Hannah's Dream Read online

  “Good girl!” Neva and Sam cried in unison. Neva took the brush back so Sam could reward her with a yam. “Who’d have thought shug was an artist?” Sam marveled as Neva loaded the brush with yellow paint this time. Hannah brought it from the upper left corner of the canvas to the lower right, and then made a series of jabs and swipes.

  “I’ll be damned,” Truman said softly to Winslow.

  “She’s pretty smart, huh?” Winslow said.

  “She’s certainly got the idea,” said Neva, loading the brush with blue paint while Hannah waved her trunk impatiently.

  “Just look at her,” Sam said.

  “What made you think of doing this?” Truman asked Neva.

  “It’s not my idea. It’s been done before at other zoos. It gives the elephants something fun to do, and the zoos can sell the paintings to raise money to improve the elephant yards. They seem to like the challenge.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Truman said. “I never would have guessed she’d be so dexterous.”

  “They have one hundred thousand muscles in their trunk,” Winslow said. “They can take the shell off a peanut.”

  Neva smiled. The canvas was filling up with strokes and splashes of color. It could have been art, or it could have been accident. Either was okay with her.

  “I’d better go,” Truman said regretfully. “Harriet had an appointment in town, but I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

  “She keeps you on a pretty short leash, huh,” Neva said.

  “She does have a hands-on style,” Truman said.

  “You mean she’s a control freak.”

  Truman smiled sadly. “Yes, well. Are you ready to go, Winnie?”

  Winslow sneezed. “Fifty-nine.”

  “Fifty-nine?” Neva said.

  “That’s how many times he’s sneezed today,” Truman said.

  “My dad bought me some of that Kleenex that has lotion or something in it. It’s supposed to keep your nose from getting chapped, but it’s not working. Plus I have a cold sore.” Winslow opened his mouth and turned his cheek inside out for Neva’s inspection. “See?”

  Neva peered out through the fence. “Ow. So I’m guessing no school again today, huh?”

  “Nope. I’m missing a social studies quiz.”

  “He’ll probably be well enough to go back tomorrow,” Truman said. “Anyway, here’s hoping. Come on, Winnie. Time to go.”

  “Well, you two take care.” To Winslow Neva said, “I bet you get to eighty-six. No. Eighty-two. I bet you get to eighty-two sneezes by the end of the day.”

  “A hundred and seven,” Winslow called over his shoulder as he and Truman started up the hill. “Bet you a buck!”

  “You’re on!”

  As the two turned to leave, Neva heard Truman say, “Well, you’re as thick as thieves.”

  “Yeah,” Winslow said. “She’s nice.”

  Neva rinsed out the paint brushes with the elephant yard hose. Sam had gathered up the easel and canvas. “Why don’t you take the painting home?” she told him. “You can have it framed and then hang it in the living room or someplace. It’s colorful. And it’s her first.”

  “Nah. It’s zoo property and all.”

  “If you don’t take it, you can bet Harriet will. You know I’m right.”

  “Well, it would look real pretty in the kitchen. Imagine, me having a shug original on my wall. It’s too bad Mama had a customer. She’d have loved seeing the girl rushing around all important like that.”

  “Next time we’ll plan ahead, so she can be here.”

  Neva took the brushes, palette, and paint cans into the elephant barn while Sam took the canvas to his car. She was glad their experiment had gone so well, and not just for Hannah’s sake. She’d gotten up this morning in a melancholy mood and hadn’t been able to shake it. At first she hadn’t known why, but then she’d seen the wall calendar in the elephant barn. The boy turned twelve today. His hair, Neva was sure, was dark red like hers, thick like hers; it had been when he was born. Would his build be hers, too? She had small bones, but so dense that even when she was a child they’d weighed her down. Her father, when he’d taught her to swim, would say in exasperation, You’re sinking on purpose! You’re just not trying. But she had been trying. The only time she’d been buoyant was when she had been pregnant. She’d been twenty-four. It had been an awful time. She and Howard had fought about everything—her choice of career, his misery at a dead-end job selling athletic shoes, their crappy little apartment above a crappy little bar.

