He took the little claw, half afraid it would scratch. Under her blanket, Mother MacNeil still looked like a cat they had talcumed over very neatly, and put a hat and bunioned shoes on. Her black wrinkles matched her coat.
“She can understand you, but you have to bend down,” the attendant said. “She must have been a little deaf even before. Lip-reads a little.” She bent down. “Wales. He’s been in Wales.”
The old woman struggled to speak. Said something.
“Learning to talk.” His mother said quietly. “That’s the day I leave.”
“For shame, Maeve.” The attendant had a champagne glass in one hand. Whose companion was she?
“You remember Mrs. Reeves,” Buddy said behind him.
“Buddy was so generous, bringing Mother here,” Maeve said at Buddy. “I thought I’d be generous back.”
He squinted, removing himself. They had never used him like this, or had they. Maeve was looking down—her bronze buckles. Her shoes never showed wear. She wouldn’t look at him.
Old Reeves’s white hair had been dyed brown. A little of her backbone had gone with it. Or into the wheelchair.
“I had a mother once,” Mrs. Reeves said. “For a very—hic—long time.”
The light was pretty here. Acknowledge it. Not a cathedral light, but the old chemical stain gathered anywhere there was a roof and a dusk. Not to be spent with old people. A waiter came up and changed their glasses, each full of light. Mother MacNeil was given a sip too. Their four faces looked at him hopefully. Yes, Bunty, this is how rich we are.
“Oops, she wants to write something.” Reeves bent to his grandmother. “Well, off we go. She won’t—except in the bathroom. Isn’t that extraordinary? Most people read.”
“Well, I’m off to my party. I see two possible love-objects over there.” He touched his mother’s arm. “Watch my line, anyone?”
“Excuse me a minute. Take your father. He never knows many people here.”
Buddy and he watched her open a door in the terrarium and disappear among the plants.
“When a depression gets very low, Bunt, people say anything they think. The doctor says.”
“Wuddya know, I do it without thinking.”
He would have to cheer them up.
In succession, he took three fast tries.
A yellow-haired man came up, and was introduced to him as the designer of the terrarium.
“Claes Hilversum here—haven’t we met somewhere?”
“You Dutch? El Paradiso, maybe, I used to hang out there.”
“That government place? No, I have not been. I have not been a student for some years.” This was no exaggeration. “Cheapest pot in Europe, though, I hear.” He took out a wildly elegant case and angled it. “Have some.”
Bunty handed Buddy his glass. “Hold my bottle.” He and the blond boy, so called, lit up.
“Morocco?” Claes said, breathing close. “Rue de l’Art? Leuwenstrasse? Lapses like that bawthair me. We must talk.”
“The M-Mowzel,” Bunt said quickly. He turned to Buddy. “English for mousehole.” Handed Claes back his joint. “That place in Soho, with a—with a suit of armor takes your hat.”
“R-right,” Claes said. “What a lovely idea.”
“We had a place with a suit of armor, once, remember Buddy? Central Park West.”
He and Buddy exchanged smiles. In the foyer, like a truant from the lobby, sent to guard them with its pike. One of the cousins, asking its price, had scolded, “Maeve, you could have a mink coat for that.” His mother’s report of this had become family-famous between the three of them, Buddy teasing for years. At the time Bunty hadn’t understood why. Suspecting his mother didn’t either, quite. “Imagine,” she’d said that night at dinner. “Imagine anybody wanting a mink coat. When you could have a suit of armor.”
Maeve, just returning, slipped under Bunty’s arm. The way she smiled, she understood it now. “The armor? Wish we still had it. I could put it in the terrarium.”
“Why?” Keep it going, if you can’t cheer.
“She’d like to put everything in there,” Buddy said. “Last week that little safe with the jewelry. Thought it would be a swell place for it. And this week, another load of plants.”
They’d bought the jewel-safe, an imposing many-drawered affair, in the gift shop, their first trip on the Michelangelo—the most expensive item there. Since then Buddy put something into it any anniversary handy; it must be crammed. Mostly with the diamonds she was indifferent to—“I always feel I’m only boarding them.” There was also the pale Ceylon ruby she’d told the cousins was a tourmaline, more gold junk she never wore, and the small pearls which were her emblem. She had them on now, hung with the opal she did love, and called her bad-luck-piece.
