A shooting star, p.34
A Shooting Star, page 34
“Oh, Mother, don’t throw a fit! It isn’t the end of the world.”
“It is … a disaster. Please … think what you are doing.”
“It isn’t all up to me. Two of us are involved.”
The expression of wincing dismay did not pass from her mother’s face, but deepened. “Is it so final, then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I have not mentioned it because I hoped you might … think it over and decide … to make it up. It has been several weeks.”
“Counting Mexico, two months.”
“I didn’t know Mexico was part of it.”
“Mexico was part of it. And a long time before Mexico.”
The still afternoon seeped around them. She watched the clustered gnats in the shade of the nearest oak. They hung in a tight mass, never still but never getting out of the bushel of space that they had for some reason chosen. What point in that unresting buzz? How did they eat or breed? Did they just hang in their centripetal constellation until they fell and died? She heard her mother say hesitantly, “Couldn’t you … go down, or telephone?”
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Someone has to give in.”
“I gave in all I could.”
“Oh! You are … to blame, my dear!”
“That’s what you’ve always believed,” Sabrina said.
“In being … unforgiving and … proud.”
Sabrina moved her shoulders angrily.
After some time her mother said, “I always thought that … if you had had children …”
“Oh, you did!”
Without looking, she knew the expression of offended good intentions on her mother’s face. They sat in huffy silence, and the afternoon like sluggish water closed over them again. She thought, Oh, why doesn’t somebody call, why don’t I get up the energy to go somewhere, why don’t some of her cronies come over, even, why don’t we read diaries! We can’t sit around here forsaken in brocade like something in Amy Lowell.
They had the patterned garden paths; all they needed was the plashing of the waterdrops in the silver fountains. Toying with the idea of a swim, she gave it up because the pool would be full of Oliver’s young. Her mother said in a voice that was placatory, almost apologetic, “I am afraid your rest hasn’t done you … much good.”
For the first time in minutes Sabrina looked fully at her. The long shaking face was surely trying to be kind. She threw up her hands and laughed. “No.”
“If I could …” She broke off; her puckered mouth was rueful; she worked her hands in the air. “You see nothing of your old friends. You need diversion and … somebody to talk to.” Her embarrassment grew, her hands fluttered. “If it would help to … tell me,” she said.
And what a doubtful, peeping look accompanied that uncharacteristic remark! So far as Sabrina could remember—and her mother was undoubtedly thinking the same thing—she had never since very early childhood brought a trouble home to have it cured. She had learned young that it always turned out to be her fault that her knee was skinned or her dress torn, or that the child brought in to play with her was in tears. Anger, selfishness, untidiness, uncooperativeness, nastiness, these in her mother’s eyes had been a Sabrina monopoly. “Why don’t you ever take my side?” she remembered screaming once. How long ago? Twenty-five years at least, and yet the rankle was still there. Why not ever my side?
Oh, you are to blame, Sabrina! You’re unforgiving and proud and spiteful. You will learn to curb that temper, my girl, or it will destroy all of us. Will you ever learn to be clean? Don’t you know that the first rule of a lady’s life is to be fastidious? Why, why, why do you do these things? It’s as if you were determined to balk every wish I ever had for you. And learn to be civil, do you understand me? When you speak to me or any other adult. You’re not too old to have your hands slapped. You’re not too grown up to think things over in the closet. I wonder if there was ever anyone in our family who behaved as you do! I think you were sent as a punishment. And we will have no more words about it. And no impertinence.
Sent to her room to brood and sulk, Sabrina would have had an answer, a fierce one, before she learned the indifferent shrug and the insolence that stretched just over, but not too far over, a certain line. Her answer in those early years was something she hugged to herself: You’re not my mother! I don’t belong here.
There was something almost begging in her mother’s eyes. “Nothing to tell,” Sabrina said. “We’ve said too much to one another. It couldn’t ever be the same.”
