Dear Old Dead(69)

Then she tucked her head even lower, past her arms and onto her knees, and burst into tears.





2


IDA GREEL KNEW THAT ever since the reading of the will, Victor and Martha had been angry at her. To be precise, Victor had been vaguely annoyed, and Martha had been furious. Ida didn’t blame them. They suspected she had known about Grandfather’s intentions all along, and they were right. Ida had taken a certain amount of satisfaction in watching Grandfather string that silly twit Rosalie along. She hadn’t given a thought to how Victor and Martha would feel about it. Ida had never liked Rosalie very much. She had never liked any of her relatives, even her grandfather, but she had been especially intolerant about Rosalie. When they were all growing up, Rosalie had been the perfect one, thin, pretty, not stupid like Victor. Ida would go to her grave thinking she had heard twice as much as she needed to just how cute Rosalie was in curls.

If it had been Rosalie who was angry at her, Ida wouldn’t have bothered to do anything about it. She wouldn’t have cared. If it had been Victor, Ida would have let it ride. Victor always came around in the end. Martha was a special case. Ida wasn’t close to Martha. Nobody could be. Still, Ida relied on her. It was a relief for Ida to have somebody at the center that she could talk to without having to mentally translate everything she said. Before coming up here to work, Ida had never realized how many differences there were in simple vocabulary between rich people and poor people. Then there were the expectations. Ida had a whole list of different kinds of behavior that she considered “normal.” She wasn’t aware of it as a list, but it was there. When she had lunch with a large group of other people and they were going to split the check, she expected to split it, to divide it by the number of people at the table, to charge everyone an equal share. Up here, split checks were pored over endlessly, the charges parceled out bit by bit, each person being responsible only for what she had actually ordered. The check took half an hour to unravel and left at least one person in tears. Then there was the little matter of the coats. Ida put her winter coat anywhere, on the back of a chair, across a desk, shoved into a locker all crumpled up. If it fell on the floor, she picked it up, brushed it off, and put it out of the way again. All the other people here were very careful to hang their coats on hangers. If those coats fell on the floor, their owners cleaned and agonized and accused. Everyone got together and tried to figure out who had caused the coat to fall onto the floor. It drove Ida crazy. The big things were easy to take in stride. Race and class, education and politics—Ida had been astonished at how little any of these things had mattered. The small things were impossible. Ida had started to refuse invitations out to lunch and dinner from the people she worked with. She had begun to steer clear of the lockers and the racks and the other places people hung their coats. She had begun to use her cousin Martha as a tranquilizer.

Now it was fifteen minutes after twelve noon on Friday, and Ida had no one she wanted to go to lunch with. It had been a quiet morning. She had used her unusual free time to get her paperwork done and to look over the notes for her pharmacology class. Ida had something close to an eidetic memory. She could repeat her own notes back to herself verbatim, even without studying. Her mind was still on that scene in the lawyers’ offices yesterday, with Victor in shock and Martha brewing steam and vitriol. She got up and walked to the door of the nurses’ station and looked out. She went far to the other end of the hall, walking into what seemed to be the linen closet. She told herself she wasn’t getting enough sleep and searched around in the pocket of her smock for her cough drops. Michael was in his office, free for once, but Ida didn’t have anything to talk to him about. There was nobody else around.

Ida found her cough drops, popped one into her mouth, and made up her mind. There was a phone at the station desk. Ida picked it up, dialed the east building and asked for Martha. She didn’t say it was Ida calling because Martha might refuse to answer, just the way she had refused to answer Grandfather on the night he died. Ida said she was Augie.

“Sister?” Martha asked, coming immediately on the line.

“It’s not Sister Augustine,” Ida said, “it’s me. I want you to meet me in the cafeteria right away.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Martha said.

“I’ve got plenty to say to you,” Ida told her. “Stop acting like a jerk. Come on downstairs.”

“Why should I come downstairs? Why should I talk to you at all? You knew all about it.”

“Yes, all right. I knew all about it. That’s not the point.”