The Evening Star

  6

  Of course, Aurora could write—or at least she could scrawl. Every day she scrawled requests on big legal pads and gave the requests to anyone who came to visit. Usually the requests were for books or music or a specific food Aurora wanted—and it was usually Theo, a sad-looking old Greek—who took the requests and filled them; though sometimes, if Ellen and Jane felt like spending an afternoon together, they might fill seven or eight of Aurora’s little requests on a single shopping spree.

  Ellen really wanted to know what Aurora thought about Tommy’s having killed his girlfriend. She would have liked to ask Aurora flat out if she thought Tommy might do it again someday, in which case the most likely victim, assuming they stayed married, would be herself. But you couldn’t expect an old woman who was nearly ninety to scrawl an answer to a question like that on a legal pad.

  Much as Ellen wanted to ask the question, she knew she’d better wait for the miracle to happen—she’d better wait until Aurora could speak again.

  7

  Ellen had supposed she would spend her whole life in Minneapolis, where she was an art critic on a newspaper. She flew to Houston for a weekend with Jane, her old roommate, and met Tommy, who was just finishing his parole. Tommy and Teddy had already started their business, which was tiny at the time. Jane was teaching a class in Greek and a class in Latin at the University of Houston. Ellen had never had a really exciting romance before—not a really exciting romance. The next thing she knew, she had moved from the top of the country to the bottom. Work was no problem. Ellen knew her stuff—she was soon writing free-lance art criticism for a number of Texas magazines. The fact that Tommy had killed his former girlfriend was a huge problem, though, for Ellen’s sober Midwestern parents.

  But Ellen—as Jane put it—was really in a lather about Tommy. She married him anyway.

  8

  Aurora concluded that her luck had finally run out. It seemed that her future, what little there was likely to be of it, would mainly consist of frustration. She couldn’t talk, and her capacity for movement was severely limited. At least she was home—she could watch TV in her own bedroom, and look out her own large windows at the beautiful sky. She was lucky in Maria, who cared for her very well. Hoping to get her more interested in life than she usually was, Maria even brought in some of the old date books from the little office in the garage. On dull days, when Theo was too down in his back even to drag himself across town, Aurora piddled a little with her memory project; she would flip through a few scrap-books or diaries and would occasionally conjure up what she supposed was really a memory of some picnic on the Cape, seventy-five or eighty years before—her mother, Amelia Starrett, would be there, and a number of vague men with mustaches, wearing white trousers.

  9

  Aurora, though, was not much persuaded by her own dabblings in the past—she knew she was just wading in the shallows of a memory that had never been particularly deep. Despite the playbills and the concert programs, despite the diaries and the scrapbooks, she had to admit that she could remember practically nothing of her long experience of life. The analysis of high moments, whether ecstatic or terrible, that Monsieur Proust was so good at was far beyond her. She could not get back in memory the life of her emotions, or of her senses, or even of her society, to any important degree. She really knew nothing of her mother, except that she had loved a gardener, her Sammy. She had never understood her daughter—she still found herself wondering why Emma had chosen to marry an almost worthless man.

  10

  She did remember, with pain, how cold and colorless the Nebraska sky had looked the day Emma died. It was a day in which all the color—as well as all the hope—had seemed to go out of life.

  11

  Of her time with men, Aurora could call back little, though she did recall the ambivalence that had always seemed to precede and impede seductions, or anything else she might want to do with a man. She had always wanted love to go both faster and slower—but men had never got it right. They made her impatient when they hurried; they made her impatient when they lagged.

  Theo had fallen out of his pickup and hurt his back badly. He was more than half-crippled himself, but when he came to see Aurora he gave her such sad looks that she wanted to smack him. She didn’t want to think of herself as sick—if she must, then at least she didn’t want to forget what it had felt like to be well.

  For that, a forthright man might have helped, but Theo Petrakis had forgotten how to be forthright. “Go away if you’re going to look at me that way!” Aurora scrawled on her pad one day.

  “What way?” Theo asked.

  12

  Vassily had died some years earlier. Theo had sold the bar, he had nothing to do, he loved Aurora, he kept coming. After all, her condition had improved a lot—she might keep on improving. They might even marry someday. When she looked at him angrily and scolded him bitterly, in notes, Theo consoled himself with the thought that at least—and at last!—he had no rivals.

  Pascal, the last rival, had stumbled onto a rich widow, a Jungian or something. They married and moved to Switzerland, only to capsize in a boat and drown.

  13

  Though she was habituated to Theo and grateful for his loyalty, Aurora was often very angry with him. She was old and rather sick, yet she still found that when initiative was required—or, at least, when it would have been welcomed—she still had to supply it. If they wanted a special meal, she ordered it. If they felt like a change of scene—a little card game on her patio, perhaps—she made the decision and went to the considerable trouble of having herself moved. If they decided to listen to opera, she chose the opera.

  Theo always agreed; he just never initiated—and there, it seemed to her, was the story of her life with men. She didn’t need to remember it because it was still happening.

  14

  Once she wrote, “You don’t provide, I never want to see you again,” on her pad. But Theo was late that day, and she tore the page off and wadded it up before he came.

