On Keeping Women (31 page)

“Does Father know?” he’d asked. He was a year younger then.
“Him?”
Chess said. And Reeny shut her up.

Charles thinks Father does know. Though Charles never will discuss it. Who Charles hates is Bets Kellihy. And what he calls the whole bog-rotten clan over there. Though he has a soft spot for Arthur, who makes him laugh. Arthur has a harder time than any poor butler should, Charles says. “But you go over there once more though, to bathe Dodo, I’ll beat the hell out of you.” That kid from the Missionary Institute, older than most paperboys, and a little odd from religion maybe; Charles was sent to pay him once. “Pay him for the Kellihys’ too—” Lexie said “—the boy looks so miserable.” Charles came back saying “The sods. The stinking sods.” Not to worry, his mother said. “We’ll get it back, from Bets.”

Does Charles know about his father and Bets? There’s an innocence about his brother which awes Royal. Or a willingness to believe the best. When he asked Chess she snapped, “Look in your notebooks.” She knows Royal’s worth investigating. She knows everything.

“Lexie’ll go to the party,” she said tonight. “You’ll see. She’ll even wear shoes to it.” Why else were they being packed off?—she said. Not just for them to be like other kids—hand it to Ma, she never did that to them. Chess, before going to the Hall, finally convinced to, is haughty, mocking. And in her own far-out eye marvelously dressed. Siding with Reeny, he isn’t so sure. “The lunks won’t get it,” Chess says airily. “But somebody will.” And one older boy had. But by that time, Lucy had arrived. And came all the way home with her.

When Charles knelt to her, saying what he said, he and Reeny held their breath. Would Chessie rage, stalk off, or retreat? In their span she’s done all of these. But never what they expect.

She said nothing. But her lips formed an Oh. She put out her hands, slowly, across something. Charles grasped them. The two of them held on. Like lightning, then, she broke away, leaping. Calling out, “‘Love and Friendship’!” They ran to the piano together and played it—as they had in their earlier teens. A Schubert duet with much crossing-over of hands. Higher and higher. Round and round. Loud. “Louder than the party!” she called. The music from the party wasn’t much yet—only a fever-clink sound of people, that stole in from next door and ripped off their silence, giving them nothing in return.

Afterwards, she had a lovely, sleepy sanity they’d never glimpsed before. And was easily urged to bed. Usually nobody ever succeeded in urging Chess. “Yes, sleepy,” she said, closing her door on them. But she left on her light. From the library window below her bedroom, the three of them saw the light falling on the grass, a shaft from the baywindow. Was she sitting there again? Charles on other nights has sneaked out the back way and out to the front; but one couldn’t see from the lawn. Out on the road, any passerby, walking either north or south, must see her. And be seen. So they’d have to take her on trust. For the night.

But when the three of them leaned in from the library window, it came Royal’s time. “I can tell you where Lucy lives.”

Charles haggardly stared at him. “Don’t you be fancy. I’m walking on my eyelids. Where?”

Royal led them there.

The tower is bare. No drawing materials, even no chair. The deep-ledged window looks out into the treetops like a pulpit in the air, with no sense of the house below. By day one can see north to the Kellihys’ rolling lawn, to the east, the wavering river and its far shore. Between it and them across the road, and directly in front of them, and some yards south of the white cottage opposite Kellihys’ where the retarded boy is sat every morning—is the high, dipping-off bank they call the dock. The tower walls are newly white and clean, left so by the last workman. In the middle of the floor are the roll of masking-tape he asked for, the handled blade he chipped the panes clear with, a dried-up paint-bucket and a flyswatter—all of which belong to them. The bucket is upended. Why would she sit up there though? Chess hates heights.

“Shhh, she’ll hear us. We’re right over her head.”

They aren’t; they’re off side. But it gave him kind of a thrill to say so.

“She said she’d sleep,” Charles says. “We have to trust her. Not just act as if we do. It’s the only way, with Chess.” He stares out the dark window. “With them.”

So he’s admitting it. What Royal’s been telling him. Suddenly he stepped back from the window and turned off the light. The long chain hanging down from the oldfashioned ceiling-bulb swayed between them in the dark.

“Somebody out there, Charlie? … Is it her?” Once, at the beginning of her trouble, her first night home from school she did that, raging out into the winter road and away from Dad. Standing out there, refusing to come in. Charles had finally persuaded her to.

