She thought for a moment, a frown between her perfect eyebrows. "Maybe you need a place like Eclipse to make you appreciate the city. And vice versa. Well, if that's what you want, then that's the way I want your story to go, too."
They parked their bicycles in the front drive of Eclipse and went inside to tell Bentley about Walnut Manor.
The day of the move, a parade of ambulances delivered Mousey, Horatio, Flossie, and Attila to Walnut Manor while all the residents except Eddy stood on the broad porch watching. Dr. Waldemar had opened a section of the closed wing for the new patients, and furnished an adjoining bedroom for Sunnie. Sunnie carried Attila, in the dishpan, through the front door. This was the first Dr. Waldemar and the others knew that a chicken was to be one of the patients.
As she passed Graham, Sunnie pointed to him and said, "You're a big strong boy. How about taking my suitcase up to my room?"
Graham shambled forward and grabbed the handle of the suitcase. He pulled it toward him but it didn't budge. He pulled again, harder, and this time it moved a couple of inches. "What have you got in here?" he asked, astonished.
"Books," she said, coming back onto the porch, the dishpan in her arms. "I don't have time right now to explain my theories of education to you, but I can tell you that I believe in continuing to learn, and after a bit of experimenting, I settled on a method of picking a subject and reading in depth on it. I've just finished an extensive study of whales—nothing personal," she said, eyeing Graham's girth. "I figure if I give three months to each subject, that's four a year. In ten years I'll know a lot about forty different things. How many people do you know who know a lot about forty different things? I can see already that some subjects will be more interesting to me than others. Whales weren't too bad, and they did get more interesting as I went along, though I wasn't sure they would at first. I even read a book from the whales' point of view. It was all about what they thought and how they felt and how they communicated with each other. The book said they had ESP. But it seems so far-fetched to me. Like imagining Louie sitting around composing poetry in his head. I
know
he doesn't do that. At least I don't think he does. Oh dear, now I'm all confused. Well, come on, let's get this stuff un-loaded so we can get settled in. Some day soon you and I have to have a nice chat." She turned and carried Attila into Walnut Manor.
Graham looked after her, a dazed expression on his round face. "Who's Louie?" he asked. No one on the porch knew, so he wrestled with the suitcase again, finally dragging it up the steps and through the door.
There was a great deal of commotion as people went back and forth, up and down the stairs, carrying things, depositing things, dropping things. Finally the sleepers were settled in their room, Sunnie's suitcase was unpacked, and Sandy and Bentley were sadly contemplating returning to Eclipse alone.
"Oh, you might as well stay for supper," Opal said, looking at their crestfallen expressions. "It's nothing special."
Sunnie decided to eat her dinner on a tray in her patients' room so she could make sure the travel hadn't harmed them, but the others gathered around a single long table in the dining room.
Opal had made a great pot of spaghetti and a big green salad, and as she dished up the plates, she announced that dessert would be canned peaches from Walnut Manor's own trees and anybody who didn't like that could just lump it.
Sandy thought Opal's spaghetti sauce was the best he'd ever tasted, but he didn't say so for fear of hurting Bentley's feelings. Bentley was quite proud of his own spaghetti sauce.
Mr. Moreland leaned across the table toward Sandy and said, "That's a good-looking nurse you've brought along. I seem to remember her from somewhere. What's her name? Stormy? Windy? I can't remember anything anymore."
"Her name's Sunnie." Sandy loved to say her name. "And you saw her a few days ago when we came to take a tour of Walnut Manor."
"Is that so?" Mr. Moreland asked.
Everett nudged Sandy with his elbow. "'She had curves in places other women don't even have places.' Cybill Shepherd said that about Marilyn Monroe."
"She may be right," Sandy said. "I don't know much about women."
"I must be forgetting what I knew about them," Mr. Moreland said. "Today I pinched Opal. She almost broke my arm after I did it."
"'Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.' Albert Schweitzer," Everett said.
