Eye of Horace

Horace took a glance around and let out a relieved sigh when he saw that the lobby was empty. Usually in these places, there seemed to be at least a couple of quivering, drooling vegetables leaning out of wheelchairs, obviously forgotten by their families and apparently invisible even to the staff. Strange how you can still smell the old farts even when they’re not in the room, he thought as he approached the battered metal desk where guests were supposed to sign in before visiting whichever decrepit specimen they called their own.

The desk was empty, like the lobby. He sighed, irritated that he was going to have to wait around in this stinking room until someone decided to wander in and greet him. They should really have a bell so visitors don’t have to stand here breathing in this miasma for any longer than necessary, he thought. He  tapped  his  foot  on  the  ancient  linoleum, which  had probably once been a shade of green but had faded to a nondescript color that now just looked old. He whistled, trying simultaneously to make as loud   a noise as possible to attract some attention and to sound nonchalant, like he wasn’t getting more and more pissed off the longer he had to wait. The registration nurse must have had some pretty good hearing. She appeared almost instantly from a back room, breezing toward the desk with a gruesome fake smile plastered on her face.

“Mr. Cairo! Glad you could get here so quickly,” she said, squeezing her bulging stomachs (she seemed to have several) between the desk and the wall and thrusting her hand toward  him.

He made an effort to raise the corners of his lips into what seemed like an approximation of a smile and pumped her hand once. He noticed right away that she was struggling not to stare at the patch over his left eye, and his hand flew up to adjust it, even though it was already lying perfectly straight. Touching the patch was a nervous tic he had developed over the years, and it always seemed to get worse when the person he was with was having trouble ignoring the patch. For some reason, younger women never seemed to be as repulsed by the patch as older women were. In fact, he had discovered (to his immense satisfaction) that there was an entire subcul- ture of women who actually seemed a little turned on by it. Thankfully, the nurse was not part of that group.

“Is there paperwork or something I have to fill out?” he asked.

The nurse’s phony broad smile morphed into a smaller, more genuine, sadder smile. She tilted her head sympathetically as she took his arm and led him to a rickety wooden chair beside the metal desk. He hardly noticed as she pushed him into the chair and slid her bulky form into the rolling chair behind the desk. She ruffled through a stack of paper, as if searching for a particular sheet, then gave up and shoved the whole pile toward him. “Just a signature there at the bottom,” she said as she tugged open the desk drawer and ransacked it, apparently looking for a pen.

He produced a fountain pen from his own pocket. “I got it.” He leaned over and scribbled his name on the line the nurse had indicated. He pushed the papers back at her and began to  rise.

“If that’s all . . .”

The nurse leapt up. “No, no! Mr. Cairo! I have several boxes of your mother’s belongings for you.”

He frowned. “I’m sure it’ll be fine if you just toss that stuff. Or give it to her friends in here, if she had any.”

“Your mother was a wonderful woman,” the nurse said. Although  the sentiment struck Horace as false, her tone sounded sincere. “Everyone loved her. We all loved her. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

“Yes, well.” He capped his pen and slid it back into his pocket. “Really, Mr. Cairo, you’ll  want  these  things. There  are  all  sorts of amazing things. Scrapbooks, photo albums, notebooks, letters. A real treasure trove, believe me.”

He sighed, trying to sound tired instead of exasperated. “All right, all right. Give it to me.”

“Juan, the orderly, will help you load everything into your car, if you’ll bring it around front.”

“Jesus, how much stuff is there?”

The nurse gave him a stiff smile. She’s probably religious, he thought, and doesn’t like it when someone takes the lord’s name in vain or some crap like that.

“There are four or five large plastic cartons, I think. So if you’ll just drive around front . . .”

“I’m already double-parked out front. Right in front of the ambulance.”

He could tell that she was trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid scowling at him. “Fine, then. Juan will be out shortly. Take care, Mr. Cairo.” She shook his hand but broke her grasp much more quickly than she had done earlier. He couldn’t help but smile. Sometimes it was just too easy to offend people, and when it happened this fast, it hardly seemed worth the effort.

He stood leaning against the driver’s side door of his Lexus SUV  and watched as a burly Filipino orderly wheeled out a handcart loaded with multicolored, scratched Rubbermaid containers and stacked them in the back of the car. The nurse had underestimated; there were six cartons, and they all looked heavy. Horace shook his head, disgusted. Once he got home, there would be no orderly to help him unload all this crap. He’d either have to do it himself or wait until the landscapers came tomorrow and offer to pay them to lug it all inside. Maybe he should just drive down to the docks and dump the crap into the water, right out of the back of the car. It was a tempting possibility.

He pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the orderly’s hand without a word, climbed into the driver’s seat, and skidded away, sending a shower of pebbles raining down over the hood of the parked  ambulance.

The turnpike was jammed with late-afternoon traffic and it took him over an hour to get home. By the time he pulled into his driveway, he was itching for a drink. As he climbed out of the car and looked around at his silent neighborhood, the sky was getting dark and he could smell burning leaves on the wind. When he was younger, he had loved early autumn nights like this. It made him think of school—the first couple of months   of the school year, when homework still seemed kind of like fun and you knew Christmas was just around the corner. Back then, it had been legal  to burn leaves, so that cozy odor had curled around every tree, every house. Burning leaves had been outlawed years ago, decades probably, but some- one was ignoring that, and Horace was glad.

He went inside and flipped on the lights in the foyer. The house smelled faintly of lemon and eucalyptus, which meant that the maid had been here today, polishing tables that Horace never touched and vacuuming rooms he hadn’t entered since he bought the damn place. He understood that the house, a sprawling and somewhat tacky (in his opinion) Tudor,  was too big for him to live in alone as a bachelor. But he was rich, and he assumed that people expected him to have a huge house. Besides, it never failed to impress the women he brought home, especially since he tended to have an affinity for a trashier type of girl—the kind who was unfamiliar with the trappings of wealth that, to him, had long ago grown a bit tire- some. But just a bit. Money never becomes completely tiresome, despite what the rich like to tell normal people.

He tossed his keys onto a small marble-topped table beside the door and made his way through the dim hallway to the kitchen. Not bother- ing to switch on the overhead lamps, he fixed himself a drink by the light under the stove hood, which the maid must have left on by mistake. He leaned against the massive center island, with its eight burners that he had never yet used, and took a long sip of gin. He hated the way gin tasted—a little like pine needles marinated in motor oil—but it seemed somehow classier than whiskey, so he was trying to force himself to cultivate a preference for it.

He pulled out one of the heavy oak chairs at the table in the corner and slumped down, leaning forward on his elbows and staring out into the darkening gray of the backyard. As he took another sip of gin, he started to think about the boxes in his car. What the hell could be in them? In all the years he had lived with his mother, he had never noticed anything in her room except for the old-fashioned silver-framed portrait of his father that always sat on her bedside table, and maybe a couple of paperback books. That’s all. He had never seen—or at least he didn’t recall seeing—any photo albums or journals. The more he sat and wondered what was in the boxes, the more he felt compelled to go outside and drag the damn things inside himself. He turned his glass upside down over his mouth, shaking out the last drops of the foul, evergreen-tinged liquor, then slammed the empty glass down on the table. He sighed and shook his head. Now he was going to have to bring in the fucking cartons. Damn curiosity.

It didn’t take him as long as he expected to get the cartons into the foyer, lining them up like stout dominos around the circular walls of the room. He picked a light blue carton to start. Rather than exerting himself any further, he pushed it into the living room with his shins, holding a fresh glass of gin high in the air over his head. As soon as he knocked the carton over the lip of the doorway between the marble-floored foyer  and the carpeted living room, he sat down on the floor with a self-satisfied humpf and yanked the lid off.

The nurse had been right. The carton was filled with neat stacks of photo albums and binders that looked like scrapbooks or maybe diaries. He lifted out one of the albums at random and flipped through it. The pages were covered with crisp-edged, yellowed documents and black- and-white photographs with scalloped edges, the kind they used to take back in the ’40s and ’50s. He recognized some of the faces as long-dead relatives: his mother’s parents and older people—his great-grandparents, maybe—with his mother and his aunt Nora sitting in front of everyone else, bright-faced children with blond bologna curls in their hair. He closed the album and put it on the floor beside the carton, then reached in to pull out the next one.

“Ooooh,” he said aloud as he opened a small pink notebook. “Mom’s diary. What year is this? 1954? She’d have been—what? Five or six? Oh, yeah, this one’ll be juicy.” He shook his head and tossed the book aside. The next one was dated just about a decade before he was born. Now we’re in business, he thought. He took a slug of gin and started to cough. He slapped his chest to clear his throat. Then he set down his glass and started to read.