Patsy waited for the slow-coming beep, and when it came she was ready.
“You cocksucker, this is to let you know that Melanie miscarried and could have bled to death in the Oxnard jail Saturday night,” she said. “She was in jail because she got caught stealing food. It seems you didn’t care to help her. She’s at my place in Malibu, recuperating. I suggest that Professor and Mrs. Horton think this over.”
She left her phone number and hung up.
Back on the deck, Melanie was still wiping her eyes—she had put a cereal bowl on top of her pile of used Kleenex so none would blow off and litter the beach.
“Was my daddy nice, when you knew him a long time ago?” Melanie asked, when Patsy returned. She had been worrying about her father lately, mainly wondering if he was going to give her a hard time about the shoplifting. He was never loud or violent or anything—he just had a way of putting people down that was pretty unpleasant. He hadn’t done it with her so much, but he was real hard on Tommy and Teddy.
“He was okay,” Patsy said. “For a while he had a crush on me, which made it a bit awkward.”
Melanie could easily imagine her father having a crush on Patsy—it was easy to imagine any guy getting a crush on Patsy. Even Bruce seemed to be showing the beginnings of one, though up to the night she had got arrested he had always been sort of scared of Patsy.
Still, the issue that gnawed at her was her father—she could remember that he had adored her when she was a kid. He had liked reading to her, or taking her to the park and stuff. But then she became a teenager and got a little chubby, and it stopped. From then on it was pretty clear that what he felt was a kind of distaste, almost as if he thought she was polluted, or something. It was true she was having periods, and after a while she was screwing boys, but after all, that was normal—why did it make her father start disliking her to the point on not even wanting to invite her and Bruce for lunch?
“It’s a wonder you even care about me, Aunt Patsy,” Melanie said, feeling very lonely for a moment; she wished the little baby inside her hadn’t died. If it could have been born she might not have felt the lonely feeling anymore.
“Why’s that, honey?” Patsy asked, looking at the sad girl.
“You were in opposition to my granny and in opposition to my dad,” Melanie said. “It’s a wonder they even let you see me.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t in opposition to your mother,” Patsy reminded her. “She made sure there was no nonsense about my not seeing you.”
“Oh,” Melanie said, reaching in a moment for another Kleenex. Thinking about her mother, with the sea so gray, the sky so cloudy, and the little baby lost, was just too much.
17
“Aurora spends an awful lot of time dressing,” the General remarked, trying to choose his words carefully. He and Rosie were playing a little game of dominoes and Rosie, as usual, was busy with her computations.
The General was aware, sadly, that words were more and more often getting away from him, despite his care. There were days when he was fine, when he was his old self—or rather, not his old self but his real self. He called Rosie Rosie and Aurora Aurora and could be as precise in his speech as the next man, and a good deal more precise than the women of the household. Aurora of course denied that anyone could be more precise than herself, but he and Rosie both knew that she was hardly ever precise about dates or times or much of anything else.
In particular she had become wildly erratic about her time of arrival—that is, the time at which she would come home. Always before, in good times and bad, Aurora would arrive home before dark; but now, suddenly, there was no telling when she would arrive home. Some nights he tried and tried to stay awake, hoping Aurora would show up and talk with him a bit—maybe even hold hands with him. But usually he couldn’t make it. Usually he would go to sleep, and sleep badly. He had gotten used, over twenty years, to a little pillow talk before he slept—somehow he just didn’t sleep as well without it.
Often when he got up to hobble to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he would be disturbed to discover that Aurora still wasn’t in bed. Sometimes he would creep across the second-floor patio and look out at the garage. The little room where Aurora was working on her ridiculous memory project was over the garage. It was there that she kept all her old diaries, and her husband Rudyard’s desk calendars, plus her mother’s date books and her grandmother’s date books—for all he or anyone else knew, she had diaries and date books going all the way back to the Mayflower—though what good she thought her grandmother’s date books would do he didn’t know: after all, it was her life she was trying to remember every day of, not her grandmother’s.
But Aurora was finicky about what she called her “memory room.” She wouldn’t let anyone else in it, not even Rosie. When it needed cleaning, she cleaned it herself, a rare thing. She claimed she wouldn’t let Rosie clean because Rosie cleaned too well: in her eagerness to tidy up she might accidentally throw away some invitation or concert program or something that would have allowed Aurora to fill in a vital day from 1936 or 1941 or sometime.
The General had to admit that Rosie was likely to throw away things that others might have liked to keep. Several times she had thrown away obituaries he had clipped out of newspapers—obituaries he had meant to save. He had formed the habit of clipping obituaries of old comrades-in-arms—it seemed to him that more of them had died since the war than had died in the war. Sometimes the thought struck him that if they kept on dying so regularly he might end up being the oldest living veteran of World War II—that is, if he could avoid dying himself—no sure thing, particularly now that Aurora had become erratic and was leaving him alone too much at night.
