Superior Women (49 page)

“No, but I really wish we did. I’ve always wished I were thin and blond,” Megan tells her, as Lavinia crosses her mind.

“Well, what I would have given for a shape like yours. Nobody’s content with themselves, have you noticed? But I probably got myself in plenty of trouble without a shape.”

“Well, me too. With.”

They both laugh, a little warily—still sizing each other up, still questioning.

The rescue of Florence, once launched, turned out to be less difficult than Megan had imagined.

First, she remembered that in the office they had a San Francisco telephone directory, the fat book of yellow pages. Under Rest Homes she found what came to a single page of listings, and on that page, easily enough, she found the address that Florence had given her. “California Pines,” the place was called.

At that time it was eleven thirty in New York, thus eight thirty in San Francisco, a perfectly reasonable time to call a rest home, Megan decided. But still she had to force herself; her hands shook and she didn’t trust her voice. She was sorely afraid of whatever she would find out about Florence. Afraid of Florence.

A creaking, elderly voice answered the phone, which in her panic Megan assumed to be the voice of Florence. But no; however this person would summon Mrs. Greene, right away.

And Florence, who arrived with merciful alacrity—she could have been waiting for Megan to call—Florence was instantly reassuring. Her voice, if not young, was clear and strong. How smart of Megan to find her, Florence said, and how good of her to call. Although she, Florence, was perfectly all right, never better. It is pretty silly, actually, her being in any rest home. The truth was, she took sick the winter before and finally she had to have an operation. Her gall bladder, it turned out to be. And that damned Harry arranged for her to go from the hospital to the rest home. And since then she’s just not quite had the gumption to get out of there, just too lazy, she guessed. And she did like the people, although most of them were too old to be much fun.

“But we can’t just gab on like this, this call must be costing you a fortune,” she said to Megan.

Megan explained about WATS lines, and then she said that she wanted to come out to California, to see Florence. And at that point the conversation became very strained, and difficult.

Florence repeated how well she was, what a lovely place, what lovely friends. No need for Megan to go to any trouble. She went on and on until Megan concluded that Florence hated and was deeply ashamed of where she was.

She had to come to San Francisco on business, Megan lied. She had booked a double room at the St. Francis; would Florence please just meet her there? That way they would have a chance to talk, maybe plan something. Maybe, even, Florence could come on to New York for a while?

And that is as far as they have got, with plans; the next day Florence, in the car that Megan has rented, will go back out to “California Pines” to collect the rest of her things (it is clear that she does not want Megan to come with her). Megan will attend to the business that brought her out here. And then they will take an early afternoon plane for New York. Florence has been assured that Megan has plenty of money, plenty of room. She, Florence, will visit “for a while.”

•     •     •

The last time Megan stayed at the St. Francis was for the short visit that terminated in New York with the horrifying news of Adam’s murder. Megan now thinks about Adam—and about Cathy, remembering that she did not call Mrs. Piscetti again, having once failed to get her.

And she decides against calling her now; it is easier to imagine or to assume that they are all well and happy, Stephen growing up, college, all that.

She does wonder about Cathy’s priest, the father of Stephen: where and how he is, and if he thinks much of Cathy, and of Stephen. Very likely he has more children, by his wife? Megan does not wish him well.

Adam’s murder has remained unsolved, a “random killing.”

But Megan is in fairly close touch with Aron Marr, son of Adam; his novel is coming out the following fall, two book clubs are interested, and Megan believes, and has confided to Janet, that it will do well. “Maybe just as well Adam’s not around to see that,” is Janet’s wry response. “I’m not sure that he could cope with a successful writer son. And Jesus, a novel about a gay relationship.” Megan thinks that Janet is probably right.

“It was when I lost my job that everything went bad,” Florence tells Megan. They are on the plane, flying east, just now above the sharp and snowy Rockies. “It’s supposed to work the other way around, I know,” says Florence. “The man gets laid off and there goes the marriage. But with us, like I say, it was me laid off, ‘retired,’ is how they put it, and even though Harry still went off to that old shop of his every day, there I was at home every night, which he wasn’t used to, nowhere near.

