Emma considered. “I’d like to, but I don’t think he will,” she said.
“Probably not. He doesn’t like being outshone by me,” Aurora said.
“Shoot, he’d be outshone by a twenty-watt bulb,” Rosie said. “Poor Emma, she was the nicest baby.”
“Momma, why are you being so mean?” Emma said. “Can’t you stop it?”
Aurora sighed. “It just comes out whenever I think of him,” she said. “Bad things always seem to happen to me on the day I try to pay my bills. Vernon’s been the only bright spot—that’s the man I hit. Rosie, I wish you weren’t eavesdropping.”
“All right, I’ll go out an’ rake the flowerbeds,” Rosie said. “I done know about you an’ Vernon, anyway. I seen it in his eyes.”
“Oh, well, I guess you did,” Aurora said. “Stay, I don’t care. I feel quite chaotic just now.”
She did too. She had passed through parts of the day without really feeling them, and now those parts were catching up with her. She had begun to feel them all, and they were contradictory and ambiguous, but with Emma on the phone and Rosie in the kitchen she was at least feeling them within familiar human boundaries. She felt strange, but not quite lost.
“What about this Vernon?” Emma asked.
“He’s fallen in love with me,” Aurora said quietly. “It took him about an hour. Actually I more or less made him, but he did it rather nicely and in his own way.”
“Momma, you’re crazy,” Emma said. “That’s just nonsense. You know that’s all a myth.”
“What is, dear?” Aurora asked. “I’m not following you, I’m afraid.”
“Love at first sight,” Emma said. “You certainly didn’t fall in love with him at first sight, did you?”
“No, I’m not so fortunate,” Aurora said.
“That’s silly,” Emma said.
“Well, you’ve always been a cautious child,” Aurora said, sipping a little tea.
“I have not,” Emma said, remembering Danny.
“Of course you have. Look at who you married. Any more caution and you’d be paralytic.”
“God, you’re awful,” Emma said. “You’re just awful! I wish I had somebody else for a mother.”
“Who would you like?” Aurora asked.
“Rosie,” Emma said. “She appreciates me at least.”
Aurora rapped on the table and held out the phone to Rosie. “My daughter prefers you,” she said. “She also denies that there is such a thing as love at first sight.”
“She ain’t seen Vernon,” Rosie said, seating herself on the end of the table. “Hello, honey.”
“Be my mother,” Emma said. “I don’t want my child to have a grandmother like Mother.”
“Drop ever’thing an’ come over here an’ see your ma’s new beau,” Rosie said. “He’s got millions.”
“She forgot to mention that, but so what.” Emma said. “Her yachtsman’s got millions too.”
“Yeah, but this one ain’t fancy,” Rosie said. “He’s just a plain old country boy. I wouldn’t mind marryin’ him myself, now that I’m single agin.”
“Royce didn’t really beat you, did he?”
“Yeah, he boxed me right on the head before I could stab him, the lying bastard,” Rosie said. “I just hope you never get into nothin’ like this, honey. Here I been takin’ time off to fix him lunch all these years and come to find out the sonofabitch has been running right off to that slut before he even gets ’em digested. You think that don’t hit you where it hurts?
“The lowlife sonofabitch,” she added, on reflection. “He ain’t gettin’ the kids, I can tell him that.”
“Stop swearing, and don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” Aurora put in. “If either of us starts feeling sorry for herself we’re lost. Just give my cautious daughter your views on love at first sight.”
“What’s Momma saying?” Emma asked.
“Something about you being precautious,” Rosie said. “I don’t know what she thinks is wrong with it. If I’d been a little more precautious I wouldn’t have so many mouths to feed now that I been deserted.”
“Maybe it’s not all that serious,” Emma said. “Don’t you think you might forgive him if he promises to behave?”
“Hold on a second, honey,” Rosie said. She took the receiver away from her ear and looked out the back window on the darkening yard. The question Emma had asked was the very question she had been turning over and over in her mind all afternoon, without arriving at any conclusion. She looked down at Aurora.
