Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (30 page)

"Did we sound like cats in heat last night?" I asked.

"You mean, when you were singing? I thought it was charming. A little precious, perhaps. But if you'd lived with my family in that room, you'd have thought last night how far the human race has come since men lived in caves. If my father had walked in, he would have killed you all with his bare hands."

"Then why did you leave?"

"No, I have it all wrong," he said, caught in a sudden reverie. "He would have killed
himself
with his bare hands. I've always thought my father must have died like Rumpelstiltskin, who tore himself in two. But in my father's case, they called it a heart attack."

"Did you and Phidias go somewhere and talk?" What business was it of mine?

"Yes and no. We went somewhere, and we didn't talk. To my mother's grave, in fact."

"Oh."

"Yes. They do that a lot in
Wuthering Heights.
But maybe you're not a reader."

"I've read it," I said. Then, with terrific patience, "What happened?"

"Nothing." He turned around and splashed another ounce of scotch in his glass. "I didn't offer you a drink because it's before breakfast for you. It's before lunch for me." He looked out to sea and spoke as if he had been a mere witness and not an accessory to the crime. "I didn't fall down and cry and hold on to Phidias's skirts. I thought it was strange up there, and it made me lonely. I suppose it made Phidias feel better." He took hold of the car's aerial and bent it toward him as if he were stringing a bow. He knew he wasn't getting it right. "I suppose I'll remember it some Saturday night this winter, and I'll spend an hour making drunken phone calls to John and Cicely. Or maybe to you, Rick." He let go of the antenna and looked at me. "In a word, nothing."

"What do you do, beat it against a wall to get it off?"

"Are you going to yell at me like Phidias?" he asked, suddenly alert to the fact that he might have someone new to play with.

"No. I'm going swimming. I only came this way because I thought my friends were here."

"Your friends. What a quaint idea."

He took the glass between his teeth and held it there while he picked up the bottle in one hand and the bucket in the other. He leaned into the car through the driver's door and set up his little bar on the passenger's seat. He took the glass from his mouth and wedged the scotch-on-the-rocks between the windshield and the dashboard, just over the steering wheel so he wouldn't miss it. While he went around to the back of the car to load his suitcases, I paraded across the courtyard like a lifeguard. I was making my way to the water, intending to leave him as robbed of farewell as the others had done. Of all of us, I sure as hell was the last holdout about Tony. Being my own age, Aldo had at last made me feel how wonderful the differences were between one man and another, as if we had been shaped by different sculptors in different styles. Tony made me base, made me feel superior to him and critical and, in the cankerous faults of my heart, glad he was a mess and not I. As if he were some kind of pariah who would take all the bad blood and bad faith with him out of the world I had just caught the rhythm of.

"I'll think of you on Labor Day," he said, and now it seemed like a taunt. I stopped at the corner of the house, one bare foot still in the gravel and the other in the wet grass that started here and went around into the deep front lawn. "And don't forget to answer your phone when it rings this winter. By then I'll have figured it all out."

He swung himself into the car and slammed the door.
"
I'm unlisted," I said, which wasn't true, but I don't think he heard me over the starting of the car. "I'm not going back there," I said, a little louder this time, and now he didn't hear me because he backed up with a jolt and a little screech. He braked when he was almost on top of me and then put the car into forward gear. I crouched so that I was level with the car window, and I meant to announce as he pulled away that there
wasn't
anything to figure out, that that was the problem in some things. But he looked so sad when he took his last look at me. I think it had more to do with the summer place he couldn't come to grips with, but it knocked the wind out of me as I stood there ready to spring. "Take care," I said, and I put on a cockeyed smile.

"I will," he said. "I travel light. The medicine and the disease go in the same bottle. Good-bye, Rick."

