The Widower's Tale (12 page)

She did not answer my second question. She introduced herself as Penelope Goodwin. "I'll let you call me Poppy if you tell me your name."

"I don't care what you let me call you, but I'm Percy," I told her. "Percy Darling."

She looked at me, wide-eyed for a moment, as if I'd shocked her. I braced myself for some predictably dog-eared jest about my surname. "Percy
Darling,"
she said, "are you from Vigil Harbor?"

I'd begun to find her less attractive than strange. I glanced about, to see if any of my new coworkers stood nearby, anyone to rescue me from this peculiar interrogation. "Where's that?"

"Darling," she said, "is an old name in Vigil Harbor. You've never been to Vigil Harbor, up near Gloucester?"

"Never heard of it."

She looked skeptical. "Very old, very romantic. That's where my father's family landed. A place for seduction, my mother says. So. The very first lighthouse keeper was Ezekiel Darling. We're probably distant cousins." She took my drink out of my hand and set it on top of the bookcase. "You're not enjoying this--the drink or the party. Come to my house for something better than Chaucer and pretzels." She started away from me but stopped when she sensed I wasn't following.

"Come on, cousin. I live next door. You can always change your mind and come back. I'm taking care of my parents' house. Let's go make ourselves some supper, what do you think of that?"

"Do you even know the Smithsons?" I said as we crossed our host's backyard and passed through a hedge. "Did you simply barge in?"

"I used to babysit for their kids. The kids grew up, so now I take care of their plants and their dog. They invite me to everything. They think I'm lonely."

Why she had approached me in that crowd of strangers, I did not ask for months. I did not want to press my luck. When I finally did, she told me that she had been attracted first by the color of my shirt ("It was such a celestial blue, I mean like
actual sky")
and then by the earnest look on my face as I pretended to scrutinize those books.

"My heart went out to you," she said, "for being so over your head. And then I found out you were a Darling. And you are."

We married the next year. We were twenty-four years old.

When I returned from my run, I saw that Robert and Arturo were up in the tree, straddling limbs on opposite sides of the trunk, while Ira was--with the help of Celestino--handing up a long board. Robert and Ira were bare-chested. It was early October, yet the heat had returned for what was sure to be the last bold parry of summer.

I stopped at the tree. "Hello, young craftsmen," I said, striving not to sound winded. "Please do take care not to kill yourselves."

"Granddad," said Robert, "this part is a cinch. And hey--Mrs. Connaughton's loaned us the help of this very able-bodied guy."

Celestino nodded at me, his smile aloof or shy, I couldn't tell which.

"Now let me get this right," I said. "I thought the idea was that the precocious little architects of the--the Nightshades? the Toadstools?--were to build this masterpiece."

"We build the platforms, ladders, and guardrails, the basic structure," said Ira, "and then we bring the kids in to do the fun stuff. The embellishments. The interior details. They're like the decorators."

"Ah! Well, carry on." As if my permission were the least bit germane.

I struggled with the recurrent sensation I'd been having for over a month, that I was not the lord of the manor here but, rather, a favored guest at an eccentric country estate where children called the shots. A sort of toffee-coated
Lord of the Flies
. If Julie Andrews or Suzanne Pleshette had appeared on the lawn and broken into song, it wouldn't have fazed me one bit.

Ordinarily, I got in my postmarathon swim before the kiddies' first recess, but that day, my late start meant that--unless I wanted to run the gauntlet of their impish stares on my way to the pond--I had to wait until after lunch, after "first dismissal." Most of the children were picked up, swallowed by the maws of their parents' lumbering minivans, at twelve-thirty, though a small group stayed on for Lunch Bunch, a nosh-and-nap session that lasted another hour. And then, except for the teachers who lingered to clean up the day's bedlam, I had the place to myself.

I paid bills in my study, pausing to watch Robert and his crew balance and hoist boards, hammering in stereo. That poor tree. I could feel its anguished gaze through the window: its arboreal
Et tu, Brute?
I sighed. Poppy had once called herself my leavener; she had known how to tease me out of my possessive, pessimistic anxieties. If she had been there beside me, she would have said, "Percy, it's a tree. A divine majesty of a tree, but your grandson knows just what he's doing. And please think of the delight he is building with that hammer. Think of it!"

