1. Meeting Biff

 

 

I first saw Biff about thirty years ago, maybe less than that. He came into the Doctor's house, his hair all scraggly. And his coat all smelling of dirt. And he was dirty, too. I could smell it on him. He was white all over, like all of them were. They all were. I figured right away he was Love's boy whom she was bringing home over the holiday. But usually they were nice looking at least. This one, he was short. And he had long hair. And like I said already, he smelled. It was probably in his bones; they cannot help that.

 

But also, he had a twinkle in his eye. Some of them do, you know. And he is one that did. That is the twinkle of a special somebody. As for the rest of him, he was just like they all were—only, somehow, also not. I am surprised how much I remember about it. But he was not with her long. Biff was with Love a summer, I think, at the most. No more than that. No more.

 

Mister Doctor, I had been with him a long time. I knew him before all this happened. Before her and before him also. Before all of them. Fay was there. Fay was always there by the side of Mister Doctor. If I had been white, I would be the Missus Doctor myself. For more than twenty-five years, I drove his Mercedes-Benzes; other years a Lexus; and some years an Audi. "Fay, take the old one for now," the Mister Doctor said to me when it came time for a new car for himself. It did not matter to me that the cars he gave me were not brand new.

 

Every year, I drove a luxury car like most people never in their whole lives have ever been in. I have driven a dozen of them. I picked up their children from school in them; I drove their grandchildren in them. I cooked their dinner. I washed their clothes. I did the shopping. I cleaned their house. It was I, Fay Fenton Black, who raised their children. The Missus? Oh, she was there was all right. She was there. But not like Fay was. The way I saw it, I had my position to keep, and my family to raise.

 

Biff had one those names that did not make sense anytime you said it. It is not a name for any man, and it is not a name for any boy. Maybe if Biff had been in a Batman show, then it would be a name, all right. Besides that, it is not. So, when Love and Biff were home, she was making him a snuggle already in the sofa when I came into the den with sodas. "Mister Doctor, he will be home soon, Love," I told her. "Fay," she goes, "this is my friend, Biff. He is staying for dinner."

 

When she said that, I already saw the worried look in his eyes. I saw he wondered if she meant he was supposed to go after dinner. I saw he was frightened. He was afraid. I told her her father did not like it when she kept her feet up up on the table. "That is a fine piece of furniture you keep putting up your feet up on, Love," I told her. "Your father has had that piece of furniture in the family for many many years," "One of Daddy's conquests," she says, and moved her feet off of it, in socks.

 

I saw also this: he was not used to people talking past him like he was not there. "Nice to meet you, Mister Biff," I said. He said nothing. He did not know what to call me. He cannot say: Fay. He will not say: Missus Fay. So he is silent. He does not know what to say to me. He does not know this household. He just looked away like only he and Love were there, but they were not. It was me, too.

 

When she married, I saw it was right. They were both business lawyers. He was from a good family; she was from a good family. Even though they were Jews, both of them. That did not matter to me, so long as they were good families. Lots of houses; places to go to: Florence in Italy, Lake Balaton in Hungary, London in England, the Midi in France, I have been on all their vacations even before Love and her brother were born.

 

How Mark Steeplechase killed himself, I will not go on about. He is out of my story. He is out. The other Mark, Love's husband, I will talk plenty more about him. Before Biff, Love knew so many boys, why, I cannot even tell myself how many more times I told her to take her foot off from her father's mahogany table—before Biff, and also after him.

 

The second time I am seeing Biff, some thirty years later, he is just as scrappy as he was the first time I saw him. "Hello, Biff," I say to him, when I see him. He again does not know what to say. He does not see who I am. I see that. "Biff," Love says, "maybe you do not remember Fay? She worked for my parents." Of course if he does, he does not see exactly straight now why I am here at Love's house; and if he does not, he just does not.

 

He is almost fifty and the same confused man he was thirty years ago. "Nice to meet you, Fay, if we have not met before," he goes. He is just one mistake after next. "Oh, we met before. You were one of those boys that never took his foot off a coffee table." "Fay!" Love goes. "That was me!" "Of course it was," I go, "it always was you with all those boys back at the Mister Doctor's house." "Fay," she goes now, "the girls are going to their father's." "Yes, Love, I am taking them there right away, right away now." "It is nice to meet you again, Biff," I say to him. "You, too," he says, all confused.

 

Pursued by a fifty year old sex-crazed ex-girlfriend from thirty years ago, middle-aged Biff McAllister finds himself once again in the upper middle class clutches of the Steeplechase family. Narrated by Fay Black, their African-American octogenarian nanny, her novel reveals the bigotry, malice, and racism (along with their secrets of incest, arson, and suicide) that has held this otherwise respectable and successful Ivy League family together during her decades of service. But, in the end, it is Fay herself who must choose to either save Biff or watch him be destroyed for good by this warped family's intergenerational sickness.