Nobody's Fool

this observation were attributable to herself.
    While the woman talked, Miss Beryl sank comfortably into her seat and tried not to glare, taking what solace there was in the fact that the coffee she’d given her guest was not decaf. Slender consolation, since the fool woman was probably as wrong about caffeine as she was about everything else. Thinking she’d drunk decaf, she’d sleep like the dead, like the president she admired, all three of their shared ideas rattling around in their otherwise empty heads, unassailed by doubt or caffeine.
    In this, it turned out, Miss Beryl had been wrong. She’d heard the dreadful Joyce woman get up to use the bathroom at midnight, then againat two, and finally at four-thirty. Each time, Miss Beryl had muttered “Good!” in the dark.
    One of the other things she’d been slow on the uptake about was that Clive Jr. had planned for the Joyce woman to spend the night in the spare bedroom rather than return to Lake George, where she lived. Even after she caught her son’s drift, she wasn’t sure what his intention meant, or was supposed to mean. Was it simply Clive Jr.’s plan for the two women to get to know each other? Or were Clive Jr. and his fiancée trying to reassure her that they were not sleeping together? Was this propriety for show or for real? Poor Clive Jr., either way, Miss Beryl thought.
    When the Queen Anne buckled, the two brittle back legs had splintered lengthwise and it was a matter of great good fortune, Miss Beryl supposed, that the Joyce woman had not been impaled. As it was, she’d hit the floor hard enough to shake the walls. Driver Ed had come crashing down from his wall, denting his chin, which made him look even more dour and disapproving. Also a little like Kirk Douglas. The look that had come over the Joyce woman’s face, more of mortification than pain, had been horrible. She’d looked at Clive Jr. as if he’d played a practical joke on her by seating her, or allowing her to be seated, on a trick chair. Her bottom lip had begun to quiver and then her whole face came apart in the kind of grief that Miss Beryl associated with the sudden, violent loss of a loved one, not a momentary loss of dignity. Clive Jr. had ushered her, choking and sobbing, into the bathroom, where she stayed for nearly half an hour. In the living room, Clive Jr. and Miss Beryl had spoken in whispers, each pretending to ignore the ebb and flow of sorrow on the other side of the bathroom door.
    â€œJoyce’s emotions are very near the surface,” Clive Jr. had explained as he gathered up the pieces of the Queen Anne. “Menopause devastated her.”
    Miss Beryl had narrowed her eyes at this observation, so clearly out of character for Clive Jr., whom she’d never known to see anything from a woman’s point of view. No doubt he was repeating the Joyce woman’s own explanation for her emotional instability. Miss Beryl herself was not particularly sympathetic to the “devastations” supposedly wrought by menopause, a condition she herself had weathered with good grace. She’d observed that women who were “devastated by menopause” were often vain creatures to begin with. They’d spent their young lives trading on their looks, knowing, in fact, no other currency.
    This Joyce woman had been attractive all right, at least to judge fromher yearbook photo. It had occurred to Miss Beryl this morning when she’d studied the pretty girl in
The Torch
, that in a way the Joyce woman who had whimpered for half an hour in the bathroom
was
grieving the loss of a loved one—the self she had been when she was flush with the currency of youth. And Miss Beryl was unable to decide whether it was appropriate to sympathize with such a person. She was inclined not to. It had been within her power to comfort the Joyce woman by telling her, once she returned from the bathroom, that the chair’s destruction was not so much her fault as Sully’s, whose squirming into his work boots every morning had no doubt readied the chair for its final collapse. But every time Miss Beryl had been about to make this gesture, the Joyce woman had said something disagreeable, and finally Miss Beryl had decided to let her suffer.
    When she’d finally returned to their company in the living room, the Joyce woman’s mood had swung dramatically. She’d become heroically yakky, as if only a steady