The Cadence of Grass (17 page)

Evelyn found her erstwhile mother-in-law in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, reading a large, old book with a Dewey-decimal sticker on the back. Her coat and green canvas purse were piled in front of her, and she wore low-heeled pumps, a pleated blue wool skirt and a shawl-collared red sweater with coins for buttons. Evelyn took this all in, faintly hoping for some sartorial concord; but in her baggy but clean pants, Sorel felt packs and down jacket she was clearly of another mind.

As Evelyn arrived, Dr. Crusoe put down the book and accusingly wagged a travel prospectus published by the state. “Skiing, snowmobiling, lake sailing, trout fishing, you name it. Clearly the locals think the water will last forever. This mess began with the last Homestead Act and won’t end until desertification turns the West into a vast parking lot for sport-utility vehicles.” She stood at her considerable height. “These are happy times for anyone untroubled by the extinction of wildlife and the destruction of the countryside. I know you invited me for coffee, but what chance might I have for substituting a highball? I have already determined the presence of an adequate ‘nightery’ on the grounds.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

“Do you still drink?”

“You bet.” They headed for the lounge, which was already enlivened by five plastered individuals piecing together “Luck Be a Lady” over the piano. Judging by the fervor of the lyrics, “luck” was the only word that gave them any confidence. They did far better with “Love and Marriage,” positively roaring the phrase “goes together like a horse and carriage.” The songbirds greeted Evelyn by name as she cringed past, leading Dr. Crusoe to a distant table while giving the waitress a small nod.

“It’s a gift to be able to just have fun and let time pass without a quarrel,” Paul’s mother said, beaming at the boozers around the piano.

Evelyn knew her to be an old bar fly, but it was interesting to see her in action, generating accompanying theories.

“The lush life, a peaceful part of America.” She ducked her head into her collar out of delight with this remark.

“Are you still teaching, Edith?”

“
What
?”

“Are you still actually teaching?”

“Good God, let me have a drink first.”

The waitress took their order, anxiously glancing over at the group by the piano, which included two car dealers, a CPA and a chiropractor the other three swore by. The latter had the pianist by the back of the neck, and it looked as if he’d get satisfactory playing out of him or else work him till he did. The pianist, now coerced into the moronic anthem “My Way,” looked frail, even ill, behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Evelyn indicated his plight to Dr. Crusoe, who commented, “It’s Jung’s wounded prince. If he can’t play alone or in that cerebral jazz quartet he dreams about, he doesn’t want to play at all. But his talent is small and those men need music to bolster them on their more vigorous quest.”

Evelyn wanted to kick her in her big butt. “Car sales, tax returns, lower back pain?”

“Fine!” said Dr. Crusoe. “Work must be done.” Flushed with her third highball, she bobbed an ice cube with her forefinger. “To answer your question, I’m still teaching, and of course that consists now and forevermore of my award-winning, oft-recorded seminar on rainfall, What Comes Down, Must Go Up.” She let out a whoop and gulped from her highball. When she replaced the glass on the table, she looked straight at Evelyn without seeing her. Evelyn felt the gaze go through and past her. She waited as the hooch made the long drop. Dr. Crusoe’s lips parted slowly at the desired effect.

Evelyn said, “Was there a special reason you wished to see me?”

Mrs. Crusoe was staring off into a dark, empty corner. “I’m never sorry when politicians die,” she said.

“Right . . .”

“Oh yes, dear, there was a reason, and naturally I escape into prevarication where my interference might be unwelcome. First of all, I never extended my sympathy to you on the death of your father.”

“Thank you.”

“And are you recovered?”

“Yes and no.”

“‘
Yes and no
’?”

“Well, we were never sure he liked us.”

“Liked you! Of course he liked you; he was your father.”

“Somehow this was different.”

“Really? I don’t see how. I met your father. A commanding presence. And normal in every way. I despise it when your age group extracts some poor old male from the culture that made him, all the things he survived, only to conclude he was a brute. It’s banal.”

