On Keeping Women (16 page)

“Have you.”

“Stop staring so.” She reaches for the switch.

He bars her. “When people have too private a language… other people stare.”

She withdraws her hand. It trembles. “Oh James, that’s beautiful… if it’s friendly.” Better not to look at him, to see if it is. Slowly she presses her shaky hand with the firm one. “With Chess it’s hats, costumes. A kind of self-protection. Being freaky before they can say you are.” Saying: This is what I am. What my family, those fakirs, will not admit. “Poor Maureen, when they went off. It’s hard on her … Not on me so much.” She does look at him. “Well it really isn’t… but it’s a relief to talk about it. I never do, you know. Not even to—her father.” No, especially not to Ray. “James, I apologize. For teasing you. They’re just down the road, all of them. All the children on the road. It’s going to be a real brawl, across the way. Not that the whole road doesn’t want to go to it; they’re mad to. So the Village Hall’s been set up for a kids’ party. With a couple of nice old committee-women to play piper. The kids can even sleep over there, if they want. But I doubt if ours will.”

“Like Hamlin. A whole village would do that?”

She laughs. “A resourceful one … Well for God’s sake. Don’t you believe me? One would think—what do you think? That I’ve put them in the pond?”

Is it the light makes him blink, several times? “One never can be sure. How far passivity will go.”

She stands up, then. Drawing the deepest breath. Glad she has the space for it. “Can you be so sure—of Ray’s?”

And covers her mouth. Against what has come from it.

“Right. If it ever comes into court, on whose side would I flop?” He laughs. Swinging himself up onto the balustrade, where he leans against the porchpost, facing toward the river, clasping his knees, nonchalantly false-young.

She touches his shoulder. “Marry the Bajan girl. Get some kids of your own. If she’ll have you.”

No answer. Maybe she won’t.

“I meant that, then,” she says. “About the winter.”

“If I can bear Chess, you mean. That I can have Royal.”

“Not if you put it that way.”

“Hadn’t you better? Begin to?”

There is a tiny, bitter pill still given girls for menstrual cramps—a school nurse had first given it to her. She’d given it to Chess once. Feeling the link. Though she herself hasn’t used it in years, she tastes it now, a spark of gunpowder on the tongue.
Tastes blue,
Chess said.

“You do grapple them,” he’s saying.

“Ah, you’ve been with Mother, all right. She phones that, twice a week. Ever since Ray’s been away. ‘Oh Lex, don’t wait like I did. To see it all clear.’ I tell her ‘That’s
your
destiny. What else do you think old age is?’ I’ve been thinking about old age. Oughtn’t one? …”

“Oh?”

“Don’t sound so—doctorly.”

“No wonder Mother’s worried. I meant what I said you know. About court.”

“What court?”

“She wants Ray to be made to come home and take custody. I’m to insist.”

“Has
Ray
ever—?”

“No,” he says quickly. “Nothing about that. Or about you. Ever.”

She sat down, stunned. “I don’t know whether to cry. Or to laugh.”

“There you go.”

“Eh?”

“People usually say that the other way round.”

“Last time I saw her, I didn’t know which. She’s still wearing those gray do-gooder clothes. Even in Florida.” I must use my head, she thinks. For the kids, I always can. “James … remember those custody cases she had? And the child-abuse ones? Remember how angry she used to get because mothers in the State are inviolate. ‘Because they’re made to be—’ she used to say ‘—not because they should.’ That’s it, James. She wants me to have all the advantages she didn’t have.” She lets herself laugh.

“Maybe … She said to me ‘You and I did your sister a real bad turn. Even if this looks like another bad turn, we have to put it right.’”

They laugh until they choke.

“All women’re mad,” he says, backslapping her.

“All women—have always been mad.” She says dutifully. Like a proverb. Or a quote.

“Ayuh,” he clowns, in his old Maine accent, carried over the college winter from summers as a camp-counselor. “Ayuh. But now they know.”

“I hope. You and Ray could, you know. Two medical men. In court.”

“It’s possible.”

“And who would
I
cable? For my rights?”

“Look, Lex—it wasn’t my idea.”

