The Angel of Hastings House

(A SHORT STORY)

"Mrs. Bookstaver called. I haven’t heard from her in ages."

My mother was looking in the mirror, adjusting her earrings before she went to work. I sat at the breakfast table, contemplating whether I should take up coffee drinking.

"Is she still alive?" I asked half seriously. "She must have been a hundred years-old already when she was my baby sitter."

"She sounded fine to me, and she wasn't a hundred. I remember her last working day was on her sixty-eighth birthday, when you were already five. That was ten years ago."

I did the math. Seventy-eight. Not quite dead.

"She's such an angel," continued mother, "She wants you to come over to Hastings House to fix some things for the old ladies. Its so sweet how she looks after them. She asked you to be there at noon."

Realizing I could get a few cartoons in before I had to set off, I grunted affirmatively.

"Remember: she is in 3G," mom said as she went out the door.

 I strapped my toolkit under the crossbar of my bicycle. My handyman business was booming. The ad mom wrote for me and placed in the local paper really helped.

At age nine I made a deal with fellow 4th grader Nils Morgan, whose dad owned the local printing plant, and purchased 10,000 of these cards. I still have a few…

"Lifflander Fixes all!

None too big,

or too small!

Reasonable rates,

at a call! "

My competition came from licensed plumbers, electricians and painters who demanded union wages and had overhead, including gasoline costs. I demanded 5$ an hour and got by on pedal power.

 My clientele varied, consisting mostly of homemakers and old folks trying to make ends meet, tired of being ripped-off. I had a trustworthy face nobody balked at my rates. Sometimes a housewife would get nervous as she watched me disassemble the dishwasher into dozens of parts and carefully spread them out on the kitchen linoleum. But I never had a case I couldn’t crack, and found sources for replacement parts. That was my gift: I could figure out how anything worked.

As I peddled up to Hastings-House, childhood memories of the garden-apartment complex began to flood my mind. The broad lawn with the view of the Hudson and the Palisade cliffs beyond. The massive underground garages and storage complex. Built in the late forties, Hastings-House had an extensive fallout shelter system, complete with stores of government issue food and water. You passed by the wire mesh walls of the locked storerooms when walking from the garage to the basement of your building. As a child, with no sense of the potential horror implied, those supplies gave a sense of security.  I was sure if we ran out of flour or sugar while baking cookies, we could simply go down to the store room and pilfer a cup. It was a nice place to grow up, and a probably a nice place to die.

Abigail Bookstaver looked exactly as I remembered her. I'd swear the black floral print dress was the same one she used to wear, but somehow it looked brand new.

"Justy!" she exclaimed as I dismounted in front of her stoop. All the old ladies called me that.  "My, how you have grown. Its so sweet of you to come. I'm sure you'd rather be out playing."

"Actually, Mrs. B," I said in my most business-like tone, "I like working and earning money."

"Well, that's most enterprising of you. Now, here is what I want you to do. First, go to 2F and visit the Baxter sisters. I am afraid they've been up to some mischief…so please check all their wiring. Then stop in and see Miss Lloyd in 5c. You know she is alone, and her sight is going. Glaucoma. Anyway, she needs some bigger light bulbs put in. Have a general check on her appliances while you’re at it."

"Swell," I said.

"Now take this twenty-dollar bill. If you need more let me know.”

"Gee, thanks," I said stuffing the bill in my pocket. "I don’t usually get paid in advance."

I raced off toward the entrance to building No. 2, wrenches and screwdrivers clanging beneath me.

The Baxter sisters also seemed ageless. They were nice spinsters, though a bit goofy.

As I reached for the doorbell button, I recalled my last Halloween at Hastings-House, a decade ago. They bickered for the right to put the candy in the bags of goblins and ghosties.  Finally, to our delight, they decided they’d both do it and we got double portions. No tricks on them.

A raspy, "Who's there?" came from the other side of the thick door.

"It’s Justin, Miss Baxter. Mrs B sent me"

"Who? Who's there?"

I realized time had taken its toll on their hearing, so I shouted once again,

"It’s me, Justin! I'm here to fix things."

The door opened and Tilly Baxter's smile greeted me. Then she turned and shouted into the depths of the apartment, "Amelia, Justy’s here to fix things! Isn’t that sweet?" Turning back to me she said, "Come in, come in. My how you've grown!"

My sweetness and growth knew no bounds. Amelia and Tilly set up court in twin armchairs in the living room, a faded photograph of them together in their youth perched on the lamp table between. I took a quick patrol of the three-room apartment. Indeed, they were a creative pair. Extension cords were stapled, nailed, taped, and dangled in just about every corner. It would seem they had at least one of every appliance you could imagine.  To top it off, their choice of location was rather eclectic. The blow dryer in living room ("We know not to use that near water"), the toaster in the bed room ("Saves effort in the morning. You can get up and have your toast right away"), and most curiously, the Osterizer in the closet, perched on a stool (giggling, they explained that was their "secret" bar). I politely declined their offer of an early Margarita. 

