Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Phyllis, who tanned beautifully, looking, these summer days, years younger than her age (she’d recently had a birthday: her forty-sixth), regarded even Terence’s toes, like his pale, if sturdy, legs, with a measure of exasperation. Wasn’t it like Terence not to tan? How, even in the summer, did he manage that?

  Terence smiled, that sweet boyish smile that, years ago, had so won Phyllis’s heart. He said, “If I’ve neglected your mother, dear, it wasn’t intentionally. From now on, I’ll try harder to be nice. This very day. This morning!” He kicked his feet into sandals, and made swiping motions at his wispy hair with both his hands, peering into a mirror on the wall. “And I’m damned sorry for losing that attaché case she gave me.”

  Phyllis said sharply, “Mother didn’t give you that attaché case, Terry. I did.”

  “Oh—really? I—must be thinking of another case, or a—wallet—or something.” Terence’s face colored faintly, with embarrassment.

  Phyllis asked, “Why do you think of the attaché case, why right now? I’m just curious.”

  “Why? I really don’t know, Phyllis,” Terence said, sighing, “—just thinking of your mother, I suppose. Of disappointing her. And you.”

  “Are you still thinking about that trial? About Trenton? After so long?”

  “I’m sure I was not.”

  “Imagine, on Nantucket Island, with this view of the Atlantic—thinking about Trenton, New Jersey.” Phyllis laughed, fondly, if with exasperation. She touched Terence’s upper arm, feeling the hard, compact muscles: a swimmer’s muscles. “Of course you don’t ‘disappoint,’ Terry, either my mother, or me. Don’t talk that way.”

  “I will admit, I’ve been distracted. I really don’t know why.” There was a pause. Terence seemed about to continue, but did not.

  “Well, I advised you not to sign on for jury duty. I said—”

  “Phyllis, why do you make such a fuss over that? The trial was unexceptional, it lasted only five days, it’s done.” Terence spoke with unusual severity. “I was only doing my duty as a citizen.”

  Phyllis looked at him searchingly, her hand still on his arm.

  How open, frank, innocent her husband was!—he could have no secrets from her, she knew. Her parents’ initial disappointment with Terence Greene—with his background, rather more than with him—had been tempered by their perception that here was a good man, an honest man, a man of integrity. At times, Phyllis felt herself the custodian of her husband’s very innocence, as if, along with being his wife, she were also his mother: the mother he’d lost as a small child.

  Quickly Phyllis stood on her toes, and kissed her husband’s warm, mildly indignant cheek. “Sorry, darling! I won’t bring it up again.”

  Because I know something about you, and your early life, which you don’t know. Which you’ve blessedly forgotten.

  For the remainder of the Nantucket visit, Terence seemed clearly to be making an effort to be less self-absorbed; above all, to be attentive to Phyllis’s mother. He commiserated with her on the subject of her rheumatoid arthritis; he learned to be deft and adroit and gallant, assisting her in the wheelchair when they went out, while sharing with her the fiction that the wheelchair’s use was merely temporary, an anomaly in the life of a healthy, vigorous, independent woman; he listened to her reminiscences, and her complaints, and called her “Fanny” instead of “Mrs. Winston,” as he’d done for years.

  Phyllis’s mother was a solid-bodied woman with a strong, bulldog face, eyes direct and level as her daughter’s, a mind like a proverbial steel trap when it came to finances; yet, like many widows of her class, she imagined herself made more feminine, thus more fluttery and girlish, since her husband’s death. Certainly it was true, in her wheelchair, which she detested, she was at a disadvantage. So it seemed quite natural that she hang heavily on her son-in-law’s arm, and his hand; that, having drunk too much at dinner, she giggle, and call him “Terry, dear,” and address most of her chatter, even intimate reminiscences of Phyllis’s childhood, to him.

  It was to Terence that Fanny Winston said, sniffing as if on the verge of tears, “I feel so safe around you—and your family. As if I know who I am.” And, as August neared its end, “This has been a lovely visit, hasn’t it? I’m afraid I’m going to miss you, terribly!” And, with a squeeze of Terence’s fingers, “Phyllis has invited me to visit you in Queenston this fall—I hope that’s agreeable with you?”

  Terence smiled sweetly, and said, “Why, Fanny, of course, yes.”

