Double Delight

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Hey—is my smoke bothering you?” Ava-Grace asked, innocently. She waved her hand about again, flicking ash. “You’re looking kind of sick, Doctor.”

  Terence did not hear. Or, hearing, had not the strength to reply.

  He was thinking. There was something important, urgent, of which he must think. He was losing it, and he did not want to lose it. Yes but his brain ached. And his eyes. Since those terrible blows to his head just be grateful her new lover didn’t shoot you dead, asshole he had not felt quite himself.

  Himself!—who was that?

  Ava-Grace Renfrew was peering at him inquisitively; with a sort of bemused professional pity. Her cheap navy blue costume was a prison matron’s uniform, the too-white pearls around her neck a mockery of feminine adornment. “Uh, Doctor—you aren’t going to be sick, are you?”

  Carefully, with the air of a man fighting nausea, Terence said, “I suppose I am a bit—sick, Miss Renfrew. Sickened. I am upset—of course. Miss Renfrew, you have—”

  “Hey c’mon: ‘Ava-Grace’ is my name.”

  “—Ava-Grace—come into my office unexpected, without warning—I’ve no doubt, with a charitable motive—and you must understand that what you’ve told me is a shock, a profound—”

  Ava-Grace made a snorting sound, as of disbelief. “Nah, you must’ve known—didn’t you? Down deep inside?”

  Terence shut his eyes, grasping the slender thread of his words as if it were a lifeline, keeping his head above water. “—shock. I have in fact ceased to see Ava-Rose. I believe she is in love with another man.” No in truth he could not believe: he knew she loved only him. “I would not force my attentions on any woman who did not want them, and I am willing to refrain from trying to see her again. And I am married, and happily married. And I will remain married. But, Miss Renfrew”—and here he nearly broke down, speaking suddenly in great anguish—“you’ve said such things! Such incredible things! Accusing your own sister of—of murder!—of conspiring to murder!—the woman with whom I was, or am, in love—”

  Ava-Grace sucked her breath in, astonished. “What! ‘In love’! Listen to him!” She briskly stubbed her cigarette out on an edge of Terence’s desk, and dropped it into his waste-basket. “I see I’ve come to the wrong place, haven’t I! And, gosh-sake, I hate this damn dirty ol’ city, and that nasty Port Authority—”

  Terence said, alarmed, “No, wait! I didn’t mean—”

  “—at my own expense, just to bring tidings of truth to deaf ears—‘Greene’—‘Bunsen’—‘Wineapple’—God knows who all else.” She was on her feet, swiping at her eyes. Terence was astounded by the immediate transformation. “Well, I am a Christian who knows her duty—unlike my family—and she—my heathen sister you are all in love with—she’s a shameless devil worshipper, did you know that? Eh? Doctor?” Ava-Grace glared at Terence. Saliva glistened in the corners of her mouth. Terence tried to apologize, on his feet, too, but Ava-Grace interrupted. “Jesus sees, and He forgives, but He’s pretty pissed off, too!”

  Terence said quickly, “Miss Renfrew, I mean Ava-Grace—please don’t leave yet. I didn’t mean to insult you—”

  “Insult me? How, insult me? No man can insult me—I do not ‘cast my pearls before swine.’”

  Terence hoped that the woman’s outburst had not been overheard in the outer office. He was fairly wringing his hands, not knowing what to do. Let her go. You don’t want to hear more. She is a hard, cold, calculating woman. Erase her from your memory. He said, “Please, won’t you stay a little longer? We have much to discuss. And—if it’s a question of money—your bus fare from Jersey City—”

  Ava-Grace refused to sit down again. She held her ugly, oversized handbag in front of her as if to keep Terence at a distance. But she seemed temporarily placated, and did not leave: Perhaps the offer of financial reimbursement had mollified her. “Well! now we’re speaking frankly, Doctor,” she said, with a mean little twist of her mouth, of a kind Terence recalled having seen once or twice in Chickie, but never in Ava-Rose, “—let me ask you: did Ava-Rose tell you, bald-faced, that those little girls are mine?—Dara and Dana, my girls?—that I abandoned?—yes?—did she?”

  “Yes, she—”

  “In fact, Doctor, Dara and Dana are her children, that she has so ill-treated, I am suing to get custody of them, through the state children’s welfare bureau. So!—what d’you think of that?”

