Shakespeare's Landlord

For that matter, how had he died? There'd been blood on his head, but I hadn't investigated further. The examination had been too disgusting and frightening alone in the park.

I glanced at my man-sized wristwatch. Eight on the dot; one of the primary virtues Alvah admires is punctuality.

Alvah looked dreadful when she answered the door.

"Are you all right?" I asked involuntarily.

Alvah's gray hair was matted, obviously uncombed and uncurled, and her slacks and shirt were a haphazard match.

"Yes, I'm all right," she said heavily. "Come on in. T. L. and I were just finishing breakfast."

Normally, the Yorks are up at 5:30 and have finished breakfast, dressed, and are taking a walk by 8:30.

"When did you get home?" I asked. I wasn't in the habit of asking question, but I wanted to get some response from Alvah. Usually, after one of their trips out of town, Alvah can't wait to brag about her grandchildren and her daughter, and even from time to time that unimportant person, the father of those grandchildren and husband of that daughter, but today Alvah was just dragging into the living room ahead of me, in silence.

T. L., seated at their little dinette set, was more like his usual bluff self. T. L. is one of those people whose conversation is of 75 percent platitudes.

"Good morning, Lily! Pretty as ever, I see. It's going to be a beautiful day today."

But something was wrong with T. L., too. His usual patter was thudding, and there wasn't any spring in his movement as he rose from the little table. He was using his cane this morning, the fancy silver-headed one his daughter had given him for Christmas, and he was really leaning on it.

"Just let me go shave, ladies," he rumbled valiantly, "and then I'll leave the field to you."

Folding the paper beside his place at the table, he went down the hall. T. L. is a big, shrewd gray-haired man, running to fat now, but still strong from a lifetime of hard physical work. I watched T. L. duck into the bedroom doorway. Something else was different about him. After a moment, it came to me: This morning, he walked in silence. T. L. always whistles, usually country-and-western songs or hymns.

"Alvah, would you like me to come back some other time?"

Alvah seemed surprised I'd asked. "No, Lily, though it's right sweet of you to be concerned. I may as well get on with spring cleaning."

It looked to me as if it would be better for Alvah to go back to bed. But I began carrying the breakfast things into the kitchen, something I'd never had to do at the Yorks' before. Alvah had always done things like that herself.

Alvah didn't comment at all while I did the dishes, dried them, and put them away. She sat with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, staring into the dark fluid as if it would tell her the future. T. L. emerged from the bedroom, shaven and outwardly cheerful, but still not whistling. "I'm going to get a haircut, honey," he told his wife. "You and Lily don't work too hard." He gave her a kiss and was out the door.

I was wrong again in thinking Alvah would be galvanized by her husband's departure. All she did was drink the coffee. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle with anxiety. I'd worked with Alvah side by side on many mornings, but the woman at the table seemed altogether different.

Alvah suffers from a pinched nerve in her back and is having increasing problems getting around, but she is normally a practical, good-natured woman with decided ideas about how she wants things done and a plain way of expressing them. She could offend by this straightforwardness, and I've seen it happen, but I've never minded her ways myself. There are few unexpressed thoughts hanging around in Alvah York's head, and very little tact, but Alvah is a good person, honest and generous.

Then I saw the supplies I'd brought in for the Yorks on Monday afternoon were exactly where I'd left them. The butter was in the refrigerator in the same place I'd laid it down, and the lettuce beside it hadn't been washed. At least the paper towels had been unwrapped, put on the dispenser, and used, and the bread had been put into the bread box.

I couldn't say anything more than I'd already said. Alvah wouldn't tell me what to do. So I mopped the kitchen.

Alvah has her own way of spring cleaning, and I thought I remembered she began by getting all the curtains down; in fact, the pair that hung in the living room on the window facing the street had already been removed, leaving the blinds looking curiously naked. So until very recently, Alvah had been operating normally. I cleaned the exposed blinds. They were dusty; Alvah had stopped just at that point, after she'd taken down the first pair of curtains.

