Harriet Doerr (5 page)

When Ann hears him again, he is enumerating notable events that occurred on this day, October 15, in years past. It is the day Oscar Wilde was born. It is the day that Mata Hari was executed by a French firing squad. On this day, says the announcer, Hermann Goring committed suicide.

At the parking lot, Ann pulls out the ticket to raise the striped barrier and sees by the clock that she is fifteen minutes late for her appointment.

“You are fifteen minutes late,” says the girl behind the counter. She is someone new. She is made up like a Parisian cocotte, thinks Ann, or like Canio in
Pagliacci.

“We couldn’t reach you by phone,” states the mouth of the mask. “Joseph hurt his back. We don’t know how long he’ll be away. We’ve given you to Robert.”

After her hair is washed, she sits in Robert’s chair, her bag at her side. Her distant self reflects on Robert’s paunch, which has been induced by an unbroken chain of two-martini lunches.

“How about going for something different?” Robert says. “Remember, this is 1975.”

Ann is afraid that if she argues he will look closer and perhaps see through her ribs and through her skull. He proceeds, using at random a hand dryer, a comb, scissors, and a curling iron.

Carlos is combing out a woman in the next chair. She is in her fifties, and her body is a tightly belted gray wool sack tied in the middle by a belt. Her sloping forehead gives her the profile of a Nefertiti who was born neither beautiful nor a queen.

“Carlos,” she says. “How old are you, Carlos?”

Carlos says something to Robert in Spanish. Then he says, “Forty.”

He is much younger, thinks Ann, who is forty-six. She imagines his baptism twenty-eight years ago in a small church, La Capilla del Espiritu Santo, a few miles out of Guadalajara. His godmother, wearing earrings shaped like hearts, holds him. His mother and father are short and proud. The priest expects to be paid with a turkey, for they have a farm.

Now the woman has asked Carlos the year of his birth. The answer makes him forty-three.

“Never mind, Carlos,” she says. “Age doesn’t matter. You’re my kind. I can tell. Why don’t we have dinner and talk? How about Saturday night?”

Carlos thinks for a moment. “I will commit the engagement,” he says. “Do you have a BankAmericard?”

Everyone laughs. Ann’s observer sees her laugh. She sees the knife make a quarter turn. At last, Robert finishes with her hair. In a voice that is a tape recording of her own voice, she asks if it will last.

“Hang it over the side of the bed when you make love,” Robert tells her, and everyone laughs again.

She gets her sweater and goes back to leave a tip. Drawing the envelope from her bag with the wallet, she hastily fits it behind the last bill, tips Robert, and hears her recorded voice say, “Thank you.”

“Now go out and use it. Get it mussed up,” Robert tells her.

Outside, she finds it is so late that traffic has thinned. In the sky, night has overtaken twilight, and cars have their lights on. Ann estimates that she will be home in thirty minutes.

She is less than a mile from her exit when she sees ahead, where the freeway bends, a figure waving a flashlight. As she approaches, she notices that the man has had no choice but to stand in the narrow space between the traffic lane and the chain-link fence which bounds it. There is an urgency in his effort to flag her down. She glances at him as she circles past. He is so majestically tall and black that he could be Chamberlain or Jab-bar. Her off-ramp is just beyond. She accelerates, and moves to the right as she rounds the curve, and immediately hits a car which is stopped in her lane, hood up, warning lights flashing.

She wakes at midnight in a hospital room. Her second self, the observer, has joined her. They are one. There is no one to review objectively the pain in her chest or her head. Her left arm is in a cast. A nurse is holding her other wrist. She shows Ann some flowers on the bed table.

“Your husband brought them earlier.” She releases Ann’s wrist. Now she wants her to swallow a pill. “The duty nurse asked him to take the wallet from your bag. We can’t be responsible for valuables.”

She leaves the room on silent white soles.

