On Keeping Women (7 page)

Driving home at his side, the car silent except for the boys, she sees how, after twenty years, he and she are matched—neither interlocked at the head or heels, nor in handfast, but like certain notched wheels which fit each other’s serrations: what one or the other cannot confront, the other continues with.

So pass four months. What does Ray do in his study while she watches her house-of-cloud—though no longer from her nightly ledge? Twice that pile of tumulus downriver has opened a window to her however briefly; one day, there may be a door. At four in the afternoon now, never at nine—though she can’t say why these changes, she’s not really depressed—she still walks the cat.

One day, a Saturday too warm for town, when Ray is off on a trip and the kids are all at picnic, just as the cat and she are returning, the cat leading, she sees a long black coupe drawn up at the door. Even before she recognizes the Jag which for so many evenings—no, so few really—had needled her back and forth between those restaurants, Day Folger gets out, and a girl.

They’re looking for a house, it appears, and have found themselves in the region.

He’s hangdog, the girl triumphant; in one of the exquisite revenges men are blind to, or prefer to be, she has led him here. “Bonnie’s from down home.”

She does adaptations for television, Day says. Her first big one is just coming up.

She’s pretty in a chalkboned way, but about Day’s age, not a girl. A few months more with Day’s crowd of sharp-eyed dazzlers and she’ll get him to option those upper teeth of hers, and have them crowned. She dresses in the brightly literal way smalltowners do when they begin to make it in New York; down home, Lexie suspects, Bonnie’s not quite Day’s sort, but up here, it won’t show.

Just now she’s all after-bed slinks and twitches, aimed at Day. From an excess of secrets, she bursts out laughing! “Dyin’ to see the house.”

Lexie’s breasts feel too big and sloppy in the washed-thin white sweater she’s wearing over old, stretched shepherd’s-check trousers she always means to throw out. Though she’s only a couple of inches above average height, she walks after them into her house feeling herself its shambly giantess.

Day holds back politely. Bonnie stalks through as if she’s buying the place. Or not buying it.

Following after them through parlor—too white-and-red against the river?—library—the best of rooms, dining room, a broad empty swathe at this hour, kitchen (in which the enormous farmhouse plank of a nineteenth-century counter has been kept but its niggling corner sink also), she keeps them from the children’s rooms—for the children’s sake, especially Chessie’s. Watching the house huckster its own views, window-to-window, she’s defensive. Yes, it
is
majestic; no, poor tower, we never did enough for it. She’ll even defend the suburbs if she can bear to—to Bonnie, clearly one of those girls who’ll adopt the city so fast that its born citizens will have to take a step back.

From the top of the house there’s a peal of laughter. They’ve found her ledge. That view of the river will stop their breath. She advances, its smiling custodian.

They’ve just kissed. A couple househunting for the afternoon, for kicks: “Let’s, shall we?” she can hear them saying to the spanking city noon, to the subtle outer noises that lip Day’s shaded bed.

She folds her arms, touching her elbows as if they are the points of a heart. They aren’t—though she can still see Day’s naked chest advancing over her, jackknifing suddenly to put his black head between her thighs. Takes women longer to wrench themselves free of the details. She knows that already.

Though Day has turned red.

He’s getting his artiste. Providentially, one from home; maybe that’s what’s held him back, but he and this girl are the kind of provincials who’ll make born New Yorkers look slow. Meanwhile settling a mite slavishly for the brand-names in life, the best of course. How she, Lexie, knows this, is what makes her not a provincial. Has nothing to do with these two. Comes from the piers and the streets.

At the same time, Day’s out of this catfight. A little vanity, yes, but his real dramas are elsewhere: commercial, military. The dramas of women are small ones, containable in rooms. What happens to him with this woman will be submerged, whatever it is—years will pass, before he knows. We drag them down, she thinks. And thinking of Ray—do we keep them up?

What Bonnie knows for herself is that Day is the enemy. Who must pay.

Right now, he’s uncomfortable. “Lexie.
Is
this house for sale?”

“Not that
I
know of.”

“Why Day Folger. You did give the
im
-pression.” Quick to the attack, Bonnie addresses Lexie. Not by name of course. Bonnie will leave other women in limbo, if possible. “I do believe I built you up as restless.” To Day. “One of my
stoh-ries,
dawlin. You know how they come to me, ’bout people. All I do is ketchum. It’s just out of my control.”

