The Goodbye Summer (5 page)

Thus was born Earth People Communicating, Frances Winger’s new and completely unique grassroots artistic medium, a form of expression she would explore tirelessly, along with other projects, until an unfortunate accident put her active art career on hold. Today, striking evidence of her work in the form of living sculptures can be seen on the lawn of her home at 823 Early Street in the heart of Michaelstown.

It hasn’t always been an easy road Frances has followed. Her work has been misunderstood, even denounced. But she always meets her critics with tolerance and good humor. When neighbors dismissed her earthy creations as “dirt” or eyesores, she always took it in stride, smiled, and shrugged, and never once considered filing a countersuit. Live and let live is Frances’s motto. “Life is short,” she likes to say. “You only get one, and if you waste it worrying about what other people think, you’re an idiot.”

Caddie had entertained a private fantasy of Finney becoming Wake House’s therapy dog, but it died the first day she brought him. In hindsight she could see it was a bad idea from the start, but Nana had kept pestering her to bring him, Brenda had said it would be all right as long as they shut the cats up in the office first, and Caddie had a picture in her head of a docile, grinning, blood pressure–lowering Finney being pulled onto lap after lap of delighted Wake House residents sitting around in the Red Room. She’d forgotten that, except with Nana, Finney was docile only when he was sleeping.

He had a new leash, the kind that extended for fifteen feet or so when fully unfurled; you held it by a plastic handle and pressed a button to make it shorten,
zip,
like a vacuum cleaner cord. Caddie hadn’t quite mastered the mechanism herself yet, and Nana couldn’t figure it out at all. The first thing Finney did was wind the leash around ancient Mr. Lorton’s legs four or five times as he was making his turtle-paced, hunched-over way back to the parlor from the bathroom. Luckily, he stayed on his feet, but Caddie couldn’t help thinking what if it had been Magill.

After they got Mr. Lorton untangled, Finney grabbed hold of Cornel’s foot in its leather bedroom slipper and wouldn’t let go. People thought it was funny at first, and even Cornel had eked out a smile with his turtle lips and made a joke about what a ferocious dog that was, a pint-size pit bull, better watch out, and so on. Finney looked harmless—that’s what threw people off. He weighed seventeen pounds. He was all white except
for one brown eye and two black spots on his back. He looked like a child’s toy. One of his tricks was lunging at you when you were walking fast—say, trying to get to the phone before it stopped ringing—and latching onto your shoe like a lobster. You ended up having to drag him across the room with you because he would
not
let go, he
was
like a pit bull—and Cornel wasn’t a bit amused after he figured that out because the joke had gone on too long.

“Damn dog, get him off me, Caddie, tell him no, would you? Get
off…
” He ended up kicking his slipper off so Finney could have it. Unattached to a foot, though, Finney had no interest in it.

Caddie wrestled the leash from Nana and reeled him in. Peace reigned for one minute; then Susan rolled her wheelchair into the room. Finney had seen Nana’s wheelchair before, so why he went into a fit of shrill, earsplitting barking at the sight of Susan’s, Caddie couldn’t imagine. Susan shrank back against the vinyl seat, gaping in fear and trying to make the chair go backward, but her left arm was weaker than her right and in her distress she made it turn in a circle. Finney took that as a provocation and began to make fake lunges at the wheels, barking and snarling and showing his teeth. “Finney!” Caddie shouted about fifty times. Every time she almost had him, he squirted away.

At last, he wound his extension leash so many times around Susan’s chair that he had to stop or choke to death. Caddie was hoping for the latter, but he halted, winded and panting, head down, hackles raised. “He’s not like this,” she kept saying as she unhooked him, shoved him into Nana’s arms, and got his leash untied around the chair wheels. “He’s a really nice dog.” No one objected when she suggested to Nana that they take him up to her room for a private visit.

“Mrs. Tourneau says to tell you those peonies are finally blooming.”

“What peonies?”

“Remember the peonies you let her dig up and plant on her side? At least three years ago, and all they did was send up leaves. Well, this year they’ve finally got flowers.”

“That’s nice.”

“We had a good program on Saturday afternoon,” Caddie went on. “Remember, I told you we were playing the Vivaldi concerto? Well, we had to change it at the last minute because the first violinist came down with food poisoning. So instead we did ‘Spotlight on Chopin,’ but it went fine.”

“Mmm,” Nana said dreamily. She looked half asleep in her chair, with a dozing Finney in her lap, getting his little white hairs all over her skirt. Seeing them together like that, relaxed and content, Caddie couldn’t be sorry she’d brought him, even though he’d disgraced himself.

