Alex looked alarmed. “Are you turning against it, now?”
“No, no! But it isn’t as simple as it might seem. Not that it seems simple.”
“No. I intend to be guided by the nuns—they’ve done this before, they know all about it. And we’re starting small, only spending a couple of million to begin with, a small clinic. Carefully. Working our way in in a nonthreatening way, helping mainly the children at first. I’ve had a couple of talks with them. They were quite cheerful talks I might add! Great fun! They were of course ecstatic! And quite boozy by the end! It’s been the greatest week—well, the greatest month of my life! Meeting you, and then all this! Even though Father died, even though I … I never really knew him, after all. Except carnally!” she suddenly burst out in a hysterical giggle.
They all joined in, in a suddenly self-aware discomforted ironic giggle, then the laughter died down into a greater quiet, the crackle of the fire, the aching snap of a pine branch.
“And what about the two of you, then? Have you made plans?”
The easiness tensed. “Not really,” Mary said.
“I’ve looked at some houses in Virginia,” Elizabeth said unsurely. “Two really beautiful ones. One with four bedrooms, each with its own bath. Enough for each of us, and a study Marie-Laure could stay in.” She looked meaningfully at Mary.
Mary averted her gaze. “She won’t want to leave New York.”
“If and when she wants to. Or if Ronnie wants to bring a friend to visit”—Ronnie’s head snapped up—“or Alex wants to bring one of her kids. It’s a big house but not a mansion. For all of us …” Her voice dwindled off. Perhaps she heard the plea in it.
Mary gazed at her softly. “It sounds lovely, Lizzie.”
She could not contain herself. “And you could write poetry, and we could give parties. There are some sophisticated people in Washington, Mary, some of your old friends …”
“And we could be together the way I always wanted when we were little. We could play go fish at night!” she laughed.
“Or I’ll teach you chess.”
“Actually, I know chess. Paul liked to play. But he always had to win. If he didn’t win, he threw, he hurled all the pieces across the room! Then he’d expect me to pick them up. I didn’t of course, and the servants always had to scurry around next morning. Once a piece got lost, a knight. Paul was furious, blamed me for it. I said good, without a knight we couldn’t play anymore, it wasn’t much fun playing with a baby anyway. That was the end of the chess phase. I think that’s when he bought a new plane, a bigger one.”
“You could have the Bosendorfer moved down there. You could play.”
“And what would Ronnie do?” she asked playfully.
“Why, design the garden, of course. There’s a gorgeous Japanese garden there now, but it occupies only part of the lot. There are a few acres. Ronnie could design the rest, plant it, whatever. …”
Ronnie’s eyes glistened. “You’re not suggesting we all live together, Lizzie.”
“Not unless we want to. If it’s convenient. Suppose you got a job in Washington?” She saw the look on Ronnie’s face. “You might want just to come for long weekends, or Christmas, or Thanksgiving. Family holidays.”
That was imaginable. “Yes.”
“And Alex, in between jaunts to El Salvador and trips home might want to wind down. No?”
“Oh, I’ll be there every Christmas! Promise!”
“Well, think about it,” Elizabeth said, sagging a little. They sat in silence then, as if obeying her. The fire was dying, but it was late, and no one got up to refresh it. A sudden sweep against the window made them sit up.
Ronnie jumped up and looked out the sliding glass door. “It’s snowing!” she cried.
They all leapt up and huddled around the window. “Snow!” they announced, and as if they were observing a miracle, they embraced each other, standing there looking out at the soft white drift settling in the pines, the bare gray branches of the dogwoods, on the dry dead ground.
26
BRILLIANT WITH SNOW, THE morning did seem to signal a season’s difference, a turning from darkness to light. But the sisters discarded its metaphoric baggage to delight in it as they came downstairs in robes and slippers. Each exclaimed on the light, the wonderful light, “like morning in your heart,” Alex gushed. Elizabeth murmured almost to herself, “As bright as the sky over Africa, but a different color,” making Ronnie think jealously, shit, she’s even been to Africa.
Mrs. Browning had set up a tea table in the playroom, and now she loaded it with coffee and juices, a steaming quiche, crunchy French rolls, platters of cakes filled with raisins, apples, nuts, cinnamon. They pulled the drapes as far open as possible, turned on the tree lights, and luxuriated in the food, complacently eyeing the presents heaped up under the tree. No rush. Everything was for pleasure today, they all seemed simultaneously and silently to have decided.
