Caroline's Daughters (2 page)

“I sometimes don't think Sage really likes Fiona very much,” Caroline next remarks. “Or for that matter Jill.”

“How could she? All that money that both of them seem to have.” Ralph tends to speak more succinctly than Caroline does; conversationally he does not wander, as he sometimes accuses Caroline of doing.

“But she and Liza always seem great pals.”

“Everyone likes Liza. She's the most like you.”

This is a remark that Caroline often hears, not only from Ralph—so often that she is tired of responding to it. What she might say,
of herself and Liza, might be: We only sort of look alike, both being large, and she has three children. But we've got very different characters, lucky for her.

Ralph, that quintessential American, that most unlikely expatriate, was in fact quite happy in Lisbon, during those years. His solution—and this was a part of the overall unlikeliness of it all—was to domesticate himself, in ways hitherto quite unimaginable for him. He not only learned to cook, he went out to markets and he bargained, endlessly and successfully, in a language he could not speak, coming home with the largest cod and the smallest shellfish, at bargain prices. And this from a man whose life before that had been of the most intense and public involvement; in San Francisco he was known to be a not-too-secret political kingmaker—and a man who had always come home, to all those wives, expecting meals on time and clean clothes, a clean bed and a pretty, accommodating wife, and who had always found all that, except for very brief between-wife periods. “It's something new for me,” was Ralph's explanation to Caroline. And, “I like the fish.” She came to understand that he also liked the docks and the fishermen, the whole waterfront atmosphere; it was what he was used to, and missed.

Whereas Caroline, who had spent her life in domestic pursuits, now spent all her days in museums and galleries. She even did some sketches and some tentative watercolors from their small apartment, high up in the Alfama, the old quarter of Lisbon, near the Castel San Georgio. They had a view of the harbor, boats and the bridge, the Twenty-fifth of April Bridge, built to commemorate the Generals' Revolution, the end of fascism. And all around them geraniums bloomed, on balconies and terraces, every shade from white to pink, orange to deep scarlet.

One of the best aspects of Lisbon was its access to the rest of Europe. Ralph and Caroline flew to London or Paris or Rome, they took trains to Madrid or Barcelona. And so those Portuguese years worked out quite well—but nevertheless they both became quite restless, impatient. Travel writing was not his métier, Ralph decided, and Caroline felt that her sketches were hopelessly amateur. And then everything seemed at once to conspire to bring them home,
most immediately the deaths of their tenants, the vacancy of their house.

They both, especially Caroline, had a sense that by this time their daughters were all right, or were at least settled on courses that they, the parent figures, would be unlikely to deflect. Sage had her ceramics, and her marriage to Noel. Liza was married to Saul Jacobs, a psychiatrist, and had her three babies. Fiona had her restaurant, Jill her law and her money. And Portia had her Bolinas shack, where (it was generally believed) she wrote poetry.

What could change?

“Well, of course you were right, there's Sage's car.” Unnecessarily, Ralph points downward to the battered, mud-spattered, once-black, once-convertible VW. Sage is just getting out, alone, and maneuvering a very large box.

Tall, too-thin Sage is wearing white pants, probably Levi's, and something striped on top that is from Cost Plus, probably. Sage resists clothes, she tends to beat them up, to pour liquids over them. Her long, very dark hair is unfashionably pony-tailed. All in all she seems to be saying that she does not care, does not care that she is getting into her forties, that her husband is seven years younger and very handsome. But Caroline, looking at Sage as objectively as possible, still thinks that this daughter, this difficult eldest, is very beautiful, perhaps the only truly beautiful one. Ralph agrees: “Fiona and Jill are sexy but not true beauties.” But they also agree that Sage should fix up a little more, as Ralph puts it. (Liza is very pretty but too fat, and Portia is, well, odd-looking; she looks like Ralph.)

Caroline calls out to Sage from where they are walking down the steps, and Sage waits for them where she stands, leaning against her dirty old car, with her big brown cardboard box.

“Noel had to go down the Peninsula,” is the first thing that Sage says, with a quick downward twist of her mouth—once kisses have been exchanged among the three of them, out there on the sidewalk, in the very unseasonal hot sun. “Honestly, these damn clients expect maintenance too,” Sage says, and then adds, with a lift of her small cleft chin, “Of course it's a lot his fault. Noel loves to feel indispensable.”

