Caroline's Daughters (11 page)

And so Caroline and Aaron, in another phrase from that time, “got serious.” They progressed from parked cars to Aaron's room
at Amherst; Caroline by this time was a freshman at Vassar. And then, on some steamy afternoon in the spring of 1943, during one or another jubilant act of love, Caroline became pregnant, and so they got married, in Molly Blair's pretty house. And then Aaron went off to war, to Okinawa, where he was killed. And Sage was born.

But it all really began out on the dance floor at the Katonah roadhouse, dancing to something pretty and quite ridiculous, like “Dancing in the Dark.” Which this band, at this preposterous party, is playing at this moment.

“Would you care to dance?” Unnoticed by Caroline, a man from across the table has got up and come around to stand beside her, just after the
filet japonais
. A tall dark bald man, shining skin taut across his bare skull, heavy dark brows and arrogant, sexy eyes. He too looks vaguely familiar—but, then, everyone does, in this room.

Murmuring some assent, Caroline gets up and follows him to a small dance floor (Katonah-sized), where other couples are making the same brave effort.

This man is an excellent dancer, graceful and confident, strong. Too bad there is not more room and a better band, thinks Caroline; they would have had so much more scope, she could follow this man through almost any dance, she thinks. What fun!

Believing, though, that women are supposed to make some sort of conversation, having been so instructed by Molly Blair, instead of just dancing, enjoying it, Caroline says, “I didn't get your name, I'm sorry, so hard to hear—”

“Roland Gallo. And you're Caroline Carter, formerly McAndrew, right?”

Caroline misses a beat and steps on his foot. “Oh, sorry.”

He holds her more closely but Caroline has stiffened. Then she silently laughs at herself as she thinks, Am I supposed to be the avenger of my daughter's old broken heart? She smiles up at Roland Gallo. “Yes, I am Caroline Carter.”

And he smiles back, a very sexy, acknowledging look. “I do know some of your daughters,” he tells her. “As a matter of fact I met Fiona just last week, in her very spiffy restaurant.”

“We seem not to go there,” is Caroline's comment, as she realizes that this fact might seem a little odd to anyone else. “My husband
dislikes nouvelle cuisine,” she explains. As she is thinking, Oh, my poor Sage, this guy is a very sexy piece of business.

And then the dance is over, and Caroline and Roland Gallo exchange small regretful smiles, and push their way back through the dancers and then through tables to their own table, their separated seats.

Where at last the dessert is being served. The wedding cake.

Surely, thinks Caroline, after this it will be time to go home? However, apparently not. There is a general movement toward the dance floor, or floors, and just as Caroline has finished her last bit of cake, which was delicious, saffron-flavored, at her elbow she hears, “Caroline, couldn't we have this dance?”

It is not Roland Gallo (no such luck), but a tall thin man with wispy thinning blond hair whom at first she does not quite know but who is—dear God, how could she not recognize him?—Jim McAndrew, her second husband. The father of three of her daughters. “How terribly nice,” she murmurs, assenting to the dance.

Jim is not a good dancer. Clumsy and insecure, no rhythm. Almost automatically Caroline finds herself taking over, helping out. As it was in their marriage. And what a joke, really, these relationship power struggles are, she thinks, when it matters so fiercely who does what, works at what, earns more. I do hope younger people manage to work things out better than we did, she thinks, though I don't see a lot of hope in my daughters' relationships.

“Well, how do you like San Francisco, now that you're back?” Jim asks, speaking into her ear; they are just about the same height, due to Caroline's heels.

“Oh, rather mixed,” she tells him. “I love our house, but I sort of miss the homey old neighborhood. You know, out in the Mission. And I think Ralph misses it even more than I do. He's not exactly a Pacific Heights type, you know.”

A little stiffly, “I suppose not.”

