Terms of Endearment (13 page)

She looked her daughter right in the eye.

“Okay, okay, forget it,” Emma said.

“No, I’ve not finished,” Aurora said. “I may have new heights to rise to. For all I know, my dear, good grammar provides a more lasting basis for sound character than quote real feeling unquote. I would not presume to claim that definitively, but I must say that I suspect it. I also suspect, if you must know, that it was lucky for your father and me that none of my admirers had much capacity for kicking. The difference between the saved and the fallen, I have always maintained, boils down to adequate temptation.”

“What’s adequate?” Emma asked.

“Adequate is a kind that’s hard to come by in these parts, unhappily for me,” Aurora said. “Or happily for me, as the case may be. I’ve not given up the search though, I assure you.

“I suppose it’s something of an enigma,” she added reflectively.

“What?”

“Adequacy.” Aurora smiled at her daughter, and a touch of mischief was in her smile.

“I only hope your brilliant young friend is adequate to maintain you, if it should prove that he’s adequate to tempt you,” she said.

Emma flushed and jumped to her feet. “Shut up,” she said. “He’s gone. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. I just wanted to see him once. He’s an old friend—what’s the harm in that?”

“I don’t believe I suggested there was any harm in it,” Aurora said.

“Well, there wasn’t,” Emma said. “Don’t sit there and make
complete sentences at me. I hate good grammar and I think you’re awful. I’m going home. Thank you for the dinner.”

Aurora waved her soup spoon, smiling at her furious daughter. “Yes, thank you for attending, dear,” she said. “Your dress was quite well chosen.”

They looked at one another for a moment. “All right, if you’re not going to help me,” Emma said. At once she wished she hadn’t said it.

Aurora looked at her daughter calmly. “I doubt seriously that I shall fail to help you if I’m called upon,” she said. “What is far more likely is that you’ll be too stubborn to call upon me at the proper time. I wish you would sit back down. In fact, I wish you would spend the night here. If you go back home you’re surely going to fret.”

“Of course I am,” Emma said. “I can fret if I want to.”

“Listen!” Aurora said commandingly.

Emma listened. All she could hear was the flutter of wings from one of the several birdhouses.

“Those are my martins,” Aurora said. “I imagine you’ve disturbed them. They are quite responsive to agitation, you know.”

“I’m going on,” Emma said. “Good night.”

When she had gone Aurora took her spoon and her bowl to the kitchen and washed them. Then she returned to the patio and walked out in her back yard. The martins were still fluttering in the martin house, and she stood beneath them and sang softly for a little while, as she often did at night. It occurred to her, thinking of Emma, that she had no real wish to be younger. Few enough of the rewards of life seemed to belong to youth, when one considered. She leaned against the pole of the martin house, happily barefoot, and tried to remember something that would induce her to want to start again where her daughter was. She could think of nothing, but she did remember that she had a couple of new movie magazines to read, tucked away by her bed—a little reward for having done her duty by her old lover and good friend Alberto. He had been such a fine singer once. No doubt he had more reason than she did for wishing to be young again.

The grass, as she walked in, was just beginning to be wet from the moist night, and the moon that earlier had shone so nicely on her elm and her cypress and her pines was curtained and faint in the mist—that mist that the Gulf breathed over Houston almost every night, as if to help the city sleep.

CHAPTER VI

1.

“P
HONE’S RINGING
,” Rosie said.

The news came as no surprise to Aurora, whose hand was less than a foot from the instrument in question. Midmorning had come again and she was ensconced in a sunny little window nook in her bedroom, almost her favorite place in the world. She had the sunlight and an open window and a great many pillows around her, for moral support, and she needed them all, since she was in the midst of one of her least favorite of all tasks: paying bills. Nothing filled her with quite such a sense of indecision as the sight of her bills, more than fifty of which lay scattered about the window nook. None of them so far had even been opened, much less paid, and Aurora was staring fixedly at her checkbook, trying to get her balance solidly in mind before tearing into the many ominous envelopes.

“Phone’s ringing, I said,” Rosie repeated, since it still was.

