The Carousel

by Belva Plain

  “But so many of the things she said about Tina, the way she won’t let us hug her and doesn’t want us to go out, are accurate. Remember how Tina carried on when we went overnight to Washington two weeks ago?”

  “Sally,” he said patiently, “I had a dog once who climbed into my suitcase. Little fox terrier mutt, he was, smart enough to know that I was going away. If a dog can do that, what do you expect of a child?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Well, I know. Listen, let’s analyze this. Where does Tina go? No place much except nursery school. And I’ll tell you what I think. I think some little guy in nursery school is a bit ‘precocious,’ shall we say? Kids all play panty games. Hell, I remember doing it myself, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but—but this is different.”

  At the doctor’s office she had been defiant in her disbelief. Now she was almost upholding the doctor, playing devil’s advocate, wanting Dan to keep arguing her down. “Happy recommended her highly, you remember.”

  “I know Happy recommended her, so she’s undoubtedly got good qualifications. But I’d be more at ease with someone else. Tomorrow we’ll both ask around for names, compare notes and get Tina started somewhere else before this behavior of hers becomes a habit. That’s what it is, Sally, a bad habit. She’s jealous, she wants attention, and we need to be taught how to handle her. That’s all it is and nothing more, I’m convinced.”

  “You’re truly not scared that she might possibly be right?”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t see any signs of what she’s talking about. It’s not possible, the way we live, the way the child is cared for and watched. Listen. A lot of these accusations of pedophilia are exaggerated. Sure, it’s high time that these atrocities be brought into the open. I’m all for that. But still, you can’t let good intentions run away with you. You know what I mean. People misinterpret totally innocent actions. They tell me that some schoolteachers are even afraid to hug a child these days.”

  “I know what you mean,” Sally murmured. “I just hope you’re right.”

  “Well, when we get another opinion, we’ll know whether I’m right or not. But I’m so sure I’m right that I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I’ll tell you something, if I do lose any sleep, it’ll be over all that business that we heard tonight.”

  “Ian and your sister?”

  “Yes, and I’m afraid it’ll be a whole lot worse before it gets better. Come on, honey, let’s go to bed.”

  In the warm and quiet darkness they lay together. It flashed through Sally’s mind that sex was not only rapture, but comfort. The union was healing. It gave strength, so that fear faded. When she opened her eyes toward the black window and the black night, the world seemed less hostile than it had all day. In a kind of miraculous turnabout, it seemed to her that she, that Dan, that they together could weather any trouble, whether Tina’s, or Ian’s, or Amanda’s. As for Tina, Dan was right; that doctor had terrified her for nothing. And with her lips upon the back of Dan’s neck, she fell asleep.

  Chapter Three

  April 1990

  In the Sonoma Valley the bare earth lay in dull gold stripes between vine rows that stretched away as evenly as ruled lines on drafting paper. Up toward Napa the soaring hills were drenched in green, blue green, pine green, lettuce green, and then as the light veered among enormous cumulus clouds, they were drowned in black. On a pond beneath the rise where Amanda stood, a flight of ducks had settled, their wakes marking the water as if drawn by a silver-tipped pencil. It had been raining, and a brilliant, unfamiliar leaf, flat as a plate, that she had torn from a shrub was still glistening in her hand.

  “It looks fantastic, like something you’d see in a painting of the South Seas,” she remarked.

  Todd was looking at her, rather than at the leaf or the splendid view. She had not known him for very long, only a few months, but she had come to expect this look, this slight, thoughtful smile that reminded her vaguely of her brother, although they did not look alike. He was darker than Dan, and not as tall. Still, there was that same calm quality about him, as well as a delicate touch of humor about the eyes. Todd’s were blue; even framed by wire glasses, they were a striking blue. He had a resonant, low voice. Possibly it was this voice, heard through a jumble of dissonant chatter at a cocktail party, one of those horrible, uncivilized mass meetings that, so it turned out, he abhorred as much as she did, that had first attracted her.

  “You have the voice of an actor,” she had told him.

  “Sorry to disillusion you. I’m a lawyer,” he had replied in mock dismay.

  But she had not been disillusioned.…

  “Well, what do you think of it?” she inquired now, waving the hand with the leaf toward the spread of land below.

  “Of its beauty? Paradise, of course.”

  Like a lawyer, he measured his words, and she was quick to detect hesitation.

  “What’s wrong with it, then?”

  “Nothing except the price, Amanda.”

  “My real estate friends tell me it’s not at all unreasonable.”

  “That’s true if you want a commercial property, a vineyard, for instance. You’d get your investment back. This is vineyard country, after all. But for what you want to do, it’s sheer extravagance.”

  “My investment isn’t grapes, it’s human beings. If you could see the girls I’ve worked with, fourteen-year-old prostitutes—”

  “You’re a wonderful woman, and your plan is wonderful. But this isn’t the place for it.”

  Frowning and with a petulant gesture, she threw the leaf away.

  “I’m disappointed,” she said.

  “You asked me to come see it and tell you what I thought. And I think you should start smaller, much smaller, with a good-sized house on a few acres in one of the outer suburbs.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  The words came out as if she were annoyed and aggrieved, as if he had somehow failed her. Since that had not been her intention, she felt awkward. Whenever that happened, the awkwardness, the pause that often followed, made her more angry at herself.

