“Al and I are moving to Laurel Canyon, after the holidays.” She looked at Al, and he stepped in to explain.
“A delicate situation, really,” Al said. “It seems—”
“Delicate?” Rex rested his glass beside his plate.
“Nothing at the college, sir. It seems, well, you remember the Parrishes, from Laguna?”
Mary Frances bit the inside of her lip to keep quiet. It was taking so long for Al to get around to it, she was stuck here, waiting for him to say the wrong thing. She was sorry she’d brought the matter up at the dinner table. She could have just told Edith, let her pass it on. Rex shook his head; he was a midwesterner at heart, and no one from Indiana got divorced.
“You people,” he said, picking up the delicate cage of the hen’s breast. He closed his eyes to take a bite.
“Us, Daddy?” Anne said. She could not abide to be judged wanting.
Then like a door slamming, Sean wailed from his cradle by the fireplace, and Anne sprang up so fast her chair tipped back onto the floor. Al reached down with one long arm and righted it, still nodding his head at Rex, whatever Rex had to say. Anne called for Liesl in the kitchen and Sean’s bottle, the afternoon turning back so easily toward the baby’s needs and satisfactions, their announcement seemed gone as quickly as it had come.
After lunch, Al was ready to go home.
“I need to get back to my study. I have notes.” He jabbed his book in the air like a prophet. “I thought we were just going to stay for the one thing.”
“Mother wants to take me into town. Can we stay just an hour?”
“For what?”
“It’s almost Christmas.” She turned to brush out her hair. It was silly to be so vague, she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. If she said they were going shopping, Al would draw up like a sponge. “You could sit in the garden and read again like this morning. That would be quiet.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Please, Al.” She dropped her hair around her shoulders and turned to face him, but he was already stepping back, determined to keep their distance as it was.
“What difference would it make if I refused?” he said. “Go ahead. Have a nice time.”
She laughed as if he were joking and turned back to the mirror. Rouge, a dab of Vaseline on her eyelids to make them shine. When she opened her eyes again, she was relived to see him gone.
Edith was waiting in the foyer in her sensible shoes.
“Shall I bring the car around?” Mary Frances said.
“We can walk. It will do us good after that meal.”
“We’re not going into the city?”
“Your father’s money is spent right here in Whittier these days. He supports this town in thick and thin. And I need the constitutional.”
Anne arrived on the stairs. “You sound like Grandmother.”
“And you sound disrespectful.”
Anne’s expression could blacken like a cloud. “Mother.”
“Here we are then,” Mary Frances said, holding one arm for Edith and the other for Anne.
Edith was having one of her days of resolution; they would walk because she wanted to, and perhaps it would improve her mood. Rex walked to town every morning. He said it was better than church for clean living, and god knew he never went to church.
Whittier was a Quaker settlement, and Christmas was no more or less holy than any other day. But when Mary Frances was a child and they lived downtown on Painter Street, Christmas morning she and Anne would run to the sleeping porch and crawl into bed with Rex, Edith already gone to sing with the Episcopalian choir. At dawn, a trumpet played “Joy to the World” from the steeple of the meetinghouse, chilly, trembling notes in each direction. Mary Frances thought of the pale, church-bound holidays in Dijon, she and Al shivering in their apartment, waiting for the peal of bells. It had not been much different: the promise of a child’s holiday to come.
Somehow today didn’t seem as much like Christmas as it might have when they were children. Part of it was Norah and Dave off at school, but too, as they passed into town itself, the shops were quiet, some of them with the windows papered over with the Whittier News.
Edith stopped to read the dates, full of tut and bustle, one hand twisting at the other. “Your poor father.”
“He didn’t close the hat shop.”
“But he sees it, Dote. And I know it kills him.”
And here her mother headed into the version of Rex-as-pillar-of-the-community. People of Whittier looked to him for solutions and responsibility, had always looked to him, but especially now that times were hard and jobs were few. Anne rolled her eyes and turned away, but Mary Frances liked this version. Rex was a great man; Rex was her father.
