Buffalo Noir Page 15

  Lou liked old things, an interest he had developed after selling for a pittance the complete Depression glass dish set Georgie’s wife Mary had left in his attic for safekeeping while they looked for a home in Dallas. Less than chastened by the girl’s rage, he had suggested that his son learn to control his wife. Still, he had listened and understood his mistake, resolving never to repeat it. If he could be said to have a hobby, then, it would be antiquing. But the word hobby wasn’t entirely accurate. Though he used the computer Spiro gave him to study the value of silver tea sets, gilt-edged china, Hummel figurines, ivory-handled utensils, vintage sewing machines and typewriters, gold pocket watches with chains intact, gramophones and music cylinders, porcelain dolls, paper dolls, wooden and metal toy trucks, tin product signs, stamped cookie tins, Avon bottles, well-kept furniture, and other detritus of bygone eras—he didn’t build collections, as true hobbyists did. He searched dark, dusty shops for items he could sell quickly for the biggest possible profit. He liked old things if and only if he could flip them.

  Helen Schildkraut was an old thing. She had papery skin, brittle white hair, abundant liver spots on her hands, and tired, rheumy eyes that might once have been green. Lou met Helen over the fence one day and later told Athena, “That old girl’s gotta be pushin’ eighty if not pullin’ it.” He liked the line so much he kept repeating it—in less-than-clever contexts. Pushing three hundred if not pulling it certainly applied to his fat cousin Markos, but pushing diarrhea if not pulling it when the Towne didn’t seat him quickly enough made no sense, and pushing ugly if not pulling it for Spiro’s wife at Fort Benning was just plain mean. In their nearly forty years together Athena never laughed at his jokes, or, for that matter, at anyone else’s, but the insult to her daughter-in-law did bring a small smile to her lips. She was at first indifferent to Helen and told Lou, “You like old stuff so much, you be her friend.” He forgot his wife’s comment until Helen saw him out front one day and asked if he could help open a stuck cabinet door.

  Mounting the porch steps and entering through the front door, he had to walk through the parlor and the dining room to get to her kitchen. Wiry and robust, Lou was used to walking fast but found himself moving in slow motion. Though he had seen the leaded glass windows from outside, he had given little thought to what lay behind the curtains. Now every corner was a revelation, furnished with antiques, from knickknacks in mirror shadow boxes to elaborate table lamps with crystal teardrops dangling from their shades to marble-topped end tables to a clock in the belly of a leaping brass lion to pieces of furniture that predated FDR. She had a crystal chandelier, a grandfather clock with gold-flaked numerals, and a claw-foot mahogany china cabinet full of gilt-edged, gold-leaf, Depression-green, and milky-blue treasures, from teacups and bowls to platters, butter dishes, and candlesticks. After he jerked open the stuck cabinet door and sanded the edges, he stayed for afternoon tea.

  “You won’t believe the stuff she’s got,” he said to Athena at dinner that evening. Face flushed enough to ignite the roots of the few gray hairs left near his forehead, he described the pieces he’d seen, estimating their value because he had not yet gone online to check. When he finished, he sat back with a self-satisfied grin that made his wife narrow her eyes at him and purse her lips even more.

  “Don’t matter what she got, Lou,” Athena replied. “Ain’t your stuff.”

  “We talked this afternoon,” Lou said, pausing to let his sentence sink in. “We talked a lot, Helen and me. She’s a widow.”

  Athena sucked her teeth. “So now she Helen, not old girl or Miss Whats-her-kraut.”

  Lou dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “One daughter, who died unmarried. Two sisters, both dead without children. Her husband was an only child. No nieces or nephews from either side of the family. No cousins. No bridge club. No garden club. No friends who come to visit. Don’t go to church or give to charity. Used to have a hairdresser who made house calls but he died. Used to have a handyman but he died too.”

