by Alice Adams
Jill notes too that the house is much too clean, for Caroline. All that obvious effort with the vacuum, with mops and rags and brushes bespeaks time on her hands, and tension, nervous energy to burn. Normally what is called an “indifferent” housekeeper, in her case an accurate description, Caroline has worked too hard at cleaning, so that every surface shines, with too high a gloss. Too much is reflected from glass-topped tables, silver vases and picture frames, in the high sheen of wooden surfaces, the rosewood table, Molly Blair’s big walnut desk. It is simply not a good sign, all this cleaning by Caroline.
“Actually he’s doing rather better, though,” Caroline tells Jill, of Ralph. “But it’s so back and forth, up and down. I keep having to readjust.”
Readjust to the possibility of Ralph’s dying, or not dying: she must mean that, and Jill tries to take it in, even as in another part of her mind she wonders: Should she tell Caroline about losing her money? Maybe not, after all?
Jill on the whole likes Ralph very much, she always has. At first, when she, Jill, was a very small child, he was sort of someone their mother knew, and then, when Jill was four, and Fiona six, they got married, Caroline and Ralph. In a non-close way Jill is fond of him (God knows nothing like Sage with her huge disgusting permanent crush on Jim McAndrew). And the real point is that Caroline is crazy about Ralph, she always has been. Fiona and Jill have figured that he was the first big sex figure for Caroline, that Caroline and Jim, their dad, did not get along so wonderfully, in the sack. And so Ralph’s illness must be really horrible for Caroline. Loyal Caroline, who always puts such a good face on things.
“This bag lady,” Caroline is saying now. “She kept pacing the sidewalk, with this awful chant about fires and dung, the end of the world. And I sort of knew I knew her, or at least I used to see her. Obviously in some entirely other context. And finally it came to me, of course one night, or rather early morning, when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I suddenly remembered.”
Her name was Mary Higgins Lord, and she was married to the head of surgery at one of the hospitals, Dr. Bayard King Lord (“the most ridiculously redundant name,” Caroline had giggled to her then-husband, Jim McAndrew, who did not find the observation especially funny). And Dr. Bayard King Lord, who was quite as pompous as his name, dumped Mary Higgins Lord, his wife, whom almost everyone, including the doctor, insistently called Higgsie—for a much younger, blonder horsey type (so original, Dr. Lord), and “Higgsie,” instead of taking it well, being a sport about it all, as discarded wives of her caste were known to do—quite out of character, Higgsie went mad, what was described as a total nervous collapse: there were rumors of scenes at parties, in restaurants, tears, endless tears, and all that from Mary Higgins Lord, hitherto such a model of control, of perfect children and parties, meals and clothes.
Caroline was of course one of those surprised, and sympathetically appalled—as she is now appalled, imagining the anguish involved in such a descent. Before that descent, she remembers fearing certain parties because of knowing that Higgsie Lord would be there, in all her black-and-pearl perfection—making her, Caroline, feel invariably a mess, a little overweight and showing it, her hair distraught, nails (from so much gardening) not right at all, her dress at best last year’s. Perfect Higgsie Lord, with her never-to-be-forgotten yellow eyes.
“And the damn thing is,” Caroline concludes her story, “now that I’ve remembered who she is, of course I don’t see her any more. Although I’m not quite sure what I’d do about it if I did.”
“It’s a very scary story.” Jill feels that this is not a great day for her to hear about how a perfectly okay woman fell through the cracks.
“Jill darling, you look so stricken. You mustn’t take my story to heart. I didn’t mean it to be an object lesson.”
“But—” Jill is about to explain, to say, Look, I’m almost broke, I’m wiped out. But the doorbell rings.
They both jump, so concentrated are they on each other—and Caroline frowns as she gets up to answer.
In another moment from the front hall Jill hears the voice of her older half-sister, Sage. “I was on my way out to a place on Geary to get some paints Noel needs, and I thought I’d swing by,” Sage is saying, as Jill thinks: I really don’t feel like seeing Sage, I’m not up to Sage right now. Why do I have to keep running into Sage?