“I saw an old woman, a woman my age,” Edith said. “Down in the orange groves by the Ranch with a pack of hungry children. I don’t think they were even her children. I told her to pick all the oranges she wanted.”
Edith was intent, and clearly Mary Frances’s audience was not enough; Mary Frances could see it, and she didn’t know why Anne could not or would not. It would be Anne’s first Christmas on her own with the baby, and everyone was worried she was turning mawkish.
Mary Frances caught her sister by the elbow. “What will Santa Claus bring Sean?” she said. “I want to make him something. I could knit him a sweater. Herbert Fisher brought me some really lovely lamb’s wool last winter, and I never did anything with it.”
Anne squeezed Mary Frances’s hand where it fell across her arm. “Sweet of you,” she said. “You are so talented. I never have time for that sort of thing anymore. Or patience. By the time I get home from the office—”
Mary Frances let out her breath, and let her sister talk.
* * *
Edith bought Mary Frances a dress of deep russet silk, the skirt fluted and biased close, with a bracelet-length bishop sleeve and a keyhole tied at the neckline. The color set off her skin, her eyes. The dress cost as much as a week’s rent for the house in Eagle Rock, and Mary Frances could not remember the last time she’d worn something so pretty.
Anne laid the flat of her palm against Mary Frances’s hip, nudging her around to model. She was not trying on dresses herself.
“It’s just right, Dote,” she said, and she kept spinning her until Mary Frances stumbled and laughed.
“You buy one, Anne.”
“I need so many things before a new dress. Besides, who would I wear it for?”
“Oh, come on, now.”
“You’ll see someday. You and Al will have a child, and then what you want will be different. Or god forbid, you won’t know what you want anymore. . . .” Anne wandered to the curtain at the edge of the dressing room and stared off theatrically.
Mary Frances didn’t know if she could bear to hear her go on like this. A baby didn’t make you smarter, or a humanitarian. Without really thinking about it first, Mary Frances blew right into the middle of Anne’s speech to say she wondered if she and Al would ever have a child anyway.
The talk stopped. Anne’s fingers played the base of her throat. “You mean?” she said.
“I thought maybe I was pregnant last spring, but frankly I was relieved to be wrong. Anyhow, I’m not sure it’s for us.”
Anne was quiet. The quiet rang through the dress shop, out to the settee where Edith waited with her tea, and beyond. They had talked often about Anne and Ted, but Mary Frances had never offered anything about her own marriage in return, and in one deep breath she’d drawn back the curtain entirely.
Anne touched the top of Mary Frances’s head and left the dressing room. Edith would know in a matter of seconds, and later Rex, and then Nora, eventually even David. Every Kennedy knew everything about each other. She reached around herself to unbutton the dress, its skirt slicking to the floor, and she wanted to go with it. Th
ere would be no one she could ever tell about what she’d done with Tim.
She looked at herself in the mirror. There were carolers on the street, and she could hear them singing about good kings and laden boughs, probably for money, or worse, for food, and here she was about to take a silk dress from a shop because her mother still bought her clothes. She turned to see the shabby edge of lace along her hem, her second pair of stockings, not her good ones, held at the garter with a pin. She fingered her slip at her shoulder where she’d stitched it, just the touch drawing that particular evening to her mind again, and she whispered no no no over and over to herself. This was not her life: this dress, the move to Laurel Canyon. These were not the things she could afford.
* * *
It happened when he was tired. Al had been reading Keats’s letters, then scanning the page, no longer registering words as they were written but rather as they occurred to him, and suddenly he slipped into some kind of liminal space between reading and writing that felt weightless. We take but three steps from feathers to iron. Connections clear and essential, slipped together in his thoughts with a sudden loop of language, until the thump came loud from overhead, and he was himself once again, in a chair, in the Kennedys’ parlor, Alfred Young Fisher, Al.
