Beautiful Money

        Mother closed her sleepy left eye. She was a tiny woman standing in my bedroom doorway over Leda's garage. She was angry because I had on jeans and a T-shirt. "At least you could have dressed," she said. Except for her eye, she was perfect - all done up in a dark navy suit, a cloche, and tan gloves. She had permed her white hair into tight corkscrews. The pupil in her sleepy eye floated under her lid like a glass marble and stuck there.
         "We're not going to the Stork Club," I said.
         Even if she wanted to hang on someone's arm I wasn't going to pretend. I hadn't spoken to her since what she called "Father's accident." I did the best I could. I offered the cane with a rubber end. I held the door.
         "I could break my hip," she said.
         "Use your cane," I said.
         Of course that hurt her. I had a knack for that. Her good eye shone like the cultured pearl dangling on her necklace. She descended the stairs, taking very small dignified steps and using the cane like a theater prop. Her burgundy red car reflected the sunlight. Up close I could make out the raw brand-new smell.
         "I spent too much money for a car I never use," she said. I helped her in behind the wheel. I got in beside her.
         "That's real leather," she said.
         "It looks expensive," I said. Of course, I'm not allowed to drive.
         She sat there like the Queen of England on a throne twisting the dials. She complained that the steering wheel was too big for her dainty fingers, that the car's big engine used too much gas, that the color was so loud it hurt her eyes. I didn't budge. Then she straightened her hem and her nylons before starting down toward the harbor. The way she drove was nerve-wracking - leaning forward, hooking her arms over the wheel, squinting through the windshield like there was a snowstorm outside. The restaurant she liked was at the harbor entrance on a pier.
         She chose an outdoor table under an awning.
         "I thought something might have happened to you," she said. I did my best to smile like that was a joke.
         A waiter in a white jacket took our order. They were old friends.
         "I haven't seen you in a while, Madam," he said. I know she enjoyed being recognized.
         "Tony, I'm embarrassed to say I haven't had anyone to take me," she said, giving her reserved social smile. The one that doesn't show her broken tooth. "I'm all alone now and my children are preoccupied with their own affairs."
         I ordered two shrimp cocktails. The waiter narrowed his eyes. "Come again?," he said. "What's the matter? You hard of hearing?" I said. Mother deliberated over the menu. She ordered the one-pound lobster and spread her napkin on her lap. When they brought it out, she jabbed at the claw with a small fork, her pearl necklace swinging back and forth like a watch fob. After a few mouthfuls she complained of stomach pains. She was, at her age, no longer interested in eating. Food meant nothing, she said. My shrimp came in a cup arranged like feathers of an Indian headdress. I ate while the lobster lay on its back with its claws in the air in a posture of surrender.
         Mother was glancing my way as she picked up the check. "At least you can drive me home," she said. Outside, the red car with its bulging fenders reminded me of the lobster.
         I took my time behind the wheel and pulled out into traffic. We were in a newly homogenized suburb and everything looked gray and angular. I made a wrong turn.
         "There's a lot of traffic," she said, as if the traffic was intruding on her privacy. "Where did all these cars come from?"
         "I really couldn't tell you, Mother, but if you're really concerned I could stop one of the cars behind me and ask them."
         "Watch the road," she said. She turned her face to the mirror and preened, which was her way of saying the way home was up to me.
         I hadn't driven since my license was taken away and I can't say that I ever enjoyed it. I found the way home on dead reckoning. I drove down the tree-lined street and I pulled in front of the house and we went in. I eased her down on her couch. She floated down into the pillow and put her head against the cushion and one arm behind her head. She seemed so small and weightless, like a folded-up envelope.
         "Make your mother some tea," she said.
         I should have gone home then. The cups sat on dusty pegs on the sideboard and I washed them before bringing them over. I set them out on the table, and she picked one up and squinted over the rim.
         "This one has a chip-get the good one."
         I suppose, like us, only three survived.
