Hannah's Dream (9 page)

“But you can’t see from over there,” Harriet said.

“You can see well enough,” Neva said. “Please.”

Sam saw the muscles flex in Harriet’s jaw—two strong women in a struggle to dominate. As he brought Hannah over he saw Corinna hurrying up from the parking lot. “’Scuse me,” he said to Neva, leaving Hannah with her so he could go around to let Corinna in the barn gate without Harriet’s seeing her. “Hi, hon,” he whispered. “Harriet Saul’s here, and she’s in a mean mood. Best to stay out of the way.”

Corinna looked to the heavens and slipped inside the barn. She’d watch from the office window.

When Sam got outside again, Neva was talking to Hannah. “Do you remember this?” She held up a brush loaded with blue paint. Hannah took it in her trunk and without hesitation laid down a track of blue from the upper left to the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. Truman shifted a few feet along the barn wall to get a better view. Harriet strode directly across the yard until she was standing right beside Neva. Hannah’s eye rolled nervously.

“It’s much safer if you don’t stand right here,” Neva said in a low, quiet voice. “She’s very excited.”

Harriet folded her arms in defiance.

Sam saw Truman catch Neva’s eye and make the slightest gesture:
Unless she’s about to be killed, let her be
. Neva collected
herself and turned back to the elephant, saying, “All right, Hannah. You’re doing a great job. Do you want more paint?” She offered the palette and Hannah dabbed her brush and made a tornado of red at the bottom of her canvas. Zoo visitors were piling up along the fence, including a young man who was frantically scribbling notes in a small reporter’s spiral notebook.

Hannah switched to orange paint and then black. The canvas was filling with strokes and color, swoops and dots and vortexes. Inside the office Corinna, seen only by Sam, laughed in amazement and lifted her hands to her mouth.

The young man with the notepad took several pictures of Hannah painting, and of Harriet and Neva watching. Then it was over. Hannah returned the paintbrush to Neva and walked off to her mud wallow without a backward glance.

The visitors applauded.

Neva unclamped the canvas, handed it to Harriet without a word, and began to clean up.

Sam gave Hannah six apple quarters and a banana. Unseen except by Sam, to whom she blew a kiss, Corinna hurried back to her car: she’d left a customer under the hair dryer back at the Beauty Spot.

Harriet walked out of the elephant yard
without a word. Truman closed the gate carefully behind them and said, “She was just doing her job. Hannah was agitated, and I’m sure that can be dangerous.”

“My ass,” Harriet said bitterly. “And I want you to talk to Sam. I won’t have family members in the exhibits during work hours.”

She was furious. These two employees were completely out
of hand. Harriet had been so involved with her own projects that she’d allowed Sam and Neva too much freedom, and this was what it had led to: insubordination. Harriet wouldn’t stand for that. She expected—no, she demanded—respect for her office if not for herself. Without that, Harriet could never move the zoo into the future she envisioned, a brilliant gem in Washington’s tourism crown.

When they arrived at the office, they found the young man from outside the elephant exhibit talking to Brenda at the reception desk. He was trying to take notes while juggling a great deal of camera gear.

“Hello,” Harriet said coolly, cutting Brenda off in mid-sentence. “Brenda, please don’t speak.” To the young man she said, “I am the zoo’s director. May I help you with something?”

Brenda flushed to the roots of her hair.

The young man looked up. “Oh! Sorry. My name is Martin Choi.” He held out his hand. “I’m a reporter with the
Bladenham News-Gazette
.”

Harriet grasped his hand and smiled. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Sure. I was just getting some information from, ah—”

“Brenda doesn’t speak for the zoo.”

“Yeah? Well, okay, then maybe I can talk with you.” The reporter looked with confusion at Harriet’s badge. “Maxine Biedelman?”

“My real name is Harriet Saul.”

“Oh. That’s kind of confusing, isn’t it?”

“No,” Harriet said.

“So who’s Maxine Biedelman? She his daughter or something?”

“Whose daughter?”

“Max Biedelman’s.”

“Max
was
Maxine,” Harriet said. “It’s what she called herself.”

“No shit? I thought it was a guy.” Martin scribbled a note.

