A shooting star, p.8
A Shooting Star, page 8
Nevertheless, something like a threat had lodged itself in her mind. He would have to see that not all the forgiving was on his side. She had something to forgive, too. She had the total pointlessness of her life to forgive somebody for—him or her mother or herself or all three.
She told herself that she would not call Bernard. That was miserably, desperately over with; they had kissed its corpse good-by in Oaxaca. She would wait for Burke to call, and then they would see whether he could be reasonable and she could keep from going to pieces.
Until seven she lay brooding, rewriting the conversation that would take place when the telephone rang, never finishing it but always starting over with new justifications or new ways of showing him she would not have been treacherous if he had not already blindly failed her. But the only bells she heard were the bells of her squaw boots when she rose to pour a new drink—those and eventually the shudder of the bronze gong that announced dinner.
CHAPTER 6
THE FILM stuttered, flapped whitely, went out. “Little too old,” Oliver said. They sat in the dark until Lizardo touched switches and restored islands of light and groupings of furniture. The children argued and shoved one another, but among the adults the silence was general. No one commented to Oliver, holding the rewind switch and watching his mother, on what an interesting family record he had dug up; no one asked where he had found it. That face, mugging and grinning just before the film snapped, that figure in its ridiculous plus fours, had silenced them all. Even Helen, Sabrina saw, knew who had been shown, though she could have known no more than any of them why Oliver had shown him. He could not possibly have done it unthinking. Looking at the old, blotched, undone face of her mother, shocked speechless and shaking as if she had paralysis agitans, she was sick, sick, sick of all this family business. Since she came home there had been nothing else. First the diaries, now this. She put her hands on the arms of the chair, prepared to rise.
Passing among them with a tray of orange juice and grape-juice-and-ginger-ale, Lizardo paused before her and gave her a blank, discreet look. No call yet. She stood up so abruptly he had to swing the tray aside. “Excuse me, everybody,” she said. “I’ve got some letters to write. Good night, Mother, Oliver, Minna. Good night, everyone.”
As she had done that afternoon, she got out ahead of their questions—assuming that anyone just then had any questions. In the cross hall leading to the library and tearoom she stood a moment, her eyes burning with weariness and a hopeless premonition of tears. Burke would have known she’d be waiting. He had deliberately done his bare duty by calling once, and that was all he was going to do.
Anger flared up and went out in tiredness. She listened for voices in the drawing room, but heard only the children. The hall’s faint smell of cedar oil recalled times when she had stood outside rooms wanting things. Half her life she had stood in halls waiting for someone, or missing someone, or wishing something, or hoping for a voice, or maybe only listening for sounds of life. If she did hear laughter or talk or the clink of cups, as often as not she held back stiffly, repudiating what she was drawn toward, and thinking how solitary and excluded and defiant she was.
Why couldn’t he have called, and helped her through this?
Under her fingers the paneling was satiny and cool. Her feet took her into the library, lighted only by the reading lamp on the desk. Monet’s lilies were back on the wall. Standing by the desk, Sabrina turned the clock and read it: eight-forty. She went around and opened a drawer and pushed it shut again, trying the smoothness of the slide. She opened another and there lay the telephone books, San Mateo County on top, San Francisco underneath.
Her breathing had grown difficult and shallow. When she riffled the pages of the heavy San Francisco book they stuck to her fingers with static. Pinching the flimsy sheets, she turned them; her eye noted that she had opened to the M’s. McCaughey-McDermid, McDermond-McGregor, McLaughlin-Meade, Meade-Mendes—her eye went down the columns, her thumbnail moved along the names and stopped. Marked now by the deep dent of her nail, the name stared up at her from the anonymity of the page, and with a suspension of everything in her except a half-nauseated haste, she began to dial.
Remotely the mechanism spun through its whirrings (and how lonely a thing it is to telephone, how hopeful and pitiful a thing to make incantatory motions with a piece of machinery and trust that somehow magic will humanize it and the miracle of contact be established! In Oaxaca, just before they parted, he had said, “This can’t be forever, somehow we’ll keep in touch,” and she had laid two fingers on his lips, saying, “Touch—that’s just what we can’t keep. How lovely if it were true.”) Now she heard the distant ringing and thought how dead and sad when the miracle didn’t happen, when there was only this senseless repetition of sound like something left running on an empty planet.
And what if she should answer? Sabrina would not have known her if she had walked into the room, yet she thought of her as the Enemy. What a difference there might be if that woman were dead. Suddenly panicky, she thought, This is terribly dangerous! and started the instrument back toward its cradle. It clicked. A woman’s voice, rising in question, said, “Hello?”
Sabrina clapped her palm over the mouthpiece as if her thoughts, racing toward some lie, were audible. Then her eyes slanted toward a shadow of motion in the doorway and saw Oliver there. Quietly she put the receiver down on the woman’s reiterant voice. She looked at her brother with hatred.
Too big for the room, too aggressive for its repose, he came on in, probing with his glance like someone turning over rocks in search of fish-bait bugs. “Talking to someone? I hope you didn’t hang up on account of me.”
“I did. What do you want?”
