Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (34 page)

"You're going to turn it into butter if you don't quit," Phidias said to Aldo.

"I don't deny you're a whiz about cattle, Phidias," Aldo said, not missing a beat, "but dessert is more important to me than people, and I'm as jealous as a sorcerer. I don't make mistakes, and when I do, they're a revelation."

Madeleine meanwhile paced up and down the beach, writing her book in her head between dinner and dessert. Everything was fine, I told myself, as if I had to take our temperature and reassure myself. I wouldn't have dared to tell
them
that everything was fine, because they would have accused me of tying us up together and throwing away the key, implicating us all in a mixed metaphor. It was my most secret failing, that I had to keep looking to see if we were all right, and the summer had not done away with it. I did as I promised I would and took the present at its word, but something else persisted. The apples on the tree in the drive were crabbed and tart, but you could eat a bite or two before your lips puckered. If I was walking with Madeleine to the woods, for example, I would sometimes bring down a couple and chew and spit them. Some gauge in me, no doubt, was checking to see how far along the season was, no matter how much it seemed as thoughtless to play with apples as to draw in the sand.

What I wanted, I knew, was to say what we were, even though the four of them, the only ones who might have cared, didn't. I hadn't anyone to compare us to, and now that we were splitting up, I expected we would seem like an optical illusion when we had gone, since no one would remind me of us. I got what comfort I could from taking our measure one by one. Aldo and Phidias bickering like old vaudevillians over the shortcake. David suspended in a Zen intermission at the shore like a fly in amber. Madeleine rampant, I kept it a secret that I wanted more, wanted something to take away with me that would group us all together in a metaphysical snapshot. I had to be content with the image we had all made real, of Mrs. Carroll swimming east toward Bermuda. A sensible New England freestyle until she got beyond the breakers, and then a lazy sidestroke as she made it out to sea. It was vivid to me, like a scrap of film.

So what we
did
this summer was what we were, I said to myself on the beach. The sentiment made me queasy with its moral uplift. It made us sound like the bugger fringe of the Eagle Scouts. Not that we hadn't had terrific results, having kept a whole suburb off the face of the earth and won one for Mrs. Carroll's deer. It's hard to describe what I ached for. You could say I just wanted to stay on in a safe place.

I jogged over to Madeleine and fell into step beside her. "What year are you up to?" I asked. We tended now to talk about her book first, and today our afternoon's cooking had preempted our afternoon walk. She had asked me more and more questions about her films in the last few days, putting her trust in the passion of the myth. Because she had scoffed so long at its balmy prose and its excess of relics and ceremony, she probed its contours now with the cool of a social scientist. A myth and a self, she seemed to decide, were not mutually exclusive.

"Nineteen fifty-eight," she said.

"Oh." The year we met in France.

"You're having a relapse, aren't you?"

"Of what? Nineteen fifty-eight?"

"No," she said sharply. "You're mooning at all of us. The next thing you know, you'll be wringing your hands."

"I was being sentimental about the summer," I admitted, my hands in my pants pockets as still as the twilight air. "I'll get over it. Am I in it?"

"In what?"

"Nineteen fifty-eight."

"No," she said, hanging her head and shaking it thoughtfully. "As these things go, you're not important enough. Isn't it stupid?" She stopped and put one hand on her hip in the concert position, as if she were about to sing a cafe ballad. She looked worried. Something was on her mind. She had never had anything on her mind long enough to furrow her brow and make her frown, because she put whatever it was into words with a lightning touch and got rid of it, or at least it had always been so between her and me. Since she didn't embarrass herself, since her genetic makeup didn't include the need for approval, there was nothing she wouldn't say. And yet, as we stood face to face on the beach, she was struggling with words as much as I was, though I couldn't guess the reason. Nineteen fifty-eight was a big year, working out as it did the shift from movie star to chanteuse, but the years had not brought her to grief so far in her memoirs. I couldn't imagine they would start to hurt her now. The years that started in 'fifty-eight were her most triumphant. Everyone agreed about that.

