Listening to Billie (3 page)

The wedding was planned by Josephine—the successful writer, but not a poet: some essays, biography, travel. A couple of early short stories. Liking to be in charge, Josephine was good at plans.

“Or did she ever marry anyone?” asked Daria, still speaking of Billie. And then in a softer voice she asked, “Was Evan with you when you saw her?”

Intimacy between the two sisters had been uneven, partly because of the difference in age; not, Eliza thought, because of separate fathers. Eliza had seen their friendship as marked with dark areas of reticence, like craters, or whatever they are, on the moon. But, she wondered, does there come a time when all areas should be explored, illuminated? Should she then say: Evan and I weren’t getting along, and then he fell in love with someone else, someone forbidden?

Daria’s thin face was sharpened and flushed with intensity; her eyes were gray and luminous.

Gently, Eliza said, “Yes, I was with Evan. Not long before we were married.” And lightly she added, “Billie was one of the few things we agreed on. We were both crazy about her.”

“Smith and I like Billie, too,” said Daria, and then added, with one of her infrequent jolts of humor, “I hope that’s not a bad sign?”

With a sort of relief both women laughed; they lit new cigarettes and concentrated on their tea, in which most of the ice had melted.

“Or,” said Daria, “is it a bad sign that Smith and Josephine are so uneasy with each other?” At times Daria’s voice was curiously old; it became tight and dry.

Eliza reassured her, “Not really. I think it’s the idea of husbands. Evan, and her own three. Marriage itself.”

Then Daria asked, “What about Billie—did she always support herself? I wonder how much money she earned.”

And that question was understood by Eliza as an oblique reference to and question about Smith, an economist, who presumably was interested in money, and who would probably earn a lot. Eliza had understood several things at once: Daria was purposefully not talking about Smith, and her marriage to him—perhaps out of nervousness, reasonable in any wedding circumstances, Eliza thought. And also Daria was wondering about Eliza’s marriage to Evan. What really happened? why were they getting a divorce? why did Evan kill himself?

“I don’t know,” Eliza said, of Billie and money. “I don’t think money was exactly her thing, somehow.” She was unable not to say this defiantly, money not being her thing either. Then, afraid as always of having too great an influence on her sister, and of sounding opposed to Smith, she modified: “I think she was pretty careless about money.”

And she wondered: did she say that for Smith’s indirect approval? She had so far very little sense of Smith. He had a kind of anonymous pleasantness, but he smoked a pipe, and Eliza had a vague prejudice against pipe-smokers.

“In any case, there they are,” said Daria, as a car was heard being jolted over bumps, then harshly braked. “Why must she always drive?”

“She doesn’t trust anyone else.”

•  •  •

Behind the orchard a narrow road wound into the woods; at the beginning it was pine-needled, passing the hidden boulders and the thickets. Then it became hard, white-surfaced, winding between strict dark Norway pines, past small grassy meadows and an occasional farmhouse. The barns were connected to the houses by closed passageways, against heavy winter weather, and when the barn was larger than the house, it meant the man was in charge, as Josephine had pointed out to Smith in the course of this afternoon’s excursion. She had for the first time noticed that in this area most of the houses were larger than the barns—and why? Her practiced writer’s mind noted this for possible exploration.

The white road then reached a narrow black asphalt highway, where it ended. The highway returned eventually to the lake, which was glimpsed at intervals between pine woods, or beyond a hillock of grass. There were cemeteries of broken gray or old white stones, a logging camp, then a crossroads with a grocery store and a small library.

Josephine and Smith had traversed all that this afternoon; she had chosen errands as a not terribly original way of getting to know Smith. The “Evan experience,” as she thought of it, not to mention her own three marriages—none madly successful, she sometimes sighingly said, at those moments forgetting the adored middle husband: Franz, killed in Spain, by whom she had no child—all that had made her nervous about the marriages of her daughters. Daria at twenty seemed incredibly young, and so vulnerable, much more so than Eliza at that same age. Eliza had always been strong—unlike her father, thought Josephine, remembering Caleb Hamilton. Like both her daughters, Josephine married at twenty.

