“Wow,” said Roger politely.
“Wow is right,” said their father severely. “Wow is right. The best-looking house in the whole damn club.” His face was stern but he jingled his keys, radiating satisfaction.
It was an architect’s rendering, drawn in straight and perfect lines. It was an ideal, a paradigm of a house, orderly, calm, supported by logic. Roger stared at it intently. He tried to imagine the drawing as an actual house, built, made real, with the sound of real waves beyond it, real palm fronds crashing around it, in real sea wind. Roger tried, but the transformation from theoretical to real was beyond him. He felt he was encountering his own limitations, and the vast reaches of his father’s strength. He knew the plan would be made real, and it seemed as though the house would be created out of his father’s sheer willpower.
This made Roger feel both proud and baffled, as though his father knew some empowering secret and Roger himself were stretching toward this knowledge, trying to live into what his father possessed so easily—his stern certitude, his absolute grasp of the laws governing the real world. Roger pulled his shoulders back farther, drawing himself up. At his feet, Troy thumped his heavy tail hopefully; Roger, usually his ally, frowned down at him severely.
Now Roger looked around Mrs. Harrison’s living room. It was large and light, but it looked as though it had not been touched in decades—since the nineteen-fifties. The turquoise plaster walls were covered with long, complicated cracks. Black kidney-shaped coffee tables stood on looping wrought-iron legs, and the big curved sofas were made of contoured foam-rubber cushions. At each end were square pillows with abstract shell designs on them. Whatever was not faded turquoise was faded yellow. On a table stood a huge conch shell, glossy, gum-pink inside, with a hard white undulating edge, like congealed icing. A faint, sharp odor of mildew hung in the air.
“Look at that,” said Mrs. Harrison, pointing with satisfaction out beyond the terrace. Below them was the long, sloping hillside of tropical thicket. Roger gazed dutifully at the ocean spread out in the distance, flat and gray-blue, glittering restlessly.
“That’s where the sun sets, right there.” Mrs. Harrison pointed, authoritative. “You can see it in the evening.”
“Very nice,” Roger said.
“Now let me show you the rest of the house,” said Mrs. Harrison. “It’s quite a remarkable place. Martin will be back in a minute, and you can take him down to the cah.”
“Mrs. Harrison—” Roger began, but she interrupted at once.
“Let me just see where Martin is. I hate for him to keep you waiting like this. I’ve told him a hundred times not to go off without telling someone where you’re going. You can’t get them to listen to a word you say.”
“Mrs. Harrison, I’m afraid I have to get back for lunch,” Roger said. He was beginning to think of his retreat.
“I know that, I know that,” Mrs. Harrison said. “That’s why I’m so cross at Martin. Let me just go and find him.” She vanished outside.
Roger did not follow her. He was reluctant to leave her stranded here, with no car and no telephone, but Roger had seen enough of Mrs. Harrison’s house, and of Mrs. Harrison as well. He did not look up again at the rafters. There was a second part to his memory of the house plans; it came back to him unasked, unwelcome.
The next morning, Roger had been called back into the library alone. When he came in, silent on the thick carpet, his father closed the door behind him without speaking and walked to the fireplace. The sky outside was overcast, the light inside was dull. The room was now cold. Thanksgiving dinner was over, the house silent. Roger’s father stood again by the fireplace, which was now black and empty. The easel still displayed the calm and perfect house plans, but this now seemed pallid and irrelevant. Roger’s father did not look at it. He looked at Roger. His face was dark, his eyebrows drawn fiercely together at the top of his high curved nose. He jingled his keys.
“Know why you’re here?” he asked Roger. It was an accusation.
Roger thought he did.
The trouble at school had started with minor offenses—skipping study hall, lights on after lights-out. There had been a forgotten appointment with his adviser. He had missed chapel and been caught. He and some friends had gone off campus without permission one Saturday night and were found walking along the road by a master driving by. There had been warnings about Roger’s attitude. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Middlesex had played its annual football game with its great rival, St. George’s. The game was at St. George’s, and Middlesex won, for the first time in years. It was a great and important victory, and the way to celebrate it had come to Roger in a moment of happy inspiration.
