Off Keck Road (10 page)

Her mother and them, they never guessed about George, but they must have noticed something, and that's where the spot of wrong felt sore.

“You know what they're saying,” her mother whispered. “They're saying you're getting to be like a prostitute almost.”

“No” was all Shelley could answer.

“Well, I said so, too. And so did Cath. Cath was real mad. She said, ‘With a guy that age, he probably can't anymore.' But everyone knows they still want to try.”

Shelley went back to the kitchen sink, craned her neck over, and drank from the faucet. The cold water out here tasted good. It was well water, still—what she missed the most living in town.

Then she gave her mom the wrapped boxes with the coffeemaker and all. She told her what was inside, so she wouldn't have to open it right then.

“Jeez, Shelley, it's so much bother,” she said.

That was it. No thank-you or anything. And Shelley could tell she wouldn't use it. You knew right away with her mother and a gift. Now, if one of the boys had brought it, that would be a different story.

Even so, Shelley asked Bill Alberts to her family's Christmas, but he declined. He'd go to the Riverclub on Christmas Eve to hear some bass player and then over to Bea Maxwell's house the next morning.

“Though, God knows, the food would be better anywhere else,” he said.

XV

W
hen her mother died, for a long time Bea kept busy. She took great care to honor the wishes her mother had expressed regarding the funeral. After all, they'd had a long time to plan. Her mother died June 14, 1984.

She had left detailed preferences, much as, years earlier, she'd organized her parties. She wanted roses, definitely, clustered together in round glass vases, and if there was anything else at all, it should be branches. No ferny things. Or baby's breath, God forbid.

Standing in the back of the florist's, Bea thought of June's store in Arizona. June would get it right away, what her mother wanted. June had always admired Hazel's taste, which even Bea had to admit was somewhat standard. Three or four of the more subtle women Hazel's age wore the same cardigans, chose the same muted shades for their living room drapes. But June's taste—Bea had never seen anything else quite like it. It was almost what you'd have to call a talent. As original as June was, though, she didn't have the confidence Hazel and her friends took for granted. That was a difference, Bea had thought to herself many times since June left. A talent was really something you were born with. Taste had more to do with money, growing up around one kind of furniture you were taught was better than the other kinds.

Her mother had asked for specific music, Schubert songs and an aria from
Lakmé
. Bea told Bill Alberts—her music adviser for many years—and he'd found the musicians. And Lil would play a piano piece by John Robert Poe.

Father Matthew would deliver the eulogy. By the end of her life, Bea's mother would sigh and say, “Too bad he's a priest. Maybe he should just leave, like so many of them do now. Wouldn't
that
be something? Course, then what would he do? He's not really trained in anything. When you think about it, it's not a great background.”

Bea shrugged. “How about real estate?”

That was how they laughed together. Small soft jokes that no one else would find funny.

“And look at how well you've done,” her mother said. “Really.
Really
.”

Maybe, maybe, her mother would've even come around to Bill Alberts.

Talking to Father Matthew about the service, she found herself, for the first time, sitting across a desk from him in his office.

It was a strange room, absolutely silent, lit with the stained-glass windows in muted 1950s colors, muddy pink, brown, and pale green. “My mother and dad,” she heard herself saying. “I don't know if they, if they really . . . ”

They both sat quiet for a while, absorbed by the peace of the room.

“Raising two children together, living in a house every day, that is a sexual act,” Father Matthew finally said.

“She said she missed his warm back at night.”

Father Matthew nodded as if this had been expected. But he had known them together, had heard Hazel's exasperation talking about her husband. Surely she had been a dutiful wife. But Bea found herself wondering if there was anything
personal
in it. Sometimes, Bea felt a spike of something—even rage?—but then it subsided as if embarrassed, always unexplained. It would have been important for Hazel to be a good wife. To anyone.

“Maybe she did love him, then,” Bea said, a small sob escaping the corner of her mouth, continuing a conversation with herself that Father Matthew was, nonetheless, in his silence, steering. “It was just hard for her to feel that most of the time.”

“But she could feel her attachment to you,” Father Matthew said. “When she first came to me here, in this room, it was because you'd moved home and she was worried about you. She thought you wouldn't find enough here, after Chicago.”

