Authors: Diane Hammond
Thomas handed Neva a menu. “Take this with you. He won’t need one.”
“Home away from home?” Neva asked Truman when they’d found a table at the very back of the restaurant.
“More often than I care to admit. Winslow puts up with my cooking, but there are times when neither one of us can summon the necessary forbearance.”
“So you come here.”
“So we come here. You don’t see anyone from the zoo here, do you?”
“You’d probably know better than I would,” Neva said. “But I don’t recognize anyone.”
“Thank god. I’ve never been any good at cloak and dagger sorts of things. I hardly ever do anything illicit, and whenever I do, I get caught.”
“For example?”
“Sneaking things onto Harriet’s desk to sign when I know she isn’t in there. Leaving work ten minutes early.”
“You sneak?”
“From time to time. I’m not proud of it.”
“And that’s the best you can come up with?”
Truman thought for a minute. “Well, lately, anyway. I did steal a candy bar when I was six. It was a Payday. I slipped it into my pocket and the next thing I knew, my mother was hauling me up to the store manager’s booth demanding that I make a full confession. My mother was the district attorney here for thirty years. I’ve never fully recovered.”
“So what did the manager do?”
“Winked. He winked at me. It was very confusing.”
While Neva examined the menu, Truman allowed himself to take her in. He had a nearly overwhelming desire to touch her. He imagined it would be like touching a lightly charged wire, that he would feel the hum and the heat. He was startled to realize that she was blushing. “Was I staring?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a novelty to be here with anyone older than eleven. Not to mention nice-looking.”
“Winslow’s nice-looking.”
“Even so.”
A waiter arrived to take their order. Once he was gone, Neva appeared to marshal herself and said, “Look, I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Uh oh.”
“The thing is, it’s got to be held in the strictest confidence. If you’d rather I not involve you, this would be a good time to say so.”
“It doesn’t involve Paydays, by any chance?”
Neva looked startled. “I can’t promise that.”
“You’re not planning a candy heist, are you?”
“What?”
“Candy? Payday bars,” Truman reminded her gently.
“Oh! I was thinking payday with a small ‘p,’ as in ‘to get paid.’ You’re not the only one who doesn’t lie or cheat very well.”
While their waiter slid plates of teriyaki chicken in front of them, Neva took a deep breath and said, “Is there any chance at all that the zoo might get another Asian elephant to keep Hannah company?”
Truman looked startled. “Not that I’ve ever heard of. We’re certainly in no financial position to do that. Why?”
Neva picked at her teriyaki. “There isn’t any way at all?”
“I don’t see how. The zoo’s revenues haven’t met operating expenses in years. Short of receiving a huge endowment, I can’t see how we’d be able to support a second elephant. And, to be frank, if we
did
get a huge endowment, I’d recommend using it for physical plant maintenance and repairs, not acquiring another animal.”
Neva clasped her hands in front of her and said quietly, “Okay, then here’s the thing. I’m going to try to get Hannah relocated to an elephant sanctuary in northern California. I can’t believe I’m saying this to you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because she’ll die if she has to stay here after Sam Brown retires.”
“
What?
Has something happened? Is he retiring?”
Neva poked at the ice cubes in her water glass with her fork. “Look, I’m not very good at this. No, nothing’s happened. Yet. But Sam’s sixty-eight years old and he’s got diabetes. It catches up with you fast, at his age. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to work that much longer. And once he’s gone you might as well put a gun to Hannah’s head, except it’ll be worse than that because it’ll be slower. Way slower.”
“I don’t understand. You’re very capable. Are you resigning?”
“No, no, that’s not the thing. The thing is, elephants, especially female Asian elephants, are extremely social. They live in herds dominated by a single leader—usually a female, but in Hannah’s case Sam is her herd. And her leader. Take that away and what she’s left with is a yard that’s way too small, a barn that’s a hellhole, chronically infected feet, and advancing arthritis, especially when she has to stand on a concrete substrate all day, which she will once Sam’s gone because she won’t be going on walks around the zoo anymore. Sam keeps her calm, but without him I wouldn’t trust her out there, she’s too skittish. So her entire world will shrink to about three thousand square feet of concrete and up to fourteen hours a day chained to a wall.”
