Caroline's Daughters (36 page)

Portia tends toward healthy California food, whereas Hilda, whose girlhood was spent in Paris, Tangier, Beirut, likes richer, much more exotic fare. In tiny portions.

All this has still to be resolved, and so far, at times, the results have been somewhat dismaying: there was Portia's perfect fresh grilled swordfish—which Hilda topped with a (perfect)
crème fraîche
-cilantro sauce. And there were Hilda's exquisite
profiteroles
, produced to accompany Portia's first-of-season raspberries, from Real Food.

Not to mention the prolonged and intense political discussions: the threats of war in Iraq-Iran-Lebanon. The true character of Arafat. And what should be done, really, with the West Bank?

On the first night that Hilda finally came to dinner (Portia had called on the day after her father's death, which occurred on the night of the day they met)—after that dinner, at which Portia had talked more than she meant to of Ralph, sometimes with tears but more often in an intense effort to get across to this new friend, Hilda, some sense of what he was like, this waterfront man from Texas—after all that talk it was Hilda who simply rose and came
over to lean down to Portia for a kiss, and then to say, “And now you must please let me take you to bed.”

Which she did. For Portia, there was amazing revelation, and former confusions clarified. For Hilda, the more experienced, there was also revelation, of love. “I find myself astounded,” she said to Portia, with a laugh of disbelief. “My terrible war-torn cynical self. In love.”

And so it is Portia who sits beside Jill's tight white hospital bed (the same hospital, Presbyterian, that both Molly Blair and then Ralph were in); she sits there longing for Hilda, looking forward to Hilda. Talking, in her secret mind, to Hilda.

As Jill, who is getting better fast, talks more and more. “Needless to say I do feel the most horrendous guilt.” She repeats this sentence, with variations, frequently. “Screwing your sister's husband, even a half-sister's, that's got to be the worst. And the terrible thing is—Portia, you must never tell this to anyone—I really didn't like him all that much. Oh, at first I was sort of crazy about him, but I never really wanted him for me. I would never have married Noel, he has absolutely no class.” And then, “Oh Jesus, it's all so horrible. I can't wait to get into AA.”

Once she asks, “Do you mean you're really in love with this woman, this Hilda Daid, the lawyer?”

“Well yes, you could put it like that.”

“Tell me something, is it simpler with women? I mean just getting along?”

“I honestly don't know, I've had so little experience with men. Or for that matter with women either.” Portia makes an effort to examine what she is saying. “I wouldn't say that things with Hilda are exactly simple. Just, uh, very good.”

Jim McAndrew's visits to his daughter are brief and awkward, so that Portia, who is usually there when he comes, is for the first time aware of what Caroline has sometimes complained of; Jim's entire capacity for affection and for intimacy is directed toward his patients, has been Caroline's claim.

Jim and Jill discuss her symptoms, the stiffness and burn pain—since she is not a patient, but just his daughter, Jill's most frequent sentence to her father is simply, “When am I getting out of here?” Which Portia often takes as a cue to leave.

But Jim in his stiff white lab coat is far more impressive than in the old Brooks garb that Portia has usually seen him wear, on those infrequent occasions when they have met at all. (He must feel quite odd about her, Portia believes; she would be for him the product of his wife's adulterous love. Or perhaps he does not think in those terms at all.) Portia has never understood Jim's great attraction for Sage, except in the most rudimentary “Freudian” terms. Nor can she really understand why Caroline was ever sufficiently attracted to marry Jim. In any case, though, Jim as “the doctor” is clearer, more in focus and more confident than in the discarded-husband, uneasy-guest roles in which Portia has seen him before.

“Don't let me force you out of here, now, please, Portia,” Jim tells her, flashing his doctor smile, which is quick and confident. Then, checking his watch, “I've just got a couple of minutes.”

“No, I really have to get home. Dinner,” Portia murmurs. “Okay, Jill. See you tomorrow.”

“Ports, you really don't have to come every day. But of course I love it when you do,” Jill tells her.

This grateful Jill is quite a new person, to Portia. (Even Caroline has been heard to complain that Jill has never thanked anyone, for anything.) And she still looks quite unlike herself, with her short unwashed hair plastered down to her skull, her staring eyes no longer dark-rimmed, fringed. And Portia wonders, how will Jill be when she really gets all better, and gets into AA, as she insists that her plan is?