Then, “Jill must be here,” she hears Sage saying, from the hall. “The only gorgeous yellow Mercedes in town.”
As Jill thinks, She doesn’t much like me either. Would she like me any better broke? Will she?
Sage is wearing her habitual black turtleneck, silver loops in her ears and black pants. Black Reeboks. Well, no wonder Noel likes lace so much, is Jill’s almost automatic thought. Lace and silk, no wonder.
“I’ve got the very worst cold,” is what Sage first says to Jill, “don’t even come near me,” as she extracts some Kleenex from her pants.
“Well, how’s it going?” Jill very politely asks (too politely? maybe).
“Actually things are better than I sound or probably look. I was pretty undone at first, my show being cancelled. I mean postponed. So suddenly. So unreasonably, I thought. But now it all makes a little more sense, and I’m getting some work done. And Noel has been really wonderful.”
“Darling, that’s absolutely great,” Caroline tells her.
No wonder I haven’t seen him for a while, is Jill’s silent thought. He’s busy being wonderful at home. Being so supportive and protective, taking care. Being everything he really isn’t. And how will he feel about me when I’m down, maybe out on the street?
“I felt so terrible, really totally discouraged,” Sage is saying to her mother. “And then, out of that feeling, I’m doing some stuff I really like.” After a small sniffling pause she adds, “It’s a sort of phoenix syndrome. Hard to explain.”
“Darling, you don’t have to explain. But that is interesting. I can’t wait to see.”
“Well, Caroline, it’ll be a while.” (Sage always calls her mother by her first name, just as she calls Jill’s father, her stepfather, Jim). “Caroline, you look awfully thin. Are you okay?” Sage asks.
“Oh yes, it’s just the effort I make, all this readjusting. I was telling Jill, Ralph getting better and then worse, back and forth to the hospital.”
They get along with each other much better than I get along with anyone, Sage and Caroline do, Jill thinks. They admire each other, especially Caroline admires what Sage does, her “creativity,” whereas they both think that what I do is sort of immoral. And they’re probably right, and they don’t even know the half.
If she told them about her lost money, they would both be very sympathetic, they are both very “nice.” But Jill decides not to tell them. She does not want their sympathy, and she surely does not want to appear to ask for it. Not from her mother, and definitely not from Sage. And she thinks, Oh God, suppose Sage found out about Noel, Noel and me? Suppose he should tell her, as part of his being “wonderful”? And suppose she should tell my mother, suppose Sage told Caroline? If Noel tells I will kill him, Jill decides; with my last cent I’ll have him offed, Jill thinks.
And it is pretty bad, she further thinks; fucking your half-sister’s husband is worse than turning tricks, it really is.
“Ah, Caroline, that’s really hard on you.” Sage has gone over to give her mother a quick warm hug. “All this with Ralph.”
Jill has never before thought much about Ralph. Early on she and Fiona used to snicker about his accent, his general corniness; but as adolescents they recognized (without snickering this to each other, or certainly to Ralph) that he was a lot less uptight than Jim, their father, Ralph is a fair-minded person, they both dimly perceived (but how could Caroline find him so attractive).
And now, confronted with his illness, Jill uncomfortably realizes that she cares about Ralph, she would hate it if he died—that is caring, isn’t it?
On the other hand, it might be interesting to see what
Caroline would do next.
Perhaps to change the subject, Caroline then tells her daughters, “I got a card from Jim, is that not funny? He’s down in Mexico snorkeling, he was apologetic about not being around to help. Medically, I guess he must have meant.”
Sage flushes a dark unbecoming scarlet, as she mutters, “I haven’t seen him for a while.”
Jill begins to laugh: the very idea of her dignified middle-aged doctor-father snorkeling—in Mexico—is somehow funny.
Both Caroline and Sage regard her with some incomprehension, so that Jill feels she must explain, “It’s just an odd picture, don’t you think? He’s so tall and pale. Such a doctor.”
“Presumably he’s not snorkeling in his lab coat,” suggests Caroline.
“The truth is I’m a little hysterical,” Jill now tells them both. “The market went sort of crazy today. Went way down, that is. I think I’ve really lost a lot of money.”
