“Baby, you must listen to me now,” I said. “I am not going to let Glynn come out here and do that movie. That is not ever, ever going to happen. If there was any other way I could help this…relationship…happen, I would do it, if you want it this badly. But Glynn will not do Joan and I will not let Caleb Pringle think I’m going to change my mind, because I’m not. And I’m not going to let Glynn think that, either. Or Mr. Margolies. It’s horribly, awfully dishonest; it’s playing games with people’s lives, my daughter’s chief among them. Surely you must see that.”
“I didn’t mean you had to change your mind about it,” she murmured. “But what’s so wrong with letting him think he just might have a chance? Just for this tiny little bit of time, Glynn would never have to know. In fact you’d never even have to mention it again; your going up there would be all he wanted. You could still tell him no after a day or two. Glynn wants to go stay with her friends, anyway—she wouldn’t even be around him. That way we could have a day or two together, you and I and Pring, then I could say well, I’ll stay a little while after Met and Glynn leave, and it would be a natural thing to do, and we’d be alone, and I could…it would work out. If not the movie, then Met, please, please, let me have the time at the lodge.”
She looked at me and saw the refusal in my face and put hers into her hands and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved and her hands shook, but the sobs were silent and terrible. I put my arms around her and held her against me. How many times, I thought dully, her pain seeping into the very core of me, had we stood like this? She impaled on her pain; I trying to absorb it.
“I don’t understand why the lodge is so important to you,” I said against her hair. “Can’t you stay in L.A. and see him? What is it that’s so special about the lodge?”
“Because it’s the place where he’s happiest, the place he loves most in the world. I want him to think of me in it; I want him to see me there and remember how it was, how good, how well I fit. And I have something I have to tell him, and I want it to be there; otherwise I don’t know…”
A coldness settled around my heart.
“What is it you have to tell him, Laura?” I said.
She shook her head against me, and then she looked up at me and it came out.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, beginning to cry again. “It’s his. I want this child, but I want him. I want him and me and the baby to be together, a real family, and I’m afraid.…I have to have some kind of insurance when I tell him. I know he loves kids, but I don’t know just how one will fit into his life now, and I’m scared. I cannot lose him, Met; it would kill me; I would die. That month that he didn’t call…I was already dead and in hell. I can tell him up there, in his place. Especially if he thinks there still might be a chance for Arc. Can you possibly, possibly see?”
I stared at her more in grief and an old, sucking despair than shock. The pregnancy was not a shock. I had always been surprised and grateful that it had not happened before. Or perhaps it had.
“Oh, Pie,” I said, my own tears beginning. “What on earth is going to happen to you?”
“That’s up to you,” she whispered. “That’s entirely up to you. Can’t you trade just one week of your life for the rest of mine? I’d be off your hands then.…Oh, dear God, I need this so much. I want this so much.”
I held her and rocked her, staring over her head at the blank steel door of the studio washroom, not seeing it. I want. I need. Only you, Met. Only you, Mom. Only you, Merritt. Help me. Fix it. Take care of me.…
Suddenly and violently I was sick of it, sick with the weight of all those cries, all those years. I was tired beyond thinking, tired beyond even the effort to speak. To speak, to explain, to say, once again, no. No, it isn’t good for you, no it isn’t good for Glynn, no.
I thought of Caleb Pringle’s words: “Up there in those redwoods it’s like being right under the eye of God…and the silence is so deep you can hear it.”
A week, I thought. A week in that healing silence and solitude. Days alone with my sister, days in which to make her see that a man who needed to be tricked was no man to hang a life on, to entrust a child’s life to. Days in which to find another answer.
And I thought of what we were headed back to, Glynn and I.
“Yes,” I said faintly. “All right. We’ll go. We’ll go and we’ll figure out something about the baby, you and I. But first we’ll sit down and look at the trees and just be very, very quiet, and we’ll do that for a long time.”
The sobs began again, and she hugged me so hard that I lost my breath.