“T-t-t-t-t,” he said. “Why get sore? I want to talk to you.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Exuding charm.”
“What do you want?”
“Come on, come on, you’re all upset about something. Is this a bad time? Shall we make it another day?”
“Oh, get it over. Have they all gone, in there?”
“Minna and kiddies all gone home, Mother and La Secretary gone up to exercises and so to bed. We have the place to ourselves.”
“How nice for us.” She looked for a cigarette and finally accepted one from his outstretched pack. Across the lighter’s blade of flame she looked into his square athlete’s face. “What on earth was the idea, shocking her like that?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, don’t play with me! Where did you get that old movie, anyway?”
He smiled. “A usually reliable source.”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“No.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t burn it.”
“Did you ever know her to burn anything?”
“Everything connected with him, I thought she did.”
“She never had a chance on this. I just got hold of it recently.”
“All right, but why did you have to spring it on her? You just let him come back to life without warning in front of her.”
“Yes!” Oliver said, “and did you see how she reacted?”
She shook her head angrily. “If it’s reactions you want, why not kick her in the stomach?”
“Well, well.” Oliver’s eyes were narrowed to bright little half-moons, his eyebrows peaked into inverted V’s. “Standing up for Mother. You’ve mellowed.”
“That was dirty,” Sabrina said. “She isn’t what she used to be, she has to get braced for things. What is it you want, anyway?”
Smiling, he looked around among bookcases and cabinets; he seemed to brood upon the brass footrail of the fireplace. “Why don’t we go somewhere and get a drink? Or have you got any more of that whisky you were so perfumed with at dinner?”
She set her foot on the bell button under the desk. For nearly a minute she studied Oliver’s amused face. He liked to act as if he found you ridiculous; his pose was that he read you like a book. Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate him. There was more to him than sports cars and skin-diving and the muscles that she knew reduced some women to jelly. His squinted eyes looked back at her with more knowingness than she liked.
The white coat glimmered in the doorway. “Lizardo,” she said, “would you get that bottle from my room? And some glasses and ice? Please.”
“The reaction is important,” Oliver said. “I didn’t show that movie just to shock her. I wanted to see how far gone she is.”
“Gone?”
“All this idiotic family worship. It gets worse and worse. Grandmother’s church attendance record in Nahant is more real to her than what goes on right here, today. I doubt if she can tell one of my kids from the other. I doubt if she can tell past from present, except that the past is realer. I showed that movie because I wanted to see if he was as real to her as the Wolcotts are. He is.”
“Real?” she said. “Of course. Even with all the hush-hush, he’s always been the realest thing around here. Remember when she caught me looking at his picture in her locket? Don’t tell me she’s any different than she always was. Wasn’t he real to you, in his knickers and his smile? He was to me—twice as real and twice as dreadful as if anybody’d respected him while he was alive.”
She felt unreasonably angry. It wasn’t simply that he had been brought back, but that he had come back in that silly costume of the twenties, going through the pantomime of a Harold Lloyd comedy, turning his frantic and over-eager smile into the camera, making an ass of himself, flickering and jittering there like a parody, a puppet in boy’s clothes.
Oliver said, with his eyebrows high, “How did you know he was dead?”
“I don’t. How would anyone know? I don’t know how I recognized him in the movie, unless from that peek into Mother’s locket. Or maybe he looked like you, a little.” The hazel eyes with sunburned squint wrinkles tightening at their corners knew something; he was feeling ironic and superior. “Why?” she said. “Do you know? Who told you?”
“I went to his funeral.”
“You what?”
“On Kauai, two months ago. I was intending to go over and see him, and then I got word he was dead. It was his wife gave me this movie and some other stuff.”
“His wife?”
“The woman he was living with. I don’t know whether they were married or not. Probably were—technical bigamy. They’d been living together for twenty years.”
She stared at him, oppressed by a disappointment so overwhelming that she could find nothing to say. You wondered all your life, you never quite gave up the childhood dream of finding him and knowing him, and then when you did it was just too late. If she had known two months ago, she might have gone to the islands instead of to Oaxaca. Forcing her voice, she said, “How did you know he was on Kauai? What was he doing there, beachcombing?”
“He had a ranch there,” Oliver said. “I saw him once during the war. He got a pass to Pearl to see them hang a Navy Cross on Big Brudder.”
“You never told me.”
Acknowledging something, he ducked his head sideways with a half shrug. “I sort of thought he might get in touch with you. He didn’t, ever?”
“What do you think?” she said bitterly. “I’m the one that’s never known anything, not even why he left. What was it, this woman, or gambling debts, or something else attractive?”
He smiled. “There may have been women, and there probably were debts. But that isn’t why he left. He left because Grandmother and Mercer, especially Grandmother, bought him off.”
After a considerable pause she said, “How do you know that?”
“He told me; he was sort of apologizing and explaining. Also I’ve got copies of the papers he signed, a sort of quit-claim agreement, and a receipt for two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“My God, Mother must have been really fond of him!”
“I doubt she even knew about it. She probably thinks he skipped.”
“You mean they … ?”
“I mean they.”