“Good god.”
“Look. I’m not anti-captivity and I don’t have a bleeding heart. I’ve been taking care of zoo animals for twenty years, and I believe deeply in what zoos do, what keepers do, and how we do it. But I also believe in doing what’s right for the animals first. Hannah’s a wonderful elephant and she’s adapted amazingly well. She’s not neurotic, and she’s never hurt anybody. But that could change—it’s almost guaranteed to change—once Sam isn’t here. We need to get her out. And I’d like your help.”
Truman pushed his plate away. He didn’t really know this woman, but he trusted her. He watched her knock rice around her plate with a fork.
“Yeah,” she said. “Kaboom.”
That evening, Truman
stood at the stove stirring a pan of spaghetti sauce while Miles and Winslow played nose hockey across the kitchen floor with a plastic puck. He didn’t know who was more delighted, the pig or the boy. During a break in the cooking he got his camera and found two remarkably similar pairs of dark eyes dancing wickedly through the lens.
When it was ready, Truman set a plate of spaghetti on the round oak table for Winslow, and a second one for himself. On a placemat in the corner Miles received his own small dish of pasta, which he consumed in four gulps and a burp. Truman was discovering a certain charm in the little pig. His utter lack of guile, his naked and cheerful dedication to his appetites—food, warmth, and affection—were not so different from Winslow’s or Truman’s. By some obscure Darwinian chance eons ago, humans cared for pigs and not the other way around. But surely it could have gone differently another day. Admittedly Truman overcompensated. Miles ate cereal for his breakfast just as Winslow did, down to the brand name and the milk. At the end of each meal, his dishes were washed and stored in a cupboard. He had his own polar fleece throw in the den.
Truman remembered being similarly uneasy when he and Rhonda had first brought Winslow home. He could still remember the terror he’d felt when he looked down for the first time at the gently pulsing soft spot on the top of Winslow’s skull. When he was anywhere near the baby he’d tiptoed, whispered,
walked slowly. Rhonda, on the other hand, had seemed faintly disappointed with the entire experience, changing diapers indifferently, complaining about the unceasing demands Winslow made on her time and attention. It was Truman who had rocked, sung, burped, and borne the warm, damp weight of the baby as he slept. Even eleven years later there were moments when, in Winslow’s presence, Truman felt stunned by love.
Miles slammed the plastic hockey puck into the side of Truman’s foot, breaking his reverie. “Winslow, I’d like your opinion about something.”
The boy looked up, strands of spaghetti arrested mid-suck. Truman smiled. “Tell me about Hannah. What’s she like?”
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. Big. She’s big.”
“Is she scary? Do you ever feel as though she might hurt you?”
“No, she’s real gentle.
She
gets scared sometimes, though.”
“Does she? By what?”
“She doesn’t like when people run. She’s blind in her left eye.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Winslow nodded solemnly. “Sam says when he used to take her for walks in the woods she’d get upset if he got too far away. You can tell she likes Sam. She hugs his head with her trunk. He keeps a hand on her when we take her for walks. Me and Reginald do that sometimes, too.”
“I wouldn’t think that would keep her from running away.”
“She’d never run away, Dad. Sam says he does it to keep her from getting spooked. Me and Reginald asked if we could take her for a walk by ourselves sometime, but he said she wouldn’t go unless he was with her.”
“Ah.”
“She’s real smart, though. Like, Sam says she can tell when he has a headache. I guess he gets these real bad headaches, and she’ll just stand over him like she’s guarding him until he feels better.”
“Does it help?”
“Yup.” Winslow twirled a huge forkful of spaghetti and continued talking through his food. “Sometimes she’ll give him stuff, too, like these little round rocks she likes to play with. She’ll bring them to him. He says he doesn’t know why. He says if it’s a real bad day she’ll even bring him her tire. You know, that car tire she sleeps with at night.”
“She sleeps with a tire?”
“It’s not funny, Dad.”
“I didn’t say it was funny.”
“Sam says she uses it to keep her company when she’s chained up by herself all night.”
Truman wondered if he could bear to hear more. “What do you think would happen to her if Sam couldn’t take care of her anymore?”
“That’d never happen, Dad.”
