Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "I don't think we have to worry about it," he said. "Did you put those canvas chairs out on the lawn like I told you to?"

  "She can't pull it off, Phidias. People know what their mother looks like."

  "I don't know who put them in the cellar, but whoever it was doesn't know mildew," he said, radiating the assurance of a man who knew mildew and therefore much more. "You don't understand, Rick. Christmas is when they come here to do their business."

  "But Farley's going to call them."

  He sighed. The self-evident nature of things inhabited his unworried face like a summer home. I saw now that he was going to tell me what he knew. I had already decided that he kept things from us only because he thought we had already figured them out. I tried to let him know as artfully as I could where in the story I got lost. It was best to have it out front that I for one didn't know mildew.

  "It's this way," he said. "Last year Cicely told Beth it was her last Christmas, so she won't come. John is sailing in the Chesapeake, like he does every summer. I don't think either of them would come up here for Beth's funeral unless she had the courtesy to die at Christmas. Farley won't be able to find Tony."

  "Why?" Tony, I knew, was the nervous one.

  "He teaches school, and in the summer he runs away." Somehow he didn't have the same grasp of Tony as he did of the others, and consequently it was more difficult to detest him. I wondered if Mrs. Carroll had made the same distinction. Also, it struck me that Tony was gay, though I didn't know why I thought so. "He sent Beth a card from North Africa just before she died."

  "But what happens," I persisted, jittery about the idea as I brushed away the facts, "if he does get through and they do all come?"

  "What happens happens," he said, slipping into a farmer's logic as if he were taking a rest. He seemed to have lost interest. He drew a red checked handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the heat from the back of his neck. "David's a good boy," he added after a moment, but he seemed to expect no reply to the notion. It was a comment that began and ended with his own thoughts, and it appeared to surface as briefly as his mention of the canvas chairs. So I went on.

  "Another thing, Phidias. What are we going to do about Mrs. Carroll? She's legally still alive now. How does she die?"

  "That's all figured out." He took up his pace along the road toward the house, and I fell in beside him.

  "How?"

  "I'll take care of it. She disappears at the end of the summer, like she's always said." It was clearly meant as the final word on the matter for the time being. "The reason I mention David is that he wants to go to work. He's good at taking care of people, so I think he'll come up with something, only he's scared. What you have to do," and he slapped the back of my hand with his own as we walked along, "is make sure he doesn't make do with taking care of you."

  Everyone, I thought, is going to start getting involved in David and me because we are the lovers, and no one can seem to leave lovers alone. It seems inappropriately Romeo-and-Juliet of me to have responded so defensively, since Phidias and Madeleine and Aldo were not out to part us or poison us or use us. But I did not want to be the object of their enlightenment, no matter how well-meaning they were. I wasn't going to let David get trapped. Phidias seemed not to understand that I had spent a few years looking out for David's best interests. Of course, it could be argued that I had botched the job. But who had given Phidias the cause for concern? If he could come up with the scenario he just came up with, then someone was telling tales out of school about the past. David, I thought. Had David thought I needed taking care of when we were young and foolish? I thought I took care of him.

  "David is free, and so am I," I said tartly.

  He shrugged as if to say that freedom might not be the issue. David could freely choose me over his future, after all, and still be making a mistake. Well, maybe, but if he were free, then it would be his own bad mistake and not my fault. And besides, he wasn't heading in that direction because this time we were different. I cast a sidelong look at the rumpled farmer who could make me go through such contortions and justifications. He looked like nothing more than a practical man, possessed of a good head for numbers and an intuition about the properties of pipes and wires. Since I believed that men infatuated with method—carpenters and captains and makers of systems—made wonderful lovers and nothing more, I thought over again what it was in Phidias that Mrs. Carroll needed. I could explain them as an affair of passion, the hot-blooded lady in the tower and the big-shouldered farmer, and get them into focus when they were young. I could see them spending money in Paris. Even on this estate they made sense, exchanging significant looks in front of dry-lipped Mr. Carroll. But it was more than that.

