He straightened again, scratched his ribs, and looked at her. His small dark eyes were merry as Kris Kringle. “Elen,” he stated. “Elen Evans. Who’d have believed you would grow up this tall.”
Elen sat immobile. “Not so tall, George. Five-eight.”
Right and left St. Ives swung his head, seemingly just for the pleasure of the movement. “You know what I mean, lady. Why hide it? Who is it gonna hurt to know?”
Elen was rigid, her sweating can clenched in a white hand. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Ted, still on the high table, peered worriedly down at the top of his protégé’s balding head. Martha, torn between wanting to stay with Elen and feeling the best help she could give her would be to go away before unwelcome revelations, paused half out of her seat.
“Why hide the fact that we had a thing, you and me. Once. A long time ago before you knew…”
“Anything.” Elen finished the sentence for him, and then to make perfect her misery, there was Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, standing in the doorway, looking from one to the other. “Before I knew anything at all. I thought, after all these weeks, that you were going to have enough common courtesy to keep your…”
He gave a massive shrug. “And what’s wrong with it? Everyone begins somewhere. Me as an arrogant punk kid, you as a groupie.”
In a quiet voice Elen called him something shocking.
Ted spoke louder. “You don’t mean to insult Elen, George. I’m sure if you thought about it…”
Still with a gentle smile, St. Ives shook his head. “I’m not calling her a groupie, Pozz. I’m saying just the opposite. That she isn’t a groupie now. Makes all the difference.”
“Why is it”—it was Martha Macnamara who spoke, and with bitterness—“why is it that a woman with any interest in music is automatically…?” She sought control over herself, breathing deeply. I do not like to recall the number of times I was asked, in my checkered career, who in the group I was married to or sleeping with to be allowed to go along with them. To be allowed!” Her voice broke. “Sometimes they were groups I’d put together too. Managed.” She let out a shuddering breath.
“It makes me very glad to be on the slope side of fifty.”
Ted Poznan, taking the opportunity to divert the conversation, chuckled too loudly. “It won’t wash, Martha. ‘Slope side of fifty,’ like you were on crutches. You have the rowdiest personal life of the bunch of us.”
Elen cut through. “As long as we’re doing confessions here, George, at least you can tell it properly. We had a very brief thing, which was eight years ago. Hardly an affair at all.”
St. Ives looked up at her from under his eyebrows. “Not to you?”
“Not to you!” she exploded.
“And you’ve hated me for it for all this time,” he said evenly. “I know you have, you poor thing.”
Elen sent the empty soda can spinning over the dirty floor. It was caught by Pádraig, who met her eyes. His glance was full of meaning but she could not decipher it. She was too upset to try. “I haven’t exactly occupied my years with my disappointment, George. Let it alone!”
“I can’t,” he answered. “It’s one of the things that won’t let me alone anymore. I’m fifty-eight years old and I don’t feel good about anything, in body or soul. It’s got to be cleared out. All cleared out.
“You don’t really know me, Elen. I’m not sure anyone does, least of all myself.
“I decided, when I was still a teenager, that I wasn’t going to let friends or family—any personal relationship—stand between me and my music.”
“Very convenient sacrifices,” said Martha to no one in particular.
George wasn’t listening. “Nor was I going to bend for money or popularity or any of those goodies. I know it’s hard for you g—you women—to realize, but the lack of responsibilities was more than equaled by the years of deprivation!”
Elen blinked. “I’m trying to think of something you deprived yourself of, George.”
“Home!” It was as though he had prepared to bellow the word and was as surprised as anyone that it came out in a sigh. “Home, family, security…”
“Not to be found on this earth,” murmured Long to himself.
“… everything the ordinary man has and doesn’t know how to value.”
Martha wanted very badly to ask George what he meant by an ordinary man. One who did not limit his sex to overnight encounters? She wanted to tell him that there were many people in the world who lived very stable lives and still wound up without fireplace, slippers, and the golden retriever. But it wasn’t her argument, really, and George was going on.
