Taken
AT THE TOP of the terrace steps Avery Mayhew rose into view. No one in sight to stop him from wheeling his chair off the edge. Perhaps the aides indoors, in their flowered smocks with cigarettes in the pocket, wanted him to.
Or perhaps, more generously, because in the slowness of their walk they seemed in some undeliberate way generous, they wanted him to have the choice. All of the aides were immigrants, from countries with little idea of places like this, Jane imagined, and that was why they would pass her with the look, light as a brushstroke, that said something was wrong—not here inside the building but outside it, where she came from.
Mayhew never remembered her. He did retain a vestigial politeness towards women; strapped in with a mesh harness, he made an effort to sit up as she climbed the steps.
On her first visit, just after he had been moved to Calling Creek, Fana, one of the Eritrean aides, had shown her how he backed the wheelchair into his room when the meal trolleys had to pass, instead of sticking out of the doorway where they all liked to sit, claiming part of the hall as a kind of porch. Never mind spit, harness, diaper, Mayhew was established as having manners. Fana rewarded him with a spot in the shade between two boxes of geraniums, at the other end of the terrace from the water bowl set out for therapy dogs.
The aides had unfriendly words in their own soft languages for these animals. “It is not clean,” Fana said. “But he like-es the dogs. Monday and Thursday they will bring them, they will take them in-to the bet-rooms.” Jane liked to hear her T’s, they were so delicate, so refraining; they held a suggestion that everything would lie lightly upon one, never pierce.
While her husband Avery was in the hospital near death, one article said, Mrs. Mayhew had taken his dog to the vet and had her put to sleep. She told the reporter who knocked, “The dog was old and she was sick. And don’t let me see you on this porch again.”
“Hello, Avery,” Jane said. “I’m back. Yes, it’s me. I’m back. I’m glad to see you.”
Without gladness, his blue eyes saw her. The rims and whites were angrily inflamed. “He rubs his ey-yes,” said Fana, crossing the terrace with a Dixie cup and a pill. “You do that don’t you, Mr. Mayhew?” She put a lament into the name.
He was dressed in a blue plaid shirt with a terrycloth bib; his feet were in what looked like women’s slippers lined with bunny fur. “Comfees, we have put,” said Fana, indicating the slippers. She turned her face to speak out of the side of her mouth like a comic. “On the heel. Bet-so.” Bedsore.
“Oh, no,” Jane said. She quickly clamped her teeth, which often chattered when she first saw Mayhew or heard physical details offered about him. Who did Fana think she might be? Not the wife. The wife, Doris Mayhew, had never come, after the state removed him from her care. The removal was Jane’s doing. Why had she involved herself? For her niece. Because her niece Tara begged her to. Now she had her brother’s sad warning that this particular caprice was one he found it hard to excuse, when everyone else was rebuilding, after seven years, had rebuilt. Rebuilt what? She bent towards Mayhew. “Today, I came without my paints. But next time.”
He heard her with the dull look of an old horse. She was several years his senior, but she wore high-heeled sandals and a toe ring, the gift of a man, her lover Karel—or Karel who had once been her lover—while Mayhew wore slippers, a bib, and on his wrist a Wanderer’s Alarm. Mr. Mayhew, the history teacher. Seven years ago her niece Tara had been one of his students.
Then for more than five years he had lived in a chicken coop. There was legal proof of that. Days after the accident—still called that, in town—the Mayhew family had disappeared. It was as if they had never lived on a named street in town; never attended the Methodist church; never passed, the sons, through the gauntlet on the steps of the school where their father had taught. Doris Mayhew must have made a trip back to get him, because the hospital, which was in the next county, had a record of his release to her. It was not as if anyone had been visiting him to notice. Of course a wife can sign out a husband.
Then it took a long time for word of them to reach town, and longer for any sense to be made of it. She had bought herself a piece of scrubland, it was said, down near the Tennessee border where her people were originally from. Gone on teaching the fifth grade. How could she retire? Mothers recalled how you could hear a pin drop in Doris Mayhew’s classroom. Not to excuse him.
“I redid the whole place,” she was reported to have said, holding the door of the chicken coop for the girl from the Health Department. A toilet, a tin shower with a chair. Doris Mayhew lifting, soaping: Jane tried not to imagine it. If anyone washed the man. Maybe the sons, while they were still at home. Maybe the sons rebuilt the chicken coop. And had they had any say, when the dog was put down? Boys who had gone to school with Tara, one of them in her class, enduring World History with his father at the blackboard and the girls listening with their heads back, their eyes half closed or sliding sideways at each other, as girls’ eyes always had, in his father’s class. The girls raising their hands, teasing for his father’s notice. The son must have figured he could get through that, his father’s following. His brother had. He must have thought that was the thing that would be asked of him that year.
“When you will paint,” said Fana, “I will watch.” She lowered her voice but kept it loud enough for him to hear. “It is good you will paint Mr. Mayhew because he is hand-some.” The metal chair she was dragging gave a screech on the flagstones. “For you.” At the other end several women came out in floppy gardening hats and walked on their own to chairs in the sun.
