The Road Taken (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

It had been a long time since Rose had dropped in every day to visit her friend Elsie Wilder next door, or Elsie had come over unexpectedly to say hello. “Just passing by. Why weren’t you in the park today?” They were still dear friends, but life’s responsibilities had intervened, and now they made appointments to see each other when they could. Rose had imagined their children would grow up to be lifelong allies, but they hadn’t. Their children had chosen their own playmates and confidantes, partly because of the age difference, and partly because they were their own people. Her daughters did not marry Elsie’s sons, in fact they never even dated. Rose knew that back home in Bristol, a much smaller place, at a different time of the century, young people often fell in love with neighbors, as she had so long ago. But New York was an indifferent and electric city, and there was more to do.

It was her own daughters whom she had chosen to be her best friends. Rose wondered if she had made a mistake.

Ginger had graduated from college and was going on to medical school, again at nearby NYU, as she had long planned. She would not give her Sunday salons anymore; there would be too much schoolwork to do. Ginger seemed so much more confident now, a woman both in body and in mind. Although she still lived at home, Rose hardly ever saw her. She had friends, work, and purpose. That was what a parent wanted for a child, and the only thing missing was a husband and children, but Rose knew that for a person of Ginger’s totally focused disposition, even if she were not physically handicapped, it was probably too soon. Of course, there was still that boy in Boston. When would she get over him? But Rose couldn’t try to reason with her yet again. Ginger knew quite well how her mother felt, and to pursue it further would be useless nagging.

Peggy had settled in with her new baby, Markie, and every time Rose called her or saw her she seemed to have recovered more of her happiness and former spirit. It was eerie how much Markie resembled Marianne. And in a way, even after all the dramatic and tragic events, little had changed: Peggy, Ed, Markie, and Peter were as strong and self-sufficient and isolated a family unit as they had been when Marianne was there. Rose knew they didn’t need her. She loved Peggy more than Peggy loved her; she was aware of that, and although it hurt, she knew the abyss of difference between the love for a mother and the love for a child.

Joan was still missing.

Ben had started to send money to Joan far less frequently than he had in the beginning. He was pained at the lack of response. In a way, he had begun to feel that if Joan wasn’t asking for money and was not communicating with them, then she must be all right. But whether there was a check or not, Rose still wrote to Joan at her post office box every week, even when there was no news. She kept thinking that perhaps this epistolary onslaught of love and memories would make Joan feel ready to come back, if only for a visit. She tried to keep the letters cheerful.

Hugh and Teddy had bought a dog, Rose wrote, and the poor thing had become the child they’d never have. Or perhaps not the poor thing, perhaps the lucky thing. She was a little golden spaniel with a white muzzle, and Hugh had named her Blanche, after Blanche du Bois in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Rose did not imagine there was a dog on this earth who was more doted upon. The dog dish: silver, and an antique! The dog bed: a wine-colored velvet pillow with gold tassels, but it was never used because Blanche slept in the bed with them. (Although she didn’t write this to Joan, Rose could never quite get used to the fact that Hugh and Teddy slept in the same bed, even though she knew they were lovers. Somehow the bed made it all too obvious, and on that one occasion when the family had gone to their housewarming she had been rather embarrassed.) She and Ben didn’t go to visit Hugh and Teddy, but they were always happy to have them come to the town house for dinner, which they often did, and sometimes they brought Blanche, and Rose always had new toys for her.

“Your granddog,” Hugh called her.

Markie is six months old, Rose wrote to Joan’s post office box, and Peggy gave a birthday party for her. Thought you’d enjoy seeing this photo of the occasion, darling, and you might notice how much Markie looks like both Peggy and you when you were little. I wish you’d just send Peggy a card. She has changed. She’s happy now. You must stop punishing yourself, Joan. California is so far away.

Another dog letter! Grandma’s sick old Spunky passed away. He was almost eighteen. Where does the time go? Grandma says she won’t buy another dog, she wants to travel. My goodness, she has more energy than any of us. She says she’d go to California and look you up, but no one knows where you’re living. Why don’t you tell us, Joan?

