Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Chapter Twelve

  NOVEMBER 1975

  Carole stood on Ninety-first across from the school. It was a handsome stone building, nine stories high, with heavy carvings over the windows and doors. A private walled garden belonging to somebody else—Carnegies or Mellons, she thought—went from the school all the way to Fifth Avenue. She watched as women poured through the red door. Some of them were tiny with age, their little silver heads bobbing in the November sun. The young ones were sleek in dark minicoats and long smooth hair. A few got dropped off by limousines or taxis, but most came on foot in groups of two or three. They all seemed confident as they pulled open that door.

  She had on her new parka. She’d just bought it at Gray’s in September, and it was quite stylish in Montpelier. But here? All these years later, and she would still miss the boat when it came to clothes. She had on a long black skirt and a black sweater. When she was getting ready this morning, Will had suggested her silver earrings and a bright scarf. “For color,” he’d said. “You need a spot of color.” And when she was dressed, he’d stood back from her and said she looked great.

  They’d had an awkward few days after the telephone call. He’d wanted to know more about the woman who called, why it was such a big deal if she moved up here. If Carole didn’t like her, she could just ignore her, couldn’t she? He didn’t get why Carole was so undone by the whole thing. It wasn’t like her.

  Carole had said he didn’t understand, and he’d said, laughing the way he did when she was so obviously missing the point about something, as if she were missing the point on purpose, “So explain!” She’d snapped his head off and then felt sorry about it, but she hadn’t opened the discussion again. This time had to be the last time, it just had to. Her whole life, it seemed, was about hiding and running and close calls. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone? Naomi and Eddie both. They kept taunting her with what had happened, with Rita, with her own guilt, like a couple of wolves working the herd and singling out the weakest prey. They would hunt her down until she fell. But if she could just make sure that Naomi wasn’t coming, that she was staying put where she was, then she’d know what to tell Will. It all depended on that. She checked her watch: 11:27. At Chacha’s they’d be setting up for lunch right now. A few early birds would already be there. Will was taking the day off and filling in for her.

  A woman who looked familiar passed her. One of the other grades, not hers. Maybe one of those girls she used to look up to. Okay, it was 11:30 exactly, time to take the plunge.

  She checked up the street for traffic, headed across, and got swept into the lobby with a noisy group of women who all arrived at once. All around her women were hugging and talking. She tried to remember faces, voices, but it was all confusing, so bright and fast. There were signs on the walls telling them what to do, a guestbook to sign, and forms to complete about tours of the new wing, requests for money. In her whole life, she’d never gone back to any place of significance and she was unprepared for what happened to her in the blink of an eye. She was that girl again—the girl she once was, feeling the tremor of intimidation among all these women who were so polished and sure of themselves. She went to the stuffed cloakroom, took off her parka, hung it on a hanger, and found a mirror. Her face looked small in all that bushy wild-woman hair, but she had an intensity. Her don’t-mess-with-me look, Will called it. Maybe it was born of fear this time, but so what. No one could tell. She stood up straight, throwing back her shoulders, and then went back to the lobby determined not to look around pitifully for somebody she might know. The only person she wanted to see was Naomi, and Naomi would have to come to her.

  While she waited for the elevator, a calm settled over her. She went over what she planned to say again. She’d take Naomi aside. She would tell her in no uncertain terms that she was not to move to Montpelier, and if she’d already bought a house, which was so unlikely as to be ludicrous, well, tough. She’d have to sell it. She knew drunks well enough to know their remorse and guilt after a bender. More than likely, Naomi would be ashamed of herself for making the call and would acquiesce easily.

  And anyway, she would add, they weren’t friends. Once Naomi had succumbed, Carole would tell her what a good decision she’d made not to come. She’d be solicitous even, telling Naomi everything would be okay. She’d appeal to the snob in Naomi. You wouldn’t have liked it anyway, she would say. Montpelier is just old brick buildings and aluminum-sided houses. It has two bars and a few restaurants, most of them just burger-and-fries joints. At four o’clock when the state and the insurance company let out, the streets are a gridlock of bumper-to-bumper. People do their shopping from the Sears catalog and get their merchandise delivered to the post office. Really, she might say, if you want Vermont, there are better places to look.

