Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “It’s something,” Aurora said.

  “You know, if I’d of known she was that old, I never would have run off,” Rosie said. “Royce told me she was nineteen, the liar.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “Didn’t want to make it look no worse than it was,” Rosie said.

  “Dear, we’d better get over to Emma,” Aurora said. “I’ll check on you later, when I can.”

  Walking out, she found herself pondering what Royce had told Rosie—that his mistress was only nineteen. It struck her as being a remarkably keen piece of invention for a man of Royce’s stolidity—the detail most likely to cause Rosie the keenest jealousy, for whatever she might manage to be or do as a wife she would certainly not be able to be nineteen again.

  “Human beings have such genius for deception,” she said once they were in the car. “I’ve not been fortunate. I’m far more gifted at deception than any man I’ve ever known. In my heyday I deceived everyone I knew, and never got caught. I hesitate to think what I might have been capable of if I’d found a man smart enough to deceive me and then let me find it out. I doubt that my admiration would have known any bounds. Unfortunately I was always the more cunning, and I still am.”

  When they walked up to the other hospital they saw the General’s old blue Packard sitting out front, with F.V. in his chauffeur’s cap at the wheel. The General got out and stood at attention as they approached.

  He had decided, while waiting, to take a businesslike approach to Vernon, and he shook his hand briskly. “What’s the situation?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m feeling very philosophical, so don’t ruffle me,” Aurora said. “Talk to Vernon while I calm down. I just remembered that Emma’s having a child.”

  “That must be an antique car,” Vernon said, looking at the Packard.

  “It’s no better than mine,” Aurora said, looking in her mirror. She felt a little confused. Inside, nothing seemed certain. Emma had given her the slip, finally, and looking at Vernon and the General trying awkwardly to talk to one another made her realize how strange it was that she should be involved with either of them in whatever way. No sooner did she gain a sense of herself and feel a little authority than it all slipped away. Having nothing to say suddenly, she walked into the hospital, leaving the two men to follow uneasily.

  “Is she all right?” the General asked awkwardly. “I never know.”

  “She ate a good breakfast,” Vernon said. “I guess that counts for something.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the General said. “She always eats. She seemed a little out of sorts when she left home.”

  Aurora heard the sound of male voices behind her and whirled on them. “All right, I feel quite sure you two are discussing me,” she said. “I don’t see why you can’t keep up with me. It would be a good deal nicer if we all walked along together.”

  “We thought you wanted to be alone to collect your thoughts,” the General said hastily.

  “Hector, my thoughts have been collected since I was five,” Aurora said. “You know I become irritable when I think I’m being discussed. It does seem like you and Vernon could remember that. I’d rather not have a scene right now, if we can help it.”

  She waited until they caught up and obediently and silently kept pace with her. The nurse at the registration desk had trouble finding Emma’s room number, and Aurora was just on the point of an acid remark when she finally found it.

  Immediately she went striding off. Vernon and the General tried to anticipate which way she might turn so as not to bump into her. It was obvious to both of them that she was in no mood to tolerate minor awkwardnesses.

  Indeed, riding up in the elevator was terrifying to both of them. Aurora had a tigerish look in her eye—she seemed the very contradiction of everything a grandmother ought to be. It was plain that she suddenly felt almost intolerably hostile to both of them, but neither of them knew why. They felt their best course lay in keeping silent, so they kept very silent.

  “Well, you’re both total failures as conversationalists,” Aurora said angrily. Her bosom was heaving; she herself could not remember when she had felt so mixed and so violent.

  “Evidently you’re only able to talk about me,” she said. “You’re not at all interested in talking to me. The sight of the two of you makes me wish I was ninety instead of forty-nine. I might as well be ninety, for all the good it’s going to do me. In a healthier age I’d still be having babies, you know—in a healthier age I could probably find someone worth having them by.”

  Fortunately the elevator opened just then, and Aurora strode out, giving them a haughty, rather contemptuous glance.

