Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  Madeleine looked up and cocked her head. She said very quietly: "This?"

  "You know what I mean. This summer. This whole masquerade."

  It got awfully quiet. David didn't know which of them was the appropriate one to answer. The answer itself was as simple as ever, as far as he was concerned—they were doing it for Mrs. Carroll. David thought Phidias should be given the chance to say it, and then he wondered if he shouldn't step in and do it instead. If I had been there, of course, I would have leapt into it headfirst. "He's right," I would have said, "it's run away with us, and we're in danger." As it turned out, Madeleine took the cue. She is always given the best lines, but then she is the most practiced at being on the spot where the best lines fall.

  "It's a thriller, Aldo," she said, "and you're doing it too, so don't try to palm it off on us. We're all doing it for ourselves."

  What a way of seeing it. As she got more and more comfortable in Beth Carroll's bed, she got to kill two birds with one stone. She was taking a break from her own life and at the same time accomplishing something in someone else's. And so were we, she was quick to add. Just by sitting out the summer on the coast, we did a noble deed. The reward for the generous act was written into the terms of the act itself. It was like doing a nightclub gig at Monte Carlo, I suppose she would have said, because of the chance to play all day. Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but she seemed to know that the rest of us thought we were lucky if we brought down even one bird per stone in a given season.

  As to its being a thriller we were in, with a hum in the background like the zither in The Third Man—well, I didn't want to take too close a look at that. Between me and Madeleine, it would have been one more argument about conducting life as if she were directing a film.

  "Just testing," Aldo said with a smile. He approved of people doing nice things for themselves, whatever the cost. Nice things, he was fond of telling us, cost an arm and a leg.

  So the other reasons never got stated out loud, because they all filed single-file again down the ladderlike attic stairs and then dispersed. It was no less true, of course, that we were doing it for Mrs. Carroll and the pines and mossy rocks, for the love of summer theater and the dead-of-night dreams that shimmered between Phidias and his lost love. But David said it was as if all the reasons had been reiterated, crystal clear. Whatever Madeleine meant, she allowed us each his own eccentric notion of the time. Walking down the stairs between Aldo and Madeleine, David knew that our summer was not quantifiable like those days of the Carrolls. It wouldn't register on a camera. As they came into the cool of the upstairs hall, they all looked delirious at the change in the weather. And they all knew what they were doing.

  The five of us almost never found ourselves together in the same room because Phidias had gone back to his old habit of being overseer and spent most of his time up at the farm. The rest of us met in the evening for dinner. Aldo and Madeleine huddled together every afternoon doing business, and it annoyed me that Madeleine was not being treated to the easy vacation she had promised herself after the will was signed. But there was the money to think of. Aldo wanted to set up the concerts for the winter and spring. Credit-card calls went out to London and Paris and Berlin and Las Vegas. Mrs. Carroll's bedroom took on the air of a classy small business like diamonds or Pre-Columbian art. They renegotiated a recording contract. They sketched out an agreement whereby Madeleine could donate certain of the artifacts of her career for tax breaks and put others up for auction.

  We drank a toast one night to a fast sale to a private bidder in Los Angeles. Six thousand dollars for the opera gloves with the cigarette burn between two fingers from The Ambassador's Lady. She wears them in the scene in the empty ballroom while she waits to find out who wins the duel for her honor, Tyrone Power or Randolph Scott. She sits on the piano bench and holds the cigarette and looks glassy-eyed until she feels the burn. Then she cries out and runs across the room in her hooped dress, calling the Scott character's name over and over. She reaches the doors just in time for Power to catch her in his arms. 1946.

  "That's three thousand dollars a glove," David said.

  "No," Madeleine said, shaking her head. "Only one of the gloves has the cigarette burn. I figure five thousand for the right hand and a thousand for the left."

