A quarter of a century ago, Stu’s public relations firm had done well enough. But it was an inheritance from Muffy’s father that allowed them to indulge her attachment to furnishings, rugs, jewelry, and dreary but costly clothing. Stu was quiet, Muffy quieter. Stu occasionally put in a word about the weather, but mostly he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyeglasses watching while Rennie spread jewelry on the counter at Muffy’s soft request. And Muffy’s voice — there was nothing to it. It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.
When Rennie had spotted the diamond bracelet at an estate sale, she thought right away of Muffy. The bracelet was a four-strand cuff, each square-cut jewel exactly like the one beside it and behind it and in front of it, like a team of expensive mules. Rennie called Muffy the next morning, and within half an hour the couple was standing before her. How meager they were growing. The diamond cuff hung heavily on Muffy’s mournful wrist. “Oh,” she sighed.
Stu’s palm held the bracelet Muffy had taken off — similar to the new offering, but emerald. He tossed it up and down. “Stu,” Muffy murmured. Stu was one of her words. “Look, Stu.”
He gave the diamonds something between an inspection and a glance. “Nice.”
“Can I wear it for a while, Rennie?”
“Of course.”
“What’s a while?” Stu inquired of his wife.
“Go have a nice lunch.”
And so, pocketing the emeralds, he strolled out — emaciated and out-of-fashion. Yet there was something of the dandy’s spring to his step.
Muffy settled herself on the striped love seat and Rennie prepared for skimpy strings of conversation. From time to time Muffy would wonder aloud if the thing really suited her. And of course it didn’t suit her any more than it would have suited a vegetable brush. The Lord alone knew what would suit her. What might improve her would be a transfusion, a perm, a toddler (her one child, an unmarried daughter, lived in California and paid two brief visits a year); an interest in something, anything — gardens, bridge, crime novels, crime itself…“Perhaps this design is monotonous,” she said in her nearly inaudible voice.
“Perhaps it is,” Rennie said.
Customers — regulars, occasionals, strangers — came in and went out. Some left with purchases. Rennie sold a good ring, a poor Limoges box, a set of demitasse spoons. Muffy’s eyes wandered from one person to another, her braceleted wrist unmoving on her thigh. Between customers, she produced a few murmurs. She’d heard about a movie that wasn’t worth seeing. Someone had mentioned a program that wasn’t worth watching. They’d dined at a restaurant out in Worcester that wasn’t worth the drive. The Willises tried a new place every Saturday, alone, together. On the other six nights, alone, together, they dined at the Tavern on Jefferson Avenue, walking from the town house Muffy had grown up in. They ordered the special, whatever it was, and Stu drank a glass or two of wine, and Muffy drank water. The Tavern had once been a church and boasted a stained-glass window. Its patrons included academics and young doctors from nearby Boston hospitals, still wearing their scrubs, and pairs of single women — young, no longer young, frankly old. Rennie often dined here with her friend Dr. Elissa Albright, collector of art deco jewelry. Yefgin and Vera liked it. And here, Saturdays excepted, in this thickly colored noisy place, sat the wordless couple.
“The bracelet may be too wide,” Muffy said now.
“It may be,” Rennie said.
“I will use the last of Papa’s legacy if I buy it.”
Rennie said nothing.
After a while: “Diamonds are like currency,” Muffy said.
More silence.
“Perhaps it’s too heavy.”
“Perhaps it is.”
Stu came back from lunch at last. He lifted Muffy’s wrist from her lap. “Mmm,” he said.
They bought the bracelet.
But not only the bracelet. It was as if this end-of-the-legacy purchase included a stake in the business too. Many mornings, on his way to his office — recently reduced from two rooms to one — Stu dropped off his wife like a day-care child. Rennie feigned enthusiasm. Muffy spent the morning inspecting the jewelry, and the Staffordshire, and the Tiffany lamps. She searched for secret compartments in the Pennsylvania desks. Often she stayed the entire day. “No, Rennie, I never eat lunch,” she said to Rennie’s offer. After hours of musing, she turned to the silver as if it were a sweet saved for last. Vases and platters and tea sets stood on shelves behind glass; shallow drawers were full of tableware. “Nice you’ve finally got an assistant,” said Mr. Gadsby one afternoon. He’d stopped in to look at a barometer. When Rennie lifted her eyebrows he turned to the little figure on its knees, in front of a low drawer, holding a spoon, apparently memorizing its arabesques.
In a way Mr. Gadsby was right. Many days Muffy brought in soft cloths and silver polish. She rubbed trivets and serving forks, and then bathed them in a dappled enamel basin she’d set up on newspapers in a corner, and then carried the basin up the three stairs to the skylit back room and rinsed the silver in the lavatory whose door was hidden by a Chinese screen. When she brought it back down the stuff glowed nicely.
One night at the Tavern, Dr. Elissa treated Rennie to a description of decline. “You see, old girl, elderly people can often tolerate what their cells do to them. They can even tolerate what their physicians do. But that first slip, that first turn of the ankle — ah, that’s the beginning of the end. What seems like convalescence is really weakening. Bed rest is preparation for the coffin. There’ll be another incident, and another. The aging body cannot repair its skeleton. It begins to yearn toward ruin, and then it accomplishes it. Even—”
“Elissa, for God’s sake…”
Elissa took a swig of beer. Seven bar pins gleamed on her broad chest. “None of this applies to you, Rennie. You’ll live forever. We all need you.”
Muffy fell at Forget Me Not. The skylit back room was rather bare that day. Mrs. Fortescue, who rarely bought anything, had, in the space of twenty-four hours, purchased and removed a dining table and six chairs. It was a present to her son on the occasion of his third marriage. “Fine furniture can anchor a relationship,” the hopeful lady confided to Rennie. And so there was space for Mr. Gadsby’s grandsons to stage a make-believe sword fight with cardboard tubes. They stood aside politely when Muffy padded by carrying a rinsed silver coffeepot. But they may have addled her. At any rate she missed the top stair, and, leaning backward, she slid down the other two. She entered the main room of the store lizard shoes first. She held on to the pot. She made so little noise that the Gadsby boys didn’t notice her unusual descent, nor did their grandfather and Rennie, heads bent over a signet ring. Stu, coming into the store, saw Muffy flat in front of the stairs, legs spread as if awaiting him. Behind and above her the duel had resumed, the boys appearing and reappearing under the arch, parrying, thrusting. “Muffy,” said Stu, in a tone of reproach.
Mr. Gadsby raised his glance from the ring and bounded to the silent form. Rennie too. Stu was third.
“Don’t move her,” Rennie said.
“Is there pain, dear?” Mr. Gadsby said.
“My wife,” Stu mentioned, and took the coffeepot and put it on the floor beside her feet.
The boys had paused. “I didn’t do it,” one said.
Nobody had done it, thought Rennie as she telephoned 911; that had been Elissa’s point, hadn’t it. Muffy fluttered her fingers until Stu took her hand in his.