Ruffly Speaking (15 page)

Thinking of my own tax dollars, the ones Alice Savery was wasting, I said, “And you still have to...?”

“The one time we don’t—”

“It’ll be real.”

“And the thing of it is,” Kevin said somewhat apologetically, “according to her, the way
she
sees it, it
is
real, because how’s she supposed to know it’s all in her head? So you gotta feel sorry for her. You can’t help it.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“And she goes through, uh, phases. She has these fits of calling us. And then she lays off for a while. And a lot of the time, she just wants someone to complain to, so she calls and complains, and they listen, and that’s the end of it. For now.”

“Kevin, when I was there the other day, these kids ran in her yard.... Well, one kid did, but he had a couple of friends with him, not that they did any harm, but it was pretty obvious that they just did it to get her goat. So some of her complaints probably are justified, in a way. I think the kids probably do torment her.”

“Course they do,” Kevin said. “Same as this dog of yours probably
does
run over and pee on her flowers, but, like they keep telling her at the station, there’s no law against it. It’s just human nature. But one thing about Alice is, she’s always right. Won’t listen to a word you say.”

“Which dog of mine? Did Alice Savery actually call-And it is not
human
nature to—”

“This deaf lady’s dog. That’s her latest.” Kevin sounded like a happy owner describing a naughty puppy’s newest trick. I’d finished soaping the Bronco and was hosing it off. While I let the water run over the rear, I glanced at Kevin. The pride in his voice and on his face was both personal and civic. Alice Savery, I realized, was a condescending, arrogant nuisance, but she was Kevin’s nuisance and probably the pet eccentric of the rest of the Cambridge police force as well.

“She complains about... Kevin, I don’t know what she says, but that is possibly the best-behaved dog in Cambridge, and if Alice Savery starts trying to make trouble— Well, you know, really she can’t. That dog does not run loose, and, also, the laws about guide dogs for the blind apply to hearing dogs, so—”

“It defecates on her lawn,” Kevin said, “or so I’m told. Alice isn’t my personal responsibility anymore. It’s one of the prices you pay for promotion around here. They take away your uniform, and you don’t get Alice anymore, either, so all’s I know these days is what I’m told, but what I’m told is that it defecates on her lawn, and it does a lot else, too.” Kevin gave a sly smile and narrowed his eyes. “But I can’t swear to the
else,
because that’s not what she showed up at the station with.” He studied me.

“You’re joking,” I said.

He solemnly raised his right hand. “Scout’s honor. In a Ziploc bag.”

16

 “A pot of Earl Grey, please,” I told the waiter, whose name, I remembered, was Fy-odor. Harvard Square abounds in my-name-is-and-I’ll-be-your establishments, but Winer &. Lamb wasn’t one of them. Fyodor’s name stuck in my memory because Morris Lamb, who always added Homeric epithets to the names of his waiters, invariably referred to this one as
Fyodor with the mad Russian eyes.
Morris liked to dramatize. The waiter’s bright blue eyes looked perfectly sane to me, and the only thing Russian I’d ever noticed about Fyodor was his name. “Leah?”

It was four o’clock on that same Sunday afternoon, and Leah and I were seated indoors at a pink-draped table for two. Taking tea in the Square had been Leah’s idea. Sometime during the preceding week, Doug Winer had shown up at Stephanie’s while Leah was visiting. He’d come to repair a light switch, unstop the garbage disposal, and perform a few other landlordly tasks, I gathered. He’d also used the occasion to announce that henceforth

Winer & Lamb would be doing Sunday teas. Leah had arrived home with a large and rather formal invitation to the gala tea that would launch this entrepreneurial ship, and I’d agreed to accompany her.

When we tried to make a little party of the event, everyone we invited made excuses. Kevin didn’t actually say no; all he did was make a show of crooking the gigantic little finger of his right hand and raising an imaginary china cup to his lips. Steve said bluntly that tea wasn’t his cup of. Rita begged off, too. Her aids amplified the clatter of dishes and the background noise, so restaurants drove her crazy. I said we’d sit outdoors. She still said no. Another time? Stephanie had an obligation at St. Margaret’s, and Matthew was attending a conference at MIT with his father, Phillip, who was in town for the weekend. I’d counted on the dogs, who would’ve been allowed under one of the sidewalk tables, but in the midafternoon, a heavy cover of gray-black clouds blew in, and by the time Leah and I were ready to leave, big drops of rain were pelting down, so Leah and I got dressed up and went alone. I wore a white jersey dress and carried a black umbrella. Leah bound her hair back from her face with a wide black band that matched the rest of her existentialist funereal chic. We felt grand.

“An espresso, please,” Leah told Fyodor, who scribbled down the order, removed the invitation card that entitled us to a free platter of goodies, muttered deferentially, and took off.

The café was already quite crowded with what looked to me like a principally Harvardian clientele— alumni, alumnae, and faculty, women with intelligent faces, no makeup, and simple clothes, men who spoke in educated tenor voices and would have been outraged at the accusation that they adored women who were good listeners. I heard scraps of French, Spanish, and a couple languages I didn’t recognize. A man with African blue-black skin and ritual scars on his cheeks spoke British English to an elderly Caucasian woman dressed in a pale blue sari. At the table next to ours, a couple nibbled cucumber sandwiches and discussed feminism in relation to the next presidential election. She had a blotchy-looking scarf messily draped around her neck. He wore a neatly folded ascot. He argued that it was meaningless to speak of the women’s vote. She agreed with him.

“This is what Rita calls a ‘civilized occasion,’ ” I told Leah.

