Crazy in Love (13 page)

THE NIGHTS GREW COOLER
than usual for August, and the first scarlet leaves had begun to appear in the trees of Black Hall. When I was a child those leaves had been heralds of the end of summer, the beginning of school, and I had always felt sad to see them. Now, sitting on my porch, typing the last pages of my report, I felt excited by the change in seasons. Like birds changing their plumage and migrating to southern marshes, I felt as if something fine were about to happen to me. Perhaps it was the pleasure of work progressing well. Clare and Honora left me alone most of the time; when we did meet, we would talk about my interviews, and they would tell me their impressions and try to place themselves in the situations of my subjects. Nick had returned from London and, although his workload remained heavy, he flew home to Black Hall every night. But his eyes were sad, and since those hotel-room conversations between Chicago and London, there were long silences between us.

One morning I rode my bicycle to the post office to mail my second quarterly report to the Averys. Under the hard blue sky, cloudless, reflecting the calm sea, I pedaled slowly home. I felt as though I had earned the right to leisure. Perhaps I would take a long swim with my mother, if she was in the mood. I wheeled into her driveway, propped my bike against the stone wall, and entered the house. Bloodcurdling screams greeted me. Grabbing a brass candlestick, I ran upstairs, at least three at a time.

“You’re scalding me, you’re scalding me,” cried Pem from behind the closed bathroom door.

“Honora? Are you in there?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m giving her a bath,” Honora said. “Mother, hold still.”

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“If you dare,” my mother answered.

I entered feeling nervous and shy. I had never seen Pem naked, much less in a bathtub. I worried that she would feel embarrassed by my presence, and I was afraid of seeing her body. She sat in the claw-footed tub; her head bent, she didn’t notice me at first. Ah, Pem. Her skin was white and smooth, pulled tight over her humpback. The pillowy breasts I remembered from childhood had stretched, long counterweights to the humpback, flat as empty hot-water bottles. Her white hair, now wet, looked touchingly sparse, and crusty red sores covered her scalp. She had a few wisps of pubic hair, dark as her brows, but her legs were hairless; I remember her telling me that if I started shaving my legs I’d soon “have a regular beard down there,” that she had never shaved hers, and after a while all the hair had rubbed off or fallen out. She glanced up, saw me, and smiled. “Hi! What’s this, a party?”

“Should I go?” I asked Honora, who shook her head. She stood beside the tub, wet patches covering her white blouse. She looked old, as if the battle to bathe Pem had defeated her.

“Having a bath, Pem?” I asked.

“I’ll be damned if I have a bath!”

“But you’re already having one—you’re all wet.”

She blushed, realizing I was right, then turned haughtily to stare at the towel bar.

“I’m trying to wash her hair,” Honora said. “The doctor says that’s psoriasis on her scalp. Doesn’t it look terrible?”

We both bent down for a closer look and stood peering at the ugly sores. Pem splashed some water at us. “Heh, heh,” she laughed.

“That’s not funny, Mother,” my mother said.

“Want me to shampoo her?” I asked, not really wanting to touch her head.

“I hate to say yes, Georgie, but I’m about to lose my mind.”

I held the spray nozzle in one hand, then turned on the water to adjust the pressure. Spraying it gently against the inside of my arm, I tested the temperature. It felt perfect.

“Ooooh, freezing! You’re freezing me!” Pem wailed. I made the water a little warmer.

“You’re burning me! Ouch! Where’s your mother? Honora, she’s burning me.”

Without adjusting the temperature again, I directed the stream at Pem’s head, lathered up the medicated tar prescribed by the doctor, and began to massage her scalp.

“There, there, dear,” I said, in my best hairdresser voice. “What’ll it be today? Shampoo and a curl? Maybe a manicure?”

“You’re freezing me! You’re burning me!” Pem cried.

“How about we change that hair color of yours, you’ve had it for years. Want to go platinum? Or maybe auburn? Your hair’s been white too long. Maybe we should darken it, match your brows . . .”

But Pem’s distress was so great that even the chance to tell the brow story refused to cheer her up. She hunched even further, trying to hide her face, and wept. I heard Honora crying behind me. Pem’s eyes were closed tight as a child’s, and great, round tears rolled down her withered cheeks.

“There, I think all the soap’s out,” I said after I had finished rinsing. Pem tried to stand on her own, but the tub was too slippery. Honora and I each reached under one arm and hoisted her up. She stepped out of the tub like a cowboy climbing over the corral fence after falling off a bronco. Honora wrapped a pink towel around her.