  Terence, appalled, said, “My God, what are you saying? Ava-Rose is the twins’ mother? But I’d thought—”

  Ava-Grace shook her finger rudely at Terence. “And don’t you finance any damn ol’ lawyer to block my suit, or I’ll expose you! I’ll put your picture on the front page of the Trenton Times! You and her! The lot of you! The girls’ own grandmother has betrayed them, and I despair!—Dana is hidden away somewhere, and I don’t know where; and Dara is—starting to change. My darling little nieces, that always loved me.”

  “Wait,” Terence said, “—let me get this straight: Ava-Rose is the girls’ mother, not you; and Holly Mae is—your mother? Yours and Ava-Rose’s?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Doctor,” Ava-Grace said fiercely. “Don’t tell me, deep in your heart, you didn’t know.”

  But Terence had not known. He simply had not known.

  Had he?

  “—And Chick is Ava-Rose’s son, too. That she had when she was sixteen, and ran away to Atlantic City with some gambler—who dumped her, nine months pregnant, and I had to go get her, by bus, and miss half my high school exams, and almost flunk out! Not that she cared, nor even thank me. Y’know what she said to me, Doctor?—‘Why do you always poke your nose in my business, Ava-Grace!’—that’s what the thankless girl said to me. I’ll never forget!”

  “Chick is Ava-Rose’s son? But—”

  “Oh, I devoted myself to him, too, when he was a little baby, and Ava-Rose would run off with men, and none of us knew where she was, or if she was alive, from one day to the next. That little boy loved me like I was his mother, yes and he loves me still, though he has long ago acquired his Renfrew ways, like a young snake growing into its markings. I pray for his soul, like for the twins, every day, Doctor, yes I do.”

  “Her son—?”

  Terence saw the hulking blond boy in his mind’s eye: the smirking smile, the “innocent” lift of the eyes, the handsome but blemished broad face. Ava-Rose Renfrew’s son?

  Like an avenging Fury, Ava-Grace paused to look at Terence with renewed scorn. “‘Why, Ava-Rose is too young to be that boy’s mother’—that’s what you’re thinking, eh, Doctor? Same ol’ crap you all say, right about now. You men!”

  “Please, Ava-Grace, don’t speak so loudly—”

  “I will speak as loud as I please, Doctor, and ‘he who has ears to hear, let him hear.’ D’you want to know the truth, or not?”

  “Yes, of course, I—”

  “Well! Holly Mae Loomis, who is the biggest the most shameless liar of them all, is our mother, yessir: Ava-Rose’s and mine. She’ll deny it to this day, telling a bald-faced lie to her own girls, but we know. That’s just some ol’ tale she invented, that our real mother abandoned us; and she took us in. Now I’m not saying that the woman is pure evil—she’s my mother, and there is good in her, I know. When Ava-Rose and I were in fifth grade, she did time up at Elizabeth, for bad checks, and there she found Jesus—then, afterward, backslid, as a certain percentage will; but once Jesus is in your heart, He’s in.” Ava-Grace paused. A steely look came into her eyes. “The cruelty of that woman is her favoring one child over the other, from the cradle onward. My twin sister and I started out this life equal, as all mankind is equal before God; then, a change came upon us, and Ava-Rose was favored. I believe it was because she acquired her Renfrew markings when we were still in grade school, and I never did. She was one of them, taking happiness from evil, and I never was. And I’m proud to say, I never will be.”

  Ava-Grace’s forehead was deeply furrowed. Her sallow face appeared swollen. Terence
sensed that, if he moved precipitously, she might haul off and strike him with the handbag.

