The Cardturner: A Novel About Imperfect Partners and Infinite Possibilities Read online

  “Uh, yes, sir,” I said.

  My mother’s eyes widened when she realized to whom I was talking. “Tell him he’s your favorite uncle,” she urged.

  “Do you know how to play bridge?” asked my uncle.

  I didn’t, but thought that maybe I could fake it.

  “Tell him you love him,” said my mother.

  “No,” I said to my uncle (and to my mother).

  “Good!” barked my uncle. “It’s better that way!”

  “I could probably pick it up by Satur—” I started to say, but Mrs. Mahoney was back on the line.

  “Hello, Alton?” She told me that Mr. Trapp needed to be at his club by one o’clock, and that I should pick him up no later than twelve-fifteen. I would be his cardturner, which meant, as far as I could tell, that he would tell me what card to play and I would play it. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I was having trouble concentrating on everything Mrs. Mahoney said, because my mother, thinking that I was still talking to Uncle Lester, kept telling me what to say.

  “Well?” my mother asked once I hung up.

  “I’m supposed to take him to his club on Saturday and play bridge with him.”

  My mother put her hands on my shoulders, looked me straight in the eye, and gave me her best motherly advice.

  “Don’t screw it up, Alton.”

  6

  Are You Sure?

  I knew that bridge was a card game, but that was about it. It seemed dull and old-fashioned. Maybe, at one time, bridge might have been some people’s idea of fun, but that was before computers and video games.

  I called Cliff, and hoped Katie wasn’t with him. I’m always amazed by the stuff he knows. If anybody could teach me how to play bridge by Saturday, it would be him.

  He was no help. According to Cliff, bridge was a card game little old ladies played while eating chocolate-covered raisins.

  “Anyway, your uncle’s blind,” Cliff pointed out. “So he won’t be able to tell whether you know how to play or not.”

  I wasn’t quite sure about that. I went online and found a Web site that sold bridge books. There were hundreds of books on bridge, possibly a thousand. There were books for beginners, and for advanced and expert players. Just your basic how-to-play-bridge book was over two hundred pages, but even if I wanted to read it, I wouldn’t get it in time for Saturday.

  Mostly, the whole thing struck me as very odd. Why would there be so many books about one game?

  I found another site that had the rules of bridge. I learned that bridge was a game played by four people. All the cards were dealt, so each person got thirteen cards. You were partners with the person who sat across from you.

  I was lost after that. There were two parts to a bridge hand, the bidding and the play,1 but I couldn’t tell you what you were supposed to do in either part. There were also things called a contract, and trump, and a dummy, and the directions north, south, east, and west seemed to have something to do with it.

  “Didn’t Uncle Lester say it was good you don’t know how to play?” Leslie asked me, looking over my shoulder.

  “I guess,” I muttered, but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense either. “How are we supposed to be partners?” I complained. “He can’t see the cards, and I don’t know the rules!”

  “Don’t yell at me,” said Leslie.

  Saturday, my mother made me wear a jacket and tie. This despite the fact that it was over eighty degrees outside, and also despite the fact that “He can’t see what I’m wearing!”

  “You’re taking him to his club,” replied my mother.

  She let me take her car, thankfully, since mine wasn’t all that reliable, but first I had to wash it. That made even less sense to me than wearing a jacket and tie. What, would all the other people at the club be looking out the window to make sure he arrived in a clean car?

  My Internet directions said it would take forty-three minutes to get to his house, but it took me over an hour. Once I left Cross Canyon Boulevard, I had to follow a labyrinth of winding roads up a hill, and most of the street signs were hidden behind trees and flowering shrubs. I followed this simple rule: when in doubt, go up. My uncle’s house was at the very top of the hill.

  The house wasn’t the castle I remembered from when I was six, but I could see why it had made that impression on me, all stone and wrought iron with giant beams of wood. Nor was the hill a mountain, although there were great sweeping views in all directions.

  Not that the views were much good to him now, I thought somewhat morbidly.

  An iron knocker in the shape of a goat’s head, horns included, was attached to the massive front door. I was tempted, but used the doorbell instead. A dog barked inside.

  Mrs. Mahoney opened the door. “Well, aren’t you a handsome young man,” she said, no doubt referring to my jacket and tie. “Hush, Captain!” she said to the dog, who did not hush.

  “You’ll have to excuse Captain. He’s gotten a lot more protective since Mr. Trapp lost his eyesight.”

  Mrs. Mahoney was dressed in a peach-colored pantsuit and wore a jade necklace. At first glance she seemed very refined and genteel, but the way she grabbed Captain by his collar revealed a woman with muscular arms and a strong grip.

  She invited me inside.

  Captain was a mixed-breed, with just enough Doberman pinscher to make me wary about entering. However, my hope of seeing the half-naked Teodora was greater than my fear of my uncle’s dog.

  “He knows I’ve never played bridge, right?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mrs. Mahoney assured me. “He will tell you which card to play.”

  “And you will play that card!” declared my uncle, coming through an archway. “You will not hesitate. You will not ask, ‘Are you sure?’”

