Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  David began in a shy and muted voice, and Aldo and I took up the backup after a line or two. It was a very sultry song with the three of us singing it, ripe with midseason and the constant sun. Neither Phidias nor Tony had a clue how to keep up with us, distracted as they were by inexperience. They watched, and they watched each other, too. David, it turned out, didn't know all the words. His enthusiasm carried him along far enough, and Aldo and I filled in the rest. Aldo sang as if he were caricaturing Madeleine, dropping an octave and even hinting at the remnant of a French accent. I probably did too, but I couldn't hear myself in the general din.

  "You just need a little training," Madeleine said excitedly. "Why don't we all go on tour together? We'll buy a gypsy's wagon and sing for our supper and never come home."

  "We can sing at weddings and feasts, like minstrels," David said. "And set up a stage at county fairs."

  Madeleine nodded. She seemed delighted by us parroting her, and in the next song, "Quant à Moi," she joined us for the choruses and exaggerated the Madeleine effect even more than we did. The only French the rest of us could really speak was the French in Madeleine's songs, so we sounded weird and broke up laughing when our eyes met. Aldo was doing his French with such an air of seriousness, his lips pouting and his chins sunk down into his neck. David had faintly raised his eyebrows, and he looked like the young Boyer, casting a disapproving eye on the human lot.

  "No one ever sang along with me before," Madeleine said at the end. "Maybe it's because I'm off-key half the time."

  "'The Marseillaise,'" I said, correcting her, because it is a story that is central to the myth, a set of concerts for the French army in 1945 that ended with everyone singing the national anthem.

  "Well, besides that," she said, acknowledging the reference with a glance straight at me, but too intoxicated by the present to go into the past.

  "Will we all wear tuxedos and bleach our hair?" Aldo asked.

  "It doesn't matter," I said, "but will we stick together through thick and thin?"

  "Yup," said David, hoisting himself onto the piano and sitting there like a boy fishing on a dock. "And we won't want fame or money."

  "I think you'd better count me out and be a trio," Aldo said, and then he folded his arms. "But you'd better save some money for your old age."

  "What old age?" Madeleine asked, who loved to tease Aldo for being a prig. "That's a sissy's way out."

  "If we ignore it," I said, "it will go away. Start the next number."

  And we did the last four in a row, with barely a pause between them. We were really pretty terrible, and as we got more enthusiastic and full of the muse, all our showstopper fantasies coming true, we got more terrible still. In the end, it only made it seem more perfect, that we were good enough for this one evening and that we had better get it out of our systems once and for all. As we tore up the ninth number, a barroom song, I had a fleeting wish that we had decided earlier that this was what we were going to do, not so we could have rehearsed but so we could have savored the event and worked up a stage presence. Of course, we couldn't have projected this far ahead when we were upstairs in Madeleine's room. The turn of events that had three of us crooning while Madeleine played demanded the flash of the moment. Take this hour for what it is, I said to myself. I let go, and I had to get louder and put my feet wide apart and gesture with my hands to reach the undersea passion the songs welled up with. Aldo and David and I had all stopped laughing at ourselves. We just sang.

  About then, Tony went back to his chair to pick up his drink, still smiling. He seemed grateful to withdraw. He wasn't intimidated, it turned out, and he liked our maniac program. But he didn't want to be involved. It was too gay, though I don't think he articulated it to himself that way. He would have called it too group-conscious, the sort of thing he had enough of at school. Phidias, who had become accustomed to the yammering of his summer guests, didn't appear the least bit fazed that we had begun to do it to music. He followed Tony and then drew him away to the opposite end of the room to talk. When I next happened to look in their direction, they were gone.

  When he got going, Aldo had a voice the size of Kate Smith, and he was so irrepressible that he jigged a little in the drinking song and flattened his hands against his heart during the final ballad. Madeleine egged him on, and in the end David was doing a closer imitation of him than he was of Madeleine. That left a space for Madeleine and me, one we had not asked for or planned any projects to fill. I sang along with Aldo and David, but my own exaggerated, ritual parody had begun to subside. Madeleine paid as much attention to me as to them, but not much more. That is what kept it from being soupy and overwrought. Well, it was and it wasn't. I bent over from the waist and rested on my elbows on the brink of the piano and sang exactly to the measure she was playing. A little bit like Dick Powell, though I suppose that gives the wrong idea about how really full of myself I was.

