A Patchwork Planet

5

MRS. GLYNN lived on a shady street just south of Cold Spring Lane, in a brown shingle-board house with peeling green shutters. I was supposed to meet Sophia there at five-thirty, which would give her time to drive over after work; but when I pulled up early, about a quarter past, she was already waiting out front. She was leaning against the hood of her car — a silver-gray Saab. I had always thought Saab owners were shallow, but now I saw I might have been mistaken.

I parked behind her and stepped out. “Yo! Sophia,” I said, and then I wondered if I should have called her Miss Maynard. Mrs. Dibble had her rules about how we addressed our clients. Except that Sophia wasn’t a client, strictly speaking. And she didn’t appear to mind; she just smiled and said, “Thanks for coming, Barnaby.”

Today she was wearing a different coat, black wool with a Chinese type of collar. It made her hair look blonder. Also, it seemed to me she had more makeup on. This must be her loan officer outfit. I said, “I thought bankers’ hours were shorter. You mean you have to work till five like everybody else?”

“Yes, alas,” she told me. We started up the front steps. “It was nice of you to agree to meeting my aunt first,” she said. “I need to sort of talk her into this, as I explained to your employer.”

“Oh, no problem,” I told her.

“Is that who she is?” Sophia asked.

“Who who is?”

“Mrs. Dibble,” Sophia said. She pressed the doorbell, and a dog started yapping somewhere inside. “Is Mrs. Dibble your employer?” she asked me.

“Yes, she owns the whole company. Started it from scratch and owns it lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Because I had somehow understood that the company was yours,” she said.

“Mine? No way.” I had to raise my voice, since the yapping was coming closer. “I’m just a peon, is all.”

“Well, surely more than a peon,” she said. “It must take quite a bit of skill, dealing with your older clients.”

“Oh, a fair amount. Shoot, some of us have Ph.D.s, times being what they are,” I said. “Not me, though, I don’t mean.” I was consciously trying to be truthful, so she wouldn’t get any more wrong ideas. But before I could explain that I didn’t even have my B.A., the front door swung open and Sophia’s aunt said, “There you are!”

She was no bigger than a minute — a tiny, cute gnat of a woman with a wizened face and eyes so pouchy they seemed goggled. She wore a navy polka-dot dress that hung nearly to her ankles, although on someone else it would have been normal length, and loose, thick beige stockings and enormous Nikes. Over her forearm she carried a Yorkshire terrier, neatly folded like a waiter’s napkin. “This is my doorbell,” she said, thrusting him toward me. “I’d never have known you were out here if not for Tatters.”

“Aunt Grace,” Sophia said, “I’d like you to meet Barnaby.”

“Bartleby?” her aunt said sharply.

“Barnaby.”

“Well, that sounds more promising. Won’t you come in?”

“My aunt, Mrs. Glynn,” Sophia told me, but Mrs. Glynn had already turned to lead us into her parlor. There was something about her back that let you know she was hard of hearing. And clearly the place was getting to be too much for her. The lace curtains were stiff with dust, and the walls were darker in the corners, and the air had the brownish, sweet, woolen smell that comes from a person sleeping extra-long hours in a tightly closed space.

“Sophia thinks I’m too doddery to do for myself anymore,” Mrs. Glynn said. She waved us toward the couch. When she perched in a wing chair opposite, her Nikes didn’t quite touch the floor. She set the dog down next to her, tidily arranging his paws. “Lately she’s been after me to hire a companion. I say, ‘What do I want with a companion? I’d just end up waiting on her, like as not, and we’d bicker and snipe at each other all day and I wouldn’t know how to get rid of her.’ ”

“Well, there you see the value of Rent-a-Back,” I told her. I was speaking in that narrower range of tone that carries well. (I had it down to a science.) “We can go about our business without a word, if you want. You can leave a key at the office, and we’ll let ourselves in while you’re out; be gone before you get home again.”

“It’s not that I’m antisocial,” Mrs. Glynn said. “Am I, Sophia.”

“Goodness, no, Aunt Grace. Just independent.”

“Pensive? Well, I do like to have my thinking time, but—”

“Independent, is what I said.”

