Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (7 page)

There was a pause, and they eyed each other closely. They were gauging what waited to be said, and how long it might take at the rate they had chosen. The death of Mrs. Carroll was the project for this June afternoon, and yet neither of them appeared to feel trapped by it. If they could have been free instead to wander at will, they would have come up against Mrs. Carroll at every turn anyway. And they might have been much less willing, if she had still been alive in her curtained bed and they had found themselves alone together outside her hearing, to give over to each other the unique Mrs. Carroll each had known. If they had been too free, they would have remained tough-guys, very classy and very melancholy. Because she was dead, you could see in their clear-eyed look that they planned to hold nothing back.

"But you don't know my friend Rick," she said, putting her hand on mine and holding on for a moment. It was a gesture meant to fortify her, I think, not me. She looked over at David as Phidias and I measured each other directly. "I know he's
our
friend, David, I'm not being possessive. But I know you by reputation, remember. On the evidence, you aren't my dream of a friend."

You can't say that line nicely. Still, she spoke levelly and with sufficient wryness that she purified it of moralizing and condescension. She wanted to make it plain that she could be as honest with him as she could with Phidias and me. She was warning him to treat me right, of course. But further, she was warning him not to assume that his charm and good humor and swimmer's build could absolve him of the truth here. Her own looks, after all, could have beaten a rap of first-degree murder, so she knew about the uses of power. And since her voice, her sexual pitch, and her social graces had lined her corridors with honors and made her a totem figure for fifty years, she had the wit to urge a man like David on, to wish him well at seduction and spells. But not here. Here, she was saying, we are among friends. And she wanted him to think over the gravity of the word.

"I'm working on it," David said.

"Here's your chance. Phidias is about to have his arm twisted, and it's going to take him a couple of hours to show me all the places where I used to pout." She stood up and leaned on one hand at the edge of the table. One of her shoulders was thus thrown into a deep shrug, and then she tilted her head lazily toward that shoulder. It was a pose she was famous for, and she could go into it as automatically as a dancer taking Position One. In one of the freeze frames that I carry in my head, Madeleine stands just so when Yves Montand walks into the bar in
A Dollar a Dance.
1947. She looked straight at David. "Then Rick and I will race to the airport. And we'll tell each other what went on, just like schoolgirls. So watch yourself."

And with that she turned to Phidias and took his arm. They walked away along the porch, and she began to talk in a low voice, the words blurring from where we sat. For a moment, though, the magic vanished and they looked to me like an old, careful couple taking a cautious walk. From the back, Phidias seemed to have the slightest stoop. And Madeleine's wide shoulders and narrow hips were, at this angle, exaggerated and unbearably frail. The effect of the monument, of the woman sculpted in stone and immune to change, required the mystery of her face. It made you sorry that you could see so much. If you were beginning to get a glimpse too of the winy headache that waited at the end of the afternoon, starting now in a hairline fracture, it made you want to go to your room and cry yourself to sleep. So I turned my back and blocked them out, forgetting as I did it that David now had to be faced. He was looking straight at me and had the double advantage of having me all in focus and of being spared the angle in time that I had just seen.

"Do you want to go down to the beach?" he asked.

"Aren't you getting it all wrong, David?
You
go down to the beach. I go get a horse. The meeting comes later."

Silence. I am playing this by ear; and I see, as it comes out, that I am taking my cue from Robert Taylor about thirty seconds before he pulls the trigger.

"I don't know what to say, Rick. No matter what I say, it's going to hurt. You have to help me."

No perceptible whine. Apparently he wasn't going to duck the difficult part. He was getting older every minute.

"David dear, it's all I can do to help myself. Just try to remember that this isn't being televised, so I can feel more than one thing at a time. I know I've avoided you and played with Madeleine and eaten my lunch, and you think I'm going to beat you. But it's wonderful to see you too. Just wonderful."

He looked down and smiled an old dreamy smile of his that has always made him look as milky as a shepherd.

