The Last Coin (10 page)

The doctor went out through the front door and onto the porch. Andrew shook his hand, which, it occurred to him, felt rather like a mushroom, as if pressing it too hard would release a little cloud of spores. He dropped it abruptly. “About animals in the room, Doctor Garibaldi—the cats, that is. All the hair and noise and cat boxes and half-eaten food. That can’t be healthful. It would be hard for me to see them go, of course, but perhaps they should. We’re fond of them, my wife and I, but we could sacrifice ourselves just a bit if it would improve Naomi’s health.”

The doctor grimaced. “If it were a matter of asthma or allergies I’d concur,” he said. “But this is general debility, so to speak. The cats are a boost to her lagging spirits.” He paused, then winked broadly at Andrew. He bent forward and whispered, “She’ll outlive us both if she’s kept away from rich foods, liquor, and tobacco.’’ And then he turned and hurried away like a fat little animal, a marmot or a raccoon, toward his car.

Andrew stepped into the house, and popped back up the stairs whistling, still carrying his chocolates. He tapped twice on the door before shoving it open a crack and looking in. There sat Aunt Naomi, propped against pillows. She looked tired—but who wouldn’t, lying around all day in a room full of cats? In fact, when he looked more closely, it wasn’t so much tired as put-upon that she looked—by circumstance, by doctors, by ‘possums, by the world in general.

Aunt Naomi was inscrutable; that was her problem, or one of them anyway. Either that or she was merely empty-headed. In truth, Andrew hadn’t ever been able to figure her out—not entirely. He had always had mixed thoughts about inscrutable people, about eastern mystics or people claiming to be geniuses or certain sorts of knowing, pipe-smoking men whom he’d meet in bookstores or aquarium shops. Their knowledge could never be clearly defined, and although when he was younger he had assumed that he simply hadn’t the brains to fathom that knowledge, when he’d gotten older he began to develop suspicions.

Aunt Naomi’s suffering was the same sort of thing. It was this, it was that, it was the other: twinges, pains, general listlessness. Iron capsules accomplished nothing. Orthopedic pillows brought on headaches. An army of doctors had come and gone over the long course of her life, and those that had gone the quickest had been the ones to suggest that her maladies were “psychosomatic.” Uncle Arthur had recommended something called a “Bed Massage,” which he had peddled, in his day, door to door. It was an electronic contrivance that hummed and rippled the stuffing in the mattress. Somehow it had gone haywire, though, after Andrew had hooked it up, and had, through some kink in the laws of physics, caused the leg on the nightstand to collapse and then couldn’t be turned off until, hearing an ominous hammering on the floorboards and Aunt Naomi shouting, Andrew had dashed up the stairs and jerked the plug out of the wall socket.

Andrew preferred maladies that were more sharply defined. If he were a doctor he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes with Aunt Naomi. One time when discussing the death of Naomi’s husband after only two years of marriage, Andrew had said to Rose, “Who wouldn’t have died?” thinking to be funny. It hadn’t been funny, though, and Rose had given him a look.

There were secrets in Aunt Naomi’s past, skeletons in the closet. The circumstances of her husband’s death was one of them. Mrs. Gummidge was familiar with them. The women had been fast friends in school, if such a thing were possible. There had been a falling out. The two had been in love with the same man—Miles Lepton, but it had been Aunt Naomi who had married him. He’d been fascinated with the story of the pig spoon and had actually come to possess it, or so Rose had heard. Mrs. Gummidge—who hadn’t, of course, been Mrs. Gummidge at the time—toad felt jilted and swore to do them ill, but Lepton had died, and old wounds slowly began to heal. But it was years afterward that the reconciliation between the two women occurred. Mrs. Gummidge had come west, down on her luck, and Aunt Naomi had condescended, charitably, to take her in. That gave Andrew a pain. It was
his
house, after all. It had been
him
who had taken Mrs. Gummidge in, and yet Aunt Naomi had become a sort of saint because of it.

He regarded Aunt Naomi with a smile. “How are you feeling?” he asked, sitting softly on the end of the bed. She opened one eye and looked at him as if he were some creature in a zoo and had wandered inadvertently into the wrong cage. “Piece of chocolate?”

“I can’t tolerate chocolate,” she said, sighing, “You can’t imagine what it does to me.”

