Then one Wednesday night: “Tell us a story, please,” said Win. “You do tell stories; your résumé said so.”
“Well … mine aren’t exactly stories.”
“What, then?”
“Interactive dilemmas. Together we invent situations that require resolution. Then we invent some resolutions. Then we choose among them, or don’t.”
“Please,” said Win.
“Once upon a time,” said Val, “in a peaceful house in a peaceful village, a lodger came to the inn. He was a dark, quiet man: a woodworker. He carved beautiful spoons and ladles and spindles, and he charged fair prices. After a while he was able to buy his own cottage and build a studio next door—a big, open barnlike thing, only three sides to it. The children in the village gathered where a wall might have been, to watch him work.
“One day an official from the prince of the district stopped at the village to speak to the mayor about something financial, or maybe agricultural. On his way out of town he passed the woodworker’s cottage, slowly, for the house was pretty and the horse thought so, too. In the studio the woodworker was carving a puppet, and several children were watching. The official reined in his horse. The woodworker looked up. The men’s eyes met. The official turned his horse around and went back towards the mayor’s house at a leisurely trot.
“It turned out that the woodworker had spent time in the prince’s dungeon being punished for a crime. Not an ordinary crime, though. A crime against a child.” A figure crept close to the couch: She. “And the official’s dilemma was this: was he bound to tell the mayor that there was a person with such tendencies in their midst?
“He thought and thought. His horse drew to a halt. They both pondered.”
“He was bound to tell only if the tendencies hadn’t … hadn’t gone away,” said Fay.
“Such tendencies rarely go away entirely,” said Mrs. Duprey.
“The carver had done his penance,” said Win.
“What happens if the official tells the mayor?” said Fay.
“Then the dilemma flies off his shoulders onto the back of the mayor,” said Val. “Should the mayor let the woodworker’s past be known to the village?”
“The woodworker would be shunned,” said Win. “He’d leave.”
“Three walls—everyone can see what he does,” said Liam.
“Let him alone unless he builds a fourth wall,” said Win.
“Until,” corrected Mrs. Duprey.
That was that. There were no tuckings-in for this gang. The children just wandered off. Their little mother, too.
THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, was Val’s day off. She went to the movies with a friend. And Friday the Dupreys had one of their rare evenings of guests—another family and its children. Val cooked two meat loaves and let the kids mix the salad. Though she was invited to join the table—as she had been invited at the Chapins’, the Greens’—she declined as always. She stood at the kitchen window and looked through screens she’d installed at the transformed garden, now shades of gray under the winter moon: but she knew where the tulips she’d planted would come up, and the allium later.
Saturday night: “Please, another dilemma!” cried Fay. And Sunday, too, this time joined by Him as well as Her. He sat in a chair by the fireplace, stern as any mayor. And She on the floor beside the couch, and Liam on the footstool, and the girls next to Val, Fay stroking her arm.
They took these positions several nights a week while Val recycled the old Vallies, some of them inventions, some embellishments on real or half-real incidents. Finally she couldn’t remember any more. Well then, invent some more, embellish …
“There was a large town that climbed up the side of a mountain,” she began, “a bustling town, prosperous, most people happy, some miserable of course. People had big families in those days …”
“They expected to lose some children,” said Mrs. Duprey.
“They practiced redundancy,” said the professor.
“One household was particularly numerous—nine offspring, assorted uncles and aunts, a grandfather. They didn’t have much money, for none of them liked to work, but they were generous with what they had. There were three cows and some hens. Usually someone remembered to feed them. Mum did the cooking for the family and Dad did the repairs on the house.
“Right in the middle of the lively crowd were twin girls, not identical. One was spirited. She had light curly hair that went its own willful way. People couldn’t seem to help loving this tousled girl. The other one, who was pretty, too, hovered between a sense of duty and a wish for fun. She was organized; the family trusted her to manage their skimpy finances. Her hair was black and reliably straight, like licorice.
