Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "Yes, but they can't fit you by mail. They'd ship things over, dozens of things, and we'd choose. I found her in a village in Mexico when we were on location. She didn't know what a Worth dress was, but she was a genius at a fitting. She did the final work in my bedroom, sewing by hand, and it would put me to sleep to watch her." Madeleine paused and stared into space, the autobiographer at work, trying to get the full arc of the anecdote right. "Later she got a job at MGM. She's very wealthy today. I think she's titled."

  "See, Rick," Aldo said impatiently, turning over and drawing up his knees, "that's a story you can really sink your teeth into. Not like the way they treat each other around here. Since they make no progress, why do they still bother?"

  "Well, Phidias and Tony bother in particular because they're jealous. They think the other one has something of Mrs. Carroll that they don't have."

  "So it's a complex," he said with a shrug. "All right, Madeleine, what happened? Start at the beginning."

  "Move over," she said, standing up from the bony, eggshell chair. "Let an old lady rest." I smiled at the irony and at the circuitous reference to Beth Carroll. It used to turn me inside out when Madeleine mentioned growing old, but I could see she was not afraid of jinxing herself when she said it. She plumped up the pillows and lay against them in her robe, then beckoned me. "There's room for you, too," she said. Aldo had pulled back to make her a place, and now he sat cross-legged at her head like the palace eunuch. "Did you know, Rick, you've been standing in the same place since you walked in?"

  It was true. I stood frozen to the spot, relishing my safety from the storms that blew about the room. Afraid to take a step, perhaps, because I might jar the set of my nerves that kept me warm and dry. But it was time to go forward. I had stood still long enough and taken in all that went on with the others, so I thought I would launch forth now like a spider on his own length of rope. I jaunted over to the bed, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the end with my back against one of the posts. Above me the canopy swayed like a sail. I leaned against the post, my hands around my knees like Huck Finn on the raft. Madeleine and Aldo and I were as curious a group as the house held, and as we went through the story of Tony Carroll and his artificial mother, we played a curious group for all it was worth. We sat on the four-poster like people in a lifeboat or bent around a campfire, and we gossiped and theorized and did over the scene in a dozen different ways. We didn't make fun of Tony. Aldo and I had to hear every detail and every symptom, I think, because the three of us were so appalled by the way in which Tony was gay. His was the fate the rest of us had escaped, and we spoke of it with all the fascination of veterans and runaways telling stories of those who didn't make it.

  Meanwhile, with missionary zeal, David tracked down Tony, fleshing out the plot as he went along. David believed that, as long as the genitals still had a dream of their own, there was no one who couldn't make it. He liked the challenge to his erotic energy, and he could transform himself in bed into a creature full of kinks and folklore. "Blood from a stone," I used to tell him on bad days, when I couldn't get it up, and then he would get me laughing with some swank little dirty trick with his tongue or his tireless cock, and then we'd be off and running. So I wasn't discounting his ingenuity. But when he finally cornered Tony in the butlers pantry, he didn't have the advantage he had in bed, with his body heat and the smell of him sweating close.

  "Are you looking for the scotch?" David asked from the door to the kitchen.

  "I'd like to have a nickel for every time I've been asked that," Tony said without turning around, opening one cupboard after another. "Do you practice temperance along with the farmer in the dell?"

  "No, not in anything," David said. "Today I've already had too much rain and too much family. I only asked because Aldo brought the bottle up with him. It's in the bedroom."

  Tony snapped his fingers.

  "Of course," he said, grinning broadly at David. "I knew I'd seen it somewhere. I thought I was having hallucinations."

  "There's gin."

  "It reminds me of shit perfume."

  "Or wine."

  "You mean the twelve percent stuff they make from grapes." He shrugged. "I suppose if it's that or Sterno. Where did you go to school?"

  David let the swing door thump shut behind him, and he unlocked the wine cabinet and took out a bottle at random, which turned out later, when David and I finished it, to be a '61 Chateau Margaux and too good for the occasion. David knew, as he twisted the screw into the cork, that Tony was asking about prep school and not college.

