Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (26 page)

"You think I'm going to
tell
someone?" he asked her, and then it seemed to dawn on him that he was the center of our attention. He appealed to all of us now, and his eyes kept darting back to David's face. "What do you think, that I'm going to call Donald Farley and blow the whistle? I don't care what you do here. If you want to sow the ground with salt or cover it with cement, go ahead. I don't just
hate
this house. I'm really unreasonable. I don't like trees or the ocean or anything. I started out hating
those
trees," he said, his voice full of self-mockery, pointing over his shoulder and out the window to the woods, "but I hate everything now. I was telling her"—he nodded at Madeleine, not yet able to name her—"that I've never forgiven this house."

"Don't you see," I said, turning his attention from David, "you're the one we're disinheriting. This is a crime against
you."

"But since I don't want my mother's land," he shot back at me, "I don't accept the crime. Now if John and Cicely were here, they'd swarm all over you." He was cheery and ingratiating, and he so much wanted us to believe he was one of us that I could have throttled him. "There are these killer bees, you know, that just keep stinging and stinging. That's Cicely. John is more like a scorpion."

"So you don't care," Madeleine said.

"Well, I'm
interested,"
he replied. "I saw you all through the kitchen window, before I came in last night. I watched you all eat. It made me jealous, because we always took our meals in the dining room. If I hadn't seen you then, you know," he said to Madeleine, "I might have been fooled. You were just like her, except you were too nice. My mother wasn't nice."

"You're no damned good," Phidias said, and we turned back to where he stood in front of the french doors. He had been left hanging just at the end of his story, and he had not been given the proper time to draw the moral. In the interval, he scrapped the temple of reason. He was white with anger, but he spoke in a low corrosive voice, as if everything were a suppressed shout. "You don't even ask how she died. Or if she died easy. She'd laugh at me if she was here, because it's a waste of time, but I want you to know something. She stopped talking about you and your worthless brother and sister as soon as she saw the lawyer. David, did you ever hear her talk about the children?"

"No," David said as if he wanted to crawl under the carpet.

"So she died clean, Tony." He was magnificent, rocking back on his heels and huge with scorn. "You'd turn on us in a minute, but you're afraid to make threats because we might laugh at you. You're just like your goddam father, except that he had the excuse that he was a fool. You know just what you sound like, and you don't care." As he wheeled around to the doors, his eyes swept over Aldo and David and me like a firestorm. But he didn't see us, arguing as he was with the whole departed family that ghosted the house. When he pulled open the doors, I remembered David's telling me about his coming in the same way on the night Mrs. Carroll died. To him, I suppose, all of us violated the room he visited after dark for forty years. Before going out, he flung back one more dart. "No wonder you drink," he snarled. "I don't know how you stand it." And then he clanged down the iron spiral stairs and away.

Now that the doors to the balcony stood open, the pearly light and the rain-washed air came in, and we had a moment to catch our breath. I had the oddest sense that, one after another, each of us would have an explosion just as Phidias had, and one by one we would leave the room. If that happened, I thought, who would be the last one left? Me, I figured, because I was so calm I could land a DC-10 on a tennis court. Calm because I had known all morning that Tony was going to react just as he did. David was right that I was jittery the night before, but that was before I knew how he and I saw each other as possessed of the same devils. When I threw myself on top of him and began to fight, without a clue about where wrestling ended and sex began, I became devoted to contrary behavior. I have lived my life (that thing I think about all day long) being sure of everything, but I had coasted through the last day on something new, that everything was at least the opposite of what I was sure of. Put another way, I thought of myself now as having stopped getting older.

"He's always told me that about my mother," Tony said, a little apologetically. "You shouldn't think it's something new. That's the sort of thing we would say in this house."

"Remind me that I'm busy next Christmas," Aldo said. He seemed quite serious. He cradled the big half-gallon of Dewar's in the crook of his arm as if he were holding a baby.

