He gave a hug to each, hugs with their names said fondly in them. Mitch’s also contained two comradely pats on the back.
“I came out to cut some Bibb for lunch and got challenged by some weeds,” Straw said. He introduced the woman.
Walks Wentworth.
Assumed or not, Mitch thought, both the Wallis and the Wentworth suited her. Cindy, Amy, Chrissie or whatever would have been unfortunate. Straw called her Wally. He put his arm around her, drew her to his side possessively. “I sent Wally in for beers,” he said. He extended his. “Have a swig.”
Maddie’s reach went right to the bottle. She took three swallows and pressed the cold sweating green glass to her hot sweating forehead before handing it on to Mitch.
Wally apparently thought nothing of standing there so nearly nude. She had her arms crossed, which partially covered her breasts; however that was a natural aspect of her stance, not self-consciousness. Her breasts were small but not meager. Firm, almost adolescent-looking with pink nipples like the tips of a baby’s finger. A slight, nice pooch to her abdomen.
Mitch guessed Wally was beyond her thirties by maybe four or five years. A time-fighter. Well-boned features that wouldn’t give up easily. She reminded him somewhat of the late actress Kay Kendall. He appreciated the way her smile annihilated her aloofness. How could he describe it to Maddie? An explosive smile, he might say, and probably Maddie would quip that she hadn’t heard it.
Straw and Wally.
A good physical match, and perhaps not only that, was Mitch’s early impression. Straw had the size and substance such a woman would play against best. Her black cap of hair counterpoint to his straight, thinning gray and white. Her lengthy leanness, Straw’s above average height and bulky build. Her forties, his sixties. And yes, his wealth and her urgency to be underwritten.
Need for need, they were a pair of providers who had evidently opened up supply lines.
Gratified mischief, Mitch thought.
“I’ve yet to cut the lettuce,” Straw said. He was effortlessly aristocratic-looking. It was incongruous that his hands and forearms should now be so caked with dirt, that soil was impacted beneath his fingernails. A transfer of lipstick was discernible on his nearly white brush mustache. He had on frayed cutoff jeans and ruined moccasins.
“Why don’t you all go inside,” he said, “and I’ll be along shortly.”
Chapter 16
Lunch on the upper terrace.
Everyone freshly bathed and changed into whites. Pleated linen shorts, sheer shirts hardly buttoned, oversize tank tops with loose ventilating armholes.
Straw had on a creamy Ecuadorian hat, its brim shaped just so for maximum jauntiness. It was new.
“Coveting my hat, are you? Here!” He put it on Wally before she could dodge. Like his boots it was too large for her, slipped down over her forehead to her brows, caught on her ears.
She laughed gorgeously, went along with it as though the hat was now hers and she intended to wear it. Then, suddenly, as though it was her right, she flung it anywhere. Her hair had gotten mussed. She didn’t bother with it.
Above the table, well above them, a stretch of bleached muslin tamed blaze into shadowless flattery. The scents that had been atomized on wrists, throats and ankles competed with the fragrance of the sweet williams in the close-by Versailles planters. The food appeared too beautiful to disturb.
Everything cool.
Green beans, red peppers, white Argenteuil asparagus, magenta beets. Poached salmon sprinkled with dill, a legion of identical and equally decapitated Brisling sardines, tomatoes, cornichons, a paté. And that wasn’t all.
The wine was a vintage Gewürztraminer.
Aside on a serving table, to be anticipated throughout, was a tarte aux poires and something else layered that was extremely chocolate and a silver platter of fresh green figs so perfectly ripe they required a bed of cotton.
Straw tore at a crusty loaf of French peasant bread. He used the hunk to sop up some olive oil, then dabbed it into a saucer of grated parmesan. He’d be a vigorous eater this day. In keeping with his state of mind.
Mitch had noticed the change in Straw. Not that Straw had been so evidently heavy-hearted before now but it seemed as though an encumbering skin had been shed. Straw’s eyes and hands were quicker, his posture higher, his voice rounder and coming from deeper in him.
