Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  So Madeleine could change the course of events without talking, particularly when her course of events was different from the one her partner was pursuing. She didn't have to listen very sharply to Mr. Farley's explanation. She knew what the will said. Phidias had coached her so thoroughly in the minutiae of it that she only had to make sure that Farley hadn't slipped in anything new. For the first time, she thought about Beth Carroll's love for this land that had depressed her for three seasons of the year. It seemed to Madeleine, listening to the plan that would leave the coast to its own erosion, the forest to its terms and cycles, that Beth Carroll had been true to the ancient Carrolls and their first sight of an unowned country. Madeleine wore the other woman as a mask that afternoon, but she had learned so much about Beth's late relationship to her estate that she felt proprietary herself. Beth had loved the land for the land's sake, not for her own. As she had told David in the spring, she found the place glacial and brutalizing. But trees cannot take care of themselves. Therefore, Beth had made it her final business to protect the trees' interests.

  Madeleine had an immigrant's pride in material things, and she resorted to her own range of words when she spoke of her private property. The Acadia ruby, which she had owned from 1940 until 1946, was still hers in some fundamental way. She had worn it during the war concerts and been photographed wearing it around her neck with everyone from Mrs. Roosevelt to Gandhi. But because she had been poor and philosophical before she was rich and frivolous, she also had an immigrant's love for virgin soil. It did not seem a paradox to her that she could want luxurious things of her own and at the same time want things to be free of the ties of possession and ownership. The same sort of contradiction appeared to move her when she was in love in a film. Let me have it but let it be free. No such paradoxes clouded Mr. Farley's world, and Madeleine fumed at how little he understood the fierce spirit of Beth Carroll.

  When he looked up from the document, calmed by the precision of his own voice, he glimpsed the rush of tears that had come to Madeleine's eyes. But he misread them. She had been moved to mourn the woman she played, but she was too much in control of the performance to let go. She let the tears sting and kept them in. She turned them into rage at Arthur Carroll and Donald Farley and waited to pick a fight. Mr. Farley thought she was getting weepy about the shadow of death that the will threw on her kingdom. He was a fount of experience in these matters. Dryly, ever so dryly, he had patted the hands of those who made their testaments and saw therein how time is a stream and it flows away. He had a whole Bartlett's at his fingertips about inheritance and continuity. Now, he must have thought, was the time to bring up Mrs. Carroll's poor, dispossessed children. He walked right into it.

  "Sign it and it's done, Beth," he said, "but I wouldn't be a good lawyer"—and God only knew that he was, Madeleine could hear him thinking—"if I didn't mention the children. You simply can't do this without telling them. It takes all the nobility away from your gift to the people. If you don't let the children take part in it too, they will think you have done this just to punish them."

  "I can think of three reasons why we shouldn't tell them."

  "Why?"

  "John, Cicely, and Tony," Madeleine said, reciting the names like a list of the damned.

  "You know you care about them more than that." Mr. Farley appealed to reason again and again, like the waves of the sea combing in and beating on the shore. But the tide was going out.

  "I just want to make sure they don't challenge this will. Or, if they do, that they don't win. I told you," she said, so coldblooded that he couldn't look at her, "I would rather have three of the pine trees in my woods for children than my children. Now go open the doors to my balcony and call up my witnesses."

  "You're not yourself today, Beth," he said, standing up and moving across the room.

  "Oh yes I am," she said, feeling more like herself every minute, whichever self she was. There was a thread of consciousness between Madeleine and Beth that she had been aware of from the moment they met in Paris, and Madeleine had reached the dramatic peak in her performance where she was dancing on that thread like a tightrope. Madeleine's high-wire act.

  I don't know what Mr. Farley expected when he opened the doors and came out onto the balcony. Calling up the witnesses seems like such a biblical thing to do, but then I think he was too taken aback by Madeleine's railing about the children to have thought about it. In any case, there we were, Phidias and David and I, lounging in the courtyard in much the same way as we had at noon, like people in a waiting room. Mr. Farley seemed surprised that we were all together and ready to sign. He probably had an inkling that Mrs. Carroll had planned her moves as much as he had planned his, and he must have begun already to throw up his hands and think he had done what he could.

