Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  Now wait a minute, I thought.

  "Are you saying that Tony's your son?" I asked her.

  "No," she said impatiently, as if I were being stupid and mawkish. "Beth put the baby up for adoption."

  But then it didn't make sense at all. And then, when we were almost on top of the picnic, it all came together.

  "Aldo?" I said, and she let go of my arm to walk around the blanket to her own place, between Aldo and David.

  "Sit down," Aldo said to me. I was standing up at my place, and Madeleine had reached the opposite side. She looked over at me as if she had already dropped the subject. The others were all sitting down and waiting.

  "Not me," I said, swaying a bit, and she shook her head no and then tilted it to the side and smiled, as if to say she knew what I meant. "It's no one," she said. "I don't know who it is. I never will now. Forget it."

  But what if it were me, I thought as I sat down. Just suppose it were. Suddenly my mind swept over us all like an airborne camera zooming in, and I knew I was finally in a scene in a Madeleine Cosquer film. As luck would have it, I had drawn a fragment of thirties melodrama. But there are no small parts, as they say in the theater, just small actors.

  You keep certain things about yourself like money in the bank. I always expected to be terrific in an emergency. I may not have actually waited for one, for the pilot, say, to slump over, and the stewardess to turn to me and tell me, "You fly the plane." But I've thought about them, tremors in the earth and wildfire and storms, and I've known in my deepest place that that was how it might be given to me to take care of people. It was the very impulse that set me up as the group moralist at the beginning of the summer. I was the one who would have been the troubleshooter if the cops got called. I would have done the plea bargaining with the DA. Or if worse came to worst, I would have black-marketed the cigarettes and whiskey for my gang and me while we languished in jail. In other words, I had a real feel for movie emergencies and the measures people take who take charge. Since I had always lived so hermited a life, I never expected to be myself the center of the crisis, so the wind was knocked out of me for half a minute as I danced among the possibilities here. I spooned up the first big berry and bit into it, and the sweetness of it stung my eyes with tears. But I swallowed it and recovered, because there was nothing else I could do. You have to rescue the survivors so they won't die and make matters even worse. The dead are already dead.

  It couldn't be me, I thought. There were too many problems. I looked too much like my mother and father back home, for one thing, and it didn't change the facts of my bloodline that I had sloughed them off and become just like my friends at Mrs. Carroll's. Besides, my parents were too dull to have hidden the business of an adoption from me. But I was not interested in the truth, which had a habit of getting me nowhere. I was flying. I couldn't imagine what I used to do all the time, but I was damn sure it didn't used to happen in the air.

  I was between Phidias and David, and when I made a sentence out of it and thought to myself "What if I'm sitting for the first time next to my father?" I knew I was on the wrong track. Madeleine was a pure evangelical who believed our survival lay in choosing what was real over what was true. It was still a distinction that sounded too good to me, but I was doing what I could to applaud us for how far we had come. I shouldn't get too lost in the confection, I thought, watching us gobble up shortcake for all the world as if we could get away with being like everyone else. They were all talking. I waited for a good place to jump in and swear we were pals at least, if not blood kin, and ready to defend our right to believe the sheerest lunacy.

  "I knew you wouldn't chip in and buy me a present because it's tacky, and I have everything already," Aldo said, going into his picnic basket. "So I brought my own bottle to crack over my bows and launch me," and he pulled out a cobwebbed bottle of Mr. Carroll's cognac. "Eighty years old. Worth its weight in carats."

  "I don't understand why Tony doesn't haul it away by the case," Phidias said. "It's practically his."

  "Drunks can't stand good liquor," Aldo said. "It makes them edgy." He drew the cork and passed it to Madeleine, who breathed in the perfume and narrowed her eyes as if she were a medium and we were a séance.

  "Why not?" David asked.

  "Because they like to swill it," I said, "and it makes them ashamed to waste it."

  "You have to be a connoisseur to like it," David said.

