On Keeping Women (18 page)

“That’s right,” Kevin says. “Nobody up there.”

Held in the searchlight beams each time, there in the streaky shadows of the vines at the back door, is Violet, a dowager out of
Ebony
magazine—massive cocoa-brown shoulders in black decolleté, a Roman-striped bandeau around a tiara of curls, and her mistress’s three-stand corals. Behind her a punchbowl glitters, and a three-tier bar, but Violet typically stands in front. Beyond the bar is the cabana. In front of its orange-and-black howdah-fringed stripes, Arthur stands, shining with gladiator oil, in silver trunks, and barechested except for a huge orange bow-tie. His hair is silver too, lustrous as the bands which clip his wrists. He bows, beckoning.

“Yuck.” Kevin’s arms circle her from behind. “Ever see anything more minstrel-racist? Than the two of them?”

“Oh no, they do it to themselves.” There’s no time to explain who bosses the color-charts at the Kellihys’. The searchlights cross, and stop—fixed. On Bets, who’s sitting guru-fashion in black mid-air. In a white bikini, Violet’s diamond dog-collar, and on her turbaned head, Violet’s canary-feather aigrette.

On the far side of the pool beneath her, lower-class trapezes, swing-bars, see-saws and pulley-weights crouch like the servitors in a throne room, before the soaring mastermodel in their midst.

Bets is on top of the very high slide.

“She wanted everybody to enter the party that way,” a woman behind them says. “By having to climb up the slide, and splash down. Only the pool was in the wrong place.”

“Chut!” a man answered. “They’ll change it around in the morning … My God, is that the three-year-old she’s got with her—Dum-dum?”

“Dodo.” The women always know the facts.

The little girl climbing to the platform has on silvery net panties. And a head-feather like Bets’. Her chub little butt backs shyly against her mother.

“Can the kid swim?” voices say.

“Nothing kills a Kellihy,” one answers. “They all float.”

“Oh Kev.”

“Why Lex. What a face.”

“It’s the Pasadena party, down to a T—the famous one Bets went to, once. The slide, the gym machines—everything. Bets is always yearning over it.” Glass in hand. “Oh Kevin, is that sad? Or not?”

“Wait—.”

Bets is urging a slim bottle into the child’s fists. Dodo waves it; she isn’t shy.

“A split of champagne,” the voices say.

“Wouldn’t you know.”

“Hooray for Bets.”

Out of the cheers and catcalls, a cool, penetrating call. “Betsy? What about the broken glass? If it falls in?”

“That’s the sister,” Kevin says. “Always the little helper. And always right. She went to school with mine. I even dated her—one of my sister’s good works. We’re not in their money-class though.” He squeezes her. “And Sister ain’t in mine.”

Upperclass Catholic. So that’s his milieu. Everything she knows about him—his assumed coarseness, the bedeviled drinking, his firm sense of his own style through all of it—shifts slightly to the right. And of course a Jesuit school.

“What you laughing at?”

And the encyclopedias. It also dovetails.

“Oh, look.”

Bets, expertly juggling child, bottle and herself, is taking off Dodo’s net panties, and slipping the champagne-bottle inside them. More cheers, when the crowd sees what she’s getting at. She bows, up there in the Pasadena dream-sky. Bottle and baby in hand, she’s never looked more maternal.

A wonderful mother of a sort, Lexie thinks. The slapdash kind I can never be.

The bottle smashes smartly against the slide. Naked Dodo chortles. Her mother holds up the panties with the shards dripping inside, and flings it safely to shore.

“A clean break,” someone says. “The Kellihy luck. What’s she doing now? Oh no.”

“Gather she didn’t get the Monsignor.” Kevin ear-kisses her. “Don’t tell nobody she makes the sign of the cross wrong.”

Bets is poising herself on the slide. Dodo’s in her lap. A fine splash. They’re down.

A silence, while they’re under. The little girl appears first, held aloft by a pair of arms, whose head is emerging slowly.

It’s Bob, in a King Cole crown. Hauling himself and Dodo on the raft, he sits her on his shoulders and shakes his clasped hands at the crowd. The raft is large, and stacked with bottles. Behind it, Betsy’s feather rises like a periscope. Then she surfaces too, stage-bowing, arms spread like Titania, the little finger of each hand sticking up.

“Safe,” the man behind them said. “The kid’s even laughing. They must have practiced it. Ah, look at poor Bob.” The big crown has slid down around his neck.

“Betsy yelled something,” the woman said. “On the way down.”

