On Keeping Women (4 page)

“Bob bought her a hundred-dollar nightgown last week, at Saks’. After he gave her the black eye. They had a party in to contemplate both.”

The next day, at an autograph-party in the bookshop, for an actress who happens to live up here, Betsy went, in a heavy black veil, and autographed dozens of books on her own before the proprietor caught her at it. She said, “Why shouldn’t I? Who else do you know has five children, is going to a psychiatrist, and is only twenty-nine?”

And is a stunner, though this she never says. The veil would be the same one she wears when she walks past us down the road to take instruction from the priest in the next village south.

“Hope it’s a party,” I say. Otherwise, Ray will have to go over and get her through the night. Get them both through the night.

“I don’t hear any cars,” James says.

And the smashing’s stopped.

The telephone rings. I don’t answer it.

“Ray comes in. “I’m going over. I may have a drink or two with them. Don’t wait up.”

Don’t blame him. Please don’t. Drinking with them cures the moment for them, and Ray never likes to prescribe tranquilizers when there’s alcohol in the picture too. He never takes more than one drink himself. But there’s such honey over there for the likes of us. Risk and wealth and youth, all slightly rotting—the decadence that brings flies. When the Kellihys give a party, the whole road comes if asked—apple-cheeked matrons and all, big houses or cottages—for a sniff of high living. After a night at the Kellihys, the cottage-mortgage looks great for another week. Or a week of whatever you yourself are. And the stories last even longer. Did you hear that when Holmesie—the Grand River policeman—stopped them on the road for speeding, Betsy leaned out and hit him with her handbag?

James is at the window. “No, not a party.” He regrets this. “Lexie—whyn’t you go with him?”

I used to. But now I know all the stories.

“Plenty of chaperones,” I say. “Violet, the children’s nurse, who brought up Master Bob too. She steals Betsy’s jewelry, for her Thursday day off to the city. On Saturdays, Betsy goes up to the attic, to Violet’s trunk, and steals it back. Black Violet, their kids call her, though she’s isn’t very. Arthur, the senior Kellihy’s former butler, lives there too. Same color, but they’re not allowed to call him it.”

I like Arthur. His hobby’s making silver flatware by hand, which he sells in the village for little sums. With which to pay the paperboy. Arthur brought up Bobby too. “Bob rehires all the old family servants,” Betsy once said, proudly. “Can it, Bets,” Bob said, that froggy face working. The senior K’s pay, I guess. Arthur and Violet are remittanced here too. So if I want to borrow a cup of sugar—why is it always sugar we borrow?—I can watch a retired butler stirring the soup. I used to like to see that; it made me laugh for the resilience of the world. But nowadays I take care to keep plenty of sugar in the house.

They all drink over there, which is their bond. Retiring into their separate corners as their spells of duty cease. Bob’ll go upstairs at some point, trailing one of his telephone-cords along. His talent is that he never trips on them. And Ray will be left to get Bets through the night.

“Their eldest son’s a pyromaniac,” I say. “That’s all that worries me.” At seven Roddy carries matches in his pockets everywhere. And has been known to light them. “And our trees are so near.”

That’s all that worries me.

“That another pane of glass?” James’s eyes are bright. He knows well enough it’s the sound of our back door. Underneath the great river-trees which border all along here, there’s a path through the thicket between Kellihys’ and us. Which Betsy hopefully dubbed “the martini path” the first year they came. That part of it came to nothing. The martinis, I mean. She has the charm of a child who drinks them. I feel it myself. “Why don’t you go, James?” I say. We’re siblings, after all.

He smiles, but shakes his head.

Outside, the River Road goes palely wandering. Alongside it and below, the riverline itself blends with the dark of its own water and the opposite shore to a height above all our terraces, making a house-of-cloud above all our houses, with no panes to break. At night, when most are asleep along here, I walk the road, learning it. Two and a half miles to the village north, twenty-seven and a half to the city south, but I have only to walk a few paces. The road is always the same.

“Do you have a lover?” James says suddenly—he knows I don’t. “Lexie. Maybe you ought.”

“Ought I?” I know I ought; know I ought not. The daisy petals drop.

