Caroline's Daughters (3 page)

Then from the doorway is heard a voice, high-pitched and quite familiar to them all: “This fucking van, where in hell do you expect a person to park?”

And there is Jill, her pale-blonde hair short and sleek, a small cap, a helmet. Jill, in pale-pink silk, looking slightly rumpled, and flustered—and, as Ralph has said, very sexy.

“I thought I left plenty of room. You do look fabulous, Jill.”

“Hurry up. We're just starting, my kids will eat it all up if we don't.”

“Where on earth have you been?”

Thus more or less in chorus is Jill greeted by her sisters. She chooses, though, to answer only Sage's somewhat accusing question. “I had some work to do,” she tells Sage, and then, “Where's Noel? He's working too?” She laughs again, and seems not to expect an answer. “I will have a glass of wine,” she tells Ralph. “It all seems so festive, I feel rather festive myself.”

As though deliberately, the three blonde daughters have clustered together, Liza, Fiona, and Jill, all happily out in the sunshine, in their summer clothes, with plates of summer food before them. Sage, isolating herself somewhat, chooses a shaded corner of the deck, near a budding yellow rose.

Caroline is moved to go over to her, though not to say what is most in her mind, not to say, You're worried over Noel, you
shouldn't be, he's just not worth it. Although that is what she would have liked to say.

And Caroline sighs, with the further self-critical observation, How much a mother I do seem still to be! So annoying, no wonder I haven't done much else with my life.

To Sage, though, what she does say is, “How's your work going these days? Do I get to come to your studio any time soon?”

S
age is not sure why she feels that she must tell her mother and Ralph that she is just going for a walk, “I'll just walk around for a while, check out Pacific Heights,” when she is actually going to see her stepfather. (Or, former stepfather? These designations have become unclear.) Nevertheless, that is what she says.

She is actually going to see Jim McAndrew, former husband of Caroline and father of Liza, Fiona and Jill. Who lives in a condominium not far from Caroline's house. Sage is off to see Jim, while Caroline and Liza are dealing with one of Liza's kids, who threw up. And Ralph and Saul are packing leftovers into Saul's old Ford wagon, directed by Fiona—as Jill buzzes off in her yellow Mercedes.

And Sage announces her walk. “I'll be back in an hour or so to pick up my car, but you guys will probably be taking naps by then.”

“That sounds right.”

Has she always, all her life, been in love with Jim McAndrew? Sage has wondered this, and she took it up, repeatedly if not very fruitfully, with the psychiatrist to whom she briefly went—at the end of a love affair with a man of about Jim's age, a married man, a father. Roland Gallo, a well-known local lawyer-politico, a semi-friend of Ralph's.

But it did not much matter what name she gave to her strong, surviving emotions in Jim's direction, both she and the shrink concluded.
Entering her life when she was at the very tender, very vulnerable age of less than three, as the first San Francisco suitor of her widowed mother, Jim was and has remained for Sage the ultimately desirable and finally unavailable person. “Friends” is the word she generally uses to describe her connection with Jim, and very likely that is how he too thinks and speaks of it, if he ever does mention this connection. “Sage and Jim have remained the greatest friends; it's slightly odd, I suppose, but extremely nice, and quite natural when you think of it. After all, he was her father for all those years,” is how Caroline has been heard to describe it.

Sage did not much like the lunch party. Or, she wonders, are her nagging, ill-defined worries over both Noel and her work enough to prevent her enjoyment of anything, even in this soft blue April weather? It is easier to ascribe the mild depression that she now experiences to the multiple presences of her sisters, her three half-sisters. Three halves: the very phrase suggests wrongness, no one should have three half-sisters, much less four.

Not for the first time Sage considers the fact that of all those women it is Caroline, her mother, who seems most truly her sister. Although she is indeed fond of Liza, and of the absent Portia.

Suppose she did a group of those female figures? Suddenly seeing that possibility, seeing the circle of small clay figures—perhaps at a table? chairs? No, standing would be better, more scope for individual postures—Sage stops in her tracks, stops right there on the sidewalk, which happens to be at the crest of a hill, the height of Pacific Heights. She stops to think, and to see.

