My Nine Lives (10 page)

Teddy had met her in New York where she had set up as a drama teacher and speech therapist. He told us that she had a reputation for discovering talent and developing it. When he first brought her to Springlake and introduced her to us, she held my hand in hers, which felt warm and plump like a little cushion. She pushed up my sleeve a bit as though she wanted to hold more of me: and she breathed a long “
Yes
” of recognition—which I took to be recognition of my talent and was thrilled. She greeted George in the same way and and was about to do so to Father except that he withheld his hand. Smiling, she turned from him and looked instead around the house; she seemed to be measuring the size of the rooms and the height of the ceilings, and again she breathed “
Yes
,” which made Teddy glow since it confirmed his promise that the place, along with my talent, held every potential for development.

After that first visit she came to see us often, and when there was some difficulty with the studio space she used in New York, she began to stay for a longer, indeed an indefinite period. She took over the upstairs front bedroom, which was usually occupied by Father's more important guests. When he brought them on occasional weekends, we informed her a day or two before he was expected, in order to give her time to pack. But he always sniffed the air, loudly demanding, “Who's been holed up in here?” and then pushed up the sash windows as high as they would go. He made no secret of his dislike of her, but she very sweetly continued to speak of him with great admiration for his qualities. She looked up to him—literally, for she was very short—and seemed not to notice his intense irritation. But we, who knew how choleric he could be, tried to keep her out of his way. Our weekends tended to bifurcate, with Father and his guests engaged in social and sporting activities, and the three of us—
George, myself and Teddy—clustered around Maggie, discussing our artistic plans. Only little Lisa—three years old at the time—ran freely between both groups, first to Father, to be lifted up and kissed by him and absorb his smell of cigars, liqueurs, and strong coffee; and then to Maggie who also kissed her, bending down to envelop her in her pungent perfume and smeary lipstick.

As soon as Father and his guests departed, Maggie moved back into the front bedroom and continued to fill our days with excitement. In recollection, these were our best years: Teddy and I were still together, we adored little Lisa, and George too was with us; and there was Maggie, still so blooming and yet also experienced and deeply intuitive. In the winter we sat around a big log fire, in the spring we walked among the daffodils spreading lakes of yellow in the grass. Blossoms flew through the air, there were fresh buds on the trees and nests of fledgling birds inside them. Little Lisa skipped in and out among us, crowned with a daisy chain that Maggie had knotted for her. I felt confident of my talent—of what I loved to do more than anything in the world. And Maggie reassured me—reassured all of us—that it was right to dedicate ourselves to expressing our deepest emotions through an art that she was there to foster. The house was in its pristine glory at the time and so were the grounds—even the apple trees had been sprayed and revived enough to put out blossoms for a shimmering two weeks—and Father was still there to keep everything in order and pay all the bills.

But one day Father arrived in the middle of the week. Looking grim, he called Maggie into his study and shut the door behind them. She went in smiling and she came out smiling; with unperturbed good humor, she packed her bag and got into the cab that Father had called to take her to the
station. He left the same day without explaining anything to us; but just as he got into his car, he looked back at us and shook his head under the checked cap he wore for motoring in the country: “What's going to happen to you three when I'm no longer here? And what's going to happen to my sweetheart?” he said, including little Lisa in his despairing glance.

I suppose it could be said that his premonition turned out to be correct. Even before he died, our personal lives had begun to slide downhill. Teddy and I went our separate ways. He left for India to pursue a new path, and I continued to be sent to a few auditions until I became emotionally too distracted to show up for them. George had the same distractions, in his case even more turbulent since they were mostly with feckless boys who specialized in making men like him unhappy. Then the trouble with Lisa started in her adolescence and she had to undergo various treatments. But actually, with the help of her anti-depressants, she alone emerged intact from those years. She managed to complete her studies and to get a job with an investment firm where she proved to have been the only one to inherit Father's talent for business. George retreated into the smothering atmosphere of our mother's apartment, while I continued to live in the one Father had bought for me, though I had to resort to my lawyer's help to get my last lover out. Strangely, George had the same experience at Springlake—with a local boy whom he had moved into the house and then had to engage legal help to get him moved out. This was an additional reason for our decision to sell the house, though an unspoken one; for while I told George every detail of my unhappy affairs, he preferred to keep his to himself, and I respected his privacy.

So this was our situation when Teddy resurfaced and said we were crazy: “You want to sell
this
place? What about our plans for it, our Performing Arts Center?”

George smiled tolerantly: “Teddy dear, that was twenty-five years ago and we've moved on.”

“Moved on? How can anyone move on from an immutable ideal?”

This was the sort of thing he was still saying, and meaning it. Teddy, though his adventures had been so much more farflung than ours, was the one who had changed the least. George, now past fifty, had taken on the appearance and maybe some of the cautious character of a banker; he wore excellently tailored suits to disguise his too wide hips. Teddy had remained as thin as he had been when I had first seen him chopping wood outside his hut; in fact, he looked as though he might cheerfully go back to that hut, if there was no other place for him. True, in repose he could sometimes look sad, as sad as George did for all his appearance of good living. But Teddy rarely was in repose—his expression was very mobile and he never sat still for long.

He spoke of the Performing Arts Center as though no time had passed and no disappointment had come to him or to any of us. “And Maggie's come back,” he urged. “She'll help us, she's wild to get going on something.”

“Maggie!”

George and I hadn't thought of her in years; even the question of why Father had turned her out, though still unanswered, no longer interested us. “But where's she been?” Unlike Teddy, who had turned up every time he changed direction in his various careers, she had disappeared from view.

Teddy couldn't tell us much, for he too had lost sight of her. She no longer went by her Russian name but was now called “Princess,” having married an Arab with connections to some royal family. She had met him in Bombay—“How on earth did she get to Bombay?”

