Barney put down his drink and came with me. For a moment we waited to see if Vincent would come with us. But he wasn’t even there. Downstairs we found Mimi already seated at the dining table. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying any more. She was eating a roll.
“Hey, sport,” Barney said, bending over and giving her a kiss. She smiled absently. We sat down. Mrs. Cushman brought in the salad and Mimi began serving without asking where Vincent and Lily were.
“Where’s Grandma?” Barney asked.
“Grandma?” Mimi repeated.
“Mmm. Grandma Lily,” Barney said. “Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to you that that’s what she’s going to be?”
“No,” Mimi said. “I hadn’t really thought of her that way.”
“I don’t imagine she thinks of herself that way,” Barney said. “I don’t imagine she wants to.”
“Is that what it’s all about!” Mimi exclaimed with some relief, but then her face clouded over and she said, “You told them, Beth. You told them what she said.”
Vincent, or the body of Vincent, came downstairs and seated itself at the table. A moment later Lily came in and asked why no one had told her dinner was ready, she was famished. There was absolute silence around the table for perhaps a full minute, then Mimi said she was sorry, she’d assumed Lily knew and hadn’t felt like coming in yet.
“I’m famished,” lily repeated, attacking her salad. “Everyone in Westport is on Weight Watchers, the food was ghastly. Dietetic soda and vegetables and some kind of fake dressing on the salad. Unbelievable.” She shuddered but couldn’t conceal her smugness at not having to diet.
“How is old Westport these days, Lil?” Barney asked.
“Dull,” she said. “Incredibly dull. All they talk about is TV commercials and Vietnam. I don’t know which bores me more.”
“Vietnam, no doubt.”
“I suppose so. At least they all have different accounts but they all say the same thing about Vietnam. That wretched little swamp has just about destroyed the art of conversation in this country. I don’t even know where it is.” Proudly. Lily was the only person who ever briefly made me feel I should take an interest in outside affairs.
“Lily,” Barney said abruptly. “When did Trotsky’s daughter kill herself?”
“Zina?” she said. “ ’Thirty-three. Why?”
“Where?”
“Berlin. You know that, Barney. When they wouldn’t let her come back to her husband.”
“You see?” Barney said to Vincent. “That’s what I was talking about before, about the things they remember and the things they don’t remember. Even Lily . . .” but he trailed off because he’d failed to get Vincent’s attention. Oddly, Barney was always quicker to catch my moods, or even Mimi’s, than to understand Vincent’s.
“That was when Josh broke, Barney,” Lily said. “A little after then, you know that. It was so sad, her husband was in Russia and she’d gone to Germany for treatments, she was tubercular or something, and while she was there they took away her citizenship and wouldn’t let’ her back in and finally she killed herself with gas. I remember we weren’t supposed to think it was sad and then when Josh broke with the Party he came home and told me that now I could cry for her if I wanted to, and not be ashamed of it, and the hell with anyone who thought it was all right just because Stalin had done it. Then I didn’t know which was sadder, that Trotsky’s daughter killed herself . . . or that Josh had broken and no one would talk to us any more. Josh knew they wouldn’t talk to us, that we’d be outcasts, none of our old friends would come near us . . . that was really why it took him so long to break.”
Vincent stirred.
“Did you ever decide?” Barney asked her softly. “Which was sadder, I mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lily said. “Suicide, I suppose, because it lasts longer. After all, by the time of the Moscow Trials we had a few of our friends back and then after the Nazi-Soviet Pact we had almost all of them. In New York, I mean. On the Coast it was never as bad. There’s always someone there who wants to talk to you more than you want to talk to them . . . but Trotsky’s daughter was still dead.” She giggled suddenly but when no one else laughed she became very serious. “Suicide is a terrible thing,” she announced. “When you think about it . . . and don’t think I haven’t thought about it. There’ve been times . . .”
It had the desired effect, at least on Mimi, who quickly said, “Oh, Lily, don’t talk like that,” in a low, troubled voice.
“Oh but it’s true,” lily said. “Ask Josh how close I came. Once it took him hours to convince me that I should keep living.”
It was easier to conceive of Lily’s pressing that button I once read about, to destroy the entire world, than to imagine her letting a razor come within an inch of her wrist.
“I don’t have the courage,” Lily said. “That’s the thing. It takes an enormous amount of courage to—”
Vincent stood up so abruptly that he knocked down his chair in back of him, and stalked out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
“What on earth is wrong with him now?” Lily asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, “In the old days, people were plenty temperamental, but they were interesting. Josh was always slamming out of houses, especially after he broke, but at least he’d have a good fight first. We were still on all the mailing lists and we’d get all these invitations, you know, people would give private parties and you paid for food and the money would always go to something called Liberation this or Freedom that and then Josh would always get into an argument with someone about whether it was just a Party front, which was what it was most of the time, even if a lot of them didn’t know it, and then Josh would get kicked out because he always won the arguments and they couldn’t stand it. Or else we’d just slam out on our own and go get drunk. It was fun. He didn’t just sit there like a zombie and then slam out for no reason.”