  "Oh, wine queens don't like it either if they've had to buy it," Aldo said, who was a connoisseur of queens. "They hate themselves for it, but all they can think of is how much it cost. Whether it was worth it or not."

  "I never think of how much something costs," Madeleine said, as if we didn't know. She was on another wavelength, like a foreigner who has misread the idiom. When she was in a good mood, she spoke to the interviewer she carried around in her head and judged everything she touched until you knew damn well what was first class and what wasn't. She was no age at all to me anymore, and since I wasn't either, it was all one to me what hour it was or what season. A voice in my head said, "This is who we are, who we are right now," over and over, and I mentally put a match to the diary I never wrote down but kept in perfect chronological order. I let the voice try it out: there is no past.

  "I bet nobody gets to like it if it's that old and it costs that much," David said.

  "Wrong," Aldo answered brightly. "Thieves get to, if they've stolen it. And con artists and song-and-dance men love it after a caper. People who live from job to job get into the vintage stuff, right, Madeleine?"

  "What do you mean 'that old'?" Madeleine said dryly to David. "I'm almost as old as this myself."

  "You're not old," he said, and she lifted her glass to him and smiled as if she had never heard it before.

  The cognac didn't have what you would call a taste at all. When I took a sip, the top of my head lifted off, and a warm breeze blew in from the south. It didn't make you drunk exactly either. After a minute or so of it, though, I could have kissed the whole lot of us, cavorted around the blanket planting wet ones on everyone's face. But I haven't sat through Madeleine's films in vain. I knew we were at the climax, when it could all fall over into spun sugar and mush. This was the scene where Madeleine would step back and survive the narrow, sentimental valentine that movies used to end with because they didn't know how to suggest how life went on after the credits. Only Madeleine, of all the actors, would get it across that she kept on going beyond the frame of the film, that every passion of her life was as arresting and inevitable as the one the movie chronicled. Things are at their most cruelly sentimental only at the end, and if you can get it across that things don't end, the moment won't curdle. Oh had I studied it.

  "Listen," I said, a touch of the senior officer in my voice, "since this is the last time we'll all be together, we'd better sort of synchronize our watches about the end of the summer. I've got a timetable." I hadn't one at all, of course. I was going to make it up now as I went along. They all leaned forward to make sure they'd heard me right, since I was the one who had always held them back from making plans. I came up into a crouch and laid out a master plan, restraining myself from fetching a stick and scratching in the sand while I talked. I spoke with a little reluctance, as if I hated to spoil a party, a shade world-weary at having to think of these things, but resigned to it too because someone had to. It went like this: Aldo and the gardener would leave tomorrow. Then, in about three weeks, David and I. Madeleine, I said, had better be alone at the end and do a swan song as Mrs. Carroll. Perhaps a phone call to Farley or even to John or Cicely. She should be seen by some of them up at the dairy. Then, a day or two before Mrs. Carroll's ocean swim, Phidias would smuggle her out during the night in a milk truck and get her to the airport. Then it was up to him. Leave the note on the bed on the first nice day and then find it and call the authorities.

  It didn't take Caesar to plot this strategy, and it was, after all, what we had been expecting to happen, give or take a tactic.
But they murmured their approval and nodded alertly when I spoke their names. They looked so unexpectedly relieved that for a moment I thought I'd come up with something clever. And then I realized, as we broke up into small and easy conversations, that they were relieved about me. By putting off the talk about September, it seemed they had been taking care of me. Am I all wrong, I wondered, and didn't I take care of them at all? But then I shook that thought as sniveling and trapped in time. Oddly enough, and I felt this very specifically, I didn't believe it was too late for me to claim Phidias and Madeleine as father and mother and grow up all over again. Besides, they deserved the son they had lost too carelessly, and I was as good as anyone. It was too late for them, though, so I had to let it go. I laughed out loud, a single-noted hoot, because for once I wasn't going to get anywhere splitting hairs. I gave up the past I wanted to invent along with the one I spent my life burying. It was like buying champagne with my last ten dollars.