“Perhaps the lighthearted girl was also scatterbrained. At any rate, when she was nineteen, she found she was with child. The child’s father had scampered. This had happened to one or two of her sisters. Such an event was accepted, was even applauded. The new child, like the others, would be everyone’s. Everyone would care for it. There would be only an increase of the family’s easy happiness …
“But the child was born—”
“Defective,” said Mrs. Duprey.
Val swallowed. “Yes, the infant, a girl, was born deformed and also defective, the kind of child who cries all the time and is un-rewarding to care for. Her red ringlets”—Val’s hand fluttered to her own hair—“seemed like a curse. The town witches would have done away with her. The priests offered to take her to their House of Compassion on the far side of the mountain and bring her up with others of her kind. A magician wanted to transform her into an amphibian. But the family wouldn’t listen to those ideas. ‘Hope,’ they said—Hope was the poor infant’s misbegotten name—‘Hope will be brought up in our midst.’ ‘She will have the best life that can be given to her,’ said the oldest and laziest sister.
“There was only one silent voice—one person whose vision of the family had been darkened by the event, who inwardly damned its members as feckless and forgetful.”
“A twin sister,” said Liam.
“Who knew she’d do all the caring,” said Win.
“She would have accepted the magician’s offer. A nice frog,” said Fay.
“Or the priests’,” said Mrs. Duprey.
“Or even the witches’. Euthanasia,” said the professor.
“But she would not have been listened to,” said his wife. “Even though she was—”
“So what should she do?” Val quickly interrupted.
“Run away,” came all five voices at once.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, on a rainy Sunday, Val was having a cup of tea near the movie theater, waiting to see a new Afghan film. A man dressed in clothes that had once been good sat down opposite her. His teeth, too, had deteriorated, but his smile remained charming nonetheless, and of course she recognized him.
They had recently returned to town. Val asked for news of the twins, and Deborah. Desmond asked for news of Val.
“I’m nanny in a professor’s family now,” she said. “I’m also dogs-body and housekeeper. I find I rather like it.”
“Do you live in?”
“… yes.”
“I’ve thought of you off and on through the years,” said Desmond. “I remember that first day, when you reminded me of Mary Poppins. But it wasn’t Mary Poppins, really—it was the actress who played her in that movie, who played in so many movies, remember, Julie Andrews. She was once an adorable English ingenue, and she was still adorable years later. You weren’t a governess type, and neither was she. You were a party girl in disguise.”
Val said nothing to this discourteous unmasking.
“You’ve cut your hair at last and let it curl the way it wants to. More youthful … you’re only fifty, yes?”
“Forty-nine.” Sallie was forty-nine, too, if she hadn’t already died of self-sacrifice. And Hope … Hope would be thirty. Val remembered the painful birth, the big head with its red fuzz finally emerging from between her thighs, the instant rea
lization that this misshapen infant would not be like other children except maybe in her attachment to her mother.
Desmond said: “With that flighty coiffure I’ll bet you remind yourself of the girl you were.”
“The girl I left behind,” said Val in a low, flat voice.
AUNT TELEPHONE
I GOT MY FIRST TASTE OF RAW FLESH when I was nine years old. I had been taken to an adult party. My father was out of town at an investors’ conference and my brother was spending the night at a friend’s; and my babysitter got sick at the last minute, or said she did. What was my mother to do—stay home? So she brought me along. The affair was cocktails and a buffet featuring beef tartare on pumpernickel rounds and a bowl of icy seviche—this was thirty years ago, before such delicacies had been declared lethal. The party was given by the Plunkets, family therapists: two fatties who dressed in similar sloppy clothing as if to demonstrate that glamour was not a prerequisite for rambunctious sex.
My mother and I and Milo walked over to the party in the glowing September afternoon. Our house and Milo’s and the Plunkets’ all lay within a mile of each other in Godolphin, a leafy wedge of Boston, as did the homes of most of the other guests—the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and social workers who made up this crowd. They were all friends, they referred patients to one another, they distributed themselves into peer-supervision subsets—a collegial, talkative crew, their envy vigorously tamped down. Their kids were friends, too—some as close as cousins. I already hated groups, but I was willy-nilly part of the bunch.
