Страница 3 из 55
The town of Gle
Now, for the first time in thirty years in this quiet town of trees and houses and shops-“Gle
The office is quiet; above the door to the waiting room-a dim, shabby space with battered file cabinets, an old plaid sofa, a coffee table dressed with stacks of wrinkled magazines, and the desk where his secretary sits when he hasn’t given her the day off, as he has today-the clock reads ten forty-eight. He has canceled his appointments, meaning to use this wedge of time between finishing his work and leaving for New Hampshire (already he is ru
Dear Dora.
The problem is that there is nothing to say, no story to tell and therefore finish; that nothing has, in fact, happened between them at all. And yet: like every secret Arthur’s has a history, an arc of events. Pressed, he would trace this awkward, silent moment at his desk to an afternoon a little over eight months ago, when Dora came to see him in his office. He had done some work for the clinic before-a zoning variance for an addition, permits to build it, the odd dispute with a patient over billing-so when she entered, shaking her umbrella, and told him the matter at hand was personal, he was surprised, and interested; he wondered what it could be. There was some money, she explained, that she’d inherited from an aunt-not much, just $60,000-that she wanted to put away for the boys. Could he draw up some kind of… well. What did one call it? A trust? She said the word as if she’d only just learned it, though of course she knew just what she was asking. There were beads of rain in her hair, which she wore short, in neat layers, making a dark frame around her face. She liked the sound of it, she said, smiling at him: a trust.
He offered her a seat and set to work. And how was she? And the boys? (He remembered two: Josh, the younger but a strong kid like his father; his older brother, Leo, the more delicate, a boy who liked to read and taught swimming at the Y.) He drew up the papers at his desk. It was easy work, pure boilerplate, though just the kind of work he liked-putting money aside for children. Dora named her brother, a surgeon in San Francisco, as one trustee, herself as the other; she had already visited her broker and invested the money in a sensible mixture of zero-coupon bonds and blue-chip stocks. Her will was up to date, she thought, she’d taken care of that right after Sam had died-she said this last phrase quickly, almost as one word-though if it was not too much trouble would Arthur mind having a look at it? A thick envelope, full of folded paper: she had brought it in her bag.
And so on, through that afternoon and part of another, when the papers were ready to sign. He would call her, he said, when the documents came back from the brother in California; he could mail her a copy, or else she could come to pick it up, and of course he would keep one in his office, on file, her file. Fine, she said. Fine.
They looked at one another. Their time together was through. It’s fu