Trust Me (28 page)

Fulham didn’t see what was quite so funny. People in the lobby had turned their heads toward Tod’s conspicuous laugh. Fulham was sweating again, and it took him some seconds to realize that the small insistent face, as round and white and incisively marked as the face of a clock, had chimed something up at him: he was being asked for another quarter. “Come on, Grandpa. It’s only two bits,” the child demanded.

“No,” Fulham said, with considerable satisfaction, and led the children to his car and home. By the time his own child showed up with her husband, both young adults rosy-faced and loud from their tennis match or cocktail party, he was glad to see the grandchildren taken away, and his large white
house in Wellesley returned to the order that he and his wife maintained.

With a history of hypertension, Fulham had taken early retirement from his brokerage firm, and managed his own investments and those of a favored few old clients in an upstairs room. He went to this room, overlooking his side yard’s trimmed shrubs, every morning with his
Wall Street Journal
and second cup of decaffeinated coffee. He kept up his charts and his correspondence, made his phone calls and a daily visit to the post office; but the illusion of integration with the larger circuits of the world was harder to maintain than when he enjoyed a corner office on the nineteenth floor of a Boston skyscraper, with swift-moving secretaries to shield and buttress him and to turn his hesitant murmurs of dictation into official communications, on engraved company stationery. Now that the postmen of an increasingly lazy and insolent government were no longer permitted to walk up to a doorway more than a specified distance from the sidewalk, his mail came to him in a tin box down by his white picket fence, and this casual and hazardous housing somehow made additional light of the old pomp of finance.

For some days he had been expecting a large check, which the sender, a Houston oil company, had not chosen to send by registered mail or any of the express services now available. The check, in the low six figures, represented considerable acumen and initial investment on Fulham’s part, and he was anxious to stow it away in one of his bank accounts. Every noon, after the mailman—a young man who with annoying musicality whistled opera arias as he strolled along—had banged shut the lid of the box, Fulham hurried down the long
brick walk to discover, amid the wads of bills and fourth-class solicitations, if the check had come. It had not, day after day. Standing by the mailbox, he could feel his heart thudding, annoyingly, like one of those large trucks that, defying a clearly posted sign, went by every now and then on their quiet street, making the house shudder. A week passed, and then another. Phone calls to Houston produced only a series of drawling assurances that the check had been mailed and had not been cashed, and undoubtedly it would show up. One lady, who from the resonant lilt of her voice seemed to be black and, like the mailman, excessively musical, even explained to him that the company never registered checks, on the theory that this called attention to them and in some cases had instigated thievery, among the poorer class of postal workers.

The possibility of thievery had not in so many words occurred to Fulham; he had always thought of the postal service as an overarching entity, like the cloud pattern projected nightly on Channel 5, which, however unpredictable, in the last analysis inevitably delivers every bit of vapor entrusted to it. Now the possibility had been raised that the system had holes in it, through one of which had fallen a sum of money that should be his, numbers that should already be punched into his bank’s computer and generating interest for his account. Each day that the check didn’t arrive, he computed, he was losing more money than it cost him and his wife to eat. His calls to Houston rose in pitch of insistence, and his comforters correspondingly rose in the company’s hierarchy, urging him, however, in the end, to wait a few more days before asking them—as was his privilege, of course—to stop the check and issue another.

He slept poorly, agitated by the injustice of it. There was
no one to blame and no court in which to place an appeal—just an impenetrable delivery system stretched airily between New England and Texas. Awake at odd hours, he imagined footsteps softly passing on the sidewalk and hands rattling at his mailbox. The box itself, substituted by governmental decree for his infallibly retentive front-door letter slot, seemed a perilous extension of himself, an indefensible outpost, subject to graffiti and casual battering. He tried to imagine in detail the processes of the mails—the belts, the sacks, the shufflings, the sorting machines that fling envelopes heedlessly in all directions. He yearned to seize and shake that vast imagined system, to shake loose that stuck small fortune so blithely confided to a scrap of paper within another, folded, scrap. The wish to shake shook him; Fulham’s pulpy, intimidated heart filled his skull, the bed, and the bedroom with its thumping.

