Compass Rose (24 page)

“Don’t worry. The doctor said that’ll clear up.”

Charlie touched his nose with his right forefinger, then with his left. “There. Could be worse. But what am I going to call you, Ph-Ph-Phoebe?”

Phoebe laughed the way she did around men. “Oh, we’ll think of something.” Phoebe touched Charlie’s arm. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing because … It was hearing my own name.”

“It’s okay.”

“You know, a little bit of a stammer has a certain charm. You’ll have to watch yourself.”

May willed Phoebe’s hand off Charlie’s arm.

E
xecutrix
. Jack enjoyed saying it as often as possible. “The first thing you should do as executrix is to go identify the assets. Real property, personal property, choses in action—”

“I know.”

“Johnny won’t be able to help this time around, since the state may have an interest.”

“I know.”

“But he could be helpful in informal ways. You may want more leave from Natural Resources, since your duties as executrix—”

“Jack, I know what to do.”

But when Elsie stepped into Miss Perry’s house she was surprisingly undone. Not by grief—she knew her grief—but by the house itself, which she suddenly didn’t know. It was as if the house and everything in it were springing to life. She saw the door, the rack with Miss Perry’s father’s canes, the staircase, the bull’s-eye window in the library—as if she’d once heard of them and was only now seeing them. At first she shrank back as if all these things radiated an energy that was opposed to her. Then she began to touch things: the desk, the mantelpiece, the corner of the glass-front bookcase. She said, “I am the executrix.” It could be her word—to hell with Jack—a magic word. She didn’t say it to diminish the house but to receive it. She’d meant to sit down at the desk, but the air was too charged for that, the light too heavy. She filled a pail of water, added a cup of vinegar, and cleaned the tall windows to the west. She used the bookshelf ladder to reach the bull’s-eye window. She found a jar of
leather preservative in a pigeonhole in the desk. The label read “Everett Hazard Book Shop.” She dipped her fingers in it and anointed the leather bindings of all eight volumes of Gibbon’s
Roman Empire
. And then the whole shelf of leather-bound histories. Parkman, Prescott, Mottley. This was the sort of executrix she would be, letting in light and applying balm. A curator. Or rather curatrix.

She would have charge of this house until the Perryville School took over. The library was to remain a library, the second and third floors to be a dormitory for the senior girls. And surely a faculty member to supervise them. The headmaster had spoken to her about the possibility.

She applied the last of the jar to Henry Adams’s complete works. She smelled her hands—where could she find another jar?—and wondered what she could teach, how anyone could teach anything, since everything depended on everything else.

R
ose screeched. She screeched with her mouth closed so it was half screech, half whinny. She took a breath and said, “It’s not enough that I have to go to this … this finishing school. What do you think that’ll be like with you—”

“It’s not a finishing school. It’s a perfectly good progressive school. I don’t know where you got the idea that—”

“Whatever. Just when a few people have stopped thinking I’m a total loser, you’re butting in and the whole thing’ll start all over again.”

“I won’t be teaching
you
. And I’ll be part-time administration, mostly at Miss Perry’s house.”

“Why can’t you just go on guarding the Great Swamp?”

“Because they’ve replaced me with someone.” This was half true. “I can stay on, but it would be at a desk job in Providence.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want to.”

“So get your old boyfriend to fix it.”

“How I decide to earn money is up to me. Besides—”

“And that makes my life up to you, too.”

“Besides, he’s done enough. And besides, you don’t go around fixing things that way.”

Rose cocked her head. “You’re saying he’s done enough
and
you don’t go around fixing things that way? I hope you’re not going to teach logic.”

Elsie stared at her. Rose said, “What’s the use?” and went into her room and closed the door.

Beside Rose’s door there was a thermostat that controlled the heat in her bedroom. Elsie turned it down to fifty. She put another log in the woodstove. With the door closed Rose would be freezing in twenty minutes. After five minutes Elsie turned it back up. Part of what made her so mad at Rose was her own uncertainty—was she leaping boldly or curling up?

Elsie rode her Exercycle. Rose called through the door, “Mom! I’m trying to study!”

Elsie started to carry the Exercycle up the inside stairs to Mary Scanlon’s empty room. It wouldn’t fit. She used the outdoor stairs—the separate entrance that they’d thought discreet but that Mary, as far as Elsie knew, never used.

