Nine Women

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Bill ignored him and continued staring at Myra, who had finished with the flowers. “So old Hugh’s dead. What’d he die of?”

  “The paper didn’t say.”

  “Old age, I guess. What was he? Eighty?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  “I sure hope Jane wrote her a note, but she probably forgot that too.”

  Harry stood up, waving and calling, “Myra, good to see you. Come sit with us for a bit.”

  Myra smiled politely and warmly while she struggled to remember their names. It was so long from summer to summer, she thought. Hugh had been good at names. Hugh had always remembered for her.

  “How nice to see you again.” A name popped into her memory: Harry Marshall. That was right. And Bill something or other. “You both look wonderful,” she said, brightening up her smile. “Just wonderful.”

  “We’re still at the same old table.” Bill laughed. “And that’s probably the same old umbrella up there.”

  “Same table, same umbrella, same drinks,” Harry said. “Yours was a gin and tonic, right?”

  “You have a fantastic memory.” She sat down carefully in the canvas deck chair. Her back was very stiff today.

  “I’ll get the drinks,” Harry said.

  “One for me, brother-in-law,” Bill called after him.

  He was pretty drunk already, Myra noticed, his skin flushed so deeply that blood seemed ready to ooze from each pore. “And how is your wife?” she inquired politely.

  “Jane’s fine. She’s down there on the beach with the grandchildren. But you knew about Edna?”

  “Last summer seems such a long time ago.”

  “I know you remember Edna. Great friend of Jane’s. Like a sister really, not just a summer friend. They used to have lunch together every Tuesday all winter long. Well, she died.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” Myra said, “I do remember her.” A short thin wiry woman who played a fine game of tennis. Myra had disliked her, her nervousness and constant movement.

  “Cancer,” Bill said, wiping the sweat from his bald head. “Everywhere, even her brain. Doctors couldn’t do anything. They didn’t even try.”

  All that flitting vibration stopped, Myra thought wearily, all those jerking muscles and racing feet.

  Harry Marshall put the tray of drinks down on the table. “Here’s to the summer!”

  Bill lifted his glass. “To us old folks. We made another year.” Then blushing, remembering, “I didn’t really mean that the way it sounded, Myra. I’m awfully sorry about Hugh. I really am. He was one great guy.”

  “I don’t talk about it any more.” Myra saw relief smooth out the squinched agitation on his face.

  “We bought a place in the Bahamas,” Harry said, changing the subject. “A little pink cottage with bougainvillea on the fence. The house is all right, but it was that bougainvillea that sold me. It’s pink like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Bill said, “And right away Jane’s got to go see her dear brother’s house. And once she sees it, she wants one too. So we’re looking. The funniest thing, Myra, would you believe they’ve got a beach club that looks almost exactly like this one.”

  “Except for the pine trees,” Harry added. “No pine trees.”

  “So you have an eternal summer,” Myra said. “How nice, how very nice.”

  Harry beamed. “What a wonderful way to look at it, Myra. I suppose that’s exactly what it is. We’re retired and living in an eternal summer. Damn poetic, that’s what it is.”

  Liam Thorpe, who was stretched full length on one of the blue padded lounges, lifted his head and squinted across the deck. “Isabel, isn’t that Myra Rowland?”

  His wife, who was lying face down, said, “I heard she came early this year, a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Did you remember to write her after Hugh died?”

  “I always remember.”

  “She came alone this year?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Now what the hell’s that supposed to mean.”

  “Her two grandsons came with her. And she’s still got that housekeeping couple she’s had all these years. And her son and his wife will be down every weekend.”

  “You are a veritable treasure trove of information.”

  “I met her son in the post office.” Isabel chuckled smugly. “He also told me that they’ve booked in a steady series of guests. So that’s why I said that in a way she wasn’t alone.”

  “Well, she sure has room for everybody in that big old house.” Liam lay back, talking to the heat-hazed sky. “Hugh Rowland’s dead. And… Isabel, hasn’t there been an awful lot of that this winter? I mean, an unusual amount of dying.”