Her mother had selected her own outfit, her own jewels. She was going to be buried in one of Bea's dark brown shawls.

The jewelry became a problem, though. Bea's sister didn't want to bury her in it. “That watch is full of diamonds,” Elaine said, here at last, in for the action. Well—the action, so to speak, Bea thought. Her sister hadn't made it in time to see their mother alive.

“Those are
real
pearls,” Elaine murmured.

Bea's sister didn't seem to expect or want or try for any experience here. No walk, no conversation that could make a memory. No, her real life was in Minnesota and she was only here to uncover things to take back there. It was as if here she couldn't
feel
. And Bea was a part of what dulled her so.

Her sister was a person who was sure of things. Sure of her life and its importance.

Children, a household, no one would deny that Elaine was living a productive life. But weren't there other things that could matter?

They were in the dim morgue, their mother literally between them, frowning. That frown became an issue later on, too.

“She wants to wear the things our father bought for her,” Bea said.

“It's up to you,” the undertaker added. “But if it was my mother, I'd think she'd want one of you to get it. Or one of your kids.”

Of course Gregg Garsh knew Bea had no children. Everyone was always, in the end, on the side of people with kids. Why was love for children more esteemed than love for parents? Even a man who'd seen you in church every Sunday for the past twenty-five years. And Bea and her mother had always been conscientiously kind to Marge Garsh since the divorce.

After all those evenings, nights when she and her mother sat on their porch looking over the darkening backyard, drinking their tea, now Bea was outnumbered.

Bea tried one more time. “She did select. She gave each of us gifts. But she didn't give us these.”

“How old was your ma?” the undertaker asked.

“She was eighty-one, Gregg. I think you know that.”

In that way, they won. And because Bea would have none of the dividing or fighting, she let her sister take it all.

She remembered her mother with a three-inch pencil, making notes on a lined card. Bea had tried to see every one of those wishes materialized.

But now she had failed. Her mother's hands were buried bare.

XVI

B
ea and Bill Alberts met for breakfast every Thursday. At Bosses, they had their own booth. Bill walked, along the river, and was always there, a little before seven, dressed and dapper, sleeves already rolled up, dipping his dry toast in black coffee and reading the newspapers, when Bea arrived. He'd put money on the tabletop jukebox and set it for Nat King Cole's “Route 66.”

They talked, ate, and then got to-gos and drove out in Bea's car to see the new listings.

When Jim Dehn handed them their cups from behind the counter, a revolving display of pipes and pipe cleaners, he passed Bea a dime, with a wink.

All week long, she looked forward to Thursday.

Her mother had died and there was an immense stillness in her nights. The eternal conversation, infinitely detailed, had finally ended, leaving Bea in a large house, which seemed itself duller, lackluster.

But every Thursday, she and Bill talked. Often they discussed starting a book club, but they never went about making the necessary plans. Bea didn't take on the task because she felt reluctant to invite others. What if she and Bill didn't like them, once they were in?

Bill Alberts and Bea had June in common. He'd pursued her once, if not for very long; he always was a realist. But he still got a kick out of her adventures and asked after her. When Bea received a letter, she brought it and read the more audacious parts out loud. (“Guess who's blond!” the last one said. “And I
am
having more fun.”) They both laughed about her in the same way, glad she was somewhere in Arizona, with her wildflowers and bright colors.

Bea had been surprised and gratified by the finite term of Bill's pursuit of June. It had been pronounced andpublic, but shorter than his interest in Bea. That alleviated a certain humiliation Bea had felt when it ended. No, even June had not been the grand passion in Bill Alberts's life. That was some consolation, Bea supposed, since she hadn't been, either. It made her wonder if there even was such a thing.

He had one passion and that was jazz.

Green Bay had become a regular stop on musicians' tours, as he'd hoped it would when he'd bought the Riverclub, though jazz itself, he told her, was becoming rare. Its audience, and not only here, had dwindled. People wanted to hear other things. The younger people wanted rock 'n' roll. Even Tony Bennett was scraping bottom. Most of the crooners were playing wherever they could get a job. Bill himself had played drums for more than forty years. Once, when Benny Goodman's band toured Green Bay, he had filled in for a sick drummer. “Glared at me all night,” he told Bea. “Didn't like my playing.”