Too late Caroline recalls that Jim does not know Ralph—oh Christ, of course not. He only knows what he's read in the papers about this “labor firebrand, this hulking radical.” And he knows that Ralph was the man with whom he saw Caroline coming out of a motel on Lombard Street, fatally, late on a lovely spring Wednesday afternoon, when Jim was driving back from an innocent afternoon
of tennis in Marin. And Caroline stood in that motel parking lot with Ralph Carter hulking beside her, Caroline smiling beatifically into the sun and not quite seeing Jim as he drove past. (This incident is one of Caroline's reasons for insisting on the smallness of San Francisco.) “It's great for us to be so near the girls,” she says—mainly to change the subject.

“I mostly see Sage, or sometimes Liza and the kids. But Sage comes around—” Jim's voice trails off huskily.

And Caroline recalls what she has considered his somewhat mawkish affection, always, for her daughter,
her
daughter, when after all he has three of his own.

“Wonderful news of Sage, don't you think?” Jim goes on so warmly and happily that Caroline chides herself for negative views. Jim is simply being kind to Sage, that's all, and God knows Sage could use a little more kindness in her life, especially from men.

“It is great news; now Jill's the one I worry about.” Caroline has not known that she would say this.

“Oh, why?”

“I don't know, she's so thin. She looks strained. Unhappy.”

“They're all too thin. Stressed out.”

“I guess.”

Bumping around the small floor with Jim, for the first time Caroline thinks, And just where is Ralph?

And then she sees him: Ralph is dancing with the bride, in a far corner of the very small dance floor. Dancing to music that is slow and saccharine and very familiar. Tall heavy Ralph and the tall, very beautiful, truly radiant dark bride, small ringlets escaping from her smoothly knotted hair down her smooth olive-skinned neck. They are dancing, Ralph and that girl, barely moving, both smiling as though at some secret joke.

Caroline feels a sharp jolt, a lunge of heated blood: it is sexual jealousy, pure and simple and terrible, and instantly recognized as such—although jealousy has not really been experienced by Caroline for many years, not since the early days with Ralph, when she used to worry obsessively about all those former wives, all three of them, and those even more threatening lady friends. Along with the jealousy Caroline feels its frequent concomitant, strong sexual arousal, pure lust, so acute that she has to laugh at herself, though on the
surface she is merely smiling, pleasantly, as she dances with her nice former husband, Jim McAndrew. But such craziness, and at her age! And all over Ralph, who is only doing what all gentlemen at weddings are supposed to do, he is dancing with the bride.

“It's really nice to see you,” Jim is saying, as he steps sharply across her left instep. “Oh, sorry. Maybe we could—”

“Have tea or something? Well, that would be awfully nice. And now I must go collect Ralph. I'm sure he's forgotten that we have an early date with a contractor tomorrow.”

“Some expensive bash.”

“Well, what do you think it cost? You know, I'm not great at calculations,” Caroline on the way home asks Ralph, rather tipsily.

“I'd say thirty thou, but Roland Gallo put it at more like forty, and he'd be more apt to know.”

“You talked to Roland Gallo? You're friends?”

“Sure, we're sort of old buddies. I used to see him around City Hall all the time. His politics are quite okay, actually. He's just rotten with the ladies. But you mean you spent all that time dancing with him and you didn't talk?”

“Of course we did, but not about how much the party cost. Honestly, Ralph. Though of course it is interesting. All that money.”

“Goddam right it's interesting. Thirty or forty thou for a fucking wedding? Lucky no one in that group's running for public office.”

“Well, why didn't you just ask the beautiful bride how much it all cost, speaking of dance-floor conversations?”

This half-drunken and fairly heated conversation takes place in Ralph's old Mercury, in the brief drive between the marble mansion and the home of Caroline and Ralph.

Who, at their door, disembark with not quite sober dignity.

In their separate bathrooms (a marvellous new luxury for them, in this new house) they undress and wash. Caroline very much wishes she had not had so much to eat and drink, and she thinks, Are all men dirty old men, at heart? I suppose they are. But, Lord, that girl could be Ralph's granddaughter.

As Ralph in his bathroom is thinking, Roland Gallo, Jesus Christ. He's laid everything in town, including Sage, for God's sake. I always
thought my Caroline was too much of a snob for that sleazy bald dago.

