Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  “What are you watching?” I asked.

  “Nothing. A movie.”

  I made her move over so I could sit next to her on the sofa. All the lights were out except for the TV. She was huddled under a chenille throw Gram got her for Christmas, wearing one of Dad’s old gray Henley shirts and her nightgown. She looked terrible. “I can see that. What is it?”

  “Why are you up? You should be in bed.”

  “I’ll go in a sec.”

  “It’s James Stewart in Call Northside 777. I thought it would be a Hitchcock, but it’s not.”

  “Who’s this guy?”

  “He’s in prison, he’s been in for eleven years for killing a cop. James Stewart’s a reporter who thinks he’s innocent and is trying to get him out.”

  I love watching old movies with Mom. It’s one of the best things we do together. That and going shopping and then having lunch in a restaurant. Although we haven’t done that in a long time, but we used to. We’d almost always get ice cream instead of food, and she always made that seem exciting and nervy and forbidden. “We won’t mention this to your father,” she’d say in a low voice, ordering two double hot fudge sundaes, one with nuts and one without, and I’d say, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” We’d laugh, and eat ice cream until our stomachs hurt.

  It was a pretty good movie. James Stewart got Richard Conte out of prison at the last second by enlarging a photograph that showed the date on a newspaper, which proved he was innocent. In the very end, they showed Richard Conte getting out of jail and meeting his wife and son and her new husband. She’d divorced him but she still loved him, and she wasn’t going back to him because now she had E. G. Marshall.

  “Would you ever get married again?”

  We both stared straight ahead at the TV. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so, I doubt it. I can’t imagine it.”

  “What if you fell in love with somebody? You’re not that old.”

  She made a face. “I feel old.”

  “No, but in ten years you could meet some guy and fall in love all over again. You could. It’s possible.”

  She pulled her knees up under her nightgown, dropped her head, and ran her fingers through her hair, messing it up.

  “I’m just saying it’s possible,” I said, touching her on the foot. She had on a pair of Dad’s old woolly socks. She never used to wear his clothes like this when he was alive. “Right? You can’t be sad forever. Nobody is, except in books. People start up again, they go on.” I had been studying this, noticing. “Sonny Bono’s wife started dating like nine months after he died. Remember? And after Diana’s wreck, the princes went to parties and stuff, they showed pictures of them laughing and looking happy, and you’d never have thought they could do that from the way they were at the funeral. Remember?”

  “Yep.” She put her arm around me. I burrowed against her, liking her warmth and her flannel smell, even her dirty hair smell. “Tell me about your day.”

  “I already did. Oh, we saw a movie in World Cultures. It was on the Scottish Highlands, which are incredibly cold and barren, but really really beautiful, and they have more sheep there than people. I was thinking how cool it would be to live there.”

  “Why? If it’s cold and bleak and nobody lives there.”

  “Because, it just would be. Nothing could happen to you because nobody would even know you were there. And the rent would be cheap.”

  In fact, I fell asleep tonight thinking about what it would be like to live in a stone cottage with a thatched roof on a hillside all by myself, just a black and white collie for company. I could be either a writer or a painter. People would talk about me, that American girl who lives alone and doesn’t speak to anyone. They’d observe me walking along the cliffs with my dog and the wind blowing out my hair and my black cape. “How lonely she must be,” the natives would say, seeing my solitary figure. I’d have a walking stick. I’d speak with a hint of a brogue. Then a handsome, older man would move into the cottage on the neighboring cliff. He too would be an artist, but a tortured, unsuccessful one. I would become his muse. Because of me he would regain his ability to write haunting poetry. Together we would win the Pulitzer Prize, and in our acceptance speech he’d say that without me he would be nothing. We’d get a lot of money and live on the barren heath forever.

  “I can’t wait for my new job to start,” I said. “When does yours?”

  “Next week. Monday morning.”