  And Todd admonished gently, “You look angry.”

  “I’m not. I’m disappointed, I said.”

  When he went to the car to use the telephone, she stayed where she was. Looking out over the land, she understood how a piece of earth can possess you, how every standing tree seems to speak. A fresh rush of wind flattened the cotton shirt against her breasts and billowed it out between her shoulder blades. Damp and cool on her face and her bare arms, it came from the north-west; from the ocean or down from Alaska? she wondered. And she gazed out again over this coveted land, drawing a mental picture: Here on the rise the main building would stand, to the left in an arc would lie the cottages, like nineteenth-century village houses, each with its front porch where a girl might sit and study or simply do nothing for a quiet while. And inwardly she cried, Oh, I need to build here and work here; I need this!

  She wanted so much, wanted to give of herself, to—to be alive! She looked back toward the car where Todd was standing with the phone at his ear. Catching her glance, he waved. If only she could be sure of not losing him! But the likelihood was that, like so many others, she would lose him, too. She could never depend on men. They were attracted to her brains, her thick fair hair, and the good figure that she owed to tennis. They stayed awhile, slept with her, then they began to slide away, made excuses, came less often, and finally did not come at all.

  “You’re cold,” Harold had told her after they had been married almost three years.

  She had loved him, but he had been too hard to please. On his way up in an investment banking firm, he had high, perfectionist standards for everything: friends, entertaining, house decoration, table service, and clothes.

  She who had been doing volunteer work with new immigrants and starting a course in Mandarin Chinese was suddenly presented with a list of duties: a daytime life with important wives at important ch
arity luncheons and a nighttime life with “contacts” at dinners, the opera, and the clubs. These people were all polished, smooth and glib, sure of themselves and sure of where they were going. They were decent enough people, friendly toward Amanda, perhaps especially eager to be friendly because Harold had let them know that she was of the Grey’s Foods family. Being of that family, she was carefully, curiously watched.

  She hated it, hated the empty hours buying clothes, consulting decorators, and dusting the growing collections of French porcelains and English silver that were too precious to be entrusted to a cleaning service. The collections reminded her of Hawthorne: walls full of fussy, costly objects, the gilt-edged leather books that no one read, the black silk Japanese fan, the silver carousel.

  They quarreled often. The time span between quarrels grew shorter and the time span between their sexual unions grew longer. Sex was perfunctory and joyless. Rising from their bed one night, Harold stood looking down at her.

  “You don’t really care whether we do this or not, do you?” he asked.

  She did not answer at once because to admit the truth would be so final. Disappointing as the marriage might be, she did not want to end it.

  He continued, “I don’t think it’s only that we have differing tastes. People adjust to those and they compromise. I think there’s something missing in you. I don’t say this to be unkind, Amanda.”

  No, he was not unkind. He was just so large, so commanding. His ways, his voice, his body, all so commanding. Perhaps if they had a child, she began to think, she would feel different about him; he would be its father and everything would change. Yes, she wanted a child, wanted one badly, so very badly!

  But when she told him, he refused. “We’re not ready to have one, you and I. People don’t make babies to patch up their problems for them.”

  Not long afterward he found another woman. The marriage was over.

  Like running water life slips between your hands. And she was thirty-four.… She smiled toward Todd.

  “We’ve had a lovely ride, anyway. Would you like to have lobster salad for supper? I made it this morning,” she said.

  “That was good,” he told her. “Best feed in town.”

  “I like to cook. Even when I’m alone, I eat well.”

  She had made hot biscuits, new potatoes, fresh peas, and a lemon snow served with a light French wine. A handful of rosebuds nestled in damp fern mingled with the fragrance of food and sweetened the air. The table at the window end of the living room overlooked Nob Hill and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond.

  “A postcard view,” she said, waving toward it.

  She was pleased with the apartment, which she had decorated herself, so that unlike any other in the city, it was purely Amanda’s, from the blue walls and ceiling, colored like summer sky, to the pale simple Swedish furniture, to the dark red oriental rugs.

  “This place looks like you,” Todd said. “If I were brought in here without knowing beforehand to whom it belonged, I would say it’s yours.”

  “Really?” And pleased, she pressed for more. “Why?”

  “I guess I’ll have to fall back on that old word ‘indefinable.’ It’s the same as trying to explain an immediate attraction. Like explaining love.” He smiled. “Still, I’ll try. This room has your spirit. It feels free as outdoors. Simple and easy. No clutter. And yet it is filled with very civilized, very elegant objects. It’s all a subtle contradiction, like you.”

  “Contradiction? That sounds awful.”

  “Oh no, it’s tantalizing. It’s a puzzle, an intricate jigsaw puzzle that you know will be a great painting when it’s finished.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’m not finished!” Teasing, she was aware that her light tone, prolonging the subject, was a mask over an intensely human wish to hear more about herself.

  “No, it’s I who am not finished solving the puzzle,” he said, suddenly sober. “As long as we’ve started, do you mind if I go all the way?”