The years I spent with Poppy amount to less than half--even closer to a third--of the time I have known our daughters, and yet the truth is that Poppy abides with me still, inside my head, speaking to me, far more than do Trudy or Clover. If I had a nickel for all the times I have uttered, alone with myself, "Oh, Poppy"--in sorrow, in exasperation, in pleasure or relief or physical pain--I would have amassed a bank balance large enough to buy the entire town of Matlock and to rule the place as I damn well pleased, from firing the idiotically plugged-in librarian to knocking down the hideous addition on the Harris Homestead and replanting Jonathan Newcomb's three-acre turfiganza with nothing but milkweed. Ah, but that was not to be my destiny. Far from it.

I waited until the last civilian tank had slid past the window. I grabbed a towel from the mudroom and set off for the pond. Passing the barn, I could hear Ira as he led the Lunch Bunch in a song comparing love to a magic penny. He played the guitar and sang the sappy lyrics without the slightest inhibition. Actually, he had a rather nice singing voice, and I chastised myself for regarding his choice of employment as any more odd, in these times, than mine had been in a stodgier era. As I had done for my entire working life, he was holding his own in a profession ruled by women. Good for him, I thought as I backstroked my way across the pond, from under one shore's canopy of yellow leaves across the open stretch of sky to another.

You give the magic penny away and, poof, you possess another, and another and another and another.
Lend it, spend it, and you'll have so many, they'll roll all over the floor!
Whether she'd been sincere or not, Mistress Lorelei had a point about the children's voices. They had a tranquilizing, even mesmerizing effect. "Oh, Poppy," I said for the five trillion ninety-ninth time.

At last I pulled myself from the water, wading through the soft sandy mud. I wasn't squeamish about the mud, as most people were; I loved the feel of it between my toes. Our neighbors had always thought us vaguely mad to swim in the pond--someone had seen a snapping turtle more than once--but Poppy and I scoffed at their timidity. For years, until it finally rotted, I put out a raft from May to October. Perhaps, I thought idly that day, I could bribe Robert into building a replacement.

I wrapped the towel around my shoulders and walked up to the house, to the outdoor shower. Members of the Lunch Bunch were making their exit, receiving their hugs and kisses, relinquishing their tiny satchels.

I stayed in the shower a long time, staring up at the sky through the trees. I would swim at least through the end of the month, but this would be one of the last balmy days of no goosebumps, no gasps from the cold air against my wet skin. The morning paper decreed a sharp downturn in the temperature that night. Very soon, for a brief time, the water would be warmer than the air.

I came out onto the pathway singing snatches of the magic penny song. I was still in my swimsuit, toweling my hair, when I practically collided with a mother leading her child by the hand.

"Greetings!" I barked in sudden alarm.

"I'm sorry!" said the mother.

Startled speechless, we faced each other, six inches apart. I glanced at the boy to be sure I hadn't knocked him down. He stepped off the path, scowling at me. When I focused on the mother, she was staring at my midsection. She actually laughed.

I was poised to express my territorial indignation when she said, "Why, if it isn't the pink pineapples."

I had definitely seen this woman before, but then, all these fit, generically charmed mommies had been passing by my windows for a month. I'd surely seen them all.

She said, "Do you remember me from the store? I helped you pick out this suit. I must say, it does make a positive statement."

Oh heavens: my sartorial handmaid at The Great Outdoorsman was a mother at Elves & Fairies.

I bowed. "How kind of you to follow up on customer satisfaction. You see that I have put the garment to good use. I have definitely got my money's worth!"

We laughed together.

"Then you're Percival Darling," she said.

"In the flesh. A bit too much of it on view right now."

"I'm Sarah Straight. My son, Rico."

I held my hand toward the boy, but he did not oblige me with his. I noticed that he did not look a thing like his mother. Where she was fair-skinned, he was quite dark, with a broad face where hers was narrow and angled.

