Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Joyce’s emotions are very near the surface,” Clive Jr. had explained as he gathered up the pieces of the Queen Anne. “Menopause devastated her.”

Miss Beryl had narrowed her eyes at this observation, so clearly out of character for Clive Jr., whom she’d never known to see anything from a woman’s point of view. No doubt he was repeating the Joyce woman’s own explanation for her emotional instability. Miss Beryl herself was not particularly sympathetic to the “devastations” supposedly wrought by menopause, a condition she herself had weathered with good grace. She’d observed that women who were “devastated by menopause” were often vain creatures to begin with. They’d spent their young lives trading on their looks, knowing, in fact, no other currency.

This Joyce woman had been attractive all right, at least to judge from her yearbook photo. It had occurred to Miss Beryl this morning when she’d studied the pretty girl in The Torch , that in a way the Joyce woman who had whimpered for half an hour in the bathroom was grieving the loss of a loved one — the self she had been when she was flush with the currency of youth. And Miss Beryl was unable to decide whether it was appropriate to sympathize with such a person. She was inclined not to. It had been within her power to comfort the Joyce woman by telling her, once she returned from the bathroom, that the chair’s destruction was not so much her fault as Sully’s, whose squirming into his work boots every morning had no doubt readied the chair for its final collapse. But every time Miss Beryl had been about to make this gesture, the Joyce woman had said something disagreeable, and finally Miss Beryl had decided to let her suffer.

When she’d finally returned to their company in the living room, the Joyce woman’s mood had swung dramatically. She’d become heroically yakky, as if only a steady stream of pointless, breathless, one-sided conversation could ensure that Clive Jr. and Miss Beryl would be prevented from inquiring after her health, physical and emotional. Miss Beryl wondered if she’d popped a pill. The Joyce woman made no mention of the broken chair, refused, in fact, to glance in its direction.

“She’s really a wonderful girl, Ma,” Clive Jr. now insisted with uncharacteristic sincerity. “She wasn’t herself yesterday.”

“Who was she?” Miss Beryl said, an unkind question perhaps, though not as unkind as the other that occurred to her: “What girl?” The woman had to be in her late fifties.

Clive Jr. looked at his hands. “You’re always hard on people, Ma.”

Miss Beryl had to concede that this was probably true. Clive Sr. had pointed it out to her more than once, and Mrs. Gruber was of the same opinion. So had been her legion of eighth-graders, whose mediocre efforts she’d rewarded with mediocre grades. “I wasn’t aware of being mean to her,” she told Clive Jr., “but if I was, I’m sorry. It’s not my opinion of her that matters anyway. I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You’re the one that’s got to like her.”

“Well, I do,” Clive Jr. insisted, that same stubborn quality to his voice that he’d had as a child. “I love her,” he added. He’d set the splintered sticks he’d been trying to match on the floor with the remains of the crippled chair and taken back from her the yearbook, the ribbed surface of which he massaged affectionately with his pink thumb, a gesture so pathetic that Miss Beryl felt herself soften toward him.

Getting up from the table, she gathered her teacup and saucer. “I’m glad for you,” she said. “There are worse things than love. Give me a minute and I’ll think of one.”

She’d meant this remark as a joke, but it had come out with such conviction it had startled her. Why had she said such a thing? She had no doubt that if Audrey Peach had not put Clive Sr. through the windshield of the driver ed car, they’d still be happily married, that Clive Sr.’s surprising love for her would still be the centerpiece of her life, even as its memory was now. She could think of no reason for this sudden regret about having loved and been loved.

Clive Jr. cocked his head. “I think I hear her,” he said.

Miss Beryl shook her head and pointed at the ceiling with her thumb. What Clive Jr. had heard was the thud of Sully’s heavy feet hitting the floor upstairs. For the last ten minutes she’d been vaguely aware of the buzzing of Sully’s alarm, not quite so audible to her in the kitchen as it was in her front room. On Clive Jr. the sound had apparently not registered at all, which allowed Miss Beryl to indulge an inward smile. Her faculties, or at least one of them, were intact.

When Clive Jr. looked at the ceiling, his face clouded over, and together they listened to Sully’s footfalls traverse the ceiling and into the upstairs bathroom. Which meant they were about to resume an old discussion.

“Have you given anymore thought to … things?” Clive Jr. said. “I know you don’t like the idea, but you should sell me the house while you still can.”

“You’re right,” she told him. “I don’t like the idea.”

“Ma,” he said. “Let me explain something. If you got sick tomorrow and you had to go into the hospital, they wouldn’t let you sell it. The law wouldn’t allow it. You have to sell before you get sick. They don’t let you sell to avoid loss.”

“What happens if I sell it to you and you get sick tomorrow?”

Clive Jr. massaged his temples. “Ma,” he said. “You have to play the odds.”

Miss Beryl sighed. She knew the odds. She didn’t need to be lectured about the odds. She just hated conceding arguments to Clive Jr., who was, as a general rule, easily vanquished in debate. “I’ll take the matter under advisement,” she promised, hoping this would satisfy her son for the moment.

“What about upstairs, at least?” he said, his voice confidential now, as if he suspected that Sully might somehow be eavesdropping on their conversation, ear to the radiator. Clive Jr. always referred to Sully as “upstairs,” just as Sully always referred to Clive Jr. as “The Bank.” “The first of the year would be a perfect opportunity for a new arrangement.”

“I’m content with the old arrangement,” Miss Beryl said.

“You promised—”

“I promised to think about it,” Miss Beryl reminded him.

“Ma,” Clive Jr. said. “Keeping the house is dangerous enough, but Sully has to go.”

Right on cue, the upstairs toilet flushed. Miss Beryl smiled, grudgingly, and was ashamed of herself again.

“You need another sign?” Clive Jr. was also smiling, smug again. “Even God agrees.”

“That wasn’t God on the commode,” Miss Beryl reminded him. “Just a lonely, stubborn, unlucky man.”

“Whose bad luck is going to rub off on you someday,” Clive Jr. insisted.

Miss Beryl sighed. Like most discussions with her son, this one always went exactly the same way. Next Clive Jr. would remind her that Sully had once burned down another house he was living in.

“He’s already burned down one house in Bath,” Clive Jr. recalled innocently. “You should see it upstairs. There are cigarette burns everywhere. Fresh ones, Ma.”

Here, so soon after the last, was another point Miss Beryl had to concede. Sully did smoke, did forget lighted cigarettes, letting them tip off ashtrays onto the floor and roll under the sofa, probably even smoked himself to sleep. Clive Jr. swore he’d seen brown cigarette holes in Sully’s pillowcases.

“Don’t believe me, Ma,” Clive Jr. insisted. “See for yourself. Go up and see the condition of that flat. Count the cigarette burns. See for yourself how many bullets you’ve dodged.”