Banishing Verona Read online

  Of course they pounced, spewing out questions, so agitated they barely heard his answers. He offered only the dull facts; how she’d arrived one afternoon, spent two nights and one day under their roof. He did not mention the five lightbulbs nor that they’d painted, eaten, lain together. “The next day,” he concluded, “I got here soon after eight and she was gone.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t know her?” they kept saying.

  “Why would I be asking you,” Zeke said crossly, “if I did?”

  Gerald began to flail around the room. He bumped into a chair, grazed a table. “So while we were away and you were decorating our living room, a young woman claiming to be related to us was staying here and had the run of our house?”

  “Not especially young.” That was one of the things he had liked about her.

  “This is completely weird,” said Ariel, her deep-set eyes darting from her husband to Zeke and back again. “What I don’t understand is why you let her in? Surely you knew we’d have told you if anyone were coming.”

  “People have relatives who show up out of the blue,” he protested. “I was trying to be helpful.”

  Echoing his own earlier thoughts, Ariel asked if the woman took after either of them. He pretended to consider. “Not really. She said she was Gerald’s side of the family. She was tall and she looked a little like Beethoven.” There, that would have to do. No Ms. F for them, no glimpse of how she swung across the room, or blew out her cheeks, or bit her nails, or went berserk cooking, or made a sound when they made love like a clock poised to strike the hour.

  “Your side of the family, Gerald,” said Ariel. “That suggests various possibilities.”

  Crikey, thought Zeke. A few drops of her anger spattered him as she drove, full steam ahead, toward her husband. But Gerald seemed unaware. “The police,” he announced, rocking the standard lamp. “We should call the police. This is breaking and entering.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Zeke. “Nothing was broken. And I asked her in.”

  “Perhaps someone you know,” Ariel continued, bright and relentless as a plumber’s snake. “One of your hangers-on, your groupies?”

  But even as she spoke, Gerald was gone, pounding up the stairs. After a moment, Ariel slipped off the sofa and followed. Alone, Zeke stood up and, in an effort to calm himself, walked over to the bay window. He peered at one of the sills, checking his handiwork. Except for a small pucker in the paint where a fly had met its demise, the surface was immaculate. From overhead came the scuffle of footsteps—searching, he presumed, for clues—but nothing remained save the nail holes, which were once again hidden by a rug. The day she left, he had returned upstairs hour after hour, tiptoeing into the room as if the coveralls were alive and might, if properly approached, confide in him. But however quietly he moved, however patiently he waited, they said nothing. Finally, just before he packed up for the day, he had fetched his claw-head hammer and levered out the nails. He had put them in an envelope and tucked them, along with the coveralls, into a shopping bag that he set beside his bed. What had sustained him since then was the belief that the Barrows would tell him what the garment had failed to do. Now he fingered the fly’s grave and grappled with the confounding turn of events.

  Upstairs the Barrows’ voices rose. Usually Zeke did his utmost to avoid eavesdropping. For years, during his parents’ stormiest rows, he had covered his ears and recited the instructions for school evacuation. Today, anxious not to miss a syllable, he hastened to the door.

  “Maybe she’s a friend of Seth’s,” said Gerald.

  “Maybe,” said Ariel, “she’s the Empress of Siam.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. She could just as easily be one of your friends. In fact”—there was a loud thud—“she must know one of us. It’s too many coincidences—our holiday, the painter being here—to be a total stranger.”

  Doglike, Zeke shivered. What a dolt he was. Of course she knew the Barrows, though not as their niece. He wanted to run upstairs at once to offer a full description, but Ariel was still hurling gibes and Gerald was shouting, and interrupting either activity was unthinkable. He retreated to the living room and, carefully emptying the pockets, folded his jacket and laid it on the floor beside his chair. Then, he couldn’t have said quite why, he walked over to the bay and slid open the side window. He was astride the sill, listening one last time to hear if the Barrows were calming down, when another bulb detonated. The room flashed to darkness.

