The Evening Star (70 page)

As she saw it, the memory project was her last chance. Whatever she achieved with her new computer and her huge archive of social calendars, desk diaries, baby books, cruise journals, concert programs, playbills and the like—counting Emma’s few jottings, the collection spanned four generations—would not be a great work of creation and re-creation, such as Proust had done, but it would be something that would reflect the deeper side of her nature, or at least show that there had been a deeper side.

“I can’t keep the poor man hanging, I’ve got to say yes or no,” Rosie said, still tortured by the thought of Arthur Cotton.

“Pardon my bluntness, but have you slept with him yet?” Aurora asked.

“Well, nearly,” Rosie said. “He’s been nervous. He says he’s nervous because he’s afraid of getting his heart broke at the last minute.

“I don’t really care, I ain’t very attracted to him anyway,” she added. “I think he’s cute, but cute’s kind of got its limits.”

“Then why won’t you give Theo a chance before you handcuff yourself to this rich man?” Aurora asked. “Theo’s dying to take you out.”

“It’s just because he’s given up on you, though,” Rosie said. It was true that she still had her soft spot for Theo, and it was also true that he had been asking her for dates and even bringing her little presents lately—usually just some particularly good olives, or some feta or something—and yet it didn’t feel right, she knew it was just because of his despair about Aurora. Like everything else that happened to her, Theo’s little suit seemed to involve impossible complications.

“It all just comes back to what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place,” Rosie said.

“Oh, yes, my state of mind,” Aurora said. “I’m aware that practically everyone in the universe is dissatisfied with it, but I don’t know why. I’m healthy, stable, and busy—isn’t that enough?”

“No, because it’s like you ain’t trying anymore,” Rosie said. “All these years, when one of us got ground down and just wanted to give up, it was mainly just that you always kept on trying that got us though.”

“What that boils down to is that I’m a very selfish woman and I’ve brought a certain amount of energy to what was mainly just selfishness,” Aurora said. “I was grabby and you all liked it, although you complained about it constantly. Now I’ve stopped being grabby, and none of you know what to do with yourselves.”

“That’s it,” Rosie said. “When are you going to start being grabby again?”

“What if I never do?” Aurora asked. “The years have slipped by in a twinkling, and now you and I are old women—at least we are women who are not young. I don’t feel like being grabby any more. Since we’re talking about my state of mind, I want to point out that what seems to shock all of you is that a state of
mind
is what I’ve acquired. If I feel that I’ve lived my life fully enough, what I want to do now is
think
about it. Just
think
about it, got it?”

“I got it, I just don’t understand,” Rosie said. “What if you do sit out there and go through them old calendars until you remember every single day of your life? What if you remember
everything? It’s still all just stuff that’s passed. What’ll you have, when you do remember it?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Aurora admitted cheerfully. “I haven’t gotten very far with my memory project yet. I’ve just assembled a few scraps. But I do know that working on my memory project is what I want to do. I don’t care about society, I don’t want to travel, I’m not interested in males and their penises anymore. I just want to work on my project. I may be at it for months, or I may be at it for the rest of my life. I don’t know, and I also don’t know why it should throw the universe off just because I’ve chosen to use my mind for a change, instead of just indulging my body.”

“You used to want to be happy,” Rosie said. “It’s what made you such fun to be around, even if you were a little bossy sometimes. You were just
determined
to be happy. I guess that’s what I miss.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Aurora said—often she missed her old high spirits too. In her memory it was not so much that she had been determined to be happy as that she had been determined to fight clear of the constant drag of unhappiness that she supposed to be merely the common affliction of adult life.

“I didn’t want to be defeated,” she said to Rosie. “I didn’t want to be, and I wasn’t—at least I never was for very long.”

“But now you don’t care, right?” Rosie asked.

“I wouldn’t say I don’t care,” Aurora said. “I suppose I’m like an old dog. I’ve mostly got my eye on the other place now.”

“Well, I hate it,” Rosie said. “I’m about as old as you and I’m thinking of getting married. I might even go to Paris, over in France. I ain’t happy but I ain’t quitting, either. We
are
sort of in this together—it ain’t fair for you to quit, and leave me to struggle alone.”

