Perfect Recall

by Ann Beattie

  “You don’t? It’s Cornwell. That why he calls me ‘Corny.’”

  “He’s always called you Aunt Rose’ to me.”

  The woman shrugged. “Well—he’s not much on establishing intimacy, and if he does, I suppose he doesn’t let anyone else in on it,” she said. To the waiter, she said: “Earl Grey tea, please, no milk, and I’m not English, but I’d appreciate it, anyway, if the water was boiling, not just hot.”

  The waiter nodded his antlers and walked away.

  “The English can really be insufferable,” Aunt Rose said.

  “Have you spent a lot of time in England?” she asked.

  “I married an Englishman,” Aunt Rose said. “Much ado about the tea.”

  “Oh. You lived in England.”

  “No. They all love to live elsewhere. Meet them all over the place. We had a small place in Devon that we went to for a few months in the summer. A lovely old stone house. I miss it and I miss my husband, although I’d appreciate it if you didn’t offer your condolences. It’s all I can do to get through Christmas in the first place. It’s been twenty years since he died.”

  “Hetherly—” She corrected herself: “Did Miles visit you in England as a boy?”

  The woman looked at her. She was studying her, but not in an unkind way.

  “He came once and it was a disaster. He’s come to like the water, apparently, but when he was young you’d have thought every raindrop was there to bring him personal misery.”

  The waiter put the teapot and the unasked-for pitcher of milk in front of Aunt Rose. He placed a little sugar bowl carefully between them. She had not touched her wine, beyond taking the first sip. As he walked away, Aunt Rose said: “You know, I think there was a real-life story about a woman wearing white gloves who went out to hang up her wash and got shot by trigger-happy hunters, but it might be like the dog in the microwave. An urban legend, I mean. Some of the people who live in my building believe all of them. They think their son really knew someone who tried to dry the toy poodle in the microwave. Things like that.”

  She took a sip of her wine. “I feel terrible if you stayed away from the pool all day just because you thought you’d intrude on my vacation,” she said.

  “I needed a facial,” Aunt Rose said, gesturing with her fingertips to her cheeks. “That, and talking on the phone to relatives and friends. Very difficult to get connected on Christmas.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “I promise not to dwell on this, but I’ve always been so curious: was he always just carrying a torch for you, or was there a real possibility you might have become a couple?”

  So James—James, whom she wanted to disbelieve; James whom she wanted to disregard—had been right. She looked into Aunt Rose’s eyes. “What makes you think he was carrying a torch?”

  “He wrote you so many letters. I’d visit him, when I still flew places, and there would be letters in progress all over the place. Don’t tell me he didn’t at least mail some of them.”

  “Letters? Only in answer to mine. During the war,” she added.

  “It’s still going on,” Aunt Rose said.

  “Writing me letters?” she said. She spoke to him two or three times a year. She never even got a postcard. He’d never sent a birthday card.

  “Oh, that. No, I wouldn’t know about that. I meant the war. In a manner of speaking, only, of course. Anyone who’d been there would take as much offense as the Holocaust survivors take when the Holocaust is brought up as a metaphor for general inhumanity,” she said. “What I meant was: look at that parachute coming down over there, over that odd little island that seems to be nothing but trees, and the waiters—” She lowered her voice. “The waiters in their silly costumes, which they’re wearing because they want to keep their jobs, of course. They’d do whatever they were told, poor things. And all those sirens. Have you heard them? They’ve been incessant, like the whole town’s burning.”

  It was true. She had heard them all day, far in the distance.

  “I’ve always liked that expression, ‘for the sake of argument.’ No Brit ever says that, you know. They just argue. But Americans always try to diffuse the animosity by claiming they’re just doing something for the fun of doing it. Anyway: for the sake of argument, though it’s peacetime, there are certain things that seem to be there as reminders: the parachutes and all the boats in the water and the young people I saw coming into town, wearing combat boots and camouflage outfits. With blue hair, I’ll grant you, and they’ve pierced their bodies themselves, but still: it does remind one of terrible things that can happen during captivity.”

  “There was never anything romantic between us,” she said. “I was engaged to someone else before James and I got together. I was engaged in college. All during the war. During the time I wrote to him.”

  “You were? He never told me that. Of course, what I know is just what I learned from Maude. She was so bitter toward the end. They were trying to adopt, and there he was, having an affair, right under her nose, with the same college girl she’d hoped to hire to help her care for the baby. Babies, as it turned out.” Aunt Rose finished her tea. “I know that problems in a marriage are never caused entirely by one person, but it was hard for me to understand what he wanted, if he didn’t want Maude. She’d gone back to school to get her master’s degree, and she was such a hard-working, nice person. I came right out and asked him what he wanted, if he didn’t want Maude, and do you know what he said? He told me that he wanted to sleep without anybody’s cold feet touching his legs. I would have taken a fistful of ice cubes to bed and rammed those into his you-know-what, if my husband had been carrying on that flagrantly.”

  “He probably couldn’t explain himself.”