But he had chosen to stay here in Green Bay. “Why did you?” Bea asked one Thursday morning.

“I used to tell my friends I was the only one whose mother worked when he was growing up and the only one who had her living with him now.” He waved his hands the same as he had eighteen years ago when he'd hired her. “My sisters left. I was the one to look after them. See my parents into their last beds,” he said. “Tuck them in.”

Was her reason also his reason? Now, Bea thought, she'd finally gotten the answer to something she'd always wondered. And here the flirt, the womanizer, the putative philanderer had made his life at home in order to take care of his parents.

Bea had seen him drum.

He was one of those musicians who look worst, their most contorted, playing. And yet he played, wanted to play, more than anything. There was something beautiful in it.

After his divorce, he'd never chased Bea again. She was either not pretty enough or not poor enough; she'd never known exactly which. Her mother, of course, had believed it was the latter.

Or maybe it was because he'd already asked, long ago.

Perhaps he'd merely accepted her refusal.

And now Shelley. Shelley who was tootling around town in her new red Jeep, slapping down the platinum credit card he'd given her.

For years, Bea hadn't trusted him because he was a flirt.

And he still was, even with a hip that hadn't healed in the four years since he'd broken it, a prescription that gave him thicker and thicker lenses, and a revoked license that declared him legally blind. She'd wondered if he said the things that he'd said to her to everybody. By now she knew he did, but somehow that didn't seem to make them any less good.

One night at the Riverclub, for a Chamber of Commerce dinner, she recognized his familiar still-headed quality of attention as he listened to the waitress who brought them their drinks. The waitress had a son at home who'd been diagnosed with a condition. Bill wrote the name of a doctor on a napkin and told her he'd call the man tomorrow; the doctor had been one of his mother's students.

He was a flirt, no doubt. But, she found herself wondering, was that so bad? Surely there were worse things. Bea's mother had always said he asked Bea because he knew she had the good sense to say no. What might have warranted a yes?

Was it just another way he flung beauty (white lace handkerchiefs) onto the life they both knew? (Green Bay could certainly use a little.)

To help a waitress command respect from a doctor, to make a real estate agent feel alluring, perhaps this was his compassion.

She ended most Friday evenings with him in the Riverclub, listening to his Cocktail Combo.

One Thursday morning in November, she told him her favorite novel was
Middlemarch
. She'd first read it in college and was reading it again. It was her favorite because the two best people never got together.

“Realistic,” he said.

During a phone call from Arizona, June sounded amazed to hear that Bea and Bill Alberts were seeing each other outside the office.

“Just last Friday, he played at the Riverclub,” Bea said.

“I hear he's not even very good,” June whispered into the phone.

Bea, aghast, felt her breath socked out of her.

What did it matter? To have a lifelong interest like that was admirable, remarkable.

The closest Bea came to that kind of devotion was—what? She wrote to the local government when she thought somebody deserved something. She still rode a bicycle (in brown corduroy knickers), still golfed, still skied. She signed petitions to preserve the city's trees. She knit a blanket and a whole layette for the baby next door. Hundreds of Green Bay houses still displayed her “new home throws.” Mostly, she supposed, it had been a life of talking about other people, thinking about love, a kind of love, it turned out, she had never experienced.

At times, she felt that was a failure of hers, some resistance, a hard piece inside her like the stones people got at her age, some mineral blockage. Other times, she thought probably all that would've been fine if she had a slightly more symmetrical face, more space between her top lip and nose.

Most times, she thought it was the world's problem, assuming that everyone had to be two by two, like animals boarding Noah's ark.

Bea supposed she used to be a gossip. June, even with the hardships she'd no doubt borne in the move, her child grown up and gone, had not lost her sly edge. And Bea had. With no attachments to speak of except to a dead mother and her friends.

“You should see me now,” June said idly. “I'm unrealistically thin.”

Toward the end of the call, when Bea thought it was time to hang up, June kept talking. “Say,” she said. “I've got some news. I told you about the person I'm seeing, Hank. Well, he's a very nice man. And we got married. We just did it here at city hall, a Saturday morning, no big fuss or anything. He wanted to. So you're it,” she said lightly.