Roger still remembered the silence of the empty stone chapel, the smell of damp walls, the ecclesiastical perfume of hymnbooks and pews, the lightning thrill of illicitness. He remembered running easily up the stairs to the belfry, finding the long coil of heavy rope unguarded. The moment of setting himself onto the rope, fixing his grip on the rough, twisting surface, throwing his whole weight into the effort. He hung in the air, clamped onto the rope, his feet pulled up under him, his whole body willing the great change to begin. For a long moment there was nothing. Then, triumphantly, he felt the rope begin to give ponderous way beneath him, to begin its slow descent. Above him he heard the great sonorous clamor begin, the clanging jubilation sent out into the clear air. It had been his doing. It had been wonderful. He had nearly been expelled.
“You know why you’re here or not?” his father asked again. He walked back and forth in front of the fireplace, his hands in his pockets, his strides menacing. Against the somber sky, the heavy dark green curtains looked black.
“I guess so,” said Roger. He stood up straight, his shoulders pulled back.
His father stopped. “Why do you think you’re here?” His tone was belligerent.
“Ringing the bell, I guess,” said Roger bravely.
His father snorted. “You guess?”
“Ringing the bell at St. George’s,” Roger said.
His father glared at him. “You’re goddamned right. You’re here because of the goddamned bell.” He stopped and stared at Roger for a second, then turned again away. “I don’t know who you think you are,” he said.
Roger said nothing.
“I drove up to your school on Tuesday to talk to the headmaster.”
Roger had known nothing of this. The thought of his father at his school, talking to the headmaster, unbeknownst to him, gave him a chill feeling. He could see his father in his gray suit, frowning, walking rapidly across the gravel of the parking lot toward the brick administration building. It had happened three days ago. Roger felt a darkening of the room.
“Drinkwater said he’d never had a boy like you. He said no one had ever done a thing like that before at the school.” His father turned and faced Roger. His thick eyebrows were pulled angrily together. “I told him I thought he should expel you.”
There was a silence in the room.
“I said, ‘Kick the boy out. Teach him a lesson.’” His father looked at him. His mouth was a wide, bleak line, set by a rigid jaw.
Roger said nothing. He did not know what it would be possible to say. He felt cold, as though the November wind were sweeping right through him, as though the house itself were no protection. The room seemed colder than anywhere he had ever been.
Roger’s father fixed him for a moment, narrowing his eyes, and then began again, walking back and forth before the blackened fireplace.
“He wouldn’t do it,” his father said, his voice contemptuous. “Drinkwater said he wanted to give you another chance.” Roger’s father shook his head.
Now, in the tropical air, Roger could feel again the cold of that morning, hear his father’s voice as he said the word “expel.” He saw the easel, the drawing of the tropical house still there. He had felt ashamed that the house plans had been witness to this.
Roger moved out onto Mrs. Harrison’s terrace. By now hi
s mother would be back from golf, and changing for lunch. Charlotte was tall and thin, with long limbs and dry, mottled skin that wrinkled diagonally along her arms. A spray of fine lines radiated from around her mouth, and her pale blue eyes had milky rims. Her short, dust-colored hair was in neat waves, held back by two combs at her temples. She wore no makeup.
Charlotte had told Roger her plans at breakfast. “I’m having lunch with the Simpsons,” she announced. She squeezed a slice of lime over the narrow prow of a pale green melon wedge. “I doubt they’d interest you. They’re a hundred years old and he’s had a stroke. I’ve known them all my life. Betty’s a saint. I don’t think you’d have much fun with them. Better have a sandwich at the club. Come if you want.” She did not look at him; she was concentrating on spooning a perfect half-moon out of the melon. “You’ll do better at the club. Betty’s cook is famous. Worst on the whole island.”
Roger had not minded his exclusion from lunch at the Simpsons’. In fact, he was relieved at the prospect of solitude: he and Charlotte had spent three whole days almost entirely in each other’s company. Roger had never before spent three days alone with his mother, and before coming down he had wondered if the trip would be uncomfortable, if it might produce some kind of awkward intimacy. What he dreaded, vaguely, was some disclosure from his mother, some unwanted revelation of grief, loneliness, regret—something ghastly, unavoidable. Of course this had not happened. Charlotte had been as she always was: cool, pleasant, composed. Roger was proud of her for this, proud of her emotional reticence and her sense of propriety. And he was proud of himself, too: he gave himself modest credit for maintaining an atmosphere—decorous, civilized—in which an emotional storm would not occur.
