Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  IT WAS UNSIGNED and unwitnessed, so it probably wouldn't have held up in court, but it made a lovely will all the same. It would not convey the right idea to call Mrs. Carroll's written plan of action a suicide note. It was more of a wave good-bye. I liked the head-on settling of accounts and the gaiety of it. A flirtation with a great adventure was at work, and thus the drama of the gesture was a romance and not a low comedy. Though I was hard put to decide who the audience was meant to be. I knew, of course, who the audience would be—Phidias, the three dead-end children, and Donald Farley. But the relish of it, the peculiar good humor with which she held herself up to take stock, were directed farther away than at those who were her circle. In part, I think she was talking to someone like me, to someone newly drunk on changing places. And then I think she was talking back to the land, both the brute New England earth and the iron winter sea.

  The page had been torn out of a diary so forcefully that threads from the binding still clung to one side of the paper. I was the one who figured out, one morning while I sat in the bay window reading through the years, that the pages were not from the current year. I had first seen the note a week before, a few days after Tony left. When Madeleine finished reading Beth Carroll's journals, Phidias brought the note out of the safe to show to her, as if she were now ready to see it in context. She showed the rest of us. And we all assumed that Mrs. Carroll had written it out at some point during the last winter. But I found the place where the page had been torn out, and it was the day after Labor Day, four years ago. So Mrs. Carroll had had the idea rooted in her mind for a long time. And we would never know now why she waited four years. When I told the others, I didn't tell them what was really on my mind. I wondered if perhaps she wouldn't have done it this year either, even though she had broadcast to everyone that this was her last summer and handed the note over to Phidias in the spring. Maybe it was only an act of defiance against the winter, a dream of freedom that she would put off from September to September. It bothered me. I paid attention now to the difference between doing something and talking about it.

  Madeleine read the diaries from beginning to end, starting where they started, in 1922. I went the other way around, starting back from the present. And it surprised me how much I liked them, considering the bad press Madeleine had given them throughout. They were quirky and spare and full of self-definitions. When she dropped names, she let them bounce a little on the boulevard because she didn't have any patience with fame and pretense. It took a while to get used to the flavor, but it got to be delicious. At the same time, I was willing to believe Madeleine when she said the voice in the diary and Beth Carroll were entirely different. But when I went back over their meeting in Paris, it didn't seem as flat and badly blurred and dumb as it did the day Madeleine read it to me up at the quarry. Then I understood. It was Mrs. Carroll's portrait of Madeleine that stung her. The tone was high-strung and overblown, as if for once she lost her balance and fell in love with a star. She hid her schoolgirl reactions beneath her usual rough style, and Madeleine hadn't noticed anything odd when they were together. Now, reading the real thing, Madeleine was offended and acted betrayed, taking out her disapproval and wounded sense of proportion by hating every page of Mrs. Carroll's diary.

  It all had me wondering again about The Truth and The Past, those creatures I kept hoping I had put behind me. Madeleine let me lie back on the chaise for an hour or two in the midmorning, as long as I didn't disturb her. So I was keeping it all to myself, which was all right because I forgot all about it by lunchtime. I got involved in Mrs. Carroll's narrative mostly in the summers, when I would read about the overnight guests and the fireworks on the Fourth and the weather. She noted the last with unbelievable attention to detail, massing up a private language ripe with meaning. July 10. A June rain all morning. The children in sweaters. You could smell wool in the dining room at lunch, and outside you smelled the grass, which is usually brown by now. I like it brown. I was content to drowse over the import of "a June rain" and managed to get The Truth off my mind. I wouldn't have mentioned it if Madeleine hadn't brought it up.

  "Tell me something," she said. She had turned the vanity table into a desk and did her writing there, among the powders and pots and ointments. There was a mirror over it, and I don't know how she stood it, catching glimpses of herself for six and eight hours a day. Perhaps that is how she kept a good grip on the present.

  "What?" It was the first time she had spoken in all these morning sessions. I came and went without a hello or goodbye. We did our talking on our afternoon walks.

  "Rick, was I any good in The Fork in the Rood?"

  "You want the truth?" I asked, turning so I could see her. She was looking into the mirror and tapping her pencil lightly against her cheek. "It was a mess. You were forty-seven, and you looked thirty-five. But they dressed you up like Carmen Miranda. You made a lousy gypsy."

  "You know, they all seem about the same to me," she said. She stood up and came over to the bay window. She wore a Chanel suit when she was writing because it made her feel like a working girl. "I've heard that people laugh at The Fork in the Road, but you know, it didn't feel like crap when we were making it. And Bad Dream didn't feel like a breakthrough either—they talk about me as if I invented the thirties in it." She wasn't sure where this was going, but she wanted to make it simple. "Listen: it always felt good to work and get it right, but it always felt the same."

  "What are you trying to say, Madeleine? You think the critics are full of shit?"

  "Some are, some aren't," she said, as if she didn't care one way or the other. "I'm talking about the public. And they all agree. After all these years, they say one's good and one's crap."

  "And you wish they were all good," I said.

