by Bel Mooney
“I’m real glad to have you meet my Mom, Emmeline Carl, and my little girl, Miranda. Mom, Mira, this is Barbara Rowe from London – you remember she took that great picture of me at the Versailles Palace a couple of years ago?”
Carl’s expression was gentle and proud. It transformed him. Emmeline shook my hand, holding it gently for a fraction too long and looking at me with her head cocked slightly on one side, as if assessing me. Her eyes were grey, and had a flinty, determined look that belied the benign expression about her lips. You could imagine this woman running a brothel, I thought, and ruling her girls with love and terror.
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” she murmured. Miranda said, “Glad to know you,” dropping her eyes, so that I thought she was shy until, a second later, I saw her looking at me with the same look of distant appraisal as her grandmother’s.
“Mira’s just graduated from High School,” Carl said, slipping his arm through his daughter’s. “She’s the clever one in the family. She’s gonna be a psychologist – though I guess she could major in just about anything.” The girl still said nothing, though she met my eyes with a gaze that was challenging – as if she was daring me to make a comment that would mock her father.
“And what about Anthony Junior?” I asked politely. “What is he going to do?”
“Tony? He’s joining the business, of course. In September. He’s gonna be a red-hot tough negotiator, once he sees how his old Pa does it.” I looked across at the lumpy boy in cut-off denims and training shoes, pushing a button yet again then slouching back in the chair, and tried to imagine him clinching a deal on Fifth Avenue. “Er … I can see that,” I said.
Anthony told his daughter to take me upstairs and show me the house. “We got a half-hour to freshen up before dinner,” he added, motioning to the driver to carry my case. All this time David Sternberg had been standing by the door, given a drink yet somehow not allowed to be part of the circle of family and guests. Throughout the weekend it was like that. He hovered at the edge of the house party, allowed to tease a little and even make jokes at the expense of his boss, like a licensed fool at court.
In silence I followed Miranda up the polished wooden staircase, and on to the wide, airy landing. There were pot plants on the window-sill, a smell of salt, suntan oil and spray polish that reminded me of holiday homes I had visited in my childhood. We took a house in Cornwall once, a house open to the four winds on a headland, with narrow wooden stairs to the creaking attics where my brother and I slept, listening to the churning sea at night. And we listened to our parents quarrelling, the low nagging mumble of my mother’s goading, my father’s hysterical responses, the slamming of doors – to be opened again for a fresh insult, even the crash of furniture. Most nights. Mornings would dawn and my brother would avoid my eyes, pulling that watery, closed-off expression over his face like a stocking mask. He wore it until he died, at eighty miles an hour, in a borrowed car. We would go to the beach, whether the water was cold or not, and kill the day, dreading the night when those sounds would begin again. One night, knowing he was asleep, I crept down the uncarpeted stairs, smelling everywhere the polish, and listened outside their bedroom door.
“You’re a bitch – a cold bitch,” he was saying, in a voice that almost sobbed.
“I’m what you made me,” came her voice, chilly and mocking.
“Always turning your back, always pulling away as if I was poison, as if I repel you,” he continued in that low, sobbing mutter, as if she hadn’t spoken.
“Listen!” she interrupted, with a new harsh clarity in her voice. “I hate it! Do you understand me? I always hated it, hated your fingers and the weight of you flopping on me, and your grunts and then it was over and I hated it. If it wasn’t for the children I’d have finished everything years ago.”
There was a short silence, as if he was shocked. “You’d … have left me?” he asked finally.
Her laugh was horrible. “Left you? Too much trouble, dear. No, I’d have packed a heavy suitcase and walked out into those lovely waves. And a blessed relief it would have been.”
