“If you knew what I went through to get this number you would try to help me.” “Sorry.” “Please.” I m sorry.
Madeleine was the last one of his specials. I saw her at the funeral. She hadn’t got to Kenora. Or else she’d come back. I didn’t recognize her at first because she was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with a horizontal feather. She must have borrowed it-she wasn’t used to the feather which came drooping down over her eye. She spoke to me in the lineup at the reception in the church hall. I said to her just the same thing I said to everybody.
“So good of you to come.”
Then I realized what an odd thing she’d said to me. “I was just counting on you to have a sweet tooth.”
“Perhaps he didn’t always charge,” I say to the lawyer. “Perhaps he worked for nothing sometimes. Some people do things out of charity.”
The lawyer is getting used to me now. He says, “Perhaps.” “Or possibly an actual charity,” I say. “A charity he supported without keeping any record of it.”
The lawyer holds my eyes for a moment. “A charity,” he says.
“Well I haven’t dug up the cellar floor yet,” I say, and he smiles wincingly at this levity.
Mrs. Barrie hasn’t given her notice. She just hasn’t shown up. There was nothing in particular for her to do, since the funeral was in the church and the reception was in the church hall. She didn’t come to the funeral. None of her family came. So many people were there that I would not have noticed that if someone hadn’t said to me, “I didn’t see any of the Barrie connection, did you?”
I phoned her several days afterwards and she said, “I never went to the church because I had too bad a cold.”
I said that that wasn’t why I’d called. I said I could manage quite well but wondered what she planned to do.
“Oh I don’t see no need for me to come back there now.”
I said that she should come and get something from the house, a keepsake. By this time I knew about the money and I wanted to tell her I felt bad about it. But I didn’t know how to say that.
She said, “I got some stuff I left there. I’ll be out when I can.”
She came out the next morning. The things she had to collect were mops and pails and scrub brushes and a clothes basket. It was hard to believe she would care about retrieving articles like these. And hard to believe she wanted them for sentimental reasons, but maybe she did. They were things she had used for years-during all her years in this house, where she had spent more waking hours than she had spent at home.
“Isn’t there anything else?” I said. “For a keepsake?”
She looked around the kitchen, chewing on her bottom lip. She might have been chewing back a smile.
“I don’t think there’s nothing here I’d have much use for,” she said.
I had a check ready for her. I just needed to write in the amount. I hadn’t been able to decide how much of the five thousand dollars to share with her. A thousand? I had been thinking. Now that seemed shameful. I thought I’d better double it.
I got out the checks that I had hidden in a drawer. I found a pen. I made it out for four thousand dollars.
“This is for you,” I said. “And thank you for everything.”
She took the check in her hand and glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. I thought maybe she hadn’t been able to read how much it was for. Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful.
She managed to pick up all the things she was taking, using her one good arm. I opened the door for her. I was so anxious for her to say something more that I almost said, Sorry that’s all.
Instead I said, “Your elbow’s not better yet?”
“It’ll never be better,” she said. She ducked her head as if she was afraid of another of my kisses. She said, “Well-thanks-very-much-goodbye.”
I watched her making her way to the car. I had assumed her nephew’s wife had driven her out here.
But it was not the usual car that the nephew’s wife drove. The thought crossed my mind that she might have a new employer. Bad arm or not. A new and rich employer. That would account for her haste, her cranky embarrassment.
It was the nephew’s wife, after all, who got out to help with the load. I waved, but she was too busy stowing the mops and pails.
“Gorgeous car,” I called out, because I thought that was a compliment both women would appreciate. I didn’t know what make the car was, but it was shining new and large and glamorous. A silvery lilac color.
The nephew’s wife called out, “Oh yeah,” and Mrs. Barrie ducked her head in acknowledgment.
Shivering in my indoor clothes, but compelled by my feelings of apology and bewilderment, I stood there and waved the car out of sight.
I couldn’t settle down to do anything after that. I made myself coffee and sat in the kitchen. I got Madeleine’s chocolates out of the drawer and ate a couple, though I really did not have enough of a sweet tooth for their chemically colored orange and yellow centers. I wished I had thanked her. I didn’t see how I could now-I didn’t even know her last name.
I decided to go out skiing. There are gravel pits that I believe I told you about at the back of our property. I put on the old wooden skis that my father used to wear in the days when the back roads were not plowed out in winter, and he might have to go across the fields to deliver a baby or take out an appendix. There were only cross straps to hold your feet in place.
I skied back to the gravel pits whose slopes have been padded with grass over the years and are now additionally covered with snow. There were dog tracks, bird tracks, the faint circles that the skittering vole made, but no sign of humans. I went up and down, up and down, first choosing a cautious diagonal and then going on to steeper descents. I fell now and then, but easily on the fresh plentiful snow, and between one moment of falling and the next of getting to my feet I found out that I knew something.
I knew where the money had gone.
Perhaps a charity.
Gorgeous car.
And four thousand dollars out of five.
Since that moment I have been happy.
I’ve been given the feeling of seeing money thrown over a bridge or high up into the air. Money, hopes, love letters-all such things can be tossed off into the air and come down changed, come down all light and free of context.
The thing I can’t imagine is my father caving in to blackmail. Particularly not to people who wouldn’t be very credible or clever. Not when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence.
What I can imagine, though, is a grand perverse gesture. To forestall demand, maybe, or just to show he didn’t care. Looking forward to the lawyer’s shock, and to my trying even harder to figure him out, now that he’s dead.
No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that. I don’t think I’d have come into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I’d like to believe.
What I’ve been shying away from is that it could have been done for love.
For love, then. Never rule that out.
I climbed out of the gravel pit and as soon as I came out on the fields the wind hit me. Wind was blowing snow over the dog tracks and the fine chain traces of the vole and the trail that will likely be the last ever to be broken by my father’s skis.
Dear R., Robin-what should be the last thing I say to you?
Goodbye and good luck.
I send you my love.
(What if people really did that-sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkeys’ eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.)