"Now," I said, "a couple of questions. You knew Madeleine was with me when you called on Saturday, is that right?"

"Right."

"Well, you haven't answered the question."

"You mean, how did I know?"

"Right."

"I always knew that. That she stayed with you when she was in Boston."

"Is that so? You know, if my flesh could still creep, it would make its way to the Chevy and get out of here. Why do you suppose you never told me before?"

"I figured it was something private between you and her. And I liked it that you had a secret that you kept from me."

"As long as you knew it."

"I guess so."

"But here we are. Centuries have passed. Why bring it all up now? Don't you think it might
still
be something private?"

It wasn't, of course. I had never cared who knew Madeleine came to me once a year, but there never seemed any reason to tell anyone. I didn't know anyone that well that I could tell. Madeleine wanted a little privacy, and that seemed fine with me. And then, during the years with David, I kept it secret so as to have a secret from him. He was right about that. But now that he
knew,
we could have had a press conference, Madeleine and I, as far as I cared. Something private indeed. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

"I did it for Phidias," he said. "He needed to talk to Madeleine Cosquer, and I knew how to get hold of her. That's all."

"That's all."

"Except for you and me. I know it involves us too now."

I stood up and walked over to the railing and leaned out and looked at the Atlantic.

"David, you have the moral intelligence of a shellfish. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about about you and me." I was so afraid at that moment that I had lost both Madeleine and David. This was why I don't bother with people much. The more time you spend with them, the more you can't follow anything they do. "It doesn't surprise me, of course. All I want you to do now is tell me what this 'it' is that you and I are now involved in. Then I can go about getting myself uninvolved. I'm going to go into the library and read
A Tale of Two Cities
until I fall asleep. And you can wake me up when it's time to go."

He came up behind me and put his arms around my shoulders. He put his face on my neck, letting his lips rest against me. He didn't kiss me. If he had, I would have wrestled him to the ground and slapped him and shouted at him. Instead, because he just stood there holding me, I started to cry. I didn't have anything else to say, and I felt like a stand-up comic who has finished his routine but the time isn't up. I finished with the sobbing part in a couple of minutes. Then I let David lead me away while I went on to silent weeping and wiping my eyes with my sleeve. We walked down the porch steps, across the lawn and through the bushes into the wild scrub above the dunes. We stopped there as if we had come to look at the view. After a while I was dry-eyed again, but I still couldn't talk. And it seemed as reasonable as anything else to keep on walking, down through the dunes on a trail of wooden planks laid end to end, until we came to the last rise before the flat sand and the water. I sat down and drew my knees up. David lay down on his side. He didn't touch me.

He told me some of the story of Mrs. Carroll's death and the reaches of Phidias's plan. Though he told it badly, in all the wrong order, it was some time before I could ask questions calmly and
put
it in order. What they had done scared me, and what they wanted to do now stupefied me. But I see that I really didn't raise any objection. I assumed Madeleine would tell Phidias no, and we would be right on schedule at American Airlines for flight 41. Meanwhile, the pain I was in had to do with David, because I knew how much I missed him now, and I remained at some remove from both the drama David had been through and the one he and Phidias were proposing. In a way, the plan had a curious charm. It also meant that I would not have to leave David right away. Just by hearing him out, I let myself be brought in on the secret. And for me, a secret is such a seductive place.

On Tuesday morning, Phidias had gone back up to the dairy just after dawn. He hitched a donkey to a donkey cart and made a slow and ancient progress back to the house. He called up to David in the tower. Together, they carried a plain pine coffin out of the wine cellar where it was stored and brought it up through the house to Mrs. Carroll's bedroom. Phidias had dressed her. It only took a moment to move her from the bed into the coffin, but David was feeling green and shaky in the knees. He was told to sit down. Phidias put the cover on, not even glancing at Mrs. Carroll, and as he drove in the nails all around it, he told David how happy she was to foil her ceremonious children. She had saved her death for herself, he said.

