Caroline's Daughters (16 page)

“No animals. I can't stand it. No warm fur to touch.”

“She's allergic, isn't she?”

“Most likely. It'd be just like her, poor thing.”

After a few minutes Harold tells her, “But I have to say, I really don't mind all that much.” And then he says, “You remember I'm having dinner with a visiting aunt tonight? You'll survive here alone?”

“Silly boy. Of course.” But Portia, who had indeed forgotten the visiting aunt, had rather hoped that she and Harold could go over to North Beach for pizza or something, and she now experiences a certain pang; she in fact does not like to be alone in this particular place at night—infantile, regressive as she knows that feeling to be. For one thing, the phone rings at all hours, people who generally hang up, realizing that she is not Janice Lee. But she tells Harold, “It's okay, I'm having lunch with my dad. Family day for me, I guess.”

Portia does not especially like Bruno's, the once extremely popular North Beach restaurant that is still her father's sentimental favorite. In the distant (to Portia non-existent, prehistoric) Forties and Fifties, it was popular with Telegraph Hill's new bohemians, the bright young men and women with little money and considerable taste, aspirations and a sense of local history—and with what came to be known as the Beats. It was popular with writers generally, some painters and a scattering of newspeople. And with a few old leftist political types, relics of waterfront, Wobbly days, including Ralph Carter.

A colorful mix, Ralph likes to tell his daughter, and, like many people of his age, Ralph finds it hard to resist alluding to prices then: the five-course meals for $2.50, the fifty-cent drinks (Portia
believes he exaggerates, but he does not). Just sitting in Bruno's seems to bring a form of instant happiness for Ralph, and so from time to time Portia agrees: okay, they'll meet for lunch at Bruno's.

But she does not like waiting for Ralph, in this window seat of honor that he is always given—another reason that he cleaves to this place, obviously. Portia hates the exposure, the conspicuousness of being seated there just next to the hustling, bustling sidewalk, where anyone and everyone can see her.

How she wishes she had thought to bring a book or a magazine, anything to read. Lacking that, she studies the big shiny white menu, as if it ever changed, as if she did not know it by heart. But anything to avoid all those faces on the street, looking in at her.

Impossible, though, not to look up from time to time, as, even when you are terrified of heights (Portia is), in a high building sometimes you have to look down. And to nearsighted Portia, looking out, those faces all blur in a single stream, as she glances out at them, a scary stream of unknowns.

And then, in a stabbing flash of clarity, two well-known faces pass, and then are gone, but not before Portia has recognized Jill and Noel. She has seen Jill's sleek fair cap of hair, Noel's dark thick hair (so like Sage's), and their radiant, blind smiles; dazed with each other, they see no one.

Portia's stomach twists, and she gulps at her water. What
jerks
, she thinks. Ralph could easily have been here, Jill knows he comes here all the time. Anyone could have seen them. And then she thinks, Oh God. Oh Sage—as her old extreme love for her sister overwhelms her.

“Well hey there, honey. I'm not really late, now, am I?” With an anxious frown, a mouth-avoiding kiss, her father, Ralph, is with her. Settling down across from her, and in another instant checking out the room: no one he knows. Portia sees that in a tiny flicker of disappointment across his face.

“No, you're not late,” she reassures him.

“Well, I guess it's time for my bi-monthly martini. You'll have a shot of that expensive imported water you favor?” Ralph very much disapproves of Perrier and its offshoots, something he mentions a little too often.

“No, I'll have a glass of wine. Uh, white.” It might help her, Portia is thinking. And if it makes me feel worse that will at least be a distraction (the total illogic of this last escapes her for the moment).

“Your mother is home praying for rain,” Ralph then tells her. “I have to remind her that in California dark clouds don't mean a thing, necessarily. But I think that woman lives for her garden these days.” He grins fondly.

“That's nice,” Portia tells him. She is thinking that at some point they will have to get to Sage, their whole family lately is talking so much about Sage, and how difficult now to discuss her—for Portia, with her new knowledge. She thinks, How could Noel? How could Jill? I do not understand the sexuality of grownups, Portia thinks, having momentarily forgotten that she is one; twenty-five is grown up, by most standards.

