The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 17

We realize that no one we can in good faith call a friend is one of the poor. We know only one person who doesn't have health insurance. One who won't get social security. We both worry about these people and hope that if they're in need we'll have the wherewithal to help. By wherewithal we mean both money and goodwill.

My friend tells me about a woman whom she works with who has three children, a husband out of work, a mother with Alzheimer's in a nursing home, an alcoholic father in another nursing home. My friend says, "I think that I should genuflect to her. But there's nothing I can do for her. Nothing at all."

No one we know well doesn't have some sort of household help. A cleaning woman.

I tell my friend that when I was young no one I knew had household help, and that in the years when no one I knew had household help, I was left by men, or boys, over and over.

I suggest that it would be too simple to say this has to do with age and money.

But I don't know how else to explain it.

I confide that my closest male friend, J., had a cancer scare this summer. The day before he left for a month-long holiday, his doctor phoned and said the minute he came back, he had to schedule a biopsy. He was about to get on a boat to sail around the Caribbean. He did get on the boat, he went sailing, and he told the friend he was sailing with about his cancer scare. But he didn't tell me, although I'm the person he usually confides in, because he knew I was trying to finish a book and he didn't want to distract me.

When he finally told me after the book was finished, and the biopsy had come back negative, I was grateful that he hadn't told me before. Then I was appalled. I say to my friend, "I often think I'm not really capable of love. Or capable of real love."

I repeat to her for the thousandth time the story about my daughter and me when we were in a riptide. I didn't try to save her. I saved myself. Someone else saved my daughter.

My friend (the friend with whom I'm having the conversation) tells me that I panicked, that it doesn't mean anything about my character. And that I wouldn't have felt like that about our other friend's not telling me about his cancer scare if I hadn't been finishing a book.

I don't believe her.

I know that one day it will be clear to everyone: I am incapable of love.

We stop for a cappuccino, and though we know it's overpriced, we don't for a minute consider not buying it. $2.75. Too much, but nothing, really, in our lives. On the tables there are bowls full of packets of sugar. I tell my friend that if I were one of the poor, I'd load my pockets with these packets of sugar; it would make a big difference. Perhaps I'd allow myself a coffee- not a cappuccino like this, but a plain coffee in a plain coffee shop- eighty-five cents- once a month. Each time I did this, I'd fill my pockets with sugar. I'd have to choose a different coffee shop each time because if I were one of the poor, I'd be noticed.

But, my friend says, if we lived in a really poor country, there wouldn't be packets of sugar on the tables.

Because of the conversation we are having, we pick up the movie The Story of Adele H. from the video store. We can hardly bear to watch it. The daughter of a famous man, Victor Hugo, Adele puts herself in the place of the desperate. For love. For unrequited love. She condemns herself to wandering. To starvation. Beneath our pity and our fascination, there is grat.i.tude. Because she has done it, we need not.

The next day, I copy a line from a book I'm reading, and mail it to my friend. It says, Ready to be someone else in order to be loved, she would abandon herself to ridicule and even to madness. Under the words I write, Today it is the fifth day of October. My friend meets me in front of my son's school. A little paradise, this school, where children can be happy as they learn. A private school, with a very high tuition. Leaning against the building is a woman wearing a white clown's wig, bell-bottomed jeans, a blue bra, and no shirt. I have neglected to mention that it's raining and she appears to be at least seventy. And that she's not wearing shoes. My friend and I don't say anything about her.

No one entering or leaving the building appears to look at her.

It is not possible that anyone entering or leaving the building will speak to her.

It is also impossible to invent anything that might approximate her history.

My friend and I don't say anything about her because we both know she's the woman we're afraid of becoming.

The one we fear becoming when we have lost our prosperity.

The one we really are.

The Healing.