“Darling. I suppose we all do, don't we?” At times Caroline still sounds just faintly British, more inheritance from Molly. Her father was a New Englander, a Connecticut Yankee.

“Men are like that, kiddo.” Ralph likes teasing Sage, who has been known not to take it very well, possibly (Caroline thinks) because she was an only child for all those years, those six before Liza was born. And perhaps for the same reason Caroline is aware of being over-protective of this daughter. Still.

“Sage, whatever have you brought in that great box?” As they walk toward the house Caroline for an instant puts an arm across her daughter's thin shoulders. “Can't Ralph carry it in for you?”

“No, it's okay.”

As they reach the front steps, from inside the house the phone begins to ring, and Ralph hurries in to get it.

“That could be Noel,” Sage tells her mother. “Coming after all. Maybe.” Her smile is brief, and wistful.

“Or Portia not coming at all,” says Caroline.

“Well honey, I'm just sorry,” they hear Ralph say as they enter. “We'll do it later. See you and celebrate.”

“Portia,” says Caroline to Sage.

“You're so always right,” says Sage, with a little laugh.

“I know, it's tiresome, isn't it. Sage, do put that down.”

“It's Portia, want to talk to her?” Ralph, from the kitchen phone.

“No, just give love.”

Caroline and Sage then walk through the long narrow white Victorian living room, through the dining room to the deck, where at last Sage deposits the big square box. Very carefully; clearly its contents could break.

“Portia's car has died.” Ralph has come out to stand beside them, on the deck that Caroline has so filled with pots of flowers that very little room is left for furniture, or for people. Roses, mostly. Two rose trees, full and white, and smaller bushes of yellow, peach and pink and lavender (Sterling Silver, a delicate favorite of Caroline's), but also two lemon trees, and three large wooden tubs of poppies and ranunculuses, all now in bloom. And smaller pots of thriving marguerites, all over.

Below the deck and down in the garden are still more roses, tall
rose trees and bushes of roses, all placed at rather formal intervals, in tidy beds that súrround a circular area of brick. In the farthest bed, at the very back of the garden, are two enormous twin camellias, now profusely flowering, dark scarlet. It has been so far an exceptionally sunny spring, leading to talks of drought, and Caroline has feared for her flowers, just now so lovely.

“You might as well open your present,” Sage instructs, indicating the box, with a smile that to her mother signals pride.

Caroline works at the taped-down flaps, and then for no reason that she can think of (except that she always makes guesses, as she opens presents) she says, “I know, you've made me a birdbath.”

“Jesus, Mother. I hate you, I really do.”

Dismayed at the accuracy of her intuition (and, having had it, why on earth did she have to blurt it out like that?), Caroline sees that what Sage has brought is a birdbath: a wide, shallow, blue-glazed bowl, with tiny birds, a small frieze of birds perched here and there on its ridge. “But darling, it's so beautiful, that glaze—”

“But how did you know what it was? Jesus, Mother.” Sage's thin lovely face is pulled into a frown. Her pale-brown skin is lightly freckled, her eyes troubled but golden, clear gold.

“I don't know, it was just a lucky guess. Let's put it over here. Look, it's perfect.”

“All that noise has got to be Fiona,” says Ralph.

“Besides, you always think of what I really lust for,” adds Caroline, to Sage. “I did want a birdbath. I need one, and this is ravishing.” She goes over to give Sage a quick light kiss.

Fiona's arrival is a big production, taking place as it does from her restaurant's big white van.
FIONA
is emblazoned on one side. And Fiona has brought along an assistant, a fat, very pretty young woman who immediately begins to unload a series of white food boxes.

“You didn't exactly leave me a lot of room,” is Fiona's opening remark to her older half-sister, Sage.

“I didn't know you were bringing that truck, I thought the Ferrari.”

“How could I get all this food into the Ferrari?”

“How many people did you think were coming?” asks Ralph, as boxes are passed into the kitchen, either stacked or piled into the refrigerator.

“Well, isn't Liza bringing her kids?”

“She only has three, and they're little,” Caroline reminds her.