“—worried over Sage,” her father indeed is saying at just that moment. However, the waiter then interrupts with their drinks, and a stern demand for their food choices.

Ralph, who always has linguini with clam sauce, today orders minestrone.

And Portia, who often orders minestrone, chooses a Caesar salad.

The two sips of wine that she has had so far have a somewhat giddying effect, Portia now observes. Well, good, she thinks. And she begins to tell her father in some detail how much she does not like the condominium of Janice Lee. “It's so bloody English,” she tells him. “Why are so many insecure people such Anglophiles? Nothing against the English, it's not their fault, but I do wonder. Poor Janice Lee. Even the magazines that she gets are the English editions. British
Vogue
—”

“Would you excuse me for a minute?”

With her father gone, Portia has again no defense against her angry thoughts of Noel and Jill (her quite prurient thoughts, actually: by now they must be back in Jill's apartment, to which they were so clearly headed. They are naked there, together, having sex, doing everything that people do—about which Portia is a little vague). These terrible—reprehensible, embarrassing—and complicated
thoughts twist Portia's face in shame, as she also thinks, again, Oh, poor Sage, after Roland she loved and trusted Noel, she seemed really happy with Noel.

Has Ralph actually been gone a long time, though, or has she simply felt his absence is long, alone with her painful imaginings? Portia cannot be sure, but as she begins to focus on waiting for him the time then seems long indeed.

When at last Ralph does return to his chair, he sits down heavily, not speaking for a moment. His large face is gray, and he tells Portia, “I have to say, I don't feel so wonderful. That martini, maybe. I'll have to cut down to one a month. I think—I think I'd just better get a cab.”

“Sure, I'll come with you. I'd love to see Mother.”

“Don't you dare, you'd scare the woman to death, taking care of me. No, I'll just go along, a little rest will fix me right up.”

She can't call Caroline right away, that indeed would alarm her mother, Portia tells herself, forcing her steps to slow down on the short walk from Stockton Street, in North Beach, up to California Street, on Nob Hill. At Broadway she allows the light to change twice, three times, making herself just stand there among the tourists, the local Chinese, businessmen, women out shopping, children getting home from school—the anonymous throngs who blur before her distracted, nearsighted face.

But then she thinks, Suppose I run into Jill and Noel again? The way this day is going I really could. And that thought alone gives her license to hurry, Portia decides, back to poor misguided Janice Lee's fake-English retreat, her county spread of rooms, high up in the fog.

She dials from Janice Lee's “study,” but there is no answer at her mother's house.

And no answer at Sage's either. Sage and Noel's.

And no answer at either place, still, an hour later, after Portia has done every time-consuming thing she can think of, in terms of cleaning up
chez
Janice Lee. Washed the kitchen and bathroom shelves, dusted and straightened up the floors of closets, polished
various small needy pieces of silver, and washed and dried all the tiny Baccarat animals, from Neiman's.

When the phone rings a little after 5 Portia runs for it, almost trips, and answers breathlessly, “Hello?”

A woman's voice, “Hey there, lambkin. You feel like seeing anybody?”

Horribly tempted to say yes, yes, I would love to see almost anyone, Portia nevertheless explains that she is not Janice Lee. No, Janice Lee will not be back for another week.

At about 5:30 Caroline calls, sounding very tired but using what Portia thinks of as her English good-sport voice. “He's in Presbyterian Hospital, so lucky it's so near,” Caroline tells her daughter. “A mild stroke, he's being monitored. They thought it'd be best to keep him there for a while, but you can imagine how Ralph liked that.”

“But, but he'll be okay? really soon?”

“Well, darling, of course that's what we hope. But it's hard to tell.”

“Shall I come over?”

“No, love, if you don't mind I think really better not.”

Sage is not at home.

Nor is Harold. Dialling his number, Portia had entirely forgotten the visiting aunt. Of all times for an aunt, she rancorously thinks. And she thinks, senselessly, Why don't I have a true lover? Someone I could always trust and count on? (Someone with whom sex was wonderful.)