Ann closes her eyes. The knife does not turn. In the room’s dim light she sees the flowers. Elliot has brought an arrangement of ferns and yesterday’s white carnations in a brandy glass lined with foil and tied with a lace ribbon bow. She supposes it is the first one he saw at the gift shop near the elevator or the last one left out at closing time. The flowers seem intended for a graduate or someone bereaved. There is no card.

She becomes aware of a memory pushing up from the bottom of a secret sea, breaking off from the accrued strata, coral hard, lying there unmoved by tides. It fights its way to light and air. When it emerges it is full-dimensioned, whole.

 

 

It is the previous year, and the month is May. They are on the road from Nice to Genoa. Elliot is driving. She is the passenger. They have just crossed the border. The guidebook says that Ventimiglia is one of Italy’s most important flower markets. Ann has never seen so many carnations. Fields of them rise to the hills on the left and slope to the sea on the right. They line the road that stretches ahead, and she has forgotten where they began. They are being gathered in straw baskets, clove pink, spice red, candy-striped pink and white, pink and red.

On both sides of the road, men and women sell them at stands. Dozens are tied together to make a single bunch, sometimes all one color, sometimes mixed.

Ann sees a man standing ahead of them on the right. He is importuning them with all the flowers his hands can hold. Ann supposes that their fragrance hangs about him like incense. He is hatless and wears sandals. They are about to pass him. She hasn’t had time to say “Stop.”

Then, in an impact as clear and sudden as the clash of cymbals, Ann’s eyes meet the eyes of the vendor. Their smiles meet and fuse. The second is held in timeless suspension, like a rain-drop on a spiderweb.

His arms, lifting the carnations like lanterns, are open in an encompassing embrace. They hold the terraced vineyards and the twisted pines, they hold the marble figures and the tapestried palace walls, the tile on hillside houses and the stone on Roman roads.

Long after they have left the vendor behind, Ann turns to Elliot. His lips are moving, and she supposes he is dividing liters of gasoline. She waits for a moment, then touches his arm. “Back there,” she says, forgetting that her vagueness would annoy him. “Back there, we could have stopped. We could have bought flowers.”

Great-Aunt Alice broke her hip when she was eighty-two. Walking about her garden one summer night, she fell over a hose that had been left across a brick path. She lay there until morning with her cheek pressed against candytuft and her feet on a clump of white dianthus. Her thoughts, rising like star shells over the pain, were various. She remembered the girlhood excursion when her long poplin skirt caught in the spokes of her bicycle. She remembered when the chipped beak of her grandfather’s grotto-blue parrot had clamped onto her finger until it bled. She remembered the gestation and delivery of Theodore, her son. And she earnestly hoped that she would be found when daylight came by her driver or her gardener and not by Theo.

During her three-week confinement to a hospital bed, the only family visits Great-Aunt Alice endured with grace were those of her great-niece, Elizabeth, then eleven years old. Elizabeth brought strange maps she had drawn of India, France, and Peru, striped with rivers, crocheted with mountains, shaded with forests, dotted with wheat, rice, and corn, red-circled with capitals, and all bounded by shores of a thousand parentheses. She brought recent school compositions, which might start, “When I give my dog, Old Moll, a bath she smells like seaweed,” or “Things I hate: roller coasters, Brussels sprouts, The Phantom of the Opera.” Great-Aunt Alice felt more akin to the second generation than to the intervening one. Her son, niece, and nephews tended to cloud issues. Elizabeth and Great-Aunt Alice shared the same crystal vision.

Through the open door of her hospital room, Great-Aunt Alice sometimes heard protracted weeping. It seemed chronic rather than acute, a way of life rather than a trauma. During the fifth night of her stay she woke in the dark to the sound of steady sobbing beyond the foot of her bed. Switching on the light, she saw a woman sitting in the visitor’s upholstered armchair. Long strands of uncombed white hair fell over her shoulders, and she was naked. Great-Aunt Alice understood very little about senility, everything about eccentricity, and was not alarmed. She first rang for the nurse, then regarded her caller. The sunken red-rimmed eyes, the mouth half open in lament, the sagging lines of the body, shaped like a wrinkled winter pear, gradually took form as a painted image.