  We don’t have the money, he’d said to her over and over. And if you have this kid, we never will. Neva hadn’t wanted to raise a child any more than Howard did, but she couldn’t bring herself to abort it, either. In the end, the free health clinic had referred her to a private adoption attorney who represented an infertile couple willing to pay all Neva’s prenatal and delivery expenses in return for a closed adoption—no contact between biological mother and son, ever. The baby had been whisked away within minutes of his birth, and Neva was left with an aching perineum, leaky breasts, and a fatally compromised marriage. She and Howard hadn’t officially divorced for another two years, but the outcome hadn’t been in doubt, only the timing. Ironically, it was Neva’s first-ever bonus check that had set them free, though they’d been living apart for over a year by then—Neva in New York, Howard in Seattle. By now memories of that time had faded into neutrality except for this one day a year.

  Fifty-nine sneezes. She picked up the phone in the tiny office, dialed Truman’s extension, and asked for Winslow.

  “Sixty-eight,” she said when he came on the line.

  “Seventy-one. But my dad made me take a decongestant, so I’m never going to win now,” the boy said disconsolately. “I haven’t sneezed in half an hour.”

  “Bummer,” Neva said. “You’re probably a lot more comfortable, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, let’s do this. After you’re better, we’ll just bet on something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Number of farts?”

  “No way!” he said in the tone of someone who considers himself to be in the presence of greatness. “In a day?”

  “In a day. Pig-farts, not boy-farts.”

  “Awesome!”

  She could hear him telling Truman all about it as he hung up the phone.

  Corinna’s new customer had given her name over the phone as Maxine. Corinna hadn’t thought much about it until she saw Harriet Saul stumping through her beauty shop door.

  “Ms. Saul,” Corinna said. “I never would’ve expected to see you here. I thought you said Maxine over the phone.”

  “I did.” Harriet rummaged around in a bulging leather briefcase and took out a stack of photos of Max Biedelman which she handed over to Corinna. “I want you to make me look like her,” she said.

  “She sure was a fine-looking lady.” Corinna studied a studio portrait taken in the mid-1930s. “I wish we’d have known her when she was as young as this, instead of already old. Course, she was still a fine-looking woman even then—always looked like she was going to fix things once and for all, like there wasn’t a problem in the world she couldn’t make right.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Corinna frowned. “Well, first we’re going to need to turn your hair white, and that’s going to take a bunch of chemicals. That all right with you? Because it’s going to play hell with the cuticle.”

  “Do whatever you have to,” Harriet said.

  Corinna shook out a smock. The musical notes looked small all bunched up in Harriet’s lap that way.

  “Won’t I make a good Maxine Biedelman?”

  “Well, she was one of a kind,” Corinna said doubtfully. “But we can sure give it a try.”

  Corinna laid out scissors, combs, and chemicals as precisely as a surgeon and settled down to work. “Last time I saw Miss Biedelman she probably only weighed a hundred and twenty, hundred and twenty-five pounds,
and that was nowhere near enough. She was a big woman. Tall, too, almost as tall as Sam. She just lost her spirit after Miss Effie passed.”

  “She was the personal secretary, right? She was in some of the pictures. Sam said you didn’t know much about her.”

  “We knew enough. You never saw two people more devoted to each other than those two. Miss Effie, she didn’t weigh more than ninety-five pounds dripping wet, just like a little bird, like a sparrow. Her people were all from the South—Virginia, maybe, or North Carolina. She was always saying, Oh, my land, and things like that, that would have sounded foolish coming from anyone else, but Miss Effie was a lady, so it sounded right. It broke Miss Biedelman’s heart when she passed away. She never would let herself see it coming, even with Effie getting so frail and all. By the end you could have snapped her arm like a twig. You going to have someone play her?”

  “No.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “She wasn’t important.”

  “Is that right?” Corinna said. “Well, it’s nobody’s business, anyway.”