“Jill dear, how terrible, why didn’t you say? How awful.” Caroline and Sage speak almost in unison, their very dissimilar faces expressing similar concern.
But this is not their kind of problem, Jill knows. They are both very nice women, and they mean awfully well, but they live in an entirely other world. They are basically anti-money, anti-business. Even technology, they seem against that, they don’t even have any kind of computer, either of them. Though how they think the world would function if everyone were just like them—
“Well, I’ll really be all right,” Jill tells them. “I’m not exactly out on the street. Not yet. And lots of people were hit much harder than I was.”
“But it’s no fun, losing money,” Caroline sighs. “One of the joys of not having any, I suppose.” (Which strikes her daughter Jill as a very smug remark indeed. Very unimaginative.)
A short time after that Sage announces that she really has to run along, Noel needs his paint. “But why am I running around after paint for Noel?” she laughingly, rhetorically asks. “Marriage makes no sense, it makes you senseless. You and Fiona have the right idea, Jilly.”
“And Portia,” her mother reminds her.
“Oh well, yes. Of course Portia. Well, goodby; lovely to see you both.”
Caroline goes to the front door with Sage, as Jill (digesting that “Jilly”) is left to wonder: Why did I have to hear so much about how well Sage and Noel are getting along? That skinny little bastard, I’ll get him yet. One way or another.
And then the phone rings. From the front hall Caroline calls back, “Would you get that, darling, please?”
Jill, answering, identifies herself to a man who then suggests that she and her mother come along to the hospital. Right away.
Eighteen
When Portia was a small child her father, Ralph, used to take her down to Mission Street (they were living then up on Liberty) for treat excursions. From his boyhood, so much of which was spent visiting relatives in Texas, Ralph retained a strong nostalgia for anything Mexican: colors, smells, sounds, food. Especially Mexican people, for whom he felt a ferocious, sometimes despairing affection. “A whole lot of Texans don’t feel this way, I know,” he said to his half-comprehending young daughter. “Some of the worst racists you’re ever going to find are Texans, on the subject of Mexicans. Some of them up in high places in our government, sad to say. I don’t exactly know why, but I feel exactly the opposite. To me they’re the gentlest, loveliest people. I’ll take them over those mean-hearted rednecks any day. If I’m not around Mexicans for a really long spell I miss them. I go over to Mission Street, Dolores, Valencia, for my own special kind of fix.”
Ralph knew all the best tacquerias, the chili parlors, and he knew where the best Latin bands were, where sometimes he could persuade Caroline to go. (Caroline protested, “Darling, I have to tell you the truth, it’s just not my beat. Even in the Forties I was not so marvellous at the rumba, or the tango.”) But Portia took to the whole Mission District scene. The Mission was her Mexico, and later her South America. And later still, as Vietnamese, Cambodian boat people began to arrive, the Mission was also her Southeast Asia.
For all these reasons, then, Portia sometimes house-sits for the Fuerte family, who live out on Guerrero, off Army Street, for free. Mostly, she very much likes them. Betty Fuerte works part-time in the Galería de la Raza, and Eduardo is a rather scholarly importer; together the Fuertes travel all over Mexico for artifacts, which then are sold at a far-from-enormous profit, from a converted warehouse on York Street.
The Fuerte house is curiously Southern, with verandas and side porches, a small orchard out in back and very little room inside; the house is also used as a storehouse for unsold objets, going into any room you can trip over a piñata, or stumble into a pile of holy relics (lapsed Catholics, the Fuertes do not treat their plaster saints with much reverence).
Simply walking through the small bare streets of the Mission, though, or along broad, very crowded Mission Street itself, Portia feels the sort of flutter in her blood, the purely visceral happiness that another person might feel in Paris, in Amsterdam or Tahiti, depending on taste. (This “flutter” has more than a little to do with intense early feelings for Ralph; Portia is of course aware of this, but she chooses not to make too much of it.)
