MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  They drifted into the kitchen, and the woman named Dr. Porter said, “Sit down, I’m warming some soup.”

  “I love real minestrone soup,” Adela Ware said. She sat on a high stool next to the chopping block as Isabel fussed with the bag and a bowl from the cupboard. “I’d hate to tell you what I used to eat,” she said. “Horrible, horrible things.”

  “Like what?” Mac said, interested in such stories.

  The microwave bell dinged, and Isabel removed the soup and placed it in front of Adela Ware on the chopping block. To his surprise, she actually tied a towel around Carolyn’s mother’s neck.

  “Tell him what I used to eat,” Adela said, blowing on a hot spoonful.

  “I don’t know what you ate,” Isabel Porter said.

  “You see,” Carolyn’s mother said, “by pickling and preserving, Mother wanted to preserve a place for us in the world. She opened accounts for our schooling and paid for lessons—she herself had taken music lessons as a girl in Hamburg—and my sister and I both played piano and danced and sang. She even managed to enroll us at St. Ursula’s. Somehow we were very popular! By the time my sister was nineteen, she had been proposed to by Marcher Wyndham Reilly—do you know the name? His father owned the third-largest rendering plant in Chicago. The reception took place at the family’s home in Winnetka—a thirty-room house on the lake. And I remember saying to Mother that Marcher’s brain had been rendered of dead meat, and that I’d marry someone who could think, no matter if he hadn’t a penny. Oh, it’s cold!”

  “Stop talking and drink up,” Isabel said. Then she said, “Mr. West, I’m not sure at all when she’s coming.”

  “It won’t be long,” he said. “I can wait out here.”

  “She’s not an easy one to pin down,” Isabel said. “I’d be surprised if she came back when you expected her.”

  “Don’t tell him that,” Adela Ware said.

  “I’m only saying that perhaps your wait will be somewhat fruitless.”

  Mac said, “She left me a note. It’s fine.”

  “I wouldn’t wait myself,” Isabel said.

  Feeling annoyed, Mac said, “Maybe I’ll take a walk after all.”

  Isabel said, “Let me take those flowers.”

  He recoiled.

  It was then he heard some fidgeting at the front door.

  “There,” he said defiantly. “See?”

  He recognized the choo-choo shuffle of Carolyn’s walk. When he turned and saw her entering the kitchen, he was pleased by the chastened look on her face.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “ ‘S okay,” he said, and he handed her the little rose pot.

  “Oh, these are so pretty! Thank you.”

  “Carolyn?” her mother said. “Offer him something. We have ice cream, I think.”

  “It’s icy and tastes like a motor,” Carolyn said. “Like some?”

  “Maybe later,” said Mac.

  “I told this young man you weren’t coming,” Isabel Porter said, and shook her head.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” Carolyn said.

  “I couldn’t be sure, dear girl.”

  Carolyn gave the old bag a kiss, then her mother, and said “Come on!” to Mac.

  “Soup? Ice cream?” the mother called again.

  “Thanks, Mother,” said Carolyn.

  She took him down a wide hall with a number of rooms off of it.

  She darted into one, came out with an armload of clean, unfolded laundry, and suddenly she was on the run. A narrow, cheerless stairwell ascended through the dark hindquarters of the house. “This way!”

  Her slim ankles disappeared at the top. Up he went, landing in a musty corridor, hexagonally shaped, with large black doors appointing every other side of it.

  “Over here,” floated her voice.

  Following her into her room that first time, he registered only space—it was as long as a ballroom.

  “Whoa.”

  Carolyn heaved the clothes onto her bed.

  “God!” she said, and shut the door behind him.

  “Is everything okay down there?” Mac gasped.

  “Okay as ever.”

  “Your mother all right?”

  “Quite all right,” Carolyn said. “I mean, she has asthma and takes a lot of steroid stuff, and then something else to relax.” Her hair fell before her face, and she was speaking as if through a mask. “You know, she’s actually a remarkable person. She has all kinds of hidden talents.”

  “Is that her caretaker?”

  “Isabel? No.”

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “Our family doctor. She’s taken care of Dad since he was a boy.”

  “Lucky guy.”

  “Don’t say anything bad about her! She’s a great, great person.”

  “Oh. Not too experienced with the greats.”

  She began snapping wrinkly T-shirts in the air like whips.

  Well, then. Everything seemed awkward suddenly. Was he going to break the spell in just a day? Mac’s well-refined compensatory behaviors kicked in.

  Her room faced the street and the world to the west. Bare oak floors at his feet. “Your walls, they’re hand painted,” he noticed, moving closer to inspect them.

  “It’s a representation of a trip my grandparents took to China.”

  Fading village scenes and landscapes were connected with flowers and leaves and the spreading arms of trees. He followed a river around walls, found himself visiting other small villages of water buffalo and huts. Mountains and farms. A chubby panda hiding in a glade of bamboo. Peaked red roofs and barbed dragons and a rushing river of bicycles when he rounded the corner and reached Shanghai. Her room had been, in those days, the master suite. “How did you get it?” he asked. And she said, “Dad could never sleep in his parents’ room. Ghosts of the fornicating elders.” So Charles and Adela now had rooms in the other wing.