“Being in neutral isn’t quite the same as quitting,” Aurora quibbled. “The motor’s still running. The car could jump in gear and run over somebody anytime.”

Rosie shook her head. “The bottom line is, you quit,” Rosie said. “I still think it’s all because of Jerry, even though you wasn’t dating him and he was about to leave town.”

“Well, this is where I came in, goodbye for now,” Aurora said. “I’ve got to go organize my concert programs. I seem to have over a thousand, which is odd.”

“I don’t think it’s odd,” Rosie said. “You was always going off to the symphony.”

“But I don’t remember it that way—it’s what makes my memory project so interesting,” Aurora said. “I have the programs, so I must have gone to concerts constantly, but I don’t remember getting to go to concerts that often. Rudyard hated having to go out—I always had to coax him or trick him when there was a program I really wanted to hear.”

“If that’s the way you remember it, your memory project’s got a long way to go,” Rosie informed her matter-of-factly.

“Meaning what, may I ask?” Aurora inquired.

“You never coaxed Rud or tricked him when I was here,” Rosie said, a little too vengefully, Aurora thought. “You mainly just told him to get up and get dressed—he was going to a concert with you.”

“Oh, well, I may occasionally have been a little peremptory, if there was a good soloist or if a conductor I happened to be mad about happened to be conducting,” Aurora said. “How tactless of you to remember the few times when I was peremptory with Rud and forget the many times I was forced to coax.”

“I notice you didn’t pester Rud to go along when that old fat Englishman you were so crazy about happened to be conducting,” Rosie reminded her.

“Sir Thomas Beecham, of course I was crazy about him,” Aurora admitted. “Of course I didn’t drag Rud along on those occasions. In fact I was saddened that Sir Thomas had been forced by circumstance to spend his declining years conducting in front of barbarians, and I was quite prepared to make it up to him any way I could.”

“So did you?” Rosie asked. Sir Thomas Beecham had come to dinner a number of times in those years. Rosie remembered that he was very forcefully spoken, and also very hard to please when it came to food.

“There’s no food outside New York,” he had said, not once but several times, even as he was eating Aurora’s delicious
food, and eating it heartily, too. Rosie found that sort of behavior disgusting. If she had been the boss, and not the maid, she would have told him he ought to stop taking third helpings if he didn’t like the food. He could have run on back to New York any time, it would have been fine with her. But she had not been the boss, most of her kids were still at home in those days, and she needed the job. The Beecham dinners usually took place when Rud, Aurora’s husband, was away on one of his mysterious fishing trips—the mystery being why he never came back with even a single fish. It was plain that Aurora would have jumped in bed with old Sir Thomas in a minute, but he had soon moved away and Rosie had never been quite sure whether Aurora had or hadn’t been able to make matters up to him in that particular way.

“Pardon me, did I what?” Aurora asked.

“Sleep with that old white-haired fart?” Rosie said. Since Aurora had just asked her if she’d slept with Arthur, she thought she might get away with asking if Aurora had slept with Sir Thomas Beecham.

“Nope,” Aurora admitted. “Apart from some fumblings once, nothing came to pass.”

“Is that what you’re doing, sitting out there with all those old date books?” Rosie asked. “Trying to remember who you fumbled with and who you didn’t?”

“No, because I never fumbled—as you put it—with anyone very noteworthy in my whole life,” Aurora said. “As a seducer of the illustrious I have a very poor record—in fact, no record.”

“I wouldn’t lose no sleep over it, they’re probably just duds, like most men,” Rosie said.

“You’re probably right, oh sage,” Aurora said. “I would have liked to try just one celebrity, though, just to be sure, and Sir Thomas Beecham would have been high on my list. It’s unlikely that anyone of that caliber will come my way again.”

“Yeah, but you never know,” Rosie said. “I sure never expected Arthur Cotton to come my way, but he showed up, and now look what a jam I’m in.”