  It had not sunk in before, what Aldo had confided to me about Madeleine's money problems. When he first spoke of it, we had just finished defrauding Mrs. Carroll's children out of twenty-eight hundred acres of coastal lowlands, enough property to build a suburb on. I wasn't able to take him seriously. Madeleine looked rich and acted rich. She was rich in the same way as she was French, inevitably and for good. As we all clinked our glasses and laughed about the gloves, though, I realized that I was accustomed to taking Madeleine's view of liquid assets. You make a lot of money on a picture or a pair of gloves, and you pay a lot of money for a Dior suit or a first-class passage across the North Atlantic. None of these things seemed to have anything to do with real money, what you buy groceries with or what pays the rent. Madeleine was not engaged in keeping the wolf from the door.

  But if she was penniless (and I allowed enough room for Aldo's exaggeration to know that she wasn't reduced to eating cat food or taking in boarders), then she should be getting something more steady than glove money. I was grateful to Aldo after all for his afternoon manager's sessions with Madeleine. When I met him the next day in the kitchen, where he was eating right out of the refrigerator, I told him so.

  "Aldo, you must have broken the record for opera gloves. You ought to go into the antique business."

  "My dear, I already have," he said, waving a drumstick. "I just acquired a pair of slightly used opera gloves."

  "You bought them?"

  "Honey, she has a whore's pride. She won't take money for free. I had to do something."

  Aldo was with Madeleine several days later when Farley called about the children. He answered the bedroom phone in the middle of a sentence, assuming it was Lake Tahoe returning his call, and he gave a bug-eyed look at Madeleine when Mr. Farley asked, in his ashen tone, to speak to Mrs. Carroll. Madeleine didn't mind at all. She took up the phone and greeted him as Mrs. Carroll, bracing herself for the second act.

  Who, Mr. Farley begged to know, was answering her telephone as if the place were a delicatessen. "That was the undertaker," she told him. "I want my funeral to look like New Year's Day at the Rose Parade. You're not invited."

  Farley had no comment. He was just calling to pass along information, and it turned out that Phidias had predicted the outcome accurately. Cicely was not about to come when her mother called. She had turned over the financial end of her family life to her brother John. She was fifty-six years old, and she didn't think she and her mother had any chance of suddenly getting chummy with one another. "She's probably right," Madeleine said to Farley. "When she was here last Christmas, she said most people's mothers are dead by the time they're fifty-six. I told her it was all her fault. I just can't stand to leave my little cubs behind."

  Meanwhile, John was going up and down the Chesapeake in a sloop. John was a lawyer like Mr. Farley, and they had presumably agreed that Christmas would be soon enough to deal with mother. John and Mr. Farley agreed about everything, but they agreed most passionately, until they were practically hoarse, about the skeleton in the closet that took the form of Phidias and Mrs. Carroll. All of this came out in Beth Carroll's diary, which Madeleine had begun to read piecemeal before going to sleep. It was shelved, several volumes of it, in the hidden cupboard behind the bed where the cameos were kept. Madeleine had discovered that Donald Farley had been something of a father to John Carroll ever since the day Mr. Carroll fell over onto his desk with a coronary in the middle of a memo. In turn, John was father to Cicely, even though she was three years older, and to poor nervous Tony.

  "What about Tony?" Madeleine asked.

  "The school says he's in Africa," Mr. Farley said.

  "I know that. Of all of them, you kno
w, he'd come if you got hold of him. He's the only one who'd suspect that I changed the will."

  "I think it can wait until Christmas," he said. He exuded good sense and authority. He was giving his judgment.

  "It can. I can't," she said, to tease him mostly.

  "You aren't sick, are you, Beth? You know, you don't sound like yourself."

  "Don't jinx me, Farley. You've talked half of Boston into an early grave with talk like that. Does someone pay you a bounty?"

  Hanging up, Mr. Farley seemed to feel she was more herself again. She had always talked tough. Madeleine decided that Beth survived by it. The diary showed how they all got even with her by cutting her out of their lives. But Madeleine could not find any evidence that she cared or fought back. Because the love affair that wrecked their home had been going on so long, none of the children was entirely sure that Phidias wasn't their father. Cicely and John apparently convinced themselves that they were purebred Carrolls, but they never forgave their mother for the doubt. They saw a little Greek in Tony and spooked him about it. Mrs. Carroll wrote it all down in her diary, but she didn't seem to know what to do. She fell into tough talk and dismissed it and so got even with them.