“What is it about doctors, really? Why are so many women turned on by them? I wonder if men are.” Portia, at dinner, asks these questions more of herself than as someone expecting an answer. And as soon as she has voiced them she rather wishes that she had not—or, that she had waited until she and Hilda were alone: at the moment they have two guests, Sage and Stevie.

Hilda, though, emerging from the shyness with which she has so
far been stricken, takes it up. “I think it has to do with power,” she says. “The old equation of power and sexuality.”

Stevie: “That's extremely interesting. I bet you're right. Not, as commonly supposed, so much their access to forbidden body parts.”

Hilda: “That too, but less so, I believe.”

Stevie: “Terrible, isn't it. An equation of total power over your life, which is far from always benign—with sex.”

Hilda: “Indeed.”

Stevie: “Of course, to be totally fair, I have to say that we're ignoring the helping aspect of doctors.”

Hilda: “Yes, there is that, but I don't think that's what's sexy.”

Pleased that the guests are getting along, and rather surprised at this dialogue which she herself seems to have instigated, Portia for the moment simply listens. She is also pleased that the whole implication of her remark was not apparent: she was speaking of course of Jim McAndrew, and she could just as well have said, Just what does anyone see in Jim McAndrew?

“Sometimes I think I only like gay men,” is Sage's contribution. And then, with a small ambiguous laugh in the direction of her friend, “No offense, Stevie.”

Good-naturedly he tells her, “Well, actually me too. At least half my friends are gay, which can be more than a little sad these days. Four lost already this year.”

At which they all say yes, fervently, and then are quiet for a while.

“And the other half are women,” Stevie next says, successfully breaking that moment of mourning. “I really like women friends.”

This is visibly true, if the present moment is a sample of how Stevie “relates” to women. In the company of this somewhat heterogeneous trio, he is clearly much at ease. His plump soft body even seems to enlarge, to expand, as he sits so relaxed in Portia's (Mrs. Kaltenborn's) largest shabby leather chair, which creaks a little as he shifts his considerable weight.

They are having coffee, after an extremely good if slightly eccentric dinner—combined efforts by Portia and Hilda, their Middle Eastern-Texas-California cuisine.

“I really could not have got through the last few weeks without Calvin Crome,” says Sage. “What a kind and really magic person in my life.”

“You're forgiving him for making you so rich?” Stevie asks this with great affection, as though the question were familiar, one often repeated between them. And then he says, more or less to everyone, “Sage and I are the perfect example of what happens to old hippies. We get rich. If not conservative.”

“Yes, but we really didn't mean to,” Sage tells him. “You didn't know that Fiona would ever sell Fiona's.”

“No, not really. But I saw to it that I had a very clever contract, so maybe in some sense I did know.”

“You're too hard on yourself, you know that?”

“Unlike you.” He laughs at her.

Sage then says, “Ports, I guess I do have to go and see Jill?” This was actually a question.

“Well, not necessarily,” Portia tells her, somewhat guardedly.

“You think not? You're probably right, she could be dreading it too. Dreading me.”

“Well, sure.”

“And I have to admit, I am pretty angry. Which I might as well not say to Jill,” Sage continues. “But of all the sleaze, getting it on with your sister's husband.”

Stevie asks, “Did it ever come out what her connection was with that Buck Fister?”

“Not really,” Sage tells him. “I suppose it might have if he hadn't got himself offed. By the Mafia, probably. And probably Jill was one of his girls, turning tricks for him.”

“Oh, Sage.”

“Sage, really.”

“Sage, you're too harsh, really.”

“Well, I've got some reason to be mad at her, don't you think? And even if she wasn't turning tricks, Fister is a very suspect person to have as a friend. I think Jill is basically dreadful!” Sage cries out, suddenly unleashed. “I've really had it with her, with her hundred-dollar panty hose—”

“How on earth do you know that?”

“She told me once. Actually boasting. And twice a week a masseur and three times comb-outs and every other day a manicure. Jesus, I hate yuppies. They're immoral. Hundred-dollar panty hose is immoral.” In her passion Sage's voice trembles, edged with tears.