Cynthia Harrison now came out behind him. “Rose thinks he’ll be back soon,” she said. “Let me get you a pick-me-up.”
This surprised him: “pick-me-up” was his father’s phrase. Roger did not answer. Mrs. Harrison bustled smoothly back inside to the ice bucket, and Roger followed her. She scooped ice into two fat plastic glasses. “I will say, Rose makes the best rum punch in the whole club. Everyone says so.”
But Roger had not gotten a sandwich at the club, and he did not want his empty stomach invaded by rum punch. He answered in a no-thank-you tone.
“I’m afraid—” he began. But his voice was not quite firm enough, and Mrs. Harrison could hear through it that he had no plans. She waved her hand and interrupted.
“He’ll be back in a moment, Rose says. Because he has to fix the cah.” Mrs. Harrison handed him a glass, took the other for herself, and guided him to a chair. She sat on a sofa, where she leaned back theatrically against the cushions. Her long white legs were crossed at the thigh. The veins in them were bold and blue. Roger wondered how old she was: seventy? A bit more.
“Go on,” she said, “try it. Everyone says she makes the best.”
Roger took a sip: sweet and strong. He would drink half of it and leave, he decided. Then, if Martin was still not back, Roger would drive up to the club and ask the manager to take care of Mrs. Harrison and her car.
“Now, tell me,” said Mrs. Harrison. “Tell me about your fohthah. I’m so sorry to hear that he died. What happened?”
“There’s not much to tell,” said Roger. “He had a heart attack last summer, in Greenwich. He was playing golf. The eighth hole,” he added politely, in case she knew the course.
“Oh, your poor mothah,” said Mrs. Harrison expansively, shaking her head. “I know just what she’s going through. I remember when Eric died. I was devastated.” Her tone had become relaxed and intimate. “It changes everything, death. I mean apart from the grief, from your feelings. Everything is different. You don’t know what time you should get up in the morning. Should you have lunch? Should you go on having the paper delivered? You don’t know what to do, you haven’t the first idea.” She gestured widely. “And then people stop asking you out. They do at first, out of pity, but pretty soon instead of being a widow you turn into a single woman, and then they stop. No one wants a single woman at the dinner table. Your best friend will only ask you to lunch. She thinks you’re after her husband. As though I’d look at John Addington: a drunken sheep!” Cynthia Harrison laughed and shook her head. “But we can’t be picky, of course. None of us can. We aren’t such bargains anymore ourselves.” She suddenly smiled disarmingly, tilting her head self-deprecatingly. Her white hands with their gnarled knuckles fanned out on either side of her face, as though displaying some disappointing merchandise.
Roger looked down at his drink, uncomfortable. He did not want Mrs. Harrison’s sympathy. She was wrong, too, about his mother: Charlotte had been entirely self-possessed when his father died. She had been sad, of course, but calm and rational, not lonely and dithering. Roger could not imagine his mother wondering scattily whether or not to have lunch, any more than he could imagine her wearing blood-colored nail polish and a turban, flagging down cars on the road, asking strangers for favors.
“How long has your—how long have you been alone?” Roger asked. He looked at his watch. He would stay for five more minutes and then leave, Martin or no Martin.
“I was divorced in nineteen fifty-six,” said Mrs. Harrison promptly. “I remarried in nineteen fifty-seven, and then my second husband, Eric, died in nineteen seventy-nine. But I had already known your fohthah long before all that. He was such an attractive man.”
“Did you know him well?” Roger asked, sure she had not.
“At one time I knew him well,” said Mrs. Harrison thoughtfully. “I used to see him in Saratoga. I never saw your mothah there.”
“She didn’t go,” said Roger authoritatively, as though he knew. In fact, the trips to Saratoga had been in the summer, when he and Steven were at camp. He didn’t know whether his mother had gone or not. Still, he refused to let Mrs. Harrison be an authority on his parents.
Mrs. Harrison took another long swallow of Rose’s famous rum punch. So did Roger: it had actually begun to seem like a good idea. The rum was sweet and comforting, and it felt somehow energizing.
“No. I never saw your mothah there. Your fohthah said she didn’t like it.” Mrs. Harrison looked at Roger and paused. “Saratoga, I mean.” There was another pause. Mrs. Harrison seemed to be about to say something more, or waiting for Roger to ask her something, something more about his father.