  “I don’t think so.” Isabel’s voice was muffled by the folded towel over her head. “Of course at our age you do have to expect a certain amount, I guess.”

  “But so many: I mean, that’s not natural. There was Hugh, and there was that awful woman Edna. And Sally and Andrew, remember them?”

  “Liam, they were killed in a plane crash. That’s not the same at all.”

  “They aren’t here, that’s all I’m counting.”

  Isabel’s legs began to move restlessly. “Don’t be silly.”

  “And then there was Webster. Ed Webster.”

  “He’d have been close to ninety.”

  “We’re not that far away, duck.”

  Her head jerked up, the towel slid to her shoulders. “Liam, you are nowhere near ninety and neither am I. Don’t exaggerate.”

  “And Roger. Remember him, Roger Fasterling?”

  Isabel began turning over, slowly sighing with annoyance.

  “How many is that?” he asked the sky. “It’s a lot.”

  Isabel completed her roll and settled down on her back. Eyes closed, she began rubbing sun lotion on her face. “Well, Liam, however many people died, there are still plenty left. The place is positively packed. Just look down the beach.”

  “Kids,” he said.

  “And up here,” she insisted. “This deck is as crowded as I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Another thing.” Liam sat up. “I don’t know half the people here. I remember how it used to be. It used to be I could walk up and down and know every face I passed. I could sit down and talk to just anybody and everybody.”

  “You can still do that.”

  “What would I say? What do you want me to say? Who are you? Or maybe: I knew your grandfather when he was alive.”

  “You could say: I like to meet people I don’t know.”

  “I’d just look senile.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Isabel bounced up and down irritably, the padded cushions squeaking. “This whole thing is utterly silly. Next year I am going to wait until everybody has finished counting and knows who died over the winter and who’s too sick to be here.” She swiped her towel at a passing deerfly. “On opening day this whole place sounds like a bunch of lunatic gardeners: Did it survive the winter? Did it survive in good shape? Has it had a little stroke, nothing serious? … God, what crazy accounting.”

  “But you haven’t said we’re wrong,” Liam insisted. “Only that you don’t want to hear us.”

  Isabel put the folded towel across her face, carefully, deliberately, then lifted one corner to say, “Tell me if Myra comes this way.”

  Myra Rowland changed into her bathing suit, moving and bending with careful deliberation. The locker room maid, she noticed, was the same as last year: a college girl, short, bespectacled, silent.

  “Hello,” Myra said.

  The young woman looked up from her book, flashing brilliant blue eyes at the bottom of deep lens pools. And smiled faintly.

  “Studying?” Myra asked politely as she gathered her beach towel and hat.

  The blue eyes blinked, vanishing behind their lids. Stubby fingers held up a book. Myra glanced at it: something about the endocrine system.

  Good lord, she sits in this damp locker room and studies that. A silent blue-eyed toa
d under a rock.

  “See you later,” Myra said.

  The head nodded slightly, tipped, it seemed, by the weight of its glasses.

  The sand was very hot to her feet and she hurried to the water, tossing her things on a vacant lounge.

  I need bathing shoes, she thought. I did have a pair once, years ago. But Hugh disliked them. Those things make you look like a grandmotherly washerwoman, he said.… I wonder if I still have them at the house, put away in a box somewhere.

  She stood in the cool sand at the very edge of the water, curling her toes in the damp softness.

  At once her two grandsons appeared, swimming rapidly to stand next to her. Gleaming sleek creatures, smooth muscles under taut skin.

  She smiled at them, noticing for the uncounted thousandth time how very much they resembled Hugh.

  For a second or so she allowed herself the comforting thought that they were Hugh, that he was here, in them, young and strong and healthy, younger even than when she’d first met him.… The idea flitted, soothed, vanished with a tiny pop like a bubble.

  Hugh did not live in them. Hugh was dead. She was here alone.