Stevie pours some red wine into her glass—a beautiful Mexican swirled blue, Mrs. Kaltenborn's glasses. “Baby, we all hate yuppies,” he tells her. “Even yuppies hate yuppies. But you're right, they consort with the enemy, they're bad.”

Sage is crying now, tears streaming down, and her voice is uncontrolled, but still she is trying to talk, to say something. “Well, you can see that my going to visit Jill is not such a great idea,” she gets out. Her laugh is a croak. “I must be drunk, I think. Stevie, take me home?”

“Would you say that Stevie is gay? Is that what Sage meant?” Hilda asks this of Portia as together they try to clean up their disordered kitchen. Lively Hilda and sleepy, failing Portia.

“Well, I don't know. She could have meant that, I guess.”

“Or is he possibly one of those men who are quite at peace with their feminine natures? Their animas. Often such men seem to be gay but are not, in all ways they are deeply fond of women.”

“Well, I guess. Hilda, don't you think we could get a dishwasher? Everyone has them.”

“Would not Sage then accuse us of yuppiness? My darling, for this night you have a dishwasher, who is myself. And now would you please go up to bed?”

W
aking in Ravello, an hour or so south of Naples, on the morning after a very late and somewhat problematic arrival at this inaccessible, mountaintop hotel, Caroline sees the slits of sunlight between the louvers, in the long wide windows. She sees and feels that indeed it must be morning, and so she gets up, she goes to open a shutter, and she sees what she never could have imagined: a bright vista of small steep olive fields, bordered by gray stone fences; tiny houses with sloping red-tiled roofs, gardens, everywhere trees and flowers; a miniature woman, blue-aproned, in her doorway; a man with a wheelbarrow; a horse and a goat; and far off in the shimmering pale-blue silver distance the sea, the Mediterranean. Caroline gasps and almost laughs with the sheer surprise of it all, of what she sees, the amazing beauty. A painter's dream of a morning, she thinks to herself.

She arrived the night before at a darkened entrance: a gate, a terrace, steps and a massive, barely illuminated door with a big brass plate. Bearing a name. A bellboy mysteriously appeared, opened her car door and took in her bags—there seemed no question as to her destination.

Quite punchy with fatigue, Caroline stood beside her pile of luggage in the entrance hall, on a black-and-white marble floor, noting a broad carpeted staircase with intricately carved banisters—leading upstairs? to beds?—as she watched the bellboy in some sort of conference, or argument, with a sleekly white-haired, rather corpulent
person behind the desk. They both were gesturing, scowling, as Caroline was acutely aware of a longing to be in any bed at all.

She was allowed, though, only to wash up (in a surprisingly institutional, utilitarian, large bathroom, on the ground floor) before being ushered into what she could dimly make out to be a magnificent dining room: deep-drawn draperies, presumably over windows that looked out to some sort of view. And a dozen or so small round white-clothed tables, above one and only one of which a delicate crystal-hung chandelier shone down.

Seated alone in such splendor, she was soon served by a young blond white-coated waiter, who brought her a chilled green bottle of wine. Then cold chicken, a plate of sliced tomatoes. Some cheese and bread and butter.

Feeling drunk from her first sip of wine, which was dry and delicious, heady, Caroline said to the white-haired owner, “This is the most elegant supper I've ever had.” He had appeared discreetly to inquire.

He bowed and smiled, reminding her suddenly but imprecisely of someone, someone—and then, as the smile receded, she saw that it was Roland. For a single exhausted and quite unnerving moment Caroline felt that Roland had followed her there—disguised, in a white wig, an affable innkeeper manner.

In the morning, though, waking to that view, and to no Roland, to her own wide restful private bed, Caroline thinks, How ridiculous, how very silly I do get, sometimes when I'm tired. Roland Gallo has undoubtedly propositioned at least several women since me, and no doubt with large success, his turn-downs must be as rare as hen's teeth.

“How brave you are, going all the way off to Italy by yourself.” Almost everyone said that to Caroline, with a few individual variations. Even her daughters said it. And Saul, the favorite, reliable son-in-law, surprised her by asking, privately and highly seriously, “Caroline, are you really sure you want to do this?”