All That Is

10


CORNERSVILLE



Caroline Amussen was living, as she had for years, on Dupont Circle in an apartment the furnishings of which, not particularly fashionable to begin with, hadn’t changed in all the time she’d been there, the same long sofa, the same easy chairs and lamps, the same white enameled table in the kitchen where she sat smoking and drinking coffee in the mornings and, having finished the paper, listening to the radio and her favorite host, whose witticisms she repeated to her friends in a voice that had become slightly hoarse, a voice of experience and drink. Various women, divorced and married, were her friends including Eve Lambert, whom she’d known since they were little girls and who had married into the Lambert family and loads of money—she was still invited pretty regularly to the Lamberts’ and occasionally went sailing with them although Brice Lambert, broad-faced and sporting, didn’t often go sailing with his wife but with another party, it was said, a young reporter who wrote for the social column. The boat afforded absolute privacy and the rumor was that Brice had his girlfriend spend the day of sailing naked. So it was said. But how would anyone know? Caroline thought.

With her friends, she had lunch and often, in the afternoon or evening, played cards. She was still the best looking of them and except for Eve had made the best marriage, the others had married, in her opinion, either lower-class or uninteresting men, salesmen and assistant managers. Washington could be dull. At five every afternoon the thousands of government offices would empty and the government workers would go home having spent the whole day wasting George Amussen’s hard-earned money, as he always complained. The government should be abolished, he said, the whole damned thing. We’d be better off without it.

Caroline’s rent was paid by Amussen, no real burden for him since his company managed the building and he could take care of the rent by including it in other things, general expenses. Her alimony was $350 a month and she received a little extra from her father. It was not enough to give parties with or gamble, but she did bet on the horses now and then or dressed up in nice weather and went to Pimlico with Susan McCann, who had almost married a Brazilian diplomat, should have, but there had been a disastrous weekend in Rehoboth during which, she would afterwards confess to Caroline, she had been too narrow-minded and he later began seeing another woman, who had an antique shop in Georgetown.

Caroline, for her part, was not unhappy. She was optimistic, there was still life to think about, both what had been and what might be ahead. She had not given up the idea that she might marry again and had been involved with several men over the years, but none of them was right. She wanted a man who, among other things, would make George Amussen wonder if he’d made a mistake if they happened to cross paths with him, which was bound to happen sooner or later, although she was still angry and didn’t care what he thought.

In her becalmed life she knew she was drinking too much, though a drink or two made you feel more like yourself and people were more lively and attractive when they drank.

“Anyway, you feel more attractive,” Susan agreed.

“It’s the same thing.”

“Are you still seeing Milton Goldman?” Susan asked offhandedly.

“No,” said Caroline.

“What happened?”

“Nothing actually happened.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“He’s a very nice man,” Caroline said.

Which he was and owned property on Connecticut Avenue a little further out, but she remembered very well the photograph of him as a child in what was almost a dress and with long curls along the side of his head like the men in black hats and coats that you sometimes saw in New York. It made her realize that she couldn’t be married to him, not with the people she knew. She was thinking of Brice Lambert and also, though she was no longer part of it, of life in Virginia. But her own life went on, one week very much like another, one year following another, and you began to lose track.

Then one morning a bad thing happened. She woke unable to move her arm or her leg, and when she tried to use the phone her words had lost their shape. She couldn’t make them sound right, they filled her mouth and came out deformed. She’d had a stroke, they told her at the hospital. It would be a long, slow process to recover. Ten days later she boarded a plane in a wheelchair and flew to her father’s house near Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Beverly had arranged it and taken her to the airport and settled her aboard, but having three children prevented her from doing more, and now Vivian would have to help.

The house was actually in Cornersville on a quiet road, a beautiful, half-derelict old brick house dating almost from Civil War days that Warren Wain, Caroline’s father, had bought to restore and spend his retirement in, but the restoration had proved to be more than he could handle, even with the help of his son, Cook, Vivian’s uncle. Warren Wain had been an architect in Cleveland, well regarded, and though some of his essential quality and good looks had come down to his daughter, less had come down to his son, who had also studied architecture but never gotten a license. For a long time he had worked in his father’s office and his father in essence had supported him. He had few friends and had never married. He had gone with a divorced woman for four or five years and finally asked her to marry him. He did it by commenting that maybe they should get married.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said calmly.