Aurora continued to stare at her checkbook. “How like you to
state the obvious,” she said. “I know the phone is ringing. It’s my sanity that’s being destroyed, not my hearing.”

“It could be good news,” Rosie said brightly.

“That is a remote possibility, in the mood I’m in,” Aurora said. “It is far more likely to be someone I don’t want to talk to.”

“Who would that be?” Rosie asked.

“That would be anyone insensitive enough to call me when I don’t wish to be called,” she said. She made a dark face at the phone.

“You answer it,” she said. “It’s making it difficult for me to keep my mind on figures.”

“It’s got to be the General, anyway,” Rosie said. “He’s the only one with the gall to let it ring twenty-five times.”

“Well, let’s test him,” Aurora said, laying down her checkbook. “Let’s see if he has the gall to let it ring fifty times. That much gall amounts to arrogance, and if there’s anything I don’t need right now it’s arrogance. Do you suppose he’s watching?”

“Yep,” Rosie said, borrowing a little of her employer’s hand lotion. “What else has he got to do?”

The General’s home, as luck would have it, was at the end of Aurora’s street, and his bedroom window commanded a clear view of her garage. He had only to pick up his binoculars to determine if her car was there, and his binoculars were seldom far from his hand. His wife’s death and Rudyard Greenway’s had come only six months apart, and the General and his binoculars had been a constant factor in Aurora’s life ever since. Even working in the flowerbeds in her front yard became a problem; she could seldom do so without the thought that two greedy, cold blue military eyes were fixed upon her.

Her phone continued to ring.

“I certainly think military training must destroy the finer instincts,” Aurora said. “Are you keeping count of the rings?”

“He ain’t my boy friend,” Rosie said. She was exploring Aurora’s dressing table, looking for things she might need.

“Answer it,” Aurora said. “I’m growing faint from listening to it ring. Be acerbic.”

“Be what?” Rosie asked. “Talk English.”

“Don’t let him push you around, in other words,” Aurora said.

Rosie picked up the phone and the scratchy masculine voice of General Hector Scott immediately began to grate on the ears of both. Even amid her pillows Aurora could hear it distinctly.

“Hi there, General,” Rosie said blithely. “What are you doing up so early?”

Everyone who knew him knew that Hector Scott rose at five
A.M
., summer and winter, and ran three miles before breakfast. He was accompanied on his runs by his two Dalmatians, Pershing and Marshal Ney, both of whom, unlike the General, were in the prime of life. The dogs enjoyed the runs—again unlike the General, who ran because his standards would not permit him not to. The one member of his establishment who absolutely loathed them was his man. F.V., who was forced to follow the morning runs in the General’s old Packard sedan car in case the General or perhaps one of the Dalmatians dropped dead along the way.

F.V.’s last name was d’Arch, though few knew it. Rosie happened to be one of the few, the reason being that F.V. hailed from Bossier City, Louisiana, which was right next to her own home town of Shreveport. Occasionally, when she was caught up with her work, Rosie would trip down the street and spend a happy morning in General Scott’s garage helping F.V. tinker with the old Packard, a car so over-the-hill and generally unreliable that it was usually broken down by the time it got home from following the three-mile run. Rosie was a great comfort to F.V., partly because they both loved to reminisce about the good old days in Shreveport and Bossier City, and partly because she understood Packard engines almost as well as he did. F.V. was a thin little fellow with a pencil mustache and a good deal of native Cajun melancholy; his old home ties with Rosie might have grown into something stronger if they hadn’t both been convinced that Royce Dunlup would walk in with a shotgun and mow them both down if, as F.V. put it, “anything ever happened.”

“Yeah, they mowed down Bonnie and Clyde,” Rosie observed happily whenever the conversation drifted into such channels.

General Scott, however, knew quite well that Rosie knew quite well that he had been up since five
A.M
., and her remark fell
somewhere between impertinence and insult. Under ordinary circumstances he would not have tolerated either from anyone, but unfortunately nothing involving Aurora Greenway and her household, if it could be called a household, seemed to align in any way with ordinary circumstances. Faced with the usual irritating and extraordinary circumstances, he made his usual effort to be restrained but firm.

