Any Minute I Can Split (23 page)

“I know,” she said. “But when I think about living here, Europe seems different.”

Roger rumpled her hair fondly. “At the rate you're going in another five years of country you'll be a reasonably sophisticated human being.”

A letter from Roger's mother.

June 7th, 1970

Dearest Roger:

I have your little note of June 3rd. At least I imagine it was written on or about the 3rd. I do wish you would remember to date your notes, dear, it makes filing so much easier.

It was pleasant to learn that you and Margaret and the twins are in good health. We look forward to a time when you will visit with us as we are naturally anxious to see our grandchildren.

Now about the money, dear, I have something to say which I fear will come as a shock to you. I have instructed Mr. Leddington to withhold your allowance until such time as you choose to return to a decent home and a normal way of life, such as it is. I realize that this is a much more drastic step than we took when you made your disastrous first “match,” when we only refused to pay the exorbitant bills we were frequently sent. The reason for this is that I have been seeing a psychiatrist, a kind and brilliant man named Dr. Pfensig, who has convinced me that your difficulties stem from my failure to be firm with you, to use the authority which he says is available to every parent. Dr. Pfensig says that I am so in awe of your intelligence that I have refused to influence you or to inculcate you with our values as every parent should do.

Well, dear, better late than never. I am withholding your allowance to express my disapproval of the way those people live. They are dirty, they are sex fiends and they take drugs. Please let me know when you have returned home so that I can instruct Mr. Leddington to resume your allowance.

Your loving mother,

Sarah Adams

Roger's face was a playground for astonishment, hilarity and rage. He would reread some line, like
they are dirty, they are sex fiends and they take drugs,
and begin to laugh and then stop abruptly and mutter furiously, “The fucking idiot, goddammit, the fucking idiot.” Or he would read
I have instructed Mr. Leddington to withhold your allowance
with fury but then begin to howl at her refusal to refer to his first wife by name, or at the name of the doctor, or
inculcate you with our values.
But then finally he could only repeat over and over in a tone of ironic awe,
Well, dear, better late than never.

He stared at the letter. “Menopause. Or maybe she's trying to kick Mr. Boston.”

Roger's mother was a secret drinker who kept bottles of Old Mr. Boston whiskey in her dresser drawers, shoe bags and so on.

They were lying in the pasture, having spent most of the morning tilling and removing the rocks from the land for the tender crops, which were ready to go in. De Witt had brought the mail from town. Paul had mown the pasture for the first time that spring and the smell of the damp, cut grass was sweet and powerful. Rosemary sat nearby, grabbing handfuls of the grass, stuffing them into her mouth then spitting them out. Tiring of the game she would watch Rue, who was gamboling fearlessly around the soft pasture land, once in a while stopping to pick some grass and dump it on Roger or Margaret. It was a clear bright day. A perfect jewel of a day. All the more precious because it couldn't last; tomorrow it would get warmer or moister or colder or something you didn't want it to do.

“On a day like this,” she said, “it seems impossible to think of ever leaving here.” Maybe it was that she'd been resigning herself to staying, anyway. There were really good things to be said for the idea. De Witt and Roger stayed up late into each night now, talking, and while she was jealous, she understood how good it was for Roger's mind to be working on something concrete.
When he really got going on some job, whether it was a film or sculpture or whatever, he became quite a different person; the dissatisfaction, the intensity, the restlessness, the ironic fantasies got channeled into what he was doing and life became easy and pleasant.

“Don't worry,” Roger said. “We're not leaving.” He stared at the letter. “The fucking idiot.”

Also, the letter from Roger's mother had given the farm the extra appeal of being difficult or impossible to achieve. Roger had arranged for brokers in Hartsdale to show the house but that could take ages. They had no idea of what Mitchell was going to ask for the farm. He'd picked it up for a pittance, something like eight thousand dollars, seventeen years before, but it was unlikely that this would be a factor; he was a businessman, after all, and the worth of the farm and the adjoining acreage, which he also owned, had multiplied geometrically several times since.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Obviously,” Roger said, “we're going to have to go to Philadelphia and talk to the idiot.”

“We?” Her heart sank. In Philadelphia she always felt as though she'd been embalmed a moment before dying.

He nodded. “All of us.”

They looked at the twins. Rosie had fallen asleep near them; Rue had finally stopped reeling around and was pulling apart some daisies.

Children, you are about to be manipulated for financial gain.

She sighed. “It seems like such a  . . . yicch thing to have to do.”

“Mmm,” Roger said. “Well, they'll never know the difference.”

“Do we have to go right away?” she asked, her stomach already twisting with dread.

“No,” Roger said, “we'll wait until we talk to Mitchell. He's coming up for the weekend of the Fourth.”

