The Evening Star (4 page)

Then the General remembered a particular widow he had once encountered in Washington, and his own vision of aged biddies dissolved. This widow, a lively Southern blonde, had seduced him immediately, without even suggesting that he leave his wife and marry her. “What the heck, Hec,” she said, the minute they entered her apartment. “Let’s have a little fun.”

The General had not thought of the woman in years—her name had been Lily something. A lot of time had passed, but it seemed to him that they had had quite a bit of fun. It had been the only easy seduction of his entire life; he hadn’t had
to do a thing except undress. Seducing Aurora, on the other hand, had taken the better part of five years, and what had it got him, other than constant harassment?

The General’s vision of life in a military home came back into focus, only this time it was a much more pleasant vision, with Lily in it. She hadn’t been especially old, then. Perhaps she was still around; perhaps she was even still interested in fun. And if she wasn’t, so what? There must be other attractive widows in some of those homes.

The thought made him smile, and Aurora saw the smile. She realized she had been a little dense in allowing her own imagination to people the military homes of America entirely with trim colonels—the only kind of colonels she herself would have been likely to take an interest in. There would also be widows, a few of whom might also have remained trim themselves. Some might even have remained quite attractive. Hector obviously thought so, or he wouldn’t be grinning like an idiot. Her spirits began to slide, and the General noticed.

“Ha,” he said. “Hoist on your own petard, am I right? You were ready to pack me off, but you overlooked one big fact: women live longer than men.”

“Normally, I suppose you’re right, although any number have failed to live longer than you,” Aurora said, “Your dear wife, for example. She didn’t live longer than you, and it’s unlikely I shall myself, considering how much you enjoy breaking my heart.”

“The sledgehammer has yet to be forged that could break your goddamn heart,” the General said crisply. “I had an affair in a military home once, if you must know. I tell you that so you’ll realize I won’t just be drooling on golf courses if you pack me off. I intend to find a girlfriend within a week if you carry out that threat.”

It had been, Aurora reflected, a highly unsuccessful conversation. The bitterest cut had been Hector’s smile. Every day she flashed him her best lights, offered him her gaiety, her optimism, her mischief, her fun. It seemed to her no small thing that she could continue to summon any mischief
or any fun at her age, considering all the grief she’d had with the grandchildren.

Yet she did summon them, but it brought her no smiles from Hector, when a few smiles from Hector was all she really hoped for.

“Why won’t men smile when you want them to?” she asked Rosie. “Almost inevitably, they fail to smile just when one wants them to most.”

Rosie was still hanging on Tom Brokaw’s every word, although now he was talking about something called the European community, a topic that didn’t interest her much.

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “Mine’s got the opposite problem. All C.C. can think of to do is grin. If C.C.’s grinned at me once he’s grinned at me a million times.”

“I have noticed that C.C. seems to have difficulty getting his mouth over his teeth,” Aurora said. “I suppose it would get old, being confronted with nothing but teeth, day after day.”

“I keep pointing out to him that there’s ways to have fun in this life that don’t involve grinning,” Rosie said, getting up to inspect the gumbo. “You want some more tea?”

Aurora’s mind was on the General. He was up there, as he always was, waiting for her to appear and entertain him. The likelihood of his being in a decent mood was very slim. In the hour before dinner he seemed to feel his age the most.

“At least I don’t feed him off a tray,” Aurora said.

A table had been moved to the patio with a tablecloth, place settings, candles. There were some things she wouldn’t give up. She herself did not intend to eat off trays, nor would Hector, even though it meant a lot of carrying for herself and Rosie.

The phone rang, and Rosie took it. She listened a moment, looked at Aurora, shrugged.

“Honey, stop that boo-hooing and get on over here,” she said. “I’ll take care of Bruce, if he shows up before you do. I’ll make him wish he was someplace nice, like in jail, before I’m through with him.”

She listened a bit more.

“We’re having gumbo,” she said. “Don’t run no red lights on your way over, either. That little one don’t need to be in any car wrecks.”

“That was Melly,” she said when she hung up. “Bruce has been hassling her agin.”

