Richard Russo: Nobody's Fool

Miss Beryl did not argue, but neither did she share her son’s optimism. To her way of thinking there would always be bad locations, and unless she was gravely mistaken Clive Jr. would discover this by investing in them. Clive Jr. was a cynical optimist. He believed that people went broke for two reasons: stupidity and small thinking. Stupidity in others was a good thing, according to Clive Jr., because there was money to be made by it. Other people’s financial failures were opportunities, not cause for alarm. He liked to analyze failure after the fact, discover its source in small thinking, limited ambition, penny antes. He prided himself on having rescued the North Bath Savings and Loan from just such unhealthy notions. For years that institution had been edging by slender centimeters toward insolvency, the result of Clive Jr.’s predecessor, a deeply suspicious and pessimistic man from Maine who hated to loan people money. The fact that people came to him asking for money and often truly needing it suggested to him the likelihood of their not being able to repay it. He could see the need in their eyes, and he couldn’t imagine such need going away. He thought the institution’s money was safer in the vault than in their pockets. The man had actually died in the bank, on a Sunday, seated in his leather chair, his office door closed, as it always was, as if he suspected he might be petitioned even on a weekend night with the doors to the bank locked. He was discovered on Monday morning in a state of advanced rigor mortis not unlike, it was later remarked, the condition of the institution he oversaw.

When Clive Jr. took over, things loosened up right away. The first thing he did was put down a new carpet in the lobby, the old one having evolved several stages beyond threadbare except in the passageway that led to the CEO’s office, where there’d been little traffic. His goal for the decade was to increase tenfold the savings and loan’s assets, and he made known his intention to invest what money was left aggressively and even, when the situation seemed to call for it, to loan money out. After so many years of pessimism, Clive Jr. maintained, it was time for a little optimism. Furthermore, that was the mood of the nation.

The only policy Clive Jr. shared with his late predecessor was his deep distrust of the residents of North Bath, whom both men considered shiftless. That’s the way his high school classmates had been, and they’d grown up shiftless, in Clive Jr.’s view. He preferred to deal with investors and borrowers from downstate, indeed from out of state, indeed from as far away as Texas, convinced that these were the future of Bath, just as they had been the salvation of Clifton Park and the other recently affluent Albany suburbs. “Downstate money is creeping up the Northway,” Clive Jr. told his mother, a remark that always caused her to peer at him over the rims of her reading glasses. To Miss Beryl, the idea of money creeping up the interstate was sinister. “Ma,” he insisted, “take it from me. When the time comes to sell the house, you’re going to make a bundle.”

It was phrases like “when the time comes” that worried Miss Beryl. They had a menacing resonance when Clive Jr. delivered them. She wondered what he had in mind. Would she be the judge of “when the time came,” or would he? When he visited her, he looked the house over with a realtor’s eye, found excuses to go down into the basement and up into the attic, as if he wanted to make sure that “when the time came” for him to inherit his mother’s property it would be in good condition. He objected to her renting the upstairs flat to Donald Sullivan, against whom Clive Jr. harbored some ancient animosity, and no visit from Clive Jr., no matter how brief, passed without a renewed plea for her to throw Sully out before he fell asleep in bed with a lighted cigarette. Something about the way Clive Jr. voiced this concern convinced Miss Beryl that her son’s anxiety had less to do with the possibility that his elderly mother might go up in flames than that the house would.

Miss Beryl was not proud of entertaining such unkind thoughts about her only child, and at times she even tried to reason herself out of them and into more natural maternal affection. The only difficulty was that natural maternal affection did not come naturally where Clive Jr. was concerned. The Clive Jr. who sat on the television opposite his father seemed pleasant enough, and the face the camera caught did not seem to be that of an unhappy, insecure, middle-aged banker. In fact, Clive Jr.’s face, still boyish in some ways, seemed full of possibility at an age where the countenances of most men were etched indelibly by the certainties of their existences. Clive Jr., at least the Clive Jr. who sat on the television, still struck Miss Beryl as unresolved, even though he would be fifty-six on his next birthday. Clive Jr. in real life was a different story. Whenever he appeared for one of his visits and gave Miss Beryl a dry, unpleasant peck on the forehead before scanning the living room ceiling for water damage, his character, if character was the right word, seemed as fixed and settled as a fifth-term conservative politician’s. She endured his visits, his endless financial advice, with as much good cheer as she could muster. He would tell her what to do and why, and she would listen politely for as long as it took before declining to follow his advice. In her opinion Clive Jr. was full of cockamamie schemes, and he treated each as if its origin were the burning bush and not his own fevered brain. “Ma,” he often said, on those occasions when she emphatically declined to follow his advice, “it’s almost as if you didn’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust you,” Miss Beryl said aloud, addressing her son’s photo on the television, then adding, to her husband, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I don’t trust him. Ed understands, don’t you, Ed.”

Clive Sr. just smiled back, a tad ruefully, it seemed to her. Since his death he’d increasingly taken their son’s side in matters of conflict. “Trust him, Beryl,” he whispered to her now, his voice confidential, as if he feared that Driver Ed might overhear. “He’s our son. He’s the star of your firmament now.”

“I’m working on it,” Miss Beryl assured her husband, and in fact, she was. She’d loaned Clive Jr. money twice during the last five years and not even asked him what he intended to do with it. Five thousand dollars the first time. Ten thousand the second. Amounts she would not be pleased to lose but which, truth be told, she could afford to lose. But both times Clive Jr. had paid her back when he said he would, and Miss Beryl, on the lookout for a reason not to trust her son, discovered that she was mildly disappointed to have the money back in her own possession. In fact, she was unable to fend off a particularly shameful suspicion — that Clive Jr. had not needed the money at all, that he’d borrowed it to demonstrate to her that he was trustworthy. She even began to suspect that what he must be after was not part of what would be his soon enough, but rather control of the whole. But to what end? Miss Beryl had to admit that the logic of her suspicions was flawed. After all, her money, the house on Upper Main and its considerable contents, everything would belong to Clive Jr. eventually, when, as he put it, “the time came.”

One of the things that drove her son to distraction, Miss Beryl suspected, was not knowing how much “everything” amounted to. There was the house, of course, and the ten thousand dollars he knew his mother had because she’d loaned it to him. But how much more? It was this information about her finances that Miss Beryl did not trust her son with. She had an accountant in Schuyler Springs do her taxes each year, and she instructed him to surrender no information about her affairs to Clive Jr. For legal advice, she dealt with a local attorney named Abraham Wirfly, whom her son continued to warn her against as an incompetent and a drunkard. Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr. Wirfly’s shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer. More important, she considered the man to be absolutely loyal, and when he promised to divulge nothing of her financial and legal affairs to Clive Jr., she believed him. Without ever saying so, Abraham Wirfly seemed also to entertain reservations about Clive Jr., and so Miss Beryl continued to trust him. Clive Jr.’s growing exasperation was testimony to her excellent judgment. “Ma,” he pleaded pitifully, pacing up and down the length of her front room, “how can I help you protect your assets if you won’t let me? What’s going to happen if you get sick? Do you want the hospital to take everything? Is that your plan? To have a stroke and let some hospital take their thousand a day until it’s all gone and you’re destitute?”