Was it crazy to keep that stuff out there? Or smart? Claes puffed irritated smoke at her, from a straight cigarette. “I told you. That drome is built for a lifetime—all right, all right. But to a certain stress.”
“You said we could even dance in it.”
“So you can—I’ve built twenty-five of them. They respond to motion in the usual way. And take any reasonable bearing weight. But they have an overload point like anyplace.” He turned to Bunty, flashing teeth. “Like those waterbeds in your old brownstones here, too dangerous, don’t you agree?” And to Buddy. “This is the first attached to poured concrete. Give me the key, Maeve, will you. I’d better check.”
She unhitched a dainty one, fitted somehow on her belt.
They watched him unlock. The doorcurve couldn’t be distinguished from the rest. Copied from Bucky Fuller, he would guess. Beautifully executed. “Why lock it?”
“Doughty pries in there and lifts a leg,” his father said. “Part of the floor’s earth.”
New dog, then. “Must be some dog.”
They could see a vague outline of Claes inside, bending and touching. Funny how anything inside there looked as if it were struggling to get out.
Claes came back, handing Maeve the key. “Looks all right, I must say. New plants look groggy, better feed them. See you did take out the Chinese porcelains. Bulls and lions your mother had in there, Bunty. And a Kwan Yin. Terrible example of one. Like a diplomat in drag.”
“I miss her company.” Maeve touched her own hair. “She’s in a nearby closet, though. And the safe, Buddy. I took out that.”
“Where’d you put it?”
“Sent it to the office. Care of Blum.”
“To Blum? What did you do that for?”
“Not to her, Buddy. Care of. Isn’t that what secretaries are for?”
His mother had a style now, he saw, wincing. The temporary-starvation style that girls got when they went thin.
“Well, ta-ta all,” Claes sighed. “God, I do beautiful work. You see the piece on it in Art News—‘L’art nouveau nouveau’? Sure you don’t want to back me, Mr. Bronstein? I’d love to be a Limited. Or even an Inc.”
“No thanks, Claes, I told you. This way it stays art. That way—you’re only a supplier.”
“What a fate. Well, nice to have met you again, Bunty, we must get together.”
“See you at the Mowzel.”
“That lovely place. But we needn’t go so far.” He slouched across the room to a Rothko, slid the panel aside, and slipped out. Buddy watched, scowling.
“I think he has an effeminate interest in you, Bunt.”
He was touched. Buddy could be as naive as Maeve. “Not to worry.”
“Where’d that come from?”
“It’s English. Like the Mowzel.”
“What’s the Mowzel?” Buddy said sullenly. “One of those haunts?”
“I made it up.”
Maeve laughed.
A bad pause then. Why should that be? Maybe they weren’t looking to him to cheer them. Maybe the dog did it now.
“Chickie, Bunt,” his father said suddenly. “Here come the cops.”
The two priests were coming their way.
“You sicke
d ’em on me.” Wasn’t like his father, to play both ends through the middle. He reached up and slid the yarmulka, still on his own head, forward and sideways. Half and half.
“Father Melchior, my son Quentin,” Maeve said. Quentin. Was she so impressed with the cloth after all, then? Or only with the father himself, a huge man with an oversized, fresco face. She looked inquiringly up at the other one. “Father always brings us somebody new.”
“Archie Dunham, ma’am,” the second one said, looking down even on Bunty, from an elegant, yellow-skinned face that sat like a finial on his seven-foot bones. “But I reckon your son and I already know each other.”
This time it was true. “You were graduating the year I came.” He’d been the basketball star at Bunt’s last prep school. And their star black. “You ordained already?”
“Seminarian. Like you?”
“What? Oh, you mean my hat? Just my at-home hat. You know, like a smoking jacket.”
“Smoke?” Archie offered his pack.
