Ruffly Speaking Page 10

  “What was the guy’s name?”

  “Lamb. Morris Lamb. Winer and Lamb, in the Square?”

  “Guy pulled a lady out of the Charles a couple of years back?”

  “Yes! So—”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes. I was wondering... This woman, Stephanie Benson, the woman who’s renting his house... I just Wrote an article about her. She’s an Episcopal priest. She bas a hearing dog. Anyway, she just casually mentioned something about Morris’s accident. So I wondered. But maybe it was AIDS after all.”

  “Deaf lady.” Kevin jabbed the shears at the hedge. “Over on Highland.”

  “Yeah.” My sponge made big swirls of soap on the side of the car. “She’s renting Morris Lamb’s house. It’s that sort of glass cube, right next door to the run-down one that looks a little like the Longfellow House.”

  “Crackpot House.” Kevin’s voice capitalized the words.

  “What?”

  “Crackpot House,” he repeated. “ ’Cause there’s a nut that lives there. Crazy lady who—”

  “Stephanie Benson isn’t a nut,” I said. “Far from it. She has a hearing loss, and she’s a priest, but—”

  “Lady next door.Miss Alice Savery.”

  “Oh, her,” I said. “I ran into her. How do you...?”

  “How?Because she calls us. Been doing it for years. Royal pain in the butt.” Kevin’s voice was oddly tolerant, almost affectionate. “Help! Police! House across the street’s being broken into, and then you get there, and there’s a furniture van and a guy delivering a sofa. First time I get called there, I’m on the force all of maybe three days, and I’m all dressed up in my new uniform, I march up with my chest all puffed up, Officer Dennehy to the rescue, at your service, ma’am, and I’m, Jesus, I’m Sir Galahad charging out of the cruiser, and my partner sees fit not to warn me, ’cause that’d spoil the fun. ‘You handle this one, kid,’ he says, and puff, puff, my chest swells up more, and my head does, too. So I go charging up to the big front door, and first thing that happens is—Jesus, that son of a bitch, pardon my French, should’ve warned me—this tiny little lady comes to the door, can’t be more than five feet tall, but that doesn’t stop her! She still looks down her nose at me, and she says, I never forgot it, she says, ‘Constable,’ just like that, ‘Constable,’ she says, ‘I am going to make an exception in your case, but, at this house, service personnel are expected to call at the rear.

  “My God,” I said.

  “And Cardello, my partner, Cardello’s standing there just waiting, because he knows what’s coming, and when I turn around, he’s got this big smirk on his face, and he’s just standing there splitting a gut.”

  “What a nasty woman,” I said. “So what did she want? Why did she call you?”

  “Something dead.” Kevin’s voice was flat but ominous. I quit scrubbing the Bronco and looked toward him. He was looming over the hedge with a wicked grin on his big freckled face.

  “An animal?” I asked.

  “Something dead.” Kevin’s voice dropped to basso profundo and lingered on the word. “Dead,” he repeated.

  “Well, what was it? A squirrel or...?”

  Kevin let me suffer and then, obviously pleased to have suckered me, said, “Not a damn thing. That’s all it ever is, nothing, but that’s not how Alice sees it.”

  “You’re on a first-name basis?”

  “Alice in Wonderland. Not to her face, but that’s a, uh, kind of a nickname.”

  “So what was her problem?”

  “Well, according to her, something—she doesn’t say what, but something—is...” Kevin paused to clear his throat. “It seems like, according to her, all of a sudden, there’s some kind of a bad smell in the house, and the way she’s worked it out, what it’s coming from is that something’s died.” Kevin tilted his head to the side and rapped two big fingers against it. “Nut case,” he explained. “She calls all the time. Calls about everything. Helicopters. Charcoal. Clothes dryers. Got to watch out for them. In winter, where they’re vented outside, they give off this steam, and the way she sees it, the house is on fire. Her house, neighbor’s house, anyone’s house. Men. Strange men. They break into her house all the time. Dig up her garden. Bury things in it. Pollution. Guy walks down the street smoking a cigarette, and she calls us. Dogs. Kids. She hates kids. The sun comes up, she calls us. Like I said, nut case.”

