Nobody's Fool

mother, a remark that always caused her to peer at him over the rims of her reading glasses. To Miss Beryl, the idea of money creeping up the interstate was sinister. “Ma,” he insisted, “take it from me. When the time comes to sell the house, you’re going to make a bundle.”
    It was phrases like “when the time comes” that worried Miss Beryl. They had a menacing resonance when Clive Jr. delivered them. She wondered what he had in mind. Would she be the judge of “when the time came,” or would he? When he visited her, he looked the house over with a realtor’s eye, found excuses to go down into the basement and up into the attic, as if he wanted to make sure that “when the time came” for him to inherit his mother’s property it would be in good condition. He objected to her renting the upstairs flat to Donald Sullivan, against whom Clive Jr. harbored some ancient animosity, and no visit from Clive Jr., no matter how brief, passed without a renewed plea for her to throw Sully out before he fell asleep in bed with a lighted cigarette. Something about the way Clive Jr. voiced this concern convinced Miss Beryl that her son’s anxiety had less to do with the possibility that his elderly mother might go up in flames than that the house would.
    Miss Beryl was not proud of entertaining such unkind thoughts about her only child, and at times she even tried to reason herself out of them and into more natural maternal affection. The only difficulty was that natural maternal affection did not come naturally where Clive Jr. was concerned. The Clive Jr. who sat on the television opposite his father seemed pleasant enough, and the face the camera caught did not seem to be that of anunhappy, insecure, middle-aged banker. In fact, Clive Jr.’s face, still boyish in some ways, seemed full of possibility at an age where the countenances of most men were etched indelibly by the certainties of their existences. Clive Jr., at least the Clive Jr. who sat on the television, still struck Miss Beryl as unresolved, even though he would be fifty-six on his next birthday. Clive Jr. in real life was a different story. Whenever he appeared for one of his visits and gave Miss Beryl a dry, unpleasant peck on the forehead before scanning the living room ceiling for water damage, his character, if character was the right word, seemed as fixed and settled as a fifth-term conservative politician’s. She endured his visits, his endless financial advice, with as much good cheer as she could muster. He would tell her what to do and why, and she would listen politely for as long as it took before declining to follow his advice. In her opinion Clive Jr. was full of cockamamie schemes, and he treated each as if its origin were the burning bush and not his own fevered brain. “Ma,” he often said, on those occasions when she emphatically declined to follow his advice, “it’s
almost
as if you didn’t trust me.”
    â€œI
don’t
trust you,” Miss Beryl said aloud, addressing her son’s photo on the television, then adding, to her husband, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I don’t trust him. Ed understands, don’t you, Ed.”
    Clive Sr. just smiled back, a tad ruefully, it seemed to her. Since his death he’d increasingly taken their son’s side in matters of conflict. “Trust him, Beryl,” he whispered to her now, his voice confidential, as if he feared that Driver Ed might overhear. “He’s our son. He’s the star of your firmament now.”
    â€œI’m working on it,” Miss Beryl assured her husband, and in fact, she was. She’d loaned Clive Jr. money twice during the last five years and not even asked him what he intended to do with it. Five thousand dollars the first time. Ten thousand the second. Amounts she would not be pleased to lose but which, truth be told, she could afford to lose. But both times Clive Jr. had paid her back when he said he would, and Miss Beryl, on the lookout for a reason
not
to trust her son, discovered that she was mildly disappointed to have the money back in her own possession. In fact, she was unable to fend off a particularly shameful suspicion—that Clive Jr. had not needed the money at all, that he’d borrowed it to demonstrate to her that he was trustworthy. She even began to suspect that what he must be after was not part of what would be his