  On the sixth floor, the brass grate rattled aside, the outer doors parted, and she stepped into a wide corridor packed with women, glints of gold at their ears and wrists, a rush of smoke, the scent of Joy, and excited conversation. Uniformed maids circulated, carrying silver trays of canapés and sherry. Carole drew in a quick breath as a grinning blonde in pink, the current headmistress, grabbed her hand and pumped it vigorously. She had too many teeth and a raspy voice.

  “Class?” she asked.

  “Sixty-five,” Carole said. The headmistress pressed one hand firmly into the small of her back, pointed to the far end of the corridor with the other, and gave her a little push. “Down there. Do you see them?”

  The turnout was dismal, only four out of a class of twenty-eight. Carole narrowed her eyes to see who they were. Louisa, Joan, Deirdre, and Amanda were huddled in a tight circle. No Naomi. They’d been a miserable year, fractured by cliques and rivalries, one of those classes that never really jelled. She had no idea how their lives had turned out. She took a few steps forward. All four were talking furiously, hands flying. She knew their type so well. The last she’d seen of them was in the master bedroom of Shelly’s parents’ apartment that time, sprawled out with Jeremy Lyon among tangled sheets with another couple. She forgot who. There had been other bodies spread across the floor. The room had been dark and smoky. She remembered looking around at her classmates and their drunken boyfriends. How Naomi had staggered through the room toward her. She had thought that she would never see any of them again after that night.

  She made her way over to the little group of four. Deirdre barely glanced at her as she went on talking to the others. It was Louisa who finally recognized her. “My God, it’s Carole? Is it really? Is it you?” There was a chorus of excited little shrieks as they took her into their small circle with hugs and handshakes, telling her how fabulous she looked. She’d lost weight, right? Without waiting for an answer, they were filling her in on their lives. What they did, which wasn’t much, mostly volunteering at the Met and taking courses when they had time away from their children.

  “And what about you?” Louisa asked.

  “I run a bar,” Carole said. She felt pleased to say that. She’d made a life for herself, while they hadn’t done much. They nodded and blinked, not knowing what to say. A bar? Carole? “It’s called Chacha’s.” She shrugged.

  “Are you married?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Amanda said.

  “It’s a long story,” she said.

  “Who else is coming?” Louisa said. “Who has the list?”

  Amanda pulled one from her purse and cruised the names, rattling off bits of gossip. “Naomi.” She looked at Carole over the tops of half-glasses.

  “She’s coming,” Carole said.

  “Whatever happened with you guys?” Amanda asked. “You were like this.” She twisted her first two fingers together. “And then boom, all of a sudden—” She splayed her hand open. “We could never figure it out.”

  “Everybody thought it was that guy she brought to the graduation party.”

  “No,” Carole said, thinking yes. That guy. It scared her
a little that they would remember Eddie.

  Up and down the hall, the sherry was making the women loud. There was more laughter and faster talk. Word spread that it was time to go in to lunch. The huge double doors were drawn open, and the women moved in groups into the dining room with its famous Revolutionary War wallpaper. The smell brought it all back. If she shut her eyes, she was fifteen again, and not a mirror in sight.

  The whole event quickened after that. Everybody was looped. Photographs were passed around, and Carole stared at husbands in seersucker suits, blond children at the seashore. There was a volley of questions for each photo. Who was that? Where was it taken? What were the names? And Oh, isn’t she adorable, isn’t he handsome.

  She rummaged through her purse for a photograph of Will. She’d just come back from getting a roll developed, and she passed one of the snaps along to Louisa on her left. It showed the two of them sitting on barstools at Chacha’s, Will’s arm around her, his face pressed against hers. Louisa had to put on her reading glasses. She stared at the picture but said nothing, her silence speaking volumes.