Elsie had been puzzled and hurt. She missed Mary and knew she’d go on missing her, but she recognized what Mary was talking about when Mary said she wanted to get out of the Rose-Elsie crossfire.

As Elsie pedaled it occurred to her that Rose could be a boarder at school. If Elsie worked full-time she’d get a free pass on tuition—maybe room and board were covered, too. What was she thinking? That Mary would come back then? That Rose would miss her and be nice? Or did she want her house to herself? For peace and quiet? That would be nice for a change. And of course she could come and go as she pleased. She hadn’t had a sexual fantasy since she’d gone on leave to care for Miss Perry. Maybe she’d forgotten how. She’d certainly been hollowed, her senses had become simpler, her attention
lifted out of herself. Some days she’d felt as young as Li Tran, or as if she were once again Miss Perry’s pet student. Other days she’d felt ageless, gliding up and down the stairs, the swing of her skirt barely stirring the still air. How long had it gone on? A month? Forty days? She’d liked the feeling of her body being hollowed—she hadn’t exercised, she’d eaten little. Now she was re-finding her body, and it was diminished, not up to hard exercise. Not even responding to fantasy. Had something else happened? Could it be that what she’d thought was a time of ascetic selflessness (for which Captain Teixeira had so sweetly praised her) was also when the first tendril of menopause was taking hold? Were her breasts smaller? Was there a bloom of down on her upper lip? Was that why she was snappish with Rose? And now unable even to conjure an imaginary lover?

She looked at the maple leaves outside the window, half of them still green, half tipped with red. Miss Perry always loved fall, would stop at the first sight of scarlet, lean on her walking stick, and recite, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …” One time Elsie had been in the woods with Dick and, feeling a bubble of rebellion against Miss Perry’s bookishness, she’d said to Dick, “That first bit of red gives me a pang.”

“What? You don’t like fall? I like fall.”

“Fall’s okay. It’s just the first bit of red on the green. It reminds me of how I feel when I’m just starting to come and I don’t want to stop fucking just yet.” She’d laughed because she thought his frown was his first reaction and that in a second or two he’d see that she was being high-spirited, that she was flirting, she was joking …

But as she replayed it now—and she couldn’t keep from hearing herself several times over—it sounded like coarse swaggering. She saw the mixture of puzzlement and distaste in his eyes. And only now it dawned on her that he hadn’t just been shocked that she was mixing up natural beauty with private frenzies, he must also have thought that she was blithely waving a hand at a whole forest of her old gaspings and moanings.

She formed a sentence—“I meant
us
”—but it didn’t get into her mouth. She was pedaling faster, as if she could outrace the banshee
of embarrassment swooping after her. It caught the back of her neck and threaded down her spine.

Rose called up the stairs. “Are we going to eat? I mean, anytime in the foreseeable future?”

M
ay tried to be fair. She reminded herself that Deirdre had pulled Charlie out of the water. That had to count more than everything else. So May was at a loss to say why it bothered her to see Deirdre putting Charlie through their exercise routine. The doctor said the exercises were probably helpful, certainly couldn’t do any harm. So there Charlie and Deirdre were out in front of the house, sort of running in place in slow motion, lifting the right knee and touching it with the left elbow, left knee to right elbow. Deirdre said it activated the right brain–left brain flow.

It was worse now that Dick was out to sea again. It had bothered May some that Deirdre could get Dick talking, could ask him just the sort of questions to get him going. But Deirdre pulled Charlie into it, too. It turned out Charlie had done some research on red-crab habitat. Deirdre didn’t come right out and suggest it, but she’d got Charlie thinking about going out with Dick to take a look. At least, Charlie asked a lot of questions about what sort of electronics were on board. It was a blessing May had waited for.

When Dick was in the house Deirdre slept in Tom’s old room. She still started out sleeping in Tom’s room, appeared to wake up in Tom’s room, but May had heard her going down the hall to the bathroom and not going back to Tom’s room.

May couldn’t bring herself to ask the doctor about that sort of thing.

