“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. Kindergarten teaching, he thought. And apartment hunting. With the old Thompson Street apartment gone forever and Manhattan rents hitting the stratosphere, it would probably save time to start off the search in Queens. Or New Jersey.
“You know, Lloyd,” Ma’am said to him, “my niece Camilla complained that you were an overly cautious driver. Try to remember that I prefer this.” She returned to Amy. “You were saying that Mr. Cook’s suspicions are justifiable. Do you seriously mean in regard to me?”
“Very seriously, Miss Durie. I believe you did arrange for Mrs. Upshur to hire someone to investigate Kim Lowry. Whatever he reported back she put into braille for you as a form of code. You also opened a special bank account for the Institute to secretly do business with him. In the end, you met with him at least twice to pay him in cash and probably get an oral account of his investigation. Then I was made your agent in dealing with Kim Lowry so, at whatever cost, you could maintain anonymity.”
“At whatever cost?”
“To my self-respect,” Amy said grimly. “And my husband’s. I know all this deception was to keep the family from interfering with your plans, but in the process you deliberately deceived us too. It seems to me—”
“Lloyd, do you have any idea of how wildly presumptuous you’re being?”
“I don’t feel that’s the word,” Amy said. “When we first met you told me how much you esteemed straight speaking. I’m simply taking that at face value now.”
“Are you indeed? I thought I was hiring a confidential secretary. It appears that what I’ve obtained is a lawyer. A veritable Portia.” The tone, Mike realized, was sardonic, not wrathful. “You’re a clever girl, Lloyd.”
“Thank you. But I am somewhat past being a girl.”
“My unintentional error. You are a clever young woman. Now tell me. Have you mentioned any of this to any of the household? Family or staff? Or Mrs. Upshur possibly?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“But if I were to discharge you on the spot—both of you—for outrageous insolence, you would then—?”
“No, we would not. Believe me, there’s never been any possibility of that.”
There was a long silence. “You know,” Ma’am said at last, “I think I do believe you.”
“Thank you.”
“So neither of us truly knew the other before this enlightenment, did we? I must admit I find it all very refreshing. But I’m still unclear about one thing. How did you think I’d respond when you confronted me with your deductions? Deny them?”
“I don’t know,” Amy admitted. “I suppose I was too emotional to even consider that part of it.”
“Ah,” said Ma’am with satisfaction, “and in that your cleverness failed you. Because, Lloyd, there’s a weak link in all my wicked plotting. Mrs. Upshur. Confronted by you she would have tried to lie—after all, I am her Lady Bountiful—but she would have soon given in. No spine at all. So if you and I hadn’t reached this most pleasant understanding—if I foolishly attempted to put you off by denial—all you’d need do is extract the truth from her. She did engage a private investigator for me. A most unpleasant fellow in some ways, but highly competent. All this—it hardly needs emphasis—for a most worthy end. Worthy ends, Lloyd, sometimes do require unworthy means. My one regret now is that you were wounded in the process. Yet, I couldn’t really know the full measure of your loyalty to me until now, could I?”
“Perhaps not, ma’am. But I’ve never given you cause to doubt it.”
“True. But take into account that I’ve learned distrustfulness out of bitter experience. The men in my family, Lloyd, never seem to share that experience. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do. But, ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking—”
“Now that we’ve cleared the air? No, not at all.”
“Well then, what could Mr. Craig and Mr. Walter have possibly done about it if you were open in your support of Kim Lowry? The respect you’re held in—”
“Respect?” said Ma’am. “The respect that an infant gets from its kindly parents?”
“But I’m sure that isn’t the case, ma’am.”
“Unfortunately,” said Ma’am with finality, “your opinion, Lloyd, has no bearing on the actual case.”
So, Mike thought in the silence that followed, a silence unbroken along the few blocks up Madison Avenue and the turn into the street before the house, that settles that. Because reckless Amy, having cleared the air except for this touch of frost, seemed willing to pull up short right here. She must have sensed that the next step—getting into the family’s touchy feelings about each other—was altogether out of bounds for the hired help.
