After You've Gone (7 page)

Liza did not understand Sophia at all. Sophia reminded her of a teacher, especially one of the strict ones who might hit your knuckles with her ruler. And with such a handsome, flirty husband, why didn't Sophia fix herself up, just a little bit? Her face was always so red and shiny; could she be so old-timey that she thought face powder was bad?

Liza never spent any time with Sophia, and although she surely did not want to, she felt that their not being friends was odd. From what she had observed and understood of couple friendships, usually the two women would get together between the parties to talk things over; the strongest friendship is between those two, usually—the husbands make nervous jokes about “the girls.” But with them, the Jamiesons and Matthewses, it was she and Dan holding everything together.

And the children, Laura Lee and thin little Prudence, Prudy. A strange child; if she were mine, I'd worry about that girl, Liza thought. So skinny and nervous, sometimes she looked to be scared of her own shadow. But at other times she could get very fresh and talk back to grown-ups; in fact, at those times she sounded like Sophia, the same long-worded, show-off way of talking. Only when Prudy came over to stay with Laura Lee did she act like just a plain old little girl.

But didn't Sophia care about the way her husband carried on at parties? Did Sophia somehow think that Dan Jamieson didn't really mean it? Was Dan afraid of Sophia?

In any case, they were never alone together, she and Dan,
not for five minutes—not ever, although it would have been so easy, Liza thought. There she was, at home so much of the day, Carlton off at the hospital or his office, and Laura Lee like as not over at Dan's own house. Dan could just … drop in, some afternoon. With no excuse at all. They could (Oh Lord!) kiss, the way she used to do back home with the boys who came over to see her.

Sometimes when they were all down at the pool, Sophia would go back up to her house to go to bed; everyone knew she worked very hard all day, but often she would not even say good night, not to anyone. Liza could never decide whether that made it better or worse, her sneaking out like that. When Sophia did say good night, after she left there would be a guilty lull in the conversation. But it was almost the same when she didn't say good night; eventually, someone would say, “Oh, Sophia must have gone on up to the house,” and the same lull would come, as though Sophia questioned their right to be down there carousing—until everyone had had a few more drinks and Dan had picked up the accordion again.

One night in October, during a strange heat wave—hot days like summer coming back again—there was a party at the Jamiesons', but at the last minute Carlton had an emergency at the hospital. The little girls were already upstairs, starting their evening of giggling and whispers, and Liza was almost dressed, when she had to call the Jamiesons to say they couldn't come. But Sophia, who answered the phone, insisted that Liza come by herself. Liza could drop Carlton off at the hospital, which was not too far from the Jamiesons'; he could get a ride over later. Sophia had it all figured out.

The night was almost as hot as the day had been and heavy, starless, purely dark. Liza had on an old dress from the summer before, but it hardly mattered what she wore; no one could see a thing.

That night, Dan didn't play the accordion, because another man, someone's houseguest, was there with his guitar. He was good; he knew some Mexican songs, as well as the old ones they were all so used to. In fact, Liza was so moved by this man's music, so interested, that for a minute she didn't realize that in the darkness Dan had somehow moved over to her steamer rug, where she was sitting all by herself, at the back of the group. But, of course, it was Dan she had been thinking about as she listened to those songs. And now there he was, seated right next to her. His face was just visible, his bright teeth, his smile.

His hand touched hers, then covered it. Slowly, like someone hypnotized, Liza turned her palm upward in his grasp, so that all the naked flesh of their two hands lay tightly together. Liza felt as though all the nerves of her body had moved to that one hand, her hand pushing upward to Dan's pushing downward. Oh, Dan, I love you, I love you so deeply, with everything! cried out Liza, within her heart.

The effects of strong drink on that particular group were interesting in their variety; Prudence, saved from drinking by an ulcer, was later to make this observation. Heavy, tired Carlton passed out early; lively Dan, and probably Liza too, could have stayed up all night, getting drunker and wilder. And then there was lonely, hostile Sophia, who preferred to drink alone.