Whatever it was she wanted, Roger refused her. “I don’t know what my mother likes,” he said abruptly. “Bridge. Golf. She has the garden club. I don’t know what she does. What do you do all day?” he asked, surprising himself by the question. It was the rum, he decided. But he wondered if his mother did get invited to dinner by her friends. He had never thought of this before.
“Oh, I have so much I can hardly get it all in,” said Mrs. Harrison, raising her hand to stem the tide. “You’ve seen what’s going on down here. It’s just as bad at home. Things seem to fall apart as soon as you notice them. Oh, you know what I mean. As soon as you’ve got the pool filter fixed, the maid quits. I’ve quite a lot to do. And I’ve got my boards. I’m very active on my boards. Have been for years.”
“I suppose my mother is on some boards,” Roger said, frowning. He wondered if she was.
“Of course your mothah’s on boards,” said Mrs. Harrison, waving her glass generously. “What else would she do?” She paused and looked at Roger. “What do you do? Are you married?”
“I’m a lawyer,” Roger said shortly.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Harrison inattentively, and stood up. She brought the pitcher of punch back over to the coffee table. She replenished both glasses and sat back down.
“Are you married?” she asked again. Her tone was gentle, and she cocked her head kindly.
“Not anymore,” Roger said, stiff.
Mrs. Harrison shook her head sympathetically. “Oh, it’s so painful, getting divorced. I went through agonies, myself, even though it was my own idea.”
Roger took another swallow of Rose’s punch and did
not answer. He would not discuss his divorce with this woman, his failure.
“Well, it’s one thing my parents didn’t do,” he said, reminding her instead of his family’s success. “They always stayed together.”
“You mean they always stayed married,” said Mrs. Harrison lightly.
“They stayed together,” said Roger stubbornly.
“They stayed married. They didn’t always stay together. I knew your fohthah very well,” said Mrs. Harrison.
“And just how was it that you knew him so well?” Roger asked, nettled.
“Saratoga,” said Mrs. Harrison.
“I suppose he stayed with you there?” Roger asked, belligerent. He was now trying to goad her into indiscretion, falsehood, something he could challenge, deny.
“Oh, of course he stayed with us,” said Mrs. Harrison, surprising him with the pronoun. “Lots of times. We had a lovely big house at Saratoga, and he always came to us. Sometimes we’d all motor up together from New York. He loved Saratoga. We had a wonderful pair of linden trees by the terrace. Your fohthah was crazy about those trees. He used to stand underneath them and look up into the branches and close his eyes. He said he liked the sound the wind made in them. He said the sound was different from the wind in other trees.”
Roger made a small noise through his nose. He had never seen his father look up into a tree.
Mrs. Harrison shook her head. “Oh, we always loved having him up to stay. And of course he was wonderful company. He was so funny.”
“Funny?” Roger said, offended. “Roger Conrad?” His father had not been remotely funny.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Harrison, smiling reminiscently. She took another swallow of rum punch. She looked past him out the doorway. Without any warning she called out suddenly, “Martin!,” in a loud high voice. She listened, frozen, her head raised, frowning. She had put on more lipstick, Roger noticed, and the dark mouth glistened horribly in her faded face. There was no answer from outside. Mrs. Harrison looked back at Roger.
“They laugh at me, you know,” she said in a conversational tone. “The help. It’s all changed here. When we first came down, years ago, they loved us here, because we gave them work. And we loved them, because they gave us this beautiful place. We used to be friends. Now, they hate us because we have money. They hate the scholarship funds we set up for their children, they hate the library we built them, they hate everything we do. Now they laugh at us behind our backs, and now we lock every room when we leave it.” Mrs. Harrison shook her head. “I miss it all,” she said. “I miss being friends with them. My old cook, Rachel, I miss her. Oh, how she used to make me laugh. We used to tell each other the most dreadful things, about our families, and laugh together. Now Rachel’s dead, and I have Rose, her niece. You saw her. Rose barely speaks to me. She won’t look at me unless she has to, and she won’t smile at me at all. Not a glimmer.” Mrs. Harrison shook her head again. “I miss my friends.” She paused, and looked at him candidly. “Of course it’s our fault, too, you know. It’s not just them.”
Asking for Love Page 8