“Like I say, this must’ve been different. He
was
a brute.”

“And Natalie believes this too?”

“No, but she’s been hurt by it.”

“Oh, crap.”

“He never smiled once.”

“That’s fact masquerading as theory.”

“We were very wrapped up in him, but I don’t think he ever really saw us.”

“Did you,” asked Dr. Crusoe with a magisterial lifting of her whole person, “give him anything to see?”

Evelyn inspected her thumbnail, then looked off.

“Go to hell, Edith.”

Paul’s mother rotated slightly from the waist, lifting her arm high over her head and wiggling her hand fervidly. Fearing immediate attack, Evelyn failed to realize Dr. Crusoe was merely ordering another drink. “When the time comes,” she said, “I shall go uncomplainingly.” Once again, she shook the tourist brochure. “If, as is here claimed, this is heaven, then I intend to go trippingly to the alternative you have just suggested.” The defeated pianist was now rendering “Thanks for the Memories,” and it was clear that Dr. Crusoe would have preferred being in the chorus. “Evelyn, let me get to my point. I’m here to ask if there is
anything
I can say to make you consider reconciling with Paul.” She tilted her head and peered down into her drink with one eye like a parrot.

“No.”

“I find that a most troubling reply.”

“Edith, you ought to realize how painful this has been for everyone.”

“There must’ve been some basis for the original attraction. There must be some respect due for the time invested. Upon every relationship reside the claims of others: we do not live in a vacuum. It is an economic universe, and you are bankrupting a family. You are only hurting yourself, and revenge, Evelyn, is a diminishing motive.”

In the background, the pianist was banging out “The Mexican Hat Dance” while the four businessmen took turns jumping up and down on what was once his appealing fedora.

“A marriage can be reduced to an arm’s-length contract, should the benefits to all outweigh the limitations of appearance for one.”

Evelyn had had enough. “Mrs. Crusoe, I am entirely aware of two things. Academic salaries are not what they should be, and Paul has always been a most dutiful son.”

“Not a
cent
of child support did I once receive,” the woman hissed. “Thirty-one stitches as a result of his birth and a
gruesome
convalescence.”

“Shouldn’t you have told him who his father was? He never knew.”

“An arid-lands botanist, a scofflaw, a premature ejaculator!”

“Aw gee,” she said as Dr. Crusoe lurched to her feet. Evelyn had long worried about the effect of ending Paul’s checks to his mother; she saw now that it was profound, and that earlier wailings as to the possible termination of a January research project in sun-drenched Tucson were but the tip of the iceberg.

“And may I say,” Dr. Crusoe spat, “that you have painted yourself into a very narrow corner, young woman. Belligerent self-sufficiency is on no one’s list of virtues. But perhaps, you are a
pioneer
.”

“I’ve had as much of you as I can stand,” Evelyn said. “I really have.” And with that she left the room. The group around the piano importuned her to return for the good times, but she pretended to be stone deaf.

The desk clerk was refilling a bowl of complimentary red-and-white mints. A television monitor revealed, in bluish light, corridors and exits and empty spaces around the laundry room, pop and ice machines; it was like an art movie, not a soul in sight, great reviews in New York. Worried, she stole back to surreptitiously observe Paul’s mother, who seemed to be explaining something quite grave to the bleary faces around the piano. Finally, the men rose to their feet, facing forward in a line, the pianist gloomily poising hands over the keyboard. Dr. Crusoe took her place at the end of the line, hands on the hips of chubby Martin Jelks, and when a vaguely Latin tune emerged from the piano, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” a primitive conga line began to snake between the Formica tables with festive grunts invoking the ghost of Perez Prado.

Out in the cold and starless night, Evelyn smiled ruefully at the old broad’s self-sufficiency. She might have deserved better luck, but Evelyn gave up immediately on trying to find the roots of Paul’s feral nature in her high spirits. Besides, Evelyn admitted, Edith was not without appeal, a good soul really.