“No. Come on, let’s go down.”

“Who was it?”

“Some man. And some woman. Going down to the dock.”

“Lemme see.” But the ledge is too high and deep. He can’t see over it. He lifts his hod-foot; he can’t get up there alone. And Charles, staring him down, won’t help.

They tiptoed down the stairs, passing Chess’ door, which was still closed, and on down the hall to his own room.

Charles is certainly white-looking. He collapses on the bottom of the bed. “Shut-eye. I’ve got to.” But it seems he can’t.

“You going to snitch on Chess, then,” Royal says, warily, “or aren’t you?”

“To who?” Charles grinds. “Who’s there to snitch to? To James?” And after a while, he does sleep.

You can’t really depend on anybody except yourself. And your notebook. Which now advises Royal—in between some notes he took at James’s lecture and a dainty drawing of Dodo Kellihy’s privates—that yes, according to his mother’s dates, she is in a proper physical state to receive a man if she finds one. So it was Lexie out there. With some man from the party. He can always read Charles.

And now, listen man. That couple. They’re coming into the house. The guy is, for sure. And he wouldn’t be here without Lex. His mother’s as lightfooted as Chess. Some mothers in a room are like mountains to climb over, but his mother lets them forget her presence. When other kids are in the house, she sinks back even; she is the mother-wraith. A light sorrow presses his chest. All his friends compliment him, on her good taste.

He knows the quality of Charles’ sleep. His brother’s forehead is already lined like a thirty-year-old’s. How must it feel, to care like that; to have an aristocratic self which won’t lie? Which can’t?

“Charlie. Wake up.”

He’s sleeping against his fist. The eyes open, blank. He wipes the wet from his mouth, smiling. “The in … tense inane.”

“What?”

“I was walking up it. Up a pure stair.” He doesn’t move.

“Listen.”
He whispers it. “Somebody’s out on the porch. They’re coming in.”

When the front door is shut down below, however quietly, a shock of air travels up the stair, all the way to the back, to warn. The old house cooperates.

Charles can’t wake. He turns his head from side to side, to show he can’t.

“
I
can’t go,” Royal hisses, raising his foot. “I make too much noise. And we have to. We have to know everything.”

“Chess?” his brother says drunkenly. “Oh Christ.”

He put his mouth to his brother’s ear. “Lexie and a guy, I think. It was them outside before, wasn’t it. She’s bringing him in… Chess’ll go off her rocker… Go on out. We got to.”

Charles is on his feet.

“Here,” Roy breathes, holding out his brother’s glasses. But his brother’s already out there.

Roy waits, his eyes bright. He has to know. Everything.

At the back of the long hallway a minute later Charles stands, swaying a little. The long dark passage is like the universe he’s been climbing in sleep, the same faint parallels converging on the ever-receding illusion nipped between them—a logical space draining toward an end conceivable.

Is that it—a man and a woman—or a girl—clasped, and musically grunting? The image at the top of the stair?

Inconceivable. Don’t look at it. Turn back.

In Royal’s room, he fell on the bed again.

“Who was it?” Royal whispers in his ear. “Was it them?” At no reply he mouths inaudibly,
“Lexie
and a guy? I only
heard
a guy.” He is watching himself in his chrome lamp.

“Gimme my glasses.” Charles put them on.

That’s the way to look at it. Lexie, made young by midnight grace. And the anonymous man he saw from the tower, going down to the dock with her. Now brought into the house.

Not his own father. With Chess.

Parallel lines. Which way will he have it?

He’s awake. He stands up, gripping the brass knob of the bed until fingers smart. He grips harder. It
was
Chess. And his father is home.

Choose, Charlie. In the lamp surface, Roy’s warped face is waiting.

“Must have been. Them.”

Downstairs, the door hushed closed. A man, going down the porch steps. With familiar tread. A guy, his father. Gone.

Royal hasn’t moved. A beetlewatcher, his arm slows wavily now in front of his mouth. His lower jaw drops, a mandible. At the same time, he grasps his left ankle with the other hand, laying himself along the bad leg in the exercise which both eases and stretches its shortened tendon. The angle of the foot is such that he can touch his chin to its arch. He rests there, goggling. “Well—now we know.”