And then they meet in bed, very eagerly, where for the next fifteen or twenty minutes they experience the liveliest, the most intense pleasure of and from each other that they have known in many months.

E
ven the weather is conspiring, Sage now feels, to make her perilously elated: how can she expect to calm down and to be simply, quietly happy when July, normally such a terrible month of cold wind and heavy fog in San Francisco, this year is brilliantly blue from early morning on, and warm, with the gentlest, most seductive breezes? Even the usually gray San Francisco Bay looks blue, and is festively strewn with white sails, and rippled here and there with streaks of waves, like a small inland sea.

But she must calm down, Sage knows that. She has a lot of work to do before her show.

Sheer physical fatigue has been most helpful for almost anything that is wrong, in Sage's past upheavals, and so now she walks a great deal, hoping for peace. She walks from her own house on Russian Hill to North Beach, and up and down Grant Avenue, past all the seedy old once-beatnik haunts, past uninviting small shops, full of old stamp collections, dingy jewels, and a few new boutiques of expensive, downtown clothes. Past new bars and experimental restaurants, across Columbus Avenue and up through Chinatown, where despite the jarring crowds, the sheer press of terrific overpopulation, Sage is assailed by the most marvellous food aromas, spicy, exotic, tantalizing—so enticing that she hurries home to make a sandwich for her lunch.

And then to work.

• • •

What she is working on, when, these days, she can and does work—what she absolutely must finish before the show—is the mother group, the woman with her five daughters that she first began to contemplate, to imagine, on the day of the welcome-home lunch for Caroline and Ralph (when Fiona brought all that ludicrous food and Jill was so especially bitchy, Sage thought). This matriarchal group will in no way be specifically
them,
and God knows not recognizably so, not really Caroline and her five daughters. Just six related female figures, one of whom is considerably larger, more in control and more beautiful, more reposeful than the other, smaller five, who also vary among themselves as to size and shape, awkward restiveness or grace (the most reposeful, most graceful of the smaller figures is also the heaviest: is that Liza?). No faces are in the least defined, just figures. Sage is all absorbed in this project, fascinated. She is so pleased with its concept that she can hardly bring herself to its implementation, a seemingly contradictory condition that she has experienced before.

But she does. She surprises herself with the prolonged intensity of her work, and with the amount that she gets done. By the end of that afternoon, the largest figure, who is seated, is almost there, large and reposing, with a quality of waiting, of peaceful expectation, that Sage had neither planned nor foreseen, but that she very much likes.

And all the time she is thinking, thinking and saying to herself, New York. A gallery in SoHo.

Noel is indecisive or in any case vague about whether or not he will come along to New York with her. “It really depends,” he tells her, presumably meaning his work. “Do I have to decide right now?”

“No, of course not.” And, saying that, Sage thinks of another time, almost exactly two years back, when she had to go or felt that she had to go to Los Angeles, to take some slides around to galleries there (everyone said artists had a much better chance down there, San Francisco being so very conservative, art-wise). And she wanted
Noel to come too, she wanted (she told him this) to make an interesting, fun excursion out of what could be otherwise just a chore, a discouraging task. They could go to some galleries together; Noel likes to see paintings, he has an extraordinary if quite untutored eye. They could find some good restaurants, walk around. Make fun of Rodeo Drive, its horror show of commerce.
Have fun
. Sage said all that to Noel until she realized that she was pleading, and that the true point (as extremely intuitive Noel had no doubt grasped)—the real point was that she did not dare leave him alone. Even for one night.

Which of course was crazy: if he was “involved” with someone, as from various signs she often suspected that he was (those finger-round upper-arm bruises, his more-than-usual impatience and crossness with her), he could see
her
, whoever, at any time. He had all day to be out seeing someone else. And if, as Sage suspected, whoever it was was married,
she
was not free at night (or on weekends) either. And so to make sure that she, Noel's wife, was with him every night did not make sense.

At that time Noel decided not to go, after all, to L.A., and so Sage did all her business, all that discouraging legwork, in one day, leaving early and coming home late and horrendously tired. To find Noel asleep in their bed, of course, and annoyed that she woke him up—coming in, kissing him good night.