The Arrangement (17 page)

At Don’s, Al ordered a dozen oysters, and they talked about the grizzled men at Crespin’s in Dijon, their blood-flecked hands, the green shells prized open in their palms and pearly pale inside. Mary Frances had to work to keep her face clear; she felt like a wall that had rotted through, plaster turned to slurry inside.

She would pack their things this afternoon.

*   *   *

The house at Eagle Rock had not rented that summer or fall, and they took it back. It looked as they had left it, the bedsteads draped in muslin, the kitchen coated with a fine film of sticky grime. Mary Frances pulled out the rags and brooms and did some satisfying work, but Al wandered the rooms for days, an engine sputtering to catch.

She left an atlas open on the coffee table in front of the fire, but the pages never turned. She suggested books and movies, a drive down to the coast, and he would nod his head, tell her to go get ready, but she’d find him napping in his armchair half an hour later. She asked him if he’d talked to Larry, to Gordon, anybody at the college, but his answer was always no. She spent a lot of time watching him when he was lost in thought, and she stayed up late to write when she was alone.

For the holidays, they went to the Ranch. Anne was secretive and snippy. She took at least one private phone call in Rex’s office and came back as flushed as if she’d been sprinting up and down the stairs. Mary Frances knew she must be seeing someone, but she wouldn’t say, which meant she had a reason not to. She thought of Gigi’s friend Nan and the nine-month engagement she was bearing somewhere in San Francisco. It looked exhausting to be single, let alone a single mother.

Baby Sean was toddling to and from any reachable surface, babbling his sounds, and Edith kept asking when the next new baby might be on the way. Mary Frances and Al looked at each other politely and smiled, asked Edith for another slice of cake, or Rex for his thoughts on the governor’s race. Deflection seemed everyone’s default position, but when Mary Frances had Rex alone in his office, she explained more of what was going on.

“Al says he wants to adopt a baby.”

“Adopt?”

She could not look at him when she nodded, but she had always shared everything with Rex, the privileges of being oldest.

“Your mother didn’t have you the minute we were married. You shouldn’t be so hasty.”

“I’m not being hasty.” She sat on the edge of Rex’s desk, looking at her shoes.

“But someone is, if I catch your meaning.”

Mary Frances shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re supposed to know, what he’s supposed to know.”

Rex laughed. “You people spend too much time in school.”

“Daddy.”

“If you want a baby, Mary Frances, I have no doubt you’ll get one.”

“But Al has no job, no . . . drive.”

“Now, now. It’s the season for miracles, Dote.”

She let herself be led into another conversation, but it marked the first time a talk with her father had failed her, and she knew the fault was her own. She hadn’t been able to be honest with him. He’d see her differently in light of her correspondence with Tim, and whatever else she was carrying on there, and so she’d streamlined. She made a different story, one that was just as true as the real story. Her feelings for Tim were not so different from dreaming of being a writer, or an actress, a fantasy based on slender experience, slight encouragement, and the vast space inside her head to fill.

She hadn’t heard from him in weeks now. He was traveling Europe. She had no way to tell him they’d left Laurel Canyon, no good address in this country or another. The one thing Tim’s attention required was paper and ink, and while filling notebook after notebook, journal after journal, she realized what a flimsy requisite that really was.

Something drastic would have to happen now if they were to continue, something equally drastic as her starting a family to continue with Al. From where she stood, either prospect seemed both unlikely and necessary, vital. A rebirth.

*   *   *

After the new year, a letter from Tim arrived. He was grateful for their friendship, for the time they’d spent with Gigi. He understood from her that all was well and they had moved
back to Eagle Rock. But he would like to repay their generosity, or perhaps ask another favor, it was hard for him to tell—but they were such good friends, he felt he didn’t need to stand on ceremony. Would Mary Frances be able to escort himself and his mother on a tour of France? They needed someone with her skills in companionship and conversation, both in English and in French. Mrs. Parrish wanted to revisit the places she had loved in her youth, and it seemed like the timing would be right in February . . .