He looked around: the English antiques, the portraits, the sheer size of the place—you could not see the end of the property from the windows. Rex wanted a dovecote, he built one. He wanted a new car, he bought one. Al wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the gas they needed to get home, but it had been important to Mary Frances to come here today, and he hated to tell her no. He looked at his watch. She’d only been gone an hour.
These long afternoons at the Ranch were always tedious—Rex ensconced in his office like a resident dignitary, and Mary Frances shopping with her mother, or canning fruit, or carting David and Norah somewhere, or performing some other task that could not be done without her presence, or at least her say in the matter. Edith wasn’t feeble, but she required Mary Frances. Since the divorce from Ted, so did Anne.
Through the ceiling, he could hear the trip-stop of the baby running from the cook, laughing. Not that Ted was such a good guy, or that people didn’t do it all the time, in one way or another, but you could not lose a child the way you could lose a wife, and Ted was an idiot if he thought so. Look at Mary Frances; look at Al here now. The Kennedy family was as much a part of his life as if he’d married them all, and there was no real way to divorce yourself from that.
He thumbed the pages of his book but couldn’t concentrate with the patter overhead, and found himself taking the wide oak staircase two steps at a time to tell Liesl to keep the boy quiet. The day did not have to be a total wash.
The door of the nursery was cracked, and Al stopped with his hand on the knob.
It wasn’t Liesl on the floor with the boy, but Rex in his shirtsleeves, rolling a blue spotted ball and watching the boy chase it back. He was completely taken, laughing nearly as much as Sean. Al could not recall having ever seen him in the nursery, let alone without a coat and tie, kneeling. He tried to back away, but the floor groaned and Rex looked up.
“Sir,” Al said.
“Are we disturbing you, Al?”
“Not at all. I was just curious.”
Sean clapped his hands, his face intent upon his grandfather. And Al thought an invitation might follow, that Rex might call him into the nursery, onto the floor, to play with this baby as if this baby were his concern as well, but Rex just laughed and rolled the ball again.
Al backed into the hallway, pulling the door closed. He would have declined anyhow.
The clock chimed. Next to the clock, an étagère. On one of the shelves, a framed photograph of Mary Frances when she was in high school. Her dark hair was pulled back over her ears, her dress falling loosely from her shoulders, and all that cleverness in her face Al had first been attracted to when he met her in the library. Only in this photo, it was the promise of such a woman, rather than the shifting fact of who she had become.
Al could not guess what she was up to at the library these days, leafing through old books, taking careful notes. In Dijon, she’d started a potboiler mystery novel, a sketchy travelogue, and countless articles for Ladies’ Home Journal, all abandoned at some difficult point along the way. She wanted to write something important, he could see that, but it was a little like watching a kitten with a mouse, fast enough to catch it, but without the instincts to do what needed to be done next. Maybe she would get lucky and find something she wanted to say. But maybe she would lose interest and go back to knitting socks. Now, especially, without Tim to encourage her.
He slipped the photo from the frame and slipped the frame into the bottom drawer of the étagère. There were so many portraits of the children in Edith’s house, he doubted anyone would miss it. Downstairs, he tucked the photo into the back of his book, turned to the front page, and started reading what he’d been trying to read all afternoon, the thwack and patter sounding from overhead, each line repeating, repeating once again.
He was nearly beside himself when the women finally returned, but Mary Frances pretended not to notice. He stood from the chair he’d taken by the fireplace, his books already gathered under his arm. She asked if he was ready to go, and he rolled his eyes.
Anne brushed past them, tugging off the fingers of her gloves. “Sean?” she called. And then, “Good travels, Dote. I’ll see you both next week.”
Al reached out for Mary Frances’s shopping bag.
“I have to see my father,” she said. “I have to say good-bye.”
“Fine, Mary Frances. Whatever you need to do.”
“Thank you.”
Rex was back in his study with his typewriter and a cup of coffee, the closed-up room rich with man and dust and book leather. Edith was forever trying to shove the cleaning woman through there, but Rex protected his schedule. His hours at home were few. He sat with his feet propped up on the desk, his glasses slipped down his nose and his arms thrown back as though he might solve whatever problem you presented, but that was just how he relaxed.
