The Evening Star (3 page)

“I agree you probably aren’t the wig type, but there are always new hairdos one can try,” Aurora said. “I’ve tried quite a variety myself. Now, what was that you were asking about my sex life?”

Rosie sighed deeply but said nothing. She didn’t want to admit that she had asked Aurora about her sex life.

“They say curiosity killed the cat,” she finally ventured.

“Good lord, Rosie,” Aurora said. “We’ve known one another for more than forty years. I’m not going to maul you just because you asked me about my sex life. The truth is, I thought you never would ask me about it.”

“I’m asking, what about it?” Rosie said.

“It’s a short story—Hector can’t do it,” Aurora said.

“Oh,” Rosie said.

They sat in silence for a minute as the shadows of the great trees began to extend themselves across the house and the yard.

“I knew that stuff you read in magazines was probably lies,” Rosie said.

Aurora looked at her calmly. “What stuff?” she asked.

“That stuff about men being able to do it until they’re ninety-five or a hundred,” Rosie said.

“Yes, we’ve been reading the same magazines,” Aurora said. “In other words, the ones I subscribe to. Those stories do give a rather misleading impression of male capacities, at least as I’ve experienced them.”

“You think you’ve got problems? C.C.’s just sixty-eight and he won’t even try,” Rosie said. “Trying to get him to do
something is like trying to corner a bobcat. Sometimes I feel like giving up.”

“I’ve considered it myself,” Aurora admitted.

“Yeah, but you got beaus,” Rosie reminded her. “You got Pascal, and then there’s Louis and Junior and Cowboy Bill.”

It was Aurora’s turn to sigh. “Just hearing their names depresses me,” she confessed. “There was a time when I could command a more impressive assortment. I rather like Pascal, but it must be admitted that he’s mostly talk.”

“I think he’s scared of the General,” Rosie said.

“I’m afraid the truth is he’s scared of me,” Aurora said. “Of course the fact that Hector lives here probably does discourage my beaus. Unfortunately, the fact that they seem a little too willing to be discouraged is beginning to arouse my contempt. I may clear the deck of the whole lot of them pretty soon, Hector included.”

“Maybe the General’s just in a slump,” Rosie speculated. “They’ve got all these new medicines for your glands now. Stuff a few of them down him and see what happens.”

The shadows touched the car and Aurora’s mood turned. She remembered Tommy’s face, so young and so closed; she remembered the stolid guards who led him away.

“Put the car in, it’s getting dark—you’ll knock down my garage,” she said.

Rosie, who had been thinking the same thought, edged forward, correcting her course by minute degrees as she neared the garage.

“I shouldn’t be thinking of these things,” Aurora said. Her mood was sinking fast. “I’m an old withered thing now, what does it matter?” she asked. “You’re younger, of course you should be concerned about C.C. But I’ve got a grandson in prison, another grandson who’s in and out of mental hospitals, and a granddaughter who’s pregnant and is not even sure she can identify the father. Why should I care about male capabilities, or male anything? I should just forget it.”

They edged safely into the dark garage.

Rosie, exactly one year younger than her boss, reached over and squeezed Aurora’s hand.

“Hon, you got to think of yourself sometime,” she said. “You’re human, like the rest of us. You got to think of yourself sometime.”

“What I think is that I wish you’d hit that pillar so this garage would fall and make an end of me,” Aurora said. She gathered up her purse and her box of Kleenex and quickly got out of the car.

3

“Another bad thing about Hector’s state is that I now dread going up my own stairs,” Aurora said. She had more or less finished another long cry, and was in her kitchen, drinking tea.

Rosie, who had become a news junkie in her late maturity—a phrase gleaned from the very magazines that had contained the misleading information about male capabilities—was peering through her contacts at her idol, Tom Brokaw. “Lithuania’s not looking so good—I hope Gorby knows what he’s doing,” she said.

Aurora had little patience with Rosie’s late-blooming interest in world affairs. In her view, Rosie was not so much a news junkie as an anchorman groupie, and, to make matters worse, had fixed her affections on the wrong anchorman to boot. She herself much preferred the urbane Peter Jennings.

