The Vagabonds (25 page)

At least they were company, Alice decided; at least she’d invite them for lunch. She considered the Renoir. She lifted a piece of the puzzle—part of a jigsawed face, an ear and cheek—but did not have the patience for it, not this morning anyhow, and dropped the thing back in the box. In the fairy tale, the lost children are brother and sister and never would act like those two in the kitchen: laughing and looking for beds. And
which
was the girl who ate porridge, and
what
was that man’s name who spun gold from straw and
why
was she thinking of fairy tales now when she had visitors, her Molly Maids all in a row.
Who once flew south,
she repeated, and stood, and made her way into the kitchen, where the young people worked.

“Do fix yourselves some tuna fish.”

The girl had a beauty mark high on her cheek. She had been scrubbing the sink. She was wiping down the stove.

“And why not take a pickle, too, and a glass of orange juice, I think it’s in the fridge.”

“That’s OK, Mrs. Saperstone.”

“No, really. I insist.”

“We’re not supposed to . . .”

“Nonsense. I’ll say I invited you. Both!”

Gretel looked at Hansel. He raised his shoulders shruggingly but did not shake his head.

“Well, that’s settled, isn’t it,” Alice declared. “You two will join me for lunch.”

They did. They were acquiescent, uncomplaining, and they opened the can of tuna fish and found the container of fresh squeezed orange juice not from concentrate and Gretel prepared three sandwiches with mayonnaise and mustard and do you want some lettuce, this iceberg will last in the icebox a week. I wonder why they call it that—not
icebox,
of course, there used to be ice blocks and sawdust, but
iceberg,
is it the color of the lettuce, that particular off-putting yellowish white, or how much has been hidden by the frozen outer leaf? And then the children sat to eat and Alice heard herself explaining how she used to fix half a dozen sandwiches each time she fixed their lunch and this was the bare minimum because David alone could eat three. What an appetite he had! What a pleasure it had been to cook for Thanksgiving, to watch them all tuck in at table—that
was
the expression, wasn’t it,
tuck
?—with peas and yams and mashed potatoes, because Joanna preferred mashed potatoes, and cider and stuffing and chestnuts and two kinds of cranberry sauce. It was anticipation and the aftermath of feasting she herself had feasted on, the prospect and the memory but not the food itself . . .

Except why do they call it, Alice wondered, Chicken of the Sea? There’s no relationship at all between a tuna and a chicken; they don’t resemble each other in the slightest or taste the same way, do they, Hansel, even if you slather it with mayonnaise and that runny mustard for lunch. Carefully, she levered tuna fish onto the fork tines and pushed at the bread with her spoon. Letting the morsel expand in her mouth and tasting it, she chewed. Consequently we sit here, she told them, eating icebergs and chickens and white toasted Pepperidge Farm bread that has no pepper in it and doesn’t come from a farm. Oh I know you, she wanted to tell them, I know that you’d rather be eating alone or rolling around on the bed. But for thirty dollars an hour, my dear, you’ll just have to suffer my company, because nothing
needs
to be cleaned.

“Cold enough for you this morning?” she asked, and Gretel answered, “Yup.”

And then—as happened to her often still, though she never could predict what would cause it—her hard scant breath came easily and her eyesight cleared. She was her clear-eyed self again and, chewing, Alice frowned.
Here
were the kitchen counters,
here
the dishes to be done and the unswept floor. In the vanity mirror where hats and scarves hung she saw herself without illusion: trying to interest dullards, trying to keep them at table when they should be gone. They were wasting her money, her time. She was neither so old nor solitary that she needed to suffer these children and spend the best part of a morning on nonsense—the puzzle and the calendar, the Brothers Grimm, this elegiac maundering . . .

It had been a long night. She had not slept at all. Or if she slept it was briefly, and badly, and on the wrong side of the bed. She straightened her shoulders, adjusting her shawl, and chastised herself for the habit of chatter, the pointless garrulity of politesse. For she had had her dream again, the dream that woke her shouting of her father in her car. “Your name, girl?” she inquired, and Gretel wiped her lips and told her “Jean.”

“And his?” she tilted her head at the boy across the tabletop and Jean answered, “Toby.”

