Hello? How are you? I’ve just called to hear your voice.
Tell me: How is the family? Holly Mae, Cap’n-Uncle Riff—I wish you’d let me do more for you—for all of you.
Phyllis, standing barefoot before Terence, leaned down impulsively to take his hands in hers. With a bright, brisk smile she said, “We have to make an effort, Terry! We’ve been growing apart. Since last fall, I think. Mother’s visit was difficult, and it seems the children are always making demands, and I—I haven’t been myself lately. I suppose you know?”
Terence looked up at Phyllis, uncertainly. Know what?
“Why, Phyllis, I—”
“I want us to try again, Terry. Please?”
“Phyllis, of course. But—”
Tears glinted in Phyllis’s eyes, but her smile held fast: It was a domestic version of The Radiant Smile, which Terence had not seen in months. Yet there was something fearsome in Phyllis’s intensity.
“Do you love me, Terry? As—we used to be?”
Terence said, hesitantly, and then with genuine warmth, “I love you. Of course.”
“As we used to be—? Before—?”
“Before—?”
Phyllis gestured carelessly as if to indicate the room; the house; all that surrounded them. “All this!”
Phyllis leaned down, to kiss Terence on the lips; he half-rose, awkwardly, to embrace her; his heart swelled with an emotion—love, tenderness, yearning, a need to protect and preserve as powerful as any sexual need. All this: all of our lives together. Yes.
Terence said, urgently, “Why don’t we stay home tonight, Phyllis?—I could build a fire, and—” He thought of the children, as they’d been; the image shimmered before him, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
But Phyllis pushed at his shoulder in gentle reproof. Already she was turning away, headed for her bathroom. “I wish we could, darling, but Glenda Ryan would be terribly hurt if we cancelled out at the last minute—and furious. You know how some of our friends are.” How swiftly Phyllis’s mood had changed! Terence blinked in her wake, like a man who has lifted his face to be kissed but has been slapped instead.
He began to change his clothes, moving about numbly as, in the adjoining room, Phyllis raised her voice to be heard over the sound of fiercely running water. With no apparent transition she was speaking of Aaron; alluding, worriedly, to a matter Terence hadn’t known about, though Phyllis spoke as if he did. “—seems so unfair, doesn’t it!—‘social probation’—he and his fraternity brothers—out of loyalty—and their friend who’d actually assaulted the girl—or whatever: accounts vary—lied to the disciplinary committee about them, and so—”
Terence asked, startled, “What? What are you saying?”
“—a lawyer, if worse comes to worse and the girl’s parents sue—I mean, sue Aaron and the other two or three boys—who, she says, lied—and apparently it got into all the papers up there, not Aaron, but—”
“Phyllis—?”
Phyllis had closed the bathroom door. Terence stood for some seconds, immobilized, gnawing at his lower lip.
After a brief spell he came to, and continued dressing. So it was the Ryans’ for dinner: And in the morning, she would call him, giving an invented name as he’d asked.
I don’t feel it’s right, “fructifying untruths.”
Nor do I. But, for me at least, what is the alternative?
Passing by the bed, where the puckered satin spread showed the imprint of Phyllis’s body, Terence caught sight of the receiver, still off its hook. The querulous beeping noise had long since stopped. Terence put the receiver back, with a mild fleeting wonder why Phyllis, who usually answered the phone with girlish enthusiasm, had chosen not to answer it a few minutes ago, in his presence.
Not seeing, as, mornings before dawn, he swam—a vigorous half-mile of laps in the turquoise-glittering chlorine-stinging pool of the Queenston Athletic Club—the mangled body, the bloodied white face, the greasy tendrils of dark hair beneath him as he swam, a lean youthfully middle-aged man keeping scrupulously to his own lane, glancing neither to the right nor the left, he swam doing the Australian crawl as he’d been taught, he swam not seeing what had sunken beneath the choppy moonlit waves, dumped like debris measuring his strength, knowing he wasn’t in the very best condition for a man of his age but determined to swim a half-mile and no less feeling the strength, the thrill of such strength, coursing through his shoulders, arms, kicking legs he swam, he swam seeing nothing beneath him a shadow at the bottom of the pool but how could it be his, being motionless as death.
He swam.
Ava-Rose Renfrew at the long, battered “antique” table in the room the Renfrews called the parlor, preparing her appliquéd garments and purses by hand, and with loving patience.
Ava-Rose, gorgeous as a rose, one of those creamy-petaled multifoliate roses shading into crimson, exquisite.
What had Holly Mae Loomis called that rose?—“Double Delight.”