  So Phyllis was the more mystified, and the more upset, when, at the time of her mother’s visit, Terence was his old absentminded self again; and worse.

  The trouble began at once, on the very first day. Phyllis’s mother was due to arrive at Newark Airport at 1 P.M. of the first Saturday in October; Terence was to pick her up at the airport; unforgivably, he was fifty minutes late. And when at last he did arrive, looking disheveled, and behaving most distractedly, he could offer the poor woman no better excuse than claiming he’d been “slowed down by Turnpike traffic.”

  Mrs. Winston complained to Phyllis, that evening: “He hardly looked at me. He hadn’t even shaved. I’ve never been so rudely treated!”

  Phyllis, who was angry with Terence, too, and had had words with him earlier, tried now to defend him. “Mother, Terry is under so much pressure, these days, at the Foundation. One of his associates is giving him trouble, and he has so many extra meetings, conferences—”

  “Is that any excuse? Are you offering that as an excuse?”

  “Oh no, Mother. Except—”

  “Your poor father had as much pressure, or more; there was always at least one parishioner dying, and invariably, over the holidays, when we wanted to get away to Coral Gables, three or four. No wonder he had those terrible strokes!”

  “Oh, I know, Mother. I realize—”

  “And Willard had numerous investments, adding up to quite a bit of money, for which he bore sole responsibility—unlike Terence, I believe?”

  Phyllis winced at this remark. She loved her mother, however a challenge it was at such times to like her mother; certainly she felt sympathy for the aging woman in the wheelchair, once attractive, now puffy-faced, with bluish-gray permed hair and drooping eyelids and a perpetually aggrieved air. She said, squeezing her mother’s beringed hands, “Now, Mother!—you know that Terry has other qualities, don’t you? He has apologized for being late at the airport.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Where—now? In his study, I think. Working.”

  Mrs. Winston dabbed at her eyes, which were fierce with tears, a bright steely-gray. Seated in her shiny motorized wheelchair she commanded an authority she had not had previously. Unspoken between Phyllis and her mother—as, indeed, between Phyllis and her father: for the Winstons were not comfortable speaking of such things—was the issue of the older woman’s estate, which must be worth, by now, no less than several million dollars in cash, property, and investments. There was no one else to whom Mrs. Winston might reasonably leave this fortune than her daughter and her daughter’s family—was there? At all times, the subject was unspoken yet underscored such conversations, like an incessant humming noise in the background.

  Phyllis said, warmly, her hands still on her mother’s, “Terry is a perfectionist in his work. I try to get him to relax, but—”

  “I thought he wanted me to visit,” Mrs. Winston said, hurt. “I just don’t feel welcome here.”

  “Mother, of course Terry wants you to visit. He’s been looking forward to this, really he has. It’s just that—you know how he is.”

  “After Willard and I helped you with this house—and it is a lovely house, isn’t it?”

  Phyllis smiled a little harder. “Yes, Mother: a lovely house. And Terry and I were, and are, grateful. As I think we’ve said.”

  “I’m not sure I like the new carpeting in the family room, it’s too—I don’t know: bland. But the new curtains in my room—in the guest room—are ver
y charming. I’ve always loved organdy.”

  “I picked them out myself, with you in mind. Pink organdy.”

  “Did you!” Mrs. Winston smiled, though warily. She leaned toward Phyllis, shifting her weight in the wheelchair with some effort. She was not a tall woman, but she’d become quite stout; her poor swollen legs, encased in unfashionable cotton support hose, added to her bulk. It pained Phyllis to see her dignified mother so altered—the more so, in that Fanny Winston so resembled her. In an undertone Mrs. Winston asked, “Your husband isn’t seeing another woman, is he?”

  Phyllis laughed, shocked. “Mother, really!”

  It was the most preposterous thing Fanny Winston had ever uttered in her daughter’s hearing.

  Mrs. Winston visited with the Greenes for twelve days in October, a visit that had its pleasant interludes, but, overall, put a considerable strain upon Phyllis. She had to entertain, daily, her easily bored mother, whose handicapped condition made everything more difficult; she had to keep up, however sporadically, her public relations work. (Not that Queenston Opportunities, with but one or two clients, was anything like a full-time enterprise: But Phyllis hoped to give her friends and acquaintances the impression that it was.) During this time, Cindy behaved, on the whole, surprisingly well; Kim made an obvious effort to be nice to her grandmother; but Terence was unpredictable. On those evenings when he actually sat down at the dinner table with his family, he might be courteous, attentive, warm, and engaging—or he might be sombre, ashen-faced, distracted, and without appetite. Or, he might drink too much. Or, he might excuse himself midway in the meal, and disappear into his study to make a telephone call—“Don’t wait for me, I don’t know how long this will take.”