Later, in her little office, her hands dusty from stacking and arranging the many hundreds of concert programs—hers, her mother’s, and her grandmother’s—Aurora reflected that if nothing else her memory project would show how profoundly important music and the theater had been in the lives of the women in her family. The concert programs went back almost a century, and she still had, boxed, almost an equal number of playbills.

It occurred to her that if she cared to type every concert program into her computer, she would know, at the end, exactly how many times she and her mother and her grandmother had listened to a given piece of music, or been charmed by a given conductor or soloist. How much Debussy, how much Mozart, how much Haydn. Then, if she did the same with the playbills, she could also chart their dramatic loyalties: Shakespeare, O’Neill, Ibsen, Shaw.

It was a daunting mass of concert programs, though—they covered the floor, and so would the playbills, when she got around to unpacking them. It seemed to her that she might need an assistant—even two assistants. She thought of Teddy and Jane—they both had computers and also, both had time on their hands. They had quit their jobs at the 7-Eleven, where danger had increased to the point that they had to make change for the customers from behind a plexiglass shield.

“Sort of takes the fun out of it,” Jane said. At the moment they were both drawing unemployment; they seemed to do nothing except study dead languages and indulge their brilliant child. Aurora decided she might visit and offer them temporary employment on her memory project. Jane liked music—she could do the concert programs, and Teddy, who, despite his antidepressants, still showed signs of shakiness, could do the playbills.

What that left was eight shelves of social calendars, desk diaries, and other memorabilia, source of the raw chronological data from which Aurora hoped to extract a more or less day-to-day record of her existence. She realized that it was an eccentric hope: after all, she had lived twenty-five thousand
days or more, and might not have time enough left in which to work back through the years and months, the weeks and days, to her unremembered beginnings.

The truth was that most—indeed, almost all—of those days were unremembered, and she knew already that the calendars and desk diaries stacked on her shelves were not going to bring many of them back in much detail. Like herself, her mother and grandmother had taken a severely minimalist attitude toward diary keeping. So brief were their entries—and hers, too—that the really odd thing was that they had felt the need to make even a faint scratch on the rock of time as it rolled past. Yet all three of them had scratched—they seldom missed a day, even though they seldom scratched even as much as a complete sentence.

A typical entry for her grandmother, Catherine Dodd, might simply read “Left Boston,” or “Got home, beds dusty.” A New England picnic, of the sort Renoir ought to have painted, might receive from Catherine Dodd only one brusque stroke: “Bad clam, Charley sick.”

Her mother, Amelia, was equally terse. One entry, made when Aurora was five, merely said, “Aurora spat on Bob.” Aurora could not even recall who Bob might have been—she had no cousin named Bob. Though she searched carefully through the diaries of that period hoping for other references to a Bob, she found none. Try as she might, she could not remember spitting on a little boy—though, she had to admit, it was well within her potential: she did recall being often angry with little boys when she was around six; she was violently jealous because they had so much more freedom and more fun than little girls. Probably she had spat on one—but why, precisely?

Her own diaries, she had to admit, were no improvement. She had rarely been moved to jot down more than three or four words about any day, often saying no more than “Trevor, lobster,” “Edward, wretched dancer,” or “Beulah overcooked the fish.” The majority of her jottings reflected her critical nature. She had always maintained that her critical nature was merely a by-product of high standards; but after
leafing through a decade or so of her desk diaries she was forced to conclude that an impartial judge—a biographer, say—would probably conclude that she had been a woman with a very critical nature. Year after year, the three or four words she had allotted to a given day were words of complaint: overcooked fish, suitors who couldn’t dance, policemen who gave her tickets, concerts where the woodwinds were weak or the soloists unprepared.

Such records as she had left, viewed in the main, were sobering to such a degree that she wondered at times why she had ever supposed that she wanted to remember her life. She thought she had had mostly a happy, even an exuberant, life, and yet none of her esprit or her appreciation of human vicissitudes seemed to be reflected in her jottings.

It made what she was determined to undertake seem even more eccentric: Why spend months or years remembering a life if all it had consisted of were people who couldn’t dance or didn’t know how to cook fish or woodwind sections that weren’t up to snuff?