  “It’s a fearsome thing, to have a twin,” Ava-Grace said grimly. “To be a twin. Some primitive folks, y’know?—they kill twins soon’s they’re born. You ever hear that? Some other folks, it’s said they used to make twins their rulers. (Maybe just boy twins?) I don’t know any facts for sure, and all that stuff is heathen superstition, but it is scary, sometimes. I could never send any message to Ava-Rose with my thoughts, but she could send to me. I’d hear this sweet little singsong voice in my head, Ava-Rose’s voice, ‘Think you’re too good for us, why don’t you go swim in the river,’ and I’d run to find her and tell her to stop and she’d just stare at me like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and say, ‘Stop what, Ava-Grace?’ but the voice would come back, the soft voice of the serpent it was, Satan in Ava-Rose’s form as she herself is Satan in a comely human form, so I’d cry, and yank at my hair, and seeing her all innocent-like I’d rush at her and hit her with my fists, ‘Ava-Rose you’re driving me crazy, stop! stop or I’ll kill you!’ and she’d scream like she was being killed so somebody would come save her—somebody always came.” Ava-Grace’s voice dipped, with this last. She was breathing harshly. As if sensing she might have gone too far, she said, more evenly, “I don’t doubt, Doctor, that Ava-Rose castigated me to you, and gave some ol’ heathen-astrology reading that is false—not only in itself (for astrology is discredited by all enlightened people), but because she and I have the same sign exactly—not that I know what it is, I scorn such things, but my ‘reading’ is her ‘reading,’ and she knows it. We are the same person, one of us gone wrong.”

  Terence, staring at Ava-Grace Renfrew, was overcome by the sense of vertigo he’d felt when she’d first entered his office. For there, inside the woman’s faded, drawn Fury-face, gleaming out of her narrow vindictive eyes, was the other’s face—the beautiful, radiant face, and those eyes shining like precious gems, of Ava-Rose.

  “I suppose, Doctor, Ava-Rose boasted how she has cast me out of her heart, eh? Which is exactly what I have done with her.”

  Terence said quickly, “Why, no, Ava-Rose never said such a thing. I seem to recall her saying she loved you. But that you hadn’t seen each other in—eleven years?”

  “A bald-faced lie,” Ava-Grace said, with satisfaction. “Not less than once a month I drop by that place of iniquity, hoping to see my little nieces; and sometimes I’m able to, and sometimes not. Holly Mae, my own natural mother, refuses to let me cross the threshold if she’s home—what d’you think of that, Doctor?”

  Terence tried to speak consolingly. “I’m very sorry to hear it, Ava-Grace.”

  “And all because of the trial—that damn ol’ trial that turned them against me, and me against them, forever!”

  “Trial?”

  “Cap’n-Uncle Riff had to stand trial for mail fraud in a federal court in Trenton, and some of the family, including Ava-Rose and me, were subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify against him. I knew the old fox was guilty of all they’d charged him for, and—”

  “Guilty? Mail fraud? Cap’n-Uncle Riff?” Terence spoke disbelievingly. In his mind’s eye there rose the solemn patriarchal figure of the elderly white-haired and bearded man.

  “Why of course, Doctor: ‘mail fraud’ was just one of his money-schemes, and he made a mistake to use the U.S. mail. What he did was run an ad in the classifieds in a whole lot of newspapers—‘A call for ambitious men and women to earn $100,000 yearly in your own home! Send $11.95 cash and stamped self-addressed envelope for instructions!’ And the silly fools would send money, hundreds and hundreds of them, to one or another P.O. Box (Cap’n-Uncle switched around), and he’d mail back as ‘instructions’ a little printed slip of paper like out of a Chinese fortune cookie—‘Place my ad in newspapers.’” Ava-Grace laughed as if despite herself. “That old man is clever, you got to hand it to him. ‘The Prince of Darkness’ in disguise. But they arrested him, and he had to stand trial, and I took the stand, like I said, and spoke the truth of what I knew; and Ava-Rose took the stand right after me, and undid every word I uttered, by the telling of sheer lies. Swearing on the Holy Bible never meant the least thing to her!” Ava-Grace paused, her face suffused with blood. She was hugging her handbag ever more tightly against her chest. “And we looked more alike then than we do now. And out of deviltry Ava-Rose found out what I was going to wear to court, and wore something identical. Naturally, the fool jurors couldn’t decide which of us to believe, and Cap’n-Uncle speechified so fine, from when he’d heard the Reverend Billy Graham preach once—they trooped back in with a verdict of ‘not guilty.’” Ava-Grace paused, with a look of bitter resignation. “Only a single time I know of that man (who never was anybody’s uncle, nor any sea-captain, nor even any Renfrew, probably) did get sent away to prison—manslaughter, down in Miami, seven years and he got out in three. But he’d been young then, the sinner, and hadn’t his fancy white hair and beard.”

  “Manslaughter?—Cap’n-Uncle? Who did he kill?”

  Ava-Grace said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “Who did he get caught for killing, is what you mean.”

