Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  David sat down on the end of the bed, facing Aldo, and I did my usual trick of standing at the window, here an open casement facing north to the marshes. I still gravitated to windows as if I needed as much light as I could get. At least I no longer did it in order to protect my rear flank and have an easy escape.

  "I have two things on my mind," he said, stuffing the newspaper down into the chair beside him. He glanced at the table next to his chair, on which were gathered a box of cookies, a quart bottle of Tab, and several packets of gum, and he seemed to waver about offering us something. He wanted to, but there wasn't anything good enough for guests, so he let it go and went on. "One is that I have to leave."

  "You mean, leave here?" I asked, feeling a little foolish because I sounded like Heidi.

  "I've stayed too long as it is, Rick. My telephone bill would pay off the national debt if I didn't get to write it off my taxes. My friends all think I'm at a fat farm, no matter what I tell them, so they're going to expect me thin. I will be utterly humiliated."

  "When?" David asked.

  "In a few days. Frankly, I'm so sick of fish I could shit. I'm going to go home and eat beef forever, like a good American."

  "We'll starve without you," I said, to tease him. "I thought we were one for all and all for one."

  "Which brings me to the other thing on my mind," he said, as if there were scarcely room for two. "What are you going to do at the end of the summer?" He looked from one to the other of us expectantly.

  "Beats me," David said and then turned to me. "You tell him," he said, wondering what I would come up with.

  "We'll decide that then," I said, curbing my impulse to float away out the window and be done with decisions.

  "You could come west," Aldo said. "I mean, I don't want to be a spoilsport, but in a couple of months it's going to look like Hudson's Bay out there."

  I darted my eyes out the open window once and, because the sun cast the sea into sapphire, refused to believe him. It was warm enough now for me to swim as long as I wanted, no matter what Mrs. Carroll said. I felt closer to the sea just then than I did to either David or Aldo, and I saw how the feeling sprang up because I feared their control. I may not ever know, I thought, why this wave of suspicion comes over me that I don't know who I am. I think everyone is going to take advantage of my momentary lapse of self and enslave me forever in who they think I am. Then the other side hit me. I threw off people who left me free, who had no version of me at all—they were the population of my bedroom for fifteen years, the men in jeans and flannel shirts who came for the one night only. Go after the contrasts, I said to myself. Don't say it will still be summer when you know it won't. If you don't remember who you are, play for a while with the opposite.

  I knew then, I think, that the specter of control had nothing to do with them. It was my own shadow on the windowpane. I had always made the Chinese boxes I got locked in, and when I had no one around to blame, I accused the passing of time. In Aldo's room it was going on noon, and time was suddenly as actual to me as the window. I mean it was open.

  "Am I talking out of turn?" Aldo asked, and when there was no answer from David, I turned back from the view and saw the question was meant for me. I had reached for a split-second look toward the sea, and I had gone into a little trance. David and Aldo didn't know where I was, and they waited for me to say.

  "The end of the summer is not taboo," I said, to reassure us all. "What do you have in mind for us, Aldo? Do you need more cheap New England labor?"

  "No," he grinned, "but you can stay with me while you look around."

  "What would we be looking around for?" I asked David.

  "Work, I guess," he said. "What would we do with the Chevy?"

  "Drive it?" I just threw these answers out, but they sounded all right to me. It was like running on the beach in the fog: you can't see a foot in front of you, but on the other hand there isn't anything there to bump into.

  "What about Boston?" David asked.

  "What about it?" I said. "I've got everything with me." I hadn't actually told David that Boston was over with, but he must have known.

  "That Chevy will be worth a pile on the Coast," Aldo remarked. "It's so kinky."

  David looked over at me, and we both shrugged as if to say, "Why not?" Because it didn't hurt the way my decisions always used to, I would be hard put to call it a decision. It was just the way things happened.