Standing outside that door, my body tingling with the tension of making ready to run, I felt the sadness well up from somewhere low down in my stomach – understanding, at ten, exactly what this “it” was she so hated, and knowing that it was all our fault, for it was the making of us. Such horror I felt at her hatred, and his humiliation – that I knew would go on for years, until I stood, on separate occasions, listening to the thin words in the crematorium, and making mental notes about the pattern of light on wood, and how the graininess would be best in black and white. But I didn’t close off from her then, because I had always thought her so beautiful, with her rustling dresses and perfume in the evenings, and her lithe body smelling of suntan preparations in that ruched red satin swimsuit.
No – it was him I despised, for failing to make her love him, and for that low, pleading note I would hear again and again from men who made me laugh, just as she had laughed. And still all of it mingles inextricably with a sense of empty corridors, and coastal light, whilst that resinous smell of cleanliness haunts memories of holiday expectations doomed always to fall short, shrivelling like skin in the sun. Following me everywhere, even to New Jersey.
Miranda paused and turned to me. “It’s a nice house,” I said.
“Sure. We come here a lot. But next year the guy is moving back in.” She was opening one of the many polished doors that led off the landing. “There’s ten bedrooms,” she explained. I looked impressed. “Sure, it’s big. There’s four small ones upstairs, you see. Plenty of room for all of us. But Dad’s put Marylinne and Lace together, ’cos they like to share.” Then, as if she had decided to be friendly: “We got twelve bedrooms in our new house. On the Upper East Side. Used to be a movie star’s house, but I can’t remember her name right now. Someone, you know – older. Dad used to like her, watch her movies when he was a kid. He was real pleased to be able to buy her place! He didn’t wanna change it much, but Zandra – she likes a lot of tacky stuff, and she always gets what she wants. Gold taps, stuff like that.”
She made a face.
“Don’t you get on with her?” I asked.
Miranda shrugged. “Oh sure, but my Mom, she lives upstate, she’s different. She’s great.” She opened a door quickly. My room was small; a curious combination of seaside simplicity and New England contrivance. There was a plain double wooden bedstead in old wood, yet an elaborately inlaid reproduction chest of drawers, with a small mirror on top decorated with seashells. The floor was polished wood, with a rag rug on each side of the bed; the curtains were designer-expensive – a pattern of Florentine weave in shades of purple and pink, with braided tie-backs. The wardrobe matched the wood of the bed, old and grainy with a single painted line to give it definition. The round bedside table was covered with a cloth to match the curtains, yet the bedside light, of white onyx and gilt, looked as if it had been bought in a Times Square emporium.
Miranda walked across the room and opened another door, showing me a small bathroom. “Neat, huh?” she said, and I nodded, wondering who had thought to add garish red mock-Mexican tiles to the elegant old white basin with brass taps, in the corner.
She walked to the window and nodded over her shoulder at its blue-purple light, without turning to look out. “The ocean is on the other side of the house. We’re all along there, Dad and Zandra, Grandma, Tony and me. We got the best views, but it’s still good from here. Look, you can see the pool. It’s only a small one, but good if you don’t like swimming in salt.” She made a face and pushed a hand up through her straight, fringed bob. “Yuk, I hate the salt. It dries you all up. I only swim in the pool.”
I stood beside her and looked out, thinking how fortunate it was that the pretty sashed windows had not been replaced by metal ones. The garden was dusky now, but I could glimpse fruit trees, and the glimmer of paved paths leading to the dark blue area that was the pool. The water was still, allowi
ng not even a momentary gleam of light. Crickets rasped, and a couple of white moths beat against the glass from the inside, trying vainly to escape. Miranda threw open the window, apologising for the heat of the room, and gently forming her hands into cups to shoo the creatures to safety. As she leaned there I could see how slight she was, with her brown arms and ankles poking bonily from her clothes, in contrast to the sculptured fleshiness of the girls downstairs.
“Why psychology?” I directed the question at her back. She turned immediately and pushed back her hair again. “Oh, that’s just Dad. That’s what he says, because it’s what he wants. He figures that if he says it often enough it’ll happen, like when you were a kid and wished for things. Like, he can’t buy me that, and it bothers him. But I don’t mind him saying it, ’cos I was good at school, and I reckon I could do what I want. I just wanna, you know, hang out and see what I feel like doing. That’s cool.”
