by Luanne Rice
“She was a terrific mother. She loved taking me, and you girls, places. She’d take us to Providence or New York for the day at the drop of a hat. She and I saw the first night of many a Broadway show. I’m sad that she won’t ever be that way again. I’d always hoped that we could be good company for each other.”
Bennison Point was a maypole of good company, with colored streamers connecting the Swifts and the Symondses and the Mackens and the Bennisons. And here came Pem, shuffling through the house, appearing at the porch door in her pink towel, both hands stretched out, a mask of perplexity on her old face, saying, “I can’t find my clothes.” And Honora and I both started to laugh, we couldn’t help it, and we walked to Pem and held her in our arms.
9
“THIS IS MARVELOUS,” HELEN SAID, TAPPING my quarterly report with one hand. We were sitting at the dining table in her apartment because she could not, as she had written in her note, “abide the stodginess of the foundation offices.” She lived in Chelsea, not far from the Gregory, with a view of the seminary gardens from her windows. Worn but vivid tapestries of life in the French court covered her walls. A gaudy parrot regarded us from a cage that resembled a Chinese teahouse.
“I’m so pleased you like it.”
“Oh, I do—we all like your work. John appointed me to discuss it with you. As you probably know, he’s all over the world these days. Your husband keeps you informed of John’s travels, doesn’t he?”
“Quite well, considering he’s usually traveling with him.”
“Oh dear,” Helen said, gazing politely out the window, leaving no doubt that she had definite views about those travels. She wore green eye shadow today, applied as patchily as her sister’s had been, but somehow it seemed glamorous on her. Silver and enameled bangles clanked when she moved her arm. Her movements as she poured our tea were somehow theatrical; I wondered whether she had been an actress. She wore the same yellow, orange, and green caftan she had on the first time I met her.
“Do you do much work for the foundation?” I asked.
“Nowadays I do. I used to be a professional tennis player. I did!” she said emphatically, as though she thought I wouldn’t believe her. “I played against Billie Jean King, Margaret Court, Chris Evert when she was just a baby—all the best players. I reached the semifinals at Wimbledon one year. I had to quit, on account of a really bad case of tendonitis. I still have it,” she said, flexing her right arm.
“You look like a tennis player,” I said, appraising her muscular arms.
“I still love it. John and I play all the time, whenever he’s free, that is. When we both were married, we’d have great mixed doubles.”
“Oh, you’re divorced?”
“Widowed. My husband dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. It was quite a blow. No one expects someone young to die like that. I’ve been trying to analyze what it is that draws me to your work so, and I think it’s the stories about loss. God, they kill me—that story about Caroline Orne, it could break your heart. I sense that you know about loss.”
“Well, my father died when I was young. But aside from that, I don’t, not really,” I said. I wondered: does constantly fearing it count?
“Maybe that’s enough.”
“Helen,” I said, not knowing quite how to ask the question, “the last time I saw you, you told me your mother had been murdered.”
“Yes,” Helen said. She twisted her bracelets. “None of us has quite gotten over that. I’m the youngest, and I was twelve. Jasper was twenty. You know, he was at Harvard then, and everyone said he had a brilliant future as a lawyer, but we’ll never know. All the life went out of old Jazz afterwards. He was her favorite, I guess. At least he thought he was.” She smiled in a wry manner, so that only half her mouth turned up. “Jasper is very big on things like that—‘Mother’s favorite,’ ‘eldest child’—you know. Poor Jazz, he’s just a middle-level banker.”
If Helen had been a subject instead of my patron, I would have asked her the details of her mother’s murder. I wanted to know. Perhaps she was considering telling me; she was watching me carefully, but then her gaze shifted to her parrot.
“Back to your report,” Helen said. “I liked the part about Dora Castile, though I must say it takes a far stretch of the imagination to understand what anyone, even a wife, could see in trash like Warren Castile.”
“You should have heard her voice,” I said. “It was defiant, as though she was daring me to question that she loved him, but at the same time it was shaky. He’d only been dead about two weeks.”
“The two weeks after Leroy, my husband, died . . . they were terrible. Meetings with lawyers, insurance men, the funeral-home people. It was incredible. I felt desperately sad the whole time, but I never had a minute to sit still and think about it.”
“I can’t imagine that,” I said, trying not to think about Nick, sensing it would be a bad omen if I did.
I was preparing to ask Helen about her mother when she cleared her throat. “Are you happy with your husband?” she asked, leaning forward to pour more tea.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s special between us. I don’t think anyone has a marriage like ours. We do everything possible to be together. That’s difficult, with his work, but we’re vigilant. I try to spend nights in the city when he has to work late, and I travel with him on business trips.”
“All the time?”
“Whenever possible,” I said. The beauty of talking to someone new, someone far removed from my family, was that I could go back in time—restore the truth, by what I said, to what I wanted it to be.
Helen shook her head, stirring milk into her tea with an ivory-handled spoon. “Excuse me, but that sounds brutal. He forces you to do this?”
I stared at her. “No. I want to do it,” I said.
She stirred silently for a few seconds before speaking. “Well,” she said. “Everyone has their own ways of making their marriages work. But with the life I know you must lead, after years of observing it in my own family, I think that system would turn into torture.”