“Tobias?”

He nodded, his whole mouth engorged.

“Well, Jean and Tobias, I’m grateful. I do like company at mealtimes, but now I have to get dressed. You can let yourselves out when you’ve finished the kitchen?”

They stood. To make sure they would leave, she remained. The girl did the dishes, the boy used the vacuum and swept; “Thanks a bunch for lunch,” he said. She wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly, or if he was making a joke:
a bunch for lunch
indeed! There was tuna fish oil on his shirt. It had happened long ago but Alice could remember as though it happened yesterday: the angle of her father’s head, the way it wobbled wide-eyed on the stalk of his thin twisted neck, the thing he had done with his tongue. She could remember Aaron falling—
unfolding
—in the parking lot and how he was deadweight already when she lifted him, when they listened for his breath and tried to take his pulse.

“Bye now, Mrs. Saperstone.”

“Good-bye.”

“See you next Thursday,” the girl declared brightly. They left. Down the path to the car with the Molly Maid sign the two proceeded single file, wearing coats and boots and scarves and caps, she going first where the bread crumbs were strewn and getting in on the driver’s seat side, he stowing the Electrolux and the box of rags and cleaning supplies in the trunk. Alice watched. The way young Hansel held himself reminded her of her own son; she rested her head on the pane. When David came in from karate, so dutiful and sweat-stained, so weary with taking his falls and working over boards and bricks, he had had the same composure and power in reserve. That he had been a part of her—a suckling pendant, a lip-pursed mouth—seemed, at such moments, astonishing; how
could
this strapping athlete have ever been flesh of her flesh?

Once the children were gone she relinquished the kitchen; she would in fact get dressed. She counted her steps: twelve, thirteen. Her ankles had swollen, her lower legs ached, but she managed the top of the stairs. There were apartment buildings with no thirteenth floor; the numbers went from twelve to fourteen because nobody wanted to live in between—
triskaidekaphobia,
that was the word, a fear of the number thirteen.

In the old days when the house was full there had been the friction of proximity, the loud squabbling racket of children about to take flight. How
could
they all have been so near and now so far away? How
could
this place they once called home fail to retain them now? She loved her offspring very much and missed them on a daily basis—hour by hour and minute by minute, David and J-J and Claire da Loon—but in a way that was comforting, nearly; she was with them wherever they went. Her family was with her, though distant; this caged and shallow-breathing animal her spirit had been tethered to could fly to Berkeley or Wellfleet or Ann Arbor without so much as a by-your-leave, and when and whenever she chose.

She did not choose. She had lived in this house all her life. She had been a child and then young woman and bride and mother here because her father who had bought it from the Dancey family gave it to her in turn. She and George went south on their honeymoon—two weeks of crayfish and martinis, two weeks of lovemaking and music—and by the time they returned from New Orleans her father had moved out. For the consideration of a dollar, and as a wedding present, he had transferred the deed. “It’s your house,” Aaron told her. “It’s where you were born and should stay.”

It did not escape Alice’s notice that hers was the single name on the deed and the property was registered in her own name only; when she asked him, Aaron said he’d done it for tax purposes and if at some point in the future she wanted a transfer of title—to have the document read
Saperstone et Ux
instead—why, that would be just fine. He smiled at her, indulgent; the place was too much for him to maintain, and she’d have a family soon . . .

Her father disapproved of George but was unfailingly polite to him and did not breathe a word of reproach. There had been much to reproach. There were the business ventures that failed, the investments that couldn’t go wrong and then did, the telephone calls after midnight and late afternoons at the track. There were the business trips to Chicago and Los Angeles and Kansas City where she knew—as Aaron must have known also, of course—that her husband was meeting or finding a woman; there were the lipstick smears on handkerchiefs, the gift boxes of scarves that arrived in the mail, and then at last the fishing trip with friends near the village of Keene . . .

In the silence she heard herself breathe. Alice waited; the noise would subside. It was the old familiar feeling: air and not-air passing through the membrane of her body and her throat constricting and enlarging both at once. It felt as though her body’s boundaries had been extended, expanded; she was here and not-here, and the
here
and
not-here
were the same place finally. This was true of time as well as place; she was part of the present as well as the past and the future that, receding, would become the past, and the
now
and
not-now
were the same.

