The Whiteness of Bones (27 page)

She was ashamed of her naïveté, and she was ashamed of her physical helplessness. It was not that she couldn’t have tumbled him onto the floor, or poked his eyes with her fingers or bitten him—it was that she had not. It is true that there would have been the risk of being hurt had she injured him, or even embarrassed him, but she had not even tried to defend herself. Worse, she had not even asked him to leave her room.

She did not understand that her silence had come from a falsely guilty sense of her own complicity, and from a confused wish to be liked by him, to hold onto his admiration and, most compromising of all, to hold onto her job. What worried her was that she had allowed herself to be caught beneath the writhing, heaving man because it had been easier than asking him to leave.

That a woman might be wise enough to say just what it was that she wanted, and at the same time protect her own body from harm; that she might spare the feelings of the man, so that if he were denied or rejected, the humiliation would not cause him to hate her or do violence to her, was an idea that only came to Mamie later. She was too young.

It must be said, too, that, for the first time, Mamie had come up against the powerful force of sexual impulse. Felix had been in a masturbatory trance, his mind and body unified and drawn forward by one thing only, sexual gratification, and
it would have been very difficult to stop him from having what he not only wanted, but what he assumed was his right. Mamie, in her humility and shame, suspected that once she had allowed him to get to that stage of willful delirium, she had relinquished her ability, if not
her
right, to insist that he turn back.

It would have been impossible for Mamie to have behaved otherwise, but all through her journey, and in the taxi into Manhattan, as she worried if she’d have enough money to pay the talkative driver, and up in the slow elevator, and into the quiet safety of her own dusty bedroom, she was unable to forgive herself.

After taking another shower, she put on a record of Marlene Sai singing “Nanakuli.” It was very like Mamie to find solace in the Hawaiian music.

She telephoned Alder in the country. He was very surprised that she had returned so soon and she said that Felix had decided to use only one model, after all. She did not tell him what had happened in the hotel room.

He hoped that she was not too disappointed. Oh, not at all, she said. She was drying her hair with a towel, as if doing many things at once—rubbing, talking, keeping time with her foot to the fast hula—would scramble her thoughts, like jamming an enemy’s radio waves. He invited her to the farm. She was pleased to be asked. He’d be there in three hours.

“I’ll take you to the Barnes,” he said.

“I like cows.”

“No, baby, not cows. Pictures. Pictures of cows.”

“I like those, too,” she said.

She made herself one of Claire’s Morning Mai Tais, which
had more rum in it than juice. She played the Marlene Sai record again and sat back on the wine-stained sofa and listened to the lovely voice sing, “Oh, the Boston girls will love you for your money, singing Honolulu hula hula heigh, but the Honolulu girls will be your honey, Honolulu hula hula heigh.”

The big farmhouse was built in 1740, and while it remained untouched in structure and line, it contained the distinctive mark of generations of Lee women. His grandmother had used it only a few times a year when she went there to hunt, early in her marriage. She always thought it too small and too American. She left behind a few good quilts and some pieces of country furniture and Philadelphia silver when her decorator, in 1932, introduced her to the ancien régime.

His mother, however, had made the place her own. She often came with her friends to search in the small towns nearby for antiques and to swim in the freezing river and to use a few drugs. She named her son after the round-leaved trees that grew along the river that ran through the farm.

Alder had never changed the rooms, or his name, and her belongings—sculptures of the Egyptian goddess, Isis, and Tiffany lamps and big batik pillows—filled the old house. There were even a few relics of the woman and the child who had come after her—a high chair in the pantry and a pair of pearl earrings in the drawer of a hall table. Alder came across his wife’s earrings while looking for the keys to a shed. Mamie
was embarrassed for a moment, afraid that he might regret these souvenirs.

“She didn’t like it here,” he said. “I think we only came a few weekends, at the end, when I thought the answer was to spend more time together. She found a snake on the tennis court and that was it.” He smiled.

It was a house full of women, and even the housekeeper, Mrs. Bellows, amiable and competent, with her kitchen garden bordered by hollyhocks and pale delphiniums, glazed the house, like one of her famous doughnuts, with the sweetness of her temperament. Full of things left behind by other women, the house, thanks to Mrs. Bellows, was also full of their ghost-smells—Connecticut peonies in old red glass jars; oily black tea still shipped by Mrs. Lee’s merchant in London; lavender sachets, made late each summer from flowers planted in 1952 by Alder’s mother’s college roommate, and tied each September to bed posts in the guest rooms; even the cooking smell of roast chicken, made from Mrs. Lee’s grandmother’s recipe. Alder was surrounded and protected by all of this. It was no wonder that he chose to live at the farm. What was interesting about Alder, despite his withdrawal from the world and his safe enclosure within the embrace of all these women, was that it did not deprive him of his own strong mark—to the contrary, it offset his individuality. The piles of books, the Weegee photographs, the Francis Bacon, the cigars, the pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture on grafting and duck raising—were his own.

Alder, who did not frequently invite people to the farm, having had enough of house parties when he lived with Teddy Shannon and his mother, was happy to have Mamie there.