I laughed. “But I love doing it! Nick tries to call me before the last train leaves for New York. Or he tells me we’re going on a business trip, and our bags are packed within ten minutes.”
“Oh, not you, dear. I was thinking it might be torture for Nick.”
That was it, wasn’t it? I felt my hands touch my cheeks, remembering that night at Vinnie’s, when Nick had asked me not to come into the city on his late nights. Had he rehearsed the words? Here was Helen Avery casting a cool eye on the situation, naming it torture.
“I can see I’ve upset you,” Helen said. “I mean, I know the pressures those guys put themselves under—sometimes unnecessarily, I think. And to have to worry about you, and your comfort, and making sure you are informed before the last train leaves, well—”
What an illusion, the idea that I could go back in time, reinvent my marriage for Helen. A great change had taken place in our house, and I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t. Even to someone new. Helen’s words had hurt me; they were right on the money, and it bothered me that she could so glibly define Nick’s and my great upheaval. I felt breathless, in danger, as though I were balancing on something I was about to fall off of.
“I’m sorry I’ve upset you,” she said. “Just understand that I’ve been affected by the Wall Street life, and the troubles and absences it seems to cause, and I was just thinking out loud.”
“That’s all right,” I said, hiding the fact that it was not. Something bad is going to happen, I thought. I had a quick vision: Nick’s face, mine, not smiling, not facing each other.
“Well,” Helen said, studying my expression, gauging how upset I was. “I’ll tell you why I invited you here. As I’ve said, we are wild about your work,” she said, flashing a smile that was meant to enchant me, to make me forget being upset. “And we want you to publicize it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We would like to arr
ange a few interviews with newspapers and magazines, to distribute your reports to a large readership. We think the Swift Observatory will be of interest to many people. Possibly we could arrange for syndication, for your pieces to appear in newspapers and magazines.”
The idea would have intrigued me at the beginning of the conversation, but now I felt stiff, unable to act pleased. I tilted my head, and she took it as encouragement to continue.
“We would like you to give some interviews, to publicize the project on your own. John will then negotiate with several publications that have expressed interest.”
“You mean you’ve already been discussing this with outsiders?”
Helen laughed, charmingly. “Of course, dear. From the day we saw your first report. That is how it works—call it putting out feelers, if you wish. We try to ignite interest in all our projects. It helps you, it helps the other grantees. Maybe you won’t win the Nobel Prize, but Leo Guziewicz did.”
“How does the foundation benefit?”
“Not at all, except for the satisfaction it brings. It pleases us when the world recognizes the brilliance of our grantees. It proves to us that we know what we are about.” Again the marvelous grin.
“I have no interest in publicizing the Swift Observatory,” I said.
Helen continued to smile. “I know I upset you before. I didn’t mean to. I think I feel close to you, because of what you write about and because you’re living a life that seems very familiar to me. Wrongly, I tried to give you the wisdom of my age. I’m sure that the relationship between you and Nick is lovely—totally unlike the one between my mother and father, or John and his ex, or any of the others. From everything you tell me, it is. Will you forgive me?”
“Yes,” I said, because in spite of how she had hurt me, I felt drawn to her as well. And I knew myself well enough to realize that the only people capable of truly hurting me were the ones I felt close to.
“Yawk!” the parrot croaked, making me jump. “Give us a kiss!”
Helen rose and made her way through the room’s clutter, squeezing between the baby grand piano and an ancient lectern supporting an open Bible to stand beside the cage. Then I saw how the parrot and her bright caftan were the same colors: emerald, gold, and orange.
“He thinks I’m a parrot,” she said joyfully. “He’s in love with me, aren’t you, Didier?”
“Give us a kiss, give us a kiss,” the parrot squawked.
“Gros bisous! Kiss, kiss,” Helen said, laughing.
I laughed too. “I’d better go,” I said after a minute.
“All right,” Helen said. She held my arm as we walked to the door. “Promise me you’ll think about our plan. I know it would be wonderful for you, for the Swift Observatory. And forgive me for hurting your feelings.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “And I’m not upset anymore,” I said, bending toward her to receive her kiss on the cheek, still feeling that uneasy dread that had come over me earlier. Wondering: how could I be upset over romantic advice offered by a woman in love with her parrot?
“I’M GOING BACK to London,” Nick said, and his tone was an invitation to brawl. We stood in our yard beneath the hunter’s moon. The plane had just dropped him off, and I heard it chattering across the bay to the Mendillos’ dock.
“What do you mean, you’re going back to London?” I said, feeling myself wind like a spring.
“Just what I said. Tomorrow I’ll be leaving, probably for three weeks. My participation is crucial to this deal. I’m in charge of all the documents. I sit in on every meeting. I know more about the deal than anyone involved—even the client.”
