Hannah's Dream Read online

  Filled with dread, Truman opened the sliding glass door into the backyard and summoned Winslow and Miles. The boy came in first, followed closely by the pig, which emitted a steady stream of old-mannish grunts, snorts, and general muttering.

  “I think he likes me,” Winslow said.

  “Thank god.”

  The pig approached a pile of towels, buried his nose, and began sorting through and rearranging them. Truman had had an Aunt Tilda who did the same thing when presented with a pile of partygoers’ coats in a back bedroom.

  “What’s he doing?” Winslow said.

  “Rooting. Either rooting or wallowing.” Truman thumbed through the guide. “Yes. This would be rooting.”

  “Why?”

  Truman sighed deeply. “Because he’s a pig. We can’t always expect to understand these things, Winslow.”

  “So what’s wallowing?”

  “Technically, rolling in mud and filth. According to this, though, a mainly indoor pig will be satisfied wallowing in blankets and towels.”

  And then, purely by chance, Truman’s eye fell on a page of the book subtitled Screaming. “Good Christ. It says here that if we pick him up he may scream. Evidently pigs don’t like to be picked up—it makes them think they’re prey. It says here that the scream of a pig has actually been recorded at higher decibels than a jet engine at takeoff. Oh, but here’s the good news: if he’s properly socialized, he’ll only scream for ten to thirty seconds.”

  “What if he isn’t socialized?”

  “The neighbors will turn us in.” Truman regarded the small pig, appalled.

  “Maybe we should have gotten a dog,” Winslow said.

  Oh, for god’s sake, said Rhonda.

  “Let’s give him some time, Winnie. Let’s just give him some time.”

  Harriet Saul had recently commissioned a marketing study that would help her revitalize the zoo. She wanted to know who came to visit and why; when they came, what they saw while they were there; how long they stayed; and how much money they spent per capita in the gift shop and food concessions. She intended to double the zoo’s attendance and triple its income within the next two years. It was ambitious, but Harriet had turned far less promising organizations around. At least the zoo had animals, and animals brought people—people with money to give away.

  Finches were her own—and only—true love in the animal kingdom, though they weren’t pets in the sense that you could hug them or take them for a drive in the car. No, they were miraculous little fairy-creatures, all air-filled bones and fluff and down and feathers that resolved, however improbably, into a creature that could take flight. They were, in every way, not human. She loved that about them. Harriet didn’t share the prevailing worship of wolves and whales and dogs of all descriptions. They looked out of eyes just like hers.

  Now, sitting at her desk on Sunday morning, she reviewed the marketing firm’s preliminary report. It told her what she had already assumed: Hannah was by far the zoo’s biggest draw. Parents brought their children to the zoo, but children brought their parents to see Hannah. An incredible one out of every three children under the age of twelve in the greater Bladenham area had visited Hannah, either with a school group, a family member, or both. Twenty-eight percent of all monetary donations to the Biedelman Zoo were made directly or indirectly to Hannah. Hers was the only animal’s name the majority of those interviewed could remember. The elephant was the Max L. Biedelman Zoo.

  Thus armed, Harriet intended to put Hannah’s picture on billboards, print ads, mugs, hats, T-shirts, sweatshirts, posters, postcards, trinkets, balloons—the works. She intended to make Hannah the most famous elephant on the West Coast. She’d already selected a Seattle ad agency that she would ask to execute an ad campaign pro bono. For the agency, the campaign would be the perfect platform for innovation, and innovation won national awards, which in turn lured new clients that would more than pay the agency back for the time they donated to the zoo.

  Closing the report summary and locking duplicate copies in a desk drawer, she pulled on a baggy Biedelman Zoo cardigan and left the office—a walk would do her good. It was a glorious October day. The smell of burn piles, apples and dying annuals made a perfume more intoxicating than springtime. Harriet had always seen the waning days of autumn as times of hope and renewal. School was back in session, and winter clothes hid her hefty figure. Her Aunt Maude, with whom Harriet had lived from her ninth birthday until she was eighteen, used to tell her to cover up, for God’s sake, as though the big bones and dumpy figure she’d inherited from her father’s side of the family were her fault. Harriet would often hear Maude looking through wastebaskets for wrappers that would prove Harriet was sneaking candy bars—which she was, although Maude never caught her because Harriet put the wrappers between the pages of her textbooks and threw them out at school.