“What do you think?” Mary Frances said.

Al let the letter fall to the tabletop. “What do you think?” he said.

*   *   *

Al did not sit on the edge of the bed and watch her pack. Into her trunks went clothes for the ship, silks and satins, the brocade pumps of Anne’s she’d admired at Christmas, Edith’s fox collar coat. She packed her French dictionary, needles, and yarn; it would be cold enough for mittens and scarves, and in Paris she would buy perfume. What was she packing for, really? She knew the sort of ladies companionship Tim suggested in his letter, the long stretches of tea and cards, museums and churches, but she would have his audience as well, unbroken, for weeks. She could not seem to push her imagination past that; perhaps she was not meant to.

From the other room, she could hear the drawers in Al’s desk open and close, the typewriter silent. She told herself this time would be good for him too, time to take up the poem again, but she’d tell herself anything that made it easier to leave.

He was standing in the doorway, his gaze now fastened on the spillage of slick color from the lip of the trunk.

“Your feathers,” he said, his smile tightly drawn.

Her hands felt thick and clumsy. She bundled empty hangers back into the closet, like a shuffling of bones.

“Do you remember,” Al said, “the summer I sent you to London with Edith? You didn’t want to go, but I thought it would be good for you.”

She remembered. Her mother believed the secret to a long marriage was a long vacation, but she had been crushed to leave him in Dijon, mostly because he seemed so anxious to be alone. It was then he began writing the poem. In September, she returned, and their honeymoon was over.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Mary Frances said.

He braced his hand against the doorjamb, studying the frame, as if he planned to fell it. There was anger in him, but she could no longer tell if it was meant for her.

“I keep telling myself that,” he said. “I know.”

And so he loaded her bags into the Chrysler and drove her to the train. It was just a trip, he told himself, a last fling before they made their plans. He had not brought up the child again, but while she was gone, he would talk to some people, find out what their next steps needed to be. When she returned, she would be ready. He was grateful to Tim; they would not have this kind of opportunity again.

“You’ll write?” he said. “I meant to make it easy for you. Send some stamps and envelopes.” He laughed lamely. His chest was collapsing.

She reached into the satchel at her feet and pulled out a
bundle of stationery bound with ribbon. She thumbed it like a deck of cards.

“One for every day, Al. Already addressed to you.”

At the station, he hefted her bags from the trunk to the porter, checked her tickets, escorted her to the platform to wait. She stood tall, she was so tall, with her hand folded sweetly in the crook of his arm, pale against his suit coat. He concentrated on that hand, the pale, slender fingers, the thin gold band. When the train pulled into the station, he passed her hand to the porter and watched the body of the train for a time, imagining her passage to her compartment, her hand once reaching out to steady herself before she found her seat, and was off.

She was writing as the train left the station, frantically, so as not to watch Al’s face, but god if she wasn’t writing to him. She couldn’t help herself—he seemed the only solid place to turn, and so she wrote him a letter then and there, how this was like a movie they were in, and this stretch of time just a memory that hadn’t happened yet. She would dissolve out with the steam and then back in a month from now, and they would continue. It was as honest as she could be. She loved him still, and she was unable to articulate the transgression she was about to make beyond that. She would go, and then she would return.

And so began another kind of honeymoon in France, the sort she will take until she is too old and frail to travel, the chance to slip away and see her life grow small on another coast and with it the impossible knots and complications. What seems unfixable can be fixed, if only by distance.

These days she keeps a suitcase packed beneath her bed and leaves the specifics to Norah.

There is no man waiting for her, here or there. There’s been no man for years, which has sharpened the effect of her letters and journals they’ve been sorting. These last several months have given her suddenly all the men at once. It will probably be good to get away from that for a time. She can feel the loose pieces rattling even when her mind is still.

The marmalade cat hears the knock before she does, bolting for the kitchen, her food bowls, and safety. Mary Frances stands, tucking the combs into her silvered hair, a smack of lipstick in the mirror by the door before she answers it.