“Oh. Independent. Yes.”

She faced me squarely, raising her chin. “But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you. Are you a Baltimore boy, by any chance?”

“Yes, ma’am. Born and bred,” I said.

“Is that right. Would I know your parents? What’s your last name, anyhow?”

“Gaitlin,” I told her.

“Gaitlin.” She thought it over. “As in the Foundation?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Really.”

There was a pause. Sophia smoothed her skirt across her lap. Mrs. Glynn said, “Why don’t you work for them, then?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Lost art? Why is that?”

“A long story. Complicated.”

“Aha,” she said. “So you, too, are independent. Refuse to take any handouts from rich relations. Well, I don’t blame you a bit, young man. Good for you!”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Stand on your own two feet. Right? Now you see why I don’t want a live-in companion.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Sophia’s even offered to come stay with me herself, bless her heart,” Mrs. Glynn said. She reached over to ruffle the Yorkie’s bangs. He smiled, showing his tongue — a little pink dollop of a tongue like on a child’s teddy bear. “I told her, ‘What, and spoil a perfectly good relationship?’ Sophia is my one and only niece. It’s not as if I had relatives to squander.”

“I thought I could live in her guest room,” Sophia told me, “but Aunt Grace wouldn’t hear of it.”

“She’d be watching me every minute,” Mrs. Glynn said. “Oh, I know: meaning the best! But trying to change what I ate or when I went to bed. Wouldn’t you?” she asked Sophia fondly. “As it is, you’re worse than a mother.”

“It’s true,” Sophia said. “I’m a worrywart.”

“She’s a worrywart!” Mrs. Glynn announced. She came up with it so triumphantly, I was pretty sure she hadn’t heard Sophia. “Pushing the multivitamins. Nagging me to exercise. Trying to make me stash my money in a bank.”

“Aunt Grace distrusts banks,” Sophia told me.

“Of course I distrust banks!” Mrs. Glynn said. This she seemed to have caught with no trouble, although Sophia had barely murmured it. “I lived through the Great Depression! I’d be out of my mind to trust a bank! I keep my liquid assets in the flour bin.”

“There,” Sophia said. “See what I mean?” she asked me. “She hasn’t known a person five minutes and she tells him where she keeps her cash.”

“Not just a person. A nice person, with kind brown eyes and a mouth that tips up at both ends!”

“But you’d tell anybody you met, I believe,” Sophia persisted. “You think we’re still in the thirties, when people left their front doors unlocked and their car keys in the ignition.”

“Now, don’t exaggerate,” Mrs. Glynn said. “I’m very careful to lock my front door.”

“When you happen to think of it!”

I could see they’d had this conversation any number of times. They were obviously enjoying themselves, each delivering her lines with an eye cocked in my direction. I said, “Well, anyhow. At Rent-a-Back, we’re used to dealing with independent people. We adjust to fit our customers’ needs: as much butting in as they want, or as little.”

“Tell about Mr. Shank,” Sophia prodded me.

“Mr. Shank?”

“How he calls in the middle of the night just because he’s lonely.”

“Oh,” I said. I was surprised that she’d remembered. “Well, he’s got the opposite problem, really—”

“Tell about Mrs. Gordoni. There’s this client named Mrs. Gordoni,” Sophia said to her aunt, “who can’t afford to pay.”

“In pain from what?” Mrs. Glynn asked.

“To pay To pay the fees,” Sophia said. “And Barnaby helps her out even so, and underreports his hours.”

“I have no problem whatsoever in paying off my bills,” Mrs. Glynn told me firmly.

Sophia said, “No, I didn’t mean—”

“Whatever the charge, I can more than pay. And however many hours. I believe I’ll start with an hour a day. After that, we’ll see.”

“An hour a day,” I said, hunting through my pockets for my calendar. “And would that be mornings, or afternoons?”

“Afternoons, if you have them.”

“Yes, ma’am. Or somebody will. Me or one of the others.”

“One of the others? Wait. Wouldn’t it be you who came?”

“I’ll come if possible,” I said.

“I’d prefer it to be you.”

“Well, I’ll try,” I said.

