Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “I’m not sarcastic,” Emma said.

  “No, but you’re young,” Aurora said, going in the front door. She stopped in the living room for a moment to admire her flowers.

  “He does have wonderful taste in flowers,” she said. “Italians often do. What you don’t seem to comprehend is that people of any substance are often much better in person than they seem in the abstract, when one is merely left to think about them. Everyone likes to gripe about people who aren’t there. It doesn’t mean one has no feeling, you know.”

  Together they attacked the kitchen and dispatched their chores rapidly. Emma took a big sponge and went out to the patio to wipe off the table, and Aurora soon trailed after her carrying a hairbrush and a final bowl of watercress soup. She also had some scraps of bread to put in her bird feeder. Emma sat at the table and watched her mother crumble the bread, humming as she crumbled.

  “I do believe I hum Mozart better than Alfredo can play him,” she said when she came back from the yard. She sat down across from her daughter and ate every last drop of her soup. The night had a hum of its own and mother and daughter listened to it awhile and were quiet.

  “Are you as nice to all your suitors as you are to Alberto?” Emma asked.

  “By no means,” Aurora said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they don’t deserve it,” Aurora said. She began to brush her hair.

  “Would you ever marry him?”

  Aurora shook her head. “No, that’s quite out of the question,” she said. “Alberto is just a fragment of himself now. I’m not sure but what that stroke might just as well have killed him, because it robbed him of his art. I heard him at his best and he was very fine—first rate. He behaves well, for a man who has lost the best thing he ever had—and that is saying much.”

  “So why do you rule him out?” Emma said.

  Aurora looked at her daughter and continued to brush her hair. “No, I’m far too difficult for Alberto,” she said. “I knew both his wives and they were empty as birds’ nests. He never had the skill to handle me, and now he hasn’t the energy either. In any case his tradition has only prepared him for compliant women. I’m deeply fond of him but I doubt that I could remain compliant very long.”

  “Then don’t you think it’s wrong of you to lead him on?” Emma asked.

  Aurora smiled at her daughter, who was sitting demurely in her nice yellow dress and challenging her motives.

  “You’re lucky to have caught me when I’m mellow, if you’re going to say such things to me,” she said. “I’m afraid our points of view are twenty-five years apart. Alberto is not an adolescent with his life ahead of him. He’s an aging man who’s been seriously ill, and he might drop dead tomorrow. I have told him many times that I couldn’t marry him. I am not leading him on, I’m merely doing the best I can by him. It may be that he cherishes impossible hopes—I suppose he does—but at his age impossible hopes are better than no hopes at all.”

  “I still feel sorry for him,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t want to love somebody I couldn’t get.”

  “It’s not the worst fate, whatever the young may think,” Aurora said. “There is at least a certain stimulation in it. It is certainly a good deal better than getting somebody you find you can’t love, when all is said and done.”

  Emma thought about it for a moment. “I wonder where I’ll be when all is said and done,” she said.

  Aurora didn’t reply—she was listening to the sounds of the night. Apart from a drop more soup, there was for the moment nothing she really wanted, nothing she really missed. Few things gave her quite the same sense of serenity as knowing that her food had been well prepared and well received, and that her dishes were done and her kitchen clean. In such a mood nothing could vex her deeply. She looked over at Emma and saw that Emma was looking at her.

  “Well, what?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” Emma said. Her mother was so often outrageous that it was almost troubling to have to think of her as someone who was possibly just as normal as she was—or conceivably even more normal. Seeing her with Alberto had made her realize that her mother had had a life about which, in essence, she knew nothing. What had she done with Alberto when he was younger and could still sing? What had she done in her marriage for twenty-four years? Her mother and father had been simply there, like trees in the back yard—objects of nature, not objects of curiosity.

  “Emma, you’re being somewhat evasive,” Aurora said. “That can’t be proper.”

  “I wasn’t,” Emma said. “I just don’t know what I want to ask.”

  “Well, I’m at your service, I’m sure—if you can decide before my bedtime.”

  “I guess I’m just curious to know what you liked best about Daddy. It just occurred to me that I don’t really know that much about you two.”

  Aurora smiled. “He was tall,” she said. “It wasn’t always helpful, in view of the fact that he spent such an inordinate amount of his life sitting down, but on those occasions when I could manage to get him on his feet it was an asset.”

  “I don’t think that explains twenty-four years, surely,” Emma said. “If it does I’m appalled.”

  Aurora shrugged and licked her soup spoon. “I was appalled to find such a disreputable car parked in your street this morning,” she said. “It would be more decorous of Daniel to stick it in a parking lot the next time he decides to sneak in on you at dawn.”

  “That wasn’t what we were talking about,” Emma said quickly. “That’s completely beside the point.”

  “No, as I perceive it the point is taste,” Aurora said. “You are far too romantic, Emma, and if you’re not careful it will bring you to rack, at the very least, and quite possibly to ruin as well.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Emma said.

