“Grace,” she corrected.
If only she were back in Northampton already, where everyone was needy and she was needed. She wished she had never visited that wild-animal preserve at the Cape, had never paused to look at those foxes. She wished she had not married a man because he was learned and polite, especially since he had turned out to be pedantic and sanctimonious.
FROM TIME TO TIME that Sunday, Gustave thought of calling the lawyer who’d married them—she happened to specialize in divorce. Instead he read the papers, and watched the football game. What a sport: force directed by intelligence. He prepared for tomorrow’s class, the one in which he and the students would reproduce one of Faraday’s earliest experiments in electrification. They’d all come carrying foil-wrapped water-filled film canisters with a protruding nail. These were primitive Leyden jars in which to store electricity. The electricity would be produced by a Styrofoam dinner plate nested in an aluminum pie pan—the kids would bring these friction makers, too. He went to bed early. He could see a low autumnal moon above the mansard across the street—well, only the upper half of the sphere was visible, but he could supply the rest.
GRACE BOUGHT, among other things, a yellow sweater. She took her time getting back to the hotel. She found Hal showered and smiling. During a long walk by the river she listened to his opinions on magic realism and antonomasia—she’d forgotten what that was, she admitted. “The use of an epithet instead of a proper name,” Hal said. “ ‘The Fussbudget,’ say.” He told her of the Spanish medieval farsa, which was related to farce. And just when she thought her aching head would explode, it was time to put him into a cab to the airport. He seemed to have enough cash for the taxi. He thrust his head out of the open window as the vehicle left the curb. “My apartment is near Las Ramblas, best location in Barcelona,” he called. She waved. The cab disappeared, and her headache with it.
She went back to their room, now hers, and read the papers and enjoyed a solitary supper in front of the TV, watching a replay of that afternoon’s football game. Nice intercept! Such brave boys there on the screen. But Gustave had been brave, too, hadn’t he, scorning savoir faire as he cleansed his house of unwelcome revelers. How red his face had become when Hal theatrically held out his hand … he’d felt wronged, hadn’t he, or perhaps in the wrong; maybe he thought she’d summoned her friends, maybe he thought he’d failed her. If she ever saw him again she’d tell him about Hal’s lonely rootlessness. She’d tell him about poor Lee and Lee’s barn of unsalable paintings, if she ever saw him again … She put on her new nightgown and went to bed. She could see a curve of the dome of the Massachusetts statehouse, just enough to suggest the whole.
THE LECTURE ROOM was shaped like a triangle. The platform, holding lectern and lab bench, was at the apex, the lowest part of the room; concentric rows of slightly curved tables radiated upward toward the back. Three students sat at each table. The professor stood at the lectern when he talked, moved to his lab bench for demonstrating. He and the students employed their identical homemade equipment. As he talked and demonstrated—creating the electric charge, storing it—the students imitated. There was expectant laughter and an occasional excited remark and a general air of satisfaction. Only a few of these poets might change course and become physicists, but not one of them would hold science in contempt. “Faraday made this experiment with equally crude apparatus,” he reminded them. “And with faith that it would work. Faith—so unfashionable now—was his mainstay.”
The woman in the back row, alone at a table, without pie plate or film can, wished that she, too, had the implements, that she could obey the instructions of the measured, kindly voice; but mostly she marveled again at the story that voice was telling of the humble young Faraday setting himself upon his life’s journey. “He considered that God’s presence was revealed in nature’s design,” wound up the little man. He looked radiant.
When he at last noticed the figure in the yellow sweater, he was cast back to an afternoon in Paris when that same glowing color had been produced by sun refracted through stained glass, and the lips of his companion had parted as she listened to winds and strings send music aloft. She had thrilled, she had become elevated, she had generously carried him with her …
The lecture concluded to applause; the teenagers dispersed; the professor materialized in the chair next to the visitor’s.
They looked at each other for a while.
“I’m Grace,” she said at last.
“I’m Gustave”—and how his heart leaped. “I’d like to … get to know you.”