How amazing, really, that she has not thought of this grouping before. Or for that matter not done it long before.

But now she will.

From where Sage stands, had she been looking down to the bay she would have seen a flutter of white sails, all over the blue. A Sunday regatta, through which, all slow and stately, a long black freighter moves deliberately outward, toward the Pacific, the East. Bearing exports, probably, to Japan.

Much closer to Sage, in fact she can smell them, are the thick dark woods of the Presidio, the eucalyptus and pines, the weird wind-bent cypresses.

She is or has been taking the long way around to Jim's condominium, where she is not due for almost half an hour (she called; she does not drop in on Jim, a busy bachelor-doctor). She takes this route both to kill the time and because she has always walked this way. Below her on Pacific Avenue is the row of large, dark and quite splendid houses, some Maybeck, a Julia Morgan, an Esherick, in one of which Roland the married lover lives, there across from the playground and the woods, with his view of the bridge and the bay. In the bad old days of the end of that affair Sage used to disguise herself in scarves and bulky sweaters (she hoped she was disguised) and to haunt the small area of playground just across from his house, trying to read messages from its handsome façade: lights in what must be the master bedroom (that most horrible, wounding phrase), or drawn shades. What was meant—by anything?

Just as these days Sage tries to decipher the bruises on Noel's upper arms (he bruises easily, he says, as she does): small round bruises, the size of fingertips. Fingers pressing, in some extreme of passion. Fingers belonging to almost anyone. Or, as Noel says (although she does not exactly ask him), something he bumped into, at a building site.

All of which has led Sage to rephrase an old question: was it in Roland Gallo's case the marriage, and in Noel's the possible involvements with “other women” that she finds so fascinating, so addictive? Roland was quite bald, thick-bodied, middle-aged. An essentially political person, a lawyer, involved in various local money-power structures, mostly big real-estate deals. Not much in common with Sage, intellectually speaking. (A few quite incredible tricks with oral sex, however.) Noel, although undeniably handsome, is not especially “interesting” either, and in sex, she has to admit, he is somewhat passive, a recipient of love.

Sage never gets very far with any of this, only further into her normal anxiety (she knows she's a woman who loves too much, and so what?)—and it gets her, geographically speaking, up to the massive
glass doors of Dr. Jim McAndrew's building, which she has just now reached.

Their embrace at greeting, Sage and Jim's, is always faintly indecisive, and there is awkwardness over kissing: cheeks, never mouths are aimed for, but sometimes it all goes wrong and mouths do brush, accidentally. Rather than hugging, they sometimes grip each other's shoulders.

And then the ritual comments on each other's perceived condition:

“You look—”

“—great! thin!”

“—a little tired?”

“—really rested!”

Jim in fact looks worse than tired, he looks gray, and exhausted. And too thin, he has suffered the sort of weight loss that withers the skin. However, apparently aware of his effect, he quickly explains, “This great new diet. I know, too fast. I'd never let a patient do this, but I feel really great.”

“You doctors are such jerks about your own health.”

Jim laughs, acknowledging accuracy. “Of course we are, we think we can fix anything, including ourselves.” And then, “But how're you? Still madly in love with that Noel, despite being married to him?” This is an old semi-joke between them: Jim believes that marriages have ruined his love affairs. All two of them; there has only been one wife since Caroline.

“Oh, I guess I am. For all the good that does me,” Sage tells him.

“Well, sit down over here by the window. The view may do you some good.”

And here we are again, Sage reflects, looking out at the same high green park that Caroline's house also faces, from another angle. And she and Jim are returned to their old roles; he is doctor-omnipotent, super-dad, with a small New England shading of irony. And Sage, with Jim, feels herself young and sad and bewildered, but at the same time she is a sort of wise-ass, with Jim.

She never tries to explain that sadness to Jim, though. She never
says, Noel worries me a lot, I never know where I am, with him. My work isn't going very well. I never have any money, and I'm tired.

But it seems today that Jim really wants to talk to her.