  “His name’s Will,” Carole said. “Will Burbank.”

  “Oh.” Louisa passed the photo around, and Carole watched it pass from hand to hand.

  “That’s us at my bar,” she said, since no one was saying anything. The silence that accompanied the passing of the picture told it all. He was black. They didn’t know what to say about that, so they said nothing. She suspected they would be feeling sorry for her. A cliché. Fucking her way into the black experience, she’d once heard someone say, and it had hurt her. She’d told Will, and he’d thought for a second and then roared laughing. “Nobody would want to do that,” he’d said. “That’s crazy.”

  She kept an eye on the door, waiting for Naomi to show up. Her salad got taken away and then her lunch. While the dessert was being served, they were gaveled into silence. A very elderly woman rose from a table near the dais and walked stiffly to the microphone. “I don’t know what I’m doing up here,” she said in a wobbly voice. “Since the real speaker in the family is my husband, not me.” She looked out over the crowded room and smiled fondly. “Most of you remember my husband.” At a nearby table, the senior class for that year, all bouncing girls in short uniform skirts and lug-soled oxfords, rolled their eyes at one another and stifled laughter at that dotty old broad. How could anybody remember her husband? She had to be ninety.

  The woman pointed a bejeweled hand toward the window behind her, in the direction of Central Park. “We had chaperones in my day. They came along when we went for tennis lessons in the park.” She paused. “And this made it very difficult to smoke.” The room burst into relieved laughter. “Smoking was the height of wickedness, so it was, of course, what everyone wanted to do.” More laughter. She went on, describing places in the building where the girls of her day went to sneak a cigarette—the cast room behind the stage, the room that opened onto an alley that led out to Ninety-first Street. They were places Carole remembered too, where she and Naomi used to go.

  The table of senior girls whispered among themselves, shook out their hair, rewound it, let it go, twirled spoons around in their melting desserts. By now, it was clear that Naomi would not be coming. Carole stopped glancing at the door. Some students were gathered on the dais, preparing to sing. Someone sounded a pitch pipe, there was a tune-up hum, and they opened with the same lovely obscure pieces that Carole had been taught as a girl, “Who Is Sylvia” and “Hodie.” These were followed by a medley of songs from the sixties—“Leader of the Pack,” “It’s My Party,” “He’s So Fine,” sung with the same careful attention to each note as the chants. There was no hard edge to the music, though. The notes were right, the words clear, but they held none of the tough energy that had made that music so great.

  As they filed out of the dining room, dismissed by the headmistress after a plea to contribute to the building fund, Carole ducked into the drawing room and swung the enormous doors shut behind her. It was lovely and quiet, exactly as she remembered it, with high ceilings, pale brocade-covered furniture. A painting of Miss Spence hung over the fireplace. Two satiny sofas faced each other across a polished coffee table. As underclassmen, they’d been permitted in that room only once a year to have their class pictures taken.

  Yearbooks were fanned across the coffee table, and she found her year, the white one. She flipped through the senior pictures, one page per person, all by Bachrach, all with the same Mona Lisa smile. It wasn’t until you reached the back of the book—the candids—that you saw the differences.

  Here were pictures taken out of school, around the city, and during vacations, dances, and dates—the pictures that told the real story, that showed bodies in action and faces in anger, concentration, and wonder. On the last page was a picture Carole remembered well. The two of them—Carole and Naomi—stood side by side in the Senior Room. The Inseparables, they had been called, and not kindly. It had been taken just before spring break, before the trip to Stowe. Carole was the tall, heavy-set, grinning blonde on the left, dwarfing Naomi, dark and petite. In the photograph Carole is pressing a snapshot into her breast. Only the edges were visible. It was their best secret. At the moment the photograph was taken, they’d said his name in unison. “Eddie.” It was why they were smiling that way, with open, surprised-looking mouths, as though they were singing.