  Before Ava-Grace Renfrew left, Terence insisted upon reimbursing her, with badly shaking fingers, for the bus trip from Jersey City. The price of the round-trip ticket was surprisingly low, and he wanted to give her twice the amount of money, but she staunchly refused—“Thank you, Doctor, but not me.”

  She added, in parting, “I know it was a bad shock, but ‘the truth shall make you free.’ Bare your heart to your lawful wedded wife, and beg her forgiveness, in Jesus’ name. Will you?”

  Terence nodded gravely. “Oh yes.”

  “That sister of mine!—she’s always attracted you men, no matter your age and sense, like maggots. I swear, I don’t understand.”

  Terence, who had opened the door to the outer office for Ava-Grace to pass through, winced. He was aware, through a haze of pain, of how, in the outer office, under the guise of busying themselves with desk work, Mrs. Riddle and her assistants were listening avidly. He murmured, “Magnet, you mean. Not maggots.”

  Ava-Grace swung on out in her scruffy ballerina flats, with an airy, dismissive wave of her arm. “No, sir, Doctor,” she said emphatically, “—maggots I said, and maggots I mean.”

  The floor did tilt beneath Terence Greene’s feet. He scrambled to save himself, but fell heavily. His head struck a flat surface, and a sharp surface, and something opaque and durable with a polished sheen. He was unconscious; yet woke shivering convulsively. An agitated older woman and another, younger woman were looming over him, splashing water onto his face. From a steeply vertical distance they cried, in near-unison, “Dr. Greene! Oh, Dr. Greene!”

  But he was too far away to console them.

  Ending

  By the end of the summer, it would be known generally in Queenston, even among those not in the immediate social circle to which Phyllis and Terence Greene belonged, that the couple was separated; that they would soon be filing for divorce.

  During the month of August, Phyllis Greene and her daughters were away, staying with Phyllis’s mother at her summer place on Nantucket Island—“We’re going up early, and Terry will be joining us a little later,” Phyllis told friends. But it was observed by those Queenston friends who were not themselves away in August that, in fact, Terence remained alone in the large house at 7 Juniper Way, and continued to commute to New York during the week as if nothing had changed—except, of course, he was alone. And unreceptive to invitations. Negligent about returning telephone calls.

  Then, at the very end of August, Terence moved abruptly out of the house and into a single-bedroom apartment near the railroad depot. He notified no friends, had no explanations except an embarrassed murmured “It’s temporary” and “We think it’s for the best right now”—as he told Burt Hendrie, unavoidably encountered in a Queenston liquor store one evening.

  And then Phyllis and the girls, and, for
a brief while, before leaving for college, twenty-year-old Aaron (who had been in Wyoming for most of the summer), returned to the house at 7 Juniper Way.

  And it was clear that the family was split—but why?

  And in the matter of the divorce—which of the Greenes wanted it?

  It happened like this.

  Late one July night, at the Mercer Mall, by Beno’s Pizzeria, a gathering of area teenagers sighted Studs Schrieber on a motorcycle roaring across a corner of the parking lot to avoid red lights on Route 1—Studs Schrieber, or a wiry young man in black T-shirt, ragged jeans, crash helmet, and wraparound reflector sunglasses who so uncannily resembled Studs as to be a twin.

  Of the eleven teenagers who saw the cyclist, eight were adamant, unshakable, that it had been Studs—“There’s only one of him, man.” But they were divided as to the motorcycle itself: whether it had been a black Harley Davidson, or a black Yamaha. Nor could they offer any plausible explanation why Studs, known to them all, would not have spoken with them; or, at least, waved in passing.

  One girl believed that Studs had waved to her, sort of—“You’d have to know him real well, to’ve seen it.”

  Word of the sighting passed swiftly through the area as teenagers called friends, and these friends called others. It was eleven o’clock the following morning that Kim Greene picked up a ringing telephone, in her mother’s presence: Phyllis heard the girl draw in her breath sharply as if she’d been struck, and cry, “Oh wow—that’s great!” and then repeat, in a choked, failing voice, “That’s—great,” unable to continue as she burst into tears. The telephone receiver slipped from her fingers and slammed onto a kitchen counter.

  Phyllis, astonished, was afterward to think that never in her life had she witnessed such a transformation; never had she seen anyone turn so waxy-pale, as if, within seconds, the blood had drained from Kim’s face.