make an appointment with a cardiologist, but he never did. No matter what she does or doesn’t do today, the amount she’s shortening his life is probably not appreciable.
* * *
Even now, fifteen years after his death, people talk about her dad—nasty, hypocritical things. To hear them, you’d think this fair town was a stranger to financial malfeasance, rather than a regular hornets’ nest of it. She could drive up and down the pleasant lanes of the neighborhood and point out mansion after lovely mansion bought and paid for with embezzlement, blackmail, exploitation, and every other kind of scoundrel behavior and white-collar criminal activity, felony-class and otherwise. Certainly her father wasn’t the first nor the last from this town to be sent to the minimum security facility in Minnesota.
The talk is idly malign, the chatter of strangers, not directed at her. They just bought a house on that block, you know, the Mission Hills Swindler Street. Or Bold as Gould. Stuff like that. Local color.
To Allison, Morris Gould was a good father, a good parent. The only one she had, really. Her mother was sick from as early as Allison could remember, had been her entire adult life. Hence Allison’s adoption.
Mostly what Allison remembers is her mother leaning listless at the breakfast table after chemo, lips cracked, or sitting motionless in a wicker chaise in the solarium, wrapped in a quilted satin robe—the robe vermillion, the chaise cobalt, its cushions a riot of chintz, the scarf on her head brilliantly printed, her small face beneath, colorless.
She died two days before Allison’s tenth birthday, and then it was Allison and her father in the big Tudor pile on Verona. Consuelo came Monday through Friday, seven in the morning to butter Allison’s toast. Her father drove her to school, a terrycloth Chiefs robe over his pajamas, shearling slipper mocs on his bare feet, window cracked an inch even in freezing weather as a purely symbolic, wholly ineffectual nod to the smoke billowing from his Pall Mall. If anything, the slipstream pushed the smoke to the passenger side, rather than allowing it to waft over his head. He didn’t generally commence conversation until sometime around lunch, but as he pulled up to Sunset Hill, he’d throw her a winking, cigarette-clenched smile and pat her shoulder as she slid out of the beat-up Jaguar.
He was there again in the afternoon, one of the few fathers in the line of pickup parents. Even in winter he’d be outside, leaning against the car, Soviet spy-chic in ushanka and sunglasses, puffing on a cigarette, hands plunged deep into the pockets of his Mongolian-wool overcoat. Sometimes underneath he’d still be in his pajamas and Chiefs robe.
Consuelo waited until Allison got home so she could give her a kiss on the hairline before she left for the day. She referred to her as pobrecita and did what she could to assuage the sorrow and void she imagined was life without a mother, mostly by starching her clothes so stiffly they could barely be pulled off the hangers, and cooking and baking enough for lumberjacks. The house was so big she had enough to do just rotating through the unused rooms, vacuuming and waxing floors and dusting banisters and shining the leaves on the plants in the solarium and rolling up rugs and sending them out to be cleaned. No one ever went up to the third floor, once a ballroom, which was dimly lit and piled with old furniture and boxes of papers and books, nor to the moldering stone-walled basement, a tangle of ancient bicycles and sports equipment from her father’s youth, metal parts rusted and leather straps cracked.
Her mother’s dry cleaner–bagged clothing stayed hanging in her closet, tissue-stuffed handbags and wooden-treed shoes and tissue-wrapped cardigans stacked by color remaining on the shelves. In the drawers of the peach dressing room, her lipsticks were lined up by tube length. In the endless silence of the afternoons
* * *
Even now, fifteen years after his death, people talk about her dad—nasty, hypocritical things. To hear them, you’d think this fair town was a stranger to financial malfeasance, rather than a regular hornets’ nest of it. She could drive up and down the pleasant lanes of the neighborhood and point out mansion after lovely mansion bought and paid for with embezzlement, blackmail, exploitation, and every other kind of scoundrel behavior and white-collar criminal activity, felony-class and otherwise. Certainly her father wasn’t the first nor the last from this town to be sent to the minimum security facility in Minnesota.
The talk is idly malign, the chatter of strangers, not directed at her. They just bought a house on that block, you know, the Mission Hills Swindler Street. Or Bold as Gould. Stuff like that. Local color.
To Allison, Morris Gould was a good father, a good parent. The only one she had, really. Her mother was sick from as early as Allison could remember, had been her entire adult life. Hence Allison’s adoption.
Mostly what Allison remembers is her mother leaning listless at the breakfast table after chemo, lips cracked, or sitting motionless in a wicker chaise in the solarium, wrapped in a quilted satin robe—the robe vermillion, the chaise cobalt, its cushions a riot of chintz, the scarf on her head brilliantly printed, her small face beneath, colorless.
She died two days before Allison’s tenth birthday, and then it was Allison and her father in the big Tudor pile on Verona. Consuelo came Monday through Friday, seven in the morning to butter Allison’s toast. Her father drove her to school, a terrycloth Chiefs robe over his pajamas, shearling slipper mocs on his bare feet, window cracked an inch even in freezing weather as a purely symbolic, wholly ineffectual nod to the smoke billowing from his Pall Mall. If anything, the slipstream pushed the smoke to the passenger side, rather than allowing it to waft over his head. He didn’t generally commence conversation until sometime around lunch, but as he pulled up to Sunset Hill, he’d throw her a winking, cigarette-clenched smile and pat her shoulder as she slid out of the beat-up Jaguar.
He was there again in the afternoon, one of the few fathers in the line of pickup parents. Even in winter he’d be outside, leaning against the car, Soviet spy-chic in ushanka and sunglasses, puffing on a cigarette, hands plunged deep into the pockets of his Mongolian-wool overcoat. Sometimes underneath he’d still be in his pajamas and Chiefs robe.
Consuelo waited until Allison got home so she could give her a kiss on the hairline before she left for the day. She referred to her as pobrecita and did what she could to assuage the sorrow and void she imagined was life without a mother, mostly by starching her clothes so stiffly they could barely be pulled off the hangers, and cooking and baking enough for lumberjacks. The house was so big she had enough to do just rotating through the unused rooms, vacuuming and waxing floors and dusting banisters and shining the leaves on the plants in the solarium and rolling up rugs and sending them out to be cleaned. No one ever went up to the third floor, once a ballroom, which was dimly lit and piled with old furniture and boxes of papers and books, nor to the moldering stone-walled basement, a tangle of ancient bicycles and sports equipment from her father’s youth, metal parts rusted and leather straps cracked.
Her mother’s dry cleaner–bagged clothing stayed hanging in her closet, tissue-stuffed handbags and wooden-treed shoes and tissue-wrapped cardigans stacked by color remaining on the shelves. In the drawers of the peach dressing room, her lipsticks were lined up by tube length. In the endless silence of the afternoons
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