Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (29 page)

Why do we always fight like this?

Don't call me again, all right?

I'll just come over and give you a kiss.

Don't let me stay the night.

Aldo allowed for a small pause so that the ambiguous last line could break our hearts or rattle them at least. Then he called: "Intermission." We relaxed and began to move closer to talk to her, shrinking our circle, but Madeleine put up her hand and touched Aldo on the arm.

"That's enough, isn't it?" she asked. A chill brushed the base of my spine. She turned to Tony. "Do you get the idea of it now? The second half is just more of the same, only my voice gets weaker and weaker. I do the last number in sign language."

"Thank you," Tony said, letting her out of the full contract. "It was much more than I hoped for. They don't exaggerate about you. There's no one to compare you to."

"The others have all retired," she said. "But thank
you."

For a moment I was so upset, upset out of all proportion to what was going on, that it was as if she had pleaded with Aldo: I can't do it, I'm too old. I had always known she would have to say something of the sort some day, and thinking about it made me hold my breath every year at the concert in June until it was over and they were on their feet applauding. This was the crisis Madeleine and I had been heading for all along, and it was the point of the changes we had made in the evening's concert. It was an inevitable result of the open-ended visit she had paid this summer. Though I loved her with no qualifications and felt unabashed and self-important at having a star of my own, I paid dearly for it, with a terrible case of nerves that lasted from April to June. For thirteen years, I dreaded that she would be old, more than I ever dreaded she would die. The three days I spent with her would serve to reassure me, and then I would forget about it until the next year.

But here it was. I couldn't avoid the moment now. I was holding my breath even as it happened, so I forced it out like a long sigh of relief and then plunged in, for once not testing the depth or the temperature.

"You'd better
not
sing anymore," I said. "If you do the whole concert, we'll feel obliged to pay you, and we can't afford you."

"I'm cheaper than Frank Sinatra," she said. She wasn't ready to be agreed with quite so fast. "Or since it's a small crowd, I could give you a discount."

"No dear," Aldo said. "No deals. As your manager, I can't let you give it away. I have to think about my ten percent."

"You see," I said, "you're a natural resource. I think your price is regulated by law."

"What do I know about money?" she asked with a shrug of her velvet shoulders. "I still think in francs."

"Money is the stuff you give away," Aldo remarked.

"Well, what shall we do now?" she asked, closing the lid on the keys. "I'm overdressed for everything." She looked up at David. "Do I look like a maître d' in this getup?"

"You look fabulous," Aldo said. He never missed a cue.

"Why don't you let us sing the rest?" David asked.

"The rest of what?"

"The rest of the concert," I said. How can it possibly work, I thought.

"Oh no," Aldo said. "We'll sound like the munchkins."

"So what?" Madeleine trumpeted, and she opened up the piano keys. "I think it's a marvelous idea. Can any of you play?" We all shook our heads no. "All right.
I'll
play."

So, without an intermission, the second half began. I looked across the piano at David, wondering where he had learned it. He was going to know the words as well as I did, I was sure, and I had always assumed she had no meaning for him. Until now, I thought he had heard of her the way you've heard of a first-class writer you know about and never read, like the non-Americans who win the Nobel Prize. I guess I took it in for the first time, what Phidias said about David taking care of Mrs. Carroll. He didn't patronize Madeleine, didn't diminish her wishes and fears, and he zeroed in on what kept her strong, tuned to the things she took pride in. Madeleine picked out the spare and lonely music of "When We Were New" and waited for David to take up the lyric. I suppose she had no doubts that Aldo and I would chorus along, so she didn't have to look at us. We looked at each other and agreed it was the best thing anyone had come up with.

David began in a shy and muted voice, and Aldo and I took up the backup after a line or two. It was a very sultry song with the three of us singing it, ripe with midseason and the constant sun. Neither Phidias nor Tony had a clue how to keep up with us, distracted as they were by inexperience. They watched, and they watched each other, too. David, it turned out, didn't know all the words. His enthusiasm carried him along far enough, and Aldo and I filled in the rest. Aldo sang as if he were caricaturing Madeleine, dropping an octave and even hinting at the remnant of a French accent. I probably did too, but I couldn't hear myself in the general din.