“Maybe I was right and maybe I was wrong, but I’ve always tried to be straight about it. I never set out to hurt any human soul, Elen.
“And I’ll tell you one other thing: what I’m going to do. I’m going to take care of all my responsibilities. That, and I’m going to make life give me what I need. That’s why I broke open this ancient, abscessed secret of ours. It’s a part of our—our histories which we have tried to pretend didn’t exist. That’s like suicide, woman. One might just as well die.”
Ted Poznan, above him on the table, nodded to St. Ives’s words like a happy Buddha.
Elen stood with arms crossed, as stiff as wood. “I’m not one of them, George. Not one of your responsibilities. Not much of your history, either, and certainly not your bloody business!”
George St. Ives considered her words carefully and granted them weight. “Not you. No, Elen. Perhaps I shouldn’t…”
But she was already gone, brushing roughly past Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin. The young man stopped, uncertain, in the act of following her. St. Ives himself called the boy back.
“Pádraig. Come in. We missed you a while ago.”
Pádraig looked as though he had been slapped across both cheeks. “Leave Elen be, George,” he said belligerently.
St. Ives nodded agreeably. “I’m not going to chase her. I know you two are close and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt that.”
When this didn’t seem to soften the other appreciably, he added, “I won’t talk to her again until she comes to me. How’s that?”
Pádraig looked self-consciously from side to side. “Who said we were big with each other? I never said…”
Martha turned her giggle into a cough. George St. Ives also was smiling, with the greatest good humor she had ever seen in him. “You can’t hide that kind of thing, boy. You’ve got puppy-dog-after-the-bitch written all over your face. Nothing wrong with it either.”
St. Ives snarled both his hands in his hair in an attempt to push through it. So tangled was it that he had to pull the hands out the way they went in. “Gawd, Sully, you should be glad you’ve no gift for deceit. It’s a bad talent to have. A bad talent.
“I called you back because I want to apologize to you. I’ve made this tour stinking for you, and there’s no excuse.” He rolled forward, rubbing the palms of both hands against his inflamed eyes.
“But you see, I wanted so much out of this tour. Dunno why. I thought, with the fiddling lady, Pozz, and me, we could really get down to something. Maybe an album. What you do wasn’t part of it. In my head.”
“You’re forgetting Elen also,” Martha interjected quietly.
St. Ives brushed flies away. “Yeah. That too. Not fair, just my… dream. I’m apologizing for it now. Hell, Pádraig, you’ve got your own problems, and the secrets that grind you up inside. Like me. Nationality’s a bitch. Shouldn’t have to have someone chewing up your tail on top of that.”
Martha felt an alarming suspicion that George St. Ives was about to be maudlin. Perhaps Pádraig did also, for without another word he vacated the room.
Ted unfolded his legs with many winces and small pained noises. “That was great, George. Really giving. But I’m not sure that Pádraig has secrets grinding him up inside. He’s only twenty…”
Martha asked the question that had been on her mind since she entered the room
. “George, are you drunk?”
His howl of laughter echoed in the chamber. “Ah no, Martha. Not drunk at all. Just doped with smiles, from a little something-or-other from the cabinet of Pozz the Pusher, here.”
Ted Poznan looked stricken, especially after the look Martha turned on him. “Don’t call me that!
“Not drugs, Roshi. Just a perfectly natural substance that the body itself produces, which has a direct opening action on the heart chakra…”
“You mean like bee pollen? Yeast? Amino acids?” Her childlike brow was corrugated.
He choked. “Like that. Sure.”
“How long?”
“It makes changes that last, Martha.”
“How long?” she repeated.
He sighed. “Eight hours or so.”
“And will he be… doped with smiles… for the concert tonight?”
I certainly hope so,” said St. Ives, stretching from side to side. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Probably not much,” said Ted.
Martha stared intently down at her toenail at the tip of her open-toed sandal. “And you, Teddy. Are you doing this natural substance too?”