“He’d got into the habit of going out a lot, he told me at first, eating out by himself, which at first I believed. You see these old guys in restaurants, with their papers, halfway flirting with waitresses and looking perky enough. And at first I got sort of a kick out of
fixing for myself, fresh salads and fruit things and funny breads, all food they’d never heard of at the drive-in.

“But then it began to strike me pretty funny. There we were, me and Harry, old married folk, supposedly, and legally that was true, we surely were. And every night him getting all fixed up to go out by himself, as he said, and me cooking fancy suppers just for me. So I made this little suggestion that maybe we could combine what we were doing, now and then. Sometimes he could maybe take me out, and other times I’d cook up something nice for him.

“And then, well, Harry acted like I’d made some immoral proposition to him. That’s a men’s trick, I’ve noticed—have you ever, Meg? When you say something they don’t like to hear or that makes them feel someways guilty, the first thing you hear is that you’re the one that’s crazy. Have you noticed?

“Well, he acted so peculiar that I knew something must be up, so I just up and asked him, was there some good reason we could not go out at the same time and to the same place?

“And then, at last it came out about this lady, this kind person who took him in to feed while I was
gallivanting,
that’s the very word he used, I swear it to you. Gallivanting out at the drive-in, he said. Well, if toting trays and clearing off slop and always moving faster than you can, if that’s gallivanting I guess that’s what I was doing.

“I said to him, in that case maybe we should see a lawyer, so’s he could divorce me and set up with this nice lady, this forty-five-year-old chick. Well, that’s another men thing—they all hate that word, divorce. They act like it’s some bad invention that women thought up. Always want to have their cake and eat it, men do, is what I think. Cowards, most of them.

Megan is thinking, perhaps irrelevantly, of Henry, who never said that she was crazy. Who is not a coward. Who did not want to have his cake and eat it, unless you count Lavinia, whom Megan does not believe he has seen again.

•     •     •

About that, Megan is right. Henry will be invited by Lavinia and Potter to their wedding anniversary party, and he will decline.

“Maybe there’ll be some kind of work for me to do in New York,” says Florence, above the Mississippi River. “I know I’m too old for waitressing, although in some ways it seemed an ideal sort of life for me.” She laughs. “Maybe you and me could open a restaurant?”

Megan is becoming somewhat adept at reading her mother’s mind, and has noted that although Florence says a great deal, she also leaves a lot out. And so Megan now says, “Well, sure. But you don’t have to be in such a hurry to get busy again. I have my work, and there’s a lot for you to see in New York.”

Megan is also wondering what she will do with her mother when she herself does stop working, a step that she considers more and more often.

It is clear to her that Florence will live forever.

June 1983. Georgia. A softly blue day that seems both a respite and a reward, after the punishing cold rains, the ferocious storms of the winter and spring just preceding.

In the relative cool of midmorning, Megan has begun to set the table for the people in Peg’s house: Megan herself, and Florence, Peg, and Vera. Henry Stuyvesant, a weekend resident. Jackson Clay, who has been “visiting” since April. And two current temporary guests: Peg’s son, Rex Sinclair, and Megan’s old friend Biff, who has come down from New York to celebrate Florence’s eighty-third birthday—today. Biff and Florence became great friends during Florence’s sojourn with Megan in New York. Lovely friends—and Megan thinks then of the first sentence in Florence’s letter to her from San Francisco, the letter that incited her rescue mission: “I am living in a lovely house, with some lovely friends.” Megan smiles, thinking that this could more accurately describe her own current situation.

She is distributing place cards, which seems a very silly effort for this particular group, but Florence herself has made the cards, painting small blue flowers on them all (forget-me-nots, Megan decides). Remembering old rules about not seating husbands and wives or lovers together, and considering the impossibility of applying those dicta to these people, Megan smiles further, and concludes that they might just as well sit where they usually do.