         I boiled water and put in our teabags. She was sitting on the sofa in a dainty pose with her legs crossed at her ankles. She watched a musical with loud, brassy orchestra. I poured the tea. She put on her glasses and looked at me. Then she squinted at her tea. Behind those thick teardrop lenses her eyes seemed lifeless, as dull as the brown frames. She might not have been looking at anything. She folded her hands in her lap and tapped a finger to the orchestra horns. She had long, spidery fingers and the powder she wore couldn't hide the age spots.
         "Do you need money?" She sighed over the words.
         "If it was about the money, I'd come around every day of the week to check on how you're doing," I said. "I'd send your laundry out and I'd pick it up too. I'd sit with you and watch idiot television."
         "If you're remarking after your sister, I just want you to be clear about it."
         "It's your will," I said. "Give everything to Leda if you want."
         She dismissed my remark by sipping tea. "I can't walk after the knee surgery," she said and turned the other way, plumping the pillow to make herself more comfortable.
         "You'd be walking fine if that jerk of a nephew hadn't taken you out during a snowstorm."
         "I could run out of food and starve to death if it wasn't for him," she said.
         Then we had nothing to say. It's been a long time since we had. It's been like that since I was six. We sat in the afternoon shadows staring across the living room. It was like I was part of the furniture, like she didn't see me at all. I suppose I was never more to her than a doll she dressed in cute outfits, and as I grew up I became invisible.
         "I wish you could get your driver's license reinstated," she said. She sat on the sofa, too exhausted to say good-bye. I pushed open the door and stepped outside.
         "I'm going," I said.
         Like Father, I didn't let my feelings show.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

         I looked out the window at the house across the street. It had a big front lawn and a white post fence from another era. It had stucco walls and a big veranda with two round pillars bracing the overhang. Its mansard roof made it seem stout like a portly gentleman wearing a bowler hat. Inside a top floor window I could see a beautiful woman on the telephone holding the receiver to her ear. She stroked her golden hair pressed against her cheek by the earpiece.
         She had glittering blue eyes, skin that glowed, and fine Scandinavian cheekbones. I knew her name was Irene Kaplan, Esq. because one afternoon right after the mail delivery I opened her postbox and looked at her mail. There were a dozen envelopes, all addressed to her. Sometimes, pretending I was pruning the shrubs gnawed by one of the hungry raccoons that hung out in the drainpipes, I waited by the front of her house hoping to meet her. But we must have been on different astral planes because she never came out while I was there.
         So I only got to watch her tend her windowbox geraniums from my bedroom window where I did all my watching. All I could think of was seeing her naked.

         After Father died, he spoke through my dreams. He had died going all out running on a treadmill the way he did everything. He taught me to drive the same way, gunning the engine, pedal to the floor. In my dreams he would be sitting in the passenger seat while I drove flat out on a highway. He would grin and slap my shoulder, happy to see me, and I always woke smelling the pungent cigar smoke from his long, black panatela cigar. Then the dreams changed. I would see him outside a dilapidated house in a slum neighborhood late at night and he would be standing in the shadows smoking a cigarette stub like a bum. He hadn't smoked a cigarette in years. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, his skin was ashen, his clothes shabby. The sad grin on his unshaven face warned me to escape. And that is all I ever could make out of those dreams, nothing a shrink could tell me. Everything came to a sudden end and I would wake in bed. It was a riddle of the dream that he disappeared when I needed him most.
         Mother missed him another way. She felt lonely for company and invited the Greenhouse family to Sunday dinners, setting out cloth napkins and her good china and crystal. She wanted to fill her big house with guests. The Greenhouse family meant Leda, the postman, Jeremy (their twenty-year-old), and me. If everyone came, Mother was cheerful. Jeremy - the star invitee - mostly complained about missing a day's work at the bagel bakery. Nonetheless, Mother was proud of him. The postman was another story. When he spoke, Mother trembled. Her revenge was to act like he didn't exist. She would have turned her back if the dimensions of the dining room allowed. Sometimes, speaking in the third person as if he was not at the table, she called him a moron.