Among the adults, Milo was first among peers. He produced paper after acclaimed paper: case histories of children with symptoms like elective mutism and terror of automobiles and willful constipation lasting ten days. I longed to become one of his fascinating patients, but I knew to my sadness that therapists rarely treated their friends’ children no matter how sick and I knew, also, that I wasn’t sick anyway, just ornery and self-centered. In his published work Milo gave the young sufferers false first names and surname initials. “What would you call me?” I asked him once, still hoping for immortality.
“Well, Susan, what would you like to be called?”
“Catamarina M.”
He warmed me with his brown gaze. (“The eyes,” Dr. Lenore once remarked to my mother, “thoroughly compensate for the absence of chin.”)
Milo said: “Catamarina is your name forever.”
So I had an appellation if not symptoms. All I had to do was stop talking or moving my bowels. Alas, nature proved too strong for me.
Milo’s colleagues respected his peaceable bachelordom: they recognized asexuality as an unpathological human preference, also as a boon to society. He had been born in cosmopolitan Budapest, which gave him further cachet. His liberal parents, who were in the bibelot business, had gotten out just before World War II. So Milo was brought up in New York by a pair of Hungarians, penniless at first, soon rich again. He inherited a notable collection of ancient Chinese figurines.
On the day of that party Milo was wearing his standard costume: flannel slacks, turtleneck sweater, tweed jacket. He was then almost fifty, a bit older than my parents and their friends. His hair, prematurely gray, rose high and thick from a narrow forehead. It swung at his nape like a soft broom. He was very tall and very thin.
Dr. Will Plunket gave me beef tartare in a hamburger bun. But the Plunket boys wouldn’t let me join their game of Dungeons and Dragons. So, munching my feral sandwich, I wandered in the fall garden still brightened by a glossy sun. On a chaise on the flagstone terrace sat a woman I didn’t know. She looked sulky and bored. Dr. Judah joined me for a while and wondered aloud if fairies nested under the chrysanthemums. I frowned at him, but when he went inside I knelt and peered under the mums. Nothing. After a while Milo found me. In his soft voice he talked about the greenery near the stone wall—basil was rumored to cure melancholy, marjoram headaches, ground ivy conjunctivitis. He bent, picked up a handful of the ivy, stood, and crushed a few leaves into my palm. “Not to be taken internally.” Then he, too, went in.
I drifted toward the terrace. “How lucky you are,” drawled the woman on the chaise, and she drank some of her cocktail.
“Yes. Why?”
“To have such an attentive aunt,” she said, and drank some more.
“My aunt lives in Michigan.”
“She’s here on a visit?”
“She’s in Europe this month.”
“I mean the aunt you were just talking to.”
“Milo?”
“Her name is Milo?”
I raced into the house. I found my mother standing with Dr. Margaret and Dr. Judah. “You’ll never believe it, that patient on the terrace, she thought Milo was my aunt!” My mother gave me a ferocious stare. “My aunt,” I heedlessly repeated to Dr. Margaret, and then turned to Dr. Judah. “My—” but I couldn’t finish because my mother was yanking me out of the room.
“Stop talking, Susan, stop right now, do not say that again. It would hurt Milo’s feelings dreadfully.” She let go of me and folded her arms. “There’s dirt on your knees,” she said, though dirt was not usually denigrated in this circle. “Filth.”
“Garden soil,” I corrected.
My mother sighed. “The woman on the terrace is Dr. Will’s sister.”
“I wish Milo was my aunt.”
“Were.”
“Were? Why?”