“I ortn’t to be talkin’ to our girl about such as this,” she said. “You think I’d be wrong to run him off? You think I oughta just… forgive an’ forget?”
Aurora shook her head. “You’re not likely to forget, I’m sure,” she said. “I can’t advise you about the other.”
Just as she thought she was back in control, Rosie found herself losing control worse than ever. Before she could get the phone back to her ear her lungs seemed to fill up, only with resentment and anger rather than air. It was the memory of how smug he’d been that did it. Having another woman was one thing, but being so smug about it, right to his own wife’s face, was something she’d never expected from Royce. If anything was unforgivable it was the look on his face when he told her—At the memory of it her throat began to jerk and she sat up straighter and went, “Uh… uh… uh…” as if she were trying to prevent hiccups. It was an effort not to cry, but it failed. She could only sit up so straight, and the resentment welled up out of her lungs into her throat and she was helpless. She handed the phone back to Aurora, got off the table, and went off, doubled over, to cry it out in the bathroom.
“Well, Rosie’s had to go and cry,” Aurora said. “Men have not improved, despite what you read. Hector Scott tried to blackmail me into going to Tahiti with him. He took a very nasty tone too.”
“What do you plan to do about Rosie?” Emma asked.
Aurora sipped her tea. She never liked to answer her daughter too hastily.
“Naturally Rosie is welcome to whatever she needs, if I have it,” she said. “I may propose that she stay here until Royce comes to his senses. My impression is that Royce is far too lazy to do without her very long. I expect he’ll try and make amends before very long. Vernon has gone to see to him now, in fact.
“I certainly hope Rosie will insist on lots of amends,” she added. “If I were in her shoes my demands would be extensive, I can tell you that.”
Emma snorted. “Flap says there are two things we’ll never be finished with,” she said. “Your demands and the national debt.”
“Oh, that’s a witticism, I suppose,” Aurora said. “I’ll remember who made it, if I can.”
“Why don’t you all come over here to eat?” Emma said. “I could manage that.”
“No thank you,” Aurora said. “Small as that place is we’d have to eat in our cars. Vernon has an ice box in his, did I tell you? Also a television.”
“You’re awfully flippant about that man,” Emma said. “I think that’s very unbecoming.”
Aurora set down her teacup. It was exactly the criticism her mother would have made, had her mother been privy to all that had been said. Unfortunately, there was no denying that it was just. She remembered Vernon’s contortions.
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right about me,” she said after a pause. “I’ve always been frivolous that way. I don’t start out to speak ill of people, I’m just unable to resist my little flippancies. I hope Vernon never finds out. He’s having my car fixed for me too.”
“He’s beginning to sound like Howard Hughes,” Emma said.
“Oh, no, he’s much shorter,” Aurora said. “He’s about level with my bosom.”
“Cecil misses you,” Emma said.
“Yes, I’m sure I have to rouse myself and do my annual duty by him,” Aurora said. Her annual duty was a dinner for Cecil and the young marrieds. Everyone dreaded it, and with good reason.
“Let’s do it next week,” she added
. “I’ve begun to feel it hanging over me. If you don’t mind, I’m hanging up now. I don’t feel quite myself, for some reason, and I don’t want us having a fight while I’m defenseless.”
She did hang up after saying good night, and then she went around the kitchen turning on the lights and inspecting her food-stocks. Usually she had enough food on hand for several interesting dinners, but when the need for one actually arose it was always necessary for her to do a certain amount of checking. When she was fully reassured about her meats and wines and vegetables she put all thought of dinner aside and went out into the back yard to walk slowly around in the dusk for a while, hoping her feeling of strangeness would go away.
Part of the strangeness was not really strange—it was the usual feeling of panic about money that came on her when it was time to pay her bills. Rudyard had not really left her secure financially, though she and everyone else continued to pretend that he had. There was so much income and no more. She really ought to sell her house and take an apartment somewhere, but she could never fool herself into thinking she meant to do it one day sooner than she had to. It would mean firing Rosie and pulling in her sails, and something in her resisted. As far as her sails went, it had taken her long enough to spread them, as it was; she was not inclined to pull them in until she had to. For four years she had gone along from month to month and bill to bill, hoping something would happen before matters got desperate.
