“What road?” Vincent asked. He had never taken the slightest interest in such things.
“Sugar Hill,” I said. “Once or twice a year the Planning Board tries to push through a plan to modernize it. Every maple tree on it would be destroyed, not to speak of the other things.”
But he still wasn’t interested. For all of his sudden fascination with the Peekskill riots, Yiytzo would never be a part of Vincent.
I woke up early because Lily was coming and puttered around doing nothing until I finally asked Vincent to take a walk with me and he growled through his door that the fact that I was a compulsive early riser didn’t mean I should shout him awake at any hour of the morning. It was almost eleven by then. I should have known better than to approach him that day.
“I know who she is, idiot! She’s my mother!”
That is what I remember most clearly of Josh and Lily’s first visit after Vincent had come to live with us. Mimi trying to overcome the embarrassment of those first moments by introducing Lily to Vincent in a humorous way and Vincent hitting her so hard that she fell to the floor and shouting at her, “I know who she is, idiot! She’s my mother!” And Lily saying over and over again, “My God, he’s a madman!”
There was a lot of excitement, then, until finally Josh somehow got Vincent to apologize to Mimi, although Mimi kept saying it wasn’t necessary, she was all right. It was Christmas, the first Christmas after the end of the war. The tree in the living room came to the ceiling and there were pine ropes along the mantelpiece and around the arches. In my diary that night I wrote:
Josh asked Vincent how old he is. Vincent said if Josh wants to know how old he is he has to count the years since Josh ran away with his mother then add on eleven months. Lily asked isnt somebody going to stop the little beast. Then Lily said her head hurts but Vincent did not mind that he only said to her why did you leave me. Every body got quiet.
How startling it must have been to Lily. Everyone, even I, my not quite nine-year-old self, had known what it was all about, this first meeting between Lily and her grown son, but no one had thought that what was underneath it would come out so readily. With Vincent the problem was never to bring out the truth but only to maintain the surface, which is also real.
Then, I wrote, Lily got nice to Vincent.
Surprised into forgetting her headache. Or perhaps she’d just seen that here, finally, was someone with whom her evasions wouldn’t work. The illnesses that defied diagnosis and deflected criticism (and once had even made Josh change his mind about divorcing her) would not distract Vincent for a moment.
She said she was wanting to see him but now he acts mad at her so she is afraid of him. She kissed his two cheeks and he cried and then Lily got very jolly and said how good it is to be home.
How terribly confused he must have been. Years later he still didn’t know what to make of his own mother—or rather would not make of her what he should have. He occasionally decided to address her as Mother, which drove her wild. He pretended to be indifferent to her indifference, but when he came up against it, could never believe that she herself wasn’t feigning, that she truly felt neither guilt nor remorse over what she had done to him. He swore that the time when she could hurt him was long past but spent the hours before she came barricaded in his room, attempting to build up the extra strength that he needed simply to confront her. He maintained that he’d arrived at a certain objectivity in his view of her. Then, when he said that she looked remarkably good for a woman of sixty and I pointed out that Josh once when very drunk had given us a riotous account of one of her face-lifting operations, told me that the difference between me and Josh was that Josh wasn’t to be trusted on any subject, while I was to be trusted on every subject except Lily.
Just after Mimi had gone to the station for her, Vincent emerged from his seclusion and penetrated mine.
“I’m ready to walk now,” he said, as though I’d asked him five minutes before instead of five hours. I went with him but I felt obliged to point out that the mosquitoes were out in full strength, not that it mattered to me for the bugs never come near me.
“So they’ll bite me,” he said. “So I’ll scratch. So I’ll bleed.”
I got up to go with him and he told me I looked pretty. I was startled. I was wearing the yellow lawn dress whose significance for me lay solely in the fact that Lily hated it and every time she saw me in it told me how ill it became me, with my sallow complexion. Always if there was some dress I knew she disliked I felt obliged to wear it when she was there, and when I was younger I used to become frustrated that she failed to notice what I was about and therefore failed to be offended.
“I know you hate it, Lily,” I’d once said when Lily pointed out that the dress I was wearing was a particularly loathsome shade of green. “That’s why I’m wearing it.”
“Oh, Beth, you’re such a funny girl,” trilled the Patron Saint of Triviality.
She never cared enough about me to be hurt by anything I could say or do.
“Lily hates this dress,” I said to Vincent and with a little smile he said, “Life is so simple for you, isn’t it, Beth?”
I knew what he meant. That he always intended not to try to please Lily but ended up trying in spite of himself and then getting hurt, for if he could please her at all it was only for a little time. Then, thinkingly or unthinkingly he would do something to make her aware that he was a human being and not simply an instrument of her pleasure, and as soon as that happened she retreated from him and he couldn’t bear it, however much it was expected, however many times it had happened before, back to that first time when she’d finally kissed him and he’d cried and she’d begun to dance around the living room, saying how good it was to be home.
It was pleasantly cool outside. We walked to the brook, which was flowing well for the first time in several years because of the good rain we’d had all spring. Vincent at first was fairly relaxed—my small signs of Lily-hatred seemed always to have a benign effect upon him—but as we walked I could feel him tightening inside himself.