“No.” Harriet took a strengthening breath.

“Wow. So when did you meet her?”

“Who?”

“Maxine Biedelman. You knew her, right?”

Harriet gritted her teeth. “She died in 1958.”

“So that would make it a while ago. You grow up around here?”

“No,” Harriet said. “I wasn’t born until 1956.”

Martin furrowed his brow. “So how does that work?”

“It doesn’t!” Harriet cried. “I never met Maxine Biedelman!”

“Yeah? Huh.”

“Look.” Harriet pulled several photographs out of her pocket. “Meet Maxine Biedelman.”

Martin looked through the pictures. “Not a very good-looking old broad, was she? No wonder she called herself Max.” He cracked himself up.

Harriet reached for the photos, snatching them out of his hand. “Let’s start again. I’m Harriet Saul, the director of this zoo. I’m re-enacting the role of Maxine Biedelman as part of a brand-new living history program. This is the first day, in fact. I’ll be giving daily lectures so our visitors can get a better feel for the zoo’s roots. We have colorful beginnings.”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t we go into my office?”

Harriet led the way. Inside her office door Martin stopped, surveying the wreckage. “Whoa! This looks like my apartment. No kidding. Looks like you should fire your janitor, huh?”

Harriet swept the visitor’s chair clear. “We’re a nonprofit organization. We don’t have a janitor.”

“No kidding.”

A small vein pulsed in Harriet’s temple. She sat down behind her desk, took a fortifying breath, and outlined the history of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo in extreme, even numbing, detail, as her little act of revenge. When she finally stopped at somewhere between forty-five minutes and eternity, Martin Choi squinted at her and said, “Okay, but so wait. There was never a guy named Max? It’s kind of funny to have a zoo named after a nickname, huh?”

Harriet shrugged. “It was a personal quirk of hers, I gather.”

“Well, hey, you’ve given me lots of great information. I have to talk to my editor, but maybe we’ll be able to run a feature story. I’d love to get some pictures, maybe some of you with the elephant. That painting, that was some cool stuff. Would you have a few minutes to go back down there with me now?”

“Of course,” said Harriet.

She continued to brief him as they walked. Her twice-daily interpretive performance as Maxine Biedelman was to be called
My Walks on the Wild Side
, which she believed was sexy enough to draw at least a small crowd to her impromptu stage on Havenside’s marble steps at ten every morning and three every afternoon. She would give a dramatic recitation of Max Biedelman’s travels in Burma, using as props Max Biedelman’s own elephant hook, shooting stick, and old Haaselblad camera. Except for her photographs, Max Biedelman had left behind very little anecdotal information about her life, so Harriet would have to take a certain amount of dramatic license with the contents of her monologue. She had been preparing and practicing for a week; last night she had set up a video camera and taped her
self. Though she was by no means a professional performer, she thought zoo guests would find the result moving.

The elephant yard was quiet when they arrived. Hannah appeared to be dozing against the fence, her eyes closed and trunk moving only now and then to check on the tire leaning against her ankle. Rather than enter the elephant yard, Harriet suggested that Martin shoot his photographs from outside the exhibit, but from an angle that would make it look like she and Hannah were only inches apart. They never even saw Sam or Neva, which was exactly what Harriet had intended.

When her work with Martin Choi was finished, she sat at her computer and composed a memo for all employees to receive in their paycheck envelopes first thing Monday morning. It read:

That done, Harriet nipped into the administrative bathroom to take one last look at herself. She put on the pith helmet,
tipped it to a jaunty angle, and walked outside. A family of four was coming toward her along the path. Harriet grinned broadly and extended her hand.

“Good afternoon!” she cried. “I am Maxine Biedelman. Welcome to my zoo.”

W
hen Neva got out of
her car at home that evening she smelled something miraculous in the air. Cookies. Sweet, sweet chocolate chip cookies. The aroma was wafting from the kitchen of the Big House—her landlord Johnson Johnson was baking. To her annoyance, she felt weepy. Her missionary zeal was leaching out of her like heavy metals, contaminating everything she’d touched since she’d arrived at this godforsaken place and its third-rate zoo.

