“Get in,” he told her, pressing the remote alarm control and making the car warble electronically. He opened the door for her.
“Paul, I can’t—”
“I need your help,” Paul told her.
“Why? What’s wrong with Carlos?”
“Carlos is fine. It’s my mother,” Paul said shortly. He gently pressed her into the low passenger seat and shut the door.
Vivien watched him stride around the long dark hood and open his own door and slide inside. “What’s wrong with Maria?” she asked him.
“I’m not sure. We’ll find out when we get there. She was always fond of you. Maybe you can help her.”
“I don’t understand,” Vivien said, as Paul reversed the car out from the line of cars and swung the steering wheel to bring the car around in a tight curve and out onto the access road.
Paul settled into his seat and spared a glance from the road to look at her. “Carlos says she’s gone crazy. He wasn’t making a lot of sense himself. He wants me to try to talk to her. Calm her down. Beyond that, we’ll find out when we get there.”
Chapter Seven
It was a fast trip back into town, even though Paul appeared to be abiding by the town speed limits. The difference was in the way he handled the car. He seized every marginal opening and break in the traffic. It helped that he had a vehicle that responded instantly to his control.
In a very short space of time, the sports car was climbing the hill that led to Tarcoola Heights and wending its way through the streets to Carlos’ address. Paul’s brother had a large home overlooking the sea, where he lived with his wife Kathleen and their four children. For the last three years, since the death of their father, Lorenzo, their mother had also been living with Carlos.
Paul pulled into the drive of the house and came to a sudden halt, braking barely inches away from Carlos’ legs. Carlos stood in the middle of the brick-paved driveway, peering upwards. He swiveled the top half of his body toward the car as Paul braked and lifted up both hands in a large shrug. “She’s gone mad!” he said.
Paul and Vivien both climbed out of the car and came around the hood to stand with him. Carlos pointed upwards. “There she is,” he added, with a tired sigh.
His directions were punctuated with a short, flat explosion to their right that made Vivien jump. She stared up at the upper floor of the house—the source of the noise. Leaning out from the gable window was Maria Remias Levissianos. She was a handsome woman in her sixties, dark-eyed and olive-skinned like Paul. At that moment most of her features were writhing with unadulterated anger and it appeared the object of her fury was Carlos’ wife, Kathleen, who stood on the paved courtyard beneath the window, with a black plastic garbage bin lid in her hand, which she was wielding like a medieval shield.
Kathleen stood in the center of a sea of broken crockery and china and as Vivien watched, Maria lifted up another plate high above her head and with an accompanying torrent of Italian, sent it hurtling down to smash with the same flat popping explosion near Kathleen’s feet. Kathleen gave a little shriek and hopped further away from the window.
Vivien bit her lip, trying hard not to smile. The melodrama was so typical of the Levissianos family, through which the blood of two fiery races ran.
“Well, her temper doesn’t seem to be affecting her aim,” Paul said coolly.
Vivien smothered her laugh with her hand.
Carlos ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “She’s got a bee in her bonnet over something—Kathleen’s probably said something that offended her. You know what she’s been like lately. Can you sort it out? I just seemed to make it worse when I tried, so I ducked out of range.”
Paul looked at Vivien. “Game enough to try?” he asked.
Vivien studied the woman in the gable window. She appeared to be upset about something and it seemed that neither Kathleen nor Carlos could help. Maybe a non-family member would be able to help, after all. “I’ll try,” she told Paul. “But she might be offended at having someone outside the family involved.”
Paul echoed her own thoughts. “It’s the family that caused the problem in the first place. You can’t possibly make it any worse.” He looked across at Kathleen. “Come away from there, Kathleen. We’ll talk to her.”
Kathleen stepped over the low courtyard wall and crossed the grass to where they stood on the driveway. “I can’t get any sense out of her, Paul,” the curly haired blonde told him. “She’s using Italian and it’s far too fast for me to pick up much.”
Maria lifted her voice and cried out a long speech, which Vivien failed to identify much more than the odd noun. Paul laughed and even Carlos grinned. At the end, Maria lobbed another well aimed teacup at them, which fell harmlessly two feet short of them and rolled down the gentle slope of the lawn toward the road.
“She’s increasing her range with practice,” Carlos said.
“What did she say?” Vivien asked Paul.
“I missed a little of it—she was going too fast,” Paul said. “But she said her hearing, just like the rest of her faculties, is fine and if she thinks I’m going to sweet talk her into a more reasonable frame of mind, I’m stupid as well as ugly.”
Vivien glanced at Maria. She sat on the window ledge and another plate was lobbed in their direction as Vivien watched.
“Where did she get all this ammunition?” Paul demanded, stepping aside as the plate skidded across the driveway and into the garden bed behind them.
Kathleen sighed. “It’s all the stuff she brought from their house. She’s got boxes of it up in her room. I wouldn’t care less except some of the stuff she’s throwing is the Limoges Lorenzo gave her for their wedding.”
Vivien felt a twinge of sympathy for the older woman sitting in the gable window. What had upset her so much that she would deliberately break china that had such precious memories tied up with it? Vivien herself had eaten from that china when she had been invited into Paul’s parents’ home for birthdays and other special family days. There was a generation’s worth of memories in those boxes.
