The New Yorker Stories (86 page)

Bernadine said that she liked Lucy, but Francis thought she might like her only moderately. For a woman who’d wanted a daughter, Bern was quite skeptical of other people’s daughters, though her skepticism about Lucy took the form of mentioning little oddities and quickly adding, “Nothing wrong with that, of course.” One of the things that there was nothing wrong with was Lucy’s inability to cook—her ineptitude extending even to lettuce-washing, to not understanding what a salad spinner was. She recoiled from the blender and the toaster as if they might become animated without her touching them. She drank a lot of tea, so she could boil water. But why did she resist when Bern tried to explain how other things were done in the kitchen?

Then Bern had begun finding banana peels in strange places: thrown behind a flowering bush in the garden, or pushed into a vase. “Fortunately none in the linen closet yet,” Bern said wryly. She had found two or three folded inside empty toilet-paper rolls in the trash; she’d found another buried in the little trash can that held lint from the dryer.

“What do you think?” she asked Francis. “Is it some kind of eating disorder? Some comment on something or other?”

“She’s realized we’re monkeys,” he said, curling his fingers and scratching his ribs, puckering his lips.

“It isn’t funny to me, Francis, it’s upsetting. I’ve never known anyone to stash banana peels.”

“How do you know it isn’t Sheldon?”

“Have you ever once known him to bring any food whatsoever into this house? He doesn’t even come in eating a candy bar. I’ve never once seen him with a cup of takeout coffee. He’s so lazy he relies entirely on the groceries I bring home.”

Francis put down his newspaper and looked over the top of his glasses. “Maybe it’s a mating ritual,” he said, but she’d already left the room.

Now Francis stood in the hallway of his aunt’s house, wondering if it would be worth it to take out the ceiling fixture and replace it with something less expensive and less unique before the real-estate agent came back. This required outguessing the people who would eventually tour the house: would they be inclined to like everything, once they’d seen such a splendid light fixture, or would they breeze past, the men concerned about the basement, the women interested in the kitchen? He was contemplating calling Bern to ask her opinion when he saw the Burwell Boys Moving truck turn in to the driveway, sending gravel flying into the peony beds. A hollyhock went flying like a spear. Low-hanging tree limbs snapped off.

Two men wearing chinos and dark-brown T-shirts hopped out. “Mr. Field? How do you do, Mr. Field?” the burlier of the two said. “Moving day, Mr. Field,” the other man said, retrieving a clipboard from the passenger seat. He had a couple of feathers in his shirt pocket. “I’m Jim Montgomery. My partner here is Don O’Rourke.”

“Don,” the partner echoed. “We want to do a good job here, make sure you got no reason to remember us.”

Both men came forward to shake Francis’s hand. Jim plucked a pen from between the feathers in his pocket. “Just need your John Hancock on the line, then we can get started.”

Francis signed their forms, then led the movers inside. “My aunt’s summer house,” he explained, giving them a quick tour. He’d supposed that everyone in the area knew that his aunt was dead, though, of course, he had no reason to suspect that she would have met these particular men.

“Aunt didn’t have tons of furniture,” Jim said. “She an older lady?”

“Ninety,” Francis said.

Don let out a low whistle. “Make it to ninety, then a couple of crooks come in and load everything out.”

Jim crouched to examine a side table, then looked at Francis. “You tagged the pieces we load last?”

“They’re both in the hallway. The pie safe and the hall seat.” The movers had told Bern that they would be unloading these pieces to another moving company, which would transport them to California.

“We’ll get started, then,” Jim said. He turned to Don. “What that remark was about us being crooks, I won’t ask.”

“We took those six-packs of water from behind the 7-Eleven,” Don said. He grinned at Francis. “Go to auctions, get things and distress ’em, bang ’em up and make ’em old.”

Francis nodded, trying to indicate that, whatever they’d done, he did not intend to pass judgment. (It didn’t much matter to him.) His wife had arranged for the moving men, who had been recommended—wasn’t that what she’d said?—by the real-estate agent.