I travel light too, I thought. I would have told him what an acute remark it was, but it got lost in the joke about the bottle and then in the cloud of exhaust that he burned off as he sped away. He waved at me in his rearview mirror, and I waved back. I went on through the grass, but I found myself shivering in the shade when I was parallel to the porch and face to face with the whole ocean. The grass was icy with yesterday's rain and made me squeamish. I canceled my swim. Still traveling light, I went up the front steps and stood at my perch by the porch table.

I don't know why I let Tony
off so
easily. Probably because he didn't have any friends of his own, and he couldn't sing or fuck, or cry at his mother's grave. I think he really believed he would figure it all out and that the expectation of a final equation or strategy made him rosy when he was drunk. I had always been the same way, but without the technology of heavy liquor. Figuring things out was my hedge against the self-evident. It was easier for me to control my life by being a student of it and not a professor. Anyway, this summer had stopped all that. But I couldn't tell Tony: just open the door and walk out, it isn't locked. When they hear that angle, people like Tony tell you you don't understand. That may sound the same as what David says, but it's worse. Besides, unlike David, they don't usually even tell you. They wrap their cloaks about their heads and go off and figure it out some more. And they get nowhere.

"Anyone would know where to look for you."

I turned to the voice and saw Phidias farther down the porch, dressed in the clothes he had worn for fifty years. Literally the same clothes. He walked toward me from the railing that overlooked the crossroads where Tony and I said goodbye. So Tony and I hadn't been alone after all, though we didn't know it. And then I thought:
Tony
might have known it. Maybe he was talking to Phidias before I came out.

"I wouldn't know where to look for
you,"
I said. "If I went up to the farm, I'd lose my way and ask all the wrong questions. I may have to stay in this house forever, because I don't know the way to the outside world."

"Some people," he said, taking the chair at the head of the table and motioning me to sit down, "do the looking, and the rest get looked for. You and David are the second kind."

"Why are you looking for me?"

"I'm not. I wanted to tell Tony something, but I didn't. I watched him pack his car from the end of the porch, and then, when you came out, I got tongue-tied and ducked around the corner."

I wanted to ask what, wondering too what Tony would say in return when Phidias tried to tell him something final. But I didn't ask. I had gotten good this summer at finding another question to take the place of the one I couldn't ask. I found I was much more likely to get an answer to the unasked question if I changed the subject right. Sometimes, when we were all together, the subject changed at every third or fourth remark, like a mad dance where the orchestra wants everyone dancing with everyone else. Phidias let Tony go without a last word. So what was I after? I knew Phidias wasn't shy, and I expect he'd never wasted a moment in his life ducking around a corner. He
decided
not to say what he might have said. So I wanted to know how he and Tony had left it last night. It didn't really matter how they might have left it if they'd talked again.

"Things didn't go so well when you were out walking," I said. It was about forty percent a question.

"You mean last night? It was fine."

Really?

"What happened?"

"Not much. I showed him where the grave was—did he tell you that?—and he cried a lot." Phidias shrugged. It wasn't much of a story.

"Oh." That's not what
Tony
says, I thought, wondering if anything would ever stay the same for ten minutes. It seemed more and more likely that the phone would be ringing next winter, and Tony would have a final go at me.

"I guess the two of you made up," I said.

"I shouldn't yell at him. Beth always said he was the only one in the family who couldn't help it. And he was the only one who ever wanted to know me. He used to write me letters, you know."

"When he was young?"

"When he was in college."

"What did he say?"

"He talked about women. I mean, he made them up."

"Oh." There was no disdain in his voice, and no pity. Phidias didn't feel sorry for Beth Carroll's children, as if he knew that in that direction lay the accusations that she was a lousy mother. He treated her best by knowing her as nothing more than the woman he loved. He wasn't asking that anyone in the family understand him either. He probably didn't blame the Carroll children for calling him the enemy. I had the idea that his own children knew nothing of his fifty years in Beth Carroll's bed. With them, I bet he was a private man. He was none of his sons' business. So it was easy to see that he saw no reason to look out for Tony or his brother and sister. I couldn't figure out if he had
answered
Tony's letters, but by then it was time to change the subject again. We could only go so far.