“Paul, tell her I want to talk to her,” Vivien said.
Paul lifted his chin and called out to his mother. Vivien recognized the language he was using as Spanish by the beautiful musical cadences. Reading a grocery list in Spanish would sound poetic. Spanish was Paul’s father’s natural language and Paul was the most fluent family member. After their fifty year marriage, Maria could understand that language as well as she understood English and could make herself understood more easily in it. Paul was nearly as fluent in Italian but he was using Spanish because that was his father’s language.
Vivien admired the psychology behind Paul’s tactic. By speaking to Maria in the language that her husband had always spoken to her in, he was reminding her of better times—of the loving, considerate man who had always taken the time to listen to her.
Vivien walked toward the courtyard as Paul spoke and as she stepped onto the paving, Maria leaned a little further out and shaded her eyes to look at Vivien properly.
“Vivien?” she asked.
“Hola, Mama Maria,” Vivien called, craning her head back to look up at the woman. Dredging her memory for the words and phrases Paul had taught her, she said haltingly in Spanish, “I do not think your senses have gone. I will talk to you.” She switched to English. “But I can’t talk while you are throwing your best china at me. Can I come up and see you?”
After a moment, Maria said in a small voice, “Si, I will talk to you.”
Vivien nodded. “I’ll come up right now.” She glanced at Paul before hurrying across the paving to the front door of the house. He nodded at her and she thought she saw an approving gleam in his eyes.
Vivien climbed the stairs to the second level and approached the door she assumed was Maria’s and tapped on it. After a second or two, there was the sound of the lock being turned and the door cracked open barely two inches. Maria’s eye appeared in the crack and when she saw it was Vivien at
the door and that she was alone, Maria pushed the door wider to let Vivien inside.
Vivien entered the large room, looking around. There was a single bed, a walk-in closet, a dressing table and stool. Everywhere there were shelves, holding ornaments and photos and trophies and other memory-drenched items that Vivien recognized from her visits to the Levissianos family home, many years before. This single room contained the essence of that house and the family.
Maria gave Vivien a trembling smile. “You think I am foolish?”
Vivien shook her head. “If it’s the only way you can get attention around here, then go ahead, but it does seem a shame to use your best china. I remember that pitcher you’re holding, Maria. You used to use it for making real, old-fashioned lemonade, for Sunday dinner.”
Maria looked down at the pitcher in her hands and gave a large theatrical sigh. “They are trying to turn me into an old woman before my time,” she said and crossed the room to lower the pitcher back inside a cardboard box sitting open at the foot of the window. “I am still young. But Kat’leen—she tells me to take it easy, to sit down, to go away all the time. I just want to help. I can still do that, you know—help.”
“Kathleen is trying to be considerate,” Vivien said, second-guessing the circumstances.
Maria gently kicked the cardboard box at her feet. “I don’t even have my own kitchen anymore. Kat’leen is like me, you know? She is a good and proper wife—in the old way. She doesn’t hold with having careers and having babies and having everything. Like me, she doesn’t have the arms to have everything.” Maria shrugged. “So we argue.”
Vivien tried to understand what Maria was really trying to say. She thought she could see the shape of it. “You feel useless, is that what you mean, Maria? You think you don’t have a place anymore—you don’t know where you belong.”
“Yes! Useless! That is it.” Maria’s face lit up with a quick happiness that she had been understood. “What do I do now my Lorenzo has gone, god rest his soul? I don’t know how to be anything but a mother and a good wife, and Carlos already has a good wife. Paul does not want one yet. I cannot live with Estelle—her Terry doesn’t understand the old way things are done in families. You see?”
Vivien could see very clearly. She could feel a dull aching anger herself over Maria’s predicament. Lorenzo had been everything to her in their lives together—bread winner, financial controller, head of the family in every respect. Although Maria was not stupid or illiterate, for fifty years she had never needed to fend for herself and to start trying to do so now was quite frightening to her—overwhelmingly so. The alternative, the traditional solution, was to live with one of her sons or her daughter and to a woman with Maria’s pride, it was an unhappy solution.
Only, what was the way out? Ideally, Maria needed to be taught how to be independent—step by painful step. She still had many fruitful and productive years in front of her, but that idea wouldn’t salve her pride and soothe her anger right now. She needed something to boost her spirits.
Vivien patted Maria’s forearm. “Let’s sit down and see what we can figure out,” she said. “Have you any paper here?”
* * * * *
Paul sat at Kathleen’s table and drank coffee and tried to pretend he was interested in Carlos’ latest catch but he was consumed with curiosity and it distracted him.
What was happening up in that bedroom?
It was two hours before Vivien emerged, well past lunchtime. At the first sound of the bedroom door opening, everyone abandoned the kitchen and gathered around the bottom of the steps to meet Vivien halfway.
She looked tired. “Maria is fine now,” she said. “But she would like to be left alone for the rest of the day. She has things to do. She said she would meet you at the dinner table and talk to you then. Particularly you, Carlos.”