“Condition contrary to fact.” As our conversation slid into the safe area of grammar, we returned to the party. Milo was now listening to Dr. Will. It didn’t seem to me that Milo’s longish hair was more feminine than Dr. Will’s black smock. But this once I would obey my mother—I would not again relate the error of the woman on the terrace. I hoped that Milo hadn’t heard my earlier exclamation. Not for the world would I hurt his feelings; or so I thought.
MILO CELEBRATED THANKSGIVING here, Passover there, Christmas twice in one day, first at the Collinses and then at the Shapiros. He smoked his after-dinner cigar in everybody’s backyard. He came to our annual New Year’s Day open house, which I was required to attend for fifteen minutes. I spent that quarter hour behind a lamp. My parents, shoulder to shoulder, greeted their guests. Sometimes my mother slipped her hand into my father’s pocket, like a horse nuzzling for sugar.
Milo went to piano recitals and bar mitzvahs and graduations. In August he visited four different families, one each week. He was an aunt, my aunt, aunt to many children born into our therapeutic set, if an aunt is someone always ready to talk on the telephone to worried parents—especially to mothers, who do most of the worrying. Those mothers of ours, full of understanding for their patients, were helpless when their own offspring gave them trouble. Then they became frantic kid sisters, reaching for the phone. Bad report cards, primitive behavior on the playground, sass, lying, staying out all night, playing hooky—for all such troubles Milo was ready with advice and consolation. He knew, also, when a child needed outside help—strangling the cat was a sure indication. Usually, though, it was the parent who required an interpretation and also a recommendation to back off. “No, a joint today is not a crack pipe tomorrow,” he memorably assured Dr. Lenore. Dr. Lenore’s daughter was, of course, listening on the extension. We were all masters of domestic wiretapping—slipping a forefinger between receiver and the button on which it rested, lifting the receiver to our ear, releasing the button with the caution of a surgeon until a connection was soundlessly established.
THE JULY I WAS TWELVE I ran away from overnight camp. The day after I arrived home, surly and triumphant, I eavesdropped on Milo and my mother. Milo was suggesting that my mother praise me for taking the bus rather than hitchhiking on the highway.
“She stole the bus money from her counselor,” my mother said.
“Borrowed, I think. Encourage her to return the money by mail.”
“Shouldn’t she be encouraged to return herself to camp?”
Milo said: “To the hated place?” There was a talcum paus
e as he drew on his cigar. “To the place she had the resourcefulness to escape from?”
“It’s difficult to have her home,” my mother said, with a little sob.
“Yes, Ann, I can imagine,” said Milo. And then: “It is her home, too.”
There was a silence—Milo’s the silence of someone who has delivered a truth and my mother’s the silence of someone who has received it. And a third silence, a silence within a silence: mine. “It is her home, too,” I heard. The gentle living room. The kitchen whose window looked out on birds and squirrels and sometimes a pheasant that had strayed from the more suburban part of Godolphin. The attached office where my mother saw patients during the day. The bedroom where in the evenings she received those patients’ panicky calls and where she herself called Milo. My brother’s room with his construction projects in various stages of completion—though a year younger than I, he was already an adept mechanic. My own room: posters, books, toys outgrown but not discarded, clothing pooled on the floor and draped on lamps. A long window led from my room onto a little balcony. My mother had once planted impatiens in boxes on the balcony but I let the flowers die. Without recrimination she had watched me neglect—desecrate, even—a generous space in the house. The house that was hers, too.
For the remainder of July I babysat for the kids next door, treating them with a pretend affection I ended up feeling. (“Hypocrisy is the first step toward sincerity,” Milo had written.) I made a small effort to straighten my room. (“A token is a cheap coin, but it is not counterfeit”—same source.) In August we went to Cape Cod.
Our determinedly modest bungalow faced the sea; there was no sandy beach, but we had become used to lying on our strip of shingle. The house had four small bedrooms. The walls were thin, providing perfect acoustics. There was a grille and an outdoor shower. Sometimes my father grilled fish; sometimes he and my mother prepared meals together in the inconvenient kitchen, where they bumped into each other and laughed.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 40
