Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  The next morning, he saw that his tan had begun to shred off like eraser shavings. The tattooed man had gone to work and didn't care if David stayed. So he slept until noon, full of shrill morning dreams about Neil. Then he stood in the kitchen window, naked, and stared out at the gray sky and the ankle-deep snow. He picked up the Globe. He read the classifieds and found the same jobs listed that he couldn't get in Florida. Until he came to Mrs. Carroll, whose ad had a purple ring to it and seemed like a misplaced personal.

  YOUNG MAN WANTED as live-in companion for an old lady who doesn't want to be bothered. Come and go as you please. Indiscretions and irregularities acceptable.

  With a telephone number that turned out to connect him with Mrs. Carroll's lawyer, a Mr. Farley, who felt compelled to provide the job description with the rigors and good breeding the advertisement lacked. David agreed to everything. He knew the name of the town she lived in meant shorefront and what he called "megabucks," and that seemed the safest method of reentry after two years in a condo in Miami Beach. At least it was the same ocean.

  "All I want to do is get through the summer," she told him on the day he arrived for an interview. "I came with Mr. Carroll to this glacier of a coast because I fell in love with it in June. The rest of the year it's like Poland. You don't like weather, do you?"

  Oh no, he had said, and because she saw he was telling the truth under his flaky tan, she hired him. Now he thought: that is all I really wanted myself, to get through the summer. And now it didn't appear as if either of them would. Somehow it hadn't mattered when he lived in a place where summer went on and on. One always got through in the tropics by getting by. On gimlets, on Coppertone and Chapstick, on filmy Roman shirts unbuttoned to the belly. What he wouldn't give right now, he thought, for an air-chilled car on a hot, still night. He didn't know, as the image leapt at him, whether it meant he wanted to go back to the tropics—to Florida, say—or on to the next improbable harbor, set on a summer angle to the sun. He looked over at the dead woman and tried to think what he could do for her. Then he lay back and shut his eyes to keep from crying. He couldn't think of a thing.

  He must have fallen asleep, because he knew it was late when he heard the knocking on the french doors. Ten o'clock. For all he knew, there was a law in Massachusetts that said you had to report a death within three hours. Because he was groggy from being asleep, it didn't seem odd at first that someone was knocking at Mrs. Carroll's balcony doors. He had been enough of a servant long enough to feel that a knocked door had to be answered. He got up, stretched the muscles in his face and grimaced as he passed the mirror, trying to wipe the sleep away, and went toward the door.

  "Beth," a voice called from the balcony, "are you there?" And David woke up and whirled around and saw the body again. This was someone Mrs. Carroll knew out there. Someone who was going to get upset. I don't want all this to start so soon, David thought. Give me a minute more. He stood still, wishing the intruder away, determined to wait it out. Slowly he turned back to the doors and tried to see in the half-light how they were locked.

  "Beth?" The voice was louder, the first ripple of panic rising in it. Then, suddenly, as if to prove that nothing would wait for very long, the doors opened toward David, and Phidias strode into the room.

  "David?" he said, stopped in his tracks, and David could tell he knew something was wrong. But unlike David, he wasn't going to wish it away. For the second or two before he walked past and saw Mrs. Carroll on the bed, he stared into David's eyes and silently demanded to be told.

  "Phidias, I was going to call you."

  But David's moment had passed, and now Phidias had moved past him and stood at the foot of the bed and took it in. "Oh Beth," he said, and the mildness coming into his voice shamed David and shook him so that he began to cry. He turned to the bed and watched Phidias shake his white head as if to say no, his unbrushed hair as wild as a sailor's. Phidias seemed to mean, when he called out Mrs. Carroll's name, that he had to scold her first. Beth, why didn't you tell me, he seemed to be saying, at the same time saying that it was all right. As if she might feel guilty or sorry to go without a word. Death, Phidias made it clear, was something that had to be put in its place. Is this all it is, he seemed to say, that you're dead? He sat down on the bed and rested his hand on hers where it had disarranged a tidy stack of papers at the end. The intimacy of his touch lay in its lightness. His hand sought in hers its proper repose, and lightly he let it be known that nothing had changed.