  Maude had also looked to see if Harriet was discarding the tubes of her acne medicine before they were completely exhausted. We do not waste in this house, she’d sniff if she found something that offended her. Despite what you may think, I am not made of money. Maude had made no secret of her displeasure at being stuck with Harriet after her mother, Maude’s sister, died of a brain aneurysm. She always was one for passing off her work to others, Harriet once overheard Maude say about her mother. Maude disliked children, especially large, messy girls like Harriet. As a senior in high school, Harriet had saved her money for months to have a beauty makeover at Nordstrom’s. The beauty consultant had cracked a tiny piece of gum as she’d circled Harriet’s high barstool with her brushes poised, sighed, then circled again. At the end of the hour Harriet had spent one hundred and thirty-two dollars on a pore minimizer, skin tightener, ultraviolet blocker, under-eye concealer, eyebrow lightener, six complementary shades of eye shadow and two complementary lipsticks. When she got home Maude’s single comment was, Dear god. I assume you intend to demand your money back.

  Now, as Harriet walked down the path past the elephant barn, en route to the employee parking lot, she saw the new girl, Neva Wilson, out shoveling a thick layer of sand onto the concrete pad of the elephant yard. When she looked up Harriet lifted her hand in greeting and called, “How’s our elephant this morning?”

  “Actually, the abscess is a little better,” Neva called back. “Plus this sand should give her a softer substrate.”

  “Excellent! Anything to keep our star happy!”

  “How about another elephant?”

  Harriet pretended Neva had said something amusing and walked on. The girl was far too intense for Harriet’s taste, too ready to point out a shortcoming or an unfilled need. On her third day at the zoo she’d sent Harriet a handwritten note, requesting petty cash for jumbo bags of jelly beans and raisins—snack food. Harriet had declined the request with a written note advising her that vending machines were located both in the employee lounge behind the zoo cafeteria and near the food and gift concessions; and that an institution belonging to a municipality had to be especially careful about impropriety, or even perceived impropriety, including making purchases that benefited employees who were already fairly compensated. It surprised Harriet that the woman had made the request in the first place. Neva had come with an excellent background and the most glowing references, but Harriet was still reserving final judgment. Either she had pulled off a coup by hiring someone with Neva’s experience for the low salary she could offer, or the woman was on her way down for a reason Harriet hadn’t managed to determine during the selection process. If she turned out to be a drinker or drug abuser, Harriet wouldn’t hesitate to let her go. She’d already explained this to Truman, who seemed unnecessarily attentive to her—and on zoo time, one of Harriet’s pet peeves. She was paying her people a fair living wage, and expected them to earn it. They could socialize on their own time.

  Harriet walked the entire loop through the zoo, picking up trash here and there, fluffing up some new landscaping she’d had installed and greeting the few visitors in attendance—most people
were still in church. According to the marketing summary, which confirmed Harriet’s own observations, the numbers would spike between twelve and one o’clock, especially on such a beautiful day. Harriet had never been a churchgoer, herself. She found the praying and hymn-singing bizarre, like a collective, delusional belief in Santa Claus.

  Back in her office, she stood at her window, pink-cheeked and too full of energy to settle down. On a sudden impulse she grabbed her bundle of keys, including the heavy old skeleton key that supposedly unlocked any door in the house, and headed up the grand staircase to the second floor. She’d been saving this exploration for just the right day. She had very little family memorabilia of her own—Maude considered scrapbooks and old yellowing photo albums maudlin and irrelevant.