“Oh, no,” he breathed. “This is just me. Weird Teddy. I’ll take good care of him, Martha.”
She gave him only half a smile.
Late in the afternoon it had become really too hot. Martha didn’t stand such weather well, even when it was dry and the breeze was from the sea. She stayed indoors while Long took Marty to the beach.
But neither was the motel room very congenial, and there was nothing for her to do but putter about, picking up stray horse hairs that had gotten into the spread. “Music from the heart chakra,” she said aloud, giving the headboard an unwarranted hostile glare. Were they going to have heart-chakra music tonight in front of a full house expecting Celtic traditional? She couldn’t believe it of Teddy.
Still less of George St. Ives. Was it what they called male menopause going on there, she wondered. Or was it just the eighth week of tour? She picked up her battered black kapok-stuffed pillow and threw it into the middle of the room and sat on it where it landed. There she had a second zazen of the day: a fine angry sitting that lasted a half hour.
The sun left the window of the room and her irritation went with it.
It occurred to Martha that, under all the reverses of the day, the business of Marty was of highest importance, though adult tantrums had pushed it out of sight. But for Pádraig and Elen she might have come to harm.
It was possible Elizabeth had been right all along, and that following a group of not-so-adult adults from place to place did a child damage. She had been known to suggest that her own problems in life stemmed from that source (which had made it all the more odd that she had asked Martha to take her daughter for five days). Perhaps she trusted Long, Marty’s self-declared daddo, to keep his eyes on her. More likely, she was just so used to using Grandma as a babysitter she hadn’t thought it out.
Well, that situation was scheduled to end tomorrow, for they were leaving for Los Angeles and the last gig of the tour. Elizabeth would be at the motel by nine and they could sit down and talk about Marty’s solitary expedition and about Judy and all. Elizabeth must be halfway down to Santa Cruz by now, if she were going to spend the night in the city, as she loved to do.
Martha felt a twinge of doubt. Her daughter was very reliable, but Martha didn’t want to think of what would happen if she didn’t come and it got later and later, with five hundred miles of hot road in the old, semioperative van in front of them.
She remembered the name of Elizabeth’s closest friend in San Francisco. Elizabeth didn’t have a large circle of friends, but those friendships she acquired were imbedded in concrete. If Shirley wasn’t putting Elizabeth up for the night, she would know who was.
It took ten minutes to get the number from information, to put in her calling-card number, and to find the line open. Elizabeth was there.
Martha said that Marty was fine and they then talked about the house that Elizabeth and Fred were building in Mendocino. The insulation was just done and Elizabeth asked her mother whether she thought there was any chance of getting silicosis from the floating particles. Martha admitted her ignorance, in the matter and neatly sidestepped the question of whether she’d be back in Mendocino in time to help put up the plasterboard.
Martha asked, very casually, who Judy was.
“I… I don’t know, Mother. Some playschool mate? There are forty kids at the Montessori, and twenty or so at the day-care center that folded.”
“This would be someone special. She talks about Judy a lot. Judy’s unhappy. Marty went looking for her today. Alone.” She told her daughter the whole story, not sparing her own responsibility. Elizabeth took it well, but could be of no further help. “Couldn’t Judy be someone there? A friend of someone in the group, or a motel maid?” she asked. Martha denied it, and further added that the child had been exposed to neither television nor radio in the short stint with the band.
Elizabeth gave an oddly satisfied grunt. “Then she must be invisible.”
“Uh… hey?”
“I’ve been waiting for that, Mother. Sooner or later, any child worth her salt finds an invisible playmate. In her present loneliness—”
Martha had called with the determination to remain humble and apologetic with her daughter, knowing well they did not always agree as to child rearing. But at this she could no longer restrain herself. “Loneliness? Dear one, that child has not had solitude to pee for five days!” Nor have I, she added silently.
“That’s different. I remember well: hot and cold running musicians. Adults are not company to a child. Not that she’ll be hurt by it,” Elizabeth added quickly, perhaps remembering that she herself had suggested this vacation. “But I’m sure it’s the stress of it that brought out this ‘Judy’ character.”