“Lessons have been going pretty well. So far only one person’s called to cancel for the summer, so that’s good. So far so good. And I have two new students, so as of now it’s a net gain—a little boy for piano and a lady for violin. She just got a divorce and she’s changing her life. She says her husband always told her she was too old to learn the violin, so now she’s showing him.”

“Ha,” Nana said. “Show him.”

“So I think we’re okay, I think everything’s going to be fine…” She tapered off, didn’t say “with the money situation this summer,” because—why bring it up at all?

“You get your new cast tomorrow, don’t forget. A canvas thing you can take on and off—won’t that be nice?”

“Yep.” Nana put her head back and closed her eyes. She fell into naps so easily these days.

Before she could drift off, Caddie said, “You like it here, don’t you, Nan?”

“I told you I do.”

“I know, but do you still?” She hadn’t said it in a while, and she’d been here almost four weeks. “You can come home anytime, you know. Just say the word. Even for a visit.”

“Why would I want to come home? You come to see
me
every day. So I have everything. Oh, honey, I’m just so glad you thought of this place.
Thank
you.” She reached over and squeezed Caddie’s hand.

Well, that answered that question. Anyway, why wouldn’t Nana love
it here? Something was always going on, a class or a game, a conversation, a field trip in the ratty old van with
WAKE HOUSE ELDER CARE & CONVALESCENCE
still visible under a fresh coat of paint—Brenda had the name covered up when the van got too old to be a good advertisement for the house. Nana got plenty of stimulation, much more than she had at home with just Caddie and the television. Her biography in “We Remember” had sparked interest in her life as an artist, and she’d agreed to give a talk about it for the Gray Gurus—or the Golden Geezers, as Cornel called it—an informal lecture series in which anybody who’d had a particularly interesting job or taken a fascinating trip or had some unusual knowledge could give a presentation on it to the other residents. Nana was more excited about this than she let on. Her lecture was weeks away, but she was already writing down notes and gathering her materials.

“What about you?” Nana asked. “What else new and exciting have you done besides change everything around in my house?”

“I should never have told you about that.” Nana was kidding, sort of, but she never missed a chance to bring up what Caddie had done to the living room. “Well, I’m learning a new Beethoven, the Sonata Number Seventeen—”

“
New and exciting,
I said. Have you called up any more men in the sex ads?”

“The personal ads, and no, I haven’t. Once was enough.”

“Caddie Ann—”

“Did you know twenty-seven million Americans live alone? And the median age of the whole population is thirty-five? I read that somewhere. So I’m definitely…I’m in the whatchacallit.”

“Mainstream,” Nana said, sighing.

“What’s this?” Caddie picked up a snail shell from the windowsill. “And this.” A dry twig and, next to it, pieces of a speckled blue eggshell. “What’s this stuff?”

Nana sat up straight. “That’s for my project. Be careful, don’t break anything. Put that down, Caddie, it’s fragile.”

“Sorry. This is your new art project? How exciting.” Nana had been hinting about a new work, something
big
taking shape in her mind, but
Caddie hadn’t been sure if it was real or not. Sometimes her grandmother’s art schemes stayed there, in her mind, never actually bore fruit in a material way. If this one was already taking form in twigs and eggshells, that was a good sign. Nana was always happiest when she was making something.

“It’s a monument,” she said. “To oldness. To age. It will symbolize the courage and beauty of elderliness. It’ll have ‘longevity’ in the title. That’s all I can say right now.”

“How will it—what form will it take?”

“Well, I don’t know that
yet.
It’ll be a construction. It’ll have to be big, representational.”

“You mean it’ll look like something?”

“Not necessarily. It will have
representatives,
I mean. Of everything that’s old.”

“Everything?” Another global project. Nana’s art was so
inclusive.

Through the window, Caddie saw a black taxi stop at the curb in front of the house. The driver jumped out, came around, opened the rear passenger door, and stuck his hand in to help somebody out. A woman swung her legs out, nice legs under a knee-length cherry-red skirt, and stood up. She had on a straw hat with a wide brim; Caddie couldn’t see her face until she leaned back against the car to look up at the house. Just for a second, it felt as if they were looking right into each other’s eyes. The woman said something to the driver that made him laugh. She laughed, too, and Caddie heard one ringing, agreeable “Ha!”

“Nana,” she said excitedly, “I think it’s the new lady, the one who’s taking the tower suite. The room you wanted, remember? I bet it’s her—Brenda said she was coming today or tomorrow.” The tower suite was a beautiful, round-walled bedroom with its own sitting room, but it was already taken, reserved, when Nana moved in. It would’ve been too expensive, anyway.