  Phyllis did not know whether to be angry, or concerned: She had never seen Terence quite like this, and his vague explanation, that the Feinemann Foundation was being reorganized, and that, in some quarters, his authority was being challenged, did not seem entirely adequate. Yet, Phyllis chose to believe him, and to defend him to her mother. With wifely solicitude she said, “I just hope Terry’s health won’t be affected by all this, like Father’s was!” Mrs. Winston said, with a grim little smile, “I think it already has been.”

  When it developed that, on the day of Mrs. Winston’s departure (she was flying to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a week’s visit at a health spa), Terence would be at a conference in Boston, Mrs. Winston said pointblank to him, “They certainly keep you running, at that Foundation! Willard would be surprised, I think—what he knew of it (he was well acquainted, you know, with several trustees) led him to think it would be—well, more gentlemanly, somehow. A place where you might use your intelligence.”

  “Really!” Terence murmured. It was nominally breakfast: But Terence was having only fruit juice, before hurrying off to catch his train for Manhattan. He managed a lopsided smile, catching Phyllis’s eye. “It’s very nice to think that, in Reverend Winston’s circle, intelligence and gentlemanliness were not incompatible.”

  Mrs. Winston, staring at her son-in-law, was not to be deflected. “You had a more comfortable schedule, Terry, as a college teacher, I seem to recall.”

  “But, Fanny, I made relatively little money as a teacher, didn’t I?” Terence asked. He smiled; but Phyllis could see the strain in his face. She was relieved when he left for the depot.

  And there was the evening, at one of Queenston’s most elegant restaurants, when, having drunk too much wine, Terence fell asleep in his chair—in Mrs. Winston’s bemusedly sympathetic words, “like a fevered infant.”

  And another evening, at the Hendries’ (for Alice Hendries’ eighty-nine-year-old mother was living with them, and it was hoped the two older women might enjoy meeting each other), Terence fell into a surprisingly heated argument with Burt Hendrie over the issue of gun control and the National Rifle Association: Burt, a self-proclaimed descendant of “pioneer American sportsmen,” said that if guns are denied law-abiding citizens, only criminals will have them, and Terence retorted that that kind of stereotyped thinking was in itself criminal—“That damned NRA should be sued for every gun injury and death in this country!”

  Phyllis stared at Terence. Remembering afterward, It was as though a stranger stood in his place—yet with his eyes, his mouth.

  And, next morning, Phyllis’s mother murmured, in an ambiguous tone, “Terence can be passionate, sometimes—can’t he!”

  On the final evening of Mrs. Winston’s visit, Terence was an hour late for dinner; but apologized profusely, with kisses for everyone, and, unexpectedly, presents as well—“I was walking on Madison Avenue, and there was this exotic little boutique, and I found myself looking in the window, so I thought, ‘Why not!’” Smiling happily, as if, perhaps, he’d had a drink or two on the train, Terence handed around gifts to his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughters, and stood rubbing his hands as they opened them. A silk handbag with a shoulder strap, intricately decorated with brightly colored appliquéd flowers, for Kim—“Wow, Daddy! Cool!” A brilliant crimson scarf, for Cindy, whose mouth moved oddly as she lifted it—“Oh Daddy, it’s too nice, for me.” A necklace of gaudy, chunky glass beads, for Phyllis—“Why, Terry, how thoughtful! Thank you, darling.” A pair of earrings for Fanny Winston, made of turquoise and purple feathers, in a sunburst design measuring five inches across—“Why, what is this? How—nice!”

  “Women can wear such damned pretty things!”—so Terence said, wistfully, smiling upon them all.