“You’ll never do anything else for me as important as this,” she hiccuped. “I will love you for the rest of my life. I will love you beyond that.”
“Fix your face and come on back,” I said, wrapped close in this new shroud of tiredness and the stupid-simple peace that comes after a decision, any decision, is made.
“I have to go and call Pom. We have to call Marcie’s folks in Palo Alto and see if it’s all right for Glynn to visit.”
She nodded and I left. Through the door she called after me, “Don’t let him beat up on you, Met. Don’t let him punish you for this. When was the last time you had some time just for yourself? Don’t let him talk you out of that.”
I did not reply. I walked steadily back through the still-dim corridors toward the studio, thinking what I might possibly say to my husband. Nothing came. Probably, I thought, it was because I had never, since I married him, made a decision that did not have his best interests, or Glynn’s, at the core of it. I did not know how to explain my own need. And, I realized with amazement, I did not care. Pom had coped this far. He could cope for another week. I did not expect that he would embrace the decision, but perhaps he would begin to see that sometime over the past week one of the primary rules by which we operated our lives had changed, had had to.
And maybe he would not. All I felt at the moment was a simple curiosity to see which it would be and a need to get beyond the phone call that was so great it almost felt like labor, like childbirth.
Amy answered Pom’s private line.
“Oh, Merritt. Well, the prodigal wife at last,” she chortled merrily, or with what passed, with Amy, for merriment. “Was it Doctor you wanted? I’ll take a message, Doctor’s in a meeting until—”
“Get him, Amy,” I said. “Now.”
There was a long pause, and I heard her dialing Pom, and then his voice. “Merritt,” he said.
It was his voice, of course, but it sounded so flat and without affect that for a moment I thought Amy must have connected me with another office.
“Pom?” I said witlessly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you. I left a number—”
“I got it, Met. I just didn’t call it.”
I knew then that he was still very angry with me, and that this conversation would have no good ending. But there was something else under his voice, a frailty or injury of some sort, that I had never heard before. Alarm flooded me, and pity, and the old, helpless love that Pom in trouble always called out. Could Mommee after all…
“I sincerely hope that you’re calling from the airport, Merritt,” he said, and the pity and love receded, along with most of the alarm. If Mommee had come to serious harm he would not resort to sarcasm.
“No.”
“Ah,” he said, and waited.
“Pom, I wanted to tell you that we’re going to spend another week in California,” I said, speaking rapidly and, I hoped, firmly. “Laura’s friend has offered us his lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains, south of San Francisco, and Glynn’s friends Marcie and Jessica are visiting Marcie’s father over in Palo Alto, and it’s very close to the lodge, and I’ve always wanted Glynn to see the redwood country, and so much has happened that I need to be still and sort it all out—”
“A lot has happened indeed,” he said. His tone was still level.
I could put it off no longer.
“Mommee…
is Mommee all right?”
“No, Merritt, Mommee is out of her mind and as of tonight she’s out of the one decent place that would take her on short notice, and since you will be visiting the redwood country for another week I have no idea on God’s earth what will happen to her now. That’s how Mommee is.”
Guilt leaped and anger flared higher. Pity was still there.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I know she isn’t easy. Do you want to tell me?”
“Would it get you home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, no. I don’t think I’ll bother. Oh, hell, Merritt, it’s just that…I went to see her this morning before work and she didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know me, Merritt. She’s been so traumatized by all this bouncing around, and all the unfamiliar people, that she’s gone into this kind of crazy fugue state; nobody can reach her. And they won’t keep her there—”
“Where’s there?”
