On Keeping Women (23 page)

Lose or win, after that he’d dry out his tools and get to work on Mr. Bob’s telephones, on which he and Miss Lorna have an arrangement. She can’t head off all the brokerage-houses; Bob always finds one where the Kellihy credit—even when it’s his—is unfortunately enough. Telephones are even harder. It takes finesse to know when his smart Bob is just drunk enough to ignore a tape-recorder going. Or else so far gone that you can cut off altogether the wire he’s talking on. Especially when the boy himself is wise to the deal, and for Arthur’s sake sometimes even cooperates. “Whyn’t you let the boy run, Miss Lorna? And pick up the tab later?” But she’d rather give Bob the money on an apronstring. Can’t stand to see him play with it. “Now if you want a free hand with your investments, Mr. Bob,” is what he’ll say. “We could come to an arrangement.” And Bob would gleefully cooperate. “For your sake, Arthur. For your sake.” When the market-mess that Bob will make is brought to her attention, he, Arthur will say “I couldn’t help it, Miss Lorna. I
feel
ugly, before my time.”

But no hurry. After this party, no money will roll in for a long while.

At this point in his ceremonial drink, the mother of the idiot-boy opposite comes out of their porch pushing him before her, settles him with his lap-toys, spreads her arms in a slavey gesture to the air, and goes in again. By then the early silence is already nibbled by the tiny drumming of the cars coming cross-river from the Thruway, a mile north.

In it, he stands on the edge of the rainforest, on the moss-terrace where Crooty, his first white lover, raised tree-orchids, which he called his “ladies,” sending far abroad for their tender, mad illuminations. While wild plateaus of rain sweep the garden, he and Arthur watch from behind the knobbled Georgian urn in the drawing-room, and sip Darjeeling with rum in it.

Finished with his drink—his dream-chaser, as Violet calls it—Arthur always walks briskly back inside to his family, to what they still call his butlering. This morning, holding off, he’ll stand and hark.

Back home in the Islands is a grave he’s been paying for.

Somebody’s walking on it.

No, the grave itself is walking.

It walks up-island, on the Atlantic side, in the jagged, creaming water where nobody swims, and up past the old white inn of his first job, where the British came to eat the breadfruit pie. It walks the ocean all the way here, stiff as a waterspout.

Hoo. I know what you come to tell me. Arthur, don’t you let yourself fall ugly up
here.

Git, I tell you. You not my grave any more.

It’s gone.

The inch of chaser in his goblet is teetering like an ocean. He swallows it.

Over the road, some yards south, a tall shape parts the low scrub that hides the doctor’s old dock. A man. Balls naked. Not the doctor for sure. Who’s away anyway. Maybe the older boy. Who won’t set foot over here, but met in the village always greets him most politely. A chilly white couple, that boy’s parents, cold white fish of the suburbs, like a lot of them along here. And with scarcely a sign of any kinfolk. Zombies, that mate themselves up out of the marshes. But he likes the boy.

“Hoo,” Arthur says aloud, arching a wrist.

Not the boy. Moon’s sinking, but he can see a pair of those tiger-shorts. Big blond buck, only one Bob could get to wear them. Piss-drunk by the stare of him. Oughtn’t to drive. But he ambles to the lone car left parked under their embankment, drags out a shirt from it but slambangs into the front seat still bare. Off he goes.

Hoo.

Telephone ringing, ringing, inside the house. Where’s that sot, Violet?

But thank the Lord for modern sound.

Time to take the dye-job in anyway, Arthur. Sun won’t be good for it.

Stately as all get-out, bowing to the mirror inside the band still on his wrist, he obeys.

The boy on the porch opposite, who is a man of thirty-three, says nothing.

The Kellihys are meanwhile having an affair.

Five miles inland from the river, the old coachroad to Tappan divides formally around the scabbed and poulticed bole of a tree left over from Revolutionary days—and then flows on again. The village fathers want to cut the tree, but the state won’t let them. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. The caretaker of the De Windt house, a shabby landmark which sits well back in the unshaven meadow left of the tree, can never remember which of the two pays him. He sleeps where George Washington once did, and that’s enough for him. Or would be, except for the nights when an old MG two-seater, kept for honeymoon sentiment, cracks by him on its way to the Seventy-Six House inn only a mile away, but doing eighty, every time. Yes, he knows the car. Knows them. The Seventy-Six has long since closed for the night, but for those two, his friend Walter—the waiter who sleeps
there
—will always open up again.

Betsy is singing “There is a street called Pearl,” in the fullthroated tenor which friends will know took her only when she was high. Bob is driving straight for the commodity markets of the world.