"How do we know Tony will keep his promise?" I said. I wondered if Phidias cried at the grave too. "It doesn't seem as if he's ever told the truth. He could be turning us in right now."

Phidias shook his head.

"Not Tony. Don't you see? You're right—all he can do is lie. He's never found a good reason to tell the truth, and so he never has."

"What if we turn out to be the good reason?" I wasn't worried. I liked this conversation for its own sake. We sat at opposite ends of the table like laborers at dusk, as if we were about to be served a beer.

"Ever since he was a boy, he ran away. That's what he's doing now, and it's the only thing that makes him happy. I bet he's forgotten about us already."

"Okay," I said. "I'd just feel a lot easier if he'd never shown up."

"No, Rick. He's the one we needed. He proved we wouldn't panic."

"I panicked for a while," I said, not a shred of pretense left that I was the lifeguard.

"No, you didn't." Statement of fact. He didn't let me get away with affecting a hysteria like Tony Carroll's.

We had not talked again about David and me. I wanted to let him know my friend and I were doing fine, but I also hoped he had noticed himself. It was hard. My sharpest memory of my own father finds us in his smoky study, me telling him I was a whiz at arithmetic or reporting my viola teacher's praise or something, just so he would notice me. And my father says tautly, "A gentleman doesn't talk about himself." Consequently, of course, I can barely be relied upon to say my own name, even when asked. I was shy about telling Phidias now that everything was going to be all right with me. But I wanted to badly, because he'd complimented me.

No time. He stood up and moved along the railing to the stairs.

"You know when I stopped being scared?" he said.

"When?"

"When Arthur Carroll died. He's the last person who could have made things bad for me." He went down the stairs, and the rest faded into the language I was used to in him. "I have to go see about the paint. You know how to paint? We're going to start painting in a few days."

He walked away across the lawn without waiting for an answer. I did not in fact know how to paint, but I wouldn't have said so then for anything, because I could learn. I fancied at that moment that I would go around in my flame-colored trunks till the end of the summer and never wear anything else except a splotch here and there of white paint.

I went on into the house. In the kitchen, Aldo was sprawled at the table, cookbooks open all over. He was as absorbed as a pure mathematician, but he came out of it to talk to me.

"I hope you're not hungry, because there's nothing to eat. Why are you dressed like that? Are you going to a masquerade?"

"Don't I look like a lifeguard, Aldo? My pecs are as good as David's, and I'm a whiz at mouth-to-mouth."

"You're a dream, honey, but that suit is too Jones Beach. It doesn't work." He sighed and buried himself again in the recipe. "You people just don't understand the class of this place."

I fried two eggs. I silently called on the gods of the house to bless Aldo, who had such a feel for what was classy there. He had spent his life shuttling from one manicured Beverly Hills dollhouse to another, from ersatz colonial to ersatz Tudor, and Mr. Carroll and Donald Farley probably would have hated him the most of all of us interlopers. He was candid and racy with jokes about money and power the way other people are about sex. He was such a booster of the California life that you figured he should be on the state payroll. If he had been straight, he would have risen to the top of the Jaycees and died of happiness. But in spite of being an alien in New England, he had the fullest appreciation of the stature of Mrs. Carroll's house. He didn't demand that we eat in the dining room or mind our language, and he didn't really care what I wore. But like a fugitive from Tara, he knew the use of every nut dish and copper pot, and he broke out the wedding linen and the French crystal. David had had a mild case of manorhouse manners just after he arrived, but it had to do with getting his mind off Neil Macdonald. Aldo sighed over the oak and petit point embroidery and fell in love with the old world of the house as he sifted its artifacts. You would have thought the place was Venice, where all the old queens go when they die. Mrs. Carroll would have loved his sense of values.

I ate my eggs out of the pan. Every bite was so hot that my eyes watered, but I needed the one-to-one connection between me and the food as much as Aldo needed four separate recipes for crème caramel.