Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [85]
Cicely was living out in California now with a folk guitarist. Pig Benson’s family had moved away while he was in the army. Andrew was in graduate school at Tulane. And anyhow, the last time Andrew came home it turned out he and Ian didn’t have much to talk about. At one point Andrew had referred to the “goddamned holiday traffic,” and then reddened and said, “Sorry,” so Ian knew he’d heard about Second Chance from someone. And then Ian had to take Daphne for her booster shots, and that was that. Andrew had not suggested getting together again.
Bachelor. What a dashing word. Ian the bachelor. He would live in an apartment all his own. (A bachelor pad.) He’d have friends his own age dropping by to visit. Young women going out with him. And no one trailing behind to ask, “But how about us? Who will see to us? Who will find our socks for us and help with our history project?”
At work, he was putting the final touches on a drop-front desk. He was rubbing linseed oil into the wood, while Bert, one of the new men, worked on a bureau across the room.
Their kitchen-cabinet days were over, thank heaven. Now rich young couples from Bolton Hill showed up at Mr. Brant’s shop to commission one-of-a-kind furniture: bookcases custom-fitted to Bolton Hill’s high ceilings, stand-up desks made to measure, and Shaker-looking benches. Everything was built the old way, with splines and rabbets and lap joints, no nails, no stains or plastic finishes. Orders were backed up a year or more and they’d had to hire three new employees.
You’d think this would delight Mr. Brant, but he remained as morose as always. Or was that only his deafness? No, because whenever his wife dropped by—a much younger woman who’d been deaf from birth, unlike Mr. Brant—she would sign to him with flying fingers, her face lighting up and clouding over to go with what she said; and Ian could see she lived a life as full and talkative as any hearing person’s. Mr. Brant would watch her without altering his expression, and then he would make a few signs of his own—clumsy, blunt signs, stiff-thumbed. Ian wondered how on earth they had courted. What could Mr. Brant have said that would win such a woman’s heart? When Mrs. Brant watched his hands, her eyes grew very intent and focused and all the animation left her. Ian had the feeling her husband was somehow dampening her enthusiasm, but maybe it only seemed that way.
One of the new employees was Mrs. Brant’s niece, a rosy, bosomy girl named Jeannie who’d dropped out of college to do something more real. (They were seeing a lot of that nowadays.) Jeannie said Mrs. Brant was a regular social butterfly. She said Mrs. Brant had dozens of friends who’d gone to Gallaudet with her, and they would sit around her kitchen talking away a mile a minute, using their special sign language with lots of inside jokes and dirty words; but her husband had come late to sign and could barely manage such basics as “Serve supper” and “Mail letter” (like Tonto, Jeannie said), so of course he was left in the dust. He was neither fish nor fowl, Jeannie said. This made Ian feel fonder of the man. He had long ago given up all hope of befriending him, or of seeing any hint of emotion in that handsome, leathery face; but now he regretted dismissing him so easily. “He must be awfully lonesome,” he told Jeannie, “watching his wife enjoy herself with her friends.”
“Oh, he doesn’t care,” Jeannie said. “He just stomps off to his garden. None of us can figure why she married him. Maybe it was sex. I do think he’s kind of sexy, don’t you?”
Jeannie often talked that way.