“But if it did?”
“It won’t.”
“Humor me.”
“She’d die.”
Truman stared. “Why do you say that?”
Winslow shrugged matter-of-factly. “Because she would.”
Truman let Winslow finish his meal and clear the table. Then he picked up the telephone and called Neva Wilson.
A
s the fall of 1957
deepened into winter, it was inexplicably spring in Miss Effie’s heart. She unearthed from her trunks delicate lace dresses with high collars and mutton chop sleeves that had been the height of fashion in 1905. She spent hours in front of her dressing table mirror fixing her hair with combs and rhinestones, a Gibson Girl once again. With Sam she was coy, asking him to fetch the delicate accessories she had packed away so lovingly a half-century before: ivory fans and silk-tasseled parasols, silk shawls and kid gloves so fine you could see the outline of each fingernail through the leather. And then, one sad morning, she erupted into a fit of temper at the inability of her servant to find a button hook. There were no servants. Having journeyed back to a better time, Miss Effie had mistaken Sam for a household domestic.
“I believe Effie has left us,” Max Biedelman told Sam when it seemed that Effie’s departure this time would be a lasting one. “She’s turned into a foolish old woman, and she would have hated that, had she known. She means no offense, Mr. Brown, though of course her behavior is inexcusable.”
Sam brushed this aside. “Miss Effie doesn’t know any better. Where she’s gone seems like a happy place, and that’s something to be thankful for. I hope I keep my spirit half as good when I’m her age.”
To his astonishment, Max Biedelman turned from him with welling eyes. “You are a good man, Mr. Brown,” she said, clapping a hard hand on his forearm and then going to stand at the front room window to regain her composure. At last she said, “Do you know, I’ve been in many frightening situations over the years, even times when I was in mortal danger, but I have never felt so powerless as I do now. It’s humiliating to grow old, Mr. Brown. One loses one’s dignity.”
“That isn’t true, sir. You’re the most dignified lady I’ve ever met outside of my grandmother on my daddy’s side. You stand right up and say what’s on your mind. You’re a shining example.”
Max Biedelman turned. “I’d like to hear about your grandmother on your father’s side. Please sit, Mr. Brown. I’ve forgotten my manners.” She gestured to a fine, tapestry-covered chair across from her.
Sam sat down carefully. “My grandmother, now, that’s a story,” he said. “The woman was as tough as an old boot, brought eleven children into this world and kept eight of them alive to over the age of fifteen, which was a rare trick in those days, at least where my folks were from originally, down in Arkansas. Corinna, her folks were real poor except for the
land they farmed, but that land was theirs, homesteaded fair and square. My daddy’s folks were townspeople, which was completely different. They didn’t have so much as an extra ‘Howdy.’ My daddy’s daddy worked the railroad, laying track eighty miles east of Jesus. The man was gone for months at a time. My grandma would get his pay, but it wasn’t enough to feed all those children, so she worked as a washerwoman, did clothes for anyone who had a penny or two to spare. She did fine needlework, too, and taught all the girls in the family to do fancy work right along with her—nickel a hanky, dime for lace to trim a dress or a petticoat. Rumor was, she also hired herself out to keep a man company, but the family never believed that part, mainly because she was too tired most of the time to have anything left to hire out, if you know what I mean. Her name was Leeza, at least that’s what everyone called her. Probably short for Elizabeth, now that I think about it. She had a proud head, always kept her nose up like she was smelling something sweet, didn’t take guff off anybody. My daddy tells a story about her chasing a little bitty white man around the town with a hatchet for cheating her out of twenty-five cents he owed her for some washing. Dangerous thing for a black woman to do, but Leeza wasn’t about to give up on that twenty-five cents. To hear my daddy tell it, half the town turned out for the showdown, which was her pulling him down into the mud on Main Street and sitting on his chest spouting scripture. Man not only paid her what he owed her, he promised to go to church the following Sunday.” Sam chuckled softly. “The woman wasn’t afraid of danger,
no
sir. No black person in their right mind stood up to white people back then, not even about money to feed their children. Old Leeza, though, she told the family she was too damned tired to put up with it anymore, fingers full of
calluses and half-blind from the fancy work. I guess something just snapped. Funny thing was, she and her girls got plenty of work after that. People respected her. Feared her, too. Figured any black woman crazy enough to do what she did had to be someone to reckon with. The family was sure proud of her. By the time I knew her, she was just a scrawny little thing, old hen too tough to eat and too ornery to kill.”