I walked three paces ahead of him, my arms folded across my chest. The wind felt chilly; I hadn’t been able to find a sweater when I heard the plane coming in. At the door Nick dropped his briefcase and came to stand in front of me. “I am going to hold you for a minute, and then we’d better have a good talk,” he said. His arms went around me, and we hugged tight, not moving, not even wanting to kiss. We might have stood there all night. I wasn’t going to break it up. Moonlight slanted through the kitchen window, spilling across the floor and glossing Nick’s wingtip shoe. We stood there so long the light slid away, leaving the shoe dull and black. Then we walked into the living room. Any thoughts I had had of cooking dinner were gone.
“Something bad is happening to us,” Nick said.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “You’re having a busy patch at work, and we don’t see each other as much.”
Nick shook his head. He sat at the edge of the sofa, his shirtsleeves rolled up and tie loosened, his hands clasped and elbows resting on his knees. He looked at the floor. Something bad is going to happen, I thought again, remembering Helen’s words. Dread flooded me; I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say.
“I don’t see it that way,” he said. “I’ve been busy ever since we’ve known each other. Law school, the bar exam, every year since then has been busy. You’ve been so supportive—more so than any wife I’ve heard of. But this is different. It’s obsessive, the way you doubt my tone of voice, my motives for going to London without you, everything. I feel you doubting everything about us.”
“Me? I’m doubting nothing about us,” I said.
“About me then. You don’t trust me. I hate that, Georgie. I call you up, and I sense you waiting for the worst. You’re just waiting for a suspicious tone of voice or for me to tell you I have to stay overnight in New York, or that I have to go to London. Then, when I tell you, I know that I’m just confirming what you knew all along: that I don’t want to be with you. Try to deny that.”
“It’s not true. I’m disappointed, of course, when we can’t be together. But I know it’s out of your control.”
“But what if it’s not out of my control? What if I think it’s better that I go alone to London? I can concentrate better if I know you’re not sitting in the hotel, watching the clock, wondering if I’ll get back before the restaurants close.”
“Oh my God,” I said, thinking it was exactly what Helen had said. I hated her at that moment, and I hated Nick. It didn’t matter that I had expected something awful to happen; nothing could have prepared me for this.
“While I’m gone this time we need to do some serious thinking. I can’t go on this way, hearing doubt in your voice all the time.”
When my father had taken the job with Ordaco, he was always away from home; I had felt relieved, because it had diffused the tensions between him and Honora, serious tensions that might have led to a real separation. But this relatively short business trip of Nick’s terrified me; it sounded like he was proposing separation, the emotional kind where two people go to their corners to consider the state of their love.
“Nick, don’t do this,” I said softly.
“Don’t do what? Don’t go to London? Or don’t feel so unhappy? You so badly want things to go your way, there’s no room for my feelings. Do you see that, Georgie? Do you?”
“Unhappy? You feel unhappy?” I heard myself ask.
I was holding my head because I was about to faint. I felt Nick’s warm hand on the back of my neck, pressing downward. “There, put your head between your knees,” he was saying.
Blackness rushed toward me, but then I was all right. I sat up straight. Nick kept his hand on my neck, the fingers gripping lightly. One of them traced a gentle pattern across my skin. I imagined he was spelling “I love you.” His black eyes gleamed; I saw the tears there.
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked, feeling numb.
“I don’t know,” Nick said.
We made love that night. I thought if I could remind his body of how fine we were together, everything would be all right. We undressed each other in the darkness, seriously, without speaking. Moonlight illuminated his body: his silky skin, the dark hair curling around his penis, which darkened as it grew. I made him lie on his back while my hands rubbed circles on his chest, his abdomen, his thighs. I was the wit
ch, and my hands wrote spells as I lowered my mouth to his erection, crazed with love and danger.
NICK AND THE HUBBARD, STARR entourage flew to Britain in the morning, so I was shocked to hear John Avery’s voice on the telephone.
“I’m not disturbing you, am I?” he asked.
“No, but I thought—aren’t you supposed to be in London?”
“Not this week. I’m leaving this part of the deal to my able associate, man named Nicholas Symonds. Maybe you know him?”
“Maybe I do,” I said, not at all sure I did.
“I’m calling to tighten the screws. I have arranged two interviews and a photo session for Miss Swift of Observatory renown. Will you do it?”
“I don’t think so, John. I’ve thought about it, and it doesn’t seem right for me. What does someone want pictures of me for, anyway? I can understand an interview, but why pictures?”
“I think it’s a neat angle, a pretty woman who is the Swift Observatory. Excuse me for calling you pretty—I know professional women today think that ability is all, that men shouldn’t notice anything else.”
“That’s okay. Thanks,” I said, wondering whether he was making a mild pass.
“I’ll tell you what—think about the publicity for another day or two, then call me. It would be a terrific thing, to get wide coverage for your endeavor.”
“Yes, well,” I said, anxious to end the conversation. I was sitting on my porch, thinking about Nick and Jean in London without John, which meant dinners for two, not three, when Clare came through the yard. She was wearing a turquoise bathing suit, dark glasses, and rubber thongs.
“Mother has decided today is the perfect day for a picnic. Want to come?”
“Where are you going?”
“Candle Island.” She meant the big rock half a mile offshore. For the first time I noticed the day was cloudless, one of those brilliant blue and gold August days with a breeze just strong enough to move the leaves and stir the stalks of aster and goldenrod.
“I guess so,” I said.
