The Widows' Adventures, page 7
The milkbox was built in the wall to the right of the stairs. It was six feet off the ground, with an outer door the milkman could open and a bolted inner door that opened into Ina’s powder room. She kept things to read on the toilet there in the summer, and stuffed it with old towels and paper to insulate against the cold in the winter.
“That’s a straight lift,” Ina said. “Hector was right going up a step at a time.” She felt uneasy with Hector’s softly panting face at the level of her waist.
“My daughter’s on the phone,” she said. “Long distance. Could you just carry it to the cellar? You can leave it on the floor. I’ll get it into the softener.”
“How, for instance?” Po challenged.
“I’m here, Ina,” Hector said. “You might as well make good use of me.” He clapped salt dust from his hands.
“You be careful,” his wife cautioned.
Hector faced the block, positioning his hands in the indentations molded for just that purpose. With a grunt Hector lifted the block off the porch. Swinging the door open for him, Ina listened attentively for the blowout of his heart. He shuffled into the house and Ina went ahead to open the basement door and turn on the light.
The basement steps were narrow and made treacherous with an encroaching collection of junk; on every step Ina saw things she would never use again, the bottles, sacks, brushes, and cartons of old shoes she could discard to squeeze into a new condo, to pull in. The path down was barely eighteen inches wide and Hector Strode, teetering with his burden at the head of the stairs, seemed nearly to lose his will.
“Take a rest,” Po said.
Ina went down to the foot of the stairs. Silently she implored Hector to keep coming; time was passing in the precisely calibrated units of the phone company. She could imagine clearly the growth and tenor of Annie’s impatience, it being exactly like her own.
“Just a little farther,” Ina encouraged.
“Do you want to kill him?” Po snarled.
Ina went to the water softener and removed the lid from the brine tank. The top of the stairs was out of sight. She would let Hector decide.
There followed a crash and a violent biting of wood. The salt block came into view in its descent, bouncing over one step to gouge a notch out of the next, shards and splinters of itself disengaging from the main body as it fell. Ina wondered if Hector Strode would follow, wondered if in falling he would be reduced like a star plunging through the atmosphere to land as the salt block landed, a mere nub of itself, a scattering of such nubs that she would have to sweep into a dustpan.
But Hector didn’t fall.
“I’m just awfully goddamn sorry, Ina,” he said, coming down the stairs, kicking salt ahead of him. “I was taking a breather—or getting ready to—and my hands took a breather about a half second before the rest of me did. Shit.”
“Hector Strode!” Po scolded.
Hector turned to look up at his wife. Something in the exertion, perhaps in the mischievous excitement of the calamity he had caused, and which he enjoyed as it unfolded, something filled him with himself, for he repeated distinctly, “I said shit, and I meant shit. Now grab that broom.”
“Grab your own broom,” Po Strode said, and they heard her thumped steps departing, then the bang of the door.
“She’ll be back shortly,” Hector predicted. “She doesn’t like me to be alone with women. Especially widows. Especially you.”
“What an imagination, Hector,” Ina said. She climbed past him, and at the top of the stairs slid the broom down to him. “Put it all in the brine tank,” she said.
She snatched up the phone but Annie was gone. Ina had been granted one second, then she had abused that prize greatly. Her finger rested on the button that would send her voice back to L.A. But she removed it. Annie would be eager for reaction to the rebuke of hanging up on her mother and Ina felt too strong at the moment to provide that satisfaction. The exploding salt had filled her life like a mild spice that lingered briefly and left an aftertaste of experience. Something out of the ordinary had taken place. The day had been like that.
She heard the plunk of the salt going into the water and it was like a signal of Hector’s location, providing moments of privacy. She opened an Old Style and called an invitation down the stairs; he stood at the bottom with the broom, a mound of pulverized salt at his feet.
“Thank you, Ina,” he replied breathlessly, himself made temporarily wild by the tumbling salt and his presence without his wife in the home of a widow of mystery. “A cold beer would be wonderful.”
