The Last Coin (18 page)

He opened the book at random—he’d read it often enough so that beginnings and endings meant nothing any more—and found himself dabbling through “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Ratty and Mole were off to find the baby otter, lost down the river. Dawn was near. The world was turning toward the morning. There was faint music on the breeze, which stirred through the rushes. Something was pending—something … For a moment Andrew thought he knew what it was, that something. He
did
know, but he couldn’t at all put it into words. It wasn’t something you knew in your mind; you felt it with your spine, maybe, and with your stomach. And it wasn’t the obscure machinations of men like Pennyman that you felt, either; it was something else, something that such men were ignorant of, or that they hated—that they didn’t have or want any part of, that they wanted to ruin. For that moment at least, Andrew knew that he himself wanted a part of it very badly, whatever it was. He closed the book and sat there. The late hour lent itself nicely to that sort of thing—to things of the spirit, so to speak. When the day dawned with its garages needing to be painted and its men in mystical hats coming around after rooms for rent, the feeling would be gone, dissipated, hovering just out of sight. But he would stumble upon it again when he wasn’t at all expecting it—the promise of heaven on the soft wind, “the place of my song-dream,” as Rat put it.

Andrew glanced up, surprised to see a light on in the kitchen. He’d turned it off an hour earlier. It must be late, one or two in the morning. There was the scraping of a chair being pushed back and of a spoon clanking against the side of a bowl. He stood up and tiptoed along. It might easily be Pennyman. Andrew had had enough of Pennyman for one day.

But it wasn’t. It was Aunt Naomi in a bathrobe. Andrew stood gaping for a moment, startled by the idea of Aunt Naomi out and about. She so rarely left her room that he’d begun to think of her as another fixture there, and he’d have been no more surprised to see her nightstand or her coatrack dressed in night clothes and wandering through the kitchen. She was after a bowl of cereal. There were a half-dozen boxes on the table and she sat looking at them, unable, perhaps, to decide. The sight of them reminded Andrew that he was ravenous. It seemed to him that he hadn’t eaten in months. Cereal would be just the thing.

“Hello,” he said, smiling in at her.

She looked up sharply, surprised, it seemed, to be caught in the act of eating breakfast cereal at such an hour.

“Having a bowl of something?”

She nodded. “In fact I am.”

“Mind if I join you then?”

“Not at all,” she said, nodding toward the chair opposite. She seemed almost friendly, as if the act of eating breakfast cereal was naturally cheering.

“I’m a Cheerios man myself,” said Andrew, digging a bowl out of the cupboard. “Most people pour the milk on first, then sprinkle on the sugar. I do it the other way around, to wash the sugar to the bottom. Then you can scrape it up later, when you’re spooning out the milk. It’s wonderful that way.” It occurred to him as he said this that it was just the sort of thing that Rose had warned him against—the sort of nutty talk that a woman like Aunt Naomi wouldn’t understand.

She nodded her head, though, as if she
did
understand, and she picked up the box of Wheat Chex and dumped out a third of a bowlful. “The trick,” she said, “is not to fill the bowl. You want a taste of each of them. It’s a matter of temperance, really. You don’t want to give into the urge to stuff yourself with the first sort you pick up.”

This advice sounded rock-solid to Andrew, who’d always felt more or less the same way. He was happily surprised to discover that Aunt Naomi possessed some cereal lore. “What about flakes? I’ve always said that the problem with bran flakes is that they didn’t hold up. Immediately soggy.”

She nodded again. “You put in too much milk,” she said, “and drown them. Use less, then dig for the milk with your spoon. Leave half the flakes high and dry. They’ve gotten round that with Wheaties, I’ve noticed. They hold up longer. And with sugar-sweetened cereals, too. It’s the sugar glaze that keeps the milk out. Until it melts off, of course. I’ve never had much faith in them, though. I’ve felt that it was gimmickry from the outset.”