Another long pause while he belatedly considered the dangers in so ambitious an enterprise, for he too would have to be known, and his shabby secrets revealed, and his out-of-date convictions as well. They’d endure necessary disappointments, and they’d practice necessary forgivenesses, careful to note which subjects left the other fraught. Grace’s mind moved along the same lines. Each elected to take the risk. Gustave showed his willingness by touching the lovely face, Grace hers by disdaining eclipsis. “Me too,” was all she said.
VALLIES
DESMOND CHAPIN OPENED HIS DOOR to a spare, plainly dressed woman of about forty, nose tilted, reddish hair in a strict bun. “Miss …”
“Valerie Gordon,” she said.
“The new nanny.”
“Well … If we all suit each other.” She had a faint Canadian accent.
“You remind me of somebody,” Desmond said, escorting her into the living room. When Val did not respond, he plunged on anyway. “Mary Poppins?”
She shook her head. “I’m not like Mary Poppins. I’m sometimes fanciful, but I don’t work magic. I like courtesy, but I don’t care about manners.”
This was Val’s first interview in the nanny line and she considered it a rehearsal. She had no references other than clerical. After shaking hands with Deborah Chapin, she said hello to the four-year-old twin boys. They grinned and giggled.
“I have a special rapport with twins,” she dared to say to the boys. “You see, I am …”
But they were already running out to play in the fenced-in backyard.
Desmond asked why she was leaving office work. Too repetitive, after twenty-odd years, she told him—too penitential. Yes, she could manage simple housekeeping; yes, prepare simple dinners on occasion; yes, mending. “Simple mending,” she clarified.
Deborah wrote down the names of Val’s references, office managers all.
Desmond said: “I am puzzling the difference between courtesy and manners.”
“Oh … one is innate, the other learned.”
Val left the rehearsal. She guessed that Deborah had been writing with invisible ink. But the next day a telephone offer came—“though we would be even happier,” Deborah said, “if you’d live with us, and the salary would be the same. Would you reconsider?”
“I won’t live in, sorry.”
Sigh. “We want you anyway.”
Val’s new career began.
The Chapins gave her a car with two child boosters and told her she should consider it hers. She used it sometimes, though most of her outings with the boys were by bus, trolley, or subway, or on foot. And since her flat didn’t have a parking space she kept the car at the Chapins’ and walked back and forth to work. If the Chapins asked her to babysit at night, she left without escort at the end of the evening, ignoring Desmond’s doomsaying. “I know this is safe old Godolphin, the most dangerous things here are the oak-leaf skeletonizers, still, Val … it would take just a minute to drive you.” But each time she said no, strode down the path, turned her head at the gate, and gave him an impish smile perfected long ago. He probably couldn’t see it. She tramped home without mishap.
SHE STAYED WITH THE CHAPINS for five years, until they went bankrupt. She would have stayed longer—the twins loved her, she always knew which was which, she had a nest egg and could go without pay for a while—but no, it would add to his humiliation, Desmond said; and anyway they were going to move out of
town.
The Chapins introduced Val to the Greens and their three little girls. The Greens hired her instantly, although they were disappointed that she wouldn’t occupy their attic retreat. But Val still wouldn’t leave her basement flat. In winter she appreciated the warmth of the nearby furnace, in summer the cool of the half-submerged rooms. Meager sunlight slipped like an envelope into one after another of her high windows and then lay on the floor as if waiting to be picked up. Solitude, silence … living in would subject her to constant voices and movements, bothersome even in a courteous family, worse still among the irrepressible kin she’d grown up with.
She spent several contented years as the Greens’ nanny. But then their work took them to Washington.
Sitting with Val at the kitchen table, Bunny Green said: “Think about coming with us. The capital …”
“No, but thank you.”
Bunny sighed. “You are a gem. I wish you had a twin.”
Val looked at her lap.
“One of my friends is pregnant again,” Bunny said, “and that scattered family around the corner needs a nanny, though they don’t know it yet. Your telephone will be ringing off the hook.”
