Any Minute I Can Split (30 page)

“Look, Mother,” Roger said patiently. “I have a feeling this is a big fuss about nothing. After all, I'm really doing exactly what you want me to do. You don't want me to live like a hippie and now you know I'm not. I'm ready to become a responsible citizen, work on a model organic farm, maybe supply unpoisoned beef to you and people like Pfensig right here in Philadelphia . . . he'd probably be furious with you if I lost out on this chance. What'll you tell him?”

Sillsy smiled shyly. “Did you hear what you called me, Roger?”

“Huh?”

“You called me Mother. You haven't called me Mother in years.” Sounding as much like a little girl as she ever did.

“Mmmm.” He was slightly disconcerted. “Well, that's because I'm trying to help Pfensig to get you to act like one.”

“Roger,” Sillsy said conspiratorially, “you can't imagine what that man has done for me! I think . . . I think I'm getting ready to give up alcohol!”

“Holy Moly.”

Again that girlish smile. “He's giving me
his
strength.”

Ichabod came in to say that he had located Cowpey, who was now on his way home. If Roger was impatient or upset he was concealing it fairly well at the moment.

“You don't have a beer in the fridge, do you?” Roger asked.

“Yes, of course, dear. Dark or light?”

“One of each.”

Sillsy went to find Franchesca. A moment later Crowley and his brother Cooper walked in.

“Ah,” Roger said. “Great white hunters.”

They had supposedly looked very much alike when they were young. Both were tall and fair but Crowley had grown florid and rotund, balding only slightly by the age of fifty-eight, while Cooper was bald, slender and professorial in manner. Crowley ran Adams Malties while Cooper, a doctor by profession, spent six months of each year in Vietnam and the other six hanging around the Public Library and various favorite places of his brother's, like a black whorehouse in the city. It was Roger's theory that his mother had been in love with Cooper for years, a theory based on the rather complicated fact of Sillsy's confessing to him when he reached maturity that during the war years when both Crowley and Cooper had been overseas, she had been sleeping with Ichabod. Followed by Roger's realization that his mother often confused the two dissimilar names and had once asked Roger if he didn't think Cooper and Ichabod resembled each other.

“Margaret, my dear,” Crowley said, ignoring Roger, “it's good to see you, you're looking ravishing!”

Margaret blushed for the part of herself that had wanted Crowley to see she was looking all right again. He had always been flirtatious with her until their one brief visit while she was pregnant, when he had disappeared after a glance. If Crowley had lost some of his looks, he still looked at you in a way that made you worry about what he saw. She thanked him demurely.

“Coop,” Crowley said, “Look at this beautiful girl! Don't you think she's too good for my son?”

Cooper laughed gently. “I was looking at your beautiful grandchildren.”

“Grandchildren?” Crowley was briefly, genuinely puzzled, then his eyes fell on the twins. Rue had climbed up onto the love seat at the far window and was looking through the window. Rosie sat on the rug
nearby. Rue was making noises and Rosie was attentive, the effect being that Rue seemed to be relating to her sister what she was seeing through the window. Rosie was also watching what was going on in the room. Sucking her thumb and watching.

“Yes, of course,” Crowley said. “They're lovely. They look exactly like you, Margaret. Thank heaven.”

Franchesca came in with Roger's beer and Crowley asked her to get more. Roger and Cooper chatted pleasantly together, while Crowley, ignoring them and the twins, led Margaret to the sofa, where they sat down, his arm around her.

“Now,” he said solicitously, “I want you to tell me what kind of year you've had.”

She laughed nervously. “Well, it's been a pretty crazy, I mean a mixed-up year.”

He nodded sympathetically.

“Mostly what happened is that my mother died and my daughters were born.”

“Margaret,” he clasped her hands with his free one, which was warm and moist, Ichabod must have found him at some crucial moment and she was getting the spillover, “why didn't you let me know about your mother?”

She shrugged. “I don't know.”
You never wanted to know she was alive, why would you care that she was dead?

