Anger (20 page)

“What more can you ask?”

“A word of reassurance from you,” she flashed back. “I could do with some outdoor work. Any bulbs left?”

The moment of danger was past.

“I'm sorry if I did the wrong thing,” Ned said then.

“Never mind, let's work first—and then,” Anna said unexpectedly, “if you feel like accompanying me I'd like to sing. Oh, something easy and fun!”

“I'd like that,” Ned said. Anna was rarely in the mood to sing at home, but occasionally they did play together when she could lay aside her professional self and all its anxieties and sing for pleasure. In college Ned had worked hard at the piano and had been quite surprised to find that he still had some skill. This had not happened for some time, this invitation to share music. He was pleased. So he was careful now to give Anna something easy to do so she would not get overtired and change her mind. They worked away in silence.

After a half-hour, Anna stretched and lay flat on her back for a moment, looking up through the leaves of the maple. “Look at the light … it's so beautiful,” and then “Why is autumn, when everything is dying, so beautiful?”

“Not dying, going to sleep,” Ned answered, brushing earth off his face. “Maybe you've had enough. I'll just get rid of this small bag of hyacinths and be with you.”

“I'll put the roast in and have a shower.”

“Good.”

Anna stopped at the steps to the porch and looked back at Ned, kneeling in the grass, totally concentrated, and for a moment watched his deft hands, digging holes with his sharp trowel in a quick efficient rhythm. How could she not love this secret, ungiving, maddening man? In his own peculiar way he gave so much simply by being himself. The struggle with him was giving her a kind of life and self-knowledge she had never known until now. And maybe that was what it was all about.

Chapter XII

Mrs. Fraser did not relax her standards or change her way of life in the country. She came down with Beulah, the Nova Scotian cook who had been with her for over forty years and was now rather crotchety, Maria, a West Indian waitress and general help, and Maria's husband, Pedro, who chauffeured the Mercedes and occasionally did some odd jobs like bringing in wood though he was, as Maria herself often said, “the laziest man God ever made.”

It was hard these days for Pauline Fraser to come down and face the garden, neglected since the old gardener had died, and hard not to complain too much to Joe, a local gardener who was apt to make egregious mistakes like cutting off the asters in bud, thinking they were in seed.

“I know you can't help it, Joe, but you are giving me a lot of pain in my old age.”

“Sorry, Ma'am. It won't happen again.”

“But something else will, Joe. Never mind,” Mrs. Fraser added quickly, for she was afraid Joe would walk off some day. Workmen had pride these days but no standards. And to Pauline Fraser, life had seemed for a long time a matter of dealing with small disappointments and frustrations as best she could.

That Sunday morning in honor of her luncheon guests she decided to wear a blue and white silk dress in spite of the chill in the air, threw a sweater on after breakfast and went out in rubber boots to pick a few late roses. There was mildew on some of the bushes … nothing to be done about that, she supposed. She cut and held up a yellow rose to smell its delicious slightly spicy scent and soon had quite an array of bloom in her basket.

Inside she took one look at Beulah, standing at the kitchen counter beating up egg whites for the lemon meringue pie, and fled to the pantry to arrange the roses. But of course the silverbowl she wanted was tarnished. Maria rarely noticed such things, so Mrs. Fraser got out the cleaning rag and polish and did it herself. And in the end, the centerpiece was really quite lovely, she thought.

Anna and Ned did not come over often, so Mrs. Fraser felt a little excited, if not exactly happy. She remained ill at ease with her daughter-in-law, who seemed a little larger than life, somehow. And she did occasionally wonder how Ned was faring as though, she smiled to herself, he had a tigress on his leash. No doubt the tigress occasionally purred, but Pauline Fraser suspected that she also roared. What an odd marriage it was! Ned was such a self-contained, self-assured man—except for his passion for music, and of course that was what explained it all. He had married music! That, Pauline Fraser, supposed, must have taken a certain audacity. And perhaps, she ruminated, a surprising self-abnegation. Ned could be quite ruthless. Heaven knows she had experienced that often enough. But then she had little loving kindness from her sons. She was kept at a distance. Their attitude was that she had let them down in some way after Angus died. They had never understood what it had been like for her to have her life cut in two, to be left stranded forever on an island of loss and pain.