  “So you better start getting ready, huh? Going to bed at eleven or so. Right? So you can get up in the morning.” I gave her pantyhose and perfume for Christmas, and also a new digital alarm clock, so she’s got no excuses.

  “Good idea,” she said.

  “Mine starts tomorrow.” It would’ve started sooner, but I had to get a work permit because I’m not sixteen.

  “I know.”

  “It’s so totally cool, Mom, it really is.” She nodded and smiled, but she wasn’t thrilled about it. But that was because she didn’t get it; once she met Krystal and checked out the Mother Earth Palace and all the stuff there, she’d be cool with it. Who wouldn’t? Caitlin was like, “Oh, wow, that is so weird,” but in a good way, and Raven totally gets it, totally thinks it’s an excellent choice. First thing, I have to look up sore throat in one of Krystal’s books, because I’ve had one for two days. Low-grade and not bad enough to stay home, but this is how a lot of things start, including esophageal cancer. But it’s probably not that. It’s probably, like, a cold.

  “So what are you going to wear on your first day?”

  Mom laughed. “I have absolutely no idea. You think I’ll have to get dressed up?”

  “Just show your legs a lot, he’ll like that. Mr. Wright.”

  “Ruth, what is this with you? Why don’t you like Brian?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “But why?”

  “He’s a jerk. Do you like the way he looks at you?”

  “The way he looks at me?”

  “The way he does everything.”

  She shook her head, like I was speaking in some other language besides English. “Honey—Brian’s okay, he’s just a guy. He’ll make a good boss but nothing else, you know? Know what I’m sayin’?” she tried for a joke. I hunched my shoulder and put it between our faces. “Listen,” she said. “It’s important for you to know that I’m not—playing the field or anything.”

  “Gee, Mom, you sure know some hip lingo.”

  “I’m just telling you, I’m not available. Nobody is taking your father’s place. Nothing’s going to change.”

  “Right.”

  “Is that agreement or sarcasm?”

  “Did you know him before Dad died?”

  “Yes, of course. Not well. We’d run into him at college functions.”

  “What was he like then?”

  “He was fine—what do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you see his eyes that night at dinner? And before, when you were having drinks, how he swooped down on you?”

  “Ruth, really—what are you talking about? Brian’s friendly, he’s personable, he likes people. He stands close when he talks to you, he—touches you sometimes, just to make contact. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s probably why he’s good at his job, it’s just the kind of person he is.”

  “Right. Like Bill Clinton.” She laughed, so I laughed, too. I wanted to get off this subject anyway. “Where is the Other School, anyway?” I said. “If it’s near the Mother Earth, we could go home together after work sometimes.”

  “Well, except I’ll probably be finishing up about the time you’re just starting.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Too bad.”

  She gave me a hug. I didn’t know why until I figured out that she thought it was cool that I wanted to go home from work with her. She’s so easy sometimes. “Listen, you,” she said. “I am going to take your advice and clean up my act, start going to bed early, getting in shape. But you know that I’m really all right, don
’t you? You get that?”

  “Sure,” I said, “I know.”

  “Really all right. So don’t worry about me.”

  “Okay. And you don’t worry about me.”

  “No deal, I’m your mother, I get to do that full-time.”

  “Seriously, Mom, because I’m fine, too.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I am.”

  “I know.”

  Well, somebody was lying. I wondered if she knew it was both of us, and if she thought I believed her, and if she believed me. It didn’t matter that much, though, not while we were huddled up together on the couch, her with her arms wound around my arm, me with my head on her shoulder. Watching Bob Dornan walk down a fancy staircase and explain why Elephant Walk was a classic and what Elizabeth Taylor was doing when they made it. Right here under Gram’s soft blanket, we were safe. We had each other, we practically were each other, and it was like we were full. For tonight.

