The Evening Star (75 page)

“I just don’t want no emotion, you know what I mean?” Rosie told Aurora. “I just can’t deal with no emotion no more. It wears me out.”

“That’s all right, dear,” Aurora said. “If you can’t, you won’t have to.”

That night, Rosie was afraid to sleep. She began to talk about her early days in Bossier City. She told Aurora about being bitten by a rattlesnake; about the time her little sister had been run over by a car and killed; about looking at her father across the dinner table and thinking he looked a little peculiar, just before he keeled over and died of his heart attack. She talked of Jody White, her first beau—he had died at Iwo Jima—and of the fact that her big sister Louise’s first husband had made a pass at her, Rosie, on the very day her big sister married him.

“Not only then, but every other time he could catch me alone, the skunk,” Rosie said.

“Goodness,” Aurora said. “I suspect I should be focusing my memory project on your life rather than my own. Yours has been a lot more colorful.”

“Yeah, colorful, and hard, too,” Rosie said. “But all I can think about now is that I wish I could have more of it.

“I guess I should have been going to church and praying all these years,” she whispered to Aurora, a little later. “What do you think?”

“Rosie, if it’s eternity you’re talking about, I have to confess I probably haven’t given it the kind of thought I should have given it,” Aurora said. “I’ve had too much to deal with, right here. I’m afraid I’ve just left eternity to sort itself out as best it can.”

“Me too,” Rosie said. “The thing is, Sunday morning’s such a good time to do laundry. All that time I should have been going to church I was washing sheets and pillowcases.”

She smiled a little—her eyes seemed to brighten, for a moment.

“I just hope if I meet up with the General somewhere up in the sky, he’s at least got his britches on,” she whispered.

“Amen to that,” Aurora said.

11

Near the end, a nurse was required, as well as a certain amount of medical apparatus. Rosie submitted to the IV, but she froze out the nurse and looked balefully at the apparatus.

“Your bedroom don’t look like your bedroom, no more,” she said. “You ought to just pack me off to the hospital. I’m just bones anyway.”

“Yes, but you’re beloved bones, and you belong where you are,” Aurora said.

Theo was there at the time. He was allowed to peek in the door. He had brought a few flowers which he held up for Rosie to see.

Late that night, around one, as Theo and Vassily were
counting receipts and getting ready to close down the Acropolis Bar, the phone rang.

“She’s gone, my poor girl,” Aurora said.

Though she sounded calm, Theo and Vassily hurried across town anyway. Aurora gave them whiskey, and lots of tea, and the three of them sat around in her kitchen talking about Rosie, or just about this and that, until the sun came up.

12

Rosie’s children didn’t particularly want her to be buried in Bossier City. After all, none of them lived there—none even lived close. When Aurora asked if she might bury Rosie in the Greenway plot, they quickly agreed.

“Perhaps it’s selfish, but her children don’t seem to care, and I do,” Aurora said to Patsy. “If anyone stood by me, it was Rosie Dunlup.”

“You did a certain amount of standing by, yourself,” Patsy told her.

As they stood at the graveside—it was breezy and the great trees were rustling and waving—Aurora noticed a large man short of shuffling around at the rear of the small crowd. It was Willie Cotts, in a very ill-fitting suit.

“Willie, where have you been all these months? We were both worried silly,” Aurora asked, going over to him the moment the service ended.

Where he had been was clerking at a convenience store on
Little York Road, scarcely five miles from Aurora’s door, although admittedly in a very different part of town.

“I know I really ort to have called, Miz Greenway,” Willie said. In his bad suit he looked not merely miserable; he looked bereft and pitiable.

“I thought about it a million times, but I couldn’t work up my nerve,” he added. “I felt too guilty about running off and all. What I mean is, I never dreamed she’d die on us,” Willie went on, in tones so hopeless Aurora was glad Rosie wasn’t there to hear them. “I just figured she’d be there in River Oaks, working for you, and I’d get to feeling better and make the call someday.”