“Really?” Andrew shook his head, trying to imagine it, but failing. “I’ve brought truffles. All natural. I’d be wary of preservatives. I read an article about chemical preservatives in chocolates—a list of poisons half a mile long.”

Naomi lay silent for a moment, then opened her eyes and looked at the bag of chocolates. A warm afternoon breeze billowed the window curtains. “Could you adjust an old lady’s pillows?” she asked suddenly.

“Of course, of course,” Andrew stood up and, as Aunt Naomi bent forward, he plumped up the half-dozen pillows, arranging them into a little box canyon. She leaned back and immediately pitched forward again, as if he’d hidden a cactus among them.

“My back,” she cried, screwing up her face. “Mound them, Andrew. I can’t stand that sort of thing.”

“Of course!” he said, not knowing, exactly, what it was her back couldn’t stand. There was no satisfying her, no dealing with her unfathomable maladies. “Here now. There it is. Slide back just about an inch. How’s that now?”

She settled into the pillows, as if into a too-hot bath, hunching her shoulders and souring her face. Then she shook her head, tolerably dissatisfied. She didn’t invite him to rearrange them again, though. She’d given up on him, the look on her face seemed to say. “What do you mean, natural?”

“Cream,” he said, “and cocoa and butter. That’s it, except for flavoring. And not chemical flavoring, either—walnut extract, liqueurs, berries. All very healthful. Dr. Garibaldi particularly recommended them.”

She gave him a look. Andrew smiled, thinking that by the time Dr. Garibaldi left the house next week he
would
have recommended them. Aunt Naomi would see to it. She plucked out a cocoa-covered piece and nibbled it. Then, without a word, she nodded toward the nightstand as if commanding him to set the bag down, to leave it.

“I’ve rather brought these as a peace offering,” Andrew said, shrugging just a little. “The incident with the ’possum—I blame myself for that. If it hadn’t been for your cats …”

She said nothing. She might have been dead, except that she was still chewing on the chocolate.

“I’ve set traps all around the house—a sort of Maginot Line. I think I can guarantee that there won’t be any more of the creatures in at the window.” There was a silence, during which Aunt Naomi finished chewing, then sucked the chocolate from her fingers. Andrew smiled down at her. “Would you like a telephone in your room?” he asked.

Her eyes shot open. “What on earth for?” She looked at him as if he’d uttered an obscenity. “A telephone would drive me mad, ringing all day long. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I’ve seen through you from the start, and I told Rose so when she introduced you. A telephone.”

“I meant your own phone, of course. Not an extension. Your own number. You could ring up your friends, the drugstore. You could call downstairs. We could put a phone in Mrs. Gummidge’s room. It would be better than a bell on a rope.”

“I have no friends.”

“Well,” said Andrew, stopping the compulsion to merely shrug and nod. “There’s Mrs. Gummidge.”

“Mrs. Gummidge,” said Aunt Naomi flatly—as if that was all she had to say on the subject of Mrs. Gummidge. She squinted into space, looking, perhaps, at some little piece of distant history, when she and Mrs. Gummidge had been young together.

“What
do
you want, then?” asked Andrew patiently. “A television?”

She waved the suggestion aside.

“New glasses?”

She pretended to sleep.

“A subscription to a book-of-the-month club?”

Nothing would satisfy her but that Andrew would leave her alone and send Mrs. Gummidge up. He would, said Andrew. Straightaway. It was rest she needed. He paused, trying to think up some way to ask her for the thousand dollars for the restaurant. A lie would do, and nothing less. He could hear a flock of wild parrots, out ravaging the neighborhood carob trees, probably. They’d been hanging around lately, about thirty of them, big Amazon parrots, up from Mexico. “I do have one little surprise besides the chocolate,” he said, smiling.

She waited, breathing deeply, fanning herself with a little Japanese fold-out fan from the nightstand.

“I’ve found a chef for the restaurant. I think you’ll approve. I had you in mind, in fact, when I talked to the man. He studied in Paris, under Girot. He ran a pastry kitchen in Pasadena. In fact, he made these truffles. That’s partly why I brought them up, to give you an inkling of the sort of man we’ll have in the kitchen.”