Mitch had mentioned it to Maddie.
“Told you,” she’d said, “but no need to be concerned about Straw.”
“Who’s concerned?”
“He could never be an old fool,” and after scarcely a half beat: “but we’ll keep on the lookout for symptoms, won’t we?”
The conversation at lunch, which was really the main course, skipped and skimmed along randomly and landed on Wally.
“I was once married to a golf hustler,” she said. “He was terribly good at it, would purposely slice and hook his drives, thrash around in the rough and miss easy putts to sucker whoever happened to be his opponent into betting really big on the last couple of holes. Then, of course, he’d play up to his game and make the killing.”
“When was that?”
“Oh.” Wally smiled. “Too many years ago to divulge. I was practically a child.”
“Do you golf?” That from Maddie.
Wally didn’t miss the implication. “Never have,” she replied.
She went on to tell of her days as a runway fashion model in New York and in Europe. She’d been a regular for Geoffrey Beene, Cardin and Valentino. When that silly business had had enough of her, she’d certainly had her fill of it. She got into something similar, became a Las Vegas showgirl, one of those detached walking displays, costumed in a few sequins, a feather or two and an enormous headpiece. Eyelashes out to here, she laughed, a self-penalizing laugh.
Mitch stole from her left breast by way of the armhole of her tank top. Earlier he’d seen her a mere triangle short of naked, he thought, and now here he was stealing. What a thief he was. He ought to be caught and convicted. That Wally had been a runway fashion model and a Vegas exhibitionist explained her haughty head, ass control and physical audacity. He liked her.
“That’s where Wally and I met,” Straw said, “in Vegas. About a month ago when I was out there. She won at baccarat, for me.”
“Nine hands in a row,” Wally said.
“Ten,” Straw corrected. “Then one thing led to another.”
Mitch imagined the another.
Hooray for Straw, Maddie nearly blurted. She augured that this Wally would prove to be more forthright and beneficial than all the mal marieés that had been circling Straw for years.
Maddie popped nine tiny Niçoise olives into her mouth, stored them in her left jaw. Her tongue conveyed them consecutively to her chew and helped collect the pits in her right jaw. She had an urge to eject the pits forcefully, machine-gun them out. She spat them into her hand and deposited them on her butter dish. She did an interested-in-all-things face and kept it on until there was an adequate break in the conversation. “Mitch is going to teach me to shoot,” she announced.
“Splendid idea!” Straw said.
As though his niece’s vision was twenty-twenty.
“Good thing for a woman to know,” Wally contributed.
“You are going to teach me, aren’t you precious?” Maddie said.
“One of these days,” Mitch replied.
“Tomorrow,” Maddie scheduled.
“With what? Straw doesn’t have a pistol, do you Straw?” Mitch signaled Straw should say no.
Straw fibbed reluctantly. “A shotgun or two is all.”
Maddie vetoed shotguns. “But say we had a pistol for tomorrow, you’d teach me wouldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Mitch told her, believing he was on safe ground.
“Marian was an excellent shot,” Straw said. “Really, a veritable sharpshooter. She owned a forty-four magnum. Whenever we had a squabble she’d go out and shoot at something. As you can imagine, it unner
ved me.” He grinned and shook his head as though remembering a close call. “By the way,” he told Maddie, “I received another request for foreign aid this past week.”
“So did I,” Maddie said.
“There’s a house in Aix-en-Provence that Marian says she must have.”
“To me it was in Barcelona. How much did she hit you up for?”
“Three hundred. What about Elise?”
“The same. I’ve had it sent.”
“So have I.”
Better they had given the money to an elephant or rhino cause than to that pair of girl-eating piranhas, Mitch thought. He imagined Elise and Marian with six hundred thousand to blow, and blow it they would.
The same amount Ruder had promised him if he recovered the Kalali goods. Don’t think about that, Mitch told himself. It hadn’t been on his mind all day. Anyway, not featured.
