“Oh, you’ll love it here, Mrs. Cushman,” Mimi promised, putting both arms around her. “I promise you will. We like you already, don’t we, Beth?” And Mrs. Cushman believed her. As Josh believed her when just before leaving he had gone through the motions of feeling guilty about leaving his children in the care of a stranger they’d known for four days and Mimi said to him, “Oh, but we’ll be all right, she’s such a nice lady and it’ll be an adventure and we’ll be just fine, won’t we, Beth!” (How many months later did I find the courage to ask Mimi where Leah was? She told me Leah had gone to live with the plants and the flowers.)
We always believed Mimi. All of us except Vincent, who went to the opposite extreme. “I will not die happy,” he once said, “until I wring from your sister a confession that she hates my guts.” And even with less than my total recall I would have to remember the fantastic scene that preceded his departure after his three-year stay with us, when Mimi was all of sixteen and I was eleven. Vincent chasing her around the living room, brandishing the bread knife at her, shouting, “Admit it, you little teenage whore, why don’t you admit you hate me?” And Mimi sobbing, saying, “I don’t hate you, Vincent, I feel sorry for you, I think you’re very sick, but I don’t hate you.” And then Vincent calling her, as I wrote in my journal, a sanktamoneous little slut who didn’t know the difference between love and hate, who was dead from the neck up and probably from the waist down, too, and Mimi stopping short, staring at him wildly, finally and utterly stupefied. She collapsed into a chair then, limp and drained, and sat in the chair for hours, unable to move or speak, which terrified me and made me angry with Vincent for the first time in all the three years, for we had become very close and I had from the beginning been Mimi’s substitute as the passive recipient of Vincent’s ideas. He left the following morning, his duffle bag over his right shoulder, the valise containing his manuscript in his left hand. I doubt he even knew yet where he was going. He just left, promising me I would hear from him, which I did, but not for almost two years, until his book had been published and well received and he had an advance on the next one in his pocket. And ever since his visits had been very much the same, with Vincent goading Mimi and Mimi making every effort to please him until finally he brought her to anger or tears.
• • •
Right after Vincent’s card came, Mimi had begun having trouble with her new mystery. She was puzzled by this difficulty, for until the week before she’d been moving along very well, having written the first three chapters in the month of June alone.
“I can’t understand it,” she said. “Virginia’s never deserted me so early in the book.”
Virginia Bonnett, the cheerful, no-nonsense New England spinster who teaches Latin in Salem and is called in by the local police (when all else has failed) to solve the knotty crimes committed during the tourist season. While Josh still paid the basic expenses of Yiytzo, it was Virginia who had paid the rest of the bills for the past eight or nine years, Barney’s teaching salary providing us with what he referred to as the petty cash, his scholarly essays providing us with satisfaction but of course no money at all.
“It has nothing to do with Vincent,” Mimi said. “You can believe it or not, I haven’t thought twice about Vincent. It’s not that I’m upset, it’s just that nothing comes when I sit down to work.”
“There’s something happening,” I said. “Don’t you feel strange? Don’t you feel as if you’re looking for something?”
“No,” she said. “No, of course not. I don’t know what you mean.”
Barney, on the other hand, in spite of the fact that he was drinking noticeably more than usual, was having a spurt of creative activity. His paper on the women poets of the Lowell school was going very well and a long poem he’d had half-finished in his desk for years was coming into his head at moments when he least expected it to. I had been seeing much less of him than I usually saw when he was on vacation and maybe this was contributing to my sense that things were not right, because Barney and I enjoyed that special understanding that came from his being married to Mimi while being temperamentally much more like me.
• • •
Vincent looked marvelous. He was deeply tanned after his weeks at Cape Cod, in addition to which he seemed, for the first time in the twenty-two years that I’d known him, not to be underweight. The hair in his beard was partly white but the hair on his head was still reddish brown.
“Hey, there she is!” he said when I came out to meet his cab. “There’s my little girl.” He slammed shut the cab door and picked me up and whirled me around as though I were ten years old. “Where’s Mother Courage?”
I laughed. “My God, Vincent, you’re not going to start in so soon!”
“When do I ever start in?” he asked, and then we both laughed. He took his suitcase and we went into the house. Mimi was still having breakfast. And reading the paper. She looked up and said hello. Very calmly. Not at all in the way she usually greeted Vincent—a combination of anxiety and dismay with a little hope she could never completely conceal that this visit might end up differently.
“Hi, Mimi,” Vincent said. “Where’s my breakfast?”
“In a little while, Vincent,” she said, still seeming genuinely indifferent. “When I finish my coffee.”
“I remember a time,” Vincent said, “when you had to eat a meal before you were allowed to walk in the front door.”
“My apologies,” Mimi said.
“For then or for now?” he asked.
“Take your pick,” she said coolly.
It gave Vincent pause. “Where’s your husband?” he finally asked.
“Barney’s around,” she said. “I guess he’s in the study.”
“When’s Lily coming?” he asked. “I have to ask her some questions.”
Always he has to know when he will see her and always he must provide himself with an excuse for his need.
“She said she’d be here in a week or so.”