“Said too much … about what?”
“About each other.”
“How does Burke feel?”
“I suppose injured. Self-righteous.”
“Self-righteous?” It was remarkable how her mother’s expression of distress could have in it so much of corroborated expectation. And the question that she forced out was less question than statement. “He has … something to forgive you for, then.”
“You haven’t changed, Mother,” Sabrina said. She looked out into the garden air, heavy as pewter.
“If you don’t have anything to be forgiven for you are … most fortunate,” her mother said.
“I’ve got plenty, and I won’t forgive myself any quicker than he’ll forgive me. But even so he might feel just a little guilty about the twelve years of decorative nothing he put me through while he developed the fanciest practice in Pasadena.”
Her mother was shocked. “But … a doctor. He is dedicated to humanity.”
“Some humanity. He’s a society doctor, Mother, why not admit it? He turned out to have a face and a manner that rich women trusted. He was both attentive and socially acceptable—and that’s something he owes me. He’s always willing to come when he’s called, and he’s sympathetic to nervous ailments—in other people—and easy to get sleeping pills and tranquilizers out of. But there’s not much medical missionary in him. His income’s as big as mine, and that’s one thing he’s always wanted. He’s always been as proud as Lucifer, and he’s always hated it that his family had lost everything. He didn’t marry me entirely for my face. I’ve been around for twelve years like a mountain he was determined to climb; he needed to plant a flag on my top, for some reason.”
She said it in anger that grew as she spoke, and she was sure, or nearly sure, that some of it was true.
Her mother said, “And you speak of him as proud!”
“Oh, look, Mother—Ibsen slammed the door on that doll-wife thing seventy-five years ago. I might even have submitted to it, if … Oh, I don’t know. If he had let me, I’d have loved to be a real wife. But I can’t keep my own house—that wouldn’t look well. I can’t help him, either. Once when his receptionist got sick I filled in, and I loved it. I was part of the act. For a week and a half. After that he made me quit. How would it look, except just as a sort of temporary game, for his wife to go around in a white uniform and usher her friends into his office?”
“You wouldn’t need to work in his office. You have … talents of your own.”
“Even if they were legitimate talents I wouldn’t go on perverting them,” Sabrina said. “I wanted some of my husband, was that unreasonable? Any of my friends could get an hour of his time for a set of sniffles, but I couldn’t even keep him through dinner. The wife he wants can shop, and play, and manage the servants, and dress well, and take little trips, and get her picture periodically in the paper. I’ve been abroad five times in eight years, every time alone, except that he flew over and joined me for two weeks once. I kept on suggesting that he turn some of his practice over to others in the clinic. No, people depended on him, they wouldn’t accept substitutes. I begged him, and whenever we got into that stance he began to stiffen up the way he does. So finally I threw a fit, and then he tried to comfort me. You know what he said? He said I was so completely part of him that he unconsciously sacrificed my wishes as he would his own. Everybody else came first, in other words. Mrs. McKeever and her menopause hallucinations that any intern could take care of with a hormone pill was more important than his wife. I told him so—I suggested he quit sacrificing my wishes as he would his own, and he wanted to give me a tranquilizer. I told him to save it for Mrs. McKeever, and that’s when I went to Mexico.”
Surprised at herself, she stopped. Pouring it out to Mother. Now they would see if the gospels of family solidarity worked. If they did, there should be comfort, and reassurance, and healing. But her mother was staring down at her own bonily outlined knees. The light shaking of her head might have been dubious disapproval, or it might have been only her infirmity. Her hands, hanging loose by the sides of the chair, clenched once in a movement as apparently reflex as the flop of a fish on a wharf.
Lizardo came out with a tray on which was a glass of brown liquid. To fill the stretching silence after her outburst, Sabrina said, “What’s that, Mother? Are you on some medicine?”
“Honey and vinegar,” her mother said. “It is very … good for the joints. Should you like some?”
“No thanks.”
