by Marge Piercy
Tracy had not seen Ross since Christmas. Robin was the expert on Hamilton and described it to her mother and sister. “I’ve never been in the main house. It looks like something out of Gone with the Wind, all those white columns, with a lane of maples leading to it. But some menial has always met me and ushered me down another drive. They live in this stucco house from the twenties. There’s a tall arbor vitae hedge between the house and the kennels, but what you can’t see you sure can hear. They have their own tennis courts at the big house.”
Even if Ross were an ax murderer, Daria reminded herself, he would still be Robin’s father. She had said that Robin’s and Ross’s relationship was none of her business, and she must stick to that. Her daughters were engaged in a cautious rapprochement, tentative as Marcus and Ali. Robin was gruff with her sister. She did not seem to know quite how to come close, but Tracy was patient. Daria found it astonishing how muted and how soft and how patient Tracy could be as Robin circled her.
Clearly they both needed an affirmation of family from each other. Daria knew they talked over together their occasional jealousy of her new family, how Daria herself had changed and how they should regard those changes. One Sunday night, when Sandra María, Daria and Tom had all gone off to a SON meeting, Robin and Tracy smoked dope together and saw the ghost of little Bobbie, or so they swore, and certainly they were still giggling with fright when everybody got home.
“If Daddy goes to jail,” Tracy asked at breakfast, “who’ll pay my tuition? Will I have to quit school?”
“Never.” Daria took her daughter’s firm cool hands in hers. “I promise. As soon as the renovations are completed, I’ll stop putting money into the house. I have a regular Friday night slot on the Channel Seven newsmagazine. I’ll put that money aside for your tuition.”
“We have to get you some dresses. You don’t need to come along unless you want to. I know what fits you.”
“Tracy, you seem very involved with this Scott.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m not serious about him, but he’s fine.”
“You see a lot of him for somebody you’re not serious about.”
“This summer is tough enough without being madly in love. He’s fun.” Tracy pushed her curly auburn hair out of her eyes. “That’s all I want from a man right now, Mama. It’s really all I can handle.”
The following Sunday was beyond hot into horrible. Daria shut herself in with her air conditioner turned as high as it would go. She ventured outside only to add cherry-wood chips to the little smoker in the yard, given her by the manufacturer for whom she was developing a booklet of recipes. Today she was trying a new marinade for salmon. She was alone, the others off at the park where Robin was now the regular pitcher for the reds. In midafternoon, the phone rang.
It was Bloomberg. “Mrs. Walker, this is it. I want you to know we’ve gathered a task force and at dawn we’re going to pick up the men indicted. You’re not to speak of this to anyone outside the core group of SON. Those whom I can reach, I’m calling. Nobody else is to know. It’ll be all over the papers by tomorrow midday, but we don’t want anyone skipping town tonight.”
“Are you going to arrest my ex-husband?”
“We’ve been watching all of them since the indictments came down Thursday. We expect him to drive to the Beacon Street apartment this evening, as he’s been doing. We plan to surprise him there early.”
“Mr. Bloomberg, I testified before the grand jury. Am I really going to have to testify against my ex-husband at the trial?”
“If we didn’t subpoena you, you better believe the other side would anyhow. And we need your testimony. You have to establish Walker’s situation and the connection with Ledoux.”
When her family came trickling in for supper, she had a difficult time keeping quiet. She did not so much mistrust Robin as want to shield her from the strain she herself was feeling. She was bound still across distance and distaste to Ross, implicated in his crimes and implicated in their punishment, if there were to be any punishment. She suspected that he might have suddenly flown off with his bride to some Caribbean island hospitable to refugees with money to spend. Ross had been lucky all his life. In a way he wouldn’t recognize, he was even lucky they had not died in the fire, with Lou already under SON’s surveillance. He was well connected, certainly, and well-connected lawyers seldom went to jail.
