Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (25 page)

"I don't like the rain either," I said.

"Oh, I know. You'd probably even say so if I weren't around."

"No, I never have." Get up, I said to myself. Stop hiding out in this goddam chair. So I did. I got up, and I threw down the Dickens and lost my place, and I didn't care, because he wasn't as good as he used to be. I did not, after all, have to finish every book I started. Nobody (alas) was keeping score. "But I don't want to admit that it makes me sad because there's so much of it. You know?"

"Sure. Come look at it."

I walked over and stood next to him. I didn't want to go to bed with him right now, but I would have given anything to start the morning over happy, with a clean and clear-hearted fuck.

"It frightens me," I said, "when I think you feel the same things I do. I don't know why. It's supposed to make me happy. People who meet and fall in love stay up all night
agreeing
with each other, don't they?"

"For the first few nights," he said wryly. "Then they're on their own. The rain looks like it covers the whole ocean, doesn't it? It looks like it's raining everywhere."

He was looking out at it, but I wasn't. I had developed the power not to see it, and besides I was more interested in watching him. Standing next to David in the doorway, loving him as I did, I liked the light wind and the fine mist it blew over us. And he didn't look so stricken either, though I was not ready to tell him so. I believed him that the rain must have thrown him into grief all through his youth and was the perfect outward image of his boredom and the meaningless run of time. I meant it when I said that it hurt me, too. But I think he was mournful now that the pain he suffered was not as simple as the rain. He hated the weather now for its indifference and no longer believed in its willful furies and cold shoulders. And he couldn't admit the change.

"I lie to you sometimes," I said, "so you won't know I agree with you."

"The difference between you and Aldo," he went on, as if there hadn't been a break in that conversation, "is that you insist that you know Madeleine best. His act is different. He thinks she'd be out on the street if he didn't keep his hand in."

"No one knows Madeleine very well," I said, thinking to begin modestly but about to make it clear that no one knew her better. I understood her best is how I would have put it.

"No one knows about Phidias," he said, but I didn't know what he was
trying
to say. I thought he must be telling me that he, too, knew someone better than anyone else. Or it was an oblique remark about Mrs. Carroll and how, with her dead, Phidias had lost the person who had him by heart. As with the rock stars and the pornographic film, it seemed a forced and inadequate comparison to Madeleine, and so I ignored it and looked out at the gray, low-roofed world.

"You don't either, do you?" he asked.

"We get along all right," I said, not caring a whole lot. Why were we going on about Phidias? "I haven't spent much time with him."

"Rick, they were married."

Please don't let him mean Madeleine and Phidias, I thought. But there wasn't anyone else he could mean.

"How do you know?"

"He told me. Way back at the beginning, before the two of you came here." From the look on his face, he seemed sorry he'd told me, though as I went back over the confusion of the last several sentences, I felt how firmly he'd wanted to teach me a lesson. That wounded me. It seemed to be fighting dirty to use the truth like a weapon when the truth hurt all by itself.

"Isn't he married to the woman on the farm?" I asked, feeling off balance. But who had ever seen her? If this had been a Hitchcock film, the farm woman would never have existed at all.

"Now he is," David said. "I mean he and Madeleine were married in France in the twenties. For three or four years. When they came over here, they broke it off. She went to Hollywood, and he came to work for the Carrolls. I don't know where he met the farm wife."

"What about them meeting in Paris during the war?" We lounged in the doorway and spoke these lines out into the mist. There were spaces between everything we said, and we didn't look at each other. David and I had nothing to do with what we were saying now.

"I gather that's true," he said. "But I think it started with Madeleine recognizing Phidias. I don't know whether Mrs. Carroll ever knew about them. Phidias and I only talked about it once, and I didn't think of all the right questions until later."

