Other Women (14 page)

WOMEN’

“So you’re really going to kick me out in a couple of weeks?” Caroline asked belligerently.

Hannah looked at her with mock surprise. “As I recall, the original issue was whether you’d be trapped into coming here for the rest of your life. You can come forever if you want. It’s your money.” She reached for Nigel’s stone ashtray.

Caroline was irritated. Hannah didn’t seem to care one way or the other. But she herself had started to care, she realized with alarm. This was supposed to be a visit to the dentist. She sat in terrified silence. Hannah mattered to her. She wanted to keep coming, wanted to see Hannah every week, wanted Hannah to want to see her. If Hannah found out, she’d go away in disgust. I know what you want and you can’t have it.

Caroline would have to play it cool, reveal none of this, do as she was told, or Hannah would withdraw like all the others. She felt her features assemble themselves into the bland mask she used for poker. The photos! She’d done her assignment!

Reaching into her tote bag, Caroline announced, “I brought you some pictures.”

“Great,” said Hannah, stubbing out her cigarette and setting the ashtray on the desk. Glancing through the photos, she saw confirmafor her original diagnosis in shot after shot. Obvious to anyone not blinded by the emotions associated with those individual personalities. Two anxious little boys clung to their older sister, whose head was usually turned down as though awaiting a blow. The father was absent or gazing off-camera; the mother was usually turned slightly away from the children, a literal cold shoulder. One photo was of a baby,

Caroline presumably, hanging listlessly from a doorjamb in a jump seat. In more recent photos two little boys again clung to Caroand a shifting array of men and women stood beside her, turned slightly away.

“Are these all you have?” asked Hannah.

“No, I have a whole boxful. Do you want more?”

“No. Just curious.” Caroline had selected these photos from many to tell her tale. Whether this was the “real” situation from anyone else’s perspective was irrelevant. A different selection would have told a different story. But rejection and abandonment were Caroline’s inner

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ambience, probably shaped in those first months when Daddy went to8Whom are you trying to convince, Caroline? Not me. I’ll go

war and Mummy went berserk with abandonment and terror.

Butalong with whatever you tell me. After all, I don’t even know them.”

consciously Caroline knew none of this. And telling her in so manyThey sat in silence. Finally Hannah said, “Call me while you’re

words wouldn’t work. tilde down there if you want to.”

“Do you see any patterns in these photos?” asked Hannah, leaning tilde Caroline looked at her with surprise, wondering why Hannah forward to hand them back.wd think she might want to.

Then it came back to her in a rush, “Patterns8”tilde the times she phoned from school for rides home when she was sick,

“Take them home and look at them every now and then.“ffffh maids and secretaries reply that everyone was out doing good.

Caroline frowned. She thought the point was for Hannah to pic-child”,

The times she phoned Jackson at Mass General for advice on the boys”

ture the people they were discussing. Patterns8tilde tilde health or for an errand on the way home, to be told he was in surgery.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” asked Hannah.the times she reached out for David Michael in bed, to find he’d

“Going to my parents in Boston with my sons.8gone to Clea. And Diana? Who knew what she was up to? Courting

Hannah blinked. The showdown at the OK

Corral was coming

Hisby ‘tilde

Suzanne one minute and coming on to Caroline the next. She ansooner than she figured. “Will that be fun8”tilde pounced last night that she was staying in Poughkeepsie after Christ8allyes. The boys like lots of activity at Christmas, and there’ll bej tilde mas to meet Suzanne in New York City for New Year’s Eve, the first

parties and stuff.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, then was startled

tilde d tilde

they wouldn’t be spending together since they became lovers.

to hear herself say, “I’m scared.“tilde “Thanks,” she said to Hannah in a choked voice.

“Nobody’s ever

“What of88done something like that for me before.” Her hand fluttered on the

“I’ve been feeling so good lately.”

beeatilde

couch, wanting to reach for a Kleenex from the box on the chest. She

“You can’t feel good on a sustained basis by avoiding things thatpulled the hand back to her side. Her fingertips stroked the tweed cause you pain. You have to come to terms with them. And you will.“tilde cushion cover.

