Iris nodded her head yes and continued to study the floor.
“So, here’s the money and I apologize for my daughter.” He extended the envelope to Maggie and said, “You can count it, if you want. I guarantee it’s all there.”
Maggie shook her head no. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she said.
“What do you say, Iris?”
“I wrote the email,” Iris said, and flushed crimson.
Maggie thought, He’s making her lie.
And David thought, Is there no end to this humiliation?
“Well, I’m glad that’s over and we’re all square again. I hate borrowing from friends.”
“Time for walkies,” Maggie said and Dickens responded eagerly. Maggie laid the envelope on a side table and, almost casually, ushered everybody out of the house and down the front path. Reginald and Iris said goodbye and, tired as they were, Maggie and David set out for a second morning walk. At the end of the street, seeing the Parkers were safely out of sight, they turned back and slipped into their front door as if they were thieves.
For the next three days the white envelope lay on the side table in the foyer. Neither of them touched it. Neither of them wanted to count the money. When Maggie did finally open the envelope, she was not altogether surprised to find it contained two hundred rather than the four hundred dollars Reginald had borrowed. She knew she should mention this to David but she did not have the courage.
Besides, it was worth two hundred dollars just to have all this over with.
8.
Willow was now director of the New Repertory Theatre in Baltimore and so when Claire abandoned the commune and took up again with Willow, she offered herself as the house lighting expert. Willow accepted. The theater itself had been sitting idle for many years and, even refurbished, it still suffered from an ancient electrical system, with a lightboard and a network of overhead grids that required gels and filters and an agile young person on a long ladder to make the lighting work properly. Nonetheless Claire took to this old-fashioned theater works as if she had at last found her true vocation. She seemed to have an innate sense of how a red filter or a bank of soft yellows would add to an actor’s appeal from the fourth row and sustain that appeal to the fourteenth. She had studied lighting in her senior year at Columbia, but seeing that it had no natural or useful function in any social movement, she had abandoned the artifice of theater for the hard realities of the commune. It was only a matter of months—and after the birth of Gaius—before she discovered the abundance of artifice in the emotional life of the commune. Authenticity was what she wanted and she found that in theater. She would work her social magic by bringing the harsh realities of life to the unwilling attention of theatergoers while she herself huddled in the delicate embrace of Willow.
Like Claire, Willow was the daughter of privilege. Her family had at first been appalled when she announced she was a lesbian but then, after her brief fling with suicide, they not only accepted her as she was but supplied her with endless credit to set up and manage and finally to direct her own New Repertory Theatre. They became her most generous theater patrons as well as the most enthusiastic supporters of whatever lover drifted into and then out of her life. Willow, they were surprised to discover, was not easy for other people to love. She was beautiful in her way, aristocratically long-faced and hardscrabble thin, with a pale, pale complexion. Like Claire, she wore no makeup. Also like Claire, she was manipulative by nature. She was demanding and devious. She needed solitude as much as she needed love. Few lovers met her needs and thus far only Claire had demonstrated any staying power. Willow’s parents liked Claire for her self-proclaimed honesty and for her ability to keep Willow interested and alive. They supported Willow and Willow supported Claire.
When Claire arrived back in Baltimore the theater was in the final weeks of rehearsal of Albee’s The American Dream. The aging actress playing Grandma—seized by a sudden excess of exhilaration—flung herself into the arms of the Van Man who had come to whisk her away to the Home, and when he failed to catch her, she fell to the stage floor and broke her arm. She was determined to go on, but the injury to her arm seemed strangely to have affected her memory and she dropped out of rehearsal and out of the performance. Claire went on for her. She was a quick study and the part—with its mixture of eccentricity and sentimental honesty—fitted her perfectly. She got up the lines in two days flat but there was a bad moment when they discovered she was unable to move naturally onstage. This problem was solved by Willow, who offered her refuge in a La-Z-Boy lounger, where her arms and hands could substitute for the business of acting. Claire sank gratefully into the chair and deliriously into the role and by the first performance she felt like Maggie Smith. Indeed, she played the part in the manner of an aged Maggie Smith, as was noted by two of the three reviewers of the play. “Artifice at its peak,” the first reviewer said. “Old age has never seemed so witty and attractive.” The second reviewer praised “her ability to take affectation beyond acting and into the exquisite air of truth.” She got laughs for every other line and at the curtain call she was awarded what passed for a standing ovation.
As a matter of fact, Albee’s Grandma was a role in which it was nearly impossible to fail, and informed by Claire’s mimicry of long-gone Grandma Sedgwick, her performance had a convincing cutting edge. She was, for the moment, a star.
