Caroline's Daughters (31 page)

Caroline laughs. “Sounds very good to me; you know, I adore garlic too.”

“Maybe I'll move to Sicily.”

A pause. “Why Sicily?”

“Oh, I don't know, I just thought of it. In connection with garlic.” And then, “Well, that's not quite true. I actually had this big love affair with a sort of Sicilian type, a married man, natch, very what we used to call prominent. You probably know him. Anyway, lots of talk about Sicily.”

“Oh.” A fairly long pause, before Caroline asks Fiona, “Well, how do you think Jill is, these days?”

“I guess about the same.”

Because she knew he would have hated it, Caroline had no funeral services for Ralph. Thus there was no specific, familial occasion at which she would have seen Jill. Still, the fact was, she had not seen her daughter for several months, and according to Fiona, who seemed to be in touch with her sister (her twin, Caroline sometimes thought the two of them so linked)—Fiona said a little vaguely that Jill was “sort of depressed, but really doing okay.” Caroline was instructed not to worry.

And Caroline for the most part very sensibly did not worry.

She assumed that Jill herself was worried over money. Such a perilous career, hers seemed to be, to Caroline, who understands
very little of high finance, its wheelings and contortions. It all looks quite crazy, to Caroline.

And then there was the matter of that odd person who seemed to be a sort of acquaintance of Jill's (Caroline hoped no more than that) who was murdered outside some club in the Mission District. That Buck Fister. Just when the Grand Jury was about to indict him for “running call girls,” a most unsavory phrase, and an ugly story all around. Amazing, Caroline finds it, that one of her daughters should know a person who was murdered! Not to mention that connection with what used to be called “white slaves.” Caroline can well understand Jill's being depressed, brought down by any such involvement, however slight.

The police have been quoted as saying that the killing looked “professional,” whatever that could mean; Caroline takes it to describe a crime beyond their capacity for solution.

But
was
Jill's involvement in whatever was going on so very slight, Caroline has been unable not to wonder. Why, really, was Jill's name in that man's little black book?

Caroline has always had a very dark sense of this particular daughter, a sense of some wildness, some feral greed and a sexuality that is both rampant and slightly askew, “kinky” would be the contemporary word. But Caroline does not choose to examine this intuitive impression of Jill. She would be absolutely unable to say why she thinks this of Jill.

These days Caroline would much rather think of Portia, with whom she is at least for the moment very close—first, for the blood-strong reason that Ralph's loss is one that they share. And second (more happily, much), there is Portia's acquisition of the narrow, funny house in Bernal Heights, the house and its needful, long-neglected garden, about which Portia and Caroline endlessly, these days, converse. (Not to mention the cranky old cat, with her arrogant walk and her loud, endless comments on life.)

And then there is Portia's new friend, the mysterious dark Hilda Daid, the young Lebanese lawyer. It is fairly clear to Caroline (again, she could not say why) that these two young women have now become lovers, and she rather believes that soon, any day now,
Portia will make this announcement to her mother. It is called “coming out to your mother,” Caroline believes.

And she thinks, Oh dear, why is it that my daughters always have to tell me things? Why don't they just let me guess?

This, then, is one phase of what could be termed Caroline's new single life. Her post-Ralph life. Herself as a widow, a word she much dislikes and would never use. This is the phase, as she later thinks of it, of peace and self-indulgence. Of lying about with tea and new novels, magazines. A time of solitude, really, except for all those turbulent conversations with her daughters.

Sometimes, though, her whole balance seems to shift, and she feels herself very near an abyss of pain, of loneliness and longing. She feels the black loss of Ralph. She will wake then at night to his absence in her bed. To the total lack of his large, most loved and familiar shape. His body, now totally gone.

From such a night she will wake exhausted, and hopeless. Feeling old, and fat, and irrevocably alone.

At those times, of necessity she begins to follow some of her own prescriptions, starting with exercise. Walking six or eight miles a day (that much mileage is “exercise,” according to Caroline; just walking about in her usual aimless way is not).