There were no major safety violations. I redid some of the stapling to ensure the wires weren’t penetrated. I drilled through the frame of the closet and ran the wire through the hole so it wouldn’t get caught in the door frame anymore. I decided to closely inspect the space heaters. There were three in the living room.

"The heat is off in the summer and that last rainy day old arthur really acted up," they protested, sensing my disapproval.

I nodded as if I could relate to the problem.  At first glance, their work seemed acceptable.  I followed the wiring and found that in order to make the distance to the wall receptacle, they had spliced-in a piece of doorbell wire and tacked it to the wall behind the curtains. Beyond the splice the wall was charred, the plastic having melted off the thin wire. Even the curtain was singed. Fortunately, it was a natural fiber, or it probably would have ignited.

I gently chastised them. "Ladies, this is a no-no. If you don’t mind, I'll redo it."

They looked at me like puppies not yet succeeding at their paper training. Then they brightened up and sang in unison,

"Yes, please, please do!"

I crawled behind the sofa and under the curtains to replace the burned section with a piece of heavy-gauge wire I had in my collection.  I made conversation while I worked.
"Mrs. B certainly looked well." I said as I scrapped the black plastic remains from the wall.

"Oh yes," said Tilly somewhat sadly, "She did look well.

"Awful nice of her to look after you."

"Yes," agreed Julie, "She always looked after us."

 I completed the operation, packed my tools and headed for the door, giving the old birds a hug.

Tilly began to fumble with her pocketbook. "No charge." I said gallantly, "Mrs. Bookstaver took good care of me".

"Oh yes," they said again in unison, "she sure did."

As I pedaled towards building No. 5, I contemplated my occupation. Friends thought it odd that I liked working for old ladies. But I found an unexpected commonality in the alleged chasm between youth and old age. I was on the cusp of that transition from childhood to adult, when you begin to practice caution and measured behavior. Those ladies were on the same cusp, but heading in the opposite direction. It was like going to a movie theater, and seeing a friend coming out from the previous showing. What was going to happen during the show wasn’t completely clear, but you felt reassured you hadn’t wasted your $1.50 when you saw someone you respected coming out the exit.   Yeah, I thought, I wouldn’t mind being like those Baxter sisters when I got old: a little crazy, with no shortage of ideas and a good set of tools.

Eunice Lloyd opened the door. For a nearly blind lady, she was dressed well.  A naturally petit woman, she had begun to shrink even more. When I started at Hillside Elementary, she was the superintendent for the whole district. Failing sight had forced her retirement at the age of sixty-five, just a few years ago. Her mind was as sharp as ever, though she could only vaguely make out shapes.

"It's Justy, Miss Lloyd." I said loudly, "I'm here to check things out for you."

"You don’t have to shout boy,” she said with a chuckle, "I am going blind, not deaf.  Now, that's quite a coincidence. I was just thinking about upgrading to 200-watt bulbs."

"In that case, I should change the sockets from bakelite to ceramic. I have a few with me."

I started in the foyer. She perched herself on a stool across from me, like a wrinkled ceramic owl, glaring at me through extremely thick glasses.

"Shame about the lunch bond being defeated again, " she commented.  "I had all the fogies here rallied, but those old bats at the Andrus Home and Shadow Lawn voted it down. Damn their selfishness! Don’t they realize kids need a hot lunch, even if their own offspring have already outgrown the school system."

"Yeah," I agreed, "I’m tired of P, B & J"

Suddenly, she turned her head, cocked her ear, and said "Be a dear and open the kitchen door so that Isaac can come through."

"I didn’t hear anyone," I said surprised.

"You’re not nearly blind," she answered wryly as the calico trotted towards his litter box in the living room.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself with fading vision. A world of shadows and fuzzy shapes, where two hundred watts gives an indistinct outline at best. No, I thought, better to be living with your nutty spinster sister than blind and alone.

I changed four sockets. Another three were already ceramic, thanks to the age of the building. I took a look around to see what else might require attention.  In the bathroom, all appeared in order. Then I noticed a curling iron dangling from a shelf above the tub.  The end of the handle was below what would be the waterline. It was plugged in and warm.

"Miss Lloyd, what about the curling iron?"

"Can’t seem to find it." she answered matter-of-factly, "I was using it this morning, then it just disappeared."

A tuft of Isaac’s hair on the shelf explained everything.

"He must have knocked it off when he went for his morning walk. He sleeps there. You can unplug it and put it away. I usually wind up burning my hands trying to feel what's going on up top, anyway. Good thing you found that. I was about to draw my bath".

"Well," I said, as I closed up my tool box, "It's a good thing Mrs. Bookstaver's watching over you all here. Without her you'd have burned the place down or fried yourselves by now."

"Yes, Justin, we all feel the loss and hope she is looking down on us from above," said Miss Lloyd, raising her dysfunctional eyes to the heavens.

"The loss?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

"Well, she died just this past spring, dear.  Didn’t you know?"

I felt the top of my pocket where the edge of the twenty-dollar bill was sticking out and gulped.

"Ah, I guess I just still feel her presence,” I said.

Miss Lloyd nodded in agreement. “We all do.”

Courtesy of Hastings House Coop.