  "Were you with her, David?" he said. He was crying easily, and David wasn't.

  "No. I came in with her dinner." David was standing at the dresser, his hand darting from one to another of the curios, the porcelain boxes and ivory brushes, the hand mirror face down on a folded scarf. He flushed as he looked over to the bay window, where Mrs. Carroll's dinner sat, half eaten.

  "Did you know about us?"

  Did he know what, David wondered. Then, when it dawned on him, he saw how far behind he was. He should have wondered from the first why Phidias came in from the balcony, up the spiral stairs from the garden. And why so late at night. David looked at the old sunburnt farmer and thought: the worst part is happening now. If Phidias was somehow her lover, then he, not David, was the most alone here. David had always survived by being the most alone in a given crisis. He had expected Phidias to help him, and he realized that he was not the one most in need of help. When he answered "No," he let out a sob, and he knew he was crying for himself.

  "Well, now you do," Phidias said. "Will you leave us alone for a minute?" Mildly. As if to say: "I'll get back to you in a minute, David. Everything is going to be all right."

  David went out through the french doors and pulled them closed. On the balcony he could look down on the garden court, the marshes, and the dark acres of the sea, but he stayed close to the door and looked up at the starred sky, his hands behind him gripping the door handles. He stopped crying almost at once. He still didn't know what he was going to do, but his release from the death-room had stopped the question whispering in his head. The silver polisher in him, the dustman and short-order cook, had been living day by day since he arrived at Mrs. Carroll's. And that, he promised himself, was what he was going to continue to do as long as he could. Finish up the night. Get up in the morning and see what had to be attended to. The present, he knew from practice, was all that was safe.

  "I don't understand," I said, pillowing my head on my arms as I lay back and looked at the sky. The unexpected turnabout had already blurred the simple fact of Mrs. Carroll's death. It was hard to keep it in focus that, in the middle of this growing comedy of lovers, someone died. That is what David was trying to tell me, I suppose. I don't know why, but I got madder the more I knew.

  "Why didn't you figure it out before?" I asked him. "That's the sort of thing you're good at."

  "You mean I'm nosy and a gossip," he said tartly. "Just because you aren't."

  "I didn't say it was bad. I've always said it. You have a real gift for other people's secret lives."

  "Rick, what do you want from me?"

  "Nothing. You said they were lovers. I don't understand. Why did they have to hide it from you?"

  "They were always lovers. For fifty years or something. Their meeting at night didn't have anything to do with me. From the time they were young, they were together only at night, because Phidias had his work on the farm, and they both had families. Their being lovers was a whole extra life."

  "They must have got by on next to no sleep," I said.

  "Can you imagine?" David said, and for a moment he sounded as sad as the story might have been. "No wonder Mrs. Carroll took so many naps."

  "It's the sort of thing people used to do."

  So it happened that David had never seen Phidias and Mrs. Carroll together before. Phidias had run the dairy business before he retired. The work was done now by his three milk-fed, big-shouldered sons, and Phidias had moved on to become the overseer of the whole estate. Where once there h
ad been a staff of eleven in the main house and a work force of thirty-five for the gardens and the cows, now there was only one here and one there, and Phidias had to keep it all together. Since there was so much of the Carroll place, no one else but him knew where anything was. So he was always putting his head in at the kitchen door, armed with his list of projects.

  "Tell her," he would say to David, "that I've got someone coming to rewire the boathouse. Tell her the gray pickup is all wore out. My boys are going to junk it for parts."

  David would make a mental note, and he passed it on when he went up with her lunch. Mrs. Carroll would not eat until this business was over. "Fine," she would say. "Ask him to leave me the literature on trucks. I told him that pickup was too cheap the day he bought it. Tell him I remember that. And ask him isn't it time we took down the boathouse. We won't be having any more boats, and it's an eyesore on the beach. He won't agree." And David would nod, knowing that Phidias would turn up at some point during the afternoon, and then he would relay Mrs. Carroll's answer.