  “Excuse me?”

  Carole looked up to see the headmistress standing in the door to the drawing room. “I’m going to have to ask you—” She gestured to the empty hall behind her. “We’re having to lock up.”

  “Oh,” Carole said. “I guess I got carried away in here.”

  “I understand,” the headmistress said. “These things happen.”

  “Tell me,” Carole said as they walked together, the headmistress’s hand again at the small of her back, guiding her firmly toward the elevator. “I was expecting to see someone today, but she never showed up. Is there a way to get an alum’s address?”

  The headmistress frowned, and Carole knew she was trying to decide whether it would be quicker to say yes or no. “Come along,” she said. “And we’ll see.”

  They took the stairs up one flight to her office—the same sunny, carpeted room with the mahogany desk that the headmistress had had when Carole was a student. Carole remembered sitting there, dragged in after Naomi had taken her shoplifting that time. The storekeepers had recognized Naomi’s school blazer. Naomi was the one to get into trouble; Carole was quickly off the hook. She could do no wrong in those days.

  “Let’s see,” the headmistress said, flipping through a file box that held reply cards for the reunion. “Sometimes they tell us. Leonard, Leonard, Leonard. Here we go.” She pulled out a card. “‘Naomi Leonard. Mrs. Baxter Oliver,’” she read. “Let’s see if she filled—yes, here it is. One thirty-one East Seventy-fifth.” She drew her lips over her enormous teeth and smiled. “I think you might have had just as good luck with the telephone book, but let me write it down for you anyway.” She pressed the piece of paper into Carole’s hand and steered her back through the door, to the elevator.

  Outside, the late afternoon was raw and fiercely bright. She walked down Madison to Seventy-fifth Street and then east across Park to Naomi’s building, which was one of those high, grand old things with doctors’ offices on the ground floor and a dark green canopy over the entrance.

  “Does Naomi Oliver live here?” she asked the doorman.

  He looked her up and down. “Whom should I say is calling?”

  “Then she lives here, yes?”

  “Your name again?” he said.

  “Just tell her it’s Carole,” she said.

  He disappeared into a little room off the lobby. A minute later he reappeared with a slip of paper. “Carole Mason?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Mrs. Oliver has stepped out,” he said. “But she’s left word you’re to wait for her.”

  “Stepped out? When?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, I mean, was it just now or an hour ago?”

  “I can’t say.” He pointed to an upholstered chair in the lobby that was chained to the wall. “You can wait there.”

  It frosted her that Naomi wasn’t here, and worse, she obviously expected Carole to come looking for her. She’d fallen into that same trap all over again: thinking she was playing a game she’d already lost.

  That summer after senior year, a few days after she’d seen Naomi at that strange party where Andy Warhol was supposed to show up, she’d gotten a frantic call from Naomi. They just had to get together, and it had to be that day. In retrospect Carole must have leapt to the conclusion that Naomi had information from Eddie; she’d gone to the restaurant immediately, an expensive little French bistro in the West Fifties that Carole could never afford with her own money. Naomi had told her to get a table. She’d pay. Bax, the new fiancé, was loaded. Naomi wasn’t there yet, and there was no alternative but to be seated at the reserved table and accept the cup of coffee and a plate of rolls, which she ate while she waited. And waited and waited. Until she had to pretend she was going to the ladies’ room and then sneak out a door at the back and run. No Naomi. No explanation. You could know a thing and still be powerless to change your own behavior in the face of it. That was the awful truth, she thought as she waited yet again. She’d give her another five minutes, and if Naomi didn’t show, she’d leave. She took out her checkbook so she could get it up to date and was subtracting the checks she’d entered when the door clicked open and a gust of arctic air blew in, swirling a few leaves and bits of paper across the marble floor. A small woman, swathed in a huge black coat that brushed the floor, was standing in the doorway. Her face, squinting into the lobby, was perched on top like a toy. It took Carole a minute to recognize her.