Veronica loved to hear, and then go over in her mind, the story of how her uncle Johnny Nolan came to marry Nettie Bordereau. They had met when he was working as a lifeguard at a hotel in the Adirondacks. She was a chambermaid, and they'd been thrown together because they were the only two young people who went into town for Sunday Ma.s.s. Nettie confessed afterward- not to the priest, but to Johnny- that she'd made a point of being in the station wagon that brought people to Ma.s.s because she'd had her eye on him since Memorial Day and saw that he never missed a Sunday. He'd promised his mother, he'd told Nettie later on, and she'd liked that. She told him that not only was he good-looking, he was reliable.

Johnny went back to New York after Labor Day, and she went back to Watertown. But every weekend he made the nine-hour trip to see her. He was starting a job with the telephone company, a linesman. The lifeguard job was just an interval between Korea and the job he thought would be his for life. It was a perfect time for him to get married, and the Nolans were pleased enough with Nettie. They admired her liveliness; they thought it would be good for Johnny, who, they were afraid, had a tendency to be lazy. But there was something about her quickness- which they attributed to her being French Canadian- that made them feel inadequate, apologetic, dull.

She and Johnny married in February. She wore a blue suit with a fur collar which made her look like an expectant little animal. The Nolans found the fur collar at once exciting and in bad taste. They were relieved when the couple announced they would live in Long Island City. Delia, Johnny's mother, Veronica's grandmother, had been a widow fifteen years; she liked to have her sons around her. She'd had seven, but had lost one in the war and one had moved to Baltimore. It never occurred to her that any of the three daughters would move away.

All the sons had married well, all six of them, but of the three daughters, only Veronica's mother had married. Aunt Noreen had become a Sister of the Good Shepherd. It was a cloistered order, so they never saw her. The other girl, Aunt Maddie, lived at home. She worked for the telephone company too. Or, she had worked there first, which was how Johnny had got the job. She was an operator. People said she had a good telephone voice on account of her having been musical. At family parties she played the piano while everyone sang. Veronica had never heard her sing.

Veronica knew her grandmother liked her best of all the grandchildren. It wasn't just that she was the youngest by three years; she was only nine, but she knew her having been singled out had nothing to do with her age. "You're n.o.body's fool," her grandmother had said to her once, when she'd heard about what Veronica had done when the butcher tried to shortchange her.

She was afraid of Moe Schultz with his b.l.o.o.d.y hands and his red cheeks that made you think there was blood too close under the surface, too much blood, and it would come spurting out at any minute, all over the place if someone crossed him, if he got too excited. And then he had a German accent. He had come from Germany. Veronica didn't know exactly when, but she knew that when you thought of Germany, you had to think of blood, of soldiers, of dead bodies, white, in piles. So she was standing up to all that when she looked at the coins, greasy, grown fattish themselves from the touch of Moe Schultz's fingers. She thought that there would be smears of blood on the coins if you put them under a microscope.

There should have been a quarter and two dimes in her hand, forty-five cents, and instead he had put only two dimes there. She felt in her flat palm, dry, warm, the absence of the quarter, which was of all coins the one that she liked best. Pennies were a children's coin, inconsequential. Nickels seemed coa.r.s.e to her and common, workaday, dependable, but without uses, capable of purchasing nothing that could bring excitement or real joy. You would have to think, think hard, about spending a nickel. "He counts every last nickel," was something she had heard people say. She could imagine a gray-faced man with begrudging eyes and tired felt hat and gloves with no fingers. She imagined him at night, when he came home from work to his ugly room in a boardinghouse, a room with no pictures, maybe even no window, or if there was one it brought no light. He would come home, take off his rodent-colored hat, hang his jacket, also rodent colored, on the coat tree (he would have no closet) and before he sat down at the table that, except for the bed and the dresser, was the only furniture in the room, he would reach into his pockets, lint covered perhaps because the linings of his pockets had begun to shred, and take out three or four nickels that he would add to others in a box that he took from the dresser, a flimsy box that would break one day from the weight of all those coins.