Down the steps they go, not routed. Routing, Bonnie is. Day’s gaze, fast on her as he descends to the car, is holy.

She runs back up the steps to where Lexie is. Whispers “I do believe—it was those clothes.”

And trips down again.

Below, the car is hidden by the high hedge. Only river-road people realize how voices float up here. “It was an exp
ir
ament, Day honey,” hers says. “Y’all know how I have to expirament.”

The cloud of dust the couple leaves hanging in the air is unexperimental—exactly the shape and duration for such a car on such a day.

And such people. All three of us.

Gaze at the river. It has no sexual health one way or tother.

Wish for the children,
your
experiment, to come home and save you, their faces lavender under the beach-streaked hair. Save me—with the work I will do for them. Ray is unwishable.

They are late. She’s both inside and outside the children’s story anyway. She sees clearly what she is to them. Seeing most clearly what she is not. She checks the time. It’s not four o’clock; it’s not nine.

She walks the cat.

At the secretarial school where her mother had made her go after high school, the pupils were unlike any of the girls she’d grown up with in the Village. “From the Boroughs, sounds like,” her mother said. Working for the masses, she could afford snobbery. “Well—you’re traveling.”

Instead, she’d chummed briefly, before they all scattered to jobs, with two girls who defer to her city lore: Taylor Crimmins from Carolina, sent to Gibbs because it was still for ladies, even if they must work (and even if named for a General), and Nancy Leighton, brought up by the nuns of Brookline, Mass.—and from the starchy-plump looks of her, on what she called “perdaders” still. Taylor had been reared from birth to know what men could do to her—cast her into the pit of ignored life—if she couldn’t first strike one down. Nancy had been cautioned from birth against what a man could do when he struck.

“The Jewish girls are all ready and buttered between the legs for it,” Taylor would say in the downright way her daintiness could go when stimulated.

“They’ve no Christian sense of sin,” Nancy would answer. “The Italians, they’re more like us, being in the church. But they have to guard against being full-blooded. And after they’re married, they like it too much.”

“Worry
is their worry,” her own mother said of the Jews, when applied to. “The Italians, they’re just close.”

She’d been wrapping her gray braid around her head, preparatory to going to an assemblage in one of the asphalt-covered halls she frequented, whose stony echoes and banged-up chairs seemed ready to lapse into a congregation of their own, the minute there was no human need for them. “Going to a meeting,” her mother was, to exposit on life—as if there was none of it at home. Perhaps there hadn’t been? One thing Renata had never done was ask her children to save her from anything. Knowing better than to ask their father. She’d always known best, and nowadays she and her independence shared a household—an old woman with an untrustworthy companion, arranged for her in earlier days, who no longer solaced her.

“What’ll
you
do—?” her mother said back there, to Lexie’s question “—oh, I can prognosticate.” And never equivocate, her nose says, never shilly-shally like the restfully vague mothers some people had. Even long before then, Lexie had known that she went to her mother to be pierced. “Oh, you, Lexie—your father and I have each done you our particular dirt. Can’t be helped. Same with James. James’ll be careful—too careful, I think. But you—”

She always gave her diagnosis the way she played her short repertoire at the piano—stolidly, to the end. “You Lexie? You’ll flounder.” Her gloves are old and loose. She draws them on as hard as if they’re new. Renata’s own mother ran away when Renata was ten; Renata brought the others up, and herself alongside. “You don’t only remind me of granma in the
face.
”

Young Lexie sees the guilty face of the runaway being handed on and on, by gypsies maybe, until it reaches her; she herself will probably never even have a pair of really new gloves. From the front door, her mother runs back down the long hall to clutch her, tight. “Flounder strong, hah? For me?” Leaving young Lexie stunned, radiant. Her mother ran all the way down the hall to tell her. (No, to ask.)

Walking the cat now, the river-road is deep in blue air, as if she’s wading through hyacinths which part as she breasts them, but the water washing the shore indigo is a river still, brinked from forces beyond the 49th parallel and over the edge of the geography book. She grasps a convenient paling, near the stalking cat; stares out. Is this travel? The cat spurts away, into the dark. Any sudden movement startles them, even a friend’s. Are we like that?—am I?

