Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll
Page 9
It never rains but it pours. That day, as I shook with the jitters about the imminent showdown with Mr. Farley, the gardener gave another turn to the screw. He came across the lawn, his hands in his pockets. He looked down meditatively at the grass and stopped here and there to kick at it with one foot, as if he were measuring the spring in it. He passed very near to me and stooped down at the foot of the porch steps. He worked at the dirt with his hands until he was able to bring up a handful of it. He held it to his face and sniffed at it. Then he turned.
"This soil is too sour for good grass," he said. His eyes were wide, dark, and impudent.
"Really? How can you tell?"
"Like this," he said. He brought his hand to his mouth and took a bite of the earth. Without wincing, he worked it around in his cheeks and seemed to savor it, as if he were tasting wine. Crumbs of dirt clung to his lips. Then he turned his head to the side and spat hard, wiped his mouth, and spat again. "It tastes sour. Sweet soil tastes sweet. Try it," he said and held out his hand. When he grinned, two of his front teeth were covered with a thin mud.
"No thanks," I said. "I'll take your word for it." And I saw him look over my shoulder at something behind me. Then the screen door to the front hall slammed, like thunder following lightning, and I heard David's voice as he walked up.
"It's noon, Rick," he said.
The gardener had stopped grinning, and he must have felt the grit in his teeth, because he put a finger in his mouth and wiped it away. He flung the other hand to the side and down, throwing the dirt to the ground again. He had been kneeling on one knee below me, and now he stood up and slapped his hands twice on the sides of his jeans to dust them off. All of this only took a moment, but David and I seemed to wait for a long time while the gardener made the first slow moves. At last he nodded, his eyes flashing first at me and then at David. He hooked his thumbs in the beltline of his jeans and sauntered away across the lawn.
"Did I interrupt something?" David asked.
"You sure did," I said, turning to him. He sat down on one of the wrought iron chairs, but just on the edge of it, in a kind of crouch. "But I'm not sure what we were in the middle of, so I forgive you."
"Are you and he," he said, hovering over the verb for a moment, "getting it on?"
"Um, no," I said, but I realized in the low key of his question that I had stumbled onto the two of them. If the gardener had been my type, I would have felt a brief erotic thrill at these two men locking bodies in the underbrush. As it was, it made me sad to think of David, fucked and fucked over, going after something that went nowhere. I seethed with protective feelings for a moment, but I swallowed them. "He's a punk, right?"
"I guess so, but we don't make any demands on each other."
"I'll bet," I said.
"Don't tell me what to do, Rick."
"Okay," I said, and I stood up. "Let's go, or we'll be late for the curtain." I jogged down the porch steps fast and turned at the bottom to wait for him. He stayed there, still crouching, and there was no expression on his face at all. "David, I'm sorry. It's none of my business."
"Yes it is," he said. "But I won't let you make snap judgments. There are a lot of things I want from you, but one of them is not the Ten Commandments." He came down the stairs and paused on the last step, so that he still stood a foot above me. "I keep telling you. There are no rules."
"You sound like a lapsed Catholic." We fell into step and walked to the end of the house. If this was an example of a Moral Dialogue, I didn't like the topic much. And we made a funny pair of monks.
"I'm a lapsed adolescent is what I am," he said.
He looked easy again as we came around the corner of the library and into the courtyard. Phidias was there already, sitting on the low stone wall that rimmed the basin of the fountain. I had never seen him sit still before. Even now he was throwing a black rubber ball against the library wall. The ball did a double bounce, on the flagstones and then against the shingles of the house, and he caught it and let it go in an instant. I knew it was unlikely that he would be at some peasant task, whittling or mending a sweater, and I had not quite forgiven him for not being a farsighted, squint-eyed Greek fisherman. He was not strong in his old age. He had not been weathered into something lean, and there was instead a softening of his angles and a delicacy about his postures that refined and civilized him. It would have been easier to live carelessly from day to summer day if he had been a man in full possession of his youth and a wrestler's timing. With a hero as our leader, I would have risked myself with a soldier's abandon in a battle. In truth, I expect I would have been more spurred by the thought of a sailor slipping off his uniform in the captain's cabin while the hairy captain lay in his bunk and smoked his pipe and waited to mount the fair, slim boy. In the worst way, I wanted a brute man at that moment to be in charge.