It burst out of her, the question with which she had tormented herself in childhood. “But wouldn’t you think he’d have come back sometime, or written? At least to you and me?”
“I guess he thought the whole family was so down on him the only thing he could do was take their money and thumb his nose. One thing I wanted to check on this spring, I wanted to confirm his conscience. If Mother had died before he did he might have been able to foul up the estate but good. But he had a sort of honor; he kept his bond.”
Testing his expression, which for him was singularly open, she wondered if he had some reason, like his reason for springing the movie on their mother, or his reason for visiting the pariah in his exile, for telling her all this now. “What was he like?” she said.
“You saw his picture.”
“Yes, 1927, and all dressed up like Gene Sarazen. I mean what was he like?”
“Like anybody else. Getting a little thin on top, but still sporty. He was eight or ten years younger than Mother, you know. Loud jacket, broken veins in the cheeks, ruddy face, big smile.”
“Did his smile ever look ghastly?”
He stared. Drily he said, “Ghastly isn’t a word I’d’ve picked, no. We only had about an hour together, and he was sort of embarrassed. He wanted me to understand that it was only when he was sure there was no chance of a reconciliation that he took the money; he said he did it for our sakes, to get out of our hair. Hoped I wouldn’t think he’d sold out his children. Sort of pathetic—he’d followed us in the newspapers. Had a society-page picture of you in his wallet. What makes you pick a word like ghastly, for God’s sake?”
She moved the silver letter dagger parallel with the blotter’s edge. A picture of her. It was ridiculous, but she felt like crying. She said, “I don’t know. It’s the way I’ve always seen him, like somebody damned, maybe like an old fairy rouged over his wrinkles.” With a tight little laugh she tossed her hands in the air. “And he didn’t try to blackmail you? He didn’t think a quarter of a million was too cheap for so heroic a son and so beautiful a daughter?”
Lizardo brought in the tray, looking in a state of acute anxiety. But that was only his wrinkles; when he was younger he had had a face as serene as a Khmer Buddha’s. He had put crackers and cheese and fruit on the tray with the whisky; that meant he had been watching her not-eat at dinner. To please him, she put a bit of cheese on a cracker and popped it in her mouth. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you, darling.”
He went out softly. Oliver poured two drinks. “Darling?” he said. “That’s a new one, with the servants.”
“Love isn’t so common you can disregard it,” Sabrina said. “The old man loves me. He always has. He is a darling. It’s his whisky you’re drinking. Now what is it you were so anxious to talk to me about?”
“I thought we were talking about it.”
“Father?”
“No, not Father. He was paid off thirty years ago and he kept his bargain. It’s Mother I’m talking about. She’s losing her buttons.”
“Oh, come on!”
“You haven’t been around. All the do-good outfits, for one thing. World Federalism, Moral Rearmament, Civil Liberties Union, League for Civic Unity, NAACP, God knows what. Stick around a week and see who calls. She used to have some contact with people you’d want to have contact with. Now it’s birds in turbans who eat with their fingers, and old dames preaching Absolute Honesty, and committees suggesting donations for inter-racial friendship. The only times she goes out any more are to play golf, which her doctor makes her do, and once in a while to a crackpot meeting. And watch her play golf. She potters around talking to herself and dubbing the ball up the fairway and putting it back and forth across the green while six foursomes stack up behind, and every time a putt doesn’t drop she stands there murmuring and shaking her head. “Strange!” she’ll say. “Strange!”
Sabrina laughed. “I can hear her. She isn’t used to being balked, even by a golf ball.”
“Sure, but is that normal? Here’s something else. Do you know how much she’s given away in the last few months, just in driblets? You remember we fixed it so she has to fight Collier to give anything big …”
“We fixed it?”
“You approved it. When she was sick.”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I suppose it’s a good idea.”
“You’re damned right it is. But I didn’t allow for the nibbles. I just checked. Eighteen thousand in four months. They write in, or make a call, and bingo. It’s automatic. They keep coming back, as why wouldn’t they? And new ones keep showing up. You wouldn’t know there were so God-damned many organizations, half of them on the Attorney General’s list probably, and not one in ten that’s deductible.”
“Now it comes out,” she said. “Money. What if she does give some away? She can afford it. There’s always been more income from the trust than she could possibly use. It would just go in taxes, or have to be reinvested.”
“Have to be,” Oliver said. “You kill me.”
“It does me good to have her give something away. Today Bobbie MacDonald came to borrow some of the old dresses for a play or something her children are in, and Mother loaned them to her. Not gave. Loaned.”
“Naturally. Those dresses mean more to her than any amount of money. She’d give away her total income and be happy as a clam living in mildewed party gowns and rummaging the cupboards for pairs of Auntie Grace’s eighty-year-old French gloves. The past. What I’ve been telling you.”
Sabrina’s mind had doubled back, and she was speculating on that almost-made contact that he had interrupted. If Oliver hadn’t come in, she might have got by the woman with some lie, she might now be talking to him. With marriage and duty in ruins behind her, and Burke too stiff-necked to bend an inch, she might at least be in touch with love. Instead she had Oliver talking family and finances. Lifting the bottle, she sloshed a new drink into her glass.