Ava-Rose, a faint smile on her lips, the tiny white scars invisible in lamplight, fair crackly hair subdued in braids wrapped around her head like a coronet.
Ava-Rose in a long peach-colored woolen skirt trailing on the floorboards, a purple taffeta blouse with ruffles, a black satin jacket with boldly iridescent appliqué designs on the back—a rainbow of tiny butterflies, dragonflies, bumblebees, hummingbirds.
Ava-Rose biting her lower lip as she stitched, rapidly, fingers flying, rings glittering, bracelets chiming, bright colored scraps of velvet, silk, satin, taffeta, terrycloth onto jackets, smocks, sarilike dresses, robes, shawls, wraparounds lavish as drapes—garments purchased at secondhand clothing shops and refurbished.
Ava-Rose, humming under her breath. A just perceptible pinkness rimming her nostrils—she’d been blowing her nose, but denied she had a cold.
“What is called ‘disease’ is but ‘dis-ease’—a confusion in the mind of man.”
Ava-Rose laughing, as, as Terence entered the room, Darling the magnificently feathered West African gray parrot, mad-yellow-eyed, scimitar-beaked, blood-bright tailfeathers flashing, flapped his wings and clambered out of his handsome new brass cage to perch atop the cage (except when Cap’n-Uncle Riff was home, Darling’s cage door was kept open—the fastidious old man disapproved of the bird’s liquidy droppings throughout the house, but the other Renfrews seemed scarcely to notice), and to shriek a greeting at Terence—“B’njur M’zzrrr! G’tt’ntag! M’zzrrr! Beeeyt PEEZE!”
Ava-Rose lifting her lovely face to be kissed—but lightly, chastely on the lips.
Knowing that her devoted friend and benefactor Dr. Greene of Queenston was a married man, and the father of three children.
Ava-Rose, so beautiful. Ava-Rose, won’t you love me. Ava-Rose, for whose sake a man died.
With a gesture of her arm (loose flaring sleeve trailing into a saucer of blue sequins, bracelets clattering) Ava-Rose indicated where, amid typical Renfrew-clutter, her visitor might sit. At the end of the long table, beyond the tarnished silver candlesticks and dust-coated wax fruit, in a broken-backed, but comfortable, old wicker easy chair. “Thank you! But don’t let me disturb you.”
Ava-Rose’s lips mysteriously twisted—“Ter-ence! No one does disturb me.”
And Darling, stretching his long snaky neck, continuing to shriek—“B’njur M’zzrrr! Beeeyt PEEZE!”
(Which Terence interpreted as “Be at Peace”—the formal greeting of the members of the First Church of the Holy Apocalypse of Trenton.)
And who was snoring beneath the chair, waking with a growl deep in his throat and fangs bared, until, identifying the intruder, sniffing at hands, crotch, boots, the burly dog began to yip happily and lick at Terence’s face—“Why, Buster Keaton, my old ally!”
Ava-Rose scolded Buster for jiggling the table, even as the saucer of sequins overturned, and some pearl buttons rolled rapidly across the table, setting Darling into a flurry—did the big bird think the buttons were insects, and edible?
Terence laughed in delight, having no sooner settled down in the easy chair than he jumped to his feet, scooped up the buttons to return to Ava-Rose; and kissed her again, breathlessly, yes but chastely, on her mysteriously smiling mouth.
Ava-Rose, my beloved.
“Dr. Greene, Ter-ence!—kiss us, too!”
It was Dara and Dana bursting into the parlor, just home from school, their pretty pale-freckled faces aglow from the winter cold and their braces glittering. For such petite girls, they made a considerable racket—“Dara and Dana, mind your manners!” their aunt scolded, but as usual they paid no heed.
Terence could not help but be flattered that the twelve-year-olds, who were inclined to be snippy with their elders, seemed so admiring, and so respectful, of him. Everything about Dr. Greene impressed them—the new-model white Oldsmobile he drove (he’d traded in the BMW in December); the way he talked, and dressed; the fact that he lived in prestigious Queenston, New Jersey. (Terence was surprised that mere children knew of such matters, but, as Holly Mae said, sighing, “There almost aren’t children, nowadays!”) There was something innocently flirtatious about the way they hovered about him, vying for his attention, boldly tilting their cheeks up for his kiss. Terence kissed one girl—was she Dara?—and the other giggled jealously. “Now me, Dr. Greene!—me!” and when he kissed the second girl—was she Dana?—the other giggled jealously. “Now me, Dr. Greene—you didn’t kiss me.” And so, laughing, he kissed the first girl again; and naturally had to kiss the second girl again. Identical twins! Their wire braces tickled his lips.