“Thanks, I don’t.” He laughed at himself, and up at Archie, much too hard. How explain his elation? Fancy meeting you, anybody, here. Maybe the town had begun.
“You were swimming team, weren’t you?”
“Second string.”
“Hear you’re going to be an architect,” Father Melchior put in. “I was a curator before I took orders. In Denmark. Hear you been in Bruges and Amsterdam. See any of my favorite churches? See St. Sauveur?”
Clearly they knew everything about him. Maybe Archie had even been sent.
“No, guess I only saw girls.” He reached out to touch Buddy’s arm. “Not to worry.”
He took advantage of the pause. “One I knew in London, her father wrote a history of the Vatican.” Why did he always feel he had to talk Catholic to Catholics?
“I think I know that book” Melchior said. “Came out in the fifties. And of the author. Very old family in the church, they are. Since Henry the Eighth.”
“Uh-huh. Lots of yummy childhoods, they talk about.”
They’d talked about hers all night, in the family house on the edge of Paddington. With her, it had been like foreplay; every time he touched a further zone, some old nurse or old goody gardener had jumped out. None of her family was home though, and toward dawn, when she’d been finishing a raunchy tale of what the girls had once dreamed up at St. Hilda’s, he’d had reasonable hopes. Then the family sheep dog had walked in, a ringer for Peter Pan’s, and the night was over. Always woke her for breakfast, the dear pet did—ever since she was a child.
“I think we use that book at the seminary,” Archie said.
“Approved by the Vatican, I understand,” Bunty said. “But banned in Ireland.” He hadn’t made that up, just retained it. Hopefully. He looked down. Maeve was gone again. It was like a tic.
For the second time he watched her take up the key at her waist, rest her hand on the knob for a moment, then enter, closing the door’s perfectly bent line behind her, her shadow diffusing behind the plants. In that moment before, holding the knob, she bowed her head—could she be crossing herself? Once, on his own plea during a shopping day, she had taken him into St. Patrick’s. During all the bobbing and ducking she hadn’t done anything, only explained some of it to him. He had wanted to light a votive candle, but she wouldn’t let him. Maybe her body remembered the old actions, vaguely repetitive. In time of need.
“Going to Ireland myself next year.”
“Are you, Mr. Dunham?” Buddy was watching her too. “What’ll you be doing there?”
“Serving, I hope.” Archie looked modestly down. “At least neither side will mistake me for the other.”
God, but he was token. “Uh-huh, easier than at basketball.” At once, Bunty’s head dropped his chest for shame, but this time nothing came out. He looked up to find Melchior observing him. “What are the s-sta-tions of the Cross? I always wondered.”
“Come by the rectory someday, why don’t you, and I’ll tell you.” Melchior took pencil and pad out of a pocket and wrote the address for him. “By the way, your grandmother gave me this to give to you.” He handed over a folded slip of lined paper. “Wonderful, how she is dealing with her infirmity.”
He put it in his pocket unread. Mail of any kind meant obligation.
“Don’t you want to read it?” the Dane said.
“Private,” Bunty said. “She composes in the bathroom.”
Buddy’s shoulders shook—maybe this was what he had wanted of him. “Well excuse me—I must go round the other guests.”
He went toward Maeve.
“Well, excuse me.” Bunty said. “I promised to go back to those girls over there.” Miracle, they were still together over there. “Bye, Archie. Keep the faith.” He shook the Dane’s big business-like hand. “B-bye, Mr. Melchior.” Halfway across the room he blushed for that, but didn’t look back.
“Place looks like Pompeii, doesn’t it?” A passing voice said. Not to him: “the evening before.”
He didn’t turn round. His parents had always given parties that seemed born to be hostless. And were duly snubbed for it. He could see what the voice meant. The room he had crossed, on a tide of red carpet that had penetrated every corner like stage blood, had two mantels—one at either end—both of palely chased palace-marble. No fireplaces went with, but over one mantel hung a great toothy vagina, in whose sculped vortex a whole half of an ill-advised man could be received. In front of the other, a plaster-cast workman, whose lineaments were more true-to-life than flesh was, mused over a lunch-bucket under a Tiffany lamp. He felt that both sculptures were there to reassure him that the natural functions were all right. To his left, the huge abstracts stood about as required, like guests. Nudes would have looked awful here—classical. Loose usage of Pompeii though—to which Emilio had taken him, round the little rouged rooms, pale with fright, in which you could feel the owners, blown clear of luxury. “Look!” Emilio had said. “We still eat from a pot like that.” Of pots that lasted like that, you could be proud.
