Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (10 page)

"He says I'm
better
," she said to me. "He's a bastard to work with. All I have to do is perform for a half-hour for a lawyer who has the sense of humor of a tree, and
he
thinks," pointing over her shoulder with her thumb, "that I have to know when Beth Carroll got her first teeth and who took her first confession."

"She wasn't a Roman," Phidias said. "Just the husband and the children. She wasn't anything."

"He's like a museum, right?" she said to me, but there was in the remark a sense of admiration that he knew so much.

I looked over at Phidias where he sat at the table. "Is it going to work?" I asked him. I had been asking him that for ten days, but I had become so used to the unreality of living there that the urgency had gone out of the question. Of course it was going to work. Madeleine did not get bad reviews.

"Sure it will," he said, as if success had never been an issue. Then: "Like I told you, Rick. It
has
to work." And suddenly he had made it sound dicey again. I was never satisfied by his assurances. He trusted that some form of Providence would see us through, as it always had. He seemed to assume that if you stated the goal often enough and gave yourself to it, you landed bull's-eye on the target, your parachute billowing down around you. But wait, I wanted to say, what about Mrs. Carroll's goal? "I just want to get through this summer," she had said to David. "I'll cheat the bloody winter and go in September." What about that? Things don't
have
to work, I thought. It is my experience that they practically
never
do. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be caught talking down the dead.

He drank the last of his pale, heavily doctored coffee. Half sweet cream and three sugars. It tasted like pudding. He stood up and walked to the swing door leading into the dining room.

"I'm going up to look through another stack of her papers," he said to Madeleine. "Come when you want."

"I'm going to run a cold bath and sit in it and do isometrics. I may act like I'm eighty-two, but I feel like a hundred."

"You don't look it," he said, wryly but on cue.

"So they tell me."

He left, and she hung back to watch me fill the chowder in. But I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of making a mess. I turned the flame down low and walked over to where she stood by the door, propelling her into the dining room and in the direction of her bath.

"He's the least simple farmer I've ever met," I said as we walked across the wine-dark rug, the glint of polished wood shining in the still and curtained room. "And the least Greek Greek."

"He's always been something of an overseer here. I don't think he's ever spent much time with the cows. That's what the sons are for. Isn't that Greek enough?"

"I guess so. Was Mr. Carroll here when you were here before?"

"In a way." She shrugged, as if all this were too petty to explain. "He was in Boston most of the time. Once the children were born, he and Beth stayed out of each other's way."

"Was it sad?"

"For whom?" she asked as we passed into the lighter air of the hall. We stopped at the foot of the main stairs.

"I don't know." I wasn't certain what it was that jarred me. I didn't, for instance, care who slept with whom in 1945. "Was Phidias as free then as he is now? To come and go in the house, I mean."

"Not so much," she said, looking away to think for a moment. The wide mahogany banister started at the ground floor as a kind of pedestal, and on it was a marble nude of a young girl on tiptoe, reaching into the air to capture some fuzzy Victorian abstraction. Madeleine touched the girl's heels with her fingertips and followed the arch of the foot and rested her hand there. As she turned back to me, she seemed to be holding the girl up on her toes. "You're really very proper, Rick, aren't you? You want the masters and the servants to know their places. That's a very bourgeois notion of aristocracy." When she said "bourgeois," her French seemed a thousand years old. "I met Phidias in Paris, when he and Beth had been traveling together for seven months. They had a chauffeur and a lady's maid with them. The servants rode in the front seat. Phidias rode in back."

"And then they met you."

"It was a big car. There was room in the backseat for the three of us. But it's the sex you want to know about, is it?"

"Madeleine, don't browbeat me."

"He's a very lovely man, Rick. I think it upsets you that he bosses me around. I like it. It reminds me of making a picture, and he knows it. Beth and I were very temporary. He and Beth were together the way people are in storybooks. It never crossed their minds to be sorry they were married to other people. They liked stealing time to be together. Do you understand?"

"A little. I'm just being jealous."

"Of him and me," she said, exasperated. "Be jealous of him and Beth, like I am. They had a destiny."

"What does
that
mean? You're talking movie talk."

She lowered her eyelids and shrugged her shoulders. She brought her hand away from the feet of the statue, and the girl stayed on tiptoe, all by herself.