  “You aren’t trying,” Aurora said. “You’re hoping to be allowed to keep your most cherished notions—in my day they were called illusions—but you won’t get to. In the first place I am afraid you vastly underrate appearance. Your father’s appearance was somewhat to my taste, and since he never worked hard enough or felt violently enough to cause it to deteriorate, it continued to be to my taste for twenty-four years—at least whenever he would stand up. Aside from that he was mild and had manners and was never disposed to beat me. He was much too lazy to transgress, so in general we got on.”

  “You make it sound awfully general,” Emma said. “You don’t make it sound deep at all.”

  Aurora smiled again. “As I recall, we were speaking of longevity,” she said. “I hadn’t realized that we were speaking of depth.”

  “Well,” Emma said. She had the beginnings of the odd and not entirely pleasant feeling she often felt when her mother, in her own strange way, set out to lecture her. It was a sensation almost of shrinking, of fading quietly backward into girlhood. She didn’t like it, and yet to her distress she didn’t entirely dislike it either. Her mother was still there, someone to face things with.

  “Emma, you are so remiss about finishing your sentences.” Aurora said. “You speak vaguely enough, at best, but I really think you ought to try harder to finish your sentences. You are always saying things like ‘Well,’ and then you go no further. People will think you suffer from a mental vacuum.”

  “Sometimes I do,” Emma said. “Why should I have to speak in complete sentences?”

  “Because complete sentences command attention,” Aurora said. “Vague grunts do not. Also, because you’re about to be a mother. People who lack the decisiveness to finish their sentences can hardly pretend to the decisiveness necessary to the raising of children. Fortunately you have several months in which to practice.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Emma asked. “Stand in front of a mirror and speak to myself in complete sentences?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you,” Aurora said.

  “I didn’t want to talk about me,” Emma said. “I was trying to get you to talk about you and Daddy.”

  Auror
a tilted her head a few times to exercise her neck. “I was quite willing,” she said. “I’m unusually mellow tonight, perhaps because I drank my own wine instead of allowing Alberto to fill me up with something inferior. Perhaps I’m so mellow that I missed the point of your question, if you had one. Or then again perhaps you phrased it too vaguely for me to get.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “I just wanted to know what you really felt.”

  Aurora waved her hand lightly, swinging the empty soup spoon. “My dear, doubtless there are hundreds of edifices in this world that rise from shallow foundations, if I may speak elliptically,” she said. “When I’m mellow and the air has a nice weight I do so love to speak elliptically, as you know. Many edifices, some of them even taller than your father, might well crumble if someone came along and gave them a few healthy kicks. I myself am still capable of healthy kicks, I assure you. As for your question, which happily you phrased grammatically, if rather dully, I can tell you quite distinctly that I don’t care if I never hear the phrase ‘really felt’ again.”

  She looked her daughter right in the eye.

  “Okay, okay, forget it,” Emma said.

  “No, I’ve not finished,” Aurora said. “I may have new heights to rise to. For all I know, my dear, good grammar provides a more lasting basis for sound character than quote real feeling unquote. I would not presume to claim that definitively, but I must say that I suspect it. I also suspect, if you must know, that it was lucky for your father and me that none of my admirers had much capacity for kicking. The difference between the saved and the fallen, I have always maintained, boils down to adequate temptation.”

  “What’s adequate?” Emma asked.

  “Adequate is a kind that’s hard to come by in these parts, unhappily for me,” Aurora said. “Or happily for me, as the case may be. I’ve not given up the search though, I assure you.

  “I suppose it’s something of an enigma,” she added reflectively.

  “What?”

  “Adequacy.” Aurora smiled at her daughter, and a touch of mischief was in her smile.

  “I only hope your brilliant young friend is adequate to maintain you, if it should prove that he’s adequate to tempt you,” she said.

  Emma flushed and jumped to her feet. “Shut up,” she said. “He’s gone. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I just wanted to see him once. He’s an old friend—what’s the harm in that?”

  “I don’t believe I suggested there was any harm in it,” Aurora said.

  “Well, there wasn’t,” Emma said. “Don’t sit there and make complete sentences at me. I hate good grammar and I think you’re awful. I’m going home. Thank you for the dinner.”

  Aurora waved her soup spoon, smiling at her furious daughter. “Yes, thank you for attending, dear,” she said. “Your dress was quite well chosen.”

  They looked at one another for a moment. “All right, if you’re not going to help me,” Emma said. At once she wished she hadn’t said it.

  Aurora looked at her daughter calmly. “I doubt seriously that I shall fail to help you if I’m called upon,” she said. “What is far more likely is that you’ll be too stubborn to call upon me at the proper time. I wish you would sit back down. In fact, I wish you would spend the night here. If you go back home you’re surely going to fret.”

  “Of course I am,” Emma said. “I can fret if I want to.”

  “Listen!” Aurora said commandingly.

  Emma listened. All she could hear was the flutter of wings from one of the several birdhouses.

  “Those are my martins,” Aurora said. “I imagine you’ve disturbed them. They are quite responsive to agitation, you know.”

  “I’m going on,” Emma said. “Good night.”