  The first three rooms seemed to be bedrooms, with handsome mahogany beds and dressers, huge armoires and little else. But a fourth door led into a room furnished with huge old oak file cabinets and a map case that held sixty or seventy old maps. Harriet glanced at maps of southern Africa, India, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia. Someone had clipped slips of paper to them, with code numbers printed in a firm, dark hand. A methodical thinker herself, Harriet turned to the oak filing cabinets and found each drawer labeled with corresponding code numbers. In those cabinets she found hundreds and hundreds of photographs, old sepia prints, gorgeous black and white studio shots, and more modern color snapshots.

  She dragged over a heavy oak desk chair and, one drawer at a time, brought the photographs out into the light. Early pictures showed a sturdy little girl, handsome rather than pretty, standing outside a canvas tent or near a camp table. In some she wore the clothing of a Victorian schoolgirl, but in others—the most striking ones, Harriet thought—the girl wore a pith helmet and boy’s safari costume: baggy shorts, low sturdy boots, a khaki shirt, and incongruous hair ribbons, indifferently tied.

  The girl was in the habit of looking straight and intensely into the camera lens, her light eyes as clear as rainwater. Many of the pictures also included a man whom Harriet assumed was the girl’s father—an exceedingly handsome man, hard and fit-looking and very much at his ease, with the same light eyes as the child’s. In most of the pictures he appeared to have glanced at the camera only coincidentally, as though caught in a momentary interlude.

  Curiously, neither the man nor the girl carried guns, though guns could be seen in some of the pictures leaning against tents or tables, or in the hands of the guides who accompanied them. Instead, the man—her father, Harriet guessed—held a large pair of binoculars and the girl, who must be Maxine, sometimes wore a pair of smaller opera glasses on a ribbon around her neck. According to the maps, these photographs had been taken in the Ngong Valley in Kenya in the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s.

  Harriet looked through all these photos once and then started over, lingering on those that showed Maxine’s father. People thought that homeliness sought its own level, but it wasn’t true; sometimes her heart ached for a man like this one. Maybe she could be this girl, so she could stand beside this man. Even as the daughter and not the lover, she would be blessed. Her own father hadn’t been able to stand the sight of her or her mother. When he had been killed in a car wreck two days before her seventh birthday—and before she knew what lay in store for her at Aunt Maude’s one day—she had considered his death a confirmation of God’s goodness.

  Harriet put away the first set of pictures, reached into the next drawer, and found herself at the turn of the century. There were no more photographs of Maxine’s father; the cameras found Maxine herself grown into a tall, vigorous young woman with the same pale eyes, still amused, still youthful. These pictures were taken in jungles, in bazaars, and on plantations in Burma, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. Maxine was often riding or standing beside Asian elephants, or towering over dark-skinned men carrying short sticks with metal hooks on one end.

  In several pictures Maxine led rather than rode an elephant, as though she had been allowed to work. In these she looked particularly strapping and contented. Though Harriet knew she had died more than thirty years ago, it wasn’t hard to imagine Maxine in the present day, haying a field or chopping wood, using her formidable energies in some hard physical labor. Harriet knew that restlessness, knew that so much energy was no gift unless it was matched with opportunity and circumstance. She had never been happier, more completely engaged, than on a grueling corporate five-day Outward Bound survival exercise in Montana, where she had welcomed the physical demands, greeted each day with vigor and keen attention. If she could have chosen an historical period in which to live, she would have homesteaded on the American frontier.

  The next drawer of photographs had been taken during the first fifteen years of the new century, and for the first time they included cities—New York, London, Paris, Rome, Bombay. Even in these, a middle-aged Maxine wore men’s tweeds. The camera often caught her scowling, as though she was in the cities by necessity rather than choice. In many there was a young woman, unidentified but exquisite, dressed in graceful Edwardian linen, high-collared lace blouses, and narrow pointed boots.

  In the next several decades, the pictures often showed the zoo—still called Havenside—and the growing animal population, including the two old elephants to which Maxine had apparently been so devoted. In these photographs she was often pitching hay or hauling piles of dirt or building materials, as the property grew every which way into sheds and animal yards. Harriet recognized much of it, even in its current, rundown condition. For the first time, she understood the full extent of Maxine Biedelman’s accomplishment.