  Oh, but they were good boys, they were wonderful boys. So well-mannered that they truly seemed to enjoy keeping Grandmother company.… And she was glad to have them. Glad to warm herself at the glow of their youth and health.

  “This first day, today, is very hard for me,” she told them, explaining calmly and carefully. “Last year I was here with your grandfather. This year it’s very difficult for me to come to the same place without him.”

  Two pairs of brown eyes watched her, understanding, patient, loving, obedient. Like fine spaniels.

  “But none of that has anything to do with you. Go back to your friends,” she said. “I’ll have a swim and a bite of lunch and I’ll go home early. I don’t want to get too much sun the first day.”

  They were gone into the ocean then, like porpoises, arcing and playing, ribbons of wake behind.

  The water was very cold, and she went in backwards, sinking down slowly in a kind of curtsy at the last. She swam out forty strokes, counting carefully, then side-stroked in. Her arthritis—stunned, she liked to think, by the combination of cold water and sudden exercise—did not twinge or ache as she walked back across the sand to the deck. She toweled her hair quickly and stretched out on her lounge, face down, letting the sun dry her bathing suit. She could feel the rays, like a dentist’s drill, vibrate against her spine.

  Jane Landrieux and her daughter Linda sat on a large red and blue beach blanket littered with plastic toys—shovels and pails and sand sieves—and watched two lifeguards give swimming lessons to a line of small children.

  “Mother,” Linda said, “do you think they learn anything like that? I mean, those lessons aren’t cheap.”

  Jane’s eyes found her granddaughter in the shrieking crowd. “Well, I think she’s learning. She just hasn’t got the breathing right, that’s all.”

  “That’s all! That’s the important part, Mother.”

  “I love her haircut. It makes her look, well, French.”

  “I’m not sure I like it.”

  “Watch out! Deerfly.” Jane swatted at her leg. “Got him, bury him quick.”

  “Mother, you’ve got to kill them or they’ll dig right up out of the sand.”

  Jane said, looking off across the beach, over the crowded heads and through the forest of umbrellas, “Isn’t that Myra Rowland?”

  “Pink bathing suit? Yes. I saw her earlier, sitting at Papa’s table.”

  “Her husband died last winter.”

  “You sent us a newspaper clipping, remember?”

  “I meant to,” Jane said. “I just didn’t think I had.”

  “I wonder why she came back.”

  “It’s a beautiful house with a lovely view. She must like it.”

  “But she’s got enough money to go anywhere.” Linda was again watching the children thrashing about in the shallows.

  “She must like it here.”

  “Can’t,” Linda said firmly. “No way.”

  “Then I don’t know.” Jane reached for her paperback to end the conversation.

  Myra Rowland, bones warmed and joints comforted by the sun, gathered her towel and bag and hat, and prepared to go home. Her eyes, dazzled by the glare, wrapped the contours of the world—the beach, the buildings, the people—in a gleaming radiance. She floated through a blurred and glorious landscape, in a halo of light, through shimmering featureless ephemera.

  She stopped at the bar for a gin and tonic, her second of the day, her last at the club. After this she would change and go home to sit in the green coolness of her garden, next to the heavy arcing canes of the Mermaid rosebush she herself had planted forty years before. She would have another gin and tonic and then another, less mixer each time, until finally she drank straight gin on the rocks. At eight her grandsons, houseguests, and visitors would have dinner in the dining room. Usually she joined them, though the food tasted of nothing and the wine was harsh as vinegar and she grew bored and fretful at the sound of voices. Some evenings, increasingly many evenings now, she did not go in to dinner. When she left the garden she moved, slowly and steadily, ship under full sail, through the hall—passing the dining room door without a nod, without a glance—to the stairs. She lifted and pointed her chin, following it like a compass needle. Up the wide polished stairs to the second floor where the bedrooms were, then other steps to the third floor, with its servants’ rooms and storage closets. Coming at last to a steep and narrow climb, hardly more than an enclosed ladder, where she balanced herself with palms pressed against the walls on each side. Up through the roof to the very top. The widow’s walk.

