Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“This is your fault,” she’d been telling Clive Sr. when Mrs. Gruber called to explain her present discombobulation. The last time Miss Beryl had willingly surrendered her future to another human being had been when she’d allowed Clive Sr. to talk her into marrying him and living out their lives in Bath. How had he ever managed that? she wondered. Love, dern it, was how. He had loved her, and in return for this great gift she had allowed him to bring her to Bath, where he had then promptly abandoned her to a life of fighting with eighth-graders. Then he’d gone and let himself be killed and left her to live out the rest of her many years with “Finally Fed Up” and “A True Christian” for company. Now here she was contemplating mortgaging her independence to this same man’s son, a man who’d grown to resemble his father so minutely that he might have been Clive Sr.’s clone.

“I’m sorry if I sound grumpy,” Miss Beryl told Mrs. Gruber. “I was just sitting here wishing I had somebody to fight with when you called.”

Mrs. Gruber ignored this explanation. “I saw Clive Jr. drive by,” she said. “Was that a woman with him in the car?” Mrs. Gruber knew perfectly well it was.

“Clive Jr., star of my firmament, is to wed,” Miss Beryl said. “I only just learned of it myself.”

“And that’s made you grumpy.”

“Hardly,” Miss Beryl objected. “I’m perfectly happy to turn Clive Jr. over to any woman who will have him, and this one apparently will.”

“Well, I’m eating like a bird today,” said Mrs. Gruber, who had little use for transitions. “Prune juice. Later a little dry toast and tea.”

Dry toast, tea and prune juice was Mrs. Gruber’s way of warding off the constipation that tormented her after a heavy meal at the Northwoods Inn. Yesterday she had eaten a green salad, ambrosia salad, carrot-raisin salad, pea-cheese salad and macaroni salad from the buffet. Then Old Tom, stuffing, cranberries and a candied yam. Then pumpkin pie and whipped cream. There wasn’t room for all of this on Mrs. Gruber’s ninety-five-pound frame, and today it all weighed on her rather heavily.

The other thing that weighed her down was guilt. For more than a year, as Miss Beryl suspected, she had been secretly feeding information concerning her friend to Clive Jr., who called her at least once a week to make sure that his mother was okay. She wasn’t spying for Clive Jr. exactly, just passing along information. For Miss Beryl’s own good, as Clive Jr. himself insisted. His mother was too stubborn for her own safety. Hadn’t she tried to keep a secret of her fall last summer, along with the badly sprained wrist that resulted? Mrs. Gruber understood Clive Jr.’s concern for his mother, and so she told him little things. In return, he told her things, too. She already knew, for instance, that Clive Jr. was getting married, and she now made a mental note to pretend she hadn’t known.

The only misgiving that Mrs. Gruber had about her arrangement with her best friend’s son was that sometimes she ended up telling Clive Jr. things she never intended to. This morning, for instance, when Clive Jr. called from the bank to inquire whether they’d had a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at the Northwoods Motor Inn, Mrs. Gruber hadn’t the slightest intention of telling him how Miss Beryl had gotten lost in Albany and how they’d nearly not found the restaurant at all.

“Tell me about her,” Mrs. Gruber said.

“About whom?”

“Clive Jr.’s young woman.”

“She’s not young,” Miss Beryl said. “She’s late fifties, if she’s the girl in the yearbook.”

“Is she nice?”

“She talks a lot,” Miss Beryl said. “She’s a fan of the president’s.”

“She sounds nice,” said Mrs. Gruber, who also liked the president and didn’t mind talk nearly so much as the silence of her big house. “When will the wedding be?” she asked, anxious to find out how much Clive Jr. had told his mother. Early spring was what he’d told Mrs. Gruber. Around Easter.

“I neglected to ask,” Miss Beryl admitted. “I don’t believe there’s any hurry. I’m sure the bride’s not pregnant.”

“Will Joyce work at the bank?” This was actually a question she’d been meaning and kept forgetting to ask Clive Jr., who had mentioned that his wife-to-be was an accountant.

Miss Beryl was about to confess that she didn’t know the answer to this question either when something occurred to her. “How did you know her name was Joyce?”

Mrs. Gruber froze. Despite her intention to be careful, she’d spilled the beans. “I have to go,” she said. “My telephone’s ringing.”

“You’re on the telephone,” Miss Beryl pointed out. “It can’t be ringing.”

“The doorbell, I meant,” Mrs. Gruber said. And hung up.

Miss Beryl hung up too but let her hand rest on the phone while she thought. At least now she was sure who the snitch was. Lately she’d begun to fear it might be Sully. Her advisers had been divided on this issue, just as they were on all issues. Clive Sr. subscribed to his son’s view that Sully had had her snookered for years, while Driver Ed assured her that Sully was loyal and even whispered suspicions about Clive Jr., suspicions Miss Beryl felt guilty about listening to. Now that she was sure, Miss Beryl couldn’t help smiling. “How do you like them apples?” she asked Clive Sr. Clive Sr. looked sheepish behind glass.

Miss Beryl’s hand was still on the phone in its cradle when it rang again.

“There wasn’t a soul at the door,” Mrs. Gruber said, as if this were a great mystery. “I can’t understand it. I heard the bell.”

“You know what you are?” Miss Beryl said ominously, winking at Driver Ed across the room.

Mrs. Gruber gulped. “What?” she asked a little fearfully.

“You’re all discombobulated.”

Ruth was in a good mood and at a loss to explain why. Just yesterday, Thanksgiving, of all days, she’d hit some sort of new low. Things had been so rotten she’d telephoned Sully, hoping he’d cheer her up. Talk about desperation. After so many years the one thing she should have known about Sully was that he was better at prolonging the good mood you happened already to be in than getting you out of the doldrums. He was far too honest to cause anybody to feel better than they were inclined to feel on their own.

And so, not surprisingly, Sully, who had failed dismally to cheer Ruth up yesterday, had been just the thing she needed today, when her own inclination was toward high spirits. Today Ruth felt fine, despite the tawdriness of the motel room, the grunginess of its shower and the fact that Sully had fallen dead asleep no more than a minute after they’d finished making love for the first time in many months. When she emerged from the shower, wrapped in a motel towel, he was snoring peacefully, his eyes half open but showing nothing but the whites. Though it was late November, he still hadn’t entirely lost his summer coloration, which always made Ruth smile, the way his face and neck and forearms were brown, almost gray, from exposure to sun and wind while the rest of him remained pale, almost translucent. Always a strangely shy man, he’d taken the trouble of pulling the sheet up to his waist before falling asleep. His head lay tilted up against the bed’s headboard, his hands locked behind his neck, a posture designed, in all probability, to ward off the sleep that had overtaken him anyway. That he should try to stay awake when he was so tired struck Ruth as sweet, the sort of small gesture Sully was capable of at times. She knew he needed the sleep a lot more than he had needed to make love.

Ruth, on the other hand, had needed to make love. She no longer granted her husband conjugal privileges, a fact he seemed barely to have noticed. It was possible he had another woman, but Ruth doubted this. As far as she could tell, Zack was just one of those men who gravitated naturally toward abstinence, as if celibacy were an old La-Z-Boy recliner, comfortable and molded and requiring more effort to get out of than into. She doubted he cared much about her affair with Sully. He was capable of jealousy when properly instigated, but she understood that what really bothered him was being made a fool of. And Ruth suspected that what Zack really would have liked was for people to quit telling him about her and Sully so he could pretend ignorance. He pretended ignorance as convincingly as laziness, and his pretense of laziness was indistinguishable from the real thing.