His wife, woken by his furious rotation beneath the covers, couldn’t grasp the problem, the indignity. Each day, she still ate three thoughtfully chosen and prettily prepared meals; she still tended her garden in the milky morning cool of these late-summer days and then went over to the club for lunch and a swim or nine holes with her giggling, brown-legged, female foursome. For Diane, perhaps there was no abyss. She had been a schoolteacher, forty years ago, inculcating young minds with the lessons of cause and effect and of patience. “The man said,” she reminded Fulham in the middle of the night, “that if it didn’t show up in a few more days they’d cancel it and mail another.”

“That means waiting
more
days. I should be getting interest on that amount.”

“Do we need the interest so badly?”

“It’s not a question of
need
, it’s a question of
right
. We have
a right to that money. Furthermore, every day that check is uncashed, the company is drawing interest on its undiminished balance. Not only are we losing a profit, they’re
gain
ing one, thanks to their own inefficiency!”

“I think you’re making too much of it. There’s no issue involved, it’s just one of those things. It got on the bottom of a mail sack somewhere.”

She thus managed in her soothing effort to stumble on the very wasps’ nest of imagery that infuriated him: the letter lost, at the bottom of a sack, forever; the flaw in the mindless system; the outrage without a perpetrator, or at least any perpetrator who could be discovered, who would declare himself; a certain horrible smugness within the Actual, imperfect and blundering though it was; an outrageous cosmic
unanswerableness
.

The perpetrator struck again, inside the home. Waking on Friday morning, Fulham discovered that his wallet was not on the top of his bureau, where he almost invariably put it upon retiring. He looked in the hip pocket of the pants he had worn the day before, and then, with growing desperation, on the closet floor, under the bed, in the bedside table, on the bathroom sink, into the pockets of all his pants hanging in the closets, and, insanely, all the pockets of all his coats, even those which had been hanging in dry-cleaning bags since June.

For the years and decades of his urban employment, Fulham had carried a breast wallet, a small leather shield above his heart, gradually thickening with the years. In his retirement, he wore coats only to go out at night, and so, in a minor rite of passage, a slight change of armor, he bought a hip wallet,
to go with his new working uniform of slacks and sports shirt. Strange and forgettable at first, and a little unbalancing, the wallet soon came to feel like a friendly adjunct to his person, a reminder, in its delicate pressure upon his left buttock, of his new, freer, stage of life. It was, the wallet, almost too plump to sit upon, containing plastic charge cards for Bay-Bank, NYNEX, Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Visa, Amoco, American Express, MasterCharge, The Harvard Coop, Filene’s, the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital, plus his plasticized driver’s license and paper cards signifying his membership in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Athenaeum, the Wellesley Country Club, the Tavern Club, the Harvard Club, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and Social Security. Fulham was a sentimental and retentive man; the wallet also held, in its insert of transparent leaves, photos of his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren, and, in its various leather pockets, a card showing his last draft classification (5-A), his insurance agent’s business card, six business cards of his own, a yellowed newspaper clipping recording his victory many years ago in an intercollegiate tennis championship, and a little brown photograph, taken in a booth at the Topsfield Fair, of a seventeen-year-old girl, with bangs, and dark lipstick, whom he had once loved. There were also a number of obsolete receipts (for film left at the drugstore, dry cleaning, a lawn mower to be sharpened, a watch to be repaired) and perhaps sixty dollars in cash.

