I Cannot Get You Close Enough (4 page)

“You better get him,” Momma said. “Hold out your hand, Daniel, and he'll come to you.” We had all seen Daniel do that a thousand times, inside the house or his room. Daniel walked to the edge of the broken screen. We all moved in. “Get back,” he said. “He isn't going to come with you all here.”

“Come back in my room,” I said, “let's all go in my room and leave Daniel alone.”

“You stay,” Daniel said to Phelan. “Stay here.” So the rest of us moved back into the room, but Hoyt and Davis had already run down the stairs with Helen and Louise behind them. They went down the stairs and out the door and into the yard to look at the situation from underneath the tree. “Let's climb up,” I heard Hoyt say. “Let's surround him.” Hoyt was fifteen and Davis was fourteen. They were pretty wild, a lot wilder than you would think, since they were quiet. Their mother was a beauty queen from Texas and let them do anything they liked as long as they didn't bother her.

So there is this contingent underneath the tree and Alice is on the porch saying, “The cats will get it. The cats will get it. The cats got that parakeet Miss Saybrook had. They tore it all to pieces.”

Then Milliken spread his wings and flew up above our oak tree and across the backyard in a wobbly heavy flight and landed in the silver maple in the Baileys' yard. The contingent below our tree ran over to the Baileys' yard and Phelan and Daniel started down the stairs. Sheila walked behind them with an ecstatic look on her face. “There it goes,” she said. “It's gone.” Sure enough, Milliken had left the Baileys' yard and was across Sherman Street and into the magnolia on the lawn of the First Presbyterian Church.

We spent the rest of the day underneath the magnolia trying to get Milliken down and the fire department came and then Milliken flew deep into the neighborhood behind the church and that was the last we ever saw of him. Daniel stayed out until twelve that night with Phelan and Niall and Hoyt and Davis. Searching and calling and pleading, but we never saw the parrot again.

It was four years later when we had the snow on Sheila's debut. Snow ruined the pear blossoms and the auditorium had to be filled with gladioli, which always looks like a funeral, and Sheila's dress was too big and had to be sewed onto her thin little body and her father was late. He was in the middle of the negotiations that consolidated his television empire. He barely got to the auditorium on time. He came tearing in at the last minute, still tying his tie, and marched her down to the presentation platform and stayed for the first dance, then the chauffeur came and whisked him away to catch a plane back to Washington. Daniel said it turned out to be the worst night of his life. Sheila was sick and cried all the way home. Then she started the allergic attacks that lasted for weeks and ended up with the MacNieces' sending her off to Switzerland where she met the people who later would ruin her for good. No, she was ruined at birth, maimed and compromised and sent out to make do in a world where her own father didn't love her.

“Leave these sad designs to him that hath more cause to be a mourner.” The bard. Well, we will all have cause if she gets hold of Jessie again. If only Sheila was talented. If only she could get a part in a movie in India or somewhere where you can't take children.

The case of Sheila MacNiece versus Daniel Hand for the soul of Jessica Larkin Hand, skin like snow biscuits, velvet, alabaster, marble. Eyes as blue as the skies of Delphi, bluer than that, bluer than blue. If I had given birth to a child that lovely, I would count the whole world no loss.

Addendum: Why do men love bitches? I asked Phelan that once. We were down at the seashore, lounging around on blankets in the dunes, the surf pounding not thirty feet away, seabirds diving, no boats in sight. We were out on one of the barrier islands, happy as we could be, having sailed there in Phelan's father's ketch.

“Because they are never boring,” he answered. “Boredom's the enemy, Anna, not good or evil. Just plain old staying interested. And one thing about bitches — if you can ever lay them down that hot sweet stuff will happen, there's more to love than tenderness. It has to seem like surrender, there has to be a chase.”

“Is that why you hunt?”

“To escape it? No, I hunt because I like to be alone and because it's ancient and I understand it. Men worry me who don't believe they're killers. Our species kills for a living. It always has.”

“Is Sheila a killer?”

“No, she's a victim and a worrywart. I don't like her
at all
, Anna. Never have.”

