Story: A Friend (part six)

A Friend

(part six)

All the houses were numbered black on white, the signs measured for visibility from a particular distance. It wasn’t that, that had lost Mrs. Leonhardt. There could be only one seventeen in any lettered section of any quarter. Houses not conformable to a grid, built at the ends of odd lanes, had by now been razed, the lanes closed to traffic. But whole rows of private homes would be torn down in time.

Private homes were not efficient.

Her own had a pretty rose window at the peak, shingles painted yellow. Lorin had done that; the paint was shabby now. The shingles must be covered in uniform white, and Mrs. Leonhardt wasn’t hiring it done…to waste her money. The G.R.A. would decide that she was proud. Someone looking for a home would find one splash of architecture more appealing than another, and attachments, as Anton called them, might induce the taking of a stand.

“Hi? Are you lost? You look lost.”

The woman wore a non-resident’s badge, BNE17, WAINWRIGHT, M. The picture had that eerie high definition, the encoded eyes wanting to catch yours. In life, her face was weak-chinned, her skin whiter for the brown hair pulled tight, an uncaught strand hanging by her eye. She wore a floral dress under a turquoise windbreaker, socks with her big-soled sandals.

Mrs. Leonhardt gave her silence with this study, thinking that if she said, “Go away, I don’t need you”, Wainwright, M, would shed a tear.

Anton said, “We’ve come to the place expected. They make you live there.”

“Ma’am,” Mrs. Leonhardt said, “Are you Mrs. Ochiltree’s boarder?”

For being made to stand on a nameless street holding an awkward box (taken from Anton because its contents, out of his control, would keep him at her side), she wanted to rattle the punchbowl, the cups and the ladle, make a startling noise. Stop the woman’s staring at Anton, as though behind his glasses he did not stare back.

“I’m Antonia Leonhardt. This is Anton.”

Matters became worse.

The woman put her hands on Anton’s arm, let go, spun and rushed ahead, stopped. “I’m Mary… David’s wife.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, come in!”

Fine. They could not just…where were they?

Mary led them around a barrier, through a lane of stacked stone and brick—broken, unbroken, empty window frames edge-to-perfect-edge, painted ones propped on a squared tarp, doors same, glass panes stacked on cardboard spacers, a barrel of glass shards beside them—the lane itself swept clean (by make-workers, everyday, Mrs. Leonhardt knew)…

Past the next barrier, around the corner, and into the foyer of number seventeen. “Palma might have told you, if you’ve come back, Anton…that.”

“I don’t know what she means,” he said. “That? What does this woman mean?”

“She means her dead husband,” Mrs. Leonhardt said, as the latch clicked finally in response to Mary’s badge.

Indoors Mary did spill tears, her eyes all at once gone red. She fell onto her sofa and snatched at a tissue. “Yes, I’m alone.”

“Why would Palma think you had anything to do with me?” Anton said.

“She let me have your letters.”

He whirled a fixed gaze on Mrs. Leonhardt. Dark lenses always conveyed, didn’t they, a sort of hollow anger? He stood in rigid compression, his chin dimpled, his jaw quivering. Why, she thought, is my son blaming me…what have I done?

The thought came also, incongruous, that when Anton had been younger, she would in fondness…doting, as a mother did, on even his rages…have noticed these things about his face.

6

Tourmaline

Sympathy for the Torturer (part one)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)