“Orange juice?” Lizardo said. “Grape juice?”
“Orange juice, maybe.” She met his eye and very slightly shook her head. If she had nodded, or measured on the air with thumb and finger, he would have dropped a slug of vodka in her drink. For nearly a month she had not nodded or measured. No drinking, no smoking. Ah, Mother, she thought, if you only knew how different July is from June! The image of Bernard was suddenly in her mind as still as a watchful eye, but examining herself for an emotion, she found none. Not in that direction. Remembered, but hardly conceivable.
Her mother sipped with puckered lips. “You should … try this,” she said mildly. “You don’t eat sensibly.”
Sabrina let it go. Off in the green and gold subaqueous afternoon a quail called.
Her mother, shuddering pleasurably, put the glass down. Her eyebrows were raised so high that vertical wrinkles were pulled into the full upper lids, but even so her eyes did not open very widely. She said, “I expect that you do have something to … forgive him for, too.”
“Well,” Sabrina said. “Welcome to my side,” and then smiled a brilliant diversionary smile because she liked neither the tone of her own voice nor her mother’s half-lidded, appraising stare.
“But I don’t therefore suppose … you are blameless,” her mother said. “Much as I wished that, I have … never been able to. You must learn to recognize your weaknesses and … fight against them. You are your father’s child.”
Blink—and the sagging insistent face was a younger version of itself, still able to frighten and dominate, and it was contorted and mottled with fury. “Give me it! Give me it, I say!” She pressed with her thumb, and the little clam shell of gold clicked shut; the face was back in its darkness. Stretching out her hand, she laid the locket, with its thin falling chain, in her mother’s hand. “Haven’t you things of your own, that you must meddle in mine? If you haven’t enough, I shall give you more. But I have asked you and asked you not to snoop in other people’s things.” For once, not the shrug and the silence that always infuriated her mother so; for once, defiance. “I wasn’t snooping! I was looking at my father’s picture. Is that so awful?” They stared hatred at one another. Her mother was recovering from the shock of finding her there; second by second she was coming back into control. From her gathering height she said, “Now that you have looked at him, you may go and spend an hour in the closet and remind yourself that you have seen a sneak and a liar.” “He was not! I don’t believe it!” “I won’t stand debating with you. Go on now, go!” “Go where?” “To the closet.” “What?” “Are you deaf,” her mother said, “or only insubordinate?”
She broke her eyes away from her mother’s, and her mind away from the image that was shut like a locket-picture between valves of time. The memory did not seem like much; it was not quite like having your father cut down by a madman with an ax, or run over in the street before your eyes. Even my childhood traumata, she thought, are trivial. I have nothing worse to remember than my mother’s face full of hatred. And yet ’tis enough, ’twill serve. She took the glass of orange juice that was lowered before her, and when Lizardo was gone she said, “My father’s child? I don’t suppose I can take that as a vote of confidence.’
“I have … told you he was not a good man.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But he was my husband!” her mother said. Her hand, hauling at the chair arm, pulled her upright. “I have always been ashamed.” Her eyes looked wild; Sabrina had the impression that if she had been within reach her mother would have taken her by the shoulders and shaken her. “Not of him!” she said. “Not only of him. Of myself, too.”
Sabrina sat still. The quail hammered again at the pewter air. Her mother’s mouth shook so badly, all at once, that she sank back and pressed her fingers hard against it.
“Why?” Sabrina said.
“He was involved in something that I thought I … couldn’t forgive. I forgot all about his kindness and his beauty and the … happiness he had given me. I wouldn’t … forgive him. I should have accepted him for what he was and what he had … meant to me. I knew I hadn’t either … looks or mind to match his, but I … let myself freeze in my hurt feelings and pride. I should have remembered only … how much he gave me.”
