“The lower classes? Like the many emperors who preferred their concubines to their noble-born wives? The aristocrat unbending with his mistress?”
Elizabeth smiled meanly. Exactly what she meant, of course. Head full of stereotypes.
A little anger flared on Alex’s face. “Well, is it impossible that the three of you lived … in some contentment, had some … understanding among yourselves?”
Ronnie sat back. “What, Little House on the Prairie? Are you kidding? There was a house and the man who owned it. He had a brownskinned servant who waited on him, served him, bowed and scraped to him, sí senor, no senor. And there was this little brown girl she kept hidden in the back of the house because she knew that if the girl made noise or showed herself or in any way bothered him, they’d both be sent packing. Except for an annual Fourth of July party when the servant and her daughter and all the other hired help worked like slaves for ten straight days, the house was empty and silent most of the time. The little girl learned her place—which was to be invisible even when there was no one to see her. The man never never spoke to her. Only after he retired, decided to become an old man, were there constant demands, Noradia draw my bath, Noradia bring me a brandy, Noradia find my glasses.”
“And when you were staying here with him these last months? When your mother was sick? Couldn’t he get beyond that then?”
Mother in bed, Mrs. Browning in the kitchen, Teresa cleaning upstairs: I didn’t know where to go, how to behave, not a servant anymore but certainly not a resident either. Out of place helping them, out of place in the house. Stayed with Momma, read to her, talked to her, got her tea when she could drink it or water. Stomach edgy all the time. Both of us had a hard time keeping food down. Thought I had cancer too for a while. Why I lost all that weight.
Ronnie tipped the Coke can to her mouth, found it empty. She put it on the table and stared outward into space. “There must be something real to drink in this joint.”
Elizabeth rose and walked to the bar against the side wall. “What would you like?”
“I don’t know. What is there? What do people drink? I only know about beer and wine, and I hate beer and I don’t want wine.”
Elizabeth smiled at her. “Gin and tonic?”
“Fine.”
Elizabeth made the drink in a tall glass and carried it across to Ronnie, who accepted it in silent amazement. Jesus, could she be gay?
She sipped, rolled the liquid around over her tongue and nodded at Elizabeth, almost smiling: “It’s good!” She turned to Alex. “He had me eat with him but he didn’t talk. The only thing he ever did was complain—‘This steak’s tough’ or ‘This broccoli is not cooked enough,’ something like that. Every afternoon he’d visit Momma for an hour. I’d go outdoors while he was with her, just walk around. Most days when I came back in, he’d bark at me like he was defying me to contradict him, ‘She’s better today’ or ‘She’s getting her strength back.’ As if she could recover, as if that really were a possibility As if he didn’t know she was dying.”
Three pairs of eyes stared at the floor registering “He must have loved her.”
“So when she died, he was furious, as if she’d betrayed him. … That’s how he acted that day, the day he had the stroke. Enraged that she’d done something hostile to him, outraged at her malicious perversity.”
“That’s how I felt when Don died,” Mary murmured.
They all looked at her.
“Your last husband?” Alex asked.
She nodded. “He was crazy about motorcycling, he had all kinds of motorcycles. He especially liked to ride in the mountains—I still had the Vail house then—and he’d go out into the passes … he hit something, a rock or something. Threw him. Flipped him. Broke his neck.” She searched her purse for her hankie, wiped her nose, glared at Elizabeth. “It wasn’t suicide! We were gloriously happy.”
Maybe so, Elizabeth thought, but can’t you open your mouth without sounding like a movie magazine?
Alex made a sound of lamentation. “When was that?”
“Two years ago … two years in June.”
Mrs. Browning appeared, announcing dinner.
“We’ve all had so many losses,” Alex said, turning to each of them as they rose and walked to the dining room. “You lost your mother, you lost Clare, you lost Don. …”
“I lost Charlie … and my grandparents. Of course, they were old, but I really missed them, you know, we lived with them all through my childhood. Always: until I got married. And Charlie was like my father. …”
“Don was only forty,” Mary mourned, then tensed, waiting for Elizabeth to sneer, “Robbing the cradle, Mary?” But what she said was—harshly—“That’s what it means to get old. That’s what a survivor is: a person who can outlive losses.”