Not quite. She did get some offers as she met one family after another. But no situation would do. One house was located on the edge of Godolphin where it met a western suburb—she’d have to take two buses to get there. Another family had piled lessons and activities on their four children—Val would become a chauffeur. A third had an ill child who needed constant attention. The burdened mother’s eyes silently pleaded. But Val said firmly, “I’m sorry, but I’ve found I am unsuited to such work.”
So she took a temporary job—a couple with a three-year-old was staying in Godolphin for the summer. She’d start searching again in the fall, though without confidence. The Chapin and Green references counted in her favor, but her manner probably worked against her—that hint of the governess that Desmond Chapin had spotted was out of fashion. And by now either her color or her age made her a misfit on the playgrounds. Beautiful women from Uganda and Burkina Faso, thin and smooth enough to be teenagers, tried to include her as they watched their charges from benches, but they soon lapsed into their dialect, or French, and their kids didn’t approach Val’s shy three-year-old. British au pairs avoided her as if she were a headmistress. Scandinavians smiled at her as if she were a pet. The mommies—there were some of those, too, unmannerly—ignored her entirely: they were too busy boasting about their children as if someday they meant to sell them.
She missed the Greens. By the time they had decamped, their girls did not need supervision at the park or anywhere else—they needed only dinners when their parents were out and occasional reminders about homework. But they craved her company, especially at bedtime. They wanted to hear the tales that Val had concocted with them when they were younger. Case Histories of Ethical Dilemmas, Val called her stories. The girls called them Vallies. They took place in vaguely medieval cities. Royalty lived at a distance, and there was no romantic love and no hidden treasure; but there was sometimes casual enchantment and once in a while a quest. In one Vallie a girl’s ailing mother was partial to caterpillar sandwiches: Was the daughter obliged to prepare the meal? And then share it? In another, a six-year-old boy wanted to watch a beheading—the penalty in Vallieland for sanctimony. Was he too young to see gore or would he become enlightened, and someday join the campaign against capital punishment? After a greedy squire was transformed into an ox, should he be put to the plow, or was change of identity punishment enough?
Yes, she missed the Greens. She wondered what they were doing this Monday morning … had they made friends in Washington? She still missed the Chapin twins, who must be almost in high school. She missed the three-year-old now back in California. But mooning over losses, regretting a child no longer in sight … that never got her anywhere. It was nine o’clock and she’d better hurry. She had an interview at ten.
The entire family was present at the interviewing—the parents and their two daughters and their son. Nine, seven, five. The father taught at the local university—a form of mathematics, he grudgingly revealed. “Topology.” He had a strawberry mark on his left cheek, no more disfiguring than a stripe on a shirt. The mother was petite, almost child-sized herself, with colorless messy hair and a long elfin nose. “I don’t work,” she said. “I don’t work yet,” she corrected. “I’m looking for a craft.” The children were quiet and appeared healthy, though the boy—the youngest—was too thin, and did not meet her eyes. “Your references,” Professor Duprey said tonelessly, “are impeccable.” Their shabby townhouse was located on the Boston end of Godolphin, a short walk from Val’s apartment.
But with the Dupreys it was a condition of employment that she live in.
How flexible her principles had become. This family had no gaiety and she guessed they hadn’t much small talk, either. Silence and solitude might still be hers. And Godolphin had become less safe at night, at least for a woman walking alone. A developer had recently bought her apartment house and might turn it into condominiums.
She followed Professor Duprey down a perilous staircase. The others trooped after them. They entered a group of rooms which resembled her own, even to the tiny high windows. Light would slot itself downward in the same impersonal way.
“Yes,” said Val. “But I have a lease,” she remembered.
“There’ll be a penalty for breaking it. We’ll pay,” said the professor. “You’ll have Thursdays and Sundays off, twenty-four hours each.”
A civilized form of servitude, then. But she had never indulged in much of a social life since leaving home—an occasional afternoon movie with one of her few friends.