Max Biedelman smiled. “A splendid story, Mr. Brown, and a remarkable woman.”
“Tell you the truth,” Sam said, shaking his head, “the family steered pretty clear of old Leeza those last few years. You never knew when she might take offense at something and come after you with that crooked finger of hers jabbing at you like a steel spike. Woman might have been righteous in the eyes of the Lord, but she sure was touchy.”
Sam stood up, and Max Biedelman struggled to her feet, too. “Do you know, Mr. Brown, I believe you made that story up just to cheer me. And you have.”
“No, sir,” Sam protested. “Every word of it’s true.”
“Well then,” said Max Biedelman, a little bit of hell finally coming back into her eyes, “I shall have to search my family archives for one that will top it.”
“That would be a tough thing to do,” Sam smiled. “But I do love a good story, me and Hannah both. You just say the word, and we’ll be here.”
Max Biedelman pressed his arm as she saw him to the door. “I count on that, Mr. Brown,” she said.
Harriet fussed over her finches,
wondering if they knew how beautiful they were. They were no more substantial than
a dandelion blown into the wind; their songs were heavier than their bones. So ponderous in motion herself, she had always wondered what it would be like to take wing, to no more than wish yourself airborne to
be
airborne. She’d built a large aviary in her home, devoting two whole rooms to her birds, so they could fly. In the last several weeks she had sat inside the aviary often, feeling the breath of their flight on her face as they passed. Now, late on a dark Thursday evening, she confronted squarely the fact that Truman Levy had abandoned her.
For months he had shared her deep devotion to the zoo. They had talked at length, familiarly; sometimes he even put his feet up on her second visitor’s chair, crossing one neat ankle over the other, his brown leather loafers as spruce as he was. He often came in on weekends to take care of some detail or two, and he always stopped to chat with her before going home. Several times she had invited him out to lunch, and he had always accepted. He was only five or six years younger than she was; she had once or twice caught herself wondering if a more intimate relationship might be possible.
But that had all changed when Neva Wilson came to the zoo. Harriet was no fool—she could sense immediately that Truman was different toward her. He was a courtly man, but his slight distaste for Harriet bled through his exquisite manners. It was true that she’d been featured in a number of newspaper articles as well as the new advertising campaign, but it was all for the good of the zoo, not for Harriet’s personal aggrandizement. She had expected his enthusiastic support and congratulations, but instead she detected a certain impatience, even a degree of discomfort. Whatever the exact reason, their shared commitment to the zoo—which was to say, to each other—was clearly eroding.
Harriet was never sure at what age she had recognized that
she would probably never marry. She had been young; younger than thirty-five, certainly. Younger than thirty? Impossibly young, if she’d been younger than thirty, and yet her final descent into the hell of the department store makeover had been the end of a journey, not the beginning. It marked the death of her last fading hope that she might yet rise above her plain heritage, conquer her big bones and overstated features, her mannish hands and dull hair. By the time she was in her late twenties, the list of social opportunities that she had never experienced was already long: make-out parties, high school proms, homecoming dances, festival courts, double dates, drive-in movies, sorority pledges, fraternity weekends. Instead there had been an endless string of weddings, weekend after weekend during which she was politely added to the guest lists of cousins, colleagues, neighbors. She had worn permanent creases in her one good suit from all of them; had spent money she didn’t have on silver plate and cheap crystal for the gifts. And she was greeted the same way at each one:
Why, Harriet! How good to see you! How long has it been—yes? Well, really. That long?
As though it was her fault, as though she had been deliberately withholding herself from their loving if absent-minded arms, rather than left to fend for herself for yet another Christmas, another Easter or Thanksgiving.
Harriet, dear! How grown-up you look!
they’d say, when what they meant was matronly, dowdy, plain.