“Mmm. Were they here during the riots, do you remember?”
Mimi’s calm didn’t disappear but some of its surface opened up a little. “You mean the Peekskill riots? In ’49?”
“Well of course I mean the Peekskill riots,” he said impatiently. “How many riots have there been around here?”
“Just those two,” she said slowly, “if you don’t count the business in ’53. Josh and Lily weren’t here for the first one but then they flew in that week and they were here for the second.”
“Naturally,” he said. “Every-Red in the country flew in for that one.” As though he didn’t know Josh had broken years before. “I wish I’d been here.” He grinned at her provocatively. “If it hadn’t been for you I probably still would’ve been.”
Mimi pretended to yawn.
“But you were both here.”
Mimi nodded.
“In Welford the whole time, or did you go up to hear Robeson?”
Mimi glanced at me uneasily. An old wound reopened. She went up to the grounds the first time Robeson was supposed to sing, leaving me alone with Mrs. Cushman, whose sole flaw was a tendency to fall to pieces in any emergency. I was twelve. That night a telephone call came saying we should stay indoors because men were patrolling the hill with shotguns. Mrs. Cushman got hysterical and ran through the house turning out lights and then we huddled together behind the living-room sofa for the rest of the night. Mimi came in during the early hours of the morning, with a boyfriend, and I cried as soon as I saw her and kept crying the whole following day and night until finally she had to get a doctor to put me to sleep for a while.
“I went up for the first one,” Mimi said uneasily.
“Tell me about it,” he ordered.
“Later,” Mimi said. “You just got here. I’ll give you breakfast first, okay?”
“No,” Vincent said irritably. “First talk and then give me breakfast.”
“But I don’t feel like talking, Vincent,” she said softly. “I never feel l
ike talking in the morning. You’d know that if yon knew me at all. If you’d ever tried to talk to me in all the hundreds of years since I met you.”
He stared at her thoughtfully.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I happen to be particularly tired this morning. I didn’t sleep well. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back to sleep. I’m sure Beth will be happy to make your breakfast. Or Mrs. Cushman, if you can find her.” And she rose majestically and sailed out of the room.
“What got into her?” Vincent asked. Not angry, just curious.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Some kind of evil spirit has been hovering around, messing up things, giving me bad dreams.”
He looked at me the way people look when they’d only thought they wanted a truthful answer. “It’s funny,” he finally said. “I came back with a certain idea about this place, about its not changing. I somehow had a different feeling about it after being out of the country. You can’t really understand how crazy it is, the way this place doesn’t change, and it still doesn’t really, not the way other places do, but this business of Mimi throws me, I don’t know why. She has no importance to me. What the hell.”
I waited.
“I came here right from the airport a few weeks ago,” he said after a long time. “How does that strike, you, kid?”
I smiled. It was an unvarying pattern of Vincent’s never to come directly here from Vincennes or Los Angeles or wherever he happened to be, but always to make some stop-off first In New York, at Fire Island, Cape Cod, someplace where he had a friend he could talk to.
“I took a cab from the airport and I gave the guy the order and then I read the newspaper to keep from thinking about whatever it was I was doing. Or not doing. When we got to the bottom of Sugar Hill I put down the paper and started looking out the window, getting tighter and tighter, wondering if anyone was here, and so on, and when we got here I had the guy turn down the drive, but when we got to the turn-around, without even thinking about it I said to the driver, ‘I changed my mind, take me to the city.’ Then when we got to New York I called Richard and asked him if the house at the Cape was being used, and he gave me the keys and I had it to myself most of the time except he was up for a couple of long weekends. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is up there when it’s empty.-1 kept thinking of you, I kept thinking, Beth has never seen the ocean. Maybe I can get her to come here with me some time when there’s no one else here.” He waited for me to say something but of course there was nothing I could say. The idea of the ocean is frightening to me. “So,” he finally said, “so what else is new, Beth Elizabeth?”
“Nothing much, I guess. Barney and Mimi had a little accident last week, the car went into the culvert and then someone went into it in the dark. He said he knew you, the man whose car it was. Max Merganser, something like that.”
“Maxie?” Vincent seemed pleased. “What the hell is he doing around here? He was on the Coast, last time I saw him.”
“His mother died,” I said. “He’s fixing up the house to sell it.”
“His mother died,” Vincent said. “Maxie’s mother—Maxie had the mother of them all. I don’t know how he kept from getting flattened, she was a steamroller, but Maxie would just smile at her and go do whatever he wanted to do. But Jesus, that was the bitch-cop-mother of them all.”
“I never even realized you made friends in Welford, Vincent,” I said. “I thought you used to just go and take long walks all by yourself.”
He laughed and said there was a great deal I didn’t know about him. I said, perhaps a bit truculently, that I didn’t doubt it, whereupon he became apologetic and said I shouldn’t be angry with him. It was true that he had kept his lives in and out of Yiytzo secret and apart and he wasn’t sure why he had done it, but it seemed important at the time.
“So,” he said when I didn’t respond. “Old Maxie. Is he as handsome as ever?”
“I suppose so,” I said, not looking at him.
