Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (13 page)

"Tell me," she said, "do you mean unclean-dirty or sexy-dirty?"

"What are you talking about?"

"David. You said he was dirty."

"Oh, him. I don't make the distinction between one kind of dirt and another."

"Well, that's very revealing, Farley," she said. "How did you come by your children? Immaculate Conception?"

"I know what you think of me, Beth," he said, snapping open the latches of his briefcase to indicate that they were moving on. "But someone has to tell you what's right. Besides, I owe it to my friendship with Arthur Carroll."

He had not been asked to sit down, and he had not done so. As he turned his attention to the documents in his briefcase, he rested it on the end of the bed. He slipped out a folder and handed it over to her. She opened it and pretended to read at it but was aware that he was now in a position to watch her closely. She had lost the advantage of the tension and sharp tongues, so she turned to the next diversion. She softened her voice and told him to bring a chair over close to the bed from the bay window. No, closer still, she said, so that he ended up sitting right next to her at the head of the bed and no longer had her in his line of sight. If he had turned his head and looked right at her, he would have had a close-up. But Madeleine risked that. She thought he would be too modest and discreet to look a lady in the eye from only a foot away. And she knew it was time to trigger his legal dream of order and get him absorbed in the business of the will.

She wanted it read aloud to her as she followed it along. She let him know subliminally that she needed him after all, that in spite of what they thought of one another, she was an old enfeebled woman, and he was a gentleman who would not let a lady down. As she lapsed into frailty and deferred to him, she made him understand that his reference to her husband had found its mark. In fact, Madeleine had found the remark about Arthur Carroll so cheap and underhand that she determined to give Farley an extra bruise or two before he left. But it seemed prudent to lull him into a false security right now. She made purring and clucking sounds as he read through his accurate clauses. He became almost sprightly. She hadn't said anything out loud about needing him, and she certainly hadn't apologized. But there was a pitch to her attentiveness that must have made him feel that his moral posturing had been successful. Thus, from somewhere deep in the filing cabinet, the meat locker of his heart, he felt a little glow of good feeling for Beth Carroll. She couldn't be half so bad as she seemed if she listened to him so well.

He'd probably never seen a movie. That may be harsh, because I bet he would have loved World War II movies, where men are men and prove it when they throw themselves on hand grenades to save the platoon. But Madeleine's movies surely could never have been his cup of tea, and so he missed the clue he might have had to this performance in Mrs. Carroll's room. In 1934, Madeleine made her first film in Hollywood,
Off-Season,
and in it she seduced a good man and broke up a good marriage for the first time in English. She is sitting at the races with an improbable group of fussy snobs when Joel McCrea sits down beside her. He is supposed to be finding a job, except he isn't. She's rich. She tells him she doesn't understand a thing. If only he could explain about the betting and the odds. So he launches into a monologue as he tries to watch the race (because he has his carfare and lunch money riding on this), and Madeleine just purrs and chuckles and says, "Aha." Before the race is over, he is smitten, and he is drinking deep of Madeleine's eyes when his horse comes in, paying nine for two.

So Madeleine could change the course of events without talking, particularly when her course of events was different from the one her partner was pursuing. She didn't have to listen very sharply to Mr. Farley's explanation. She knew what the will said. Phidias had coached her so thoroughly in the minutiae of it that she only had to make sure that Farley hadn't slipped in anything new. For the first time, she thought about Beth Carroll's love for this land that had depressed her for three seasons of the year. It seemed to Madeleine, listening to the plan that would leave the coast to its own erosion, the forest to its terms and cycles, that Beth Carroll had been true to the ancient Carrolls and their first sight of an unowned country. Madeleine wore the other woman as a mask that afternoon, but she had learned so much about Beth's late relationship to her estate that she felt proprietary herself. Beth had loved the land for the land's sake, not for her own. As she had told David in the spring, she found the place glacial and brutalizing. But trees cannot take care of themselves. Therefore, Beth had made it her final business to protect the trees' interests.