"They understood the time they had," Madeleine said. "There was something inevitable about them. In the war, you could see how daily life—just getting up again in the morning—killed people. Not them. The day-to-day run of things didn't make them crazy. It made them laugh."

She didn't expect an answer, perhaps didn't even care after a certain point whether or not I was listening. She didn't address the remark about movie talk, and she hadn't stopped talking it either. But the past may be a place where you have to talk that way. In any case, she had made me see that it was not my place to censor it. One talks as best one can, her shrug seemed to indicate. You take a risk. You say things that words are not
about,
things that are the opposite of words. She had looked away from me while she spoke, as if to bring them into better focus for herself. Now she looked me in the eye again.

"You know, she and I were lovers during all that time, from the day we met. But it was the two of them I needed to be with."

"Okay, Madeleine, I'll take a closer look at him," I said. "The green-eyed monster's dead."

"We'll be done with it day after tomorrow," she said, referring to Mr. Farley by the time he took. "Then it will be a vacation." She turned and began to climb the stairs. "I'm glad I have more confidence in my work than you do," she said without looking back, teasing me with it.

"You haven't made a picture in ten years," I called after her.

"It's like riding a bicycle."

She went on up, and I stood there next to the girl on tiptoe. At the top of the stairs, Madeleine turned and smiled.

"You know," she said, "that's a very funny way to make chowder. You're doing it all backwards. If you wait until I'm done, I'll come down and help you." And she walked away toward her room, savoring the joke. The last thing I heard was the laugh, "Ha!" like the toot of a boat. It hung in the air of the hall for a moment and then disappeared. But not before it got to
me,
and it was me laughing back that finished it off.

We're going to make it, I thought. I can't believe it, but we are. We have to.

We had not eaten on the front porch since the afternoon we had arrived. But the rusting, wrought iron table and chairs were there still, and they seemed so solid to me that I had taken them over. I agree with Goethe that every view pales after fifteen minutes, though I am inclined to be restive even sooner than that. Five minutes is about my limit. It is true too that I have stared at a beautiful man in a park or on an airplane for an hour at a time without flinching, but that is not the same thing as a view that is just a landscape. The beauty in nature seems willful to me. So it wasn't the dunes and the cold summer ocean that drew me there at different times of day. I think it was this: that I was not convinced that the house was ours until we had passed the inquisition of Mr. Farley. It may be, I thought, that I will not be able to take care of them after all, but someone has got to remain uninvolved. I did not permit myself in those first days to be anything more than a caller, and it is significant to me now that I spent so much time at the table where I had first paid the call, not yet caught up in anything. The house belonged to nobody yet, and I responded to the limbo it was in by sitting outside.

It was Thursday morning, the third of July, and Mr. Farley had an appointment with Mrs. Carroll at two o'clock. She had made a point of not inviting him to lunch, it seemed. Madeleine was upstairs by herself, making up. At breakfast in the kitchen, she had told Phidias and David and me to meet at noon in the courtyard next to the library. Her plan, I guessed, was to appear on the balcony outside the bedroom doors, when it would be in full sun. We would catch our first glimpse of her from below and at a distance. I could hardly blame Madeleine for counting on the advantage of an operatic entrance, but she was not going to be given so much latitude with Farley. He was coming to see Beth Carroll up close and in bed, the same as always. However, we all agreed on high noon and synchronized our watches. Then we went off in all directions, and I came out on the porch.

As it happened, Madeleine and I were able to flee at once that first afternoon. There was packing to do in Boston before we settled in at Mrs. Carroll's. She did not press me about David on the ride back, and she said nothing more about Phidias's plan than to make sure that David had explained it well enough. "Well enough," I said. When we had reached the highway again and found ourselves caught in the crawl of Sunday traffic coming back from Cape Cod, she asked me to pull over and put up the top. No, I said. Why not? I don't want to. And then she lit into me, and we had the proper argument about the turn things had taken as we crawled back into the neat and gridded city.