Dimes seemed to her deceitful; she would never have been surprised if, handing over a dime one day, a shopkeeper would say: "But these won't do at all, you know, don't you know they're worth nothing." Dimes in their lightness, their flimsiness, made her question the whole idea of worth. It seemed an impossible question to her- what was something worth- and she resented dimes for making her consider it.

Quarters, though, were the coins of the great world. She always imagined them with high, piled, shining hair, in furs, trailing behind them a scent that was strong but not floral, making their way through anything, taking with ease and calm a.s.surance what they knew to be their rightful place. Sometimes she couldn't imagine anything a quarter wouldn't buy, so desirable, so complete in its attractions, did each seem in itself.

So when Moe Schultz put into her hand only the two greasy dimes, she felt the absence of that quarter, strongly, as if she'd been deprived of a delicious meal that had been promised, that she had every right to expect, and had been presented instead with a plate of dry leaves. She felt the absence of the quarter in her mouth in just that way; the lack of it made her begin to salivate. And she saw the blood on Moe Schultz's hands, around the outlines of his nails, and she thought of the soldiers in their brown coats and the piles of corpses, and her body, too light to contain it, was filled with wave after wave of swelling anger. She had no choice but to speak.

"Excuse me, Mr. Schultz, I think you've given me the wrong change." "I've given you what is owing," he said, staring her down with his brown eyes, also meat colored, also overfed by blood.

"I got one and three-quarters of a pound of hamburger, that's a dollar twenty-five, and a quarter pound of bologna, that's twenty cents, which makes a dollar forty-five."

"You got two pounds of hamburger. Give it to me. I weigh." She knew that he would put the meat on the scale and then put his fat thumb beside it and it would look like she was wrong.

"I think you made a mistake, Mr. Schultz. I think you forgot I only asked for a pound and three-quarters."

He took the quarter from the cash register, whose keys he pushed with a violence Veronica knew was meant for her. He threw the quarter on the sawdust-covered floor, beside her shoes. She looked at the coin, shining though defiled, beside her round-toed navy oxford. She tried to think of a way to get the coin without looking clumsy, without, as her aunts would say, "giving him the satisfaction." She would not give him the satisfaction. So she bent at the knees, keeping her spine straight, keeping her eyes on the butcher, although he had turned his back on her. But she knew he could see her in the mirror that covered the shop's wall. She reached for the coin without taking her eyes from the butcher's enormous back. Not looking at the floor, not once, she fingered the coin, scooped it up, and put it in her pocket, not saying goodbye as she pushed open the door and heard, upon her leaving, the falsely cheerful tinkle of the bell.

It must have been Mrs. Gallagher who told her grandmother about it. She was glad the news had come to her grandmother rather than her mother, because it was the kind of news that would have made her mother feel afraid. Her mother was not a strong person. Veronica sometimes felt that in the process of being born, she and her brothers had pushed out all their mother's strength and left it in a b.l.o.o.d.y heap on the hospital floor. And their mother had not recovered. Her mother wore gla.s.ses all the time; Veronica had no image of her mother without gla.s.ses, and they made her eyes look swimming, as if they were always on the verge of tears. She wore her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, but little wisps of hair were always escaping, and she was always, nervously, ashamedly trying to put the stray hairs back into place. Her chest under the ap.r.o.n, limp and floral, that she always wore, seemed caved in, as though someone had given her a blow to the back where her waist was, and she had never again been quite able to straighten up.

She was afraid of so many things: things she had failed to do and things she could not possibly keep from happening. You could never leave the house without her running in once more to be sure she'd turned the oven off or not left the iron plugged in. When a high wind came you could see the look of terror on her flushed face. She didn't trust the house to keep them; when she asked Veronica's father to double-check the windows, he was cruel, and he said he would not, she must practice self-control.