He dangles there bloody-mouthed, with a shaft through a chest that was always delicate. Bets’ handbag—containing the pics of five children, the address of a doctor on East Seventy-third Street, four unpaid parking tickets, a calendar-diary with redprinted exhortations, and the Lord’s Prayer written on a purse-sized atomizer—is thrown clean. Her eyes are wide, but no more affrightened in the next world than they were in this one. She is dented forever, but clean. The robins will stop their singing but after a moment begin again. The air has that classic cool of before dawn, any summer morning. How they have connected, the Kellihys, in the end!

Light as a second crop of summer grass, their legend will be. The best man at their wedding—Sean, the philosophy brother—who will come first to identify them, will remember forever how the bride’s dress, overflowing the MG like a sundae its saucer, had had to be tucked back in, and how wittily he did so. “Vanilla Coupe!”

M
EANWHILE A MAN IS
walking home from Spain. Up the dark River Road, to the future of his house. He’s thinking of home—a church he no longer believes in—and of how to desanctify it. Where a church is groined of flesh, and gemmed at odd altars, with children’s eyes—that’s not easy. There must be a ritual. None he knows of doesn’t scatter dung.

A car soughs by from side to side of the road. Doesn’t kill him. Though the driver, jerking a shirt on, has both hands off the wheel. Nothing will kill him; he walks like the hardy skeleton of himself, feels it. Slightly nervous, though, in this blotchy close landscape with its tame quicksilver river, after the burnt-in encaustic of alp and high rivulet he’s had from his balcony, and from the window above his bed before that, all of it a black-and-tan anodyne for a doctor changed into a patient. With the night wind scratching its single bow on sand, and a gray smell of mountain lichen. He’d grown to like best the days of imaginary sun. When off in the distance or ozone, a hole in the shape of a speculum tapped an orifice in the sky. Imaginary Spain tapped him. Between the stern alluvial plains offered his eye, and the alto lisping of the nursing sisters, he began to think of it as a land of public prayer.

It surprised him that the accidie common to his disease hadn’t affected him. Otherwise, a clinical case, stringently clear—as proper to one diagnosed by the patient himself. Collapsing in a circle of colleagues all merrily lifting the white drinks that meant gin-at-last and the end of their tour, he had heard their bow-tie voices stop. From his plague-ship already lifting anchor he’d called out from his faint, up to that rim of wellwishers already halfway to the American shore. “Hepatitis. You’ll see.” By James’s later report, none of them had got it. Only him, the least adventurous. Who, once released from the round of museums and Plazas, and drinking only bottled water, had played cards the whole time, even on the excursion-bus, whose mountain-driver’s technique had been fully described to Charles, in a last letter from health. The trip had been routed them by way of return, or else he’d never have found himself in any country’s provinces. Once, playing twohanded with his seatmate Dr. Bill Caldwell, lifting his eyes from a no-trump bid as the bus lurched over the land-rim, he’d seen into an abyss three thousand feet down. And once, a passenger chicken squawking free from the rear in a moult of dirty feathers, had defecated on him. But more likely the germ had been in the greasy deck of cards, already opened, that Caldwell had got from the roomclerk in Barcelona. Paid for, of course. Had he brought his own backgammon set, he mightn’t have been walking here, four months too late for this American vegetation of shadows. Effete, dainty almost, after Avila. None of it standing clear. But he’d known there’d be two or three sets in the crowd, and so there had been, he’d played all the way over, in the jet. On the bus, all three sets had been bespoke. So it must have been the cards—which, clever as it was of him to note even in illness, he hadn’t mentioned to Lexie, as one of the household details a husband might. In Montevideo—that fight they’d had about her slumming—she’d cried out “You always travel light. At other people’s expense.”

At first, he’d intended to write all this to James. Since their internship, James had written scores of letters to him from his travels; half-way on, Ray had found out they were not only to be shared with Lex and the kids, but to be kept. Now at last he could have returned the compliment. With an import James’s letters had never had. The real key to James was in those wives, and other women. In the way James liked to sleep with strangers, and the pace of it, he was almost a foreigner. Not like himself, brought up to a hygienic distaste for any flesh but the family’s. Which Lexie had almost been, by the time James brought him home. And normality takes over hard enough. Four children, no expense—or love—spared. Short of being analyzed he was as clinically aware of himself as most. Perhaps his own family had had a certain distaste even for its own flesh. His maternal grandmother after leaving instructions for the undertaker to pluck the hairs that grew on her toes, had arisen just before the end to manage this herself. That incident had helped send him into medicine. Before he understood that only vanity had caused it, or else that obsession with mortality which sent women into self-pity before their time.

