The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  She played golf that afternoon, as she always did on Tuesdays, and came home late. She bathed and changed, dressing slowly and carefully. She checked her watch. How strange. When Edward Briscoe said seven o’clock, he usually meant exactly that. Maybe he’d left a message with Ellen. She rang, but Ellen failed to answer. Where had she got to; she was supposed to be on duty tonight.

  The bedroom light blazed out the open door across the hall carpet, but the hall itself seemed unusually dark. Margaret hurried downstairs. Only the night lights were burning —the house looked exactly the way it did at three in the morning. She checked her watch again, just to be sure. It was quarter past seven. She looked in the kitchen and the pantry. Empty. All the servants were off this evening, except her maid. “Ellen!” Lord knew where she had gotten to. Give her hell when she gets back. She’s supposed to stay available until the mistress gets herself launched. … She turned on the pantry lights and reached for the phone. And could not remember Briscoe’s number. It was unlisted; she kept it in her address book by the library phone.

  She hurried through the hall again, shouting, “Where the hell is everybody?”

  She turned in to the library, angrily switching on more lights. Why were they all off this time of evening? Was that Ellen’s idea? She pressed the call button twice with a sharp rap of her fingers—maybe Ellen will hear—found Briscoe’s phone number, and began dialing.

  “Put it up,” Robert said.

  He was standing directly behind her, almost touching her.

  She held the phone in her hand, the first two numbers dialed, the line blank. “Where in God’s name did you come from?”

  “I was sitting in the chair over there. You walked right by me.”

  “Look, Robert, I’m busy.”

  He shrugged. “Put down the phone.”

  “I’m calling just now.” She dialed the third number; he flicked his finger down, cutting the connection. “Robert, stop it.”

  He pulled the phone from her tightening fingers, twisting the plastic handle free. “I told you to put it up.”

  “I’ve got a date.”

  “I canceled it.”

  “You don’t know who it was.”

  He pointed to the desk. “Your appointment book. And I got the phone number from your address book.”

  Anger ran prickles over her scalp. She tried to keep her voice from shaking and only half-succeeded. “What did you tell him?”

  “Had a nice talk. Told him it was family business and your presence was required.”

  She put both palms on the desk top and hunched over it, swinging her weight on her arms, staring at the careful array of crystal obelisks that lined the polished leather. Stupid thing, crystal. Why put them here? “How long have you been sitting in the dark?”

  “Oh, quite a while.” He put one hand on her left shoulder, she tensed her muscles against it, and he lifted it again. “I came just after you started dressing. At least that’s what Ellen said.”

  “Ellen.” She fingered one obelisk, noticing her own prints on the spotless crystal. “What happened to Ellen?”

  “I gave her the evening off. Told her we had unexpected business.”

  She still held the ornament. She wanted to smash something, she wanted to jam her fist through something, she wanted to scream. And she wanted her thoughts to line up properly the way they always did, the way they weren’t doing now.

  “Ellen was delighted. Said she had a date.”

  With a quick jerk of her hand she knocked all the pieces of crystal to the rug. She had not intended to do that. Her thoughts weren’t working right and her hands weren’t working right. What did that leave?

  “Get out the way.” She pushed him aside and picked up the obelisks. There were three, there should be four. She crawled on hands and knees under the desk, felt her stocking snag. She straightened up, twisted to look, saw a run half an inch wide. Just one more thing.

  She put the obelisks back into position; they didn’t even seem chipped. She felt a little calmer now. Robert was standing not two feet away, arms folded, watching.

  “You’re so clever,” she said. “Because you’ve got a pair of balls, you think you run things. Well, you can take your precious balls and shove them up your ass.”

  “Quit yelling,” Robert said.

  “You’re here because my father decided to buy a husband for Anna. I never did figure out why he picked you, but you were a lousy bargain. Chasing every piece of tail that goes by. I bet Anna wishes she were out of the whole thing.”

  “Shut up and get on the sofa,” he said.

  “To hell with you.”