“Thank you,” Pem said. Then, with enormous dignity, she arranged the towel around her, the mantle of a queen, and strode toward her bedroom.

“My God,” I said. “How often—”

“Once a week,” Honora said. “She makes me feel like I’m her torturer. I always wait till a sunny day, so the house will be warm, and I try to get her into the tub before she changes out of her nightgown. One curse of my meteorology background is that I usually know the night before whether it will be warm enough or not, and I dread it all night.”

“You can’t continue to bathe her alone,” I said. “She’s too heavy. Both of you could fall. From now on you have to call me or Clare.”

“Thank you for offering, sweetie. I know you’re right, but I didn’t want you to have to see her that way. Isn’t it sad?” Unconsciously, or perhaps not, Honora cupped her own breasts as she spoke. I felt like doing the same to myself, to make sure they were still full, that whatever had drained out of Pem’s remained in mine.

We walked downstairs, onto the porch. Leaning back in wicker rockers we were silent, watching swans and cygnets fish the shallows. Just two months ago we had sat in the same places, watching fireworks, eating the Fourth of July cake. I wondered how long Pem would be in our midst. She was only eighty-six; she had a long way to go to reach the venerable ages of ninety-five and one hundred that her family regularly lived to, but that day on Honora’s porch I felt something sliding away. Things couldn’t go on forever, Pem and Honora taking care of each other, looking after the rest of us. I glanced at my mother; her face looked set and old, vaguely angry, as she stared at the swans feeding with their babies. Perhaps she was thinking that she had taken care of me and Clare, and now she was taking care of Pem. When would someone ever take care of her?

“Are you mad at Pem?” I asked.

She laughed. “Mad at her? You saw her—how can I be mad at her? I feel sorry for her. Do you remember when she was with it?”

“Yes.”

“She was a terrific mother. She loved taking me, and you girls, places. She’d take us to Providence or New York for the day at the drop of a hat. She and I saw the first night of many a Broadway show. I’m sad that she won’t ever be that way again. I’d always hoped that we could be good company for each other.”

Bennison Point was a maypole of good company, with colored streamers connecting the Swifts and the Symondses and the Mackens and the Bennisons. And here came Pem, shuffling through the house, appearing at the porch door in her pink towel, both hands stretched out, a mask of perplexity on her old face, saying, “I can’t find my clothes.” And Honora and I both started to laugh, we couldn’t help it, and we walked to Pem and held her in our arms.

9

“THIS IS MARVELOUS,” HELEN SAID, TAPPING
my quarterly report with one hand. We were sitting at the dining table in her apartment because she could not, as she had written in her note, “abide the stodginess of the foundation offices.” She lived in Chelsea, not far from the Gregory, with a view of the seminary gardens from her windows. Worn but vivid tapestries of life in the French court covered her walls. A gaudy parrot regarded us from a cage that resembled a Chinese teahouse.

“I’m so pleased you like it.”

“Oh, I do—we all like your work. John appointed me to discuss it with you. As you probably know, he’s all over the world these days. Your husband keeps you informed of John’s travels, doesn’t he?”

“Quite well, considering he’s usually traveling with him.”

“Oh dear,” Helen said, gazing politely out the window, leaving no doubt that she had definite views about those travels. She wore green eye shadow today, applied as patchily as her sister’s had been, but somehow it seemed glamorous on her. Silver and enameled bangles clanked when she moved her arm. Her movements as she poured our tea were somehow theatrical; I wondered whether she had been an actress. She wore the same yellow, orange, and green caftan she had on the first time I met her.

“Do you do much work for the foundation?” I asked.

“Nowadays I do. I used to be a professional tennis player. I did!” she said emphatically, as though she thought I wouldn’t believe her. “I played against Billie Jean King, Margaret Court, Chris Evert when she was just a baby—all the best players. I reached the semifinals at Wimbledon one year. I had to quit, on account of a really bad case of tendonitis. I still have it,” she said, flexing her right arm.

“You look like a tennis player,” I said, appraising her muscular arms.

“I still love it. John and I play all the time, whenever he’s free, that is. When we both were married, we’d have great mixed doubles.”

“Oh, you’re divorced?”