“Oh well.”

Fiona's pale-blonde hair is very long; all three of Caroline's daughters by Jim McAndrew have wispy blonde hair, as he does, and they have his eyes, very large and pale gray. Fiona dresses smartly, always, “dressed for success,” as the advertisers (and her sisters) put it. Today she wears very tailored pale linen, two shades of brown, and trim brown shoes—in which she now walks about the deck, inspecting flowers, then looking into the birdbath. “Terrific,” is her mild comment.

Fiona is thin, very thin, but nature intended her to be otherwise, or so Caroline thinks, observing this daughter. Caroline sees Fiona's wide bones, quite like her own, stretching the pummelled, pampered skin.

Sexy Fiona, how odd that she seems to have no lovers, thinks sexy Caroline.

“Where's Jill?” Fiona then asks. “She's coming?”

“I guess, but we haven't heard from her.”

“Some big deal in her life, no doubt,” sniffs Fiona. To say that Fiona is ambivalently pleased by the success of her younger sister would be to put it mildly.

“Portia's car died,” contributes Ralph.

“Lord, what else is new?”

“Well, it must be time for drinks, what would everyone like?” Caroline and Ralph say these things at almost exactly the same moment, then laugh at themselves for so doing.

Sage wants wine with some ice in it. “I know that's awful, Noel the purist would die, but it's just so hot.”

Fiona wants a Perrier.

In the kitchen, faced with all those boxes of food, Ralph and Caroline exclaim to each other, “Look at all she's brought, it's terrible, we'll have to take it all somewhere—some shelter, a food bank.”

“Well, anyway, here's Liza and her gang.”

And indeed, trooping up the steps are two small children in impressively white clothes, followed by their parents: Liza, carrying a baby, a very small one; and Saul Jacobs, the father, psychiatrist, carrying several paper sacks and also a very large bunch of oversized pink peonies. (And Caroline thinks, as she sometimes has before, how very much she likes this shrink son-in-law, this Saul—and how little she seems to feel for the children. Her grandchildren. They're quite nice enough, in their way, but after all only children. And she wonders, perhaps her strong affections for the very young are simply worn out, nothing left?)

Liza is as large as, in Caroline's view, Fiona was meant to be. In her invariable blue denim prairie skirt, her white lace Mexican blouse, blue beads, she bustles in and kisses everyone present in turn, with effusive greetings for all. “Mom, you look super, you look
home
. Ralph, don't you love your house? Does the garden give you enough chores to keep you happy? Skinny Fiona, what on earth have you brought in all those boxes, goodies to keep the rest of us all happy and fat? Darling Sage, you look so beautiful, where's Noel?” And, turning back to her mother and Ralph, “Where're Jill and Portia?”

“Portia's car,” they tell her. “We haven't heard from Jill.”

“Noel had to work,” Sage adds.

By this time, Fiona's helper is carrying boxes out onto the deck, and, assisted by Ralph, Fiona begins to arrange an assortment of salads, cold pastas and thick cold soups. And cheese and fruit and pastry. Mustards, relishes. Breads and special butters, in crocks.

We'll never be able to eat all that, Caroline begins to say, and then does not, not wishing to sound unappreciative of her daughter's largesse. But it isn't really largesse, she reminds herself. It's “free,” in the curious sense that expense-account meals are free, and certain trips. All are part of an extremely expensive bit of unreality, the unreality in which the very rich spend all their time, insulated, as though in capsules. Including Fiona and the absent Jill.

And then, more practically, she thinks, Well, Liza can take home
some leftovers. Picnic lunches all week for the kids. And she thinks, At the rate Saul's going he'll certainly never be rich. (Saul donates considerable time, most recently to an emotional-support project for people with AIDS.)

A light confusion then takes over the party, and reigns for the next several hours, actually. There is not enough ice: how come Caroline had not emptied and refilled all the ice trays early on? (It is Caroline who demands this, aloud, of herself, Ralph not being given to that sort of petulant nagging.) The children want a variety of soft drinks, mostly ones not there. “I'm not about to go out to any market, so just settle down,” Saul, their stern father, tells them. And isn't it time to eat? All the cold food will warm up in the sunshine and lose its flavor, according to Fiona.