  6

  Sensible Meals at Appropriate Hours

  AT EIGHTEEN, I was thrilled to leave Clayborne for the big city—Washington, D.C. I went to school there, met Stephen, married, moved to Chicago, had Ruth. I thought I was through with small towns, and certainly through with the south. I never reckoned on Stephen’s pleasant liberal arts college denying him tenure, a turn of fortune that effectively rendered him unemployable for any position his pride would let him accept. Except at Remington College, and there only because my father pulled strings.

  When we moved back to Clayborne three years ago, I was filled with misgivings. Dread, make that. The things that drove me wild about my hometown were still there, and most of them could be summed up in the word small. But something happened to me during my twenty-year self-exile. Smallness didn’t oppress me anymore—now I could even see advantages. Old age, I suppose.

  It wasn’t as if nothing had changed in Clayborne—shopping malls full of the usual chain stores had sprouted up where pretty farms used to be; we had new glass and metal office buildings, a few gentrified, brick-paved, gaslight-lined streets downtown where cars weren’t allowed. The Leap River had a new four-lane bridge across it, and a “fitness trail” where the old towpath used to be. But the old college hot spots were in the same wooden two-story buildings on Remington Avenue they’d been in when I was a teenager; only the names had changed. Remington students wore different clothes, different hairstyles, but their faces still looked harried, carefree, snotty, scared, drugged out—same as they did in the sixties and the seventies. And the college still gave Clayborne whatever thin veneer of culture and sophistication it had. Without it, we’d have been just another sleepy Piedmont farm village with tenuous ties to the Confederacy and funky architecture. With it, we were a poor man’s Charlottesville. A wannabe Chapel Hill.

  My family always disdained the local paper, the Morning Record. Pop wouldn’t read anything but the New York Times or, for slumming, the Richmond Times-Dispatch; Stephen didn’t even know the Morning Record existed. But I liked it. When I was in town, I picked up a copy and read it with as much guilty pleasure as if it were the National Enquirer, which it certainly was not. At the Record, everything was newsworthy, the school lunch menus, hospital admissions by name—but not ailment, fortunately—minutes of meetings of the zoning board and the PTA, the record of deeds and transfers—they printed how much you paid for your house, how much you got for your farm. Fascinating reading. My favorite section was the police blotter, because there was hardly any crime—teen vandalism, some DUI’s, a lot of college drunkenness, the tantalizing “lewd conduct,” which usually turned out to be peeing in public. That was about it. “Hit and Run” meant somebody had banged into a mailbox and kept going. The commonest headline for traffic accidents was “No One Hurt.”

  After Chicago, it was like Oz. When I was a young girl the sleepiness of my town made me crazy, but now I liked it. And it wasn’t altogether that middle age had turned me into a fossil, as my daughter claimed. It was also Ruth herself. Bad things could still happen—I knew that, I wasn’t blind—but they weren’t as likely. Simple as that. Here in Clayborne, Virginia, the law of dreadful probabilities was in my child’s favor. Proximity to my mother, I often had to remind myself, was a small price to pay for peace of mind.

  “Look, there’s my first boyfriend,” I said to Modean, my neighbor, on a chilly, sunny, Sunday afternoon in the middle of January. We were sitting on a bench in Monroe Square, Clayborne’s town center, and I was stalling, thinking of things to say so she wouldn’t get up and make me start jogging again.

  “Where?” She squinted her kind, nearsighted eyes, looking out across the concrete and grass at the mothers pushing baby strollers, the jostling students, the old men playing checkers. I pointed. “Oh, him. Mm, very handsome.”

  The Confederate Soldier had been standing in the center of Monroe Square since 1878—the plaque said so. He wasn’t famous for anything in particular; Clayborne had sent plenty of sons off to the War between the States but, except for dying, none of them had done anything spectacular. He wasn’t even on horseback; he was just a regular soldier, rifle over his left shoulder, right leg jutting out as he strode boldly north, toward trouble. “Such a crush I had on him. I even named him,” I confessed to Modean.

  “What?”

  “Beauregard Rourke. Beau to me.” Modean snickered. “I used to coast my bike around and around him and make up dreamy stories.”