  “I knew she wasn’t all right,” the General whispered. “I’m getting so I can tell.”

  Aurora walked rapidly down the long white hall, the two men forgotten. She felt like she might burst into tears or fury at any moment, and she wanted to get away from both men. Then, before she had time to calm down or even to consider why she felt so pent up, she was at Emma’s door, Room 611. The door was partially open and she could see her pale, unshaven son-in-law sitting by the bed. Without a glance at the two tag alongs, she opened the door and saw her daughter. Emma lay back amid some pillows, her eyes unusually wide.

  “He’s a boy,” Emma said. “So much for family tradition.”

  “Oh, well, I’d just like to see for myself,” Aurora said. “Where have you put him?”

  “He’s splendid,” Emma said. “You won’t be able to resist him.”

  “Un-huh, and how come you didn’t wear that blue gown I bought you—for this very occasion, I seem to remember?”

  “Forgot to pack,” Emma said. Her voice sounded tired and cracked.

  Aurora remembered that she had two men with her and looked around for them. They were standing quietly outside the room.

  “I brought Vernon and the General to share your moment of triumph,” she said. “I believe they’re both too timid to come in.”

  “Hello, hello,” the General said when they had been ushered in. Vernon managed a greeting, and Flap gave them cigars.

  “Thank God, someone to give them to,” he said.

  “I’ll leave the four of you to complete these formalities and go have a look at that baby, I believe,” Aurora said. She left them all looking vaguely at one another and went down two floors to the nursery. After some prodding, a nurse produced a tiny midge of an infant, who refused to open its eyes. She had wanted especially to see whose eyes it had, but saw she would have to wait. She wandered down the hospital corridor shaking her head and clenching her jaw. Everything was wrong—everything—but she couldn’t say what.

  When she got back to Emma’s room she found conversation at a lull, as it had been when she left. “Thomas, you look quite tired,” she said. “Fathers are allowed to rest while the infant is in the hospital, you know, but seldom afterward. If you’d like my advice you ought to go home and go to bed.”

  “For once I’ll take your advice,” Flap said. He bent and kissed Emma. “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “All right, gentlemen, I’d like a private word with my daughter,” she said, looking at her very uncomfortable suitors. “Perhaps you’d like to wait for me in the lobby. I’m sure you have notes to compare, or something.”

  “Why are you so itsy?” Emma asked, once the men were gone.

  Aurora sighed. She was pacing the room. “Is that what I am?” she asked.

  “Well, something,” Emma said. “Remember when I told you I was pregnant and you had that fit?”

  “Um,” Aurora said, sitting down. “Yes, I suppose I need to burst into tears, but neither of those men is man enough to provoke me to it.”

  Her daughter’s eyes were quite luminous, she noticed.

  “I would have liked to hear your grandmother’s comment on that child,” she said. “If your first child wasn’t a girl, then your last one is sure to be. I imagine that would have been her comment were she here.”


  She noted that Emma was quite exhausted. Her fatigue was tinged with a kind of delight, or triumph, but it was fatigue nonetheless. The unusual brightness of her eyes only served to highlight her exhaustion. She felt it incumbent upon herself to stop fretting, if that was what she was doing, and to behave in a motherly and, she supposed, grandmotherly fashion.

  “I’m being quite bad, Emma,” she said. “You’ve done everything properly, I can see, aside from forgetting my gown, and I’ve no excuse for rattling on this way.”

  “I just want to know why you’re itsy,” Emma said.

  Aurora looked at her directly, and for a long time. “I shall give you the Klee,” she said. “Come and get it when you’re on your feet.”

  “All right,” Emma said. “I hope you don’t mind that we named him Thomas. We would have named it Amelia if it had been a girl.”

  “It’s of no moment,” Aurora said and reached over and took her daughter’s light, almost lifeless hand.

  “You must get your strength back,” she said. “You’ve a lot of safety pins to bend.”