"I don't care," I said about the memoirs. "But are you mad at me about something?"

"What would you do if I were?"

"Tell you to go to hell."

"Then I'm not," she said, and the one-syllable laugh came out at half volume. "Why would I be?"

"Because maybe you feel the same way as I do about the summer, and you don't want to start mooning at your age."

"My age?" she asked, hooding her eyelids.

"It's just an expression," I said.

"Oo-hoo!" Aldo called, and we turned to see him waving us back to the picnic for our shortcake. I noticed for the first time that it had gone dark on the beach. Phidias had lighted the pair of lanterns he brought down, and Aldo would have faded into the landscape except for the scarlet of his caftan in the circle of light. It seemed the right time to go back, since Madeleine and I were just idling away the moment, teasing one another but fighting clean. I looked at her to make a joke about Aldo finally taking charge of the meal, and she was doing the most curious thing. She peered at them in the distance as if she were making calculations, then looked at me appraisingly, and I felt that I was the one variable factor. She was like someone sketching a getaway route in his head the instant before he makes a break for it, and she made you understand that they are the only kind who ever get away. But I couldn't understand what she was figuring until we started to walk. She took my arm and kept our pace slow, at the same time talking low and fast. Before I quite began to take in what she was saying, I realized she had a speech to make that would last as long as it took us to reach the others. There wouldn't be a moment left over for me to reply.

"You want it not to end," she said, going back to the summer, "because you're afraid the future will shoot you in the back the way the past did. You can't help it that you break time down into pieces. Even I do, but at least I know they're all about the same. The past isn't the enemy. In fact, I've had an even better idea this summer. There
is
no past."

Maybe it was a hundred feet, but I am not good at distances. David stood up at the water's edge and started back to the others. Of course there was a past.

"Not the way we're used to thinking of it anyway," she went on, the "we" as preachy as the ones I was partial to. "I mean, the past
happens
in the
present,
when it crosses our mind again. Most things never come up again at all, and so they don't exist. Nothing would have happened, I've always thought, if you and I had never met, and yet that meeting was an accident. Another mile one way or the other, and you never would have walked into town that day." It was curious, but I could have sworn she was as angry as she was grateful. "We're not taught to love accidents, are we?"

"No," I said. I couldn't get a handle on it. I guess I thought she was apologizing in a roundabout way for not putting me in the book. But since I really didn't care, I only half listened. It didn't mean I didn't like the theory, or what I could understand of it at least. But it was too absolute. Sometimes there was a past, and sometimes there wasn't, I thought to myself equanimically. It depended on who you were at a given time, and what proof you had and what proof you still needed. None of us here, for instance, needed more proof, and I wished we could walk a little faster and get back to the group in the lamplight.

"You have to throw out all the facts you think you know," she said, "and even if you could, it will still seem more like a story than something real. But I ought to tell somebody." She stopped again, and I waited with her. We were so close to the others now, maybe twenty-five feet, that she lowered her voice to tell the story. She still held my arm. "I met Beth Carroll in France in nineteen thirty and not during the war. Phidias didn't know. When I left him in 'thirty-one, I knew I was pregnant, but I thought I could have an operation over here. It was too late. So I called Beth Carroll from New York, and she kept me here in a maid's room until it was over. I didn't want it. It was just like being sick. Beth took the baby, and I went to Hollywood. Then, a few years later, I got Phidias a job here, and then we got divorced. He never knew."

"It sounds like a soap opera," I said, and now she had started us walking again, just as I realized we had to stop and finish this. I had no idea how either of us was feeling.

"I know," she said. "That's what I mean. The truth is
true,
but it isn't
real.
I hadn't thought about it in twenty-five years, and then that day when you walked into town, I was all alone in the hotel, I was broke, and it started to hurt again. We had that week together. I realized I didn't know anything about my own child, except I remembered it was a boy. It's the only time I ever missed him. I got busy again."

