The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [44]
She had taken these instructions to heart, and he suspected she might let the house burn almost to the foundation before intruding on his privacy. During the windstorms in August of ‘55 there had been heavy flooding in the front rooms of the old house, with heavy damage to the wide board floors. He did not learn of the situation until he left his desk at five o’clock. Mrs. Kleinschmidt, coping herself with the situation, had not even considered interrupting him. To her, his work was sacred.
Perhaps she was able to think so because she had never read his books or anyone else’s. She’d been an elderly widow when she came to work for them and looked now exactly as she had then, a wizened dumpling of a woman with an unquenchable passion for cleanliness. For years one of her sons drove her to the Markarian house four mornings a week and picked her up in the afternoons. When Anita divorced him, Mrs. Kleinschmidt had taken it harder than Hugh. “To leave a man such as you,” she muttered. “To do this.”
He suggested she move into a room in the house. “I was chust thinking these things,” she said. “In the car house there could be a room fixed up. The large room in the upstairs. This would be goot. The other, not so goot. These people, they chust look for such things. Then the tongues will wag. So why should the tongues wag?”
There were servants’ quarters on the second floor of the old carriage house and it had been simple enough to have carpenters fix up a bedroom and bathroom. She had insisted on bringing her own furniture from her son’s house and had seemed very comfortable there ever since. He had no idea what her living quarters looked like, having never been invited to visit them.
Although the thought of tongues wagging over himself and the little old woman had done nothing but amuse him, her idea was a good one for another reason. Another person in the house would have bothered him. This way he had as much privacy as he could have wished—the carriage house was not even in sight of the main house, screened by a thicket of white pine. And he had Mrs. Kleinschmidt nearby so that she could handle all of his housekeeping and shopping. He paid her a good salary and always wondered what she did with it. It did not seem to him that her personal expenditures could have amounted to as much as ten dollars a week.
He sat down at his desk, uncovered his typewriter. The machine was an IBM electric, the model with the little ball that moved magically along the page and somehow managed to print the proper letters as long as he touched the proper keys. At first it had seemed likely to drive him crazy. He hadn’t been able to get used to a machine without a moving carriage. He had had it three years now and its idiosyncrasies had long since come to seem perfectly natural.
It was a far cry from the broken-down Royal portable on which One If by Land had been systematically pounded out. But then this room, paneled in oak and lined with bookshelves, was at least as far a cry from the room on West Thirteenth Street.
,Because it was the first of the month, there were things he had to do before he could begin the novel. He wrote out a check for one hundred and fifty dollars and addressed an envelope to his daughter Karen, at Northwestern University. His child-support obligations had legally ceased on Karen’s eighteenth birthday, but he had insisted on paying her college tuition and room and board costs. He had not said anything about incidental expenses; if Anita wanted to send the girl pocket money, he was not inclined to discourage her. But he himself sent a check directly to her every month. This morning in particular he would have liked to tuck the check in the envelope and let it go at that. But he had never done so before and would not do so now. Karen did not always acknowledge the checks, and when she did it was with a brief and uninspired letter.