  Harriet flipped through the pictures with growing excitement. Here was a life she could use.

  In the very early hours of Monday morning Truman dozed uncomfortably in an armchair in the den as Miles snuffled at his feet, ceaselessly rearranging his towels and an old sleeping bag of Winslow’s. Truman’s motivation for being there was somewhere between protecting his property and helping a child through its first night away from home. He recognized the absurdity of his situation, but he hadn’t been able to relax in bed, listening for sounds of crashing furniture or piggy bereavement. In the end it seemed more bearable to doze upright in a chair than to lie wide-awake in bed, contemplating loneliness beneath his roof. The Guide to Love and Happiness had been quite stern about not giving your pig more attention at the start than it would get later on: the pig would never understand what had gone wrong. Truman had been a pig owner for less than twenty-four hours and he was already making bad choices. The only pet he’d had in his parents’ orderly home had been a turtle, which disappeared within twenty-four hours and who could blame it? Even Truman had found the little plastic desert island and single plastic palm tree depressing, and God only knew what kind of hell it looked like from the turtle’s point of view.

  Truman’s mother Lavinia—ever regal in her signature pearls and twin sets, her elegant French twist—had been firm in enforcing the household rules that applied to him: no messes, no disorder, no tussling with other boys on the living room furniture. Not that Truman had been the sort of boy to tussle with friends or anyone else on the living room furniture; he had been a pale, bookish child whose boyhood energies went mostly into imagining himself as a pirate, an astronaut, a mountain climber, a spy. As an adult he was still leaving no messes or disorder, and abstaining from tussles on the living room furniture, but he was keenly aware that he had failed to mature into a dashing figure.

  Truman sighed and switched on the nearest lamp. Its vibrant glass base had been made by a prominent glass artist, who’d given it to Rhonda in exchange for a bust of his young son. The lamp was a robust piece, the deep golden color of hope and joy, and he hoped she wouldn’t remember to ask for it back. He needed it more than she did. Rhonda had a sinewy character and edgy resilience, heavy-lidded eyes and long hard bones. Had he ever found her beautiful? It was hard to remember. He supposed he had, in the beginning, when they were in college and under the influence of the twin stimulants of sex
and sleeplessness. She had been so decisive, so sure of what she wanted, when she wanted it, and with whom. If he met her again now, for the first time, he would probably be just as vulnerable to her certainty, her supreme self-confidence. The road to Truman’s beliefs was more circuitous, traveling as it did through the dense woods and bogs of indecision and doubt.

  Indefatigable, the pig was still working on the towels beneath his chair. Miles. Truman could see Rhonda rolling her eyes at the name he and Winslow had deliberated over for so long. It’s a pig, not a banker. Why not name it Sir Francis Bacon, something clever? But Truman and Winslow weren’t clever, not in the ways Rhonda had expected.

  Truman reached down and touched the animal’s side. The pig instantly dropped to the floor in bliss. Absently, Truman scratched the sparsely haired belly while Miles subsided into soft piggy grunts and then snores. Outside it was still pitch dark, the domain of the abandoned and the loveless.

  chapter 6

  On Monday morning, Sam found a note taped to his desk in the elephant barn:

  Come see me right away.

  Harriet Saul

  As far as he was concerned, the woman could hold on until he got Hannah comfortable. That meant cutting produce, pulling down hay, sweeping the barn, attending to his sugar’s feet, and petting her a little bit before letting her out into the yard. The phone on the barn wall seemed like it rang every other minute, but Sam just let it go. Mama knew better than to call so early, especially on one of Neva’s days off, and Harriet Saul could just wait; big noisy woman with a gift for making people feel small. In the end, it was ten-thirty by the time he made it up to the house. Poor place needed a new coat of paint for its trim in the worst way; that, and to have its drive re-graveled. Max Biedelman would have died, seeing it this way. She’d been proud of her house, showed him paintings and statues and furniture she’d brought home from all over the world. The place had looked just like a museum.