  On the street side were French doors, which opened onto a narrow balcony. Mac unclasped one, looked down at the street through the tree dotted with shoes. “Why are there shoes in this tree?” he inquired.

  Carolyn’s gaze shifted out the window, and when she spoke, she seemed to be weighing each word. “When Molly was little, when she outgrew them, she’d tie them together and make a wish and let them fly.” She told him that when she herself was young, she’d kneel on the balcony and pretend she was Juliet, and the mailman, if she timed it right, would play his part. She had an old wicker chair draped with discarded scarves and clothes, and Mac took a seat on it. On the wall surrounding the bed, over some of the Chinese scenes, were pencil portraits.

  “Did you do those?”

  “They’re not very good,” she said. “Look at the nostrils—they’re awful.”

  “For nostrils, they’re pretty decent.” He recognized her mother, and Molly in numerous portraits from her childhood, and even her father, and there were a number of other impressive-looking heads and still lifes as well. His eyes came to rest on a fading, neo–Art Deco-style poster from a long-ago FESTIVAL DU FILM, PARIS.

  Mac swallowed. “How weird.”

  Carolyn followed his eyes. “What?”

  He studied it, trying to make sense of its presence. “Why do you have that?”

  The shallow breathing started, something he could not help when certain things constellated.

  “What is it, Mac?”

  “That poster’s my mother’s. It’s— She designed it.”

  Carolyn appeared to wince at this announcement. “I’ve had that up forever.”

  Tears were starting down his face. “Sorry,” he said, then gulped.

  Through the swamp in his eyes, he detected her surprise but felt an arm go around him, a mother’s pat delivered to his back. “You okay?”

  “I’ll never do this again,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I swear. Throw me out if I ever do.”

  “You really think it’s hers?”

  His heart felt as if it was beating sideways; he was expos
ed. Call him a basket case—his cover was blown. “Come here.” He pulled her over, and just as he remembered, for the poster had hung in various apartments of his youth, the initials C.W were down in the corner. “See?” He pressed his hands into apelike fists in his pockets. “She was very proud of this. The year before I was born, you see, she had been an art student in Paris, and there had been a competition, and one of her teachers recommended her, and they chose her design.” He was rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Tell me why you have it.”

  Carolyn said, “I found it, snooping around in my dad’s office, and thought it was really ethereal and delicate.”

  “It is.”

  “You can just stare at it.”

  “How was your father connected to the festival?” he asked.

  “Oh, the glory days,” she said. “Let’s see, Dad’s movie, the French version of Tangier, was screened that year. I was about four, so I remember—”

  “You’re four years older than I am?” he exclaimed.

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “Is it a problem?”

  Inexplicably, his lower regions began to tingle and shrink. “It doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “Go ahead, tell me about the poster.”

  “The poster. Yes. So let’s see, Bill Galeotto was the producer of the film and one of the directors of the festival—you know about their friendship I suppose.”

  “A little.” Who, upon having read Tangier in the blush of youth, could forget the buggering scene in the hotel garden, the inferno of the day still held in the clay ground, and the burn on the young man’s hands?

  “Des trops bons copains, ”she continued. “The things people want are often incompatible.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, he married my mother.”

  “I’m lost now. You’re here, and Molly’s here—”

  She shrugged, not looking at him. “For quite some time when I was growing up there was no place for any of us in Dad’s life. His reason for living was William Galeotto.” She dug into her pile of laundry, plucked out a pair of childish underpants, and creased them sharply down the middle. “It’s instinctive in children to resent their parents’ obsessions, don’t you think?”

  “Obviously. Then what happened?”

  “Life went on, and now they don’t speak.”

  “Really? The famous friends don’t speak?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “My father doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

  Mac said, “Does anyone care? I’m still thinking about my mother and the festival.”

  “Maybe that’s our connection.” Carolyn was back to her chore, rolling clean socks into little balls. “My dad and your mother met at the festival, got to corresponding a little. That’s not hard to imagine.”

  “It makes sense, sort of. That time period’s of interest because I was born the following spring, so she would’ve gotten pregnant around then.”

  “Oh, but not with my dad—”

  “No, of course not—”

  They looked at each other and laughed. “Thank God, right?” she said.

  “Yeah! Thank God!” Yet what would be so bad about it? It might ensure a lifelong tie. “But it’s possible he might know something about my—circumstances.”

  “He might.”

  Maybe his mother’s interest in Charles Ware and Tangier grew from seeing the film at the festival; Ware had been famous, married, freckly and red-haired, and Mac’s mother had been nothing more than a runaway kid with a musette bag full of art supplies.

  “Your bed looks just like mine,” he noted, and coughed. It was a mangy lump of blankets and sheets on a mattress squat on the floor.

  “So you might be able to embrace the side of me in disarray.”

  “I’d like to. Right now.”

  “And how many girlfriends are you juggling?”

  “Ha!” He sniffed. “I’m hoping maybe one.”

  “One’s usually enough.”

  Poor, crippled elation stirred in him, and he managed something like “And you?”

