A Fox Inside (21 page)

Lily was breathing hard. Suddenly, appallingly, she began to sob. It was much worse than that night in the house, when she had screamed, for it was low and
controlled
and trapped.

“Charles made me,” she said. “I didn’t want to.”

“No, he didn’t,” said Ford quietly. “He didn’t have to. How did Maggie find out?”

“I don’t know. Charles kept the papers. I gave him money.” She broke off.

“What did you really do?” asked Ford again. But Lily just stared at him. “Very well,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of time. There’s all the rest of your life.”

“Let go of me,” said Lily quietly. Luke did so and she closed her eyes.

“Shell tell me some time,” said Ford. “You’d better go, boy. Give me her car keys first.”

Luke pulled out the ignition keys and handed them to Ford, who put them in his pocket and sat judicially in the rear seat. Luke got out and closed the door.

“It’s all right, Lily,” said Ford. “I can wait. But you’re going to tell me just the same. I’m going to save the girl. I’m going to do it because that’s the last thing you want.”

Luke saw them sitting there, behind glass, the one in front, the other behind with the keys. He walked away.

S
HE THOUGHT SHE KNEW
EVERY
thing
about Jerome when she married him; and she was amused that it had been so easy to do so. He wasn’t what girls of her own age, but then she didn’t know many girls of her own age, would have called a good catch. He was a better catch than that, for not only was he wealthy, he was important; and except for an old aunt who died a couple of years later, there were no relatives to bother her.

It was exactly what she had wanted. Her parents did not have much money. They lived on earned income, though there was always enough of it. And at finishing school, which she had hated, when they found out about the earned income they had snubbed her. She made up her mind early, watching them, what she wanted to do; and she was always smiling and polite. Her day would come.

Then she brought it off, she could put them where they belonged: not yet, because Jerome was older than she and not handsome, but later, when money and power would count for more than romance.

In those days Jerome had still helped to run, once he had completely run, the North California political machine; and though that meant that he had to mix a
lot with the Irish, his family had been there as long as anybody else’s family; and she had seen, with him, the insides of more houses and dining-rooms than she had seen before, and had faced the girls on equal terms in the powder-room, or upstairs before the men came up. She enjoyed that. She had always thought that that was all she wanted.

Her father was dead and her mother approved of her. Her mother at last had something to talk about while she played whist. She now got the real inside dope.

Then her mother died in the same hotel she had lived in for ten years. It was the longest she had ever spent in one hotel, but after her husband died she could not bring herself any longer to move. She did think of taking a trip to Mexico, but when the war came she decided that that would have been disloyal.

Lily did not miss her. Of course Jerome was much older than she was. His friends were older, for the most part, even than he was. In a way that pleased her. She felt more secure with older men and they made a lot of fuss over her. But Jerome refused to cultivate the young, and that meant that, as time went on and his associates died off, he would lose his grip on the party machine. The trouble with them was that they had no sense of continuity. They wanted absolute power in their lifetime but they were content to let it go at that. But Lily would have to outlive them. She did her best about that, but Jerome simply did not like younger people. Some of the younger people did not know who the Barnes were.

What she did not know was what was wrong with him. Neither did he. When it began to show up he
moved down to the Atherton place and secluded himself there. He would not listen to her advice. He never did. He told her it was incommunicable and to shut up.

“But you can’t shut me up down there,” she said. “You’ll lose everything.”

He had looked at her very quietly. He had just got back from the clinic and he knew what was ahead of him. “You married me for one thing and you got
another
,” he said. “You simply made a mistake, that’s all.”

“But I’m a young woman.”

He smiled. “Not so young,” he said. “And I’m an old man. You’ll just have to make the best of it.” He had gone out of the room and up the stairs to dress for
dinner
. She looked after him, hoping that he would never come down. She never forgave him for speaking to her like that. It was the only thing of the sort he ever had said to her and she knew it was true. That was what made it so unforgivable.

He did not come down very often. He stopped talking too. He saved his words for Maggie. He was fond of Maggie. It was he who insisted that she be sent away to school. And he did that quietly, too. One day, she hoped that it would not be too long, he would not be able to speak at all.