As he opened the car door to get out he felt the pressure of the cane on his shoulder.
“Wait,” Ma’am said. “Close that door.”
He pulled the door shut, then with the certainty that something interesting was coming he angled the rearview mirror downward to get a view of his passengers. Ma’am’s face was impassive. Amy was frowning questioningly at her. Ma’am, as if uncannily aware of that frown, turned toward Amy and shook her head. “Nothing to be concerned about, Lloyd. What I have to say is from a sense of obligation to you.”
Amy looked uncomfortable. “Really, there’s no—”
“Please don’t interrupt. I also feel you have a host of questions buzzing through your head right now. And since I’m not being invited to answer them, that you will conjure up false answers. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t bother me one whit. However, as things stand between us now, it would. Do you understand?”
“I think I do.”
“I’m sure you do. You’re not only intelligent, Lloyd, but you have the questioning spirit. That’s all to your credit. But it would make me uncomfortable to suspect that any of your time goes to conjecturing about my place in Kim Lowry’s life. Why and how I arrived at it. I’ll settle that now by providing the answers to your unspoken questions. For my benefit as well as yours.”
Which, Mike thought, made him as Mrs. Lloyd’s consort about as invisible as he could get. Not quite. In the mirror he saw the cane approaching. He made no move to withdraw from it, and it prodded his shoulder. “It’s growing cold in here,” Ma’am said testily.
“Yes, ma’am. When the motor’s turned off there’s the—”
“I am not a mechanic. Just do whatever must be done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mike said. He got the motor running and adjusted the heater. Then he drew out the pencil and notebook and sat with pencil poised.
Ma’am huddled into her coat. “Would you have a cigarette to spare?” she asked. “Either of you?”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “We gave them up some time ago.”
Kindly sharing the rap, Mike thought, since he had been the lone martyr.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Ma’am said, “but they were among my two solaces for fifty years. Fifty-one years. I gave them up as a Christmas gift to myself last year. My other solace was words. Words read to me usually by machine. Literature. Endless doses of literature as an anesthetic. Often the finest of professional performers were employed to make phonograph records of those books for me. My first gift to Mrs. Upshur was almost that entire collection of records. Priceless, I suspect. But as an anesthetic, insufficient.
“For many years”—the voice, Mike observed, was taking on a hard-breathing intensity—“I would now and then wake from a deep sleep knowing that my blindness was only a bad dream. I would call out in panic to whoever was attending me to turn on the light and end the nightmare. I’d hear the click of the switch, but there was never any light. More than once, if that hallucination were strong enough, I would believe the attendant was playing a cruel joke on me, that the light had not really been turned on. I would scream my outrage at this until reality set in. In the literature I listened to I’d now and then encounter such terms as ‘a living death’ and ‘buried alive.’ I’d soundlessly cry out to the authors t
hen: ‘You fools, you don’t really know what this means, but I do!’”
“Oh, no,” Amy whispered. “How horrible.”
“Don’t speak,” Ma’am said. “I can stand remote from it now, but you must not speak.”
Weaving a spell, Mike thought. Speak, and the horror might seep through it.
“Self-pity,” Ma’am said contemptuously. “Half a century of it. And except for one strange turn of luck I could have ended my life in its throes. An unexpected episode suddenly revealed to me that while my eyes were dead my spirit was not. No, not at all. I had simply kept it dormant all those years. And this leads to something only you are privileged to know. I’ve never revealed it to anyone else—let them all make what foolish speculations they want—and I never will. But I share it with you now, because I believe we’ve learned a faith in each other that justifies it.
