Foreign Bodies (11 page)

Lili said sharply, “She knows.”

“How, how?” — Iris’s wine-dyed mouth a red hole. Julian staring, sweating in the folds of his neck.

“She knows,” Lili said again.

When Bea left them there among the teacups, and went up to her room (good riddance too to the trough in the bed and the hose in the bath) to fetch her luggage, it was understood — though no one voiced it aloud — that Julian’s lot was in Bea’s hands. What the brother and sister had feared to disclose, Lili had laid open: the boy had a wife. His father took seriously the care of a wife; his own, even when ill, he had placed in the lap of luxury. Then it was at least thinkable, for the sake of the boy’s having a wife, that the money would follow: it all depended on Bea. She should not have come, no — but since she had, and knew what she knew, it might be all to the good. Thus did Lili instruct the brother and sister.

In the plane, Bea put down her book — the cabin lights had dimmed — and played it out. It was probable, it was likely. The boy’s naïveté, the pointless years away, how he dallied, how he looked for amusement, how easily he was beguiled . . . Doubtless Lili had taken his measure: he had no means of making a living, and no evident ambition either. But his father was rich. A boy with a wife was a man, and a man with a wife could not be left to drown. Accustomed in her cubicle to opening gates that were inclined to be shut, Lili had turned
a key. The key was Bea. It was probable, it was likely. It accorded with Marvin’s predictable suspicions: inexorable Marvin, who had logic on his side. It was in his nature, he had founded a business, he comprehended greed, he was steeped in the knowledge of bad faith.

Probable? Likely? But Bea did not believe it.

W
HEN SHE WAS
gone, they lingered awhile. The emptied bottles lolled on their sides. Lili’s uneaten potato lay cold and congealed on her plate like a guillotined head. Where Julian had dribbled gravy, an oily patch went on spreading through the cloth. Lifting her chin over the debris, Iris said, “You think dad will make her crazy? She’s crazy already. When I was in New York — this tiny apartment she’s got — she offered me her own bed —”

“That’s because she’d stuck a pea under the mattress,” Julian said.

“— and just before that, I thought she wanted to kill me. There was this enormous thing, with brass feet,
claws
, you’d expect to see a piano like that on a stage, and all I did was touch it, just one note really, it was strange seeing it there, it took up nearly the whole room —”

“Wasn’t she married once? To some sort of musician?”

“— one finger, I put one finger on it, and she froze up and looked
ferocious
, I mean almost violent, with crazy eyes. As if I’d ruin it, or it could fall apart, or if you hit a wrong key lightning would come out of it. As if the thing was holy. — And then right after, as nicely as could be, she said I should take her bed.”

“The better to strangle you in the middle of the night,” Julian said. “So did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Take her bed.”

“I did, why not? Instead of that ratty davenport. With those silly claws practically under your nose.”

Lili said, “In that house you made perhaps a sin.”

“Because I let her sleep on her own ratty thing? What I really wanted was a decent hotel, but still, dad’s sister, do the family honors, it was only for overnight and I was getting her to help —”

“Iris at her saintliest,” Julian said.

But Lili said, “A sin to touch a holy thing, is it not?”

I
N THE TERMINAL
, waiting to board, Bea was attempting to finish the letter to Marvin, discarding one wary blunder after another. Either she was telling too much, or — this was certain — she was telling too little. The exertion strained her wrist; the flimsy hotel stationery went skittering over the flanks of her valise — a makeshift and unsteady surface — and she worried that her fountain pen might run dry. She surrendered finally to the old abandoned abruptness and left it at that:
There’s no use my staying any longer. Iris is a riddle, and your son won’t budge
. She dropped the envelope into a mail slot; they had begun to call her flight. The overseas stamp was big and showy. It would be postmarked Paris, as it must be. To take the letter with her, to send it from another city, was perilous.