She was not deluded. Nor, however, did she believe in self-pity. She was a woman of strength who believed that productivity was, if not a substitute for beauty, at least a damned good second. For every lover she’d failed to attract, she’d achieved a new promotion, a new title, a raise. She began to decline the endless string of baby showers that had replaced the wedding invitations, using the saved gift money to buy finches instead,
and then to build an aviary in the first small house she had bought for herself on her thirtieth birthday.
In all those years, there’d never even been a serious boyfriend. Not that she was a virgin; there had been men from time to time, more or less interchangeably. As marriage prospects, however, they had lacked luster and freshness. At first they phoned several times a week, proposing movie dates or dinner at inexpensive ethnic restaurants. Credit cards being too ambiguous for the cheapskate, cash was often laid on the table so Harriet could see for herself that she was expected to come up with the balance of the bill. Then the calls would come less and less frequently until finally they failed to come at all. Harriet rarely noticed until weeks had gone by.
But she’d thought that Truman was different. He had the smooth cheeks and clear, light eyes of a younger man, coupled with hands so beautiful they might have belonged to Michelangelo, hands capable of pulling a soul out of stone. But clearly she’d been wrong. As her birds muttered and trilled peacefully all around her in the aviary’s artificial sunlight, she picked up the telephone and called the zoo to listen one more time to Truman’s recorded voice regret that he was not available.
Across town in her apartment,
Neva was in a less philosophical frame of mind. Another gale had blown in off Puget Sound, the third in a week, with wind and rain keeping inside anyone who had a choice—including Hannah. Neva and Sam had treated her to a long indoor bath with warm water, and later Neva taught her to blow bubbles using a child’s bubble hoop and Dawn dishwashing liquid. But despite their best efforts they were losing ground. From what Sam had said about
the weather, it would rain more or less continuously until spring, making it nearly impossible to keep Hannah’s feet dry. Even now, and in spite of the apple cider vinegar footbaths, the abscess under her toenail was worse, and so was Sam, judging by his rapidly diminishing energy and noticeable limp. Time was becoming an increasingly pressing issue all over.
Now Neva sat in her Goodwill armchair in her one-room apartment, scratching Chip’s ears as he dozed in her lap. Someone must be missing him tonight. He was a gentlemanly soul, sturdy and calm, an ankle-winder, a lap-sitter, a champion sleeper with a deep, resonant purr and excellent Manchu whiskers. He usually appeared in the tunnel from Johnson Johnson’s house as soon as he heard Neva open her front door.
The windows rattled as sudden hail clattered against the glass like BBs. Sam had told her he and Corinna spent evenings like these in the barn because storms made Hannah anxious, and there were a lot of storms in this part of the Northwest. Neva sometimes found their devotion unnerving, as though Hannah’s Hannah-ness were more important to Sam than her elephant-ness—as could certainly be the case, given that Sam had never worked with or visited another elephant, or even another zoo. He and Corinna were also childless; if she remembered right, there had been something about a baby many years ago, some tragedy. She resettled Chip on her lap and contemplated the nature of loss. Six months ago, she had been sitting in the waiting room of a dental office in Yonkers, New York, when across the room a boy reading a book went off in her mind like a bomb. He had a long, slender face and hair that blazed like autumn, the exact shade of red that children hated the most because it was all people saw. He might have been her, twenty-five years earlier.
Or he might have been her son.
She’d left the office with a pounding heart. In putting her baby up for adoption she had agreed that she would never try to find the child, or assign or retain anyone else to do so. But she had asked if the dental office could slip her appointment back by an hour, went to a nearby Barnes & Noble, and bought a book about dragons that the clerk assured her would suit an eleven-year-old boy. Then she returned to the dental office.
“I just noticed this book in my backpack,” she said, lying to the receptionist. “I must have picked it up by accident—it belongs to the boy who was here this morning, and I’d like to return it to him. Can you tell me his name, or maybe an address where I can drop it off?”
“You can just leave it with me and I can call for you,” the girl had said brightly, tapping her teeth with blood-red fingernails. “His mom was in for a cleaning. Valerie Nightingale. Pretty name.”
Neva had slid the book into an envelope, put a card inside that simply said, “I’ve heard this is a great book,” and sealed it up. No signature, no phone number. No harm. The boy was as good as dead, for her; she might as well have seen a ghost in that waiting room.