Her father was afraid of nothing, but nothing pleased him either. He was never happy, and he resented others' happiness, particularly his wife's in those rare moments when she had some. If he came home from work and saw her and the children playing cards on the dining room table, he threw down his coat and accused her of indulging herself rather than seeing to his dinner. Soon he was in a rage. He responded to Veronica's excellent report cards as if they were a trick she'd pulled to show him up. Her mother would give her a nickel for an ice-cream cone as a reward; her father predicted her brains would bring her nothing but bad luck.

He might have been a bit afraid, Veronica sometimes thought, of her grandmother. Veronica's mother would deliver the good report cards to Delia and Delia would say, "Isn't that great, then," and her father would have to pretend to be pleased.

Delia told Veronica she must study hard, that if she studied hard the world was her oyster. Her grandmother used phrases that pleased Veronica but which she in no way understood. She had never seen an oyster, but she knew it was a kind of fish, something like a clam, and she knew that it was gray. What that had to do with the world, or something good about it, was nothing she could imagine. Another time Delia had said, "I wouldn't be too quick about marrying. Marriage isn't all beer and skittles." She had no idea what skittles were and she hated the taste and smell of beer. She a.s.sociated it with her father and her father's anger when he drank, so maybe the angry behavior of men was what her grandmother was talking about. But she was saying marriage wasn't beer and that other thing, so what could she possibly have meant?

Her puzzlement about the things her grandmother said added to her unease about Delia's favor. Delia liked her for things like standing up to Moe Schultz and preferring what she called "sums" to dolls and dress-up. Veronica was pretty sure that Delia a.s.sumed it was because she was "practical" rather than "dreamy" that she liked adding numbers. What she would never know, because Veronica would die before she let her know, were the dreams that went on in her head when she was adding numbers. That she wanted the quarter, not only because she was angry at being cheated, but because she wanted who the quarter was. That she liked writing numbers in a column because each of them was a person: two was a prince, five a jaunty boy, and eight a tender mother. Seven was a card-sharp and a cowboy, six was a fool who deserved nothing but to be deceived. And somehow the new number that could be born by adding the others up brought to her a world of couplings, connections she would dwell on endlessly. If her grandmother knew all that she would never take Veronica with her on errands.

So between feeling bad that her grandmother had chosen her on false grounds and sad about how the way her coming into life had sapped her mother's strength and hopeless that everything she did seemed to her father a theft from his account, she often wished she could be somewhere else, brought up among some other people. She was mostly alone, watching things, making up stories. The only sense of Tightness came from being with her grandmother, when Delia called her "partner." And even then, when she heard those words, she felt that she had stolen grace.

Her aunts and uncles didn't like her except for Johnny, who did like her, because she was happy to listen when he spoke about Korea. And she liked the slippers he'd brought back, and the paper parasols and the tops and the toys made out of paper that no American children could figure out. She thought they were meant to be looked at rather than played with. The word "toy," she thought, must be a mistranslation. She was sure Johnny had misunderstood. She never told him that; she always asked him to take out his things from Korea and show them to her. This made everyone think she was showing off; she could tell they wanted to say something about it to her, but they were too afraid of Delia to let their dislike of Veronica show. But the Bordereaus, Nettie and her brother Phil (his real name was Philippe), didn't see any need to change anything they did because of something about Delia. They said, right out, and no one stopped them, "That kid gives me the creeps," and "What the h.e.l.l's she staring at like that?"

There were a lot of Bordereaus around after a while, because within a year of Nettie's marrying Johnny her whole family had moved to Queens from Watertown. There was Phil, an electrician, and an older widowed sister, Adele, who was a nurse. A practical nurse. "An L.P.N.," Nettie had said, quickly, casually, pretending it was something she wasn't really proud of. For a long time, Veronica thought Nettie was saying "elpienne," that it was one of her French words, and Veronica thought it had something to do with the Alps, that Adele was some kind of mountain climber, although this was hard to understand because she was very fat and always complained about her sore feet. But by not asking, by listening- although the way it happened was a mystery to her- Veronica learned that L.P.N. were initials standing for licensed practical nurse. She didn't know either when or how she found out that an L.P.N. wasn't a real nurse, they didn't get paid as much, they couldn't give injections, and they almost never worked beside the doctors.