She spent ten years that way in Atherton. Their friends melted away. They were his friends, not hers, and he didn’t seem to want to see them. She put up with Senator Ford, and then even he stopped coming round. She hated card games. She hated everything she had that she had always wanted. She could remember the
first time the dining-room table had been set for only two. Even so Jerome had not come down to dinner. He refused to see her.

On the way to the dining-room, that first time of dinner alone, she had seen Ethel going upstairs with a tray. Ethel was younger then. They did not talk very much, but she saw that Ethel knew why Jerome did not wish to come downstairs. She wasn’t going to justify herself to the servant, but she had to talk to someone. She said she would take the tray upstairs herself.

Jerome was sitting propped up in bed, surrounded by newspapers. He did not say anything to her and she did not say anything to him. She was going to, but instead she put the tray down on the table beside the bed.

“I wish you would come down,” she said, after
looking
at him. “It isn’t pleasant for me to eat alone.”

He stirred slightly in the bed, looking at her foggily. “I know,” he said happily. He got gaga sometimes, but not often. She went downstairs and ate alone.

When Ford got her to give the parties Jerome seemed to enjoy it. He would lie in bed waiting. The night of the first one, when she was trying to put on her ear clips and wondering if they didn’t perhaps make her ears look too large, Ethel came in and said he wanted to speak to her. She frowned into her mirror, wondering if she really did still look pretty and wishing there was someone to tell her she was. Jerome was the only person who ever did and she did not care for the way he said it. And she saw, in the mirror, that Ethel had caught the look of irritation on her face. Ethel could be trusted, but she couldn’t be fooled. That was what made her unfireable. She has a sinecure for life, thought Lily, just like me, and
how she must hate it. With a nervous giggle she got up and went down the corridor to Jerome’s room.

She could look down at the hall as she crossed the landing. The house had that special party feeling, not for a lot of stiff old codgers, but for people that might be full of suspense and hope and laughter. Older people didn’t have a social laugh. They only laughed with each other in a conspiracy, as something socially proper to do, timing it right. She went into Jerome’s room and closed the door.

“You look lovely”, he said, “as usual. You’re
thirty-nine
, aren’t you?”

She could feel her happy smile beginning to fade. She did not see why deliberately he had to be difficult.

“Oh, well,” he said, “Ford will tell me all about it.” He played fretfully with the coverlet. She wondered suddenly if he
had
to stay in bed.

“I’m not old,” she said. “I don’t have some filthy disease.”

“Oh, well, you didn’t inherit much, did you?” he said. She did not like the way he was so gentle with her. Or the way he always watched her, sceptically, as though looking beyond her.

“I was just wondering who would be first and when,” he told her unexpectedly. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. You won’t find them very interesting, I’m afraid. Young men never are.”

He was right. He was always right. She didn’t. It was so tricky to tell how far gone he was. He had his sharp moments even now. She asked about his disease, cautiously, here and there, and she read up in various books which she bought and hid in the library behind
the
Biographia
Americana
,
but she found out very little. Sometimes fast and sometimes slow, she repeated to
herself
. Paresis was locomotor ataxia. Locomotor ataxia was paresis.

When she said she needed the power of attorney he gave it to her without hesitation. Yet there was
something
in those yellowing hands that was not weak, but only resigned. After she had it, she sometimes let people stay on and come upstairs, for after a party the emptiness of the rooms downstairs depressed her.

“You’d better take care of yourself,” he said one night. It was one of his better weeks and there were flowers in his room.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing,” he said, “just your hair.” She was wearing it shorter, because that made her look younger, and though she hadn’t had it dyed she had had it rinsed. Nowadays she washed it three times a week.

Ethel came in with a tray. Lily slipped out of the room while she had a chance and went down to the garage. She had an appointment at eight.
She
went to
them
now, drawing up before their houses, or entering a restaurant alone, while the waiter smiled, or sitting well back in a corner, waiting for them and trying to be both
self-possessed
and cheerful.

But then she had met Charles and she saw things
differently
for once. She didn’t want Jerome in the house any more. He got to bother her. No matter what she did she was always aware of him in his bedroom, waiting for her to go in and talk to him before she went downstairs. And once, in the library, when one morning she was going through the monthly accounts and had
her glasses on, she looked up and saw him standing in the doorway in an old green paisley wrapper. She took her glasses off at once. He had caught her in a moment of complete self-absorption. It wasn’t often that anybody ever did that.

