On Keeping Women (33 page)

James
—he heard her say once—
what am I overqualified for?

Chess is shivering. Unseeing. Like a statue coming to life.

No. She sees Maureen. Direct.

“I know I promised. I know.” But Reeny is stepping back, back.

“What, Reeny? What did you promise.” She can promise, Charles thinks. Why can’t I?

“We were going to live together. And have boyfriends. She says Ma puts me down. She said I could.” Reeny’s curly hair frizzes at him. “And I promised.” She whispers. “Never to let her go to a hospital… We swore it, Charlie. She’s afraid they’ll give her shock. She says it won’t help. She says she’s not insane enough … And that’s true; you know it is. She never says anything wrong. Crazy, I mean. Even about Lucy. Never. She only … well, you know.” A whisper:
Acts it.

Chess has stopped shivering. Her face is sad but not judgmental. Not of them. As if the world is listening over her shoulder but will never dream of answering. Her mouth is almost humorous.

Reeny kneels to her among the paper scraps. “Chess—I’m so tired… I’m so tired, Chess.”

But for once Maureen’s not going to cry. When you welsh, you don’t.

Royal limps to her. “You’re all crazy.” He dumps the kit down beside her. “Here. You’re gonna need it.” He turns on Charles, staring up. Defiance turns his fair skin to boiled milk; his feathery eyebrows crinkle in knots. He knows what they think of him. That only Ma is fooled. “Well—what did they swear it in—blood?”

Ohhhhh, Cha-arles. Reeny, from far off.

From the floor, Royal gawps up at him. When hit, he falls lightly. The heavens don’t fall with him. Who’d have thought? When someone hits Roy. “You might have broken me.” His voice is holy. “You might have
broken
me.”

Nobody moves to pick him up.

He feels over himself, largely. Scuffles to his feet, paper bits scattering. Bends suddenly, spry little cricket in his jointed way. “Hey. Hey. Lookit this. It’s from Dad’s typewriter. His
records.
Hoo-oo. Father’s
medical
records. She’s been tearing them up. Now will you listen to me?”

The scraps are on a familiar thin foreign paper, bluelined. Closely written though, unlike those sparse sheets to his mother. Letters to someone. He sifts the scraps, yearning. One says “—ear Cha—.” He can find only one fully legible. “What the Spanish” it says, in the old Hermes type. Yet there’s an identity to these bits of paper, a haze through the word-tatters, recalling instructions at times almost given him. An osmosis, between the ruled blue half-syllables, of feelings that almost spoke. “They’re from letters. To
me.
From Dad.”

“And she tore them up.”

Royal has his uses. Charles himself can’t say that to her. She can’t know how it must be for him. Those connections. They’re what she’s incapable of.

It’s brought her back, though. He knows that desperate smile. Its satire unites the two of them. “Now you don’t have to worry.” The voice comes stifled but clear. “You can welsh.”

He shakes his head, gathering up the scraps. “I’ll put them together again. Rocky’s mother does jigsaws with three hundred pieces in them.”

“Humpty-Dumpty?” Chess shrugs.

She sees round all corners, he thinks. Except one. Except whether or not she wants to die. He’s putting the scraps into a long envelope luckily found in one of his jeans-pockets. The envelope says Harvard University on it. Even there, will he find anybody as capable of certain connections as her?

“It was Father in the hall. Wasn’t it.” The tissue-thin scraps cling to his rough fingertips. Several fall. He retrieves them. “When I came out in the hall.” He folds away the envelope. “He’s home.”

She won’t answer him. Why should she? Why should she be answerable to any of us?

“Father?” Reeny says it joyfully, but in the middle of a yawn.

“Then it was him we heard after, wasn’t it? Coming in, then going out again? Going down to the dock … Charlie.” Royal’s voice compels. “Charlie, then he’ll catch them, won’t he. Those two.”

“What two?” Reeny, on the floor, leans against Chess’ bucket. She’s tired, but back to what she was, tired in her own way. A sleep drunk. Since babyhood, found cuddled under stairs or bushes, in cellars, all sorts of places, some dangerous.

“You know. Those two we saw go down there before.” Royal mouths it to him. That man and woman.

“Why you whispering?”

“What’s it you two know I don’t?” Reeny’s arms huddle her knees. Her head sinks to them.

Chess lowers her eyes.