  We started to climb the spiral stairs in a line, and Mr. Farley went back inside, keeping as much distance as he could from us, the lower orders.

  "Who's the third one?" he asked Madeleine.

  "You mean Rick? He's David's friend."

  "Does he do anything around here?"

  "He's David's friend."

  When we came into the room, David and Phidias walked just ahead of me. Their postures made clear that they knew their rights and weren't going to be cowed by the old class instincts. They did it for different reasons, but it was touching to see how the swagger of the one echoed the other, like a grandfather and his serious grandson. I shrank back like a coal miner in the owner's parlor, fearful of smudging the rug, and I would have nervously fingered my hatband if I'd had a hat. I was partly compensating for the other two. But I was also making a meek last stand of reluctance about the counterfeit, shrinking from the G-men Mr. Farley might still have stationed out on the stair landing. I looked over at Madeleine. Her eyes blazed out of the mask, and she beckoned us to her side. She called out our three names as if they were the antidote to John, Cicely, and Tony.

  Mr. Farley drew his sixty-dollar fountain pen out of his inside jacket pocket, where he had kept it for forty years and where it would stay until the undertaker pinched it. Madeleine signed, with a deliberating air, "Elizabeth Lucey Carroll." Then the pen made the rounds, and each of us stepped up to the bed and leaned over and witnessed the crime, our eyes wide open. Mr. Farley stood away from us at the bay window, looking out to sea as if he were soothed by its pedigree. I noticed that Madeleine whispered something into Phidias's ear as he bent forward and wrote. The same with David. So when I crouched like a wrestler beside her and smelled the long-bedded inertia of old age, I was paying more attention to what she might say than I was to my name as I wrote it down. But I wrote it out in full, including my middle initial, which I never used or said or even saw anymore. What she said to me was

  "Try to back out of it now and we've got the evidence to hang you."

  Gallows humor is a sure way to jinx a delicate operation, and I gave her a stone-faced look as I left her side. But she was right that the deed was done, and my anxiety and holding back were beginning to be out of place. Our four names stood, a list of felons and a cast of characters, and we appeared to be home free. I handed over Mr. Farley's pen to him. He glared at me as if my chunky hand might have flattened its precision point. I have not seen my North Shore, stock-manipulating father in years, but I bad a sudden sense that he must be aging in much this way, drying out like a winter bouquet of pods and grasses. Utterly sexless, and yet still possessed of the smugness of a man whose first power is carnal. I was the last of us, then, to hate Mr. Farley, but I brought to the experience now the purity of a late convert. He already had a curdled image of both David and Phidias. I wanted that bastard to remember me, too.

  As I joined David and Phidias and we three walked through the open doors and onto the balcony, I wished hard for the sort of meeting David had had downstairs. I turned and pulled the doors closed behind us, and I could see that we had shaken him. Though he believed himself superior to all of us, we were still three to one. The mineowner can count on hi
s aloofness to carry him through, that and his Persian rugs and his horsehair sofa, when a delegation of heavy-limbed miners troops in. But when they tramp out again, even if he has outtalked them as usual, he must feel a little jolted by the force that is pent up in them. His cups must rattle some in the china closet, and the gas light flicker. Or so it seemed to me, who felt in that moment a sentimental musketeer feeling about my two mates. Really, Mr. Farley looked a little scared as he stood there and twiddled his pen. He looked as if he didn't know what pocket it went in.

  I pulled the doors to, and I laughed coarsely as I waited my turn to go down the stairs. I laughed long and hollowly enough for it to carry as far as the two of them in the bedroom, meaning for it to make Mr. Farley feel that he was wearing the emperor's new clothes. The silked and powdered duke pees in his brocades when he can feel the coachman and the butch footmen snicker at him. I had never been in a class war before, never on the smutty side anyway, and I liked it. I was a real rake. You'd never have known that an hour before I saw us shamed and standing in a row in the prisoner's dock.