A huge fogbank now has covered what seemed to be the start of true spring weather. Every day the papers predict that in a couple of days the fog will lift, and it does not. It is not very cheering weather, but perfectly okay for walking, Caroline tells herself.

She finds it hard, though, to walk with no object other than exercise, and so she invents distant errands: she walks far out on Clement Street to a nursery, in search of some new shade plants, and some summer-blooming bulbs for her garden, and for Portia's. She goes over to Real Food on Sutter Street, a Portia recommendation. And sometimes she walks downtown, to Union Square.

Striding along with her usual briskness, arrested here and there
by sheer curiosity, Caroline in a gradual way becomes aware that she does have an objective, though; she is in fact looking for someone, or something—all these very long walks have the nature of a search. Seeing that this is the case, that she is indeed looking (not yet knowing for whom, or what), at first she thinks, Well, what a silly old jerk I've become, I must be looking for Ralph, in some stupid unconscious way. How
dumb
.

But that is not true. Almost as soon as she says to herself, I'm looking for Ralph, Caroline knows that she is not. And she continues to wonder: for whom? for what?

Often, almost anywhere along the streets where she walks, Caroline encounters homeless people. Muttering old wrinkled black men; haggard, chalk-faced young women; old women with wild crazy hair and crazier pale eyes; middle-aged men in business suits with the shifty, humiliated look of middle-class failure. They reach out for money; some more enterprising souls have set up on the sidewalk, with signs (“Homeless and hungry, willing to work”) and cups. Caroline passes out whatever she has, which is sometimes very little—and then she begins to make a point of taking along more quarters and single dollars, as she starts out on her walks.

At some point she begins to understand that in a way she is always expecting to see, somewhere, the thin bent woman who went chanting past her house, a year or so back, just before everything began to happen, as Caroline now thinks of it. The woman who she came to believe was Mary Higgins Lord, former wife of the famous surgeon.

Or was she, after all, “Higgsie”? It begins to seem more and more possible that she was not, and as Caroline encounters this confusion, this possible mistake in identity, she becomes more and more anxious to find this woman again.

And of course does not see her, anywhere.

“W
hat an incredibly beautiful mushroom.”

“Sure is. But it's got to be poisonous.”

“You mean all the prettiest ones are lethal? How trite of nature.” Not especially wanting an answer, Sage kneels down on the mat of damp leaves and pine needles, twigs. “Besides, I'm not planning to eat it, it's too lovely.” From her distance she examines the top surface of the mushroom, which is cream-colored, runnelled with yellow, its center a star of the palest blue. “Really, look at it,” she says, intently.

“I would, but my knee,” Jim reminds her. “If I get down I'll never get up. I'm a very old man,” he says, with a disbelieving laugh.

“I forgot,” and obligingly Sage rises to stand beside him, as they both look down at the mushroom.

The trail up which they have been hiking is not very clearly really a trail. Or, as Jim has earlier remarked, it could be just a deer trail; as he delicately put it, he has seen deer droppings.

Starting up again, Sage says, “You'd think I'd remember where we are, we used to come here all the time. Though of course that was about twenty years ago. About.”

“Trees grow a lot in that time,” Jim reminds her, puffing a little as he speaks.

“I guess so. Besides, we were usually stoned.”

After a few minutes Jim manages to ask her, “Where is Noel now, do you think?”

“I don't know. Lurking, I guess you'd call it. He phones a lot, but he doesn't say where he is. The bizarre part is how friendly he sounds. As though he were off on a trip and just checking in. With the wife.”

“You told him definitely, though?”

“Of course I did. I pointed out that he'd broken my arm, for God's sake.”

“You've got to keep repeating it to him, saying you're really through, you mean it,” Jim scolds. “Don't let him pretend you're just getting over some little spat.”

“You're right, I know you are.”

Although in a way she has very much liked Jim's scolding—it gets them back to a safe, familiar emotional plane—Sage still does not really want to defend herself. She does not want to explain her curious paralysis, in terms of Noel.