The cash was the least of it; it was the other things—the irreplaceable mementos, the credit cards that were infinitely tedious to replace—whose disappearance he could not endure, could not encompass. He methodically, yet with that frantic undercurrent which defeats method, searched the large house, checking the bathroom floors, the creases behind
sofa cushions, the drawers of his desk, the spaces above the books in the library. Fulham knew that on rare occasions, semi-consciously, he would find the wallet’s bulk bothersome and take it from his pocket to set it on a convenient surface. He went over the quiet events of the evening before, fishing them up from his aging gray cells: dinner, a walk out into the garden to admire the late roses and the first turning leaves, a little time spent in the library leafing through the latest issue of
Barron’s
, a half-hour watching, with Diane, a rerun of an old movie,
Silk Stockings
, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. The production numbers lacked grandeur on the little screen and the plot spun painfully between them. He had forgotten how high Astaire’s voice was, how slight. And Charisse, whom he had also once loved, looked stiff and uneasy under the burden of her fake Russian accent. They should have left it all on Broadway, as
Ninotchka
. Fulham had gone to bed ahead of his wife, undressing, as best he could remember, in his usual pattern, and reading himself into nodding with an Agatha Christie he may have read decades before; faint sensations of
déjà vu
teased the edges of his dissolving consciousness, as Poirot paced off precise distances in the murder-stricken drawing room.

In the morning, he recalled that there had been, between the times in the library and the television room, a call from his daughter, saying they were bringing the children over early in the morning so she and Rob could drive to Providence for a Sam Shepard play they were dying to see and then spend the night with a couple they knew in Rumford. Fulham went to the spot where he had answered the call, a nook of many small shelves just off the kitchen. Suddenly inspired, he deduced that here, amid the leaning cookbooks and rarely used hors-d’oeuvre plates, was where his wallet had to be; indeed, he
saw
it—fat, brown, with corners rubbed pale and the
shape of a credit card denting the leather as sometimes a woman’s underpants show in shallow relief through a very tight dress—and emitted a small crow of triumph before realizing that what he took for the wallet was an old out-of-date address book that Diane had not bothered to throw away. His hallucination rattled him and doubled the fury with which he searched the house, room by room, corner by corner. The wallet had ceased to exist.

“It’s been stolen,” he told his wife at lunch.

Diane had a calm patrician face, and when she lifted her chin and thus pulled smooth the loose flesh beneath, it was still beautiful, her abundant hair so utterly white as to seem an expensively sought-after effect. “How could it have been?”

“Easy. The house is big enough anybody could slip in and out in a minute without our knowing. Anyway, it’s not up to me to figure out how to do it, it’s up to
them
. And they’ve done it. The bastards have done it and I’m going to have to cancel every goddamn credit card.”

She looked at him coolly, giving him her full attention for once, and said, “I’ve never seen you like this.”

“How am I?”

“You’re wild.”

“It was my
wallet
. Everything is in it. Everything. Without that wallet, I’m nothing.” His tongue had outraced his brain, but once he said it he realized this to be true: without the wallet, he was a phantom, flitting about in a house without walls. “And I know
why
they took it,” he went on. “To get the bank card. With that bank card they can now deposit and draw on that check they stole earlier.”

“Deposit it in your own account?”

“And then transfer it to their own, somehow. I don’t know, I don’t know how criminals do their work exactly; that’s
their
job. I do know that with these computers there’s no more
common sense in banking—a wino off the street can walk away with ten thousand dollars if he knows how to satisfy the idiotic machine. People and institutions are being—what’s the phrase these kids have?—ripped off all the time. We ourselves have just been ripped off of—” He named the amount of the lost check from Houston and her blue eyes went round as she began to believe him. “Don’t you see?” Fulham pressed. “The check, and now the wallet—it’s too much of a coincidence.”

“I can’t believe,” Diane said weakly, “it’s as simple as you make it sound, with all these safeguards—our code word, for instance.”

He scoffed: “Hundreds of people know our code word by now—all the employees at the bank, and anybody who’s ever stood behind us in line.” It was irrefutably clear to him that forces out there, beyond the horizon of towering beech trees and snug slate roofs, had silently, invisibly conspired to invade his domain and steal all his treasure. Every door and window, even the little apertures of the mail slot and the telephone, were holes through which his possessions, the accumulations of a lifetime, were being pulled from him. Ruinously the world has cast property into the form of nebulous, mechanized fluidity. The cards in the missing wallet opened into slippery tunnels of credit, veins of his blood. Fulham stood, feeling drained and faint. “I’m going to call Houston and stop the check,” he told his wife. “Then the bank and freeze my account.”