I was one of several dozen people in Port City who had taken on this particular good deed. Doing it once a week was no big strain, especially since it was summer and I wasn’t busy with a damn thing anyway, except taking a course in literature at the college two mornings a week and writing my latest mystery novel, which mostly ran to afternoons. I could spare the time.
There was only one irritating aspect to my getting involved with the hospital’s Hot Supper Service (as it was ingeniously titled), and that was that by the time I had done my duty for the first time, Sally and I had broken up.
As I promised earlier, Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, and I wouldn’t even mention her if she hadn’t been the prime mover for getting me into one of my larger messes, playing a peripheral Stan Laurel to my center-stage Oliver Hardy. And I think it’s interesting, if irrelevant, to note how a person out on the sidelines of a certain chain of events can make so great a dent in those events without even trying.
As far as our breakup scene goes, I’m not going into detail about it. I didn’t find her with another man; she didn’t find me with another woman. (I didn’t even find her with another woman, which would at least have been a change of pace.)
She just got tired of me.
And chose to tell me, of course, while we were in bed-and not sleeping, either; she had a bad habit of using that most inappropriate of occasions to bring up topics for discussion.
Well, I was tired, too, and told her so; told her we’d just been using each other, and a good time was had by all, but good-bye. And I moved back into my house trailer on East Hill.
But should you ever happen to pick up this book, Sally, keep reading; even though you aren’t in it anymore, stick around.
See all the trouble you caused me.
3
The bad thing, I thought, about my getting involved in the Hot Supper Service was the flock of old people I’d be serving. Four of them; four old ladies. God forbid I’d be asked in to chat with one of the tottering old relics. Who in hell wanted to watch the decaying creatures gumming their food, saliva and masticated glop dribbling all over their hairy-warted chins? Yuck. I accepted the Hot Supper Service as a good thing, theoretically, being a humanitarian at heart; but, like so many humanitarians, I harbored a secret dislike for humanity. Old people, particularly.
For example: I’d see some old guy driving in a car in front of me, going thirty in a sixty-five zone, and I’d say, “Why don’t they get those senile old bastards off the road?”
For example: I’d be in a hurry to get some money out of my bank account, and some old bag’d be ahead of me at the window, cashing her social security check and having the teller divide up the money and place it into envelopes marked “rent,” “groceries,” and so on, and I’d think, “Just pass away in your sleep, why don’t you, and save yourself the trouble.”
But I was signed on for the duration. So there I was in my blue Dodge van, setting out to feed the elderly multitudes, with four self-lidded Styrofoam plates of hot food sitting on the floor in back. I hadn’t got around yet to carpeting and fixing the thing up, so my Styrofoam passengers got a rough ride.
The hour or so a week I had to spend delivering the meals took me all over Port City. As a rule, Hot Supper volunteers had a single neighborhood to service, but no such luck for me. Apparently I’d been saddled with a grab-bag list of leftovers from the other routes, giving me the Port City grand tour, starting with Mrs. Fox on West Hill.
West Hill is steep, rising out of the downtown business district, looking out over the bend of the Mississippi along which Port City nestles like a rhinestone in the navel of the land. The hill’s view has been spoiled somewhat by the factories that crowd the river, cluttering the scenery and dirtying the water. None of that had particularly bothered the factory owners who built the luxurious gothic homes of West Hill, as they’d found that from their perch things looked sufficiently rosy, the distance blurring out unpleasantness the way a soft-focus camera does wonders for an aging movie queen. And many of those founders of local industry died before factories were considered eyesores, before the word pollution crept thoughtlessly into the national vocabulary; and these good city fathers left both wealth and a wealth of problems to their children. Those children, being from solid stock, rose to the challenge of the changing view from West Hill by moving into high-priced housing additions and condominiums, some of them in Port City.
Mrs. Fox, like the gray two-story nineteenth-century home she lived in, was a survivor of another time. The house had been a showplace once; now it was a paint-peeling, oversize embarrassment in a neighborhood still clinging to the vestiges of class.
The first night I delivered a meal to her, I had climbed the walk up the slanted, surprisingly well-kept lawn, feeling somewhat nervous. I half-expected to be met by an apparition, a West Hill version of Gloria Swanson in a Port City Community Playhouse production of Sunset Boulevard.
But the door opened to reveal a petite woman with a smooth, wise, quite pretty face. Her cheekbones were strong and high, her hair white and pulled back in a discreet bun; only the looseness of the flesh under those strong cheekbones gave a hint of her age, which had to be seventy at the very least. She wore a simple blue cotton dress, with a white cameo brooch at the neck. She walked with a cane-because of arthritis, I found out later.
“Mrs. Fox?”
“Young man?”
“I’m here with your food. From the hospital?”
“Oh! The Hot Supper man! Come in, come in. What happened to that nice couple that was bringing the meals around?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“No matter. Follow me, please.”
She led me from the entryway into a large living room, where an oriental rug of oranges and yellows and reds, a baby grand piano, a fireplace, and assorted obviously antique Louis XVI furniture were dominated by a light wood ceiling carved in wonderfully graceful rococo detail.
“A German fellow did that,” she said. “Many years ago. No one carves that way anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose so.”
Still awestruck by the room, I somehow managed to hand her the Styrofoam plate of food and watched with some surprise as she pulled a TV tray from somewhere, set it up in front of an expensive-looking old lounge chair, and put the plate on the tray. The tray was out of place in that room, like a man arriving at a costume ball a week early.
“Unlike most living rooms,” she explained, smiling, “this one is lived in. The upstairs of the house is entirely closed off-has been for years-as is most of the downstairs; I only use the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Can I get you a lemonade, young man?”
I refused, and she went on to say, “Oh, I had so hoped I could connive some company out of you. This is a beautiful old house, but it’s a bit lonely for one.”
I explained to Mrs. Fox that I had three more stops to make on my route, but promised to make her last on my list the following week so I could stay and visit for a while. I kept my promise, and that next week she treated me to a memorable evening of reminiscences about earlier days in Port City. Seems her husband had been one of the men involved in initiating local pearl button manufacturing, which helped earn Port City the unofficial title “Pearl Button Capital of the World”; but in the days of plastic buttons, that came to mean little, and Mr. Fox had stubbornly clung to pearl when other Port City plants were converting to plastic. He had died bitter, and broken if not broke. Mrs. Fox felt lucky to still have the old house, one tangible memory of a more prosperous time.
“Our boy George, our only child George,” she said, “runs the Allstate insurance office here in town. And George has tried to get me to let go of this old house, but I won’t do it.”