She feels, though, that this hike has been a very good idea. Months back, even after she had emerged from the initial trough of shame into which that crazy drunken time with Jim had plunged her (the night of the green silk shirt, she has thought of it as), she still thought often and troublingly of Jim. She had thought of calling him, even, to say, Look, all that was crazy. I do love you but you're my father, for heaven's sake. I was just so let down by everyone else that night, by Noel and by Cal, whom I hadn't even yet met, back then. But the business about the show being postponed, everything was terrible for me then.

Sage has said all that in her mind to Jim, but she then came to believe that the best solution would be (if possible) a simple return to their old connection: doing something familiar together, like this hike. She had even thought of a movie; when she was a little girl they went to movies together a lot, when Caroline was busy with new babies, or whatever. But this hike is just right. If only she can carry it off, and not say any more about Noel than she already has. Not bring up that terrible night with Jim. How relieved he will be if she doesn't!

Sage believes that, wherever Noel is, he is there with Jill. And if she thinks of it, if she thinks specifically about Noel and Jill together, she
feels sick. In New York, at least, for the most part she managed not to, and when she did think of Noel then it was only with fury: how could he, how could he push her down in the street outside a restaurant? And in a way for Sage there was much relief in that rage. They had both been enraged, he had looked at her with pure hatred.

However, as she now imagines Noel ensconced somewhere with Jill, somewhere not too far away, probably, she feels sheer helplessness. No more power.

She and Jim have now paused once more in an almost sunny clearing, and Sage says to him, “It's interesting about sexual jealousy, isn't it. What an awful weapon it can be, I mean. If you can keep someone jealous all the time you have absolute control of them. I think it was almost deliberate, the way Noel made me jealous, and kept me jealous, and then taunted me about it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, every way. Always making some play for whoever we were with, if she was even half attractive. Telling me about people coming on to him, women he worked for. According to him he always turned them down, but of course I didn't always believe him. I wasn't meant to.”

“The truth is,” Jim brings out, “I know quite a lot about sexual jealousy, I've had some heavy doses.”

“That's what you get for consorting with young girls.” Sage did not mean to say this, but was then unable not to.

“Actually it was your mother who gave me the really worst time.” Jim looks uncomfortably into the thick dark woods to one side of their clearing, as though someone (Caroline?) might be listening there. Facing Sage again, with a reluctant smile he tells her, “She was sort of a flirt in those days, I guess you'd say. There was always someone around she seemed to like. Of course I doubt if there was anything really going on—”

“Probably not,” Sage agrees, as at the same time she thinks: If there's anything Caroline is not it's a flirt. She's serious. Probably one hell of a lot was going on. For some reason Sage finds this cheering.

“But Noel's a whole other story,” defiantly Jim tells her. “Bad news. You've got to get rid of that guy.”

“I know.”

They take up their walk again, and quite soon the woods ahead of them begin to clear, smaller trees and bushes, more sky. And then they are at the actual crest, the spiny ridge that marks the top of Mt. Vision. What they now face is the sea, the shining, spreading Pacific, with long green complicated fingers of land reaching out into the water, curling around it. Turning back for a moment to face the other direction, they see wide flat Tomales Bay, and the smooth low shape of green hills on its farther side.

“Marvellous! so beautiful!” Sage and Jim simultaneously breathe.

And then, because by now she has to, Sage says, “You know, I've felt so awful about that night I came over, I mean—”

Jim's frown is very deep. “Sage, please. We were smashed. Martinis! Please don't think about it.”

“Well, I don't exactly dwell on it,” Sage lies. “Just sometimes I do think about it, and I worry.”

“Well, not to worry. I'd say our luck has improved a lot since then, wouldn't you? Both our luck?” By now Jim is smiling with relief, glad to have finished (he thinks) with that major topic and happy to introduce another. “I've been wanting to tell you,” he says, with some enthusiasm. “Remember that time, oh, maybe a year ago? You came over, you'd been to some lunch thing, I think, at Caroline's? And I was really down? I think I told you about this girl, we weren't getting along?”