The Arrangement (8 page)

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It happened when he was tired. Al had been reading Keats’s letters, then scanning the page, no longer registering words as they were written but rather as they occurred to him, and suddenly he slipped into some kind of liminal space between reading and writing that felt weightless.
We take but three steps from feathers to iron.
Connections clear and essential, slipped together in his thoughts with a sudden loop of language, until the thump came loud from overhead, and he was himself once again, in a chair, in the Kennedys’ parlor, Alfred Young Fisher, Al.

He looked around: the English antiques, the portraits, the sheer size of the place—you could not see the end of the property from the windows. Rex wanted a dovecote, he built one. He wanted a new car, he bought one. Al wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the gas they needed to get home, but it had been important to Mary Frances to come here today, and he hated to tell her no. He looked at his watch. She’d only been gone an hour.

These long afternoons at the Ranch were always tedious—Rex ensconced in his office like a resident dignitary, and Mary Frances shopping with her mother, or canning fruit, or carting David and Norah somewhere, or performing some other task that could not be done without her presence, or at least her say in the matter. Edith wasn’t feeble, but she required Mary Frances. Since the divorce from Ted, so did Anne.

Through the ceiling, he could hear the trip-stop of the baby running from the cook, laughing. Not that Ted was such
a good guy, or that people didn’t do it all the time, in one way or another, but you could not lose a child the way you could lose a wife, and Ted was an idiot if he thought so. Look at Mary Frances; look at Al here now. The Kennedy family was as much a part of his life as if he’d married them all, and there was no real way to divorce yourself from that.

He thumbed the pages of his book but couldn’t concentrate with the patter overhead, and found himself taking the wide oak staircase two steps at a time to tell Liesl to keep the boy quiet. The day did not have to be a total wash.

The door of the nursery was cracked, and Al stopped with his hand on the knob.

It wasn’t Liesl on the floor with the boy, but Rex in his shirtsleeves, rolling a blue spotted ball and watching the boy chase it back. He was completely taken, laughing nearly as much as Sean. Al could not recall having ever seen him in the nursery, let alone without a coat and tie, kneeling. He tried to back away, but the floor groaned and Rex looked up.

“Sir,” Al said.

“Are we disturbing you, Al?”

“Not at all. I was just curious.”

Sean clapped his hands, his face intent upon his grandfather. And Al thought an invitation might follow, that Rex might call him into the nursery, onto the floor, to play with this baby as if this baby were his concern as well, but Rex just laughed and rolled the ball again.

Al backed into the hallway, pulling the door closed. He would have declined anyhow.

The clock chimed. Next to the clock, an étagère. On one of the shelves, a framed photograph of Mary Frances when
she was in high school. Her dark hair was pulled back over her ears, her dress falling loosely from her shoulders, and all that cleverness in her face Al had first been attracted to when he met her in the library. Only in this photo, it was the promise of such a woman, rather than the shifting fact of who she had become.

Al could not guess what she was up to at the library these days, leafing through old books, taking careful notes. In Dijon, she’d started a potboiler mystery novel, a sketchy travelogue, and countless articles for
Ladies’ Home Journal
, all abandoned at some difficult point along the way. She wanted to write something important, he could see that, but it was a little like watching a kitten with a mouse, fast enough to catch it, but without the instincts to do what needed to be done next. Maybe she would get lucky and find something she wanted to say. But maybe she would lose interest and go back to knitting socks. Now, especially, without Tim to encourage her.

He slipped the photo from the frame and slipped the frame into the bottom drawer of the étagère. There were so many portraits of the children in Edith’s house, he doubted anyone would miss it. Downstairs, he tucked the photo into the back of his book, turned to the front page, and started reading what he’d been trying to read all afternoon, the
thwack
and patter sounding from overhead, each line repeating, repeating once again.

He was nearly beside himself when the women finally returned, but Mary Frances pretended not to notice. He stood from the chair he’d taken by the fireplace, his books already gathered under his arm. She asked if he was ready to go, and he rolled his eyes.