Teddy grinned in the sweet lopsided way he had when he
didn't want to admit something he had done. “Well yes, all right,” he finally replied to a question we had not yet asked, “she went with me. But our paths soon diverged—my Lord,
how
they diverged!” For by the time he went up to his monastery, she had met and presumably married her Arab prince and was living with him in a double suite in the Taj Mahal Hotel.

“But now she's broke again, same as I am.”

We were used to Teddy being broke—he was broke every time we met up with him, and every time we were glad to help out, with money and a place to live. It now appeared that Maggie also had no place to live, and while George and I were still silently communing with each other, wondering whether to ask her to come visit us in the house, Teddy turned over George's wrist to consult his Rolex: “Oh my—that late! I have to meet the train, Maggie's on it, she took the 10.45 from Penn Station.”

Like Teddy, she had not really changed. She took my hand in hers in exactly the same way as she had done before, pushing up my sleeve a bit, and breathing, “
Yes.
” She was much stouter than she had been, which made her look even shorter, but her hair was still golden—
more
golden—her cheeks pink, her eyes a child's porcelain blue. And these eyes again took in our rooms, and when she walked around them, she seemed as before to be measuring them. There was something slow and solemn in her tread, with her small feet turned slightly outward; and also something compelling that drew one behind her, as though afraid of missing what she might do or say. She was in a long gown—was it the same one, twenty-five years later? I remembered how Father had lifted the hem of it to save his carpet. “God only knows
what sort of filth she's been dragging around in,” he had said.

Well, wherever it had been, she was now very tired, and for a few days she slept a lot. It turned out that not only was she tired she was also hungry, and she ate voraciously, greatly appreciating the gourmet dishes George prepared for her. Although George and I had not thought of the Performing Arts Center for years, now we seemed to be waiting for her to speak of it. Teddy warned us to let her rest first: “If only you knew how she needs it.” He also warned us to say nothing of our intention to sell the house, because she would be so horribly disappointed: “And, poor soul, she's had enough of that in her life.”

“Who hasn't?” George said. But he followed Teddy's advice and kept quiet, waiting for her to recover sufficiently to inform us of whatever plans she had for us.

On the following weekend, and before Maggie had quite finished resting, Lisa arrived, and far from keeping quiet about the sale of the house, she had come with the intention of discussing it. “Discussing” is the wrong word: like Father, Lisa was in the habit of letting us know her decisions after she had made them. She never called us by anything except our first names, Teddy and Helen; I suppose it was impossible for her to think of us as responsible enough to be anyone's parents, let alone hers. In some ways, her attitude to us, as well as to her Uncle George, was the same as Father's had been. But whereas Father had regarded our lack of practical sense with affectionate amusement, for Lisa it was a source of constant irritation. Whenever she came to see us, she had a frown—a frown of suspicion as to what we might have done or left undone. We, on the other hand, the three of us, greeted her with cries of joy and fussed around her in an attempt, usually futile, to make her pleased with us.

Maggie was overjoyed to see Lisa again, now grown up; and she fondled not just one hand but both of them in hers, while stepping back to study her. She retained her smile, but no doubt she was surprised by the way Lisa had turned out. It had been a surprise to all of us: as a child, Lisa had been, like Teddy, pale and delicate; and also like me who had grown up looking not unlike the American girls with whom Father had sent me to school. Father even had a theory that, if you were successful in America, your money would endow your daughter with the thin ankles and silky fair hair typical of an American girl of Anglo-Saxon origin. But he had to revise this theory later, when his granddaughter reverted to his own origins: Lisa was heavy, with very dark eyebrows that she refused to pluck and sturdy legs that she would not shave. The frown of displeasure with which she usually regarded us did not lighten her appearance: and under Maggie's scrutiny, it grew more intense and angry. She didn't withdraw but actually snatched her hands out of Maggie's warm and loving grasp.

Afterward, alone with us, Maggie said how thrilling it was that the child she had known so well and had crowned with daisy chains was now a serious career woman, in a business suit, wearing stockings and medium-heeled pumps. We eagerly supplied more details of Lisa's successes—how she had overcome the depression and eating disorder of her sophomore year to complete her course with honors; and while her entrance into the Wall Street firm may have been due to Father's influence, she owed her rise in it entirely to her own ability. Maggie kept nodding—yes yes yes, it was all very wonderful, and how even more wonderful that such a strong-minded, practical person should be there for the four of us; and here she smiled, looking from face to face and laying her hand on her embroidered blouse to include herself—all of us unworldly scatterbrains, bohemians, artists.

“Who the hell is she?” Lisa asked, as soon as she had come down from her room where she had changed into jeans and sweatshirt.

“Lisa! You remember Maggie! You loved her so! How you carried on when she left!”

Lisa had cried so much that Maggie had had to climb out of the taxi that had been called for her to kiss her once more. But now Lisa asked, “Why did she leave in such a hurry? . . . Did she have to leave? Did Grandpa make her leave?”

We had to admit that this was so, but when Lisa probed further, we dealt with her questions in the same way we had done for ourselves: “Oh you know how Father was—so suspicious, always putting detectives on people's trail. Probably when you're in business, dealing with huge amounts of money and whatnot, that's how you have to be.”

“Yes,” Lisa confirmed, “that's how you have to be . . . What did he find out?”

“Oh Lisa! Once you start digging up things about people, there's no end to it!”

Whenever Teddy came to the house, it was taken for granted that he slept with me in my bed. There was plenty of room in it; we were both small, and after a long absence Teddy was usually skinny. When he undressed, which he did very naturally with me, as I did with him, his ribs could be seen sticking out. That night I ran my hands over them and over his chest—as soft and smooth and hairless as it had been when I first saw him chopping wood. I said, “You've been starving again.”