"Well, Sarah Straight, it's good to see that real people with real jobs and real manners are among the parents at this institution."

Her smile stiffened. "Manners don't seem lacking around here."

"True enough," I said. "On the surface."

"That's what manners are about, though, wouldn't you say? A smooth surface."

Rico tugged on his mother's arm. "Patience, honey," she said gently.

"Do you live in Matlock?" I said, at a loss.

"Oh hardly. We live in Packard. I was lucky to get a scholarship for Rico. Do you know the arts building, on the river?"

"The old mill."

"I have a loft there. I do stained glass. That's what I think of as my real job."

"Stained glass! Intriguing. Wonderful!" I longed for an exit. Aside from feeling like a social ape, I was cold.

"Come by on a Sunday," she said. "The studios are open, noon to five. Not just mine."

"Yes. Yes, I've heard about that. We need all the local culture we can get."

Rico saw his opening; he launched a plea of thirst and fatigue.

"Next time we meet," I said, "may I be fully clothed."

As I walked toward my back door, I heard her call back, "Hot pink becomes you, Percival Darling."

"Who would have guessed?" I called in return.

After dressing, I went in search of Robert, but his car was gone. Feeling deprived, I decided to inspect what he had accomplished. The lower part of the beech tree looked as if it had been cunningly entrapped, yet as I circled the tree and examined the handiwork, I could not find a single nail that penetrated the trunk or branches. All the boards were nailed to one another. Nor could I find evidence of a single amputation. I wondered what Trudy would say if I called her that evening to praise her son's extracurricular talents. Not, I reminded myself, that I needed a reason to call my daughter.

"It's such a shame that we must begin to lock our cars and our houses."

"Must?" I scoffed. "Paranoia is certainly infectious."

"Are you really going to take such chances, Percy?" said Laurel Connaughton, Mistress Lorelei to a tee. "I've just spent a fortune to alarm the house, but I won't bat a lash if it lets me sleep soundly."

"If some jokester wants to stuff my dishwasher with regimental neckties or my underwear drawer with brussels sprouts, well boolah-boolah to him."

"Or her. You know, the police haven't been able to pin down a bit of evidence. This person is clearly sophisticated and wily."

"Or our police department is out of its depth."

"Percy, dear, it's not just Matlock. Ledgely just had an incident."

I helped myself to a fifth cucumber sandwich from a platter perched on a leather ottoman between us. Cucumber sandwiches are a weakness of mine, even if Laurel did not make them as well as Poppy had (with garlic and anchovy rather than dill). The promised salmon had not appeared, but I was holding a Tanqueray tonic in my free hand. I was not exactly suffering.

My hostess pulled her skirt down over her knees and laughed shrilly. She was, as always, meticulously dressed, though I noticed--sitting this close to her for the first time since our showdown over the bats--that she was beginning to look her sixtyish age. A bit heavier through the hips (though who was I to smirk?), and she'd pulled her bottle-blond hair back tightly enough to create the same effect as plastic surgery. At least she hadn't overdone the makeup. I tried to expunge the unpleasant memory of her red mouth, a small, garish sea anemone looming toward my face as I knelt by my bedroom fireplace....

"Well, Laurel," I said briskly, "if you're inviting me to join a vigilante group, the answer is no thank you."

"Now there's a bold idea," she said brightly. "But no, no. What I invited you over to discuss is the possibility of a Christmas house tour to benefit the Forum. Do you realize, Percy, that our houses--yours and mine--turn two hundred and fifty years old this year? The Fisk brothers hired a housewright who knew what he was doing. I was thinking of throwing a birthday bash for my house and then I said to myself, 'Use it, Laurel!' One of our younger members--of whom we have far too few--has a terrific idea to fund a series of historical field trips for local public schools. As Barack Obama is showing us all these days, it's time to inspire patriotism in our youngest citizens! And why not start with local history? Right around the corner, we have the Midnight Ride, the Old North Bridge, the Battle Road.... We'd love to have something ready to go by next Patriots' Day."