“Your m—The old lady on the porch has fallen from her chair,” I said. “I don’t think she’s well.”
“
That’s
an understatement,” said Deirdre. “Okay, okay.” She barged past me and out the door. As she turned and finally spotted her mother, she cried angrily, “Mother! Oh, good God!” and rushed towards her.
I know the care of the elderly can be trying, but I found Deirdre’s attitude appalling. But this was a moment for action, so I grabbed the phone from its cradle and rushed out the door behind her. “Shall I call an ambulance?” I asked.
Deirdre had crouched beside her mother. At the instant I said “ambulance,” she spun on her toes to face me, her eyes wide. “No!” she cried. “No, don’t do that! Give me that!” she demanded.
I hurried to her and gave her the phone, expecting her to dial another number, perhaps someone who lived closer, but she snatched it from my hand and set it aside. “Just help me get her into the chair,” she said. “She’s fine, I’m sure of it. This happens all the time. She just wiggles her way out of it.”
I moved into position and helped her lift the frail, old body of the woman, which seemed to weigh nothing. She was little more than a husk. We settled her back into the chair and covered her again.
She appeared dazed, and her breathing still came in gasps, but she smiled pleasantly and, panting between words, said, “Thank you, Deirdre. And who is our visitor?”
As Deirdre turned to second her mother’s inquiry with a raised eyebrow, I got control of my mouth and said, “Um, I’m—I was just driving past and I saw her lying here.”
Deirdre gave me an artful smile that stopped halfway up her cheeks. “I do so appreciate your stopping,” she said, moving toward me as if to squeegee me off the porch.
“Let me help you get her inside,” I said.
“I’m sure I can make it.”
She wasn’t going for the easy sell, so I affected a case of the vapors, waving my hand in front of my face as if I felt faint. “I’m sorry, but it seems I’m more upset by this than anyone. I need to sit a moment.” I thumped myself down on the bench.
Old Mrs. Krehbeil said, “Deirdre, you run along and …” She stopped
to pant. “Finish what you were doing.”
Pant
. “I’ll sit with our friend.”
Pant
. “I so seldom get a visitor.”
Deirdre gave me a look like January in the Arctic. Then she turned abruptly and lumbered back into the house. She had a large frame, and moved like she was carrying a piano.
I turned to Mrs. Krehbeil. “How are you feeling?” I inquired.
“Fine,” she panted. “Sorry to trouble you. Won’t you have a seat?”
I didn’t point out that I was already sitting.
“I should introduce myself,” she wheezed. “I’m Mrs. Krehbeil, and this is my husband’s country home.” Her frail hand trembled through a grand gesture, upsetting her quilts. “We call it ‘Far Diggings.’”
Pant
. “It’s a name my father-in-law gave it.”
“My name is Leila,” I said, giving my mother’s name to obscure my identity. “Far Diggings. Was your father-in-law an educated man, then? It doesn’t sound like a name a farmer would choose.”
Her answer was a moment coming. “He was an industrialist,” she gasped finally, and again, “This was his country home.” She began to sag forward again.
I edged toward her, ready to catch her if she leaned too far over again. “Oh? What was his business?”
“Paint. Just exactly that shade.” She raised a shaking hand to point at the front door.
“Ah.” So it was no wild coincidence that Tert had gone into an aesthetic enterprise. In an instant, I spun a whole history for the family, putting Krehbeil Primus at the apex of an expanding dynasty of gray-eyed men who held themselves in high esteem while they manipulated their women.
Mrs. Krehbeil’s breathing seemed to have eased for a moment. “Deirdre is preparing a downstairs room for me,” she said conspiratorially. “My doctor said I should take the air, and we have no second-story porch. So she’s moving my things … .”
I heard the door open behind me again, and Deirdre reappeared. “I’ll take you back inside now, Mother. Clearly Doc Abram’s idea was a bit premature.”
“All right, dear,” the old girl gasped. “Oh, but Deirdre, when is William coming?”