She was astonished by the greenness. It was not just a color. She could hear it and smell it. It was a dense, buzzing leafiness, fragrant of lilac and river grasses. The garden was airless and
still, except for the black gnats that swarmed at twilight. It was not like the gardens of her childhood whose charm came from the gay coming and going of gardeners in straw hats, and bare-legged boys carrying transplanted royal palms like rolled-up carpets. The garden in Pennsylvania did not smell like her colorful tropical gardens, either, with their thick, sweet smells of ginger and
plumeria
. In Alder’s garden, listless with humidity, there were sassafras trees, once favored by Indians for their fragrant dugout canoes.

The gray fieldstones of the house, the oak trees, the cobbled stream, the cool stone roof of the icehouse had born witness to hundreds of years of greenness, and to silent Delaware braves and to young, tired Union soldiers and even, in the last half of the twentieth century, to Mrs. Shannon’s nude scavenger hunts. The greenness held its peace.

When Mamie said vaguely that she did not think that she would be working any longer for Mr. Felix, Alder did not question her, but said instead that she should come with him to Paris. “Travel as longing for the past—you should be good at it, Mamie,” he said, teasing her. He held her hand as they waded across a cold, clear brook. He was taking her to the small experimental hatchery where his manager was restocking a chalk stream with brown trout.

“What about Claire?” Mamie asked.

“Claire will have to take care of herself.”

“I don’t think she can.”

“It is always very interesting when someone is left on his own—for years, my stepcousin begged her husband to have children. He refused, she finally left, and he married a woman with five daughters.”

“I go to Paris, Claire becomes head of the UN?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Although there were many examples to the contrary in his own family, Alder would have said that a gentleman did not divorce his wife. He did say so, in fact, to Mamie, her first night there, as he sat in a Windsor chair in the bathroom upstairs and talked to her while she had a bath. Mrs. Bellows had made a pitcher of Rum Collins and they had cocktails while Mamie bathed.

Mamie, lying in the hot, soapy water, wondering if the Foaming Bath Petals were left behind by Baby, did not know whether this idea of how a gentleman behaved was honorable or pompous. She was confused. She wanted to ask him where it left her, or some other woman he might come to love, but they had never spoken of love and she would not allow herself to ask him. She had vowed, the second time they had gone to Mrs. Lee’s, that she would not tell him that she loved him, and although there had been moments, especially when he was inside her, when she longed to admit it, she never broke down and confessed. That it was unnatural not to tell someone whom you loved that it was so was a refinement overwhelmed by the unfortunate suspicion that she had a better chance of holding onto him if he were a little unsure of her devotion. Gertrude would have approved of this subtlety, even if it were a technique that she herself had never used.

“I never expected,” he said, “that it would happen this way, or that my daughter would be taken away from me. And taken from me in order to punish me. Of course, now that it has happened, it seems predictable and inevitable. The only mystery is how I didn’t see it.”

“I had a friend who told me when she was drunk that there was a terrible secret in her family. I tried for years to get it out of her, imagining all sorts of things. She finally
broke down and admitted that her father had been married before.”

“Harry Shannon, my uncle, your uncle, too, our stepuncle, left his first wife the morning of the honeymoon.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She leaned forward to turn on the hot water and she held the soap bubbles modestly around her breasts.

“He was madly in love with her. He came downstairs the morning after the wedding, they were staying in Nantucket, and she was sitting naked on the toilet eating a big bowl of Rice Krispies. She greeted him happily and he was so appalled he went out the front door and took the first plane back to New York.”

Mamie laughed. She didn’t know if he was teasing her.

“I always thought it was a little harsh of him,” he said.

He was looking out the old sash windows as the blue darkness fell slowly across his fields and woods. Ribbons of mist threaded through the horse chestnut trees, laden with white flowers like candles. “There is a vixen that sometimes sits in that meadow at nightfall,” he said quietly, as if the shy fox might hear him. He watched for the fox, but she did not come.

“I’ll leave you some time alone,” he said. She had been given her own bedroom. “We’ll meet at eight.”

She rose in the bathtub, the water streaming from her, puffs of soap bubbles, like clouds, clinging to her body.

He was at the door. He turned back into the room and took a towel and began to dry her back and waist, and the tops of her legs. When he reached the backs of her knees, the end of the towel fell into the water, so he gave her his hand, the second time that day over water, and she stepped out of the tub.

“This is going to be very interesting,” he said, not looking at her, intent on drying her shoulders and stomach.

“What?”

“This. From now on.”

He sat her down in the chair and took one of her feet in the towel to dry it. He was very thorough, drying between the toes and rubbing the heel. He dried the other foot. It was only when he finished and had put the towel aside on the wood floor where he was kneeling, that he looked at her face. She was the color of a pink rose, and her skin was porous and faintly swollen from the heat and the moisture.

He slowly pulled her knees apart so that her thighs were against the sides of the chair. He opened her gently with his fingers and looked at her.

She tried to close her legs, but he took her knees in both his hands and held them against the chair. She tried again to conceal herself, but this time he pushed her legs open with sudden, even impatient, firmness and he bent over her and put his mouth on her.