“Mortality’s more like it,” Lexie had offered. “At ninety-six.” She had a head on her shoulders, not always set square. But women, she said, were in charge of the basic facts. Which kept them as normal as they had to be. “Oh I’m fascinated with docs,” she’d said the night he met her. “Have to be, I work for them. But
seriously
—they show up our civilization, don’t you think? Plugging ahead like mad in the midst of it. And never giving it a thought.” At the time he’d counted this in as one of his attractions for her. Her talk since had made it clearer. He was to be her lead-in to the world. And must expect to be beaten for it.

Except for an anxiety on James’s part now and then over Lexie, they didn’t speak of wives. No reason for her to see his letter to James; she’d know the conclusions in it soon enough. But he’d taken a precautionary measure. “In any case, don’t show this to Lex. I write her separately. But these are the facts.” Which are that work, not a wife, is the key to him. Twisted now out of its lock.

In the end he’d mailed only that one of all the letters written on his balcony. Using the Hermes typewriter he’d had since college—just the toy a mother would give—he’s managed to handle all the personal notation of the years since; yes, it’s traveled light. Until the Spanish hospital. There, in its own weakened state, it seemed to be learning a newly liverish language caught from his own inflammation. The minute he finished that first letter, his eyes watering with the effort of feeling, he saw suspended above that dwarf keyboard, in blue, hepatic print
Don’t trust James.
When he asked himself why, the old machine, which was himself in a way, imprinted on the keys, without his touching them:
Sunday afternoons.

They’d been feeding him so much liquid, and such unfamiliar ones, and of course no alcohol or other dehydrants; under such treatment perhaps the brain is forced to make its own wine. Or in that alkali climate where the bones dry so serviceably into age, a compensating fleshy edema of the spirit occurs. Down below his balcony, when he first gets to it, the wind-abraded passersby distort like El Grecos. So that’s all it was three centuries ago then—good cloth.

“They have marvelous cloth,” he writes Lexie on a Sunday afternoon. “I’ll bring you some.” On the following Sunday, she’ll read it over, sitting on the porch with James. Behind them, his spirit walks as it always has—behind them. The children too are trained not to break in on him. Next door is the smashing that attracts. “No depression,” he writes to her carefully, and to James looking over her shoulder. “As I often tell patients, in hospital one’s accessory education has a chance to come out. No renal symptoms in the eyes; if this typing’s off, blame the old Hermes. Have Charles cut the bamboo before it gets out of hand. Has the appointment at Joint Diseases been made for Royal? Ask Chessie—does the river still speak Swedish, saying ø, ø (he’d inked that in), near the dock? There’s a young nurse here, student, reminds me of Maureen.”

It had been a terrific strain, to put himself in touch. He’d almost forgot to mention Maureen. Actually it was the woman who swept out the wards who reminded him of her—the same irritating patience. A dirt-swallower, our Maureen—of other people’s dirt. And so am I, he’d thought. He’d hailed Sister Isaac then, and had her put the typewriter under the bed.

Was it depression, when the inner monologue brimmed out of the pores like sweat, when the blood-count seemed to attest to the patient himself the rate at which white lies could breed like corpuscles?

In the night he woke out of hand, on a raft of bed-sheets criss-crossed with bamboo thoughts.

Poling the raft for a time was Borden Wheeley, a Miami internist who’d been the self-styled barker of their trip. Born a cracker (“The mind is as red as the neck,” Caldwell had whispered) Wheeley’d come to medicine from the ministry, and found himself giving so much free advice that he’d taken a degree in psychology “so’s he could ask patients to pay for it.” Now he had “every other worry-wort in the Sarasota Ayreach in my lap,” plus two farms “to invite you-all to, or a marina; take your pick”—and a Rolls-Royce. After dinner his eyes tended to water over how “Muh pappy never got to ride in it”—which effectively prevented him from seeing the check. “These here Spanish are more in touch with their feelings,” he said at every pause in the itinerary. (And now again, poling—with the bargepole he maybe knows deepdown you wouldn’t want to touch
him
with.) “Europeans are. And it ain’t all flamenco—look how they put themselves in touch. ’Cept for us crackers and a few Texans, you people all so tight-assed—.” He finished most sentences with a drink. “Like lab hamsters?” Caldwell had said. “Open the trap-door, and trot-trot out come the feelings? Which have tripled overnight? God help Sarasota? Borden sashayed out of his chair to shake a leg with the widowlady he’s picked up in Lisbon. “He’ps itself.”