He backed his chair away from the table some and turned it to better his view. A pair of sparrows were on the terrace railing nervously considering the tray of figs. If the birds got up enough courage to make a go at the figs, how long, Mitch wondered, would he pretend to not notice?
Fig, he thought, and associated figa, which was an Italian gutter term he’d often heard Riccio use. Why didn’t Riccio just say cunt?
Strawbridge land.
Mitch gazed over the railing at it. To his left, south of the house, was about two hundred level acres of pastures. A scattered herd of Holstein-Friesian cows in it. Black and white all-day munchers. The cows didn’t belong to Straw but to the dairy farmer whose complex of barns, silos and such were miniaturized in the distance. Straw just allowed the cows.
Mitch had walked over to the dairy farm a few times. He learned from the farmer that Holsteins gave more milk than other breeds. On the average a butterfat content of 3.7 percent. But the milk from Guernseys was higher in protein.
In the opposite direction, north of the house, the terrain was uneven and mainly wooded. Oaks, elms, maples and pines vied for sunlight with their heights. A few hickories. Numerous inexplicable clearings and patches of wild blackberries. Also several energetic springs with runoffs that insisted their ways to lower terrain and spread into a marsh, mysterious, inviolable.
Straight west was the river, the Hudson. A Strawbridge mile and a half between the house and it. That distance made easier by traditional paths. It was something always there to go to, the river, to spend a while on the three-hundred-foot-high granite bluff that overlooked it. Admiring the river’s perpetualness, expending some worship on it in a way as probably the native Americans once had, the Mohicans for instance.
Those bluffs high above the river had become a favorite place for Mitch. He’d explored them up and down, gotten to know their obscure traversing ledges, their deceiving crevices and dead ends. They were a long ways from West 47.
Gazing out from the upper terrace, Mitch thought how at one time this land had been an incidental part of a vast Dutch land grant and how smart of great-grandfather Nelson Strawbridge to have acquired it. It was said he won the parcel in a one-on-one croquet match while spending a Fourth of July in Newport.
Grandfather Gordon Strawbridge had also demonstrated his judiciousness by passing the house and land on to his son, Martin (Straw), rather than to his daughter, Elise.
Elise hadn’t been entirely omitted from her father’s will, but she had good reason to feel slighted. She was left two million, an erotic sketch by Mihaly Zichy that she never knew Gordon owned (why not one of his Fantin-Latours?). And two balls, baseballs autographed by Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey.
The remainder of the estate, estimated to be in the five hundred million range, was divided equally between Straw and Elise’s fatherless thirteen-year-old daughter, Madeline (Maddie), whom Gordon had always doted on. Maddie’s portion would be looked after by the family lawyers, Albertson and Albertson, otherwise there were no restricting conditions.
Elise was more irate than hurt. She’d never gotten along well with her father. The most that could be said was they’d been fairly compatible for brief periods now and then.
Elise had always taken perverse pleasure in disappointing him. She’d promote herself in his eyes to the point where he’d begin to count on her, then let him down. He often told her she was selfish. She never denied it.
A psychiatrist suggested she was using her negative behavior to test the extent of her father’s love for her, to determine how much he would put up with.
She parried the suggestion. “What shit. I’m not that scheming.”
She seemed to believe that candor was the fee for indemnity. “It’s just not in me,” she’d say. “I don’t have what it takes to endure even the merest self-deprivation.”
No wonder, then, that inheriting only two million was tragic for her. She’d counted on so much more. As sure as she was of her own blood she’d believed it would be coming to her.
She spent close to a hundred thousand on legal fees, trying to invalidate the will. On the basis that her father had been mentally disturbed, a bigot, unbalanced by his extreme intolerance. She claimed the sole reason he’d shorted her was she’d been honest in disclosing her sexual preference for women.
A lady lawyer with whom Elise happened one night to be sharing a three A.M. afterwards ceiling forthrightly advised her to drop her legal action. No court would find in her favor. Even if she won sympathy, which was unlikely, hadn’t her father’s will been drawn up eleven years prior to her coming out?