  Athena snorted. “Lonely old woman.” She shook her head hard. “God forbid that’s what I be. Hope I go first.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Lou said. “She’s got nobody in the world and needs stuff done. She’s tired of depending on neighborhood kids to cut the grass and shovel the snow.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s eighty-six, with a house full of stuff worth a small fortune and nobody to leave it to.”

  “Very small but enough for you, eh? So to get into will you gonna be her handyman and new best friend—for dusty dishes and dirty lamps and some tiger with a clock in his ass.” She shook her head in unmasked disgust.

  “In the belly,” Lou said, “and it’s a lion.”

  Athena snorted again. “Whatever. Ain’t worth time you’ll put in.” She shrugged. “But is your time to waste. Just don’t rub your hands together till you find something worth real money. Then you get back to me.”

  * * *

  He got back to Athena a week later, after Helen activated the automatic garage door opener to give him access to the rakes and lawn tools and he first saw the old car covered with a large canvas tarp. Checking to make sure Helen wasn’t looking at him through the kitchen window, he lifted the back end of the canvas and felt his throat close. Heart pounding and mind racing, he raked and bagged leaves as quickly as he could that afternoon. The moment he got home he hit the Internet and let out a long breath when he found what he was seeking.

  That evening at dinner he smiled as he told his wife about the car, a navy-blue, front-wheel-drive 1936 Cord 810 convertible—in mint condition, if he could judge from the rear end. Even with four flat tires, it was worth at least eighty or ninety grand, maybe even as much as a quarter million.

  Athena didn’t offer a single snort and let Lou introduce her to Helen the next day.

  Athena joined Helen for tea one afternoon each week, sometimes taking her baklava or tiropita or some other flaky delight wrapped in phyllo dough. Sometimes she took Helen shopping for groceries, which consisted mainly of Salisbury steak and fried chicken TV dinners. Sometimes they went for ice cream, which Helen loved. Meanwhile, Lou took care of Helen’s yard work and rolled out her trash tote the night before garbage collection day. He replaced her crusty rotary dial telephone with a sleek desk model that featured large buttons and caller ID. The evening her power went out and she called in a panic, he took her some of his famous chicken souvlaki, which she ate by candlelight as he went into the dank basement with his flashlight and searched for the fuse box. As the days shortened and temperatures fell, Lou returned to the basement and came up with her cobwebbed storm windows, which he cleaned and hung. He also brought over his caulking gun to seal off her house from drafts. By the beginning of November, Helen had dined with them four times. On the third occasion she wept as she told them how grateful she was for this newfound friendship. On the fourth, having tried her hand at cooking for the first time in decades, she contributed some God-awful German thing that left both Lou and Athena with such indigestion they couldn’t sleep.

  That year they went to Dallas for Christmas, and Athena complained so much about the mattress that Georgie and Mary surrendered their own bed after the first night and slept in the guest room themselves. While Lou went golfing with Georgie the next day, Athena spent twenty minutes with Christina and Ari—in kindergarten and third grade, respectively—then followed Mary about the house, finding fault with the decor and the furniture and the window treatments, as well as with Mary’s parenting and housekeeping skills. That evening, when Lou telephoned Helen to let her know they had arrived safely and would return in a week, neither he nor Athena noticed the looks of contempt Mary shot Georgie or the tension in their clenched jaws. Two afternoons later, having finally mastered the caller ID, Helen rang back and in a quavering voice told them how much she missed them and wished they would come home. The instant she hung up, they booked seats on a flight out the next day, Christmas Eve. In the morning neither Lou nor Athe
na noticed Mary’s smile as Georgie loaded their luggage into the minivan and backed into the street to take his parents to the airport.

  It wasn’t until late January at one of their now weekly Thursday dinners that Helen mentioned her will. In a blue dress and pearls, she looked small in her chair—her chair, Lou reflected, because neither he nor Athena ever sat in it anymore, even when Helen wasn’t there. She gazed at Lou, seated on her right, and then Athena, on her left, and said their many kindnesses would not go unrewarded.