I said, “Vincent had a reason.”
Mimi said my name in a low warning voice but I ignored her.
“He didn’t want to be in the same house with you. He thinks you’re a murderer.”
“Beth,” Mimi said, “Beth, stop it. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Barney said.
“What is she talking about?” Lily demanded. “Will someone please tell me what the little witch is talking about?”
“It’s nothing, Lily,” Mimi said. “Forget it.”
“Being a witch is like being royalty,” I said calmly. “You have to inherit it from someone.”
“Barney,” Mimi said, “don’t you think it would be nice if Beth went up to her room for a little while until we can all calm down?”
“Two of them,” Lily said, her voice cracking with self- pity. “What have I done to deserve two of them?”
“C’mon, Beth,” Barney said, coming over to take me away. “Let’s go up, honey.”
“Honey!” Lily screeched. “Will you please tell me how he can call her honey? She’s a lunatic, a raving lunatic!”
“Please, Lily,” Mimi said. “Please let it go. Everyone’s upset.”
“Damn right I’m upset,” she screamed. “She always upsets me. The two of them upset me. Plenty of people have one crazy kid, hardly anyone has . . . In L.A. there are places to send them, I tell you, I can’t stand looking at either of them, it makes me CRINGE when I have to look at them.”
“Shut up, Lily,” Barney said, his arm around me to help me. But I had put Lily thousands of miles away where she couldn’t hurt me.
“You see?” Lily asked, still in that horrible hysterical screech. “That’s why I can’t stand to come here. She starts in with one of her crazy lunatic bits and he tells me to shut up! It’s like a zoo or a nut house or something! L.A. is full of creeps but they’re all out on the beach or put away someplace and if you want to get away from them all you do is go into your own house but here there’s no place to go, I can’t stand it here, why don’t you put her
away someplace, I don’t know—”
“She’s hysterical,” Barney said to Mimi. “Smack her face.”
“Don’t you dare!” Lily screamed. “I have a very low threshold of pain!”
For a moment we all just stared at her in wonder but gradually I felt laughter welling up inside of me, taking over my entire body until finally it burst out in a wild trumpeting sound that I was powerless to stop. Lily rushed from the room and Mimi covered her eyes but still I couldn’t stop laughing, although it was coming out a little more quietly now, and then I thought to myself, they would hit me, now, if they hadn’t been about to do it to Lily for saying they should put me away. And with that thought I began to cry, and then after a while the crying ended, too, and then Barney carried me upstairs and put me to bed, where I slept through the night with my clothes on.
• • •
Vincent didn’t come back. All his belongings, including his wallet, were in his room. I called Max, thinking he might have gone there, but Max hadn’t seen him since our last evening together. In my dreams Vincent was a bird without wings. I willed him to fly but my will was insufficient and his heart burst when he tried. I wet my pillow weeping for him before I was awake and the dream was so real to me that as my eyes opened my hand touched the wet spot and I knew without thinking why it was there.
• • •
Josh arrived as Lily was packing to leave. Another half an hour and we would have been rid of her. He’d come on a motorcycle he’d rented in Southampton. The cycle almost but not quite concealed that he’d aged somewhat in the eight or nine months since we had seen him. Still it was hard to believe that he’d just had his sixty-seventh birthday. His hair was white and his paunch had grown a bit but otherwise he was as lean as ever.
“How’s my punkin?” he asked, galloping from the cycle to the lawn, where I sat with my embroidery.
“I’m all right, Josh,” I said. Which was true, I was tired but very calm. I got up so he could kiss me. Then we went together into the house, which was very quiet.
“Where is everybody? Where’s your mother?”
Habit. He didn’t really care if she was there, I was certain; I knew that sometimes he preferred it. But he had to know right away. For a moment I toyed with the idea of getting him to take a long walk so that by the time we returned Mimi would have taken Lily to the station. Then I realized it wouldn’t work because of the motorcycle.
“She’s upstairs packing.”
“Togo?”
“Mm. But she won’t, now that you’ve come.”
We went into the kitchen where he kissed Mrs. Cushman loudly and took a can of beer from the refrigerator then strode to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, “Hey! Poppa’s here, where’s Momser?’
“Josh! Josh!” Mimi called from the top. “Oh I’m so glad you’re here!”
He turned to me. “Your sister says she’s glad I’m here.”
I nodded.
“Your sister always says she’s glad I’m here but this time it has the ring of sincerity.”
“Josh,” Mimi called, “Lily’s up here with me. Please come right up.”
And with a puzzled look in my direction he ran up to soothe his much abused wife. Mimi came down a few minutes later. I didn’t particularly feel like talking so I wandered outdoors, but she followed me outside and said I must promise not to start in with Lily again if she stayed.
“Do you want me put away, too?” Maybe it was some sort of measure of the unreality of my life that I could spend so much time eliciting specific known responses. On the TV set I saw war being waged; missiles being fired; cities being destroyed, none of which seemed to affect me although my brain, on those rare occasions when I permitted it to function, told me that eventually they all would. Certainly I never felt moved to even attempt to do something about them, if indeed anything could be done, but I did feel moved to ask Mimi if she wanted to put me away so that I could hear her tell me I was being ridiculous.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Beth.”