“But where’s Marie-Laure?” Mary cried in dismay and ran out of the room and through to the foyer and up the stairs, where she knocked on her daughter’s door. No response. She opened the door. Marie-Laure was in a deep sleep, and only vaguely roused at her mother’s voice.
“Come down, dear, it’s Christmas morning! And it snowed and it’s beautiful! You can come down in your robe, we’re all in our robes.”
The girl moaned and turned over.
Mary shook her shoulder. “Marie-Laure, I want you to get up and come downstairs.”
“In a while,” she mumbled.
“No, now!”
“Oh, fuck off, Mother,” she muttered sullenly, and blood filled Mary’s head and she hauled off and smacked the side of Marie-Laure’s face. Startled, stung, the girl sat up. Her eyes were wild.
“You hit me!”
“Yes!” Mary shouted. “And will again if you ever speak to me like that again! Now get up and brush your teeth and come downstairs!”
Shocked, the girl got out of bed. Mary watched while she went into her bathroom, waited until she came out again. She was wearing only a T-shirt.
“Do you have a robe?”
Sullen shake of head.
“Wait.”
Mary marched out of the room and into her own, found a robe, carried it back. “Put this on. And some socks, or something on your feet.”
The girl obeyed.
“Down!”
Marie-Laure started down the stairs, Mary following grimly, but she entered the playroom smiling, crying “Here we are!” As the sisters greeted Marie-Laure, Mary announced, “But we need music! And I brought some!”
She opened a brown paper bag and pulled out tapes of Renaissance and early Italian music, and inserted one in the deck. As it began to play, she sighed, cried, “Isn’t that gorgeous!” (thinking, god I sound just like Alex, I wonder if she always feels the way I do now, on the edge of hysteria) and settled herself in an armchair with some coffee and a plate of quiche.
Marie-Laure sipped orange juice and picked at some quiche. The sisters ate leisurely, fully. They barely talked. They wallowed, murmured at a beautiful passage of music, at a waft of snow blown from branch to ground, at a bird’s swooping down at some possible breakfast. Ronnie gathered up crumbs from their plates and opened the sliding doors and hurled the crumbs out to the ground, where soon a small bird community gathered. The satiated sisters watched.
“There’s enough quiche left for the kitchen,” Alex said suddenly, and went inside to tell Mrs. Browning and Teresa to clear the table. “The quiche is still a little warm, you might want to finish it,” she added, causing eyebrows to rise in the kitchen. Of course, they had intended to do just that, after a swipe in the microwave.
“No, no more coffee,” Elizabeth said lazily, “but you know what I’d like? A beer. Do we have any beer, Mrs. Browning?” She asked, as the woman came in to clear.
“Beer?” She stopped clearing. “Well, we must, the larder here is kept stocked with everything. But you’re sure you want a beer at ten-t
hirty in the morning, Miz Upton?”
“Let’s all have beer,” Mary decided. “Or a Bloody Mary. Yes, I’d rather have that. I’ll make them. I used to make them for Paul, he loved them.” She stood up, gazing helplessly at the not-yet-stocked bar.
“All very well to tell us we can eat, but now they want the bar stocked,” Mrs. Browning muttered to Teresa in the kitchen as she angrily filled an ice bucket and sliced a lime.
Ronnie waited until they were all settled back with drinks—Marie-Laure also had a beer—to ask like an eager child, “Can we have presents now?”
As Elizabeth handed out the packages ceremoniously, Mary said, “Lizzie, remember when we were little and had Christmas with Father, and sometimes Worth and Harriet and Sam and Pru would be here with their kids, and Worth said that when they were growing up, their father made a rule that the youngest would open a package first, then the next youngest, and so on, and we had to sit there squirming, of course we were the youngest, well, I was, so I went first, but I could only open one package, and then we had to wait until everybody else opened one before we could open another one? And Father said it was good discipline?”
Lizzie smiled, nodding.
“I hated it then, did you?”