It was noon before they were on their way into the woods, walking on opposite sides of the cart, swatting the donkey. By now David had stopped thinking about death, or at least it didn't upset him when he thought about
this
death. Phidias had completed during the night the first flood of his own grief and then had committed the shape of it to memory and had put it aside whole, to take up again when the work was done. "The coffin in the cellar made her feel safe," Phidias said, and it came to seem that day like a good-luck charm to David, part of a passage so in touch with the lay of the land above the sea that death seemed incidental to it.

Mrs. Carroll was a southern girl who married a rock-face New England man of property, a reader of books and a dealer in ideas. She never took to the weather, but she had chosen to lie in a scrubby hill field deep in the middle of her land whose beauty left her mute as it changed its slight colors from month to month. She liked the conceit of a homemade coffin too. It signified to her that her final act would pose a stark and lawless version of the human question, a journey to the earth like a lost scene out of Faulkner. Phidias appreciated the lady rather than the conceit, and thus he brought to the event a heart kept innocent in homage to her. Nothing he said was a way of saying something else. His gestures were never self-conscious. "Well," he said as they brought the cart out of the woods and the donkey stopped, unwilling to walk in the sun, "didn't she pick the perfect place to hide? This is the place," he continued, spreading his arms to indicate the breadth of it, "where we first came to be alone. Thirty, thirty-five years ago. We used to ride up here on horseback. She decided to come here for good at the end of the winter. 'No one will ever think to look for me there,' she said."

Phidias talked about the near past and the far past without regard for the fear of lost time. The very thing David wanted to learn. So when they arrived in the shelter of low bushes in the center of the field and started to prepare the ground, David began to talk about himself. They were not pressed for time. Phidias had already made two trips out here during the spring and had dug down three feet. Mrs. Carroll had wanted some assurance that it could be done, that the soil didn't end on a plate of granite six inches below the surface. "Go dig me half a grave, Phidias," she said, "and find out if it's all skin and bones." But the land was deep enough to hold her. So they worked their way down. Phidias loosened the earth with a pick while David shoveled.

He told Phidias he was gay, then talked about Neil for a while, but he found that he had to go back to the years he spent with me to find the real beginning. I don't know how Madeleine's name came up so soon. But when David talks about the past, he does another nervous thing people do on television. He tells you everything. He backgrounds the relationships and draws little maps of the scenery and gives resumes of all the major characters. Phidias, who had so many plans to make that day, stayed one step ahead of the burial scene. He knew he needed an actress, and Madeleine was the only actress he had ever known. When he learned that David had a connection to her, however circuitous, he listened closely to discover how likely it was that David and I would do something together. He figured he could take care of Madeleine himself, once he had succeeded in getting her onto the property. This is my reconstruction of what was going on. David's reconstruction was at some points so naive that I realized he didn't know about Madeleine and Mrs. Carroll at all. In David's view, Madeleine had merely been a famous houseguest there a generation ago. She was taking a break from the rigors of her fame. By the same token, Phidias and Mrs. Carroll were a pair out of D. H. Lawrence, the rude farmer and the lilac duchess. Phidias seemed much less rustic to me.

The problem was this: Mrs. Carroll, who persisted all year in predicting that this was to be her final summer, had been working on a will with Mr. Farley for several weeks. She had never revealed a southern passion for testaments before. She had lived for years following Mr. Carroll's lead, dividing her assets equally between John and Cicely and little Tony. She was an indifferent mother who developed a working disdain for the children only in the last years. But there were no
King Lear
scenes to speak of, no threats of disinheritance and no petulant bequests. They were all rich already, and Mrs. Carroll had come to understand they would bulldoze her land and make subdivisions of it before she was quite cold. So she took the land away. The new will turned the estate over to the public, subject to a hundred controls. And a group of trustees that the will created was empowered to tenant the house with high-minded sorts, the Audubon Society, say, or the Sierra Club. One catch. She hadn't signed it yet.