Andrew shrugged, not wanting to contradict her. In fact, he was partial to both Trix and Sugar Pops. But he was still half-afraid of setting her off, despite the growing evidence of her sanity. His coming in on the side of sugar-sweetened cereal might cause unlooked-for trouble. “Do you remember Ruskets?” he asked.

“Those little biscuits of pressed-together flakes?”

“Indeed I do.” She paused and squinted at him. “Were you a crusher or a non-crusher?”

“A non-crusher. Absolutely. The only way to do it was to lean them against the sides of the bowl, so that half of them were out of the milk, like you were saying before, then skive off sections with a spoon so that you got a little bit of the dry flakes with the rest. There was always a heap of soggy flakes in the bottom, of course, but that couldn’t be helped. Have you, by any chance, come across Weetabix?”

“Not in years,” she said, remembering. “I ate them in London, when I was feeling better. I used to travel a good bit, alas. That’s the problem with being bedridden. The world isn’t your oyster any longer.”

“Well,” said Andrew, “it happens that I’ve got a line on some Weetabix. For the cafe. My friend Pickett is driving them down from Canada. I think I can keep you supplied, actually.”

“I’d like that. A person has so few surprises nowadays, so few little comforts.”

“It must be rotten,” said Andrew. “I don’t at all mean to be nosey, Aunt, and you can tell me to mind my own business, but I’ve never entirely understood what it was that ailed you. It must be something fairly grim, to keep you holed up like that.”

She shook her head, staring out toward the kitchen door. “It’s merely a cross,” she said euphemistically, “that I’ve had to bear.”

“I see,” said Andrew, who actually saw nothing at all. He decided not to press the issue, though, just in case there was nothing, really, to see, or in case it was some sort of vaguely indefinable female trouble that he didn’t want to hear about anyway. “How did the chocolates agree with you?”

“They were quite moderately nice, thank you. You say your new chef made them?”

Andrew blinked at her. Lies seemed to have a way of perpetuating themselves. He was stricken with the urge to haul out his wallet and give Aunt Naomi the leftover fourteen hundred dollars and to admit everything. He gasped instead and grinned and nodded, and just then Rose walked in, squinting in the light, and saved him. “Well!” he said, standing up. It was awfully good to see Rose all of a sudden, and not only because her arrival clipped off the French chef discussion. It was a chance to make amends. “Bowl of cereal?”

She looked at the table, winked pleasantly at Aunt Naomi, and said, “Yes, I believe so. That looks awfully good.”

Andrew scrambled around after another bowl and spoon. Anticipating her, he picked up the box of Grapenuts and inclined his head at it. She smiled and nodded, yawning and putting her hand over her mouth. “Aunt Naomi and I have just been discussing the mysteries of breakfast cereals.” said Andrew.

“She’s something of an authority.”

They ate in silence for a moment, and there was no sound but the scraping of bowls. A cat wandered in just then, looking around. Andrew bent down to pet it. He laid his cereal bowl on the linoleum floor. The cereal was gone, but it was still half full of sweetened milk. The cat sniffed it and then set in to lap it up, pausing now and then to look around, as if wondering why it was he hadn’t made this a regular practice long ago.

“I’m finished,” said Aunt Naomi, standing up and leaning on her cane. She looked dangerously thin, with sharp cheekbones and an aristocratic face that made it clear she was once frighteningly handsome. Andrew was struck with her resemblance to Rose. Both of them were tall and patrician, as if they’d come from some royal family in the mountains of Bohemia. But whereas Naomi was polished and prim, Rose was slightly disheveled and earthy. Taken together like this, they made Andrew feel just a little bit like a bumpkin.

“This has been delightful,” Aunt Naomi continued. “Perhaps we’ll meet again like this. I’m feeling very much better this evening. Better than I’ve felt in thirty years. It’s as if I’ve had a fever for years and it’s finally broken. Good night, Rosannah, Andrew.” And with that she hobbled away, shaking her head at Rose’s offer to help her up the stairs. Rose let her go.

“Time for bed, don’t you think?” she asked, smiling at Andrew. “You’ve had a tiring day.”

Andrew shrugged. That was the truth. “So have you,” he said.