  An hour and a half later, Harriet Saul took one last look at herself in the beauty salon mirror. Her new hairstyle was as near to Max Biedelman’s as she could have asked for. And she looked good with white hair—it gave her a dignity she otherwise lacked.

  Thus armed, she called Howard Bolton, mayor of Bladenham, and made an appointment to talk. It was time to get things started.

  chapter 8

  Next morning, Harriet set aside two hours to get ready for her debut as Maxine Biedelman. Normally she dressed in her outfit for the day in five minutes flat: a Land’s End T-shirt in one of six colors; a pair of polyester, elastic-waisted slacks in black, brown, or navy blue; black, white, or tan-colored Reeboks, and a baggy Max L. Biedelman Zoo cardigan or sweatshirt. If she had a meeting, she simply exchanged her T-shirt for a polyester crepe blouse. No one had seen her in a dress in years. She didn’t even own a full-length mirror—the last one had broken several months ago, when she slammed the door on her reflection. She didn’t need a mirror to know what she looked like. What she looked like was fat. She’d been fat, and was getting fatter at the rate of almost twenty pounds a year—more, since coming to the zoo. If she still had a mirror, she knew exactly what she’d see—the jutting bosom, Tweedledee belly, heavy arms, thick waist, legs that fit better in a pair of men’s suit trousers than the detested panty hose that were always too short and too narrow. She even shunned the impeccable fingernails that were so often dear to big women. Oh, please, Maude had told her after she’d gone to the cosmetology school to get a free manicure. You have the hands of a plumber. People blamed unattractive people for their ugliness, but Harriet Saul knew better.

  Now, standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror on a cold and gloomy morning, she dressed in her new safari things and arranged her hair to look as much as possible like the pictures of Maxine that she had stood on the shelf by the sink. To her surprise, her new look suited her—the white hair flattered her dark eyes and energetic smile, and the loose-cut men’s safari shirts minimized her breasts. She carried a pith helmet in one hand and Max Biedelman’s riding crop in the other. From what she could see—and, granted, it was only from the waist up—she cut a surprisingly dashing figure. Here was a woman who was confident, leaderly, and strong.

  Maybe there was an Almighty God after all.

  She stayed at the zoo offices only long enough to collect Truman and a briefcase she’d filled to the gills the night before. He did a double-take when he saw her, and she instinctively crossed her arms over her breasts, tried to pull in her stomach and tuck in her sizable back end. You don’t have to look this big, Maude used to tell her. You’re choosing to. Stand up straight, for God’s sake.

  “Wow,” Truman said. “You look—”

  She prepared herself.

  “—like Max Biedelman.” And he said it like he meant it.

  There could have been no higher compliment.

  Outside, the moisture-saturated air tasted metallic. Truman drove them to City Hall and hoisted Harriet’s things from the back seat. Mayor Howard Bolton was already in the conference room waiting for them. He was a big, florid man with the over-hearty manner of a small-town politician. Shaking Harriet’s hand, he said, “Good to see you, Harriet. And you are—?”

  Truman held out his hand. “Truman Levy.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Howard!” Harriet said. “You’ve met him half a dozen times. He’s my business manager.”

  Truman gave a small, embarrassed smile and put Harriet’s briefcase on the table.

  The mayor gave Harriet a once-over and said, “So what’s with the getup, there, Harriet?”

  “I’m going to save the zoo.”

  “You moving it to Africa?” Howard cracked himself up, punching Truman lightly in the arm to share the joke.

  Harriet gave him a withering look. “What’s our ad budget, Howard?”

  “I don’t know—off the top of my head? Ten thousand. Maybe.”

  “For the quarter?”

  “Yeah, right. For the year.”

  Harriet and Truman exchanged glances. “Find more,” Harriet said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Find more. Ten thousand, at least. Or find me a travel magazine or two that’ll run our ads for free.”

  “Is she kidding?” the mayor said to Truman.

  “I’m not kidding,” Harriet said. “If you want me to save this zoo, you’d better give me the tools to do it.” She hauled a stack of photographs and a neatly bound proposal out of her briefcase. “Now, listen. It’s all going to be about the elephant.”