Alex frowned. “But I’m not that old.”
“You’re not. You’re only thirty-six. That’s young,” Mary said, dismissing her.
Alex rubbed her fine-boned hand across her pale forehead. “It isn’t really young. Ronnie’s only twenty-five, but she isn’t really young. …”
“Chicanas have a hard life,” Ronnie cracked.
“I mean, people didn’t use to live much beyond forty. Most people. In the world.” She turned to Elizabeth. “Isn’t that true?”
“Before the industrial revolution,” Elizabeth agreed.
“Oh Jesus, don’t get her started on the industrial revolution!” Mary cried. “She’ll talk your ear off, all this garbage about capitalism and industrialization as the salvation of the human race! Trying to impress Father and make me feel stupid. At the latter of which, at least,” she said to Elizabeth, “you succeeded.” She turned back to Alex. “Whereas it’s clear to me that people lived far far more graciously in the old days before we had either.”
“How do you know what I’d say about the industrial revolution?” Elizabeth asked, puzzled.
Mary shrugged. “For heaven’s sake, for years you used to hold forth. Regularly. At the dinner table, to Father. Trying to get him to talk, to impress him. Don’t you remember? After you came back from England, when you were working in Washington and came up here for the July vacation.” She turned to Alex, smiling meanly. “You think Elizabeth’s so grand and dignified, you should have seen her then. If she wasn’t groveling, it was the closest thing to groveling I ever saw! We’d stay here for a few days after the Fourth of July party. Elizabeth kept trying to get Father to talk to her but he wouldn’t, oh he would not!” Mary laughed. “As if he’d taken a vow not to have a conversation with you. What a hoosher he is!” Mary giggled, wiped her eyes, sipped wine, giggled again.
Alex stared at her soup. Ronnie watched with intense interest. Elizabeth turned a tight face to Alex.
“So what about people dying at forty?”
She smiled gratefully. “Just that I’m almost forty. The age most people died at. Before. And I feel … I often feel… I know … that I haven’t really lived yet. Is that crazy?”
“Oh, my dear, you’ve never been in love!” Mary said grandly.
Elizabeth groaned.
Intent on her point, Mary paid no attention. “And don’t tell me you’re married. People can be married for years and not realize they’ve never really been in love. Not realize what love is, can be …”
“So, what, you’re only alive when you’re in love but you can spend most of your life not in love? So then what are you, dead?” Elizabeth mocked.
“I was,” Mary announced dramatically. “I spent my life acting a part, performing. I was never fully alive until I fell in love!”
Alex pondered. “I love David,” she said tentatively. “He’s a lovely man, a good man.”
“I don’t mean that!” Mary flung her arm out, sweeping away all objections. Her rings glittered in the lamplight, diamond, ruby, sapphire. “I mean passion, the kind that sweeps you away, that makes everything else unimportant, the kind worth dying for!” Her uplifted face was radiant.
“The k
ind they sell in those romances you read,” Elizabeth sneered.
Mary stopped and stared at her sister. “Elizabeth, I don’t read romances. If you’d ever bothered to look, you’d see that I read mostly poetry. You think everyone in the world is stupid except Father and you and your Clare! Why don’t you just step off your throne. It’s flushing under your feet!”
To hide her grin, Ronnie dropped her fork and bent to pick it up. In her triumph at having shaken Elizabeth, Mary didn’t even remark Ronnie’s breach of manners.
Alex was elsewhere.
Totally self-involved, Ronnie thought.
She began talking, it seemed, to herself; her eyes were focused on nothing in the room. “You said my mother was a loved child. Well, I was too. I had my mother and my grandparents and Charlie and he was a wonderful man, so dear, so kind to me, as if I were his own child—but they all took care of me, they all loved me. I loved and was loved.