“Suppose you keep your hands off my wife,” said Roger, who'd once told her that his father always made it a point to flirt with his girlfriends. Cowpey complied, but suavely, seeming to ignore Roger even as he was getting distance on the sofa.

“Tell me about this commune you've been at,” he said to Margaret, who was afraid to speak because she was afraid of crossing tales with Roger.

“Well,” she said finally, “we don't really think of it as a commune.” She licked her dry lips. “It's really a working farm, with animals . . . goats, chickens, a few pigs that get slaughtered for meat in the fall. A couple of
acres planted with everything from beans and potatoes to corn and green vegetables. We really work pretty hard.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Mmm. Let's see. It's really, uh, four couples, married people, I mean . . . and then their kids, and then a couple of older kids, you know, teenagers.”

“Aha, all very respectable,” he said with a knowing wink.

“It really is,” she said.

At that moment Rue chose to get down from the love seat by climbing on Rosie's head. Rosie let out a startled yelp and began crying. Roger quickly rescued her and she stopped crying. Roger's father was watching him.

“Do we have something for them to sleep in?”

Ichabod said that he had made a bed out of quilts on the floor of the guest room. Margaret thanked him.

“We're not staying overnight,” Roger said.

“Oh,” Crowley said. “How much do you need?”

“A hundred grand,” Roger said casually.

Crowley laughed. He laughed because it was such a large amount of money and it was still meaningless to him. He'd been a rich man long before he and Cooper became the joint beneficiaries of their separately rich parents' estates. “What for?”

“I'm going into business,” Roger said.

“What kind of business?” Crowley asked.

“Organic beef cattle,” Roger said. “I actually need more than that but I'm selling the house in Hartsdale.” Roger would never pull the same kind of bullshit with his father as he did with his mother, doubtless because nothing in Crowley's background had ever taught him that it was seemly to believe everything he heard. He gave his father some details about the farm, the land, their cattle plans. All pretty straight. When he was finished, Crowley just looked at him in a remote, hostile way. Searching for flaws.

“Organic beef cattle,” Cooper murmured. “That's interesting, I gather it's a growing market.”

“It is,” Roger said. “I don't expect to do this just for fun. I expect to make a going business out of it.”

“I don't see why you shouldn't be able to do that,” Cooper said. He had always been more sympathetic and encouraging to Roger than Crowley was.

“Even without the cattle business,” Roger said gratefully, “the farm comes pretty close to being self-sustaining now.”

“Since when did you worry about sustaining yourself?” Crowley asked.

“I don't,” Roger said quickly. “I never worry about it, I just thought it would be interesting to try.”

“Are you offering to relinquish any other claims on our money?” Crowley asked.

“I'm relinquishing nothing!” Roger shouted. “I came here to get some money, not to throw it away!”

Sillsy appeared in the doorway. “I told Roger,” she said timorously, “that I'd like to talk to Dr. Pfensig before I—”

“Before you BREATHE, damn it!” Crowley snapped at her. “You want to talk to that idiot before you decide to wake up and breathe every morning!”

Sillsy shrank back into her chiffon pajamas, disappeared from the doorway. Tension hovered over all of them. It was touch and go for a moment whether Crowley might give them the money just because Sillsy had offered Dr. Pfensig as a delaying tactic. Cooper started to say in his gentle conciliatory way that he wondered if he and Crowley might not together take an interest in such a business but Crowley silenced his gentler brother with a glance.

“The market happens to be lousy my boy,” Crowley finally said.

“Spare me the bull,” Roger said. “I'm not one of your idiot employees standing on a line turning out Shredded Shitties.”

Margaret felt tears coming. They weren't going to get the money. Maybe they wouldn't even be able to sell the house. Roger would be furious and frustrated and
would surely take it out on her. In the past hour anyway he seemed to have traveled back a considerable distance in time and if he couldn't do what he wanted to do he might get stuck there, and she with him. She wouldn't ever again let him use her as badly as he once had but to state that implied that she would always have the reserves of strength needed to propel herself elsewhere. She was scared. And exhausted.