  "The Dee School, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It wasn't very tweedy. There was a slag heap from the coal mine at the far end of the soccer field. And though we had a Carnegie in the class behind me, he was practically retarded."

  "I guess you didn't like it much."

  "All I wanted to do was get laid," David said to simplify the issue. "But I liked English. Who's your favorite poet?"

  How could Tony not have winced? I winced for him when David told me the story late that night, but David swore there was no wince. He swore it turned into a cozy little seminar on Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. David sat on the old soap-stone sink, and Tony leaned against the door to the china closet, and they drank their wine. There is a tiny round window above the sink in the butler's pantry, and it looks onto the back marsh and faces west. When the sun finally broke through, they had finished off two-thirds of the bottle and had gotten on the subject of teachers and their favorite students. The late afternoon light glowed on the polished oak of the little room.

  I can see David sitting there, backlighted by the window so that his head was ringed in gold, his shirt parting to show off his ripe young chest as he leaned forward. With no self-consciousness, he would bring his free hand to his crotch and rub it meditatively for a moment, as if there were a fatal itch he had to attend to.

  "You become like brothers, don't you?" David asked, picturing himself playing tennis with the dean in college and, further back, camping in the Poconos with his history teacher. "And then everything goes wrong, and it ends like a bad love affair."

  "Sometimes it's just the year that ends. They graduate."

  "What I don't understand is, why does it end like a bad affair when there's been no affair?" He was full of the worst sort of sincerity. "I mean, I never actually had sex with my teachers. Do you?"

  "No." Tony seemed brutalized by the question, as if he hadn't really negotiated the turn in the conversation. David kept misjudging the psychic distance between them (he says because of the size of the room), and he went on, hoping it would make them more and more comfortable to have it out in the open. And it aroused him to talk about it.

  "I don't think it happens in prep school," he said. "Both people pretend that it isn't sexual until it's too late. I think the difference is that the boy's body gets turned on and the teacher's head. The teacher just wants to touch, and the boy wants to fuck. And then the boy gets scared, right? Of his own desires."

  "You know far too much about it," Tony said, and I guess by now he must have been angry and starting to put up a wall. But David misread it as shyness. "Have you been on both sides?" Tony asked.

  "No, but I was a prize student for an awfully long time. And I never get over my worst desires. Why don't we go to bed?"

  I do not love David right if I see him as wholly ego-centered and misguided at this moment when he made his move. There was no point in his being naive and letting the moment pass, or else the scene would have become the very parody of the boy and his master that he wished to counter. You judge these things at the time because the time is suddenly right. Now, David thought, I can clean out his head if we do it now. But what he meant as honesty in making the proposition came through as a taunt. What he meant as irony—let's follow this crazy dance to where it really leads because it can't be as bad as all this dancing—must have seemed to Tony to be all cutting edges.

  "No thanks," Tony said.

  "You don't have to worry
about Rick."

  "I'm not planning to. He's the mastermind behind all this, isn't he? I'll bet he's a professional crook. That's just my mother's type."

  "Is it because I've talked too much? I just wanted you to know that I've been there."

  "But only in the boy's role, don't forget."

  "Well, why don't we put them together?"

  "Because you're not really a boy."

  David's mind went blank at the thought, and in the pause that ensued, the swing door swung open, and Aldo said "Oops." Tony took the advantage, crossed the room in two strides, and slipped out. David guessed he should have taken the other route and talked about the digging of the grave, but since sex was more his subject philosophically than death, he chose the firmer ground. Now Aldo told him to go take the sheets off the furniture in the living room and circle the chairs around the piano.

  "You know she always has a bowl of violets on the piano," he said, picking through a shelf of vases. "There isn't a florist in fifteen miles. The garden is all junk and roses. What the fuck do you use instead of violets?"

  "They grow wild," David said, corking the last of the wine. "They're all over the place. Just go out the kitchen door."

  "Thank God," Aldo sighed. "I thought they only grew them at the florist."