"What a bunch of balderdash," Mr. Moreland retorted grumpily. "I've got them both and they don't add up to happiness. I used to be able to hold a full day's quotes from the Big Board in my head, and now I can hardly remember the difference between stocks and bonds. There was a time L. Barlow Van Dyke and I were making money so fast we didn't have time to count it. We were young, stubborn, ambitious, competitive. I beat him by one week to making my first million, but he made his second before I did. After that, we quit counting. Now look at us. I can hardly remember my own name, and he sits around looking like a thundercloud. Who'd ever have thought we'd end up like this? Last time I saw him out in the world he was making a speech at some big function, and now he's not only mute, he's a cat molester."
"A cat molester?" Bentley asked, alarmed, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the sound of Graham's chewing. Graham was already on thirds, while everyone else was still on firsts. "You mean he teases cats? Manhandles them? Torments, harasses, badgers, and annoys them?" Bentley had spent many hours reading the thesaurus.
"I suppose. That's the last thing he said the day he checked in here. Opal asked him what we should call him, and he said, 'Cat molester,' and he's never said another word. I guess he's ashamed of how far he's fallen."
There was a little commotion at the other end of the table where Boom-Boom sat. He had spilled his milk and now was scolding himself while his other half cried. Opal got up for a sponge and cleaned up the milk before she went back to taking one bite for herself and then giving one bite to Eddy who lay on his padded, wheeled platform next to her chair.
After dinner, which Sandy had enjoyed immensely, he and Bentley went upstairs to say good night to Sunnie and the sleepers.
As Sandy and Bentley drove back to Eclipse in the dark, Sandy sighed and said, "It doesn't feel right, just the two of us going home. Two's not enough. I want Horatio and Mousey and Flossie and Attila back." He was afraid to say he wanted Sunnie back—afraid Bentley would hear the longing in his voice. "I wish there was something we could do."
"I've been reading up, and I'm going to try something," Bentley said. "Remember our chemistry experiments in the kitchen?"
"Sure. You discovered that formula to make plastic from potato peels."
"Right. Well, I'm going back to experimenting. To see if I can find a cure."
"But Bentley, you don't know anything about medicine. This could be dangerous."
"I know a lot more about medicine now than I did a couple of months ago. I'll test my experiments on Attila."
"What if they don't work?"
"I'll just keep trying until I find something that does."
"I mean, what if..."
"I know what you mean. I'll have to be careful."
Bentley pulled the Daimler into the garage.
"Please be
very
careful," Sandy said.
The next morning, after breakfast, Bentley drove. Sandy to Walnut Manor. After he visited Flossie, Bentley went home to begin his experiments, leaving Sandy at Walnut Manor until supper time.
"Now, Sandy," Sunnie told him after they'd finished the morning chores for their patients, "my new field of study is finance, and it's as much for your benefit as for mine. If you ever want to get control of your father's money and secure it against Bart and Bernie, you've got to educate yourself. You've got to learn about buying on margin, and tax shelters, and depreciation, and things like that."
"What?" She might have been speaking a foreign language to him.
"That's all part of a sound financial education, Sandy, and you have to start now."
"Oh, all right. If you say so. But it sounds so difficult and dull."
"Well, it sounds difficult to me, too. After all, I don't know much more than you. But I do know about checking accounts and income tax. I still have trouble reconciling my bank statement, but at least I know how it's supposed to be done. Somebody told me not to bother because the bank is never wrong and I should just trust the amount on the statement, but I discovered once that the computer had stuttered or something. Instead of subtracting a check for $8.79, it subtracted $888.79, so it does pay to be alert. And if that kind of mistake could happen in a little checking account like mine, why, just think of what could go wrong with a financial empire like your father's."
"I'm sure my father has accountants or something to handle things like that. They'd spot it."
"They could be embezzlers. Now sit down and let me read this book to you. It's called
Earning, Spending, Saving, Investing, Borrowing, and Losing.
"
Before Sandy could get to a chair, Opal appeared in the doorway and said, "I need another pair of hands. You aren't doing anything that shows to the naked eye. Come on." She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the room.
Sunnie watched him go, then shrugged and opened her book.
"It's cold in the library," Opal said, dragging Sandy down the stairs, "and I can't light another fire until all the old ashes have been cleaned out of the fireplace. Dr. Waldemar's taking a nap, and I've got to get lunch going. You're elected." She towed him into the library and left him staring forlornly into the cold fireplace, which brimmed with ashes.