Leda's garage room rented for fifteen dollars a week. But my sister had had trouble keeping a tenant because she wanted the rent Saturday morning. No tenant would get up that early to hand-deliver the rent. But me, 8:00 AM sharp I made sure I handed her three crisp five-dollar bills. Then she sat me at the kitchen table while she boiled coffee and spoke loudly about how the world mistreated her. That was Leda. "Brother, you don't know, I've paid my pound of flesh!" She went on about how she couldn't find a tenant with a steady job. I kept my mouth shut. I sat there. I wanted to keep that lovely room-it had a bath and a private entrance. I suppose that makes me a hypocrite though the truth would get me nowhere, and on disability it's hard enough to rent a place-at least one that's not a dump. So I held to the status quo. I nodded my head, pretending to be a happy listener. Exaggeration is Leda's gift like sarcasm is mine. Leda always said I was mean.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

         After Father died exercising on a treadmill, the law office visit was the worst afternoon of my life. The Greenhouse family was bad enough. Irene Kaplan, Esq. was worse. She was our probate lawyer. Her office was a small white room with one window and it was hot as an oven. My palms sweated while waiting for the reading of the will and I sat in a plastic chair and pretended to be interested in a Sports Illustrated magazine.
         Leda complained about her asthma. The postman and Jeremy played a furious game on a Game Boy. Larry, husband number two, was the postman. Number one, who I liked, had divorced her. He became a bush pilot in Alaska. Larry was passive. He worked for Unemployment and lived in a dream. Father had treated him like a lost son. "Larry boy," he would say. "Pass the mustard."
         Mother wore her blue suit. She sat in an upholstered chair snuffling into a lace handkerchief. When she found out she would inherit half a million, she had a good cry over Father's generosity. That was Father's way. He enjoyed acting poor, showing up in torn pants with holes in his shoes.
         Not that I care about money. I'm my father's son. Money means nothing. His absence was the hard part of his dying.
         But all that money made Mother sentimental. She kissed her daughter and her nephew and a startled Irene, who blushed when Mother launched a kiss onto her cheek. I kept my distance. I watched the ceiling fan sputter and a squadron of flies dive between the blades. Of course the will upset Leda. She had hoped for something for herself. That afternoon she burst into my room. She banged at the door, then forced her way in.
         Damn! Before she showed up I was okay. I spent hours at the window watching the neighborhood. Each house on the street took on a personality: one droll, one quiet and withdrawn, another debonair. I was looking at the big white frame house. It had become my second favorite next to Irene's stucco, because with its two porches, tall pines, and quaint archway instead of a garage, it was serene and dignified. I was thinking how it might have looked on a June Sunday in 1920.
         Leda spoke to the back wall. I knew her game was to rile me. She knows I get livid when someone avoids looking at me. This time it didn't work. I scratched my ears and shook my head. I continued observing the windows of the nearby house. I saw the Venetian blinds open and people in white moving around in shadows. I wondered what they were doing.
         "You need to find a job," she said.
         She shouted and shook her fist at my nose. I got busy protecting my nose.
         These days, following my doctor's advice, I ignore unpleasant things, turning them into comedy. When Leda wrung her hands and hollered in that Italian way, I thought of all the betrayed housewives in old Fellini films. I imagined Leda as a Sicilian housewife wearing a kerchief and holding an old-fashioned rug beater like a truncheon. Yes, that was Leda - starring in my film, babbling in Italian, and beating the bejesus out of a rug. The funny part was those hidden dollars Leda was so hot for. Father collected old money in a haphazard way. He loved the engraved beauty of old money. For thirty years he stashed bills and coins in a cigar box just because they were beautiful. His beautiful money included nine two-dollar bills, a five-dollar coin from Liberia, a dozen liberty silver dollars, five mercury dimes, an Indian Head dime, and four Indian Head pennies along with his army .45-caliber pistol, one clip of .45-caliber ammunition, a matchbook from a clam bar called King Kong Lounge, and two moldering packets of Black Jack gum.