  Madeleine and I were still upstairs. Aldo had leapt up as if something stung him when Madeleine got to the part about Tony asking her to sing. We had been taking our time over the story because it ended well. And because I finally believed we would not be languishing in prison come Labor Day, I liked having someone else to talk about besides the lot of us. All at once, as I sat on the bed, I seemed to recover the time I lost when the deer bolted. I willingly accepted us all at face value, neither holding back because the summer was bound to go nor waiting until I trusted us more. Perhaps that is what makes the cheer possible that people are said to feel in happy families. The metaphor still grated on my nerves, us as a family in the Carroll house. What made me happy, I think, was that we didn't appear to need a metaphor to say what we were like. Out the bay window, I could see the sun break through over the trees. If a person had done it, it would have been tacky.

  So Aldo jumped like the White Rabbit and said that, as he was all Madeleine had in the way of a manager, he'd better go manage the concert. Madeleine protested that it wasn't a proper concert at all, that he shouldn't fuss just to fuss, but he didn't pay her any mind. He flew into the closet and emerged after a bit with a black velvet tuxedo over one arm and a pale gray woolen jacket and long skirt over the other. He held them up as if to say, "Well, which?" She made a face.

  "Why do we have to be so funereal, Aldo? The dead are all buried now."

  "That's not why," he said, all professional bustle. "The living room is burgundy and dark green, and if you wear a bright color, you'll look like a Christmas tree. Or a hooker."

  "All right, smart-ass," she said. "We'll go with the black-tie."

  "Is the piano in tune?" I asked.

  "Tune?" Madeleine replied in some disbelief. "Who cares? I gave up the tune ten years ago."

  Aldo laid out the clothes on the chaise in the bay window. He said he would send up a pot of hot chocolate and a wedge of his honey cake. She would not be taking dinner. Some of the singers whose style is traceable to Madeleine won't walk onstage until they have had enough bourbon or Dexamil, but Madeleine seems to favor a mild form of insulin shock. In every city where she sings once a year, she knows the pastry shops and the best dipper of chocolates. In Boston in June, I have to have in her dressing room a box of jelly babies that takes me a half-hour back and forth on the subway to buy. Lastly, Aldo couldn't believe that Madeleine hadn't thought to set a time. I couldn't believe that it mattered, but I didn't say so. We all decided on ten o'clock because, as Aldo said on the way out, a late show is better than an early show if the audience drinks.

  Now we were just the two of us. I didn't say anything for a time and was content to keep sitting against the bedpost. What I had when I came here suddenly flashed in my mind as a neat little list: a Chevy, half a dozen plants, and three common goldfish. Madeleine had drawn the arm of her robe across her face, and I thought she was taking a nap until she spoke.

  "What are you so happy about?"

  "Am I so happy?"

  "I can tell by how still you are," she said, not moving her arm. "If you were a cat, you'd be licking your fur, and you'd fall asleep with your leg up in the air and your tongue still out."

  "I realized today that I don't know who I am, and I don't care."

  The arm came down.

  "That can't be right. Why wouldn't that depress you?"

  "I don't know, Madeleine. My secret used to be that I knew who I was, even if nobody else did. It got me in and out of a lot of bedrooms in one piece." I stood up and went and stood in the bay. I had the notion that it was really my favorite place in the house, and not the porch. The porch hadn't really been very nice, just safe. "But if you always know who you are, then you can't do anything new. Like Tony."

  "Well, it sounds very teenage to me. But as long as you're not depressed. Can you bear to hear me sing twice in a single year?"

  "Sure. I'm tough."

  "This illumination you've had. Do you still know who other people are, or are we all going to come in for an overhaul?"

  "No. You're all new already because of this summer."

  "I guess that's all right," Madeleine said, turning on her side and closing her eyes. "I'd rather be new than old."

  "You're not old."