A foil-covered plate sat on the stoop of her garage-cum-apartment. It was the third time she’d received cookies since moving in. With trepidation she walked up to Johnson Johnson’s door. He answered her knock at the exact moment that she had decided to turn and run. Spectrally thin in battered jeans and a T-shirt that said
JESUS IS COMING
:
LOOK BUSY
, he appeared at the door holding a spatula.

“Hey!” he said. “Did you get the cookies? Did you taste one?”

“No, I just got home, but I wanted to thank you.”

“Sure.” A timer went off inside the kitchen, and Johnson Johnson began windmilling with his arm. “Come in, because I better get this batch out before they burn.”

“No, no—”

But he was already across the kitchen. She followed—and found, to her astonishment, that the kitchen was painted, even saturated, in the colors of a Mexican fiesta: brilliant yellows, reds, oranges, and greens. In place of baseboards, a seven-inch band of black-and-white checkerboard wrapped all the way around the room, and above that ran what appeared to be a poem. No—Neva recognized it as the opening lines of Lewis Carroll’s
Jabberwocky
:
T’WAS BRILLIG
,
AND THE SLITHY TOVES DID GYRE AND GIMBLE IN THE WABE
…Along the tops of the walls, at the ceiling-line, Johnson Johnson had painted fragments of a dinner conversation:
MY
,
WHAT A LOVELY HAM
! and
HAVE THE BROCCOLI
—
IT’S DELICIOUS
. Even the wood floor had been painted brick red, with a compass dial beneath the kitchen table.

“It’s so I know where North is,” Johnson Johnson said, sliding hot cookies onto a cooling rack, his mouth slightly open. “In case, you know, I forget.”

“Why do you need to know?”

He looked up at her. “Well, you’re supposed to.”

“You are?”

“Course.”

Neva was reminded anew that it was best not to expect clarity from the funhouse that was Johnson Johnson’s mind. “So did you do all this yourself?”

“Yeah,” he said modestly. “I don’t like white, so, you know.”
He spaded gobs of cookie dough out of a mixing bowl and onto the cookie sheet. “Did you see Kitty anywhere?”

“No. Is he supposed to be in the house?”

“Yeah, he doesn’t go out much anymore. Check the living room, okay? He gets nervous when I use the oven.”

Neva didn’t have the strength to ask why. She opened the door leading into the living room and found herself trying to take in a series of wall-mounted ramps, runways, platforms, small hammocks, and tunnels that encircled the room, rising from the floor to the ceiling—a gloriously outfitted feline jungle gym. In a far corner, a narrow carpeted ladder rose through a cat-sized hole in the ceiling. Halfway up one wall, draped across a sleeping perch, she spotted a battered orange tabby with a significant gut. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction. “I think he’s in here,” she called. “He’s out like a light.”

She returned to the kitchen. Johnson Johnson was deep inside his refrigerator. “So, you want a glass of milk with your cookies?” he said. “I even have”—he waited a reverential beat—“strawberry milk.”

“No, no. I just wanted to say thank you. Your cookies were the best things that happened all day.”

“Uh oh,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Hey! If you’re hungry we could get a pizza, maybe.”

Neva immediately put her hand on the doorknob. “Look, I’m sorry. All I can think of is a shower and then bed. I’m beat.”

“You do, like, smell of something.”

“Elephant.” The subject was getting a little too personal. Neva backed out the door. “Okay. So thanks again, okay?”

“Okay,” said Johnson Johnson. As she was pulling the door to, Neva saw him bite into a cookie and close his eyes.

Neva had just finished drying off
after her shower when the telephone rang. She considered not answering it, but she was trying to freshen up her social skills, and as her mother often admonished her, socially successful people answered their phones when they rang. Truman Levy was on the other end of the line.

“Look, how are you?” he asked.

Neva let out a long breath. “Okay. My landlord gave me a plate of home-baked chocolate chip cookies, so that’s one good thing.”

“Tough day?”

“Yeah.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to quit,” Truman said.

“What a strange thing to say. I’m not going to quit. I may start taking tranquilizers, I might even consider something stronger, but I have no intention of quitting. I wouldn’t mind a few suggestions about how to go below her radar, though.”

