The Vagabonds Read Online Free

trouble and expense she’d gone to, the obstacles she’d overcome) and cheated of its consequence; there had been no blessing asked for or received. Claire would always want something her mother refused, always be asking for some sort of attention from someone who failed to provide it. She had wondered, bleakly, vaguely, if in her old age the roles would reverse, if she would shut her daughters out and they would feel the same way. In the feng shui of her own house she is well- positioned, central, but in that other household irrelevant as dust.
    When the call arrives she is making the bed, and it is the lawyer, Joseph Beakes. He introduces himself, and she says, yes, I know you, yes, you represent my mother. He says our office has been doing so for forty years, your father too when he was alive, and we regret to inform you that Mrs. Saperstone expired last night; we were notified this morning by the Saratoga Hospice. He says you won’t remember me, but I remember you—your sister and your brother too—when you were learning how to ride and falling off your ponies and getting on again; like yesterday it seems to me, and now you’re all grown up.
    When did she die, Claire asks, exactly when, and he assures her the end had been peaceful, your mother did not suffer in her final days. The hospice has been wonderful, continues Mr. Beakes, the management of pain is much much better nowadays and the body has moved—
been
moved—to the funeral home, and are you planning to sit what I think is called shiva and how can I help?
    She answers him. Her mother had planned on cremation, the burial service is standard, and they are nonobservant Jews and will not be sitting shiva and her husband is, as Mr. Beakes might be aware, practically in the business because if you run a string of nursing homes you must be prepared for this sort of procedure; she’ll call her sister and locate their brother and fly East in the morning and the others of her family will follow in due time.
    “Mrs. Handleman? I hope you’ll let me call you Claire. We’ve been trying to contact your sister and brother—Joanna, David—too. Are they away?” asks Mr. Beakes. “They don’t seem to answer, or use a machine.”
    She swallows. He has tried to reach the others first; she is the third of three.
    Then Beakes repeats his personal condolences and they schedule an appointment and the line goes dead.
    David has been practicing avoidance; he is getting good at it, and better every day. He can avoid, for example, his own eyes in the mirror while shaving; he can avoid the pavement cracks while walking down a sidewalk and all conversation with strangers and the shrill importunities of headlines or the television news. He can say the word
rhinoceros
and then forget it rapidly; he can choose to imagine and then not imagine a gray mud-spattered charging beast, its pig-eyes and its flesh-clad horns and complicated rolling gait and snout.
    Avoidance is a discipline, and it requires work. Avoidance is the hardest task because it seems so easy and you can be tempted to relax your guard. His last lover had complained, “You’ve been avoiding me, I don’t know if you noticed but it’s been a week today, it’s been since Thursday the last time you called.” Then Adrienne had started in with the familiar litany of intimate assertion, the proprietary body language of someone who fears not so much the leaving as being left behind. She had been asking, if not for commitment, for at least a kind of
clarity,
because he simply rang the bell and hadn’t bothered to warn or inform her, and what if she’d been out, or busy maybe, not alone? She had been holding oranges and lemons and steadying a wicker basket on one outthrust hip. She was standing in front of the hot tub and jade plant, the high-breasted willowy arched length of her backlit by sun; David knew that he must dance away or give it up and stay.
    “I’m glad to see you,” said Adrienne. “Of course I’m