Carlos nodded. He was rubbing his thigh absently, where the leg brace rubbed the skin. “Fine. But what happened, Vivvy?”
“Forget it, Carlos,” Kathleen said firmly. “At least until I’ve given Vivien a cup of coffee and something to eat. You haven’t even said hello to her yet and she’s been away for years.”
Carlos looked sheepish. “Sorry, Vivien. You just seemed to arrive at the right time and we were all a little preoccupied. Paul told us you were in town again. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks,” Vivien replied warmly.
Kathleen handed Vivien a mug of rich, strong coffee and led her to the well-polished wooden dining table on the other side of the entrance. “Sit down,” she told Vivien.
Paul sat down again and finished his coffee while Vivien devoured two pieces of fruit cake and a second cup of coffee. Carlos and Kathleen quizzed her about her life and the intervening years since she left Geraldton and made polite conversation but behind their words and expressions, Paul could see that they were puzzled by her reappearance and were trying to classify where and how she fitted into his life now.
It had once been very clear to everyone exactly how she fitted in. Paul had made it abundantly clear. He’d brought her home to meet everyone the very next time he’d seen her after their Kalbarri trip and many more times after that. Vivien became almost a fixture at their dinner table—in fact, that was where Paul had realized how much he loved her.
The first time he’d recognized the depth of his feelings, they had been sitting eating dinner—Carlos and Kathleen happened to be there, with their boys and Estelle had not yet married, so the table had been full and noisy like always.
Vivien had already carved her own unique niche in the family. Although she got along with Maria, it was his father who took the greatest shine to her.
Paul had looked around the table, at Kathleen, Estelle and his mother at one end, heads together, Carlos and his sons ranging down one side and Vivien on his father’s right, the honored guest, fully occupied in speculating about the location of a famous wreck of a ship that had been lost just north of Geraldton and had never been found. His father had been listening with total attention. They were speaking in a mongrel mix of Spanish and English, with some Italian thrown in for good measure and it was then that Paul realized just how unique Vivien was.
Who else could possibly do what she was doing? Or had done so far in her life?
His pride in her was immense and swelled as he watched her chatting and it occurred to him that if he ever lost her, he would never be able to find another women like her. Ever.
Cold fingers of fear touched his heart.
She is my life.
If he ever lost her....
Paul looked at Vivien now, eating her fruit cake in between fielding questions and listening to Carlos and Kathleen fill her in on the major events of their life since she had left.
He had lost her in the end but not to a disaster, or the sea, as he had feared that day. He’d lost her because of his fear...because he’d tried to hold on too tightly.
Remember that.
* * * * *
Vivien refused a third cup of coffee and more cake. Paul sat on her left, remaining silent for the most part but Vivien could sense his impatience and his desire to be going. She knew he wanted to pick up where he had left off that morning—he wanted to carry on their discussion.
With minimum fuss Paul managed to extract her from the house and settle her back in his car. With a last farewell, Paul reversed the car onto the street. The front courtyard was clear of crockery shards already, Vivien noticed, as the car pulled away from the house. Maria’s window was shut.
“I’ll drive you back to your car,” Paul told her. “I’ve got to stow the glider, anyway.”
Vivien nodded, feeling suddenly exhausted. It had been a long, emotion-filled day and she knew that there was more ahead.
Paul, perhaps sensing her mood, stayed silent for most of the trip back out to the airport. When they were only a few minutes away from their destination he spoke again.
“I have to ask. What did you say to my mother? What were you talking about all that time?
”
Vivien smiled. “I told her to get a job,” she said.
“You what?” Paul exclaimed, braking the car hard enough to make the hood dip. He pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned in his seat to look at her. “You told my mother to get a job?” he said, looking astonished, angry and horrified at once.
Vivien had known he would react this way. She knew Carlos would react the same way tonight when Maria outlined her plan. Nevertheless, Vivien tried to keep her face serene and answer calmly. “Your mother is proud, Paul. She hates being beholden to anyone for food and shelter. These last few years, living in Carlos’ home, have frustrated her beyond endurance and you saw the result of that frustration today.”
“But...a job! She’s past sixty, Vivien. She has no more hope of finding a paying job in this day and age than anyone over forty. She has no qualifications, no skills—”
“She’s a fine cook and a wonderful mother. She ran her home like clockwork for fifty years and it sparkled every time I ever stepped in the door. They’re skills, even if they aren’t skills that you and I would recognize as marketable. I’m not saying she has to go and join the unemployment queues. I merely suggested that she find herself a vocation—something she can do that is important and means something to her. Not something frivolous. It may not actually pay anything but it will have meaning. Tonight she is going to ask Carlos to teach her how to organize her money. She is going to ask Kathleen to teach her how to drive a car. There is a long list of things that Maria is going to find out about and eventually do, and when she’s ready, Maria is going to find herself her own flat and live on her own.”
Paul was staring at Vivien as if she had suddenly grown a second head that had started spouting Shakespeare in Finnish.
Vivien could appreciate his amazement. This was so far outside any expectations and assumptions he had made about his mother that Paul was lost for reference points and a sane response. His amazement was simply an extension of the same blinkered perceptions that had landed Maria in the predicament she was in.
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