  We had never made any plans to do anything on a particular day before, so we were lucky to have the sun. It was the day before Aldo was leaving, and instead of dinner around the table, we had made up a sunset picnic and taken it down to the beach. We filled a wicker hamper with the best of everything, the china and crystal and linen, and we kept Aldo out of the kitchen and made him pack his suitcases while we cooked up the dinner and cooled it off. Cold chicken and potato salad and pickled eggplant, and Madeleine baked cream of tartar biscuits for strawberry shortcake. Phidias brought up champagne from the cellar. We didn't pretend to be doing other than what we did. This was the picnic that was stolen from us when we were children, by rain or measles or the disinclination of our long-lost families.

  We were spread out on the sand below the house. The sky was still a faded rose, but the night was coming down. Aldo, in a caftan, had compared the Pacific to the Atlantic in a long toast to the sea. Just now he was setting out the dessert on the damask cloth, arranging the strawberries one by one on the biscuits, as if the photographer from Gourmet were on his way across the dunes. Then he set to beating the cream with a wire whisk. We had successfully kept him from cooking, but he had placed himself next to the hamper like the captain in a lifeboat. Throughout the meal, he had dispensed the food at his own pace, calling our attention to the proper presentation of each dish. In fact, he had by him a small covered basket of his own, so that when he appeared from among the dunes at sunset, he had told us with a brief curtsy, "Call me the Little Red Riding Caterer." And out of it had come the parsley and paprika and whatever else was needed to tart up our humble fare.

  "Why whip cream at all if you're not going to give it guts?" he asked rhetorically of Phidias, who sat next to him. "I think an ounce of Grand Marnier is crucial in cream, but I added a little brandy, too, to tone down that orange-lollipop taste. You don't want it tacky."

  David was stooping at the water's edge, maybe ten feet away from the picnic. He had been given charge of the half-case of Taittinger's, and he held a bottle in one hand and his tulip glass in the other. All of us were dressed up tonight, but to me David was the most incongruous in fancy clothes because he never wore them. These were probably all he had, a white silk wedding shirt embroidered with flowers and black silk trousers done up in a drawstring. Erotic pajamas. He and I had spent the last few days taking in the idea of LA, and we did it by spending our time in bed and in the sea, talking less and less. If the Chevy broke down in midpassage, he told me, perhaps we would settle down on the prairie for a while. I took him to mean that we didn't want to be too tied to a calendar. The way I was feeling, I would have liked to take the Chevy and go into orbit on automatic pilot, setting up house in transit. So LA was fine, but in our own time. We had to get there first.

  Phidias had sited our picnic blankets at the exact spot where the Carrolls used to eat on the beach, and he had told us during dinner about the outings that took place in Tony's youth, with the children attended (and spoon-fed, one assumed) by a nurse, and the cook and butler serving. Since I never got the impression that Beth Carroll was happy pointing the finger at servants, the scene here evoked was rife with tension. It sounded very like Mr. Carroll's picnic, proper and sober and dead. Meanwhile, Phidias never talked at all about cows and the dairy business, and if he hadn't appeared every second morning with a crock of milk and a bottle of heavy cream, I would have forgotten about the farm entirely. It was another way in which he wouldn't talk about the present. I didn't, of course, expect him to fill us up with anecdotes about his taciturn wife and the beefy sons
, though I had read my share of master-servant stories and had an inkling of the gossip I was missing.

  But he wouldn't talk about himself in a day-to-day fashion. He had expressed in my presence exactly one crystal-clear feeling, his rage at Tony in Madeleine's room. He wasn't living wholly in the past, because he still gave us our daily orders for knocking together the house. And I knew he wasn't dumb about who we all were because of our talk about David under the apple tree. David said it was because he was the only straight one among us, an old Greek lover in a houseful of faggots. Not that he did any flinching about any of us being gay. But David said his own close contact with Phidias had ceased when he and I became lovers again. The rhythms were different between gay and straight, David said idiotically, and Phidias proved it by going his own way now that we were three to one, four counting Madeleine. I thought it had more to do with him being a man with things to do. He did them by himself, whatever they were, and they were the inner equivalent of getting the mildew off the lawn chairs, so they didn't occur in the external world. From what I had read of her journals, I guessed Mrs. Carroll had things to do herself. What luck, I told David, that they happened on each other. I was sounding idiotic, he said.

