Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (23 page)

"Excuse me," he said.

"We were just changing the sheets," David said.

I didn't say anything. I tasted the sweet, syrup red of my own blood in my throat, and I heard it bubble in my nose. I reached up to see if it was broken.

"I just wanted to tell you not to move out," Tony said apologetically, wanting to get this over with. "I've got my gear downstairs in my sister's old room. Phidias should mind his own business."

My nose was in one piece. "Do you need anything?" I asked, a certain phlegm in my voice.

"I bring what I need with me," he said, raising his glass. "Are you all right?"

"Well"—oh how he wanted to stay and chat—"good night." He seemed so embarrassed when he walked away downstairs that I felt embarrassed for him. No one should be that out of place.

"See? He's just lonely," David said.

"What do you mean 'just'?"

"Shut up. You'll start bleeding again."

He pulled me down beside him on the mattress. The moment of rage that had made me fight had passed completely. It receded now on the opposite shore, separated from me by this half-wit injury and the clumsy scene with Tony. I had a sinking feeling that I had to say something about Madeleine and another thing about David and say them in the same sentence. I had come all this way keeping the two ideas apart because I truly thought they
were
apart. David and Madeleine were night and day. But maybe not. I was a washout in algebra too, but what I was looking for was a factor like pi that could change a straight line into a circle.

"What do you want?" he asked again.

"Anything I can get."

"I don't think so. You're not that desperate.
That,"
he said, making a motion with his head toward the doorway, "is a desperate man."

"We have to talk about Madeleine," I said.

"Do you really want to go into it now?" It was a warning. We might have to fight an even bloodier fight.

"No. Tomorrow."

"Maybe they'll put us in the same cell," he said, and now he was smiling and gentle, "and we can argue about it for years."

He kissed me lightly, but I couldn't kiss him on the mouth because I felt funny about the rank, steely taste of blood on my breath. So I nuzzled his cheek, but because the blood was still sticky there, I hunched down and kissed his neck. I wondered if there was blood on the sheets.

Just after midnight, Phidias knocked at the french doors to the balcony off the bedroom. Madeleine woke with a start. She was sure it was Tony wanting to come in, and she cursed herself for not turning the lock. If he snaps on the light, she thought, or tiptoes in with a candle, he's going to find a bedraggled and unpowdered French singer where his mother ought to be and raise holy hell. She had set the alarm for eight, though she normally slept in until after ten, to give herself the whole morning to make up. For Christ's sake, she thought, if he has to see her so badly that he needs to wake her up, why doesn't he call her once in a while? When I brought in Madeleine's breakfast the next day and found her whitening her hair at the mirror, she told me that she had almost rasped at the door: "Can't it wait until morning, Tony? An old woman needs her sleep." Then she decided she would just outwait him. He knew his mother was a little deaf.

She was so sure that the knocking was coming from the door to the hall that she nearly screamed when the french doors opened. "It's me," Phidias said in the dark, as if he did it every night, and she sighed with relief. Her head ached. She should never have taken a Valium to get to sleep, she decided, because she would be too groggy now to follow the Greek's train of thought. But she had decided she'd better not have her lights on and so turned in as soon as she came upstairs from the lobsters. Otherwise, she would have been up half the night writing down the winter of 1930 and the shooting of
La Bonbonnière.
(Released in the United States as
Lovesick
the following summer, it played in Manhattan for twenty minutes before it was seized by the police, who burned the only print. No one here has ever seen it, but it made her an overnight star.) On the other hand, she reasoned as she tried to wake up, if she hadn't had the Valium, she
would
have screamed.

Of course, Phidias
was
accustomed to the moonlit entrance to Beth Carroll's bedroom, and Madeleine didn't have the heart to scold him. As he sat on the bed and briefed her about Tony Carroll, in the rose light of the miniature bedside lamp, Madeleine felt certain that the years of midnight meetings were in his mind. Tony's arrival was a crisis that both Madeleine and Phidias were convinced she could handle. There was no need for a strategy session, since they had already been over the details of Beth and Tony a dozen times for Mr. Farley's visit on the third. Phidias wanted an excuse to be there at night.