  She did not think a heavy man could move that quickly. He caught both arms, twirled her around and back on the sofa. “You god damn fool!”

  He held her firmly with one hand planted in the center of her chest. She tore at it, but the clenched fist would not move. The pressure against her breasts made breathing difficult. “Stop it.”

  Holding her with one hand, he slowly dropped his pants. “Like I told Briscoe, family business won’t wait.”

  His face was much darker than usual. The skin around his lips seemed almost blue. A flicker of fear left her limp and dizzy. “I can’t breathe,” she said.

  He lifted his hand, a flow of pain followed it. Her breasts hurt all over, tips tingling and flesh aching. Every breath, against no weight now, was an effort, a burning.

  He was laughing, a soundless assured laugh. “You’re wet,” he said between his teeth, “you’re god damn dripping wet.”

  IN THE morning she woke to find only the empty sheets. He’d left without her hearing. She hurt all over, particularly her hip—she’d stumbled coming upstairs. Or had he shoved her into the railing? She fingered the spreading blue mark on her skin. Old people used to put leeches on bruises like that.

  She got out of bed and staggered into a blistering-hot tub. She emptied two different bath oils into the water and found that the heavy odors canceled each other, leaving only a faintly chlorine smell. She rubbed her lip; it was swollen and puffy. Well, she thought, I suppose I’m lucky my teeth are still there. Damn-fool performance at my age. … He’d have a clear set of teeth marks on his shoulder. … She smiled, then shuddered as the swollen tissue flamed and twitched.

  When the water cooled, she went back to the bedroom. First she drew up the bedcovers to cover the spots and smears of blood. Then she took two dexedrines and looked at the clock. Almost nine, time to get to the office. She dressed quickly, a severely plain beige linen suit; did her face carefully. The hot bath had made her hair curlier than ever; she brushed it, sprayed it, brushed it again.

  She stopped at Robert’s office, nodded to his receptionist: “He in?”

  “No, ma’am.” She was a pretty young woman. Margaret caught herself wondering if she too were Robert’s girl. “He just called to say he’d be staying home today.”

  “Thanks, hon.” Margaret waved amiably. “Tell him I asked.”

  At five o’clock, on her way home, she stopped at a florist shop. She bought all the violets they had—half a dozen little blue bouquets ringed with white lace—and sent them to Robert. She wrote the card in her own spiky handwriting: For a delicate soul. I missed you at work.

  THIS IS WHAT AGE is, Margaret thought, with the steady passing of years. A slow diminution in feelings, in activities. … While the self makes fewer demands. (After a lifetime of screaming, Margaret thought, that silence was pretty ominous.) Her interest in men lessened. She admitted them to her bed more from habit than from raging desire. She still enjoyed the conjunction of bodies, but she no longer looked for any special value in their union. No longer did any shirt stretched over sweat-stained shoulders make her restless with desire. No longer did every square of thigh, every set of jaw look supremely good to her. She no longer stared at pants to see the charming shadow. But, curiously, her pleasure was greater than ever before. With precision, with experience, without passion, she arranged her orgasms into wide undu
lating bright-colored explosions. Proficiency and lack of real interest came together. She inspected each new male body carefully, detachedly, comparing it to others. No longer even seeing the individual. Her smooth appraising glance no longer saw a man, but a composite of all men, of male bodies. …

  And she herself, the casing of skin and the frame of bone that supported her, showed signs of age and wear. The increasing heaviness of her thighs. The sagging flesh of her forearms. The steady graying of her hair.

  She began getting regular tints. And going to gyms where batteries of rollers knocked off the accumulating fat. Where massages comforted her aching back. She could feel herself settling down into her life, pulling it up around her, like covers. The excitement, the hysterical amusement had disappeared—they’d seeped away so slowly she did not miss them. In their place was a calm competence: I am eternal, nothing can ever happen to me. Wherever I am, everything looks familiar to me. …

  She sent her son to college and dutifully attended his graduation ceremonies in the rain. She kissed him off to divinity school and made no comment.