  For someone who was supposedly on the brink of death, his voice was loud and strong. He was a large man, both in height and weight. His hair was cut short, but there was still some black mixed with the gray. The only clue that there might be something wrong with him was his dark sunglasses.

  “But you are to wait until I tell you what card to play, before you play it,” he continued. “Even if you are certain what that card will be. Even if a diamond is led, and the ten of diamonds is the only diamond in your hand, you will wait until I say ‘Ten of diamonds’ before you place it on the table. Because if you play that card before I call for it, then everyone will know it’s a singleton, won’t they?”

  I shrugged, which, I realized, was as meaningless to him as his words were to me.

  “Mr. Trapp takes his bridge very seriously,” said Mrs. Mahoney.

  Captain continued to stare threateningly at me as my uncle rubbed him behind his ears. “What’s your name?”

  “Alton. Alton Richards.”

  “Your niece’s son,” said Mrs. Mahoney.

  “Does he know Toni?” asked my uncle.

  “Ask him yourself.”

  He didn’t ask. Instead, he launched into a tirade of bridge gibberish.

  “Dummy’s got king, queen, ten of spades, and I’m sitting behind it with ace, four, doubleton. Declarer leads the deuce, partner plays the seven, and declarer calls for the king from dummy. ‘Four of spades,’ I say, without the slightest pause for thought. And what does Toni do? Does she play the four? No. She hesitates. She asks, ‘Are you sure?’2 A few lessons and she thinks she knows more than I do!”

  “Toni doesn’t think that,” said Mrs. Mahoney.

  “Well, she just told the whole table where the ace was, didn’t she?”

  I hoped that question wasn’t directed at me, because I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me again.

  “Alton Richards,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Dumb question, ain’t it? Hah!”

  7

  Teodora

  Teodora came drifting through the same archway as had my uncle,
although he hadn’t exactly drifted. The only half of her that was naked was below the knees and above the neck. She wore five ankle bracelets, all on the same ankle.

  I should mention that my interest in Teodora, and what she was or wasn’t wearing, wasn’t due entirely to my total lack of maturity. I was required to report back to my mother on whether or not she was “alluring.”

  Teodora reminded my uncle to breathe, and to focus on the Here and Now.

  She was about half my uncle’s age, about twice mine. I wouldn’t call her alluring in the normal sense, not that it was a word I would ever use. She was plump, and had a pockmarked face, yet when I shook her cool hand, I found myself looking into her dark and—there’s no other word for it—alluring eyes.

  I found her voice alluring too, which probably mattered a whole lot more to my uncle than her complexion. When she introduced herself to me she said her name was “Day-o-daughter,” with the gh in daughter not quite silent. She called Captain El Capitan.

  She confused her singulars and plurals too. As my uncle and I were about to leave, she put her hand on my arm and told me not to let him eat any “cakes or cookie.” “And no café!”

  I led him to the car, his left hand holding my right elbow. I was unsure whether I should open the front or back door for him. Was I his chauffeur, or were we family? It seems silly now, but as we moved closer to the car I really agonized over it.

  Finally I just asked. “So, do you want the front or the back?”

  “Shotgun,” he said, “so I can watch the road.”

  I guessed that was a joke. I smiled politely, which, I realized once again, meant the same to him as if I had stuck out my tongue.

  Mrs. Mahoney had given me directions to the club, but unfortunately they began by telling me to head back down the hill the way I had come. Even on normal, right-angle roads, I get confused when I try to follow directions in reverse. It was nearly impossible to try to figure out my way through the tangle of streets.

  My uncle must have realized I was having problems. He suddenly asked, “What street are you on now?”

  I edged past a shrub so I could read the street sign. “Skyflower,” I said.

  “You’re not too far off. Turn right, then make another right on Ridgecrest.”

  I did as I was told.

  “It’s easy to get lost up here,” he said. “I moved here for the view. Hah! Doesn’t do me much good now, does it?”

  That was exactly what I had been thinking earlier, but it didn’t seem right to agree with him. “Well, you can still kind of feel it, can’t you?”

  “What does a view feel like?” he asked.

  I felt foolish, but I pressed on. “An aura,” I tried. “Can’t you still kind of sense, in some way, that you’re on top of the world?”

  “I could be living across the street from a junkyard,” he said matter-of-factly, without a trace of bitterness.

  8

  The Club

  If you were expecting a fancy club, with plush carpeting, leather chairs, wood paneling, and people sipping brandy and smoking cigars as they discuss the stock market, then you’ve come to the wrong place.

  Maybe I should have realized that earlier, when I saw that my uncle was not dressed up like me, but I think I chalked that up to his blindness. I guess I thought that blind people could get away with wearing anything. Other people would just assume they made a mistake getting dressed, and would be too polite to comment.

  My second clue was the club’s location. Mrs. Mahoney’s directions took me through the parking lot of a carpet warehouse, and then into a complex of industrial offices. I parked in front of building number two, then led my uncle up some concrete steps to the second door on the right, where the words BRIDGE STUDIO were stenciled on the glass.