Now wait a minute, I thought.

"Are you saying that Tony's
your
son?" I asked her.

"No," she said impatiently, as if I were being stupid and mawkish. "Beth put the baby up for adoption."

But then it didn't make sense at all. And then, when we were almost on top of the picnic, it all came together.

"Aldo?" I said, and she let go of my arm to walk around the blanket to her own place, between Aldo and David.

"Sit down," Aldo said to me. I was standing up at my place, and Madeleine had reached the opposite side. She looked over at me as if she had already dropped the subject. The others were all sitting down and waiting.

"Not me," I said, swaying a bit, and she shook her head no and then tilted it to the side and smiled, as if to say she knew what I meant. "It's no one," she said. "I don't know who
it
is. I never will now. Forget it."

But what if it were
me,
I thought as I sat down. Just suppose it were. Suddenly my mind swept over us all like an airborne camera zooming in, and I knew I was finally in a scene in a Madeleine Cosquer film. As luck would have it, I had drawn a fragment of thirties melodrama. But there are no small parts, as they say in the theater, just small actors.

You keep certain things about yourself like money in the bank. I always expected to be terrific in an emergency. I may not have actually
waited
for one, for the pilot, say, to slump over, and the stewardess to turn to me and tell me,
"You
fly the plane." But I've thought about them, tremors in the earth and wildfire and storms, and I've known in my deepest place that that was how it might be given to me to take care of people. It was the very impulse that set me up as the group moralist at the beginning of the summer. I was the one who would have been the troubleshooter if the cops got called. I would have done the plea bargaining with the DA. Or if worse came to worst, I would have black-marketed the cigarettes and whiskey for my gang and me while we languished in jail. In other words, I had a real feel for movie emergencies and the measures people take who take charge. Since I had always lived so hermited a life, I never expected to be myself the center of the crisis, so the wind was knocked out of me for half a minute as I danced among the possibilities here. I spooned up the first big berry and bit into it, and the sweetness of it stung my eyes with tears. But I swallowed it and recovered, because there was nothing else I
could
do. You have to rescue the survivors so they won't die and make matters even worse. The dead are already dead.

It couldn't be me, I thought. There were too many problems. I looked too much like my mother and father back home, for one thing, and it didn't change the facts of my bloodline that I had sloughed them off and become just like my friends at Mrs. Carroll's. Besides, my parents were too dull to have hidden the business of an adoption from me. But I was not interested in the truth, which had a habit of getting me nowhere. I was flying. I couldn't imagine what I used to
do
all the time, but I was damn sure it didn't used to happen in the air.

I was between Phidias and David, and when I made a sentence out of it and thought to myself "What if I'm sitting for the first time next to my father?" I knew I was on the wrong track. Madeleine was a pure evangelical who believed our survival lay in choosing what was real over what was true. It was still a distinction that sounded too good to me, but I was doing what I could to applaud us for how far we had come. I shouldn't get too lost in the confection, I thought, watching us gobble up shortcake for all the world as if we could get away with being like everyone else. They were all talking. I waited for a good place to jump in and swear we were pals at least, if not blood kin, and ready to defend our right to believe the sheerest lunacy.

"I knew you wouldn't chip in and buy me a present because it's tacky, and I have everything already," Aldo said, going into his picnic basket. "So I brought my own bottle to crack over my bows and launch me," and he pulled out a cobwebbed bottle of Mr. Carroll's cognac. "Eighty years old. Worth its weight in carats."

"I don't understand why Tony doesn't haul it away by the case," Phidias said. "It's practically his."

"Drunks can't stand good liquor," Aldo said. "It makes them edgy." He drew the cork and passed it to Madeleine, who breathed in the perfume and narrowed her eyes as if she were a medium and we were a séance.

"Why not?" David asked.

"Because they like to swill it," I said, "and it makes them ashamed to waste it."

"You have to be a connoisseur to like it," David said.