  There is a reason why we can't say what it is about this song or that side of the street. To know some things, we have to be nameless. The way to say it lies too much through a forest of what things mean. I would be the first to agree that Madeleine Cosquer is an elaboration of meanings that nest inside each other like Russian dolls, but this evening's finale was not limited to her. I had an attack of immediacy about a jaunty lyric I never paid attention to before.

  What would the sky do

  If it did what we do

  And changed its mind fifty times a day?

  Aha, I thought, the good news is that we don't have to have anything particular to say. When I asked Aldo the next day what it was like for him at the concert, he said, "You think I don't know? We were just like the four of them on their way to Oz. I mean, who would have thought our condition was in that direction?" That too.

  When Madeleine seemed to be dreaming again as she played, as if she had discovered the Northwest Passage through time, I finished up with David. His version of the last song was rueful and winded, as if he were in bed enjoying a cold, while mine was crisp and heavy on adrenalin, like a bootblack buffing a shoe. We were fabulous together.

  But I woke up alone. The sun had already passed across the bed and now lit up the dust that coasted in the air in one corner. It must have been eleven or even later. David had left the sheet and bedspread on the floor when he got up, whenever that was, and the sweat had poured out of me when the sun was on me, and now I was dry. I felt stranded, too far above sea level or way below. I was streaked, grimy, and thirsty. I wanted to swim. Five or six bathing suits hung on hooks or lay draped over the furniture. I took down and stepped into an electric-orange pair of baggy trunks that said GUARD on the right thigh. Then I stood at the window and scratched the hair on my chest and waited for my head to clear.

  I made my landowner's survey, getting all manner of assurance from things that had stayed in the same place—the sea and the marshes, the woods and the rocky fields. It was a small relapse after the previous day, when I was so wildly in love with change, and it only lasted as long as the groggy feeling, a little like sunstroke, wrapped me in blankets. I snapped out of it when I looked down at the courtyard below Madeleine's room, which I could only just see a slice of because of the angle of the roof. I saw the back end of Tony's station wagon. It was open, and there were suitcases on the gravel waiting to be loaded. Wait for me, I thought, don't do anything until I get there. I didn't have anything to say to him when I was with him the night before, so I don't know what I expected to do now. But I got a sudden goose of energy and leapt into action like Popeye. I thundered down the stairs in my bare feet, the cool of the house breezing over my bare body after the heat of the tower. My orange suit glimmered in the halls.

  Coming through the library and out into the courtyard, I guess I expected to find the whole group assembled a third time. But it was just Tony. He leaned against the car in a jacket and tie, all ready for his first class. Except he was having a morning scotch. The bottle and an ice bucket were perched on the hood of the car. He looked
me up and down.

  "So you do have a job," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  He pointed at my cock, and then I realized he was pointing at the suit. "Shouldn't you have a silver whistle around your neck, and a coat of white chalk on your nose and lips?"

  "I've never been a lifeguard," I said. "David traded suits with a hunky number in Malibu. It's a souvenir."

  "Like an Indian's scalp?"

  "Like a silk stocking. Are you leaving now?"

  "Yes. When are you?" Not hostile, just interested. Just making conversation.

  "I don't know. Labor Day, I guess."

  "That's when we all used to. It about killed me."

  He drank at his drink. He didn't seem concerned that he wasn't being given a send-off. I was here, I realized, for only one reason, to see him out of sight and watch the cloud of dust settle on the gravel drive. Late last night, David and I had spoiled the pretty feelings that followed the concert by arguing about Tony. When we retired to the tower, I asked for the full story of the butler's pantry and made a mistake then and said the equivalent of "I told you so." I said he couldn't take care of people who made a career of hurting themselves. David told me to shove it. He thought he had helped Tony, even if it wasn't evident. He turned away from me to sleep, and I cursed myself in the dark.