“A year ago it would be, I rediscovered my fully sighted, talented, courageous, youthful self in Kim Lowry. My niece Gwendolyn was reading to me the theatrical news in a Sunday Times. A familiar procedure to her and others in the house. Among that literature read to me, plays often gave me the most pleasure, and through newspaper reports I learned what productions might be worth recording for me. Art—the painting I had once practiced—I shut my mind to. That art, after all, cannot be heard, it must be seen.”
Mike suddenly realized that he still had notebook and pencil idly in hand. So fascinated by watching the narrator in the mirror, he realized, that he was plumb forgetting to record the narrative. Too bad he didn’t have the minirecorder in hand, tuned in to that mesmerizing voice. But who the hell would suspect that the car would become a confessional? Still, one did the best he could. He applied himself to the shorthand as the voice became brisk.
“You’ve seen my niece Gwendolyn, Lloyd. Is she attractive?”
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, Mike counted, and then Amy found words. “Well, she has an interesting face.”
“Unattractive,” said Ma’am, accurately decoding the answer. “Formless. As her thoughts always are. Like Tolstoy she has an excessive love for humanity but finds it impossible to deal comfortably with any human being. But she was always most dutiful when I required someone as a reader. So she read to me that Sunday morning a lengthy essay in the paper about a production of The Bacchae that had opened at one of those little theaters in Greenwich Village. An ill-fated production. Do you recall it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you familiar with the play?”
In the mirror Mike saw his wife’s brow furrow. Euripides, he desperately mouthed at the mirror, those female man-eaters, and then saw Amy shake her head. A body language, he thought, wasted on Ma’am.
“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I know it’s a Greek classic, but that’s all.”
“Hardly enough,” Ma’am said in kindly rebuke. “I must find you a sound translation of it. Among the greatest of the classics. Unfortunately, this production was regarded as atrocious, but it did have one point of interest: a scandalous stage setting. A variety of monuments to Priapus, extremely large and realistic, which in later scenes were replaced by just as large and lifelike representations of the female parts. There was no denying the curious talents of the set designer, wrote the critic, but it was a case of the sets devouring the production as surely as the Bacchantes on stage devoured their male victims. Impossible, he wrote, to attend to the lines being spoken while confronted by those images. A typically censorious male reaction. No matter the vaunted sexual freedom of our times, the male still prefers not to see the female as flesh and blood. Don’t you agree, Lloyd?”
Amy took her time with this one. “Well,” she finally decided, “I’m sure there are exceptions.”
Glad to hear it, sweetheart, Mike thought. But it was Margaret Durie who was to wonder about. No, on second thought she wasn’t. This was not a child of the Victorian era turning against her creed. By date, she was out of the Jazz Age, or whatever of it had filtered into the Durie household. And as evidence of this, still addicted to that Jazz Age bobbed hair and make-up.
“Oh, exceptions,” she said dismissively to Amy. “I grant you the inevitable handful. But beyond that?
“However, what struck me during the reading of that newspaper piece was the overwhelming sympathy I felt for that young artist who was suffering the consequences to her career of being female. At best to be condescended to; at worst to be condemned for the truths she presented the world. The one sustaining force in her life, so she said, was the grandmother who had reared her but unfortunately did not have the means to fend for herself, much less—”
“Her grandmother?” Amy said accusingly. “Then you knew all along—Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. I did know much more about Kim Lowry and Adela Taliaferro than I revealed to you. But take into account that you and I didn’t share this rapport then. I was not disposed to reveal to you more than I absolutely had to. Does that suffice?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Much more relevant was my awakening to life that morning. My rebirth. With bitter regret too, for so much of that life wasted. Hating dependence, I had made myself dependent on others in every way. Disastrous, my refusal to go out into the world and find my own way around it. My refusal of the braille method that would have brought the written word directly to me instead of through intermediaries. Oh, yes, a fine and festering life I had created for myself. But there was still time to salvage a bit of it. I knew I had a goal now. I would provide that artist however I could—certainly financially—with the means of holding her own steady course against all odds. My mission alone. I couldn’t risk for a moment the interference of family. Its discouragement. Its active resistance. At all costs, not that.