“But I mustn't get teary this morning,” she said to herself, and went upstairs to brief Maria on the table setting and to be sure she remembered to dust the glass tables on the porch. By the time the sun was high, it would be warm enough out there.

“I feel so old, Maria,” she said after their little talk. “Look at my face, a mass of wrinkles! I feel a hundred.”

“You're only seventy, Ma'am, that's not old.”

“It's awfully old,” Pauline Fraser felt suddenly cross, “I lost my husband thirty years ago … thirty years without anyone.”

“Now you keep those blues away,” Maria said firmly. “You look so pretty in that dress, and your son's coming for dinner!” She plumped the bed pillows up just a little impatiently. “Better keep away from Beulah, she's in a bad mood.”

“I know.”

“High blood pressure,” Maria said. “Some day she's going to drop dead.”

“No one seems to be very cheerful this morning,” Pauline Fraser sniffed. “What a glum household this is!”

Maria refrained from comment. “I'd better get on with it,” she said. “There's a lot to do downstairs.”

“Run along, Maria. You are no comfort this morning.”

At the door, Anna let Ned go in alone and walked down to the rose garden to smell the roses. She wanted to pick one but didn't dare. No one ever picked in this garden except Mrs. Fraser who was, it had to be faced, excruciatingly possessive about everything she owned. When Anna came back toward the porch, Ned and his mother were standing in the doorway and waved at her.

“Oh, those roses!” she called, “How do you ever do it?”

“So there's where you were!” Mrs. Fraser kissed her daughter-in-law.

“I couldn't resist …”

“Well, sit down, Anna. What would you like to drink? Sherry, Dubonnet? Ned, do the honors, please.”

“Dubonnet is rather a treat.”

“I'll have some myself. A treat?” Pauline Fraser smiled. “I thought everyone drank Dubonnet these days. But of course I don't move in your circles. It's champagne in your circles, no doubt.”

“We don't have a circle, Mama,” Ned said, handing her a glass and then taking Anna hers. “If you don't mind I'll go and find the Scotch.”

“Whatever does Ned mean about no circle?” Pauline Fraser asked, as he disappeared.

“He's just teasing. But actually we don't go out much anymore. Ned works awfully hard himself and I can't have late nights when I'm getting ready for a concert.”

“And you are now?”

“I go to Dallas in two weeks.”

“Good heavens! Dallas? It seems so far away …”

“I'm in a panic, so let's talk about other things. This room is such a pleasure,” Anna said, “I love the flowery cretonne. It's so summery and cheerful.”

“They tell me wicker furniture is coming back. So after forty years we are in fashion!”

And they talked on about nothing, like skaters on a thinly iced-over pond. Anna was good at drawing Mrs. Fraser out, about the garden, Beulah (“she appears to be suffering from permanent menopause”), how Joe was working out. Ned, nursing his Scotch, was silent, and watched Anna's tactful treatment of his mother with a certain amusement. At times she could act the perfect lady with consummate skill, and he enjoyed watching her do it. As for his mother, she looked suddenly old, her face had become very wrinkled he noted, yet old age suited her. It was more tolerable to see her at seventy spending her life complaining than it had been when she was younger.

And out of these thoughts Ned asked, “Who do you see these days, Mama? How is Ernesta?”

“Oh, she's too busy to come and see me … she is on every imaginable committee and spends two days a week at the children's hospital. I'm lucky if she stops in once a month. Anne has cancer and refuses to see any of her old friends, at least refuses to see me. I seem to be some sort of leper. Sophia is a nervous wreck and ought to be in McLean.”

Ned laughed, “Spare us the lugubrious list! Isn't anyone well and happy?”

“When you get to be my age, Ned, you'll understand. Old age itself is a kind of illness, you see.” Pauline Fraser was sitting very erect and perhaps (at least Anna thought so) enjoying all this misery. It was her element.