  Thinking of my own tax dollars, the ones Alice Savery was wasting, I said, “And you still have to...?”

  “The one time we don’t—”

  “It’ll be real.”

  “And the thing of it is,” Kevin said somewhat apologetically, “according to her, the way she sees it, it is real, because how’s she supposed to know it’s all in her head? So you gotta feel sorry for her. You can’t help it.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “And she goes through, uh, phases. She has these fits of calling us. And then she lays off for a while. And a lot of the time, she just wants someone to complain to, so she calls and complains, and they listen, and that’s the end of it. For now.”

  “Kevin, when I was there the other day, these kids ran in her yard.... Well, one kid did, but he had a couple of friends with him, not that they did any harm, but it was pretty obvious that they just did it to get her goat. So some of her complaints probably are justified, in a way. I think the kids probably do torment her.”

  “Course they do,” Kevin said. “Same as this dog of yours probably does run over and pee on her flowers, but, like they keep telling her at the station, there’s no law against it. It’s just human nature. But one thing about Alice is, she’s always right. Won’t listen to a word you say.”

  “Which dog of mine? Did Alice Savery actually call-And it is not human nature to—”

  “This deaf lady’s dog. That’s her latest.” Kevin sounded like a happy owner describing a naughty puppy’s newest trick. I’d finished soaping the Bronco and was hosing it off. While I let the water run over the rear, I glanced at Kevin. The pride in his voice and on his face was both personal and civic. Alice Savery, I realized, was a condescending, arrogant nuisance, but she was Kevin’s nuisance and probably the pet eccentric of the rest of the Cambridge police force as well.

  “She complains about... Kevin, I don’t know what she says, but that is possibly the best-behaved dog in Cambridge, and if Alice Savery starts trying to make trouble— Well, you know, really she can’t. That dog does not run loose, and, also, the laws about guide dogs for the blind apply to hearing dogs, so—”

  “It defecates on her lawn,” Kevin said, “or so I’m told. Alice isn’t my personal responsibility anymore. It’s one of the prices you pay for promotion around here. They take away your uniform, and you don’t get Alice anymore, either, so all’s I know these days is what I’m told, but what I’m told is that it defecates on her lawn, and it does a lot else, too.” Kevin gave a sly smile and narrowed his eyes. “But I can’t swear to the else, because that’s not what she showed up at the station with.” He studied me.

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  He solemnly raised his right hand. “Scout’s honor. In a Ziploc bag.”

  16

  “A pot of Earl Grey, please,” I told the waiter, whose name, I remembered, was Fy-odor. Harvard Square abounds in my-name-is-and-I’ll-be-your establishments, but Winer &. Lamb wasn’t one of them. Fyodor’s name stuck in my memory because Morris Lamb, who always added Homeric epithets to the names of his waiters, invariably referred to this one as Fyodor with the mad Russian eyes. Morris liked to dramatize. The waiter’s bright blue eyes looked perfectly sane to me, and the only thing Russian I’d ever noticed about Fyodor was his name. “Leah?”

  It was four o’clock on that same Sunday afternoon, and Leah and I were seated indoors at a pink-draped table for two. Taking tea in the Square had been Leah’s idea. Sometime during the preceding week, Doug Winer had shown up at Stephanie’s while Leah was visiting. He’d come to repair a
light switch, unstop the garbage disposal, and perform a few other landlordly tasks, I gathered. He’d also used the occasion to announce that henceforth

  Winer & Lamb would be doing Sunday teas. Leah had arrived home with a large and rather formal invitation to the gala tea that would launch this entrepreneurial ship, and I’d agreed to accompany her.

  When we tried to make a little party of the event, everyone we invited made excuses. Kevin didn’t actually say no; all he did was make a show of crooking the gigantic little finger of his right hand and raising an imaginary china cup to his lips. Steve said bluntly that tea wasn’t his cup of. Rita begged off, too. Her aids amplified the clatter of dishes and the background noise, so restaurants drove her crazy. I said we’d sit outdoors. She still said no. Another time? Stephanie had an obligation at St. Margaret’s, and Matthew was attending a conference at MIT with his father, Phillip, who was in town for the weekend. I’d counted on the dogs, who would’ve been allowed under one of the sidewalk tables, but in the midafternoon, a heavy cover of gray-black clouds blew in, and by the time Leah and I were ready to leave, big drops of rain were pelting down, so Leah and I got dressed up and went alone. I wore a white jersey dress and carried a black umbrella. Leah bound her hair back from her face with a wide black band that matched the rest of her existentialist funereal chic. We felt grand.