  We regrouped at the fountain and nodding knowingly at one another like saboteurs, bombs planted, checking in for the countdown. I told them in a low voice what Madeleine whispered to me because I wanted to know what she whispered to them. Phidias would have shared his without any pressure. "She said she had an irresistible urge to write her own name," he said, "but she couldn't remember it." He beamed at David and me as if to say, "See what a professional job we did, she and I." And when we turned to David, I couldn't tell if he was disappointed that his secret was lifeless by comparison, or disconcerted because he had to spill it. As it happened, the moment suddenly took a different shape, and he was let off. We were only allowed to go so far before the next change intervened. But I was getting used to it. We heard the rattle of the key in the library doors again. What now, I thought, though I must have had Aldo in the back of my mind, because I didn't hear the police in every noise anymore.

  When I saw him, my first thought was: "He's my age." I had always thought he was an older man, but it may be that I always thought of myself as a younger man than I was. Yet he was an old forty-five. He was fat and soft and balding, one of those Californians whose skin is pasty and untanned so that you wonder why he bothers to live there. His clothes were very pricey, but wrinkled and awry because his body didn't hold them up. His cloudless face and his manic charm indicated that he knew all about it but had somehow lost control. He wanted you to know that you had to forgive him for it. He had forgiven himself.

  "Mary," he said with a sigh of irony, "there isn't a soul at the front desk. How the fuck am I supposed to check in?"

  I think the three of us had the same thought, that this one was Madeleine's affair. Meanwhile, he had to be hidden until Mr. Farley had taken his leave. I stepped forward and greeted him, reluctant though I was to give up the intimacy of the rabble. I would see them all later, but there was something especially pungent about the moments just after the caper that I had to let go. I took Aldo by one fleshy arm and guided him through the house toward the kitchen.

  "So you're Rick," he said.

  "I guess we've heard a lot about each other," I said, feeling giddy as we crossed the hall into the safety of the dining room.

  "Really?" he said. "I would have thought we hadn't heard a thing. She's said your name enough, but it's blood from a stone to get any hard information."

  "Well, I guess I know more about you." And I did, though not much. I was glad Madeleine had confided more to me than to him, but I knew too that she wouldn't gossip and never told more than she had to. Because I lived far away, I think she had given me the clues and filled in the background that she kept from people whom she saw all the time. During our several days in France, when she was what she now called "between careers," she had talked over with me her time in films so that she could get at the narrative thread. She said then that it was unusual for her to be free with details. Since then, I have gotten only fragments here and there, but I am very good at the narrative thread of Madeleine's life and so can piece them in.

  "Really?" he said again. It was his favorite word. "Do you know the kinky things about me?"

  "No. I know you've been taking care of her finances."

  We had come into the kitchen and now faced each other across the counter. Aldo played with a crock full of wooden spoons as if he were arranging flowers.

  "Such as they are, my dear. She's broke."

  "Again? Why?"

  "Ask her. She's a one-woman welfare state. She gives cash to every broken-down bit player she ever worked with. If only she weren't so European. She feels she has to earn it first. I'd give her Japan if she'd take it."

  "Do you own it?"

  "In a manner of speaking. It's all to do with transistors and diodes and things. I don't understand it. I just sign the checks. She did tell you I was rich, didn't she?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Oh good. It's so much less complicated when people know already. You're very good-looking."

  "Thank you."

  "Is that boy out in the yard yours?"

  "No," I said, bristling. "I don't own anyone."

  "So he is yours," Aldo said wistfully. "Well, mother will find some other mischief to get into. Don't worry about me, I can always amuse myself. It looks like the rest of you are going to be in jail anyway." He took a wooden spoon out of the crock and put it against his lips, as if he were about to lick chocolate off it. Then he waved it like a baton. "Jails are very kinky. But really, don't you think it's a little extreme?"

  There were clothes everywhere. When David and I brought up the last of the luggage to Madeleine's room, she and Aldo had already opened four suitcases. One lay open on Mrs. Carroll's bed, another on the chaise in the bay window. Aldo was making room in the closets, bunching up the dead woman's clothes to one side. He had emptied drawers in the high dresser, the low dresser and the vanity, and I don't know what he did with the things he cleared out. Then he had gone into every bedroom on the second floor and ransacked the closets for coat hangers. Now he stood in the middle of the room, clutching a bundle of wooden hangers in his arms, deciding what next to throw into disarray.