  "Did we sound like cats in heat last night?" I asked.

  "You mean, when you were singing? I thought it was charming. A little precious, perhaps. But if you'd lived with my family in that room, you'd have thought last night how far the human race has come since men lived in caves. If my father had walked in, he would have killed you all with his bare hands."

  "Then why did you leave?"

  "No, I have it all wrong," he said, caught in a sudden reverie. "He would have killed himself with his bare hands. I've always thought my father must have died like Rumpelstiltskin, who tore himself in two. But in my father's case, they called it a heart attack."

  "Did you and Phidias go somewhere and talk?" What business was it of mine?

  "Yes and no. We went somewhere, and we didn't talk. To my mother's grave, in fact."

  "Oh."

  "Yes. They do that a lot in Wuthering Heights. But maybe you're not a reader."

  "I've read it," I said. Then, with terrific patience, "What happened?"

  "Nothing." He turned around and splashed another ounce of scotch in his glass. "I didn't offer you a drink because it's before breakfast for you. It's before lunch for me." He looked out to sea and spoke as if he had been a mere witness and not an accessory to the crime. "I didn't fall down and cry and hold on to Phidias's skirts. I thought it was strange up there, and it made me lonely. I suppose it made Phidias feel better." He took hold of the car's aerial and bent it toward him as if he were stringing a bow. He knew he wasn't getting it right. "I suppose I'll remember it some Saturday night this winter, and I'll spend an hour making drunken phone calls to John and Cicely. Or maybe to you, Rick." He let go of the antenna and looked at me. "In a word, nothing."

  "What do you do, beat it against a wall to get it off?"

  "Are you going to yell at me like Phidias?" he asked, suddenly alert to the fact that he might have someone new to play with.

  "No. I'm going swimming. I only came this way because I thought my friends were here."

  "Your friends. What a quaint idea."

  He took the glass between his teeth and held it there while he picked up the bottle in one hand and the bucket in the other. He leaned into the car through the driver's door and set up his little bar on the passenger's seat. He took the glass from his mouth and wedged the scotch-on-the-rocks between the windshield and the dashboard, just over the steering wheel so he wouldn't miss it. While he went around to the back of the car to load his suitcases, I paraded across the courtyard like a lifeguard. I was making my way to the water, intending to leave him as robbed of farewell as the others had done. Of all of us, I sure as hell was the last holdout about Tony. Being my own age, Aldo had at last made me feel how wonderful the differences were between one man and another, as if we had been shaped by different sculptors in different styles. Tony made me base, made me feel superior to him and critical and, in the cankerous faults of my heart, glad he was a mess and not I. As if he were some kind of pariah who would take all the bad blood and bad faith with him out of the world I had just caught the rhythm of.

  "I'll think of you on Labor Day," he said, and now it seemed like a taunt. I stopped at the corner of the house, one bare foot still in the gravel and the other in the wet grass that started here and went around into the deep front lawn. "And don't forget to answer your phone when it rings this winter. By then I'll have figured it all out."

  He swung himself into the car and slammed the door. "I'm unlisted," I said, which wasn't true, but I don't think he heard me over the starting of the car. "I'm not going back there," I said, a little louder this time, and now he didn't hear me because he backed up with a jolt and a little screech. He braked when he was almost on top of me and then put the car into forward gear. I crouched so that I was level with the car window, and I meant to announce as he pulled away that there wasn't anything to figure out, that that was the problem in some things. But he looked so sad when he took his last look at me. I think it had more to do with the summer place he couldn't come to grips with, but it knocked the wind out of me as I stood there ready to spring. "Take care," I said, and I put on a cockeyed smile.

  "I will," he said. "I travel light. The medicine and the disease go in the same bottle. Good-bye, Rick."

