Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "What about them meeting in Paris during the war?" We lounged in the doorway and spoke these lines out into the mist. There were spaces between everything we said, and we didn't look at each other. David and I had nothing to do with what we were saying now.

  "I gather that's true," he said. "But I think it started with Madeleine recognizing Phidias. I don't know whether Mrs. Carroll ever knew about them. Phidias and I only talked about it once, and I didn't think of all the right questions until later."

  This conversation was so surreal that it seemed to me we had at last broken through the looking glass. We were having the conversation that happens at the end of a comedy, when it turns out that everyone is everyone else's brother. Some are in drag, and some know and some don't, and some have been taken care of by kindly shepherds. But usually there is someone who has all the facts, and David was plainly half-informed. I wanted to shake him and demand a full chronology. It occurred to me that David and I were amateurs at the past compared to Madeleine and Phidias. And no wonder there were problems in her memoirs far back in the beginning. Madeleine had a good reason for keeping it from me, no doubt, though I couldn't see quite what it was. I had a sudden, irrational pang, hoping that Aldo didn't know.

  "And she hadn't seen him for thirty years between then and this summer," I said, trying to sort out what it meant to her. What it meant to me was that I had some final illusions to put away. I had not known until now that I had so many left. Well, I thought, it's your own fault. I got a kick out of blaming myself. It was very gutsy and pragmatic and General MacArthur of me. I squinted into the future. Blaming myself and getting it over with was palpably more interesting than feeling sorry for myself.

  "What are you thinking?" David asked, half-convinced that I had gone into shock.

  "It's amazing, isn't it, how for some people nothing ever really goes away. I don't ever expect to see anyone again. I've slept with a hundred people I wouldn't even recognize. That's the one thing I like about the past, that it doesn't rise out of the grave."

  "Except me."

  "Except you."

  "Hey, you guys," Aldo called. We turned around, and there he was again at the door to the hall, the Dewar's half-gallon in hand. The hourly bulletin. I hoped he was going to say Madeleine wanted to see me first to talk about Tony, but instead he said: "The jig is up."

  "What do you mean?" David asked.

  "Tony blew her cover. He guessed. We are all wanted upstairs." Nothing was going right, I might have thought, but instead I thought, nothing is going according to plan. So we needed to make a new plan. And I was all ready.

  "I'm bringing up a peace offering," Aldo went on, waving the scotch. "I wish I could give it to him intravenously."

  "What's the mood upstairs?" David asked.

  "I haven't been there yet," he said. "She called me on the intercom. She didn't sound as if he had a shotgun trained on her, but perhaps a small automatic."

  As we trooped upstairs, one behind the other, me bringing up the rear in my coal miner's slouch, I realized that David was scared and I wasn't. He was asking Aldo questions Aldo couldn't answer, about what might happen and what had. David had been the first person, after all, who went along with Phidias's plan, and it fell out for him that he then turned the moral subtleties over to the rest of us, trusting us to carry on.

  His job had been to dig a grave. After that, he proceeded with the summer he had promised himself. No wonder he paid no attention until now. It was his view, I think, that there were so many of us against a little-boy, whiskey-rotten schoolmaster that it was no contest. But now it was out of his hands, and he was getting jittery, like a passenger who notices that the pilot seems stumped about what's the matter as the plane nosedives. He wanted us to do something. As for me, reaching up the stairs to take his hand as it swung back, I was feeling more in control at every revelation. Perversity is going to win in the end with me. Each pricked balloon, each shock of context was bracing me like a long walk in a cold woods.

  I caught David's hand, and he turned. "Don't worry," I said.

  "That's not what you said last night."

  "I know. I just wanted you to know that one of us is all right. This time it's me."

