Superior Women (44 page)

The next morning she does think of Cathy again, but now she is able to think of Cathy alive, Cathy brighter and funnier than anyone. No longer dying.

To break the flight back, Megan has, as planned, a twenty-four-hour layover in San Francisco, an expensive room at the St. Francis, which overlooks not Union Square but a curious concrete courtyard, with a small fountain and some small plumy ferns. That look gives her an odd sensation of being already back in New York—or that San Francisco has at last become New York.

Bracing herself, she dials the number that she has for Mrs. Piscetti, Cathy’s mother. But the phone rings and rings, and no one answers.

Inwardly promising herself to try again, Megan goes out for a walk.

On Geary Street, as she passes the theaters, she sees that in one of them
Nicaragua,
one of Adam’s greatest successes, is currently playing. Thinking of Adam in a friendly way, she smiles, and continues her walk, turning upward toward Nob Hill.

Back in the hotel, very tired, Megan decides that she will not even call her own parents, but that decision somehow shocks her, and instead she dials the familiar number.

The phone rings for a long time as Megan thinks, Well, of course, Florence is off carhopping and Harry is off—somewhere. Just what her father does on her mother’s work nights is something that Megan has not considered before, and now she has barely time to, before Florence answers.

“Hello?” Florence sounds muffled, distant, or sick? But Florence is never sick.

“It’s me, Megan.” And Megan tries to explain: between planes, hardly any time. As usual, she notes to herself, she is making excuses, when in fact her mother has asked nothing of her.

But then Florence does ask something. “I’d give just anything to see you now,” she says, in an almost pleading, unfamiliar way. “We could talk—”

“I
know,
I
do
wish we could,” agrees Megan, meaning: I know I’ve never talked to you, and it may be time. “But now I just can’t, I’m burned out, and I have to get back,” she says. “I’ll call you from New York.”

“Well, that just might be the very best thing—a long-distance gab can be a real treat.” The old Florence—perky, folksy—and perhaps pretending? Megan resolves to call her soon, for a long conversation.

She dials Mrs. Piscetti’s number again, and still gets no answer. She concludes that they must be away.

She orders dinner in her room, with a good bottle of California wine.

She writes a long letter to Jackson, which she then tears up.

And the next day she takes an early plane to New York, Oakland to Newark, again.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever seen just back from Hawaii without any tan at all,” is the dead-pan comment of Leslie DuVal.

“Well, I had a lot to do there.”

“Oh. Business?” Poor Leslie, chatty by nature, is frustrated, always, by Megan.

“Well yes, sort of. Private business.”

“Oh.
” Leslie sniffs. Desperately concerned with style, Leslie invents her own fashions; it is her form of fiction, Megan understands. That day she is wearing black net stockings, a tight black skirt and very high heels. “Well,” she now says to Megan, “you won’t mind if I’m a little late back from lunch? I’m doing it with Benny.”

•     •     •

She goes home early.

Tired and aimless, disoriented in her own apartment, Megan’s attention is suddenly caught by the preening voice of a news announcer; coming in, out of habit she must have flicked on the radio. He is talking about Christopher Street, and a slight breathiness in his delivery indicates that he has something big on his mind. “Christopher Street, where there have been several ugly incidents of what is known as ‘fag-baiting’ or ‘queer-bashing’ tonight added a new horror to its list. The famous playwright Adam Marr, out walking with a young actor, Donald Stark, neither of them, uh, known homosexuals—were assaulted by three men. There was an exchange of insults, and shots were fired by the men in the car, who escaped. They were not identified by passersby.… Not expected to live … Survived by … Shock … very successful playwright … wives … children … successful …”

Megan manages to turn off the radio, that horrible self-approving voice. She manages to sit down. She finds that she is trembling, and not weeping but covering her face with her hands as though she were.

She does not, of course, for an instant believe that Adam is dead. Nor Cathy.

After a while, when she can, Megan dials Janet’s number, and is informed by an answering service that Dr. Marr is unavailable at this time. Is this an emergency? Well, is it? Dr. Marr will call.

Megan considers making herself a drink, and decides on tea instead, partly because boiling the water, heating the pot—all that tea ceremony will take up a certain amount of time.