The house was too lovely, too comfortable, too much hers—her furniture, her kitchen, her yard and her flowers and her birds, her patio and her window nook. Without them she would not merely have to change, she would have to find another person to be, and it seemed to her that the only person left for her to be, besides the person she was, was a very old lady. Not Aurora Greenway, but simply Mrs. Greenway. When the day came when everyone who knew her called her Mrs. Greenway, then perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much about the house. By then, if she were not dead, she would have dignity enough to manage anywhere—as her mother had managed in her last years.
But she was not ready. She wanted to manage right where she was. She could, if worst came to worst, sell the Klee. It would be a disloyalty to her mother, of course, but then her mother had committed a disloyalty to her in buying it with money that would soon have been hers. It would also be a disloyalty to Emma, because Emma loved it, but then Emma would someday get the Renoir and if she had any sort of life would come to love the Renoir more—far more—Aurora thought.
There was a new part to the strangeness, though—something more than panic about money—and it was the new part that she seemed to feel increasingly. It was not just loneliness, though there was that; nor yet just sexlessness, though there was that too: a few nights before, to her amusement, she had had a dream in which she opened a can of tunafish, only to have a penis pop out. It had actually been a charming dream, rather inventive, she thought, and her chief frustration in regard to it was that there was no one with whom she felt quite right about sharing it. Everyone she might have shared it with, her daughter included, would only have taken it to mean that she was considerably more fevered than she was.
In any case the strangeness was different from fever—it was more an off-centeredness, a feeling of distortion, as if already, years before her time, she was slipping away, losing touch, either falling behind or, perhaps worse, moving too far ahead. She had the feeling that everyone who knew her only saw her outward motions—the motions of a woman who constantly complained and wheedled affection. Her inward motions no one seemed to see. What frightened her was the knowledge of how much she had already learned not to count on, how much she could do without. If her inward motion was not checked she had the feeling that she would soon find herself beyond everyone, and that was the cause of the strangeness, which seemed to have chosen a physical place inside her, behind her breastbone. She could press hard against her chest and feel it, like a lump almost, a lump that sometimes nothing seemed to loosen.
While she was walking, hoping her back yard would set her right, she heard voices from the kitchen. Hurrying in, she found Rosie and Vernon standing by the sink in earnest conversation.
“He’s worked a miracle,” Rosie said. “Royce has decided he wants me back.”
“What did you do?” Aurora asked.
“My little secret,” Vernon said.
Rosie had collected her purse and was obviously ready to go home.
“I’ll worm it out of Royce,” she said. “Royce never kept no secret in his life.
“At least no nice secret,” she added, remembering something.
“Sure you don’t want me to run you home now?” Vernon asked.
“He’s a regular taxi service, ain’t he?” Rosie said. “It wouldn’t look too good in the neighborhood if I was to come ridin’ up in a big white Lincoln. I’ll just hop on down an’ catch my bus.”
“I find this all rather bewildering,” Aurora said. “Why are you rushing right back to a cad like Royce? You could sleep here tonight, you know. If I were you I’d let him cool his heels for twenty-four hours at least.”
“Just ‘cause I’m going back don’t mean I plan on callin’ things even,” Rosie said. “I ain’t forgettin’ nothin’. Don’t you worry.”
They all stood silently for a minute.
“Well, good luck, dear,” Aurora said. “I’ll cook Vernon a dinner and you go home and see what comes out in the wash.”
“Many thanks, Mr. Dalhart,” Rosie said at the door.
“Don’t you take any chances,” Aurora said. “If he shows any violent tendencies get a cab and come back here.”
“God didn’t build me to be no punchin’ bag,” Rosie said. “I ain’t too proud to run.”