“Lithuania will have to look out for itself—anyway it’s Truman’s fault,” she said. “If General MacArthur had had his way all those communists would have been dealt with long ago.

“You better not let General Scott hear you talking about
MacArthur,” Rosie cautioned. General Scott had once been a subordinate of General MacArthur’s, and it had not been a happy experience, to hear him tell it—and Rosie had heard him tell it many times.

“I have no doubt that whatever happened between Hector and General MacArthur was entirely Hector’s fault,” Aurora said. “Besides that, he was jealous.”

At least the gumbo they were making for dinner smelled good. She sipped her tea and enjoyed the good smell. She had always loved her kitchen—but then, she had once loved her whole house. Now it seemed the kitchen was the only place she was likely to feel happy. It was to the kitchen that she repaired when she needed to recover some sense of esprit.

Once she had made the window nook in her bedroom her haven, when seeking to recover a bit of esprit, but the window nook was no longer reliable in the way that it had been. Hector Scott was far too likely to hobble in and scatter whatever little blossoms of spirit she had managed to gather.

“Come to think of it, everything bad that happens in this house is Hector’s fault,” Aurora said with a flash of bitterness. “I once loved going up my stairs, but now I dread it because I never know what I’ll find at the top of them. Even if Hector doesn’t decide to flash, he’ll be angry because I went off and left him.”

She sipped a little more tea. “Old men are so dreadfully selfish, and there’s little one can do about it,” she said. “They can’t simply be put down, like old dogs.”

“You better go up and speak to him, selfish or not,” Rosie said. She was waiting patiently for NBC to cut back to Tom Brokaw. She herself had never been to Lithuania, or anywhere farther from home than Las Vegas, where C.C. had taken her for a giddy weekend when their relationship was just firing up—but from what she could tell, life in Lithuania consisted mostly of standing in crowds in front of parliament or somewhere else official, protesting for more freedom and better government.

Actually, from what she could tell, life in most of the rest
of the world consisted of standing in just such crowds, protesting for more freedom and better government. An exception was Israel—or perhaps it was Palestine; she was not entirely clear about the distinction—where youths with handkerchiefs over their faces threw stones at soldiers, who then shot tear gas at them.

Rosie had long since decided that if the U.S. government ever threatened her freedom, or raised taxes one more time, or did much of anything she didn’t like, she would join a crowd of protesters herself and see if it did any good—or, at least, see if it was any fun.

From what she could tell, though, protests always seemed to be rather similar. She was always glad when Tom Brokaw came back on and told them how things were going with the protesters.

Aurora contemplated going upstairs and informing Hector that he would have to leave. Several times in the last year or two she had composed a little speech on that subject, and once had even made a tentative approach to it by asking him what he would do if she abruptly died.

In her thinking about her own demise, Aurora always supposed it would be abrupt. She did not propose to linger in a hospital as her beloved daughter Emma had. Poor Emma had taken months to die, but Aurora had no intention of following her example. Something would happen that she didn’t feel, and she would just be gone.

She outlined just such a scenario to Hector one afternoon. He had looked startled, and his Adam’s apple wobbled for a bit. He looked at her as if he considered that she had almost lost her mind. He seemed momentarily to be about to cry; but he didn’t cry—nor did he speak. He had been watching a golf tournament, and he resumed his watching.

“Hector, we really should think about it,” Aurora insisted. “I certainly shall die someday, I imagine. Hadn’t you better be thinking of arrangements? I know they have some very nice military homes for distinguished old soldiers such as yourself. You could sit around with your peers and talk over the Battle of the Somme or something.”

“Aurora, I was eight years old when the Battle of the
Somme was fought,” the General said. “You need to get your world wars straight. There were two. The Battle of the Somme was in the first. I fought in the second.”

“You would be pedantic just when I’m attempting to discuss something serious,” Aurora said. “We weren’t talking about which war you fought in, we were talking about my untimely demise.”

“I wasn’t talking about your goddamn demise,” the General said. “I was watching my golf tournament. Who says your demise will be untimely anyway? You’re no longer a young woman, you know.”

“I recognize that I am now in late middle age,” Aurora said. “Nevertheless, my demise will be untimely, whenever it occurs.”