  Aldo paused at the door until we caught up, and then we all walked in. I was surprised to see Madeleine out of costume. Her face was severe, and her hair was combed straight back because she had taken her makeup off. She wore the chiffon robe, and it only emphasized how gaunt she looked. I supposed she decided to get out of Mrs. Carroll because it had come to seem a bad joke, and she probably felt she needed her own wits about her, in her own incarnation. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the bed. Tony stood at the dresser. Phidias had stopped just inside the door, just as we had, but when we bunched together behind him, he moved forward. I realized that he was the one who was going to speak and that everyone, including Tony, watched him tensely, waiting for a way out.

  And, certain of his audience, Phidias was clearly prepared to settle in for a lecture. Soon he was pacing about on the persian rug between the bed and the french doors while we all watched from the sidelines. He started back in the previous autumn, explaining how Mrs. Carroll felt as the winter came down. From the beginning, at the first north wind in October, she promised him it would be her last winter. And, having made the decision, she seemed to savor the rainy, lightless days that in the past sent her into bitterness and rage. For the first time in anyone's memory, she canceled the winter invitations from Palm Beach, and all along Worth Avenue, the linen-hatted grandmothers must have assumed something terminal was at work. Christmas was as grim as ever, but Phidias found her full of mirth when he visited in the late evenings. In the face of her bloodless, censorious children, she took untold nourishment from her secret death. It was set ticking like a bomb at the end of the next summer.

  A lot of this was just between Phidias and Tony. I think that Phidias had always maintained the fiction of the feudal-lord-and-farmer manners where the children were concerned, so that even the mention of those nightly meetings was evidence that he wasn't going to mince words. He was establishing his power by means of his intimacy. Tony should have been doubled up with loathing at the speech, but I couldn't read him. I think David expected Tony to be weeping and inconsolable, on account of his mother being so suddenly dead. I knew better. Because he was a drunk, I knew he would save his tears for his late-night, iceless scotches. His mother's death would be the right sort of material for a tantrum. And yet I felt sorry for both of them, sharing the death and without a way to bridge the distance between them. I remembered our first day here in June, thinking as they went off after lunch that Madeleine and Phidias would bargain back and forth with their separate versions of Mrs. Carroll. Phidias and Tony were not likely to strike that kind of bargain.

  I looked us all over as Phidias went on. Mrs. Carroll had made the decision about the land and the new will just as the first spring winds blew in off the ocean. Mr. Farley was summoned in Easter week and given his orders. When the garden was in full flower in May, she told Phidias her wishes about the burial. I had heard the next part before, about the night she died, and I tuned it out. It seemed none of my business, even if Phidias and Tony could not come clean about it and make it their business. I had compared us all before to a family gathered for the reading of a will, but the image had never made more sense. At that moment, I had the exact snapshot of the situation that Madeleine had an hour or two before, that we were the family in residence and not the Carrolls. If that was so, I thought as I looked sideways at Aldo and David, so different from each other they could be of different species, then the family we composed was still another mixed blessing. What family feelings still persisted in any of us from the dim past were a mess of false faces and doomed tests of affection. A family is a place where the fear of abandonment has turned all the human habitations into caves and cages and islands with treacherous approaches. We could do without it.

  Lastly I looked at Madeleine, who h
ad put on a face keyed to the gravity of the occasion. I wondered if she saw her husband when she looked at Phidias gesturing and chronicling in front of us. I knew the second husband's name was Peter Jackson and that he was the heir to a middling fortune and a slice of real estate in Arizona about the size of Connecticut. They were married for two years in the late forties, before anyone consented to live in Arizona, and Madeleine left for LA and told the weird sisters, Hedda and Louella, that marriage was not her game. Peter Jackson still surfaced in the news in his own right, a vulgar, toothy man who wore a white cowboy hat when he got dressed up. But the first husband, the child-bride marriage in Europe, was left behind in another world. When you thought of Madeleine, you had to think of her in a one-to-one with Boyer or Robert Taylor or Joel McCrea, because she had abandoned real-life men. For different reasons, of course, Boyer and Taylor do not live in the barrens of Arizona.

  "Phidias?" Tony asked, interrupting the narrative, "I don't see what this has to do with me."