It would be very inconsiderate to call Caroline again, thinks Portia, and so she does not. She remains alone, and falls at last into a light
and troubled sleep, broken by pornographic visions of Noel and Jill. And every now and then she wakes to foghorns, their heavy, grating, mourning sobs, far out in the bay.

At last, she allows herself to admit (she has no choice, at that undefended time) the true source of her panic: she is thinking,
feeling
, that Ralph might die.

When the phone does ring, at some cold black pre-dawn hour, her first conscious thought is, Oh Christ, all I need right now is some drunken Janice Lee old pal.

But it is Caroline, who tells her, “Darling, I am sorry to call so very late. But the head doctor just got here, finally, and I did think you'd want to know. He's really doing all right, the doctor says. He'll have to stay here in Presbyterian for a while, but he's really going to be okay. I think.”

U
nable to throw out the fall harvest from her deck, the dozens of too-full rose blossoms that must be clipped from the potted bushes to make room for more, Caroline instead floats all those stemless flowers, those masses of yellow, white, pale pink and lavender, in a large blue shallow Chinese bowl. How lovely they are, she thinks, stepping back to admire the luxuriance of bloom, of satin petals, of scent. Leaning down, she brushes her face against the cool petals, and sighs. They'll be gone by tomorrow, she knows that, or further gone than they indeed are now, but in the meantime how very beautiful they are. She has placed the bowl on a table, against the French windows that lead out to the deck, and now, crossing her kitchen, she looks back at her arrangement, and sees with pleasure the floral profusion, the waves of flowers.

She wishes she could take them to Ralph, at Presbyterian, but they would not survive even that four-block trip, Caroline knows that.

Ralph is not doing very well. While still in the hospital he has had two more mild strokes (and how can a stroke be mild? Caroline wonders). The doctors have been guarded; there is now a group of them, all hovering and circling. Like vultures, Caroline tends to think. They do not, they tell Caroline, try to predict the extent of the damage. (Amazing how little doctors turn out to know; she thinks that with some bitterness. For all their airs.)

But damaged he is, Caroline is certain of that. Even now he
is vague, and weak. He will come home damaged, not the person she is used to.

Damaged, or dead.

And at times, with great guilt, Caroline thinks that dead might indeed be better. How can she not think that?

But as though she had a choice, any choice whatsoever. As though Ralph did.

“Mother, those roses. So like you, I could see that bowl of blossoms anywhere and know it was yours.” Liza is the most effusive of Caroline's daughters, she is cheering to have about. And today she has come over without any children; good Saul on his days off takes the kids on outings, even the baby. “I find them infinitely more interesting than golf,” is his mild joke, presumably at the expense of most of his colleagues, including his father-in-law, Dr. James McAndrew.

“I was wishing Ralph could see them—the roses, I mean—but then I remembered he's not actually mad for flowers,” Caroline tells her daughter. “It's something he tolerates in me. Some English mania, he thinks.”

“We've both married very nice men,” is Liza's comment.

“Well, on the whole, yes, I do think so,” her mother agrees, even as she wonders:
is
the Liza-Saul marriage as good as it looks? can it be? She is remembering herself at Liza's age, looking rather as Liza does now, somewhat overweight and underdressed (by doctors' wives' standards). Married to Jim McAndrew. A nice young fairly appropriate doctor's wife, who spent most Tuesday afternoons in motels, with a lively succession of lovers. (Tuesdays, the one day she had help and could leave.) Those afternoons were what got me through those long years, though, she has thought, through the rest of the days with those four little girls, and the nights with Jim, the bad sex or none at all. Until she met Ralph, who insisted on ending both the marriage and the parade of lovers, of which he was only dimly aware.

“Does it strike you that all your daughters are acting rather odd lately?” now asks Liza, somewhat surprisingly: she is given to gossip (thank God, they all are) but is usually more precise in her observations.
Caroline has supposed that Liza's form of gossip is in some way connected to her literary aspirations: Liza “gathers material.”

“Well, maybe,” Caroline tells Liza. “Maybe. I haven't given them much real thought, except Sage. She's off next week, you know. New York.”