She reflected for a moment on poor little pregnant Melanie, on Teddy and his lithium, on Tommy in his cell.

“I know I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “It was Emma’s demise that was untimely, and look what woe it bred.”

“The ruin of those children, that’s what it bred,” the General said. “I tried, you tried, Rosie tried, and nothing worked. One’s crazy, one’s a criminal, and one’s pregnant. Thank God there weren’t more, I say.”

“I refuse to regard Teddy as crazy,” Aurora said. “He’s just having a rather hard time finding himself.”

The General, too, grew sad at the thought of Teddy, a boy he had always had a deep soft spot for, even though he didn’t entirely approve of his own soft spot.

“No, and he’ll never find himself as long as he can find a pharmacy and get more pills,” the General said. “He’s a perfectly healthy boy—I’m opposed to all those pills. I wish he had taken my advice and joined the army. The army would have straightened him out in no time.”

“No, the army would have crushed him—he’s already more or less crushed,” Aurora said bitterly.

Her tone alarmed the General. He thought for a moment that she was accusing him of crushing Teddy.

“
I
didn’t crush him,” he insisted. “I love Teddy. I took him fishing, remember?”

“Yes,” Aurora said. “I remember.

“I don’t know why talking to you is so difficult now, Hector,” she said, after she had recovered herself for a bit.

“Well, I’m old and cranky,” the General said. “I can’t help it. I wish I was young again but I’m never going to be. Knowing that makes me cranky.”

“All right, suppose I drop dead,” Aurora said. “That was what I was attempting to talk to you about. Then there’ll be no one to care for you but Rosie, and Rosie has her hands full with my grandchildren and her own. Difficult as you are, I would still like to think you’ll be well looked after when I catch the tide. Don’t you think you ought to look into the possibility of a nice military home?”

The General clicked off the TV and looked at her out of eyes that still occasionally had the piercing quality that generals’ eyes were supposed to have.

“I see what you’re up to now,” he said. “You want to be rid of me. You want to pack me off to the old soldiers’ home.”

“As usual, you’re quite unjust,” Aurora said, flaring up. “I was merely thinking of your own welfare. I’m sure some of those homes have golf courses. You could be playing golf with your cronies, rather than sitting here glued to a stupid television set.”

“Oh, yes, my cronies from the Battle of the Somme,” the General said. “It’s plain you know nothing about old soldiers’ homes. That idiot MacArthur should have been court-martialed for saying what he said about old soldiers.”

“Hector, I’m aghast,” Aurora said. “Whatever your differences with General MacArthur, I’m sure he did not deserve to be court-martialed.”

“Yes, for saying old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” the General insisted. “Of course old soldiers die. Most of them die the minute they retire, or at least within a few days. I have no cronies, Aurora. They all died.”

“Hector, please don’t exaggerate,” Aurora said. “You know perfectly well you have some cronies left in California. We visited them ourselves.”

“That’s right, two cronies,” the General said. “Joe’s still hanging on in Pebble Beach, but they won’t let him on the
golf course because he chews tobacco and spots up the greens when he spits. As for Sammy, I guess he’s still alive. He’s down in Rancho Mirage. All Sammy was ever interested in was bimbos. I told him he ought to move to Las Vegas, but he claims he finds plenty of bimbos in Rancho Mirage.”

“I’m sure you’d find a better class of old soldier in some of the nicer military homes,” Aurora said, wondering why she was bothering to keep such an unedifying conversation going. Hector clearly wasn’t eager to commence negotiations with a military home.

“You aren’t listening,” the General said. “The point I’m making is that there are
no
old soldiers in military homes. The old soldiers have all died. There are only old soldiers’
widows
—talk about living forever. Some of those old biddies look like they’re three hundred years old. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. Battle of the Somme, nothing—some of those widows probably knew Napoleon.”

“Hector, I’m sure that’s not possible,” Aurora said. However, her vision of Hector playing golf with a number of trim ex-officers blurred suddenly, to be replaced with the less appealing vision of Hector playing bridge with a number of vivacious widows.

“Besides that, they’re the horniest women in the world,” the General said. “Their husbands were never around much to begin with, and then they died—those women are looking to make up for lost time. They’d be on me like sharks—I wouldn’t last a month.”