  For the rest of the time we were quiet, and I didn't leave until Aldo brought the chocolate up at seven-thirty and called me down to dinner. Madeleine did sleep, a half-hour one time and later again. When the sun went down, I went over and closed the doors to the balcony. Mostly, I sat on the windowsill and saw the whole estate as a map of the last month, like a board game with baffles and penalties and windfalls. There I found David and the gardener. There I met Phidias under the tree. There I go walking with Madeleine. It was altogether a lucky view, and for once I saw time as a place. It is not strictly true that nothing was said in the couple of hours I was there. At one point I said, "I know about Phidias," and she said, "Oh?" But it really wasn't that important.

  MADELEINE COULDN'T stop laughing. She sprinkled the song with notes, but in fact she was right—the melody was long gone.

  The only men I go with

  Have money up to here.

  They like to give me emeralds

  And eighty grand a year.

  She can't sing American, and so she pays no attention to the jokes or the local ironies. She laughs because the audience has always found it funny and dirty. The song has a story that I can't follow. I can only be certain that it comes from Broadway in the late thirties, but it is by no one anyone has ever heard of. It is famous because Madeleine sings it. One verse is just a list of foods that begins with hot dogs and ends with candy canes, but Madeleine could be singing Hindi for all you can understand of the stuff in between. It closes with the whore knowing more than you do, but it isn't clear what she knows, not the way Madeleine sings it.

  I make them laugh at breakfast

  And serve their coffee hot.

  You'd love them when they're loving me

  And steal them when they're not.

  But watch yourself. When I give them up,

  They've lost their golden touch.

  They'll take you out in taxicabs

  And order dinner dutch.

  "Watch yourself" could be "wash yourself," since I have never seen it written down, and "touch" comes out "tush." It doesn't make sense to me. Nevertheless, it has been the third song on the program for the thirteen years I've heard it.

  Madeleine does a dozen numbers, the same dozen whenever she sings. Some people are jarred if they've heard them once and then again five or ten years later. In every city, one critic or another has said that Madeleine is finally so old that the love songs and the street girl's come-ons are shameles
s, and then the next year the same man turns around and writes a rave. It's the same as it was after all, he says, and he tells about a night on Corregidor, a lull in the shelling, when the lieutenant put on a scratchy seventy-eight of Madeleine singing "The Only Men I Go With" in a blacked-out officers' club. And everyone stopped shouting and drinking and playing poker as if it were a telephone call from home. I have heard them all too many times to hear much difference from one year to the next, like someone who lives with someone else and so can't see them age and change. And because I love opera, I don't think of what Madeleine does as strictly singing anyway. It's a one-character play about love and time in a language made up for the night on which it is performed. And then it is lost into thin air, like the dialect of an island or the tongue of a Mayan tribe whose only echo is the wind riffling the palms on the beach. Since nobody else does Madeleine's dozen songs (nobody would dare to), they exist all by themselves, indistinguishable from the instrument that sings them.

  No one was in a very good mood. While we set the table for dinner, David had whispered a sentence or two about his sunset talk with Tony in the butler's pantry. When Tony came in, he and David said nothing, and the silence got thicker and thicker throughout the meal. Aldo took up the slack because he was so nervous about the singing, fretting about the acoustics of the living room as if we were recording. Phidias ate up at the farm. I still wanted Tony gone, no matter how neutralized the threat of him was, because he was so self-indulgent. Not that the rest of us weren't, but at least we had all been invited. All in all, I was probably in the best shape to listen to Madeleine sing. I realized that Aldo didn't believe Madeleine had it in her anymore, and he brooded because he couldn't summon enough illusion to soften and control the effects. He wanted rose-colored gels and pinpoint spots and the lilac sequined gown. We had the dress in the car from the Boston concert, but it wouldn't work in a room-sized room. David was too young to have gone through enough stages of Madeleine's career. Tony looked like a relentless listener to classical music who doesn't like songs unless they're called lieder and finally can only bear to hear one record, Schwarzkopf say, doing the "Four Last Songs" of Strauss. Perhaps that, or perhaps he had no interests at all beyond the Dewar's. Either way, Madeleine would be too supper-club for him, her heart too pinned to her sleeve.