  She saw her father through two more coronaries and a series of minor strokes. She noticed too that he breathed more comfortably in warm wet air. And it was she who devised the huge greenhouse—a way to give him comfort without being therapeutic. She designed it herself to run the entire length of the New Orleans house. (She hired two men to wash the windows, day after day, inside and out.) And then because the silence of so many plants—from the creeping bougainvillaea on the roof to the ficus and the orchids at eye level—seemed oppressive, she added the bird cage. It was made of bamboo, a copy of a primitive Brazilian fish trap she had once seen. It was a huge almost perfect teardrop; its tip reached the top of the two-story glass roof. Within it, dozens of birds fluttered and sang on the branches of a changing array of large potted trees—orange, lemon, gardenia.

  “What the hell is that?” her father asked.

  But he was amused and interested. You could find him there almost any time of the day, resting easily in the thick heavy sweet-smelling air.

  (Immediately afterward, Anna constructed an almost identical greenhouse at Port Bella; the only difference was a floor of polished slate rather than one of white marble.)

  Margaret had redone her father’s house a dozen times—she began to tire of decorators and color swatches and finding the right furniture. As a last swaggering gesture, she imported a New York decorator and did over every one of the bathrooms—sea shells of onyx and swans of gold, fluted columns of alabaster and marble, and mounds of white fur underfoot. When she’d finished, and looked at it carefully, the pale blue veining in the marble struck her as quite obscene. I have reached the end of this, the sobbing end.

  “Papa, do you know how foolish this whole house is?”

  “What do you do now?” he asked. “Do we move out and start another?”

  “Good God, no. This is the best house in New Orleans; it’s taken me years to get it to this gorgeous point. …” She stopped and giggled. “There isn’t a single thing in it that’s not overdone.”

  He insisted. “What do you spend money on now?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You like to.”

  “I know I do.” She thought for a minute. “And I know you don’t, Papa. It’s enough for you to know that you have it. Would you believe that sometimes I dream that money’s like the yeast bread we learned to make in the convent, growing big and fat and swelling all out of the pans and bowls? Like it was alive, growing and creeping and walking. Like it was taking over the earth.”

  The Old Man laughed. “It does, and it is.”

  “Well, I make money and I like to spend it on me. Anna can do the good works.”

  “Try jewelry. You have no great jewelry.”

  “With my face?” Margaret leaned over and kissed his dry, papery cheek. “Papa, nothing would make my face look worse than jewelry hung around it. Like a lamb chop with a frill.” She sat back in mock resignation. “No, Papa, I’ve got to find something else.”

  “Well,” the Old Man said, “how about art?”

  Margaret shook her head, but his words lingered. A week later, after an especially late party, she put on her galoshes and her mink coat, and caught the early-morning flight to New York. By noon, she had walked twenty blocks up and down Madison Avenue, in and out of the galleries, and spent $97,000 for a Utrillo. By three o’clock she had bought four Manzu bronzes. Then she took the six-o’clock flight home. She was getting rather chilly in her chiffon dress.

  Now that she had decided to be a collector, she began building a gallery wing to her father’s house.

  “Well,” the Old Man said, “this house is becoming quite a monument.”

  She shrugged. “It does begin to look like Grant’s Tomb, Papa, but I like to build things.”

  “As long as you have fun.”

  She began to collect with enthusiasm, doing the selecting herself. She smuggled a trunk full of pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico. In Vienna she bought half a dozen Chinese scrolls from a Polish Communist; in Hong Kong a dozen Tibetan altars. She flew them back, with faked bills of purchase. She went to London to pay three-quarters of a million dollars for a small collection of Egyptian hawks and Greek vases. “Papa,” she said, “it’s the way they look at you. Like they were saying: She’s crazy but she’s got money; look at the old bag.”

  “What do you do with the stuff now?”

  “Well.” She scratched her head and made her most comic face. “Sit and look at it, I guess, Papa.”

