Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“I like words,” Miss Beryl said when they were seated again and Mrs. Gruber had begun eating, with great solemnity, her cottage cheese. “I like choosing the right ones.”

An hour later, on their way back to Bath, Mrs. Gruber got the hiccups. Miss Beryl remembered one of her mother’s favorite quips, which she now shared with her companion. “Well,” she told Mrs. Gruber. “Either you told a lie or you ‘et’ something.”

Mrs. Gruber looked guilty and hiccuped again. When they arrived back at Upper Main, Clive Jr.’s car was parked at the curb.

Sully’s ex-wife, Vera, stood at the sink in the kitchen of her house on Silver Street, feeling, for the umpteenth time today, liquid emotion climb in her throat like illness. From the kitchen window in the gathering dusk she was able to make out a ramshackle pickup truck idling at the curb, its blue exhaust creating a cloud that threatened to take over the entire block. Apparently whoever owned it had gone into the house across the street, leaving the truck running, its viral pollution not so much dissipating as enshrouding. Vera imagined the cloud of noxious fumes growing until it covered not only the block but the entire town of her childhood, her life, leaving a greasy film on everything.

For nearly sixty years she’d lived on Silver Street in the town of North Bath, for the last thirty in this modest, well-tended house with Ralph Mott, the man she’d married soon after divorcing Sully. For the first twenty years of her life she’d lived down the block in a house that, until a decade ago when her father took up residence in the veterans’ home, had been as pretty and well-tended as any on the street. Since then the whole neighborhood had slipped into unmistakable decline. Her father’s house, the house of her happy girlhood, was now rented to its third grubby, loutish welfare family. The current owner was a man Vera had known and disliked when they were in the same high school class. At the time he bought her father’s house everyone had assumed he’d move in, but instead he rented it, along with the one his parents had lived in around the corner, and he himself moved to Schuyler Springs. He’d bought her father’s house for a song when Robert Halsey, who was in slowly declining health, sensed that it would not be long before he would be in need of constant care. He’d sold the house well below market, without consulting his daughter or anyone else, perhaps without suspecting what the house was worth, perhaps fearing that if he waited too long, the house could conceivably be lost to illness. He’d sold it in the summer, when Vera and Ralph and Peter were away for their week’s vacation, and had moved into the veterans’ home in Schuyler Springs before she returned. He knew that she would try to dissuade him, and perhaps succeed in doing so, knew that it was her intention to tend to his needs for as long as he allowed her. He was unsentimental where his daughter was concerned, knew all too well the preternatural strength of her devotion to him, knew that she would put his needs, his well-being, before her own, and maybe even before her family’s. When she’d been a younger woman, away at her first year at the state teachers’ college at Oneonta and he’d taken ill, she’d simply dropped all her classes and come home to tend to him. When he got well again, at least for a time, she never went back, instead allowing herself to slip into a doomed marriage with Sully (so she could be close by, he suspected) and then, after the divorce, into a more satisfactory but — her father suspected — equally unhappy marriage to Ralph Mott.

Robert Halsey had been concerned, though not terribly surprised, when his daughter talked her second husband into buying a house down the street. He understood that the proximity made Vera feel safe and good, and he was never able to find a way to tell her that it was time for her to give him up, just as he was never able to tell her when she exercised bad judgment in other respects, despite the numerous opportunities she provided. Her love for him was the most terrible thing he’d ever witnessed, and he could think of no way to combat it, no way to prevent her from injuring herself further. By selling the house and giving her and Ralph the money, by moving to Schuyler Springs and into the VA home, he had fled her devotion and helped his daughter and her second husband get out from under the burden of debt brought on by her earlier lapses in judgment.

Though he had never found a way to tell her, Vera knew that she was a disappointment to her father. He had worked hard and sacrificed much on his small-town teacher’s salary to provide her with an opportunity to attend college. Instead of going to the university as he’d urged her, she’d insisted on the state teachers’ college because it was closer, and then had walked away from even that. She’d known that returning home to tend him would not please her father, that doing it was some sort of deep-down lie. She had not liked the college or her life there, had not made friends, had not been able to focus on her studies. Her father’s illness had been an excuse to return home and share his life. She loved him that much and found it impossible to question her unflagging devotion to him, even though she understood, at least in moments of brutal clarity, that it was this devotion, as much as Sully’s myriad shortcomings, that was responsible for the failure of her first marriage, just as it was responsible for the continued unhappiness of her second. The simple fact was that no man measured up to Robert Halsey, her father, a man of noble bearing, directly descended from Jedediah Halsey, the man who first envisioned, then made a reality of, the Sans Souci.

The only person who came close to measuring up was her son, Peter, in whom Vera had a great deal invested. In Peter she saw a boy destined to redeem her father’s faith and sacrifice. He was bright, a far better student than she had ever been, and he did very well in school despite the fact that his teachers seemed not to like him. His achievements always seemed to fall just short of brilliance, a fact for which his mother was never able to account. He was an exceedingly nervous child, but she did not suspect that he studied out of fear, propelled forward only as far as fear could push him, which was a goodly distance. When she finally began to recognize her son’s terrors for what they were, it did not take her long to isolate their source, which could only be Sully, the man who both was and was not his father, who was lurking in the back of her son’s consciousness.

Vera was able to identify this fear because she shared it. She had always carried with her the knowledge that Sully possessed the power to destroy them all, possibly through carelessness, perhaps even through misguided good intentions. Her most nagging fear when Peter was growing up was that Sully might one day wake up and take an interest in their son. This turned out to be an unwarranted concern, but Vera spent many a sleepless night developing strategies for coping with Sully in the unlikely event that he should become an issue, and each time he turned up at her door, usually at her foolish husband Ralph’s instigation, with plans to take Peter somewhere, Vera was terrified that he would suddenly love the boy. What would she do then? What could she do?

It was this irrational concern that had so often led Vera’s judgment to falter. Recalling how homesick she’d been in college at Oneonta, how out of place she had felt, how hard it had been to focus on her studies, she decided to spare Peter North Bath’s suspect high school by sending him to an all-boy prep school in New Hampshire. The decision had been an agonizing one because she’d known that even as the strategy protected Peter from his father, it also separated the boy from herself. In the end she decided the risk was worth it, telling herself that the better educated and more refined he became, the less appealing he would be to his father, the less likely Sully would be to come to his senses and love his own son.