them while you hosed the old man down. Did he get sick?'
'He just complained a lot. I pushed him into the shower and made sure he used soap. He goes into these funny states, he doesn't remember how to do the simplest things. Other times, like when he was down here, he seems almost in control—not really rational, of course, but kind of on top of things.'
I wondered what the other times were like if I had seen Alan Brookner when he was on top of things.
We finished washing and drying the dishes.
'Where is he now?'
'Back in bed. As soon as he was dry, he passed out. Which is exactly what I want to do. Would you mind us getting out of here?'
I pulled the plug in the sink and wiped my hands on the wet towel. 'Did you ever figure out what that trip was that he kept talking about?'
He opened the kitchen door and fiddled with the knob so that the door would lock behind us when he closed it. 'Trip? April used to take him to the zoo, the museum, places like that. Alan isn't really up for any excursion, as you probably noticed.'
'And this was one of his good days?'
We went outside by the kitchen door and walked around the side of the house. The overgrown grass baked in the sunlight. One of the big oak trees had been split by lightning, and an entire side had turned black and leafless. Everything, house, lawn, and trees, needed care.
'Well, everything he said was coherent, as far as I remember. He would have been better if he hadn't been drinking for a couple of days.'
We came out of the tall grass onto the sidewalk and began walking back to Ely Place. Prickly little brown balls clung to my trousers like Velcro. I pulled fresh moist air into my lungs.
'He's supposed to teach next year?'
'He made it through last year with only a couple of funny episodes.'
I asked how old he was.
'Seventy-six.'
'Why hasn't he retired?'
John laughed—an unhappy bark. 'He's Alan Brookner. He can stay on as long as he wants. But if he goes, the whole department goes with him.'
'Why is that?'
'I'm the rest of the department.'
'Are you looking for a new job?'
'Anything could happen. Alan might snap out of it.'
We walked along in silence for a time.
'I suppose I ought to get him a new cleaning woman,' he said finally.
'I think you ought to start checking out nursing homes,' I told him.
'On my salary?'
'Doesn't he have money of his own?'
'Oh yes,' he said. 'I suppose there's some of that.'
When we got back to his house, Ransom asked me if I wanted something from the kitchen. We went through a dining room dominated by a baronial table and into a modern kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a double bed and deep counters lined with two food processors, a pasta machine, a blender, and a bread maker. Ransom opened a cabinet and brought down two glasses from a crowded shelf. He shoved them one after the other into the ice- making contraption on the front of the refrigerator and filled them with silvery crescents of ice. 'Some kind of water? Soft drink?'
'Anything,' I said.
He swung open the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water with a picture of an iceberg on the label, broke the seal, and filled my glass. He handed me the glass, returned the bottle, and pulled bags of sliced meat and wrapped cheeses and a loaf of bread from the shelves. Mayonnaise, mustard in a stone crock, margarine, a head of romaine lettuce. He lined all of this up on the butcher block counter between us, and then set two plates and knives and forks beside them. Then he closed the refrigerator and opened the freezer door on shelves of frozen cuts of meat, a stack of frozen dinners, a big frozen pizza wedged in like a truck tire, and two shelves filled with bottles of vodka resting on their sides—Absolut Peppar and Citron; Finlandia; Japanese vodka; Polish vodka; Stolichnaya Cristal; pale green vodkas and pale brown vodkas and vodkas with things floating inside the bottles, long strands of grass, cherries, chunks of lemon, grapes. I leaned forward to get a better look.
He yanked out the Cristal, unscrewed the cap, and poured his glass half full. 'Really ought to chill the glass,' he mumbled, 'but it's not every day that your wife dies, and then you have to shove a seventy-six-year-old man into the shower and make sure he cleans off the shit smeared all over his legs.' He gulped down vodka and made a face. 'I practically had to climb in with him.' Another gulp, another grimace, another gulp. 'I did have to dry him off. That white hair all over his body—ugh. Sandpaper.'
'Maybe you should hire that nurse, Eliza Morgan, to spend at least the daytime with him.'
'You don't think my father-in-law seemed capable of caring for himself? I wonder what might have given you that impression.' John dropped more ice crescents into his glass and poured in another three inches of icy vodka. 'Anyhow, here's the sandwich stuff. Dig in.'
I began piling roast beef and swiss cheese on bread. 'Have you thought about how you'll tell him the truth about April?'
'The truth about April?' He set down his glass and almost smiled at me. 'No. I have not thought about that yet. Come to think of it, I'll have to tell a lot of people about what happened.' His eyes narrowed, and he drank again. 'Or maybe I won't. They'll read all about it in the paper.' Ransom set his glass back on the counter and rather absentmindedly began making a sandwich, laying a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread, then adding two slices of salami and a slice of ham. He peeled a strip from a slice of cheese and shoved it into his mouth. He stuck a spoon into the crock of mustard and stirred it aimlessly.
I put lettuce and mayonnaise on my own sandwich and watched him stir the mustard.
'What about funeral arrangements, a service, things like that?'
'Oh, yes,' he said. 'The hospital set up an undertaker.'
'Do you own gravesites, anything like that?'
'Who thinks about stuff like that, when your wife is thirty-rive?' He drank again. 'I guess I'll have her cremated. That's probably what she would have wanted.'
'Would you like me to stay on here a few more days? I wouldn't mind, if you wouldn't feel that I was intruding or becoming a burden.'
'Please do. I'm going to need someone to talk to. All this hasn't really hit me yet.'
'I'd be glad to,' I said. For a little while I watched him push the spoon around inside the grainy mustard. Finally he lifted it out and splatted mustard on his strange sandwich. He closed it up with a piece of bread.
'Was there any truth in what you told her father about her company's merger with the other brokerage house?' I asked him. 'It sounded so specific.'
'Made-up stories ought to be specific.' He picked the sandwich up and looked at it as if someone else had handed it to him.
'You made it all up?' It occurred to me that he must have invented the story shortly after April had been taken to the hospital.
'Well, I think something was, as they say, in the wind. Something was wafted here and there and everywhere, like dandelion seeds.' He put his sandwich down on the plate and lifted his glass and drank. 'You know the worst thing about people who do what April did, people in that kind of work? I don't mean April, of course, because she wasn't like that, but the rest of them? They were all absolutely full of hot air. They gab in their morning meetings, then they gab on the phone, then they gab to the institutional customers during lunch, then they gab some more on the phone—that's it, that's the job. It's all