She found casual conversation at supper beyond her. She excused herself by blaming the humidity. Robin scarcely noticed, high on having pitched a two-hitter in a game their side won 10 to 1, the most lopsided game of the year. Robin was talking of playing softball more seriously, of trying out for a women’s team. Daria realized how depressed Robin had been all through June, by contrast to her animation tonight. Robin had been working at the insurance company for a year, but the promotion she expected had not come. She was beginning to suspect she was stuck in a dead-end, entry-level job. Now with her roommates moving out, she felt deserted. Daria said suddenly, “Robin, why keep that apartment? You could move in here for a while. Would you like that?”
Robin stared blankly. “Gee, Mom, that’s sweet of you. But, no thanks. That would feel like a giant step backward. I like Back Bay and I like walking to work.”
Wrong guess. She was relieved, even though she and Robin were closer now than at any time since her older daughter had entered high school.
As soon as Robin left, she described Bloomberg’s call. “At last,” Tom bellowed. “Let’s break out the champagne!” He raised his arms over his head in triumph, like a prizefighter.
But Sandra María was looking hard at Daria. “I don’t think so. We seem to have a case of the bad regrets.”
“Not again!” Tom groaned. “He tried to kill you. What more does he have to do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Daria got up. “I’m going upstairs. I have a headache.”
She was lying on her bed facedown when she heard a soft knock, perhaps an hour later. “Sandra María? Come in.”
The door opened. “It’s me. Foot in mouth. Heart in hand. I came to apologize for terminal insensitivity.” Tom waited just inside the door.
“Come in. I shouldn’t have flounced up here like an injured adolescent.” She rolled onto her back, sitting up to face him.
He had a way of looking at her sometimes so sweet and powerful, it made her feel as if she shone for him. “You’re sad, peaches,” he said softly, still poised in the doorway.
“Half blue, half jumpy. I don’t even know if I dread more his being arrested or his getting away.”
“What’s happening is happening no matter what you hope. It’s out of our hands.” He held up a bottle. “I realize champagne is off-key, but how about some bourbon? That might help us through the night. You aren’t going to sleep.”
“I don’t imagine I am.” She sat up against a pile of pillows and motioned for him to shut the door and come in. The sight of him, dark and ruddy, black hair, a five-o’clock shadow darkening his cheek, his straight thick brows, the fiery glow of his skin red from the sun, his lips that always looked to her touched with wine, even in her funk pleased her. “One of the best things we have going for us is how we come back from being angry. Sit tight and I’ll get ice and glasses. And Tom …” She paused on her way out the door. “This business of trekking back and forth is ridiculous. When we go sweeping out of the room in high dudgeon, it would be much more convenient if we had only to cross the hall to make up. Why don’t you move in?”
“Should I really?” He put the bourbon on her vanity and stood facing it, looking at her in the mirror, their eyes meeting in the reflection above her row of perfumes and toiletries.
“Yes.” She started to leave but paused and swung back, again meeting his dark gaze that was somber without being cold. She was struck that she had encountered in him anger, impatience, resentment, on occasion self-pity, but never coldness. “I do love you. I know it. I’m half surprised I have the sense and the resilience enough to do it, bu
t yes, I love you.”
31
The arrests were a four-day wonder, the announcement by the attorney general all over the papers and the evening news, followed by indignant editorials and analyses of arson for profit.
Then came the self-righteous repudiation by those arrested of the farcical and highly political nature of the roundup in an election year, the unscrupulous motives of the AG, the squalid self-interest of the tenants. Then the case dropped from the papers. Motions were brought by teams of defense attorneys and argued before judges. Trials were set, postponed, set again for September. The AG was eager to bring at least the first of the cases to court before the elections.
Gretta called when the news hit the papers. “I don’t know whether to congratulate you or commiserate with you. Is revenge sweeter than alimony?”
“Oh, it was a lump settlement. But I worry about the girls’ reactions.”
“Does this have anything to do with that nasty fire you had?”
“I’d say so, but that’s not what he’s being indicted for.”