  “I don’t have much,” she said. “Just an old house with old things nobody wants, and my husband’s old car nobody’s driven in sixty-odd years.” As always when mentioning Heinrich, she dabbed her eyes. “He was much older than I, you know.” They knew. “He’d be more than a hundred and ten now.” They knew that too. “I was his legal secretary, but after a week we both just knew we were each other’s destiny.” She looked off for a moment, gazing into a distant corner. “Less than ten years together, but he was the love of my life. When he died I just couldn’t bear to give away his things or sell the house he loved.” She turned to Lou. “My sisters came to live with me. They were lovely girls, and we were happy together for many years. But now they’re gone too.” Her voice cracked, and she shifted her attention to Athena. “Until you two moved in, I had no one. I know an old house with old stuff isn’t worth much to young people nowadays, but you leave the things you love to the people you love, and I love you both. I’ve put you in my will.”

  Of course, they protested, assuring her that hers was pleasant company and such a gesture wasn’t necessary. But in bed that night Athena initiated sex, despite their having already done it that month. Afterward, on her back in the dark and tugging down her gown, she said, “Wonder how long she gonna live.” She felt Lou shrug beside her.

  “She’s eighty-six and fragile as a robin’s egg,” he replied, pulling his boxers back up. “She can’t live forever.” Soon they drifted off to sleep, peaceful in the certainty that before long their fortune would improve substantially.

  But live Helen did, all through that cold dark winter and into the sunny days of spring—as Lou and Athena ran her errands, shoveled her snow, cleaned her house, cleaned and set out her porch furniture, washed her clothes and her front windows, helped her plant flowers in her garden while Athena’s garden languished, reset the cable box that sat atop her twenty-five-inch RCA color console every time she pushed the wrong buttons on the remote, gave her a microwave oven to make heating her TV dinners easier and then reset it every time she pushed the wrong buttons on the keypad, readjusted her electronic thermostat every time she disengaged the furnace by pushing the wrong buttons on the display panel, sat with her in her living room to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and reruns of Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy, sat at her bedside to hold her hand when she wasn’t feeling well, and took her to this or that of her numerous doctors. The more time they spent with her, the more strength they discovered beneath her seemingly fragile exterior. They knew she suffered from shingles, psoriasis, alopecia, muscle tremors, osteoporosis, and memory loss, but were surprised to learn she had already survived two heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, stomach cancer, skin cancer, and back surgery.

  Through the winter Lou had entertained half-serious thoughts of putting a pillow over Helen’s face or snuffing the pilot light on her stove’s back burners one night so the house would fill with natural gas. But episode after episode of one CSI show or another (along with a dream in which he shared a cell with his son Niko) convinced him he didn’t know enough to hide the evidence of suffocation and wasn’t yet desperate enough to take the chance. And the possibility of a gas explosion that would destroy his inheritance was all he needed to reject the stove idea. He had no choice but to face the truth. Helen Schildkraut was too stubborn to die. Stubborn himself, he couldn’t help but admire her determination to live forever against the odds, and it was there that he found the strength to continue. After all, as he explained to Athena one evening, she didn’t need them every day, just a few times a week for a total of ten or fifteen hours. The house, the antiques, the car—everything together might bring in $400,000. What were ten or fifteen hours a week in the face of such a payoff? And so, with their eyes on the prize, they settled into a routine that was at times difficult but manageable.

  * * *

  Despite a reported increase in the area’s burglary rate, the Washingtons moved into the house on the other side of Helen’s when she was ninety and Lou and Athena finally qualified for Social Security. Pete Washington was a tall, well-built, coffee-colored man with a bald head and a black mustache above an easy smile. His wife was petite, short-haired, and very dark. Before anyone in the neighborhood made their acquaintance, word went round that they were drug dealers or speculators who would flip the house or ghetto lottery winners who chose Allentown gentrification over a suburban McMansion. When someone engaged Ebere Washington in conversation at a local market, the news that she was from Nigeria was the only remnant of the exchange to make it back to the street and was enough to convince some of the wagging tongues that they were part of Buffalo’s growing refugee population. Apparently, no one noticed the Buffalo State College faculty sticker on Pete’s Camry or the Buffalo General Hospital sticker and MD license plate on Ebere’s Prius.