Anne brushed past them, tugging off the fingers of her gloves. “Sean?” she called. And then, “Good travels, Dote. I’ll see you both next week.”

Al reached out for Mary Frances’s shopping bag.

“I have to see my father,” she said. “I have to say good-bye.”

“Fine, Mary Frances. Whatever you need to do.”

“Thank you.”

Rex was back in his study with his typewriter and a cup of coffee, the closed-up room rich with man and dust and book leather. Edith was forever trying to shove the cleaning woman through there, but Rex protected his schedule. His hours at home were few. He sat with his feet propped up on the desk, his glasses slipped down his nose and his arms thrown back as though he might solve whatever problem you presented, but that was just how he relaxed.

“Do you ever think,” he said, “if we’d not had those Sundays in Laguna? The ocean, Dote, such a magnificent balm. Without it, we’d have shot each other.”

Mary Frances went to him and pressed her lips against his head, his great big brilliant head. Sudden tears leaped to her eyes. She did not want to leave him, ever.

“I went to the house a few weeks ago,” she said.

“Oh? You didn’t say.”

“It was a secret mission.”

“Mary Frances Kennedy.” He put his feet back to the floor and looked at her. He seemed about to say something else but took her hand instead, pressing a fold of bills into her palm.

“For your missions,” he said. “Or whatever else arises.”

“Daddy. You embarrass me.”

“Then you, my dear, need a thicker skin. That there is
mostly enough for a night on the town. A girl needs a night on the town, a new frock. These things don’t stop because you get too old to take money from your dad.”

“Al’s waiting,” she said.

“He’s been waiting since he got here, by the looks of it.”

Mary Frances tried to laugh.

“It’s all right, Dote.” Her father patted her hand where it rested on his shoulder. He could always read her deeper currents.

“I don’t think it is.” She shook her head. “It’s not.”

“We were all young once, dear. If it were so difficult to survive, we wouldn’t be here now.”

And she knew Rex meant to sound glib and cheery, but she found herself wondering what he’d given up or turned away, what inexorable choices he’d made beyond Edith and his children. Rex was barely fifty; how far was this life from the one he once imagined?

In the driveway, Al shook Rex’s hand, kissed Edith, opened Mary Frances’s door. In the flurry of remembrances for the holiday—Mary Frances would bring the Baltimore relish she had put up at the end of the summer, and Edith needed plenty of help with the goose—she said good-bye and fell silent.

She tried to remember if Al had always been this impatient with her, or if he only seemed so now because she knew he had the right to be. Her anger in return also seemed convenient. She thought of Anne in the dressing room of the shop, the willowy unhappiness she flounced like so much veil. Anne had done the thing that was supposed to make it better, she had left her husband, and yet she had not been able to quit the
display of wanting to leave that had sustained her for so long. Her freedom seemed to leave her with nothing to push against. Her freedom, it seemed, had made things worse.

Mary Frances knew she would do anything not to end up like Anne. Even now she felt herself dividing, some false bottom giving way, making room for some other kind of life: there would be the truth of what she’d done, and she would keep that to herself, for herself. Then there would be the things she would do to keep it, and that could make a marriage. Couldn’t it?

She slipped across the seat. Her hand fit neatly in the pocket of Al’s trousers.

“Oh,” he said. “Would you look at this?”

She could feel his thigh clutch as she pressed her palm against him. She tried to say something with that pressure, but he kept his own hands on the steering wheel, and she couldn’t think of what to do next.

When he stopped the car in front of their house, the sun was low in the sky and terribly gold beneath the brow of clouds: Al looked handsome, and she told him so. She took his arm to walk inside. She led him to the sofa and sat on the edge of the tufted seat before him, her legs crossed primly, looking up. She imagined all his schoolgirls, their smooth young faces upturned, who must find him so handsome every morning at the lectern, their notebooks open and ready, pens in hand.

“Read me your poem, Mr. Fisher,” she said.

He laughed, but not as if she were funny. “Mary Frances.”

“Please.”