“Lenox Meadows. That high-rise place in Brookhaven, the one all the Buckhead old people go to. I called Bob Scully, the director, a couple of days ago and as a favor to me they took her right in, and if I do say so myself it’s a nice place. It has everything, even a sunroom that’s been fixed up exactly like the one at the Cloister, you know, where the birdcages are? A lot of the people there are confused, and they think they’re back at Sea Island when they see it, and they settle right down.…Anyway, it seemed like the perfect solution. All sorts of services and frills: a hair styling salon and a pool and sauna and a nice restaurant and a private limo to shopping and the symphony and the arts center, you know…but it upset her so to be away from her family and her room that she just sort of flipped out, and she got into the sunroom and opened the birds’ cages and let them all out, and then at dinner she threw soup at the waitress. So I’ve got to move her by tonight. I was counting on you to bring her home this afternoon, Merritt. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. My God, she actually thought I was going to hurt her! She didn’t know me—”
“Pom, I’m sorry. But you must see that Mommee’s gone beyond home care now. The sooner you can get her into a place that specializes in Alzheimer’s and senility, the better off she’ll be. Not we’ll be, Pom, she’ll be. You don’t need me to do that. I couldn’t admit her, anyway. You’d have to authorize it—”
“I don’t know any places like that,” he said, sounding lost and querulous.
Annoyance and the old pity warred in me; annoyance, for the moment, won.
“Pom, you’ve got a five-page list of places like that in your office right this minute. The social worker has it; I’ve seen it. Your office sends people there every day of the week; it’s part of the outreach and resources program, or whatever you call it. All you’ve got to do is pick up a phone. You don’t even have to do it; Amy would love to do it for you. You know good and well that if this Lenox Meadows place would take her immediately as a favor to you, any one of those places will. You’ve supported them for ages. You could have her in a nice room by the end of the workday. Amy would pick her up and take her, I’ll bet, if you sent a nurse along. Or maybe the limo could take her…”
There was a long silence. In it I had a picture of Mommee, roaring and careening around in the back of a huge limo, tiny finches darting in an agitated cloud about her head. At the wheel was Jesus. When he decanted her tenderly from the limo he would say, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo, hah?” I thought for one desperate moment I was going to burst into idiot laughter.
“I’m not going to put my mother in one of those places,” Pom said, and the picture dissolved.
“Only poor people, huh?” I said in exasperation. “Pom, Mommee is way, way past noticing where she is. She isn’t going to know a new place from her old room. She isn’t going to know you from a…a turnip. The reason she doesn’t recognize you isn’t that she’s upset and traumatized or that you’ve hurt her, it’s that she has Alzheimer’s disease and that’s what eventually happens to people who have it. You’re a doctor, you know that. You see it every day. She isn’t going to get better if you bring her back home and we try again to look after her, and suddenly recognize you, and embrace you, and get back to normal. It doesn’t happen like that. You’re putting off the day she gets the kind of care that really can help her, and you’re condemning Glynn and me to another season in hell in the bargain. Without Ina I couldn’t manage it five minutes. Even with Ina, I couldn’t do the Mommee thing anymore. It’s killing our daughter. She’s so much better out here; you’d love seeing how well she is, and oh, Pom, so many wonderful things have happened to her, and she’s so anxious to tell you about them, and good things are coming up for Laura, too—”
“How nice,” he said coldly, “that you’re all having such a good time.”
“Pom, do you want your wife and daughter to be miserable? Is that it? How would that help things?” I said. My voice was trembling. Why couldn’t I get through to him? What would it take? Whatever, I obviously was not going to be able to do it over long distance, not when he was still torn with anger at us and terror and pity for his mother.
But I was past helping him there.
“There’s another reason, too,” I said. “Laura’s got sort of a problem. I think it can be settled in a week, and I feel sure I can help her work it out if I have some quiet time alone with her. But she’s not in very good shape right now, and I’m the only one who can—”
“I cannot remember a time in my life since I was acquainted with Laura that she did not have sort of a problem,” Pom broke in coldly. “What is it this time, booze again? Drugs? AIDS? What? What terrible calamity has befallen poor Laura that only you can fix up for her, Merritt? Whatever it is, I’m not going to have it spilling all over Glynn. I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking of. I want Glynn back here today, on that noon plane. I’m still not sure I’m not going to punish her for her attitude toward Mommee; I’m damned if I’m going to finance a grand tour for her right now. If you want to stay I can’t stop you, but I will not have Glynn—”
“I’ll call you from the lodge and give you the number when we get there,” I said over his escalating voice. It was not, now, Pom’s voice. “I’ll leave a message on the machine if you’re not in. We will be back in about a week. I am sorry about Mommee, sorrier than I can say, but you are the only one who can help her now. Sooner or later, Pom, you’ve got to cast your vote with the living. You don’t know how much I pray it’s sooner. I’ve missed you, and so has Glynn. We love you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can tell how much even over the phone.”