"What are you going to do?" I asked, and I didn't hear the question throbbing in my own head like an echo. I wanted to let him know that we could keep to the flight plan even if the captain was knocked out. For once I was not asking the question of myself, as if I understood that I could not be both the questioner and the questioned. Because the one does not wait for an answer, while the other burns all inquiries.

"I think I'm going to make a break for it," he said, and I wondered if we had the same taste in television movies. "Is my mother—when is my mother going to die? I mean, is my brother John going to call me on Labor Day to break the news?"

"In September," Madeleine said evenly. "Phidias knows when."

"You're not leaving now," Aldo said, as if enough was enough.

"In the morning," David said, and Tony locked eyes with him. David was as innocent as ever, but the moment was lousy with crimes of passion.

"I'll stay tonight," he said, turning to Madeleine, "if you'll sing."

"Oh sure," she told him. What the hell was this? Madeleine must have agreed to sing for him, as if he were the scrubbed-up kid soldier in
Sea to Shining Sea
who goes into the canteen and hears Madeleine's voice in the smoke, and she's singing "As Long As You Come Home." She hadn't been good enough in the play that just closed in the middle of the second performance. So, to shake the rheumatic old woman and the flawed bit of acting in a single stroke, she meant to show Tony how good she could be. I wasn't sure he would know it if it bit him.

"I'm going to take a walk up to the field," Tony said. "I'll see you all at dinner. I'm invited, I guess."

He walked out between me and David. It took me a moment to realize that he meant to go visit his mother's grave, which Phidias must have pinpointed in the course of his story, when I wasn't listening. It was queer of him to do it, almost in questionable taste after what he had said in her bedroom. And now we were four.

"He doesn't want to be alone," David said. Inevitably. He turned to me, and only the sense of expectation in his eyes betrayed the anxiety that once would have been there at a time like this, when he wasn't sure I saw how urgent something was. He had rid himself of it, but the space it left wasn't yet filled.

"You'd better go see," I said, bringing my hand to the small of his back. I had been standing next to him all this time, and my hand homed in like sonar so that I touched him without thinking on his thin flannel shirt. In front, he wore it unbuttoned halfway down, a gesture to the cooler air the rain brought with it. I knew what he was thinking, that he could help Tony with the gay part. Maybe so. I thought it more likely that his knowing the grave well might be of more immediate help, but it was between them.

"When I get back," he said, I suppose so that I wouldn't worry that he mightn't, "we'll get dinner ready."

The door had barely clicked closed behind him when Aldo went over to the bed, put his scotch on the floor beside it, and fell forward onto the quilt with a groan. He buried his face in his arms.

"I'm going to have a peptic ulcer when I leave here. You know what I should be doing on a day like today? Sitting by the pool having a haircut and a pedicure."

"His barber makes house calls," Madeleine explained to me. "It makes him a big shot."

"That's not true, Madeleine. I know three men in Beverly Hills who have their own barbers.
Live-in.
That's what a big shot is. But I mean, on a day like this at home, I wouldn't move from my bed without a consultation with someone in authority. I could tell it was that kind of day when I woke up."

"I had a live-in dressmaker once," Madeleine said. "In the thirties."

"Didn't you get your clothes in Paris?" I asked, aware that this little chat was an island and glad of it.

"Yes, but they can't fit you by mail. They'd ship things over, dozens of things, and we'd choose. I found her in a village in Mexico when we were on location. She didn't know what a Worth dress was, but she was a genius at a fitting. She did the final work in my bedroom, sewing by hand, and it would put me to sleep to watch her." Madeleine paused and stared into space, the autobiographer at work, trying to get the full arc of the anecdote right. "Later she got a job at MGM. She's very wealthy today. I think she's titled."

"See, Rick," Aldo said impatiently, turning over and drawing up his knees, "that's a story you can really sink your teeth into. Not like the way they treat each other around here. Since they make no
progress,
why do they still bother?"

"Well, Phidias and Tony bother in particular because they're jealous. They think the other one has something of Mrs. Carroll that they don't have."

"So it's a complex," he said with a shrug. "All right, Madeleine, what happened? Start at the beginning."