  "Don't worry," he said to me as I let down onto the floor a canvas and leather sack of boots and shoes, "I know where everything goes. I can tell you're a worrier. But I can put everything back where it was in five minutes if I have to. Tell him, Madeleine."

  "Aldo is very visual," Madeleine said absently. She was standing at the bed, holding up a long linen skirt and examining it closely for wrinkles. She was wearing a peach-colored dressing gown, yards and yards of chiffon that must have taken up the whole of one suitcase itself. Her head was wrapped in a towel.

  She had come out onto the landing after Mr. Farley left and, still in Mrs. Carroll's reedy voice, demanded an hour entirely to herself. When Aldo and I appeared in the downstairs hall, she sighed in her own voice. "Oh Christ, Aldo, I thought you'd never get here," she said. "Find me something to wear, will you?" Then she went away to take off her makeup and bathe.

  Aldo paced around the downstairs waiting, the peach chiffon over his arm. He groaned about the austerity of Mrs. Carroll's oaken furniture. He flipped through her records in the library and said he'd never heard of any of them, giving you the impression that he owned all the records you ought to have heard of. "So you can't listen to music," he said. "What do you do? Talk? God help you." He said he didn't even need to ask, he knew we were without television. He said it as if we were without running water or indoor plumbing. I shook my head no, and I stood around listening to him and felt few-worded and unflappable like Gary Cooper. By comparison anyway. He never stopped talking. He made you think something terrible might happen if he did stop. And yet he was not one of those people who makes everyone as nervous as he is. All the nervous energy in a room flowed into him. He looked like he would register on a Geiger counter.

  At last he was so edgy that he said we were going up, w
hether she was ready or not. He strode into her room, and I heard her squawk briefly from the bathtub. But the chiffon must have melted her because he came back and called down the stairs that I could start unloading the car. I had never volunteered to do it, but I didn't care until I reached the car in the back drive and found it piled with luggage like a first-class stateroom. I bellowed to David in the tower, and he came down.

  Just now he entered Madeleine's room behind me, a fat garment bag slung over his shoulder like a sail.

  "David, you're an angel," Aldo said. "And see, I've made a place for it right here in the closet. This is just for dressy things." David walked by him into the closet and hung up the bag. Aldo filled the doorway and said in a smutty voice, "We can meet here whenever you like, and we can play in the dark."

  "No thanks," David said. "I'm not into closets." He squeezed by Aldo and took a long look at Madeleine as she drew one thing and then another out of the suitcase on the bed. He would have loved to sit cross-legged on the pillows and talk with her about her clothes. But he couldn't get his bearings on the situation. He looked at me and said, "If you need me, I'll be outside. I'm going swimming."

  "I think that boy's in love with me," Aldo said when David had closed the door. He grinned at me. "You'd better watch out, Rick. I'm a terrible home-wrecker."

  "Don't worry," I said. "We're all homeless here."

  "Aldo," Madeleine said, holding out silk blouses in each hand. He went over and took them from her. "Go easy on David. Don't swallow him up."

  Madeleine surprised me. I hadn't thought she was paying attention. It was difficult to say what was wrong anyway, since David had answered every one of Aldo's antic lines breezily enough. I thought I was the only one who noticed. David had never gotten on with the dizziest gay men, the reckless, boy-hungry types with their hysterics, their vamp's humor, and their greeting-card sentiments. I found Aldo's Ping-Pong conversation endearing as it shuttled back and forth between air-headed chatter and seamy innuendo. David seemed threatened by it. Once, when he was young and perfect, he must have sensed a nonstop sexual hunger in a man like Aldo, and he feared attack. He should know by now that they are harmless men, and they shock and act wildly camp because they don't get much action. Besides, Aldo was more complex than the queens in bars who drink too much and try to appear gay in the older, sadder sense of the word. I would have to remind David, I thought, that there were no rules. The queen's way was in its own way delicious and brave.