  Phidias was not just the shell of a heavy lover. I was beginning to see that he was the real moralist among us. He decided what had to be done and did it. A moral act was an act, pure and simple. He never said as much, but then he also seemed to feel that talking too much could rob the act of its moral clarity. I pictured Mrs. Carroll loving him for that, with no bullshit between them. It made me wonder about Madeleine's remark about their destiny. I couldn't believe it when she first said it because it was drowned out by the Hollywood swell of violins. But if destiny did operate in the human air that breezed about us, and if lovers could be touched by it, then perhaps it attached to those few who went ahead and did what they thought had to be done.

  It threw me into a silence as we walked along. I savored Phidias and Mrs. Carroll as having no regrets, and I envied them. I found myself paying him the compliment I usually saved for Madeleine alone: he didn't seem old at all. He was asking me not to let David just happen to me. If David and I wanted it, then we had to know what we had to do and then do it. Destiny had no commerce, it seemed, with those who listed their options again and again and combed the past for clues that made the future easy. Begin by not letting David take care of you, I thought, and then you will see what you have to do next. I had a picture of the two of them laughing, Mrs. Carroll in a white satin dressing gown with a white fox collar and Phidias in work clothes, unbuttoning his shirt. Then laughing in a three-star restaurant on the Left Bank while the waiter flamed their steaks. The rides with Madeleine in the Pierce-Arrow. It was heady stuff, these visions of the moral life.

  My not talking seemed to bring us closer together as we neared the house. I imitated his style, affecting my own rhythm in the face of the sweet, self-evident shine of life, or at least I walked that way, swinging my hands and crunching my boots heavily on the gravel. I am a notorious parrot when I want to be liked. It is the last of my youthful wiles, and it always works with candid, open-eyed people. They'll nail you in a minute if they catch you in a lie or an evasion, but they get all tender and expansive if they see themselves in you. Especially if you are younger than they are, and then they see themselves in their own youth. Some such fury of tacit understanding was operating between Phidias and me. He began to talk again, but more mildly.

  "You first knew Madeleine," he said, "in France. So did I. It's the best place to meet her first."

  "Well, it's the only place where I met her first, but I see what you mean. I met her in Burgundy, though, and you met her in Paris. There's a difference."

  "Is there? How did the village people treat her?"

  "Like a goddess."

  "In Paris too. It's because it's a Catholic country. Beth and I were introduced to her at a party, and Beth asked her where she was staying. 'The Ritz,' she said, and she acted confused, as if you had asked her what day of the week it was. There was a story about her and the Ritz that everybody knew but us."

  He stopped talking abruptly. We had come as far as the house, and Phidias headed around to the front lawn. I went along and waited for the story. When he saw the canvas chairs all in a row as if they were on a ship's deck, he beamed at them. I was storing up points all over the place. We stood there side by side looking off at the water, and he went on.

  "After she did her first tour in t
he front lines, she came back to Paris, and the French navy gave her the royal suite at the Ritz. They were using it as a war room, but they moved all their charts across the hall so she could have the view of the square. It turned out the Ritz was the only hotel that had hot water, so she invited all the entertainers who were in Paris to come over and take baths in her room. They never saw so many stars going in and out of one room. One right after another."

  "Who?" I asked. His attention had drifted back to the canvas chairs.

  "How would I know? Madeleine said they used enough towels to dry off a tugboat."

  He walked over to the chairs and peered closely at the fabric. Leave it to him not to know the names of the stars in his own story.

  "It's a wonderful story," I said. "She never told me."

  "Like I said, it's something you're supposed to know already." He turned back to me. "When she got there, she opened the closet and found a set of new uniforms from all the Allied powers. They had been done up for her by a tailor in Savile Row and sent over secretly on an RAF plane. I don't think she ever found out who ordered them. They say it was de Gaulle who put in a call to Churchill, but you don't know what to believe when it's about Madeleine, right?"