“It helps to be male.”

“So that’s out. Am I the only one she doesn’t like?”

“No, you’re just the most recent. Here’s my suggestion: steer clear of her whenever you can, and avoid disagreeing with her when you can’t.”

“Like that’s going to help,” Neva said. “Thanks for the concern, though.”

“All right,” said Truman. “Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

Just as Neva hung up the phone, she heard a faint porcine grunting coming through the receiver, and smiled the first real smile of the evening.

Truman hung up the phone
with a mighty sigh. At his feet, Miles was pushing around a child’s plastic ring-toss ring, bright pink and filthy after days of pig slobber, backyard mud, and carpet fibers. Truman reached down absently and scratched him behind one ear.

Harriet had shown him storyboards of the zoo’s new ad campaign. There was a three-quarter profile of Hannah and, ghosted behind her, a picture of Harriet as Maxine Biedelman, squinting heroically into the jungle interior as suggested by a few ghosted palm fronds. Truman hadn’t given her much of a reaction, buying time by saying he would prefer to give the matter a night’s thought before offering his opinion. Of course, this amounted to feet of clay, since he knew that tomorrow he’d advise her to use a picture of the real Max Biedelman instead. God knew how she would take it. He wondered how much unemployment he might be able to collect if he found himself suddenly out of work. Not enough, probably, to cover Winslow’s art and music lessons, plus Miles and his expenses, including food, ring-toss games, other miscellaneous toys, and new blankets and towels.

Miles and Truman had bonded.

It was not what Truman had had in mind.

The little pig followed him everywhere, and when Truman went beyond the baby gate that limited Miles to the kitchen and den, the pig cried, making little snuffling sounds. It was heartbreaking. He showed no such devotion to Winslow. Happily, the boy didn’t seem to mind, taking only the faintest interest in the animal he’d once so desperately wanted.

Truman heaved himself up from the depths of the sofa
Rhonda had insisted he keep because she knew he hated it. Why weren’t more women like Neva Wilson? Though he would be the first one to concede that he didn’t know her, really, she seemed balanced, reasonable, and completely professional. She even seemed to have a sense of humor. He wondered what she would think of Harriet’s ad campaign.

As he began dinner preparations, Winslow shuffled into the kitchen in his socks. Truman wondered for the zillionth time why no matter what brand or style of socks he bought for the boy, they all ended up flapping off the ends of his son’s feet like clown shoes. He had always held to the highest standards of personal grooming—one thing he had very much in common with his orderly mother, Lavinia. While Truman was growing up she had brooked no compromise, insisting that his shirt be tucked in, its elbows intact, and all buttons accounted for. He had never been allowed to wear badly fitting slacks or messy shoes.

“Pull up your socks, Winnie.”

“What?”

“Your socks. They’re bagging.”

Winslow shrugged and halfheartedly pulled up his socks. Miles came over to investigate.

“He’s got such little tiny eyes,” Winslow said, peering at them. “They look like polished onyx.”

“Where have you seen onyx?”

“Morris brought some into school once. He has a rock tumbler.” Morris was a brainy kid with whom Winslow was often paired for science projects. Last year, they’d performed elaborate experiments with bread mold that Truman had never quite understood, but which had won first place at the school’s science fair.

Truman assembled chopped meat, an egg, fresh breadcrumbs, and ketchup in a mixing bowl and, shuddering, plunged his hands in. The combined feel of cold animal fat and raw egg was almost more than he could bear. He squished the stuff through his fingers. “Hand me that pan, would you Winnie?”

Winslow handed him a glass baking dish, and Truman dumped the meat loaf out of the bowl. “You want to shape it, or no?”

“You can.”

Truman slapped the clammy stuff into a tidy loaf, iced it with ketchup, and, with infinite relief, slid it into the oven. He set down the bowl for Miles to lick. The pig pushed it around the floor, running it into the baseboards, cupboard doors, Truman’s feet and ankles, and Winslow’s terrible socks.

“Do you think he’s smart?” Winslow said.

Truman regarded the pig doubtfully. “They’re supposed to be.”

“But is
he
?”

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“Yeah,” said Winslow.

“So tell me about your day.”