  “Like?”

  “Like…I was a beautiful spy from Philadelphia and he was my secret contact. And clandestine lover.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Already I’d figured out the beauty of a bronze boyfriend is that he has to be anything you want, and he can’t change.”

  Modean said, “Carrie, how was your Christmas?” She’d asked me that question yesterday, when she and Dave got back from three weeks in Atlanta, where his folks live, and I’d said, “Fine! It went well, really, much better than I expected.”

  But now I told her the truth. “It was sad,” I said, leaning over to rub a sore place on my heel through my sneaker. “Ruth was so sweet. She did everything she could think of to cheer me up. I did the same for her, so by one o’clock we were both exhausted and we hadn’t even gone to my mother’s yet.”

  “How was that?”

  “Okay. Same as always, pretty much. My cousins were there, and Aunt Fan, my father’s sister. You know my mother always takes over at things like that, the big family occasions. It’s her show. Stephen—well, he tended to recede as much as he could. That was just how he coped.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I know he was quiet in groups. Shy.”

  Shy? That was one way to look at it. “Well, he wasn’t much of a participant in family events,” I said. “He observed. If anything. I did the work and Stephen…attended.”

  “Oh, well. That’s just how men are.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said quickly, “they’re all like that.”

  Modean, who saw nothing but good in everyone, was the last person in the world I could complain to about Stephen. Not that I wanted to complain about him. But I wanted to explain to someone why I hadn’t missed him terribly over the holidays. I wanted to tell Modean how he could make himself invisible. He did his duty—strung the lights, wrote checks, bought the booze if we were having a party—then he disappeared. It was the same every year, and eventually I got used to doing everything myself. How could I miss him at my mother’s house on Christmas day? His absence was noticeable, but not remarkable. Without him, Mama’s show really did go on.

  “We had an okay time in Atlanta,” Modean was telling me. “Dave’s dad has a drinking problem, I think I told you, but he stayed on good behavior because of the baby. But there was always that tension, you know, and not knowing. I worried a lot about Dave because he was worrying a lot about his father. So mostly I guess everybody just worried.”

  Modean was the most perfect friend I’d ever had. She was kindhearted, happy, simple, direct, and together. I’d give
n up my cynical search for the crack—the secret drinking, the sudden religious proselytizing, the kleptomania. It wasn’t there, and she was a paragon, with the saving grace of a sense of humor. Dave was a tall, reedy guy with bushy gray hair and a perpetually startled look, as if he couldn’t believe the amazing turn his luck had taken. He was older, widowed for about fifteen years when he found Modean. And Harry was the perfect baby for these perfect parents. I considered it a point in my favor that I had never, even at my lowest, most miserable, self-pitying point, hated the lot of them.

  Forcing me, with Ruth’s complicity, to go jogging with her was the first mean thing Modean had ever done to me. “You need to get strong, Carrie, you have to build yourself back up. How do you expect to start working eight-hour days? You’ll collapse at that office before lunchtime.” All true, but I still hated it. When I was in better shape—before Stephen died—I used to jog with him every once in a while, but it never worked out very well. I only did it for the chance to spend time with him, and he preferred to run alone. Cross-purposes.

  “Ready to go?” Modean jumped up and started doing stretching exercises. I mimicked her halfheartedly, stiff as a plank. She was ten years younger than me, but even at her age I was never that fit. She was small but strong, with frizzy blonde hair and fair skin, and blue eyes with blonde lashes. She looked like a baby bird. “Okay?” she said, and took off. I followed creakily. It was only eleven blocks from the square to our street, and she regularly ran ten times that without breaking a sweat. I was panting before we hit Jefferson Street.

  “So are you all set for work?” She slowed for me, practically running in place. “What are you going to wear tomorrow?”

  “Oh, gosh,” I wheezed, “I don’t know—there’s only one other employee besides Brian—a woman—I think it’s pretty casual.”

  “A pantsuit, maybe.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”