“No. It helped to conceal the fact that I got so many fewer presents than all the rest of you. After I’d opened my last box—it was always a bathrobe or a blouse, something I really didn’t care about—I could slip away with the presents I loved, the books, and no one would even notice.”
“Well, I had lots of presents of course. And I hated it then. But I think we should do it today. Not for discipline—just to draw it out. To exclaim over each thing. To appreciate each thing fully. What do you say?” she asked her sisters.
They liked the idea, so when all the gifts had been distributed, Mary told Marie-Laure to go first. Not knowing she would be there, the sisters had not brought presents for her, but Mary had brought so many that the girl had as high a heap as the others. She pulled languidly at the string on one box, while the others watched. It took her a long time to loosen it, then, using her hands delicately, careful of her long nails, she savagely tore away the beautiful heavy wrapping paper. She pulled out a pair of white silk pajamas.
“Oh, cool. Thanks,” she said, dropping the pajamas back in their box, picking up her beer.
Their faces shadowed with disappointment, but Mary said cheerfully, “I’m glad you like them. Ronnie’s next!”
She opened a huge box, Elizabeth’s gift, a fleece-lined calfskin jacket richer than anything she had ever owned, or even seen close up. She looked up at Elizabeth with glistening eyes.
“When I looked at it, I just felt it was you,” Elizabeth said dismissively feeling banal.
But they all said something similar as each gift was opened, because they had all chosen their gifts with the same deep interest, the same deep sense of who the other was. And except for Marie-Laure, who greeted all her presents listlessly, they paid the same kind of attention to the opening of the gifts, exclaiming over each, discovering in each what made it special, gorgeous, one more item in a treasure heaped at their feet, the marvels the world had to offer, all the beauty and wit of human production, the making of things for the delectation of the senses. So as a chorus, they remarked on the lovely richness of color of the cashmere sweater Mary had chosen for Ronnie, the lovely structure of the lightweight denim jumpsuit Elizabeth gave Alex, its pale soft color, its wonderful weight and texture, its fitness for hard work in a tropical climate. And so it went through the light nylon windbreaker Mary gave her, which would fold into nothing and never wrinkle; and the gorgeous square scarf Elizabeth gave Mary, threaded with gold and purple, that illuminated her eyes, and the tiny velvet purse Alex had discovered for Mary lined with satin, as beautiful and luxurious as Mary herself. For Elizabeth, Alex had found a globe of the world that came with a set of paste ons that changed borders and country names at will, and Mary had found an antique Mexican silver cigarette case with the Aztec calendar on its face.
Ronnie’s eyes burned. They had all also bought small gifts for each other—handkerchiefs, sachets, perfume, potpourri, soaps, chocolates filled with liqueurs and creams. She did not belong in this company; she did not understand gift giving like this. In her world one never bought useless things, things you did not absolutely need. Her small offerings fell to the bottom of the pile, and she dreaded their discovery.
But eventually, of course, they were discovered.
By this time, they had lost track of turns, and Elizabeth opened her small package. “From Ronnie!” she announced tearing the paper, as if she were surprised, as if she had not expected a gift from Ronnie. She stared down at two tapes of Bill Evans and his jazz group in performance. She gazed at Ronnie. Her eyes filled.
“Ronnie!” she said softly. “How did you know I love Bill Evans? And this one has ‘I Was Up with the Lark Today’! My absolute favorite!”
Ronnie squirmed, studied a bird pecking at a last crumb. “Yeah. You mentioned it once.”
“And you remembered.” Elizabeth stood up, crossed the room, embraced her. “Thank you so much! So much! I can’t tell you what this means to me. Brings back … my old tape is long gone, wrecked … I played it so often. And it had so many memories,” her voice trailed off wistfully.
Mary watched jealously. “It must be my turn, isn’t it? What did I get?” she cried, tearing open her gift. She examined the two books—poems by Sharon Olds and Barbara Greenberg. “Oh, I love Sharon Olds! And Barbara Greenberg! Yes, I bought a book of hers, I was reading it when I was here, but this is a different one, oh, Ronnie, you remembered! Thank you, thank you!”
Alex ripped hers open. She exclaimed “Stein—my name?” and studied the book, read the jacket copy aloud. “‘A biography of Edith Stein, the only Jewish Catholic to become a saint.’” Her eyes raised to Ronnie. And she wept.
