I looked out toward the Thicket to the east. When our children were small, Harriet and I had taken them on day trips into the ancient area, showed them swamp lilies, widow’s-tears, carnivorous pitcher plants. We’d photographed golden spiders for Edith. Among the cypress we’d sighted wood ducks and egrets, and heard the thump-thump splash of alligators in the waters of the bayou. I said, “Maybe the best thing our mothers have done for us is to live to an old age.”
I TOOK A QUICK tour of the old country house while Harriet and her mother made their good-nights. I hadn’t been out often, and I found it a very pleasing place, with its surfeit of bedrooms, painted in faded flat paint-box colors: ochre, lavender, gray, blue, sage, rose. Rooms which once must have been designated as parlor, sewing room, nursery. I papered them in my mind’s eye as they must have looked a hundred years ago. I could see that despite her diminished vision and disappearing hearing, Doll Sloane was far from lonesome here. The past was too present.
The front bedroom had one giant feather bed, and we each sank down as if in separate sleeping bags. I tried to prop up on one elbow, but that only made me sink deeper into the goose-down mattress. Instead, I put my hands behind my head. We were both in sprigged cotton nightgowns which smelled of dried sachet, faintly musty. It was a true slumber party.
Harriet scooted way down and put a feather pillow on her chest, tucking herself in the way she’d done at boarding school. “The first night Knox and I slept over after Mom moved in,” she recounted, “she asked us, ‘You sleep together or apart? Some folks snore. I can put you in two rooms or one.’ Knox was as embarrassed as a teenager, as if we weren’t long married. Then the door didn’t quite close—we were in the blue room—you know the way these old frames sag, and he was sure she could hear the bed bang against the wall in the middle of the night. He just about died.” Harriet gasped. “Oh, listen to me, the things we say and don’t even hear—”
“This is like being back at Pritchard’s,” I said. “Listen to us, we’re whispering as if it were after lights out.”
“I know. We could shout and she wouldn’t hear.” Harriet shifted to her side. “My back’s going to pay for this mattress,” she said. “I should have tested every bed like Goldilocks.”
“I like this room with windows on two sides.”
In a normal voice, Harriet asked, “Do you think in another ten years we’ll be worrying about our boys the way we do our girls now? Boys are always slower—maybe even at breaking their mothers’ hearts.”
I thought of our sons, George and Dwayne. “I’m sure we’ll see some cracks in the surface from losing their fathers at such an early age.”
“I don’t miss that, the father-son thing.”
“I can’t say I do either.”
“Our marketroids. How on earth? Sons of bankers are supposed to turn out to be potters or forest rangers, aren’t they? My Dwayne a trader, and I don’t even know what he trades, except that it’s foreign things that don’t exist yet. Your George betting on miracle materials and getting backers besides. Maybe we were a recessive influence, like recessive genes.”
“We never thought about all those Stuarts and Stewarts at school as having fathers, did we?” I was thinking that when you’re young you imagine only yourself to be part of a family. I had talked to Ned Brown a lot about my mother, her spiders, my daddy being already gone, but had never thought for a minute of asking him about his parents. Had not even, I think, considered that he had parents. He was grown. Imagine, and six years younger than my son now.
Harriet peeped out over her pillow and sighed. “All those big-boned Virginia boys with stand-up hair and sagging socks—I miss them. Where are they now?”
“The future was open then, wasn’t it?” I said. “Open as a fan.”
“Remember,” Harriet asked, giggling, “how we were the absolute only girls in school without nicknames. That must be why they put us in the same room. Harriet and Sarah when everyone else was Teeny, Tiny, Bitsy, Midge, Punkin, Puddin, Sugar, Ginger.”
“What happened to all those names?” I asked. And to all those girls now heading for sixty.
Harriet hugged her pillow. “You know what I miss? I miss the corsages. Remember how we all had to compare what the Stus sent? To see if we were going to be wearing skimpy split carnations or delectable camellias. You never seemed to care, they were the same to you, even when you got those awful Vanda orchids that looked as if someone had picked bug-eating plants from the Thicket. But I minded. I liked to open that chilled box with its little sentimental card, lift off the layers of waxy paper, and see those real red rosebuds or that melting white orchid. How I loved it—my girlhood of corsages.”