"Is something wrong?" I asked reluctantly.

Alvah maintained her silence for so long that I began to hope she wouldn't tell me whatever it was. But finally, she began speaking. "We didn't tell anyone around here," she said with a great weariness. "But that man over in Creek County - that Harley Don Murrell, the one who was sentenced for rape - well, that man... the girl he raped was our granddaughter Sarah."

I could feel the blood drain from my face.

"What happened?" I sat across from Alvah.

"Thank God they don't publish the victim's name in the paper or put it on the news," Alvah said. "She's not in the hospital anymore, but T. L. thinks maybe she should be - the mental hospital. She's just seventeen. And her husband ain't no help - he just acts mad that this happened to her. Said if she hadn't been wearing that leotard and tights, that man would have left her alone."

Alvah heaved a sigh, staring down at her coffee cup. She would have seen a different woman if she'd looked up, but I was hoping she wouldn't look up. I was keeping my eyes open very wide so they wouldn't overflow.

"But he wouldn't have," I said. "Left her alone."

Wrapped in her own misery, Alvah replied, "I know that, her mother knows that, and you know that. But men always wonder, and some women, too. You should have seen that woman Murrell's married to, her sitting up there in court when she should have been at home hiding her head in shame, acting like she didn't have any idea in the world what her husband was up to, telling the newspaper people that Sarah was ... a bad girl, that everyone in Creek County knew it, that Sarah must have led him on. ..."

Then Alvah cried.

"But he got convicted," I said.

"Yes," Alvah said. "He cried and screamed and said he'd got the Lord. It didn't do him a bit of good; he got convicted. But he'll get out, less someone kills him in prison, which is what I pray for, though the Lord may damn me for it. They say that other prisoners don't like rapists or child molesters. Maybe someone will kill him some night."

I recognized the tone, the words. I had to fight panic hard for a second. I was grateful for Alvah's absorption in her own troubles. My hand went up to my chest, touched the light yellow of my T-shirt, felt the ridges of the scars underneath it.

"Alvah, all I can do is clean," I said.

"Well, let's do that," Alvah said shakily. "We might as well."

For three hours, we worked in the small apartment, cleaning things that had never been dirty and straightening things that had never been messy. Alvah likes her life streamlined - she would live well on a boat, I've always thought. Everything superfluous was thrown away ruthlessly; everything else was arranged logically and compactly. I admire this, having tendencies that way myself, though I'm not as extreme as Alvah. For one thing, I reflected as I wiped the cabinets in the bathroom, Alvah has such limited interests that cleaning is one of her few outlets for self-expression. Alvah does a little embroidery of an uninspired kind, but she doesn't read or sew and is not particularly interested in cooking or television. So she cleans.

Alvah is a warning to me.

"What about the camper?" I asked when I thought we were almost through with the apartment.

"What?" Alvah said.

"We usually do the camper, too," I reminded her. The Yorks have a camper they pull behind their pickup truck, and when they visit their daughter, they park in her driveway and live in the camper. They can make their own coffee in the morning, go to bed when they feel like it, they've often told me. I'd been remembering while I worked how may times the Yorks had mentioned their granddaughter Sarah; youngest of their daughter's children, Sarah had been spoiled and had just last year made a bad marriage to a boy as young as she. But the Yorks have always doted on Sarah.

"You remember all the arguments Pardon gave us about that camper?" Alvah asked unexpectedly.

I did indeed. At each end of the residents' parking garage is a space about car width between the wall of the garage and the surrounding fence. The Yorks had asked permission to park their camper in the north space, and initially Pardon had agreed. But later, he'd reneged, insisting it stuck out and inconvenienced the other residents.

It had never been my business, so I'd paid little attention to the whole brouhaha. But I'd heard the Yorks carry on about it, and I'd seen Pardon standing out in the parking area, shaking his head at the camper as if it were a difficult child, puttering around it with a yardstick. Pardon Albee had been a fusser, a man apparently unable to let anything be.