Sabrina sat silent, watching the thin shoulders twitch, and thinking of the flickering screen and the jigging, mugging figure made antic by the camera’s speed—a handsome face, a good leg in plus fours, probably the gift of gab, no character. How on earth a playboy should ever have married a Boston lady. Money, undoubtedly. In his careless good-natured way he would surely have expected the easy forgiveness of his weaknesses and vices that palaver and wheedling had always brought him. And instead he had run head-on into the puritan inflexibility, the grudge-holding God. I can’t get sore, but I can sure hold a grudge, Burke used to say, joking. But it was no joke, it fitted them all, herself included.
She touched with her fingers the grayed, raised grain of the redwood lounge chair’s arm. “I always thought you despised him,” she said.
It seemed a time when she might have gone and put an arm around her mother’s shoulders, and yet she found the act impossible. Gestures like that were possible only when the atmosphere was neutral, watchful, under control. Her mother touched her handkerchief to her nose, and looking away, said, “I did. I do. He behaved … very badly. But I despise myself, too.” Her lips thrust out in a sharp pucker, her tongue clicked against her teeth. “I should never have listened to them, God forgive me.”
“Listened to whom?”
“Mercer was a snob,” her mother said, “but Mother was implacable!”
Seemingly very old, her dry hand clutching the arm of her chair, her scalp visible through the thinning hair, she sat erectly and would not meet Sabrina’s eyes. Very old, and yet a long way from senile, as Oliver pretended to think she was. This was no vaguely smiling mind pottering around among the images of the past, but a woman scalded by emotions as hot and unreconciled as her own.
“Your father’s child,” she said, still looking away, “but mine too, mine too.”
It was a long time before she moved anything but her puckering, trembling lips. Then she glanced across almost furtively, and her enlarged hand fumbled over the closed portfolio in her lap. “I was shocked at luncheon,” she said, “to hear that … Leonard is so near the end of the papers. It made me realize that … everything is now on file … except myself.”
“Yes?” Sabrina said.
“I have just been reading over some letters private to me. It seems that for the sake of the … archive they should be included, and yet they are … so personal and … humiliating.”
“Ah,” Sabrina said. “From father?”
Speaking as if unwillingly, with a curious effect of frail violence, her mother said, “I felt that in the history of the family these events … should be known. I thought that perhaps … now, in your own trouble, you should know them … that they might … help you.…”
She opened the portfolio and took out an unsealed envelope. It rested, lightly rustling, within the trembling of her fingers. “All right, Mother,” Sabrina said. “If you want me to.”
“I am somewhat uncertain.…”
“Whatever you say.” Sabrina did not much believe in the melodramatics. She could guess that the letters contained some evidence of her father’s infidelity, some lesion in his respectability—certainly something that she herself did not much care to know.
Her mother thrust the envelope at her. “Read it! Not here before me. I could not … bear it, I think. But read it and then seal the envelope and we shall … put it among the papers.” She floundered up out of her chair. “Please read it and … imagine my feelings and my … regrets, and then seal it up. We shall mark it … Not to be opened until … What do you think? The year 2000? After my death? Oh my dear, I am so …”
She began to cry silently, while Sabrina stood ruefully watching, unable to touch her or make the conventional motions of sympathy or comfort. “I’ll read them,” she said. “I’ll be glad to know, finally. But please be patient with me, Mother, don’t think you can help. Nobody can. It isn’t my decision now. He’s got to make up his mind, and when he does, then I can. So can I send for my dog?”
“Of course, my dear.”
“I’ll keep him in the garage, if you want.”
“Keep him … where you want him. He’ll be company for you.”
“That’s nice of you, Mother. Is anyone coming for tea?”
“Only Helen and perhaps Minna.”
“Not Leonard?”
“He said he had some … errands to do.”
“I guess I’ll skip it too, if you’ll excuse me.”
They were off on safe inconsequentialities. Her mother’s eyes were only a little reddened; she looked, now, yearning and fond. My God, Sabrina thought, it’s like mother and daughter.