I let a beat or two go by, and then I said, not knowing until I spoke that I was going to say it, “Pom, did you have an affair with that Jamaican doctor you had on staff a few years ago? I forget her name—”
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said, and hung up.
I don’t either, I said to the dead phone, and put it back into its cradle. I went out into the little studio where everyone was waiting for me, bright-faced with anticipation.
“Marcie’s stepmother said for me to come ahead by all means,” Glynn caroled. “And Jess and Marcie are simply having shitfits about the screen test. ’Scuse me. I’m sorry. Did Dad…is it, you know, okay?”
“No problem,” I said. “Redwoods, here we come.”
Laura looked keenly at me and started to speak and then didn’t. Later, I would tell her all about it, and she would say something funny and awful and absolutely right, and put everything back into perspective, and the sly, thick sickness of the fight with Pom would melt out of my heart like rotting old ice. She could always do that. And in turn I would help her sort things out.
Meanwhile, to the north, the great trees waited, and the silence that was as deep and pure and old as the sea, and the sun burning through the morning fog to warm the thin air and touch our faces.…
“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said.
As I was hugging Caleb Pringle good
-bye the earth beneath the parking lot gave a fishlike flop and a dolphin’s roll. I froze, clinging to Caleb, waiting. The tremor did not come again.
“Did the earth move for you?” he smiled down at me.
“No, but I’ll bet it would if we did that again,” I said lightly, my heart pounding in slow, dragging beats.
He laughed and hugged me once more, hard.
“What would I have done if Laura’s big sister hadn’t turned out to be a babe?” he said.
“Put her in a horror movie and made a gajillion dollars,” I smiled back. “See? I’m catching on.”
We got to Caleb Pringle’s mountain retreat long past dark, so I really did not see any of the surrounding country until the next day. But all the way through the tangle of suburban streets that stretched from San Jose to Saratoga I could feel the presence of the mountains to our west. Once we began to climb them, threading our way through the bewildering maze of small roads and trails that led up and over their crest and down into the Big Basin area, the unseen spires of the great redwoods seemed to lean so close over us in the little red car that we automatically spoke in near-whispers. Fog or low clouds augmented the darkness; it was like making our way through an endless tunnel whose walls were swirling gray. The silence was so dense and total that it seemed to have its own monolithic shape. Only the close-brushing branches of unfamiliar undergrowth broke the fog wall, and occasionally the red flash of wild watching eyes, or the ghostly shape of an animal whisking across the road in front of us. Twice we saw deer, and once a fox, and once something low and solid and scurrying that none of us could put a name to. By that time we were not speaking much. The darkness and the silence were oppressive, as was the growing sense that we were hopelessly lost in an alien moonscape where only inhuman things and towering, implacable giants tracked us.
We had met the dense June coastal fog just outside San Luis Obispo. It was scarcely past noon; we had left at nine and made remarkably good time up Highway 1, the old coast road. It had been Laura’s plan to drive up that way, taking our time and stopping wherever along the spectacular coast our fancy dictated. It would be, she said, a drive we would never forget: San Simeon, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterey. Perhaps we would break the trip for the night at Carmel, where a friend of hers had, she knew, an empty guest house, and then cut inland at Santa Cruz and follow Highways 9 and 236 up into the Big Basin area. Caleb Pringle’s private road snaked off there, up near the Santa Cruz County border.
Fault Lines Page 22