  “I have time,” Emma said.

  “Yes, well, I shall keep the Renoir yet a bit,” Aurora said.

  Emma stopped looking delighted—a look of slight downcastness came into her face. “You don’t like being a grandmother, do you?” she said. “You don’t accept it as being a natural part of life, or anything like that, do you?”

  “No!” Aurora said, so fiercely that Emma jumped.

  “Okay, but I hoped you would,” Emma said faintly, in the beaten, retreating tones Aurora’s own mother, Amelia Starrett, had employed so often and so tellingly when faced with her own daughter’s sudden angers.

  “I’m stripped … don’t you see?” Aurora began passionately. But then her heart twisted and she blushed, very ashamed, and took Emma into her arms.

  “I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” she said. “You’ve been a perfect and proper daughter and I’m simply crazy … just crazy.”

  Then she seemed to pass out for a while, holding her weak white daughter, and when she looked up she was enough herself to notice that Emma’s hair was as awful as ever. She refrained from comment, though, and stood up and walked around the bed.

  Emma’s eyes had recovered a bit of their shine. “Why did you decide to give me the Klee?” she asked.

  Aurora shrugged. “My life is crazy enough without that picture around,” she said. “It’s probably had an influence on me all these years, you know. It’s probably why my lines never meet.”

  She took out her mirror and looked at herself thoughtfully for a while, neither really calm nor really wrought up.

  “How come you brought two men?” Emma asked.

  “I’ve decided to force them down one another’s throats,” Aurora said. “Those two and Alberto and any others that come along. I’m going to require plenty of attendants from now on, I can tell you that.

  “You must consider that I’ve only been a grandmother as long as you’ve been a mother,” she said. “It’s likely I’ll come to feel differently about the role, or if not about the role at least about the child.”

  She noticed that her daughter was smiling shyly. In her fat way, with almost no hair to speak of, she yet managed to be an endearing, even a fetching girl, and nicely mannered, despite her dreadful marriage.

  “Count yourself lucky you’ve got my Boston, my dear,” she said. “And don’t tell me it was only New Haven. If you just had your father’s Charleston I’d not count on you for very much.”

  She shook her fist at her daughter’s shy smile and northern eyes, and turned and left.

  3.

  IN THE lobby of the hospital the General and Vernon were walking around and around feeling uncomfortable with one another, but less uncomfortable with one another than either of them felt at the prospect of Aurora’s return.

  “I’ve felt all day she was somewhat out of sorts,” the General said several times. “There’s no predicting her moods, you know.”

  Vernon would have agreed, but before he could she stepped out of the elevator and took them by surprise. “What’d you think of the baby?” she asked at once.

  “We didn’t go see it,” the General said. “You didn’t tell us to.”

  Aurora looked haughty. “You’ve spent thirty minutes in the same building with my grandchild and haven’t even gone to see him,” she said. “That shows rather a lack of ambition, or generalship, or something, and that includes you, Vernon. I hope you’ve at least made friends while I’ve been busy.”

  “Of course,” Vernon said.

  “I bet,” Aurora said. “Would you please take me back to the building where my car is? I’m tired. I’ll meet you at home quite shortly, Hector, if you don’t mind.”

  The General stood by the Packard and watched them drive off in the Lincoln. F.V. held the door open for him.

  “It’s true this car’s becoming a bit inconvenient, F.V.,” the General said. “A Lincoln would be somewhat more convenient, I’ll admit.”

  “A Lincoln?” F.V. said in disbelief.

  “Well, or something comparable,” the General said.

  4.

  AURORA RODE downtown in silence. Vernon could not decide whether she was happy or unhappy, and he didn’t ask. She held her silence until they were eight stories up the garage ramp.

  “Up, up, up,” she said and yawned.

  “Yeah, you been up a while,” Vernon offered.

  “Not brilliant, but it’s conversation,” Aurora said and yawned again. She spoke no more until Vernon pulled up beside her Cadillac.

