Any Minute I Can Split (28 page)

The Adamses had never known her mother. This was somehow unbelievable to her. Roger's parents and her parents had never met.
Do you know, Mr. and Mrs. Crowley Adams, that she is dead? My mother? Whom you never expressed the remotest interest in meeting? Who when she was young, before her foothold was taken away, had so many little talents that the problem was thought to be which she might fully develop? She could sketch a little, sculpt a little, play the piano and dance but had insufficient drive to continue any of those activities when she could no longer have lessons in them.

How many times had she seen Roger's family herself, outside of Christmases? Six Christmases, each more funereal than the last. The four of them, plus Roger's father's brother who'd never married, plus (sometimes) Roger's mother's kid brother who'd been married four times and was as likely to show up with a past or future wife as with his present one. The place was briefly alive while he was there but otherwise it was an unremittingly dismal formal occasion, more
like a board meeting than a holiday, a polite stock-option-giving ceremony from which, as little as they seemed to have given emotionally, Roger's parents always had to recover by going to Nassau for three months. Not the least of the blessings of being at the farm this past winter had been escaping the Adams Christmas.

“Roger?” She sat up suddenly. “What did you tell your parents last Christmas?”

“I told them the babies were too young to travel so we wouldn't be down.”

“They must have known that didn't make sense.”

Roger laughed shortly. “You have to think about something to know whether it makes sense.”

“Roger?”

“Mmm?”

Do something to reassure me, Roger. Tell me that the more things change the more they remain the same or something like that.

“I've been dreaming about my mother.”

He groaned. “I thought you were past that.”

You've got to be kidding, Roger. The past isn't what's finished it's only what's invisible.

“Everything's flooding back on me. I almost feel guilty I haven't thought of her more since I've been here.”

“You can go to confession while you're in Philadelphia.”

“Very funny.” But it made sense for the trip to bother him as much as it did her. More, even, just as
he
was less upset by
her
father. Now he was building up his shell.

“Are you sure they'll be there?” They did spend most summers at home in Ardmore since they'd sold the camp on the Jersey shore when the area got built up. Why should they go anyplace, as Roger's mother had said, when the club had a marvelous pool and eight tennis courts? Roger's mother was a superb player, as unlikely as her squat frame and spindly legs made her seem for the role.

“Mmmm. We faked a call to Sillsy.” Sillsy was Sarah Adams. They all had nicknames, that brave Wasp attempt at warmth roughly comparable to trying to heat a house with a can of Sterno. Crowley was Cowpey, Roger's baby pronunciation having stuck where nothing before had.

“Don't you think we should let them know we're coming?”

“Uh uh. I don't want to give them time to build up their defenses.”

“Don't you think they'll resent it if we just drop in on them out of the blue?”

He shrugged. “If they're resentful then they'll feel guilty and we'll get the money twice as fast.”

Roger the Master Manipulator.

“That sounds awful,” she said.

“That's all right,” Roger said. “We're talking about awful people.”

D
OWN
91, then ugly 95, then across Westchester to the Tappan Zee. She looked toward Hartsdale, waiting to feel a pang, but there was nothing. Roger had filled in the space between the front and back seats and put the crib mattress across the whole thing. In the hot breeze, naked except for their diapers, the twins slept on and off the whole time. Margaret did, too. Across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania.

“I'm so hungry,” she said. She'd awakened with it, an absolutely ravenous feeling.

“You had three breakfasts, for Christ's sake.”

It was true. She'd sat there at the kitchen table, not wanting to leave, thinking of one thing after another to delay departure, and as the others had come in for breakfast or fresh coffee she'd joined them. Coffee and bread and eggs, then coffee and cereal, then more coffee, and, when Starr and Carol brought them in, blueberries, the first of the season, with top milk. When Roger had finally scooped up both girls in exasperation and started out of the house, she'd buttered another piece of bread to take with her, in addition to the bread
and fruit she'd packed for the twins so they wouldn't have to stop along the way. Roger always hated to stop along the way, no matter where they were going and how little he might actually want to get there.

“But we've been in the car more than six hours since then,” she pointed out.

“Will you stop it?” Roger said irritably. “We're almost there and you've had enough to eat to last you a week.”

“I'm fortifying myself,” she said. “You should understand that.”

A
ND
then they were in Ardmore. Beautiful Ardmore. What people once thought suburbs were going to be like. If the houses were a bit close together, well Philadelphians were used to that sort of thing, and the stone was so thick as to constitute an adequate barrier between neighbors who didn't tend to spill over each other with noisy warmth, anyway. They were busy people, desirable neighbors. A gynecologist on one side, an ear-nose-throat man on the other and a heart surgeon across the street. Margaret's mother would have thought she was in heaven. The taste in the buildings and the landscaping was uniformly good and of course subdued. It had been a major coup of Roger's, the year he turned twenty-one and spent a summer at home while his parents were in Europe, to have ordered installed a kidney-shaped swimming pool that took up most of their back grounds. Taste was terribly important. It was their word for life style and it was mistaken for content just as often as the latter. The crucial aspect of bad taste was that it revealed something about you that it was inappropriate for others to know.