“In the city,” he says. “Why not? It would thin you down.”

My laugh breaks in two in the larynx. Like little Royal’s cough; maybe he’s taught me it. I resisted calling him that—for his paternal grandfather Royal—the veterinarian. Might as well call him Rover and get it over with, I thought but didn’t say. And confusing, with a father named Ray. But he resembles neither of them. And nobody is ever confused about Roy.

“Ride the early morning bus in, you mean, to the Elizabeth Arden salon? For an appointment for the hair? And spend the afternoon in bed?” Or take the car, and park it at the bridge. Taxi to the bridge, and you can be home in time to cook. “Some along the road do. I can’t afford it yet.”

We have no smashed panes in our house, only loose ones. The wind breathes through them like a learner.

“Can’t afford it? Do you know what Ray makes?”

I’m getting to be James’s older sister, I think. Not younger. “Guess I’ll go up now. If the lecture on public health is over.”

He can’t bear me to go. He’s so vulnerable. With his long, palomino face. He’ll spin it out for hours, if I let him.

“Three detective-stories by your bed, James. Winners, every one of them. I read them all, last night.”

We stare, head on. I could tell him what he comes here for.

Listening to me is the way he screams.

But until he tells me what I’m qualified for, why should I say?

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

Upstairs, I stand on my double bed to reach a small, pointed churchwindow. Its upper pane is tight, and kept as clean as any in the house. There is another just like it in the bathroom next door. And in the tower. Through them one can see the whole sweep of downriver, and the road, which now that it’s raining hard will still be muddy tomorrow when I walk it, in the four o’clock hour after the chores are done and before they start up again. Chores are comfy, one sinks into them. Better than into tears. Someday I’ll exceed my need of chores, but not yet. Strange, how if I did weep, it wouldn’t be for a man who’s not a bad man (perhaps then I would) but for a wrong turning. Odd, how the wet road steams a different way in winter from what it does in summer. Surely, it’s worthwhile, to clock the moods of a road. Sometimes the cat paces me, picket to picket. Soon I’ll go down.

My nightgown’s thin but not entirely useless. Either for warmth or for love. I lean against the brick wall, shuddering with vitality. Passivity drops from me, chore by chore. I live at the back of other people’s days now, drained this way, drained that—and this is likable, which I daren’t say. They wouldn’t want to hear me say—James or Ray, or other women on the road, either. But I’m learning. Can’t afford the torments of the happy, yet. No James, not yet. But I’m learning my lingo, all by myself.

Out there, the house-of-cloud watches me. I’m awake, and all too ready. But the river, for walking out with only, is my lover now. I transliterate well.

Then I see the cat down there, already picket-to-picket on its way. Drop back into bed then, listen for a child to moan. You love the children, you don’t recede from them. Serving them with small cookies and hard pats. You live back of other people’s days, that’s all.

That’s all.

But in the night the whole house flowered with her silent Mellophone.

That was the state of affairs around the twelfth year. Now add about five. Six. The house is sleek now, fresh as a prism with the light that comes from gently ringing telephones. And so is she. They have three separate phone lines now: one of course for Ray, one for the three older children’s impassioned teen-age conversations, and one for her own activities—the village’s word for whatever its women like her (still young and well-favored and perhaps with more energy than is needed) do with themselves. Since she has help, and the accessory services that help demands, the house is now organized. And so is she.

Both the house and she—having arrived with their mutual weight of goods and children at a certain recognizable stage for many such houses along the road and such wives—now spin like tops, singing ones, around an orbit whose central truth hasn’t yet been revealed (all are agreed on that) but surely will be, perhaps on retirement, or at the birth of the first grandchild. When it will come too late to be taken advantage of. So meanwhile she goes into the city twice a week. To learn what she can. Parking her car at the bridge.

Once a week is for her real and honest Continued Education, the phrase used to describe the route of women like her, by the college she attends, not in the city actually, but on the opposite shore of the river, halfway down. There she’s met women who are in various stages of finding either their professions, themselves, or merely each other—which is not to be despised.