The Residence at Calling Creek stood over its built-on wing of red brick like a cow with a calf not her own. It had been a farmhouse, one of the big old fieldstone places parting with their fenced hills one by one. The old porch had given way to an open terrace, and the double-hung windows had been replaced and stripped of their black shutters; with a gaze like someone missing her glasses the stone face of the building looked out over the circle drive and the parking lot. In the yard was a buggy, shafts in the grass, left over from the period when the place had been an antique store. Beyond the parking lot was a small field, leased to somebody now to finish his Herefords. Thick with clover, it sloped in its square of board fence down to bulldozers and the close-ranked new roofs of Calling Creek Acres. The creek itself was nowhere to be seen; it ran under the tangles of Virginia creeper somewhere at the back of the original farm.
Her brother Dewey said, “I’m not sure why you’re going down there at all. And you’re taking your paints? I can’t altogether see why you feel you need to do that.”
“Not need, want. I just want to paint a couple of things.”
“Like the buggy?” he said, aggrieved but optimistic.
“No, not that.” Could he ever have looked at her paintings, and think she would paint a buggy?
The next minute he said, “Anymore, you don’t ride hardly at all.” He lapsed into his country lawyer talk when he had a point to make.
“It was disagreeing with my hip bones,” she said. Dewey could accept that, rather than “I got tired of it,” or worse, “I stopped loving my horse. All that time I could only love one thing.” Of Karel, Dewey knew the name, nothing more. “Carroll,” he spelled it, e-mailing her in New York to say that she should of course bring him or someone else of her choice to the wedding. Dewey’s theory, endorsed or more likely proposed by his wife Maggie, was that New York was full of men standing ready to occupy Jane’s time and attention. Many men, not one. Maggie would never credit, in Jane, a paralyzed longing for one. Dewey shook his head; even though he and Maggie were in the midst of an addition to their stable, he pitied his sister for letting him have her horses.
“You know, Jane . . .”
“It always begins with ‘You know.’ Something you don’t know, that’s going to make you feel bad.”
“I think you blame yourself for what happened.”
“No, Dewey.”
“It may be you do.”
“You mean Maggie does. Just because Tara was over here so much, just because I—” She almost said “love the girl,” but that would be reported to Maggie and Maggie would see it as envy. “But honestly I never passed on any of my black arts to your daughter.”
“Now Jane.” He wiped his face as she had seen him do in court; with him it was sincere, it had something to do with thought, the draining quality of thought. “Tara was a . . . she was fifteen, she was just a silly girl.”
“No she was not. She was a wild girl, maybe she was an awful girl. Silly she was not.” I was never so careless, so fearless as Tara, no. So merciless. If I could have been, I would have been.
But she must stop, she must not keep on until she brought to the kindly face of her brother, who was, after all, the father, the old look of baffled shame.
VERY EARLY THAT morning, Monday, someone had called from the front desk and put Fana on, because Jane had said a month ago that she would be back. “All day he was wai-ting,” Fana said. “Mr. Mayhew.”
Jane knew Mayhew had not been waiting; to wait you had to have memory. Fana said he talked, and Jane defended herself. She knew the man did not talk. “My dear, I don’t have my calendar with me”—she was still in bed—“but I feel sure it was today. Yesterday we had a wedding here.” She didn’t say, My niece Tara got married. Ask around. Somebody there can tell you about Tara.
She had given up her habit of agreeing with people when it made her the culprit. For some time she had been saying, in fact, whatever came into her mind. There was no reason not to, now, no reason to be charming or even particularly civil. There was no reason to have her hair cut and colored and know the plots of operas and be ready to book a flight.
It seemed all she had done for years, even putting paint on canvas, had been done for the sake of a man. A man whose name she must not mention, because it was foreign and unusual, and in some places a known name. A man she must not write or call or imagine leaning on her in a cab in desire so long-established it was almost lawful. And now there was no reason to do anything but paint and sleep.
But the phone had cut off both sleep and the images that formed on waking, and she got up quickly and wandered in her nightgown into the early sun, among the white almost weightless chairs you could rent now, arranged in curved rows in the garden.
Petals coated everything; Maggie had made sure the little girls had their baskets full. Jane picked up napkins, cigarette butts. She brought one of them to her nose. Karel. Karel had given up smoking with the greatest difficulty. Gum and patches and hypnotism, and finally a therapist. Some of the same aids he had required to give up Jane. He admitted such things. “I’m weak.” To love her was weak.
“You’re strong,” he told her. “Don’t worry. You’ll wonder how you ever wasted your time on me.”
“I’m strong,” she repeated.
“It’s in the paintings.” Karel was a connoisseur; he gazed, he selected; years ago he had followed her into the coatroom of a gallery, taken her by the shoulders, pressed her into the coats. “Who are you?” she had said, out of breath.
“Don’t worry, we have been introduced.”
“I’m glad of that,” she said, testing the thick white hair with one finger.
“It was in another gallery,” he said, smiling.
“I wouldn’t have to know you to know these things about you,” he said later, caressing her. “The rashness, the sympathies . . .”