I
CHABOD
Moses, the family retainer, opened the door, greeted them calmly but warmly, ushered them in. Ichabod had once had an identity of his own. A wan, genteel, young soul, 4F during the Second World War by virtue of asthma and several other physical difficulties, he'd come to them in 1942 when they were still
living in West Philadelphia. Roger was three and Roger's father had gone off to be a Colonel in the war effort and it was thought that Sillsy should not be alone in the house with only the maid and the cook, also female, for protection, but at first no one could think of a satisfactory method or excuse for having a workman actually living in the house; it wasn't like the camp, with its separate cottage a few hundred yards away. Then a friend of Crowley's had mentioned his nephew from Minnesota who was looking for a teaching position in Philadelphia, and Crowley had asked whether the young man might be interested in living with them as Roger's tutor. From the beginning Roger had adored and terrorized Ichabod; from the beginning Roger's mother had had to protect Ichabod from Roger's temper. But from the beginning Roger had truly learned from Ichabod, whom he had christened Itchy. He learned to read, he learned to write and he learned arithmetic well before entering school, a fact which, combined with his difficult temperament, created enormous trouble when he had to sit still in school and learn the same things all over again.

There were two strange facts, though, connected to the tale of Roger and Itchy. The first was that as Roger precociously acquired knowledge from Itchy, Itchy himself seemed to shed it. The second was that as Itchy in his years with the Adamses lost his education, so did he lose the second striking aspect of his persona, his physical ailments. The asthma that had plagued him since childhood; the arthritis that had overtaken him in his teens; the nervous stomach that had prevented him from digesting well—all gradually disappeared, to be replaced by strong capabilities in fields like carpentry, plumbing and electric work. So that Margaret, meeting Ichabod years later, had assumed him to have become the family retainer by virtue of lowly birth and lack of education combined with strength and know-how.

Ichabod led them into the parlor. Outside it was still hot and sunny but the house was cool. She found herself
wondering what time it was and realized that at the farm they never thought about time. There was the clock-timer on the stove for cooking and baking and a clock-radio in De Witt's room which was occasionally set for some special reason.

The parlor had been redone since their last visit, or maybe just for the warm weather; everything was lovely and light and airy. A pale Chinese rug on the floor, pale yellow silk upholstery on the sofa and chairs, sheer white curtains at the windows. The clock on the white mantelpiece said it was five-thirty.

Where did you put the babies in a room like this? She held Rosie, who was still sleeping. Roger put down Rue on the rug.

“You're looking just fine, Margaret,” Ichabod said. “And I see you've got yourself two beautiful girls.”

She kissed his cheek. He blushed.

“How you been, Rodge?” he asked.

“Okay, okay, Itch,” said Roger. “How's things?”

“Just about the same as ever,” said Ichabod.

“Where's Sillsy?” asked Roger.

“Sarah's taking a shower, I believe.”

You swam in the pool to wash off the sun and took a shower to wash off the chlorine.

“How about Cowpey?”

“Still at the Club, I believe.”

This could mean that he was at the Club but was also a code phrase used to describe Crowley's whereabouts on days or nights when he disappeared without letting anyone know where he would be. If Sillsy and Cowpey went to the Club together they went in separate cars so Sillsy could come home earlier if she got tired—or if she'd been away from Mr. Boston too long, as Roger put it.

“Could someone make us something to eat?”

“Why surely, Maggie,” Ichabod said, and headed toward the kitchen.

Her arm was beginning to ache from carrying Rosie, and the crook of her elbow, where the baby's heavy sleeping head lay, was hot and sweaty. You couldn't
put down a baby on a lemon-silk sofa which would be stained irreparably by a bit of sweat or dribble; the carpet had no softness and would irritate her skin; the chairs had the same light covering as the sofa. In Brattleboro, with an anti-ecology guilt twinge, she'd bought a box of disposable diapers which was all the twins were wearing at the moment. What if they leaked? For the first time she had on the twins' behalf that sense she'd had on her own so often during her childhood, the sense of not having a fitting place to be, of being rather larger and grimier than a proper human being had a right to be.

Damn it, she was going to sit on the sofa. Rosie would still be warm in her arms but not nearly as heavy. She tried to remember whether her smock was clean. She'd been wearing it since the day before. In previous times she'd carefully planned what she'd wear in Ardmore but at the farm she'd seldom given a thought to what she was wearing. Would she rise from the sofa to find that the seat of her dress had left on that lemon silk some remnants of flour dust, cooking stains, mucous wiped off her hands onto her ass because no dishrag was available? The hell with it! She would sit down! In her left hand she held the twins' sleeveless smocks that were cut from the same piece of red floral cotton as her own. At the farm you cut things from the same piece because it was the obvious thing to do; here they were mother-daughter outfits, too corny for words. Then, too, the cotton itself, purchased in Brattleboro for forty-nine cents a yard, had seemed bright and beautiful at the farm, while here she became aware of the coarse grain of the cotton and the gaudy nature of the print.