  But she rarely did that. She was too busy finding more.

  SHE WAS, Margaret thought, completely happy. If Josh ever asks me—years from now when he has gray hairs—Mother, what were the happiest years of your life? I’ll tell him these were. But Joshua of course would never ask. …

  IF IT hadn’t been for Robert. If it just hadn’t been for Robert. There were times when she craved him, the taste of his skin, the faint abrasions of his body hair. Strange random times when her body burned and throbbed and panted, half nauseated, half smothered, repelled and attracted. In the middle of the night, another man in her bed. Even then. The emptiness inside her body would vibrate and echo, her flesh crawl and quiver—a kind of singsong laughing of the skin.

  HE HAD no sense of balance, Margaret thought; that was the trouble. Like his women. He displayed them proudly, flaunted them publicly. Phyllis Lorimer, for instance. He’d park his helicopter on the beach in front of her house and saunter in to her bed. While the neighbors complained to the police and all the little kids and their nurses came to stare at the strange machine. (When he bought the helicopter, Margaret thought grimly: Maybe he’ll kill himself. She’d thought the same thing years before when he learned to fly, but he was skillful even when drunk. No luck there.) And his little girls—who would have ever thought he’d be so successful with high school girls? At least Louisiana’s age of consent was low, no statutory rape charges, Margaret thought: I am thankful for the Lord’s small favors. …

  He was a fool. The way he had of telephoning at odd hours. … Of letting himself into her house. Three or four times she’d waked to find him standing by her bed. Once there was another man with her. …

  And that was enough, that was the end. Her annoyance changed to anger. He’d kept it up too long; she was tired of it.

  He stopped by her office to whisper his afternoon plans in her ear.

  “I’m busy here, Robert,” she said. “I can’t possibly get away this afternoon.”

  “It will all wait.”

  “No,” she said, “something else will wait.”

  He flushed dark red across his cheeks. “I’ll beat the bejesus out of you tonight.”

  She leaned back in her chair. “Robert, you are a nuisance. I’ve had enough.”

  “You’re crazy about me.”

  “Don’t come to the house tonight, Robert.”

  “You’ll like it,” he said, “you always do.” />
  She was waiting for him in the living room, smiling and silent. When he took two steps beyond the door, Mike Bertucci tapped him gently over the right ear with a blackjack, and even managed to catch him before he fell.

  HE WAS, Margaret thought over and over again, just trouble. For everybody. Less than a week after Mike Bertucci took him home, put him to bed, and waited the rest of the night to be sure he hadn’t hit too hard—the Old Man said to her: “Have nothing more to do with Robert.”

  A sound like breaking china in her ears, then a rustling like egg shells or dry grass. Margaret said slowly: “Papa, are you worried?”

  The Old Man folded his hands in his lap, the arthritic knuckles pointing up like accusing fingers. “Anna is concerned.”

  Margaret’s voice seemed far away, like somebody talking across the room; but it was, she noticed approvingly, quiet and level. Unconcerned. Unrevealing. “Papa, this is beginning to be a twenty-question game. Why is Anna concerned?”

  “Because,” the Old Man said, and his folded hands never moved, “Robert had a bad bump and a terrible headache and told her about you.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  “Anna had no idea.” The Old Man could sit perfectly still. Not a shift of body, not a flicker of expression on his face.

  “At this point I think I could kill him.”

  “Oh, no,” the Old Man said.

  Margaret yanked open the curtains and stared at the orderly patterns of her Japanese garden: swirls of gravel and occasional clumps of porous black rock. “Why the hell do you suppose I put in a Japanese garden with this house?” She let the surge of her blood subside, her pulse slow to normal, her breath move smoothly in and out.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said to the gravel. A bird landed and, fluttering, began a sand bath, spoiling the carefully raked patterns. “Papa, you’re playing some sort of game with me; this one doesn’t make sense.”

  The Old Man said: “You’ve become a very shrewd woman.”

  “I can’t see Anna complaining about me. If she did, she said it as part of something else.”