“Never mind, Willie,” Aurora said quickly, putting her arms around him. “I’m afraid I was just like you. I never dreamed she’d die.”

V
Last Love, First Loss

1

The night Aurora had her stroke she dreamed that a mad dog bit her. It was a small, savage black dog, and it came at her snapping while she was on her knees in the backyard, weeding a flower bed. In her fear, she couldn’t move—the fierce little black dog flung itself at her, biting her arms and breasts. Even when the dog faded and she realized she was having a nightmare, she was reluctant to wake up. For a time the dream was more convincing than her conviction that it was a dream. When she woke up she would have to go at once to the hospital and start getting painful rabies shots.

Then she became aware of a crashing headache, the worst of her life. She wondered if she were dying. Slowly, the nightmare released her, but the headache wouldn’t. She tried to sit up and found that she couldn’t move—at least, she mostly couldn’t move. One hand still moved—she tried to grasp the receiver of her telephone but dropped it. The headache pounded like surf. Soon the phone began to make the sound it makes when the receiver is left off the book. Aurora couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move.

2

Tommy and Ellen’s baby was born the week Aurora had her stroke. They named him Henry—it was kind of a wry name, and Ellen thought the baby had a wry little face. No one in Ellen’s family had been named Henry, and no one in Tommy’s family, either.

3

By the time Henry was five months old it had become clear that Aurora would never make a full recovery from the stroke. She was, after all, pushing ninety. But she got well enough to be allowed to go home, where she had many visitors. She could read, play cards a little, work a CD player, and even now and then—with the assistance of Maria, the kind, stout Guatemalan woman who had worked for her since Rosie’s death—move to her patio for the afternoon and see a different view.

But, to Ellen’s sorrow particularly, she had not recovered her speech. Aurora was the one person in Tommy’s family that Ellen really longed to talk to. Ellen kept hoping that
someday a miracle would happen so that Aurora would be able to talk again.

4

Mainly Ellen wanted to know things about Tommy that no one but Aurora could tell her. Jane, who had been Ellen’s roommate at Bryn Mawr, kept saying that she didn’t really know Tommy well. Teddy obviously knew him pretty well—the two of them worked together in a very successful business, fixing defective computer programs for some of the largest banks and oil companies in the southwest—but Teddy was closemouthed with Ellen. He didn’t seem to trust her entirely, even though Jane, his own mate, assured him over and over again that Ellen was one of the most trustworthy people on earth. Still, Teddy clammed up around her, particularly if Tommy was the subject of the conversation.

5

In a way Ellen figured it didn’t matter too much if Teddy clammed up. Her sense was that if anyone in the family, other than herself, knew much about Tommy, it was probably Aurora. After all, Aurora had raised him. And Ellen could tell just by looking into Aurora’s eyes that she still had her intelligence. In particular Ellen wanted to know if Aurora thought Tommy had killed her former girlfriend on purpose. No one in the family would come near that question, but Ellen had a feeling that Aurora might come near it, if only she could talk.

6

Of course, Aurora
could
write—or at least she could scrawl. Every day she scrawled requests on big legal pads and gave the requests to anyone who came to visit. Usually the requests were for books or music or a specific food Aurora wanted—and it was usually Theo, a sad-looking old Greek—who took the requests and filled them; though sometimes, if Ellen and Jane felt like spending an afternoon together, they might fill seven or eight of Aurora’s little requests on a single shopping spree.

Ellen
really
wanted to know what Aurora thought about Tommy’s having killed his girlfriend. She would have liked to ask Aurora flat out if she thought Tommy might do it again someday, in which case the most likely victim, assuming they stayed married, would be herself. But you couldn’t expect an old woman who was nearly ninety to scrawl an answer to a question like that on a legal pad.

Much as Ellen wanted to ask the question, she knew she’d better wait for the miracle to happen—she’d better wait until Aurora could speak again.