Nana wheeled her chair over and peered down with Caddie.

“Doesn’t she look nice? Where are your glasses, can you see? She looks young.” Relatively; middle sixties, Caddie estimated. Around here, that was a whippersnapper. Brenda said her name was Dorothea Barnes.
She was a widow with no children. She came from somewhere on the Eastern Shore, but she’d grown up here, Brenda said. She was coming home. “Barnes,” Cornel had been saying suspiciously for days. “Barnes. I don’t recall any Dorothea Barnes.” He’d grown up in Michaelstown, too, and he thought he knew everybody.

There went Brenda, hurrying down the front walk to greet the new arrival. She had a lot of luggage; the cab driver kept pulling boxes and suitcases from the trunk and piling them on the curb. She saw Brenda and went toward her, holding out her hands. She greeted her that way, shaking her hands warmly with both of hers, smiling and tilting her head to listen to Brenda’s welcoming words.

“Doesn’t she look nice?” Caddie said again. “It’ll be good to have a new person here, then you can feel like an old veteran.” Although, actually, one of the things Nana liked best about Wake House was that she was the new kid; she got a lot of attention that way. “Not that you won’t still be the—Nan? What’s wrong?” She looked funny. Guilty.

“Nothing.”

“Finney! Where is he? Did you let him off the leash? Oh,
Nana.
” He was gone, his leash in a coil on the floor, and they’d stupidly left the door open. “He went downstairs, I bet—he probably smells those cats.”

“I’m coming, too,” Nana said. Caddie started to push her chair, but Nana said, “I can do it—you better go!”

She took the stairs, Nana took the elevator. From the last landing, Caddie could see Cornel, Bea and Edgie Copes, and one of the Harris wives loitering in the front hall. Even Mrs. Brill had pulled her chair in the Red Room closer to the archway for a better view.

“What a
beautiful
porch,” came a musical voice from outside, over the racket of manic barking. “So pretty. It’s just the way I remember it.”

A lot of things happened at once. Brenda bustled through the front door holding a suitcase in each hand, calling back, “Oh, yes, it’s lovely out here on warm evenings. Sometimes the whole house gathers—”

Cornel’s voice cut her off: “Look out, get that dog. Where’s Frances? Caddie, would you
please
—” Finney shot through the door, whirled around, and began to bark louder, high, excited, hysterical-sounding barks that could vibrate your eardrums and rattle your teeth.

“Finney!” Caddie shouted, starting down the half flight of steps. Fur stood up in a line down the middle of his back; you’d think he lived here and the UPS man was at the door. “Finney! Stop it!” Dorothea Barnes came in next, followed by the taxi driver, loaded down with more suitcases. “Oh, what a cute dog,” said Mrs. Barnes. She leaned down, put out her hand, and Finney bit her.

“Ow!”

Caddie clattered down the rest of the stairs, horrified. Everybody gathered around, Brenda, Cornel, the cabdriver, Mrs. Harris, Mrs. Brill. “How bad is it? Are you bleeding? Did it break the skin? Does it hurt?”

Finney quit barking, began to wag his stubby tail frantically, trying to undo this.

Caddie pushed through the crush of worried people around Mrs. Barnes. “Oh, no, oh, I’m so sorry—he’s my grandmother’s dog but I brought him, it’s my fault—are you all right?”

“Fine.” She looked pale, though. Her hat was askew, mussing her silver-gray hair. She had dark, high-arching eyebrows, startled Vs above clear blue eyes. She was trying to smile, but it was a shaky effort. She held her right hand in her left—the middle finger was turning purple at the nail.

“Did it break the skin?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Just a bruise.”

Someone said “rabies.” Somebody said “rabies shots.”

“He’s had his shot,” Caddie rushed to say. “It lasts three years—he’s only two!”

“I’m
fine.
” She reached out to Caddie’s shoulder and gave it a soft press with her good hand.
“Really.”

“Sit down,” Brenda urged. She looked ill, probably imagining lawsuits. Dorothea Barnes let herself be led over by Brenda to the church pew under the coat hooks along the wall. Cornel offered to get her a glass of water. Mrs. Harris said she’d call the doctor.

“I am really quite all right.” She looked up at them all and gave a shivery laugh. “I was startled, mostly. That wasn’t quite the welcome I was expecting!”

Caddie started apologizing again, but she waved it off, insisting she
was fine. The crisis was over. Finney had gone into the Red Room to be alone. Caddie looked around for Nana.