This conversation was so surreal that it seemed to me we had at last broken through the looking glass. We were having the conversation that happens at the end of a comedy, when it turns out that everyone is everyone else's brother. Some are in drag, and some know and some don't, and some have been taken care of by kindly shepherds. But usually there is someone who has all the facts, and David was plainly half-informed. I wanted to shake him and demand a full chronology. It occurred to me that David and I were amateurs at the past compared to Madeleine and Phidias. And no wonder there were problems in her memoirs far back in the beginning. Madeleine had a good reason for keeping it from me, no doubt, though I couldn't see quite what it was. I had a sudden, irrational pang, hoping that Aldo didn't know.

"And she hadn't seen him for thirty years between then and this summer," I said, trying to sort out what it meant to her. What it meant to
me
was that I had some final illusions to put away. I had not known until now that I had so many left. Well, I thought, it's your own fault. I got a kick out of blaming myself. It was very gutsy and pragmatic and General MacArthur of me. I squinted into the future. Blaming myself and getting it over with was palpably more interesting than feeling sorry for myself.

"What are you thinking?" David asked, half-convinced that I had gone into shock.

"It's amazing, isn't it, how for some people nothing ever really goes away. I don't ever expect to see anyone again. I've
slept
with a hundred people I wouldn't even recognize. That's the one thing I like about the past, that it doesn't rise out of the grave."

"Except me."

"Except you."

"Hey, you guys," Aldo called. We turned around, and there he was again at the door to the hall, the Dewar's half-gallon in hand. The hourly bulletin. I hoped he was going to say Madeleine wanted to see me first to talk about Tony, but instead he said: "The jig is up."

"What do you mean?" David asked.

"Tony blew her cover. He guessed. We are all wanted upstairs." Nothing was going right, I might have thought, but instead I thought, nothing is going according to plan. So we needed to make a new plan. And I was all ready.

"I'm bringing up a peace offering," Aldo went on, waving the scotch. "I wish I could give it to him intravenously."

"What's the mood upstairs?" David asked.

"I haven't been there yet," he said. "She called me on the intercom. She didn't sound as if he had a shotgun trained on her, but perhaps a small automatic."

As we trooped upstairs, one behind the other, me bringing up the rear in my coal miner's slouch, I realized that David was scared and I wasn't. He was asking Aldo questions Aldo couldn't answer, about what might happen and what had. David had been the first person, after all, who went along with Phidias's plan, and it fell out for him that he then turned the moral subtleties over to the rest of us, trusting us to carry on.

His job had been to dig a grave. After that, he proceeded with the summer he had promised himself. No wonder he paid no attention until now. It was his view, I think, that there were so many of us against a little-boy, whiskey-rotten schoolmaster that it was no contest. But now it was out of his hands, and he was getting jittery, like a passenger who notices that the pilot seems stumped about what's the matter as the plane nosedives. He wanted us to
do
something. As for me, reaching up the stairs to take his hand as it swung back, I was feeling more in control at every revelation. Perversity is going to win in the end with me. Each pricked balloon, each shock of context was bracing me like a long walk in a cold woods.

I caught David's hand, and he turned. "Don't worry," I said.

"That's not what you said last night."

"I know. I just wanted you to know that
one
of us is all right. This time it's me."

Aldo paused at the door until we caught up, and then we all walked in. I was surprised to see Madeleine out of costume. Her face was severe, and her hair was combed straight back because she had taken her makeup off. She wore the chiffon robe, and it only emphasized how gaunt she looked. I supposed she decided to get out of Mrs. Carroll because it had come to seem a bad joke, and she probably felt she needed her own wits about her, in her own incarnation. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the bed. Tony stood at the dresser. Phidias had stopped just inside the door, just as we had, but when we bunched together behind him, he moved forward. I realized that he was the one who was going to speak and that everyone, including Tony, watched him tensely, waiting for a way out.