“You listened,” she said. “Just like—then.” She clasped the purple robe about her. Not casually. Seeing it. As she had all these years. “Ah, I don’t blame her, really; she was scared for me. Now I’ve reached the age where she can sympathize a little … Or she would like
me
to. Mutually. Her independence is maybe bitterer than she—calculated. Maybe she wouldn’t mind the sight of somebody else tasting some of the same. Even if it’s me. Or—especially me.” She threw up her hands.

“Sis. You’re remarkable. You really are.”

“Don’t say it like a disclaimer. Or an elegy.”

He’s stripping the rhododendron branch. It won’t break. “Either you mutter or you flash. One never knows how to take you.”

“I’m just learning, myself. James—I know why you and Mother got together on me. I don’t even blame you anymore. I just wish—I hadn’t had to learn it.”

“Why? I mean—why wish?”

“You and Mother were afraid of me, that’s why. The way—I’m afraid of… Chess. Oh—James.”

She is in his arms. Not bothering to look up.

They break apart.

“Let’s go to the party.”

In duo.

But he said it first.

“I’m ready.”

“Not in that, Lex.”

She looks down at herself. “I’ve had this robe since I married. It reminds me—of me.”

He shrugs, “So many things do.”

“Right. Just give me time; I’ll run out and change… Up, I mean.” She flashes that, brilliantly. “And when I come down—you can tell me about Ray.”

Upstairs, she does what’s she’s never done before, but often half-meant to. One night perhaps, as a joke. Entering the bedroom of each child, she turns the bedclothes carefully down. Thinking in turn of each child.

To dress takes her less time than she spent in any of the rooms.

“That’s nice,” James says, when she comes back.

“Yes.” The dress has chosen itself. Its dim, auroral flowers, pressed on sheer black, resemble the blotted garden of her mind. “Now. About Ray?”

“He wrote me two months ago. Asking if I could get him a job in public health.”

He’s watching her, the length of the porch between them. The whole river’s glistening now. “Well for God’s sake, Lexie. An internist. You can’t jump from private to public like that. Giving up your whole life’s work.”

The hell you can’t. But she says nothing.

“I wrote him—‘Ray, come home and we’ll talk about it. Don’t make a decision from sickness.’ He never answered back.”

From sickness. From internal sickness. But those are the decisions you
must.

“Sis. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

How separate Ray and I have been, then. On both sides. Two sea-bottom creatures fumbling up opposite walls, and forever dropping down again. Back to back … All this while Ray has had this relationship with himself.

“I’ll tell
you
then. He’d better resign himself. He hasn’t the ghost of a chance. And he has this town in the palm of his hand.”

The water in front of them sheets golden, back and forth, back and forth, a hippodrome whose arrangements are made far below. The Tappan Zee’s the widest part of the Hudson—they like to say here. A salt river even up here, twenty-seven miles from the harbor. And navigable to its source. All along it, northward, there are villages which can be held in the palm of the hand.

Southward is the harbor, and the shifty piers from which one can go anywhere. Traveler beware—of not being the traveler.

“I give you up,” James says, passing a hand in front of her immobile eyes. “Let’s go … Oh wait. My trunks are in the car.”

“They’re providing the swimsuits.” Under her dress, she already has her own bikini on.
The tribe is sensitive to clothing; it must be theirs, and both original and appropriate. Helps cure being lost.

“Shall we go down the steps and around the front way?” He’s diffident. “Or around back?”

“Why—you’ve never been over there, have you. In all these years.” Of sitting on our porch, hearing the smashing. Or brother-in-law-watching Ray. “Let’s take the martini-path, huh?” Tonight is tonight.

The path’s become a bamboo thicket again. End of April, after Ray left, she and Charles took scythes to the soft, pushing cane-sprouts; a month later, it was back. Now in August, it’s man-high.

She can’t remember Ray’s face past ten years ago. Not the later face. But the one he might bring home—from nuns, and a sickness of his own—interests her.

“We can’t get through here, Sis.”

“Yes we can.” Taking his hand, she shows him how to sidle this way, that, always advancing, and without tearing his sportshirt. There must be dozens of such talents she’s had without noticing them. All of them to do with sidling, with the adjusting of objects to people, and vice versa, from day to day.

On the Kellihy edge, the bamboo is charred; against village rules, have they been burning off again? Yet she admires. Some people simply will not adjust.