Phil and Adele and Mrs. Bordereau moved into the top floor of a house two blocks from Delia's. It was a house built on a slab of concrete; there was no gra.s.s at all, only one slab in the front and another one in the back, which Phil said was a relief because if there was anything he didn't need it was mowing. The house was very dark on account of something called blackout shades, which weren't really black, but dark green, and Veronica knew they had something to do with the war, but she didn't know what.

Mrs. Bordereau almost never left the house. She wore a white net over her hair and her gla.s.ses had no rims. Light bounced off them more than ordinary gla.s.ses. She made up special medicines and gave people "treatments" but no one ever went to her except Veronica and her family. Nettie said it would take a while for her to build things up, but then you wait and see, there'd be lines up the block, like in Watertown. Veronica did not believe her.

But for some reason, Delia did believe in Mrs. Bordereau's medicines. She took a bitter liquid in a spoon every morning and she had "treatments" for her back three times a week. She paid a dollar for the medicine and another dollar every week for treatments. Veronica was surprised: Delia was careful about money and two dollars a week seemed like a lot, particularly when she couldn't understand what happened in the treatments or what was in the liquid in the brown bottle with the cork for a stopper, wrapped in white paper and a rubber band.

With Delia getting medicine from Mrs. Bordereau and Phil coming by sometimes to take Aunt Maddie to the movies, the Bordereaus and the Nolans saw quite a lot of each other, enough for Veronica to know how much they didn't like her. Except for Mrs. Bordereau, who never said a word.

For a long time she believed they had no reason to dislike her. But then something happened and she knew they had a reason and she knew exactly what it was. She had seen something; she had seen something she wasn't supposed to see.

It was the middle of the afternoon. If they wanted to do something they didn't want anyone to see, Veronica thought, they should have waited till the sun was down. Anyone could have seen what she'd seen if they'd happened to be pa.s.sing by. It was an accident that she was the one pa.s.sing.

And she didn't move away because she didn't understand what she was seeing. She knew it was Philippe Bordereau's back; she could tell by his hair and his green work shirt that said "Phil" above the pocket in yellow script thread. He was pressing Aunt Maddie up against the side of the piano, the side that was like a little wall, narrow and solid; she had put her hand against it sometimes when Aunt Maddie played; she'd liked it very much that she could feel the music.

She knew it was Aunt Maddie because she could see her shoes, which always looked like Minnie Mouse shoes to Veronica. The shoes were pointy, but not pointy enough. Aunt Maddie had heavy legs and big hips. She wasn't fat, everyone said that, but she was a large woman. "Handsome," people said. The top of her body was smaller than the bottom half. Her feet went with the top of her body; they were too small for her legs, and although Aunt Maddie bragged about being a size five shoe, Veronica thought she shouldn't have talked about it. Sometimes it made her look down on grown-ups when she, a child, knew better than the grown-up the category of thing that should not be said.

Phil Bordereau was moving his hips in a circle, urging Aunt Maddie's back up against the piano's side. Veronica was thinking that it must have hurt Aunt Maddie; she didn't know why she was letting him go on doing it. She thought it must be a kind of kissing, although their mouths weren't joined. She could see Aunt Maddie's face (her eyes were closed) and Phil's wasn't near it.

Suddenly Phil moved away from Aunt Maddie. When he did that, she could see Veronica. "Phil," she said and pointed.

"Jesus Christ," Phil said and walked out the front door, letting it slam behind him.

Aunt Maddie walked past Veronica, up the stairs to her room. Veronica could see that the front of her dress was wet, as if she'd peed on herself. She couldn't imagine what Phil had done to Aunt Maddie that would make her pee. Whatever it was, she knew it was, more than anything that had happened to her, something she couldn't talk about.