Sometimes, peering across the dark yard at the little room over the garage, he thought he saw shadows moving across the windows. Once he thought he heard Aurora singing opera—that was very likely, since she enjoyed pouring forth song whenever the mood struck her. But the shadows moving across the windows were harder to explain. Perhaps they meant nothing. Perhaps Aurora was merely talking to Rosie. They both seemed to have become insomniacs in their old age. Willie, Rosie’s beau, had had his shift changed at the prison—he didn’t get off until midnight and rarely showed up at Rosie’s before 1:30 A.M. Rosie whiled away the time by watching CNN, but of course it was possible that now and then she and Aurora had a chat in Aurora’s memory room.
That didn’t explain the time she took dressing, though. The General thought he knew what explained the dressing: Pascal had won her away from him at last! It was just a guess, of course, but it seemed to him a shrewd guess. Pascal was nearly fifteen years younger than he was, and Frenchmen had a way of not giving up, where sex was concerned.
Add to that the undoubted fact that he was slipping a little and it seemed to him that you had a recipe for romance.
The General wished there was something to be done about the fact that he was slipping, but he didn’t know what it might be. Some days he just couldn’t seem to marshal his thoughts—instead of their being marshaled neatly, like a well-drilled platoon, they seemed to wander willy-nilly over golf courses where he had once played, or battlefields where he had once battled. He would begin thinking about something and then lose track of it entirely; his words were apt to behave as badly as his thoughts. Sometimes he called Aurora Evelyn, or Rosie Aurora.
Of course, you couldn’t expect a woman to like being called by another woman’s name, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop doing it except on his clearest days—and even on his clearest days, if he wasn’t watching, he might slip up and call Aurora Evelyn once or twice.
Perhaps that was what had driven Aurora into Pascal’s arms. She had probably reasoned that if he couldn’t remember her name she might do better to sleep with someone else. It was a position that was hard to argue with—which didn’t mean that he wasn’t jealous. On the contrary: the less he knew for sure, the more jealous he became. In time he had become so jealous just thinking of Aurora in the arms of th
e vain little Frenchman that he had taken to keeping his old service revolver in a box by his bed—the same box where he kept his medications. For a time he had apparently nearly driven Rosie and Aurora crazy by strewing his medications all over the house—a habit that meant he was almost never able to find the ones he was supposed to take at the times when he was supposed to take them.
To solve the problem, Aurora had given him an old leather box that had been her mother’s—she commanded him to keep his medications in it. After that, he did keep his medications in it, which satisfied Aurora and Rosie. They left his box alone, never suspecting that one day when they were shopping he had oiled up his old service revolver and popped it into the box amid the pills. The thought that he had it was soothing when he was lying awake wishing Aurora would come home. At such times he felt bitterly jealous and sometimes got out of bed to see if Pascal might be wandering around on the lawn. If he did turn up on the lawn some night, separated by a safe distance from Aurora, the General meant to shoot him. In fact, there was a particular spot, just to the right of the garage, where he hoped to find Pascal wandering some night. He was pretty sure he could hit Pascal, if he was anywhere near that spot.
But of course shooting Pascal fell under the heading of future pleasures and would have to wait at least until Rosie made her next move at dominoes. She had not responded to his remark about Aurora’s spending a lot of time dressing. The fact that she hadn’t responded could mean nothing, or anything, depending on whether she had heard him in the first place. The General had such a commanding lead in the domino game that he really didn’t care whether Rosie moved or not. He could easily afford to allow Rosie to win the hand, and was prepared to do just that if he could get her to confirm his suspicion.
“Do you think she’s got a boyfriend?” he asked, about the time that Rosie finally figured out that the double six was her best play.
“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I knew,” Rosie said, scooting her double six into position.
“Why the hell not, don’t I have any rights?” the General asked.
“The hand that signs the paychecks gets its secrets kept,” Rosie said. “It’s as simple as that.”
“You don’t know anyway,” the General said. “I doubt if she tells you a damn thing. She never tells either one of us a damn thing. She’s too goddamn high-handed to bother informing her own household about much of anything.”
“Much of anything unless it’s something she wants to eat,” Rosie said. “If it’s something she wants to eat, she ain’t shy.”
“I think it’s Pascal,” the General said. “I think he’s taken her away from me.”
Rosie didn’t comment. It was her turn to shuffle, and she was shuffling.
The General saw complicity in her silence, though he did note that Rosie seemed a little strained. She had not been looking too well lately, in his view. Rosie was normally so feisty that he tended to forget that she wasn’t a young woman anymore. No one in the household was young anymore. Watching her shuffle the dominoes, it seemed to him that Rosie was definitely slowing down. Usually she shuffled the dominoes a lot more vigorously than she was shuffling them at the moment.
“Are you sick, Rosie?” the General asked, feeling a little frightened, suddenly. He had long held the view that, being eldest in the household, he would die first, but lately, due to his attentive clipping of obituaries, he had become uncomfortably aware of the fact—which he knew anyway, but for long stretches forgot—that people didn’t necessarily die in strict chronological sequence. People just died when they died. In the past year he had clipped obituaries for several men who had been junior officers under him. One or two were more than twenty years younger than he was—and yet they were pushing daisies, and he was still aboveground playing dominoes.
