Free Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes Page A

else. So it wasn’t that they couldn’t talk, but that they wouldn’t.
    By this time, I had got up off the bench and was standing in front of the Woods. Maybe I could understand Ubub better if I watched his face. “Didn’t you ever hear them say anything to Mary-Evelyn?”
    Emphatically, Ubub shook his head. So did Ulub, and not, I thought, just in imitation of his brother. No, they had never heard them say anything to her. Then Ubub offered: “Nu-ee th-thun uh uhn ee.” Ulub turned to Ubub and they both nodded, confirming this statement.
    And the old man, who’d edged closer to them and was now Official Interpreter, again mouthed Ulub’s word forms and exclaimed: “Funny! They thought it was funny.” He meant the Woods did.
    Both nodded and grinned at him.
    I knew the Woods didn’t mean funny “laughable,” but funny “strange.” To me it was worse than strange; it was scary.
    “But you were only there a short time,” I said. “Maybe they just didn’t want to talk in front of strangers. Or something.”
    Ubub considered this, bringing his long, oil-begrimed fingers to his forehead. But he had set his face to a certainty and was shaking his head. He made small, grunting noises and then looked upwards, closing and unclosing his small hands. He had the look of a person who meant to throw a tantrum at God, and I can’t say I blamed him. (I knew all about tantrums.) Then he lowered his head, as if he were in disgrace. (I knew all about disgrace, too.) Ulub simply put his hand on his brother’s arm and patted him into a sort of dark, frustrated quiet.
    I thought how awful it would be to be speechless (though I imagined some people—Lola Davidow chief among them—wouldn’t mind too much if such a fate befell me). And since I was pretty sure the Woods neither read nor wrote, how it would be to have no means of communication excepting if they found someone, or some occasion when someone really wanted to understand them, such as this one.
    Yet the two of them together (and they were never apart) seemedalmost pleased with things. I’ve always thought it dumb, really dumb, to comment on other people’s happiness—that is, whether they were or were not happy—but the Woods had an air about them as if they were more or less happy. Such as when they would be eating their lunch in the Rainbow, listening to the regulars at the counter kidding around, and they’d smile as if they were included in all of the buffoonery. And, naturally, they liked the Rainbow because Maud was there, and always insisted on waiting on them; she wouldn’t let Shirl do it because Shirl teased them—Shirl could bury a lot of nastiness underneath a quirky little smile (and even that smile looked mean, I thought) and pretend she couldn’t understand what Ulub or Ubub were pointing to on the menu. But Maud would tell them the specials and tell them if anything was particularly good that day. They really liked that, being treated like anybody else, and sometimes would ponder over their order, but they always wound up pretty much with the same thing: hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes and gravy.
    I wondered, too, if their memories might not even be better than the rest of ours because they could keep them clearer, so to speak, and depended on them more, and were much deeper into their own thoughts than others were. They weren’t clouding over their memories with a lot of talk.
    I said to Ubub, hoping he would understand that I had understood him, “You don’t think—you think they never talked to her. To Mary-Evelyn.”
    Ubub raised his head, nodding and looking happier. Then he added: “Uf Mur-ur-ah tahn nu-uhn ah-ah-ahnwur.”
    This was truly inscrutable. I mulled it over, frowning deeply. I think the “uf” must have been “if.” So I said, “If Mary . . .” They nodded, encouragingly. But what was “tahn”? “Talk,” maybe. “If Mary talked . . . ”
    Heavy nods.
    But I couldn’t get the rest. The old