  When he was eight, Madeleine read, Tony wandered into a dinner party in his pajamas. His father commanded him to go upstairs. "Do what your father says," Beth said, and Tony asked, "How do I know he's my father?" The eerie thing about the diary entry, Madeleine said, was that she gave no indication of what it made her feel. She wrote down what they had for dinner and who they had for dinner and even ticked off the flowers. Madeleine was furious. She would read Aldo passages while he sat in the bay window and fattened her bank account.

  He told her it was none of her business, that nothing could be done about it now. I had won him over to my position. Madeleine said we were scared of our own shadows.

  Now it didn't matter because they weren't coming. When Aldo found me on the porch and told me, I swear that the sun came out from behind a cloud. Suddenly the time was free again. I can't pretend that my anxiety about the children had really gotten in the way of my good humor, my lust, or my sense of summer. David and I followed our own course as much as Madeleine and Aldo did when they sat upstairs and made money. "You be the grasshoppers," Madeleine told us, "and we'll be the ants." But we were a little less likely to wind up in jail on Labor Day if the Carroll children kept their distance. Also, Madeleine would not have to go through the indignity of being unmasked. In a way, I was more relieved about that than about jail. I had had such a horror of the scene, the assembled family rising to their feet in shock when the parody of Mrs. Carroll walked into the room. Angry as I was at her for thinking she could get away with it, nevertheless I didn't want Madeleine to be disabused.

  "But that's not the best part," Aldo said. "Madeleine has agreed to write her memoirs."

  "She said she never would."

  "Mrs. Carroll's children and Mrs. Carroll's diary have changed her mind."

  "How?" I asked. I saw myself taking dictation. Or sitting at a typewriter set up on the porch table, transcribing it off a Dictaphone.

  "The children because, now that they're not coming, she has no drama to look forward to. There's not enough show business in this burg. And the diary because it's so out of phase with the woman Madeleine knew, so out of touch with the facts. Madeleine wants to do a better job on her own life."

  "Is she going to tell the truth?"

  "I don't think that's been decided yet. You mean about the ladies in her life, right?"

  "I guess so." I wasn't sure what I meant. How was she going to get it all in a book? I liked it the way it was now, some of it legend and the rest documents—films and old recordings, Beaton photographs and Times photographs, reviews, interviews. "But does she have to? There isn't any more she needs to say about her life."

  "You sound like her," Aldo said. "You forget that there is money to be made. Her past is a gold mine." He puffed out his chest and poked his thumb at it. "Trust the fat man."

  For the next few days, I tried to get Madeleine to talk about the project, but she was not ready to. "Not yet. Not to you," she said. "Your standards are too high. You want it as good as Proust." I protested, but I couldn't change her mind. Then I let it go because she tricked me, telling me she wanted to spend time with me only if I would help her forget about the book she had to write. She announced that she wanted to take walks. So we began to walk in the early morning on the beach and in the late afternoon in the woods. It did not even interfere with my midday sun with David. It meant I was outside all the time. She talked about the past, but not about writing about it, and I was a pushover and preferred it that way. She wore pale linen suits tailored like a man's and a straw boater. She looked like she went to Princeton.

  One day at the rock pool between the ridges, she took a leather-bound book out of her bag and began to read aloud. It was Beth Carroll's account of the first days in Paris after Madeleine had come into their lives. Dry lists of restaurants and cafes and parties. Names dropped like so many eggs. Outings to places so famous they can't be described, and when she described them, the prose was as tongue-tied as if she had said, "In Venice there are many canals." The remarks about Madeleine were surprisingly star-struck. "I want to wear Madeleine's beaver wrap," she wrote, "but I am afraid to ask. When she is asleep at night, I put it around my bare shoulders and walk back and forth in front of the bathroom mirror." It didn't sound very tough to me. Madeleine looked up, her mouth thin and sour.

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "It's a kind of shorthand, Madeleine. She probably never meant it to be read."

  "Don't be so nice," she said, cutting me off. "She doesn't talk about anyone else that way. She never gets sloppy or stupid, no matter what happens. But this''—she rapped the page about herself with the back of her hand—"this is like Photoplay. She wasn't like that."