“Why are you so worried about her, anyway? She worries about herself enough, you don’t have to do it, too. She puts everything else out of your mind. You haven’t even asked me where Vincent is.”
“Do you know?”
“No, I don’t know. But I’m worried about him!” Because I didn’t have the strong sense that he was alive.
“I don’t think you need to,” Mimi said. “He can just bum around. Men can do that, you know.” She put a hand on her stomach, which already looked somewhat swollen. “I’m starvingly hungry. Want some lunch?”
“No.”
She rushed to the kitchen as though there were an emergency.
I walked up to the mailbox just in case there should be word from Vincent, but there wasn’t, only some letters for Josh that had been forwarded from California. And the Weekly, with a small item saying that the Village Planning Board had put on its fall agenda a discussion of the widening of Sugar Hill Road. So it was time again. Except that I thought of it as time for battle and I suddenly remembered the way Mimi had recently referred to the road. By the time I got back to the house they were having lunch and Barney had joined them. Lily and Josh sat side by side and his arm was on the back of her chair. She had on a great deal of makeup. She looked down at her plate when I came in.
“So I said to him,” Josh was saying, “ ‘Okay, baby, now I have a riddle for you. What is it that when you do it, you lose your identity and when you undo it you don’t get your identity back, you only lose the one you scraped together in the meantime?’ The answer’s ‘Marry a schickser,’ of course, but the interesting thing was to see the answers the silly bastard came up with. What they amounted to was that everything he’d ever done in his lifetime was what lost him his identity. The one thing that didn’t occur to him was that he never had one in the first place. There was someone there who knew him when he was six years old and swore to me that even then he was a total blank.”
The whole thing would have been funnier had his manner not been so strained. Josh always dominated our conversation and almost invariably in an interesting way, but now there was a feeling that he had to. As though everyone else were made of stone and this would be apparent if he didn’t keep talking. Lily looked at him adoringly. I could see through the makeup that she had been crying, could easily picture the touching scene upstairs where Josh persuaded her that the things families said to each other were meaningless and the best way to get over them was to push them out of your mind. “Come on downstairs, Lil, I’ve got some good stories for you.”
I gave him his mail and he began opening it, making jokes about the various bills and letters as he read them, until finally he came to one, from some law firm with a series of names which he read aloud from the envelope, adding a few obscene ones for effect, but when he read the letter itself he was silent.
Barney clucked. “He’s involved in another paternity suit.”
“What is it, Josh?” Lily asked, trying to see over his shoulder. But he hid the letter.
“I know,” Barney said, “You’re suing him for paternity, Mimi. I knew it couldn’t be my fault, they promised me when I had that operation . . .”
“What operation?” Josh asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your daughter is pregnant,” Barney said.
“You’re kidding,” Josh exclaimed jovially. “Hey, that’s great, I’m gonna be a grandpa! Jesus Christ! Hey, congratulations, sport!” He seemed genuinely pleased.
“My God,” Barney said, “I can see it in the papers now. A Communist-incest-paternity case!”
“I am not now nor have I ever been,” Josh said solemnly, “incestuously involved with my older daughter. She is one of my failures.”
Lily gigged.
“Very funny, Josh,” Mimi said, snapping off a big piece of her Italian bread to show what she thought of his joke.
“Ouch,” Josh said. “You know that reminds me of a party I went to. You know the
old bit, the girls coming out of a cake and so on, well—”
For some reason my mind went to the letter he hadn’t joked about, which I now realized he was edging toward his pants pocket as he spoke. Lily must have noticed it, too, because as he had the letter at the edge of his pocket, she reached around and grabbed it playfully and swooped up from the table with it, ignoring Josh’s command to give it back and opening it and reading it instead. She handed it back to him with a shrug.
“They’ve got some nerve.”
“Someone’s got nerve,” Josh said. “Someone I just rescued from the depths of depression.”
“Incredible,” Lily went on, not noticing. “It was worth more than that ten years ago.”
I still might not have understood what they were talking about if Josh hadn’t glanced at me guiltily then. A dead feeling came over me. It was too much, this on top of everything else. If he . . . but it wasn’t possible . . .”
“So anyhow,” Josh went back to his story, “instead of having the girls come out of a cake, Sam had them bust out of a huge black stew pot in the middle of the barbecue, all covered with soup and vegetables AND THEN . . .” Interruption. Laughter. They all laughed. Why didn’t they ask? Why didn’t they see what was happening? “Then he’d had these six-foot-long Italian breads flown in from Manganaro’s . . .”
“Josh,” I interrupted, “you’ve had an offer for the land.”
“Forget it, honey,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“But you have had an offer.”
“It’s not an offer, it’s a joke. Forget it.”
“Are you going to forget it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“What if they offer you more?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “They won’t offer me enough.”
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 7