"You just need a little training," Madeleine said excitedly. "Why don't we all go on tour together? We'll buy a gypsy's wagon and sing for our supper and never come home."

"We can sing at weddings and feasts, like minstrels," David said. "And set up a stage at county fairs."

Madeleine nodded. She seemed delighted by us parroting her, and in the next song,
"Quant à Moi,"
she joined us for the choruses and exaggerated the Madeleine effect even more than we did. The only French the rest of us could really speak was the French in Madeleine's songs, so we sounded weird and broke up laughing when our eyes met. Aldo was doing his French with such an air of seriousness, his lips pouting and his chins sunk down into his neck. David had faintly raised his eyebrows, and he looked like the young Boyer, casting a disapproving eye on the human lot.

"No one ever sang along with me before," Madeleine said at the end. "Maybe it's because I'm off-key half the time."

"'The Marseillaise,'" I said, correcting her, because it is a story that is central to the myth, a set of concerts for the French army in 1945 that ended with everyone singing the national anthem.

"Well, besides that," she said, acknowledging the reference with a glance straight at me, but too intoxicated by the present to go into the past.

"Will we all wear tuxedos and bleach our hair?" Aldo asked.

"It doesn't matter," I said, "but will we stick together through thick and thin?"

"Yup," said David, hoisting himself onto the piano and sitting there like a boy fishing on a dock. "And we won't want fame or money."

"I think you'd better count me out and be a trio," Aldo said, and then he folded his arms. "But you'd better save some money for your old age."

"What old age?" Madeleine asked, who loved to tease Aldo for being a prig. "That's a sissy's way out."

"If we ignore it," I said, "it will go away. Start the next number."

And we did the last four in a row, with barely a pause between them. We were really pretty terrible, and as we got more enthusiastic and full of the muse, all our showstopper fantasies coming true, we got more terrible still. In the end, it only made it seem more perfect, that we were good enough for this one evening and that we had better get it out of our systems once and for all. As we tore up the ninth number, a barroom song, I had a fleeting wish that we had decided earlier that this was what we were going to do, not so we could have rehearsed but so we could have savored the event and worked up a stage presence. Of course, we couldn't have projected this far ahead when we were upstairs in Madeleine's room. The turn of events that had three of us crooning while Madeleine played demanded the flash of the moment. Take this hour for what it is, I said to myself. I let go, and I had to get louder and put my feet wide apart and gesture with my hands to reach the undersea passion the songs welled up with. Aldo and David and I had all stopped laughing at ourselves. We just sang.

About then, Tony went back to his chair to pick up his drink, still smiling. He seemed grateful to withdraw. He wasn't intimidated, it turned out, and he liked our maniac program. But he didn't want to be involved. It was too gay, though I don't think he articulated it to himself that way. He would have called it too group-conscious, the sort of thing he had enough of at school. Phidias, who had become accustomed to the yammering of his summer guests, didn't appear the least bit fazed that we had begun to do it to music. He followed Tony and then drew him away to the opposite end of the room to talk. When I next happened to look in their direction, they were gone.

When he got going, Aldo had a voice the size of Kate Smith, and he was so irrepressible that he jigged a little in the drinking song and flattened his hands against his heart during the final ballad. Madeleine egged him on, and in the end David was doing a closer imitation of him than he was of Madeleine. That left a space for Madeleine and me, one we had not asked for or planned any projects to fill. I sang along with Aldo and David, but my own exaggerated, ritual parody had begun to subside. Madeleine paid as much attention to me as to them, but not much more. That is what kept it from being soupy and overwrought. Well, it was and it wasn't. I bent over from the waist and rested on my elbows on the brink of the piano and sang exactly to the measure she was playing. A
little
bit like Dick Powell, though I suppose that gives the wrong idea about how really full of myself I was.

