The Distinguished Guest (24 page)

Why hadn’t Lily included these comments in her memoir, these remarks by Paul about her coldness? At the time, she remembered vaguely, she had dismissed them quickly as not apropos to the
discussion of her recovery from depression, her renewed sense of connection with God. But reading them now made her almost reel, a sick, dizzy feeling.

How dishonest she had been! She had used Paul, used his letter, used everything about their life together, to justify herself. To bear witness to her own virtue. The shame of it! the endless
pitiable shame of knowing yourself so badly! For Lily had thought, of course, as she wrote the memoir, that she was peeling off layer after layer of herself, getting closer and closer to some
essential core.

Vanity. She wouldn’t live long enough to arrive there, she saw that now. “Now I know in part.” She whispered these words to herself. That would be all, until death released
her. What arrogance to have presumed she understood the truth! And what dishonesty to have revealed only part of Paul’s truth. Particularly when it was a truth—she saw this now, she
felt it in rereading the letter—so lovingly offered.

And so coldly received. So calculatedly turned to her own uses. Her spiritual triumph. Over him.

She moaned aloud, and Noreen, who’d been cutting coupons from the newspaper in the living room, set her scissors down to come and ask what was wrong. Lily’s appearance shocked her,
and when Alan came home that afternoon, she reported that his mother was having a tough weekend, that maybe he should try to get her to rest more on Sunday.

In bed that night, Saturday night, Lily had tried to pray, but these words too seemed stiffened and locked inside her. She was terror-stricken, abruptly, her pulse pounding in her head. What,
who would she be if the disease consumed even her belief?

Looking up in the dark, she made herself recite the Lord’s Prayer, the General Confession—anything, the Twenty-third Psalm, whispering the words in a rushing, panicked voice. Hearing
her, you might have thought she was in a race against time to finish up.

Later, Alan would think of those odd moments during the weekend when Lily seemed to wake from a half-sleep and thrust herself forward with a mislocated will and energy. He would
blame himself for not knowing something was wrong. When he spoke of it later, of his failure, Gaby would defend him: “But she had been so horrid to you that Friday, Alan. You were doing quite
well to be as kind to her as you were.”

At dinner on Saturday night, Lily had suddenly started to speak of Paul, to speak of him as though he needed to be defended against Akin. “Your father,” she’d said abruptly,
“was a man of his time, a narrow, narrow man, to be sure. But he was a very fine man, nonetheless.”

“I would never have said otherwise, Lily,” Alan said, after a long moment when he and Gaby held each other’s eyes. There was a silence at the table.

“I know he seemed very remote to you, but he could be very generous too. He tithed, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He did.”

And then she fell silent. Gradually Alan and Gaby began to talk to each other once more—about the Admundsens’ house and the payment schedule, about when the boys would come home for
the end-of-the-summer break.

“He broke his foot once, he was so mad at me,” Lily whispered urgently. They both looked at her. “I’d driven the car into a streetlight, backed right up into the post,
and when I told him, oh, he was mad! He wouldn’t say anything, that wasn’t his way. He didn’t get angry with me. But he went outside and kicked the car.” She smiled, the
slight demented rictus of the Parkinsonian. “Kicked it hard, I would say. I remember the cast on his foot very well. Like our friend, you know.” Her hand fluttered helplessly at her
chest.

“
Lin
nett,” Gaby said.

“Lin
nett
,” Lily corrected. “Yes.” Her head bobbed. “But there, you see, he never yelled, never scolded. That wasn’t his way.”

“No,” Alan said. “No, it wasn’t.”

And then she subsided, as though Alan had conceded some necessary point about Paul, a Paul who seemed oddly unlike anyone Alan had ever known.

And on Sunday, when Alan stayed home reading the paper—Noreen had Sundays off, and it was one of Gaby’s busiest days—Lily appeared suddenly, effortfully wobbling on her canes
across the living room. She looked, Alan told Gaby later, like the madwoman of Chaillot. She had done her own makeup with an unsteady hand, and her eyebrows trailed off upward toward her hairline.
Her hair itself had escaped in drooping strands from the bun she’d tried to make. She wore her absurd frilly bed jacket over her clothes, and its odd, faded, fleshy pink made her own flesh
look more bloodless, more ghostly, than ever.