“I wasn’t so fond of all that,” I said.
“I know. Anytime you could get out of anything you were up there in that practice room pretending you were going to be a concert pianist. I don’t think you ever even played the piano before or since. You were just trying to hide.”
“I confess it.” I smiled at her, remembering that I did like our staying up half the night talking after the dances, with Harriet confiding everything about some new boy, what he did or didn’t want to do, how far she let him go, how much he wanted to touch her treasure.
Harriet said, “This is going to sound dumb—is dumb—but what I didn’t realize was how much of what I did all day, every day, was for Knox. It seems like I spent all day getting ready for him to come home in the evening. I find myself still trying to do it. I mean, I’ll be downstairs on the sun porch making plans for supper in my mind, and I’ll think, What can we eat? We had that chicken curry, but now the weather is warming up. I’d like to have chicken salad, but that would be chicken two nights in a row. I actually find myself saying things like that, in my head. When I could eat chicken seven nights a week—or never—if I felt like it. I could even pig out on double chocolate fudge for breakast if I wanted to.”
I tried to get into Harriet’s skin. How on earth would I feel if I were still waxing that gateleg table for a husband who wasn’t there, for bankers who weren’t going to come to dinner anymore? Bereft. “I think you took to marriage better than I did,” I said finally. “I don’t miss that. It wasn’t anything that Nolan did, I don’t mean that; it was the institution that rubbed me the wrong way.”
Harriet tossed her pillow at me. “Oh, you,” she said, “with your shop and your Cooper name. I guess I’m just the opposite—even when it was something Knox did, I couldn’t imagine not being married. I still can’t; I feel like a fish out of water. Truly I do.” She got out of bed, holding up her gown, tiptoeing as if we really were back at school. She opened the window and sat on the deep wooden sill, sneaking a cigarette.
I pulled up a green-painted chair and joined her. The walls of the spacious high-ceilinged room were a color as faded as old linen, amethyst Harriet had called it. A faint scent of lilac came from the chest of drawers. “Will you be all right,” I asked her, “financially?” I was trying to sort out all that she might be missing.
Harriet hesitated. “To tell the truth, I don’t know for sure. I thought things were fine. Knox left me a life estate, you know?”
“Life is a life estate,” I said mildly. I didn’t want to get into Theo Kenton and his red suspenders, or Nolan’s change of mind about what could be conveyed from the grave.
Harriet tapped her ash in the wide windowsill and stuck the pack in her nightgown sleeve. She picked at a painted fingernail. “Last week I gussied myself up and went to see our accountant, taking all those boxes of stubs and chits I always do at income tax time. I even—promise you won’t laugh—wore that damn blouse that Knox had wrapped. I mean, black, red and white are not my colors, but I thought they might be to an accountant’s liking. The blouse was baggy but my skirt was snug. I figured that balanced out. And I didn’t think it would hurt, showing off my legs.
“The first blow was when he informed me that he, Freddy, was not my accountant; that he’d been my husband’s accountant. And here I
had not even thought to call and ask him if he’d do my return or what he charged. An arm and a leg, it turned out. That was awkward. Then, after he’d smoothed that over and told me he’d be glad to handle my problem, as he called it, he went over my checkbook. Explaining to me that in the past—this immense toad of a man in a striped vest holding him in like a girdle—my expenses had just about equalled the funds deposited in my account. ‘Well, naturally,’ I said, not seeing what he was getting at, ‘that’s how Knox and I settled on the amount he gave me to run the house.’
“ ‘Yes,’ Freddy the Frog pointed out, ‘but now the expenses are continuing but the deposits are not.’ And what did I propose to do about it? He explained in a patient tone that the investments and interest might last me up to ten years, depending on inflation, but that if I sold the golden egg, the bank stock—and who could tell where Texas banks were headed—then I was in worse shape. I could either, he said, cut my expenses in half, or—and he actually snickered, ha, ha—get a job.” Her laugh turned into a hacking cough.