She was pretty sure Phil had told Nettie about it. About what Veronica had seen. She got the idea when the two of them backed her into a corner.

"Now listen here," they said, "we want to talk to you. We want to say something."

She thought it was a little foolish that they believed those sentences were different from each other, that both of them were required. It made her feel, for a second, that she didn't have to take them seriously. But they stood very close to her, and kept taking steps even closer, so she had to take little steps back if she didn't want her feet crushed. They did that until none of them could go any further because Veronica was standing with her back against the wall.

Nettie shook her finger in Veronica's face. It was very close to her eye; she had to keep blinking it was so close.

"Curiosity killed the cat, you know," she said and then the two of them walked away. Veronica could tell they felt satisfied. As if they'd accomplished something. She wanted to tell them they'd accomplished nothing, nothing new had happened on account of what they'd done. She was never going to say anything, but it wasn't because of them, it was because of who she was and the things she'd always known. Long before she'd ever heard of them.

Delia stopped by to get Veronica. "Come with me, partner," she said. "We're going to take your Aunt Maddie over to Mrs. Bordereau's for a treatment. She's been a bit under the weather."

For a minute Veronica felt bad that Delia had asked her and not her mother. But she wanted to go too much to think about it for long. It would be interesting to go to Mrs. Bordereau's and find out what a treatment was and what it meant that Aunt Maddie was under the weather. She liked that about words, that they could hide what they meant, but not forever. In her experience you could always find out what they meant. Like when Nettie said, "Curiosity killed the cat." It meant they were mad at her for having seen Phil and Aunt Maddie when he did that thing to her that made her pee. It had nothing to do with cats, just as what was wrong with Aunt Maddie had nothing to do with weather. But you had to make the picture first. First you had to see a cat looking into something, then you had to see something springing out of it, maybe a bigger cat, a tiger, and jumping at its throat. Then you saw the cat dead. And you saw Aunt Maddie under a heavy, wet cloud, pressing her down, covering her almost entirely, until all you saw was her thick ankles and her little feet in their not-quite-pointy shoes.

"Ready, partner?" said Delia, pressing her foot down on the gas pedal. Her grandmother always wore only one kind of shoe, the shoe that all old ladies wore, black, with a rounded toe and a little heel and laces.

"Ready, partner," Veronica said.

"We'll get your Aunt Maddie and be on our way."

Aunt Maddie did not look well. She'd had a flu for weeks that Delia said "she couldn't shake." She was under the weather, and Veronica understood that; today was the kind of weather she most disliked, a winter morning. The sky was gun colored and the air tasted of rust. Old ice stuck to the sidewalk and the edges of the road. Delia said you had to be careful on this kind of road: you never knew when a slippery patch would come up. Maybe that was why she drove so slowly, or maybe it was because Aunt Maddie's stomach was upset.

Aunt Maddie looked heavy in her tweed coat. When she got out of the car, she took the white scarf from around her neck and wrapped it around her head, as if they were walking a long distance. But it wasn't a long distance, only a few steps up the concrete slab that led to the Bordereaus' house.

Nettie was waiting for them at the door. She'd opened it before they were halfway up the staircase.

When they were in the living room, Nettie said, "What's the little one doing here?"

"She's keeping me company," Delia said.

"Well that's a funny business," said Nettie, but she was afraid to look at Delia when she said it.

"There's no funny business about anything," Delia said, and Veronica thought this would make it impossible for Nettie to say anything back. But she was wrong.

"Suit yourself," she said.

The living room had nothing in it but what could be used. There were no pictures, no plants, no statues, no doilies or antimaca.s.sars. The floors were wooden; there were three hooked rugs, blue and olive green. There was a wooden table without a cloth and around it four wooden chairs without cushions so that Veronica thought it would be uncomfortable to sit on them even for the length of a meal. There was a TV and in front of it an olive green leather chair with a matching ha.s.sock, and another chair, covered in tweed, that looked exactly like Aunt Maddie's coat.