         Leda took the .45 pistol, though she denied it. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it waits for some thug to redeem it in all its grim glory, its black steel shining in the window of some Brooklyn pawnshop.
         "Buon giorno," I said when she slammed the door.

         I suppose Mother felt obliged to invite her lawyer to Sunday dinner and perhaps Irene Kaplan, Esq came to dinner because she had to. Of course I snubbed her. I wasn't about to fall all over myself. I watched football and drank supermarket beer. But just to let her know I had class I said to no one in particular, "Ordinarily I don't drink supermarket beer. To me it's belly wash in a can. I prefer Belgian ale at forty-two degrees Fahrenheit with lacy foam ruffles on the lip of a round glass."
         "Have another," Jeremy said.
         "How many is that?" I asked, but I didn't care. I was drunk.
         I sat on the couch watching the eighty-inch screen and tossed a rubber football. Jeremy had a dull expression and stone hands.
         "You need your own television," he said guzzling down a beer. "Why don't you get one?"
         "I've got other things on my mind besides a new television. You'll see when you get older that not everything's about the Yankees and the Giants."
         "What else is there?" he said. The sad thing was he was serious.
         "My advice to you is find some girl and have a relationship."
         "I get my share," he said in an irritated way that told me just how big a share he had. He strangled the beer can in his fist. The mangled can lying on its side reminded me of a flattened palooka.
         "I'm not talking about sleeping around," I said. "Besides, you have to stop listening to your grandmother and your parents. You don't know anything about life. You'll die a moron, like them."
         "They mean well which is more than I can say for you."
         That's the thanks I get for sound advice.
         We sat down to dinner at a round table, a family heirloom too small for six. Mother took her old seat by the kitchen door and Leda squeezed her chair in beside her. Jeremy and the postman huddled on my right and Irene was seated across from me like a bad dream I once had. Her hair was golden and her smile was a sunburst. She wore a soft pink dress that exposed her tan arms. I broke into her stare and she gave me a smirk. I noticed she was very thin and her face was narrow. There was loose skin on her neck. Her nose seemed long and shaped like a hawk beak. She wasn't the beautiful vision I had seen in the window. She looked like someone else.
         I chewed the roast beef, staring into her eyes. She stared at her food. Her eyes, small and cruel, were lighted with conceit. She only nibbled the end of her roast. She struggled to chew a piece of gristle. She could have spoken to someone or turned to the wall. But she didn't. Suddenly I had this urge. I wanted to say I loved her. I stammered and she swallowed the gristle and turned away, pointing that beak nose in the air. She made some comment to my mother and Mother put her chin in her hand and looked awfully tired.
         From then on I looked down at my plate at the garden scene of an English thatched cottage with a picket fence surrounded by daffodils. The daffodils were the same pale yellow as the check the government sent me. The Victorian windows glowed with a warm light. Under the mashed potatoes I counted dozens of flowers in the beds of the tiny front yard. I realized I loved her Norwegian cheekbones in the worst way. There were forty-seven daffodils.
         Leda yanked down on my sleeve. "Isn't that Father's watch?"
         Mother held her cake fork in midair. "Leda!" she said.
         There was a general commotion then. The postman thumped a spoon on the table and Jeremy belched.
         "Our father would never own one like this," I answered coolly because I had trumped her. "This watch has Roman numbers and what antique dealers call a cushion case. Our father would not have favored one with foreign numbers."
         Leda squinted at the dial, staring it down.
         "I seem to remember he had one like this. I seem to remember that he wore it to my wedding."
         "You were too drunk to remember," I said.
         The postman, insulted, crimped up his face and his jaw moved. Then he went into the living room and switched on the television. He plunged onto the sofa and watched the game.