It’s a man in his shirtsleeves with his suitcase, his face obscured by the long brim of his hat. There’s a familiar set to his shoulders, the peak of his chest, and the fine square hand he extends to stroke the marmalade cat, but Mary Frances does not know him. The marmalade cat pushes up to nuzzle the brace of quail he’s holding.

“I stopped in the village for directions,” he says. “When I mentioned your name, everyone had something they needed me to bring to you.”

She laughs. She knows the hunter who saves his quail for her, and from the pocket of the suitcase, her visitor takes a jar of olallieberry jam, a paper sack of dusty white salamis, a glassine envelope of powdered spice. She fixes on the folded birds, their bodies limpid, hung the way she’s told the hunter they do in France.

“How can I help you?” she asks, taking the quail.

He is from the library. He’s driven a van all the way across
the country for the boxes, his suitcase full of her books rather than his clothes, her books for her to sign.

“If you don’t mind,” he says. “And then I can collect my parcels and be out of your way.”

“Oh, no,” she says. “You have to stay for dinner now. Who will help me eat these quail?”

“It’s not necessary, Ms. Fisher. I have a room waiting for me in town, and a long ride home.”

“And I don’t want to keep you working late. But still, it is a lot of quail.”

He seems to consider his options, his eyes warm and brown, his eyes not familiar, not the eyes she’s longing for, but still somehow related to this sifting through the past she has been doing. This man, now appeared, a kind of souvenir.

“I’d be honored,” he says.

She turns and leads the way inside.

Sea Change

Spring 1936

T
he train would be three days to Chicago, another to New York. The seats in her compartment were plush, the window wide, a berth the porter cranked down from the ceiling every night, a little johnnie in the corner with a curtain, a sink that unfolded from the wall. Each human concern fit neatly here, and twelve deep to a car, at least six cars of sleepers. It was like a tiny, efficient neighborhood, hurtling across the country.

The film of travel settled into her skin. The train rattled and swayed, loud and drafty, then blasted with heat so that her coat was always on and off her shoulders. The passengers talked endlessly about nothing, and when she went to the dining car, there was nothing she wanted to eat, and outside the window the red desert became the measureless bitter plains, the fields beaten back beneath the swollen sky, and then all was gray or darkness.

Mary Frances could hear a mother and child in the compartment next to hers, a toddler as given to words as he was to tears and thuds and crashes, and then his mother’s stroking voice. She couldn’t make out what was said; parenting remained something she spied on.

She swung over the edge of the berth and huddled in her nightgown, her bare feet dangling above the floor. During this interlude with Tim, whatever happened would be something discrete, a miniature life. She rolled her palms open in her lap and wished she had someplace to pray, someone to promise, but there was only herself. That hardly seemed like a promise she would keep.

Outside the window, the middle country raced by.

At breakfast in the dining car, she faced the mother from the berth next door, whispering to the boy as though they were alone. She bent to serve her son’s eggs, to pass the fork to his rosy mouth. There was no man traveling with them, and the woman wore no ring. Mary Frances thought of Anne, how frazzled and overwrought she would be traveling with Sean. The boy smacked his hands against the tabletop, sending spoons flying. His mother laughed, and the steward brought her more.

Mary Frances said, “Your son reminds me of my nephew.”

The woman smiled, brushing the crumbs from her lap. She spoke with such a thick accent it took Mary Frances a full moment to hear her words after she said them.

“Oh, Mum, he’s not mine. His parents are in New York a week already.”

“Oh,” Mary Frances said. “I just assumed.”

Now looking at the pair, she could chart no resemblance. But the woman beamed at the boy in a motherly fashion; she was patient, and she seemed to enjoy him.

“Have you always been his nurse?” she asked. It was too personal, but who was to say, on this train, what she should and should not do? It seemed, suddenly, important that she know.

“Since the morning he was born.”

The woman smiled at Mary Frances and turned her attention back to the boy, his fists now full of his breakfast and headed to the floor. Everything, Mary Frances thought, eventually came down. Both the nurse and the boy laughed about it.