  When she had gone Aurora took her spoon and her bowl to the kitchen and washed them. Then she returned to the patio and walked out in her back yard. The martins were still fluttering in the martin house, and she stood beneath them and sang softly for a little while, as she often did at night. It occurred to her, thinking of Emma, that she had no real wish to be younger. Few enough of the rewards of life seemed to belong to youth, when one considered. She leaned against the pole of the martin house, happily barefoot, and tried to remember something that would induce her to want to start again where her daughter was. She could think of nothing, but she did remember that she had a couple of new movie magazines to read, tucked away by her bed—a little reward for having done her duty by her old lover and good friend Alberto. He had been such a fine singer once. No doubt he had more reason than she did for wishing to be young again.

  The grass, as she walked in, was just beginning to be wet from the moist night, and the moon that earlier had shone so nicely on her elm and her cypress and her pines was curtained and faint in the mist—that mist that the Gulf breathed over Houston almost every night, as if to help the city sleep.

  CHAPTER VI

  1.

  “PHONE’S RINGING,” Rosie said.

  The news came as no surprise to Aurora, whose hand was less than a foot from the instrument in question. Midmorning had come again and she was ensconced in a sunny little window nook in her bedroom, almost her favorite place in the world. She had the sunlight and an open window and a great many pillows around her, for moral support, and she needed them all, since she was in the midst of one of her least favorite of all tasks: paying bills. Nothing filled her with quite such a sense of indecision as the sight of her bills, more than fifty of which lay scattered about the window nook. None of them so far had even been opened, much less paid, and Aurora was staring fixedly at her checkbook, trying to get her balance solidly in mind before tearing into the many ominous envelopes.

  “Phone’s ringing, I said,” Rosie repeated, since it still was.

  Aurora continued to stare at her checkbook. “How like you to state the obvious,” she said. “I know the phone is ringing. It’s my sanity that’s being destroyed, not my hearing.”

  “It could be good news,” Rosie said brightly.

  “That is a remote possibility, in the mood I’m in,” Aurora said. “It is far more likely to be someone I don’t want to talk to.”

  “Who would that be?” Rosie asked.

  “That would be anyone insensitive enough to call me when I don’t wish to be called,” she said. She made a dark face at the phone.

  “You answer it,” she said. “It’s making it difficult for me to keep my mind on figures.”

  “It’s got to be the General, anyway,” Rosie said. “He’s the only one with the gall to let it ring twenty-five times.”

  “Well, let’s test him,” Aurora said, laying down her checkbook. “Let’s see if he has the gall to let it ring fifty times. That much gall amounts to arrogance, and if there’s anything I don’t need right now it’s arrogance. Do you suppose he’s watching?”

  “Yep,” Rosie said, borrowing a little of her employer’s hand lotion. “What else has he got to do?”

  The General’s home, as luck would have it, was at the end of Aurora’s street, and his bedroom window commanded a clear view of her garage. He had only to pick up his binoculars to determine if her car was there, and his binoculars were seldom far from his hand. His wife’s death and Rudyard Greenway’s had come only six months apart, and the General and his binoculars had been a constant factor in Aurora’s life ever since. Even working in the flowerbeds in her front yard became a problem; she could seldom do so without the thought that two greedy, cold blue military eyes were fixed upon her.

  Her phone continued to ring.

  “I certainly think military training must destroy the finer instincts,” Aurora said. “Are you keeping count of the rings?”

  “He ain’t my boy friend,” Rosie said. She was exploring Aurora’s dressing table, looking for things she might need.

  “Answer it,” Aurora said. “I’m growing faint from listening to it ring. Be acerbic.”

  “Be what?” Rosie asked. “Talk English.”

  �
��Don’t let him push you around, in other words,” Aurora said.

  Rosie picked up the phone and the scratchy masculine voice of General Hector Scott immediately began to grate on the ears of both. Even amid her pillows Aurora could hear it distinctly.

  “Hi there, General,” Rosie said blithely. “What are you doing up so early?”

  Everyone who knew him knew that Hector Scott rose at five A.M., summer and winter, and ran three miles before breakfast. He was accompanied on his runs by his two Dalmatians, Pershing and Marshal Ney, both of whom, unlike the General, were in the prime of life. The dogs enjoyed the runs—again unlike the General, who ran because his standards would not permit him not to. The one member of his establishment who absolutely loathed them was his man. F.V., who was forced to follow the morning runs in the General’s old Packard sedan car in case the General or perhaps one of the Dalmatians dropped dead along the way.

  F.V.’s last name was d’Arch, though few knew it. Rosie happened to be one of the few, the reason being that F.V. hailed from Bossier City, Louisiana, which was right next to her own home town of Shreveport. Occasionally, when she was caught up with her work, Rosie would trip down the street and spend a happy morning in General Scott’s garage helping F.V. tinker with the old Packard, a car so over-the-hill and generally unreliable that it was usually broken down by the time it got home from following the three-mile run. Rosie was a great comfort to F.V., partly because they both loved to reminisce about the good old days in Shreveport and Bossier City, and partly because she understood Packard engines almost as well as he did. F.V. was a thin little fellow with a pencil mustache and a good deal of native Cajun melancholy; his old home ties with Rosie might have grown into something stronger if they hadn’t both been convinced that Royce Dunlup would walk in with a shotgun and mow them both down if, as F.V. put it, “anything ever happened.”