“I always thought Ross was on the dull side. I’d never had him pegged as some sort of criminal mastermind.” Gretta clucked. “Is it embarrassing?”
“More for his present wife, I’d imagine.”
She realized she had mixed feelings about the trial. She dreaded having to testify, but there at last the truth would become evident. There she would come to grasp the essence of Ross and his actions. There she would see the pattern revealed. The critical fault was somewhere hidden, although she could trace it back most likely to the point when he had given up his public ambitions. Never had he said out loud, Well, people in cities get what they deserve, and since I have been driven from public life, a pox on them and I’ll take whatever I can squeeze out. They don’t deserve an honest defender; they deserve to be used and bled. They didn’t appreciate me and now I’ll show them. Or was that a fiction like all the other stories she had invented to try to make sense of what Ross had done and therefore what Ross had become? At the trial finally her questions would be answered.
SON was meeting little as the summer ripened. Elroy had gone to Monhegan Island on vacation. Sylvia and Orlando married and moved into Tom’s old apartment. His share in the building had been bought out by the couple downstairs. Sylvia came to collect the orange and white kitten; Mr. Schulman stood at the back fence and received the first black female. The other had acquired a name, Cassis, and seemed to be staying.
Ali got into a fight. In the aftermath his hind leg swelled and he ran a high fever. After the abscess had been operated on, first he and then Sheba went in to be altered. “Three are enough to produce,” Daria announced. “We have to leave room for a stray.”
The renovations were finally completed, with Orlando on the crew learning. Even the living room was splendid since Tom moved in, bringing his couch, coffee table and good chairs. Daria told Robin, “The real reason I asked him to join us is so we could get rid of that doggy couch.”
Sandra María put money down on a dining-room set. “Danish modern?” Daria groaned.
Sandra María crossed her arms and assumed a position of immovability. “Daria, I like it. It goes well with Tom’s stuff. This is going to look different from your old house—it’s going to look like all of us.”
Daria realized that she had been used to a division of territory. Once in a while Ross had insisted that some gift from a client be displayed, but decoration had otherwise been her province. Now she had to learn to compromise, for she was not Mommy and did not always know best.
She was nervous not only about the trial to come, but more immediately about the impending arrival of Tom’s daughters. Tom wanted her to travel to Vermont with them to his sister’s farm. She had not decided. She could not take off all of August. Tom decided to keep the girls with them for the first week, to meet his new family and witness his new life. She wanted to see how she got along with his girls, how much they would resent her. She was much older than their mother, so that perhaps she would seem more like a grandmother to them.
Tom went alone to meet his daughters at Logan Airport. He told Daria he would probably take them out to eat. It was a quarter to ten when she heard him on the porch, his deep voice, dark and bittersweet, counterpointed with high queries. She did not want to be sitting in wait like a large spider, so she fled to the kitchen. Mariela had been persuaded reluctantly to bed, promised that she would meet Tom’s daughters in the morning. Sandra María had tactfully retired to do some paperwork. “Let’s not confuse them. They can meet all the rest of us tomorrow.”
Daria had been half an hour dressing, with Tracy’s help. She kept deciding she was too dressed up or too casual. Tracy, not in a mood to be tactfully absent, heard the voices too and stuck her head out her door, then dashed into the living room, while Daria was still pointlessly fussing in the kitchen. Daria had a moment of bad temper as if Tracy had preempted something; then she shook her head hard and ventured into the living room herself.
Rosa was tall for ten and Georgia about average for eight, so that Rosa seemed more than two years older than her sister. Unsmiling she shook hands with Daria. They both had dark curly hair like Tom’s. Rosa was the prettier in spite of her solemnity and glasses too big for her oval face. She seemed also the more ill at ease, looking around suspiciously and then staring straight ahead as if determined to take no notice.
Georgia flung herself on the couch where Ali, Sheba and Cassis made a sandwich, Cassis in the middle with just her little head with the amber eyes wide open sticking up from the strong black curve of Ali’s flank. Georgia exclaimed over them. “All black kitties. Are they yours?”