  The girls left the table, and Phyllis and her mother lingered over coffee, while Terence, still a bit breathless, ate a few mouthfuls of the meal Phyllis had kept warm for him. He chatted with his mother-in-law, teased her a bit. Was he a little drunk?—or just excited? (He’d quickly poured himself a glass of red wine, so, if Phyllis leaned over to kiss him, to smell his breath, she wouldn’t really know.) Phyllis watched him closely, considering. Absurd to imagine Terence Greene, of all people, seeing another woman: His behavior was mercurial, and he was becoming ever more eccentric, but, in his fumbling way, he meant well.

  So Phyllis forgave him, another time.

  Thinking, “I do love him—I suppose.”

  But what silly gifts he’d given her and her mother—the cheap Indian-style necklace, of a kind Phyllis would have scorned wearing since high school; the utterly inappropriate pair of earrings for her mother, of a kind hippies and flower children might have worn, in the 1960s. Phyllis would pass on her necklace to Kim, who would love it—Kim was so pretty, any sort of jewelry looked good on her. But, poor Fanny!—there she was, preening a bit, holding the outsized earrings up to her ears, the exotic feathers brushing against her flaccid, rouged cheeks. “Why, Terry,” she was saying, her eyelashes quivering, “—I certainly don’t own anything like these.”

  And there was Kim Greene’s upsetting encounter with her father—which, being Kim Greene, a girl of many secrets, she did not share with her sister Cindy, still less Mommy. No chance!

  For one thing, Kim would have had to say she’d been hanging out at tacky Mercer Mall, miles away on Route 1—a place not only forbidden to her, but accessible to her only by way of some guy with a car, forbidden too.

  And the guy—could it be Studs Schrieber, whom Kim had promised never to see again, after an unfortunate episode that summer, at Brooke Casey’s place, the weekend Brooke’s parents were away? (This episode, thank God, had been kept secret from Daddy—it was Mommy’s conviction that it would simply upset him too much.)

  So, Kim told no one in the family, and tried hard to forget: how, that night, just before Hallowe’en, she’d seen Daddy grinning so, hauling a large brass birdcage to his car, and he’d looked right through her—his favorite of his three children.

  Mercer Mall, in front of Beno’s Pizzeria, was a gathering place for local teenagers—public school kids, kids from outside Trenton, older guys who’d dropped out of school and led mysterious, enviable lives. Very few kids from Queenston Day!—except Studs Schrieber, who drove a new
-model chocolate-brown Camaro, and his favored buddies, and his girlfriends. (Kim, who loved Studs passionately, and knew, for all his cruelty to her, that she would never love any man as much in her entire life, had to accept it that Studs had other girls. It was like the stigmata, such knowledge.) While her parents believed that Kim was in Queenston, at one or another friend’s house, maybe doing homework, Kim was, most nights, at the mall, from approximately 8 P.M. until 10:30 P.M. (Her curfew was 11 P.M.) There, a rowdy, ever-shifting pack of teenagers gathered, mostly in their cars; eating pizza, drinking beer, passing joints around, in delicious stealth. This corner of the mall was raided occasionally by police, but that was part of the excitement—to outwit the “shithead-Smokeys,” as the guys called them.

  So far, Kimberly Greene, a junior at Queenston Day School, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Terence Greene of 7 Juniper Way, Queenston, had not yet been swept up in a police raid, and hauled by van to Mercer County Detention Center in Trenton. Studs Schrieber cheerfully boasted, “I got internal radar, that smells a shithead cop a mile away.”

  It happened that, one evening, in late October, at about 8:30 P.M., Kim, and Studs, and several of Studs’s buddies, were standing by the Camaro trading wisecracks with some beefy redneck skinheads from the far side of Route 1, and Kim glanced up to see, to her horror, her own father driving past!—Terence Greene, in his handsome silver BMW, unmistakable. Thank God, Daddy did not see her.

  Kim was so astonished, she clutched wordlessly at the sleeve of Studs’s leather jacket.

  What was Daddy doing here, at tacky Mercer Mall?—at such an hour? Miles out of his way, assuming he was coming from the Queenston depot? (He hadn’t been home for dinner that night, he’d called around 6 P.M. to apologize for having to work late at the Foundation—Kim herself had spoken with Daddy on the phone.) Kim watched incredulously as her father parked the BMW close by, and went into, of all places, a pet supplies store called Birds ’N’ Beasts; and, perhaps ten minutes later, came out again, briskly, smiling—carrying a rectangular brass birdcage large enough to hold a vulture!