“Do you know how old I am?” he asked after a while.
“Of course I do, Vincent,” I said.
“How old?” he demanded. “When is my birthday?”
“September 26th,” I said. “You’ll be forty-two on September 26th.”
“For all the good it does me,” he said fiercely. I didn’t reply and after a while he went on. “I could be five years old for all the good my age has done me. I’ve never been afraid of getting old and I’ve never been afraid of dying. The only thing I was ever afraid of was not changing and naturally, that’s what’s happening, the thing I’m most afraid of. I keep waiting for the numbers of my age to have some significance. I keep waiting to be different and year after year goes by and the world is changing at the most fucking unbelievable pace, beyond all human comprehension, and I’m the same fucking Vincent.” I touched his arm and he put it around me. “If she died I’d be different. I know that, I’m just not sure how. You can’t really change while your mother’s alive, they don’t let you, they don’t want you to, or else they don’t give a damn and that has the same effect, maybe worse, because you can’t break out of a prison with no walls, you can’t wave goodbye if there’s no one looking out of the window. Otherwise known as the parable of the forest. If the tree falls and no one’s there to see it, did it happen? Does the tree exist? Sure the tree does, but you don’t, you sap. What time is it?”
“Five past five.”
“When does the train get here?”
“Ten past.” He knew this, of course.
“Did you miss me while I was away, Beth?”
“Sometimes a lot,” I said.
“When?”
“Mostly around two o’clock in the afternoon.”
He laughed.
“But also sometimes in the evening,” I said. “Or when things are happening. Like . . . I was terribly eager for you to come this time.”
“Why?�
�� he said quickly. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not this road business you mentioned the other day.”
“I don’t think so. There hasn’t been anything about that in a few months.”
“Then what is it about two o’clock in the afternoon?”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet you do.”
“When Mimi went to school, I used to keep myself busy all day, my tutor would come in the morning, and then in the afternoon I’d do things, keep busy . . . except around two I would get very restless. The waiting would come up to the surface from wherever it’d been all day, and those last minutes when I knew she was about to start home but she hadn’t been let out of school yet were almost unbearable.”
“It wasn’t as though you were alone here.”
“Oh, the whole house was different when Mimi came home. Leah and I . . . sometimes we didn’t say a word to each other all day, not because we were mad, it was just that I didn’t talk and she was very quiet. Then Mimi would come home, and she was always so gay, and she thought of good things to do. The whole house changed, really, it was like a physical thing, the rooms got brighter—warmer, even. Everything changed from not right to quite right. That’s the way it’s always been, that the three of us are supposed to be here, Mimi and me and Leah or Mrs. Cushman or someone like that. And when you ask me if I miss you . . . there are times when I want very much for you to be here, but when you’re not here, or if Barney goes away for a few days or something, or anyone outside of the three of us, it’s not as though there’s anything missing.”
We walked in silence for a while, reaching the place where the brook went underground but continuing on the path through the woods. As we walked I became aware, not for the first time that day, of irregular flutterings of my heart, and I put a hand on my chest to feel them better.
“I’ve been feeling my heart beat all day,” I said, “in a kind of strange erratic way. Fluttery.”
He asked if there was anything wrong with my heart and I said not that I knew of. Then he asked if I was aware that I’d talked more in the past five minutes than I usually talked in five days.
I smiled. “Well you know I’ve never been much of a talker, Vincent.”
“Then why now?” The question frightened me because I had no idea of why, but when I told him that, he pointed out that I’d said the same thing about two o’clock in the afternoon, the first time he asked.
“Well it’s more true this time,” I said.
“You’re so fucking careful with words, Beth,” he said. “As if they cost you something.”
“What I mean,” I said, “is that I don’t know what’s happening any more than you do.”
“Then what makes you think anything’s happening at all?”
I shrugged.
“Come on, Beth,” he coaxed. “You’ve said it more than once since I got here.”
“It’s a lot of small things, nothing anyone would notice. And I’ve been having dreams.”
“Dreams?” he asked incredulously.
“I mean I’ve been dreaming that things went wrong.”
He laughed shortly. “Did you ever dream things went right?”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes I have lovely dreams.”
Silence. Then, “What was the dream?”
But I could no more give away one of my dreams than I could . . . For Vincent things said were less frightening than those same things left unsaid, but for me . . . We had an argument about dreams, Mimi and I, the first time that I was ill. When I was eleven. I don’t remember the early part of course but I do remember Mimi’s telling me as I got a little better that the doctor wouldn’t be able to help me if I didn’t try to tell him my dreams. And then Josh, too, saying that I couldn’t be treated at home if I didn’t cooperate, that I would have to go back to the hospital. And so I took fairy tales remembered from my books and changed the characters to objects that moved like furniture in the house, and the doctor said, “I understand what you’re doing, Elizabeth, but it’s all right.” And then I stopped talking to him but the doctor told Josh that I was apparently better off at home, anyway, than I would be in the hospital. And Josh went back to California, leaving a trained nurse in his place, find Mimi came into my room and cried with relief that they weren’t going to take me away again, and at one point she said, “Forgive me, Bethie, forgive me.” But she never said why.