The meeting with Edith seemed a turning point, the last straw that helped her realize that she stood in the way of her own family’s happiness. Three unhappy days later, Evelyn withdrew her suit for divorce, wearing the same clothes she’d worn in the park, slumped in a metal folding chair at the edge of the Justice of the Peace’s desk. Paul was with her, having decided to promote this as a romantic occasion. Papers were pushed toward her, she signed them and pushed them back. The Justice of the Peace, a middle-aged woman in a dark green pantsuit, hair tucked into red plastic combs, kept looking back and forth, focusing on the contrast between Paul’s dark suit, blue shirt and vivid paisley tie, and Evelyn’s crumpled costume. She must be pregnant, Justice of the Peace concluded, but at least we have a proud papa!

The next morning, house finches, magpies, two kinds of chickadees and a belligerent Canada jay awaited her. When the phone rang, she put down the bag of seed, held her bathrobe around her waist, went back inside to answer it.

“Sis,” Natalie said abruptly, “I needed to fax some papers to Mama from the state tax people. And I called Mountain Travel for a number on the cruise ship in Alaska. They sort of
laughed in my face
when I said the word ‘Alaska.’ In fact, they said, ‘Look out your window.’ Anyway, long story short, Mama didn’t
go
to Alaska.”

“
What
?” Evelyn was pouring hot water over her coffee grounds.

“You heard me.”

“Where is she, Nat?”

“She’s on a cruise, very sensibly, in the South Pacific.”

“I don’t believe this!”

“It’s not easy. Any thoughts?”

“Just one: How did we ever believe ‘Alaska’?”

Evelyn cut two pieces of sourdough toast diagonally, got out a jar of black Oxford marmalade and set them all on the small table in the kitchen, then sat pondering Natalie’s news until she became aware of someone at the front door. By tilting her chair back, she saw the shape of a face in the oval glass and called, “Yes?” in a particularly unwelcoming tone. These questions about what was becoming of her family and this latest anomaly about her mother were like the weights that hold divers underwater.

Thrust into the slight opening of the doorway was the cold reddened face of Dr. Randy. “Terribly sorry,” he said, face surrounded by down-filled nylon and surmounted by a tam-o’-shanter.

Evelyn said through a mouthful of toast, “You were lonely.”

“I won’t even ask if you can forgive me. I’m just sorry. I have no excuses.”

“You’re forgiven. Now close the door, it’s making a draft.”

She called Natalie back in hopes of amplifying the information, but Natalie had other interests. “Stuart and I,” she said, “have decided it was time to get on with our lives.”

“Why am I not surprised?” said Evelyn. She’d been down this road too many times. Alaska, at least, was new.

“I don’t know, Evelyn, why aren’t you?”

“We’ve heard a good bit of the preliminaries.”

“In the future,” said Natalie, “I’ll make a greater effort to hold your attention.”

This was cooling down quickly, and Evelyn thought it best to get off the phone.

Stuart, meanwhile, had heard nothing of getting on with their lives. And he wasn’t nearly as thick as Natalie or anyone else thought; it was a mistake to take his disinclination for conflict as weakness. When he declined to embrace Paul’s more dubious ventures, Paul wrongly concluded that Stuart was “plodding.”

Paul also had decided that Natalie and Stuart weren’t getting along and would at odd times intrude upon them. He did this breezily, coming into their house with beaming detachment not unlike a minister’s and often speaking of higher values no one imagined he was aware of or took seriously. Sometimes as he spoke he held both of their hands in his own, a deed that filled Natalie with such disgust. Given the details of her intimacy with him, she marveled at the perversity of these counseling sessions, whereas Stuart, sitting there at the refectory table, seemed warmed when Paul addressed him particularly. “The union of a man and a woman,” he intoned, “is smiled upon by God only to the extent that their faith in each other is unsoiled. Loyalty is God’s particular blessing upon a marriage.”