  "No I don't." She walked around the chaise and stood in the bay window, her hands on her hips and her elbows thrown back. "If you know it's crap when you're doing it, you learn a lot from it. You get to know the direction it comes from. If you don't know crap, what you don't know can't hurt. But later on it's different. The years go by, and you see there are two separate things, what it was like and what people say a long time afterwards, when they've put it all together."

  The years go by is a line she sings in half a dozen songs, or it seems that way.

  "There's a third thing, isn't there? What you say when you put it all together. That's what you're doing over there," I said, jerking my thumb in the direction of the vanity.

  "I guess so."

  Silence fell. It was about the end of my hour at the diaries, and I wanted to walk before lunch, find David, get moving. I kept guessing wrong anyway. I couldn't say how she was. Not unhappy. Her antennae were crackling, and—unusual for someone whose two feet were planted firm on the ground—she could have talked on and on, I think, about what was real. She appeared to be struggling to work the key to her book into the lock on an old satin album. I had had two versions of the past myself, David's and mine, but this summer I had brought them together. Her versions were not disparate for lovers' reasons. Then, when I thought she must be unhappy after all, she went on, and I heard the mirth rising in her voice. Honestly, she seemed to feel that those who had analyzed her work and boiled her life down to obituary length were just as right about it as she could be. It even amused her. She realized that she was an irony in the flesh.

  "Nobody wants new material from me," she said. "The best I can do with this book is give people what they already have, tell them the stories they tell about me."

  "You're right, Madeleine," I said, standing up and moving next to her at the window. I shut Mrs. Carroll and put the book on the wide sill. "The fans don't want to hear that that's not how it was. They'd all feel, I don't know, cheated."

  "Old," she said, calling a spade a spade.

  "You're not old."

  "I know," she said, swatting my arm with the back of her hand, "but a lot of them are."

  Her book was proving to be the limit of the summer. She was coasting al
ong at eight or ten pages a day now, and she expected to be done with a draft before the end of the first week in September. "I was up to two years a day until I hit 1930," she told us, as if she were sewing a quilt every night in front of a fire, "but I'm lucky now if I can do one." So it seemed that the rest of us could settle down for another month. Madeleine's progress on the book seemed to dovetail nicely with the timetable of Mrs. Carroll's farewell swim. If Madeleine had a stretch of writer's block, of course, we would still have to leave in the first week of September, because setting the stage for the last of Mrs. Carroll took precedence over everything else. But as long as Madeleine's book was likely to conclude at the right time, we liked the idea that we were waiting for her to finish. It seemed to make the waiting more real, because Madeleine's book would at least go public, whereas Mrs. Carroll's passage would have to remain a secret.

  "Where are you and David going to go?" she asked. It was the first time she let me know she understood that I wasn't going back to Boston, though she probably knew it way back in June when I packed the plants and the dime-store fish.

  "We don't have to decide that yet."

  "I'm not rushing you, so don't sound like you're holding a gun."

  "David and I haven't said we'll leave here together," I said, and I thought I was being waggish.

  "Stop it."

  "Stop what?"

  "Sounding so cautious. You both know you're together again."

  "All right, we're together." She was being much more exacting than the occasion required. Of course we were back together, David and I, but since everything was going to be all right, we left a lot unsaid. David and I had arrived at a strange economy. We were forgiving the past as fast as we could recall it, but I didn't think of us as putting it in words, or having to. Madeleine had the wrong idea. "But I can't speak for him," I said, "about after the summer. I don't want to make too many plans."

  "Because you're afraid to?" she asked. She turned to me with the question and looked straight up at me. She asked it so mildly that she seemed to say, "I don't blame you, anyone would be." It touched me, but I just didn't need the protection it offered.

  "No, Madeleine. Because I'm spending my time as I go along."

  She took it in with a neutral look on her face. She nodded as if to say she'd heard, though not necessarily that she'd understood or agreed. Then she walked back over to her desk, sat down, and patted her hair in the mirror. She talked to me through it, the way David had in the bathroom.

  "Since when have you been spending time instead of doing it?" she asked.

  "Just lately," I said, smiling broadly because I was on good speaking terms with time. "I don't save it up much anymore."

  "Good. Get your fill of it. Later it costs more and more." Madeleine and I had enough sermons between us for a month of Sundays. "I knew a girl singer in France who waited twenty years to get a coat made of martens, and then they went extinct before she got it."

  "What's a marten?" I asked her.

  "Some poor little beast. David and I have started to talk about things other than movies, you know."

  "Did he run out of questions?"

  "I ran out of movies." She picked up her pen and got set to write, as if she were being photographed doing it, then paused and froze in a profile. She had one more thing.

  "He's more flexible than you and I are," she said admiringly. "He doesn't disapprove of life having stages."

  "He's in an easy one."

  "Oh no," she corrected me, "nobody is. You know that."