“I know that.” I leaned back on the pillow of sand beneath the blanket. Phelan was stretched out beside me, his body so fine and warm, and I guess I could have loved him if I knew how to love. If any of us knew anything about love, which for many generations we have not. What's love got to do with the Hands and Mannings and MacNieces and McLaurins and Arnolds and Clarks and Scotts? Power is all any of us know, all we have known since we arrived on these shores. If anybody in these clans knew anything about love or really valued it, they have long since been left behind and forgotten. You have to make up your mind as a tribe. You either have individuals or you have couples. You can't have it both ways no matter how long and hard the preachers and therapists and headshrinkers dream and imagine and rave.

Sick or not, it was at the debutante ball among the gladioli that Sheila met Darley Mahew and decided to have him for a beau instead of Daniel. First she danced with her father, then she danced with Daniel, then she was introduced to Darley, who had just come down for the weekend to do some fortune hunting. There she is, someone must have said to him, that skinny little tight-faced one, she's the richest girl in town if this television thing continues to catch on. So he danced with her several times and told her about Germany, where he had spent the summer, and asked if he could come to call. He was at the white brick house the next day at noon and after that he was there every afternoon. It was his introductions that got Sheila mixed up with the wrong crowd in Zurich.

On the day she left for Switzerland Sheila called up Daniel at the university and told him she was in love with Darley instead, that Darley was coming overseas to be with her. So Daniel finished the semester, then packed a small bag and went out west to be a hippie. He was gone six months, during which time Darley Mahew turned out to have feet of clay and Sheila left him with his trashy European friends and came back to Charlotte. Meanwhile Daniel had discovered LSD and married Summer Wagoner and impregnated her, although none of us, including Daniel, would know about that baby for fifteen years.

Summer Wagoner came to visit us in Charlotte and stayed a week and ran away and Sheila came home with her allergies temporarily cured and let Daniel screw her in her room beside the pool, and somewhere down inside Sheila's womb, somewhere far away from words and flights to Europe and LSD and, hopefully, safe from the chlorine in the pool and the Estee Lauder bath salts Sheila used so lavishly, Daniel's sperm found Sheila's egg and Jessie was conceived. Bud and bloom and go to seed. Branch out and blossom.

Then Daddy and Big Ed's lawyers got Daniel an annulment from the lost Summer Wagoner and Daniel and Sheila were married in the MacNieces' living room by the Presbyterian minister in exchange for a new roof for the Sunday School building. Jessie was born seven months later, three months after Olivia de Havilland Hand made her entrance into the light in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Fifteen years later I would receive my letter from Olivia.
Dear Aunt Anna, you do not know me but I think I am your niece. I think you are the sister of my father. If it's not too much trouble could you write back to me and tell me if your brother was married to Summer Wagoner of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation. Yours most sincerely, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
.

So there I was in London with my business transacted and nothing to do since Sheila had flown the coop. To hell with Sheila, I decided. I need a break from the sad designs. I walked around the rest of the day looking into shop windows and exploring the area around Queen's Square. I bought flowers for my jacket and ate an omelet in a pub and then went back to the hotel and made reservations to fly home to New York. I was staying at Durrant's, a small hotel where once I heard the poet, May Sarton, holding court in the lobby. She was describing a storm that came from the sea and swept across her New England farm and everyone within earshot had dropped their chores and come streaming in to listen. I use that incident to cheer myself on when I become disheartened at the audacity of trying to be a writer in a world of video and hype.

Daniel called that night from Charlotte. “What time is it there?” I asked.

“Two-thirty. Listen, she's filed a suit to change the custody. She's got some lawyer in Washington and he's hooked up with her daddy's lawyers in Charlotte. Joe Weil and those guys. It's going to be rough.”

“What does she want?”

“Custody during the school year until Jessie is eighteen.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Well, Bardee says there's a chance she might get it. Unless we can get Jessie to talk to the judge and tell him she wants to stay with me.”

“Will she?”

“I don't know.”

“Ask her.”

“Not yet. I don't want to mess her up until school is out.”

“What's she doing? How is she?”