“I couldn’t have guessed,” Aurora said.

4

When the evening news ended, Aurora rinsed her teacup and forced herself to go upstairs and change. She was urged on by Rosie, who flogged her with platitudes whenever her spirits sunk to threatening depths.

Rosie considered that her floggings were mostly delivered out of self-interest: when Aurora’s spirits sank they often carried her own to the bottom with them. Aurora’s invariably floated back to the surface sooner or later, whereas her own were apt to dwell on the bottom for days.

“Life has to go on,” she commented, as Aurora was rinsing her cup.

“It seems to go on, but that doesn’t mean my mood has to accompany it,” Aurora said. “I wish I hadn’t invited Pascal to come by for dessert—now I’m not in the mood for him.”

“It don’t take a Frenchman long to eat dessert,” Rosie said.

“No, but it takes this Frenchman a long time to pay court,” Aurora said. “I wish Trevor hadn’t died. Trevor always favored the shortest distance between two points, and there were only two points that interested him, where human beings were concerned.”

“Which two?” Rosie asked. Besides being interested in whether Aurora and the General still had a sex life, she was also curious about the sexual behavior of Aurora’s former boyfriends.

“Which two would you suppose?” Aurora asked. “You should have been named Nosie, not Rosie.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Rosie pointed out.

“The male point and the female point,” Aurora said, heading upstairs. Trevor had been a yachtsman—he was very old school. After forty years of yachting he had choked on a bite of lobster while dining with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend at a restaurant in New York. Aurora had almost married him once; sometimes she found herself wondering whether marriage to Trevor, considered as a whole, would have increased or decreased her life’s load of misfortune.

She would have been the first to admit that her life’s load of misfortune had been far lighter than the load many, perhaps most, humans sustained; nonetheless, hers weighed quite enough. Trevor had been both charming and devoted, but, as his six marriages and innumerable romances suggested, he had not been noted for his willingness to shoulder anyone’s load for very long. He far preferred to bob about on the seven seas, putting into port now and then in order to indulge in heavy meals and light seductions.

Still, Aurora missed Trevor, and the fact that he would never be showing up again to buy her any of the heavy meals, or attempt any of the light seductions, did nothing to lighten her tread as she pulled herself upstairs.

General Hector Scott, on his crutches, met her at the head of the stairs. To her surprise she saw that he was actually dressed. He wore a clean shirt and his bright red bow tie. For a second, Aurora was hit by an intense feeling of déjà vu; was this not a moment that had occurred long ago at the head of her stairs?

“My goodness, Hector, you’re up,” she said. “You’re dressed. I believe you’ve even shaved. “I’m witnessing a miracle.”

“It’s no miracle,” the General said. “I’m sick of feeling old
and ugly. I’m trying to reform. I decided to start my reform by getting dressed. How was Tommy?”

“Oh, Hector,” Aurora said, and before she knew it she was crying again. Every thought of Tommy brought it on. The General spread his crutches and took her into his arms for what proved to be a short cry.

“I mustn’t mess your shirt, now that you’re wearing one,” Aurora said, resting her wet cheek against it anyway.

“My shirt’s expendable,” the General said. “I know how you get when you go see Tommy. I thought I’d make a special effort. Did he seem all right?”

“No, he just seemed the same,” Aurora said. “He’s always the same. It makes me want to shake him. I’m afraid though, that even if I shook him, Tommy would be the same. Nothing anyone can do affects him at all.”

She drew back and looked at the General. Despite his improved appearance, he seemed subdued.

“Hector, you look quite wonderful,” she said. “Still, you don’t seem to be quite yourself.”

“No, I’m usually cranky,” the General said. “Tonight I’m not cranky. I’m making a special effort.”

“Ordinarily I would consider that a good sign,” Aurora said, wondering why she didn’t consider it an especially good sign.

“Of course it’s a good sign,” the General said.

“I can’t quite convince myself that it is,” Aurora said. “I’m not sure that it’s good that you’ve decided to restrain your strong preference for being cranky. What if it brought on a stroke?”