  Outside, forgetting about his van, he wandered from one gray city street to the next. The cold afternoon closed in around him. She was gone, vanished, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been when he rang the Barrows’ bell an hour ago. The sidewalks, the passing cars, were filled with women, old, young, tall, short, fat, thin, black, white, but none of them were her. A police car drove sedately by and for a moment he thought of waving it down, but he could hear already the hopeless conversation. A woman, whose name he didn’t know, had abruptly left a house she was visiting. So what? The coveralls and five nails were his only proof of her existence. There were machines, he knew, capable of identifying a person from a fleck of skin, a single hair, but how a civilian, not a scientist or a spy, got access to them he had no idea. The exhilaration he had felt when he first grasped that she was not the Barrows’ niece was entirely gone. How was he ever going to find her again?

  Crossing yet another street without paying attention, he heard a horn and looked up to see a blue van, like the one Phil drove, swerving to avoid him. At once, for reasons stretching back over a decade, his old friend seemed like the perfect destination. Still studying every woman he passed, Zeke made his way through the side streets to Phil’s house and was rewarded by a familiar figure answering the door almost immediately.

  “Zeke, is something wrong? Is your dad okay?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Dad is terrible. How did—”

  A sharp cry echoed down the hall and Phil was hurrying toward it. “Come in,” he called over his shoulder. “Close the door.”

  One thing the two men had always shared was a habit of neatness. They put tools away, used masking tape and drop cloths, washed up meticulously. Once, after a particularly trying discussion with a customer, Phil had announced he was going home to clean the windows; Zeke had understood perfectly. Now the kitchen sink overflowed with dishes, the table and floor were strewn with toys and garments. Lying in a cot near the counter was the source of both cry and chaos: Brenda. Phil picked her up and began to walk back and forth. Zeke cleared a chair of clothes, dirty or clean he couldn’t tell, and sat down. It was, he realized, almost exactly a year since the evening Phil had appeared at his door, standing very upright—a sure sign, in his case, of drunkenness—to announce that Mavis had said yes.

  Yes to what? Zeke had asked.

  Yes to getting hitched, tying the knot, marrying your humble friend. He swept his hand over his head and made a deep bow.

  Zeke had felt his mouth open. For as long as they had known each other Phil had been courting Mavis. In winter they went dancing twice a week; in summer they shared a garden. Phil referred to her without irony, both in her presence and absence, as the love of his life. Whether Mavis, with her shapely arms and rippling hair, reciprocated had never been clear. She did seem fond of Phil, but Zeke had met her several times in the company of other men. He was still adrift in amazement, each second taking him farther from the appropriate response, when Phil had straightened and—another of his tricks—was quite sober. You’re thinking, he had said slowly, why would Mavis, who walks on air, settle for a chap like me.

  I was, confessed Zeke.

  Phil pulled out a chair, sat down, and placed his hands in his lap. Mavis is pregnant, he said. The three of us plan to live happily ever after.

  So you do sleep together, Zeke thought. (He and Emmanuel had often debated the question.) And then immediately revised his thought: not necessarily.

  Of course, Phil went on, this doesn’t mean she’ll
settle down. Mavis can’t help roaming, but I’ll be the house she returns to, and if I choose to keep the door always open, whose business is it but mine?

  Why Mavis, Zeke had wanted to say, when there are so many girls who would treat you well? He was torn four-square between envy, anger, exasperation, and bewilderment. Then, looking at Phil’s straight back, his crisp jeans, his shining shoes, he recognized the truth: it was no one else’s business. Belatedly, he had stepped around the table to embrace his old friend.

  Now Brenda continued to cry at full volume, ignoring Phil’s comic faces, his offer of a bottle, his soothing remarks. Then quite suddenly, as if a switch had turned, she stopped. Phil sat down. “It’s not her fault,” he said. “Mavis has gone off and Brenda misses her.”

  “How old is she?” said Zeke.

  “Thirty-four.”

  “I meant Brenda, actually.”

  “Five months and eleven days.”

