“How’s everything? Getting everything done, I hope?” she said in her alwaysalittlehoarse voice.
She carried the silver tray to the hunchback coffee table, kicking a paperback on the floor missing half its cover (The Lib Wo by Ari So): more Gruyère and British farmhouse cheddar fanned around the plate like Busby Berkeley girls, another pot of oolong tea. Her appearance caused the dogs and cats to come out of their salooned shadows and band around her, and when she returned in a swoosh to the kitchen (they weren’t allowed, when she was cooking), they roamed the living room like dazed cowboys, unsure what to do with themselves with no showdown.
Her house (“Noah’s Arc,” Charles called it) I found fascinating, schizophrenic, in fact. Its original personality was old-fashioned and charming, albeit slightly outmoded and wooden (the two-floor log cabin structure built in the late 1940s with a stone fireplace and low, beamed ceilings). Yet there was another persona lurking inside as well, which could spring forth unexpectedly as soon as one turned a corner, a profane, common, at times embarrassingly crude disposition (the boxy aluminum-siding additions she’d made to the ground floor the previous year).
Every room was crammed with so much worn, mismatched furniture (stripe married to plaid, orange engaged to pink, paisley coming out of the closet), at any position in any of the rooms, you could take a haphazard Polaroid and end up with a snapshot that bore a startling resemblance to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Instead of misshapen cube-ladies filling the frame, the angular shapes would be Hannah’s skewed bookshelf (used, not for a library, but for displaying plants, Oriental ashtrays and her chopstick collection, with a few notable exceptions: On the Road [Kerouac, 1957], Change Your Brain [Leary, 1988], Modern Warriors [Chute, 1989], a Bob Dylan book of lyrics and Queenie [1985] by Michael Korda), Hannah’s blistered leather chair, Hannah’s samovar by the hat rack devoid of hats, the end table without an end.
Hannah’s furnishings weren’t the only things tired and poor. I was surprised to observe that, despite her immaculate appearance, which rarely, upon even the closest inspections, had an eyelash out of place, some of her clothes were somewhat fatigued in appearance, though this was only obvious if you were sitting next to her and she happened to shift a certain way. There, suddenly, the lamplight stone-skipped across hundreds of tiny lint balls rippling through the front of her wool skirt, or, very faintly, as she picked up her wineglass and laughed like a man, the unmistakable smell of mothballs embedded in all that Palais de Anything.
A lot of her clothes looked as if they’d gone a night without sleeping or had taken the red-eye, like her canary-and-cream Chanel-like suit with the weary hem, or her white cashmere sweater with the haggard elbows and debilitated waist, and a few articles, like the silver blouse with the drooping rose safety-pinned to the neck, actually looked like runners-up in a three-day Depression dance marathon (see They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?).
I overheard the others referring to Hannah’s “secret trust fund” on countless occasions, but I assumed these suppositions were incorrect and a precarious financial situation lay at the heart of Hannah’s evident thrift store purchases. I once watched Hannah over a rump of lamb “with tea leaves and cherry-rose compote” and envisioned her teetering, like a cartooned man, drunk and blindfolded, on the craggy cliffs of Bankruptcy and Ruin. (Even Dad lamented teachers’ salaries in a Bourbon Mood: “And they wonder why Americans can’t locate Sri Lanka on a map! I hate to break the news to them, but there ain’t no grease for the wheel of American education! Non dinero! Kein Geld!”)
As it turned out, money had nothing to do with it. On one occasion, when Hannah was outside with the dogs, Jade and Nigel were laughing about the gigantic peeling wagon wheel that had just appeared that day, leaning against the side of the garage like a fat man on a cigarette break. It was missing half its spokes and Hannah had announced she was planning to turn it into a coffee table.
“St. Gallway must not pay her enough,” I noted quietly.
Jade turned to me. “What?” she asked, as if I’d just insulted her.
I swallowed. “Maybe she should ask for a raise.”
Nigel suppressed his laughter. The others seemed content to ignore me, but then, something unexpected happened: Milton lifted his head from his Chemistry textbook.
“Oh, no,” he said smiling. I felt my heart shudder and stall. Blood began to flood my cheeks. “Junkyards, dumps — Hannah goes nuts for ’em. All this stuff? She found it in sad places, trailer parks, parkin’ lots. She’s been known to stop in the middle of a highway — cars honkin’ crazy, mad pile-up — just so she can rescue a chair from the side of the road. The animals too — she saved them from shelters. I was with her once, last year when she stopped for a freaky-ass hitchhiker — muscles, head shaved, total skinhead. The back of his neck read, ‘Kill or Be Killed.’ I asked her what she was doin’ and she said she had to show him kindness. That maybe he never had any. And she was right. Guy was like a kid, smilin’ the whole way. We dropped him off at Red Lobster. He shouted, ‘God bless you!’ Hannah had made his year.” He shrugged and returned to his Chemistry. “S’just who she is.”
Who she was, too, was a woman surprisingly daring and competent, whine and whimper free. The woman could fix, in a matter of minutes, any clog, drip, leak, seep — slacker toilet flushes, pipe clangs before sunrise, a dazed and confused garage door. Frankly, her handyman expertise made Dad look like a twitchy-mouthed grandmother. One Sunday, I watched in awe while Hannah fixed her own recessed doorbell with electrician gloves, screwdriver and voltmeter — not the easiest of processes, if one reads Mr. Fix-It’s Guide to Rewiring the Home (Thurber, 2002). Another occasion, after dinner, she disappeared into the basement to fix the temperamental light on her water heater: “There’s too much air in the flue,” she said with a sigh.
And she was an expert mountaineer. Not that she boasted: “I camp,” was all she’d say. One could infer it, however, from the overload of Paul Bunyan paraphernalia: carabiners and water bottles lying around the house, Swiss army knives in the same drawer as junk mail and old batteries; and in the garage, brawny hiking boots (seriously gnarled soles), moth-eaten sleeping bags, rock-climbing rope, snowshoes, tent poles, crusty sunscreen, a first-aid kit (empty, apart for blunt scissors and discolored gauze). “What’re those?” Nigel asked, frowning at what looked like two vicious animal traps atop a pile of firewood. “Crampons,” Hannah said, and when he continued to stare confusedly: “So you don’t fall off the mountain.”
She once admitted as a footnote to dinner conversation, she’d saved a man’s life while camping as a teenager.
“Where?” asked Jade.
She hesitated, then: “The Adirondacks.”
I’ll admit I almost leapt from my seat and boasted, “I’ve saved a life too! My shot gardener!” but thankfully I had some tact; Dad and I held in contempt people forever interrupting fascinating conversations with their own rinky-dink story. (Dad called them What-About-Mes, accompanying said phrase with a slow blink, his gesture of Marked Aversion.)