The doctor is sitting on his own steps. Behind him, at the head of the flagged path, a second flight of five broad wooden ones leads to the wide porch that encircles the house. At the path’s bottom where he is, four high, narrow stone steps, early ones, lead sharply up from the road to the rise of land where the house is. All the old houses here have them. He is sitting on the top one, between two stone pillars. Added by some pretentious turn-of-the-century owner, he’s never thought of them as his own, or as belonging to the real house. Tonight he leans against the nearer pillar, his head between his knees, his wrists crossed over his genitals, trying not to retch. Don’t keep touching where it hurts, a doctor has to say, day after day. Tongue away from that sore; stop picking that scab. Hands off your eyes; stop rubbing them. Don’t keep trying to press it, that lump you didn’t know you had.

The pain in his groin is ebbing; he misses it, wishing he’d retched. Where does it hurt, still hurt? Where’s his injury? In the fatherhood? In the familyhood.
Where, oh where
—goes the song his mother sang—
has my little girl gone?
His own mother never had a little girl, except herself. What is a father? What is a family? He grasps the round stone ball on the righthand pillar, pushing his head against it. And again. The other stone ball waits for him. Everything’s touching him. Everything wants an answer, at once.

All he’d wanted was to give her the same kiss he always had, since her beginning. The kiss on the two-year-old top of her head where the single curl used to be. The hugged one for the mitten searching in what she herself had named his “candy-pocket.” The absent-minded evening kisses, the graduation one—where had they gone? When?

“Brought you a present?” He knows he said that. But which present had he had in mind? The earrings? Or the portfolio?

Or was it the fault of the damn nightgown?

When
did he know it was Chess? How long after did the kiss go on?
When
did his arms tighten, his mouth bruise down?

He groans. That sound he made. Just before he knew it was Chessie? Or just after he knew it wasn’t Lex? He can still hear it. He’s never made a sound like that one before. Or has he? Who’s he asking, pleading with?

Borden Wheeley would know. “Wey-
ull
… Lookit ole candy-pocket. Transplantin’ pussy, right in his own house.”

And then she kneed him. A pure action, straight from the adrenalin. As taught.

It was a kiss from Spain, polymorphous for all of them.

Whatever. Whichever. Chess will know.

As her doctor explained to him, that kind of straddle is
what
she does know, the very crux of her mental life. She sees the doubling alternative too clear—and everywhere. “It’s why she can never decide, never choose a path. We have to bring them together for her. If we can.”

“What a god-damn statement,” he’d said to Lexie that night, reporting, their arms linked. The psychiatrist linked them, every time, in a glossy hatred they could share. “If you see anything clear, oughtn’t you hang
onto
it?” she’d answered. In what James called her on-the-barricades voice. “If you see
anything.”

It’s all coming back to him. Home. A place where it never stays as dark any more, or as light, as it once did, Lexie said not long ago. Much of what she says has either no meaning to him, or an inaccessible one, but still sheds an aura that clings. Any room where his wife is seems always messy with her shadow—along with those shadowy women she ranges always beside her, related or not. Energy streams from her, center-less—one day a bilgestench, the next a sporadic perfume. When she does chop logic—and she can, God knows—she’s as hardened as one of the swart old nurses who dogged his training with servile malice, handing him a roll of gauze or a specific, or even a diagnosis he should have been quicker with. “Yes, so it was trachoma,” Lexie said in the cool chippy-voice she quarreled in, striding the hotel-room after her slum-spree in Montevideo. “Women
can’t
travel light. We’re in charge of the basic facts.”

The block of dark he’s staring into is whitening, lifting with a stirring freshness which should engage the heart. In another minute he’d be able to see the opposite riverline, two and a half miles out—the view people say they stay here for. And in its foreground, right across the road, the little promontory he owns. A bit of land that seemed always to be moving forward. Owning it soothes, like owning a wave. A private thought. Nothing that she dragged him to, in the way she does—caw-caw to every pebble on their common beach. In another minute (Dawn! she’d say) he’d have to hunker onto his feet and walk back into his history. The bag of presents is still upstairs, where he let it fall. A bag of farewells. Of noise, dropped inside his silent house. In a minute the cleansing sloth of invalidism will desert him. The power-web of his disease, that precious invigoration, will melt. He’ll be back in the crushing cell-drudgery of health. No, stay. Stay. I know where it hurts. I sight my injury. I want to be alone, with what I am.