She wandered out of the room as casually as she could, through the hallway and into the library. The library was a source of amazement to Margaret every time she saw it, not because of its large number of elegant, unread leather-bound books but because of the even larger number of less elegant thoroughly read ones, not to speak of vast collections of magazines—
National Geographic, Time, Life, Esquire, Sports Illustrated
, Crowley's other sporting and gun magazines, and so on (not to speak of Sillsy's secret collection of movie magazines, hidden away in cupboards beneath the open shelves). Idly she picked up a
National Geographic
, burrowed into a corner of the green-leather sofa and leafed through the pages without seeing them because she was crying.

“Margaret?” It was Crowley.

“Yes, Cowpey?”

“May I come in?”

“Okay.” She sat up. He sat down next to her on the sofa, took her hands again.

“You've been crying, Margaret.”

She nodded.

“Is it about the money?”

“I guess so. At least partly.”

“You like this scheme of Roger's?”

“I have mixed feelings about it.”

Crowley nodded. She found herself wondering how she would feel if her own father held her hands the way Crowley did. She thought of her last visit to Boston and found a heaviness in her chest that made breathing difficult. They hadn't come within three feet of each
other. The last time he'd touched her had been after the funeral and then before that . . . who could remember? Tears, horrible embarrassing tears which Crowley would misunderstand, filled her eyes again.

“You're putting me in a very difficult position,” Crowley said softly. “There's nothing harder to resist than a lovely young woman's tears . . . and yet there are some decisions that have to be made on a very hard-headed basis.” He brought her hands to his mouth, kissed them.

“I know,” she said, “I wasn't even thinking about that.”

“What were you thinking about?” Looking deeply into her eyes.

“I was thinking about my mother.” So effortless maybe it wasn't even a lie.

“Ah, Margaret, I wish you'd let me know! I would have wanted to be there.”

“I was very confused.”

“Was she ill for a long time?”

She shook her head. “She committed suicide.”

He dropped her hands as though she'd just confessed to hereditary syphilis.

“Oh, my G-g-g-od!” Crowley said. “When was this?”

“Not so long ago.”
Once a week for the rest of my life.
“I guess just before I—we went to the farm.”

“There's no light in here!” Crowley said abruptly. He got up and turned on the overhead light.

“Didn't you ever know anyone who committed suicide?” she asked, because he was staring at her wildly.

“N-n-no,” Crowley said. “It wasn't done.” But he heard what he'd said and grimaced apologetically. “I mean except for economic reasons, like the Depression.”

How about noneconomic reasons, like depression?

He asked, almost hopefully, “She wasn't bothered about money, was she?”

“She thought a lot about money,” Margaret said. “Her family was wealthy once, I guess I never mentioned
that. Until the Depression, as a matter of fact. But that wasn't the whole thing. Mostly she just felt futile. She had no career . . . no real interests to pull her out of herself when she was low . . .”
No love
 . . . “Money might've made it a little better, she could've gone on trips sometimes, things like that.”

“God,” Crowley said, “I wish I'd known. I wish you'd come to me for help, Margaret.”

She smiled. “That's sweet of you. But in the long run it probably wouldn't have made any difference.”
Rich people commit suicide, too. As a matter of fact, suicide may be enjoying a bit of a vogue. Ontogeny anticipates phylogeny.

“Still,” Crowley said. “You should have told me, Margaret.”

“The truth is I didn't know myself.”
The truth is that somewhere I did know, which was why I'd stayed away for longer than usual. I felt I couldn't go there pregnant, I felt guilty about it for some strange reason.
“I wasn't home for a while, I was pregnant and it was uncomfortable for me to travel . . . and I was so busy . . .”
Too busy to even write and tell her how busy I was.

“It must have been agony for you,” Crowley said, and that simple statement brought forth a quantity of tears unlike anything since the time immediately after her mother's death. Her whole body was racked with pain. Crowley held her while she cried and cried and cried and then eventually she was still.