  "You're going to turn it into butter if you don't quit," Phidias said to Aldo.

  "I don't deny you're a whiz about cattle, Phidias," Aldo said, not missing a beat, "but dessert is more important to me than people, and I'm as jealous as a sorcerer. I don't make mistakes, and when I do, they're a revelation."

  Madeleine meanwhile paced up and down the beach, writing her book in her head between dinner and dessert. Everything was fine, I told myself, as if I had to take our temperature and reassure myself. I wouldn't have dared to tell them that everything was fine, because they would have accused me of tying us up together and throwing away the key, implicating us all in a mixed metaphor. It was my most secret failing, that I had to keep looking to see if we were all right, and the summer had not done away with it. I did as I promised I would and took the present at its word, but something else persisted. The apples on the tree in the drive were crabbed and tart, but you could eat a bite or two before your lips puckered. If I was walking with Madeleine to the woods, for example, I would sometimes bring down a couple and chew and spit them. Some gauge in me, no doubt, was checking to see how far along the season was, no matter how much it seemed as thoughtless to play with apples as to draw in the sand.

  What I wanted, I knew, was to say what we were, even though the four of them, the only ones who might have cared, didn't. I hadn't anyone to compare us to, and now that we were splitting up, I expected we would seem like an optical illusion when we had gone, since no one would remind me of us. I got what comfort I could from taking our measure one by one. Aldo and Phidias bickering like old vaudevillians over the shortcake. David suspended in a Zen intermission at the shore like a fly in amber. Madeleine rampant, I kept it a secret that I wanted more, wanted something to take away with me that would group us all together in a metaphysical snapshot. I had to be content with the image we had all made real, of Mrs. Carroll swimming east toward Bermuda. A sensible New England freestyle until she got beyond the breakers, and then a lazy sidestroke as she made it out to sea. It was vivid to me, like a scrap of film.

  So what we did this summer was what we were, I said to myself on the beach. The sentiment made me queasy with its moral uplift. It made us sound like the bugger fringe of the Eagle Scouts. Not that we hadn't had terrific results, having kept a whole suburb off the face of the earth and won one for Mrs. Carroll's deer. It's hard to describe what I ached for. You could say I just wanted to stay on in a safe place.

  I jogged over to Madeleine and fell into step beside her. "What year are you up to?" I asked. We tended now to talk about her book first, and today our afternoon's cooking had preempted our afternoon walk. She had asked me more and more questions about her films in the last few days, putting her trust in the passion of the myth. Because she had scoffed so long at its balmy prose and its excess of relics and ceremony, she probed its contours now with the cool of a social scientist. A myth and a self, she seemed to decide, were not mutually exclusive.

  "Nineteen fifty-eight," she said.

  "Oh." The year we met in France.

  "You're having a relapse, aren't you?"

  "Of what? Nineteen fifty-eight?"

  "No," she said sharply. "You're mooning at all of us. The next thing you know, you'll be wringing your hands."

  "I was being sentimental about the summer," I admitted, my hands in my pants pockets as still as the twilight air. "I'll get over it. Am I in it?"

  "In what?"

  "Nineteen fifty-eight."

  "No," she said, hanging her head and shaking it thoughtfully. "As these things go, you're not important enough. Isn't it stupid?" She stopped and put one hand on her hip in the concert position, as if she were about to sing a cafe ballad. She looked worried. Something was on her mind. She had never had anything on her mind long enough to furrow her brow and make her frown, because she put whatever it was into words with a lightning touch and got rid of it, or at least it had always been so between her and me. Since she didn't embarrass herself, since her genetic makeup didn't include the need for approval, there was nothing she wouldn't say. And yet, as we stood face to face on the beach, she was struggling with words as much as I was, though I couldn't guess the reason. Nineteen fifty-eight was a big year, working out as it did the shift from movie star to chanteuse, but the years had not brought her to grief so far in her memoirs. I couldn't imagine they would start to hurt her now. The years that started in 'fifty-eight were her most triumphant. Everyone agreed about that.