  Because he liked the two of them so much, it delighted him to be their go-between. He didn't know why they preferred to do it that way, but he had fallen in with enough British novels all rafted with servants and intrigues to know that it had always been done that way. As the weeks passed, the nuances of disdain and irony in their messages were as tidal as the sea limit that circled their land. Sometimes Phidias would send up a local irony with David on the lunch tray. "Tell her they voted at town meeting to thank her for the rhododendrons she put in the park. Now they want to know will she pay to have the Carroll fountain in front of the library sandblasted. Someone wrote SHIT on it two feet high."

  And she said, "Tell him to say I have nothing against SHIT. Say we will negotiate if it ever comes to sexual organs, and not before."

  Long ago, David decided on the balcony that night, a charade must have been worked out to establish the gulf between Phidias and Mrs. Carroll, and at some point the two of them had become infatuated by the charade. It was meant to fool the two families and the staff of eleven. It grew to outlive them. David felt how far away it was from anything he had been on the lookout for. When he settled in from Florida, he was so drained from the crying and accusations in Neil Macdonald's kitchen that he wouldn't have noticed if she'd been making it with a whole troupe of acrobats. He couldn't keep his mind on anything. Even Mrs. Carroll had fretted about him a couple of weeks before: "Don't be so harmless, David." What? "You can't survive," she said, "without ulterior motives. I think you ought to start stealing the silver instead of polishing it all day long."

  He walked over to the spiral stair and sat down to wait for Phidias, resting his cheek on the cool wrought iron and looking down the beach. If they needed no ruse with David, who was suspicious only of himself, then they played the game for the game's sake. He wished he had known about them before now, if only so that he could have been a better go-between. It was too late to discover that the best thing he had been doing here was done for the two of them. Uninvolved himself, his days reduced to a seamless net of habits, he had gone about the business of taking him and Neil apart. He stopped the pain by ridding himself of love, and sure enough, he was improving. The gardener proved he was almost ready, give or take a pang, to shiver at sex for its own sake. He could have used the secret Phidias and Mrs. Carroll kept, just to show what might be done with fifty years. If he was harmless, he decided, it was because he didn't believe in time. It required too much attention.

  The balcony flooded with light as Phidias came out. He walked over to the railing and stood over David, taking in a long breath of the sea air.

  "David," he said, "I'm going to tell you what I have to do." His voice was as strong as ever, even his irony somehow intact. "You don't have to do anything, but you have to know. I'm going to bury her on her own land. We discussed it, and I promised I would do that for her. She wasn't afraid to die"—as if that was beneath contempt—"but she was terrified of cemeteries and funerals. She thought all that was what hell was." He paused, locked in on every side by what he and Mrs. Carroll had come to at last. David was scared. Then for a moment Phidias spoke more distantly. "I think she was afraid I would die first, but she never said so. I make it sound like we talked about it. But even when you bring it up, you don't talk about it long. Whatever you say hurts."

  "Won't they stop you?"

  "Who? The police?"

  "No. Her children. Mr. Farley. They'll say it's crazy."

  "I'm not going to tell them, David." There was a touch of irritation in him now. David could see that there were a thousand impossible steps in this, but he understood right away that Phidias wasn't interested in hearing them. He was not so much irritated as bored. There was something he had to do, and that was that.

  "Do you want me to help you?"

  "Yes, David, but you don't have to."

  "She hated her children."

  "Every one of them. Because they come back at Christmas and tell her to sell off the land. They want her dead."

  "And now they've won?" David asked, though he could see they hadn't, not yet.

  "We'll see. Do you think it's crazy?"

  "No."

  "We didn't think you would."