No matter how many times Rose wrote to Joan, no matter how optimistic and nonincriminating those letters were, Joan never wrote back. Hugh and Ginger wrote to her sometimes too, but she never answered them either.

Although Rose and Elsie never just popped into one another’s houses anymore, they still called each other frequently, relieved themselves of whatever emotional baggage was ruining their week, and then they sometimes made a date. How odd it was, Rose thought, to telephone someone who lived just next door. Yet, the mystery of New York was that you could live in your neighborhood for years and not run into someone on the street, not see her in the grocery store. You were more apt to run into her in a favorite restaurant, each of you dining with other people, and even that did not happen very often. Sometimes she looked up at the lighted window in Elsie’s bedroom and wondered if she were at home at all. And then sometimes Rose had the eerie feeling that Elsie never left her house. Somehow she was afraid to ask.

“When can we have lunch?” Rose asked, on the phone. “You and I haven’t had one of our silly lunches together in such a long time.”

“I don’t go out to those long lunches with friends anymore,” Elsie said.

“No?”

“It ruins my day. But come over. We can have a drink. You’re right, it’s been ages.”

“When should I come?”

“Thursday?”

“That would be fine.” She remembered when Elsie would have said, “Come now.” But that was a long time ago, and everyone was so busy. What exactly they were so busy with, she had no idea. Running a household, even when your children were gone, doing some volunteer work, going to charity luncheons, shopping, having your hats made, getting your hair and nails done, chatting on the phone, keeping up, pleasing your husband, attending to your social calendar, worrying about your children—was that the career that kept their days so occupied? You could spend an entire afternoon lining the kitchen drawers. You read: women’s magazines and popular novels. Rose and Elsie had had household help for years, so they didn’t clean, and they cooked only on special occasions and on the nights that the girl was off if their husbands were reluctant to go out. Their days were not stressful, but they were full.

Rose had never doubted her life and those of her friends, and she didn’t intend to do so now, but it occurred to her that she was always running just to stay in the same place. Perhaps she would talk to Elsie about it and they could figure it all out.

She got dressed up to go next door to Elsie’s for drinks, since it felt like an occasion. An Irish maid in a little black uniform with a white ruffled apron opened the front door. This was new. A fire was neatly laid in the fireplace, but not lit because it was still summer. The drapes were drawn against the late afternoon heat, and an air conditioner hummed. There was the usual huge arrangement of fresh seasonal flowers on the piano in the living room, perfuming the air. Elsie’s tall, narrow, tranquil house smelled familiarly of flowers and smoke. She was a chain smoker and had been since before they had met.

“Rose!” she cried, emerging from the gloom, wearing a cocktail dress and her good jewelry. “Come in.” She kissed Rose lightly on the cheek, brushed it, rather, since she was wearing lipstick. She looked very thin.

Elsie led the way to the living room sofa, where a silver tray had been set up bearing a frosty shaker of martinis and two glasses, a jar of honey and a pitcher of water. There was a tiny bowl of peanuts next to the cocktail napkins, and a large ashtray, already partly full of lipstick-ended butts. “Oh, Siobhan, please,” Elsie said, waving at the ashtray, and the maid whisked the butts and ashes away in a silver container with a lid.

“You are so elegant,” Rose said admiringly.

“But it’s my avocation,” Elsie said smiling.

Rose held up her martini in a toast. “Cheers.”

“Health,” Elsie said.

“That too.” Rose sipped at her drink. It was perfectly made, but even after all these years she had never acquired a taste for alcohol and one was all she could stand.

“And how is your family, Rose?”

“Well. And yours?”

“Fine. Any news from Joan?”

“Of course not.”

“She’ll be back,” Elsie said. “Trust me.”

“Let’s talk about something more amusing,” Rose said.

“Or less amusing.” Elsie doubled over in a paroxysm of coughing. “Excuse me.” She measured out a teaspoonful of honey and swallowed it, and washed it down with a half glass of the water.

“What’s wrong?” Rose asked, concerned.

“Oh, my doctor said to take this. I have some lung problem. He says it might be from smoking so much. The honey makes it feel better.”