She opened one eye, almost imperceptibly, like a toad regarding an unsuspecting fly. She had, somewhere along the line, developed a reputation as a gourmet, although Andrew was fairly sure that she couldn’t tell milk-fed veal from dairy cow. He’d found that she liked a drink well enough, but again, maybe just out of perversity, he’d concluded that it didn’t much matter how you defined “drink.” Mrs. Gummidge, he was fairly sure, had the same tastes, and kept Aunt Naomi well enough satisfied. Rose would have been too temperate. Dr. Garibaldi’s advice would have struck home with Rose.

The news of the hiring of the French chef seemed to revive Aunt Naomi just a little. She nodded at Andrew in almost a “good man” sort of way. “And you say you’ve actually hired this man? When?”

“Yesterday,” Andrew lied. There was no such man, although there might be someday soon. It was only half a lie. “He’s given notice, but he has to stick it out for two more weeks at the pastry shop. The honor of the French, you know. Then he’ll be here. I’m hustling to get the restaurant in order. They’re installing the equipment that you helped buy, in fact. But it’s still an expensive thing—hiring chefs, buying this and that, stocking the shelves. These foreign chefs want fresh materials. It’s not just a matter of hauling a truckload of canned goods back from the market. I’ve got three different suppliers on the hook—two of them importers. Pickett is drawing up a menu. We’d be grateful to you—Aunt—if you’d give it a look-over when we’ve got it roughed out.”

“I should be glad to,” she said. “It wouldn’t be excessive to say that I’ve had some experience along those lines.”

“I’m certain you have.” Andrew sighed. “I’m afraid the menu won’t be—what?—as
nice
, maybe, as you’re accustomed to.” He cleared his throat. “As I said, the expenses of a hired chef and all …”

She squinted at him. “How much do you want?”

“No, no. That isn’t it at all. Dr. Garibaldi tells me that you’ve got a delicate constitution. That’s all. Under the circumstances a foreign chef isn’t a luxury, is it? That’s what I said to Rose.”

“How much do you want?”

Andrew shook his head, half-sadly, and, hating himself, patted her on the shoulder. “Well,” he said, “not to put too fine a point on it, there’s wages for the man in advance for a month and the price of copper mixing bowls and pots and pans. He won’t have anything less. And he insists on an espresso maker. You won’t argue with that, I’d bet. Would you like a cup now, in fact?”

“Have you already bought it? The espresso maker? I thought you were asking for money for it. Now it’s suddenly in use.”

“No, no, no.” Andrew laughed and slapped his knee theatrically. “I’ve got a small one—one cup at a time. And a milk steamer. For the restaurant we would need something sizeable. I was just thinking that a big cup might go right along with another of these chocolates. Since you press me, though, let’s call it … two thousand. At month’s end I should have a good bit of it back. Rose says we’re almost ready for boarders—by the end of the week, she thinks. I’ve drawn up a placard, and there’s a man coming round to hang it out front, facing the boulevard.” All the talk about getting the money back was perfunctory. Aunt Naomi had never asked for it back, which made Andrew feel guilty, and so he was doubly scrupulous about offering to give it back, even if that were impossible.

Aunt Naomi nodded tiredly and mechanically, and gestured Andrew out of the room.

“I’ll just brew up that coffee,” he said, and went away whistling, down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. He loved meddling with coffee machinery—grinders, steamers, even thermometers if he were doing the job right. He poured beans into the hand grinder on the wall, cranked the setting to super fine, and smashed out nearly a half-cup of powdered coffee, which he heaped into the coffee trap in the stove-top espresso maker. In minutes, thick, black liquid, dark as sewer sludge but smelling wonderful, was bubbling up out of the depths of the pot, and his milk steamer hissed through the pressure-release hole. He steamed a third of a mug of milk, topped it off with coffee, and then, before dumping in two teaspoons of sugar, he poured the leftover coffee across the copper bottom of a pan in the sink, tilting it this way and that to cover the entire pan bottom. In twenty minutes the copper would shine like a new penny.

Aunt Naomi handed him a check when he set the mug down next to the chocolates. He could tell that she’d been shoving the truffles down while he’d been out. The checkbook had vanished. She kept it hidden. With it she kept a little spiral binder listing all the money she’d doled out over the months. She had let him catch a glimpse of that more than once, to remind him, possibly, that he wasn’t getting away with anything.