Do Dara and Dana know about Eldrick Gill?—the accident?
No, impossible—they wouldn’t want me to kiss them, if they did.
The girls leapt about so excitedly, they overturned a saucer of brightly colored glass beads Ava-Rose had been sewing on a black felt vest; Ava-Rose sprang to her feet, exasperated, but laughing, as she slapped lightly at the girls—“Dara, Dana! Aren’t you ashamed! Pick up every last bead you’ve spilled, and put them back in this saucer, and go upstairs and do your homework, d’you hear?”
The girls cringed, though Ava-Rose’s aggression was merely playful. “Yes, Aunt Ava-Rose,” mumbled the one; and the other, “Yes, Aunt Ava-Rose, we’re sorry.”
Terence helped the girls pick up the glass beads, making a game of it—who could find the most beads, most quickly. He was reminded of similar delightful games he’d played years ago with his own children; a long-forgotten game played with Aaron when the boy was no more than two or three, collecting toys scattered across the nursery floor.
Dara and Dana fascinated Terence, for there was, to him, a mystery in twins; identical twins; two human beings sharing the same genes, precisely. How very different from Terence Greene, as a child, and, yes, as an adult, knowing himself so profoundly alone in the world—isolated in his “uniqueness.”
Dara and Dana were sweet girls, if sometimes overexuberant. Terence tried, but could never tell them apart. Looking from one to the other, and back, he felt the more mystified. They were not quite so pretty as Kim, but they had certain of her mannerisms—intonations of voice, facial gestures. The shared subculture of American youth, from which, too, Terence felt permanently estranged.
And, too, the girls’ uncanny resemblance to Ava-Rose—except for the pale freckles scattered across their faces, and darkish strawberry blond hair less curly than Ava-Rose’s, and the charmingly crooked front teeth, they were child-versions of their aunt, thus rather seductive. Even their voices were unusually low and throaty for girls so young.
The glass beads were recovered, presented to Ava-Rose in the old cracked saucer. The girls ran off, giggling—one cried, “Bye-bye, Dr. Wineapple!” and the other, giving a hard shove to the first, corrected her, “—Dr. Greene! ’Bye!”
In their wake, there was a moment’s awkward silence.
Determined not to inquire after “Wineapple,” for fear of seeming a jealous lover (which, assuredly, he was not), Terence observed, “How much the twins resemble you, Ava-Rose! I suppose you and your sister look very much alike?”
Ava-Rose had taken up her needle and thread again, and said, stiffening slightly, “No. Not really. We have a common mother, of course—that’s the genetic inheritance. Grace is three years older than I am, a Cancer, with a Moon in Capricorn and a Fixed, Aquarius Ascendant. Very cold, calculating. Detached. She long ago divorced the man who was—is—the twins’ father; he seems to have disappeared.” Ava-Rose paused, stitching. She regarded Terence with eyes brimming with sudden moisture. “Grace had a hardness in her even when we were children. She used to say, ‘Our mother abandoned us like stray kittens—that’s what we owe the world.’ I love her, Ter-ence, but I have cast her out of my thoughts, because I know that’s what Grace wants. I have not seen my sister in eleven years.”
“I’m so sorry!” Terence murmured.
Abandoned. Like me.
That was the snow-swirling January afternoon, shading into evening, when Terence Greene told Ava-Rose Renfrew certain secrets of his life, which he had never confessed to anyone previously. Not even Phyllis.
Especially not Phyllis!—who would have been revulsed.
How, as a child of two, he’d been abandoned by both his parents. He could scarcely remember either of them. A woman who’d been his mother, a young woman, with no distinct features—a man who’d been his father, big, bearded, or perhaps just unshaven, with bulging blood-threaded eyes, an angry hacking cough. (Had Terence’s father coughed blood?—Terence seemed, vaguely, to recall this.) “Something terrible had happened, because I remember being in a speeding car—my mother screaming—a siren?—an ambulance, or a police car?—and a crash—I’m sure it must have been a crash—though my memory is blurred, like something glimpsed through water.” He paused, seeing that Ava-Rose was listening closely, sympathetically. But should he pour out his heart, and risk this lovely young woman’s pity? He drew a deep breath. “Even now, sometimes, I hear a woman’s voice—I look around, and no one’s there. I see, sometimes,” he held out his hands, which trembled slightly, “ghost-splotches of blood, on my hands. Of course, there’s nothing there.”