And he starts right out. “I've been in this, uh, situation. This
girl
, Lord, she's younger than Jill.” (Amazing that anyone could be younger than his youngest daughter, Jim's tone seems to say. Much less a girl with whom he has a romantic connection, or whatever.) “Well, I guess you could say I loved her, I was crazy about her, I have to admit it. I even thought, A new family. Hey, why not? A lot of guys my age do it, and I'd read these articles, and some of my patients, they go on about their biological clocks. Girls wanting babies. But she saw a lot of reasons why not, as things turned out, and it wasn't just my age. For one thing she doesn't like doctors. Gosh, I thought everyone loved doctors.” (This is only half ironic). “For another thing she has this really pathological obsession about AIDS. No new relationship for her, she says.”

Jim talks on and on, a boyish man in his early sixties, in the throes of an obsessional love. Sage's glance and her attention wander out to the terraced park, the dark swaying pines and redwoods, the eucalyptus. And she thinks of the time when she walked through that park in black blind mourning for Roland Gallo, who was only a few blocks away, but could not see her. As Jim has no doubt walked along those same paths.

She listens enough to grasp the essence of his story, though: a rational, older-than-middle-aged man, a doctor, a “success,” is having a sort of semi-breakdown all over this thin, thin girl (“I even worried that she could be anorexic, I cared that much about her, wanted to run some tests”). This girl, who, like his youngest daughter, Jill, is also a big success, another lawyer, is clearly quite uninterested in him, in Dr. James McAndrew. Refusing sex, refusing finally to see him. So that Jim indeed went a little crazy, walking around on upper Grant, where she lived. And calling, calling, leaving messages on her machine. “I even fell in love with her answering machine,” is Jim's small joke.

During the Sixties, when so many middle-aged men, Jim's-age men, were growing beards, buying turtlenecks and Nehru jackets, taking off after young girls, Jim was a stalwart, only mildly liberal
husband and father, in clothes from Brooks. And that period was the nadir of his relationship with Sage, who was actively demonstrating for Free Speech, the People's Park, and was totally committed to the Anti-War Movement. “It's your methods, that's all I disagree with,” Jim used (not quite truthfully) to complain. “You mean you think we're vulgar? Noisy? Well, you're fucking right, we are,” Sage would cry back.

What he is going through now could be called a delayed mid-life crisis, then, Sage thinks. Apparently men can have them at any time, and repeatedly.

But why are you telling me all this? she also thinks, observing his pale bony high-browed familiar face (so similar and yet so much more distinguished than the smaller faces of his daughters, Sage believes). I am not in sufficiently good shape myself to hear so much of your nutty obsession, she thinks. And the real problem is that you old guys are just not used to being turned down, you've had it your way forever, all you middle-aged establishment successes. Young girls all tumbling into your tired old beds.

At the same time she knows she is being both selfish and unfair; for one thing, Jim has never been “promiscuous” in the sense that she thinks Roland is—fears that Noel is—and an impulse urges her to go over to Jim, to cradle him in her arms with murmurs of reassurance, of ultimate love. And then, as in Sage's childhood dreams, could the two of them run off somewhere together? Could they live happily and sexily ever after? Sage often believes that they could, if things were ever so slightly changed, changes that she cannot exactly specify.

“I've even thought of going to a shrink,” Jim more or less finishes, running nervous medical fingers through his fair graying thinning hair.

“That wouldn't be the worst idea.”

“I guess not to my son-in-law, though.”

“Saul could recommend someone.”

“I wonder if Caroline would see me,” Jim muses.

“It's not quite the same thing.”

Sensing a small joke, Jim laughs a little. “Don't think I don't know how trite all this is,” he tells her. “If one of my patients told me this story, it'd be very hard not to laugh.”

“Why don't you try laughing, then?”

He frowns. “Laughing? That nonsense? But I'm not sick.”

“No, I mean pretending you're a patient. Your own patient.”

“Oh. Well.” The frown deepens as he tries to puzzle it out. “I sort of see what you mean.” He brightens a little. “Matter of fact, a patient was telling me her story yesterday, very sad, mixed up with an alcoholic, and heaven knows I didn't laugh.”