A Farewell to Yarns

as if he were some sort of museum exhibit: “The Nerd Who Married Richie Divine’s Widow.“ Jane suddenly understood why Phyllis couldn’t think of the name of the friend they had in common. There wasn’t such a person. Phyllis had just kept up with the fan magazines and had been curious about Fiona and her husband.
    Too bad Albert was such a loser, physically—the little pot belly, the thinning dull hair, the jowls that drew attention to his almost complete lack of chin. Everybody must look at him and make the comparison between Fiona’s current husband and her former husband and wonder what on earth she saw in this one. It couldn’t be easy to be Albert Howard.
    “If you’d just let me in, I could take a little look around and bring the key back?“ Phyllis suggested.
    “Good idea,“ Fiona agreed.
    “Oh, very well, I’ll take you over there,“ Albert replied. It was just short of openly hostile. “Come along, Mrs.—uh--“
    “Wagner, but you must call me Phyllis,“ she said, following his rather abrupt departure from the room. “I’m just sorry my son isn’t with me. He’s looking forward to coming back to Chicago, I think. He was raised here. You see—“ Her voice stopped as a door closed. Good Lord, Jane thought, she’s telling him the whole story. The woman didn’t know the meaning of discretion.
    Fiona started sorting boxes with Jane but seemed preoccupied. “Albert seems to be a bit out of sorts,“ she finally said. “It must be something about the accountant. I think, too, that he worries about anybody having to live next door to Mr. Finch, but after all, somebody has to. The township can’t just level the whole block. I don’t think he’s half as bad as people say, do you? At least, he might not be. We had an old lady in the village where I grew up that everybody claimed was a witch, and she was really a sweet old thing when you got to know her. She just had an intimidating manner. Jane, what is this stuff?”
    . “Oh, that! It was a gorgeous angel-hair angel that Suzie Williams made, but it’s sort of turned into a blob with a head. Max and Meow got into it before I brought the carton over. I’ll just pretend to have bought it before the sale starts so we don’t have to put it out. Here’s the box with the fruitcakes. Where shall we put the things with food?“
    “Just out in the hallway. I’ll have the maid move them to the family room, and then the yard man can take them out the back .door to store in my car until the bug people are gone.”
    Jane smiled. “You know, I heard once that there are only a hundred fruitcakes in existence. Every year everyone exchanges the same hundred, and nobody knows they’re the same ones.“
    “I can believe that. My family had a fruitcake that was an heirloom. We kept giving it to my Uncle Charles, and he kept giving it back on alternate years. I think he eventually sold it to an antique dealer,“ Fiona said with a giggle.
    “So about these—there’s no point in three people moving them. Just point me toward the family room, and we’ll eliminate one stage of the process.”
    Fiona gave her directions, and Jane staggered out. The family room turned out to be the most interesting—and strange—room of the house. It wasn’t really a family room in the usual sense. It was more of a shrine. The walls were adorned with all Richie Divine’s gold and platinum records. Jane had never seen a real gold record in her life, and she walked around the room looking at them, awed. Completely apart from their meaning, they were beautiful things in a flashy way.
    There was “Red Christmas,“ the sappy but moving ballad about two young lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. Jane remembered hearing once that three of the biggest selling Christmas records year in and year out were Elvis’s “Blue Christmas,“ Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,“ and Richie Divine’s “Red Christmas.“ The commentator liked the irony of the three dead artists with the patriotic color scheme outselling so many of the live ones.
    Next to it was the platinum disk of “Goodbye, Philly,“ the heartbreakingly lilting little song that was released, with terrible irony, the same week Richie died. The song had stayed on the charts for months and months afterward. It had a sort of “You Can’t Go Home Again“ theme, adapted to the seventies.
    Katie had been an infant when that came out, and Jane always associated the song with sitting in the kitchen,