  He was watching the baby, an expression on his face that Zeke had seen only once or twice before when Phil and Mavis were working side by side in their garden. He ought to say something, something about Mavis and how he was sure she really did love Phil, but in fact he was sure of nothing. Instead, he stepped over to the sink. As he filled the dish rack, he talked about his father. “When I went round, I didn’t even recognize him. I know for me that’s not saying much, but everything about him was different: his voice, the way he held his head, his wrist bones. And he was angry in the worst way.”

  “Poor sod,” said Phil, gently bouncing Brenda. “He was always so careful. I remember him at the pub, never having crisps or peanuts. Who’s minding the shop?”

  “My mother, but she can’t manage alone.” He scrubbed a particularly stubborn smear of red. “I’m afraid that once I start working there, they’ll never let me go.” He did not add his other, newly acquired fear. If he were stuck in the shop, how could he find the non-niece?

  In the early days, when his parents had begged Phil to fire their son so that he would come back to the shop, Phil had staunchly refused. But this afternoon, still bouncing Brenda, he said, “I don’t see what choice you have. Of course they’ll want you to stay. You’ll have to fight that battle later.” As if the matter were settled, he launched into an account of Brenda’s accomplishments. She liked the swings at the park; her favorite song was “Brown-Eyed Girl”; she could suck her toes and her thumbs with equal ease.

  Listening to this litany, Zeke found all his own aggravations transferred to his friend. At last he burst out, “But you can’t let her do this.”

  “Do what?” said Phil mildly.

  “Saddle you with Brenda. It’s not fair.”

  Phil raised Brenda so that her face was on the same level as his. “I wouldn’t change places with the richest man in New Zealand. Why did you come round? Is something wrong besides your father?”

  For the first time since he rang the bell, Zeke had Phil’s undivided attention, and for a few seconds, as he scoured a saucepan, he couldn’t think where to start. Then he began to explain, not about the Barrows and the niece but how, finally, he had met someone he cared for in the way Phil cared for Mavis, how he had lost her, and had to find her. Across the room he sensed Phil’s startled satisfaction at his avowal and then, as the story unfolded, mild annoyance.

  “Well,” said Phil, “people can’t vanish. What does she look like?”

  This time he wanted to answer but it was surprisingly hard. A woman, five foot nine or ten, springy hair in many shades of brown, a high forehead engraved with three lines, one broken, two continuous, eyes somewhere between green and brown, a nose like a rudder, ears hidden by aforementioned hair but receptive, broad hands with chapped knuckles. Her feet were bony and made Zeke think of the wings of birds. And her voice? Deep, warm, mellifluous. As for what he had seen when he removed her coveralls, the swell of her belly traced by the linea nigra, that was not to be spoken aloud, even to his old friend.

  Phil listened patiently and shook his head. “I can’t say she sounds like anyone I know. She said she’d be in touch. Maybe all you can do is wait. Would you like to hold Brenda?”

  Zeke was about to say something grumpy—waiting worked for you but you knew who Mavis was—but he saw that Phil was offering the most precious remedy he had. He dried his hands and reached for Brenda. Embracing her soft, warm weight, he did feel slightly better.

  He arrived home to find his street jammed with cars. He had to circle twice before he squeezed the van in round the corner. As he walked back toward the house, the noise of riotous pleasure intensified with every step; someone was giving a party. He was just sparing a moment from his own troubles to sympathize with whoever had to endure this havoc at close quarters—and on a Sunday—when, reaching his front door, he discovered that person to be himself. The party had spilled out of the downstairs flat into the common hallway, and Zeke had to fight his way past the revelers. On the stairs, two slender youths were urging a plump woman to chug a beer; all three were clad, minimally, in sheets.

  His own flat provided the barest illusion of safety. The floor throbbed. The stove rattled. Not even the loudest of his clocks could be heard. He sat in the kitchen, miserably giving himself over to the vibrations. When he left home that afternoon, he had expected to be in her company by nightfall, at least to have a name and address. Now he was back again, and he knew only who she wasn’t. For a few evil seconds the notion that he might never see her again raced through his brain. He leaped to his feet and seized a notebook he’d used for estimates last spring. On an empty page, he began a halting list.