  Phidias faced him and studied him for a moment, seeming reluctant to yield the least detail of the story, since he had no one else to tell it to. Perhaps he should have begun by begging Tony's pardon, and yet Tony didn't appear offended. He looked genuinely confused.

  "Doesn't anyone want a drink?" Tony asked, turning again to the tray. "We can't have a proper wake without something stronger than Phidias giving a speech. Aldo, we need more glasses."

  "Tony," Madeleine said in a tired and husky voice, "you have to decide what you're going to do."

  "Oh." He took a drink. "I don't think you need me to do anything. I really don't want to be involved."

  "All of this is against the law," she said, throwing up her hands to take in the summer and the house and what we could see of the coast from the bay window.

  "You think I'm going to tell someone?" he asked her, and then it seemed to dawn on him that he was the center of our attention. He appealed to all of us now, and his eyes kept darting back to David's face. "What do you think, that I'm going to call Donald Farley and blow the whistle? I don't care what you do here. If you want to sow the ground with salt or cover it with cement, go ahead. I don't just hate this house. I'm really unreasonable. I don't like trees or the ocean or anything. I started out hating those trees," he said, his voice full of self-mockery, pointing over his shoulder and out the window to the woods, "but I hate everything now. I was telling her"—he nodded at Madeleine, not yet able to name her—"that I've never forgiven this house."

  "Don't you see," I said, turning his attention from David, "you're the one we're disinheriting. This is a crime against you."

  "But since I don't want my mother's land," he shot back at me, "I don't accept the crime. Now if John and Cicely were here, they'd swarm all over you." He was cheery and ingratiating, and he so much wanted us to believe he was one of us that I could have throttled him. "There are these killer bees, you know, that just keep stinging and stinging. That's Cicely. John is more like a scorpion."

  "So you don't care," Madeleine said.

  "Well, I'm interested," he replied. "I saw you all through the kitchen window, before I came in last night. I watched you all eat. It made me jealous, because we always took our meals in the dining room. If I hadn't seen you then, you know," he said to Madeleine, "I might have been fooled. You were just like her, except you were too nice. My mother wasn't nice."

  "You're no damned good," Phidias said, and we turned back to where he stood in front of the french doors. He had been left hanging just at the end of his story, and he had not been given the proper time to draw the moral. In the interval, he scrapped the temple of reason. He was white with anger, but he spoke in a low corrosive voice, as if everything were a suppressed shout. "You don't even ask how she died. Or if she died easy. She'd laugh at me if she was here, because it's a waste of time, but I want you to know something. She stopped talking about you and your worthless brother and sister as soon as she saw the lawyer. David, did you ever hear her talk about the children?"

  "No," David said as if he wanted to crawl under the carpet.

  "So she died clean, Tony." He was magnificent, rocking back on his heels and huge with scorn. "You'd turn on us in a minute, but you're afraid to make threats because we might laugh at you. You're just like your goddam father, except that he had the excuse that he was a fool. You know just what you sound like, and you don't care." As he wheeled around to the doors, his eyes swept over Aldo and David and me like a firestorm. But he didn't see us, arguing as he was with the whole departed family that ghosted the house. When he pulled open the doors, I remembered David's telling me about his coming in the same way on the night Mrs. Carroll died. To him, I suppose, all of us violated the room he visited after dark for forty years. Before going out, he flung back one more dart. "No wonder you drink," he snarled. "I don't know how you stand it." And then he clanged down the iron spiral stairs and away.

  Now that the doors to the balcony stood open, the pearly light and the rain-washed air came in, and we had a moment to catch our breath. I had the oddest sense that, one after another, each of us would have an explosion just as Phidias had, and one by one we would leave the room. If that happened, I thought, who would be the last one left? Me, I figured, because I was so calm I could land a DC-10 on a tennis court. Calm because I had known all morning that Tony was going to react just as he did. David was right that I was jittery the night before, but that was before I knew how he and I saw each other as possessed of the same devils. When I threw myself on top of him and began to fight, without a clue about where wrestling ended and sex began, I became devoted to contrary behavior. I have lived my life (that thing I think about all day long) being sure of everything, but I had coasted through the last day on something new, that everything was at least the opposite of what I was sure of. Put another way, I thought of myself now as having stopped getting older.