She has struck a pose, Great-Aunt Alice thought, and wished for the reincarnated presence of Picasso or Matisse.

With her new artificial hip, Great-Aunt Alice regained much of her former mobility. She resumed attendance on Sunday mornings at her church. This was a modest ivy-covered stone structure in a decaying section of the city. Here it was that she had gone to Sunday school. She recalled coloring and cutting out pictures of David and Goliath, and of the baby Moses lying swaddled in his craft among the reeds.

Great-Aunt Alice, an inveterate nonbeliever, went to church because she always had, just as she took off her glasses when men were present, and called her car the machine. At an Easter service, she suffered a severe muscle spasm at the beginning of the Apostles’ Creed. Feeling sharp pain, she rose at once, tall and erect as always, to tower over the lilies at the altar and the bowed heads of the congregation until she felt she could walk unassisted and without a limp.

Soon after the hip operation, Great-Aunt Alice became the victim of a series of small strokes. These were apt to cause temporary spells of what her doctor called disorientation. At the onset of one particularly trying lapse, when Bridget, her close friend and cook of forty years, was in Ireland for her sister’s funeral, and Theo was away at a college reunion, Brooke, Elizabeth’s mother, had to have Great-Aunt Alice admitted to a nursing home. Or, put more accurately, locked up.

The patient imagined that she was vacationing at a second-rate motel and, being naturally gregarious, soon had a dozen acquaintances among her fellow guests. One of these was an ash-blond widow, willowy to the point of emaciation and given to apologetic coughs. It was to her, one tedious afternoon, that Great-Aunt Alice said on impulse, “Let’s go out to tea.” Shortly after that, the two ladies exited through the empty kitchen, thus eluding their wardens.

Once on their own, they walked a few blocks until they reached the freshly sprinkled lawns and flower beds of a residential neighborhood. In the driveway ahead of them, a woman was backing her compact station wagon from the garage of a whitewashed bungalow.

“There’s a taxi,” exclaimed Great-Aunt Alice, hurrying on and signaling the driver with an urgent wave. She and her friend approached the car, now idling at the curb, opened the door to the back seat, and got in.

“To the Maryland Hotel, please,” said Great-Aunt Alice. She had conjured out of a rainbow kaleidoscope of the fragmented past the site of her first dancing class and her first lemonade served on a palm-shaded terrace by a waiter wearing gloves. The Maryland Hotel, with its gilded chairs lining the paneled walls of the ballroom, its gold-and-crystal chandeliers, its polished floors, and Great-Aunt Alice herself in tucked dimity and high white buttoned shoes, were now of one flesh with thirty stories of concrete and black glass. That is, if Great-Aunt Alice, and her niece Brooke, Elizabeth’s mother, and inevitably Elizabeth, were correct in their notion that nothing was ever lost. That the theaters they once played could produce on demand the voices of Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, and Harry Lauder, the boards of the great stages the faint tapping above the orchestra of Anna Pavlova dancing backward
aux pointes.
That the tree still held all the birds that ever sang there.

The driver of the station wagon wore thick, brown-rimmed glasses and a lime-green pantsuit. She had planted both feet on the ground when she was one and a half, and an aura of common sense hung about her like the aroma of wholesome food. Today she had realized at once that she must pilot the rudderless into safe waters, and set off with purpose and without surprise.

On arrival at the police station, she took the desk sergeant aside and hazarded a guess that her passengers were from one of several nearby institutions for the failing aged. The sergeant picked up the telephone.

Meanwhile Great-Aunt Alice and her friend had been served coffee by a pair of young policemen, and the four sat together, two chairs having been drawn up to face the bench next to the wall. Great-Aunt Alice, assuming they were midshipmen, immediately began an account of the June prom at Annapolis in 1901. After their second cup of coffee and some packaged Nabiscos from a vending machine, the sergeant interrupted to report that a car was waiting to take them home, and the ladies entered a black-and-white automobile whose revolving red lights and siren were temporarily stilled.