  Two days before Thanksgiving, 1956, Sam had sought out Miss Biedelman about something that had been on his and Corinna’s minds. It was late morning, and cold; in the fields, wisps of ground fog were still caught in the corn stubble, and the air smelled like animals and loam. Sam found the old woman moving painfully across the front lawn. Her arthritis had been worse lately—he could see it in her face as well as her walk. He’d taken a strengthening breath and approached her. “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Brown,” she said.

  “I wonder if I could ask you a question.”

  “Of course. You may walk with me. Let me take your arm.” Sam held out his elbow and she slipped her arm through his; and though she gave him most of her weight, it was surprisingly little—she was as light and dry as cured tobacco. “Now, what is this question of yours?”

  “Well, sir, you remember that reincarnation you were telling me about?”

  Max Biedelman nodded. “I remember.”

  “Me and Corinna have been talking about it, and we wanted to know, can a person come back as an animal?”

  “According to the Hindu faith it happens all the time. Why?”

  Sam was perspiring lightly despite the chill. He breathed in, breathed out for nerve. “We think Hannah’s our baby girl.”

  Max Biedelman pressed Sam’s arm; they’d stopped walking without his noticing. Then they started again. “Yes?” she said “And why is that?”

  “Well, sir, from the very first time I set eyes on shug I thought there was something familiar about her. That’s why you used to see me watching her at lunch and all. And Corinna, she took one look into shug’s eye and started crying, and Hannah, she wrapped her trunk around Mama’s head and started making this low sound, this humming, you know how she does. And Corinna says to me, She’s talking to us, honey. She meant her—that she’d lived after all, only she was doing it as Hannah. We figure her soul must have passed from one of them to the other, like you can pass along a flame from candle to candle. Call us damn fools, but we both saw it as clear as if God Himself came down and shined His heavenly light.”

  “Well, Mr. Brown,” Max Biedelman said, “I can’t speak for God, of course, but I believe you’ve already answered your question.”

  “Yes, sir. I guess I did.”

  “Please tell Corinna she’s welcome to v
isit Hannah whenever she’d like.”

  “Thank you, sir. She doesn’t like to presume.”

  They had reached the house. Max Biedelman had withdrawn her arm from his and pressed his hand warmly.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Of course, Mr. Brown. If the truth be told, I’m envious. I’ve been all around the world, but I have had precious few revelations. And to think one was right here all the time.”

  Corinna set a plate of beef stew and biscuits down on the table in front of Sam. She prided herself on her stew, using herbs that she’d grown in a little greenhouse she kept behind the Beauty Spot. “Have you seen that Harriet Saul in her Miss Biedelman outfit yet?”

  Sam nodded glumly. “Yeah, I’ve seen her.”

  “She wearing those clothes and all?”

  “Yeah. She’s carrying one of Miss Biedelman’s riding crops, too. She even got herself a nametag, says MAXINE L. BIEDELMAN, OWNER, like Miss Biedelman’s some suit of clothes she can just put on.” Sam shook his head, chewing. “She doesn’t like Neva, either—gave her a hard time for buying Hannah a new ball that cost twenty-five dollars because a gorilla could slam it around and the thing won’t even crack. It has a couple holes, and Neva put raisins and grapes inside. You should have seen shug shaking it—just like watching a little kid emptying their piggy bank. Girl’s still got plenty of spunk left in her. Neva thinks we should spread some smells around, too—tiger pee, maybe, or antelope dung. It’d sure give shug something new to think about. Bet Miss Biedelman’s real impressed with her, if she’s up there watching.” Sam wiped his bowl clean with a biscuit. “This was a real good meal, Mama.”

  “Have you told her about your dream yet, hon?”

  “Nah. She’d probably think I was crazy, dreaming someone else’s dream like that.”

  “You’re already crazy. What kind of harm could it do? Besides, we’re out of ideas. And you’re coming home tired all the time now. All the time.”

  “I’m fine, Mama.”

  “Yeah, and that’s what you’re going to tell me right up to the day you drop.”