  15

  Aurora decided it would be wisest to stop hoping for anything beyond the simplest pleasure: an especially sunny day; a particularly good tomato. Cast about as she might, she could not find a focus for any larger expectation.

  16

  It was then, when she was very low, scarcely looking at Theo, scarcely responding to visitors, that new life came, in the person of Henry.

  She had supposed herself to be beyond babies—and indeed, had been beyond Midge, Jane and Teddy’s second child—well before she had her stroke. Midge had a bland-ness that stood in sharp contrast to the rather disturbing behavior of her brother, Bump. Before Midge was three months old, Bump—almost a teenager, and old enough to know better—had stuffed her in the toilet twice, flushing it both times. Jane and Teddy had hastily bought a one-level ranch-style house, a precaution against the moment when it might occur to Bump to throw Midge out the window.

  Aurora hoped for Midge’s survival, and hoped, too, that Bump would not follow in his Uncle Tommy’s footsteps and kill somebody. But she could not really sustain much interest in either child.

  When Ellen began to bring Henry to see her, Aurora was not, at first, very interested. Henry was over six months old before he began to hold her attention, and the first thing that attracted her to him was that she was holding Henry’s attention.

  Babies, of course, would stare at anything—babies could stare down panthers. But Henry didn’t just stare. He seemed unusually curious for a person so young. Aurora had been forced to buy a hospital bed, one that raised and lowered itself. Henry was fascinated by the bed, not so much by the raising and lowering itself as by the sound the bed made when Aurora pushed its buttons. Henry soon figured out that the little buttons made the sound happen—be could feel the buttons but he couldn’t push them—his fingers were too small. He would look at Aurora expectantly out of hopeful young gray eyes—they reminded her of Emma’s eyes—and when she pushed the buttons and made the bed p
roduce its sound, Henry would grin a big grin.

  When Aurora gave Henry a spoon to play with, Henry banged it on the tray, but that produced no sound of interest. When, by accident, he happened to bang it on the metal railings of the bed, the sound that resulted was much more to his interest. Henry then banged the spoon on the railings many times. Aurora wrote “pan” on her pad and Ellen grabbed Henry for a moment and went to get one. Henry immediately banged the pan with his spoon. Then he slapped the pan with his hand, making a different sound. When he managed to make a particularly loud sound he looked at Aurora questioningly, wondering if she enjoyed the sound, too.

  Sometimes Aurora pushed Henry on his back with her good hand and tickled him. Henry laughed and squealed. Sometimes he would try to tug the rings off her fingers. Other times he would crawl up on her chest and try to get her earrings. On the whole, he proceeded rather delicately with his investigations. He didn’t try to yank her earrings off—she still tended toward elaborate earrings. Henry mainly liked to make her earrings sway.

  Aurora quickly grew to like the little boy and to look forward to his visits. It seemed to her that Henry had an unusually long attention span for a child his age. Often Henry would sit on her bed for ten minutes or more, playing with a piece of wrapping paper or a ribbon from one of the packages she received. Sometimes he would flip the pages of whatever book she was reading. Frequently Henry attempted to speak to her, making confident remarks in his own language. Often he sat thinking, but when he decided to crawl somewhere he crawled with confidence. He crawled to get there, and he hated his mother or Maria to pick him up before he reached his destination. When they did anyway, he uttered a kind of war cry. If they relented and sat him down again, he immediately resumed his journey.

  Ellen liked bringing the baby to Aurora’s. It was someplace to take him. She also loved it that Aurora was interested in her baby. Jane was always complaining about Aurora’s indifference to Midge—a perfectly nice little girl but, in Ellen’s view, nowhere near as interesting a child as Henry.

  Though Aurora couldn’t talk, she could produce a kind of murmur, faintly musical. Once she and Henry became chums, she would do her little singsong murmurings for him. Henry didn’t find her murmurings as interesting as the hangings he could do with his spoon. But Aurora kept murmuring her little wordless song, and Henry grew more interested. He crawled up on her chest and put his fingers to her lips, trying to figure out how she made the sound. He could sputter, himself; when Aurora murmured, he sputtered, thinking that might be what the old woman was hoping he would do.

  Aurora liked it that Henry seemed to enjoy her company. She liked the way he sat on her bed, perfectly at ease, playing with her scraps of paper. She also liked the way he dived off the edge when he decided to leave the bed. Henry was confident that some adult would always be there to catch him, and so far his confidence had not been misplaced, though once it was Aurora who performed this duty. She just managed to catch his heel with her good hand.

  It amused her to watch Henry crawl away when he was tired of whatever adults happened to be in the bedroom—or if he merely wanted to see what he could find on the patio. The thought occurred to her that finally life had provided her with a forthright male. He just happened, at the time, to be slightly less than ten months old.

  But Henry was happy, male, and forthright, that was for sure. He loved to bang on her wastebasket, or on the toilet seat in her bathroom, or on a hatbox he discovered in her closet. Unusual sounds fascinated him. Once by accident he dropped his spoon on a little brass doorstop at the entrance to her bedroom. The spoon struck the brass and produced what to Henry was a new tone. He had been outward bound, ready to explore the patio, but he stopped immediately and began again to drop his spoon on the doorstop. He succeeded in making the new sound fifteen or twenty times before he had heard it enough. Then he left the spoon and crawled away.