         Mother took a bite of her cake and settled in her chair. Everyone exhaled a breath; I went back to eating. And all this time Irene gazed straight ahead, composing her face. She put her fingertips to her cheeks. Her cheeks were flushed. I knew she was addled because she was breathing through her mouth. The sound of her breathing blended into the gasping air conditioner.
         "What are you looking at?" Mother said.
         "Nothing," I said. "It's hot in here."
         "Air conditioning costs money," she said.
         "What about Father's watch?" Leda said. "It's mine you know."
         "You prove it's his and I'll give it to you."
         "Don't talk to my mother that way," Jeremy said.
         "Jeremy!" Mother said.

         Hundreds of Monarch butterflies swarmed over the shrubs. Their golden wings glittered and fluttered as they floated through the sunlight.
         Jeremy went outside to smoke a cigarette. I could see his cigarette smoke drifting past the window panes like bands of silk unraveling into threads. When he came back in, the screen door banged like a gunshot and slammed shut.
         "I don't want you to wind up in the hospital." Leda said.
         Time was I pocketed a small pistol, unloaded for the sake of my own genitalia.
         The postman looked up from the sofa and gave me the finger. That was the best he could do. He was preparing to descend into football stupor. Some years ago I tossed a fruit bowl at his head. The peaches and oranges marked the wall like a wild sunset for nearly a year. The juice slicked the floor and when the postman lunged at me he wrenched his back. Out the window the butterflies had flown off leaving the shrub's black branches screeching against the glass.
         Jeremy put an arm around Mother's shoulder and massaged her neck. She looked so old and as skinny as a bird. I just sat there with my elbows up and my napkin fluttering in my plate. There was some rumbling of chairs as Irene whispered. Did she say she was late or that she had a date? I never found out. She escaped me in a hurry. She made her way across the carpet as silent as air. She was tall and slim like a fashion model. When she opened the door there was droning and sudden stale heat. The heat made me queasy. No one even saw her out.
         "You had too much to drink." Jeremy said.
         I used my napkin to mop the floor.
         "Ha!" Jeremy said.
        "Oh my goodness," Mother said. She looked queasy herself and turned quickly away.
         "I'll get paper towels." Jeremy said.
         "It looks like another pleasant afternoon comes to an end," Leda said. She showed me an ugly face.
         I gagged. I was heavy-footed and slow outside.

         That evening I dreamed that Irene had a crush on me. I can't recall what the circumstances were or whether my heart was broken but I knew she was there. We were eating together, platters of wonderful food in a beautiful dining room on a date. Then the lights went out and I felt her loss as empty space and I felt terribly guilty, as if I had done something to chase her off. I thought of death as empty space, of my dead father trapped in an airless box. I went to the window and gulped fresh air. The neighborhood houses seemed wonderfully safe. They were full of stuff. They had organdy curtains in the windows and painted shutters. Their brick chimneys shone with sunlight, and wrens playing lookout on their peaked roofs swooped down to scavenge the lawns. Then the dark settled in and the rolling lawns became emerald green. The flower gardens were blossoms of fire. It felt good to breathe the luscious damp air. Even the automobiles parked in the shade of the street with the milky reflection of moonlight on their fenders held some mystery.
         A week later I felt my pocket for the small pistol, touching the machined edge of the butt plate and the crosshatching on the bone grip when Jeremy told me. There was a big empty space like a bullet hole in my chest. "When we found her, it was too late for CPR," he said.
         I put my finger on the trigger guard and extracted the barrel from my pants and with a squinting eye aimed at the windowpane and then at the roof. "I'll look for myself," I said. "I don't need you to squire me around."
         "I just came to tell you," he said, gawking in the doorway. "I don't give a damn one way or the other who gets what. You got anything to drink?"
         "Sure," I said. "You're not a stranger. Help yourself to a quality beer."
         He scoured the fridge and took a large Chimay and yanked off the cork with one athletic move.
         By the time I caught the bus Leda was there packing everything in cartons. I knew she had been crying. She turned quickly away. I could see the hard glint in her eyes.