And, certain of his audience, Phidias was clearly prepared to settle in for a lecture. Soon he was pacing about on the persian rug between the bed and the french doors while we all watched from the sidelines. He started back in the previous autumn, explaining how Mrs. Carroll felt as the winter came down. From the beginning, at the first north wind in October, she promised him it would be her last winter. And, having made the decision, she seemed to savor the rainy, lightless days that in the past sent her into bitterness and rage. For the first time in anyone's memory, she canceled the winter invitations from Palm Beach, and all along Worth Avenue, the linen-hatted grandmothers must have assumed something terminal was at work. Christmas was as grim as ever, but Phidias found her full of mirth when he visited in the late evenings. In the face of her bloodless, censorious children, she took untold nourishment from her secret death. It was set ticking like a bomb at the end of the next summer.

A lot of this was just between Phidias and Tony. I think that Phidias had always maintained the fiction of the feudal-lord-and-farmer manners where the children were concerned, so that even the mention of those nightly meetings was evidence that he wasn't going to mince words. He was establishing his power by means of his intimacy. Tony should have been doubled up with loathing at the speech, but I couldn't read him. I think David expected Tony to be weeping and inconsolable, on account of his mother being so suddenly dead. I knew better. Because he was a drunk, I knew he would save his tears for his late-night, iceless scotches. His mother's death would be the right sort of material for a tantrum. And yet I felt sorry for both of them, sharing the death and without a way to bridge the distance between them. I remembered our first day here in June, thinking as they went off after lunch that Madeleine and Phidias would bargain back and forth with their separate versions of Mrs. Carroll. Phidias and Tony were not likely to strike that kind of bargain.

I looked us all over as Phidias went on. Mrs. Carroll had made the decision about the land and the new will just as the first spring winds blew in off the ocean. Mr. Farley was summoned in Easter week and given his orders. When the garden was in full flower in May, she told Phidias her wishes about the burial. I had heard the next part before, about the night she died, and I tuned it out. It seemed none of my business, even if Phidias and Tony could not come clean about it and make it
their
business. I had compared us all before to a family gathered for the reading of a will, but the image had never made more sense. At that moment, I had the exact snapshot of the situation that Madeleine had an hour or two before, that we were the family in residence and not the Carrolls. If that was so, I thought as I looked sideways at Aldo and David, so different from each other they could be of different species, then the family we composed was still another mixed blessing. What family feelings still persisted in any of us from the dim past were a mess of false faces and doomed tests of affection. A family is a place where the fear of abandonment has turned all the human habitations into caves and cages and islands with treacherous approaches. We could do without it.

Lastly I looked at Madeleine, who had put on a face keyed to the gravity of the occasion. I wondered if she saw her husband when she looked at Phidias gesturing and chronicling in front of us. I knew the
second
husband's name was Peter Jackson and that he was the heir to a middling fortune and a slice of real estate in Arizona about the size of Connecticut. They were married for two years in the late forties, before anyone consented to live in Arizona, and Madeleine left for LA and told the weird sisters, Hedda and Louella, that marriage was not her game. Peter Jackson still surfaced in the news in his own right, a vulgar, toothy man who wore a white cowboy hat when he got dressed up. But the first husband, the child-bride marriage in Europe, was left behind in another world. When you thought of Madeleine, you had to think of her in a one-to-one with Boyer or Robert Taylor or Joel McCrea, because she had abandoned real-life men. For different reasons, of course, Boyer and Taylor do not live in the barrens of Arizona.

"Phidias?" Tony asked, interrupting the narrative, "I don't see what this has to do with me."

Phidias faced him and studied him for a moment, seeming reluctant to yield the least detail of the story, since he had no one else to tell it to. Perhaps he should have begun by begging Tony's pardon, and yet Tony didn't appear offended. He looked genuinely confused.

"Doesn't anyone want a drink?" Tony asked, turning again to the tray. "We can't have a proper wake without something stronger than Phidias giving a speech. Aldo, we need more glasses."

"Tony," Madeleine said in a tired and husky voice, "you have to decide what you're going to do."

"Oh." He took a drink. "I don't think you need
me to
do anything. I really don't want to be involved."

"All of this is against the law," she said, throwing up her hands to take in the summer and the house and what we could see of the coast from the bay window.