  “Not much has been sticking lately.”

  “So, what should we do today, besides weep and fold clothes?”

  She tossed a sock ball into the air. “I can’t go upstairs empty-handed. I look around and make sure I’m taking something with me to where it belongs. I feel compelled to accomplish something every time I move. What I’m saying is, I can’t leave a room unless I make it count. And I scorn others who don’t do the same. Is that normal?”

  “Doesn’t sound very relaxing,” Mac said.

  “It’s not.”

  They were standing in the middle of her room. The light was fading as the fog wrapped around the house like a coat. He wanted to kiss her again. The poster was making him nervous.

  “So, want to go out and have a drink, or dinner, or something?” he asked.

  Just then there was a knock. Carolyn said, “Yes?”

  “Want to talk a minute,” her mother said in that sticky voice.

  “Now?”

  “Is that young man in there?”

  Carolyn grimaced. “I don’t want her to start talking to you,” she whispered. “Do you mind?”

  “Can you open up a moment, please?” called the mother.

  Carolyn ushered him into her closet, and he played along, nestling back among her outfits and shoes as she shut him in.

  “What is it?” he heard Carolyn say.

  “What are the arrangements for tomorrow?” came Adela’s voice.

  Their conversation receded down the hall.

  Time goes very slowly in closets. There was some kind of shoe rack cleaving his buttocks. He shifted his weight, held in a sneeze. And when his eyes failed to adjust to the absence of light, he groped for the string he’d seen hanging by the door. And yanked it. At least he could keep himself occupied by the sight of Carolyn’s clothes.

  What a collection. And she clearly liked shoes. Strange little beaded shoes, and boots— Damn! Where was she?

  Then Mac noticed something sticking out of a crack in the wall: the outline of a miniature door. He reached and pulled it open. Warm air blew along the rafters into his face. Sure enough, there was a nice straw hat, crunched in the hinges, ruined. Then he saw stacks of books, and when he moved aside to let the light shine in, it looked as though years and years of hats and books and other items were backed up in this black hole. A burial ground. At the top of one pile of books was a volume that had been torn to bits, its pages and signatures ripped from the binding. He leaned in and picked up the loose, mangled cover: it belonged to the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  Feeling unsettled, he shut the door and squatted down to wait. Snooping wasn’t his desire. His mood was darkening. In short order, the situation he found himself in reminded him of the infamous rat episode from his childhood.

  One night, he’d heard a scuffling behind the heater vent in his bedroom wall, and he’d sat straight up. The sound grew louder, the vent began to shake, then stretch, and moments later it clattered and burst from the wall, and a large, wiggling Rattus norvegicus torpedoed into Mac’s room. He screamed.

  It ricocheted off a chair leg into his closet; he slammed the closet door.

  For three days and nights, the rat scratched and gnawed. Lying in his bed with it scratching, Mac felt torn in two. His mother said a rat in a closet was better than a rat out of one, so he tossed and turned to the desperate sound. Day four and all quiet; he jumped from his bed and opened the closet door. Maybe the rodent had escaped, was now sunning on the banks of the Charles. But moments later he found it, curled up in one of his slippers—even pests wanted to be comfortable when they died. He was a killer. He couldn’t believe he’d sentenced such a robust creature to die in such a lonely way. It was too late now, forever. That night, after they disposed of it, Mac heard his mother and some guy laughing. He came out and told them to shut up; they looked at him as if he was very young.

  A new concept crossed his
mind: that all these years, he’d been as trapped as the rat. Locked in by events beyond his control, doomed to shrivel and die. It was time to break out, move on! For God’s sake, where was this woman he barely knew? It’s not hard to chew your cuticles to the point of bloodshed. The air was growing tight. One must be patient at the start of a relationship. One was learning to navigate the other person’s world, pileups and wrecks all along the way. Would he die in her slippers? Just then he heard her fumbling with the door, and she opened the closet and released him.

  “What’s up?” he said, shaking himself out like a dog.

  “Nothing. She just wanted to know about Molly getting home.”

  “Hey, not to pry, but why does she come to you to find that out?”

  Carolyn said, “I seem to be the one keeping track of everything around here.”

  It didn’t make sense, and he couldn’t hold back. “Why are you letting your mother get away with being such a space case?”

  But he’d gone too far. “Do you know anything about my mother?” she said. “You don’t. She was a great actress, in college had all the leads. She could sing and dance, and she was wonderful at Shakespeare, too. And of course she was very beautiful. I look like my father.”

  “That’s great, but so?”

  “Well, she could’ve taken herself seriously, and she didn’t.”

  “And what happened?”

  “My father was becoming more well known by the day, and that’s kind of overwhelming.”

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “So my mother needs some help—so what?” And she took up her brush and began to rush it through her hair. She was tearing her beautiful hair.

  She had him. He clearly knew nothing about relationships— especially with parents. He stood there a long time, staring at her back, before he finally made himself say: “Carolyn, that was all stupid, what I said. Sorry. I just want to know everything about you. I mean it. Really.”

  She looked around at him. “Stop that!”

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re looking at me—like you’re thinking something different from what you’re saying.”