         "What are you doing here?" She seemed surprised that I would come. She pushed up the window sash to let in some air.
         "I came to see her," I said. Leda was wearing a ratty bathrobe. "I have something to talk to you about."
         "You idiot," she said. "Make it quick."
         "Aren't you going to invite me in?" I said, with the moths fluttering around the porch light.
         "I don't want to disturb her."
         "Call the police," I said, "if it bothers you so much."
         "Sure," she said. "Another one of your wisecracks. Is that all you came for?"
         "Our mother," I said. I pushed past Leda. Mother was slumped on the couch as if napping with the television on. She had on the same fancy suit she had worn at the restaurant. She had waited all night expecting Leda to take her to lunch.
         "You came about the will," she said, sticking out her lower lip the way our father used to when he was sore. "She was alive a good long time, as if you would know anyway. It's me or Jeremy that took her to the doctors and they said she was remarkable for an eighty-seven-year-old woman. She had a pulse rate of fifty-nine."
         "You're sure she's gone?" I asked this question mostly to myself.
         Then it all came out, more like a shout than a sob. She bent over, holding her stomach as if she had a knife wound. The fat tears dropped from her eyelashes and spotted the rug. Her nose got fat and red. Jeremy came in then and offered her a swig of his beer and a Kleenex.
         "You know damn well her mind was going," I said. "She didn't even know the day of the week any more."
         "And you do?" she said. She gave me the family sneer. I took that to mean that just the two of us were left and she didn't want to think of our father gone and being left alone with me. "Don't touch her," she said.
         I moved away. "I'd just leave her be," I said.
         "We should put a blanket over her," Jeremy said.
         "Put a blanket over her," Leda said. "It's the decent thing."
         Jeremy rummaged in the hall closet and found a comforter and folded it like a tent very gently over the couch.
         The three of us looked down at the folded comforter like staring into a deep well. Her feet hung out from the bottom until I went over and took off her shoes, low-heeled strapless slip-ons stained with perspiration. Her feet seemed cold, fragile, and white like pieces of ceramic china. I tucked a corner of the comforter under her toes.
         I said, "She didn't know how to --."
         I stopped myself. Leda's face went blank for a long moment.
         "You're going to have to find another place."
         I felt unsteady on my feet as if the floor had tilted.
         "I'll call a funeral home," Jeremy said. "Does it matter which one?"
         "Nothing too fancy," Leda said.
         Then, as if answering a question, she turned to me, "Our father, yes I think of him. We should have put you in a nursing home. I let you stay because of them. He wouldn't have suffered so much if he had listened to me. I could show you medical evidence."
         The thought of Father made me sad. I felt a throbbing in my throat and my windpipe tightening. I just set my jaw listening to her going on. I gritted my teeth as the lights flashed past like painted horses on a merry-go-round. It was better he went quickly, mishandled though it was. I thought about Irene Kaplan, Esq. and I opened my eyes and saw Leda out the window. Her tangled hair receded into the shadows and her long face was suspended above her shoulders with her mouth moving. She had been a gawky kid once, all elbows and knees, and the dim light took some pounds off and she seemed to be waiting in the doorway for our father's smile, and I remembered him coming home at five o'clock taking the turn onto our sidewalk swinging his lunch pail and bursting up the steps with his arms reaching to gather us in.
         "You aren't listening," she said. She slammed down the window sash.
         Outside I caught the early morning bus coming around the corner. It was crowded with people carrying briefcases on their way to work. I rode home standing all the way.
         I got off across the street in front of the stucco. Someone built that house when they built them right and I bet Irene Kaplan, Esq slept soundly. I said a few things in a loud voice but I doubt she heard. Then I stood under her window and called to her. I bellowed her name so loud that the windows rattled but if the neighbors heard they never showed themselves, although I did see a light go on down the street. I was long gone by the time the police arrived if anyone thought to call them. Here, alone in this neighborhood, I see more dangerous raccoons than people after midnight-the people are safely asleep, and the raccoons bite, though only when cornered.