“Well, why not?” I said, feeling old. “You’re very young to decide.”
She shook her head gravely. “Yeah, but all the kids are under a lot of pressure, you know? ’Cos, like, these days you have to know what you want and go for it, right away. That’s what Dad says, and I know he’s right. Otherwise …”
“But isn’t it, er, a bit different for you?” I heard myself saying.
“Why?” Her delicate features wore such a look of innocent enquiry that I felt churlish for asking.
“Well,” I went on lamely, “I mean because your father obviously has a lot of… er … contacts. So it can’t really be so so … well … urgent for you.”
The change was instantaneous. “I know that’s what people think,” she retorted angrily, “but it’s not like that. I believe women should be independent, you know. You ever heard of feminism your side of the pond?” With that she walked quickly from the room, closing the door sharply behind her.
It was typical of me, I thought, to locate the only member of the household with whom I might have something in common, and annoy her when I had been in the house only thirty or forty minutes. But I was irritated too, by her glib claim to this absurd thing called feminism, this fashionable catch-all, when she could quite happily live off paternal money made by exposing the Handmaidens to the camera in gynaecological poses.
But there you go again, I told myself, as I unpacked and laid my few articles of clothing in the chest of drawers, assuming she does not mind – but how do you know? You never know, and that is not a cliche – rather an admission of the inadequacy I feel now, more and more, as I focus on faces through my lens. Con-men, depressed women, flash achievers, cafe society poseurs, self-consciously melancholy writers, arrogant tycoons, small-time thieves, mental defectives, heavyweight boxers, whores … I have taken pictures of all of them, taken without payment, as if they were mine – the crispness of my prints belying the muzziness I see before me. And all my old assurances dissolve before the impossibility of understanding what I know is on those faces – even Anthony Carl’s. The mystery, again.
When I went downstairs, Lace and Marylinne were watching television with Tony. They had changed into silky halter-necked dresses which skimmed their knees, and Lace must have put electric rollers in her long dark hair, because it now drifted into loose curls at the ends. Emmeline Carl sat by the open french windows, smoking and watching the strands and swirls of smoke drift out on to the terrace, where Peter Corelli and Sam Luenbach stood talking in low voices. There were sounds and smells from the kitchen. “Anthony and Zandra are fixing dinner, dear,” Emmeline said, looking round and patting the space beside her on the leather sofa.
“They cook?” I could not keep the incredulity from my voice.
“Sure they do. It’s their hobby, dear. There’s nothing my son likes better than to get home from the office and fix himself some fried chicken, or pasta with clam sauce. I taught him. I always felt that little boys should learn to cook and bake, don’t you agree? You should taste his brownies! Lord, did he like to work hard at my stove!” I was nodding like a crazy clockwork toy, stunned for a second by the image of little Anthony baking cookies in Emmeline’s wholesome kitchen, the very picture of upright Washingtonian honesty and industry. It was succeeded by the wilder vision of Emmeline in her apron by the same stove, resting her legs for morning coffee and studying the pages of Emperor, as she once inspected the brownies. “Yes … yes … just the right shade of brown, and the right size too, and you can just see the nuts … Perfect, son, perfect.”
I managed to control the corners of my mouth.
Emmeline was about seventy, I calculated, and still attractive, in that carefully-coiffed and made-up Lord and Taylor style adopted by so many Manhattan widows. She wore a single diamond on a chain around her neck, a heavy gold charm bracelet, and only two rings: a large pear-shaped diamond with which she played incessantly when not smoking, and a wide gold wedding ring.
I knew from many articles that Anthony’s father, a bus driver, had died in a road accident when he was six, so Mom had brought him up alone, working in a small corner store in downtown Detroit to support them both. Anthony Carl made much of his humble origins, in all those interviews. It was as if they justified all that he did, as if the necessity for “making good” cancels out all else. “My Mom worked hard for me, and now I work hard for her,” he was quoted, again and again, so that whatever sincerity might have been present when first he uttered the words was reduced gradually to an advertising slogan.