  David was tugging at my sleeve. I looked at him and thought: I wonder if we're together now for good. Once we got it balanced, could we ever get it to stay that way? But the bells rang, and the flashing went off in the tilt mechanism. Dopey thought. Wrong attitude.

  "I just wanted you to know," he said, locking eyes with me, "you're not a romantic anymore."

  "Why?"

  "Because you don't want to cling to the past, and that's what they do."

  "What am I now?" I asked. How did he know? Where was he getting his information?

  "Beats me," he said. "But Madeleine and I agree. It used to be you couldn't wait for the present to become the past so you could cling to it. You're a post-romantic now. You're going to have to wait for civilization to catch up."

  "They'll catch me. The Chevy doesn't go over fifty-five. Fifty uphill." He stretched back from the blanket into the sand and propped on his elbows. When I turned to him, we were removed from the lights of the picnic. We were not removed from the scene I was in, since I brought it with me. "Are you sure I won't have a relapse? What if I start asking again why you left me?"

  "I'll say I already told you."

  "The weather." He meant the question would never deserve more of an answer. "Well, how can we be sure we're going to stay together now?"

  "Because there isn't much time."

  "Why not?"

  "Don't you see," he said, as if he wished I knew it already, without him having to tell me, "I'm the romantic now. Everything's going to die, and I can't stand it. In a minute you're old, and before you turn around you're lying in a field." He seemed to find it maddening to talk about. "I'm thirty. Madeleine says that's the oldest you ever get, and then you get over it. I don't believe it."

  "But wait," I said, wanting to let him know there was nothing to worry about there. I was all rosy about the ten dollars and the bottle of champagne. Once you've gone and bought it, I thought, anything can happen, and you're free enough at last to go with whatever it is. But I didn't know how to say it and still be the bittersweet senior officer, rueful and in charge. And I had to stay in the part. David didn't want me sentimental any more than Madeleine did.

  "It's just a phase I'm going through. I know." He smiled wanly, and he looked too young to be visited by the dark phases. "So is a bad cold, but you still blow your nose and cough a lot."

  Why did it hurt so much that he reminded me of me? Had he always? When I thought everything was going to die, when we used to make love and be like two men in a mirror, it was not each other we resembled but a third man charged with life, and I imagined him as the one man I knew who was fully free. Now that everything was going to live, I was full of ordinary thoughts. I thought that nobody was so smart about me as David and nobody but me knew quite what he meant about himself. I put my hand on his stomach and stirred the silk as if I were rubbing a Buddha's paunch for luck. The million things I had to say to him about time would take all the time we had. But I didn't say so now because he would think it proved him right. He couldn't know we had all the time in the world, because that was the next phase. By then, I suppose, I might be back in the glooms myself. So it would go, back and forth between us like the urge to make love.

  "Where did you get these dreamy clothes?" I asked him. "Did one of your lovers in high places used to dress you up?"

  "They're Aldo's, and they don't fit him. He got them cheap at a studio auction. They were in a movie called China Captain. I never heard of it, but the guy who wore this outfit was Aldo's first man. He never made it big in pictures."

  "It's like the six-thousand-dollar gloves," I said, thinking of Aldo buying up the golden age, piece by piece.

  "Oh no it's not," David said, not understanding, thinking I was comparing Madeleine to a co-star. "These are just souvenirs. The glove with the cigarette burn is history, like the pens they signed the Constitution with. Or Washington's wooden teeth."

  "What if nobody ever heard of The Ambassador's Lady? And what if China Captain starred Errol Flynn in your silk pajamas?"

  "Then it would be the other way around," he admitted, but he wasn't really interested. "What are you saying?"

  "I was wondering what's real."

  "You were?" He started to laugh as if I were irresistible. "You sound like Madeleine. And you both sound like a B-picture."