Rose came to visit. She came with Tom—May saw that Rose and
Tom were thick as thieves, and that pleased her. Everyone piled into the kitchen. May set out biscuits and jelly and watched, trying to keep herself away from her little dark wish that Rose wouldn’t like Deirdre. But Deirdre held back, let Rose get all the attention from Tom and Charlie. When Charlie stuttered, Rose opened her eyes wide and then put her hand on Charlie’s arm. Charlie smiled a little tugged-down smile. He said, “I’m working on it, Rose.”

Rose said, “I’m in a play at school, and the hero stutters a little and the heroine likes it.”

May felt one of her pangs of love for Rose. The thought of Rose at that school made her fearful, but she loved the way Rose touched Charlie, the way Rose was at home here.

May asked Rose if she could stay for supper. Rose said it was a school night, she had a ton of homework. Tom said he had to be off, too, and May got ready for another supper with just Charlie and Deirdre and her at the kitchen table.

It was Deirdre who said, “So can we come see your play? Or is it just for the school?”

May tried not to mind Deirdre saying “we.”

“Yeah, sure,” Rose said. “I mean, yes, they want people to come.”

“You got a big part?” Tom said.

“Yes, but only because I can sing. It’s a musical version of
She Stoops to Conquer
. Some guy in Boston wrote the music. It’s not bad.”

“Jeez, Rose. Right out of the gate and you’re a star.” Tom laughed. “Some of the other girls must be pissed off.”

May said, “Tom …”

Rose said, “Yeah. Some.” Rose’s face tightened—Tom always did say one thing too many. Then Rose lifted her head and May saw how Rose would look when she was full-grown. Rose said, “A lot of the teachers went to Miss Perry’s funeral, and one of them’s the music teacher. It’s not like I said, ‘Me, me, oh, pick me!’ ” Rose said this last part in a squeaky voice that made Tom laugh. Rose added, “So let ’em be”—she looked sideways at May—“peeved.”

Tom laughed, and Charlie and Deirdre joined in. May flushed. Tom said, “Well, there you go, Ma. At least you raised one of us right.”

May turned to Tom to hush him before he got going the way he
sometimes did, barking out joke after joke. Then, as if she’d struck a match that sputtered for a second and then burst into flame, she heard what Tom just said. It made her eyes sting. It wasn’t really true, it couldn’t ever be but a little bit true. It certainly wasn’t meant to be said out loud like that. She took a step back, away from Tom, away from where he’d just plucked it out of her, Tom the magician taking a penny out of her ear in front of everyone.

She put her apron on, got busy fixing supper. She heard a chair scrape. She turned and saw they were all getting up. They weren’t laughing. Tom put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder; Charlie touched Tom’s arm. May thought that was what she ought to have been worrying about. But here was Rose coming to her; Rose, who’d shot up over the last year, but not just that—her face was more definite. Girls grow up quicker than boys—May could say things like that now.

Rose said, “Can you come to the play? It’s not till spring, but they’re already getting parents to buy tickets. I know the songs; all I have to do now is get a kind of accent for the dialogue parts. Mary Scanlon said I should think of the way Miss Perry talked, but I didn’t see her all that much, not when I was old enough to pay attention to people’s accents. It’s an old English play, but we’re doing it as if it’s nowadays. The joke is the girl is sort of upper-class, but she pretends to be the maid because the boy she likes doesn’t stutter when he’s flirting with the maid.” Rose laughed. “It sounds silly, but we’re getting it to be funny. So say you’ll come.”

From across the room Tom said, “You want to sound funny, talk like Phoebe Fitzgerald.”

May said, “Yes, Rose,” although she felt uneasy already; she’d never been up to that school, and the notion of going up there to see those private-school kids—a lot of them from Sawtooth Point—put on a play making fun of the way people talk … And there she and Dick would be, talking the way they talked …“Yes, Rose,” she said again. And then to Tom, “And don’t you pick on Phoebe Fitzgerald.”

“Have you ever noticed, Ma, that you spend a lot of time saying ‘yes’ to Rose and ‘don’t’ to me?”

“Well, who wouldn’t?” Deirdre said. “I just got here and that sounds about right to me.”

Tom laughed. “Hey—I got to watch out for you. Come on, Rose, before she zings me again.”

Rose leaned closer to May and whispered in her ear, “I’m glad Charlie’s all right. That’s so great.”