  “He was so bitter when he came home and people weren’t throwing themselves at him, giving a big parade for him for being such a hero. I know you must remember that. He drank a lot, and I’d never known him to drink before the war. Apparently Maude hadn’t been opposed to the war, like so many people her age. I think that was one thing that attracted him to her, but at the same time, I think he deeply resented it.”

  “I didn’t know Maude very well. James and I were living in Chicago during most of their marriage. I think we had dinner together a couple of times, when we got to New York. The four of us.”

  “She was a nice woman. She behaved very decently, I think.”

  “And by now your grandchildren must be . . . what? Seven or eight?”

  “Nine and a half.”

  “That’s good,” she said, realizing that she sounded inane. She had never gotten to know the children at all.

  “Maude remarried. A man with a child of his own. An older child. In college now.”

  “That’s good,” she said again.

  “She always thought that when they separated, he was going after you.”

  “Me? But he was having an affair with someone else.”

  “Maude thought that was just Miles’s way of passing time until he could get the real thing.”

  “Well,” she said, “there was never anything like that between us.”

  “I certainly believe you. Anyway, after all this time he’d be crazy not to realize you’re a happily married woman.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “My husband is having an affair.” She did not use the past tense. She did not even think before she spoke. In the moment she spoke the words, she was again an unhappily married woman whose husband was having an affair.

  Aunt Rose leaned into the table. “Unless he’s incapable of telling the truth, that’s over,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Miles reported to me that he said it was over and that he regrets it very much.” “He told Miles?”

  “Well, they’re close friends, aren’t they?”

  “No,” she said honestly.

  “They aren’t? But he has something to say about James every time I talk to him. He always has news of James.”

  This was puzzling inf
ormation. She caught sight of a parachute and watched the little black figure against the blue sky, drifting. From where she sat, the boat that pulled the parachute was not visible.

  “He says you’re all going to London in the spring. Surely, people who aren’t close don’t get together to spend a week in London and then go on to—”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait a minute. I don’t know anything about London.”

  For the first time, Aunt Rose looked flustered. “Oh, I’m awfully sorry if I’ve ruined some lovely surprise. I must have, but nobody told me it was a secret. Please don’t let on that I’ve told you—or would that be asking too much?”

  “London?” she echoed. “But I teach. I do volunteer work. The work can’t be dropped whenever I want just because I volunteer. I wouldn’t have time to go to London.”

  “Oh, dear,” Aunt Rose said. “Wash my mouth out with soap.”

  “Rose—you’re sure that I’m part of these plans?”

  “Well, I thought so,” Aunt Rose said.

  They looked at each other. In the distance, sirens wailed. From the booth, the mother she had seen earlier at poolside rose, holding her sack-of-potatoes son, her purse clasped against his back and walked bow-legged out of the restaurant, struggling with the boy’s weight.

  “The dead,” Aunt Rose said, looking over her shoulder.

  “Excuse me?” she said again.

  “My war analogy,” Aunt Rose said. “It looked like that woman was carrying someone who was dead.”

  “But it was just her son. Sleeping,” she said, her voice going a little shrill on the last word.

  “Well, I know that, dear. I’m just following through with my analogy.”

  “But if we see it as a war . . . I mean, earlier today I was thinking of life as a play, but to me, that’s a warning that I’m spinning out of control, that I’m seeing things in a particular way to make all the craziness more containable.”

  “I suppose that’s exactly what I’m doing,” Aunt Rose said, pouring more tea into her cup.

  “But it’s just—it’s just inside our heads. We can’t take charge of the chaos. You’re right: this place is strange and noisy, and it doesn’t seem like Christmas, it doesn’t seem at all like Christmas, and what you’ve just told me, really, is that my husband and my friend are a lot closer than I ever imagined, and I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Aunt Rose said quietly.

  “But what does it mean?” she said.

  “In wartime, strange conditions apply, I’ve always been told.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said. “This isn’t wartime.”

  “Oh, dear, I really have upset you. I’m really so sorry. I never for a moment thought I knew anything you didn’t know. Maybe it’s been planned as a surprise. Don’t you think?” Aunt Rose put her fingers to her chin, lowering her voice. “He finds your husband quite remote, he was telling me. He thinks he’s becoming more and more withdrawn, and of course no one likes that. Then again, maybe he’s just exercising restraint. What should a friend say to Miles, when there’s too much drinking. Too many women. Too much time off from work. I don’t kid myself about his being a dutiful nephew; if I didn’t live in Florida, he wouldn’t be so keen on seeing me. He never visits all summer long, from May until November. As I’m sure you know, he rarely sees his own sons, in Minnesota.”

  “Why do you think he agreed to go through with the adoption?” she said, eager to focus on some issue that didn’t pertain to her. “It seemed wrong of both of them to proceed, when they knew they were going to end the marriage.”

  “Maude is an heiress. She bought him off,” Aunt Rose said. “She couldn’t have children, so she got things in the works and then she bought him off.”

  “An heiress? An heiress to what?”

  “What on earth would that matter?” Aunt Rose said.

  For the first time, she had the feeling that she was being too gullible. She thought it was perfectly possible that the woman was having a little malicious fun, seeing how credulous a listener she’d found. Her intuition suddenly told her—a lightening of her heartbeat told her—that something wasn’t right.