  Three rows of square tables. Eight tables per row. Four chairs at each table. Computer printouts posted on the walls. And all around me, people were speaking bridge gibberish.

  “I’m the only one to bid the grand, which would be cold if spades weren’t five-one.”

  “Unless you can count thirteen tricks, don’t bid a grand.”

  “I had thirteen tricks! Hell, I had fifteen tricks, as long as spades broke decently.”3

  I asked my uncle where we were supposed to go, and he told me he always sat at table three, South.

  In the center of each table was a laminated placard that indicated the table number and the directions: North, South, East, and West. Each direction corresponded to one of the four sides of the table.

  As I negotiated our way to table three, a woman wearing a big hat approached my uncle. “Trapp!” she demanded. “One banana, pass, pass, two no-trump. Is that unusual?”

  It sounded unusual to me.

  “That’s not how I play it,” said my uncle.4

  A moment later a man in shorts and a torn T-shirt came up to him.

  “Trapp, can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you remember that hand from last Monday, when you were in four hearts, and dummy had six clubs to the king?”

  “King, nine, eight, six, four, three,” said my uncle. “Your partner led the five, clearly a singleton.”

  “Could I have set you?”

  “You needed to cash the king and ace of spades before giving your partner his club ruff.”

  “I didn’t have the king.”

  “Your partner did.”

  “How was I to know that?”

  My uncle gave a half-smile as he raised his left shoulder about an inch, then lowered it.

  Even though I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I think that was my first inkling that bridge wasn’t just a simple game, and that there maybe was something extraordinary about my uncle.

  When we reached table three, there were two chairs in the South position. My uncle told me to take the one closer to the table, and then he sat in the chair to my left and a little behind me.

  “Well, I see you have a new cardturner,” said the woman sitting across from me in the North seat. “Do you think maybe you can keep this one?”

  “He’s perfect,” my uncle said. “He knows nothing about bridge, and even better, he knows he knows nothing.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I was being complimented or insulted.

  “Well, aren’t you going to introduce us?” asked the woman.

  My uncle didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t know his name, do you?” accused the woman.

  He remained quiet.

  She reached her hand across the table. “I’m Gloria.”

  “Alton,” I said, shaking her hand.

  “Don’t feel bad, Alton. I’ve been Trapp’s partner for eighteen years, and he only just learned my name last Wednesday.”

  “Hah!” laughed my uncle.

  9

  Shuffle and Play

  Gloria was an elderly woman with blond hair. She wore lots of jewelry, including earrings that looked like cards, the queen of hearts and the queen of clubs. She was nicely dressed, as were most of the women in the room. It was mostly the men who were slobs.5

  You know what? I’m not going to describe anybody else as elderly. Let’s just say that if you take my age and double it, I would still have been the youngest person in the room, by a lot.

  A man came around and placed two metal trays on each table. The room, which had been abuzz with bridge gibberish, began to quiet down.

  “There are fourteen tables,” the man announced. “We will play thirteen rounds, two boards a round, with a skip after round seven. Shuffle and play.”

  I didn’t know he was called the director, or that the metal card-holding trays were called boards. This isn’t easy. I’m trying to relate my overwhelming sense of confusion and at the same time let you know what was going on—even though I didn’t.

  A board is a small rectangular tray, with four slots for the cards. The slots are labeled North, South, East, and West. Each board is numbered. Our boards were numbere
d five and six.

  One thing did become clear to me. Gloria was my uncle’s partner. I was to be his assistant, his cardturner. Before each hand, I was to take him aside and tell him what cards he held, and then he would tell me which card to play.

  That made more sense.

  Sort of.

  The cards were shuffled and dealt; then each hand was placed back into the slots on the board. I learned later that this would be the only time all day that the cards would be shuffled. The same hands would be played over and over again at different tables.

  We began with board number five. Everyone removed their cards from their corresponding slots. Since my uncle and I were in the South position, I removed the cards from the South slot. The bridge studio was now as quiet as a library.

  It may seem silly, but I suddenly felt very nervous.

  I stood up and led my uncle to the coffee alcove. I think that was why he always sat at table three. It was the one closest to the alcove.

  No, I didn’t let him have any “café.” Even if my family did hope to inherit his fortune, I wasn’t about to do anything to speed up the process. The coffee alcove was just a place where I could tell him his hand without other people overhearing.

  I spoke quietly, slightly above a whisper. “Nine of spades, king of hearts, three of clubs, jack of spades, ten of di—”

  “Stop!” he suddenly shouted, covering his ears. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Just telling you—”

  “Are you a moron?” he asked. “Or are you just trying to drive me insane?”

  I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to look at us.

  The director hurried over and asked if there was a problem.

  “Yes, there’s a problem,” said my uncle. “My new cardturner is an imbecile!”

  “Keep it up, Trapp,” the director warned, “and I’m going to penalize you half a board.”

  “Yes, penalize him,” said Gloria, entering the alcove. “Maybe he’ll learn some manners.” She said this even though penalizing my uncle would also have meant penalizing her.