Jim and Don began issuing orders to each other, pulling furniture into the center of the room, moving quickly. Francis turned, pretending to have something to do upstairs. Over his shoulder he noticed something small on the floor and went back to see what it was, as the two men carried the Sheridan sofa out the door. It was Jim’s feather. He put it on the chair cushion, where Jim would be sure to notice it, and returned to the stairs. He went up three steps, four . . . then stopped. Through the window, he saw the broken limb of a tree dangling over the front windshield of the moving truck. On the stairs, a dust ball grazed his foot, stirred up by the small breeze coming through the door. His aunt had lived to be ninety, and he was sixty-six. His son was twenty-four, which, he quickly computed, was the difference in age between his aunt and him. The computation meant nothing.

Francis had practiced law for years, and he did not think his son was at all suited to the vocation. But what was he suited to? He’d been a solid B-plus student, but he’d done very well on his law boards, and he had two very good letters of recommendation, plus one that Bern had helped him get from their congressman. Sheldon played tennis and golf, if that mattered. Lawyers were always disparaged and joked about; probably passion was not a prerequisite quality. Still, he imagined the worst: that Sheldon might get engaged to Lucy just to keep her from other men; that, yes, Lucy did have an eating disorder, and, even if she didn’t, being sneaky was a problem; Sheldon would begin law school then quit—Francis was entirely sure that that was the way things would go—and then he and Lucy would rethink things, though it would be too late if they were already married, or if she was pregnant. She was pregnant. That was why she was eating the bananas, he realized, standing on his aunt’s stairs, the moving men coming and going, oblivious to him. She was coming back—Lucy was coming back from Tokyo early, because she was pregnant. He and Bern would be grandparents. Sheldon would be overwhelmed with responsibility. His life would be nothing but takeout coffee. He wouldn’t have time to study if he wanted to. He would be in a relationship with a woman who did not love him, and whom he did not love.

“That feather,” Francis said, standing (how had he got there?) in the living room. Jim and Don were sweating. The clipboard was on a table. Both feathers were in Jim’s pocket. The pen lay on the clipboard.

“Yeah?” Jim said, patting his pocket.

“What is it from?”

“From? From a bird. I picked it up because I didn’t recognize it, and around here I know the birds. After the hurricane, we lost a lot, then this spring we got some others that hadn’t come around before. Big bird, obviously. I’ve got a book at home. I’m gonna check it.”

“Do you hunt?” Francis asked. He was giving in to his nervousness, making idle conversation.

“Sure,” Jim said slowly. “Hunt, fish. Only go after deer with bow and arrow, though. You wouldn’t be one of those people who get upset because a guy wants to eat, would ya?”

“No, no. I was just curious. Because of your interest in birds. Whether you also hunted, I mean.”

“Know what else he does?” Don interrupted. “Famous for his carving.”

“Oh?” was all Francis could think to say.

“Decoys,” Jim said quietly, almost shyly.

“People collect ’em,” Don said. “Real artistry involved. He apprenticed himself to his grandfather. His grandfather’s things are in that museum in Hartford, Connecticut. You must have been there.”

“The Wadsworth Atheneum,” Francis said. “It’s not that close to where I live.”

“Well, when you go there, you look for Roy Jay Bluefield’s decoys. They’re beautiful things, and my friend here is the bearer of the flame.”

“I’d like to see your work,” Francis said.

“You would?” Jim said. “I live in a workshop that would about fit in the living room of this house. Wife put me out three years ago. You would be interested in seeing decoys?” he said again, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

Francis nodded.

“Tell you what,” Jim said. “You go upstairs, like you were doin’, and in an hour we’ll be outta here. We can swing by my place on our way to Connecticut, if you were serious.”

“Oh, I was very serious. Most serious,” Francis added. That was right: he had been going up the stairs, and suddenly time had gone into a warp, and now it was much later. At this moment, if the plane had landed on time, Lucy might be telling Sheldon the news. That was how your life could change: someone would tell you something.