“Get someone to listen to that,” I said, thinking she sounded like a child with the croup.
“I’m going to quit, cross my heart.” She stubbed her cigarette.
I hadn’t thought to wonder what Harriet would do for money; it had never occurred to me there would be a problem. Knox was a banker’s banker, an enthusiastic financier, a charming money manager. I didn’t waver in my objections to husbands supporting wives from the grave, yet what would someone like Harriet do? For that matter, what could my daughter do, with another on the way?
Crawling back into bed, Harriet said, “I imagined myself going to some career counselor who specialized in Returning Women, as they call us. Some little-chinned guy in a black toupee who’d lean across his desk and say, Mrs. Calhoun, I’ve looked over your life experiences, your aptitudes and interests, and my strongest suggestion for you is: remarriage.” She crouped, only the top of her head visible. “And for that advice I’ll have to pay a hunk of money which fat Freddy has just explained to me I no longer have.”
“It sounds to me as if you’ve got ten years to be a swinging single before you have to settle down.” I said it lightly.
Harriet confessed in a hoarse voice, “I’m scared to pieces, is the truth. I mean, my grandmother was a widow for forty-six years, forty-six, and my mom might as well be one, running off fifteen years ago, camping out here in the backwoods of the universe since then.” She spoke in a whisper. “I mean it. I’d die before I’d end up like them.”
THREE
I WAS PARKED AT the gate to the doctors’ parking lot at quarter till one, waiting on Will Perry. I had Gentle Ben in the car, and had stopped at BiLo on the way to pick up a double pack of Gainesburgers for the two pups if it became a long afternoon. The treat, and pie tins to use as water pans, were locked in the trunk.
I’d called him yesterday at his office, catching him right before he left for rounds. His nurse, who knew me only as the wife of one of his deceased patients, did her duty as the cop at the door, skillfully screening the survivors.
“The doctor is with a patient,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”
“Tell him it’s Sarah Rankin.”
“Ma’am, I can’t interrupt him now.”
“Let him decide that. Just tell him I’m on the line.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
“I’m going to hold,” I told her.
In half a minute, Will picked up. “What’s going on, Coop? Be fast. I’ve got a naked man here and you’re delaying his receiving good news.”
“Want to take the pups to the state park tomorrow afternoon?” I knew Wednesday he had half a day off.
He drew in his breath. “Sounds good. Pick me up at the doctors’ parking lot at the hospital, by the gate. One o’clock. Make that ten till. If I don’t leave then, I’ll never get out of there.”
“What about Missoula?”
“We’ll swing by the house for her. You take care of whatever else we need.” He made a hoarse sound, a bark almost.
“Food or whatever.”
“I know a swell place.”
“I could use one.” He hung up.
I stroked Ben, who was lying on the passenger seat beside me. Such a smooth sleek coat. He knew we were going to the country; he could unfailingly sense it. I’d had dogs ever since I married. Mother had always had dogs. Scotties, Edith had, and then, later, Cairn terriers. Nice, neat, smart, sporty little dogs who kept pace beside their human. Agreeable dogs. All males. Mother refused to get a female dog; she said she didn’t have time to worry about getting her spayed or with dispensing puppies. I’d thought that an awful attitude when I was a girl. Now I wondered if it was behind the generally accepted preference for male children. It was certainly true that reproduction, the danger of it, the possibility of it, a woman’s fear of or need for herself or her daughters to bear babies, was always on her mind. Look at Harriet—fretting herself into a state because Pammy was not having children; look at me—getting gray-haired and frazzled because Fannin was having so many, so heedlessly.
Bess had called this morning to say that she’d invited Fannin and the boys to come for Mother’s Day. Would I mind? “We’ve got two foaling,” she said. “Plus the Polo Cup matches. They can take over the upstairs and sleep as late as they like.”
“You’re so good to them,” I told her. My daughter liked going to her Aunt Bess’s and being coddled. And her sons loved to be around the animals. On neighboring horse farms there were sometimes foxhound puppies or even fox cubs to see. My good Ben was not enough for four pairs of arms.
