Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘What?’ Carter said. ‘I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘We’re going to wean Bobby while he’s with the nurse and we’re on this vacation.’

  ‘Has he made a will?’

  ‘We both did. At the same time we made out all the new insurance papers.’

  ‘New? You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘It’s only the normal thing. Especially if you’ve just started a family.’

  ‘How much are you insured for?’

  ‘Oh, thousands and thousands. The limit.’

  ‘Just like Julie.’

  ‘But so is he.’

  ‘That isn’t going to matter, if he’s the one pushing you over the railings.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘That’s how it happened to her.’

  ‘Then they wouldn’t try the same way again, would they?’

  ‘People who commit murders usually stick to a pattern.’

  ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’

  He turned his head again. He said, ‘If I had to get rid of somebody who was in my way – somebody who deserved it – I wouldn’t feel guilty. Would you?’

  ‘Yes. That’s how people get caught. They want to talk about it. Because they feel bad.’

  ‘I bet some of them feel better afterwards. Everybody wants to kill at least one person. Don’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Maybe not at the moment. But think back to when you were working in the theatre. Nobody you hated?’

  ‘Two people.’

  ‘I’ve got four at the office. And if you could have gotten away with it, wouldn’t you have liked to?’

  ‘Just for that moment of destroying them. But afterwards, think what it would do to you. How lonely and miserable you’d feel.’

  ‘Not me.’ He handed Bobby back to her. ‘You’ve got to be the one to do it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be easy for you. They won’t suspect you for a minute, the mother of such a cute little baby.’

  *

  ‘Did you enjoy your trip?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘It was great. The girls all loved him. They cried. He was the only one that didn’t. He was so good. Where is everybody?’

  The others were out. Katherine asked her to take the baby up to the nursery and then come down to the study to have a cup of coffee and a chat.

  Marilyn brought the coffee on one of the big silver trays. She came back with a plate of sandwiches. It still gave Mamie the creeps to have servants bringing things in and taking them out all the time. At the beginning, she’d thought it would be wonderful: gracious living like the advertisements. But what it meant in practice was that you could never be alone. And in her white uniform Marilyn looked more like a nurse than a maid.

  Katherine said, ‘I wanted to talk to you, Rhoda, before we go away. Of course there’s time enough – a couple of months. But I always think it’s best to settle up as you go along; not to let things slide.’

  Mamie nodded. She didn’t think she was ever going to like her mother-in-law, but she was no longer afraid of her. She could even see that Katherine was a lonely woman. She also knew that she herself had the approval of all the men in the family and that that was what counted with the Chases, even with Katherine.

  ‘I’ve always been proud of my boys. Raymond and Randall were so good at sports …’

  Loose-living studs, Mamie thought, both headed towards the same path their father had taken and the same sauce he was pickled in.

  ‘… and now at the bank.’

  Checking in late in the morning and out early in the afternoon, with a so-called business lunch in between, and playing around with their secretaries, sometimes right in the office.

  ‘And Russell …’

  Russell, the baby. It didn’t show too much; his father had made him join all those games like the others, so he was in pretty good condition physically. But he hadn’t escaped his mother.

  ‘He was the really bright one at school. He always had his own ideas about the way things should be. We thought he’d go to the top. But – I do see he was right: he convinced us that the study of nature was just as important. Of course we know it is. It’s just that sometimes it seems to me a shame that somebody who has a talent for a thing – that he should have avoided developing it. I expect you know he sometimes plays roulette and twenty-one.’

  ‘Yes. He’s interested in working out his systems.’

  ‘I used to believe so. But it’s an odd thing: you can go along believing something for years, and suddenly you know the truth in a flash. We all used to think this sort of gambling fever would come over Ross in waves – he’d go out and lose a lot and then come back and devote himself to the invention of a new set of numbers. I used to think the craving struck him when he was unhappy: that it was an addiction like alcohol.’

  Everybody had an addiction, Mamie thought. Her father-in-law and the two other sons had liquor, sometimes women; Katherine had her position in the community. And she herself had Carter.

  ‘I wasn’t looking at the facts,’ Katherine said. ‘The facts are simply that gambling is the quickest way there is of throwing money away. Our family is a banking family and all the men in it, except Russell, work in the bank. He never wanted to – that was all right. But his choice of work didn’t stop his feeling against it: guilt, or rebellion, or whatever it is. I don’t understand it.’

  Neither did Mamie. It seemed crazy. Most people would do just about anything for money. Money could change your life. She could certainly understand the excitement of gambling, but only if you were poor. Rich people didn’t need to gamble; they had it already.

  Katherine said, ‘He needs someone to take him in hand. Now that you’re both parents, it’s important for you to think of the future.’

  ‘I don’t know much about money,’ Mamie said.

  ‘But perhaps you could speak to him. I think you ought to.’

  ‘All right. I will. And maybe you could help me with something.’