There is a reason why we can't say what it is about this song or that side of the street. To know some things, we have to be nameless. The way to say it lies too much through a forest of what things mean. I would be the first to agree that Madeleine Cosquer is an elaboration of meanings that nest inside each other like Russian dolls, but this evening's finale was not limited to her. I had an attack of immediacy about a jaunty lyric I never paid attention to before.

What would the sky do

If it did what we do

And changed its mind fifty times a day?

Aha, I thought, the good news is that we don't have to have anything particular to say. When I asked Aldo the next day what it was like for him at the concert, he said, "You think I don't know? We were just like the four of them on their way to Oz. I mean, who would have thought our condition was in that direction?" That too.

When Madeleine seemed to be dreaming again as she played, as if she had discovered the Northwest Passage through time, I finished up with David. His version of the last song was rueful and winded, as if he were in bed enjoying a cold, while mine was crisp and heavy on adrenalin, like a bootblack buffing a shoe. We were fabulous together.

But I woke up alone. The sun had already passed across the bed and now lit up the dust that coasted in the air in one corner. It must have been eleven or even later. David had left the sheet and bedspread on the floor when he got up, whenever that was, and the sweat had poured out of me when the sun was on me, and now I was dry. I felt stranded, too far above sea level or way below. I was streaked, grimy, and thirsty. I wanted to swim. Five or six bathing suits hung on hooks or lay draped over the furniture. I took down and stepped into an electric-orange pair of baggy trunks that said
GUARD
on the right thigh. Then I stood at the window and scratched the hair on my chest and waited for my head to clear.

I made my landowner's survey, getting all manner of assurance from things that had stayed in the same place—the sea and the marshes, the woods and the rocky fields. It was a small relapse after the previous day, when I was so wildly in love with change, and it only lasted as long as the groggy feeling, a little like sunstroke, wrapped me in blankets. I snapped out of it when I looked down at the courtyard below Madeleine's room, which I could only just see a slice of because of the angle of the roof. I saw the back end of Tony's station wagon. It was open, and there were suitcases on the gravel waiting to be loaded. Wait for me, I thought, don't do anything until I get there. I didn't have anything to say to him when I was with him the night before, so I don't know what I expected to do now. But I got a sudden goose of energy and leapt into action like Popeye. I thundered down the stairs in my bare feet, the cool of the house breezing over my bare body after the heat of the tower. My orange suit glimmered in the halls.

Coming through the library and out into the courtyard, I guess I expected to find the whole group assembled a third time. But it was just Tony. He leaned against the car in a jacket and tie, all ready for his first class. Except he was having a morning scotch. The bottle and an ice bucket were perched on the hood of the car. He looked me up and down.

"So you do have a job," he said.

"What do you mean?"

He pointed at my cock, and then I realized he was pointing at the suit. "Shouldn't you have a silver whistle around your neck, and a coat of white chalk on your nose and lips?"

"I've never been a lifeguard," I said. "David traded suits with a hunky number in Malibu. It's a souvenir."

"Like an Indian's scalp?"

"Like a silk stocking. Are you leaving now?"

"Yes. When are you?" Not hostile, just interested. Just making conversation.

"I don't know. Labor Day, I guess."

"That's when we all used to. It about killed me."

He drank at his drink. He didn't seem concerned that he wasn't being given a send-off. I was here, I realized, for only one reason, to see him out of sight and watch the cloud of dust settle on the gravel drive. Late last night, David and I had spoiled the pretty feelings that followed the concert by arguing about Tony. When we retired to the tower, I asked for the full story of the butler's pantry and made a mistake then and said the equivalent of "I told you so." I said he couldn't take care of people who made a career of hurting themselves. David told me to shove it. He thought he had helped Tony, even if it wasn't evident. He turned away from me to sleep, and I cursed myself in the dark.