“Widowed. My husband dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. It was quite a blow. No one expects someone young to die like that. I’ve been trying to analyze what it is that draws me to your work so, and I think it’s the stories about loss. God, they kill me—that story about Caroline Orne, it could break your heart. I sense that you know about loss.”

“Well, my father died when I was young. But aside from that, I don’t, not really,” I said. I wondered: does constantly fearing it count?

“Maybe that’s enough.”

“Helen,” I said, not knowing quite how to ask the question, “the last time I saw you, you told me your mother had been murdered.”

“Yes,” Helen said. She twisted her bracelets. “None of us has quite gotten over that. I’m the youngest, and I was twelve. Jasper was twenty. You know, he was at Harvard then, and everyone said he had a brilliant future as a lawyer, but we’ll never know. All the life went out of old Jazz afterwards. He was her favorite, I guess. At least he thought he was.” She smiled in a wry manner, so that only half her mouth turned up. “Jasper is very big on things like that—‘Mother’s favorite,’ ‘eldest child’—you know. Poor Jazz, he’s just a middle-level banker.”

If Helen had been a subject instead of my patron, I would have asked her the details of her mother’s murder. I wanted to know. Perhaps she was considering telling me; she was watching me carefully, but then her gaze shifted to her parrot.

“Back to your report,” Helen said. “I liked the part about Dora Castile, though I must say it takes a far stretch of the imagination to understand what anyone, even a wife, could see in trash like Warren Castile.”

“You should have heard her voice,” I said. “It was defiant, as though she was daring me to question that she loved him, but at the same time it was shaky. He’d only been dead about two weeks.”

“The two weeks after Leroy, my husband, died . . . they were terrible. Meetings with lawyers, insurance men, the funeral-home people. It was incredible. I felt desperately sad the whole time, but I never had a minute to sit still and think about it.”

“I can’t imagine that,” I said, trying not to think about Nick, sensing it would be a bad omen if I did.

I was preparing to ask Helen about her mother when she cleared her throat. “Are you happy with your husband?” she asked, leaning forward to pour more tea.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s special between us. I don’t think anyone has a marriage like ours. We do everything possible to be together. That’s difficult, with his work, but we’re vigilant. I try to spend nights in the city when he has to work late, and I travel with him on business trips.”

“All the time?”

“Whenever possible,” I said. The beauty of talking to someone new, someone far removed from my family, was that I could go back in time—restore the truth, by what I said, to what I wanted it to be.

Helen shook her head, stirring milk into her tea with an ivory-handled spoon. “Excuse me, but that sounds brutal. He forces you to do this?”

I stared at her. “No. I want to do it,” I said.

She stirred silently for a few seconds before speaking. “Well,” she said. “Everyone has their own ways of making their marriages work. But with the life I know you must lead, after years of observing it in my own family, I think that system would turn into torture.”

I laughed. “But I love doing it! Nick tries to call me before the last train leaves for New York. Or he tells me we’re going on a business trip, and our bags are packed within ten minutes.”

“Oh, not you, dear. I was thinking it might be torture for Nick.”

That was it, wasn’t it? I felt my hands touch my cheeks, remembering that night at Vinnie’s, when Nick had asked me not to come into the city on his late nights. Had he rehearsed the words? Here was Helen Avery casting a cool eye on the situation, naming it torture.

“I can see I’ve upset you,” Helen said. “I mean, I know the pressures those guys put themselves under—sometimes unnecessarily, I think. And to have to worry about you, and your comfort, and making sure you are informed before the last train leaves, well—”

What an illusion, the idea that I could go back in time, reinvent my marriage for Helen. A great change had taken place in our house, and I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t. Even to someone new. Helen’s words had hurt me; they were right on the money, and it bothered me that she could so glibly define Nick’s and my great upheaval. I felt breathless, in danger, as though I were balancing on something I was about to fall off of.

“I’m sorry I’ve upset you,” she said. “Just understand that I’ve been affected by the Wall Street life, and the troubles and absences it seems to cause, and I was just thinking out loud.”

“That’s all right,” I said, hiding the fact that it was not.
Something bad is going to happen
, I thought. I had a quick vision: Nick’s face, mine, not smiling, not facing each other.

“Well,” Helen said, studying my expression, gauging how upset I was. “I’ll tell you why I invited you here. As I’ve said, we are wild about your work,” she said, flashing a smile that was meant to enchant me, to make me forget being upset. “And we want you to publicize it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We would like to arrange a few interviews with newspapers and magazines, to distribute your reports to a large readership. We think the Swift Observatory will be of interest to many people. Possibly we could arrange for syndication, for your pieces to appear in newspapers and magazines.”

