Tales of the Black Widowers

Trumbull said indignantly, "Shakespeare? Who the hell wants to talk about Shakespeare?" His disposition had not been improved by the loss of five dollars and by the look of unearthly virtue upon Rubin's face.
"Host's privilege," said Avalon firmly.
"Humph. All right. Mr. Levy, as a science writer, what is your connection with Shakespeare?"
"None, as a science writer." He spoke with a distinct Brooklyn accent. "It's just that I'm after three thousand dollars."
"In Shakespeare?"
"Somewhere in Shakespeare. Can't say I've had any luck, though."
"You speak in riddles, Levy. What do you mean three thousand dollars somewhere in Shakespeare that you can't find?"
"Oh, well, it's a complicated story."
"Well, tell it. That's what we're here for. It's a longstanding rule that nothing that is said or done in this room is ever repeated outside under any circumstances, so speak freely. If you get boring, we'll stop you. Don't worry about that."
Levy spread out his arms. "All right, but let me finish my tea."
"Go ahead, Henry will bring you another pot, since you aren't civilized enough to drink coffee… Henry!"
"Yes, sir," murmured Henry.
"Don't start till he comes back," said Trumbull. "We don't want him to miss any of this."
"The waiter?"
"He's one of us. Best man here."
Henry arrived with a new pot of tea and Levy said, "It's a question of a legacy, sort of. It's not one of those things where the family homestead is at stake, or millions in jewels, or anything like that. It's just three thousand dollars which I don't really need, but which would be nice to have."
"A legacy from whom?" asked Drake.
"From my wife's grandfather. He died two months ago at the age of seventy-six. He'd been living with us for five years. A little troublesome, but he was a nice old guy and, being on my wife's side of the family, she took care of most of it. He was sort of grateful to us for taking him in. There were no other descendants and it was either us or a hotel for old people."
"Get to the legacy," said Trumbull, showing some signs of impatience.
"Grandpa wasn't rich but he had a few thousand. When he first came to us, he told us that he had bought
three thousand dollars' worth of negotiable bonds and would give them to us when he died."
"Why when he died?" asked Rubin.
"I suppose the old guy worried about our getting tired of him. He held out the three thousand to us as a reward for good behavior. If he was still with us when he was dying, he would give the bonds to us, and if we kicked him out, he wouldn't. I guess that was what was in his mind."
Levy went on, "He hid them in various places. Old guys can be funny. He'd change the hiding place now and then whenever he began to fear we might find them. Of course, we usually did find them before long, but we'd never let on and we'd never touch them. Except once! He put them in the clothes hamper and we had to give them back to him and ask him to put them elsewhere, or sooner or later they would get into the washing machine.
"That was about the time he had a small stroke-no connection, I'm sure-and after that he was a little harder to handle. He grew morose and didn't talk much. He had difficulties in using his right leg and it gave him a feeling of mortality. After that, he must have hidden the bonds more efficiently, for we lost track of them, though we didn't attach much importance to that. We assumed he would tell us when he was ready.
"Then two months ago, little Julia, that's my younger daughter, came running to us to tell us that Grandpa was lying on the couch and looking funny. We ran to the living room, and it was obvious that he had had another stroke. We called the doctor, but it was clear that his right side was gone entirely. He couldn't speak. He could move his lips and make sounds, but they came to no words.
"He kept moving his left arm and trying to speak and I said, 'Grandpa, are you trying to tell me something?' He could just about tremor his head into a small nod. 'About the bonds?' Again a small nod. 'You want us to have them?' Again a nod and his hand began to move as though he were trying to point.
"I said, 'Where are they?' His left hand trembled and continued to point. I couldn't help but say, 'What are you pointing at, Grandpa?' but he couldn't tell me. His finger just kept pointing in an anxious, quivering way, and his face seemed in agony as he tried to talk and failed. I was sorry for him. He wanted to give the bonds to us, to reward us, and he was dying without being able to.
"My wife, Caroline, was crying and saying, 'Leave him alone, Simon,' but I couldn't leave him alone. I couldn't let him die in despair. I said, 'We'll have to move the couch toward whatever it is he's pointing to.' Caroline didn't want to, but the old man was nodding his head.
"Caroline got at one end of the couch and I at the other and we moved it, little by little, trying not to jar him. He was no light-weight, either. His finger kept pointing, always pointing. He turned his head in the direction in which we were moving him, making moaning sounds as though to indicate whether we were moving him in the right direction or not. I would say, 'More to the right, Grandpa?' 'More to the left?' And sometimes he would nod.
"Finally, we got him up against the line of bookcases, and slowly his head turned. I wanted to turn it for him, but I was afraid to harm him. He managed to get it round and stared at the books for a long time. Then his finger moved along the line of books till it pointed toward one particular book. It was a copy of The Complete Works oj Shakespeare, the Kittredge edition.
"I said, 'Shakespeare, Grandpa?' He didn't answer, he didn't nod, but his face relaxed and he stopped trying to speak. I suppose he didn't hear me. Something like a half-smile pulled at the left side of his mouth and he died. The doctor came, the body was taken away, we made arrangements for the funeral. It wasn't till after the funeral that we went back to the Shakespeare. We figured it would wait for us and it didn't seem right to grab for it before we took care of the old man.
"I assumed there would be something in the Shakespeare volume to tell us where the bonds were, and that's when the first shock came. We turned through every page,
one by one, and there was nothing there. Not a scrap of paper. Not a word."
Gonzalo said, "What about the binding? You know, in between the stuff that glues the pages and the backstrip?"
"Nothing there."
"Maybe someone took it?"
"How? The only ones who knew were myself and Caroline. It isn't as though there were any robbery. Eventually, we thought there was a clue somewhere in the book, in the written material, in the plays themselves, you know. That was Caroline's idea. In the last two months, I've read every word of Shakespeare's plays; every word of his sonnets and miscellaneous poems-twice over. I've gotten nowhere."
"The hell with Shakespeare," said Trumbull querulously. "Forget the clue. He had to leave them somewhere in the house."
"Why do you suppose that?" said Levy. "He might have put it in a bank vault for all we know. He got around even after his first stroke. After we found the bonds in the clothes hamper, he might have thought the house wasn't safe."
"All right, but he still might have put them in the house somewhere. Why not just search?"
"We did. Or at least Caroline did. That was how we divided the labor. She searched the house, which is a big, rambling one-one reason we could take in Grandpa- and I searched Shakespeare, and we both came out with nothing."
Avalon untwisted a thoughtful frown and said, "See here, there's no reason we can't be logical about this. I assume, Simon, that your grandfather was born in Europe."
"Yes. He came to America as a teen-ager, just as World War I was starting. He got out just in time."