In a different voice she asked, “By the by, Mother, do you still have that offensive fellow with you? The bagpiper? I think he alone might cause Marty a little bit of worry.”
Martha tightened her hand on the grip of the phone. “George St. Ives is with us, of course. We’d be in deep yogurt if he left us: the group was formed to center on a good piper with an edge to his playing, and he’s as good as we’ll find. His manners and ideas aren’t quite fashionable, perhaps, but he’s had them for a good long while.
“As have I,” she added, not mentioning that her own convictions, while equaling St. Ives’s in seniority, were not at all identical to his. “But as for his scaring Marty, or inhibiting her in any way, he’s welcome to try. She’s unflappable, unfrightenable, and totally uninhibitable.”
“She gets that from you,” replied Elizabeth. “It skips a generation. Or from Fred, maybe. Did I tell you how he bounced around on the tops of the walls during the framing? He says he has natural talent as a carpenter, but I know it’s just that he can’t imagine himself getting hurt. Like any kid. On my bike I used…”
There was the sound of a door opening and closing in the adjoining room: the room where Marty slept. It was followed by a beating of energetic little feet against the bed frame, as Marty herself was set down. Martha heard a man’s voice: not Long’s. She stood up to investigate, but hearing Marty’s “daddo” reply to it, she stopped in place.
Long was speaking in his deep, Oxfordish voice, which meant he was not happy. “You will not tell anyone at all, simply because you have promised me that you won’t. Whether or not you agree with me. It is a matter of honor and I will hold you to it.”
Was there threat in that tone? Martha thought about Stoughie, and Long’s worry about the police. And about the black cable which had dragged Mayland Long almost into the hospital.
“Just a minute,” she said, cutting off a story about broken spokes, a neighbor boy, and a pipe-rail fence. As she opened the connecting door she heard the outer door open and close once more. Marty was on the bed, pulling one shoelace out of its moorings in her tennie. Long stood b
eside the door, alone and impeccable, his dark skin shining against the rough weave of his jacket. His eyes were preoccupied and angry and did not offer confidences. “Hello,” said Martha and she backed out again, returning to the telephone.
“And if he’s dead, I’ll wish him rest”
The way Martha was shaking her head from side to side was intimidating, and more so was her silence. The musicians who had shown up glanced one to another. “I’m sorry as I can be,” said Teddy Poznan, not for the first time. “But I really don’t think this has anything to do with the MDM.”
Her bothered blue eyes focused sharply on him. “MDM? Adam? But you said it was a natural substance, like bee pollen. Adam’s a felony drug!”
Teddy couldn’t help but wince. “It shouldn’t be, Martha. And it is a natural substance, unlike most of what George shoves into his body.”
Martha Macnamara turned away from him and he glanced around the small circle for support. Elen raised one eyebrow and looked down at her nylon-painted nails. Long’s glance was flat and without pity. Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin was looking at the clock on the wall, which said seven-forty. Ted continued, “But the fact is, that stuff doesn’t last so long in the human body. It’s certainly not keeping him away now.”
Martha’s anger wore thin, curiosity taking its place. “Could he have fallen asleep somewhere? On the beach maybe?”
“Maybe he threw himself into the ocean,” Elen suggested, hard-eyed.
Teddy started like a horse and rolled his eyes. “Wrong! Not after doing Adam, he didn’t!”
She shrugged. “Then maybe someone with very good taste threw him in.”
“Twenty minutes, yet,” said Pádraig.
Martha grunted and slapped the dressing room table. “Enough. We have to plan what we’ll do if he doesn’t show.”
Everyone around the table nodded, but apart from sitting expectantly, no one did anything for two minutes. At last Martha sighed and said, “It’s a shame no one of us can sing. It’s so easy to fake an accompaniment to a song, or just sit respectfully while somebody yodels. And it really uses up the time.”
Twisting the Rope Page 9