Out in the clearing, great trees still half-hide the Kellihys’, a square white house, too big for its clapboard lines. Standing on the rise of hill between, turning, she can see her own winged and turreted house through other people’s eyes. Never hers, really, and for more than a century not the house of the people who built it, bought by Ray from the Morrises, who had it only nine years, it is still “the Appletons’,” who had it for twenty-five. Nobody in a village owns a house. Forget houses. Golden water’s floating through the trees.

“Yes, you were wise to buy it,” James is saying. “A fine property!”

If I can just sidle through, and past it. Property is murder.

“And for the kids,” he says.

On this side you can see the office-wing jutting back. In Britain—according to Ray who’d had a student’s tour of Edinburgh—a doctor’s office is called “the surgery.” He’d actually had a plaque made up, saying that. One foolish glimpse of it from the road, and he’d had it taken down again; she remembers that face of his. Perhaps if she’d had the plaque to see all day, would it have joined them closer? Or if she’d hung one alongside, saying, as she had joked at the time—“Wivery.” What’s the public health, against the private one? If you live in one, do you die from not having lived in the other?

“Cat got your tongue?” her brother says. “Why Lex … what a face.”

She must have lost the habit. The last time she wept was when Royal was born. For his foot. Mothers didn’t cry much, for themselves. Girlhood was a passion of tears, flung on a bed—and gratefully departed from. During the first year of marriage, that first hard swallow of the strange double solitude, she was now and then flung back. To be absolved by the first child. And to relapse only that once—with the last. She’s never wanted to weep for his father before.

All that time, this other solitude, hobbling along beside her.

Are Ray and I a tragedy? For I want to bawl, bawl. But it’s too deep for that, too deep. It belongs to the tragic rhythm of the fathers. I can feel it, but not transliterate.

James is urging her along, out of the thicket. Locking her knees, she withstands him. He is frightened of her. She grips him.

“Ray
dreams
,” she says shaking. “
Ray
dreams.” And I must tell the children, at once.

“Mind your face,” James says after a minute. Wiping it for her with a handkerchief that smells of Bay Rum. He’s gawking over the hedge. “Everybody’s there.”

Or everybody will be, in the peacock way of parties, with a feather on the village curls, or hat. Can’t come to Kellihys’ as yourself; that’s why their parties are so popular. Come as you’re not. That’s why the kids have been sent off. They already know what that is.

She’s already smiling. James, whose shirt has been torn after all, is already swaggering.

They creep through the trees, whispering the last gossip before plunging in.

“Betsy’s invited the priest to come bless the pool.”

“He coming?”

“He doesn’t, he’ll be the only one on the road.”

“Betsy started by borrowing everybody’s glasses. When the acceptances went over two hundred, she brought them all back. ‘We’re having a New York caterer; Alfie’s getting them for us,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that
live
!”

“Only one cabana I can see. Maybe the whole two hundred’re inside it. Who’s Alfie?”

“A restaurant in New York that’s their hangout. Where she and Bob go when they want to have an affair with one another. Alfie lends them the room at the back.”

The hillside rumpling behind these houses that line the river has as many niches as a conservatory. Music is letting out from one or the other of these. There’s a sharp-fingered look to the shrubbery. The moon is riding high.

“Must be having one at the moment,” her brother’s saying. “Isn’t that a string trio?” They’re at the crest of a rise. Dark shadows, moving over the lawn to the glitter ahead, can’t be identified yet. One of these lights its pipe, then goes dark again. Was that Hoppe?

“Come meet the mutual friend.” James stretches out his hands, a smiling partner.

This deflates her. For just a second. For the girl in Barbados. For all other girls. “Sure. Love to meet her.”

Grabbing her hand, he skims her into the party, over the lawn and through the Hades-ranks, past greetings, past friends who merely wave. A striped cabana billows out at them, tawnily. Empty, no sheiks. The swimming-pool is black but gaudy, ready for the high mass. Silvering meanwhile with a few people, none of them bare yet, unless the bodies of those bobbing heads are, below. Or down at the bottom, is there that bogey of nighttime waterplay, the drowned body bare for always? Somebody slipped below, and ignored? As she and James run, saunter, skim, stopped by no one—how deft he is, really—that image flicks past her. Below the waterlilies brought by the nurserymen last Sunday, a body cooled past lotuses, lulling now and then to the splashing above, its nose scraping the concrete.