“It's funny,” Anna said, “but I have always looked forward to being old. I have known so many great old people—my teacher, Madama Protopova, is one. She is nearly eighty I believe, but she is still so vitally engaged in her life in and with music, still so fierce and demanding she acts like an electric current on her pupils. Old age can be a great time … I mean …”

“Well, if you have a career of course it's quite different,” Pauline said, not pleased by the turn the conversation was taking. Why was it that Anna always managed to make her feel lacking in some way? “But if your life was cut in two when you were young, old age would only emphasize the loss.”

Luckily Maria now made her appearance at the door. And they went into the dining room, an extremely formal room, daunting, Anna always felt, as though conversation died at its entrance.

“Oh, those roses!” she exclaimed as she unfolded her damask napkin. “Roses and silver, I had not thought of them as setting each other off, but they do! It's beautiful!”

“Mama is a genius at arranging flowers,” Ned said, smiling across at his mother for the first time.

“Am I?” Pauline blushed with pleasure. “I've always enjoyed doing it.”

Ned really should be kinder to his mother, Anna was thinking. It took so little, a compliment … why couldn't he do it more often?

“This soup is heaven,” she said. “What is it? Cucumber?”

“I think so—it's a secret of Beulah's.” Pauline was beginning to thaw. She felt less nervous, and so she turned to Anna and asked, “How do you two manage? About cooking, I mean?”

“Oh, we take turns … and then Felicia comes in every other day and makes a casserole and dessert.”

“You have not made a cook out of Ned, have you?”

“Would that be a disaster?”

“No, a triumph, my dear!” Pauline Fraser was suffused with laughter. “When he was a boy he tried to make brownies and burned them. Another time, popovers that refused to rise—do you remember?” she asked Ned.

“Of course I remember. But you forget, Mama, that Paul and I lived in the little house for a summer, and we used to cook things.”

Pauline finished her soup and the next course was served as she spoke in her forlorn voice, the voice that infuriated Ned. “I had a lot to bear that summer. Paul, you know,” she said to Anna, “tried to commit suicide.”

“That must have been awfully hard for you,” Anna murmured.

“Yes, it was. Paul recovered. He had the help of a psychiatrist He had someone to lean on. I had nobody and I never recovered.”

“Must we dwell on the past, Mama? You are giving us a lovely meal. Let's enjoy it,” Ned said coldly.

“Ned has no compassion,” Pauline said to Anna. “You must have found that out by now.”

“He can't show it,” Anna said in the intimacy of the moment, not looking at her husband. She knew that he would have his closed, cold look and she preferred not to see it.

“How do you know someone feels anything if they can't show it?” Pauline warmed to her daughter-in-law.

“I expect your husband was a very compassionate man?” Anna asked.

“Was he, Ned?”

“Was he?” Ned asked himself. “He was marvelous with any wounded animal. That I do remember.”

“Poor Toby,” Pauline said.

“We had a dog who died of cancer,” Ned explained. “Father nursed him, stayed up night after night with him.” A thing, he also remembered, but did not say, was that it had irritated his mother. She felt the dog should have been put to sleep for mercy's sake and also because she didn't like Angus to sleep downstairs.

“Long, long ago,” Pauline sighed. “Isn't memory a strange thing? A little thing makes an indelible impression. And then there are whole areas in the past that just disappear.”

Anna was thinking what strange people these were … how close they came to coming out with things and then withdrew, as Ned now did. “All this is boring for Anna,” he said.

“Not at all. I am fascinated. Do go on about your father.”

“Ned never talks about his father,” Pauline said. “Does anyone want a second helping? No? Well then, you may clear the table and bring in dessert, Maria.”

Perhaps to change the subject, perhaps out of sheer curiosity, perhaps to stir things up, Pauline, using her new confidential tone with Anna, leaned toward her and whispered, “I'm always hoping for some good news.”

“What's that, Mother?” Ned's voice was sharp. “To what good news are you referring?”

“I give you three guesses,” she said, smiling across at her son.

“I'll give you good news. Anna had a triumph in Pittsburgh last week.”

“You know that isn't what I meant! Though I am very glad to hear it, of course.”