Doug Winer, who’d been drifting from table to table, overheard and happily repeated the phrase. “Civilized occasion! I may borrow that sometime,” he said playfully. “Sunday tea at Winer and Lamb. The ultimate civilized occasion.” As usual, Doug’s face showed his apparently ineradicable black whiskers. He wore a boxy white suit that somehow narrowed and elongated his low, muscular build. Murmuring a perfunctory apology to the three people at a nearby table for four, Doug removed the empty chair, and, before seating himself with us, asked, “May I join you ladies? The preparation for this has been simply indescribable. I cannot stay on my feet another second.” As Leah and I nodded and made room for him, he exclaimed, “Where is your tea? Where is Fyodor!”

“We’ve ordered. We haven’t been here long,” I said.

With an audible sigh of exasperation or exhaustion, Doug settled himself at our table.
“Pink,”
he said, fingering the heavy tablecloth. “This pink has
got
to go.”

“It’s pretty,” I said.

He tsked. “Tacky, tacky. Pink! Morris wanted lamp shades. He wanted little lamps on the tables with
pink
shades. Pink! Well, I managed to talk him out of that) thank God. Can you imagine? Pink lamp shades? ‘Morris it’ll look like a boudoir,’ I said, and
that
convinced him, finally, but when it came to the linens, he would not gi
^vt
-in, and here we are. Pink! But I haven’t even welcomed you! This whole thing has been exhausting.
Where
is your tea?”

As if in response to Doug’s rhetorical question, Fyodor appeared. He rapidly covered the tiny table with pink-rimmed crockery, my pot of tea, and a dainty little triple-tiered glass contraption, each layer of which was piled with miniature pastries, crustless sandwiches, and squares of frosted cake interspersed here and there with whole strawberries, clusters of green and purple grapes, and slices of orange and melon. Food makes me feel mothered.

“This is just like a birthday party,” I said to Doug, who flushed with pleasure, but then interrupted Leah’s praise by seizing her spoon, examining it closely, grimacing, and summoning Fyodor to replace it.

“It looked fine to me,” Leah said. “Everything does. Everything is perfect.” Before serving herself, she tried to cajole Doug into sharing the cakes and sandwiches with us, but Doug insisted that he couldn’t possibly touch a thing.

Leah and I helped ourselves. Partly to divert Doug from his scrutiny of the food, china, silver, and linen for any minute deviations from perfection, I said that I’d been happy to meet his father. How was Mr. Winer? I asked. And the Bedlingtons?

Nelson and Jennie, Doug said, were a godsend. The family had been futilely trying to persuade Mr. Winer to wear an identification bracelet on his long daily walks, or else to limit himself to repetitive perambulations of the block in front of his own house. The dogs had solved the ID tag problem without hurting Mr. Winer’s pride: Their tags bore his address.

I swallowed a tiny cream puff and said, “I thought your parents might be here today. Because of...” I caught myself. I’d been about to say something about celebrating the launch of the Sunday teas, but the word
celebrating
stuck to my vocal cords. I coughed lightly. Today was the twenty-eighth of June. Morris had been dead less than two months. Wasn’t it a little soon for Doug to
celebrate
anything? “Or Stephanie,” I added to cover my embarrassment.

“Holly, Stephanie—” Leah began.

Before Leah could blurt anything out, I said, “Oh, that’s right. She had something at her church. That’s too bad.”

“Isn’t she a love?” Doug said. “And her little dog, too?” The phrase sounded familiar. I remembered it as a croaking threat.
The Wizard, of Oz,
that was it: “And your little dog, too.” Then the evil cackle of the Wicked Witch of the West. I used to have nightmares about that movie. I didn’t care all that much whether Dorothy got back to Kansas, but I was scared silly that something bad would happen to Toto. I glanced sharply at Doug, picked up a fork, and started on a little cube of multilayered cake filled with chocolate and fruit. While I worked my way through a watercress sandwich, a raspberry tartlet, and a bite-size butterscotch éclair, Doug chatted with Leah without making even the most oblique reference to her beautiful red hair. Leah, in turn, somehow succeeded in conversing for four or five minutes without once permitting Bernie Brown’s name to pass her lips. At the end of this near conversational triumph, however, Doug once again began to grumble about the waiters and then moved from the burden of running a business to the horrendous responsibility of being a landlord.

“I had no idea!” he exclaimed. “But what choice did I have? What was I going to do with Morris’s things? As it is I had to rush half of them into storage, and I don’t have the slightest idea what’s where, and it’s all going to have to be sorted through, but Stephanie was desperate, and she is my cousin Sheila’s oldest friend, so what could I tell her? Stephanie moved here very precipitously, you know, and the apartment she was in, well, it was a perfect dump, if you want to know the truth, and the miserable landlord was giving her a dreadful time about Ruffly.”

“That’s illegal,” I said. “That dog isn’t—”

“I know! I know! But Stephanie is not a disputatious person, and the place was not suitable for her. The neighborhood was... Well, I won’t say what the neighborhood was like, but it was completely unsuitable, and I was far from satisfied that it was safe to leave Morris’s house sitting there empty. And talk about depressing! And Morris would just have hated that. So I had mountains of Morris’s things thrown into boxes and carted away or stashed out of sight, and
in
Stephanie went, and, in all fairness to myself, I did warn her that there was a neighbor with a perfect
phobia
about dogs—”

“Alice Savery,” I said.

“Morris adored her, of course.”

I found that hard to believe. “He did?”

“Because she was such a perfect
type,"
Doug explained. “I never could stand Alice, but Morris would egg her on and get her to perform. Do you know that she used to address him in
Latin?
Morris adored it.”