Behind him Mr. Moreland, L. Barlow Van Dyke, Boom-Boom, and Everett sat at the card table, in coats and gloves, playing their usual game. Virgil and Lyle sat on the couch, a blanket wrapped around them, watching television. They had a schedule they abided by, watching the same programs every day. The only conflict they had was at 11:00
A.M.,
when Virgil wanted to watch
Bowling for Dollars
and Lyle wanted to watch I
Love Lucy
reruns. They compromised, alternating days for those programs.
"Hurry up and get that fireplace ready," Mr. Moreland said. "I'm freezing."
"And it's harder to cheat when you're dealing the cards with gloves on," Boom-Boom said in his little kid's voice. "Boom-Boom," he said in his grown-up voice, "that isn't very nice. Now apologize to Mr. Moreland." "No," he answered, sticking his thumb in his mouth.
Sandy tentatively took a shovelful of ashes from the fireplace and deposited it in a brown paper grocery sack. A fine gray cloud rose from it and floated over the hearth, settling slowly onto the carpet and making Sandy cough.
Graham turned from the windows, where he was looking out onto a barren winter landscape. "Why don't you wet the ashes down before you shovel them? Then they won't fly around like that."
"That's a great idea," Sandy said with admiration. Graham flushed and turned back to the window as Sandy went off to the kitchen to get a pitcher of water.
Working at the messy job, he listened to the sounds of the TV and the four men playing cards, and he was glad they'd decided to put Mousey and Horatio and Flossie and Attila here.
"Well, LBVD," Mr. Moreland said, slapping his cards on the table, "that makes two million, three hundred and fifty-seven thousand, nineteen dollars and twenty-four cents you owe me." He scraped together the cards from the other players and shuffled them. L. Barlow Van Dyke scowled more darkly than usual and stuck his gloved hands in his pockets.
"'That money talks/I'll not deny,/I heard it once:/ It said, "Goodbye."' Richard Armour," Everett said.
"Not to me, it doesn't," Mr. Moreland said. "I know more about earning, spending, saving, investing, and borrowing money than any man alive." He sighed. "At least, I used to."
"You don't seem to have forgotten anything about playing cards," Sandy said. "It sounds like you've won a lot of money playing them."
"True. But I didn't learn to play until I got to Walnut Manor. I never had time before. It's the things I did out
there,"
he gestured in the direction of the windows, "that I have trouble remembering."
Sandy put the last shovelful of ashes into the grocery sack. He had just finished laying the new fire when Sunnie came into the library. "Sandy, why don't you go sit with your family? I know you'd like to spend some time with them, and I'd like to get to know these gentlemen, since it looks as if we're going to be spending a lot of time together. Go on. I'll light the fire."
Sandy left the room, and Sunnie touched a match to the fire starter amid the logs in the fireplace. Then she pulled a chair up to the card table and sat down. "Go ahead," she said. "Don't mind me. I just want to watch. I'm not much at cards, unless you count Go Fish and Old Maid. I used to play them by the hour with my mother while she sat at the window watching for my father. Evenings were especially hard for her and she needed distractions. I've found that most people have One time of day that's most difficult for them. It was dusk for my mother. All that blue light, maybe. For some people it's early morning. Hard starters, I call them. One of my patients in nurses' training hated 2:30 in the afternoon. She said everything bad that had ever happened to her happened at 2:30 in the afternoon. She'd had a car crash at 2:30, lost a job at 2:30, been left standing at the altar at 2:30. She'd even broken her leg skiing at 2:30. That's what she was in the hospital for, a broken leg. I suggested maybe she could have her watch fixed so it would go straight from 2:29 to 2:31 without stopping at 2:30, the way some hotels have elevators that go from the twelfth floor to the fourteenth floor with no thirteenth floor in between. Of course, there
is
a thirteenth floor, they're just calling it by another name, so I don't know who they're trying to kid."
As Sunnie talked, Boom-Boom edged his chair closer to hers, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and leaned his head on her shoulder. She glanced down at him, smiled, and kept talking.