"Move over," she said, standing up from the bony, eggshell chair. "Let an old lady rest." I smiled at the irony and at the circuitous reference to Beth Carroll. It used to turn me inside out when Madeleine mentioned growing old, but I could see she was not afraid of jinxing herself when she said it. She plumped up the pillows and lay against them in her robe, then beckoned me. "There's room for you, too," she said. Aldo had pulled back to make her a place, and now he sat cross-legged at her head like the palace eunuch. "Did you know, Rick, you've been standing in the same place since you walked in?"

It was true. I stood frozen to the spot, relishing my safety from the storms that blew about the room. Afraid to take a step, perhaps, because I might jar the set of my nerves that kept me warm and dry. But it was time to go forward. I had stood still long enough and taken in all that went on with the others, so I thought I would launch forth now like a spider on his own length of rope. I jaunted over to the bed, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the end with my back against one of the posts. Above me the canopy swayed like a sail. I leaned against the post, my hands around my knees like Huck Finn on the raft. Madeleine and Aldo and I were as curious a group as the house held, and as we went through the story of Tony Carroll and his artificial mother, we played a curious group for all it was worth. We sat on the four-poster like people in a lifeboat or bent around a campfire, and we gossiped and theorized and did over the scene in a dozen different ways. We didn't make fun of Tony. Aldo and I had to hear every detail and every symptom, I think, because the three of us were so appalled by the way in which Tony was gay. His was the fate the rest of us had escaped, and we spoke of it with all the fascination of veterans and runaways telling stories of those who didn't make it.

Meanwhile, with missionary zeal, David tracked down Tony, fleshing out the plot as he went along. David believed that, as long as the genitals still had a dream of their own, there was no one who couldn't make it. He liked the challenge to his erotic energy, and he could transform himself in bed into a creature full of kinks and folklore. "Blood from a stone," I used to tell him on bad days, when I couldn't get it up, and then he would get me laughing with some swank little dirty trick with his tongue or his tireless cock, and then we'd be off and running. So I wasn't discounting his ingenuity. But when he finally cornered Tony in the butlers pantry, he didn't have the advantage he had in bed, with his body heat and the smell of him sweating close.

"Are you looking for the scotch?" David asked from the door to the kitchen.

"I'd like to have a nickel for every time I've been asked that," Tony said without turning around, opening one cupboard after another. "Do you practice temperance along with the farmer in the dell?"

"No, not in anything," David said. "Today I've already had too much rain and too much family. I only asked because Aldo brought the bottle up with him. It's in the bedroom."

Tony snapped his fingers.

"Of course," he said, grinning broadly at David. "I knew I'd seen it somewhere. I thought I was having hallucinations."

"There's gin."

"It reminds me of shit perfume."

"Or wine."

"You mean the twelve percent stuff they make from grapes." He shrugged. "I suppose if it's that or Sterno. Where did you go to school?"

David let the swing door thump shut behind him, and he unlocked the wine cabinet and took out a bottle at random, which turned out later, when David and I finished it, to be a '61 Chateau Margaux and too good for the occasion. David knew, as he twisted the screw into the cork, that Tony was asking about prep school and not college.

"The Dee School, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It wasn't very tweedy. There was a slag heap from the coal mine at the far end of the soccer field. And though we had a Carnegie in the class behind me, he was practically retarded."

"I guess you didn't like it much."

"All I wanted to do was get laid," David said to simplify the issue. "But I liked English. Who's your favorite poet?"

How could Tony not have winced? I winced
for
him when David told me the story late that night, but David swore there was no wince. He swore it turned into a cozy little seminar on Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. David sat on the old soap-stone sink, and Tony leaned against the door to the china closet, and they drank their wine. There is a tiny round window above the sink in the butler's pantry, and it looks onto the back marsh and faces west. When the sun finally broke through, they had finished off two-thirds of the bottle and had gotten on the subject of teachers and their favorite students. The late afternoon light glowed on the polished oak of the little room.