“I couldn’t possibly tell you, Vincent.”
“Why the hell not? What do you think I’m going to do with it, for Christ’s sake? Publish it?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It has nothing to do with you. I’ve never told anyone any of my dreams, not even Mimi.”
He made me face him. “Is that true?”
I nodded and he released me.
“What about her?” he asked. “Does she think something’s happening, too? Does she know the two of you are acting different?”
“No, she thinks I’m silly. You know, Mimi doesn’t believe in anything she can’t see.”
“But you, sweetheart,” Vincent laughed. “That’s all you believe in.”
“No,” I said. “I do believe in the things I can’t see. But I believe what I can see, too.”
From far away at the house we heard the car horn honk several times.
“Oh, shit,” Vincent said. But he turned and began walking back to the house so rapidly that it was difficult for me to keep up with him. Until we got to the interior garden, where he slowed down so that we were barely moving at all. I heard him take a deep breath before opening the front door and then we went in.
Lily was standing at the fireplace, looking around. Her unnaturally white-blonde hair piled high on her head. Her face bland and unwrinkled as ever, her loose wrinkled neck giving the lie to her face. Wearing a white dress and high white pumps, always high pumps, to set off her legs, no matter what the current fashion might dictate. Josh once said that if Lily took a fifty-mile hike she would wear high heels so the squirrels would notice her ankles.
“Sweethearts,” she said, fluttering toward us so that everything inside of me shrank away from my skin in case Lily should touch it. “Vincent, darling, you look magnificent, what happened to you in Europe, you look positively handsome! I know, you’ve put on some weight Marvelous. Very becoming. Oooh,” she squeezed his arm excitedly, “it’s wonderful to see you. It feels so good to be home . . . and Beth . . .” Her eyes clouded momentarily as she looked for something to say about me. “How are you, Beth, dear?”
I said that I was the same as usual because lies always came to me more readily than the truth when I was with Lily. Mimi came in from the kitchen with iced tea for herself and Lily. She asked if we wanted some but we both refused.
“Now,” Lily said, dropping into the big armchair that we used to call Josh’s throne, “tell me what’s been happening. Tell me everything.”
Mimi laughed. “Very little’s been going on, really, Lily. But that’ll change, now that you’re here.”
Lily giggled. “Where’s Barney?” she asked. “Barney always tells me good stories.”
“Not sure,” Mimi said. “He said he was going out but he didn’t say where. Probably just for a walk, he’s been taking walks. Or maybe fishing.”
“Fishing,” Lily sighed. “Walking. Not Barney, too. Now everyone walks but me. When did he become a traitor?”
“I don’t know,” Mimi said. “The past couple of weeks, I guess. Maybe vacation boredom set in.”
“He’s been working harder than he ever worked on vacation,” I pointed out.
“Mmmm,” she said. “And Vincent’s working on a new book, too, Lily.”
“How exciting,” Lily said. “I wish to hell I had some talent I met a boy on the plane, a lovely young boy who’s a writer. He asked me if it was true blondes had more fun and I pointed out that my hair is really white, not blonde, and he said he didn’t believe it for a minute and why did I feel that I had
to protect myself from him?” She giggled. “He writes for the ladies’ magazines. He told me he spent his childhood waiting for his mother in the beauty parlor, reading ladies’ magazines, and when he got out of school he tried selling them stuff but he kept missing until one day he noticed all the writers had two last names. So he changed his name, his pen name, to Brigid Pocatelli Smavarmt, something like that, and he swears that right away they started buying everything he could turn out. He was delightful, so funny. I gave him the number here but I don’t imagine he could stand this place for more than an hour or two. He’s not the type for the quiet rustic life.” She sighed. “I do love pansies, I only wish they aged better. The fakes are all right, they look better than real men, more masculine, but the others, I don’t know. Something happens to their mouths.” She sipped reflectively at her iced tea. “It’s such a relief to hear good conversation again. Hollywood has changed, you can’t imagine how much it’s changed. Lately I’ve even considered coming back to New York. Everyone I used to know practically is in New York now.”
“That would be wonderful, Lily,” Mimi said. “If you came back to the East Coast.”
“Mmm,” Lily said. “Well, I’ll have to see . . .”
See whether she would confer on us this great favor, the very thought of which kept me from eating for the rest of the day. Vincent hadn’t uttered a word through all of this but just sat there, almost succeeding in looking amused, an unthinking imitation of Josh in which he never really succeeded because unlike Josh, he had never accepted the truth about her. “I used to think your mother’s ignorance was an affectation,” Josh once told him. “After all, even in Indiana they have high schools. Eventually I was forced to face the fact that it’s not only genuine but it’s probably her most profound quality. Lily’s politics change with the temper of the times and her tastes with the woman’s page but her ignorance is always there to be relied upon.” And Vincent said, “You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you,” and loped out of the room. Refusing to understand what Josh was trying to help him do, which was to take Lily less seriously. To care less. To get past the point of being concerned with Lily’s reactions because to care for Lily’s reactions meant, in a sense, to depend on something that didn’t exist.
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 4