He got up as soon as he saw her, and went quickly to her. He’d never seen her so frail, so crazy-looking, and it frightened him. As he took her arm, she opened her mouth to speak, but
nothing came out.

“What is it?” he asked. “What is it, Mother?”

She shook her head, with great effort. Alan was panicked. He thought perhaps she was dying, that she was having a stroke. He got her across the room, into a chair. He fetched her a glass of
water, and then, halfway over to her, thought better of that and went back and got a glass of whiskey. She recoiled when he held it to her lips. Her tongue pushed out at it, the way the boys’
had as babies when they were offered new foods.

He sat, then, helpless, holding her hand and patting it.

“What is it?” she whispered at last.

“What is what? What?” he asked. And then, because he sounded so impatient, he said, “I’m listening.”

She stared at him, as though trying to understand who he was. “I needed . . . your help.”

“With what?” he asked. She didn’t answer, and after a moment he said, “I’m right here, Lily.”

“I needed your help,” she said again.

“Okay,” he said. And he remembered that he had begun at this point truly to be impatient with her. He looked at her painted face, the puzzled, halted look in her eyes, the strange,
doubled eyebrows, her opened mouth, and he’d felt irritated. Finally, when she didn’t speak again, he said, “But you did get yourself up, Mother. All by yourself. And you got your
makeup on, and your . . . jacket there.”

She lifted her arm and looked at the jacket sleeve hanging loosely off it as though she didn’t recognize it.

“So you didn’t really need me, you did it yourself.”

“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes. That must have been it.”

And now, here it was Monday, and Linnett would arrive soon. Lily needed to gather her energy. Often in the past, the reading through of her papers and letters in the morning had fueled her for
her afternoons with Linnett. The younger woman would arrive and find Lily ready, eager to recreate for her the world of Hyde Park and Woodlawn in the forties and fifties, for instance. Or the life
of a young minister’s wife in a small-town parish.

Today though, Lily wished Linnett wasn’t coming, that she could have Noreen help her back to bed and just let go, let go of it all. It seemed to her, looking at the pages lying curled but
intact in her wastebasket, that all of life was simply diminution and loss, the paring away by degrees of what had seemed necessary, the learning to do without. She thought of Rebecca the last time
she’d seen her, her beautiful, passionate daughter, about to disappear forever. She thought of Paul. She thought of Alan, and Clary, and their lives, so unconnected to hers, so full of
things
. Her hands hung, curled down from the arms of the chair, spotted, trembling the more now in repose. She felt done in, done for, nearly invisible. She wasn’t sure she even had a
voice. She opened her mouth and made a squawk, small and high-pitched. Over her vacant face as she heard it, something faintly amused passed, and was gone.

Since Lily didn’t have much of a voice, Linnett said she wouldn’t stay long—just until Noreen got back with the groceries. (The Ph.D. candidate writing her
thesis on early efforts at integration was coming for tea the next day, and Noreen had “a bunch of stuff” she wanted to get.) Linnett read Lily’s mail aloud to her, and copied
Lily’s whispered indications of how to respond on the back of each letter. To the request for a signed copy of the memoir to be auctioned off for charity, regrets. All copies were in storage
in Chicago. To the request to lecture next spring in San Francisco, regrets too. “No voice,” Lily whispered. “By then, probably no body.”

Linnett laughed.

To the woman in Chicago doing a collection of memoir excerpts, instructions on whom to contact in Lily’s publishing house for permission. There was a long silence. Lily’s face looked
remote, dead but for the color.

Linnett had arrived today steeled against Lily. She’d decided on the drive over, after this morning’s talk with Alan, that she wouldn’t be susceptible anymore, either to
Lily’s charm or to her weakness. But there was something nearly childishly bereft about the way she looked now, and Linnett felt sorry for her in spite of herself. “Why don’t I
get us each a good stiff drink from Alan’s supply, Lily?” she asked now. “Maybe you could use one, and then a long, long nap today.”

Lily nodded. “But just wine,” she said, as Linnett started to struggle up.

“Righto,” Linnett said. It was laborious, her trips back and forth on crutches to get the glasses, then the bottle of wine and the corkscrew, but once she was seated again, she
served them quickly.

Lily held her glass with both hands and lowered her head to the rim to sip. Even so a little wine splashed onto her bosom. Linnett pretended not to have seen it.

