Richard Russo: Nobody's Fool

The logic of her son’s concern was inescapable, his argument consistent, yet despite this, Miss Beryl could not shed the feeling that Clive Jr. had a hidden agenda. She knew no more about his personal finances than he knew about hers, but she suspected that he was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man. She knew too that despite his realtor’s eye, he had no interest in the house, that if he were to inherit it tomorrow, he’d sell it the day after. He’d recently purchased a luxury town home at the new Schuyler Springs Country Club between North Bath and Schuyler Springs. The house on Upper Main might bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, maybe more, and this was nothing to sneeze at, even if Clive Jr. didn’t “need” the money. Yet she was unable to accept at face value that this was her son’s design. There was something about the way his eye roved uncomfortably from corner to corner of each room, as if in search of spirit trails, that convinced Miss Beryl he was seeing something she couldn’t see, and until she discovered what it was, she had no intention of trusting him fully.

Outside Miss Beryl’s front window a thick clump of snow fell noiselessly from an unseen branch. There was a lot of it, but the snow wouldn’t stay. Despite appearances, this wasn’t real winter. Not yet. Still, Miss Beryl went out into the back hall and located the snow shovel where she had stored it beneath the stairs last April and leaned it up against the door where even Sully couldn’t fail to see it when he left. Back inside, she became aware of a distant buzzing which meant that her tenant’s alarm had gone off. Since injuring his knee, Sully slept even less than Miss Beryl, who got by on five hours a night, along with the three or four fifteen-minute naps she adamantly refused to admit taking throughout the day. Sully woke up several times each night. Miss Beryl heard him pad across his bedroom floor above her own and into the bathroom, where he would patiently wait to urinate. Old houses surrendered a great many auditory secrets, and Miss Beryl knew, for instance, that Sully had recently taken to sitting on the commode, which creaked beneath him, to await his water. Sometimes, to judge from the time it took him to return to bed, he fell asleep there. Either that or he was having prostate problems. Miss Beryl made a mental note to share with Sully one of the ditties of her childhood:

Old Mrs. Jones had diabetes

Not a drop she couldn’t pee

She took two bottles

Of Lydia Pinkham’s

And they piped her to the sea .

Miss Beryl wondered if Sully would be amused. That probably depended on whether he knew what Lydia Pinkham’s was. One of the problems of being eighty was that you built up a pretty impressive store of allusions. Other people didn’t follow them, and they made it clear that this was your fault. Somewhere along the line, about the time America was being colonized, Miss Beryl suspected, the knowledge of old people had gotten discounted until now it was worth what the little boy shot at. Had Miss Beryl been a younger woman, it might have made an interesting project to trace the evolution of conventional wisdom on this point. Somehow old people, once the revered repositories of the culture’s history and values, had become dusty museums of arcane and worthless information. No matter. She’d share the jingle with Sully anyway. He could stand a little poetry in his life.

Upstairs, the alarm clock continued to buzz. According to Sully, the only deep sleep he got any more was during the hour or so before his alarm went off. He’d recently purchased a new alarm clock because he kept sleeping through the old one. Also the new one. The first time Mrs. Beryl had heard that strange, faraway buzzing, she’d mistakenly concluded that the end was near. She’d read somewhere that the human brain was little more than a maze of electrical impulses, firing dutifully inside the skull, and the buzzing, she concluded, must be some sort of malfunction. The fact that the buzzing occurred at the same time every morning did not immediately tip her off, as it should have, that it was external to herself. She’d assumed that the time Clive Jr. was always alluding to had indeed come. It was the abrupt cessation of the buzzing, always followed immediately by the thud of Sully’s heavy feet hitting the bedroom floor, that finally allowed Miss Beryl to solve the mystery, for which she was grateful, because, having solved it, she could stop worrying and shaking her head in search of the electrical short and giving herself headaches.

Perhaps because of her original misdiagnosis, the distant buzzing of Sully’s alarm was still mildly disconcerting, so she did this morning what she did most mornings. She went first to the kitchen for the broom, then to her bedroom, where she gave the ceiling a good sharp thump or two with the broom handle, stopping when she heard her tenant grunt awake, snorting loudly and confused. She doubted Sully was aware of what really woke him so many mornings, that it was not the new alarm.

Perhaps, Miss Beryl conceded, her son was right about giving Sully the boot. He was a careless man, there was no denying it. He was careless with cigarettes, careless, without ever meaning to be, about people and circumstances. And therefore dangerous. Maybe, it occurred to Miss Beryl as she returned to her front window and stared up into the network of black limbs, Sully was the metaphorical branch that would fall on her from above. Part of getting old, she knew, was becoming unsure. For longer than any of her widowed neighbors, Miss Beryl had staved off the ravages of uncertainty by remaining intellectually challenged and alert. So far she’d been able to keep faith in her own judgment, in part by rigorously questioning the judgment of others. Having Clive Jr. around helped in this regard, and Miss Beryl had always told herself that when her son’s advice started making sense to her, then she’d know she was slipping. Perhaps her fearing Clive Jr.’s wisdom on the subject of Sully was the beginning.

But she’d not concede quite yet, she decided. In several important respects Sully was an important ally, just as he had been a month ago when she’d taken a tumble and sprained her wrist painfully. Fearing it might be broken, she’d had Sully drive her to the hospital in Schuyler Springs, where the wrist had been X-rayed and taped. The whole episode had taken no more than two hours, and she’d been sent home with a prescription for Tylenol 3 painkillers. She’d taken only two of the pills because they made her drowsy and she didn’t mind the pain once she knew what it was. As soon as she’d learned the wrist wasn’t fractured, she felt better, and the next day she made a gift of the remaining Tylenols to Sully, who since his injury was always in the market for pain pills.

Sully could be trusted, she knew, to keep her secret. She wished the same could be said for Mrs. Gruber, whom Clive Jr. used, Miss Beryl suspected, to check up on her. Mrs. Gruber denied this, of course, but then she would, having been forbidden by her friend to communicate any information of a personal nature to Clive Jr. But Miss Beryl was pretty sure Mrs. Gruber was a snitch just the same. Clive Jr. could be ingratiating, and one of Mrs. Gruber’s chief enjoyments in life was discussing other people’s illnesses and accidents. Miss Beryl doubted that her friend could resist an insidious sweet-talker like Clive Jr.

Still at the front window, Miss Beryl peered for a long time through the blinds and up the street in the direction of Mrs. Gruber’s house. Quarter to seven. The street was still silent, the new blanket of snow spoiled by just the one set of dark tire tracks. Miss Beryl sighed and stared up into the web of tree limbs, starkly black against the white morning sky. “Fall,” she said, pleased and heartened as she always was by the sound of her own decisive voice. “See if I care.”