“‘Tonight in Hollywood!’—what else. Come on. There’s champagne on that raft.”

Couple after couple are diving over the side to it. She sees the woman who also steals at parties, playing a passionate and excellent piano in the intervals. Tonight she has flowers in her hair, a hormonal signal to all. The man with her isn’t her lover, nor her husband either.

And Kevin isn’t Ray.

Other neighbors surround her, Hoppe’s anecdotes. Over there’s a redheaded man with a smile of gentle concupiscence on his face, who takes care of this as he can. If he seems uneasy, it’s not because of his wife, who’s at his side, but because of his mistress, who’s not. The two are watching her.

The wife has a neat, unmemorable face and eyes slyly loose from it; sometimes she buttonholes other women with the suggestion that they sleep with him—“With my bad luck, I’m not enough for him”—doing this however only during the ordinary wifely day, at the supermarket perhaps or the butchershop, where this procuring may be seen as part of other duties. At parties she is always circumspect.

Her husband keeps the mistress in a large white house down the road; he and his family live ten miles inland. Half the week he stops on the river road first on his way from the city, but sleeps home; the other half he dines at home like any householder, but sleeps away from it—where one may meet him and the mistress out for a morning constitutional. Regularity is what oppresses him sexually, but he hasn’t known how to get rid of it.

Here comes the mistress. An Englishwoman, she dresses always in black jumper, and jersey tights of the same, stuck in leather gym shoes—a style which makes stylish women crumble—and has an air of meeting no one. Rumor gives her five children, so competently disposed of in the continental way that no American can cavil. She has short blackberry hair, a steely air of capability, and a set of teeth so perfectly white, plumb and forthcoming that despite her few darts of speech the upper jaw seems movable as well. One imagines her and the husband’s congress as a set of teeth slowly ingesting a smile.

But at parties, when the irregular in people tends to show up, the husband’s smile grows again. When this happens, the mistress comes and stands at the wife’s side.

As has happened now—Lexie sees why. The husband, who to date has never troubled over her, has seen that Kevin isn’t Ray.

“H’are you, Lexie?” His smile is a shy throe.

“Hi. Hi.” She hesitates, eyeing the wife. But loyal neighbors are expected to ask it. “How’s the back?”

The wife’s eyes tiny themselves. “Ray better come home soon. That therapist Dr. Bly got me to is great.”

Her husband’s head comes out at Lexie like a turtle’s. From under his womanshell. “Have you met Mrs. Tork?” Yes, he’s offering his Mrs. Tork as a sign: as you see, I’m available. When another woman interests him, he introduces Mrs. Tork.

“’Ja do.” Even when met, Mrs. Tork doesn’t meet. But an animal shudder ripples her jersey.

“Kevin Sheridan here.” He’s grinning out and out. “Mind if I ask what’s the joke?”

Tork measures him. “The card
she
got, from the therapist. ‘Happy August. And be sure to keep your hamstrings stretched.’”

Kevin’s measuring her. Is there some bond? There appears to be. “Marvelous get-up, Mrs. Tork. Black Mass in the pool, maybe? Though your eyes are parson-blue.”

The jaws open. She speaks as if from a rear twiddle of the tongue, or air-passage through the mandibles. “Know your brother, don’t I? The poet.”

Kevin studies his trunks. “That’s my drinking brother.” Vaguest voice she’s ever heard from him. “Which reminds me …” He links arms with Lexie. “’Bye.” A ring to it like a wooden nickel’s. “’Bye.”

As he and Lexie skim off, she looks back. Where are the five children, so competently cared for, of Mrs. Tork? Where are her own? We here are all twined in each others’ acts.

“Don’t tell me the plot of those three,” Kevin’s saying. “It’s as clear as day.”

“The way you are.” She’s careful to smile.

“Do you mind?”

“Wish I did.”

“You need a drink.”

She’s still looking back. “
Didn’t
her upper jaw move, when she stretched her mouth? Didn’t it?”

“Like a hamstring. More moving parts at a party, better it is.” He waves at the moon, which is now sailing. “Moons, jaws, violins. And a good assortment of lower limbs … I need a drink.”

The punchbowl’s surrounded by neighbors bouncing talk off Violet, who when high speaks a perfect stage-English, which she palms off as wit. She’s seventy, and bone-tired from rambling after her adored little pyromaniac and his sister, but vanity is her chiropractor, any day. And she has a prisoner’s sense of due north—the Kellihys don’t pay her anything at all. Tonight though, she won’t look at Lexie, and her enunciation’s dropped off. “What the name of this stuff?” she grumps, ladling. “Dunno.
They
made it.” Her elbow waggles at the caterer’s men who are manning the other and proper bar. “If it make you randy, that why we built the pool.”