“Maybe”—she returned to the room, to Mary—“that’s not the kind of love you mean. But when David and I were first married, I felt what I imagine you mean by passion. I felt. …” She broke off, laughing. “He used to tease me, accuse me of trying to possess him utterly, he liked it of course, that I wanted to touch him, hold him, all the time. I wanted to hold all of him in my hands all at one time, I told him I wished he were tiny so I could hold him in my palm, I wanted to own him, to gobble him up, his sweet mouth, his beautiful smooth golden skin.”
Mary frowned. She had it wrong.
“And probably you’re right,” Alex went on unheeding, “during that time I did feel completely alive. But I still feel that way about him every once in a while. When I see him standing in front of the window in the back door in his plaid woolen shirt with the sleeves rolled up … with the light behind him, his profile is dark and clean and strong. … I want to go up to him and just … contain him, surround him, swallow him up. …”
“What do you do?” Ronnie was amused.
Alex was startled. “Oh! Well that depends. On what we have to do. I mean, if the kids have to be driven somewhere or I’m in the middle of baking a pie … well, then I just smile at him. But sometimes I go up to him.”
“And?”
“I contain him, surround him, I swallow him whole!” Alex cried, laughing. They all laughed. Even Mary.
Alex sobered. “But that doesn’t change the fact that all those years—I felt something was missing. I don’t know what. I’ve always felt—I think I’ve always felt—that something vital was lacking in my life. And I think I imagined you all had it—well, Elizabeth and Mary, I didn’t know about you, Ronnie. I thought of the two of you as if you were angels living in paradise—without the, I don’t know, constraints I had.”
“Constraints?” Elizabeth, cool.
Alex sat back. “In 1978, David got a promotion and to celebrate he took me to New York for New Year’s Eve. We stayed in a nice hotel on the East Side and he took me to a fancy place for dinner and dancing and afterwards to a jazz club in the Village. And we were in a cab going back to our hotel, it must have been three or four in the morning, we were driving I remember up Sixth Avenue, and there on the street, in the middle of the street, was a young man in full evening dress, his arms out like wings, his white scarf flying out behind him, on a skateboard. And my heart stopped. And I knew that’s what I had always wanted to do. I had always wanted to feel that free. And I knew I never had.”
“And you never will. Because of male predation,” Ronnie declaimed. “No woman can ever feel that free or act that free because the male of the human species preys on the female. The only species in which one sex systematically …”
Elizabeth interrupted. “What made you feel unfree? Did your parents keep you from doing things?”
“Oh, I suppose the things all parents keep their children from doing—playing in the traffic, you know. I don’t know,” Alex said vaguely. “I mean, they loved me—they kept telling me what a good girl I was—and I knew I was a good girl. …”
“But you felt that to keep their love, you had to go on being a good girl,” Mary said. “Which meant obeying. Not playing in the traffic, not skateboarding on the boulevard.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you’re clearly still a good girl,” Elizabeth said, with an amused smile that included Alex.
“Yes,” Alex smiled back, sighing. “But I don’t know if that’s it.” She faced Elizabeth, her face intense. “When you work, when you’re doing economics, whatever it is you do, do you feel …”—she stopped again—“alive? The way Mary means?”
“Yes. Totally. I feel full. I feel in gear, like a powerful machine working at full capacity. Not a machine, really, because there’s nothing mechanical about the way I feel. I’m using everything human in me—what I feel and think and want and don’t want, body mind emotion, everything. …”
Alex attended closely. “What about you, Ronnie? What do you do when you’re alone in your room?”
Thought you’d never ask. “Actually, I’m writing my dissertation.”
They all stopped dead, staring at her.
Yeah. That knocked your socks off, huh? Didn’t expect an educated wetback.
“In what?”
“Energy and the environment, ecology, really. Specializing in ecosystems, everything in the universe part of one system, everything keeps everything else going, everything contributes to continuing life. Plants, especially, I concentrate on.”
“I’m impressed,” Elizabeth announced.
Shit why does that feel so good. Ronnie lowered her gaze to hide the dampness of her eyes.
“Well so am I, Ronnie,” Mary agreed hesitantly.