“Noreen shouldn’t be too long, Lily,” she said. “As soon as she’s back, I’ll go.” Lily made a little noise of assent. “I wish I could help you up,
but . . . ” Linnett gestured at her crutches, at her cast.

They sat in silence for a while. Lily had set her glass down now, and her hands, lying in her lap, moved incessantly, a repetitive, curling, jittery motion of the fingers against the pads of her
thumbs. Linnett had the impulse, which she resisted, to reach over and put her hand on Lily’s two hands, to hold them until they stilled. She cleared her throat. “Why do you suppose,
Lily, that we each kept our . . . infirmity, so to speak, from the other?”

For the first time this afternoon, Lily looked at Linnett with a spark of true interest. She shook her head slightly and her mouth made an
O
. No. Don’t know.

Linnett smiled, glad to have roused Lily a little anyway. “If I were being fancy about it,” she said, “I’d diagnose
denial
. You know, that we’re both people
who deal with difficulty that way. But I don’t really believe that, because we don’t deny anything to ourselves. We
know
our problems.”

Lily’s eyes were guardedly alive.

Linnett leaned forward and adopted something close to Lily’s whisper. “We’re liars, Lily. A much, much better thing to be.” She grinned and sat back. Lily’s eyes
were steady on her.

“No, no, no. I should speak for myself, Lily.
I am
a liar.” Linnett rested a hand on her bosom and sighed. She took another sip of wine and watched Lily. “But I do
think, also, that anyone who writes a memoir has got to be a
little
bit of a liar too.”

Lily’s hands fluttered, and she directed them to her drink, set on the edge of the table next to her. Linnett watched her, checking the urge to help. When Lily had successfully managed a
swallow and set the glass back down, Linnett continued, “You want it to have a shape, after all. A memoir. Just as I, when I write a piece, an article, I need a shape for it. But life is . .
. ” She sighed. “Well, the famous loose, baggy monster itself. Hideously shapeless. Ain’t it?” She smiled again. “If I were writing my memoir, for instance, I’d
be tempted just to jiggle it over this way a bit here . . . ” Linnett lifted her shoulder and imitated this motion. “Tug it into shape there. And whatnot. What not?
Why
not?”

Lily had looked away now, maybe out the window at something. Linnett couldn’t tell whether the old woman was really listening, but after a minute she went on anyway, a little louder.
“I could tell you how much fun it was, for instance, traveling around, staying in the odd hotel or motel, moving into a new world with each article. Why not indeed? It’s partly true.
Why bother with the other part? It messes up the
story
.”

Linnett’s voice had grown hard a little earlier, and Lily had looked away because she heard accusation in it. Now she wondered: had she said something to Linnett about Paul’s letter?
about her own editing of it for her memoir? She was confused, suddenly, about how much Linnett might or might not know about her, about whether she’d just thought things, or also spoken them
aloud.

Now Linnett sat back. She stretched her legs out, and lifted the one in the cast onto the coffee table in front of her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s all
like dreaming anyway, Lily. Our lives. You know.”

Lily’s head swung back to look at Linnett. She shook it. No. She didn’t know anything.

“Oh, you’ve read the stuff, I’m sure. About dreams. Our dreaming is just chemicals getting readjusted in our brains, and we give it visuals. Or we find explanations for the
visuals that the chemicals create. It’s a version of watching clouds drift across the sky. You know—‘Hey! here’s a camel. Here’s St. Nick. Here’re the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ ”

Lily looked blank.

But Lily always looked blank, Linnett reminded herself. “Maybe life is just like that. Is only that. We’re busy
firing
away on these synapses or whatever in response to
things, and trying like crazy to make sense of what is senseless, just this
traipse
of chemical life.”

She laughed, suddenly, and had another sip of wine. “Nah. Pay no attention to me. I wouldn’t even be here, Lily, if I didn’t think you could tell me the truth. If you wanted
to.” She smiled over her glass.

Lily gave her the faintest of smiles back, which Linnett read as the sharing of her joke, but what Lily was thinking was that she hadn’t told her, she was certain of that. She remembered
abruptly Linnett’s betrayal of her the other night, her intimacy, her alliance, with the others. The way she’d ignored Lily. She wouldn’t have told her. Not after that.