“For one thing, you’re left-handed,” she told me.

I was, in fact, although I had no idea how she had figured that out. Sophia said, “What does left-handed have to do with it?”

“I just feel left-handers are more reliable, that’s all.”

Sophia made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. I said, “Yes, ma’am, I’m very reliable,” as I flipped through calendar pages. “How is three o’clock?” I asked. “I have that open every weekday. Or four o’clock except for Fridays, so on Fridays we could—”

“No, I think later,” Mrs. Glynn said decisively. “I think five-thirty. Could you do that?”

“Sure thing,” I told her, penciling it in. Five-thirty was our slow time — dinner hour for many of the older folks. “Will you be here then? Or you want to give us a key.”

“You can take a key for unexpected occurrences,” she said, “but generally FU be here. Why don’t you start next Monday? By then I’ll have a list written out.”

She rose from her chair, and we did too. Her little dog perked up his ears and made a chortling sound. “I knew you were left-handed because you put Sophia on your right when you sat down,” Mrs. Glynn told me. “My husband was left-handed. He liked to have me on his right at all times — sitting, walking, even sleeping. He said it freed his sword arm to defend me.”

When she smiled up at me, the bags beneath her eyes grew bigger than ever. She had to sort of peek out over them. It made her seem mischievous and gleeful, like an elf.

Mrs. Glynn’s five hours would help out quite a bit with the eighty-seven hundred, but they wouldn’t be enough on their own, of course. I told Mrs. Dibble I needed more jobs. “You know Mrs. Figg? The Client from Hell? You can send me over there after all; I’ve changed my mind. And forget what I told you about wanting off Saturday nights.”

“Hmm,” Mrs. Dibble said. “Someone must be saving up for something.”

I just said, “Oh, a few extra dollars would always come in handy.”

For the sake of a few extra dollars, I agreed to a double trash-can route when Jay Cohen came down with mono. I spent an entire day shifting furniture for Mrs. Binney, who stood about with one finger set prettily to her chin and said, “On second thought …” I loaded the Winstons’ station wagon at four o’clock in the morning for their annual drive to Florida. (They wouldn’t let me do it the night before — scared of thieves. And of course they were the type who believed in setting off before dawn.)

I even went so far as to telephone Len Parrish, because he had mentioned needing part-time help on his newest housing development. Someone to show off the model home — just a warm body, he’d said. But not my warm body, evidently, because first he behaved like Mr. Important (“Barn! You caught me just as I was heading out the door! Sorry I can’t chat.”), and then he claimed he’d already hired someone. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. “Hey, guy,” he said. “How you doing? How’s the car? We should get together for a drink at some point. I’m going to give you a call.”

I wondered if he planned to declare the drink on his taxes. (Not that I really expected him to call.) One time, Len had told me that just about anything he did he considered tax deductible. “Taking a trip to the beach, going to the movies …,” he said. “Because it gives me more experience, and I’m therefore better equipped to make informed business decisions. Heck, the way I figure it, life is tax deductible!”

Probably it was just as well he didn’t have any work for me.

On Monday, I went to Mrs. Glynn’s, bringing my canvas gloves because I didn’t know what chores she had in mind. But as it turned out, her list contained only the most undemanding tasks. Fetch all tureens and platters from tops of kitchen cabinets, replace on shelves within my reach. Move armchair from sunporch to living room.

I was tightening the screws on a saucepan rack when Sophia showed up. I heard Tatters yapping at her. She had come straight from work, apparently. Breezed into the kitchen in her dressy black coat and asked me, “How’s it going?”

“Going fine,” I told her.

“I just thought I’d stop by and make sure the two of you were getting along.”

“Well, we haven’t had all that much to do with each other,” I said. I could speak in a normal tone, because Mrs. Glynn had returned to the parlor after ushering in Sophia. “So far I’ve just been following what she’s got on her list,” I said. “But I’m not sure there’s enough here to fill the whole hour.”

“Oh, this is just the beginning, when she’s not used to the luxury of having you around. Believe me: there’s a lot to be done! I can name some things if she can’t. I’ve been nagging her for years now to pack up my uncle’s lawbooks in the sun-porch.”

