by Mary Gordon
“Ready, partner,” Veronica said.
“We'll get your Aunt Maddie and be on our way.”
Aunt Maddie did not look well. She'd had a flu for weeks that Delia said “she couldn't shake.” She was under the weather, and Veronica understood that; today was the kind of weather she most disliked, a winter morning. The sky was gun colored and the air tasted of rust. Old ice stuck to the sidewalk and the edges of the road. Delia said you had to be careful on this kind of road: you never knew when a slippery patch would come up. Maybe that was why she drove so slowly, or maybe it was because Aunt Maddie's stomach was upset.
Aunt Maddie looked heavy in her tweed coat. When she got out of the car, she took the white scarf from around her neck and wrapped it around her head, as if they were walking a long distance. But it wasn't a long distance, only a few steps up the concrete slab that led to the Bordereaus’ house.
Nettie was waiting for them at the door. She'd opened it before they were halfway up the staircase.
When they were in the living room, Nettie said, “What's the little one doing here?”
“She's keeping me company,” Delia said.
“Well that's a funny business,” said Nettie, but she was afraid to look at Delia when she said it.
“There's no funny business about anything,” Delia said, and Veronica thought this would make it impossible for Nettie to say anything back. But she was wrong.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
The living room had nothing in it but what could be used. There were no pictures, no plants, no statues, no doilies or antimacassars. The floors were wooden; there were three hooked rugs, blue and olive green. There was a wooden table without a cloth and around it four wooden chairs without cushions so that Veronica thought it would be uncomfortable to sit on them even for the length of a meal. There was a TV and in front of it an olive green leather chair with a matching hassock, and another chair, covered in tweed, that looked exactly like Aunt Maddie's coat.
Mrs. Bordereau sat at the dining room table, on one of the hard chairs. But she was sitting on two pillows, so she was high up, like a bird on a perch or a queen on a throne. On the table in front of her were scissors, a clear, shallow bowl of water, cotton balls, a jar half full of a greenish ointment, a saucer with a white powder, paper bags, rubber bands, a corked brown bottle.
She looked as she always did, like a doll or a very neat, very dressed-up child, and the things spread out in front of her looked like some kind of child's game. She indicated, pointing, that Nettie should take the coats. She stood up. Veronica thought it was possible that she'd become taller than Mrs. Bordereau since the last time she saw her.
Mrs. Bordereau walked into the bedroom without saying anything. Aunt Maddie followed. Then Nettie went in, carrying a rubber sheet. It was mole colored and when the door opened and then closed a sharp smell came into the room.
“I'm getting the hell out of here,” Nettie said, putting on her coat, patting the fur collar as if it were a small animal she loved, but not too much.
Delia reached into her pocketbook and took out a pack of cards. A rubber band that was too thick, too inelastic for the cards so that they bent a bit under its pressure, went around the pack. Delia took the rubber band off the cards and hung it around her wrist. When she dealt the cards, the rubber band, which was light blue, swung in what seemed to Veronica an inconvenient way.
She and Delia played hand after hand of casino. There was no noise from the other room. The clock ticked loudly; it was only a face with no border, and it was so high on the wall that it was hard to read. Delia and Veronica said only, “You won,” or “I'll take that one.” Two hours passed.
Then the bedroom door opened and they could hear the sound of weeping. Mrs. Bordereau went to the phone which was on a table near the front door. She dialed a number. She said something in French. Then she went into the bedroom and closed the door. They no longer heard the sound of weeping.
Nettie burst into the room rushing, bringing the cold of the outside with her. She didn't say anything to Delia or Veronica. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. Then she was dragging Aunt Maddie, who was crying.
Delia rose up and said, “What have you done to her?”
Nettie's look was full of hate. “Oh, innocent,” she said. “No time to talk about it now. We'll take her to the hospital. We'll go in my car. You sit in the back with her.”
In seconds they were all out the door, and Veronica could hear first the car starting and then the sound of it going down the street.