“They’re mine,” Tracy said. “But you can pet them. That’s the father, the mother and their little girl.”
“Where’s Marcus?” Rosa demanded. “What did you do with Marcus?”
He was perched on the mantelpiece. He liked to be higher than the other cats. Daria thought he watched their family scene with a mixture of curiosity and envy, but he hissed if either adult approached too near. However, he had been found several times curled up with Cassis.
The cats took some of the awkwardness from the entrance, because Rosa fussed over Marcus and Georgia leaned over the others. Ali rolled to have his belly scratched. “Aren’t you the darlings,” Georgia pronounced. “What are we supposed to call you?”
Figuring out after a moment that the question was addressed to her, Daria was about to answer as Rosa cut in firmly, “Mrs. Walker, idiot!”
Daria said simultaneously, “You can call me Daria.”
“Aunt Daria?” Georgia asked.
Rosa and Daria again spoke in unison, Rosa saying, “Don’t be silly, she isn’t our aunt,” and Daria saying, “Aunt Daria or Daria, just as you like.”
As Tom said upstairs later, “Georgia’s going to be easy—she likes anybody who has animals. Andrea’s allergic and the girls never have anything bigger than a goldfish. Rosa will come around too, you’ll see.”
The next day, Wednesday, they had to buy bathing suits. Tom told Daria that this happened every year, as if Andrea had so shaken the dust of the East Coast from her heels that she could not remember that in August people there went swimming. She never packed the girls’ bathing suits. Every year Tom had to go with them to buy suits when they arrived. Daria stayed home with Peggy.
By Thursday, she could see that Georgia would indeed be easy. Georgia was a kid who, when dropped in water, swam. She liked variety. She was a little adventurer who charmed and was charmed. At eight, less pretty than her older sister, Georgia was far more conscious of the need to please and to please herself. She already had Cassis sleeping in her bed, seduced away from the parent cats. She already had Mariela following her about. She had sat in Ángel’s lap and got him to photograph her with every one of the cats in succession: Ángel who had contempt for snapshots and only photographed Sandra María when he needed a human figure for perspective in some fascinatingly bleak urban landsca
pe.
Rosa meantime withdrew behind a book or into the television. She had fixed programs she always watched and was alarmed not to find them on local stations or on at what she considered the wrong time. At home Star Trek reruns were aired regularly five days a week at five P.M., just before supper. Here they were only on Saturdays at seven. Immediately Boston plummeted to the bottom of the list of livable places for Rosa.
Her first response to anything new was to demand why it was that way. “Why do you grind the pepper? My mother buys it already ground in big square cans. It doesn’t come out in those funny pieces.”
The weekend passed bumpily. Georgia loved fried clams. Rosa said they squished in her mouth. Georgia loved the trip in Boston Harbor to visit the islands. Rosa gripped the railing and looked green. When they landed on Georges Island, she threw up on her shoes. Tom was beginning to take on a dogged, defeated look she imagined he must have worn the last years of his marriage. Rosa’s face was set into a stubborn refusal to be entertained, wooed. Monday Tom took only Rosa with him while Georgia was promised time alone later and whisked off by Tracy for a day at camp, where she made a basket she displayed proudly at supper. Rosa was somewhat less unbending alone with Tom, he reported, but would not give full approval to anything from the Stoneham Zoo (the Fleishacker was better, which Tom freely admitted) to the swan boats in the public garden—for which Rosa felt she was too mature.
Rosa even resisted Mariela. She said she didn’t want to spend her vacation baby-sitting. All the time she was home she toted Marcus around like a security blanket. He enjoyed that.
By Friday Tom was exhausted. Daria offered to take the girls into the studio with her while she taped her show for that night and for the next two weeks, which she had reluctantly agreed to spend in Vermont. When she asked him what he was going to do, he said he thought he would get back in bed with a bottle of bourbon and stay there.