The idea would have intrigued me at the beginning of the conversation, but now I felt stiff, unable to act pleased. I tilted my head, and she took it as encouragement to continue.

“We would like you to give some interviews, to publicize the project on your own. John will then negotiate with several publications that have expressed interest.”

“You mean you’ve already been discussing this with outsiders?”

Helen laughed, charmingly. “Of course, dear. From the day we saw your first report. That is how it works—call it putting out feelers, if you wish. We try to ignite interest in all our projects. It helps you, it helps the other grantees. Maybe you won’t win the Nobel Prize, but Leo Guziewicz did.”

“How does the foundation benefit?”

“Not at all, except for the satisfaction it brings. It pleases us when the world recognizes the brilliance of our grantees. It proves to us that we know what we are about.” Again the marvelous grin.

“I have no interest in publicizing the Swift Observatory,” I said.

Helen continued to smile. “I know I upset you before. I didn’t mean to. I think I feel close to you, because of what you write about and because you’re living a life that seems very familiar to me. Wrongly, I tried to give you the wisdom of my age. I’m sure that the relationship between you and Nick is lovely—totally unlike the one between my mother and father, or John and his ex, or any of the others. From everything you tell me, it is. Will you forgive me?”

“Yes,” I said, because in spite of how she had hurt me, I felt drawn to her as well. And I knew myself well enough to realize that the only people capable of truly hurting me were the ones I felt close to.

“Yawk!” the parrot croaked, making me jump. “Give us a kiss!”

Helen rose and made her way through the room’s clutter, squeezing between the baby grand piano and an ancient lectern supporting an open Bible to stand beside the cage. Then I saw how the parrot and her bright caftan were the same colors: emerald, gold, and orange.

“He thinks I’m a parrot,” she said joyfully. “He’s in love with me, aren’t you, Didier?”

“Give us a kiss, give us a kiss,” the parrot squawked.

“
Gros bisous!
Kiss, kiss,” Helen said, laughing.

I laughed too. “I’d better go,” I said after a minute.

“All right,” Helen said. She held my arm as we walked to the door. “Promise me you’ll think about our plan. I know it would be wonderful for you, for the Swift Observatory. And forgive me for hurting your feelings.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “And I’m not upset anymore,” I said, bending toward her to receive her kiss on the cheek, still feeling that uneasy dread that had come over me earlier. Wondering: how could I be upset over romantic advice offered by a woman in love with her parrot?

“I’M GOING BACK
to London,” Nick said, and his tone was an invitation to brawl. We stood in our yard beneath the hunter’s moon. The plane had just dropped him off, and I heard it chattering across the bay to the Mendillos’ dock.

“What do you mean, you’re going back to London?” I said, feeling myself wind like a spring.

“Just what I said. Tomorrow I’ll be leaving, probably for three weeks. My participation is crucial to this deal. I’m in charge of all the documents. I sit in on every meeting. I know more about the deal than anyone involved—even the client.”

I walked three paces ahead of him, my arms folded across my chest. The wind felt chilly; I hadn’t been able to find a sweater when I heard the plane coming in. At the door Nick dropped his briefcase and came to stand in front of me. “I am going to hold you for a minute, and then we’d better have a good talk,” he said. His arms went around me, and we hugged tight, not moving, not even wanting to kiss. We might have stood there all night. I wasn’t going to break it up. Moonlight slanted through the kitchen window, spilling across the floor and glossing Nick’s wingtip shoe. We stood there so long the light slid away, leaving the shoe dull and black. Then we walked into the living room. Any thoughts I had had of cooking dinner were gone.

“Something bad is happening to us,” Nick said.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “You’re having a busy patch at work, and we don’t see each other as much.”

Nick shook his head. He sat at the edge of the sofa, his shirtsleeves rolled up and tie loosened, his hands clasped and elbows resting on his knees. He looked at the floor.
Something bad is going to happen
, I thought again, remembering Helen’s words. Dread flooded me; I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say.

“I don’t see it that way,” he said. “I’ve been busy ever since we’ve known each other. Law school, the bar exam, every year since then has been busy. You’ve been so supportive—more so than any wife I’ve heard of. But this is different. It’s obsessive, the way you doubt my tone of voice, my motives for going to London without you, everything. I feel you doubting everything about us.”