The moving men resumed giving each other orders, furniture was lifted and shifted into other positions, then something was selected and carried down the steps to the driveway, where the big truck sat. Francis thought again about calling his wife, but realized that she would still be driving home and wouldn’t answer the cell phone. She would probably stop for groceries, which she bought most days, though they both had light appetites. Their son was taller and heavier and ate more than they did, though he was big-boned, rather than heavy. Six feet; a nice-looking boy, with thick wavy hair and those square glasses that all the young people wore unapologetically now. The novel he’d worked on in college had become a novella, then had been abandoned entirely, except for sections he obsessed over and had used to apply to various M.F.A. programs, not one of which admitted him. Good or bad, Francis had no idea; Sheldon would show his writing to no one. An entire year had passed after he finished college, during which he’d lived in their attic and—a bit histrionically, Francis thought—started and abandoned a second novel. Then he had moved out and worked for a year or so with a college friend, doing ordering for the friend’s father’s company, even taking a trip to London. Then—how exactly had it happened?—he had let his lease expire and had moved back into the house, forgoing the attic for his old bedroom, which he repainted charcoal gray. On the weekends Lucy often joined him there.

What did they plan to do? Have the baby and live in the house?

Francis had climbed to the second floor, where his wife had packed his aunt’s clothes into boxes to be donated to charity. There was toile de Jouy wallpaper in his aunt’s bedroom. Near the end, his aunt, on high doses of painkiller, had thought she was stretched on a divan surrounded by a party of French aristocrats, the women dressed in feathery bonnets and carrying parasols, the men on horseback, all awaiting her cue to open celebratory bottles of champagne. Aristocrats, in a nine-by-twelve bedroom on the second floor of a house in rural Maine. Who knew what she’d made of them all being pastel blue? Perhaps that they were cold.

His aunt had died of pancreatic cancer less than two months after she was given the diagnosis. When she called them with the bad news, he and Bern had driven out to the house and cried and cried, unable to think of anything optimistic to say. His aunt had pressed jewelry on his wife, though Bern was a no-nonsense sort of woman who usually wore nothing but her wedding ring and a Timex. His aunt had told them her sensible plan for what she called “home help.” She had asked him, as a complete non sequitur, to change the light bulbs in the hallway, but instead of doing this immediately they had talked more—Bern, in her strong way, had been very upset. And then he had left that night, forgetting to do the one little thing his aunt had asked of him. He had not remembered until almost the day she died.

There was a faint odor of ammonia in every room, and he thought that might be what he’d been squinting against. Bern had opened all the blinds; it made the house look more spacious, the real-estate agent had told her. So where had his aunt’s spirit gone, he wondered; had it lingered for a moment in the pastel confusion, then permeated the window—nicely beveled old glass—to alight briefly in the now smashed tree? If so, she’d had a safe landing, leaving well before the moving van pulled in.

Francis never knew what was the proper amount to tip moving men. It had probably become more than he could imagine, if the average tip in a nice restaurant was at least twenty percent, no matter how indifferent the service. He wondered if his seeing the decoys meant that he must buy one; if so, what would they cost, and shouldn’t he tip the men before he got to Jim’s workroom, because otherwise the price of purchase might be confused with the tip. Or, if he tipped generously in advance (whatever generously meant), might the decoy have a more reasonable price?

He backed the Lexus out to follow the moving truck down the drive. Jim drove faster than Francis expected, but he kept up, patting his pocket to make sure that his cell phone was there. They drove for a while, then turned down a rutted road where someone had put a red-and-black cone to indicate a deep pothole. The houses here were smaller than the ones on the main road. With all that he had to do, what was he doing going into the woods with two men to see decoys? It was the sort of thing that could turn out badly, though his instincts told him it would not. Still, he could imagine being in court, asking the defendant with a hint of skepticism in his voice, “You followed these two strangers to one of their houses?”

When the road forked, the truck slowed and Jim put down his window, pointing to the right with his thumb. Francis hesitated. The truck continued to the left, bumping onto a field. He thought he understood and took the right fork, stopping in front of a little clapboard house that stood alone, with no trees in front and only a half-dead bush in the side yard. It was, indeed, very small. Again he heard himself in the courtroom: “And with no hesitation you got out of your car?”

He got out. Don and Jim were walking toward him. He could tell from their faces that there was nothing to fear. Don was holding a can of seltzer. Jim—who looked much larger beside his tiny house—had a set of keys in his hand, though he used none of them to open the unlocked door.