“I’m beside myself,” she said aloud, and George said, “Yes, I noticed. You’re in your favorite position . . .”

“What’s that mean?” Alice asked him. “Whatever’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“Being beside yourself, darling. It’s your favorite position.” And then he turned away.

She could have responded, of course; she could have said
his
favorite position was supine, or prone, a spineless lying-down and waiting for the world to pay attention, and if not, to pass him by. Room service was
his
favorite: lounging, wearing a terry-cloth monogrammed robe, the waiters saying “Thank you, sir” when George signed for the tip. Or being the life of the party at parties, telling the same joke again and again and hovering over the drinks. Oh, it was a misery, but in her bedroom she could breathe once more and took off and folded the shawl. When he died she had been young enough to have a series of gentlemen callers, the lawyers and doctors she tried on for size, but the truth of it was, Alice understood now, she’d used up her patience with men. One marriage was enough. One marriage was more than enough. She had had no patience left for all their needy posturings, their hunger for approval and their ridiculous antics in bed and their childish assertiveness:
me me me me me!
When she thought of her husband these mornings it was no longer with anger but a kind of bemused irritation; he had been—what was the word?—
incorrigible;
he was less of a grown-up than child and could not be corrected or changed.

So Alice tried
not
to think about him; he had been her one true love, her white knight on a Mustang charger, but he was also a difficult child and what Aaron called a “luftmensch,” a man built out of air. He was the prodigal son, coming home and begging for forgiveness and beating himself on the chest:
me me!
The prodigal son is the one who leaves home and squanders everything; then he returns and all is forgiven, because he gets down on his knees and confesses:
Father, I have sinned.
If she had let George know, she knew, that there were stock market shares they could sell, that would have been the end of it; the trust fund would have emptied out like the bottles of Tanqueray gin.

She would have told him, she supposed, when Joanna went to college because they would have needed the money, but by the time Joanna went to college she had had his life insurance and
that,
at least, was actual cash, not luftmenschlike but substantial because George had valued himself very highly and his life insurance had sent the three children to school. It was peculiar, wasn’t it; his get-rich schemes went belly-up, but when he died there was money, and more than enough to go round. She herself had wanted nothing; she had not touched the General Electric shares but left them for the children, when the time came, to inherit and, when the time came, to spend . . .

Inheritance: it troubled her that David took after his father, and not only in the way he moved and looked. They both attended Williams; they both were athletes and charmers—but she had tried to make certain that there all resemblance would end. The acorn, Aaron used to say, will never fall far from the tree. David
was
his father’s son, of course, but George did not live long enough to set a bad example or corrupt him utterly; bad habits have to be learned. In some sense it was fortunate her husband died so young, in the flush of his prime, because he would have been impossible at sixty—pinching the waitress and dyeing his hair and slobbering into his gin . . .

The phone rang: shrill, prolonged. When it failed to stop she retrieved it and the man on the line was Joe Beakes. He said hello, she said hello, and they talked about the weather and he said he’d had a cold, the flu, but was feeling tip-top now and asked about her health. She told him, never better, and he said, that’s good, that’s excellent, and finally came to the point.

“You haven’t forgotten?” he asked her, and she said, “Of course not, no.”

“Are you up to driving over here?”

“What time is it?”

“One, well, nearly one o’clock. Our meeting’s scheduled for two.”

He was being gallant; he said, I’m happy to come pick you up, while she played for time, for clues, and then he said the documents are ready for your signature and the call snapped into focus. Alice was bright-eyed, clearheaded again, and told her old suitor, coquettish, that she’d be delighted to go out with him afterward to Mrs. London’s or, if he preferred it, somewhere they could share a drink; let’s celebrate, she said. Like old times, said Joe Beakes. We’ll witness the documents here in the office and need to have the last will and testament notarized, but afterward by all means let me invite you for tea or a drink; he made his joke about billable hours and how for every hour they shared he’d reduce her tab by 10 percent,
she
was doing
him
a favor, not the other way around. He very much looked forward to her arrival at two.