In the back seat was Catherine, Eliza’s daughter. Catherine, fat and blond, pleasantly self-sufficient, affectionate and rather quiet—qualities that were to describe her for life, more or less.

The afternoon had been nice enough, but unsuccessful—Smith had not let himself be known. He was exceptionally polite—though not, thank God, with those elaborate manners Evan had, but then poor Evan was so Southern. And Smith had an air of innocence—that smooth, clear white skin, those wide and opaque brown eyes. But how could a brilliant young economist—Harvard,
summa cum laude
, a Ph.D. at twenty-four—possibly be so innocent? Josephine had tried to draw him out about politics—to her, always crucial in an assessment of people—but with considerable unsuccess. He was unenthusiastic about the Kennedys, as she was herself, but she was unable to tell from which point of view: her own, which was vaguely Marxist, or from the right.

At least his features were not bland: Smith was a decisively handsome young man, with thick dark brown hair above a fine high white forehead, and eyebrows that flared up slightly at the ends. Only his chin was a little blurred. Thinking ahead, Josephine decided that he would look even better in middle age: distinguished, properly graying. Perhaps he would go into politics.

“Have you ever thought about politics for yourself?” she asked.

“Never,” said Smith, more firmly than he had said anything so far.

Using an old phrase of her own, Josephine thought, He’s a Money Person. (A phrase in which she never saw any irony: to many people, including her daughters, she herself, being a rich woman, could be called a Money Person.)

Josephine had looked the same for the past twenty years: a tall thin woman with very white hair and bright blue eyes, a smoothly tanned skin. Still somewhat Thirties in her behavior, left-wing Thirties with its bohemian overtones, she tended to dress in ways that could be described as peasanty; her daughters so described her longish flowered skirts and billowing blouses. She was aware of that view, but did not care at all; a secure woman, she knew that that was how she liked to dress.

She parked the car in the clearing beyond the portecochère, and she and Smith walked around to the porch with Catherine. Daria got up to greet them. Eliza had gone inside to turn the record off.

At dinner, as she sometimes did, Josephine talked more than anyone else, and with an unaccustomed lurch of sympathy Eliza thought: poor Josephine, she’s more unstrung than any of us are. The meal was one of Josephine’s worst; deeply uninterested in food, except abstractly, Josephine regarded attention paid to cooking as frivolous. Tonight she had underdone both the chicken and the corn.

Eliza, in her mind, was writing a letter to a man with whom she was still involved, The Lawyer. The night with Red-Bill marked the end of “sleeping around”; rather arbitrarily she settled on The Lawyer for monogamy, and although he was dull she sometimes thought of marrying him, in moods in which she thought that she
should
marry. “This house is from another world,” she was writing, in her mind. “Certainly another century. Actually my mother inherited it when her parents died, and it has survived all the storms of her life, the husbands and her work, Daria and me. I think she would die if she lost it, and it is a wonderful house. The rooms—the halls—kitchen—the pantry that smells of apples—all the windows looking out to the lake. The attic full of books, and generations of dolls. Dolls’ houses.” She imagined that after dinner she would go upstairs and write that letter; very likely, Daria and Smith would want to be alone, and Josephine always worked at night. She had said that she was well into a book about Dorothy Thompson, whom she knew and greatly admired.

“It will actually be more like a party than a wedding, a nice informal family party. Just a few neighbors, old friends.” Josephine had said all this before, several times, in the course of the day. “Smith, dear, won’t you have another ear of corn? Catherine?”

Smith declined; Catherine said, “Yes, I’ll have at least two more.”

But later, in her room, although seated at her desk, Eliza did not write a letter; she worked on a poem, or perhaps it was a poem. She played with images of the house and the lake, a kaleidoscope of words, of patterns of words—and she smiled to herself with pleasure as she worked.

The night was very warm for Maine, in late August, and just then it was whitely illuminated by the moon; moonlight made long shadows across the lawn, below Eliza’s window, and out on the lake there was a glimmering path of moonlight. Once, a long time ago, she and Daria had gone out in a canoe at night to follow such a path: Eliza could see them clearly now, as though from the shore—herself, much taller, paddling in the stern, and small Daria in the bow, putting down her paddle and turning excitedly to exclaim, or to ask something.