“Rosie, we won’t go into the question of why I’m up,” he said. “Could you put Mrs. Greenway on at once?”

“It don’t look like it,” Rosie said, glancing at her boss. Her boss had a cheerful but rather distant look on her face as she sat among the litter of bills.

“Why not?” the General asked.

“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “I don’t think she’s made up her mind who she’s talkin’ to today. Wait a minute while I find out.”

“I do not want to wait, and I won’t,” the General said. “This is childish nonsense. You tell her I want to speak with her at once. I have waited thirty-five rings already. I’m a punctual man myself and I was married for forty-three years to a punctual woman. I don’t appreciate delays of this kind.”

Rosie held the receiver away from her ear and grinned at Aurora.

“He says he won’t wait,” she said loudly. “He says it’s childish nonsense, and his wife never made him wait in his life. She was right on time for forty-three years.”

“What a ghastly thought,” Aurora said with a dreamy wave of her hand. “I’m afraid I’ve never marched to any man’s drum and I’m far too old to start now. Also I have observed that it’s generally weak-minded people who allow themselves to be slaves to the clock. Tell the General that.”

“She ain’t marching to no drum and she ain’t no slave to no clock,” Rosie said to the General. “And she thinks you got a weak mind. I guess you can hang up if you want to.”

“I do not want to hang up,” the General said, gritting his teeth. “I want to speak to Aurora, and I want to speak to her now.”

Invariably, attempts to get through to Aurora caused him to
grit his teeth at some point. The only saving aspect was that they were still, at least,
his
teeth: he had not yet been reduced to gritting dentures.

“Where is she?” he asked, still gritting.

“Uh, she ain’t far,” Rosie said cheerfully. “Uh, some ways she’s far and some ways she’s close,” she added after another glance at her boss.

“That being the case,” the General said, “I would like to ask why it was necessary to allow the phone to ring thirty-five times. If I still had my tanks this wouldn’t have happened, Rosie. A certain house I know would have been leveled long before the thirty-fifth ring, if I still had my tanks. Then we’d find out who’s to be trifled with and who isn’t.”

Rosie held the receiver away from her ear. “He’s off on his tanks agin,” she said. “You better talk to him.”

“Who’s there, who’s there?” the General said loudly into his silent receiver. In his prime he had commanded a tank division, and attempts to get through to Aurora almost always brought his tanks to mind. He had even begun to dream of tanks, for the first time since the war. Only a few nights before he had had a very happy dream in which he had driven up River Oaks Boulevard standing in the turret of his largest tank. The people in the country club at the end of the boulevard had all come out and lined up and looked at him respectfully. He was the only four-star general in the club, and the people there looked at him respectfully even without his tank; but it had been a satisfying dream nonetheless. General Scott had many dreams involving tanks, many of which ended with him crunching through the lower walls of Aurora’s house, into her living room, or sometimes her kitchen. In some of the dreams he merely tanked around indecisively in front of her house, trying to come up with some method for getting a tank up the stairs to her bedroom, where she always seemed to stay. To get into her bedroom he would need a flying tank, and everyone who knew anything about generals knew that Hector Scott was a realist where ordnance was concerned. There were no flying tanks, and even under duress his subconscious refused to supply him one. As a result he continued
to find himself in conversations with Aurora Greenway or her maid that put him in the mood to try and break the telephone receiver over his knee.

He was just arriving at that state when Aurora stretched out her hand and took the phone. “I might as well talk to him,” she said. “I’m really not in any great hurry to pay my bills.”

Rosie yielded the receiver with some reluctance. “It’s a good thing they took his tanks away when they let him out of the army,” she said. “What if he got ahold of one someday an’ come after us?”

Aurora ignored her. “Well, as usual, Hector,” she said, uncovering the mouthpiece, “you’ve frightened Rosie rather badly with all your talk of tanks. It seems to me that at your age you would have learned what frightens people and what doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gives notice. No one wants to work in a household that a tank’s apt to burst into at any moment. It does seem to me you’d realize that. I’m sure F.V. wouldn’t like it if he thought I was likely to smash in on him any any moment.”