Instead, I thought, we are just two fairies and an old farmer. It shames me that anxiety sends me into stereotypes, but there you are. In a crisis, I am not so sure what a man is and what a man would do. Seen less harshly, we were still an odd group, David and Phidias and I. We were gathered in the court like an unlikely collection of cousins awaiting the reading of a will. We all knew Mr. Farley was coming at two o'clock, and it was all talked to death. Phidias continued to throw the ball. David took off his shirt and sat facing the sun at the bottom of the spiral stairs going up to Madeleine's little theater. I stared into the bilge, green as a grasshopper, that lay in the bottom of the fountain basin. The statue here was of a sea boy riding a dolphin, and the water was meant to stream out of the dolphin's mouth. I caught myself wishing we could fix it.
"Have we made any plans for the Fourth?" David called out. "We have to do something."
"I think we'd better get through the third first," I said.
"When the children were small," Phidias said, catching up his ball, "we had fireworks down on the beach."
The silence that followed the bouncing of the ball thickened, and instinctively we all turned our attention to the balcony above us. Just to make some noise, I was going to ask what time it was. Suddenly, from behind us, the key turned in the french doors of the library. "We've been caught," I thought angrily, turning to face the music, expecting to see Mr. Farley and a squad of police detectives. But the doors swung in, and a bent old woman stepped onto the threshold. I had never met her, remember, so I was not spooked in quite the way that David and Phidias must have been.
"It's my own damn fault," she said in the bird's voice, fixing me with her eyes, and I would have sworn that they too were not Madeleine's, were more blurred and less blue. "I spend too much time in bed, and I don't know my own kitchen anymore. Where's David?"
"Here," David said, his voice a little ashen. He came forward and stood next to me.
"The butler's pantry is so clean, it looks like an exhibit. But I can't find the fingerbowls." She shrugged, for a moment like Madeleine. "We will have to eat lunch second class."
"Where are we having lunch?" Phidias asked quietly.
"Guess," she said. She held on to the doorknob, partly to hold herself up and partly, it seemed, to let it be known that this was her house and she still had a grip on it.
"The library?" David asked. "No."
"Your room," Phidias said. "No."
"The front porch," I said. I had known all along, I realized.
"Rick," she said, "you are a classic case of still waters. Yes, the front porch. I had a dear friend who loved to eat there. We will drink a toast to her, I think. I permit myself a glass of claret once a day, because it clears the kidneys."
She reached behind the door and took up a heavy cane, making a motion with it to let us pass. David and I walked in, and when Phidias reached her, she took his arm and set off across the room, very shaky in the legs. Beth Carroll was tiny and clean and breakable. Her hair was still thick, and she had pulled it back and pinned it willy-nilly in a bun. She wore a waistless, dark green dress that Madeleine would not have let her housekeeper wear.
"I'll show you later," he said. "They're in a hollow panel in the wall behind the bed."
"I thought I would wear my cameos," she said. "Do I have cameos?"
"Yes," he said. "You remember. We found them in Venice."
And then they were out of hearing, making for the front door. David and I hung back.
"I thought she was bedridden," I said.
"I thought she was dead." He was beginning to enjoy this in a new way. "No, she used to get up every couple of days and make a tour. Otherwise, she only went back and forth to the bathroom."
"Is it going to work?" I asked.
"Yes, yes it is," he said impatiently. "It's worked already. Come on."