“She's a normal little girl. Her friends come over and she goes to school. She rides and plays the piano. I took them to the fair last week.”

“I'm on my way home. I'll come there.”

“There's nothing you can do. Look, did you find anything out?”

“No, except that she probably needs money. She was living in an awful flat so, if it's dope, it's got her, not the other way around.”

“I'm sorry about that.”

“So am I. Do you want me to come there?”

“Not yet. Go on back to New York. I know you have work of your own to do.”

“I hope so. I hope I still know how to do it.”

“You know.”

“I hope so. We will see.”

So I gave up on Sheila for a while and flew to Frankfurt and met Arthur at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Arthur is my publisher, also my editor, also my ally and my friend. The Europeans were crazy about me that year. I had gotten dark enough for them again and so I came home feeling smart and valuable. Arthur flew home with me and we drank martinis over Greenland and talked about the future.

“You have to think before you write, Anna,” he said to me above the snowbanks. “I want to find something for you, a great story or theme. I think you go off too fast after anything you get interested in. You need to get it all planned out, then do the writing.”

“Well, bullshit, Arthur,” I replied. We were on our third martinis, sunk deep down in the seats, compadres of the first order after a successful trip. “I was a goddamn poet when you got me into fiction writing. I'm a poet, goddammit. One more book and I'm going back to poetry”

“You always say that.”

“I do not.”

“What else do you want? The world loves you, isn't that enough?”

“I never wanted the world to love me. I wanted to be a poet. Right now I want to find out what my goddamn sister-in-law has been up to. She's trying to take my niece away. She's a bitch, a terrible bitch. Don't get me thinking about it.”

“Well, don't start writing about that.”

“Arthur, you want to write a book, write your own goddamn book. Don't start telling me what to write.”

“Well, I'll tell you one thing, Anna. Another book like
Falling Away
and you're going to start losing fans. The next one has to be better.”

“I've got a lot of things on my mind. I can't spend my life glued to a typewriter. If you didn't pay me I would never write another word. I'm sick of it. Sick of the mess around publication.”

“You always say that.”

“I know it. I mean it, that's why. If you could see Jessie, if you knew her. She's the prettiest little girl I've ever seen in my life. She's so precious. Daniel was like that, her daddy, just precious and beautiful and sweet. She's my treasure, Arthur, I'm sorry, I can't think about literature right now. You want another martini?”

“They're bringing champagne, let's wait for that.”

“We're too old to drink like this. It's disgusting.”

“You're right.” He lifted his glass and we giggled. Once we had been the bad boys of a certain segment of American publishing. Now we were mainstream and colleges couldn't get enough of me. Even my mother's bridge club was reading me. We drank our drinks. The stewardess served dinner. We went to sleep.

We arrived in New York City at nine in the morning. We came in to JFK and collected my baggage. Arthur was traveling with a hanging bag, a feat I admire extravagantly. We shared a taxi into town and I got off at my apartment and went inside, meaning to sleep all day. I threw my bags down on the floor, took off my clothes and climbed into my bed. Just before I fell asleep I picked up the phone and called my answering service. I had hardly been back in the city three hours and already I had to make sure I was part of the scene. “Miss Adair's been calling for three days,” the operator said. “She wants you to go to a play tonight. Some important person wants to meet you. Miss Adair said to call her morning, noon, or night as soon as you come in. She said it was urgent. She said for me to ring every hour to see if you were home.”

“What did she say?”

“It's a play you told her to get tickets to. The costume designer's here and he wants to meet you. You better call her. She's called a dozen times.”

“I'm going to sleep. Don't ring this phone. Tell her I'll call when I wake up.” I snuggled down into the sheets thinking of Celestine pacing around her apartment waiting for me to call. Celestine Adair. Divine Celestine, the last of the great artist lovers. She had loved and known them all, helped them all. She loved me too and she had plans for me. At a more practical level she owned the movie rights to several of my books. So far she had never managed to figure out a way to make a film out of my plotless, language-burdened novels but she never stopped trying. I giggled, still half drunk from the flight. Welcome home, I told myself and fell asleep.