  As he often told others, Lou had no problem with black people. He’d worked with them, served them meals, and a few times hired them. Sure, there were some assholes, but anybody who worked his way out of wherever he’d been born, as he himself had done, was okay by him—not necessarily to be his friend, but okay. Having come to America later than Lou and having spent much of her life isolated at home raising her boys, Athena was less magnanimous than her husband when it came to race. Some of them, she supposed, were all right, but on the whole she thought they were trouble and said so to Helen during one of their afternoon teas.

  “Oh, but Dr. Washington is different,” Helen said, with mild reproach in her voice. “And such a nice man.”

  Athena set down her teacup. “You meet?”

  “Over the fence last week.” Helen smiled with a twinkle of something Athena could not understand in her eyes. “He’s a professor. Isn’t that wonderful? Heinrich often said all colored people needed was a chance. And the Washingtons are proof of it. The wife is a real doctor.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice as if about to mention the unmentionable. “Ob-gyn.” Then she sat back and clasped her hands in her lap. “And they have a son too, away at college in Chicago.” She nodded. “Very nice people.”

  In bed, as he sat up reading one of his antiques guides, Athena told Lou about the Washingtons. Shrugging at her obvious discomfort, he said, “Good for him, and I guess a lady doc’s okay if she knows her place as a wife.” They weren’t the first people of color in the area, he reminded her—in fact, there were lots of them, all kinds of coloreds from all over the world. A few days later, after he met Pete Washington—who seemed vaguely familiar—and shook his hand, he said to Athena, “Told you, I got no trouble with blacks.”

  It took Lou almost a month to recognize the danger posed by the newcomers. It was midafternoon of a bright fall Friday, and in golf shirt and walking shorts he was on his way home from visiting the antique shops that dotted Allen between Elmwood and Main. He had stopped at the Towne for a bite of saganaki, just enough to keep him till dinner, and rounded the corner of his street with visions of sinking into his recliner. But he saw that a lot of leaves had fallen since his morning departure and guessed his recliner would have to wait until he had raked the front lawns. But three or four doors from the corner he stopped and squinted at what he thought he saw eight or ten doors up the street.

  It looked like somebody was raking Helen Schildkraut’s lawn.

  Lou hustled up the street, recognizing Pete Washington as the interloping landscaper. Worse, Pete was using Helen’s old green plastic rake—which meant he’d been inside the garage and might have seen the Cord. Would he know what it was? Of
course he would, Lou thought, if he saw it. He was a professor, smart. The question was, was he the kind of guy nosy enough to lift the tarp?

  “Hey, Pete,” Lou said. “What you up to?”

  “Just raking.” In polo shirt, shorts, and sandals, Pete stopped working and wiped his forehead with tissue he pulled from his pocket.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was doing my lawn and my rake fell apart. Helen saw me through the window and offered to let me use hers. I’m just repaying the favor.”

  Lou nodded, waiting.

  “What?” Pete said.

  “Just tired after my walk,” Lou said. “So you were saying Helen gave you her rake.”

  “Nah,” Pete said. He resumed dragging the long plastic tines through leaves. “She just opened her garage from inside the house with her remote and let me get it myself.”

  Lou hesitated. “Surprised you’re not at work.”

  “My department meeting was canceled and I came home early. Ebere’s at the hospital till eight tonight, so I’ll have the house to myself for a while.” He stopped raking. “And I can make her dinner. Candles. Music. Wine. I like to surprise her. Keeps things . . . interesting.”