  “An heiress to what?” she persisted.

  “Well, since I don’t understand machines, I don’t really grasp what exactly the family did. Something with microchips. Something patented back in the sixties, I think.”

  Take it easy, she told herself. Don’t ask too many questions, but don’t stop talking, either. She had read, somewhere, that that was a helpful tactic for victims of kidnapping. She thought she recalled that you were supposed to follow the kidnapper’s lead, though you should try not to ever stop talking entirely.

  “So you see Maude fairly often? Maude and the grandchildren?”

  “Not all that often, but we talk on the phone.”

  “I’m sure you’d like it if they lived closer,” she said, after a long pause.

  “What grandmother wouldn’t,” Aunt Rose said.

  “Wouldn’t you technically be their great-aunt?”

  “Yes, I would, technically. But since I had so much to do with Miles’s upbringing, he’s always said he considered me a second mother. So when the children came along, I was given the honorific of ‘grandma.’”

  “How did you happen to have so much to do with his upbringing?” she asked.

  Aunt Rose put her teacup down. There was sudden hatred in her eyes. “Because I went to them, when they didn’t come to me,” she said. “I intended to have some semblance of family life. My own husband was infertile due to radiation exposure. That was the worst heartbreak of my marriage. But I made the best of it. I gave my love to my sister’s boy, and it was a good thing I did, because I was able to guide him away from some of her bad influences. His mother, Harriet. You knew she was an alcoholic.”

  “Really?” she said. If she was wrong—if she was way off track—it was cruel of her to have persisted with the old lady.

  “She certainly was,” Aunt Rose said. As she picked up her teacup, her hand wavered slightly. “It’s traumatic to remember those years. Though they keep coming back to me, whatever I do to try not to relive them.”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. She took a certain bemused pride in continuing the old lady’s war analogy. “Nightmares. Feeling caught in a time warp.”

  “How do you know about such things?”

  “Everyone’s read about the aftereffects of war,” she said.

  The waiter appeared at their table. “Anything else for you ladies?” he said.

  “No thank you. That’s all,” she said. As she spoke, she realized that she would have to converse with Aunt Rose, now, until James and Hetherly returned. She was going to have quite a few questions for James when he got back. How much she wanted to confront Hetherly with she would have to think about.

  “It was delightful to meet you,” Aunt Rose said, clasping her hand, suddenly formal. “I hope you’ll forgive me for ruining their surprise. People get old, and they just blunder along. Half the time you don’t even know you’ve done something wrong.”

  “It wasn’t wrong. They should have told you, if it was a secret.”

  “Merry Christmas and happy New Year,” the waiter said, dropping a few red-and-green foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses on their table with the check.

  She opened the folder and signed the bill. “Shall we?” she said to Aunt Rose.

  “I think I may have another cup of tea, but you go on,” Aunt Rose said.

  Could she really be free? “You’re sure?” she said.

  “Oh yes. I like to watch it get dark. Quite the opposite of what our troops think, fighting a war,” she said. She raised her eyebrows slightly, smiling. “The dark gives the enemy better opportunities,” she said.

  On the way to her room, she thought that the old lady didn’t know anything more about war than she did: what she read in the paper; what books told you; movies. Or, i
n some cases, first-hand reports. She, herself, had no first-hand report on Vietnam because Hetherly, alone among her friends at the time, had been the only one who’d volunteered. He’d volunteered, though every other boy she knew, every single one, had somehow dodged the draft.

  In the elevator, listening to “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” she wondered, for the first time, why he had volunteered.

  The room had been made up, but the curtains weren’t drawn. She went to the window and looked at the darkening sky. No more parasailers. No stars, either. It was a very black sky. She stared at it for a while. James was off having his fun. Buddy-buddy with the person he always took pains to remark was her friend. London? Surely Aunt Rose would know that if that was a total fabrication, with one single question she’d be found out. So who would risk lying that way? What if they really were going to London?

  It seemed more likely, though, that the two of them might be going to London alone. But how peculiar. Why not meet in New York and see some plays? Pubs, theater, museums—New York had everything London had. Except that it wasn’t far, far away. If it was New York, of course she could arrange for a weekend away. That would be no big deal. That was it: not that London, itself, was so important, but that they could ditch her. Completely paranoid, she told herself, sitting on the bed. Just because he had a fling with a woman he now admitted was obnoxious, she’d concocted a scenario in which a casual friend of hers and her husband were going off together to carouse and to act like silly boys together. They were both too dour, really. Weren’t they both a little dour—Hetherly with his defeated, stooped shoulders and James with his self-containment? Not seeing the family at Christmas was a big liberation for James. Going fishing was a major thrill.

  Fishing in the dark?

  She drew the curtain, so the darkness wouldn’t seem so insistent. It was perfectly possible that Aunt Rose was confused. Like the rest of the world, she’d probably gotten some things right and some things wrong. Maybe Hetherly had hatched the London plan and she’d been misled, thinking he’d communicated everything to her, and to James. Or maybe it was someone else: maybe someone else she knew would be going to London.