She awaited him at her kitchen table. She had set out a glass and noticed the inner sleeve of dust the glass contained. It had been such a long time between guests. She wiped out the glass with her fingers.
Hector took the seat not across from her, where she had placed the beer and glass like a namecard for him to heed, but at her right hand. She leaned back an inch. He was perspiring. He poured beer into the glass and chuckled. He drank, laughed, and smacked his lips.
“Po will be back within the minute,” he said, “so I’d best speak frankly and right now. It’s so rare for me to have the opportunity to speak privately with a woman other than my wife.”
“What is Po’s real name?” Ina asked, viewing her question as a chock thrown under a wheel that had begun to careen.
“What? Po? Why it’s short for Polly—which is short for Penelope,” Hector said. He drank beer, his place lost momentarily. Ina readied another deflective question.
“I’m surprised she’s stayed away this long,” he said, half rising from his chair to look out the window at his house. Ina doubted that he saw much. He said nothing for a time and Ina wondered what his point was in remaining; a hair to irritate his wife?
“I’ve watched you over here all my life, it seems,” he suddenly declared, a little sweat and beer on his upper lip.
“Hector—”
“Wait. What’s the point in keeping secrets now? I’m not going to embarrass all concerned by running off and abandoning dear Penelope. But I wanted it stated for someone other than myself to hear that I long considered Vincent the luckiest man on Earth.”
“And look what it got him,” Ina said, fending off mortification.
“Ina, Ina,” Hector murmured, eyes averted. “I just had to tell you. Not to prompt any sort of response from you—but just to have it in the public domain.”
“I’m flattered. Truly. Now let’s get it back out of the public domain,” Ina said.
“Surely you must have known,” he said. “A hundred times you must have caught me staring over here. I can’t remember all the false pretexts I used to have a word with Vincent.”
“I knew you liked me,” Ina said, thinking of the kiss at the end of the dance. “I’ve always had a way with men.”
“You put us at our ease,” Hector said. “Other men have mentioned the same thing to me. Po resents that in you because it’s a quality she doesn’t possess.”
“I won’t have you sit here and speak ill of your wife,” Ina said. “That’s unfaithfulness as clear as two people in bed together.”
Hector blushed and gulped beer; a little spilled on his shirt. Ina was warmed by the Old Style and the circumstances; she felt flirtatious and in command, putting a man at ease by shocking him, telling him a little of what he wanted to hear.
The remark about a man and woman in bed had just come to her; the picture in her mind as she said it was of her and Vincent, two pale bodies, much younger, lost in a jumble of striped sheets. She could not remember ever being attracted to Hector beyond the cool friendship of neighbors. There had only been Vincent. She raised her eyes to Hector and ached for her husband. The longing stunned her and she had to stifle a groan too private for anyone ever to hear. She blinked and drank, caught off balance. She thought she had moved past such honed moments of grief.
It was Ina, then, who rose from her seat to see if Po Strode was on her way back. Hector concentrated on his beer. He was chagrined, because despite his protestations to the contrary, he had hoped his declaration would lead to something. He thought he might dislodge from Ina’s heart an emotion that he could use. She had merely shushed him.
“I’m glad I told you,” he lumbered.
“If it was important for you to tell me—then I’m glad you told me, too.”
“Then we’re both glad.”
“I suspect,” she said, distracted.
He brightened and leaned closer. He rested his hand cupped like a trap on the tabletop, prepared to spring should her own hand stray near.
“I want to thank you for getting my salt in, Hector,” she said. “But I’ve had a long day and I think it’s time for you to go.”
He stood and looked again out the window. “It was my pleasure,” he declared. “I know what Po says about you, but when the opportunity presented itself, to come help you, I couldn’t refuse.”
“You’re too kind. What does Po say about me?”
“Women things. They carry no weight with me, and I’m the only person she ever talks to. She told me she found you on the river stairs.”
“Women things,” Ina mused.