  17

  Aurora grew to love Henry—he became the only person she really looked forward to seeing, the only one to whom she would commit her interest or what energy she had left.

  But Henry, so far, only came in the company of his mother. Aurora didn’t really object to Ellen; she did feel rather sorry for her, though without quite knowing what Ellen’s problems might be. Rumor had it that there had been a falling-out between Ellen and Jane—and Jane, besides being her sister-in-law, had been Ellen’s main Houston friend. Aurora didn’t imagine that Ellen’s home life could be all that rich, either—Tommy had gone from being a murderer and an inmate to being a workaholic computer gypsy, much in demand, rarely at home.

  Despite having produced such a bright, lively little boy, a charmer not even Tommy—a good resister—could resist, Ellen had a lonely, needy, undecided look. Perhaps to compensate for her sense of uncertainty, she was overdutiful, to a degree that made Aurora slightly restive. Ellen was very careful to give no cause for complaint, in itself a quality that Aurora, had she felt healthier, might have found to be a basis for complaint.

  Mainly, though, what Aurora wanted was to have Henry entirely to herself. She wanted it to be just the two of them, if it was for only fifteen minutes a day. She didn’t want Maria interfering, laughing at every cute thing Henry did. She didn’t want Ellen around, either. She wanted more time with her new little male, alone.

  18

  One day Aurora scrawled on her pad: “Please leave me alone with Henry—thirty minutes. I want to teach him music.”

  She arranged with Maria to make her a kind of pallet on the floor, in a corner of her patio where it was lovely and sunny. It was the spot where Hector Scott had once had his chaise. Maria, who could lift Aurora as if she were no heavier than a feather pillow, carried her to the pallet and propped her up. If she was on the floor, Henry could not injure himself falling off the bed.

  Ellen thought it was lovely that Aurora wanted to teach Henry music—she sure hadn’t offered to teach Midge music. She brought Henry upstairs, plopped him on the pallet, and went back down to watch a Spanish soap opera with Maria.

  19

  Aurora had chosen Petrouchka for the first offering. She turned the volume up fairly loud. Henry perked up when the sounds began; he listened for a few seconds, but then he decided that he was more interested in the CD player on the floor by Aurora than he was in the sounds. He tried to get the CD player, but Aurora fended him off with her good hand.

  Henry crawled around the room and pulled himself up by a large flowerpot with a green plant in it. He pulled a leaf off the plant and put it in his mouth. He looked at the old woman, to see if she was going to make him stop eating the green leaf. She did something that made the music louder, but she didn’t try to stop him.

  The leaf, however, was bitter, not tasty at all. Henry spat it out and crawled back over to the pallet. He managed to knock over one of the little black boxes that the sound came out of. Then the old woman rolled him on his back and put the black box close to his ear. Henry lay still for a minute, taking in the sound. It was some kind of game involving the sound. He grinned—he liked games, even if they meant tickling, which is what often happened when a Big rolled him on his back.

  20

  Aurora and Henry’s half hour of music became a daily ritual, timed to coincide with Maria’s favorite Spanish soap. One of the two women would bring the little boy upstairs, plop him down, fasten the little gate that kept him from tumbling downstairs, and leave.

  Aurora would turn on the music—different every day. It might be Mozart, it might be blues, or jazz, or Debussy—and Henry would crawl around the patio, seeing what he could find. Aurora made sure she was provided with a bottle—at some point, when Henry crawled within reach, she would roll him on his back, stick the bottle in his mouth, turn up the music, and bring one of the speakers a little closer to his ear.

  Sucking at his bottle greedily, Henry listened. Sometimes the old woman put a hand on his stomach. When she did he idly twisted the big green ring on her finger. But the sounds were interesting, too.
They were different every day, and they were interesting to listen to while he sucked his bottle. Sometimes the old woman couldn’t resist tickling him. When she did, he rolled over and crawled on her. He liked to touch the big yellow things that hung from her ears.

  21

  Sometimes, when Henry was crawling on the old woman, trying to play with the toys she hung from her ears, he would put his face very close to hers. He knew that most Bigs liked for him to do that. They liked for him to mash his nose against their faces—it always made them smile. He did it a few times with the old woman—she had interesting toys stuck in her hair, too, and he could sometimes get close enough to pull the interesting toys out of her hair so he could examine them.

  While he crawled on her, the old woman sometimes made the sounds they were hearing a bit louder. Often she made them so loud that Henry would forget about the toys in her hair, or those dangling from her ears. The sounds became so loud that he had to stop and listen. They were interesting sounds—different, but always interesting. The old woman was a really interesting Big—none of the others he owned ever caused sounds that loud or that complicated to occur. The old woman didn’t make the sounds with her mouth, either. She caused them to come out of the two little black boxes, and when the sounds got out they filled his ears and they filled the room. Henry had to listen to them closely, they were so complicated, but they were very pleasing, too. It was worth it, listening to them.