In a straight line, a line made by a series of red dots, some larger and some smaller, was a trail of blood that led from the bedroom to the front door. Mrs. Bordereau was on her knees, wiping the dots up with a wet cloth. She went into the bedroom and came out with a brown paper parcel tied with string which she brought into the kitchen. Then she went into the room again and came out carrying the rubber sheet. She walked into the bathroom with it and closed the door. Veronica could hear the sound of water filling up the bathtub. She heard the rubber sheet go plop into the water. Mrs. Bordereau came out, wiping her hands on the apron.
Then she sat down at the dining room table across from Veronica. They were both sitting the same way, with their hands folded in front of them, waiting for the next thing to happen. The clock ticked and the sounds bounced back and forth between the surfaces of the wooden floor and the hard wooden chairs.
Veronica felt herself beginning to cry. She didn't know whether she was crying because she was afraid or because she didn't know what to do. And she didn't know what she was afraid of, if she was afraid. Was it the trail of blood, the way Aunt Maddie looked? Or was it being alone with Mrs. Bordereau? She understood, finally, that not knowing what to do made her the most afraid. She wished more than anything that Delia hadn't taken her cards with her.
A rod of light slipped through the crack in the Venetian blinds and glanced off Mrs. Bordereau's glasses. This made Veronica cry afresh.
“Why do you cry for?”
When Mrs. Bordereau spoke, Veronica realized she had never heard her voice before. She had an accent. Veronica guessed it must be French, but it did not sound like movies about Paris.
Veronica shook her head.
“You mustn't cry,” said Mrs. Bordereau. “If people see you crying dey will tink you are remorseful.”
Remorseful. The word, beautiful, heavy, cushioned, and enveloping and therefore different in its texture from everything in the room, consoled Veronica for a minute. The word stopped her tears. But it was only the sound of it that did that. The sound was purplish, or no, dark blue; it moved slowly like a royal robe. But the meaning was sharp; it pressed the surface of her skin and settled its blade in the organs of her stomach. She wanted to go to the bathroom. But she was afraid to move.
Remorseful.
Mrs. Bordereau was looking straight ahead of her, not at Veronica who sat a little to the left of where her gaze stopped. Mrs. Bordereau knew things about her. She understood that there were things wrong with Veronica and, looking at her, with her white hair in a net, and her glasses, Veronica knew she wasn't a person who spoke if she believed there was a chance she might be wrong.
Remorseful. It was a kind of being sorry. Veronica was very sorry. She wanted to tell Mrs. Bordereau everything she was sorry about. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she wanted to say. I wish I was not the person who I am. I'm sorry I see things and I make up stories to myself. I'm sorry I make my father angry and my mother tired, that I stole her place with my grandmother and that my grandmother loves me too much because she thinks I'm something that I'm not. I'm sorry I saw Philippe and Aunt Maddie and the dots of blood. I am remorseful and I will change my ways. I will not see too much and I will not make up stories. I will not take a place that is not mine; I will not see the things I am not meant to see, and if I see them I will tell myself that I have not.
The clock ticked and the rays of light grew shorter on the wooden floor. Veronica believed that ev
erybody had forgotten where she was, that they would not remember until the thing that was happening to Aunt Maddie was over. She did not know how long she had to sit across from Mrs. Bordereau, but she knew she couldn't move because Mrs. Bordereau knew everything and she must prove to her that she had understood, she was remorseful, but she would not let people know that she was, because that was the sort of thing you kept a secret, that other people shouldn't know.
Mrs. Bordereau's eyes had closed. She was asleep but her hands were still folded in front of her. Veronica believed that both of them could stay there forever. It was quite possible that nobody would come for her. She could not for the life of her imagine what the right thing was to do.
When the bell rang downstairs, the force of it frightened her. It was sharp, it was a sound of iron. Mrs. Bordereau opened her eyes. She got up and walked to the door. Veronica stayed still. She knew it would be Delia. Her grandmother would tell her something, she did not know what, but she knew it would change her life. But that was wrong. The change had happened. It was already much too late.