“Do you ever think,” he said, “if we’d not had those Sundays in Laguna? The ocean, Dote, such a magnificent balm. Without it, we’d have shot each other.”
Mary Frances went to him and pressed her lips against his head, his great big brilliant head. Sudden tears leaped to her eyes. She did not want to leave him, ever.
“I went to the house a few weeks ago,” she said.
“Oh? You didn’t say.”
“It was a secret mission.”
“Mary Frances Kennedy.” He put his feet back to the floor and looked at her. He seemed about to say something else but took her hand instead, pressing a fold of bills into her palm.
“For your missions,” he said. “Or whatever else arises.”
“Daddy. You embarrass me.”
“Then you, my dear, need a thicker skin. That there is mostly enough for a night on the town. A girl needs a night on the town, a new frock. These things don’t stop because you get too old to take money from your dad.”
“Al’s waiting,” she said.
“He’s been waiting since he got here, by the looks of it.”
Mary Frances tried to laugh.
“It’s all right, Dote.” Her father patted her hand where it rested on his shoulder. He could always read her deeper currents.
“I don’t think it is.” She shook her head. “It’s not.”
“We were all young once, dear. If it were so difficult to survive, we wouldn’t be here now.”
And she knew Rex meant to sound glib and cheery, but she found herself wondering what he’d given up or turned away, what inexorable choices he’d made beyond Edith and his children. Rex was barely fifty; how far was this life from the one he once imagined?
In the driveway, Al shook Rex’s hand, kissed Edith,
opened Mary Frances’s door. In the flurry of remembrances for the holiday—Mary Frances would bring the Baltimore relish she had put up at the end of the summer, and Edith needed plenty of help with the goose—she said good-bye and fell silent.
She tried to remember if Al had always been this impatient with her, or if he only seemed so now because she knew he had the right to be. Her anger in return also seemed convenient. She thought of Anne in the dressing room of the shop, the willowy unhappiness she flounced like so much veil. Anne had done the thing that was supposed to make it better, she had left her husband, and yet she had not been able to quit the display of wanting to leave that had sustained her for so long. Her freedom seemed to leave her with nothing to push against. Her freedom, it seemed, had made things worse.
Mary Frances knew she would do anything not to end up like Anne. Even now she felt herself dividing, some false bottom giving way, making room for some other kind of life: there would be the truth of what she’d done, and she would keep that to herself, for herself. Then there would be the things she would do to keep it, and that could make a marriage. Couldn’t it?
She slipped across the seat. Her hand fit neatly in the pocket of Al’s trousers.
“Oh,” he said. “Would you look at this?”
She could feel his thigh clutch as she pressed her palm against him. She tried to say something with that pressure, but he kept his own hands on the steering wheel, and she couldn’t think of what to do next.
When he stopped the car in front of their house, the sun was low in the sky and terribly gold beneath the brow of clouds: Al looked handsome, and she told him so. She took his arm to walk inside. She led him to the sofa and sat on the edge of the tufted seat before him, her legs crossed primly, looking up. She imagined all his schoolgirls, their smooth young faces upturned, who must find him so handsome every morning at the lectern, their notebooks open and ready, pens in hand.
“Read me your poem, Mr. Fisher,” she said.
He laughed, but not as if she were funny. “Mary Frances.”
“Please.”
She stretched back and let her arms go long overhead, closed her eyes, and now the delicious sound of all that fabric upon itself, the catch and glide of her stockings to her skirt, her blouse pulling free at her waist. What was it the schoolgirls wore these days? She pushed one knee loose from the other and imagined Al standing between, the balance tilting her way, and god, she had hope. She imagined they were people who would do this, who would ravish each other come an early evening at home. Maybe if they were fast enough, they could sneak past all of it, wind up on the other side of these days, sweaty, spent, and somehow knit back together. It seemed possible. It seemed as if it were going to happen, and Mary Frances whispered, just once, his name, Al.
The Arrangement Page 6