Her friend Harold likes the Mission too, or he says he does, but Portia senses his liking as being more abstract, a theoretical affection. His true mania is for Israel, he is crazy about Jerusalem, the Old City. (“It’s so extremely beautiful, and besides I like Jews much better than WASPs. At school ALL my best friends were Jews.” “I think maybe I like Third World people best.” (“You mean Arabs?” Which led to a familiar and quite unresolvable argument.) Harold also likes Greek islands, Dubrovnik and anywhere in Italy. A privileged child, in a way, he spent most of his adolescence in travel.
Another reason that Portia is especially happy at the Fuerte house is that she and Harold do not, cannot possibly sleep together there. (This is something that Portia admits to herself but, again, does not examine.) The bed is quite simply too small for two exceptionally tall people. A couple would have to be wildly in love, or at least in love, and fairly small, to make it in that bed. Portia, curled contentedly alone, has naturally wondered about Betty and Eduardo, who are both on the short side and fairly plump. Any explanation is possible, she believes. They seem very fond of each other.
Thus, not going to bed together, when Portia is at the Fuerte house and Harold comes to visit, they spend a lot of time walking about in the Mission. They go to various take-out taco places, they have silly arguments about which one is best. They like to sit around in the large but object-cluttered living room with store-bought enchiladas heated up on Betty’s nice brown earthenware plates, and pale cold Mexican beer in tall blue swirled glasses.
Appropriately enough, Portia has been there at the Fuertes’ for the weeks of Ralph’s most recent crisis, which began on the day that Caroline and Jill were summoned to the hospital.
“It’s not as though there were three choices,” Portia tells Harold; as often with this close friend, she is half speaking to herself. “Of course actually there’s no choice at all. I mean possibilities. Possible outcomes.”
“None of them swell.”
“Right. He’s not going to come out great.”
“No. Not what we’d call his old self.”
“No. If he as we say comes through, it’s a question of how much damage.”
“Right.”
“And which would be better, dead or damaged.”
“Christ. But as you say we have no choice. But since it’s Ralph—” Harold is enormously fond of Ralph, in fact he loves Ralph, partly by way of contrast to his own father, a John Birch Society, alcoholic Wall Street lawyer, a great success. “Since it’s Ralph we have to think that anything’s better than no Ralph,” Harold tells Portia.
“Poor Mom. Poor old Caroline. She must feel all different ways at once.”
“At least.”
“We should know a lot more in a day
or so. She says.”
“I’m not sure how much longer I can take working at Podesta, speaking of days.”
“Do you want me to talk to Fiona? She’s always in trouble with flowers, probably you could help—”
“No, she scares me to death. And Jill.”
During the past week Harold has often gone to the hospital with Portia, at first with some ambivalence (his more or less normal state), torn between wanting to help Portia and not wanting to be what his mother quite often describes as “very de trop.”
It began, though, to seem to Harold that he was very welcome; even Jill and Fiona, usually so intimidating, so impeccably blonde and hard-edged sexy, were glad to see him, Harold felt. (He was always happy with Caroline.) He began to see that he was a sort of buffer, separating family members from too much raw contact with each other, in a very bad time for them all.
No one but Caroline stayed in the hospital for very long—that terrible room, poor Ralph all tubed and computerized, medicated into insensibility. The others all came and went, they stood about with long sad faces, whispering, and at the approach of doctors they all scurried out, leaving Caroline to deal with authority.
“Dad must really hate this,” Portia had whispered to Harold, more than once. And, “You’re awfully good to come.”
All the others and especially Caroline have whispered thanks, including Fiona and Jill—though Harold is still quite afraid of them both.
“I couldn’t work for Fiona,” he now tells Portia.
“You wouldn’t. A nice sort of fat odd guy named Stevie does most of the stuff with flowers. You might get along with him.”
“You mean, because he’s so odd? Or fat.”
“Harold, please don’t be so touchy. I can’t stand it. Not just now, okay?”
And then the phone rings.
The news of Ralph is, though, guardedly, good. Unaccountably in tears, Portia comes back to tell Harold. “He’s going to be okay,” she weeps. “I mean, not die. Not yet. Caroline says the doctors say the worst part is over. But what can they mean?”