She smiled at herself for sounding so sure. tilde tilde “It sounds as though you

have

surrounded yourself with people

“I don’t know why I said that. I get along fine with my parents.who haven’t valued you properly.”

It took a real leap of the imagination Always have. I had a very happy and privileged childhood.8ffcall someone as doggedly determined to please as Caroline a

Hannah held her face expressionless, remembering the many tilde “taker.” Hannah noted the near-lunge for a Kleenex, pleased self-pity times Maggie fought to do the same with her.had appeared on the scene. The battlements must be tottering.

“I did,” said Caroline, looking at Hannah defiantly.caroline struggled with Hannah’s remark. What had Caroline said

“I wasn’t disagreeing.?ffccvey the impression people hadn’t treated her properly? She’d led “You just said they caused me pain.” She stuffed the photos intoa privileged life. What

had Hannah seen in those photos?

her tote bag.8ally didn’t pick your parents,”

Hannah replied to Caroline’s look

“All right, so they don’t. Fine.8of confusion, “but you’ve picked everybody since.”

“They’ve done a lot of good for a lot of people.”

Throughout her’ iCaroline stood up abruptly, feeling like a wimp. “I picked you, childhood clients and neighbors collared her on the street to tell herdidn’t I?”

what wonderful people her parents were. And it was the truth.8allyes, and it was a smart choice, too,” said Hannah.

“Great.”

“Well, they have, damn it!”. . ,

OTHER

Caroline unloaded cardboard boxes of the boys’

outgrown clothing and L. L. Bean boots from the back of her Subaru, as the boys raced to the corner drugstore to squander their allowances, a luxury country living didn’t afford. Her mother had asked for stuff for a Boat People Relief Fund rummage sale. Caroline carried the boxes into the empty garage. There were two large oil stains on the concrete floor where the cars were usually parked.

Her parents had evidently gone to their offices despite her arrival. But it had always been understood in their family that disaster had priority.

Vacations had been postponed, Brownie Flying Up ceremonies missed, as her father went to jail to post bond, as her mother tracked down a runaway.

It went without saying that clients’ needs came first, because their own family was so fortunate. Her parents were good people. She resented Hannah’s skepticism.

How could Hannah feel so free to pass judgment on people she didn’t even know?

As she stacked boxes, Caroline reflected that her father had always brought things into this house, whereas her mother had always taken them back out again. Their marriage was a perfectly balanced ecosystem. He’d had clients who could get anything wholesale. One mana salvage store in Dorchester that sold the contents of wrecked trucks and trains. The beige wall-to-wall carpeting through the house had survived a thirty-five vehicle pileup on Route 128. Whenever her father locked the keys in his car, he’d phone a client he’d gotten off a breaking and entering charge. Every fall they’d driven to Maine to gather bushels of potatoes too small for harvesting by the machines. On weekends they’d go to a fish market at Boston Harbor. In front were trays of fish under a sign reading “Catch of the Day.” They’d buy the limper, smellier catch of yesterday out back. On the way home they’d stop at the Haymarket for unsold vegetables at reduced prices.

His forebears came to Boston from a farm on the Bay of Dingle during the potato famine. He put himself through BU Law School during the Depression by loading freighters and delivering laundry. He met Caroline’s mother at a mixer at Wellesley College. She used to talk regretfully of the other young men who’d pursued her at Wellesley.

Though what she wanted that he’d failed to deliver had never been clear. Caroline’s mother’s father, the Anglican priest, reared his daughter to a life of service. As did her mother’s mother, who ran sales WOMEN

at the Shaker Heights church with the finesse of a casino croupier. Here in this rambling wreck of a house on Walnut Street in Brookline Village, Caroline’s family lived alongside those who needed service. Apparently Caroline’s mother’s notion of service was more genteel.

You served, but you retreated at night to your Shaker Heights comforts.

Caroline walked out into the driveway and inspected the huge Victorian structure with its peeling white paint, on its street of simidilapidated houses. Exterior woodwork had fallen off the turrets and from under the eaves throughout her childhood, and hadn’t been replaced, so the house looked still under construction, a hundred years in the making, like a Gothic cathedral. The evergreens out front were rust-colored from salt spray from the street, and the grass had been trampled by passing schoolchildren. There were patches of dirty snow where the house cast shadows. Her father had grown up down the street with nine brothers and sisters, children of an Irishman with a minor position at the municipal housing authority.