Another, much earlier observation of Prudence's was that she could get along with either parent alone; two people is all right, she thought. It was the three of them that she found unbearable: the meals full of heavy silences, of too strong emotions. But the three of them were all right with guests around, preferably lots of guests, a party. It was like a geometry theorem
in which the triangle is the villain. (She never even considered the possibility of Sophia and Dan alone, partly because they almost never were.)

In any case, during the November week that Dan Jamieson and Carlton Matthews and a couple of other men went duck hunting in the eastern, marshy part of the state, Prudence and Sophia even enjoyed being together, for a while. Sophia talked much more than usual to her daughter, and Prudence experienced an odd elation, quite unfamiliar; at dinner her mother talked about her college days, up North at Bryn Mawr, her studies there in history and economics. (“No one thought those fit subjects for a girl, back then,” said Sophia, enjoying her recollected defiance.) Sophia talked about her friends from that time, many of whom she kept in touch with, though still she missed them.

“I think I might like to be a physicist,” said Prudence boldly; she was not at all sure what that was, but she hoped the word might appeal to her mother.

“Well, that's a hard profession for a woman to get into. But, Prudence, dear, we know that you're exceptionally intelligent.”

Prudence thrilled to her mother's praise and to the attention.

Sophia too seemed to enjoy their time together. “Well, I think I'll have a little sherry with my dessert,” she said on a couple of nights. “No reason not to.” Gay, liberated Sophia.

And then one night, about an hour after dinner, when Prudence had gone up to her room to do homework and Sophia to her room for whatever she did at night, Prudence heard a loud, determined knock at the front door. And a few minutes later, she heard Sophia's steps going down the front stairs.

It was Liza Matthews. Very surprising: at first, Prudence felt a small chill of fear at the sheer unusualness of Liza's coming
to call, and at this hour. But soon she was reassured by the entirely usual sounds of social pleasure she heard from both women down below. Liza explained that she had just been driving by and thought she would drop in for a minute. Sophia expressed joy that Liza should have done so. Drinks were offered and accepted.

Bored with her homework and not quite sleepy yet, Prudence decided to go and listen more closely; her bedroom's situation near the top of the stairs made this easy. She and Laura Lee often sat there listening to parties.

As she settled down, her nightgown tucked up under her knees, Prudence heard Liza announce, “I just have to tell you, Sophia, what I've been thinking and wondering about.” Her voice was slurred, but Liza often slurred late at night. “I just wonder how it is,” continued Liza, “that you and me, I mean you and I, haven't ever got to be friends.”

A silent moment followed, during which ice clinked in glasses.

And then Prudence heard her mother's voice: “That is very possibly because you and me, as you put it, have nothing in common whatsoever.”

“Well, I guess—” Liza's voice had begun to tremble a little.

“You guess.” Sophia's voice grew louder, and harder. “Well, I know. I know that I have absolutely nothing in common with a low-class little tramp … who
drinks
.”

“But Sophia …” Was Liza crying now? Very possibly. Prudence herself was trembling on her cold top step.

Sophia made a loud, hoarse sound. Prudence had never heard this noise before, but she knew that it came from her mother.

“Drinks!” Sophia repeated, with emphasis. “Why, Popsie Hooker said you showed up for morning Cokes with gin on your breath.”

But her mother sounded drunk too, thought Prudence, her blood chilled, her stomach sick. Even though she could not actually see Sophia's face, she could visualize red-faced Sophia, blinking with rage, could imagine the impotent wringing motion of her hands. Prudence saw and heard the invisible; she recognized her mother's essence.

Liza left, and Prudence went to bed and pretended to sleep.

A few days later, Dan came home, and at breakfast Sophia told him, offhandedly, “Oh, and Liza Matthews came by here one night. Drunk as a skunk, I'm afraid. I wish you could have seen her.” Accusative, she stared at her husband.

Prudence too stared at her handsome, duplicitous, frightened father, and she too thought, Oh, I wish you had been here.