  “An espresso, please,” Leah told Fyodor, who scribbled down the order, removed the invitation card that entitled us to a free platter of goodies, muttered deferentially, and took off.

  The café was already quite crowded with what looked to me like a principally Harvardian clientele— alumni, alumnae, and faculty, women with intelligent faces, no makeup, and simple clothes, men who spoke in educated tenor voices and would have been outraged at the accusation that they adored women who were good listeners. I heard scraps of French, Spanish, and a couple languages I didn’t recognize. A man with African blue-black skin and ritual scars on his cheeks spoke British English to an elderly Caucasian woman dressed in a pale blue sari. At the table next to ours, a couple nibbled cucumber sandwiches and discussed feminism in relation to the next presidential election. She had a blotchy-looking scarf messily draped around her neck. He wore a neatly folded ascot. He argued that it was meaningless to speak of the women’s vote. She agreed with him.

  “This is what Rita calls a ‘civilized occasion,’ ” I told Leah.

  Doug Winer, who’d been drifting from table to table, overheard and happily repeated the phrase. “Civilized occasion! I may borrow that sometime,” he said playfully. “Sunday tea at Winer and Lamb. The ultimate civilized occasion.” As usual, Doug’s face showed his apparently ineradicable black whiskers. He wore a boxy white suit that somehow narrowed and elongated his low, muscular build. Murmuring a perfunctory apology to the three people at a nearby table for four, Doug removed the empty chair, and, before seating himself with us, asked, “May I join you ladies? The preparation for this has been simply indescribable. I cannot stay on my feet another second.” As Leah and I nodded and made room for him, he exclaimed, “Where is your tea? Where is Fyodor!”

  “We’ve ordered. We haven’t been here long,” I said.

  With an audible sigh of exasperation or exhaustion, Doug settled himself at our table. “Pink,” he said, fingering the heavy tablecloth. “This pink has got to go.”

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  He tsked. “Tacky, tacky. Pink! Morris wanted lamp shades. He wanted little lamps on the tables with pink shades. Pink! Well, I managed to talk him out of that) thank God. Can you imagine? Pink lamp shades? ‘Morris it’ll look like a boudoir,’ I said, and that convinced him, finally, but when it came to the linens, he would not givt-in, and here we are. Pink! But I haven’t even welcomed you! This whole thing has been exhausting. Where is your tea?”

  As if in response to Doug’s rhetorical question, Fyodor appeared. He rapidly covered the tiny table with pink-rimmed crockery, my pot of tea, and a dainty little triple-tiered glass contraption, each layer of which was piled with miniature pastries, crustless sandwiches, and squares of frosted cake interspersed here and there with whole strawberries, clusters of green and purple grapes, and slices of orange and melon. Food makes me feel mothered.

  “This is just like a birthday party,” I said to Doug, who flushed with pleasure, but then interrupted Leah’s praise by seizing her spoon, examining it closely, grimacing, and summoning Fyodor to replace it.

  “It looked fine to me,” Leah said. “Everything does. Everything is perfect.” Before serving herself, she tried to cajole Doug into sharing the cakes and sandwiches with us, but Doug insisted that he couldn’t possibly touch a thing.

  Leah and I helped ourselves. Partly to divert Doug from his scrutiny of the food, china, silver, and linen for any minute deviations from perfection, I said that I’d been happy to meet his father. How was Mr. Winer? I asked. And the Bedlingtons?

  Nelson and Jennie, Doug said, were a godsend. The family had been futilely trying to persuade Mr. Winer to wear an identification bracelet on his long daily walks, or else to limit himself to repetitive perambulations of the block in front of his own house. The dogs had solved the ID tag problem without hurting Mr. Winer’s pride: Their tags bore his address.