“He’s not coming today, Mother,” she said testily. Then, in a low,
growling tone, she muttered, “You get sicker every time he comes. Don’t you think it best he stay away?”
“My precious William. When did you say he was coming?”
“Don’t wait up, Mom.” Deirdre unlocked the wheels and moved around behind the chair to push it back inside. I had to hustle to make it look like I was helping her with the doors, so efficient was the daughter, but, moving from door to living room to inner hallway at a good clip, I was able to keep ahead of Deirdre, all the time taking surreptitious glances at the drizzly paintings. At the far end of the hall, there was a small maid’s room with a hospital bed, sheets tight and blankets turned down.
I helped Deirdre heft her mother into the bed and arrange the covers. “There,” she said, as she smoothed her white curls about her papery face,
“you get some rest, Mother.”
“Yes, dear.” The old woman dutifully closed her eyes.
Deirdre indicated that I should lead the way out of the room. “Thank you for your assistance,” she said briskly.
As I moved back into the hallway I smelled cinnamon and glanced into the kitchen, in hopes of obligating her to invite me there. “What smells so divine?” I gushed.
Mrs. Krehbeil’s voice quavered from the small room. “Give her some toast and tea, dear.”
Deirdre’s eyes closed. “Okay,” she said heavily. “Would you like some toast?”
“I’d love some!” I drawled. By then I wanted to stay, not only so I could gather information, but also in some small way to inconvenience this creature who treated her ailing mother so churlishly.
Deirdre showed me to a chair at the kitchen table and hurried about the task of preparing one slice of balloon bread, toasted lightly in an ancient toaster and spread with a niggardly film of butter and a chintzy glaze of home-made jam. I noticed that she pulled the bread out of the toaster barehanded, as if her hands were made of asbestos. Without even whacking the piece in half, she stuck it in front of me. “Tea?” she inquired.
“Tea would be marvelous,” I replied. I dawdled, lifting the toast to my lips and taking the tiniest of bites from one corner.
Deirdre turned on the fire underneath a pan of water. When it had heated, she grabbed the metal handle and poured a half-cup into a mug, stuck a cheap tea-bag in it, lifted it by the sides of the mug, and set it in
front of me. Then she sat down across from me and stared. I noticed that her eyes were the same cool shade of gray as her brother’s, but instead of self-absorption I saw unveiled cunning.
Trying to engage her in conversation that might lead to information, I said, “You have good, honest farmwoman’s hands.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t seem to need a hot-pad to handle hot things.”
She made a derisive grunt. “I have a condition called peripheral neuropathy. That means I can no longer feel my hands or feet.” She smiled, as if taking a bizarre pleasure in talking about it. “It’s like death visiting you a little bit at a time,” she said. “Gradually, the tips of you die, each nerve going out with a bolt of pain, but all portending your overall death. The numbness is just an early visit.”
We stared at each other a moment. Her words had been more an assault than an opening-up. I said, “Has your mother been ill long? It can be such a trial.”
Deirdre shook her head with robust bitterness. “I’m out here all alone with her.” Casting me a sidelong glance, she added, “She won’t go to the hospital. Why do that when I’m here to wait on her hand and foot? Insists on going to that old cadaver of a doctor. He should have retired years ago.”
I smiled sweetly, but thought,
What luck! A griper. She’ll tell me all sorts of things that are none of my business in the name of glorifying her martyrdom
. “Is it her lungs?” I asked, giving my voice ever-so-slight a quaver.
Martyrdom and drama, they go hand in hand
.
Deirdre bore down on her pet issues. “I get no help from my brothers,” she grouched. “One is a drunk who fancies himself an
actor
,” she emphasized this last, indicating her distaste for the profession. “And the other is off making his millions.”
“Is that the ‘Precious William’ your mother mentioned?” I asked. “Your mother asked after him.”
“William seldom comes to see her, which is just as well, because every time he comes, she gets sicker.”
“Yes, you said.”