“All the girls were crazy about him,” Vincent said. “Every afternoon you could see this bunch of giggly girls following Maxie and the others up the hill, twenty or thirty yards behind. The others called it his fan club.”
That was irritating to me. It made him seem silly. I had to remind myself how long ago it had been.
“Old Maxie,” Vincent said again. “I’ll have to give him a ring.”
Barney, drink in hand, came down from his study to see Vincent. Terribly fond of each other, their fondness was hedged with-doubts, qualifications, animosities. Vincent’s anyway. For Barney there was only the occasional discomfort of enjoying someone who despised his wife—a discomfort which would have been more severe had Barney not been amused by the entire situation. For Vincent it was a different matter; his liking for Barney had always involved a perpetual challenge to his own professed beliefs.
“A college teacher she met at a campus HUAC protest,” Vincent wrote when I told him of their coming marriage “An intellectual. A liberal. Great Perfect. That is all ye know and all ye need to know. I can sculpt the guy just as well as write about him—a great big Welford-type egghead and no balls at all. This is completely appropriate since his head will have to serve for both of them and as far as balls go, she wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.”
And then a length) diatribe on the liberal Eastern intellectuals of Welford Heights as opposed to the bedrock Midwestern conservatives like his lather (“By definition an intellectual is someone who isn’t capable of undying loyalty, just as by definition a Catholic like my father is someone who is”) ending with a promise to visit me soon to rescue me from the tedium. (I was fifteen years old and of course tedium was not my problem when Barney came into the household.)
And then finally they met and so much of what Vincent had assumed about Barney was true, and the only thing Vincent hadn’t counted on was that Barney knew it all and could make better jokes about it than Vincent could.
“I don’t trust your sense of humor,” Vincent told him.
“Because it robs you of your target” Barney said. “And you can never be sure that somewhere down inside I don’t take myself very seriously. Don’t worry about it. If it’s true, the somewhere is so far down that I don’t have access to it myself.”
“Hey, hot-stuff,” he said to Vincent now. “How you doing?”
“Okay, okay,” Vincent said. “How you. Barn?”
Barney shrugged. “My wife tells me that after all Mr. Guggenheim’s done for you you’ve gone and gotten hung up on Peekskill U.S.A.”
Vincent laughed. “Maybe it was partly being in Europe. Mainly I think it was because I started noticing how different the school kids are now, there and here. They’re philosophically liberal but they’ve picked up some of that low class right-wing personality that always appealed to me. They don’t sit around for hours picking the nits out of America’s pubic hairs, they—”
“You’re always so worried about the harm the intellectuals did,” Mimi broke in from the doorway. “What about what the others were doing? What about the ones who were overturning cars and calling Paul Robeson a dirty nigger and patrolling Sugar Hill with shotguns? What were they doing?”
“They were defending a symbolic threat to their country, that’s what they were doing.”
“Symbolic threats should be defended symbolically,” Barney said.
“This country’s too big for any symbols but violent ones to matter,” Vincent said. “That’s something this generation found out.”
“And what were they doing when they frightened my sister half to death?” Mimi asked angrily. “Was that for their country’s sake, too?”
Long pause. Vincent glanced at me, considered, decided to play dirty. “What were you doing when they frightened your sister half to death? That’s a better question.”
“It’s not!” Mimi cried out. “It’s not at all. You’re being completely unfair!” She was on the verge of tears.
“Hey, Vin,” Barney said, “
you’re setting some kind of record. How long have you been here, an hour?”
“All right, all right, I’m sorry,” Vincent muttered.
But I did find myself wondering, not so much about what Mimi had been doing during the day as why she’d come home as late as she did. I’d never thought about it before. The day had been one mass of horror in my mind but it was true that the riots had been early and Mimi had come home very late. When I was far past the point of reason.
“Once we crept out through the field in the darkness,” Mimi said slowly, almost oblivious to Vincent, “and went nearly up to the road and we saw a bunch of them going by, they looked like a lynch mob. When school opened a couple of weeks later this boy I knew, I mean we were friends, I’d gone out with him and we were still friendly, he came up to me in Tony’s and he put his arm around me and he said, ‘Hey, Sugar, I’m glad we didn’t see you that week ’cause if we’d’ve seen you we’d’ve killed you.’ ” She shuddered. “It was what made me decide that I’d never have anything to do with politics.”
“Atta girl, Mimi,” Barney said. “You see, Vincent? They say McCarthy cowed Mimi’s whole generation but my little cow here took her vows six months before he made his first headline.”
“Except maybe for the little things that affect us right here,” Mimi said. “Like the road.”
It sent tremors through me. A little thing like the road. I would have known then that something was wrong if I hadn’t sensed it for days. By what sudden shift of standards had the road become a little thing? Periodically the Planning Board talked about modernizing and widening Sugar Hill Road. Always, no matter who brought up the plan, we at Yiytzo were affected in some way. Yiytzo and the few other large estates that remained along the road. Periodically Mimi led the battle against those people who wanted to ruin our land. For the time each battle lasted, it dominated our lives and thoughts. And now here was Mimi, referring to the road as an example of a small matter. As though she were hoarding her energies for something more important.
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 3