Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“No, I’m sorry, Gam, I didn’t. I’m just passing through Portland and I thought I’d stop by.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding her heavy head, her eyebrows knit, her watery blue eyes studying his face. “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise!” She closed the door to undo the chain, then opened it wide to him. “Won’t you come in?” He could see she still had no idea who he was. “And to think that I was just thinking of you, too! How do you like that?”

“Hi, Gam,” said Eddie, putting his arms around the old woman and kissing her cheek. Raised by her German parents on a farm outside Davenport at the beginning of the century, Oriole was a big, broad-backed woman, ample and plain and quadrangular as the state of Iowa itself. Hugging her, Eddie felt comforted, as by the charitable gaze of a cow. He picked up the briefcase and followed her into the apartment, a suite of four rooms with two baths, a tiny kitchen, and a view from two sides of roofs and bridges, the dull, shining band of the river, and, on this hot, clear summer afternoon, the distant white ghost of Mt. Hood. Oriole passed most of her time in the small, bright room just off the entryway, sitting in a green chintz chair, with her feet propped up on a green chintz hassock, reading large-print editions of the novels of Barbara Cartland, whom she somewhat resembled, solving word-search puzzles, and spying on the next-door neighbors through a pair of Zeiss binoculars nearly as old as she was — Eddie thought she must be ninety — brought back from the Great War by Dolores’s grandfather, Horace. The Farnham was built on the plan of a Greek cross, and Oriole, whose apartment was in the eastern arm, had only to gaze along an angle reaching some twenty feet to the northwest to see into the windows of 9-F. There was never much to see — the occupants were a Persian cat and a couple of maiden sisters named Stark who kept their blinds drawn most of the time and whose chief occupations seemed to be drinking tea and reading religious magazines — but Oriole never stopped hoping, and once she had been fortunate enough to witness a brief foray by the housebound cat out onto the narrow window ledge, and the sisterly panic that ensued. It was a momentous event that Oriole rarely neglected to renarrate to visitors.

“Why don’t you put your darling little suitcase in the guest room?” she said to Eddie now, patting at the wispy cloud of her hair, tugging at the collar of her housecoat. “I’m just going to get dressed.” She chuckled. “You must think I’m awfully lazy! I guess I just lost track of the time this morning. What time is it?”

Eddie blushed for her sake and pretended to look at his watch. “It’s still early,” he said. “But, Gam, I’m afraid I’m not staying. I only—”

“I’ll bring you some clean towels,” said Oriole, steering herself into her bedroom. “I know we’ll have such a nice time.”

Eddie shrugged, set down his burden, and sank onto a cheap vinyl-and-chrome kitchen chair, beside a scarred old walnut table whose matching chairs and sideboard had long since disappeared. Besides the well-worn armchair and hassock, the only other furniture in this room, which served as Oriole’s parlor, study, and dining room, was an overlarge piece of Empire cabinetry that held her romance novels, Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and a heartbreakingly beautiful photograph of a homely sixteen-year-old debutante Dolores, with a snaggled smile, being devoured by a vast pink chiffon ball gown. There was a formal living room, in which a few other relics of Oriole’s life — a scrollworked Victorian chesterfield, a gilt mirror, some chairs with feet carved into lions’ heads — had been set on display, but she rarely used it, preferring to entertain guests from the lumbar comfort of her green chintz armchair. All the rest of her furniture — and, according to the dentally sound but no less heartbreaking woman who’d emerged from the clutches of that vast pink dress, there had been rooms and rooms of it — had been sold, along with the big house on Alameda Street which Eddie had never seen, or dispersed among Oriole’s eventual heirs, or, as Oriole always claimed, stolen, by the gang of crooked servants, nurses, and kleptomaniacal beings by whom the old lady imagined herself to be plagued. “There!” said Oriole, emerging from her bedroom in a loose sleeveless dress, belted at the waist and patterned with pink daisies, purple irises, red carnations, and gold fleurs-de-lis against a background of green lattice. Eddie wondered if such dresses were, for old ladies, the fashion equivalent of large-print books and shouted conversations. “That’s much better. It’s awfully warm today.”

“It is hot,” said Eddie. It was stuffy, as well, and there was a faint sweet tang from the kitchen trash. Despite the heat of the afternoon, none of the windows were open, and the apartment felt even more close and airless than the elevator. “You look very nice.”

“Thank you.” She made her way over to her green chair and lowered herself slowly and with an air of deep satisfaction into it. She and Eddie looked at each other, smiling across the gap of years and nonblood relationship and a fundamental lack of acquaintance. It occurred to Eddie, for the first time, that he and Mrs. Box were nothing to each other. Eddie mopped his forehead. Oriole tapped her knobby fingers on the arm of her chair and studied him, eyes screwed, head cocked to one side.

“Do I know you from Davenport?” she said at last.

“No, Gam,” said Eddie. “I’ve never been to Davenport. You know me from here in Portland. From your granddaughter. Dolores?”

“Of course,” said Oriole. She nodded. “I like her.”

“So do I,” said Eddie.

“Did you know my husband?”

“No, I didn’t, Gam. But I know what a nice man he was.” In point of fact, old Horace Box, an executive with the Great Northern Railroad who died when Dolores was a little girl, had always been described to Eddie as a formidable person — a strikebuster, a perfectionist. His photograph looked out from the wall above Oriole’s head — square jaw, rimless spectacles, brilliantined hair, an expression of unsurprised disappointment.

“Oh, he was a wonderful man,” said Oriole. “I miss him to this day.”

“I know you do.”

“You know,” she said, lowering her voice as though about to impart a confidence. She fingered a gold chain that hung amid the satiny pleats of her throat — an ornate, inch-thick, and not particularly attractive piece of jewelry, a sort of gnarled golden tree branch across which crawled beetle-size diamonds surrounded by swarms of emerald-chip aphids. “This beautiful necklace he gave me never leaves my body.”

“Wow,” said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life. But this time, as he watched her run her swollen fingers along the twisted branch that Horace Box had presented her with on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, Eddie was moved, and somehow disturbed, by the enduring habit of her grief. For twenty-two years the necklace had not left her withered throat except on two calamitous and oft-narrated occasions, when the clasp had given way — once on the beach at Gearhart, and once as she bent to draw a bath.

“I sleep with it on, you know,” she said. “Though at times it lies quite heavy on my windpipe.”

“Seventy-two years,” said Eddie, enviously, too softly for Oriole to hear. He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs. Eddie had known for a long time — since his wedding day — that it was not a strong marriage, but now, for the first time, it occurred to him that this was because he and Dolores were not strong people; they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.