Mrs. Bordereau sat at the dining room table, on one of the hard chairs. But she was sitting on two pillows, so she was high up, like a bird on a perch or a queen on a throne. On the table in front of her were scissors, a clear, shallow bowl of water, cotton b.a.l.l.s, a jar half full of a greenish ointment, a saucer with a white powder, paper bags, rubber bands, a corked brown bottle.

She looked as she always did, like a doll or a very neat, very dressed-up child, and the things spread out in front of her looked like some kind of child's game. She indicated, pointing, that Nettie should take the coats. She stood up. Veronica thought it was possible that she'd become taller than Mrs. Bordereau since the last time she saw her.

Mrs. Bordereau walked into the bedroom without saying anything. Aunt Maddie followed. Then Nettie went in, carrying a rubber sheet. It was mole colored and when the door opened and then closed a sharp smell came into the room.

"I'm getting the h.e.l.l out of here," Nettie said, putting on her coat, patting the fur collar as if it were a small animal she loved, but not too much.

Delia reached into her pocketbook and took out a pack of cards. A rubber band that was too thick, too inelastic for the cards so that they bent a bit under its pressure, went around the pack. Delia took the rubber band off the cards and hung it around her wrist. When she dealt the cards, the rubber band, which was light blue, swung in what seemed to Veronica an inconvenient way.

She and Delia played hand after hand of casino. There was no noise from the other room. The clock ticked loudly; it was only a face with no border, and it was so high on the wall that it was hard to read. Delia and Veronica said only, "You won," or "I'll take that one." Two hours pa.s.sed.

Then the bedroom door opened and they could hear the sound of weeping. Mrs. Bordereau went to the phone which was on a table near the front door. She dialed a number. She said something in French. Then she went into the bedroom and closed the door. They no longer heard the sound of weeping.

Nettie burst into the room rushing, bringing the cold of the outside with her. She didn't say anything to Delia or Veronica. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. Then she was dragging Aunt Maddie, who was crying.

Delia rose up and said, "What have you done to her?"

Nettie's look was full of hate. "Oh, innocent," she said. "No time to talk about it now. We'll take her to the hospital. We'll go in my car. You sit in the back with her."

In seconds they were all out the door, and Veronica could hear first the car starting and then the sound of it going down the street.

In a straight line, a line made by a series of red dots, some larger and some smaller, was a trail of blood that led from the bedroom to the front door. Mrs. Bordereau was on her knees, wiping the dots up with a wet cloth. She went into the bedroom and came out with a brown paper parcel tied with string which she brought into the kitchen. Then she went into the room again and came out carrying the rubber sheet. She walked into the bathroom with it and closed the door. Veronica could hear the sound of water filling up the bathtub. She heard the rubber sheet go plop into the water. Mrs. Bordereau came out, wiping her hands on the ap.r.o.n.

Then she sat down at the dining room table across from Veronica. They were both sitting the same way, with their hands folded in front of them, waiting for the next thing to happen. The clock ticked and the sounds bounced back and forth between the surfaces of the wooden floor and the hard wooden chairs.

Veronica felt herself beginning to cry. She didn't know whether she was crying because she was afraid or because she didn't know what to do. And she didn't know what she was afraid of, if she was afraid. Was it the trail of blood, the way Aunt Maddie looked? Or was it being alone with Mrs. Bordereau? She understood, finally, that not knowing what to do made her the most afraid. She wished more than anything that Delia hadn't taken her cards with her.

A rod of light slipped through the crack in the Venetian blinds and glanced off Mrs. Bordereau's gla.s.ses. This made Veronica cry afresh.

"Why do you cry for?"

When Mrs. Bordereau spoke, Veronica realized she had never heard her voice before. She had an accent. Veronica guessed it must be French, but it did not sound like movies about Paris.

Veronica shook her head.

"You mustn't cry," said Mrs. Bordereau. "If people see you crying dey will tink you are remorseful."