“It won’t bring on a stroke,” the General said. He wanted rewards, not questions, but he was getting questions, and it was all he could do not to slip back into his normal cranky state.

“I don’t want to be packed off, it’s as simple as that,” he said. “I decided to clean up so maybe you’ll let me stay. I also decided to stop being cranky. I don’t want to go to the old soldiers’ home. I wouldn’t last a year in one of those places. I’d miss you so much I’d just die.”

Aurora was struck to the quick.

“Now you’ve spoiled the one nice moment of the day,” she said, abruptly drawing back. “Do I appear to be the sort of woman who would simply pack off my companion after putting up with him for twenty years?”

“Well, I can tell you’re thinking about it,” the General said. “You as much as suggested it, just the other day. I’ve got my pride, you know. I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted.”

“Pride such as yours goeth before a punch in the nose—or it should,” Aurora said, getting angrier. “I only once mentioned a military home to you, Hector, and if you’ll recall I mentioned it strictly in the context of my own unfortunate demise.”

The General, who had shaved and dressed in the specific hope that if he did he and Aurora might get through one evening without a fight, was annoyed to realize that they were heading straight into a fight.

“Your death, you mean,” he said. “Don’t keep calling it your demise.”

“Yes, my death, Hector,” Aurora said. “I don’t see why I can’t choose my own name for it. Demise, departure, death—I don’t care. If you’re trying to reform, you’re not succeeding. I scarcely got up my own stairs before you started picking on me.”

The General felt, as usual, that his tongue had betrayed him. Despite his best effort to say only the right things, invariably whatever he said turned out to be the wrong things.

“I’m just going to die, when
I
go,” he said lamely. “I’m not going to demise.”

“Yes, but that’s you,” Aurora said, cooling slightly. “Hector Scott, plain soldier. Of course you’re just going to die, although I imagine you’ll expect America to give you a twenty-one-gun salute, or whatever number of guns is appropriate to your age and attainments.”

“Oh, they hardly ever do that anymore,” the General said. “I doubt it would occur to them to do it for me. They’ll just drop me in a hole and that will be that.”

The thought that his own burial would lack ceremony made the General feel sorry for himself; he
had
always supposed he would have a military funeral and a twenty-one-gun salute. The fact was, he had lived too long: even towering figures, even an Eisenhower, would be lucky to get that kind of attention nowadays. He himself had not quite been a towering figure and could not expect much.

“Hector, we must stop this quarreling,” Aurora said. “We’ll be too upset to eat. Now we’re even quarreling about dying, when the obvious fact is that neither of us
is
dying, demising, departing, or going anywhere at all. We’re living on forever, quarreling every step of the way. I’m sure if there turned out to be an afterlife you’d get there first and lie in wait for me. You’d ambush me, just as you did tonight, and we’d resume our quarrels.”

She walked into her bedroom and stood by her window nook, trying to gain control of her emotions. Hector had the irritating habit of being at his best and his worst at the same time; on countless occasions in their twenty years together his best and his worst had manifested themselves within a few seconds of one another. Just as she had softened toward him for taking her into his arms and allowing her to cry about Tommy, he had made an insulting remark about her packing him off.

The General hobbled into the bedroom behind her, feeling very low in his thoughts. He was saddened by his own propensity for angering Aurora, even on occasions when he was making a special effort to keep her in a good mood. Special efforts didn’t seem to count for much in this life—not really, the General concluded. Whatever ground one gained by a special effort was rarely ground one could hold for more than a few seconds, after which it was back to trench warfare. Aurora’s chance reference to the Battle of the Somme didn’t describe his life as it might be in a military home. It described his life as it was with her. Mud, barbed wire, and sudden death were likely to be one’s portion.

He crutched himself over to the window and stood beside her silently. He didn’t know what to say.

On the sidewalk below them, under the streetlight, two squirrels sat facing one another as if in conversation.

“Do you think those squirrels are happier than we are?” the General asked. Aurora loved animals and could sometimes be distracted by references to them.

Aurora knew he was trying to atone for his wounding remark, but she still felt wounded and did not intend to be led into a discussion about the happiness of squirrels.