"I don't think he left until after two," Madeleine told me as

I pulled open the draperies and mixed her coffee and scalded milk. "We went over some things I can't get right in the memoirs, and I read him what I've written. He says I'm jealous of the girl I was, and I said I thought she was a dodo. Then we came downstairs and had a brandy and talked about Beth. The nights are the worst, Rick. Anyone will tell you that. When is my baby boy coming up?"

A little before noon, it turned out. Tony had clearly had a couple of drinks before he walked in, because he was hostile right from the beginning. The rest of us didn't know how to set him up for the meeting, so we decided we should steer clear. David ran into him at about eleven when they passed each other at the door to the second-floor bathroom. David didn't have his shirt on because he had been shaving, and Tony, his face constricted by a searing hangover, had taken a sad look up and down David's bare chest as he shuffled past and closed the door. They hadn't said anything. At eleven-thirty, Tony appeared in the kitchen, dressed and somewhat put together. Aldo was layering a lasagna and tried to be cheerful and talk food talk. He offered Tony breakfast—eggs and pancakes and sausages and grits. He sounded, as he put it, "as down-home as a waitress who can retire on her tips to Daytona Beach before she's fifty." Tony said no and got his bottle out of the pantry, looking suspiciously at the level to see if anyone was nipping it behind his back. We relayed our readings of his mood to one another, and at a quarter to twelve Phidias stuck his head through the french doors one last time and gave Madeleine the word.

For the first few minutes, Tony stood just inside the door and talked from as far away from her as he could get. Madeleine had been concerned, when she originally agreed to take on the children, about the business of kisses and embraces. She told Phidias she was convincing as close up as three feet, but there were bits of putty and tape that would show if anyone got nearer. Nothing to worry about, Phidias said. Kisses had never been much in the Carroll tradition from the Mayflower on down, but the last several Christmases had been marked by a no-man's-land between everybody and everybody else. The policy with Tony was distinctly "hands off." When he walked in, he looked at her and then looked away at the room as if it were a dream he was having against his will. Madeleine told me later that she knew he was gay the moment she set eyes on him.

"I got your card," she said, testing the timbre of the voice. "Why did you go
there?"

"Why do I go anywhere, Mother?" he asked, as if the question were deliberately aimed.

"Well, I don't know. Didn't you have a good time?"

"That's not the point. The point is, I wrote John and Sis that I did. And I sent chatty little cards to the headmaster and my department chairman and the creature who runs the switchboard at the school. Therefore, I have shown all the powers that be that I am a worldly-wise and self-reliant bachelor. John and Sis will say I'm finding myself. The school will say I'm broadening myself. Thus, they will avert their eyes and let me keep drinking."

"How did Farley get hold of you?" she asked, wondering if he was so transparent because he was accustomed to dealing with adolescents.

"Farley? Why, I didn't send a card to Donald Farley. That
was
naughty, wasn't it? No, he didn't get hold of me. What does he want?"

"I wanted to see you."

"What do
you
want?"

"I wanted to read my will."

And that broke the tension for him at last. He laughed out loud like a cough. Then he came forward to the foot of the bed, and she was surprised at how clumsy and wavering he was. Aldo had always been her image of a man at war with his body because he was fat. She came from places where you were thin or else. But Tony seemed less to have given up on his body—as Aldo had, his bread sopping round in the gravy—than never to have caught the drift of it at all. Madeleine had come upon every sort of neurotic at one time or another, and Tony was something else. "Crazy people," she said to me later, when it all came out in detail, "and people who punish themselves are obsessed with their bodies. When they crack up and fall apart, they
study
it. They're like people bent over cutting their toenails—they're hypnotized. But that boy is bodiless. He tries to divert your attention from it. Housewives do that."

"Your
will!"
Tony said scornfully. "How positively Dickensian. Is it to be our last chance to beg for land? I have an idea. Why don't you award the family jewels on a point system? We'll decide who's been the most cruel to you, who's been the most indifferent. It will be like a parlor game."