So we came out onto the porch to show we had come full circle. Madeleine and Phidias sat across the wrought iron table from one another, and David and I went to the remaining chairs. I was facing the water. Lunch was simple, a salad and fruit, but it seemed infinitely more magical because David and I had just left this place, and the table was empty. I pictured Madeleine listening at the front door until we went away, then rushing out and setting up the meal. And then I realized that everything was falling into place much easier than that. It just happened that David and I rounded the corner of the house as she stepped out onto the porch with her tray. We were in luck. The old woman was fretted with time, but the ocean air had pinked her cheeks. None of the lines that scored her face were worry lines.
"Give us a toast, Rick," she said, lifting her glass of claret. "To your dear friend," I said.
IF THERE HAD BEEN such a thing as a four-piece suit, Madeleine told me later, Donald Farley would have worn it. I disagreed. From what I saw of him, what little, I figured he wouldn't have worn it unless his grandfathers down to the eighth generation had worn it. He did not just look like he had come over on the Mayflower. He looked like he did it every summer. There must have been places set for Indians at his Thanksgiving dinner. It must have killed him not to be a judge, with the Mayflower Farley's discretion in the use of a stake and an armload of faggots, but he wasn't wasting his time crying over it either. He judged everything, and he found it wanting. It is said of certain primitive tribes that they have a hundred different words for the fish that is the staple of their diet. Fish-caught-on-a-snowy-Monday. Fish-cooked-hard. Big-fish. Donald Farley had as many different ways of saying private property.
He was about sixty-five, and he had been narrowing his eyelids for so long that they had permanently fixed in an expression of contempt. He must have expected David to be dressed in livery. I thought even David was pushing things by remaining in his cut-off jeans when he answered the door. But all he said was "I put on a shirt, didn't I?" He had been biding his time waiting for a private confrontation with Mr. Farley ever since the day Mrs. Carroll had hired him. Though he had never met him, David knew his man. Given as Mr. Farley was to the ideal of the four-piece suit, he wanted the underling who opened the door to take his hat and wish him good day and announce him. A beach bum opened the door. If possible, Mr. Farley's eyes narrowed further until they were mere slits. It was a wonder that he could see at all.
"Does Mrs. Carroll let you go around like that?"
"Like what?" David said.
"Not dressed. You know, all you do is work here," he said coldly. The point he was trying to make, I think, was that David had no right to set the tone of things, either by his clothes or by his surly tongue.
"So do you," David said, and walked past Mr. Farley onto the porch, down the steps, and away.
"Young man!" Mr. Farley shouted after him, and the phrase was an accusation when he said it. He couldn't remember David's name, and David kept on walking down to the beach. From where I was witnessing this scene, peering through a crack in the library doors, I couldn't see Farley until he strode across the hall to the stairs. He was the avenging angel. He might have had a hydrogen bomb in his briefcase. As he took the stairs two at a time, I suppressed a whee of laughter and danced a bit like a boxer.
When he walked into Madeleine's room, she said, he was a furious, disoriented man. He looked as if he'd just found out that Farley had been deleted from the firm's name. He was too shaken to look very closely at the details of his wizened client. She had gained the advantage without even trying.
"Beth," he said, "something is going to have to be done about that boy."
"What I plan to do, Farley," she said, "is double his salary. I have been poisoned and starved for twelve years, and my house was falling apart when he arrived. What could I expect? That old couple was sweet, but they practically needed a nurse."
"I mean it, Beth. You don't look at all well. I'm sure he isn't feeding you right. He looks dirty."
"I'm not trying to look good. I'm trying to feel good. I told you, all I want to do is get through the summer."
He knew she didn't care how it looked to anyone on the outside, but he told her anyway. He said it looked like she had given up the little bit of reputation she had won back by finally getting old and slowing down. He did not mention Phidias by name, nor anyone else, but then he had no memory for names he had not known since prep school and his first boyish sails off Block Island. He meant Phidias, though, when he spoke of the tarnishing of the Carrolls. It is one thing to dally with a servant, to have a tumble in the bushes now and then, and quite another to drive your husband out of the house with it. Madeleine got the impression that Beth and Phidias, in spite of their penchant for secret night meetings, were a matter of public outrage in Mr. Farley's set. Mr. Farley didn't say as much, but Madeleine had a second sight for reading between lines.
