Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

This was the state of affairs when Miss Beryl and Mrs. Gruber were seated at a table far too large for the two of them in the very center of the room. Miss Beryl was still unnerved at having driven right past the restaurant, and she was far too peeved at her companion to think seriously of food. Mrs. Gruber was all for joining the buffet line immediately, before it got any longer. Miss Beryl refused, ordering a Manhattan. “It’s not going to get longer,” she explained. “Except for us, everyone in the room is already in it.”

“If you say so, dear,” said Mrs. Gruber, who deferred to Miss Beryl, albeit reluctantly, in most worldly matters. “What’s that tasty highball I always like?”

“An old-fashioned,” Miss Beryl reminded her.

Mrs. Gruber ordered an old-fashioned.

The menu was a special Thanksgiving issue scripted onto an onionskin page with scalloped edges, and Mrs. Gruber studied this as if it were the Rosetta Stone. They had a choice among roast turkey, glazed ham, and Yankee pot roast. Mrs. Gruber’s lips moved as she read each description and broadened into a smile as she arrived at her decision, which Miss Beryl could have predicted at the outset. “I’m going to eat Old Tom,” Mrs. Gruber announced, much too loudly. Several people nearby looked up, startled. “Old Tom Turkey will be just the thing,” Mrs. Gruber said. She was reading the menu a second time, just to make sure. “Succulent, it says.”

What Mrs. Gruber liked about the food at the Northwoods Motor Inn was precisely what Miss Beryl disliked about it — everything came overcooked. Vegetables were recognizable only by their color, or a bleached version of it, the original shapes and textures lost to the puree process. Meats too were always on the verge of losing their natural composition, so broken down by heat and steam that Mrs. Gruber was always prompted to remark that you could cut it with a fork.

“Succulent is the wrong word to describe turkey,” Miss Beryl said.

Mrs. Gruber put down her menu. “What?” she said.

Miss Beryl repeated her observation.

“You always get angry about words when you’re in a bad mood,” Mrs. Gruber said, apparently having decided to acknowledge her friend’s offishness. “There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘succulent.’ It’s a perfectly lovely word. You can see it, almost.”

Miss Beryl conceded that you could almost see the word ‘succulent,’ but she doubted that what she almost saw was what Mrs. Gruber almost saw. It was entirely true, however, that she found fault with words when it was really something else that troubled her. Perhaps she was even guilty of being in a bad mood. Clive Jr.’s call and her suspicions concerning Mrs. Gruber were only part of it. She’d been feeling vaguely annoyed with everything since the morning when she’d conversed with Sully on the back porch and Sully had unexpectedly admitted to having misspent his life. Miss Beryl had always admired in Sully his fierce loyalty to the myriad mistakes that constituted his odd, lonely existence. She’d expected his usual defiance, and his sad, uncharacteristic admission had made him seem even more ghostlike than usual. The whole town of Bath, it sometimes seemed to Miss Beryl, was becoming ghostlike, especially Upper Main Street with its elms, the tangle of their black branches overhead, the old houses, most of which were haunted by a single surviving member of a once-flourishing family, and that member conversing more regularly with the dead than the living. Maybe she would be better off living next to a golf course. Maybe it was better to act as a magnet for slicing Titleists than sit beneath limbs that were bound eventually to fall. That morning after Sully had left and before Clive Jr. called, Miss Beryl had a long and not terribly satisfying discussion with Clive Sr., whom she always missed most urgently on holidays. She’d tuned in the Macy’s parade, but her attention was drawn to the photograph of her husband, whose round face hovered above the Snoopy balloon. Was there something in his expression this morning suggestive of mild disapproval? “If you don’t like the way I’m handling things, you can just butt out,” Miss Beryl told him. “You too,” she told Driver Ed, who looked like he was about to whisper more subversive Zamble advice from his perch on the wall.

Until recently, Miss Beryl had lived a more or less contented existence on Upper Main, and she didn’t understand why she shouldn’t be contented now, since the circumstances of her existence had changed so little. True, death was nearer, but she didn’t fear death, or didn’t fear it any more than she had twenty-five years ago. What she suffered from now, it seemed, was an indefinite sense of misgiving, as if she’d forgotten something important she’d meant to do. Seeing that wretched little girl and her mother yesterday had focused and intensified the feeling, though Miss Beryl was at a loss to account for why this child, however pitiful, should heighten her own personal regret. Regret, when you thought about it, was an absurd emotion for an eighty-year-old woman to indulge on a snowy Thanksgiving, when she had, Miss Beryl was compelled to admit, a great deal to be thankful for. All of this staring up into trees and waiting for God to lower the cosmic boom was nonsense, evidence no doubt that her mind was becoming as arthritic as her toes and fingers. It would have to stop. All of it. Sully wasn’t a ghost, he was a man. And Clive Jr. was her son, her own flesh and blood, and there was no reason to believe that his protestations of concern for her well-being were other than genuine. Her suspicions were paranoia, pure and simple. Clive Jr. had nothing conceivable to gain by scheming against her independence, and if he had no reason to do it, then he wasn’t doing it. And if he wasn’t scheming against her, then Mrs. Gruber couldn’t be his accomplice.

There, Miss Beryl said to herself, glad to have reasoned this through so she could enjoy her dinner and be thankful. She once again studied Mrs. Gruber, who’d gone back to her menu and was examining that document as if it contained a plot. Probably, Miss Beryl conceded, she owed Mrs. Gruber an apology. And she was about to offer one, when she heard herself say something entirely unexpected. “Tell the truth,” she said, as if she meant it. “Does my son call you to check up on me?”

Mrs. Gruber started to put her menu down, then did not. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I mean, does he call you and check up on me?”

“Of course not, dear,” Mrs. Gruber said to her menu. “Why ever would he call me?”

Miss Beryl smiled, her spirits lifted by her friend’s feeble lie and her own ability to detect it. “I didn’t tell him we were coming here for dinner today,” Miss Beryl said, suddenly certain that this was true. “But this morning when I talked to him, he knew.”

“You must have told him before,” Mrs. Gruber told her menu. “You just forgot.”

“Look at me, Alice,” Miss Beryl said.

Mrs. Gruber lowered her menu fearfully.

“Clive Jr. isn’t really my son,” she told her friend. “The bassinets were exchanged in the hospital.”

Mrs. Gruber’s stricken look was testimony to the fact that she believed this for a full five seconds. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“It was a joke,” Miss Beryl said, though it hadn’t been. It was a wish, was what it was.

When Miss Beryl finished her Manhattan, she noted that the line at the salad bar had begun to dwindle. “Well,” she said, rising. “Let’s establish a beachhead at that buffet.”

Mrs. Gruber, still looking guilty, received this suggestion gratefully. “Beachhead,” she repeated, pushing back her chair. “You and your words.”

At the salad bar Mrs. Gruber filled two plates, which she allowed one of the Tyrolean waitresses to deliver to their table.