Madeleine told me she really didn't know what to do. Phidias had promised her it would be like this, but somehow she didn't believe that in the event it would be so sad. She thought there would be in their bickering a certain briskness and a quirky kind of humor. But it was more brutal than she expected. And she was expected to reply in kind. What she had secretly supposed all along was that she could turn this relationship around and let the sun in at last. It was her own damned fault.

"You take to drinking from your father's side of the family," she said. She assumed it was typical of them not to answer each other's questions but instead to go on to the next assault. "It's hereditary, did you know that? They've proved it."

"My father didn't drink."

"Your father didn't drink like
you
do. He just drank enough to feel sorry for himself. It didn't take very much. A double old-fashioned would do it. I don't call a man a drinker because of how
much
he drinks."

"How illuminating. Is the same thing true about sex?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, making an old-lady gesture at the ribbons at the neck of her robe.

"That it doesn't matter how
much
you do it. To be an adulterer, you can make it an everyday thing, or you can sin once in seven years."

"Adulteress is the word you mean, I think. What a churchy word. Have you come home so that we can talk some more about Phidias and me?"

"For once, dear lady, I have not come home to call you a whore." He was wearing a tight grin and holding on to both posts at the foot of the bed. Madeleine was offended by the histrionics because it was just plain bad acting. Madeleine had never been in an American school except once, when she heard a daft man in New York give a lecture about the
tranche de vie
pattern in her films. It had made her queasy to listen, and Tony was doing the same thing.

"I was sitting in a bar in Algiers," he said, "kind of taking sips at a Pernod. I had dysentery, see, and I didn't want to jostle my insides too much. And there was a Britisher there, about fifty, but he talked like a schoolboy about rugger and his old Classics master. And he just
hated
his parents because they went and got divorced when he was fifteen.
Divorced
." He fairly shrieked the word at her. "Well, I started to brag about
our
family secrets. Lady Chatterley and the milkman, I told him. And I realized something." He smiled a grim little smile, and then the tone lowered. The dramatics fell away. "If John and Sis and I had only had sex lives of our own, we wouldn't have kept up this punishment of you. See, John and his wife do it with their clothes on. Sis lies there like it's someone burning her with cigarettes. And I don't do anything at all. So it's our own fault. I don't forgive you, but it's not your fault."

She didn't
feel
forgiven either, but she was touched by him and (curious for her, who let people alone) wanted to protect him. It struck Madeleine that people do give speeches half the time. But in the last few weeks, she told me, she had not been accustomed to hearing them. As I said, we had all been together here long enough to speak in code, and we had each other's number too well to let anyone spin out a whole speech without a hoot. Her protective instinct sprang from this: it was the first time Madeleine felt that we had replaced the Carrolls as the family in the house.

"You figured all that out in a bar in Algiers?"

"Dysentery is like truth serum. Why don't we have a drink? I bet it's afternoon."

"Do you usually wait until noon?"

He shrugged and turned away. He wasn't guilty about the drink, but he seemed exhausted by his own bile and was signaling for a break. Madeleine picked up the old horn that interconnected the bedroom and the kitchen and asked: "Is anyone there? We want liquor." She told Tony that he might have to go down himself, and then Aldo's voice answered back: "We read your Mayday, Commander. Over and out."

Madeleine had the sense that each of them should go about his own business while they waited. Tony stood at the tall dresser and looked over the silver and porcelain odds and ends. From her bed, Madeleine looked out the bay window and considered mentioning the weather. It was drizzling, and she thought to tell him that it was the first rain in two weeks. Then she thought better of it, because he might hear an unintended irony in the remark, as if she equated his coming with that of the squall line. When she glanced back at him, she was surprised at how intently he examined the terrain of the dresser, as if the totem objects of his mother, her brushes and mirror and flagons, were as real to him as the old woman Madeleine played. The things on the dresser, she thought, must haunt his dreams along with the younger woman his mother used to be. The old woman Mrs. Carroll had become was someone different, and Madeleine knew that her impersonation was successful precisely because old people are somehow all alike to the young and the real mother is always the remembered woman with the clear skin and the long bright hair.