“What a relief,” one says to her, “to find so many others who’re hysterical.” Racked with laughter, the two have to leave the studyhall. “I’ve never had a fit of adult giggles before,” Lexie says. She’s begun writing a thesis on Roger Bacon, though not quite able to explain her choice of subject to the instructor. “Because of that sixth-grade-reader story, I think. The one about the clock that said to him ‘Time is.’ And then ‘Time was.’ And then wasn’t there a last one—‘Time will be’? Or not?”

Plaut, the instructor, can’t say, but approves the subject. As he’s done for all ten of his students, though in admitted bewilderment.

“Not that you aren’t as bright as—.” He halts. Ten women stare at him, all different, all feral with need. “As butchers,” he said. “But the subjects you choose are so in-between. Extraordinary. Not a major subject in the lot of you.” Does he hesitate, resting on her? “No. Not one.”

They discuss what a truly major subject might be—a ridiculous pastime in which Plaut’s blond beard seems to thin itself from being plucked. Perhaps because it discloses a strong chin, even a dimple, those in the class who don’t fall for him, tend to confide in him, excluding only the one woman in the class who already has a profession, a second who admits to already having a lover—and herself. At the term-end party, Plaut makes a speech. “I’ve learned so much,” he says. “What strange lives you all lead. Such interior ones.”

Their outdoor girl, who, whether she comes in riding-pants or ski-boots, or in bikini on a bicycle, speaks only in monosyllables, squints up at him frostily, but does not condemn.

“Is it abnormal—?” Plaut goes on. “I can’t decide. But I think I owe it to you to tell you. That my relations with my own wife have much improved … from my chats with you honest ladies. In fact we are going to have another child.”

A strange speech. Exactly what Ray might have said, barring the child. And since Ray now teaches a class in birth-control, and their own relations have bettered, perhaps Ray has. What strange lives
they
lead. She herself has neither fallen in love with the instructor nor finished her thesis, for one and the same reason. Her other weekly day in town.

Only her new talent for deceiving others shocks her, at first so deeply that she wants at once to tell Ray. But even as a younger man Ray used to bumble out everything, and doctorhood has turned any tact he has toward his patients’ ill health, leaving him transparent to the rest of life. The three children, now in their divining teens, would know at once. As it is—to come home to family dinner just in time to sit down facing them, with her thighs still ravaged, wet and open from adventure—and to make the usual mother responses: “Charles, will you wash those grubby hands, please”—no.

Or worse, to arrive back before any of them, but so numbed, drugged from sweet excess with a stranger, that after her long soak in the bathroom she can only drag herself to table in her dressing-gown, there to be catered to like an invalid by her own daughters, who are just now in a religious stage, alternated with certain budding sexual vanities and drowning-wild gawks of their own—? No to that too.

There’s a pinkening shudder comes over a woman who finds herself mother and lover at once; early in marriage she’d met it first. When she and Ray, on a dark Sunday, and under the shade of her by then bedraggled purple velvet “hostess” gown, had made such slapping suction with their bare breasts that the boy of three and the eighteen-month-old girl, wakened from naps, pattered in to clamber over them and join the game. Under the babies, they finished off.

That was animal-nice but somehow never could be repeated. Except in the breathy nirvana-dreams of lady anthropologists, where mothers gave suck and fuck at the same time. Ending up like the two such on the road here, with each other—two bitch-bellygoddesses, with an appliance between. In the road’s only real Colonial house.

Ray, summoned there late one night, had told her about it, entirely without humor—which he can never apply to bodies—but in one of those bursts of confidence which even the best of doctors has to have. Giving her his sex at the same time.

These days, she accepts both more gracefully. The morning after, putting off her second day-in-town until the following week. She’s no sexual orgiast in terms of numbers; in fact being with two men concurrently bothers her. Those little friendships which two bodies make, must make, however transient-to-be, those clues of voice and nerve-code so quickly learned; here she doesn’t transliterate well. And admit it, there are hazards in these amours. She gets—not so much affectionate as—magnetized. No matter how unsuited her brain tells her a man is—or even how scoundrelly, the rest of the week she tends to brood on him, and to centralize. Casting herself far more importantly in his vision than sense tells her she is. For, because of her home circumstance, it is always she who telephones. And however happily received she is, doesn’t that cast a certain light—on these affairs?