It appealed to her sense of risk. It was like singing "Now Is All We Need" at the front lines, the shells popping in the distance. In the car, at least, she had not been full of the high-flown purpose she had since developed. I don't think for a minute that she saw herself as playing a part in the destiny of Phidias and Beth Carroll. She wanted to do it, she said, for the fun of it. She had been turning down movie offers for so long, letting half-finished screenplays pile up beside her bed, that people had ceased to ask. She didn't feel finished or, worse, passed by; but she did miss the work. "I want to get my hands dirty again," she said. The old Dijon mustard-maker, doing up a small batch of the old recipe. I might have asked, "What fun is it going to be for
me?"
except I knew. I hadn't risked a nickel in years. For the wrong reason. I had convinced myself that it gave me no pleasure, and I had once known better. For fifteen years, I had cruised the bars and had risked falling in love, daring to go so far and no further, getting out alive. Whatever the specter of David and me might have in store for us, I could feel that first day the lilt in my head that hazardous living induces. There is no outer manifestation of this feeling, unless it is Madeleine's half-smile. I was half smiling myself.

But perhaps it is best not to attach my shifting and parroty motives to her. I was scared to my bones about David, and at the same time I was thrilled and merry about the caper. I didn't want to explore that paradox too closely, for fear that the answer was Madeleine's own, that I wanted the pain back. But now that I thought of it, I just wanted to
do
something, to do
something.
I don't work, and I don't see people much, and I don't have the patience to sit down with a book. I don't even go to the movies anymore. I just run a lot of little errands. I sat in the car, going home, a thousand years after Madeleine had warned me about the pain, and yelled at her about fraud and shallow graves. She hit the dashboard with her fist and told me I talked like a skinny Anglican spinster. She had said from the porch, "Let's do it." Okay, I must have thought, as long as there is something for me to
do.
And not just taking care of them. I would do that anyway. But as I shouted about the law and made prophecies, I realized I was going to ride shotgun in this caper. The devil's advocate or, since I had been living clean, the angels'. "Wait a minute," someone ought to say, "while we think this over." And they wait because he forces them to, and he does use the time to think, and at last he can tell them what it all means.

Madeleine put in a call first to Aldo, her money manager in Beverly Hills. She had found a quiet place for the summer, she told him, and asked him to pack her a couple of suitcases and air-freight them east. "You hate quiet places," he said, but she ignored him and started her list. She rattled it off like a pilot talking to mission control. Madeleine admits that her mind is a memory bank of the clothes she has worn, both those she has owned and those she has only worn in passing, in films. They say that Isadora Duncan, writing her memoirs, wrote in a large hand on scraps of paper that were thrown about the room as she reached for a fresh sheet. Every few days, a secretary picked them all up and put them in order. If Madeleine were to write hers, the pages would be stacked and pinned like sales slips, all method and no madness. These memoirs of hers would read like the paragraphs about the bride's clothes in wedding announcements. She paced about my living room, the phone in one hand and the receiver cradled between her shoulder and her tilted head. They would have given her a job buying and selling on the commodities market.

"Now listen, Aldo," she said, "for the Geoffrey Beene I have to have the gold chain with the sapphire clasp. That's in the safe. And my gray sunglasses. In the top left drawer of the vanity. Then a scarf. Send a lot of scarves in the coral range. No reds. I don't have any shoes that are right. Go to Gucci and charge me some boots. Ask for Helene, and tell her they're for the Geoffrey Beene. She'll know."

I had never met Aldo, and I was not clear about how busy a millionaire in the computer software business was. I had always assumed that he did a little work on Madeleine's taxes and spent some time on the phone every now and then, ironing out the terms of a concert contract. It was a very different thing entirely to think that she could order him about like the upstairs maid. In the past, when I had asked her for details about her financial wiz, she dismissed the question with "Aldo? Aldo's just an old queen who's been looking all his life for a pet movie star. It's considered a very respectable relationship in LA. I couldn't go on without him." Now, as I listened to her pack a suitcase over the telephone, I thought: Madeleine, don't you dare take advantage of him. Or me, I added, glowering to myself. Fortunately for us all, I thought grandly, I am coming down to Mrs. Carroll's to raise these questions of ethics. I pictured us walking in pairs like the monks in an abbey, the air heady with ripening as the scent wafted in out of the orchards. And we would idle the afternoon away in a field above the sea while we did a Plato dialogue.