“Some women—Po, for instance—can’t abide anyone different, anyone the least out of the ordinary. An old woman, she sees another old woman climbing the river stairs, it gets her to thinking that maybe she isn’t living her life to the fullest. She stays home all day worrying and she sees another old woman—”
“An older woman than herself,” Ina said.
“Don’t brag,” Hector said, and winked. “She sees a woman older than herself out and about, she begins to think maybe she is wasting time. But that is terrible to contemplate, an old woman wasting time when time is short. Such an admission would require great courage and great insight—which my Po, bless her heart, doesn’t have. So she makes you out not to be free-spirited or daring, but mad. A drunk. A walker in your sleep.”
“Let her,” Ina said.
They heard a commotion out back and then the crisp steps of Po Strode’s return. She came through the door in such a whirl of indignation that Ina almost did not notice that she had, in her absence, tied a ribbon in her hair. Ina smiled and offered Po something to drink, which was refused. Po touched the ribbon. Hector had not risen, turned around, moved at all.
“Is he twisting your ear?” Po asked nervously. “He’s become full of words and philosophies in his old age. Years he never said three sentences in a line, and now when I’d appreciate a little peace and quiet I can’t shut him up.”
Hector worked his hands as if squaring up a phantom deck of cards. Po came up shyly behind him and rested her left hand lightly on his shoulder. She wore no ring, bracelet, or polish, nothing to make pretty the hewn, toughened hand resting there. Her face was plain and unpainted. There was only the ribbon she had put in her hair, while her husband was declaring his love to her neighbor.
“Let’s go home, Strode.”
“Thank you for bringing in my salt,” Ina said.
“Fool dropped it down the stairs,” Po derided, hand still in place.
Hector caught Ina’s glance. Then he rose to his feet.
“He got it downstairs,” Ina said. “That’s all I was concerned with. One piece or a thousand makes no difference to me.”
“Will you be all right here alone?” Hector asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Ina said jovially, pushing her guests gently toward the door. “Go home. Both of you. And thanks again.”
She threw the bolts after the Strodes were safe in the shadows of their gardens, then fastened the door chain. She swept the basement stairs and finished with a little mound of salt and dirt that she transferred to a dustpan and threw away. She double-checked the lock on the cellar door. She looked in on her cache of stolen beer.
There were reading materials on the table next to her bed; the newspaper, junk mail she had not gotten to earlier, she would read every word. There was a water-stained spy novel of incomprehensible plotting, and a thick novel about a good woman in love with a rotten man. She set her fresh glass on the table, then turned out the light while she undressed.
The Crabbs’ shrine was without movement and she stood at the window for a long time picking at her buttons; just studying the darkness. But no one was there, or they saw her watching and sat motionless with hands cupped over the lights of their cigarettes. Her clothes came off with an efficiency that saddened her. Vincent was not present to appreciate her slow disrobing, once one of their favorite things. She was out of her clothes and into her nightgown so quickly she could not recall being naked. Nor could she remember if she had eaten dinner that evening.
Then a dark car full of boys parked on the street beneath her window. A tall boy emerged. As she watched, he pointed at her house, pointed almost directly at her.
Ina tied the bow of her nightgown in a double knot. Her hands shook a bit. She stepped back into her shoes, still moist and warm from the day’s activities. They returned to her the illusion of readiness, if not of speed.
Other boys were emerging from the car. She prayed they would cross to the Crabbs’ lot to have their secret party, but for a long time they just stood by the car. The boy who had pointed at her house had disappeared. His friends were lighting cigarettes, playfully punching each other, their laughter rising to her.
Ina felt like a wraith descending, all insubstantial cloth and old air. A light still burned in the kitchen. The phone when she lifted it to her ear buzzed reassuringly and she set it back quickly lest the boys outside hear. She saw the car (was it maroon?) from a downstairs window, saw the boys with their insouciant poses against the fenders, hot buttons of ash suspended before their faces.
And there seemed to be fewer of them. She thought she had counted five boys waiting for the first, and now there were only four. They had been able to slip a second boy through the net of invisibility that existed everywhere she could not see.