  Fear, light fingers, ran up and down her spine. At the same time, she needed to hear the rest.

  “It’s a subtle quality in you,” he said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I often feel that for all your competence and all your elegance, you don’t like yourself.”

  “What on earth makes you think that?” she cried, still feigning ease.

  “You hold back. There’s something in you that you won’t—that doesn’t want to give way.”

  Over the blue and white porcelain coffee service their eyes met for just an instant, an odd fraction of time through which each of them fled.

  “Forget it. I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said.

  The little fingers on Amanda’s back subsided. She served the dessert and filled Todd’s cup again, exactly as if nothing had interrupted the gracious little dinner.

  After a while, Todd said, “That photograph of your brother. I never noticed it before.”

  “I moved it from the top of the bookcase.”

  “You look alike. Are you alike?”

  “I don’t know him very well, so I can’t say. Probably not.”

  “Then what makes you say ‘probably not’?”

  “He’s very ‘settled,’ ” she replied. “In his niche.”

  Todd nodded. “Nothing wrong with that, especially for a man with a wife and two children.”

  The phrase “wife and two children” disturbed her. It carried an echo: He has responsibilities, and it is heartless to burden him. So without replying, since no reply was necessary, she got up to clear the table.

  Todd helped. When the few dishes had been removed to the kitchen, he walked around the living room.

  “You’ve got a miniature museum here. This Bonnard’s a treasure, the meadow and the hedgerows, and this little still life, the green grapes—beautiful stuff, Amanda.”

  “Unsolicited gifts.”

  “The Grey Foundation made a very generous gift to the museum here a few years ago, six exceptional American primitives.”

  “The best of everything, always,” she said wryly.

  “What is it about your family, Amanda? I keep getting these hints, but nothing more.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, wishing he would stop his discomfiting questions. She gave a little shrug. “Anyway, I do have a family, my mother’s people, the cousins down in San Jose. Where you picked me up last Thanksgiving weekend. Phyllis and Dick were really like a father and mother, keeping track of me at school, taking me home over vacations, doing the dentist and clothes business and all the rest. They were wonderful and sweet to Dan, too, when he visited in the summers. Sweet people.”

  “But the other side? You never visit them, do you? Not even your brother?”

  “He comes here. Years ago when I first came west, I missed him terribly. But when people are three thousand miles apart, they lose touch. Things can”—she hesitated—“even grow cold, even a trifle sour sometimes. Sad but true.”

  The blue eyes shone kindly within the gold-wire circles. “Yes, it is sad when things go sour and cold in a family. The world’s a cold place. You need each other. As you grow older, even more.”

  Her words, in spite of her, came out with a wry, sharp twist. “I’ve been managing rather well all on my own, I think.”

  “Oh, ‘managing,’ of course. What I’m talking about is closeness. Take my brother, for instance. We’re as different as can be; we argue like hell over politics and things, but all the same, we’re close as two fingers on the same hand. And when my kid sister got a grant to study sculpture in Rome, it was a personal triumph for me, silly as that may sound. But it was.”

  He was lecturing her, and she didn’t like it. Of course he meant well, but today was a wrong day, and had been altogether wrong from the beginning. And he kept on.

  “The Greys seem to do a lot of good. My brother went to a medical meeting in New York and told me about the Grey Cancer Research—”

  She blurted, “Let them hand me some of their philanthropy fo
r a change so I can do something with my own philanthropy! You know what I do. That time you went down to the settlement house, when I brought that poor little thing in off the street, you saw her, weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, rouged like a clown, impertinent and bold and scared to death, fresh from the boondocks out of some ‘dysfunctional’ family, as they call it. Just plain horror—” She stopped.

  “Yes, I saw,” Todd said gravely. “She wasn’t any older than my niece in junior high. Tragedy.”

  “Exactly. ‘There but for the grace of God,’ et cetera. What’s needed is people who care enough to come to the rescue and undo the damage. And money’s needed, naturally. Always money. I’ve learned so much ever since I took that one course, Todd. You don’t need to be a trained social worker. I can hire them for the hands-on work while I run the thing and pay for it. There are seven girls living now with two staff in that house I rented downtown. And you should see how they’ve—what can I say?—flowered? Five are back in school, one has a job, and we lost one back to the streets.”

  “Pretty good record, I’d say.”

  “I took two on vacation before I knew you, did I ever tell you? Took them camping in Yosemite, in the high meadows. They were like a dog who’s been tied up. When it’s suddenly unchained, it can’t stop running and looking and sniffing. I think the grandeur overwhelmed them, only they didn’t have the vocabulary to express it. At night when I was alone, I cried. That’s why I want that land we saw today.”

  “I understand, Amanda, I really do. But I still say you’ll have to compromise.”

  “I don’t want to compromise! Why should I? Dammit, the money’s there! You should see that place, that Hawthorne. Talk of the British aristocracy, the landed gentry! I don’t live that way.”

  “I have the impression you don’t want to, anyhow.”

  “I don’t, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t have the means to do it if I should want to. As it is, I want the money for a better purpose.”

  “You’d need millions before you were through. To buy the land, to build and to maintain. Millions.”