The fact was, there were three of them in the household, and there was no predicting the sequence in which they might go. Any day Aurora could perish in a smashup on the freeway. Any day his ticker could stop. And now that he thought about it, Rosie might just keel over. She looked as if she might be about ready to keel over, even as she shuffled the dominoes.
“Are you sick?” he asked. It suddenly occurred to him that if Rosie died he might be left alone with Aurora. All these years Rosie had been their buffer—if she dropped dead there would be no buffer. It was not a cheering thought. On days when the weather was foul between him and Aurora, he could always go down and play rummy with Rosie—or watch television, if she wasn’t in the mood to play cards.
“I wish Melly would come home,” Rosie said. “I know she needs to go and live her own life and all that, but I miss her, and I still wish she’d come home. I miss her so bad I can taste it.”
“Yes, but are you sick?” the General asked.
“Not particularly, unless you mean sick of the same things happening over and over a million times,” Rosie said. “We need somebody young around here. We’re just a bunch of selfish old people with nothing to do but fuss at one another.”
Indeed, she missed Melly terribly—so much that it forced her to realize that she had largely misread the order of things. She had always thought that Melly depended heavily on her—that one part of her human task was to keep Melly on an even keel.
Now she had come to think it was the other way around. It was she who depended on Melly, and it was Melly’s task to keep her on an even keel.
Besides that, the day before, one of her grandsons had fallen out of a third-floor window and fractured his skull. He survived; the skull fracture wasn’t that bad, he wouldn’t be brain-damaged or anything, but it was one more thing to worry about, and she had plenty to worry about already.
If that wasn’t enough—in Rosie’s opinion, it was enough—she and Aurora were in one of those periods when they seemed to rub one another the wrong way. Much of the time she liked Aurora—after all, they had been together forty years—and there were other times when they got along fine without giving it much thought. But then there were times when she didn’t like Aurora very much, when her vanity and selfishness and general high-handedness were almost too irritating to be borne.
At the moment Rosie seemed to be stuck in one of those times when she not only didn’t much like Aurora, she could barely tolerate her. Just hearing her sing opera in the shower was enough to make Rosie want to get a butcher knife and murder her, like in Psycho. Sometimes she felt like murdering Aurora when she was doing nothing more aggressive than watching soap operas and looking pleased with herself. Rosie was forced to conclude that she must have watched Aurora Greenway look pleased with herself once too often over the course of the forty years.
“The trouble with Aurora, she’s a bad winner,” she said to the General. “She’s a good loser—it’s when she’s losing that you can’t help liking her. But when she’s winning it’s a different story. When she’s winning she ain’t interested in nobody but herself.”
“I think you’re right,” the General said. “She certainly isn’t interested in me anymore.”
Once he thought it over for a minute, Rosie’s theory looked better and better. Aurora had always had a tendency toward arrogance, and any sort of success was apt to magnify this tendency.
“When she’s winning, it’s like dealing with a queen,” Rosie commented, as she and the General selected their hands.
“It’s like dealing with an empress,” the General corrected.
As always, when talking negatively about Aurora, Rosie began to feel guilty. After all, Aurora had done her many kindnesses. It was Aurora who had sat up with her in the hospital all night when her youngest boy, Little Buster, had almost died of rheumatic fever. In fact, in every serious illness or other crisis with her seven children, it had been Aurora, not the male currently in her life, who had stood by her until the crisis passed.
Only this week Aurora had flown to L.A. to help Melanie and Bruce find a nicer, safer apartment; it wasn’t true that she never did anything for others when she was winning. All that was
really true, Rosie admitted to herself, was that Aurora was now in love with Jerry Bruckner, a man much too young for her; and that, being in love, she had neither time nor interest enough to hear Rosie’s complaints about Willie—and Willie was turning out to have quite a serious downside, one element of which was that he was a heroin addict. In his own defense, Willie claimed that all prison guards were heroin addicts, a claim Rosie didn’t accept. She didn’t see how all prison guards could be heroin addicts, but then again, it wasn’t her problem. Her problem was that the one prison guard she was sleeping with was a heroin addict. Willie had only revealed his problem the week before in the course of a discussion about marriage—Willie was really anxious for Rosie to marry him, and Rosie would have admitted that she was considering it if Aurora had demonstrated any interest in hearing the admission. But Aurora hadn’t, and—if that weren’t enough—Rosie had just discovered that she was about to be a great-grandmother. If Melanie hadn’t miscarried, Rosie would have felt okay, knowing that Aurora was going to be a great-grandmother again at more or less the same time; but Melanie had miscarried.
Also, the fact that she was staring great-grandmotherhood in the face was a serious element in her thinking about Willie’s marriage proposal. Look at it any way she could, it just seemed a little tacky for a great-grandmother to be screwing around. What would she tell her kids and grandkids, not to mention her great-grandkids?
But Aurora, a great-grandmother herself, and certainly likely to be one again within a year or two, since Melanie and Bruce seemed to have every intention of continuing to try, was definitely screwing around—and with a man who was only going to break her heart, sooner or later. After all, Aurora was thirty years older than Jerry: there was only one way, in Rosie’s view, that the story could end.