“That’s why I’ve been sleeping. You’ve been wearing yourself out, wrestling with things. Quit thinking so much. Sleep more. Why don’t you go fishing more often? Do you remember when we used to get up in the morning and be out on the pier at dawn? Why don’t we do that any more?”

“Not tomorrow, you don’t mean. Not at dawn?”

“No, not tomorrow. But sometime.”

“Of course,” said Andrew. “I didn’t think you liked that sort of thing anymore.”

“Quit thinking, then, as I said. It’s not doing you any good. You’re full of anticipation—worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and probably won’t. You’re half-wornout just getting ready to dodge phantoms. You don’t have to dodge me. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Andrew mumbled, unable to say anything more. He
did
know it, too. What he didn’t know was why he so often failed to remember it.

“You’re probably right.” He stood up and cleared away the dishes, running water into them and stacking them in the sink. “Look,” he said, “paper towels. I’m being good.” And he yanked two towels off the roll, dried his hands, and threw them into the trash. Rose shook her head, giving him a mock-serious look.

He was frightfully tired all of a sudden. It had been a long day. With Rose following, he wandered into the library to turn out the reading lamp. On an impulse, he read her a bit out of his book, and she took the book from him and read a little more to herself. Then she shelved the book and switched off the lamp, and the two of them went up to bed.

William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of King Lear

Christopher Smart
“Jubilate Agno”

A
LL IN ALL
, the changes in Vancouver appealed to him—the ruination of Gastown especially. Every second shop was littered with tourist goods, with ceramic dolls and souvenir plates, with idiot wood carvings of non-existent totem poles and with pot metal ferry boats—the china-hutch dreams of travelers who preferred a homogenized, cleaned-up waterfront to what had been the dark and gritty reality of the place. Jules Pennyman was indifferent to the place itself, except that in general he preferred a sterilized world with the wrinkles ironed out of it. The deadening, prefabricated emptiness of the new tourist-appealing waterfront was just the sort of thing he approved of. It had become a place almost without spirit, a shallow place of surfaces and mirrors. Although some of the old shops were left—a few bookstores and bars—they’d be modernized and sanitized in time, too, and the sooner the better.

His meeting with August Pfennig had been interesting. Pennyman hadn’t wasted words; he’d finished his dealings with Pfennig and slipped away, the whole business reminiscent of his meeting with Aureus in Jerusalem. He had driven south, boarded a ferry, and now had stopped at Vashon Island with about an hour to spare before the outward-bound ferry departed for Seattle. His flight left Seattle/Tacoma in four hours.

Fifty yards away, at the base of a hill, sat his rented limousine, its driver polishing the dust from the fenders with a rag. Pennyman sat on his unfolded handkerchief atop a step stool outside the rusty, white-painted metal shed that passed for a gas station. There were two pumps anchored in dirty asphalt, and beyond the asphalt was forest and more forest, with here and there a house hidden in the trees. It was too idyllic—all the greenery and outdoorsy atmosphere of the place, but its lonesome silence was attractive, empty and cold as it was and devoid of human illusion. Away behind him stretched Puget Sound, the gray and shifting home of pilot whales and porpoise and octopi. There was too much life beneath the surface of the sea to satisfy Pennyman. He could barely stand thinking about it.

The Cascades, snowcapped and stretching away south toward Oregon, were what the common man would call majestic and sublime. Pennyman didn’t believe in such things; he despised the tendency of stupid people to want to turn dirt and rock into something more than it was. His shoes were murdering his feet, and he’d run out of Pepto-Bismol on the ferry. His throat was full of acid. This morning his hair seemed to have gotten back some of its life. It had begun to fall out in clumps, just before he’d paid his visit to Adams and then traded the carp for another bottle of the elixir. It hadn’t seemed to have the same restorative effect on his feet, though. And of course it wouldn’t have. He didn’t dare remove his shoes, although it felt as if there were a rock in each, jammed in against his toes. It was as if his shoes were three sizes too small now and shoved onto the wrong feet. He thought he knew why.