“Ha. That’s anybody. Sympathies? I could be Hitler. He was a painter. I could be a murderer like Caravaggio. You would never know.”
“. . . the appetites,” he went on. “I would know,” he said, with the combination of pride in himself and submissive tenderness that she had come to know.
In the rock garden the two lizards, whose cream stripes somehow turned over like ribbon and flashed into turquoise on their tails, sat in the sun. She had narrowed down; she was not the person he described, she was a woman who stood at a bedroom window, forehead on the glass, and watched for flickers in the rock garden while the big clock in the hall struck the quarter hour, the hour. She could have put those lizard colors on canvas in two, three strokes of the palette knife. Yet why would you? Hadn’t Dewey been asking, in his muddled way, why you would paint at all? Why paint anything? What if you had lost the sense of how to paint what a thing meant to you?
Now her mind was going to crawl in a low determined way through French doors into a room where it could lift its eyes to the painting hung alone, emblazoned with gouts of cadmium yellow, a sunroom where the man who had sworn himself to her sat on Sunday morning reading the paper with his wife. Where now a mind could crouch—a small replica of herself that was also a lizard, tail lashing—in the dark behind the glass panels of a bookcase, and watch the small, the trembling wife, the wife who spoke with the same accent he did and who was kind and good, holding a treasure, her own life, always in her hands before him like a cracker she could break.
Maybe his children were there. No, they were away at school, in lives of their own. Old enough that they could have managed without him. Of course they could.
Yellow had filled her paintings at the time. Yellow of celebration, of summer, of ease and satiety. None of them the yellow of today, flat and wintry, hers before she noticed it. Northern, like the yellow sky over Friedrich’s abandoned landscapes and cold seas. A color for never. I attest to it, said the color. Never.
Yet from her painting above the mantel one of the old jubilant yellows was shedding its light on him, and on his wife. A wife so fragile, trembling and silent, so huge and powerful, that she could never be left. She would kill herself.
“I know how many men have said that,” he said humbly. “About their wives.”
“Over the centuries,” Jane said.
“Jane, for God’s sake, Jane. You know.” He too could plead. “You know her. She would kill herself.” The unsaid thing was that she had tried before. So he had given her reason to try, before.
Jane did know, of course, that there were people who would kill themselves. How had he found the one person who would know this as she did?
There were people who would not give a thought to being dragged out of a car like sandbags while other people did the screaming. They would think only of dying. They would have set their sights on it. Dying, rather than going on, the way everybody else had to. Obsessed people, with no mercy for whoever had to yank hose from pipe and attempt CPR, rightfully howling at the sight of the human face turned demon red by gas, slapping that face, again and again—a bottom-heavy schoolteacher in a pantsuit, home from Parent Night and down on the cement floor of the garage beside the corpse that firemen were going to bring back from being a corpse. Those dreary others, neighbors, parents, sons, gathered in the hospital cafeteria. No mercy for them.
THE BRIDESMAIDS WERE pretty, all of them. Slim in their gauzy togas of green and lavender, pliant. Yet certain ones, she knew, were made of something invisibly resistant, like the polymers that hardened paint. Not pliant. One or two were liars.
A tanned girl bumped her, spilling champagne. “Oh, sorry, sorry,” the girl said in that high voice they all seemed to have, though it was Jane who was dizzy, not the girl with skin so smooth the ball of the shoulder gave off light. If she were forced to paint them Jane would paint their bones: curved little skull barely fused, clean jawline. The glowing collarbones of Tara. Of course if you loved beauty, if you had married badly, if you yourself were known for your black hair and your creased smile, if you had taught World History to tenth graders for fifteen years and still you loved beauty, beauty and daring—if this girl, of all of them, came to your desk after school with those collarbones lifting as she breathed, would you not think of putting your lips there?
Half the dresses in the garden were strapless; the ones that did have straps or sleeves showed bra straps as well. How many years of safety pins, of shamed pulling and tucking had gone into the concealment of bra straps, only f
or them to emerge finally as part of the ensemble? Although there was no finally. Or not in fashion: had not the tippet reappeared? Given a small twist, brought out as luxurious or perverse, and in the right colors, the parasol could return, even the bustle.
What was the matter with her, scolding like this in her mind? She had reached the side of the rabbi. He was standing by himself at the end of the walk where the paving stones led up and out of the garden. He was a heavy man; things moved around him. Before Tara and her bridegroom Josh he had stood as if to block a door, though his hands had been peaceably folded. She had an urge to sit down heavily in front of him on the scattered rice, at the level of the milling legs. She knew all these people, though not so well as she once had. They were mostly people her brother’s age, from the time when a gap of four years at school was the same as decades.
She looked for Josh’s mother, Elaine. She had sat with Elaine at the rehearsal dinner. She felt some responsibility for her, a widow, a short, friendly woman who had inadvertently crossed into the region of Maggie’s fiercest smiles during the planning by saying that she hoped to wear peach. Peach was Maggie’s color. “I’ve never visited the South,” Elaine said when Maggie steered her to Jane’s side in the garden and left her there. “Look at this. You’ve done it all so perfectly.”
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