  “It doesn’t look as classic as it used to,” she said. “I’ve a feeling that one of these days my key is going to refuse to go in the ignition.”

  “Gimme a buzz if you need me,” Vernon said.

  “A buzz indeed,” she said, collecting her shoes, which she had kicked off. “I’ll settle for having you at my door at seven this evening, and bring some cards.”

  “Seven today?” he asked, noticing her yawn again.

  “Seven today,” Aurora said. “We’re going to have a reckless middle age, the several of us. Maybe I’ll win enough money to buy a Lincoln and a beach boy, and then I won’t need any of you.” She pointed her bent key at him and got in and left.

  5.

  WHEN SHE got home she found the General sitting at her kitchen table, ramrod straight, eating a bowl of Rice Krispies.

  Aurora wasn’t fooled. She went over and gave his lean neck a good hard squeeze to see if she could make a dent in it. She didn’t make much of a dent, and the General didn’t look around.

  “All right, why are you looking like Don Quixote?” she asked. “There’s nothing more ridiculous than a General with a mournful countenance. What have I done now?”

  The General kept eating, which annoyed her.

  “Very well, Hector,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind being friendly, but if you’re going to sit there eating that stupid cereal I don’t see why I should bother.”

  “It isn’t stupid,” the General said. “You’ve no goddamn right to criticize my cereal. I’ve been eating Rice Krispies for years.”

  “I can believe that—it’s why your calves are so skinny, more than likely,” Aurora said.

  “No, that’s because I run,” the General said. “I keep in shape.”

  “What’s the point of keeping in shape if you’re going to be gloomy every time I’m friendly?” Aurora asked. “I’d rather have you friendly and with a little more meat on your calves. Legs are crucial, you know. In fact, where I’m concerned, little else counts.”

  The General didn’t pursue the argument. He poured some more milk on his cereal and listened to it snap, crackle, and pop, faintly. In the rare intervals when he wasn’t chewing he clenched his teeth. He felt like having an angry fit, but was trying to control himself.

  Then Aurora gave him a silent, haughty look, as if to say she had never seen anything more ridiculous in her life than him eating Rice Krispies.
Exasperated beyond control, he let go his fit. He grabbed the box of Rice Krispies and shook it at her, and then slung it back and forth in great sweeps, scattering Rice Krispies all over the kitchen and even getting some in Aurora’s hair, which is what he had really meant to do. He wanted to dump the whole box over her head, in fact, but unfortunately he had been feeling nervous for a couple of days and had been eating Rice Krispies steadily to calm his nerves and there weren’t enough left in the box to pour over her head—at last not satisfyingly. When he had slung the box around until it was empty he threw it at her, but it was no very effective throw. Aurora managed to catch the box easily, with one hand, and she strolled over lazily and dropped it in a wastebasket.

  “Had your fun, Hector?” she asked.

  “You’re going to mess up our life with that little oil man,” the General shouted. “I know you. You’ve already humiliated me with that Italian. How much do you think I’m going to put up with? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Oh, quite a lot,” Aurora said. “I’ll sketch it in for you after I’ve had my nap. I think you better come and have one too. After all this excitement you’re bound to be exhausted, and I’ve planned a little party for tonight.

  “You can bring your cereal,” she added, seeing that he still had half a bowlful. Then she crunched her way across a light skein of Rice Krispies and went up to her bedroom.

  6.

  SOME HOURS later, in her bedroom, as the evening was commencing, she sat in her window nook with a Scotch in her hand, listening to the General grumble as he tied his tie. It was a red tie she had bought him a few days before; it went beautifully with his accustomed charcoal gray.

  “If we’re going to play poker, why do you want me in a suit and tie?” he asked. “Alberto and Vernon certainly won’t be dressed up.”

  “I’m glad you’re able to call them by their first names,” Aurora said, looking down at her darkening yard. “That’s a promising beginning.”