The brutally cold and wet past winter and the cruel spring of freak snowstorms, rains, and floods have left in that area a strange legacy of growth. In the distance, where the creek overflowed and
remained overflowed, its gentle slow water turned into ravaging, churning mud, on those beaten banks bright new honeysuckle vines have started up from the old; and in the meadow, the ancient furrowed field that lay half the winter under heavy snow or muddy waters, tiny wild flowers now insanely bloom, riotous colors, among brilliant upshooting leaves of grass.

Around the house, Peg’s house (they all still think of it as Peg’s although in legal fact it now belongs equally to Peg and Vera, Megan, Florence) more blooms: Vera’s roses, everywhere, in bushes and climbing over trellises, all the way down along the road to the still upright tobacco barn (now converted: Megan lives there, Henry stays there with her on weekends). White roses, yellow, palest pink, and the deepest, most brilliant scarlet. And wisteria, gone mad: now, after a false, aborted start in April, it blooms and falls all over the porch, all heavy and full, sensuously lavender, fragrant.

It is all so lush, so too beautiful, really, that Megan wonders if the group of new women who are expected tomorrow, whom she is driving to Atlanta to pick up tomorrow, won’t be just a little daunted, or depressed? The contrast could be too much?

The house is run now as a temporary shelter, a way-station hospitality house for the homeless, mostly women but sometimes men too. There are nine in the group that Megan will pick up tomorrow, from an Episcopal church in Atlanta. Megan and Peg are in close touch with churches in Washington and in Atlanta, which themselves have served as shelters, over the long and viciously punishing winter.

The task of driving, picking up new people, has fallen to Megan through a process of elimination: neither Vera nor Florence drives at all, while Peg genuinely hates to; and Henry, who still teaches at Chapel Hill, is there only on weekends.

Actually Megan does not much care for driving either, and she is still uneasy with the big old cumbersome VW van out on the road, but under the circumstances these seem inadmissible feelings.

Once, though, one of the women whom Megan was driving
down from Washington—it was late at night; they had been slowed in Virginia by car trouble, had to wait for a new generator, in the rain—that woman, who was sitting in the front seat next to Megan, quietly pulled out a long curved open knife, from her big shabby plastic bag. “You just pull over, I’ll take all of everyone’s money, now,” the woman said, softly, but with a sort of desperate violence.

Megan pulled over off the highway, in the wet hot black Southern night, smelling of privet and red clay dust—they were in South Carolina, near the Georgia state line. “I don’t think anyone has any money on them but me, and I don’t have much left,” Megan told the woman, in a small polite voice that later struck her as ludicrous.

She had chosen this particular woman as her front seat companion on the simple grounds that she looked even worse than the rest, her face more sadly sagging, with great dark sunken eyes, her heavy body creaking with defeat. As Megan handed over the few dollars, all she had left after paying for the generator (the small-town garage had refused her credit cards), she thought, You’ll be lucky to make it through another day.

Not having even asked for money from the other women, or for Megan’s cards, the woman climbed out of the van, went off into the rain.

Megan had to give up the money and let the woman out, she thought at the time; she had no choice—feeling the fearful breath of the five other shabby women from the backseats of the car.

But later it seemed to her that she had handled it all wrong: surely some kindly, cajoling phrases would have worked? The woman didn’t really want to go off like that, probably. And that incident still frightens Megan; recalling the fearful glitter of those huge old eyes, Megan closes her own eyes against it, and she shudders, chilled.

In any case, for both acknowledged and for hidden reasons Megan dreads those drives. One dark and impossibly “neurotic” fear is that they simply won’t like her; they won’t speak, will be silent, surly. And sometimes that has been much the case; there are long drives during which no one responds to anything Megan says, to her tiny efforts at jokes, at reassurance.

Nor does it all go smoothly when the formerly homeless people are actually settled there, either. There have been some scaring illnesses among them, bad personal episodes, racist incidents (a woman objected that Jackson was sleeping down the hall from her room, and used the same bathroom; another woman whispered to Peg that she
suspected
that Vera might have “a touch of color” in her). Accusations of theft, when small valuables have been misplaced. A man who insisted that Henry looked at him “suggestively.” Several people with seemingly chronic depressions.