Madeleine had an immigrant's pride in material things, and she resorted to her own range of words when she spoke of her private property. The Acadia ruby, which she had owned from 1940 until 1946, was still hers in some fundamental way. She had worn it during the war concerts and been photographed wearing it around her neck with everyone from Mrs. Roosevelt to Gandhi. But because she had been poor and philosophical before she was rich and frivolous, she also had an immigrant's love for virgin soil. It did not seem a paradox to her that she could want luxurious things of her own and at the same time want things to be free of the ties of possession and ownership. The same sort of contradiction appeared to move her when she was in love in a film.
Let me have it but let it be free.
No such paradoxes clouded Mr. Farley's world, and Madeleine fumed at how little he understood the fierce spirit of Beth Carroll.

When he looked up from the document, calmed by the precision of his own voice, he glimpsed the rush of tears that had come to Madeleine's eyes. But he misread them. She had been moved to mourn the woman she played, but she was too much in control of the performance to let go. She let the tears sting and kept them in. She turned them into rage at Arthur Carroll and Donald Farley and waited to pick a fight. Mr. Farley thought she was getting weepy about the shadow of death that the will threw on her kingdom. He was a fount of experience in these matters. Dryly, ever so dryly, he had patted the hands of those who made their testaments and saw therein how time is a stream and it flows away. He had a whole
Bartlett's
at his fingertips about inheritance and continuity. Now, he must have thought, was the time to bring up Mrs. Carroll's poor, dispossessed children. He walked right into it.

"Sign it and it's done, Beth," he said, "but I wouldn't be a good lawyer"—and God only knew that he
was,
Madeleine could hear him thinking—"if I didn't mention the children. You simply can't do this without telling them. It takes all the nobility away from your gift to the people. If you don't let the children take part in it too, they will think you have done this just to punish them."

"I can think of three reasons why we shouldn't tell them."

"Why?"

"John, Cicely, and Tony," Madeleine said, reciting the names like a list of the damned.

"You know you care about them more than that." Mr. Farley appealed to reason again and again, like the waves of the sea combing in and beating on the shore. But the tide was going out.

"I just want to make sure they don't challenge this will. Or, if they do, that they don't win. I told you," she said, so coldblooded that he couldn't look at her, "I would rather have three of the pine trees in my woods for children than
my
children. Now go open the doors to my balcony and call up my witnesses."

"You're not yourself today, Beth," he said, standing up and moving across the room.

"Oh yes I am," she said, feeling more like herself every minute, whichever self she was. There was a thread of consciousness between Madeleine and Beth that she had been aware of from the moment they met in Paris, and Madeleine had reached the dramatic peak in her performance where she was dancing on that thread like a tightrope. Madeleine's high-wire act.

I don't know what Mr. Farley expected when he opened the doors and came out onto the balcony. Calling up the witnesses seems like such a biblical thing to do, but then I think he was too taken aback by Madeleine's railing about the children to have thought about it. In any case, there we were, Phidias and David and I, lounging in the courtyard in much the same way as we had at noon, like people in a waiting room. Mr. Farley seemed surprised that we were all together and ready to sign. He probably had an inkling that Mrs. Carroll had planned her moves as much as he had planned his, and he must have begun already to throw up his hands and think he had done what he could.

We started to climb the spiral stairs in a line, and Mr. Farley went back inside, keeping as much distance as he could from us, the lower orders.

"Who's the third one?" he asked Madeleine.

"You mean Rick? He's David's friend."

"Does he do anything around here?"

"He's David's friend."

When we came into the room, David and Phidias walked just ahead of me. Their postures made clear that they knew their rights and weren't going to be cowed by the old class instincts. They did it for different reasons, but it was touching to see how the swagger of the one echoed the other, like a grandfather and his serious grandson. I shrank back like a coal miner in the owner's parlor, fearful of smudging the rug, and I would have nervously fingered my hatband if I'd had a hat. I was partly compensating for the other two. But I was also making a meek last stand of reluctance about the counterfeit, shrinking from the G-men Mr. Farley might still have stationed out on the stair landing. I looked over at Madeleine. Her eyes blazed out of the mask, and she beckoned us to her side. She called out our three names as if they were the antidote to John, Cicely, and Tony.