Eleanor's Music
“Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week and he was ready to call out the constabulary.”
“Entendu,” Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase “call out the constabulary.” It was the kind of charming phrase that was all too rare in this overwhelmingly crude world; soon that kind of charm, that kind of light playfulness, would be lost entirely.
How she loved her mother! Still perfectly beautiful at eighty-six. The only concession she'd made to her age was a pair of hearing aids. “My ears,” she called them. Everything her mother touched she touched carefully, and left a little smoother, a little finer for her touch. Everything about her mother reminded Eleanor of walking through a glade, from the chestnut rinse that tinted what would be silver hair, to the shadings of her clothes. Each garment some variety of leaf tone: the light green of spring with an underhint of yellow, the dark of full summer, occasionally a detail of bright autumn: an orange scarf, a red enamel brooch. Wool in winter, cotton in summer: never an artificial fiber next to her skin. What her mother didn't understand, she often said, was a kind of laziness that in the name of convenience in the end made more work and deprived one of the small but real joys. The smell of a warm iron against damp cloth, the comfort of something that was once alive against your body. She was a great believer in not removing yourself from the kind of labor she considered natural. She wouldn't own a Cuisinart or have a credit card; she liked, she said, chopping vegetables, and when she paid for something she wanted to feel, on the tips of her fingers, on the palms of her hands, the cost.
Some people might consider these things crotchets or affectations, but Eleanor considered them an entirely admirable assertion of her mother's individuality. As she considered her father's refusal to step outside their Park Avenue apartment without a jacket and tie, regardless of the heat of the day or the informality of occasion. And, she supposed, it might be said that his continuing to smoke a pipe when there was clear evidence that it was hazardous to his health could be interpreted as a stubborn self-indulgence. But she always liked hearing him say to a born-again nonsmoker, “At my age I have the right to not listen to a bunch of damn fools who want to tell me I can live forever.”
No, they were marvelous, her parents. She adored them, as she adored the apartment on Park Avenue where the three of them had lived since Eleanor was three. Except for the years she'd been married to Billy. Then she had lived downtown.
She had been shattered when Billy had told her he was leaving but it had just seemed natural to let him keep the apartment and for her to move back in with her parents, “until you're back on your beam,” as her father said. It was eighteen years later, and she'd never moved out.
She knew that many people thought it odd, to say nothing of unhealthy, for her to be living with her parents at the age of fifty-one. “Health,” said her father, “is the new orthodoxy. The new criterion by which we are judged of the fold or outside it. In the old days, they just tested people by trying to drown them, and if they survived they were drowned because it was proof they were of the devil's party. But that's too good for the health nags.”
So she didn't listen any longer to the whispers she might once have overheard: that there was something wrong with her going on living with her parents. She had long ago given up that last residue of her embarrassment, which at one time, like a pile of dried leaves, could be set adrift by the slightest wind, and would flutter inside her, cause her to place her hand, splayed-out and flat, against her chest. Something had damped the pile, she liked to think of it as a gentle, constant, nourishing rain. The pile of leaves never flared up now. No, she never thought of it at all.
She enjoyed her life. She liked her job, teaching music at the Watson School, directing the chorus and the a cappella singers. She knew that the girls found her a little old-fashioned, a little stiff, but she believed that they were secretly pleased to have in her a sign of unchangeable standards; she allowed them to tease her, occasionally, but would not give in to their demands to include one rock-and-roll song at the Christmas concert, and she refused to disband the bell ringers, although it was, each year, increasingly difficult to find candidates. She deliberately stopped the repertory of the chorus at Victor Herbert, although one year she had allowed a Johnny Mercer song— “Dream, when you're feeling blue, dream and they might come true.” She'd been surprised that, to the girls, that song was from the same out-of-memory basket as Purcell or Liszt— it had happened before they were born and was therefore apart from them. But that was her job: to instill in them, gracefully she hoped, a sense of the value of tradition, of the beauty of the past. If that meant she wasn't one of the most popular teachers, well, she had long ago learned to live with that. She had her votaries, one or two a year: never the most popular girls and, increasingly, not the most talented.
