law.”
“Now I’m a little lost,” I said.
She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.
“I only got involved with him because of Appolonia, poor thing. Walter sat on the Boston Equity board with her father. Lovely people. Old Brookline.”
An image of them all having dinner in Newton with Abby’s parents leapt uninvited into my mind. Luckily Joyce picked that moment to stop torturing the fig tree and lead me over to one of the dining tables, freshly dressed in a bone-colored tablecloth and short vase stuffed with miniature red roses. A tall woman with a severely receding chin and straight, oily blond hair came out of the kitchen and handed Joyce a sheet of paper, I guessed a provisioning inventory. She stood immobile by the table while Joyce put on her glasses and looked it over. She handed the list back without comment, or even a look at the chinless young woman, who left as wordlessly as she arrived.
Joyce took off her glasses again and dropped them on the table, rubbing her tired eyes with the back of her hand. She let out a breath of exasperation.
“I know it’s impossible,” she said. “Even with her parents gone I really couldn’t bring litigation. I know what I said, but Walter would think it unforgivably vulgar to sue a friend’s child. A mentally ill child at that. I’m just so angry about the whole thing. To be made such a fool of.”
“So they must have left her pretty well taken care of, with or without Jonathan’s portfolio.”
“Oh my, yes. Greek shipping. You don’t get any better taken care of than that. I always assumed her husband entered the investment field so he could manage her inheritance. Isn’t that what all these opportunists do? I just hope he did a better job for her than he did for me, the insufferable little numbskull.”
I thought I saw the faintest suggestion of a smirk momentarily pass over her face. I realized she’d caught herself amused by a private joke. A joke on herself. Then it was obvious. The loss for her wasn’t financial. It was the damage to her sense of self-reliance. An affront to the posture of invincibility demanded by the people who bred her.
But I was even more taken aback when she reached across the table and touched my forearm with the tips of her dusty, calloused fingers.
“Give the girl a little advice for me, if you will,” she said. “Let the husband’s business die with the husband. It won’t bring him back. Nothing will. Not that I don’t sympathize with how she feels. If Walter wasn’t already dead I’d kill him myself for leaving me.”
Then she tapped my arm again and pulled her hand away.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, though without any sign of getting up from her chair. So I thanked her for the help and left her mustering strength for another round with the fig tree, determined as she was to wrestle its leafy little being into utter submission, to better realize its role in her orchestrated existence, irretrievably disrupted by the unscheduled demise of Walter Whithers, for whom the same occasion was probably a blessed relief.
—
Belinda answered the phone.
“Not without the lawyer,” she said.
“Aren’t we past that?”
“His instructions. You remember the number.”
I didn’t, so I had to call information from the pay phone, as far as I knew the last one in Southampton, kept as a profit center in the basement of a burger joint on Job’s Lane. Gabe was eager as always to drop whatever he was doing and run over to Appolonia’s house. A half-hour after talking to him I met him just as he was getting out of a new black Jaguar.
“Quite the collectible,” he said, trying to lean back far enough to take in the full scale of the Grand Prix.
I was going to straighten him out but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Anyway, he’d already headed into the house, which was good, since it kept something between me and Belinda.
She made us pause in the foyer, then herded us into the living room where Appolonia was already seated, complete with tea tray and a folded-over copy of the
She gently commanded Belinda to bring us both coffee before I had a chance to apologize for bothering her again.
“Not at all. It’s nice to have a little company. The underlying purpose of which notwithstanding.”
“You look well, Appolonia,” said Gabe.
She nodded her thanks, but didn’t return the compliment.
“So, Sam, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Boston,” I said.
“My beloved city.”
“Brookline, technically.”
“Few realize it’s a separate city, even those who live there. It must have been grand to grow up in Southampton.”
“Grand wouldn’t exactly describe my part of town, but it wasn’t bad. Winters were kind of bleak, especially back when everything shut down after Labor Day and all the summer people went back to Manhattan. Half the lights went out and three-quarters of the stores disappeared. But we dug it anyway. Even the air changed. Like God had flicked a switch to send cool dry wind down from Canada.”
“I think Jonathan was too busy to notice things like wind and air.”
“Overachiever.”
“I suppose.”
“Married you. Some would call that a stretch.”
She finally seemed to notice the tea tray by her elbow. I waited while she squirted lemon into the cup and took a sip.
“That can’t be flattery, so you must have another point.”
“Just came from a chat with Joyce Whithers.”
I don’t know what kind of rise I was trying to get, but all it did was give Appolonia a little smile.
“The restaurateur.”
“And old family friend.”
“The Silver Spoon. Said to be quite good. My parents’ friend, not mine.”
“You knew I’d find out eventually. Would have been easier to just tell me.”
“Excuse me,” said the lawyer, smelling a threat, “somebody catch me up.”
“Later Gabe,” said Appolonia, “I want to get to the heart of Sam’s issue.”
“Not an issue, just a curiosity.”
“Everyone has parents, Sam.”
“Not like yours.”
“Jonathan took care of all the finances, and left me with much more than I originally entrusted him with. So, why does it matter how we started out? What’s the relevance to your,” she paused a moment, “enterprise?”
I fought an impulse to launch into a lecture on the importance of establishing every possible data point before attempting an analysis of a systems failure. Give her the same sensitivity training I gave recent chemical engineering graduates unlucky enough to be cast like frightened emigres into my Technical Services and Support Division. Tell her about the catastrophic consequences that can accrue from the tiniest fractional quantities that go unnoticed in the statistical dust of an equation until suddenly complexity theory takes hold and before you know it there’s a hole the size of infinity blown in your calculations. Which could mean a hole blown in the side of a gigantic pressure vessel, thereby causing the molecules that comprise other engineering graduates of various vintage to be intermingled with a stream of super-heated, partially deconstructed hydrocarbons.
Instead I took a breath, tried to remember an appropriate verse from the
“You’re right,” I said to Appolonia. “None of my business.”