He would never let a sleeping dog lie.

Now Alvah was weeping again. "You'd better go, Lily," she said. "This whole thing has just got me where I don't know if I'm going or coming. These past few days, when we were there for the trial, they have just been like hell. I'll do better next week."

"Sure, Alvah," I said. "Call me when you want to get your curtains back up, or if you want to clean the camper."

"I'll call you," Alvah promised. I didn't remind her that I hadn't been paid; that was an indicator, too, since Alvah is always scrupulous about paying me on the dot.

I can always drop back by tomorrow, I thought. By then, perhaps some of the shock of Murrell's trial would have worn off.

Of course, Sarah's suffering would continue, for weeks and months and years... .

I realized it for sure wasn't my day as I was leaving the building. Deedra Dean came in the front door before I could get out of it.

I can't stand Deedra, especially since our conversation last week. We'd been standing right inside Deedra's upstairs apartment door. Deedra had come home for lunch and was ready to return to Shakespeare City Hall, where she almost earns a living as an office clerk.

"Hi, housekeeper!" Deedra had said chirpily. "Listen, I been meaning to tell you... last week I think you forgot to lock the door behind you when you left."

"No," I had said very firmly. Reliability is very important in my work, maybe even more important than doing an impeccable cleaning job. "I never forget. Maybe you did, but I didn't."

"But last Friday, when I came home, my door was unlocked," Deedra had insisted.

"I locked it as I left," I'd insisted right back. "Though," I'd added, struck by a sudden recollection, "Pardon was on his way up the stairs as I was coming down, and of course he has a master key."

"Why would he go into my apartment?" Deedra had asked, but not as if the idea was so ridiculous. As it sunk in even further, Deedra'd looked... well, a strange combination of angry and uneasy. I'd been intrigued by the sight of thought processes echoing through Deedra's empty head.

Deedra Dean, Deedra of the shiny blond hair, voluptuous figure, and a face completely undermined by its lack of chin. Deedra is always brightly made up and maniacally animated to distract the eye from that damning absence. Deedra moved into the apartment building three years ago and had screwed every male who had ever lived in the building except (maybe) Pardon Albee and (almost certainly) T. L. York. Deedra's fond mother, a sweet, well-to-do widow who recently remarried, subsidizes Deedra heavily. Lacey Dean Knopp is apparently under the impression that Deedra is dating around until she finds Mr. Right. To Deedra, every man is apparently Mr. Right, for a night or two, anyway.

I've told myself often that it isn't any of my business, and I've wondered why Deedra's habits infuriate me. Gradually, I've come to the conclusion that Deedra's total lack of self-respect dismays me, Deedra's risk taking frightens me, and the ease with which Deedra has sex makes me envious.

But as long as I get paid on time by Deedra's mama, I keep reminding myself every ten minutes that Deedra is an adult, nominally at least, who can arrange her life as she chooses.

"Well, just don't let it happen again," Deedra had lectured me last week, with a lame attempt at sternness, after she'd accused me of leaving the door unlocked. Even Deedra's feeble brain had finally registered my anger. "Oh, gotta run! I had to come back to get my insurance card. I've got to get my car inspected on my lunch hour and get that tag renewal notice in the mail."

I'd wanted to say something to Deedra about her lifestyle, something that would make a difference, but I knew nothing I could say would make an impression. And it was truly none of my business; Deedra was supposed to be grown up. I'd watched out the window as Deedra hurried from the front door to her red sports car, left idling at the curb. Deedra's mother had made the down payment on that unreliable but flashy car; Deedra'd told me that quite casually.

"Did you ever find out if Pardon had been in your apartment?" I asked today. There was no one else in the ground-floor hall, and I kept my voice low. I had been following my own train of thought so intently, I'd forgotten that Deedra might be thinking of something quite different, and she looked at me now as if I was a very peculiar person.

"No," she said fiercely. I raised my eyebrows and waited. "And you better not tell the police you talked to me about that, either!" ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">