  "Right," I said, and we smiled at each other.

  "I know about it because she and Beth spent a whole winter afternoon at the Ritz unpacking the uniforms out of a trunk and trying them on. The war was over then, and she had no use for them. It was too much trouble to take them back to the States. She was sick with a virus. But that afternoon, she and Beth were like two girls in their grandmother's attic. You should have seen them."

  I could see them. And I could see him as well, sitting by in an overstuffed chair, drawing on a fancy cigar or picking at some little dainty from room service. Cheerful and pampered while the women played dress-up. Was he really so super-humanly mild, I wondered. Madeleine had given me the impression that he was simply not exercised about the liaison between Madeleine and Beth, but I had found it hard to believe. He had to have been offended or threatened or jealous, I thought. Yet the story of the women in drag at the Ritz evoked something so mellow about the drunken days in Europe after the war. People recovered their senses like gleeful children in a toy shop who want this and then this, on and on. In his memories of the time, Phidias did not come through as a man who questioned his virility or raised his prerogative as Beth's true lover. If he did not strike me as a man who could be turned on by the opulence of the two women making love, he seemed as if he might at least have gone along with the luxury of it all, wherever it took them.

  And of course there was the possibility that he believed in the destiny business between him and Beth Carroll. If so, it would have been as Greek of him as he could get. Perhaps she was free to follow out her scandalous romances because, as he saw it, the stones and the sea recognized nothing but his love for her and hers for him. Well, no. When I looked at him with the sapphire sea behind him, I felt the force of something simpler cutting through my embroidery. What happens happens. It was just midsummer carrying me away that made me flirt with the notion of fate. It was my experience that people did not actually feel such operatic quivers in the soul. Except in some of Madeleine's films.

  When he asked me about my own time with Madeleine, the week we spent touring in Burgundy when I was twenty-eight, I talked haltingly about the vineyards and the medieval towns. I gave him a wearying, fuzzy travelogue instead of a lovely Madeleine story, because I couldn't think of one. It came out as if it were the single dullest week of Madeleine's life. He didn't seem to mind, and he made a point of saying we must talk again. But we didn't have a chance to during those still and cloudless weeks. Or we talked nearly every day, but it had to do with canvas chairs and the like. Not that I wasn't happy to be the labor force in housekeeping matters, and it was sane-making to know that he would come by every morning armed with a chore or two. But we didn't soon again get into the moral laws. I was on my own.

  "You don't have a good memory, Rick, because you think too much." That was the last thing he said to me that day. I didn't think he was being entirely fair. After all, I had remembered about the canvas chairs.

  I thought I was the only one concerned about the children, and it made me twice as queasy, because I don't like children. The Carrolls' bottomless well of guilt and fixed positions increasingly left me with the feeling that I was holding the bucket. I thought I had to keep bringing it up, to make them see we were on a collision course with big trouble. But it didn't seem to me that I was able to get anyone's attention when I talked about it. Then David reported a scene that I had missed, where for a moment it came up again about why we were doing what we were doing. It was the sort of talk I loved. I would have known just what to say, and I was fuming, blaming each of them in turn for leaving me out. But as David told me what was said, I saw how it wouldn't have happened if I was there. They got to it by accident, and it lasted only an instant. I would have pushed too hard, and no one would have had the space to figure it out for himself.

  How it came about was that Madeleine asked Phidias for pictures of the children, because she couldn't find any in the drawers or on the shelves in Mrs. Carroll's room. So one day, late in the afternoon, they met in the attic. Aldo came with Madeleine because he was in the middle of a sentence at the time and refused to yield the floor. And David met Phidias going up the front stairs and tagged along. It wasn't planned, David insisted. I don't know where I was. Digging down to China in the sand or something. Filling my pockets with water-washed stones and bits of glass.