The boy shrugged. “It was okay.”

“Okay, like you couldn’t wait for it to end, or okay, like there were some bright spots?”

“I don’t know. We got to draw in art class. Mr. Warner put some crushed cans, a fern, and two marbles on a table, and we were supposed to draw it.”

“Yes, it’s called a still life. And did you?”

“Yeah, but I was the only one. Jeremy Ireland called me a kiss-ass.”

“I’m sure that Vincent van Gogh’s classmates called him names, too.”

“I don’t care, anyway.”

“Really?” Truman drizzled halved baby red potatoes with olive oil and rosemary. “I always cared.”

“What exactly
is
a kiss-ass?” Winslow asked after a minute.

“Well, that depends. If you want to be literal, it’s a person who kisses a donkey. I, for instance, might be called a kiss-pig, though I don’t think I’ll ever do it again because he didn’t smell very good close up.”

Winslow snorted.

“Or it can mean a suck-up, a person who wants to win favor by helping or cooperating with a person in a position of greater power,” Truman continued. “Personally I prefer the first meaning, but you can choose for yourself.”

He slid the potatoes into the oven with the meat loaf, and fished lettuce, carrots, cauliflower, and radishes out of the vegetable bin. He didn’t feel that Winslow got enough vegetables, so he insisted on making a salad for them every night, a chore he detested. As additional penance, he refused to use pre-washed and bagged lettuces, struggling with messy heads of red leaf and romaine, vigilant for the omnipresent aphids.

“Have you talked to your mother lately?”

“Nah.”

“Why don’t you give her a call while dinner’s cooking?”

“That’s okay.”

Truman decided to let it go. In his heart he was relieved that the boy wasn’t pining, though he worried about unforeseen emotional fallout in Winslow’s later life. On the other hand, his reluctance might be simple dislike of talking to Rhonda on the phone, an experience Truman himself likened to a jousting match where only one person had a lance and that person wasn’t you.

“Then go do piano until dinner’s ready.” Truman tripped over Miles snuffling around under the open dishwasher door. “And Winnie? Take Miles with you.”

“He doesn’t want to come.”

“Yes he does, he just doesn’t know it.”

One morning in early fall, 1956,
Sam had found a note taped to the door of the elephant barn, asking him to come up to the house. He’d gotten Hannah squared away in a hurry and headed up the hill. Miss Biedelman and Miss Effie weren’t strong, either one of them—Miss Biedelman’s rheumatism was bothering her more and more, and Miss Effie had a nasty little cough. He was relieved when the old woman herself answered the door, her quick old eyes dancing with excitement.

“Mr. Brown! It’s a pleasure to see you. Come in for just a moment while I get my coat and see if Effie would like to join us. Sit, sit!” She bullied him into a chair in the front room and then hurried out. He could hear a faint conversation in the hall and then she came back alone, wearing a man’s heavy canvas barn coat and brandishing one of her walking sticks. “I’m afraid Effie won’t be walking with us today—her cough is worse. I’ve insisted that she call the doctor. Come, Mr. Brown.” She urged him out the door with a hand on his back. “I’ll explain as we go.” She led the way back to the barn, hobbling along at a remarkably fast clip.

“Looks like you’re feeling better today,” Sam said.

“Yes, yes, I feel quite myself, Mr. Brown. Slow as the dickens, of course, but never mind. At my age it’s best to lower one’s standards.” She chuckled to herself as they got near the elephant barn. “Now here’s my plan. We’re going to take Hannah for a walk.”

Sam frowned. “We don’t have a lead or a halter.”

“We don’t need one, Mr. Brown! Could you restrain her even if we had? No, the mahouts work their elephants without restraints of any kind, and so shall we. Do you have an elephant hook? I know we did at one time. Go and see, Mr. Brown.”

Sam went inside and rummaged around in a closet. The last keeper had had the habits of a hog, leaving nasty messes where you’d find them days later, stinking and caked onto something—the man hadn’t grown up around clean folks, that was obvious. Sam finally found the tool beneath a pile of old feed sacks. The stick was about a foot and a half long, not quite as stout as an axe handle, and with a blunt metal hook coming out of one end.