“Boost me on the ledge,” Royal says.

Nobody does. Evil would come of it. Reeny who might have, is asleep.

The sun is up.

Charles is standing with his back pressed against the far wall.

A beautiful morning. People who live along the river often bother to say it. Paradise, the outsiders say to them. For your kids. They already know. Maybe it’s smug not to say it, maybe only shy. As it is with him, Charles. To voice even in the soft, tamed river-voice that people acquire here, what these trees, that river-sky, this shadow-mellowed road means to him. Will mean, wherever he goes. It’s a place of light, a place of dark. He closes his eyes to it.

In the window, dead-center, will be the dock. Or what once was; we call it that. Only a wave of green land now, with some rotten pilings to swim against, below. To be warned against—each child. Himself at three, happily splashing. “They must swim,” his father says, bending a long young face like his own now, and in a tone still cherished. One of Ray’s last firm statements. His father’s statements are few enough; he’ll cherish them. In the commune, he’ll lay out the pocketed scraps on the table; eight heads will be better than one. All there will understand what he’s after. Having riddles of their own.

It seems to him that yes, his mother’s the one responsible for having caged the family in a globe more personal than it should ever have been. His father was after all doing something wider in the world—even if he never seemed to know why. “Personal?—” she’d say, if taxed with it “—well, the world sure handed me a lot of it.” He knows her every reaction; her thousandfold words dimple his flesh like water-torture, knead his brain like dough. She knows the why of things; she’s been handed enough time to. He hears her sigh, as young Ray, his father, leaves the dock, to go back up. Treading water, she grasps him strong against herself. She taught him how to swim.

More savage now, but each year openly tenderer too—she’ll get her way. Whatever it’s to be, he admires her for it. And means to shun all women like her. But not as James does. What he wants is—not a chick, but not a discoverer either. Some girl younger than him maybe. Who he can help.

Not like Chess. People who say that—Rocky, good concerned pal, has said it—will lie.

He opens his eyes.

Chess is quiet on her stool, but not tranced anymore. Her nose is running; she licks her upper lip. Her skin has lost the fishlike elegance it had when they entered; she’s slipped her bandaged wrists down between her thighs. She’s sane. Is she meditating? Like him, she must know that the interpretation of her life to others—has begun. It’ll go on all her life now—that required interpretation. If she grants herself a life.

Grubby as she is now, her aura dazzles him. Dilemma is her halo, shining from her. An impossible anti-saint, unable to be ordinary. So ugly-lovely it’s hard even for love to look at her.

Royal’s watching him, sullenly. Let him. Shrewd as Royal is, what marks him as still a child is the way time slips by him. Maureen too. Restful to be with them, half in their sluggish cycle—but now it’s over. He can’t stay.

“Charlie. What are you doing?” Royal sounds scared.

Charlie is walking heel-toe, heel-toe, around the room’s periphery. Charlie is practicing his Hulot-walk, for the last time. Daringly, eyes closed. Old movies, black-and-white ones, how he loves them; they are childhood. They unfold like coffin-shaped newspapers, tombs of the forgettable, where all the corpses are live.

Eyes open, he stops in front of Roy.

“Boost me.” Royal whispers it.
I want to look.

They’re brothers. Do it. Even if evil will come of it.

Done. Brother to brother at the window, Charles circles Royal’s waist with his arms. Comforting; comforted.

There’s the dock. On it, two figures facing the sun.

There they are. On the green ripple of riverbank which belongs to this house. Two naked figures with their backs to it.

Whoever went down to the dock with Lexie hours ago has gone. These are his parents. No other man. No other woman. One’s standing. One is lying full length. From up here, the changing river seems to flow through them, making their dais tremble. The sun, not yet rayed, more a warm sweat from the east, tinctures both outlines to a glow, anatomizing each body with its yellow stencil. The tactile, green arching of summer frames them, naked but separate.

Must be a painting like that, he thinks. Done in that near-far perspective which always extends just over the road which one can never cross. Sometimes it’ll be a perspective empty of humans. Sometimes, off-center in what is called the middle distance, will be just such a pair. Arrested in sleep or thought, in radiance. Or trudging the solemn colorings. Or running frantic before a furling cloud. Not a mother or a father—or not yet. Or not any more. Just such a pair, in the posture that is theirs. I have a picture of it in my mind.