Alex gave Ronnie her yearning look. “And what is your dissertation about?”
“I did fieldwork in the Appalachians for a year, studied mosses and lichen. Now I’m writing up my conclusions.”
“Mosses?” Alex said, wonderingly.
“Mosses are fascinating,” Ronnie said defensively. “They are right at the crux between algae, which are completely dependent on an aquatic environment, and vascular plants, which live on dry land. And lichen is a symbiote—it’s really two species from different kingdoms, one an algae, one a fungus. But it lives as a single plant, and neither part really survives without the other.”
They stared at this sudden volubility in her, and remained silent when she finished, allowing her time to continue. But she didn’t.
“So you’ll have a Ph.D.?” Elizabeth asked. “When you’re finished?”
“If it’s accepted. If I pass my orals.”
“You must feel you’re doing something really important, something that matters. To everyone, to the whole world. That you’re contributing to humanity,” Alex exclaimed.
Ronnie shrugged. “It’s probably not any more important than having children. And I’ll never have children.”
“Oh, how do you know!” Alex protested warmly, reaching across to pat her hand. “You’re still a young woman, a girl, really, you’re only in your twenties!”
“Because I’m a lesbian.”
“Oh!!!” Hand pulled back swiftly.
Bingo.
Knew it, thought Mary.
“Any cow can have children,” Elizabeth said. “Not everyone can write a dissertation.”
Jesus, could she be gay? Ronnie wondered. Out loud she said, “I think having children is hard. Takes a lot out of you. Maybe not having them—although I guess that takes enough—but raising them.”
Poor Momma’s voice breaking when she heard my voice on the phone, shrieking, “Ronalda, Ronalda, I thought you dead.” Sobbing, “Where you are, what you do, why you go, why you do this to me?”
“It is a bore,” Mary said.
“What would you know about it?” Ronnie said fiercely. “You had servants to do all the work!” Rosa, worried about the boys all the time and then after all it was Tina who flipped out, coming home drugged and disheveled. Rosa working all day working all night sick with worry a
ll the time, if it wasn’t money it was the kids, if it was money it was for the kids.
“I nursed my babies!” Mary cried indignantly. “I didn’t have them carried in to visit me at night before I went out and ignore them the rest of the time! I didn’t send my children away to school at seven! I didn’t raise them the way I was raised! I spent time with them, gave them attention, and sometimes it was very hard … you may not know but Alberto left me when I was pregnant with Marie-Laure. I had her all by myself. Completely alone!” She burst into tears.
Alex sighed, “Life is pain.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
Ronnie smirked.
Still, from that day onward, the climate was different among them: they were somehow calmer together, as if they had passed through a lock and sailed in slightly lower channels.
On foot or by bicycle, Alex visited Lincoln’s three churches, having discovered there was no synagogue of any persuasion in this town. St. Anne’s in-the-Fields, an Episcopal church, was really in the middle of fields two miles from the town center, across the road from the Codman House. It was the official church of the Upton family, although there was some question as to when the last Upton had attended any church. Despite seat cushions, (thin) pads on the kneeling benches, and a carpet down the center aisle, it was austere. Yet it appealed to Alex, and she attended a couple of services there, amused to find that they used pita bread for the communion wafers.
St. Joseph’s, the Catholic church, a plain white frame structure, was very neat and clean, more like a classroom than a place of worship, she thought. Even its carved wood stations of the cross done in freestanding scenes without a frame and painted in muted pinks, browns, greens could not save it from a studious dryness, not at all what she associated with Catholicism. It was like a Knights of Columbus meeting hall, she thought, with its small round-arched windows and geometric stained glass, each window devoted to the memory of some man or other, all Irish. There was one woman listed, she noticed. But what most upset her about St. Joseph’s was the warning in the parish newsletter: “PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! NO EATING IN THE CRYING ROOM.” What could that be, a crying room? Was there a place in this church where people went to cry? Did going there guarantee that tears would come? Maybe she should look for it. But instead, she scurried away on her bicycle and she returned to St. Joseph’s only once more, to attend Mass.