Now, on an impulse, Eliza decided to go outside for a moment, to abandon what was not yet a poem, and to see the lake and the moonlight.

It seemed silly to dress again; she left her room and tiptoed down the hall, naked beneath her linen robe. She remembered a childhood time of terror in that hall: she had been reading
Scottish Chiefs
, and imagined that English ghosts lurked there. She passed the room next to hers, in which Catherine was sleeping, passed Josephine’s room. Daria and Smith had tactfully been given adjoining rooms at the far end of the hall, in which, Eliza supposed, they were sleeping, or making love.

She went down the wide steps, tiptoeing, guarding against creaks, across the broad entrance hall, and she opened the door to the porch.

Someone was out there, someone sitting on the chair where that afternoon she herself had sat, next to Daria on her chair, as they talked and listened to Billie. A man was there. But before she had time to be frightened, she saw that it was Smith.
Smith Worthington, still fully dressed, with his unlit pipe in one hand.

Irritated, she nevertheless said, softly and pleasantly, “Oh, hi,” and—unavoidably—she went over to where he sat.

Oddly enough, he seemed very glad to see her; rising, affably touching her elbow, he said, “How nice. I’ve been hoping that sometime we could talk.”

She sat down docilely in what had been Daria’s chair, and she wondered what he could possibly want to talk about—to her. She was conscious of her nakedness beneath the robe, her big loose breasts, and for an instant it occurred to her that Smith would make love to her—or would try. But of course he did not; he was not like that. Nevertheless, she tightened the robe about her and sat up straight, and asked, “Where’s Daria?”

“Asleep, I guess.” He sounded puzzled, but then seemed quickly to catch what she meant. “Oh, I see. You thought that I—that we—that Daria and I would be together.”

It was said accusingly, and so Eliza admitted, “Well, yes, I did think so.” Well, yes, she thought that people who loved each other would make love (even—as she had pointed out to Evan-dying-of-guilt—if it broke certain rules).

Now she sighed, knowing surely that their conversation would be impossible.

He surprised her by saying next, “I haven’t really told Daria this yet, but there’s a good chance that we may move out to California. To your area, in fact.”

“Really? But that’s marvelous.”

“Yes.” He paused momentarily, so that again she thought obscurely of sex. Then he said, “There’s an opportunity for me to make a great deal of money.”

In the half-light, the midnight moonlight, Smith’s face was vague, was more boyish, more innocent even than usual. Suppose, Eliza unreasonably wondered, suppose I made a pass at him, reached and knowingly kissed that soft curved mouth? But why did she even think of this, since it was not something that she wanted to do? She looked out at the glinting lake, at the
cold gray sand where she had meant to walk, feeling more lonely than if she were in fact alone.

Of course she should have asked Smith about his work possibility, but she did not know what to ask, and she remembered a phrase of Josephine’s: the Money People. What Smith was, what she was not.

He surprised her again by saying, “I don’t know the San Francisco area well at all. And I was wondering about an appropriate place for us to live.”

One of us, Eliza at that moment thought, one of us is crazy. But why should it be Smith, who after all was not saying anything so bizarre? “Appropriate” may be a pompous word, but not a crazy one. And not for the first time she thought, I am the one who is mad, it is obviously me.

“Woodside,” she said to Smith. “Daria loves the country, and it’s elegant there. It will remind her of here. Of Maine.”

He took out a tiny notebook and made a notation. Then he asked Eliza, “How far from the city, would you say?”

“I don’t know. Less than an hour’s drive, I think.”

He noted that also, and then said what perhaps he had meant to say all along: “I do hope, Eliza, that your own life will be more settled. Soon.”

She giggled in a way that was girlish and quite out of character. Who was she—Daria? Possibly her daughter Catherine? Then she said, “I suppose you mean that I should get married—again?”

What else could he possibly mean? Smith nodded.

Having judged that he considered her crazy, and that quite possibly he was right, Eliza decided that she would confirm his view; she would make him see her as really mad.

“I’m not really convinced about marrying,” she said. “Isn’t it perhaps done too often? Look at Josephine. Once might be enough. Really, why should I marry again? Why would marriage make me more
appropriate?
” She was unable not to italicize the word.