  I travel light too, I thought. I would have told him what an acute remark it was, but it got lost in the joke about the bottle and then in the cloud of exhaust that he burned off as he sped away. He waved at me in his rearview mirror, and I waved back. I went on through the grass, but I found myself shivering in the shade when I was parallel to the porch and face to face with the whole ocean. The grass was icy with yesterday's rain and made me squeamish. I canceled my swim. Still traveling light, I went up the front steps and stood at my perch by the porch table.

  I don't know why I let Tony off so easily. Probably because he didn't have any friends of his own, and he couldn't sing or fuck, or cry at his mother's grave. I think he really believed he would figure it all out and that the expectation of a final equation or strategy made him rosy when he was drunk. I had always been the same way, but without the technology of heavy liquor. Figuring things out was my hedge against the self-evident. It was easier for me to control my life by being a student of it and not a professor. Anyway, this summer had stopped all that. But I couldn't tell Tony: just open the door and walk out, it isn't locked. When they hear that angle, people like Tony tell you you don't understand. That may sound the same as what David says, but it's worse. Besides, unlike David, they don't usually even tell you. They wrap their cloaks about their heads and go off and figure it out some more. And they get nowhere.

  "Anyone would know where to look for you."

  I turned to the voice and saw Phidias farther down the porch, dressed in the clothes he had worn for fifty years. Literally the same clothes. He walked toward me from the railing that overlooked the crossroads where Tony and I said goodbye. So Tony and I hadn't been alone after all, though we didn't know it. And then I thought: Tony might have known it. Maybe he was talking to Phidias before I came out.

  "I wouldn't know where to look for you," I said. "If I went up to the farm, I'd lose my way and ask all the wrong questions. I may have to stay in this house forever, because I don't know the way to the outside world."

  "Some people," he said, taking the chair at the head of the table and motioning me to sit down, "do the looking, and the rest get looked for. You and David are the second kind."

  "Why are you looking for me?"

  "I'm not. I wanted to tell Tony something, but I didn't. I watched him pack his car from the end of the porch, and then, when you came out, I got tongue-tied and ducked around the corner."

  I wanted
to ask what, wondering too what Tony would say in return when Phidias tried to tell him something final. But I didn't ask. I had gotten good this summer at finding another question to take the place of the one I couldn't ask. I found I was much more likely to get an answer to the unasked question if I changed the subject right. Sometimes, when we were all together, the subject changed at every third or fourth remark, like a mad dance where the orchestra wants everyone dancing with everyone else. Phidias let Tony go without a last word. So what was I after? I knew Phidias wasn't shy, and I expect he'd never wasted a moment in his life ducking around a corner. He decided not to say what he might have said. So I wanted to know how he and Tony had left it last night. It didn't really matter how they might have left it if they'd talked again.

  "Things didn't go so well when you were out walking," I said. It was about forty percent a question.

  "You mean last night? It was fine."

  Really?

  "What happened?"

  "Not much. I showed him where the grave was—did he tell you that?—and he cried a lot." Phidias shrugged. It wasn't much of a story.

  "Oh." That's not what Tony says, I thought, wondering if anything would ever stay the same for ten minutes. It seemed more and more likely that the phone would be ringing next winter, and Tony would have a final go at me.

  "I guess the two of you made up," I said.

  "I shouldn't yell at him. Beth always said he was the only one in the family who couldn't help it. And he was the only one who ever wanted to know me. He used to write me letters, you know."

  "When he was young?"

  "When he was in college."

  "What did he say?"

  "He talked about women. I mean, he made them up."

  "Oh." There was no disdain in his voice, and no pity. Phidias didn't feel sorry for Beth Carroll's children, as if he knew that in that direction lay the accusations that she was a lousy mother. He treated her best by knowing her as nothing more than the woman he loved. He wasn't asking that anyone in the family understand him either. He probably didn't blame the Carroll children for calling him the enemy. I had the idea that his own children knew nothing of his fifty years in Beth Carroll's bed. With them, I bet he was a private man. He was none of his sons' business. So it was easy to see that he saw no reason to look out for Tony or his brother and sister. I couldn't figure out if he had answered Tony's letters, but by then it was time to change the subject again. We could only go so far.