Kevin has two glassfuls, then another. “Sidecar, I think.” He squints diagnostically. “Fortified.”

She’d forgotten he’ll drink anything.

“You look like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray in that outfit,” he tell Violet.

“Gimme back twenty years, and a good lottery ticket, I be the black Mrs. First.”

They move to the regular bar, where Kevin has the bourbon-and-bitters she remembers as his drink. “What’s Violet got against you, Lex?”

“Poor old thing. She’s been paying my youngest boy on the sly. To give Dodo her daily bath.”

“Hah. Well, Sister’s been made guardian. For when the time comes.”

“What time?”

But now he’s urging her toward the house. No, I won’t go upstairs, she thinks. In the way of such parties. I won’t steal a bedroom.

“Bathroom’s all I want, honey.”

“You read me,” she says, happy.

“Like the Britannica.”

They mount the porch easily this time, passing between the deserted columns. The house, erected by a name now lost in the jangles of the 1929 Stock Exchange, is late Greek Revival, very late, and built to a scale nobly ruinous from the first. The thick columns face the river commodiously. From the many added loggias of its facade, the river is viewed ideally through flowers, all of them luckily perennial, as if the founding gardener had so foreseen. A house requiring service, but able with the weight of years to run on half servantless—the perfect house to be inhabited by cracked wealth.

Bob, dressed again, is sitting on the floor in the smaller living-room, the wired one, drinking what he always terms “Whisky-water, Sahib” and gobbling the lumps of table sugar which he claims “keep the liver straight.” He has receivers clamped to both ears and is phoning the commodity markets round the world, according to the list of opening and closing times kept always beside him. “Nobody’s answering,” he says in his soft, wise-to-everything voice. “Nowhere on the goddam flinty planet. Commerce is stopped … Hey, not that bathroom, Kevin; one of the kids left a poddle there … Violet can’t be everywhere. Try the next one down the hall… H’are you, Lexie? Have a drink.”

She accepts a whisky. Rendering exchange before he has to ask. “I saw Bets. Wow.”

“Seen Arthur? Seen Violet?” He downs a lump, insatiable.

“Yes, I saw them. They’re a gas.”

He and she sit neighborly calm. He’s given up pressing drink or sugar on her, knowing she hasn’t much taste for either. But he breeds his own slang in her, and she loves that, feeling its do-nothing spirit fed to her, eye-dropper slow.

The room itself is sweetish with the stink of old euphorias. What can be wrong with a man so gaspingly proud of anyone who lives with him? An entourage is work, is that it? Is pride.

“You were great,” she says. “In the pool. Positively great.”

“A-a, that’s the sugar. I can still hold my breath down there maybe a minute and a half. A quarter.” He’s always showily exact on anything numerical. “Having a good time, Lex?” He nods slyly toward where Kevin went.

“Marvelous. Except—that I can’t stop thinking … about the kids.” Funny, how she can tell him, rather than a woman.

He froggies at her. “Neither can I. Why I came in here. Arthur and I’re spelling each other. Giving the dames a night off.”

Arthur and Violet brought him up. He is their work.

“Somebody should give you a night off, Lex.”

“Me?” She holds tight, not wanting to give the martyr’s shrug. She doesn’t.

“
We
were supposed to have the twins sit for us. But they finked out. One time after another. Somebody must be paying them more.”

Should she tell him? She weighs it.

He mugs at her. “We always pay the sitters, don’t worry. Cash on demand.”

“Bob—their mother’s been taking the money from them, that’s why. For herself.”

“Why—that’s larceny. From her own kids? Jesus. Jesus. That calls for a drink.” And for the head-set to go on again. Any mention of money sends him to his telephones. He listens; shakes the headband off. No answers yet. “Jesus. And the twins were so good with the baby, too.”

“The baby? … You know—I forgot there was one. A new one.”

“Bets pops ’em like pups … We aim for ten, you know.”

“But how could I forget? I must be spaced out.”

“You? The least freaked-out woman on the road. Bets is afraid of your intellect. I say you’re just shy.”

“My—what? You’re all nuts. Him too.” She gestures.

“Kevin knows a powerhouse when he sees one.” He hands her a refill. “We all know you’ll do something. When you find out what.”