She was watching me replace the saucepans. They were filmed with dust — Mrs. Glynn must not cook much — so I gave each one a rub with my shirtsleeve before I hung it. Then I worried that would strike Sophia as sloppy I said, “Do you suppose she would want to run these through the dishwasher?”

“Well, maybe,” Sophia said. But she didn’t go ask. She said, “My ulterior motive here is to get Aunt Grace’s belongings organized somewhat and then move her to an apartment. Something nearer to my place, so I could keep an eye on her. She’s nearly eighty years old, after all.”

I decided to give up on the dishwasher idea. I hung another pan. “Eighty, huh?” I said. “Is she actually your aunt, or is she a great-aunt?”

“No, she’s my aunt. My father’s sister. I was a late arrival,” Sophia said. “My mother was in her forties when she had me. By now she’s almost eighty herself, and I’m only thirty-six.”

I was ready for the next job: fixing a loose knob on a cupboard in the pantry. I headed off to see to it, taking the screwdriver with me.

“I guess you think thirty-six is old,” Sophia said in the pantry doorway.

“Gosh, no,” I told her politely. “Not when I’ve been hanging out with people in their nineties.” I jiggled the knob and then squatted down in front of it.

“How old are you, Barnaby?”

“I turned thirty last week.”

“Oh. Well, happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“Did somebody throw you a party?”

“Just my parents had me to dinner,” I said. I opened the door slightly to study the inner side of the knob.

“How about your little girl?”

“How about her.”

“Did she come down for the dinner?”

“Nah. Well, she’d already given me my present, see. And besides, I knew I’d be going up there Saturday.”

“Yes, I looked for you on the train,” she said.

“You did?”

“I remembered you always visit her the last Saturday of the month.”

“This time I drove,” I said. “I generally do, if my car’s not on the blink.”

“Oh, you drove.”

“It’s cheaper.”

“I should do that too, I suppose. If I weren’t so nervous on interstates,” she said.

I was trying to tighten a screw now, but it kept slipping away from me. Sophia was making me self-conscious. I’m not a bona fide handyman; I do these little fix-it jobs by trial and error. So I looked at her, and she must have understood, because she said, “Well. I’ll let you get on with it.”

Then she straightened up from the doorway and left, and a moment later I heard her out front, telling her aunt goodbye.

My second day on the job, Mrs. Glynn had me take her to the grocery store. She was a quicker shopper than the Cartwrights but a much worse back-seat driver. Although we were in my car (she’d given hers up years ago, she said), she slammed a Nike down hard every time we neared a stoplight, and she wouldn’t talk at all but concentrated fiercely on the traffic.

Even in the store, conversation was tough, because the background noise Made her hearing worse. When I asked her, in the canned-fruit aisle, whether she liked mandarins, she said, “I like any kind of instrument,” and at the register she took offense when the clerk offered plastic or paper. (“Naturally I can pay for it, or why else would I be here?” she snapped.) But we did okay. Used up slightly more than an hour — though I didn’t note the extra on my time sheet — and at the end, she told me I’d been a help. “I hate to rely on Sophia for every little thing,” she said. “Not that she isn’t sweet as pie about it, but you know.”

Wednesday, I bought a new curtain rod and installed it in her dining room where the old one had started to sag. Thursday, she asked me to pack up those lawbooks of her husband’s. So I drove off to the liquor store for some boxes, and when I got back, I found Sophia in the sunporch. She had her coat off and her sleeves rolled up, and she’d covered the desk with cleaning supplies — rags and a can of furniture polish. “Hello, Barnaby,” she said. “I thought I’d follow along behind you and wipe off the shelves as you clear them.”

“Oh, I can do that,” I told her.

“I wouldn’t dream of it! You’re not her housekeeper, after all.”

“No, but a lot of our jobs edge over into housekeeping,” I said. “We’re used to handling pretty much anything that’s required. I’ll be glad to wipe the shelves.”

“Well, aren’t you nice,” she told me.

But when I returned from the car with the second load of boxes, she’d already emptied one bookshelf onto the desk and started dusting. So I gave up. She must have been one of those people who couldn’t bear sitting by while other people worked — unlike her aunt, who was off in the parlor happily talking baby talk to Tatters.