So it had worked after all, her gifts were the hit of the day, treasured more than the scented, the luxurious, the luscious, the opulent. They were treasured for the memory in them, for the love required to store up memory. But replete with food of every sort, nourished to their bones, they were all affectionate with each other that day, ardently insistent on saying and doing what would make the others feel loved, valuable. Although dinner was served at three so the servants could get home to their own families and their own Christmases before too late, they all dressed for dinner. And again, Ronnie felt loved, accepted, treasured, as they all exclaimed over her new black velvet smoking suit, Mary wore scarlet satin, low-cut and slim-skirted, and Alex wore a beautifully draped turquoise silk dressier than anything they had ever seen her in. Even Elizabeth conceded to the occasion and wore a dress, a pale blue wool that made her eyes brilliant. Marie-Laure wore a skinny short black skirt over a black leotard and very high black heels.
Determined not to let the girl ruin their day, the sisters ignored her sullen silence to chatter and gossip and praise the food, making the meal another orgy of delight. They were so saturated with good feeling that they sent the servants off (heaped with Christmas gifts, cookies, and bottles of wine) as soon as they had served the dessert—a real gift, since much cleaning up remained to be done. But they said they would do it themselves—after a brisk walk through the woods to burn off some calories. Marie-Laure, who had not eaten enough to need to walk it off, stayed behind. She lay on her bed smoking, wearing earphones and listening to rock tapes, staring at the ceiling. Bundling into heavy coats, the sisters did not mention her, but they were relieved at her absence. They walked for a long time in silence. When they began to speak, their voices seemed to reverberate in the evening light. Serenely they returned to clean up the kitchen with music on the tape deck, a little singing, a little dancing, and some hilariously incompetent tap dancing. And the work went fast enough with four of them, so who can say when it was, what it was that turned things, what exploded a perfect day into fragments that had not even seemed to exist within it.
&nbs
p; Maybe there can’t be any perfect days, Ronnie thought later.
Maybe it was when they were walking in the woods and Mary began to compare the beauties and pleasures of Islamic art, the Alhambra in particular, with the great Christian cathedrals.
“They were of course brilliant mathematicians, those old Moors, and their craftspeople were superb, but the way they used light, drew it in, used shade for coolness, the way they built everything—gardens, fountains, pavilions—to celebrate the sensuous pleasure of the created world, it all seems to me so much more humane and moral than the austere straining against created nature that you find in the cathedrals. All those arches struggling to stay erect, straining to hold up a roof that never needed to be so high, that was so high only to daunt, to make people feel insignificant. All that cutting out of light, turning everything into dank dark shadows, into stone, into blue glass. It’s cruel and antihuman and denying of pleasure—and after all those poor people had little enough—in the name of some god, some power. The west is really crazy,” she concluded.
“But it’s precisely that effort,” Elizabeth burst out (could that be anger in her voice?) “that makes them so splendid! The struggle to go beyond the mundane, the struggle not to live like sensuous animals, to give life significance—that’s what makes the cathedrals great!”
“Well,” Mary said easily, “if I had to choose between pleasure and significance in life, I’d take the first any day. Any significance you can come up with you have to invent. At least pleasure is real and it nourishes you. Like us today.”
Ronnie braced herself for a nasty “Well you!” but Elizabeth tightened her lips and said nothing, and the moment passed.
Or maybe it was when Alex, staring at a leafless tree, suddenly began to talk about the condition of the dispossessed peasants in a town in Brazil, describing hovels and huts built on a hillside, men who worked cutting sugarcane for fifty cents a day, not enough to feed a family, the women working as domestics or laundresses for even less. The women had to come all the way down the hill every day at dawn for water, which was delivered in limited supply. If they were lucky enough to be in the front of the line they got water, then had to carry it back up the steep hillside on their heads. If they didn’t get water, they had to use river water, deeply polluted by the chemicals used by the cane growers and filled with parasites. In any case, they had to wash clothes in the river. Most of their babies died, Alex said, of starvation and thirst, but whenever they tried to organize themselves to create a crèche or a clinic, the wealthy cane growers and professional men of the city denounced them as communists and thwarted them. They prevented clean water lines from being put through, or electricity, so huts often burned from spilled kerosene. And they denied that the people were starving.