  It was hot as an oven in the attic, and they began by not talking at all. Even Aldo. They got right down to it, each of them turning to a sea chest or a stack of cardboard boxes, right away staggered at the brute accumulation of it all. Because the Carrolls had dwindled so by the time of our tenancy—coming to life only by turns in Phidias's stories, insubstantial phantoms in this solid, solid house—the memorial detail in the attic gave overwhelming focus to the patterns of the Carrolls' summer lives. It wasn't just the heat in the attic that hastened them along. They were spooked.

  "You won't believe it," Aldo said, "because you can't believe it. You know what these are?" He held up a deck of stiff white cards. "Menus for dinner parties. Hand-lettered. There must have been one at every plate." He began to read from the top one. "'Terrine de grives.' And the wine is Pommard, nineteen thirty. What's 'grive'?"

  "Thrush," Madeleine said.

  "That's the first course. Why would anyone want to do that to a thrush?"

  "Here's a box of tennis medals," David said from the shadows. "They're all silver."

  "Why did she save all this junk anyway?" Madeleine asked with some distaste.

  "Because there was the attic to put it in, probably," Phidias said, full of his customary lack of irony in these matters.

  "Not good enough," Madeleine said, shaking her head. David said that he knew, when he heard her, that she had no attic herself. For her, it was a bad compromise between what you couldn't live without and what you couldn't help but lose. "You have to have some idea what you're liable to do, so you know what to keep and what to get rid of. The point is, you don't need old props. You buy new ones." She was slapping her way through a foot-high pile of Playbills. "And you don't need clues to the past, either, if you remember what's important."

  "You're such a consumer, Madeleine," Aldo said. "Just find the photographs. If we don't get out of here in thirty seconds, I'm going to be pressure-cooked. I'm not supposed to sweat this much. Extremes aren't good for me."

  "Here they are." Phidias drew the photograph albums, one by one, out of a carpetbag. They were uniformly bound in brown suede, stamped on the front with the summers in question—1933-1936, 1937-1939, 1940-1946. They kept a photographer in residence, Phidias explained, for a few days in the middle of August. The estate went into production like a summer stock company when the photographer arrived. The servants set picture-perfect tables and sported starched whites. The children
were dressed and undressed and arranged in holiday tableaux. Even the cows were summoned into service, dotted about rustically in the background.

  Madeleine sat down next to Phidias on the lid of a cedar chest, and they began to look through the earliest of the albums, turning the pages over slowly until Phidias found the children. David and Aldo hunched behind them and craned to get a view.

  "John and Cicely on their ponies," Phidias said, pointing them out in the midst of a sunny little group of maids and governesses dancing attendance.

  "It says they're ten and thirteen," Madeleine said. "Cicely looks about thirty-five."

  "Maybe it's the ponies that are ten and thirteen," Aldo said. "Can we please get out of this heat?"

  "Where's Tony?" David asked.

  "Not born yet," Phidias said.

  "Find him." This last from Madeleine. She knew enough already about the lost tribe of the children to know that Tony had grown up to be the loner. They were all three so unforgiving of their mother that their tantrums and accusations didn't distinguish them from each other. But Tony had ended up with no one and, from all reports, hated the very air he breathed. If Madeleine's secret plan—the one she swore was a figment of my imagination—was to settle accounts with the children and tie it up nicely before Mrs. Carroll passed on, I'll bet it was the fragments about Tony that started her mind racing with scenes out of O'Neill. In 1945, when Madeleine came to stay for the autumn, the children had already gone back to Boston for the winter with their father. But she must have had some feeling for who they were, even then. And as Phidias turned to that very summer in the third volume, Madeleine must have looked to see how the children fared in the days when their mother was away in Europe with her lovers.

  "Here he is," Phidias said, pointing at a little boy swinging on a rope in the woods, holding tight with both hands. "He's the one who loved to pose for the photographer."

  "I have to get out of here," Aldo said. He did look, David said, as if he might pass out. He headed for the stairs and, starting down, turned for a parting shot. He was wet quite through. "Why do you suppose you're all doing this?" he asked moistly.