  ‘About finances?’

  ‘No. It’s something I can’t ask Ross about. It’s about his first wife, Julie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I just want to know about her. I don’t have the feeling that something’s being kept back from me, or anything – it’s just that I can’t ask him. What was she like?’

  ‘Very attractive. Intelligent, well-read, good background, knew how to dress; perfect manners.’

  And Carter loved her.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Mamie said. ‘I want to know what she was like as a person, why Ross married her, whether she was at all like me, or whether she was my opposite.’

  ‘Not quite your opposite, but certainly very different. She gave the impression of being always cheerful and efficient, in control. She’d had a very good job, a responsible position in a large firm. She was one of those girls who could be a managing director if she wanted to. Very outgoing, pleasant, put people at their ease.’

  Mamie could imagine Sal saying, ‘Miss Vogue’; that was the way they referred to certain people, and clothes, and parts in plays, where all the details were neat and matching and everything looked as if it had been designed by a machine.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘we look alike.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. She was tall, above average height. Dark brown hair and – ’

  ‘Do you have a photograph?’ Mamie said.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Of course. All the wedding pictures, and from the summer, and that Christmas before the accident.’

  ‘Tell me about the accident.’

  ‘She just slipped. It was dreadful.’

  ‘Was it on snow or on a rockface?’

  ‘I think it must have been a slippery place, maybe ice, or just snow that was packed down.’

  ‘Weren’t you there?’

  ‘We were all there, except Waverley – he wasn’t feeling very well that morning. I was trying to keep up with the boys, and Ross and J
ulie were behind us. It was a frightful thing. He said he just looked back and she was in the air, falling away. It took him a long time to get over it.’

  ‘Could I see the pictures?’ Mamie asked.

  Katherine led the way upstairs to her room. She brought out a pile of photograph albums, found the one she wanted and took it over to the windowseat.

  Mamie sat down too. She held half the large album while Katherine turned the pages and told off the names and talked about the places. There were lots of pictures of Julie: tall, self-confident, with the dark hair and the fashion-model look.

  ‘Why did you think,’ Katherine asked, ‘that you looked alike?’

  ‘It was something Carter Mathews said that time he was here. Maybe he meant it in some other way.’

  ‘Such a good-looking boy. But unreliable.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘And quite notorious with women, always has at least three or four on a string at the same time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mamie mumbled, ‘I kind of got that impression about him.’

  *

  She wore the comedy mask on a thin silver chain around her neck. The morning after she’d come back from seeing Carter she was leaning down and forward near a chair Russell was sitting in, and he asked her, ‘Is there only one of those masks? I thought the other one was right behind the –’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s only one. The comedy one.’

  ‘You don’t like tragedy?’

  ‘I lost the other one.’

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to replace it.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I like it the way it is, now. I’m used to it like this.’

  ‘I don’t mind tragedy. It shows the character.’

  Thinking of her mother, she said, ‘Unless there’s too much of it. Then people start to lose their personality. They go dead.’

  ‘I don’t call that tragedy.’

  ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘Just bad luck.’

  ‘Uh-huh. There’s a lot of it around.’

  ‘But not for us,’ he said, smiling fatuously at her. She made him knock on wood. She ran the mask back and forth on its chain until it zinged.

  He said, ‘My old teacher at the institute would get a kick out of that. The one time I got away from home – and he spent half his time telling me about America. He was always saying that Americans sentimentalized and falsified everything in order to make life more comfortable. No more tragedy, only fun. And the idealists had the concept of worthy effort – that was their form of fun.’

  ‘Well, if you could get rid of the bad parts, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You get rid of them by living through them.’

  Mamie laughed. ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is what we used to say in the profession: comedy ends in marriage, tragedy ends in death.’

  ‘You could take that both ways. Are you saying that once you’re married, the comedy’s over?’

  ‘No, it’s –’

  ‘And once you’re dead, the tragedy’s over?’

  ‘Once you’re dead, everything’s over.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘All I said was: that’s the way they end.’

  ‘Or it could mean intent – that the purpose of comedy is marriage. And the purpose of tragedy –’

  ‘I’m getting mixed up now,’ she said. She was also getting bored. He never teased her or laughed at her like Carter; he genuinely didn’t think she was dumb. And she was gratified by the way he took her opinions so seriously; but sometimes he could go on and on until she wanted to jump up and start kicking the furniture. Her mother had said: Marry a rich man and you’ll never have to worry. But it wasn’t enough, even though her position had changed. When she was with Russell, she was in control. When she was with Carter, he was the one who had the power, because she was the one who loved. She was tied to both men without really knowing either of them. And she had two lives that she couldn’t live right. Every minute she had to watch her step, to try to remember what she was supposed to be doing.

