Beautiful Girl (25 page)

And then—and then she told me that she was pregnant. Of course (as a free-thinking Protestant) I counseled an abortion. Interestingly, so did her mother. I insisted that that was her only solution, if she couldn’t get married. (We are now talking about the Fifties, when women from San Francisco went to Seattle or Mexico for abortions.) But she pointed out that no, as a Catholic she could not have an abortion. (I have not said this: her religion was another thing we never discussed; it was simply there, a fact of her life.) She was going down to some nuns, near Los Angeles, who took in unmarried mothers, who arranged for placements.
Placements.

“Is your friend being nice about it?” I asked her that.

“Oh,
very
,” she said with some warmth.

Pregnant, Maggie looked pale and fat and wholly miserable. Her skin broke out and her small eyes seemed to recede.

She gave birth to a red-haired daughter.

And the baby was placed.

Maggie stayed pale and fat. Not curled hair (sometimes not washed). Sad old clothes, despite her good job.

•  •  •

Skip more years. I was divorced and involved with a man who was married, and I thought I was pregnant. I went to Maggie’s for dinner, and we discussed symptoms.

I drank too much wine and in a somewhat maudlin mood I asked her if she still saw her friend.

“Oh, yes, all the time.” Not saying, We still love each other tremendously. But that was clear. And I looked across at Maggie, in her old sweater, her hair dull and lank (at that time I was making the most excruciating efforts as to frosted, shining hair, and terrific clothes—all for that man), and I thought, How wonderful not to have to make such an effort, to be so secure in someone’s love.

And so I said, “Oh, Maggie, can’t you live together or something? Anyone can get a divorce these days.”

“Uh—you haven’t guessed what’s wrong?” A very tight voice.

I muttered about a sick wife, maybe crazy—

As Maggie is saying, “He’s a priest.”

My mind literally reeled with shock, revolving in images of long black skirts, and I asked the only thing that came to mind as possible to ask: “Jesus—what do you call him?”

She smiled, and in her wry, shy voice (“I’m supposed to have an aptitude in history”) she said, “Sometimes Father Feeny. Sometimes Dick.”

So, a few years later, at a party I am introduced to a handsome priest, whose name I miss. He, however, has heard a mention of the college I went to (how did that come up? I can’t remember) and he says, “Ah, yes, I know a girl who went there. Did you by chance know Maggie———–?”

“Yes, very well.” (My breath is suddenly tight.) “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Father Feeny. Richard Feeny.” And he beams.

I have had two strong drinks. I am not drunk, but not wholly controlled, and very upset.

Then, quite incredibly (to me), he says, “Well, since you’re a friend of Maggie’s, I can tell you that I’m rather worried about her. She looks so bad, and lonely. You look like the sort of young woman who knows a lot of people, perhaps you could introduce her to someone. She really should marry.”

I am wild-eyed, stammering.

Insensitive (perhaps he has also had a couple of drinks), he continues, “Lately she’s been talking about a former fiancé. Bill? It’s sad, as though she wants to say that she could have married.”

I want to say, You are horrible—you hypocrite! I hate you! But to say that or anything like it would be to betray Maggie, her confidence in me. You see? He had me, utterly. I got away from him as soon as I could.

Over the phone a couple of days later I say to Maggie: “It was really strange, meeting him, and of course his not knowing I knew who he was. And then his wishing you would marry—”

In a tight, judicious voice she says, “Well, I guess at least partly he does wish that.”

After that some terrible drift apart began, and at last Maggie and I were not seeing each other. Our lives diverged,
and I think that she also regretted telling me so much; we all know how that works.

And then a few years ago I read in our college magazine that Maggie had died, of cancer. Grief—rage—anguish: I felt all that, and some guilt at never having called her, instead of, from time to time, thinking that I would.

And I wondered, Just when did that start, that malevolent process of her cells?

Which brings us to a couple of weeks ago, when I again saw the priest. Saw Father Feeny—Richard, Dick.

And wanted to hit him, or to say, Well, your daughter must be almost twenty by now, wouldn’t you say? Or, Have you been saying a lot of masses for Maggie? Do you think they help?