Fortified, but hardly comforted, by her cup of tea, Megan telephones Biff.

Biff’s voice is so tight that at first Megan thinks he must have guests, except that in that case he would explain, “Darling Megan, I couldn’t be busier. Could we just possibly talk tomorrow?” Tonight he says nothing of the sort; in a dull-sounding way he asks about her trip and then, in answer to her question (“You’ve heard the news?”) suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, entirely out of
character (as Megan has known his character), Biff begins to shriek: “Of
course
I’ve heard the news. Lord God, don’t you know anything? It could have been me! Megan, can’t you tell I don’t want to talk to you? I don’t want to
see
you!”

Shocked, wounded, and most of all terrified, Megan hangs up. She believes that in some way she can understand Biff’s outburst, his panic and rage, and she can tell herself that it really has nothing to do with her.

She goes to bed, and lies awake. She is wholly terrified of the world, all its lurking evils. Cancer. Crazy cretins bearing guns.

At some point her phone rings. She does not answer.

That night, and for days, for weeks to come, Megan finds it impossible to think of Adam—dead. Instead she continuously sees him, with the most incredible vividness, as first she did see him, on the steps of Barnard Hall, the soldier who for one instant she thought might be George Wharton. Adam, the skinny too-curly-haired boy with the violent hot blue eyes, Adam saying to her, “You know, if you’d lose some weight you’d be one terrific tomato.”

And of Cathy too Megan thinks in earlier, middle-forties scenes. Cathy alive, in all her distinctiveness, her private quirks—her odd voice and odder wit. Cathy herself.

Of all the various known and available therapies, Megan chooses work, at that time of her life. Instead of getting out of the agency and doing something else, as she has from time to time considered, if vaguely, she throws herself back into it. She works ten and twelve hours a day, and also she walks back and forth to work every day.

And she almost succeeds, sometimes, in numbing the pain of Cathy’s loss, and the shock of Adam’s.

She does not call her mother.

In Georgia, after the deaths of the Sawyers (mercifully occurring within a single year), their house was bought by a sporting type from Texas, in the probate sale. He soon became disappointed with the local game, the scrawny rabbits and tough old squirrels not being just what he had in mind, and he took out his chagrin on the house, in the form of total neglect. The Sawyers’ lawyer, a family friend, wrote to Peg, who had kept up with the Sawyers. Would she possibly be interested? Would she not! And so, when Peg arrived, she found too a great deal of work to be done; rescue work, so gratifying! She has probably never been so happy in her life, as she sees to propping up the sagging porch, arranges for the sanding of floors, discusses drains.

She loves everything about the house: its history, beginning with the Sawyers, just down from Black Mountain with their dream of a house, and its later service as a shelter for civil rights workers; and its situation, the broad view of hills and meadow, everywhere green. She is crazy about the heavy gray wisteria vines that frame the porch—her porch.

Apart from the rudimentary, necessary repairs, Peg is remodeling the top floor, and the attic; what was once a long gallery of bedrooms, ideal for the days when she and the other rights workers were there (including Henry Stuyvesant), she now wants as a long, large, and very private, very beautiful room, with a lovely view, for her own very private life, with Vera, whom she loves beyond words. (A love that includes the most passionate gratitude. “You gave me to myself,” she has said, to Vera.)

The fact that Vera is often sick makes her an even more romantic figure, in Peg’s view. And Vera never has ugly, minor ailments, as Peg herself sometimes does. During the first winter they were together Vera had pneumonia, and then an allergic
reaction to antibiotics that almost killed her. How rare and valuable she is, to Peg—how beautiful, how loved. How unlike Peg.

Vera is considerably more realistic, more down-to-earth than Peg is, both because she has been in social work and because she has had quite a few more love affairs than Peg has, with women, sometimes men—“You would have found someone, sometime, if you hadn’t met me,” she tells Peg. And then, very affectionately, since she is truly fond of Peg (if not “in love”), “But I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure glad it was me.”

“Yes, you do have to tell me. Tell me that often, please.”