“What did you do?” Aurora demanded as soon as Rosie was out the door.
Vernon fidgeted. “Offered him a better job,” he said reluctantly. “You’d be surprised what a raise and a good new job will do for a man like Royce.”
Aurora was astonished. “You hired my maid’s husband?” she said. “That’s almost presumptuous. What did Royce do to deserve a new job, may I ask? Were you offering a reward for wife beating?”
Vernon looked discomfited. “Them delivery routes gets old,” he said. “If a man goes on driving the same one year after year the monotony’s bound to get to him sometime. That’s how messes get started.”
“Quite true,” Aurora said. “However, Rosie’s work isn’t very exciting, and she hasn’t started any messes that I’ve observed. Not for lack of opportunity, either—there’s opportunity right down at the end of the street.”
She took her midget TV off the cabinet where it lived and set it on the table. Every day, in the hope of crushing the poor little machine—or so Aurora felt—Rosie wound its cord around and around it so tightly that usually the news was half over before she could get it unwound. Vernon leapt to assist her, and she noted with pleasure that it took him as long to get it unwound as it usually took her. He was mortal at least.
“What did you hire Royce to do exactly?” she asked, chopping up some mushrooms.
“Deliver for me,” Vernon said. “I got nine or ten little businesses around here an’ nobody to deliver things to any of ’em. I been needin’ a good full-time delivery man.”
“I hope so,” she said. It seemed to her that she had cost him an awful lot of money, in one day or less, and she didn’t even know the man. It didn’t seem quite ethical, but then she knew herself well enough to know that she couldn’t cook and resolve ethical dilemmas at the same time; since she was beginning to feel distinctly hungry she let the ethical matters ride and cooked an elemental dinner: a nice little steak, smothered in mushrooms, with some asparagus on the side, and plenty of cheese, much of which she herself ate while she was fixing the meal.
Vernon controlled his fidgets to the point of being able to sit down and eat, and at table he proved an excellent listener. The first thing to be done with anyone new, Aurora felt, was to exchange life stories, and she told hers
first, starting with her childhood in New Haven and sometimes Boston. Vernon consumed his steak before she had gotten herself out of the nursery, story-wise. She had never seen food disappear quite so rapidly, unless her son-in-law was eating it, and she watched Vernon closely.
“I suppose eating fast is a logical extension of your fidgets,” she said. “I think we must take up the question of a doctor for you, Vernon. I don’t know when I’ve seen such a nervous man. You’re tapping your foot at this very moment. I can hear the vibrations quite distinctly.”
“Uh-oh,” Vernon said. He stopped tapping his foot and began to tap his fingers on the table. Aurora let it pass and ate a leisurely meal, talking while he tapped. On the patio after dinner she noticed that his boots were extremely sharp-toed. They were on the patio because she had insisted that he have brandy with her, and she had insisted on that in order not to feel guilty about drinking some herself. Drinking brandy often made her tipsy, and once or twice her daughter had called and caught her in a tipsy state. Such a state would be easier to explain if she had a guest to blame it on.
“Perhaps boots are your problem,” she said. “I imagine your toes are in constant pain. Why don’t you take them off for a while? I’d like to see what you’re like when you aren’t fidgeting.”
Vernon looked embarrassed at the thought. “Aw, no,” he said. “No tellin’ what my old feet smell like.”
“I’m not squeamish,” Aurora said. “You can keep your socks on, you know.”
Vernon remained embarrassed, and she let him alone about his feet. “What time are you setting off for Canada?” she asked.
“Ain’t goin’ for a while,” Vernon said. “Put it off.”
“I was afraid of that,” Aurora said, looking him in the eye. “May I ask why?”
“Because I met you,” Vernon said.
Aurora sipped some brandy and waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “You know, you’re rather like my late husband when it comes to comment,” she said. “He made do with a minimum, and so do you. Have you ever postponed a trip because of a lady before?”
“Lord no,” Vernon said. “I never knowed a lady before, not to talk to.”