She had exchanged her ticket for an earlier date — but also for a different destination. Marvin was not to know this; it was a recklessness. A whim. Or not a whim; it drove her. A handful of days remained before she was obliged to breathe the fetid airlessness of her classroom — Laura impatient, chafing, waiting to be freed from those hulking students with their long sideburns and beginning mustaches, how they must be hooting at Madame Defarge and her knitting, caterwauling in staccato falsettos
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done
, swiping their necks, and how was Laura handling it? — Mrs. Bienenfeld, show us how it works, the guillotine, come on, show us, show us on Charlie! Poor Laura, was she pulling
it off, staring down that mob of overgrown boys cavorting in their seats?

Paris had been hurtful; they had treated her badly. Their rebuffs and mystifications. But Bea knew now what Iris knew; they knew it together. A secret no more — Bea was carrying it with her. She had the power to divulge it or not to divulge it: either way, it was power.

The windows were black, the shades pulled down. Many of the passengers were asleep, their faces turned childlike under the dim cabin lights. The body of the plane vibrated like a tuning fork, obedient to the pulsing of the great engine quartet. In a matter of hours they would be escaping the night, outrunning it to cross into the ruddy seam of late afternoon. The shades would snap open, a dawdling finger of sun would wake the sleepers, and far beneath, as the plane’s belly lowered, a famous ocean would rise toward them — not the homebound Atlantic, at whose lip lay New York. They were landing in California.

I
T WAS ANOTHER
country. Deep summer ruled autumn. Women strolled in the streets half dressed, in halters and shorts, with pearl-painted toenails peering from high-heeled sandals. The smell of frying things flooded out of eateries and greased the air. Streams of cars on ribbons of highways: Los Angeles haphazard and fragmented, as if an entire city had been dropped from the sky to be broken into shards and scatterings, the pieces flung miles apart. She had expected mountains, blue cones merging into a gray horizon. Instead, only these shards of towns with their Old World names and their New World obstreperousness.

The Suite Eyre Spa: an English manor set in an English garden. California! — where everything was a replica of somewhere else. The parking lot was hidden behind a stand of palm trees; abutting it a long lawn fenced by rose-mobbed trellises, its grass so shockingly green that it looked newly painted. Pools of flower beds wound artlessly through, as if a wild growth of peonies and zinnias had sprouted of themselves. Oak benches were dispersed among them, and these too pretended to have aged naturally in their soil. And beyond, the manor with its six white Georgian pillars and broad shadowy porch lined with cushioned wicker lounge chairs and urns over-flowing with bougainvillea. But no one walked in the grounds or loitered on the benches or waited on the porch. A sanatorium in the hush of a communal indoor doze; or a flock of rich men’s wives under a spell.

She passed a reception desk — no one was there, though a half-full coffee cup rested on its blotter — and then moved on through a corridor of doors, some shut, many open. Women sleeping. Medicated into torpor, self-lulled into immobility. The toxin of despair. Impulse may have brought her here; yet impulse was the frail carapace of what felt long calculated. Or if not calculated, then stored and readied. Her motive was shrouded even from herself.

Margaret’s door was shut. On the doorpost a ceramic plaque: on it someone had crayoned
MRS
.
M. NACHTIGALL
. She turned the knob and looked in — and in and in, as into one of those mirrors that reflect other mirrors, far into infinitude. A suite of unfurling rooms, rows of windows, white curtains, brightness all around, bowls of unrecognizable flowers. An indefinable odor — medicinal, and foul, or else it was the flowers . . . the smell was repugnant. The flowers were silk, did silk breathe out so wormy a breath? A woman in a pleated dress — no, a nightgown or a long smock — sat in a straight chair in front of an easel. But her eyes were on the white wall behind it.

“Margaret,” Bea said.

The eyes moved. The woman did not.

“It’s Beatrice. From New York.”

“New York?” That voice: the bodiless timbre, the light quick syllables. Drained, veiled, softened almost below the threshold of Bea’s hearing. “Marvin’s sister?”

She stood up then. Bea had forgotten how tall Marvin’s wife was, but she could almost recover her face, mainly through the scrim of a snapshot or two, possibly decades old. It was one of those perfected faces, geometrically proportioned and aligned, that are beautiful on a girl of eighteen but wear badly: too much symmetry, like good manners early inculcated, turns flat. Margaret’s face, Margaret’s manners, were both perfected.