In that first spring of beginning work on the house, Peg’s house, the air inside is full of sawdust and fresh smells of new-sawn pine, sounds of hammering, sawing, the occasional protesting screech of a nail pulled out; and the voices of the young men who are doing the work, kids, actually. (And Peg is in trouble, fighting hard with the local union, because some of them are black.)

Surrounding the house, outside, the woods are full of spring. Sudden sprays of dogwood, white against the pines, like fountains. Budding maples, poplars, crepe myrtle. Peg walks everywhere, smiling to herself; she pushes aside the damp strong green boughs, brushes at cobwebs, and looks down at the thick carpeting of wet dead winter leaves, and brown needles—to see, with a rush of delight, a small patch of yellow dogtooth violets, or yellow or purple or white wild iris.

Sometimes alone, sometimes walking there with Vera. “Vera, look! Anemones, there by the waterfall!”

“Peg, you’re too much. A person would think you never saw spring before.” Vera touches her arm, and laughs, in her gentle way.

“Well, actually I might as well not. This is different.”

The tobacco barn still stands, more crumbled now, with big holes in the plaster chinks, but still imposing. In fact Peg does not quite know what to do with it, if anything. The best plan seems to be to let it alone, let it fall down in its own dignified way.

At the moment Candy is sleeping out there—Candy, a twenty-eight-year-old disaster of the sixties, of drugs and God knows what else (Peg does not want to know any more than she does). Candy sleeps out there in her ancient filthy sleeping bag, which is like a baby’s totem blanket, Peg has thought. But Peg thinks too that personal dirt and too-cold fresh spring air are less damaging to Candy than whatever her sleeping arrangements used to be, in her pads in San Francisco and Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, and back to San Francisco, where Peg finally found her.

Sometimes, sometimes for days, Candy is perfectly fine. She washes her hair and smiles, and sweeps up sawdust and eats at mealtimes, with Peg and Vera and the kids who are working there. She never talks when anyone is around, but that is all right at those meals; she is just a pale thin young girl, with short clean blond hair. Candy Sinclair.

But then, it is as if overnight her hair can go dirty and drab, and her eyes shift to a look of such anxiety as Peg has never seen, on anyone. Panic, terror, and a horrible wild nervous impatience. At those times she will follow Peg around all day, talking in an incessant and almost senseless mutter: “Do you think it could rain? I think it looks perfectly clear but who can tell? About anything? People come and go when you weren’t expecting them to do anything at all. My periods make me feel terrible. I hate blood. Once I missed for four months in Anchorage. Just the cold, I guess, and I wasn’t eating much. I hadn’t been fucking, I don’t think. Do you think it will snow down here this winter? Are we still going to be here next winter, do you think?”

Having listened to this, with variations, for several months now, Peg is almost able to turn it off, simply to keep on with whatever she is doing. At intervals she smiles at Candy, in a way that she hopes is reassuring.

At other times the content of Candy’s rambling is genuinely alarming: barely whispering, Candy confides, “Along with the Thorazine they implanted this radio set in my head. It’s tiny, that’s why the scar is so small you can’t even see it. But I can’t turn it off, and people are telling me these terrible things. Like, I’m scheduled to go to Washington and be a call girl for the government, it’s part
of the Watergate deal. I’m supposed to, uh, go down on all those guys, and let them, uh, do it to me, anally. It’ll hurt! They talk about this stuff all the time, but I don’t think they know where I am. They don’t know you’ve got this Georgia hideout for us.”

Helpless Peg can only stroke Candy’s hair, and say, “Darling Candy, that’s terrible, that’s horrible for you. But maybe they’ll stop.”

And this gentle reassurance seems to work a little, sometimes.

Vera is a considerable, kind help. “You’re doing exactly right,” she tells Peg. “Most people, including doctors, try to tell kids like Candy that what they feel isn’t true, they don’t have radios in their heads. But for them it is true, they do have radios, and they do hear those voices. I think you’re wonderful with her.”

What Cameron has said to Candy, Peg gathers, is:
You are crazy, no daughter of mine can be crazy, you have got to stop saying those things.
“Did he mean I’m not really his daughter?” Candy has asked.

“Darling, no, he just meant he was upset. Of course you’re his daughter.” And you are the result of that ghastly drunken coupling, Peg thinks, and of course does not say.