Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [142]
Repressing her reaction, Vinnie merely shrugs.
“Kinda poky and backward, you know?”
“Some people think that.” Vinnie realizes that Barbie not only has Chuck’s large, blunt, regular features and squared-off jaw (more attractive on a man than on a young woman), but his habit of blinking slowly at the end of a question.
“I mean, everything’s so small and kinda worn-out looking.”
“I suppose it might seem so, compared to Tulsa.” Vinnie allows Barbie to run on, to run down her beloved adopted country in the usual stupid tourist way. You are rightly named, she thinks, silently christening her guest The Barbarian.
“And it’s so awful wet.”
“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t want to start an argument; she is pacing herself, waiting for the moment when she can politely ask the question that has been repeating itself in her mind and interfering with her sleep for forty-eight hours.
“How did it happen?” she bursts out finally.
“Pardon?” The Barbarian lowers a fistful of cake, shedding crumbs. “Oh, Dad. It was his heart. He was in this town hall, see, over in the next county. He went there to look at some old records, you know.”
“Yes, he mentioned he might do that.”
“Well, it was a real hot day, and the office was on the top floor. There wasn’t any elevator; you had to walk up three long flights to get to it. Anyhow, even before the librarian could bring Dad the book he wanted, while he was just standing there by the desk waiting, he just kinda collapsed.” Barbie chews and swallows audibly, rubs one fist into her left eye, then reaches for another watercress sandwich. Crocodile tears, Vinnie thinks. “Anyhow, by the time the ambulance came and they got him to the hospital he had passed.”
“I see.” Vinnie lets out a long sigh. “It was a heart attack.”
“Yeh. That’s what the doctor said.”
What they call natural causes, Vinnie thinks. Not a deliberate or half-deliberate act, not his fault—not her fault. Maybe. But if it weren’t for her, Chuck wouldn’t have died in a provincial English records office; he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. (“If it hadn’t been for you”—she hears his voice again—“I never woulda thought of looking for my ancestor.”) But what does it matter whether he died because of her, or in spite of her? Either way he is dead. He will never enter this room again, never sit where his stupid daughter is sitting now, smiling stupidly at her.
With great difficulty, Vinnie remembers her manners and focuses again on Barbie. “That’s awful,” she says. “An awful shock for you.” She frowns, recognizing that her remark is as much of a cliché as The Barbarian’s.
“Uh, well.” Barbie chews and swallows. “I mean, naturally it was, but in a way we were sorta prepared for it. Dad had been alerted, after all.”
“Alerted?”
“Oh, yeh. He’d had a couple of what d’you call them, episodes, already. The doctor in Tulsa told him he oughta take it real easy: he was s’posed to give up alcohol and cigarettes and avoid exertion as much as possible. Even then there was always some risk. I mean, he could’ve gone anytime. Maybe he didn’t mention that to you, I guess.” She blinks slowly.
“No, he didn’t mention it,” Vinnie says. Images of Chuck drinking and smoking appear in her mind, followed by one of him engaged in a particular kind of exertion.
“He shouldn’t have climbed all those stairs in that dumb old town hall,” Barbie says. “But that was how Dad was, y’know. When he got some project in his head, he had to finish it.
“Like I remember once when we were kids, I said I wished we had a treehouse,” she goes on. “And Dad got interested, and started drawing plans, and the next Saturday he was up in our big catalpa tree all day building it. Gary and me were helping him, and he made Consuelo—she was our cook then—bring out sandwiches for all of us so we wouldn’t have to stop working for lunch. By the time we got done it was nearly dark, and we had a picnic up there, we had . . . pink . . . lemonade . . . Excuse me.” She snuffles back tears.
“That’s all right.” Vinnie passes Barbie another