Their mother worked as an aide at Beth Israel, which was where Caroline first got the idea of becoming a nurse. When Caroline was sick, her grandwd stop by in her white shoes, uniform dress, and hairnet. Caroline liked getting sick because her grandmother would rub her shoulders with alcohol and bring her meals on trays. Also she got to stay in bed all day instead of following Howard and Tommy around the neighborhood, rescuing them from falls into manholes and rides with strangers. She used to be terrified something awful would happen to them while she was in charge.

Entering the house, Caroline was glad for a few moments alone. She looked at the stairwell, where she hanged poor Howard’s teddy bear. He’d gone to Penn State and joined the boxing team. It was probably she whom he was pulverizing in the ring each match. He wouldn’t be home for Christmas. He was still in Chad in connection with the famine. Tommy was with the Public Health Service on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and wouldn’t be home either.

As she crossed the Route 128 carpet, she looked around the living room. The shelves and tables were devoid of the personal objects other people crammed their houses with. Her parents-were ascetics, didn’t clutter up their lives with the insignificant, focused all their attention on important issues like disaster relief. It was admirable. But this house

OTHER

was so different from the ones she’d lived in since.

Jackson’s neo-Tudor place had

been a new bride’s wet dream-every appliance and decotouch imaginable. David Michael’s Somerville commune had been its own kind of masterpiece-auto seats as couches, curtains of American flags liberated from government flagpoles, silk-screened posters about freeing this and saying no to that on every bare surface, glasses made from wine bottles, utensils stolen from Waldorf s cafeteria at Harvard Square.

Diana and she tended toward the rose-covered cottage motif-hooked rugs, fresh-baked bread, and laundry on the line. Each style was distinctive, unlike this living room, which could have been a motel lobby.

Her father walked in the front door, heavy-set and florid-faced, with auburn hair like Jason’s, gone to yellow-gray at the temples. He had a scar across his forehead above one eyebrow, from a bayonet wound when he’d fallen on a forced march as a Japanese POW. His tie was an inch wide.

As a teenager, Caroline used to be humiliated by his ties and lapels. Since he bought everything on sale, when width was fashionable he was buying narrow ones, and vice versa. He’d advance on Filene’s Basement like a soldier on an enemy trench, emerging with marked-down factory seconds. “It’s fine,” he’d insist, hunching a shoulder as his wife inspected a new jacket with appalled disbelief. “You just have to hold one shoulder higher than the other.”

“Hello there, darling!” He hugged her awkwardly.

The boys burst in, mouths stuffed with gum, hands full of Star Wars cards. “Why, who do we have here?” demanded her father, shaking the boys’ hands as they juggled Star Wars cards. “How was your trip, darling?”

“Fine, thanks, Dad. Uneventful.”

“Sorry no one was here. I had to go to Dorchester.

And your mother had an emergency. How about you three going with me to Filene’s to pick out presents for the secretaries?”

The crowds on the MTA were daunting after the New Hampshire Woods. The boys stuck close to Caroline’s side, and grabbed her hands as they fought their way through writhing ranks of half-dressed women trying on blouses in the aisles of Filene’s Basement.

Her father decided on Chanel No. 5 for the secretaries. As Caroline helped him take bottles from a damaged carton, she was inunwith the scent. Her mother had always worn it.

Caroline,

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Howard, and Tommy used to gather around her as she dressed for work. Whoever had been best behaved got to fasten her stockings to her garters. Caroline’s fingers twitched recalling the pleasure of fitting the silk stocking over the garter button and sliding both into the wire fastener. Meanwhile, her mother dabbed herself with Chanel No. 5. And Caroline gently ran her fingers over the ridges of pelvic bone that distended her mother’s silk slip. Breasts and bones, that was what you grew when you became a woman. They never had a clear idea what her work was. She talked about orphans shivering on street corners whenever Caroline or her siblings whined about anything.