Maureen, waking from her doze, sees the two boys at the ledge, steals to their side. Makes a small sound, looking out.

Royal watches, greedily.

Charles is receiving the picture as he might a gift—naming it. It hangs in the middle distance between recognition and shock. Between his own picture of the universe—and the world. It hangs there uncertainly, not yet philosophy, yet not merely flesh. And with the faintest flow—not critique, but not unreasonable—from the landscape of Immanuel Kant. But he can take it with him now, into those modest nights in the garden of satire, with his machines. It will follow him. Even onto those ranges where he hears the epistemological namings, the haunted messages. Which command him too to receive, to record.

No, he can’t say yet. What the sight of those two figures—strict, bare, washed with meditation—may mean to him. Because it is in itself a naming. It is a picture of his world. Which he may hang in his universe.

What are they doing there, naked but separate?

“If they’re going to skinny dip—I wish they’d get in.” Maureen is angry, resonant. For Maureen.

“If they’re going to make love—should we watch?” Royal’s voice is skiddy. For Roy.

All three turn.

Chessie is unfolding. Her long, nervous, beautiful legs look pale and cold, even in the hot, attic morning. Her lips move, frostily. “Can—they—see us?”

She’s come to herself. She sees it in their faces.

“Not if we stand
back,”
her sister says, so reasonably.

“They’re not
looking
at us.” Her porky little brother is scared.

Charles is silent. There’s always more to it than that; More, to us. More than one person, one reason. For why it happens. For why they’re out there. And how did Chess know? That they were.

Chess is studying her wrists.

Maureen reaches out to her, pulling the T-shirt’s long sleeves down over the bandages. “There, darling. There.”

Taking her by the waist, Charles and Maureen draw her to the window. Or she draws them. The three stand there, her tall brother and chubby sister flanking her, each with one of her hands clasped between theirs, and held to their breasts.

She stares for a long time, before she answers.

Cassandra must have been something like her, Charles thinks, holding onto her. Like one of these. A spasm of guilt tightens his hold.

She turns a cold smile on him. “They’re waiting for the bus. To see
them
.”

Maureen with a harsh cluck drops her sister’s hand. It deals in poisoned revelations.

Charles holds on, chilled. She’s right. It’s a signal, out there. Oh she’s right, and that’s why we want to put her in hospital. People like her—they pull the signals from our breasts.

From above, Royal, forgotten on his ledge, whispers “Boost me down.” It’s the one thing he can’t do by himself—let down his own weight.

No one attends him.

“Charlie?” Lightly she draws her wrist from his grasp. “Let’s run away.”

“You and me?”

She looks at him, deep. So he’s thought of it. “No.”

“All of us?”

She nods.

“Together?”

She makes the same impatient “Tchk!” their mother does. At their father. Shaking her head at him. “Alone.”

Maureen says “Away?” Slowly. They can see it dawn on her. Away from you, Chess. From Royal. From you, Charles. From each of you, differently.

“And from them,” her sister says at her. “Ha, see Charles? Look at her … Listen, Reen. Where would you go? If you did.”

A low grin. Reeny has her secrets. “To Grandpa Charlie’s. His wife; she says she’ll do me over. Just me, she says. And I love Florida.”

“See. And
you
could go to Rocky’s. You’re there half the time already. Or until Harvard comes through. Or Oxford. You know you could … And Royal.” She shrugs. “We all know where little Roy.”

“Yah. And where
she
will.” He’s white. “Let… me …
down.”

Chessie bars them. Holding up her arms, crossed at the bound wrists. “The minute you do—he’ll phone James.”

They know he will. Without looking at him.

“Chess. Where will you go? Where can you?”

She trembles. She’s never heard that stern, despairing tone from him before. “You won’t like it, Charlie.”

“Try me.”

“Yah, tell us.” If Royal can’t get down, or up, he can sneer.

Her head lifts on its long neck, the nostril opening black. “Yah to you.” She tosses it. Turns to him. “Charlie?” She can go in and out of beauty, like some old movie-star you’re watching, from either end of her life. “Charlie, I’m a swinger. Imagine. Me. I am, though. In town. And it wasn’t only the job—I got it, but I knew I wouldn’t keep it. I went to a bar. Every day for a week … They like me, Charlie.” She sees his face. “Listen, keed. All I did was sell a drawing. The one of Ma.”