On the opposite shore, the house-of-cloud has followed her. She addresses it: There is no market for my meditation. My language is not admitted. It would be no use for me to write for television.

She opens her mouth wide as a changepurse, and screams for the cat.

When she got back to the house, she went past the kitchen, bright with children fixing their own dinner, as had become the Saturday custom, and waving to them, ran up the backstairs to her ledge. The window was dusty, even cobwebbed, by the spiders that busied themselves in spring. Come autumn, though she knows nothing of their cycle, they’ll seem hoarders, nesters, different. In either case, a neglected house. In the webs-and-dirt she writes with a finger: For Sale.

Then she goes down to the kitchen. And for an evening, is saved.

Lying in the grass, where the first white beads of dew are now settling, that night now appears to her like a Breughel hanging unnoticed till then on her wall. Two boys, two girls, two younger, two older, one tall, one small, two of an even height; from moment to moment the alignments shift. The boys are conning a salad—“Keep out the worms!” a girl shrieks in scorn; the two girls have baked a cake. “Yah, remember the first cake she-ee—” the boys jeer back. “For a haffa cup sugar, who put salt?”

Now and then one appeals to her as referee. Although both this habit and her authority are dwindling, tonight she’s deep in the human fabric, and honored too. What power she’s had over these souls before her! Over there is Charles, the oldest, who could have been named James. Or Alex, after her, and her grandfather. The power of the name. And of the nose—for in three of these faces her pudgy one, handed down scarcely blended, from the power of her own father, has pushed out Ray’s. To be sure, a slender version of Ray’s has appeared in Chessie, the older girl, insuring her beauty, what with those large soft eyes which descend—who would believe it?—from Ray’s father, the veterinarian.

Chessie’s the difficult one. “The talented one,” people say, or ask? So many talents, but she’s always putting salt for sugar; will she qualify? Charlie is hellbent for aerodynamics, and these days silent as a deposed king—does she think this because he’s said to be “pure Ray”? He’s made a time-wheel to show them what his father may be doing at this moment in Monte Carlo and Spain, and Ray had given him a detailed itinerary which Charles has hung on the opposite wall. He’s jealous, even passionate about his father’s position in this house. Perhaps when the males are with themselves, do even their very features veer obediently due-male-center, toward the father and his family? Perhaps heredity’s a movable dock, which dips conformably with the weight of whoever’s standing on it.

Now dinner’s on the table, prepared by children’s hands.

“What a lovely sight,” she says, “—how magnificent,” and means it—she’s near tears. The rice steams with a biblical mist. Mustard pot, pepper, water pitcher march naive across table, in caravan. The chili glows. When the candle stumps are lit, she does cry. Finding that she can only make the dry face for it.

“Mother!” This is Maureen, the in-betweener, the sturdy one with the least personal face. She’ll nurse me when I’m senile, Lexie thinks; Maureen will settle for a life of devotion if we’re not all very careful, but she plays the piano more than serviceably, like her maternal grandmother, always finishing the pieces to the end; perhaps if we push very gently we can at least get her out of that drysink of devotion she’s in, if not quite to the Juilliard. Or perhaps she’s only in that phase when adolescents crave service, when they go to be monks and nuns. Let her have it then. “Maureen—” Lexie says, smiling, “—my rock.”

When little Royal, the youngest, creeps into her lap, though at going-on-ten he’s too old for it, she nuzzles him. Nobody jeers. Roy was born with one leg shorter than the other and a wry foot. His infirmity is good for the others; does he know this? It won’t sway him; look at the long James-jaw on him, those careful Ray-hands; he’s going to be a doctor too. And when asked what kind has already answered: “Like me.”

… Was that the particular night also the one when Chessie burst out “Salt, salt, salt—what do I care?” and ran from the table, and was brought back by little Royal, the only one who could—because she knew he’d limped upstairs to do it? Or was it the evening of that day Maureen, the sturdy one, got lost in the city, losing her wallet too and just managing to quaver out the city corner she was phoning for Lexie to drive in and pick her up from, before her telephone dime went down? When we drove in here and Maureen saw the three others waiting on the steps, how she bloomed—a flowering. She’s begged the dime, on the corner—would I have been able to do that?