“You’re sure you don’t mind? Them coming on Mother’s Day?”
“I’m glad. And besides, Fannin is the mother we ought to be thinking of.” My daughter did not have her strength back yet after Jonathan; her blood count was low. And her spirits had been sagging since her OB, a Japanese woman, had discouraged the idea of six. “Content yourself with a basketball team,” she’d told Fannin and Johnny.
“Where’s ours these days?” Bess asked.
“Heading for Patagonia,” I reminded her.
Bess’s voice had a familiar tinge of hurt. “You keep up with her, don’t you? You’re proud of her, aren’t you? You’re not mad she ran off when we were growing up, that she always had to be off somewhere, making three names for herself.”
“I am,” I said. Then, “Thanks for having them.” I didn’t want to get into our worn old argument about our mother. I had a lot more guilt than I let on to Bess. I still reproached myself that I had called Edith back from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where she was at last doing fieldwork, to say that Grandma couldn’t handle things and that Bess was having nightmares. My curly-haired little sister crying out in the dark, her daddy dead and her mother gone, her affection not yet turned to horses.
Bess of course did a lot of mothering herself, and I wanted to send her a gift in thanks. She was godmother to Fannin’s four, and I’d thought, if this one was a girl, they might name her Bess. Had I known that my sister would end up fifty-one, divorced and without children, I might have named my daughter for her rather than for the first naturalist in the family tree. But then frail dark wiry Fannin, as Bess or Bessie, would have been a different child.
Off the phone, I found some dessert plates in the Crate and Barrel catalogue, thick white pottery with raised black and white cows in the center. And some cow bowls to match. They would do for cookies and hand-churned ice cream or berry sherbets. Bess always had a houseful of company, down for some event—polo matches, flatland racing, steeplechasing, riding to the foxhounds. Her place, called the “cottage,” had fourteen rooms, and two outbuildings which had once been milking sheds and were now guest quarters. That old part of the state around William of Orange still had the look of its glory days as a vacation compound for the rich. Something that had faded from our upstate area. By now, in May, all of Bess’s plump sofas and armchairs would be wearing their
striped summer duck slipcovers. Drink proof and godson proof.
I patted Ben. Will would be late. He’d been late making the rounds when Nolan was in the hospital; when we’d had him to a supper party he was late. But he would show. I was sure of that. I knew when he left the message with Katie for me to give him a call when I was in the mood to take an old dog for a ride, that he was asking. Well, not asking, he would never do that, having been Nolan’s doctor, but just checking to see if the rules had changed.
In a more perfect world, Will and I could have been better friends than we’d been allowed to be for the last thirty-odd years. Marriage didn’t just mean unlimited time with one man; it meant no time for other men.
I had not planned to use him even informally as a doctor, now that we were free to be friends, but Harriet had called the night before with troubling news. And I knew that I would want to talk to Will about it. As an informed source, if nothing more.
I was brushing my hair dry, sitting up on the bed, when the phone rang, the catalogues for Bess still lying about. I suspected it might be Harriet, at that hour, and propped two pillows behind my head before answering
“Guess what?” she said.
She had called often since my Texas visit, usually with good news. Her friend David had made a trip back to see her; he was planning another in order to interview her mother. “I’m not sure I can stand to be there when she tells her el-um stories,” Harriet had said, sounding pleased.
“You tell me,” I said. “What?”
“I bought a gun. A .22 caliber Colt single-action nickel-plated pistol. I have to wait a week to pick it up.”
She’d really done it, not just talked about it. I had some trouble with the idea. I did not like firearms or what it meant for Harriet to have need of one, a personal weapon. Something more than Knox’s deer rifle on hand in case of intruders, although I had trouble with that as well. “Was it hard to get?” I asked, needing to make a response. I was wondering what it would mean if my eldest grandson, stalwart brave Matthew, had taken to carrying a brick with him in his yellow lunch box (or Disney backpack). If all his buddies packed bricks along with their peanut butter and jellys. Would I think them angry at the Safety Patrol or afraid of bullies?
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