But she never, ever described that scene to anyone, not to her father and especially not to Laura Lee, who over the years occasionally would ponder: “You know, Prudy, sometimes I just wonder whatever could have happened between our parents—do you reckon they had some kind of an argument?”

That fall, Liza Matthews was hospitalized with what was said to be pneumonia. Her recovery was long and slow, and at that time the two couples who had been such friends barely saw each other.

The girls saw each other at school now; they were no longer encouraged to ask each other over for the night or for a swim. In fact, both were urged in the direction of other girls, from other families. But at this both children balked: Laura Lee, generally so agreeable, did not want to have Mary Elizabeth over for supper and the night; Prudence would not even go to Henrietta's birthday party.

The next summer, the Jamiesons began a year abroad,
mostly in London—where Prudence was cold and often very lonely, but where she learned so much in school that on coming home she had skipped a grade, which put her a year ahead of Laura Lee.

Still, stubbornly, those two girls stayed friends. Even in high school, when both were taken up with boys and with what had become separate bands of other, peer-group friends, they still spent time together. They would choose, though, curiously, to revert to somewhat childish pursuits together; instead of having a downtown drugstore Coke together as either might have with another friend, Prudence and Laura Lee would take long walks out into the piney woods where once as children they had built their dams and explored. Prudence talked about where she would go to college (somewhere up North), what to study, and, closer to home, what certain boys really meant by what they said. And Laura Lee, who had the same concerns, except that she meant to stay and go to school in Hilton, would listen and offer her own views, but admiringly; she appreciated her friend.

Liza Matthews died young, at forty, of “liver problems.” And then, a couple of years after that, Sophia died, of a stroke; at that time it was discovered that she too had been an alcoholic—she left bureaus full of bottles, which she must have meant to clean up sometime. Apparently, when she left all those parties so early, she would then go up to her room and nip at sherry, by herself.

Dan died some years later, of a respectable heart attack, before he could marry the young graduate student who by then was his intended. Carlton Matthews lived the longest of those four, possibly because soon after Liza died he took the cure and never had another drink. But he married another beautiful alcoholic, who also died young. When Carlton died a few years later, he left his house to his daughter, Laura Lee.

Laura Lee married three times, each time a richer man; she had four children, by whom she always seemed quite puzzled, nor could she ever quite understand why her husbands left. Like her mother, she became a pretty alcoholic, at last retiring to Hilton, to her family house, to drink in peace. Prudence, as she had told her mother she would, became a physicist, teaching and working in Chicago, which might or might not have pleased Sophia. Prudence married only once, very early and unhappily but briefly.

The two women, then, remained close friends, not seeing each other often but phoning at crucial moments or just to keep in touch—drunken Laura Lee and terribly sober Prudence, laughing like children. Remembering flower dolls and muddy dams.

On an unspeakably cold and foggy night one November in San Francisco, something terrible happens to a woman named Antonia Love. She is a painter, middle-aged, recently successful, who has invited some people to her house for dinner (one of whom she has not even met, as yet). But in the course of tearing greens into the salad bowl and simultaneously shooing off one of her cats—the old favorite, who would like to knead on one of her new brown velvet shoes—Antonia, who is fairly tall, loses her balance and falls, skidding on a fragment of watercress and avoiding the cat but landing,
bang
, on the floor, which is Mexican-tiled, blue and white. Hard. Antonia thinks she heard the crack of a bone.

Just lying there for a moment, shocked, Antonia imagines herself a sprawled, stuffed china-headed doll, her limbs all askew, awry. How incredibly stupid, how dumb, she scolds herself; if I didn't want people to dinner, I could just have not asked them. And then: Well, useless to blame myself, there are accidents. The point is, what to do now?

As she tries to move, it is apparent that her left arm indeed
is broken; it won't work, and in the effort of trying to move it Antonia experiences an instant of pain so acute that she reels, almost faints, and only does not by the most excruciating effort of will.

The problem of what to do, then, seems almost out of her hands. Since she can't for the moment get up, she also can't call her doctor, nor 911. Nor, certainly, can she go on with making dinner.