  I swallowed a tiny cream puff and said, “I thought your parents might be here today. Because of...” I caught myself. I’d been about to say something about celebrating the launch of the Sunday teas, but the word celebrating stuck to my vocal cords. I coughed lightly. Today was the twenty-eighth of June. Morris had been dead less than two months. Wasn’t it a little soon for Doug to celebrate anything? “Or Stephanie,” I added to cover my embarrassment.

  “Holly, Stephanie—” Leah began.

  Before Leah could blurt anything out, I said, “Oh, that’s right. She had something at her church. That’s too bad.”

  “Isn’t she a love?” Doug said. “And her little dog, too?” The phrase sounded familiar. I remembered it as a croaking threat. The Wizard, of Oz, that was it: “And your little dog, too.” Then the evil cackle of the Wicked Witch of the West. I used to have nightmares about that movie. I didn’t care all that much whether Dorothy got back to Kansas, but I was scared silly that something bad would happen to Toto. I glanced sharply at Doug, picked up a fork, and started on a little cube of multilayered cake filled with chocolate and fruit. While I worked my way through a watercress sandwich, a raspberry tartlet, and a bite-size butterscotch éclair, Doug chatted with Leah without making even the most oblique reference to her beautiful red hair. Leah, in turn, somehow succeeded in conversing for four or five minutes without once permitting Bernie Brown’s name to pass her lips. At the end of this near conversational triumph, however, Doug once again began to grumble about the waiters and then moved from the burden of running a business to the horrendous responsibility of being a landlord.

  “I had no idea!” he exclaimed. “But what choice did I have? What was I going to do with Morris’s things? As it is I had to rush half of them into storage, and I don’t have the slightest idea what’s where, and it’s all going to have to be sorted through, but Stephanie was desperate, and she is my cousin Sheila’s oldest friend, so what could I tell her? Stephanie moved here very precipitously, you know, and the apartment she was in, well, it was a perfect dump, if you want to know the truth, and the miserable landlord was giving her a dreadful time about Ruffly.”

  “That’s illegal,” I said. “That dog isn’t—”

  “I know! I know! But Stephanie is not a disputatious person, and the place was not suitable for her. The neighborhood was... Well, I won’t say what the neighborhood was like, but it was completely unsuitable, and I was far from satisfied that it was safe to leave Morris’s house sitting there empty. And talk about depressing! And Morris would just have hated that. So I had mountains of Morris’s things thrown into boxes and carted away or stashed out of sight, and in Stephanie went, and, in all fairness to myself, I did warn her that there was a neighbor wit
h a perfect phobia about dogs—”

  “Alice Savery,” I said.

  “Morris adored her, of course.”

  I found that hard to believe. “He did?”

  “Because she was such a perfect type," Doug explained. “I never could stand Alice, but Morris would egg her on and get her to perform. Do you know that she used to address him in Latin? Morris adored it.”

  “Like Professor Finley,” Leah said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My father told me. It’s a sort of famous Harvard story. Professor Finley... He was a professor of classics, and one morning he was taking a walk by the river, and there were some men fishing there, and he greeted them in Latin: 'Salvete piscatores’—Hail, fishermen—and then supposedly one of the guys yelled out, ‘Hey, piss on you, too, buddy!’ ” Leah had kept her voice low, and when she finished, she glanced around as if to assure herself that no Parental figure had overheard her uttering the word piss >n public.

  Doug certainly wasn’t offended. He laughed and said something about town and gown that reminded me of Kevin Dennehy.

  “Doug?” I began. “Uh, Morris may have thought Alice Savery was sort of the quintessential Cambridge eccentric, but, Doug, did you know that she’s actually gone to the police? About Ruffly? They don’t take her seriously or anything.”

  “Oh, she hasn’t! The harridan! She never... She calls me incessantly!” He switched to a wickedly accurate mockery of Alice Savery’s Brattle Street pseudo-British. “ ‘Mr. Winer, that dog has been in my trash again,’ and then she goes into the most revolting details about saliva and the rabies virus, and I don’t have the patience with her that Morris did. The last time she called me, I said to her, ‘Miss Savery, what’s tearing up your trash bags are the raccoons living in your carriage house’—it’s a fright, and it’s positively infested with animals—‘and,’ I told her, ‘if you’d have it tom down or repaired, you’d have no more problems with your precious refuse!’ ”