  It was a small platform, four steps each way, edged by a low wooden railing and benches with blue canvas cushions. (Crisp and bright this beginning of summer, they’d be blotched with mildew by September.)

  She paced the four-step pattern, back and forth. (They could hear her footfalls on the floor immediately below.) She watched the constellations swing up out of the ocean and traced the twin bands of the Milky Way. Mosquitoes buzzed softly about her ears, and owls in their passing tore silent holes in the night. Occasionally from below there’d be human sounds, filtered by distance: mumbled voices, laughter like a match flaring, a piano badly played.

  Eventually, she would stretch out on the blue canvas cushions and stare at the sky overhead, listening to the songs the planets sang and the rattle of shingle on the beach in a falling tide. Usually she’d fall asleep, sound, dreamless sleep, waking only to first light and bird cries, her hair drenched and dripping with dew and night fog, her lips smiling with a quiet joy.

  In the sun of midafternoon Myra Rowland picked up her gin and tonic from the bar and looked for an empty table.

  “Myra! Here. Join us.”

  Her sun-diluted brain fumbled for a name and found it:

  Isabel. Isabel something or other. And he was, what—an Irish name, yes. Liam. Of course.

  She joined them, greeting them with the names she had so recently retrieved from her memory. And then they seemed to fade away from her, to dwindle, to diminish. She lost all interest in them. She fell silent, nodding now and then, drinking steadily, sleepy, eyes half-closed.

  “Look, Myra, are you sure you’re all right?”

  She heard them distinctly but faintly. She opened her eyes, lifted her chin. And smiled. Their figures grew, fleshed out, they were human again. “I am perfectly all right,” she said. “You must just be patient with an old woman.”

  Overhead a navy blue umbrella, faded and streaked by last season’s sun, trapped shimmering swirls of hot air under its dome. They were, the three of them, stained by its reflected light, the color of new bruises.

  “I am so happy to see you.” She lifted her glass. Smiling with a delight that was real, very real, but had nothing to do with them. (They would be less pleased, she thought, were they to know that.) “To our summer,” she sai
d to their hazy haloed faces, “to our summer here.”

  Oh yes, my friends whose last name I cannot remember, I am truly glad to see you. I appreciate your kindness and your friendliness.

  I am truly glad to have had this day, one of my dwindling supply, to have had the sun and the bitter sea taste in my mouth. I am glad to have my favorite drink and to hear its ice cubes rattle.

  She lifted her glass again, higher, so that the umbrella’s bluish stain poured through it.

  And this sun-spoiled, sun-streaked ragged umbrella over my head—how beautiful it is to me there, where soon enough there’ll be only earth.

  Until then, though, the days, how they shine, how they shine.

  HOUSEKEEPER

  YES, I WAS HOUSEKEEPER THERE, five days a week, for nearly nine years. And there was grief and sadness at the beginning as well as the end, I’ll tell you that.

  I started work a month or so after my husband died. I didn’t really need the money: I had his pension and the income from two rental properties we’d managed to buy over the years. But I just couldn’t sit home and be grieved by ghosts and wet the floor with tears.

  When they heard, my children got very upset. All of them—Alec and Marty and Crissie—who never agreed on anything in their lives, they all agreed that I mustn’t work. No, Mama, they said by phone, by letter. No, no, please no. Alec, my oldest, even came to see me, came all the way across the country to tell me it wasn’t decent for me to do housework.

  “If there’s anything you want, Mama, just tell us. We’re all doing very well, we can give you anything you want.”

  I started to say: Give me your father back, healthy and laughing.

  But I couldn’t say that, not to those brown eyes glistening with confusion and worry. So, because he was my child and I had had years of being patient with him, I tried to explain politely and carefully.

  “I understand, Mama,” he said. “We all understand that you want to be busy, to do something, to get out. Do you know that Mr. Congreve is looking for somebody to help in his office?”

  So Alec had been talking to the minister, not telling me anything about it. That was typical Alec, he just had to organize things. But not this time.