“It isn’t that we go out much, Miss Gordon,” said the wife. First names would probably not be the rule here.
“They don’t go out at all,” said Win, the nine-year-old.
“But the household requires another adult,” said the professor.
“If God had wanted people to have three children—,” began Mrs. Duprey.
“—he would have created a third parent,” finished young Liam, and this time he did look at Val.
AND IF VAL HAD WANTED to live in a houseful of adults and kids and bugs (the Dupreys’ screens needed patching) she might never have left her own noisy family in their ramshackle Toronto house, where no one had a room to herself; she could have watched the generations replace themselves; she could have made up Vallies for whatever children were around. What she wanted, she had discovered at twenty, was a life alone, with a family at fingertip distance. And she’d gotten that for a while, hadn’t she, with the Chapins and the Greens and that little girl this summer … She swatted a mosquito. Besides insects flying in through the screens, there were beetles making free with her kitchen as well as with the one above it—Theirs. First names were to be avoided, so she thought of her employers as pronouns. He, She, They. The pair of Them.
He was tall and ill-kempt. She was a child herself. She burned the meals or left them half cooked, sewed buttons on the wrong garments (“You’ll start a new style,” Val comforted Fay, the second daughter, who was dismayed at a cardigan adorned with toggles). And She started projects and then abandoned them, didn’t care that insects ruled the household. She was at ease only with the children and, gradually, with Val.
There was no heat between the pair of Them. No anger, no resentment, no merriment. They might have been brother and sister forced to live in reduced circumstances in order to bring up younger siblings. As for the three siblings, undemanding and obedient, they quickly attached themselves to Val, but shared her as scrupulously as if they’d made a compact.
The girls walked themselves to school. Val escorted Liam, who spent his mornings at a different school. She stood quietly when he stopped to stare at things. At an irregular stone wall held together not by mortar but by the stone layer’s skilled placement of rocks. At the buds, half-opened petals, full blooms, and spent ovals of a hibiscus. He r
emarked on the progress of one form to another day by day. He squatted to examine deposits of dogs. “This dog’s owner is not doing his share,” Val remarked. “He should follow his pet with a pooper-scooper.”
“Then we would not get to see the dog’s shit,” said the child, “and imagine the circumstances of his insides.” His utterances were few and precise. She supposed he was some sort of genius. They were all precocious—even the incompetent Mrs. Duprey seemed like an overbright twelve-year-old.
The nearby playground had whimsical sculpture. Liam often clumsily climbed a stone turtle and occupied himself in counting something, molecules of air, probably. Val sat on a bench, ignored by the usual collection of adults. They went there many times that fall. For lunch he ate a single carrot stick and half a cheese sandwich. She wondered how he’d take to caterpillars.
At home Val encouraged the children to make their beds in the morning; she encouraged Mrs. Duprey to straighten the marital bed and to dust and sweep once in a while. Val herself ran the vacuum cleaner over carpets whose pattern had been lost decades ago. And eventually it was Val who shopped for groceries, cooked the meals, called the exterminator, had the back stairs repaired, remembered to leave the money on the oversize dining table for the weekly cleaning woman (cash was kept loose in a kitchen drawer, available to everyone; Val paid herself out of it). That giant dining table had probably come with the house. The wicker living room furniture, no cushions matching—it had probably come from Goodwill.
One Saturday in December she suggested a trip to a large discount shop to buy new school clothes. Val drove the family car. She saw to it that the children were properly outfitted. Liam liked a shirt of madras plaid, and Val bought three of them, each a variation on the others. Mrs. Duprey wandered among the clothes for teens and found some navy blue dresses suitable for French orphans. Val bought her half a dozen.
It was a while before she resumed the Vallies. The children, talented readers all, still liked to be read aloud to at bedtime—at least the girls did, curled up on either side of Val on the wicker couch in the living room. On a footstool Liam would stare at the blackened fireplace. The children liked the unbowdlerized Brothers Grimm; they liked Robin McKinley’s fantasies, with their complicated psychologies.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 39