And it could only mean, she figured as she sat propped up in Beth Carroll's bed, that Mr. Carroll had talked. He must have slumped in a leather chair at his Boston club and whined around his cigar about his wife's infidelities. Madeleine did not have the stomach for the tears of a grief-stricken cuckold. Now, Mr. Farley was telling her, she was allowing her house to be overrun by an unmannered, arrogant, lower-class boy. It didn't look right. Madeleine bit her lip in anger and took a good look at the family lawyer. She gathered that Mr. Carroll must have been cut out of the same cloth.
"Tell me," she said, "do you mean unclean-dirty or sexy-dirty?"
"What are you talking about?"
"David. You said he was dirty."
"Oh, him. I don't make the distinction between one kind of dirt and another."
"Well, that's very revealing, Farley," she said. "How did you come by your children? Immaculate Conception?"
"I know what you think of me, Beth," he said, snapping open the latches of his briefcase to indicate that they were moving on. "But someone has to tell you what's right. Besides, I owe it to my friendship with Arthur Carroll."
He had not been asked to sit down, and he had not done so. As he turned his attention to the documents in his briefcase, he rested it on the end of the bed. He slipped out a folder and handed it over to her. She opened it and pretended to read at it but was aware that he was now in a position to watch her closely. She had lost the advantage of the tension and sharp tongues, so she turned to the next diversion. She softened her voice and told him to bring a chair over close to the bed from the bay window. No, closer still, she said, so that he ended up sitting right next to her at the head of the bed and no longer had her in his line of sight. If he had turned his head and looked right at her, he would have had a close-up. But Madeleine risked that. She thought he would be too modest and discreet to look a lady in the eye from only a foot away. And she knew it was time to trigger his legal dream of order and get him absorbed in the business of the will.
She wanted it read aloud to her as she followed it along. She let him know subliminally that she needed him after all, that in spite of what they thought of one another, she was an old enfeebled woman, and he was a gentleman who would not let a lady down. As she lapsed
into frailty and deferred to him, she made him understand that his reference to her husband had found its mark. In fact, Madeleine had found the remark about Arthur Carroll so cheap and underhand that she determined to give Farley an extra bruise or two before he left. But it seemed prudent to lull him into a false security right now. She made purring and clucking sounds as he read through his accurate clauses. He became almost sprightly. She hadn't said anything out loud about needing him, and she certainly hadn't apologized. But there was a pitch to her attentiveness that must have made him feel that his moral posturing had been successful. Thus, from somewhere deep in the filing cabinet, the meat locker of his heart, he felt a little glow of good feeling for Beth Carroll. She couldn't be half so bad as she seemed if she listened to him so well.
He'd probably never seen a movie. That may be harsh, because I bet he would have loved World War II movies, where men are men and prove it when they throw themselves on hand grenades to save the platoon. But Madeleine's movies surely could never have been his cup of tea, and so he missed the clue he might have had to this performance in Mrs. Carroll's room. In 1934, Madeleine made her first film in Hollywood, Off-Season, and in it she seduced a good man and broke up a good marriage for the first time in English. She is sitting at the races with an improbable group of fussy snobs when Joel McCrea sits down beside her. He is supposed to be finding a job, except he isn't. She's rich. She tells him she doesn't understand a thing. If only he could explain about the betting and the odds. So he launches into a monologue as he tries to watch the race (because he has his carfare and lunch money riding on this), and Madeleine just purrs and chuckles and says, "Aha." Before the race is over, he is smitten, and he is drinking deep of Madeleine's eyes when his horse comes in, paying nine for two.