Well, as I have said, he left before I could do or say anything, except to stare at him with a pure electric hatred—he must have felt it.

And now I wonder if my feelings were not somewhat unfair. He fell in love with Maggie and took her to bed (she felt very loved by him, I am sure of that). He was no more sexually restrained than the rest of us are, although he was supposed to have been. In his way he was kind and generous to her. Probably it is too much for me to have expected heroism of him, which in my view would have been to leave the priesthood and marry Maggie, although I do think he should have. (It is also possible that Maggie didn’t want him to do this, for her own good Catholic reasons.)

•  •  •

But I still wonder what, if anything, I should have done, or said.

“How I hate California! God, no one will ever know how much I hate it here,” cries out Pauline Field, a once-famous abstract-expressionist painter. It is lunchtime on a ferociously cold Sunday late in June—in a beach house near San Francisco: Pauline’s house—and her lunch party that is assembled there in her enclosed patio, drinking sangrias. Almost no one (in fact only one person) pays any attention to Pauline, who tends to speak in an exaggerated way. She is a huge strong woman, dressed outrageously in pink; she has wild white hair and consuming dark-brown eyes. It is possible that she has made this impassioned complaint before.

The house is some three or four years old; those years (the years, incidentally, of Pauline’s most recent marriage) and the relentless wind have almost silvered the shingled walls, and beach grass has grown up through the slats of the planked-over patio, where now all those guests, twenty or so, are standing with their cold fruity drinks, their backs to the wind and to the sea. The drive home, over steep winding hills
and beside great wooded canyons, will be somewhat dangerous even for a sober driver; these weak drinks are the inspiration of Pauline’s (third) husband, Stephen, a cautious former alcoholic.

The one person who paid attention to Pauline is also the only person who is looking out to the churning gray sea: a young girl, about twelve, Nell Ashbury, from New York; she is visiting her father and her stepmother. She listened to Pauline because her hostess has come across to her more vividly than any of the other adults present (discounting her father, Jason Ashbury, the writer, about whom she has the most passionate curiosity, not knowing him well at all). Pauline, to Nell, is more
present
than anyone else there. Her mother’s Village circle includes a lot of writers, editors, agents; Nell is tired of literary people, who all talk too much. Perhaps she herself will be a painter, like Pauline? And Pauline listens; so many grown-ups (her mother’s writers) ask questions and then don’t wait to hear the answer. Pauline is kind; she has in fact wrapped reed-thin Nell in an old Irish sweater of her own, in which the girl now sits, enveloped—it comes down to her knees—looking out across a grass-tufted rise of sand to the turbulent sea, and thinking, Pacific?

But at Pauline’s words—“I hate California”—Nell has turned to listen, and it occurs to her that she does not like it here much either; it is terribly windy and cold, not at all like a summer day at a real beach, not like Crane’s Beach, at Ipswich, where she and her mother go for the month of August every summer. Nell has a tendency to take people at their word (she believes that Pauline hates California), and partly because she is so young, she believes that what is said is meant, for good.

Nell also (half-consciously) understands Pauline to mean that she does not like her party, her guests—and possibly
she does not like her husband, the blond man, rather short, who is pouring out the reddish drinks.

“It’s not a place that’s fit for human beings,” declaims Pauline, who has not had a show of her paintings for years, although she still works, if spasmodically, and who has unhappily become used to inattention. “Perhaps mountain lions,” she continues. “Feel that wind, in
June.
”

Pauline’s size is a further reason for Nell’s instinct about her not liking her husband. “Women who hate their husbands always put on weight,” Nell’s mother has said, herself purposefully thin (and unremarried), and Nell has as yet found no evidence against this theory. Her stepmother, who visibly “adores” her father, is even trimmer than Nell’s mother is. Given the ten years or so difference in their ages, they look rather alike, Nell thinks—and would of course not say to either of them. Brown-skinned blondes, blue-eyed, rather athletic. What her father likes?

In fact Nell has seen rather few fat women among the friends of either parent, and this too gives Pauline a certain interest: what
nerve
, to be so large. And her size is somehow sexy, all that energetic flesh. The other guests look vaguely alike and are dressed quite similarly: they are in stylishly good shape; they wear pants and expensive old sweaters.