Two women, taking champagne from the same tray a waiter offered him, were talking about the rug on top of the red carpet. “Handmade, wonder who?”
Toneless, asymmetric, it had been kept on since the second Park Avenue place, as a work of art. Nobody had ever copulated on it, far as he knew.
“V-vsoské,” he said politely. A name to stick in the head. Like Silveira, the scrimshaw carver. Maeve’s first suppliers, clubbily and constantly referred to, remained in his memory like habitués of the house.
The woman stared. “Over there. On the terrace.”
“Hmmm?”
“Thought you asked for whiskey.”
He bowed, like the Polish Ambassador should, and walked toward it, pocketing his yarmulka on the way. Keeping his head down kept the voices disembodied.
“—compassionate.” A male one. “Doctor says I have to be. Or else it’s bad for me.”
Fine, you do that. That’s progress.
In a corner he shared the joke with his champagne.
Nobody had ever talked people here, much. One couldn’t expect it. Jasmin said it wasn’t done much any more in America, or even in New Zealand, where she came from. General attitudes and pursuits had taken over, like bombing and sports. Hoping for better, she had married a psychiatrist—but he was too old for it. And by profession a people-changer, which wasn’t the same thing. The only people you could trust to be interested in themselves for themselves were the young, she said. Four years older than he, she was still cavalier about wrinkles, but watched herself like a movie for signs of mental age. “Pomp is the worst. It creeps.” Bunty’s tic would help save him, she said. The husband had told her to come back when she stopped confusing him with her ideas. “See the difference between him and ideas, he meant. He’s never confused.” Now and then she did go back. But inevitably, an idea cropped up.
“You don’t do that with me,” he’d said, looking round him for her ideas. Her place was one of the few he liked
, as a place. Random. She was the kind of person other people gave stuffed animals to. That they wanted themselves. A largish kangaroo, brought by someone who had thought New Zealand was the same as Australia. Two small teddies, mating in dust, though the rest of the place was clean enough. A grass basket given her by someone at the archeological museum where she’d worked before coming here. Also a small framed drawing of what she said was a poisonous but very timid spider, called a katipo. And over the headboard a woodblock she had once bought, a scene of a rainy day, whose slanting rain-lines had to be well stared at before he saw these were words. All the same one.
She had a broad pansy-face, with almost invisible eyebrows that clenched exactly like that flower. “No, I don’t, do I.” She smiled up at him—a long, warm mold of small-print calico, pressed beneath him. Greenery-yallery, she called it. Almost all the girls that year had been wearing it. Last year. “I didn’t say it, Bunt. You.”
“I don’t stick,” he’d said to her sometime before that. “It’s the way I move.” He always said that to them carefully, not for brass but because it felt true. Never telling them how they all stuck, in the marvelous meatpacking larder that was his brain.
On the West Side Highway uptown, there was a butchers’ warehouse with a runway open to the river, where you saw the men, the torsos and the meathooks, neat in the early morning. Once, passing there, he told her. How his girl-memories were all stacked up like that, not murdered but treasured, because in the abattoir of memory they were all the same one—to whom each time he had said, “This is for once.” The car had nearly mounted Grant’s Tomb with their laughter. “You save us all?”—“Sure, no guilt. Because no heads.” He didn’t tell her that this formal lineup took the place of all those whom he hadn’t expected life to take away from him. He did explain that it had a permanence, or was achieving one. “So has Don Juan’s,” she said moodily, laughter gone. They had a fight.
The most frightening thing is permanence, he tried to tell her, not because you are locked in—but because there isn’t any. It must be we all want to be locked in.
They’d made up.
Eagle Eye Page 7