But she had something that the other teachers didn't have: she had a professional life. She was a member of the chorus of the Knickerbocker Opera Company, a small company that had three performances a year: Amahl and the Night Visitors at Christmas, a Gilbert and Sullivan in late February, and in early May one of the operas in the common repertory— Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor. She wasn't paid much, but she was paid. She felt this distinguished her, and she thought of the words “distinguished” and “distinction.” Being in the company allowed her to attach both words to herself. She was not an amateur, like many of her friends whose relationship to the arts was a species of volunteerism.
Her friends were dear to her, essential, old friends, some from when she was a student at Watson herself, some from Bryn Mawr, newer friends, one young colleague who was struggling with the fledgling string quartet, others from her book group. She was proud that her friends ranged in age from her parents’ compatriots to a twenty-five-year-old ex-student, now an investment banker who sang in a Renaissance quintet and traced her devotion to music straight to Eleanor.
And there was Billy. People thought it was peculiar that she should be such close friends with her ex-husband, as they thought it was peculiar that she lived with her parents. But she was proud of that as well: she considered the shape of her life not peculiar, but original; she lived as she liked; real courage, she believed, was doing what you believed in, however it appeared.
Of course, if it had been up to her, she and Billy would never have split. And some people might find that peculiar too, that she would have been willing to go on with a marriage that had no physical side to it— or no, that wasn't right, because many of the pleasures she and Billy enjoyed were physical, winter skiing in Colorado, swimming in Maine in summer, ballroom dancing in their class on the West Side. She thought it was such a narrow understanding, to think that in a relationship between man and woman, “physical” and “sexual” were precise synonyms. She firml
y believed that they were not.
And she didn't believe that her relationship with Billy, even now, was devoid of a sexual component. She knew he appreciated her as a woman, and that his appreciation was that of a man. He had come to her, weeping, confessing that his problems in bed with her had nothing to do with her, or with him for that matter: it was just the way he was; he had fallen in love with Paul, and realized for the first time the way he had always been, the way he had always been made, what he had been afraid of, had repressed, but could no longer. Because love had come his way.
“Love,” she had said, as if she'd just picked up, between two fingers, an iridescent, slightly putrefying thing. “And what do you call what we have for each other, devotion, loyalty, shared interests, shared values, joy in each other's company, what do you call that if not love?”
She didn't say, “Don't you know that I would die for you,” because although she meant it, she didn't want to mean it, and certainly, she would never say it. It sounded too operatic. Opera was the center of both their lives, she as a singer, he as an accompanist, but she had no interest in living at the intense, excessive temperatures opera suggested.
He had knelt before her (a gesture that was far too operatic for her tastes) and took her hands. “Of course I love you, Eleanor. I will always love you. You are my dearest friend, and always will be. But this is of another order.”
“Get up, Billy,” she said. “You must do what you think you must. I'll stay with Ma and Pa until you come to a decision.”
She was sure he'd come around, come to his senses, show up with flowers, take her to an expensive dinner, where they would eat luxuriously, drink an extravagant wine, and not mention what she thought of as “his little lapse.” But no, it didn't happen; he moved in with Paul, or rather Paul moved in with him, and she moved in with her parents. It seemed sensible; she had the option of moving in with her parents and he had no other way of staying in New York. He taught music at St. Anselm's, the boys’ school that was the brother school to Watson. And Paul was a conductor. He led the Knickerbockers; Eleanor had never begrudged his talent. That paid very little, though, and he survived by doing legal proofreading. He'd never, as far as Eleanor could see, been able to support himself in any reasonable way. So it was better that Billy kept the apartment; anything else would have been vindictive. And above all, she didn't want a vindictive parting.