7

Ellen had supposed she would spend her whole life in Minneapolis, where she was an art critic on a newspaper. She flew to Houston for a weekend with Jane, her old roommate, and met Tommy, who was just finishing his parole. Tommy and Teddy had already started their business, which was tiny at the time. Jane was teaching a class in Greek and a class in Latin at the University of Houston. Ellen had never had a really exciting romance before—not a
really
exciting romance. The next thing she knew, she had moved from the top of the country to the bottom. Work was no problem. Ellen knew her stuff—she was soon writing free-lance art criticism for a number of Texas magazines. The fact that Tommy had killed his former girlfriend was a huge problem, though, for Ellen’s sober Midwestern parents.

But Ellen—as Jane put it—was really in a lather about Tommy. She married him anyway.

8

Aurora concluded that her luck had finally run out. It seemed that her future, what little there was likely to be of it, would mainly consist of frustration. She couldn’t talk, and her capacity for movement was severely limited. At least she was home—she could watch TV in her own bedroom, and look out her own large windows at the beautiful sky. She was lucky in Maria, who cared for her very well. Hoping to get her more interested in life than she usually was, Maria even brought in some of the old date books from the little office in the garage. On dull days, when Theo was too down in his back even to drag himself across town, Aurora piddled a little with her memory project; she would flip through a few scrap-books or diaries and would occasionally conjure up what she supposed was really a memory of some picnic on the Cape, seventy-five or eighty years before—her mother, Amelia Starrett, would be there, and a number of vague men with mustaches, wearing white trousers.

9

Aurora, though, was not much persuaded by her own dabblings in the past—she knew she was just wading in the
shallows of a memory that had never been particularly deep. Despite the playbills and the concert programs, despite the diaries and the scrapbooks, she had to admit that she could remember practically nothing of her long experience of life. The analysis of high moments, whether ecstatic or terrible, that Monsieur Proust was so good at was far beyond her. She could not get back in memory the life of her emotions, or of her senses, or even of her society, to any important degree. She really knew nothing of her mother, except that she had loved a gardener, her Sammy. She had never understood her daughter—she still found herself wondering why Emma had chosen to marry an almost worthless man.

10

She did remember, with pain, how cold and colorless the Nebraska sky had looked the day Emma died. It was a day in which all the color—as well as all the hope—had seemed to go out of life.

11

Of her time with men, Aurora could call back little, though she did recall the ambivalence that had always seemed to precede and impede seductions, or anything else she might want to do with a man. She had always wanted love to go both faster and slower—but men had never got it right. They made her impatient when they hurried; they made her impatient when they lagged.

Theo had fallen out of his pickup and hurt his back badly. He was more than half-crippled himself, but when he came to see Aurora he gave her such sad looks that she wanted to smack him. She didn’t want to think of herself as sick—if she must, then at least she didn’t want to forget what it had felt like to be well.

For that, a forthright man might have helped, but Theo Petrakis had forgotten how to be forthright. “Go away if you’re going to look at me that way!” Aurora scrawled on her pad one day.

“What way?” Theo asked.

12

Vassily had died some years earlier. Theo had sold the bar, he had nothing to do, he loved Aurora, he kept coming. After all, her condition had improved a lot—she might keep on improving. They might even marry someday. When she looked at him angrily and scolded him bitterly, in notes, Theo consoled himself with the thought that at least—and at last!—he had no rivals.

Pascal, the last rival, had stumbled onto a rich widow, a Jungian or something. They married and moved to Switzerland, only to capsize in a boat and drown.

13

Though she was habituated to Theo and grateful for his loyalty, Aurora was often very angry with him. She was old and rather sick, yet she still found that when initiative was required—or, at least, when it would have been welcomed—she still had to supply it. If they wanted a special meal, she ordered it. If they felt like a change of scene—a little card game on her patio, perhaps—she made the decision and
went to the considerable trouble of having herself moved. If they decided to listen to opera, she chose the opera.

Theo always agreed; he just never initiated—and there, it seemed to her, was the story of her life with men. She didn’t need to remember it because it was still happening.