Mitchell is coming in a few weeks. Mitchell and
David's mother.
David's mother
. How was she supposed to talk to David's mother? Better not to think about it. Not to try to plan.
Oh, God, David's mother!

H
ANNAH
left under odd circumstances. She'd been depressed and withdrawn from the day of the incident with Roger. She'd attempted to maintain some sort of friendly contact with Margaret but the way she'd done it was by suggesting that together they'd been victimized by Roger and De Witt, a ploy which turned Margaret off because a) it was ridiculous and b) she felt that way herself. At the beginning of what was supposed to be the last week of school Hannah and Mira had a terrific row, or rather Hannah was terribly upset and railed furiously at Mira, who gritted her teeth and otherwise maintained a posture of benevolent condescension. As closely as anyone could tell—for Mira was charitably silent and Hannah immediately hitched up the trailer and took off—Hannah was upset because Lorna and Baba had been persecuting her children. Or rejecting them. Whichever was the greater. Hannah had a tendency to think that any child in an argument with her children's united front was persecuting them both but in this case, because of Daisy and Mario's greater age, size and sophistication, it seemed particularly ludicrous. Still, someone had seen Mario running to the trailer in tears with Daisy following languidly behind, and a moment later Hannah had burst out of the trailer, nearly crying herself, looking for Mira. Only Carol had mixed feelings about her departure; even Carol had grown weary of the heavy trip Hannah laid on her friends but she couldn't help regretting, she said sadly, the magnificent Hannah that could have been.

M
ITCHELL
and Becky were coming Friday morning. Roger spent a couple of days checking out real estate in the area so they'd have some basis for negotiating with Mitchell. There was a strange tense
feeling in the house. Mira was going around cleaning and double cleaning after everyone else. Starr was saying they didn't have to put on any goddamn show for anyone; what she was doing instead was making it a point not to do her regular chores, which refusal De Witt accepted with a smile on the grounds of temporary insanity, which Mitchell's visits often brought on. Paul and Jordan, it turned out, both entertained an inordinate hatred for Mitchell, and they disappeared without saying when they'd be back. Friday morning passed into afternoon and the visitors hadn't come.

Margaret was upstairs when the wine-red Aston-Martin, the only one she'd ever seen outside of a James Bond movie, pulled into the yard. Nobody had told her in advance about the car although there'd been some veiled jokes, and now the effect of the thing, flipping into the farm like a clerical error from another time dimension, was mind-blowing. Everything around it looked ten times as dilapidated as it had before as the car slid into the space between their shabby pickup truck and the weathered old barn, like some radiant, placid, space-age animal waiting to be milked. A large man and a small girl got out. Or was it a woman? It was hard to tell from the bedroom window; the shape was womanly but the ambiance was very young. It couldn't be David's mother. It
couldn't
be. Carol and De Witt came across the yard and hugged the visitors. Margaret sat down numbly on the bed. She'd been feeling nervous and defensive about meeting David's mother but the doll-like figure in the courtyard wasn't the person she'd felt defensive toward. Now she didn't know
how
she felt except that her heart was beating rather rapidly and she felt a strong reluctance to go downstairs. The twins were both napping. Margaret stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes but she was fully awake and the tension of trying to force her lids to stay shut began to hurt her eyes. She got up, combed her hair and wove it into one long neat braid, then went downstairs.

They were all in the common room, chatting pleasantly. De Witt got up and came over to her, put his arm around her.

“This is Margaret,” he said. “Who I've been telling you about.” His manner was just stiff enough to tell her that even he was not entirely at ease. “I was talking about David,” he said to her. “Telling Becky how you took care of him while he was here.”

She nodded but she couldn't talk. She felt as though she'd eaten a can of anchovies. She smiled feebly. Becky Kastle sat near Mira, drinking iced tea and eating strawberries and yoghurt. She was very pretty. She looked about twenty-five years old.

“We eat so much better here than we do in the city,” Becky said. It was one of the standard
turista
lines; they'd all gotten accustomed to the implied condescension in it; the marvel was that the Kastles, with their close ties to the farm, should still seem such tourists on it.

“Mmmmm,” Mitchell said, buttering a piece of bread. “We should send Pierre up here for some lessons.”

Mitchell was a pleasantly surrealistic-looking man, about six feet tall, built or evolved in the form of a Kokeshi doll, with half a head of silky black hair and the face of a cherub salesman who was his own best customer.

Becky giggled. “Pierre's our chef. It's against his religion to cook anything with less than half a pound of butter.”

“How my wife keeps her figure is another story,” Mitchell said.

His manner was jovial but his eyes were strangely evasive—as though he had to keep moving them away from you because it would be inconvenient for you to perceive his intelligence.