The Old Man

The two women appeared in Conrad's office late one afternoon in March. Olga, the mother, had rouged cheeks wrinkled like walnut shells and wore several rings on her gnarled fingers. The daughter was blonde, with a flat, handsome face and a full figure that she carried with confidence. According to her résumé she was thirty-eight years old. Her name was Lydia Krasnova.

The two had come from the former Czechoslovakia, where they had worked in a flower-growing cooperative until the fall of communism. After making their way to the States, they had settled in Albany, opening a flower stand near the Rensselaer train station with the help of a loan from an émigré business fund. From there they had scoured the area for a plot of land where they could start their own growing business. They had found a two-acre lot a few miles outside the city. There was a house on the property, which they had moved into, and a dilapidated cottage that they rented out. Now they were looking for some capital to start building the greenhouses.

The mother, who spoke little English, eyed Conrad silently while Lydia did the talking. The presentation was polished and thorough. They had priced heaters, ventilation systems, and sprinklers; found suppliers for soil additives and fertilizers; talked to distributors, and set up preliminary agreements with wholesalers in New York.

Conrad listened without interrupting. At the end he told the women he needed to make some calculations of his own, but he knew already that he was going to lend them the small sum they were asking for. He had more than two decades of experience in the kind of small-business venture they were describing, and he had an instinct for a sound proposition.

On their way out the mother pointed a bony finger at the framed photograph on his desk.

"Your daughter?"

"No. That's my wife."

"Young!"

"Well... She died. Nine years ago."

"Oh! I... Sorry..."

"That's okay."

The old woman looked helplessly at her daughter. In an easy gesture Lydia turned back and looked at the photograph, placing her hand on the desk next to the frame.

"You must miss her," she said.

"I do."

"What was her name?"

"Margot."

"She's pretty."

"Thank you."

They left. In the quiet room Conrad looked out through the window. A cement barge was gliding up the river in the evening light. It moved slowly, almost too slowly for Conrad to gauge any movement at all, but he watched until it disappeared. In the years since he had lost his wife he had become adept at sinking himself into this state of distracted oblivion.

Preparation of the site began that summer. On Conrad's first visit Lydia and her mother were in rubber boots, overseeing the clearing of the trees. The logging crew had cut down a thick stand of hardwoods, and were dragging the stumps out of the dirt. Chaos of one kind or another always prevailed at the beginning of a new project, and this was no different except perhaps in its raw physicality and the fact that these two women, one so bent and ancient, the other so immaculately elegant, were its source. The place was cratered like a bombsite, with huge, mutilated trunks lying in piles, great tangles of upturned roots that seemed to writhe in the light, and a powerful, almost animal smell of sap in the air. The wood was going to be sold at the lumberyard and the women, who seemed to know about such things, were instructing the loggers to hide flaws in the trunks by roughing the surface with the toothed edge of the backhoe's metal bucket.

"More! More!" the old woman screeched at the driver over the roar and clank of the huge machine.

"Good! Stop!"

A week later bulldozers leveled the dirt and soon after that the contractor brought in the steel and glass for the houses themselves. Tunnel frames with plastic sheeting would have been cheaper to build but harder to heat in winter, and in this, as in all other aspects of the project, the women had persuaded Conrad that the higher-priced option was the only one that could possibly merit serious consideration. There was something lofty, almost aristocratic about these women, Conrad felt, and he found that he approved of this. Lydia, with her queenly bearing and calm practicality, had begun to fascinate him.

They liked to play bridge, and on discovering that Conrad knew the rudiments of the game, they invited him to join them, summoning for a fourth the tenant they had installed in the small cottage next to their house.

This was an old man with little startled red-rimmed eyes and wisps of white hair standing upright as though he'd seen a ghost. His name was Mirek and he too was Czech, a distant relative of theirs who had managed to emigrate in the sixties and lived in Brooklyn, running a used-book business until a few years ago when the lease on his tiny store had expired. When Olga and Lydia had looked him up he was doing menial jobs for a coin and stamp dealer in Manhattan. He had complained so bitterly of the difficulty of keeping body and soul together in the city that later, when the time came for the women to find a tenant for the one-room cottage on their new property, they had decided to ask Mirek if he would like to move there himself. At first he had refused, even less certain of how he would make a living outside the city than inside. But in quick succession two things had happened to change his mind: he had been mugged on the subway, and then the dealer he was working for had moved to Florida. And so he had decided to take his chances with the women. So far the only job he had found was bagging groceries at a Grand Union two miles away, but he seemed cheerful and optimistic about his prospects.

All this came out over the course of several evenings as the bridge games developed into regular weekly events. The four of them sat at a card table in the front room, which had been furnished in an ornate, old-fashioned style, with net curtains, gold-striped wallpaper, and a crimson plush sofa with lace antimacassars. The stakes were small, though the mother saw to it that debts were paid promptly, and she kept a tin box full of change for the purpose. Conrad and the old man partnered each other, and as they almost always lost, a rueful bond established itself between them and they were able to make up for the sometimes awkward fact of their being barely able to understand a word each other said by an ongoing pantomime of commiserative gestures--sighs, grimaces, outstretched hands.