“It’s a fine day,” he said. “You should be outside.” She watched him and saw that he was not really very weak. He was only bed-weak and sometimes confused. But he had the sickroom smell to him, despite cologne and everything that Ethel could do.

The first time Charles stayed the night they were
halfway
up the stairs when Ethel came out of Jerome’s room and without looking at them, though she must have heard them, went down the corridor towards the servants’ stairs.

Charles gave Lily a swift glance.

“It’s my husband,” she said. “He isn’t well.” They had gone on up the stairs, but she had not felt quite so happy.

Charles sometimes seemed bothered about Jerome.

“Is he really dotty?” he would ask, with the special well-dressed contempt with which he wore the clothes, and the opinions, that she had bought him.

Even so, maybe Lily would not have gone through with it if she had ever believed she had a firm grip over Charles. She had to have Charles. She did not need Jerome. And then she discovered that Maggie wrote to her father. She never got to see the letters. She believed he burned them. But he wrote answers to them and there was no telling how much he knew or might say to Maggie.

“Give them to me,” she said to Ethel one day,
catching 
her with the outgoing mail. His handwriting was shady and ran uphill, a series of pale blue spiders, uneven as the handwriting of an epileptic, with the same
pulsating
systole and diastole of the size of the letters, even though all his letters were shaped the same way. Ethel gave them to her, but she did not open them. She was still too in awe of Jerome to do that. Instead she looked at them and dropped them down the mail shoot on the corner. It gave her something to do, to take a little walk to the box.

During the summer Jerome became disturbed. There didn’t seem to be any particular cause. He had long clear periods, but they always seemed to upset him. And Maggie had not written for some time. Lily wished she would write to him, if it would shut him up. Nor could Lily make her do so. She saw as little of Maggie as she could manage.

One evening Lily and Charles had been up to the opera and had then driven down to Atherton, stopping off on the way for a few drinks. They got back to the house at about one-thirty. The lights were on
downstairs
as well as upstairs. Lily ran up the steps of the house and into the hall. Ethel was leaning over the banisters, looking crazy. Her hair was all awry.

“Oh, madam,” she called. “Something’s all wrong.” She had been crying and behind her they could hear the racket of things being thrown about. It sounded as though it came from Lily’s room.

Jerome appeared. He was carrying the top of one of her side tables, with the legs off. It was poorly glued at any time and always came off in damp weather. She looked up at him. He was tall, slim, and grey, but he
did not seem hysterical. He was calm, though his speech was thick.

“What have you done with Maggie’s letters?” he shouted. It surprised her that even though he mumbled she knew clearly what he was talking about.

“Nothing,” she said. It had never occurred to her to touch them. Jerome’s eyes strayed to Charles who was standing behind her, watching.

“Get your lover out of here,” Jerome said. “It isn’t his house. It’s my house.”

“Jerome,” she called. She wished there was someone to back her up. She was really scared of him now.
Perhaps
she had gone too far. He had grown much thinner and under his gown his thin legs stuck out pale white and trembling.

“Get him out,” shouted Jerome. “I’ve had enough of this.” He gripped the rail and then, taking the table top, dashed it down to the hall. It was light and sailed at a curve through the air, smashed into the mirror over the commode and brought down a vase in the clatter of glass.

“It’s too late,” screamed Jerome. “It’s too late. I’m too old.”

“Okay,” said Charles behind her. He swept past her and bounded up the stairs, two at a time, grabbed Jerome, pushed him into his room, pulled the door to, and locked it. Jerome did not pound on the door, but just before Charles got to him Lily had seen his face. It was the only time in her life that she had ever seen him scared.

Charles came downstairs, took her arm, and led her into the library. They had to brush past Ethel, who
stared at them stupidly. Charles poured Lily a drink and then himself one, swallowed his neat, and taking out the bedroom door key, which was rusty and elementary, played with it in his hand. Then he threw it down on the coffee table, where it clinked and slid sideways over the glass top of the table towards a cigarette box, where it stopped. He shoved his hands into his pockets.