  "He's always told me that about my mother," Tony said, a little apologetically. "You shouldn't think it's something new. That's the sort of thing we would say in this house."

  "Remind me that I'm busy next Christmas," Aldo said. He seemed quite serious. He cradled the big half-gallon of Dewar's in the crook of his arm as if he were holding a baby.

  "What are you going to do?" I asked, and I didn't hear the question throbbing in my own head like an echo. I wanted to let him know that we could keep to the flight plan even if the captain was knocked out. For once I was not asking the question of myself, as if I understood that I could not be both the questioner and the questioned. Because the one does not wait for an answer, while the other burns all inquiries.

  "I think I'm going to make a break for it," he said, and I wondered if we had the same taste in television movies. "Is my mother—when is my mother going to die? I mean, is my brother John going to call me on Labor Day to break the news?"

  "In September," Madeleine said evenly. "Phidias knows when."

  "You're not leaving now," Aldo said, as if enough was enough.

  "In the morning," David said, and Tony locked eyes with him. David was as innocent as ever, but the moment was lousy with crimes of passion.

  "I'll stay tonight," he said, turning to Madeleine, "if you'll sing."

  "Oh sure," she told him. What the hell was this? Madeleine must have agreed to sing for him, as if he were the scrubbed-up kid soldier in Sea to Shining Sea who goes into the canteen and hears Madeleine's voice in the smoke, and she's singing "As Long As You Come Home." She hadn't been good enough in the play that just closed in the middle of the second performance. So, to shake the rheumatic old woman and the flawed bit of acting in a single stroke, she meant to show Tony how good she could be. I wasn't sure he would know it if it bit him.

  "I'm going to take a walk up to the field," Tony said. "I'll see you all at dinner. I'm invited, I guess."

  He walked out between me and David. It took me a moment to realize that he meant to go visit his mother's grave, which Phidias must have pinpointed in the course of his story, when I wasn
't listening. It was queer of him to do it, almost in questionable taste after what he had said in her bedroom. And now we were four.

  "He doesn't want to be alone," David said. Inevitably. He turned to me, and only the sense of expectation in his eyes betrayed the anxiety that once would have been there at a time like this, when he wasn't sure I saw how urgent something was. He had rid himself of it, but the space it left wasn't yet filled.

  "You'd better go see," I said, bringing my hand to the small of his back. I had been standing next to him all this time, and my hand homed in like sonar so that I touched him without thinking on his thin flannel shirt. In front, he wore it unbuttoned halfway down, a gesture to the cooler air the rain brought with it. I knew what he was thinking, that he could help Tony with the gay part. Maybe so. I thought it more likely that his knowing the grave well might be of more immediate help, but it was between them.

  "When I get back," he said, I suppose so that I wouldn't worry that he mightn't, "we'll get dinner ready."

  The door had barely clicked closed behind him when Aldo went over to the bed, put his scotch on the floor beside it, and fell forward onto the quilt with a groan. He buried his face in his arms.

  "I'm going to have a peptic ulcer when I leave here. You know what I should be doing on a day like today? Sitting by the pool having a haircut and a pedicure."

  "His barber makes house calls," Madeleine explained to me. "It makes him a big shot."

  "That's not true, Madeleine. I know three men in Beverly Hills who have their own barbers. Live-in. That's what a big shot is. But I mean, on a day like this at home, I wouldn't move from my bed without a consultation with someone in authority. I could tell it was that kind of day when I woke up."

  "I had a live-in dressmaker once," Madeleine said. "In the thirties."

  "Didn't you get your clothes in Paris?" I asked, aware that this little chat was an island and glad of it.