Later Pierrot sat next to him in the large bed, underneath the purposeless enormous canopy, and spoon-fed him soup. He held a napkin close by, and he dabbed any spill from Irving’s chin.
Irving stopped going outside because he didn’t want anyone to see him this aged and this incapacitated. He could only bear for Pierrot to see him this way. Pierrot didn’t judge people. Their walks were now confined to the mansion.
Because it was wintertime, Irving was fretting that he would never live to see another summer and see his roses. Pierrot hired a landscape painter to come into the bedroom and paint roses all over the walls. Irving wept when he saw the beautiful mural, thinking that he had died and had found himself, to his surprise, in heaven.
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ONE MORNING Pierrot had taken off his fancy suit, and it was hanging from a coat hanger. He was wearing a green undershirt and a pair of the old man’s pajama bottoms that tied at the waist with a string. He walked into the bedroom, carrying a tray with a plate covered in cheese and bread and some peaches that had been left by the grocer outside the front door. When he saw that the old man was frozen in time and looking at the ceiling, Pierrot dropped the tray and cried out.
There was a chandelier above his head, made out of eight thousand glass beads, like pieces of ice from a hailstorm had all been frozen mid-fall.
Pierrot called for the undertakers to come. He sat next to Irving’s body, holding his hand, occasionally whispering, “There, there.” The undertakers came and took the old man away on a stretcher, stepping over sweaters and plates in the hallway. The house was so quiet and empty once the large front door thudded to a close. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, but before he knew it, Irving’s son arrived.
Pierrot put his clothes on hastily, intimidated by the severe, middle-aged man. He pushed his wild, unwashed hair from one side to another, attempting to look normal. He shuffled through the papers on the night table. He was looking for an item of great importance for his future. He found it underneath a cup of coffee that was resting on a top hat that was on a pile of records that was balanced on an empty cake box that was on top of a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Pierrot had read the book three times to Irving. He showed Irving’s son the piece of paper, which was the amendment to Irving’s will.
The son threw the will immediately into the stove. Pierrot was left with not a cent at nineteen years of age.
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BUT EVEN WORSE, though he had been Irving’s closest companion over the past four years, Pierrot had to stand at the back of the crowd at the cemetery. The fat, middle-aged women were all dressed in black at the funeral, like a group of cello cases abandoned backstage during a performance. The fedoras on the men were like a cluster of snails. Irving’s children’s lives were to be enhanced by their father’s death because of their inheritance. Pierrot was the only one left out in the cold.
Pierrot was also the only one who actually missed the old man.
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HE WANTED TO CRAWL INTO Irving’s grave and shoot himself in the head. Then he could be buried with Irving. They would meet again in heaven, lying on an enormous bed in the sky.
Pierrot was wandering and stumbling toward the grave so haphazardly that he bumped into a large statue standing between him and the grave. He stepped back to take a look at it. It was an enormous gray stone angel, whose hair was whipped up in a frenzy. He couldn’t say whether it was female or male. Just one of its stone toes could crush him.
But the angel with its enormous sword was blocking his entrance into Paradise. The angel seemed to be clearly informing him that he needed to back away. So he turned around and went the other way.
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PIERROT TOOK THE TROLLEY DOWNTOWN. It was a neighborhood where you could loiter properly. A horse clip-clopped by like a little girl wearing wooden clogs. Who could Pierrot turn to now? He thought of all the people at the orphanage he had left behind, but he would never be able to find them now. Too much time had passed. Time was not like physical distance. There was no road map you could acquire to travel over it.
He spotted a piano in the window of a department store. He couldn’t resist. He needed to play it to calm down. He walked through the door, climbed into the window display and began to play. The instrument had a loud and bright sound. He had played a rambunctious piano like this as a child, when touring with Rose. The taut assertive notes had almost seemed to make her mad. She had stomped around to the music like a soldier dancing on the enemy’s grave. She had held out her finger under her nose as though it were a mustache. Remembering that made Pierrot smile.
As he played a young woman with blue eyes and a cloche over red curls stopped on the sidewalk and stared at him. Then she disappeared. The next thing Pierrot knew, she was sitting next to him on the bench. Her eyes were preternaturally big, as if she were looking through magnifying glasses.
“And who are you?” Pierrot asked.