Rose nodded. Elsie’s voice was husky, almost hoarse, but it had been for years. She was much thinner than usual, but she had always been careful of her weight. Years ago her husband, the businessman who looked, as Elsie put it, like a monkey, had been discovered keeping a young woman in an apartment uptown on Park Avenue, and although he and Elsie never got divorced, after that they seemed to have a marriage of convenience. The clothes and jewelry, the beautiful house, the social engagements that they attended as a respectable married couple, were Elsie’s rewards. And of course, there were their children. Elsie had always made fun of her husband behind his back, and Rose had never been really sure that she had loved him, but she knew Elsie was devastated by his infidelity.

“We’re not so young anymore, are we, Rose,” Elsie said. “I don’t tell anyone, but I’m almost sixty.”

“Fifty-nine and a half,” Rose said. “The same as I am. You and I both know that.”

“So given the alternative it’s not so depressing.”

“Not so depressing at all.”

Elsie lit another cigarette and refreshed her martini. “You don’t smoke much, do you Rose?” she said. “I always remember that.”

“Some,” Rose said. Elsie had always put her own pack of cigarettes on the dining table next to the food, and smoked all through the meal, but Rose preferred to smoke only afterward. It was partly the way she had come of age, when smoking for women was rebellious and not feminine, and then, eventually, desirable.

“Just as well,” Elsie said. “Do you know what they call cigarettes? Coffin nails. Not that it’s ever stopped me any.”

“I know.”

“No one has any idea
really
if these things are bad for you,” Elsie said. She looked down at the glowing tip of the cigarette in her hand. “If someone told you that if you gave up all the things that you liked—cigarettes, alcohol, the fun they represented—and you would live an extra ten years, or you could just live your life the way you want and then drop dead, what would you do?” Before Rose had a chance to answer, she went on. “I wouldn’t stop,” Elsie said.

“I might,” Rose said.

“Besides, who knows if it would be ten; maybe you could be buying only one more year. What good would that be?”

“A year?” Rose thought about it. A year didn’t seem so much in a long life. “Well, maybe for just a year longer on this earth I wouldn’t reform my ways.”

“Then again, though, if you didn’t drop dead—if you had a long, terrible illness . . . or even a short terrible one . . . ?”

“Elsie, why are you talking about this?”

“I don’t know,” Elsie said quickly. Her voice was strained. “Have you seen any good movies lately?”

She’s dying, Rose thought. She herself knew very little about medicine, and cancer was a secret, the word no one dared to say, but she was an intelligent woman and she could see that Elsie was not only unwell but afraid. “Elsie,” Rose said, “you can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me what the doctor said. I care about you. I want to help.”

Elsie gave a little smile. “Help? I have a little lung problem. I will probably outlive everyone, including my husband’s latest girlfriend. Rose, do have another martini. I don’t like to drink alone.”

Rose let her friend pour some more into her glass, and pretended to sip. “Have you told Lionel?”

“Heavens no, he’d be too thrilled. Maybe the doctor told him. Certainly the doctor didn’t tell
me.
My dear doctor suggested I take a trip. Europe, he said, somewhere glamorous. I suppose that was his way of suggesting that I do all the things I’ve always wanted to do before I can’t.”

“Then it is serious? Elsie, don’t play games with me.”

“But they play them with me, don’t they? I suppose I’ll find out when the time comes. In the meantime, everyone wants me to be happy, so I’ll oblige them.”

“Oh, Elsie,” Rose said. She got up impetuously and put her arms around her old friend. Although she knew Elsie was thin, she was so unexpectedly bony to the touch that Rose was startled. Get well, she wanted to say. Get well backwards, as she had said to her childhood friend, the first Elsie, in their secret code, so long ago as she was dying of diabetes. I can’t bear to lose you too, she thought. And yet, even as she thought it, Rose knew life had brought her so many losses that she was already becoming inured to this one; even as she hugged her friend, she was beginning to say good-bye.

“I’m so frightened,” Elsie murmured. “And then, sometimes I’m not. I believe everything will be all right, that I’ll get well. And then, usually at night, I can’t sleep and I think how they know something I don’t know. . . . Or maybe they don’t know either. Whoever wrote that ignorance is bliss? You’d have to be terribly ignorant.”