The reviews went straight to Claire’s head and she determined that since she was now an actress, she must take steps to learn something about acting. She hired a voice coach and enrolled in an acting class with a once-famous Broadway actress and twice a week she took the train from Baltimore to New York to learn the elements of her craft. She was astonished to find she was an artist and concluded that all the turmoil of her earlier life proceeded from this: she had been living with an artist’s temperament but without the platform for truth and violence provided by art. Henceforth, she resolved, her fierce integrity would be dedicated to the theater.
Willow was delighted at Claire’s triumph as Grandma but not so delighted at what this meant to their relationship. Claire remained the truth teller she had been even before the commune, but now her pronouncements often came in a trained voice that made the truth sound rehearsed. And at odd moments there was a kind of grandeur to Claire that may not have been new but certainly was annoying. “Will you hand me that book,” as she lay sprawled bulkily on the couch, came to sound eerily like Cleopatra’s “I have immortal longings,” or so it seemed to the theater director’s mind of Willow as she delivered the requested book. And had Claire become less emotionally dependent, Willow wondered, or did she just seem that way?
Whatever the case, when Claire told Willow she would need a good deal more money to meet the cost of becoming an actress, Willow—in her solitary mood—responded that the economy was in a recession, that the cost of running the theater was crippling, that box office receipts could not be depended upon, that Claire was being overcharged by her speech coach, not to mention the cost of that Broadway has-been, and as a matter of fact . . .
“Fuck all that,” Claire said, “I’ll ask Poop. I’ll ask Misery.”
Thus in early November Maggie and David received an anniversary card accompanied by the reviews of Claire’s performance as Grandma and a request for seven thousand dollars to pursue the study and practice of her art.
“Just take it out of my share of the inheritance,” Claire wrote.
* * *
—
“LOOK AT THIS,” MAGGIE SAID. “She’s an actress all of a sudden.”
Maggie read the reviews aloud to David and, despite their initial skepticism, they were both impressed. They looked at each other, hopeful.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she found something that made her happy,” Maggie said. “Maybe she can be an actress. Do you think she can be an actress?”
“She’s smart enough,” David said, “and it’s not as if she
plans on becoming Meryl Streep. She just wants to study—what does she say?—‘study and practice her art.’” He turned that over in his mind. “Hmm. ‘Her art.’ Do I hear Ds of G?”
“Delusions of Grandeur are fine so long as she’s happy.”
“It would be wonderful for her.”
“And for us.”
“And we owe it to her.”
Maggie looked again at the reviews. She reread the letter.
“‘Just take it out of my share of the inheritance.’ I like that. She thinks we’re her bankers.”
“It’s only Will who never asks for money.”
* * *
—
WILL SENT HIS OWN usual anniversary card and enclosed a picture of himself and his wife and their three beautiful daughters. Maggie opened the card as they were having mid-morning coffee.
“Now look at this,” Maggie said. “This is what I call a family. They’re beautiful and intelligent—you can just tell—and they’re happy. Will has always been the perfect son.”
“The Perfect Son,” David said, “in capital letters.”
Then Maggie read aloud the accompanying letter.
Dear Mother and Father:
We’re having an early winter here in Essex, both outside and inside. That is, an uncommon coldness has descended on us early and, I fear, fatally, in the country, the city, and, alas, in our lovely home, the home you both so generously helped me and Daphne to acquire. Do not fear, all is well with Daphne and the girls; it is I who am discomfortable. To be brief, I have decided to move on with my life, not from my teaching position here at Essex nor from Essex ipse but from my marriage to Daphne and from the lovely home aforementioned. Though I risk becoming that sad academic cliché—the middle-aged professor with the graduate student wife—I have chosen as my new partner in life Cloris Sears, a participant in my Yeats seminar. Cloris is young, true, but extraordinarily mature for her age (twenty-six) and does not seem to mind my being almost twice her age or my momentary encumbrance with wife and family. (Divorce takes time in England.) I know that you, as the devoted parents you have always been, will continue to wish me well and will maintain a familial relationship with Daph and the girls and I hope you will understand that at this time what I need, in addition to your customary empathy, is the loan (against my inheritance, please) of fifty thousand dollars for a down payment on a cottage for me and Cloris. These are difficult times financially for everyone and thus I particularly appreciate having parents who have always been ready to help their grateful children.
You will be interested to know I have made great progress on my study of Yeats’s prosody. I investigate and reject the early twentieth-century movement in science that invented machines for measuring rhythm in the human body and used their dubious discoveries to make further claims about culture and race, specifically about the Irish. In my study I will disprove the asserted relationship between science and poetry and locate my new study of Yeats’s prosody in an analysis of ancient Celtic runes. This has been attempted before now but I am working with newly discovered texts and anticipate a great deal of scholarly attention to this new work. I know you will be pleased to hear this.
About the money: you can simply forward it to my bank; you have the routing number from last time.
“And he wishes us much joy on our wedding anniversary,” Maggie said. “That’s it. That’s the letter. From the Perfect Son.”
David sat there, dumb, looking into his coffee.