“Poor Ter-ence!” Ava-Rose shivered.
“And, afterward, there was a courthouse—a courtroom—though I can’t remember whether I actually was there; or just knew about it. I’m inclined to think that I just knew. No one told me, no one would tell me anything as I grew up, living with one relative of my mother’s after another. ‘Hettie’s boy,’ they spoke of me, ‘Hettie’s poor boy,’ as if I couldn’t hear. My mother’s name was Hettie Greene. I don’t even know if she and my father were married, but—my name is hers. It always has been.”
Terence spoke with an odd passion, and was immediately embarrassed.
It always has been.
What I have done, I have done.
Ava-Rose said, feelingly, “You’ve suffered!”
So Terence unburdened his soul. He glided quickly over his marriage, his children; he would not exploit them, for the sake of winning sympathy from Ava-Rose. He spoke of his “unresolved” life—his earlier academic career, which had gone unexpectedly well, and which, indeed, he’d liked, very much; his subsequent position as Executive Director of the Feinemann Foundation, which seemed to be grinding him down, to a fine gritty powder. “The Foundation is wealthy, and so we’re besieged by applicants. My Aunt Megan used to say, ‘Beware of being honey set in the sun—it attracts flies.’ We give grants to museums, theaters, dance companies, individual artists, and most of it, certainly, is deserved; but there is no provision for—well, art of the kind you create, Ava-Rose.” Terence had not known he would say this, nor that he would speak with such warmth. “Those lovely appliqué designs!—the things you do with feathers, sequins, beads! It’s really quite remarkable. ‘The Art of Beauty.’ My daughter Kim loves that purse of yours I gave her—she carries it with her everywhere. And my mother-in-law, who’s famously hard to please—” But now that Terence thought of it, he
hadn’t once seen Mrs. Winston wearing the exotic feather earrings, though, that evening, she’d professed to find them beautiful. “Well—you are a genuinely gifted artist, Ava-Rose. Unfortunately the snobbish cultural establishment has its own rigid definitions of ‘art,’ and much that moves us greatly is excluded.”
Ava-Rose said, negligently, “It is said, ‘Covet not thy neighbor’s riches, else you covet his sorrow as well.’”
Terence rubbed his chin. “That’s so. But—who said that?”
“It is written in the Book of the Millennium, which has come down to us through the generations.”
Terence had several times asked Ava-Rose about the history of the Church of the Holy Apocalypse, but her answers were vague and elusive; he had the idea that she didn’t know much about it, and did not want to embarrass her. Having no religion himself, Terence envied others the apparent solace of their beliefs. Like many a humanist-agnostic, he was inclined to take religious men and women at their word.
“I see,” Terence said. “Still, there is the principle of human justice.”
“‘Justice’—!” Ava-Rose laughed, with melancholic irony. “That too excludes us.”
By this time, it had grown cozily dark.
Cozily dark, and would Terence stay for dinner?
He murmured, “Thank you, but I—” and Holly Mae Loomis protested, “Yes, yes, Dr. Greene, please! After all you done for us—” and Ava-Rose laughing and tugging at his arm, like a little girl, “Oh now Ter-ence, please do stay! Auntie has made cornmeal biscuits, and I—I have made chocolate fudge cake, just for you.”
How then could Terence Greene refuse?
(In hope of being invited to stay for dinner, Terence had shrewdly told Phyllis he’d be having dinner in New York that night. Wouldn’t be home until late.)
So a place was set at the big battered dining room table for Terence, between Ava-Rose and Holly Mae. Cap’n-Uncle Riff in navy blue brass-buttoned coat, smart nautical cap on his stiff white hair, beard freshly trimmed and brushed, sat at the head of the table, and did the carving. With a flashing silver knife the size of a dagger. (Dara and Dana, seeing Cap’n-Uncle wield the knife against the roast, giggled in a shivery-silly little-girl way, “Cap’n-Uncle, where’d you get that?” and Cap’n-Uncle and Chick answered in the same voice, “It came into the store today.” Cap’n-Uncle Riff had a second-hand goods store, or perhaps he managed such a store, on lower State Street, which Terence had not yet seen.) Hefty good-natured Chick, who seemed to have grown an inch or two, all around, in recent weeks, sat across from Terence, and between Dara and Dana—there being an old family tradition of keeping the twins separated at meals. For a boy of sixteen (Chick’s birthday had been on December 24), Chick was remarkably adult in his manner and attitude; and in his cheery deference to other adults, like Terence Greene, whom he called “Dr. Greene.”