  We were interrupted by the tweet of a whistle, very close. It must have to do with some peril at sea, I thought, because it is just too late to call the cops. David sat up, and I turned around, and Madeleine and Aldo stared across the blanket at us as if to say it wasn't their fault. Phidias was standing downwind from us, facing south, and when he blew a second blast, we at least knew where it was coming from.

  "He says he's got a present for me," Aldo said. "Isn't that European? I hope it's not something to wear because I can't stand anyone else's taste. Why is he blowing a whistle? Madeleine, say it isn't an animal."

  "What if it's a cow?" she asked him. "What would you do with it in Beverly Hills?"

  "Too much milk gives me pimples," he said.

  There was a sound from beyond the ridge like a muffled gunshot, and then the sky broke open in white and gold over the water. Fireworks. Phidias turned back to us and grinned, the whistle still in his mouth. Aldo, who was so comfortable about being sentimental that he threatened to turn us into a boy-and-his-dog story, started laughing and sobbing and took hold of Madeleine's hand for support. The aftershock of the rocket crackled up the beach. Phidias was antic and cocky, as excited as he must have been when he produced these shows for the Carroll children and shook the starch out of their lives. He couldn't stand not being with the production crew, though. The next one burst bright green, and the sound it made was like a bomb. "I better go see if they need help," he said, though I don't think they did, and he trotted away. The difference between him and us, it occurred to me, was that he worked like a cameraman and we worked like actors.

  Then a red one. It was sent up even higher and bloomed open like a flower. We all gasped in chorus, and in between firebursts we looked at each other and agreed it was the perfect thing. It was even more perfect than champagne, of course, because it was wilder and more fleeting and seemed to end with a sizzle of shrapnel out in the dark water. Madeleine told us that Phidias found the fireworks cache in the boathouse, where they were stored after the last lit-up Fourth, twenty years ago. In all that time, I figured, if anyone had dropped a match, the place would have blown like a powderhouse. But as it didn't it would have been a waste of time to worry about. Phidias's boys had set up tonight's display on the boathouse beach—all his boys but me, I thought wryly, but let it go—and they were having their own farmers' picnic between the ridges. I suppose Phidias felt more at home there with them. Then I had a picture of him and Beth Carroll and guessed he was about as close to home here as there. I thought of the mid-ocean floor where Mrs. Carroll would officially lie, and the warm night breeze blowing in off the water was full of ambiguous powers.

  Aldo got up and went to the water's edge to watch. He hugged himself gleef
ully and did a jig on the lip of the tide and got the hem of his caftan wet. David, whom I wanted to promise he wouldn't die, lay back down again and looked up at the fires in the sky. Madeleine and I were sitting across from each other now, and she motioned me forward as if she had a secret to tell. She couldn't have another secret, I knew, but we both leaned across the littered blanket and said what we could about the one we had played with.

  "Are you having an Oedipus complex?" she asked.

  "No more than usual," I said ruefully. She was lit up in the white light of the next firework, and I raised the following words to get over the noise: "Pretend for a moment it's me."

  "But it isn't."

  "Just for the sake of argument." Because it was the end of the scene, she didn't want us getting lost in sentiment. "Would we tell Phidias? We wouldn't, would we?"

  "No," she said approvingly, and as if the decision were really mine to make. "Because he has enough sons as it is. They're not what his life is about."

  "Would we tell David and Aldo?"

  "Not Aldo," she said, brushing my shoulder with her fingertips. "It would make him jealous. But David, yes. He senses it already."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It wouldn't surprise him," she said. "It's the sort of thing he appreciates."

  "And you and I would go on as before," I said.

  "Of course. How do you feel?"

  Fine, I thought. But the moment had reached such a pitch that I saw what the question must mean. When I said "Fine," I was taking my temperature again, telling how I was as if I were caught in an epidemic or a pitched battle, some situation where everything else was emphatically not fine. What I was being asked was how it felt to be who I was.