Mr. Farley drew his sixty-dollar fountain pen out of his inside jacket pocket, where he had kept it for forty years and where it would stay until the undertaker pinched it. Madeleine signed, with a deliberating air, "Elizabeth Lucey Carroll." Then the pen made the rounds, and each of us stepped up to the bed and leaned over and witnessed the crime, our eyes wide open. Mr. Farley stood away from us at the bay window, looking out to sea as if he were soothed by its pedigree. I noticed that Madeleine whispered something into Phidias's ear as he bent forward and wrote. The same with David. So when I crouched like a wrestler beside her and smelled the long-bedded inertia of old age, I was paying more attention to what she might say than I was to my name as I wrote it down. But I wrote it out in full, including my middle initial, which I never used or said or even saw anymore. What she said to me was

"Try to back out of it now and we've got the evidence to hang you."

Gallows humor is a sure way to jinx a delicate operation, and I gave her a stone-faced look as I left her side. But she was right that the deed was done, and my anxiety and holding back were beginning to be out of place. Our four names stood, a list of felons and a cast of characters, and we appeared to be home free. I handed over Mr. Farley's pen to him. He glared at me as if my chunky hand might have flattened its precision point. I have not seen my North Shore, stock-manipulating father in years, but I bad a sudden sense that he must be aging in much this way, drying out like a winter bouquet of pods and grasses. Utterly sexless, and yet still possessed of the smugness of a man whose first power is carnal. I was the last of us, then, to hate Mr. Farley, but I brought to the experience now the purity of a late convert. He already had a curdled image of both David and Phidias. I wanted that bastard to remember me, too.

As I joined David and Phidias and we three walked through the open doors and onto the balcony, I wished hard for the sort of meeting David had had downstairs. I turned and pulled the doors closed behind us, and I could see that we had shaken him. Though he believed himself superior to all of us, we were still three to one. The mineowner can count on his aloofness to carry him through, that and his Persian rugs and his horsehair sofa, when a delegation of heavy-limbed miners troops in. But when they tramp out again, even if he has outtalked them as usual, he must feel a little jolted by the force that is pent up in them. His cups must rattle some in the china closet, and the gas light flicker. Or so it seemed to me, who felt in that moment a sentimental musketeer feeling about my two mates. Really, Mr. Farley looked a little scared as he stood there and twiddled his pen. He looked as if he didn't know what pocket it went in.

I pulled the doors to, and I laughed coarsely as I waited my turn to go down the stairs. I laughed long and hollowly enough for it to carry as far as the two of them in the bedroom, meaning for it to make Mr. Farley feel that he was wearing the emperor's new clothes. The silked and powdered duke pees in his brocades when he can feel the coachman and the butch footmen snicker at him. I had never been in a class war before, never on the smutty side anyway, and I liked it. I was a real rake. You'd never have known that an hour before I saw us shamed and standing in a row in the prisoner's dock.

We regrouped at the fountain and nodding knowingly at one another like saboteurs, bombs planted, checking in for the countdown. I told them in a low voice what Madeleine whispered to me because I wanted to know what she whispered to them. Phidias would have shared his without any pressure. "She said she had an irresistible urge to write her own name," he said, "but she couldn't remember it." He beamed at David and me as if to say, "See what a professional job we did, she and I." And when we turned to David, I couldn't tell if he was disappointed that his secret was lifeless by comparison, or disconcerted because he had to spill it. As it happened, the moment suddenly took a different shape, and he was let off. We were only allowed to go so far before the next change intervened. But I was getting used to it. We heard the rattle of the key in the library doors again. What now, I thought, though I must have had Aldo in the back of my mind, because I didn't hear the police in every noise anymore.

When I saw him, my first thought was: "He's
my
age." I had always thought he was an older man, but it may be that I always thought of myself as a younger man than I was. Yet he was an old forty-five. He was fat and soft and balding, one of those Californians whose skin is pasty and untanned so that you wonder why he bothers to live there. His clothes were very pricey, but wrinkled and awry because his body didn't hold them up. His cloudless face and his manic charm indicated that he knew all about it but had somehow lost control. He wanted you to know that you had to forgive him for it. He had forgiven himself.