Ina went to the front window. The street had a certain depth of shadows, but no motion, no boys clustered at the head of the river stairs.
A boy walked beneath her window and Ina gasped. He looked her way, but moved on. He was a curly-haired head and a pair of broad shoulders, the rest of him obscured by shrubs, bobbing along as if on a quick current. She decided he had not seen her. When she returned to the window facing the car only three boys remained, and, as she watched, another boldly broke away and walked out of sight into her backyard.
She dropped the phone once trying to dial. The numbers she punched at with her fingers broke up unfinished and became worthless hailings. She awakened strangers in her first two attempts at reaching Helene, and then she decided that was just as well, for her blind sister would only be submerged in a panic of helplessness.
She would call Hector. Earlier that evening he had all but said that he loved her; now she would see to what depth his devotion ran.
The beep of dialing in her ear could not hide an insistent rapping at her back door. The door had a window that looked into the kitchen and on down the hall that ran through the center of the house. Ina could not remember if she had drawn the shade on that window.
The phone rang and was almost immediately answered by Po Strode. In the background Ina heard the upbeat din of the TV and wondered again at the hour.
“This is Ina. Could I talk to Hector real quick?”
“What about, hon?” Po asked, her voice with a ribbon in it.
“It’s an emergency. Please put him on.”
“Salt giving you a problem?”
“Po!” Ina cried, holding down the volume on her desperation. “It’s an emergency. I’m not trying to steal your husband.”
“Fuff,” Po said, and went for Hector.
“Ina? Po says it’s an emergency?”
“Yes,” Ina whispered. “Those boys you heard about? The ones I took the beer from? They’re outside. I think there are six of them. They’re knocking on my back door.”
“I don’t see anybody over there,” Hector said. “But it’s pretty dark.”
“Could you come over?”
“Six, you say? Toughs, are they?”
“I think six. Tough—I don’t know. Call the police, then come over. I’d call—I wouldn’t bother you at all—but you’re so close.”
“No bother, Ina,” Hector said. “Sit tight. Don’t answer the door. I’ll come to the front and knock. Three rapid knocks, then two with space between. Got that? They’ll think I’m your husband.”
She looked around the corner and down the hall to the back door and saw that she had pulled the shade. She felt safe with Hector on the way and the police alerted. She felt the warmth of an adventure safely negotiated and wished that she had her glass handy to sit in the dark and savor. The knocking had ceased.
She looked and there were no boys by the car. She began to worry again. The knocking resumed at the front door. No rhythm to it, no hint of the code that Hector had established and Ina had forgotten. She heard only young voices and confident laughter. They reminded her of the way Vincent and Rudy would congregate on Ina and Helene’s stoop and plot innocent trouble to win the girls’ love. They would be anything they thought would do some good: acrobats, jesters, raconteurs, braggarts, jugglers, fools. Helene and Ina sat on the flower boxes or against the base of a tree and awaited their enthrallment. The boys were sometimes intimidated by the sisters’ willingness to be fought over. Rudy was always the most daring. He broke a foot one summer walking on his hands down the stairs, and for a time he added mild obscenities to his speech until he saw himself losing ground with the girls. Vincent allowed Rudy these forms of physical daring and was content to sit and talk and comment on Rudy’s displays. Vincent was all deflection, insinuation, subtlety.
Boys were now peering boldly into her dark rooms. One scratched at the screen. Ina sat motionless in a chair, listening to her heartbeat. Vincent, whose heart had proved fallible, slept on his stomach because she once complained that the drumming in his chest kept her awake. She on occasion draped a hand across his rib cage as they lay like spoons and the pounding of his heart nearly bounced her hand away. Now her own heart was tearing loose in her chest. It might have echoed Hector’s code, but she would never have known. Boys were at the door, at the windows, talking and laughing, an infestation of boys. Would they leave her alone if she lobbed the six cans of stolen beer out a second-floor window?