“How nice to see you again,” Margaret said: a practiced chatelaine. As if they had met over cards only last week. Yet with the exception of a single perfunctory mumble and nod in a public corridor, they had never unaffectedly met. After his marriage — how many years
ago! — Marvin had removed his new wife to the farthest end of the continent, and kept her sequestered there — because, he said, this was where the future of aircraft lay, and where he would make his fortune. The wedding itself, in a modest New England chapel, was all unhappy Breckinridges, and altogether bare of unhappy Nachtigalls. Bea’s mother, and then her father, had gone to their graves without ever having heard their daughter-in-law’s even-tempered vowels, or marveled at her rounded aristocratic forehead and its precisely placed horizontal eyebrows. Nor had they witnessed her as a bride, except in the serenely posed Bachrach photograph that acknowledged their awkward wedding gift — it had bypassed the designated registry and arrived woundedly in a thin envelope. Marvin journeyed alone to his parents’ funerals. As for Bea, she was belatedly introduced to Margaret in New York, at the Princeton Club one afternoon, no more than an hour or so before Marvin hurried his wife and little daughter into a hired car to take them to that significant alumni reunion where Marvin would be honored as a lavishly philanthropic donor, and where he could not expect to greet his old classmate and brother-inlaw. Margaret’s brother had been killed the year before in the crash of a private plane after a drinking party; the woman in the passenger seat died with him. By then
AMERICA
’
S
HARDWARE EMPORIUM
had expired, and all elderly Breckinridges and Nachtigalls, including Bea’s three unmarried aunts, were dead. And by then Bea had long been Miss Nightingale. From Marvin’s point of view, Bea guessed, she was the least likely of all known Nachtigalls to embarrass him. He had brought her on that one occasion — it was rooted in her mind with an indelible agelessness, like a movie still — to be offhandedly presented to Margaret and his child. The Margaret of the movie still was steadily smiling, and the child no more than an elusive flash of white-blond head.

But the Margaret who stood before Bea now was all flicker and twitch, an engine pumping mechanical civilities. “Are you staying at the house? Did Marvin manage it? He could be away, he’s always on the run, but then the housekeeper’s there until six —”

She broke off; the engine had failed.

“No, no,” Bea reassured her, “it’s you I’ve come to see. And I’m at a motel, I rented a car at the airport —”

“Marvin wouldn’t like it. He’d be afraid of my getting upset, but I’m not upset at all. My husband has the idea that I’m unwell. I’m perfectly well, you can see for yourself.”

Bea trailed after the painter’s smock: it fell to Margaret’s ankles and brushed her bare heels. She was leading Bea from one sunlit space to another, passing an unmade bed tumbled with pillows. They came to a room where two armchairs flanked an ornamental fireplace. The fireplace was fake, its useless hearth hidden behind a large unframed landscape. Settling into one of the chairs, mentally measuring, Bea speculated that this prodigal parade of invalid’s accommodations could easily swallow her own apartment three or four times over.

She gestured toward the fireplace. “That painting, is it yours?”

“Oh, I don’t do trees and things. The person who was here before me did it, I could never do anything like that. They say I could if I tried. They tell me I have some talent. They’re expected to say things like that. It’s therapy, you know.”

With Margaret seated opposite and to the side, Bea could see only her profile, the thin nose pale as a wafer, the pale truncated eyelashes, the mouth drawn flat. In this place, a distance from where she had come in, the bad smell was not so strong. But she felt helplessly stymied — what had she supposed was to be gained from this dubious visit, these vapid courtesies of accepting and denying? The woman was flat through and through.

“Then you’re satisfied here,” Bea said.

It was meant as a question; it was not spoken as one. It received no answer. Instead Margaret said, “You won’t believe me, will you? That I’ve always been interested in my husband’s family — you’ll say there’s been no sign of it.”

“Well, here I am, the family entire. The last of the Mohicans, there’s no one else. But you’ve got a big enough clan of your own, don’t you? There’s always one or two mentioned in the magazines.”

“It’s only some cousins now. We’re in touch at Christmas, though not lately —”

“The cousin in the Cabinet. The governor. The other governor. And the congressman who flew his own plane.”