  "I don't care," I said about the memoirs. "But are you mad at me about something?"

  "What would you do if I were?"

  "Tell you to go to hell."

  "Then I'm not," she said, and the one-syllable laugh came out at half volume. "Why would I be?"

  "Because maybe you feel the same way as I do about the summer, and you don't want to start mooning at your age."

  "My age?" she asked, hooding her eyelids.

  "It's just an expression," I said.

  "Oo-hoo!" Aldo called, and we turned to see him waving us back to the picnic for our shortcake. I noticed for the first time that it had gone dark on the beach. Phidias had lighted the pair of lanterns he brought down, and Aldo would have faded into the landscape except for the scarlet of his caftan in the circle of light. It seemed the right time to go back, since Madeleine and I were just idling away the moment, teasing one another but fighting clean. I looked at her to make a joke about Aldo finally taking charge of the meal, and she was doing the most curious thing. She peered at them in the distance as if she were making calculations, then looked at me appraisingly, and I felt that I was the one variable factor. She was like someone sketching a getaway route in his head the instant before he makes a break for it, and she made you understand that they are the only kind who ever get away. But I couldn't understand what she was figuring until we started to walk. She took my arm and kept our pace slow, at the same time talking low and fast. Before I quite began to take in what she was saying, I realized she had a speech to make that would last as long as it took us to reach the others. There wouldn't be a moment left over for me to reply.

  "You want it not to end," she said, going back to the summer, "because you're afraid the future will shoot you in the back the way the past did. You can't help it that you break time down into pieces. Even I do, but at least I know they're all about the same. The past isn't the enemy. In fact, I've had an even better idea this summer. There is no past."

  Maybe it was a hundred feet, but I am not good at distances. David stood up at the water's edge and started back to the others. Of course there was a past.

  "Not the way we're used to thinking of it anyway," she went on, the "we" as preachy as the ones I was partial to. "I mean, the past happens in the present, when it crosses our mind again. Most things never come up a
gain at all, and so they don't exist. Nothing would have happened, I've always thought, if you and I had never met, and yet that meeting was an accident. Another mile one way or the other, and you never would have walked into town that day." It was curious, but I could have sworn she was as angry as she was grateful. "We're not taught to love accidents, are we?"

  "No," I said. I couldn't get a handle on it. I guess I thought she was apologizing in a roundabout way for not putting me in the book. But since I really didn't care, I only half listened. It didn't mean I didn't like the theory, or what I could understand of it at least. But it was too absolute. Sometimes there was a past, and sometimes there wasn't, I thought to myself equanimically. It depended on who you were at a given time, and what proof you had and what proof you still needed. None of us here, for instance, needed more proof, and I wished we could walk a little faster and get back to the group in the lamplight.

  "You have to throw out all the facts you think you know," she said, "and even if you could, it will still seem more like a story than something real. But I ought to tell somebody." She stopped again, and I waited with her. We were so close to the others now, maybe twenty-five feet, that she lowered her voice to tell the story. She still held my arm. "I met Beth Carroll in France in nineteen thirty and not during the war. Phidias didn't know. When I left him in 'thirty-one, I knew I was pregnant, but I thought I could have an operation over here. It was too late. So I called Beth Carroll from New York, and she kept me here in a maid's room until it was over. I didn't want it. It was just like being sick. Beth took the baby, and I went to Hollywood. Then, a few years later, I got Phidias a job here, and then we got divorced. He never knew."

  "It sounds like a soap opera," I said, and now she had started us walking again, just as I realized we had to stop and finish this. I had no idea how either of us was feeling.

  "I know," she said. "That's what I mean. The truth is true, but it isn't real. I hadn't thought about it in twenty-five years, and then that day when you walked into town, I was all alone in the hotel, I was broke, and it started to hurt again. We had that week together. I realized I didn't know anything about my own child, except I remembered it was a boy. It's the only time I ever missed him. I got busy again."