The Carls always said the same thing in interviews, I had noticed, as if they had long agreed on a script. Asked (as she was inevitably, journalists in the main having about as much originality as lemmings in spring) if she minded the fact that her husband spent a good deal of his life surrounded by naked models, Zandra would smile blandly and say, “Why no! I mean, if you work in the candy store you don’t want to eat the candy.” Once a misprint rendered this as, “If you lurk in the candy store …”, pushing the reassuring cliche across the border of voyeuristic obsession.
At dinner we sat around an oval table, with Anthony at one end, flanked by his mother and daughter, and Zandra at the other end facing him, with Corelli and Luenbach on each side. Tony Carl, Lace, Marylinne and I dispersed ourselves where we would: the chauffeur was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he cruised out in the limo, to pick up a hamburger and a girl, pretending the car was his.
Miranda grinned at me, her brief flash of irritation clearly forgotten. I was glad, still thinking of her as an ally, without considering why I should want one. There was that sense of edgy bonhomie you feel when an ill-assorted group of people are thrown into intimacy for a finite period of time: wondering how far to go, and with whom. Little silences filled with noises of forks and glasses, slight coughs, Tony’s morose “Uh huh” to any remark, Emmeline’s stretched smile … I began to miss the hot emptiness of holiday Manhattan.
Peter Corelli noticed that the wine was Californian, and Anthony Carl replied that it was his policy not to buy French wine as the Europeans were so arrogant they thought they could do everything better, when they had never tasted wine from California. Luenbach and Corelli nodded; everyone always nodded when they were with Carl. But then Corelli ventured to remark that Italian wines were good, and everybody laughed loudly when Carl retorted that he should maybe cover up his origins, or people would start to say he was with the mob.
Corelli turned to me, “Whaddya think, Babs?”
“Oh, I drink anything,” I smiled, “but I prefer champagne.”
“Yeah, champagne” said Carl. “Now that’s different. I always buy French champagne. Hey, honey, do we have any here for the little lady?”
A shadow crossed Zandra’s face, as she briskly tossed the salad in its earthenware bowl. She shook her head. Carl frowned. “How come we don’t have any?” His wife’s eyes flicked nervously across the table to me. She wished I had not raised the subject; suddenly I could imagine him berating her for getting something wrong.
“Sorry, baby, I guess you’ll have to make d
o with this stuff.” And he waved a hand dismissively in the direction of the bottle he had been praising.
At that moment Miranda reached out for it, but her father’s hand descended on her wrist, playfully yet firmly. “You want something, Mira honey?”
“I just want a drink. I want a glass of wine.”
Carl leaned forward, resting his weight on his elbows, staring at her. “Now listen, kitten, you’re too young to start drinking. No daughter of mine is going to start drinking yet. It ruins your looks, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?”
Lace and Marylinne giggled, sipping from their glasses in a dimity, birdlike manner, which did not suit their enamelled appearance. Miranda glanced at them, then at her father. “It doesn’t seem to do much harm to them,” she said, with a curious note in her voice, half-envy, half-contempt.
“They’re different,” Carl said, shortly, his mouth full of bread and salad.
“I don’t see why,” retorted the girl, with the pout of a spoiled child used to getting her own way. Marylinne and Lace looked at each other, briefly, for barely a fraction of a second. “It’s okay, Miranda,” said Marylinne at last, hooding her eyes with sweeping lashes, “your Daddy just means that we’ve been around, and you’re still the sweetest little innocent thying.” She mouthed the last word with daring irony, so that I felt my arms tingle nervously, waiting. Carl looked up sharply, his eyes narrowing. But the large blue eyes looking back at him were wide, their habitual blankness of expression about as deep as a pool of rainwater after a Texas shower. Satisfied that no menace could possibly swim in such shallows, Carl relaxed. “Sure, you got it, Marylinne.” The men laughed.