She stretched back and let her arms go long overhead, closed her eyes, and now the delicious sound of all that fabric
upon itself, the catch and glide of her stockings to her skirt, her blouse pulling free at her waist. What was it the schoolgirls wore these days? She pushed one knee loose from the other and imagined Al standing between, the balance tilting her way, and god, she had hope. She imagined they were people who would do this, who would ravish each other come an early evening at home. Maybe if they were fast enough, they could sneak past all of it, wind up on the other side of these days, sweaty, spent, and somehow knit back together. It seemed possible. It seemed as if it were going to happen, and Mary Frances whispered, just once, his name,
Al
.

Nothing.

She opened her eyes, and she was alone. The room seemed suddenly bright with sunset. She pushed herself up, smoothing the back of her hair, her blouse. She heard the cupboards in the kitchen open and close, then Al with a sandwich in the doorway, three huge bites already gone.

She felt herself smile at him, surprised at how easily the pleasantness came to her. It closed many of the conversations of the day.

Later, she woke hungry, and slipped from her covers for the kitchen. On the counter was the crate of avocados they’d brought from the Ranch. She split one along the pit and took the saltcellar and a spoon, stood in her nightdress in the window’s blue light, scraping the flesh from its skin and sprinkling it with salt. She ate two avocados that way, and in the icebox, there was cold milk, and in the pantry, a big wedge of Edith’s cake, enough to fill her up, to send her back to bed. But it wasn’t so much about being hungry as it was about being alone.

She thought of that winter in France when it was so horribly cold, she’d never left their rooms, the long days waiting for Al to return from the university. She’d discovered tangerines. They could not be peeled too carefully, each velvety string stripped away, the bright sections left to dry atop the radiator on yesterday’s newspaper while she took her bath and brushed her hair. The tangerines filled the room with their perfume, and when they were tight to bursting in their skins, she opened the window and nestled them into the snow piled on the sill to eat when they were cold, changed somehow for all the care she’d spent on them. And not to serve or share, but care she’d spent for herself. Alone.

She found her notebook on the table and wrote this down.

She wondered if Tim had gotten to Delaware, and how long he would stay. She hoped, suddenly, for him to stay forever, just slip off the other side of the country where he came from. But then she remembered the flare of his match as he touched it to a cigarette, his quick draw of breath beside her in the darkness. She turned to him, the smooth hammered skin of his chest (she could not remember his bare chest, but her mind rose up to make it for her now), and she put her mouth down, his smoke still languishing in the air, in his hand, they would do anything not to talk, moving against each other again, the sheet tangled in her feet, and she wondered how much more of this night she had to remember and reinvent and relive until it would at last be over.

That she wrote down too.

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Years from now, she will find these notes when she and Norah are gathering her papers; the library at Harvard wants everything she’s got, and there are letters to publish, the diaries to edit. She sits at her high-piled desk and pages the old notebooks, the cat curled in her lap, a glass of cold vermouth set aside, anything to steady her hands now, which always seem to shake. The notebooks are full of little gems she never knew how to set, and she loses herself to them constantly, whole afternoons slipping away. She reads this page, and here suddenly is Tim. He comes back to her full force, and even as she hasn’t had a new lover in what seems like decades, that night comes back to her complete. The first.

She has written about Tim for years now. Hasn’t she always written about Tim? He haunts her, and she lets him, she writes him into places he never was: beside her, all around her, her one true love. And because she can make Tim anything she wants, their coming together has always been cast as fated and clean, as inevitable as daylight. She has not left room for complicated feelings.

Norah lays a thin hand to her shoulder now, exchanging her vermouth for a cup of tea, so attentive these days, so good to try to help sort through it all. Her life has made so much paper, which seems as though it should be weightless until it overwhelms.

“Not this one,” she says. Norah puts the notebook on the growing pile that will never go to the library or the publisher, the notebooks and letters and scraps of her life they will burn when they are through here. For a moment it’s amazing to her that with everything she’s already written, there’s still this stack of things she cannot, will not say.