Nell herself is physically a curious replica of her father: sandy-haired, with light-gray eyes. Everyone has remarked on the likeness, and Nell has sometimes wondered if this is one thing that makes him uneasy with her: it must be strange for Jason to see his coloring, his own long nose and impossibly high brow on a girl, a thin young girl. Sometimes Nell catches him staring at her in an unnerved way, and he seems not to know what to say to her. The phrase “pale imitation” has unfortunately stuck in her mind. They were divorced so long ago, Jason and her mother, when Nell was a baby
and Jason a hugely successful novelist. On the heels of his greatest success—that rarity, a book that six or eight superior critics praised and that several hundred thousand people bought—he stopped writing entirely. He has lived a lot in Italy, in southern France and Greece.

Although she is the one complaining about the weather, Pauline has not dressed to defend herself from it: the long-sleeved pink cotton smock from which her spatulate-fingered, muscular brown hands extend is thin (“Fat women always love bright colors,” Nell’s mother has said, safe in navy or black); she is barefoot, and sand adheres to her large brown feet. She says, “I can’t bear this wind!”

“Well, Pauline,” says Jason, in his glancing, nonserious way that no one seems to know how to take (
is
he serious?), “you could chuck it all and run off to some warmer clime.”

So, Nell thinks, he too has been listening to Pauline?

Pauline’s great eyes flash across him; she says, “I just may.”

But her husband, blond Stephen, has spoken much more loudly than she. “Pauline would rather stick around and make dramatic complaints,” he says, sounding smug with his knowledge (and possession?) of Pauline.

Obviously these two men, Nell’s father and Stephen, do not like each other much, and Nell begins to regard the party with slightly more interest. Just possibly something could happen? In general, her parents’ friends do not make scenes, just talk, and she had sometimes thought that it would be more fun if they did.

“In fact I might join you there, wherever,” Jason continues, as though Stephen had not spoken. “It is awfully
goddam cold.” He turns to his small blond wife. “And how would you like that, my love?”

Neither what he said nor his look has been clear: did he mean that he would take his wife or leave her there in the California cold? Nell’s stepmother visibly does not know, but in a calm, controlled way she says, “Well, in the meantime I think I’ll go inside. It
is
terribly cold.” She starts in, and everyone begins to follow her, as though an excuse or perhaps a leader was needed.

Jason laughs, as Nell wonders why: At what private joke?

“I need help!” wildly says Pauline as people are trooping past her into the house, and then, in a more rational way, she addresses Nell—who has taken her seriously and is staring in dismay. “Nell, do come in the kitchen with me. You look as though you were good at sorting things out.”

The kitchen is farther away and thus more separate from the living room than is usual in the houses Nell has known. She and Pauline walk down a hall, past bedrooms, to what is the largest room in the house: a huge square, two stories high, with a backward-looking view of steep, ravined hills, all shades and shapes and varieties of green, here and there patched with sunlight, in other areas cloud-darkened, almost black. “There’s only one painter out here who can do that,” says Pauline (sadly? enviously? Nell can’t tell). “I’ve never tried. Perhaps I should? This is my favorite room,” she says. “I like to be alone here. I can’t bear people who come out to try to help me—I can’t be helped.” She laughs, a short harsh definite sound. “Of course I don’t mean you, little Nell—I asked you in.” And Nell is then given a large handful of silver which, for a moment, she is afraid that she is supposed to polish; this has not been done for some time.

“Just sort it out into little piles,” instructs Pauline.
“You know, to be wrapped in a napkin. Something for everyone. And now tell me all about your mother.”

“She’s fine,” Nell automatically says, and then asks, “Did you know her?”

“Oh, yes,” says Pauline, sounding bored. “We all used to know each other. But that was terribly long ago. In the Forties, in fact. Of course we were terribly young.”

The
Forties.
Wanting to know more (what was everyone like then? what was her father like?), Nell has understood that Pauline does not want to answer questions—she will talk more or less to herself.

Pauline is drinking vodka from a wineglass. “God, how I hate sangria,” she abruptly says, in much her tone of hating California. And then she asks, “Are you very tired of conversations about why your father doesn’t write anymore?”