  Russell had read a lot of plays and he could talk about them, but he didn’t like going out much. She thought he’d rather stick with the plays in books. He even said once that the theatre wasn’t like real life. Of course it wasn’t, she’d said, any more than a painted portrait was a real face. They were both pictures. And there were good pictures or bad pictures – that was the only important question. He said something about artificiality. She didn’t know where to begin on that argument. The house she lived in, her marriage, her whole life was artificial.

  He’d go to movies. Occasionally he’d suggest going out for a meal and a film, but that was for her sake. He didn’t find pleasure in the town; he preferred to see movies on television. What he really loved was his job. He also liked, and enjoyed playing with, and began to love, Bobby. When Mamie watched the two of them laughing and making faces at each other, she became fond of Russell and was happy in his company. At those moments she almost believed she belonged with him. And she started to get used to being married, and to think of it as normal.

  He tried to tell her about biology – how large the scope of it was, and what it could explain. She listened as if fascinated. Sometimes, in fact, she found herself becoming interested, but usually it was because she thought that Carter would like to hear it.

  ‘It’s beyond all other things,’ Russell told her. ‘It’s the basis. Whatever the future holds, there are millions of years behind us, and they’re part of us: we’re the product of them. All our instincts, everything.’

  ‘Our thoughts?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe not. But our dreams, certainly. They’re the same as they always were. What kind of dreams do you have?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Nice ones. And the bad ones. I guess being chased, or caught in a fire, or drowning or something. But that was only – I used to have horrible nightmares when I was little. Everybody does, don’t they? And then I grew out of it. What kind of dreams do you have?’

  ‘I have one that repeats,’ he said. ‘I’m standing alone in a high place. It’s getting dark, there’s someone behind me I can’t see. And I’m afraid to turn around.’

  ‘And that’s all? That’s the whole thing?’

  ‘That’s enough. It’s very creepy and it usually wakes me up in a sweat. You’ll see. Or maybe they’ll stop, now that I’ve got you with me.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said.

  ‘Cured by a woman’s love. If comedy ends in marriage, where does it begin?’

  ‘Laughing. Jokes.’

  ‘And tragedy?’

  ‘What?’ She’d forgotten where they’d left the conversation.

  ‘Tragedy begins at home,’ he said.

  ‘That’s charity, Ross.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Charity.’

  She thought he might have meant to imply something about her, but he started almost immediately to look through a book he had with him; he wanted to show her a picture. He spoke of trained, scientific observation; about animals, birds and insects. ‘You see these creatures,’ he said, ‘and they’re capable of astonishing things – amazing. We call it instinct, but they’re so inspired, they seem to know about cause and effect. And look here: the way the colour of the skin and fur and feathers has evolved to suit the climate and the habitat. It all seems to be so much more intelligent than ordinary thought. And simpler.’

  *

  She asked Russell to take her out for a drive in the country. It was like arranging a meeting with Carter. She wanted to talk to him outside the house.

  She said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to ask you. You remember, Randall told me to tell you about gambling? Well, now your mother’s leaning on me. I just wanted to know what’s behind it.’

  ‘When I was in high school and made my big decision to go into biology, you should have seen all the tricks they tried. They actually sent me to a doctor. They�
��d have sent me to a psychiatrist except that it would have ruined my career to have that on my record.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, who goes to psychiatrists? Crazy people – right? You can be as crazy as you like, but once you’ve seen a psychiatrist, it’s official. Everybody knows it and they won’t hire you, not even in a bank. In a bank what you should be worrying about is theft and embezzlement.’

  ‘And gambling?’

  ‘We call it investment. You want to know why they’re in such a sweat? Because if I sold my shares on the open market, the family would drop from a 60 per cent majority shareholder down to 48 per cent. So, if the other 52 per cent wanted to vote in a block, they could start kicking people off the board. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I might. Or I might give them the choice of buying me out at a slightly higher price. That’s what people usually do.’

  ‘You seem to get along OK with them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It would just about kill your mother, wouldn’t it? And your father?’

  ‘They feel that way about everything. It might be good for the bank to have a couple of new people giving orders. Why not?’

  ‘She said a peculiar thing, too. She said you were trying to throw your money away, and gambling was the quickest way of doing it.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Was that all you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what to do when they say, “You tell Russell this,” or, “Tell him that.” I mean, I can’t just say, “Tell him yourself,” can I?’

  ‘Try it. See what happens. Or – no, it’s better if you don’t; this way, I can find out what’s on their minds.’

  ‘Think of myself as a soldier operating in enemy territory? Or as an actress playing a part?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why do they assume I won’t pass everything on to you?’

  ‘They probably can’t believe we talk together like other married couples.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it something about me?’

  ‘Or me. I’m the one they always had trouble with. I won’t fit in. There are a lot of wives who sit and listen to other people’s good advice and they start to think to themselves that maybe their husband really does need to be changed around; so they don’t say anything to him, they just start heckling him the way the others told them to.’