T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

She tries her sister, but Inge isn’t much for answering the phone these days, a quirk of her advancing years. Why bother? that’s what she thinks. Who is there she wants to hear from? At her age, is there any news that can’t wait? Any news that could even vaguely be construed as good? My widow is nothing if not persistent, however, and on the twelfth ring Inge picks up the phone. “Hello?” she rasps in a voice that was never especially melodious but is now just a deflated ruin. My widow informs her of the problem, accepts a scolding that goes on for at least five minutes and incorporates a dozen ancient grievances, and then she waits on the line for another fifteen minutes while Inge hobbles out to the garage to check the car. Click, click, she’s back on the line and she has bad news for my widow: the purse is not there. Is she sure? Yes, yes, she’s sure. She’s no idiot. She still has two eyes in her head, doesn’t she?

For the next two hours my widow searches for the phone book. Her intention is to look up the phone number of the stores they’d visited, and the Thai Palace too — she’s concerned, and the cats are hungry. But the phone book is elusive. After evicting a dozen cats from the furniture in the main room, digging through the pantry and the closet and discovering any number of things she’d misplaced years ago, she loses track of what she’s looking for, lost in a reverie over an old photo album that turns up in the cabinet under the stove, amidst the pots and pans. She sits at the table, a crescent of yellow lamplight illuminating her features, and studies the hard evidence of the way things were. There are pictures of the two of us, smiling into the camera against various exotic backdrops, against Christmas trees and birthday cakes, minarets and mountains, a succession of years flipping by, our son, his dog, the first cat. Her heart — my widow’s heart — is bursting. It’s gone, everything is gone, and what’s the sense of living, what’s it all about? The girlhood in Buffalo, the college years, romance and love and hope and the prospect of the future — what was the sense in it, where had it gone? The pictures cry out to her. They scream from the page. They poke her and prod her till she’s got no breath left in her body. And just then, when the whole world seems to be closing down, the phone rings.

Bob Smith, A. K. A. Smythe Roberts, Robert P. Smithee, Claudio Noriega and Jack Frounce

“Hello?” my widow answers, her voice like the clicking of the tumblers in an old lock.

“Mrs. B.?” a man’s voice inquires.

My widow is cautious but polite, a woman who has given out her trust, time and again, and been rewarded, for the most part, with kindness and generosity in return. But she hates telephone solicitors, especially those boiler-room types that prey on the elderly — the TV news has been full of that sort of thing lately, and the A.A.R.P. newsletter too. She hesitates a moment, and then, in a barely audible voice, whispers, “Yes?”

“My name is Bob Smith,” the caller returns, “and I’ve found your purse. Somebody apparently dumped it in a trash bin outside of Macy’s — no cash left, of course, but your credit cards are intact, and your license and whatnot. Listen, I was wondering if I might bring it to you — I mean, I could mail it, but who can trust the mail these days, right?”

My widow makes a noise of assent. She doesn’t trust the mail either. Or, actually, she’s never really thought about it one way or another. She shuts her eyes and sees the mailman in his gray-blue shorts with the black stripe up the side, his neatly parted hair cut in the old-fashioned way, his smile, and the way his eyes seem to register everything about everybody on his route as if he took it personally, as if he were policing the streets out front and back of her house and stuffing mailboxes at the same time. Maybe she does trust the mail. Maybe she does.

Bob Smith says, “The mail’d take three days, and I’d have to find a box for the thing—”

My widow says what Bob Smith has been hoping she’ll say: “Oh, you don’t have to go to all that bother. Honestly, I’d come to you, but without my driving glasses — they’re in the purse, you see, and I do have another pair, several pairs, but I can’t seem to, I can’t—”

“That’s all right,” he croons, his voice flowing like sugar water into a child’s cup, “I’m just glad to help out. Now, is this address on your driver’s license still current?”

My widow is waiting at the door for him when he steps through the front gate, a pair of legs like chopsticks in motion, his hair a dyed fluff of nothing combed straight up on his head as if he were one of those long-pants comedians of her father’s era, a face gouged with wrinkles and a smile that makes his eyes all but disappear into two sinkholes of flesh. He wouldn’t have got any farther than the gate if I was around, and I don’t care how old I might have been, or how frail — this man is trouble, and my widow doesn’t know it. Look out, honey, I want to say. Watch out for this one.

But she’s smiling her beautiful smile, the smile that even after all these years has the two puckered dimples in it, her face shining and serene, and “Hello, hello, Mr. Smith,” she’s saying, “won’t you come in?”

He will. He ducks reflexively on stepping through the door, as if his head would crack the doorframe, a tall man with dangling hands, a grubby white shirt and a tie that looks as if it’d been used to swab out the deep fryer at McDonald’s. In his left hand, a plain brown shopping bag, and as she shuts the door behind him and six or seven cats glance up suspiciously from their perch on the mantel, he holds it out to her. “Here it is,” he says, and sure enough, her purse is inside, soft black leather with a silver clasp and the ponzu sauce stain etched into the right panel like an abstract design. She fumbles through the purse for her wallet, thinking to offer him a reward, but then she remembers that there’s no money in it — hadn’t he said on the phone that the money was gone? “I wanted to—” she begins, “I mean, you’ve been so nice, and I—”

Bob Smith is not listening. He’s wandered out into the arena of the grand room, hands clasped behind his back, dodging mounds of discarded magazines, balled-up skeins of yarn, toppled lamps and a cat-gutted ottoman. He has the look of a prospective buyer, interested, but not yet committed. “Pretty old place,” he says, taking his time.

My widow, plumped with gratitude, is eager to accommodate him. “Nineteen-oh-nine,” she says, working the purse between her hands. “It’s the only Prairie style—”

“The rugs and all,” he says, “they must be worth something. And all this pottery and brass stuff — you must have jewelry too.”

“Oh, yes,” my widow says, “I’ve been collecting antique jewelry for, well, since before I was an antique myself,” and she appends a little laugh. What a nice man, she’s thinking, and how many out there today would return a lady’s purse? Or anything, for that matter? They’d stolen the lawnmower right out of the garage, stripped the tires off the car that time she’d broken down in Oxnard. She’s feeling giddy, ready to dial Inge the minute he leaves and crow about the purse that’s come back to her as if it had wings.

“Your husband here?” Bob Smith asks, picking his way back to her like a man on the pitching deck of a ship. There seems to be something stuck to the bottom of his left shoe.

“My husband?” Another laugh, muted, caught deep in her throat. “He’s been gone twenty years now. Twenty-one. Or no, twenty-two.”

“Kids?”

“Our son, Philip, lives in Calcutta, India. He’s a doctor.”