  "What does Phidias say?" I asked, to change the subject some.

  "He refuses to read it. Just as well—she hardly mentions him at all for months at a time. But here"—she stared at the book, not able to find the words for how odd she found this particular thing—"she comes off as a brainless southern belle. Her biggest problem is her beaten biscuits. I can't understand it."

  "Does it make you wonder what the truth really is?"

  "No. I know what the truth is. This little scene with the mirrors may have happened, Hick. She may have done it night after night and modeled everything in my closet. But it isn't the truth about her and me."

  "The truth is everything about a person, isn't it?" God help me, I sound so sententious. Why, I wondered, are we even having this conversation? I didn't care about this. I didn't trust an abstract opinion, I realized, as far as I could throw a piano.

  "Of course not," she said. She was looking down now into the water David had dived into. She seemed in a way to have forgotten the diary itself and to be going back over her own memories. She didn't sound sententious. "A love affair only has time for certain things. It doesn't include what you hide in the bathroom."

  "Where does the rest go?" We were not getting high marks in logic, I realized, but it seemed worth it to go along for the ride. "All the secrets and the guilty dreams, I mean."

  "You save them for before and after your love affairs. Maybe nobody can get it right when they write it down. I could wallpaper that whole house with the crap people wrote about me. But Beth knew me better. I'm sure."

  "Are you going to try to get it right in your book?" I asked, bringing it up to tease her.

  "I'll get me right," she said. "I'll probably make a mess of everyone else. Do you want to be in it?"

  What a question. But before I could think of a clever, clever thing to say that would keep me from having to answer it, she spoke again.

  "Don't move," she said quietly, staring into the water. I was looking at her, and I froze. "Behind me, on the ridge."

  I looked up, and it was gone. But I caught the afterimage of a
deer, like the glow in the dark after someone has turned out the light. I knew as soon as I saw it that the flag had been dropped to signal the passing of midsummer. A moment of delight thrilled in me, and in a moment it was followed by dread, the same flash of opposites that I get when I'm making love. It is not as if the leaves suddenly yellowed or the wind went cold. Still sunny, still warm, the day circled the clear water of the pool in full green light. But I became aware of the summer air as limited, bounded on either end by—not winter exactly, but more like a diminishing of detail, a drawing back of life to two dimensions. I didn't know which two, but one was time. How much time have I let go by, I thought, without knowing it? I felt a surge of conviction that nothing stands still, not the deer, not the peak of the heat, and certainly not us. If it had been anything but a deer that came and went, I might have given it the benefit of the doubt.

  So we had shared a secret of sorts, Madeleine and I, though she only saw it reflected in the pool and I saw the wind that it left behind as it sprang away. But it had the effect of stopping us from talking any more about The Truth and The Past. Madeleine is, she would be the first to admit, such a civilized creature. One can only imagine the most domesticated animals in her vicinity, a pair of chow dogs underfoot, say, in a bedroom full of ancient painted panels and difficult plants. One would have to go further and say that Madeleine couldn't keep animals or greenery at all because they can't take care of themselves. The deer may have fled at the sight of Madeleine, then, because of the aura that clung to her of European squares and Italian gardens. But to me the both of them seemed more alike than they must have seemed to each other, exotic and calm and lordly. Five years before, I would have thought the deer was fleeing me. But they move so fast, they seem to move mostly for motion's own sake.

  In my heart, I have let the old Sea Island deer go, and I did the same thing now. I didn't smother the image by trying to hold it close, something I always used to do. We hurried home in silence, and the secret made me happy, even though I knew the summer was going to make its way downhill. I was not as surprised as everyone else that things turned upside down again. I wouldn't say that I was braced for disaster. The nimbus of late summer glowing on the land didn't ruin my time with David, either. Rather, it seemed to make me squander more at every mating. Those few days following the sighting of the deer were perhaps the most utterly blue in the sky and the sea. I didn't feel sorry for myself. What happens happens. But I did begin to grieve about all of us together, the whole haphazard summer group of us, since I knew we would have to be dispersing soon.