  It was true. I knew it. I have never felt much kinship with any of the phases except the one I happen to be going through. David was curious about all of them, but I think he was specially awed by the very old. I could imagine him here in the spring evenings, smoking a Gitane with Mrs. Carroll and getting a look at things through a wide-angle lens. Until this summer, I kept my contact with the aging to a minimum. Madeleine was my one exception, but only because she took good care and stayed young. Of course it was self-defeating of me. I had ended up being the oldest person I knew, and the very young were as young as ever. Meanwhile, I suspected that the "other things" they were talking about were David and me.

  It was a few days later that, leaving Madeleine's room just before noon, I bumped into the gardener. Actually, David and I both bumped into the gardener, but from different directions. David was coming up the stairs, and I was coming along the hall. As to the economy of gesture that grew up between us, his eyes widened a fraction, and mine narrowed about the same. Or it may have been that we both just slowed up a bit when we caught sight of each other. It is hard to say which way we did it, but that it was done by fractions I am sure. I could pick out the hairbreadth ripple of attention in his face, the strokes of concentration that would in time sink in and line it. The day took shape from our accidental meetings. We did not hold our breath for fear of anything in each other, though the weather we brought about when we were in the same room had about it the quiet of extremes, of hot or cold or the hour after a long rain. Put it this way: it was no particular time or place in the hall that morning, but because the moment threw us together, we were bent on meeting gently at the top of the stairs. And just as he reached the landing and I gripped the ball on the newel with both hands, a door opened at the opposite end of the hall from Madeleine's room, and the gardener stepped out.

  Well, well. If my first, fast reaction was a tight-lipped whistle of outrage too high-pitched for human ears, my second was much more discreet, since I saw he had come out of Aldo's room. David saw him a moment later than I did and so missed which door had shut. "What the hell are you doing in the house?" he demanded. And the gardener swaggered up to us as if he were walking through a locker room with a towel at his hips. He wore a pair of dirty white overalls and seedy engineer's boots. He put his face close to David's and answered tightly.

  "I still don't work for you," he said, "so fuck off." Then he went down the stairs. He hadn't so much as looked at me. He had caught on that he wasn't my type, so he had adopted a policy of cutting me. He made a big show of going about his pruning or his digging if he happened to meet me in the yard. He was, as I was fond of telling David, a real creep.

  "He came out of Aldo's room," I said suggestively.

  "Come on," David said, and he flew down the hall before I could stop him. His first thought must have been that the gardener was picking pockets, and he expected to find the drawers spilled and the closets ransacked. I knew better, that Aldo and the gardener must have been fucking, and I figured it was none of our business. I didn't know what Aldo was into. I didn't want to burst in on him while he was putting away his toys.

  But he was sitting in his easy chair reading the real-estate section of the LA Times when David threw open the door and we both tumbled in. Someone in Beverly Hills sent him the Times every day, which meant he read it three days late. But he said it was better than nothing, by which he meant the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

  "Am I late for something?" he asked, looking up.

  "We just saw the gardener sneak out of here," David said, and I could see that what had dawned on me about the fucking had just dawned on him.

  "Sneak?" Aldo asked delightedly. "That's just his Portuguese blood, David dear. It comes from thousands of years of skulking about in fishing boats. I gather that it takes thousands of years to produce that physique as well. All I can say is, it was worth the wait."

  "But I bet you'll sleep safer at night, knowing our security unit is so alert," I said as I boxed David's ears and grabbed him around the neck to pull him out of the room. "Come on, Inspector. This case is closed."

  "Wait," Aldo said. "It's darling of you both to look after me. Tell me what you think of this: I'm taking John out to the Coast with me."

  "Who's John?" I asked.

  "The gardener."

  "Oh. How nice," I said. Was I supposed to say congratulations? I still held David's head pinned under my arm, and I let him squirm loose. He peered over my sho
ulder at Aldo and plunged on, not leaving well enough alone even now.

  "Are you and he a thing?"

  "Goodness no, David. That type is just a cowboy in LA. You buy them by the dozen. It's a gardener I need."

  "I never thought of him actually gardening," I said. "Is he any good?" I couldn't believe we were going to talk about this. What I meant was that his gardening seemed like strictly stage business, the excuse that put him in our path day after day. I couldn't imagine him in connection with flowers. In my mind he was connected with sex, and not the flowery kind.

  "He's fabulous," Aldo said.

  "And he's going to go with you, just like that?" David asked. David had never done love for money, and he adored the details of how it was done. He wasn't sure yet that this wasn't a hustling arrangement.

  "Well," Aldo answered, "I said to him: 'Look, how long is this job going to last? She's an old lady. Big gardens are passé in the East.' And then I offered him twice what she pays."

  "Do you get all your help this way?" I asked.

  "But my dear, you can't trust the agencies. In Beverly Hills, we always steal them from each other, and it all evens out in the end. My first acquisition was Madeleine's driver. He's a hundred and ten, and he grew up on Pierce-Arrows. I'd die without him."

  "Will you pay the gardener extra to do indoor work?" David asked.

  "In my old brass bed? No, I never fuck with the servants. I pay considerably more for that sort of service, and it doesn't get in the way of the food getting cooked or the grass cut. If you fuck the servants, they take it out of your breakfast. Now don't go. I want to talk to you."