Elise withdrew but not for a moment would she be resigned. She went on a bitter fling. Ran through the two million and was left with no bearable option other than to go on Maddie’s dole.
It was difficult for her but she managed to feign affection for Maddie. Brushed her hair, took her to Bergdorf for new shoes, tucked her bedcovers. To her way of thinking it was a sort of self-deprivation. She couldn’t sustain it and was greatly relieved when she found she didn’t need to, that Maddie would never refuse her.
If Elise had any redeeming qualities she kept them obscured. Was it possible that she was completely without parental conscience? It seemed so. For her, conceiving Maddie had been unpleasant, carrying her had been disfiguring, delivering her had been painful, and having to care for her was over the top.
She didn’t keep these justifications to herself, sardonically articulated them for the amusement of her cohorts, most of whom could not feel sorry for her because they needed their full supply of pity for themselves.
About then Maddie had gone blind.
It wasn’t really a going. That is, it wasn’t gradual.
She awakened one morning believing she hadn’t awakened, that the black she was experiencing was still the black of sleep. She often had very realistic dreams, so she lay there awaiting where this one might take her.
She touched her eyelids, caused them to blink. She felt them slipping up and down over her eyes. It was weird. How many million times before had she blinked and never felt that. The tip of her finger felt the flickings of her lashes.
As swift as her realization a volt of panic shot through her. She sat up. She cried out, an unrestrained bawl. When no one came she fell back on her pillows.
Black.
There was no reason for it. She hadn’t gotten anything harmful in her eyes.
It was temporary, she assured herself, would go away in a while. Calm down, calm down.
She regretted having cried out, hoped no one had heard her. She wouldn’t again no matter what. If this inability to see didn’t go away, she’d stay in bed, say she felt achy, had caught a virus, was feverish. Perhaps she’d be brought some water and antihistamine capsules and a thermometer but other than that there’d be no concern.
She would be alone in the black.
It frightened her but, at the same time, its possible advantages occurred to her. What if she plunged into it, floated on it. What if this black was something she could bring on at will. How useful that could be. If it went away, as it surely would, she hoped she�
��d be able to get it back.
She lay there listening to herself. Her breathing was a private wind, her heartbeat a friendly, signaling drum. She scratched an itch from her cheek, clicked her teeth, sniffled, swallowed. Her insularity was amplified. With a little more concentration she might be able to hear the coursing of her blood.
Look! Weren’t those angels? Angels outlined by trails of glittering effervescence, moving about against the black? If not for the black she wouldn’t have been able to see them.
Her black.
She claimed it and felt suddenly serene, as though she’d been granted a wish.
On the third such day when Elise looked in on her, Maddie was up and dressed.
“How are you today?” Elise inquired dutifully.
“I’m blind,” Maddie replied matter of fact.
“What nonsense.”
The initial examination of Maddie was conducted by an elderly ophthalmologist at his office on East 72nd. He found nothing wrong with her eyes and said in Maddie’s presence it was his opinion that she was malingering, faking it.
Uncle Straw took Maddie to see specialists at Johns Hopkins and Mayo and the Hermann Eye Center at Texas Medical. Many of the country’s most reputable ophthalmologists, neurologists and neurobiologists had their go at her.
Her head was scanned repeatedly. Each doctor didn’t seem to want to rely upon the diagnostic procedures done by the doctor who’d preceded him. Time and again Maddie was placed on a stainless steel tray and, like a torpedo, slid into a tube. Sandbags on each side of her head to keep her from moving, while not only her visual system but her entire brain could be looked at dimensionally and in slices.
Computerized axial tomography, positron-emission tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, biomagnetic imaging. Scanning laser ophthalmoscopes mapped her retinas in three-tenths of a second.
All diseases that cause blindness were detectable, but the reason for Maddie’s loss of sight eluded the specialists.
Had she ever had meningitis?
West 47th Page 17
