Helen walked slowly, but with a spring in her step. Her first stop was her bank, where she withdrew the transferred funds and closed the account. She gave the clerk the addresses of the GLBT Historical Society, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the friend who had been swindled. “Fifty thousand to each of those. Cashier’s checks, please.”
Martin Blake would be utterly baffled, but Haskel, she thought, would have approved.
The remainder she took in cash, five banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She asked the bank manager to call a cab, and went home. Her phone buzzed as she was finishing lunch. The caller ID said: Blake. She let it go to voice mail. When he called again, two minutes later, she turned off the phone and went to take a nap.
The next morning, she hired a Cadillac convertible and a driver for one last day in the city that she loved. To Chinatown for tea and almond cookies, Fisherman’s Wharf for a lunch of Dungeness crab and champagne. In the afternoon, she went to North Beach and Russian Hill, visiting the places she had first discovered when she’d moved to San Francisco at the age of nineteen, the places where she and Haskel had become friends. Never more than that, although Helen had once entertained hopes they— She sighed. Water under a long-closed bridge.
Some of the landmarks of her memories were gone—the Monkey Block had been torn down more than fifty years before, to make way for the Transamerica Pyramid; 440 Broadway remained a seedy bar, but with a very different clientele than Mona’s. Only Lupo’s seemed the same, secure in its old location, even if the sign said Tommaso’s; its pizza was still delicious and its red wine robust—for twenty-first-century prices, of course.
Each place she stopped to eat or drink, she left a sizable tip for the startled waiter or waitress—ten thousand dollars in cash. The astonished smiles and tears were the finest part of a very fine day. By the time the driver took her back to her building, it was evening. He held the car door, shocked when she handed him the fifth stack of bills.
“Thank you for a lovely day,” she said, tapping her cane on the sidewalk. “I will remember it for the rest of my life.”
She went upstairs, weary but content. Every box on her To-Do list had been ticked off, one by one. Her realtor would sell the building on Spofford Alley. She had no children, and had outlived most of her friends, so her lawyer had drawn up a will with a generous bequest to Ivy, her caregiver, and a smaller one to her attentive doorman. The remainder of her estate she left to the Manzanar Committee, along with a few trusts and gifts to various charities. All done and dusted.
Most important, she had kept her oath, and seen to Haskel’s painting. Seventy-five years. She smiled.
It was time.
Her keys and wallet centered on the kitchen counter where Ivy would be sure to see them in the morning, she poured the last of the Macallan into a tall tumbler. She walked to the big window and stood for a minute, quietly gazing at the city spread out below her, the canyons of tall buildings spotted here and there with traffic signals and the yellow glow of sodium lamps, the ever-changing pattern of lights on the new Bay Bridge flickering off to the east.
Then she opened the bottle of pills, and took them, two at a time, with a swallow of good scotch until there was nothing left of either.
Helen Young went into her bedroom. She changed into a pair of blue silk pajamas, brushed her hair, and put on a touch of lipstick. Then she got into bed, turned out the light, and went to sleep for the last time, humming a Cole Porter tune until she and the melody simply drifted away.