“Damn it all to hell,” Maggie said and tears rose to her eyes.
David got up and put his arms around her. He held her close until the tears stopped and then he said, “It’s all right, sweet, everything will be all right. We’ll still be able to see the grandkids and you know he’ll look after Daphne. He’ll get a divorce and he’ll buy a little cottage for this new one, Clorox”—Maggie smiled or at least tried to—“and we’ll bail him out when it’s time for the next divorce. We’ve got plenty of money . . . as he cleverly notes . . . and we’ll continue the running tab we have on all three of our wonderfully independent offspring. And cheer up. Just think of Claire. Poverty-loving, truth-telling Claire. She wants only seven thousand. We’re the Rothschilds of the little people. Which—the little people—makes me think of Reginald Parker with his modest requests. How could we have begrudged him a few hundred dollars? How terrible we were. How irresponsible.”
Maggie had so far recovered by now that she had an answer for him. “It wasn’t the money itself with Reginald, it was the awkwardness of being asked for a loan from somebody who’s essentially a stranger. When we give money to the kids, we know it’s a gift, like it or not, and we don’t expect to see it returned in our lifetime. With Reginald it’s different. He’s not our child, for one thing, and for another it’s all too personal.”
“Too intimate. Too intrusive. He’s always been like that. Since we first met him he’s forced his way into our lives. He’s not honest.”
Maggie thought of the two hundred dollars in the white envelope when there should have been four. She still hadn’t told David. “Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Everything about him is dishonest. I pity that little girl.”
“Which? The one he married or poor little Iris?”
“Both, though Iris was the one I had in mind. I wish there was something we could do for her without getting involved with the father.”
“I’ll think of something.” She was thinking ahead.
“I’ll divorce you, I swear to God.”
“God?”
But he was in no mood to fool around with theology.
* * *
—
IT WAS, OF COURSE, in this same week that Sedge made his own request for a loan. This was a true loan since he had every intention of paying them back. He needed a quick hundred thousand for a down payment on a little house in the Hollywood Hills. The new location wasn’t convenient to his research lab in downtown Los Angeles but it provided an escape from the smog and the chemical poisons of the city and the overabundance of available women. This new house had nothing to do with his most recent divorce—his fourth—except inasmuch as it was a guarantee that he would never risk marriage again. He was not meant for marriage. He was a born loner and would remain so forever. Now about that loan . . .
Maggie and David groaned, then laughed. This was the perfect anniversary remembrance.
“I’ll call Michael Kelly,” David said, referring to their accountant. “He’ll pull the money chain.”
“It’s like Job,” Maggie said. “Except we still have each other.”
9.
It was a cold November day at the start of the rainy season and Maggie was dozing over her book. She was curled up uncomfortably in her little reclining chair, but at least she was officially reading and not taking a nap. David took naps. Since his last stroke—a mild one, a reminder of what could really happen one day—he had made a habit of putting on his pajamas and getting into bed for a good hour every afternoon. It did nothing for his disposition, since he often woke up groggy and impatient, but they both liked to believe it did something for his general health. Maggie preferred her unofficial nap in her reading chair.
The doorbell rang and she said, “Yes, yes,” before she realized what was happening, and then she pushed herself out of her chair. The house was cozy. It was a shame to have to answer the door. Dickens raised his head from where he lay at her feet, considering whether he should follow her. It seemed necessary and so he did it, slowly.
Iris Parker stood on the doorstep, shy and brave.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Holliss, but I wonder if you would let me take Dickens for a walk. My playdate has been canceled because Emma has a bad cold, and I can’t go home until five, so I thought I could walk Dickens for you and use up the time.”
The words came out all in a rush, as if
she were reciting lines for a play.
“Come in, Iris, it’s cold and damp out there.”
Iris came inside and rubbed her hands together. “It’s so nice and warm in here,” she said. She patted Dickens, who had recognized Iris’s voice.
“You’re cold, Iris. Come into the kitchen with me and I’ll make you some hot chocolate. My children always wanted hot chocolate on a winter day like this.”
Iris followed her dutifully and sat at the kitchen table. Maggie went about pouring milk in a pan and mixing in the chocolate syrup.
“Of course it isn’t really winter yet, is it. And besides, winter in California just means a lot of rain and a little cold. It’s nothing like New England. I grew up in Connecticut and they have real winters there, with snow up to your waist sometimes.” She looked over at Iris and saw that she seemed more at ease now. Dickens joined them in the kitchen and curled up at Iris’s feet.
“Are you all right, Iris? You seemed upset when you rang the bell.” Iris gave her a shy smile. “But I was half-asleep, reading my book, and so I may be, you know, mistaken. But it doesn’t matter, does it. Tell me about your playdate. Emily has a bad cold?”
“Emma. Her mother wouldn’t let her go to school and our playdate was canceled and I’m not expected home until five.”
“What happens at five?”
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