“Thus the steps taken one by one to the goal. I interviewed a dozen instructors of braille before I knew I had found in Mrs. Upshur my necessary instrument. Eventually, I had her searching out through her own clumsy devices all possible information of Kim Lowry wherever published. But when in late summer she brought word that a Jason Cook was opening a new gallery with a showing of Kim Lowry’s latest works, I knew that the next steps were beyond Mrs. Upshur’s capacity. I had her arrange then for a professional investigator to follow closely whatever was going on with that gallery and the artist. After that—”
“Please,” Amy said, “I must ask one question.”
“Hardly necessary. I suspect I know the question, my dear, and the answer is yes, I needed someone to help me toward my goal as Mrs. Upshur no longer could. But at least as important, I did need a companion and secretary who’d free me from the stifling presence of those around me. And, of course, a chauffeur was needed to replace one who had become alarmingly incompetent. Indeed, when Mrs. McEye complained about the quality of domestic staff obtainable nowadays I was the one to insist she arrange for the services of a married couple. Ancient wisdom, derived from my father.”
And a way, Mike thought with grudging admiration, of killing two birds with one stone, because the new chauffeur was also scheduled to be an accomplice to the plot. Not another Wilson certainly, the gabby kind who reported Miss Durie’s itineraries to headquarters. Easy to sympathize with the old lady’s frustrations when she learned that the entire well-primed staff serving her was helping record every breath she took.
Amy seemed to share this feeling. “And I do help out Mrs. McEye,” she said encouragingly. “Was that her idea, that I serve as her part-time assistant?”
“Hers and mine. She’s overburdened, and there’s really no one among staff to provide assistance. And—I say this without apology—I was overburdened by Hegnauer’s stolid presence too many hours a day. Even, spiritually alive now, I must have solitude at times. The division of your services seemed a logical compromise. I can assure you that everyone is most satisfied with the results. Any other questions?”
Amy laughed. “No. And you are being very kind.”
“More wise than kind, I suspect. Which br
ings us back to our enfant terrible, our Kim Lowry. A prickly personality, from all reports. Not quite the amicable beneficiary of my offerings I had envisioned at the outset.”
“Possibly,” said Amy, “because she’d resent being dealt with as a beneficiary in that sense. She wants her work sold on its merits. And her grandmother supports this attitude very strongly. In fact, she was the one who made negotiations difficult. If it weren’t that the money was so desperately needed—”
“The grandmother,” Ma’am cut in. “How would you describe her?”
Amy pondered this long enough for Mike to catch up on the shorthand. “In a way,” she said at last, “schizophrenic. I mean, she plainly adores Kim but is hostile to everyone else. Physically, well, the kind word would be unprepossessing. Of course, she has just come out of the hospital after a very bad—”
In the mirror Mike saw that enlightenment had struck her the same instant it struck him.
“Ma’am, when you had me read you the obituary notices—”
Ma’am smiled. “Ever the inquiring spirit, Lloyd. Yes, I knew when Adela Taliaferro was taken to the hospital in serious condition. And yes, that was the name I was concerned you’d read aloud one of those mornings.”
A mistaken concern, Mike thought. If Adela died, her granddaughter might emerge a much more amicable beneficiary of any charity.
“Well,” said Amy, “she seems pretty much recovered now.”
“Good. And she did accept my terms without animus against her granddaughter? The last thing I’d want to do is cause hard feelings between them.”
“I don’t think there’s any chance of that, ma’am. And it’s still understood I’m to meet with Kim next week to make the second payment?”
“Next week. You’ve done very well, Lloyd. Both of you. I am—yes—most truly grateful for that.”
Grateful, Mike thought. It didn’t come out easily, the long-suffering family probably hadn’t heard it in fifty years, but there it was.
A pat on the head for the faithful servitors, Abe would define it.
So what?
Very Old Money Page 28