  FINDING THE NON-NIECE

  1. Search the city.

  Suppose he could do two hundred houses a day. And suppose there were three million houses in London. That made a mere fifteen thousand days of going door-to-door. By which time he’d be close to eighty and Ms. F would have children of her own.

  2. Watch maternity wards.

  More feasible, but even for those he would have to subcontract. Perhaps he could hire homeless men to work in shifts. Or maybe those Irish girls who begged with their babies in the underground. Emmanuel swore they fed the children cough syrup to keep them quiet.

  3. Find her brother.

  Now why would he think of that? As far as he could recall, she had only mentioned him once. And the brother too was nameless. He was about to score out this suggestion but, as he raised his pen, the memory of how she’d frowned stayed his hand.

  4. Put up posters.

  He could follow the example of people who mislaid pets or bicycles: put up notices on lampposts giving a description and offering a reward. MISSING WOMAN: tall, white, pregnant, last seen wearing nothing. If only he could draw. She was so vivid inside his head, and yet he was utterly unable to convey her to anyone else.

  He couldn’t think of a number five. In his agitation, he rose from the table and went over to the window. This was an impossible list, the labors of Hercules with no goddess to lend a hand. That night in the Barrows’ living room, while the fire burned and their plates emptied, they had talked about whether a person could ever disappear. People used to be able to, she had said, but not anymore. Everyone is in a computer, even the homeless. That’s not true, he had argued. When I couldn’t leave my house no one noticed for a week. People don’t care about their neighbors, at least not in London.

  Below, in the light from the streetlamp, several partygoers were holding cigarettes and cans of beer. “I hope I’m wrong,” Zeke said, “and you’re right.” The words misted against the glass. Then he recalled his jacket lying on the floor. The Barrows were still the only key he had to finding her, though so much harder to turn than he’d imagined. Gerald was too irascible, but Ariel, if he could just get the appropriate pillow under her feet, might be more forthcoming.

  Someone was knocking at his door. “Coming,” he shouted, and rushed to answer.

  The plump girl, her sheet even more precarious, looked at him wild-eyed. “I’m going to be sick,” sh
e said, and, before Zeke could intervene, promptly fulfilled her prediction.

  5

  “Long John Silver. Say Long John Silver.”

  Zeke had let himself into the house as stealthily as a teenager. Now he lingered beside the coatrack, trying to place his father’s words in the appropriate Gilbert and Sullivan. The Pirates of Penzance perhaps? Or H.M.S. Pinafore? Then he remembered the parrot. He walked briskly down the hall and, knocking once, stepped into the living room. Neither his father in his armchair nor the parrot in its cage looked up as he came in.

  “Good bird,” said Don. “Say Long John Silver.”

  The parrot squawked and raised a claw to its beak with a dexterity that reminded Zeke of Brenda. Standing a few feet away, he felt an emotion that it took him several seconds to identify: not pleasure in his father’s improvement, not satisfaction at having for once chosen the right gift, but envy. All his life he had been disappointing his father—one might even call it his main occupation—and here was this antediluvian bunch of feathers, in a matter of days, securely lodged in his affections. As the exchange continued, he registered that, barring the bandage on his neck, Don, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, was looking markedly better than he had on Saturday; indeed, better than in several months. His cheeks no longer had a purplish tinge, and even his hair seemed to have regained its color.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, at last acknowledging Zeke’s presence. “Shouldn’t you be messing around with a paintbrush?”

  “Dad,” he pleaded, “it’s five-thirty. I’ve finished for the day. How are you feeling? Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “The doctor prescribes a walk every day.” Don patted his thighs as if to encourage them. “Next week he wants me to start going to a gym. I told him it was nuts, me trotting around like a hamster on a treadmill with all the work at the shop, but he insists. Sit down.”