  We? In that case, it wasn't crazy, but it wasn't fair. They had been implicating him all along, deeper and deeper, and they never gave him a chance. Although they didn't mean it, they were demanding that he take a stand about love. He figured the one he had assumed with the gardener was good enough, because the pain was minimal. It would not do now. If he went along with Phidias, he would be face to face for a long time with this tenacious love of theirs. Then he might not be able to go back to his hard-won detachment. The jitters and the bad stomach would start again. They would bury her, and he would be no better off than he was the night he followed Neil and sat weeping silently under the tennis pro's window in Coral Gables, listening to the two of them inside. But somehow he felt he ought to trust the trap Mrs. Carroll had led him into. After all, he wasn't feeling harmless as the night wore on, and he wasn't scared anymore. The summer was not going. There was all of July and August yet.

  "Tell me what to do," he said.

  "Go to sleep if you can," Phidias said. "I want to sit with her tonight. In the morning we'll all go up into the woods."

  "Okay. I know this isn't the time to ask you this, but I want to know more about you and her." I have a right to, he thought. He tried not to sound as if he were striking a bargain, but he was.

  "Of course," Phidias said evenly, sizing him up. "Don't worry about the time. We’ll have all the time we need."

  "You don't know how much I need."

  "No. I'm sorry, David. It's because I need it less and less. I just meant that the time will take care of itself."

  "Say you don't get arrested," David persisted. "Somebody's going to turn things upside down eventually. Once we get it done, we have to start dealing with everybody else. That's all I'm trying to say. I don't even know who everybody else is—"

  "We'll tell them when we're ready to," Phidias said. He was leaning on his elbows on the railing, and he seemed out of pain, through with it and on to something else. And though Mrs. Carroll was gone, she seemed intact in everything he said.

  But then what, David thought. He said: "But how long can we wait?"

  "As long as we need to, David. You have to stop thinking about that. Go to sleep."

  Phidias walked back into Mrs. Carroll's room and shut the light in. David sat still for another minute. It was warm, and the breeze that blew about his face was temperate as a human breath. He couldn't have said why it happened now, but he felt the full summer break on him for the first time. The other summer that never seemed to come—the one he waited for and kept imagining, weeks of cold at either end, lit by the light of the long gray spring—had given way.

  He savored the pace of things as he began to move. Leaving Mrs. Carroll to her proper witness, he spiraled down the stairs, walked across the terrace t
o the library, went through the cool and paneled hall and jogged up three flights to the tower. He opened all the windows and fell asleep in his clothes.

  "But David," I said. "You never figured out what you were going to do."

  "I know," he said. "It didn't seem the appropriate time anymore. I've put all that off till the end of the summer."

  The other questions, then, were still in midair. What he was going to do about me. What I was going to do about him. Things as basic as this: whether or not you can just die and be done with it. Now that I knew what happened, I suddenly didn't know what anyone's motives were. That is why this is a story after all. It is about how we got through the summer.

  I HAVE IT DOWN SOMEWHERE that David called me on the twenty-second of June. But I must be mistaken. Madeleine's performance was on Friday night, the twentieth, and David would have had to call the next day, because we drove down to the Carroll estate on Sunday, and that was the twenty-second. I may as well get the facts straight where I can. I don't understand yet, and here it is September, who was making plans at the beginning. Had any of us—perhaps without thinking—thought ahead quickly and led us to where we are now? I see that I wrote down the twenty-second because of David. He was twenty-two when I first met him; and now when I think of him, that is always the age he is in my head. Mothers must suffer from this.

  I had been up most of the night when the phone rang. In the five years since he left Boston, since he left me, David had called perhaps three times a year, so I had gotten very good at it. But the calls always came at midnight, sometimes as late as two or three in the morning if he was drunk, stoned, or abandoned. At ten-thirty in the morning, I knew we were not dealing with long distance. I have succeeded in being what David was trying to be after he left Florida, a man well rid of love. David is nothing if not a lover and doesn't stand a chance of coming to the steely place I sleep in. But I still shook when David called. And I am not easy with local calls, no matter who they're from.