Ignoring me, she went on with her diatribe. “But it’s fine with
them
that I give up my life to nurse her. I try to run the farm, but just watching her keeps me busy, let me tell you.”
“Oh, I’m sure. But you have the farm.”
“Damn straight I do!”
“You love this place,” I said, wondering if she in fact loved anything.
“This farm has been in the family for generations!
Nobody
loves it as much as I do, and I
will
pass it on to my children!”
“Farming is such an endless list of chores,” I clucked.
“The roof’s all but gone on the barn, and the porch is falling off the house.”
“It’s ever thus,” I said morosely, getting into the flavor of the gripe session.
“But the old girl has to have her pretty things. I was just moving her pet objects downstairs when she said she wanted to take the air.”
“Ah.”
And what are these pet objects?
I wanted to inquire.
Perhaps a Remington bronze or two?
“Well,” she said, glancing at her watch, “I have a lot to do.”
“Would you like me to sit with her while you take care of a few things? I know how this goes. My mother was ill for years with cancer, and I about lost my mind. I’ll just sit by and drink my tea, and you can get about things.”
She scowled at me. “I couldn’t impose,” she said, her brusque tone not matching the politeness of her words.
“Really, it would be a pleasure to help, and it’s no trouble whatsoever.”
Deirdre stared at me, taking my measure in detail, her mind turning as methodically as the escapement in an old watch. “Fine,” she said. “Then you can be on your way.” It was an order.
She rose and bustled from the room.
I instantly got down to the business of making observations, first making a visual inventory of the room. The refrigerator was avocado-colored and made a grinding sound, which indicated that it was quite old and as sick as Mrs. Krehbeil. The stove looked like it had been installed no later than the 1940s. There was no dishwasher. The walls once had been white, but had yellowed with the vaporized grease of five thousand dinners. Again, this did not fit with a place that might house original Russells.
Deirdre rushed past the doorway carrying an elegant fluted vase and a silver-backed brush-and-comb set. She disappeared into the room where she had installed her mother and then reappeared, hurrying back toward the stairs for another load.
While she was upstairs, I went to the door into the dining room and took a look. One small painting hung above the sideboard. It was another amateurish, inconsequential piece, and the subject was definitely an East Coast village. Hearing Deirdre returning, I hurriedly sat down again and lifted my cup as if I had not left the table. The toast was congealing on the plate in front of me. I took another bite and forced it down my throat. It stuck like the lack of welcome it was meant to represent.
This time Deirdre was carrying a small set of leather-bound books. After she had deposited them and hurried off again, I got up and cast about for a paper napkin so I could wrap up the toast and hide it in my pocket rather than gag it down. Not a scrap of paper was visible in the room, not even a roll of paper toweling. I moved across the hall and started searching for a bathroom, thinking I would use toilet paper instead, but it seemed that the house predated indoor bathrooms, at least on the ground floor. I opened the only two closed doors, but found only a coat closet and a small storage room filled with the accumulation of a hundred years of indecision about which papers and books might be thrown out. There was a pantry, but it was filled with the usual sorts of things one might expect to find, mostly dishes, and mostly chipped or mismatched.
Deirdre was fast returning with the next load, so I returned to the kitchen table but did not sit down. “May I use your bathroom?” I inquired, after palming the toast back onto the plate.
She stopped and stared at me for several moments. “Up the stairs and to your right,” she said with obvious annoyance. “Hold the handle down for at least ten seconds.”
I mounted the stairs, past faded wallpaper and framed photographs in black and white. One was of Deirdre as a young girl, and others were children who had to be her siblings. Tert as a boy, the gray gaze already perfected. Another pale-eyed lad with a supercilious smile and wide-ranging ears, hugging a stuffed beagle. A fourth portrait showed a very blonde little blue-eyed girl who smiled so widely that her dimples hurt to look at.
A sister?
I wondered.
No. If Deirdre had a sister, she would have made a special fetish out of griping about her, underlining her own worthiness at the expense of a female who does not assist
.