“I have no idea what to do with these books once we get them packed,” Sophia told me. “I suppose some charity might want them.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Dibble. She keeps a Rolodex for things like that.”

“Uncle George has been dead for twenty years or more, and every book he ever owned is still sitting here. I think all his clothes are still in the upstairs closet too.”

“That’s nothing compared to some of our clients,” I said. “This one woman, Mrs. Morey: she sleeps with her husband’s bathrobe laid across the foot of the bed, and he’s been gone as long as I’ve known her.”

“Oh! How sad!”

“Yeah, well.”

“You must see so many sad things in this job.”

“Well, quite a few,” I said. I stopped to consider, bracing a carton of books against my shoulder. “On the other hand,” I said, “I see quite a few happy things too. This same Mrs. Morey, for instance: she just loves her garden. Come spring, you’d think she was in heaven. She says, ‘As long as I can walk out in my garden first thing every morning — take that gardener’s early-morning walk, to check what’s sprouted overnight and what’s about to bloom,’ she says, ‘—why, I feel I have something worth staying alive for.’ ”

Sophia lifted her dustcloth and turned to look at me. She said, “You’re a very kindhearted person, Barnaby Gaitlin.”

I said, “Me? I am?”

Of course, I no longer believed that Sophia was my angel. Not literally, at least. But still, I paid close attention whenever she told me something in that quiet, firm tone of voice.

Martine said Sophia had designs on me — that she was hanging around at her aunt’s all the time in the hope I’d ask her out. I said, “She’s what?” We were loading the books onto Marline’s boyfriend’s truck when she came up with this. Granted, Sophia had put in several appearances — at the moment, she was in the attic, checking for more lawbooks — but the notion of any romantic interest was absurd. I heaved a box onto the truck bed and said, “Get serious, Pasko. She’s thirty-six years old.”

“So?” Martine said.

“She’s a … lady! She works in a bank!”

“We women can sense these things,” Martine said knowingly. I had to laugh. (She was wearing Everett’s parka today, the hood trimmed with matted fake fur, and her little face poked out of it like some sharp, quick, rodenty animal.) “I saw how she was eyeing you!” she said. “Lolling around the sun-porch, getting underfoot. Asking those made-up questions in that … lilting way of hers. ‘Ooh, Barnaby, do you think they’ll all fit in one truckload?’ ‘Ooh, Barnaby, won’t you strain your back lifting that great heavy box?’ ”

Sophia had asked nothing of the sort; Martine was imagining things. I said, “You’re just envious, is all.”

“Envious!”

“You wish you could act so well bred and refined.”

“Like hell I do,” Martine said. She started back up the front walk, calling over her shoulder, “So obvious and flirtatious is more like it.”

“Sh!” I said, glancing toward the house. I caught up with her and said, “She’s being a good niece; what’s wrong with that? Watching out for her aunt.”

“Committing her aunt to five hours a week just to have you around,” Martine said.

“Now wait,” I said. “I really need these extra hours, Martine.”

“Well, sure, you need them.”

Martine was the only person I’d told about my plan to pay back the eighty-seven hundred. (She’d made a bet with me that my parents wouldn’t accept it—“They’re not exactly poverty-stricken,” she’d said — but that just showed how little she knew Mommy Dearest.) “The question is,” she said now, “does the aunt need them?”

But before I could argue my case any further, Sophia stepped out the front door. “Guess what, Barnaby!” she called. “In the attic are boxes and boxes of books! More than there were in the sunporch, even!”

Her voice had a kind of caroling tone — a kind of, yes, lilting tone, I had to admit. And she tipped her head against the doorframe in this picturesque, inviting way and flashed me a white-toothed smile.

I felt my heart sink. I glanced over at Martine. She didn’t meet my eyes; just climbed the porch steps alongside me. But I saw the smug little kink at the corner of her mouth. I heard the humming sound she made beneath her breath. “Hmm-hmm-111™,” she hummed, high-pitched and airy and innocent, clomping up the steps in her motorcycle boots.