“I thought you wanted to get married. Now I’m asking you.”

“Is that what it was?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Anyway it wouldn’t work out.”

“It’s worked so far.”

“That’s probably because we haven’t been married.”

“Just what in hell do you want?” he asked. “Do you know?”

She didn’t answer.

The house was in sad disrepair. Bricks were piled at one side of it and the walkway to the front door was only half-finished, part brick and the rest dirt. Inside there was unpainted drywall that had been put up to replace the old plaster. Panes in the small windows to the cellar were broken and Vivian could see a pile of empty bottles in there. They were Cook’s, she found out. There were also, not yet known to her, many checks that had been made out to the liquor store in Cambridge and others to “Cash” on which Cook had signed his father’s name. The old man knew about them but hadn’t confronted his son. His arthritis was painful and now, with his daughter there invalided and unable to take care of herself, the tasks of daily life were almost more than he could handle. But he loved the country. They were near a large open field where you could see the weather, the sun rippling and sometimes the wind. On an inlet nearby he had seen a white goose that lived with the ducks there. Whenever a plane passed overhead, the goose looked up, watching and talking as he did. He watched it all across the sky.

Vivian was sleeping in the unfinished room that was intended to have been her grandfather’s study. She stayed for two weeks the first time, cooking, taking her mother to doctor’s appointments and once a week to the hairdresser to cheer her up. She was attentive and sympathetic to her mother but she was her father’s child. Her father had taught her to ride and hunt and play tennis. She had taken to all that more than Beverly had, and in all likelihood loved her father more, too. He was a man who represented so many things, a little stubborn perhaps but beyond that all you could wish for.

Caroline, though she was unable now to do much more than mumble, rolled her eyes whenever Vivian mentioned Cook. That was one of the clearer signs of what she was feeling. There was an inane smile on her face and a mouth full of struggling sounds, but her eyes had an expression of knowing, knowing and understanding. Tick, the black labrador that was Warren Wain’s, lay peacefully at her feet, knocking the floor with his thick tail when someone would approach. Like the rest of the household he had seen better days. He moved a little stiffly and his muzzle had flecks of white but he had a good nature. Cook, not bothering to shave and wearing a shapeless sweater, took him for walks.

“How are they getting along?” Bowman asked when Vivian came back to New York.

“Cook is spending all the money and the house is a wreck,” Vivian said.

“How’s your mother?”

“Not very good. I don’t think she’s going to be able to stay there for long. They can’t take care of her. You have to help her dress and other things, well, you know. I’ll have to go back down there.”

“Should she be in some kind of home?”

“I don’t like the idea, but she’ll probably have to be.”

“Can Beverly help? She’s a lot closer.”

“Beverly is having some trouble herself.”

“What is it? Her children? Bryan?”

Vivian shrugged.

“With the bottle,” she said. “It runs in the family.”

When she left for Maryland again, it was with the understanding that she might have to stay a few weeks longer, and when she arrived in Cornersville things seemed to be worse, for reasons that she soon understood. The bank account was overdrawn, and the old man had to do something. In his slippers and bathrobe at the breakfast table while Vivian was doing the dishes, he finally said,

“Cook, listen, I need to talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“I have to say this, but have you been signing my name to anything?”

“Signing your name? No. What for? I signed it a couple of times,” he said.

“Only a couple of times?”

“Twice. Two or three times is all.” He was becoming uneasy. “When you were too busy on account of Caroline to do it.”

“To do what?”

“Go to the bank,” Cook said.

Wain sat quietly.

“You know, when I was in France, during the war …”

He could hardly remember the war, sitting in the unfinished house across from his failed son. He could hardly construct how he had gotten from there to here. Cook’s face was bored and defensive.

“In the winter when it was cold,” the old man said, “we’d pour a big circle of gasoline on the ground and light it and then jump in to warm ourselves before we flew. They said, what are you doing that for, aren’t you afraid of getting burned? We’d probably be dead in an hour anyway, so what difference did it make?”

He’d been an observer in the flying corps and had some photographs of himself in uniform. He realized he’d gotten away from the point.

“I don’t understand,” Cook said.

“What don’t you understand?”

“The point of it.”

“The point is, I’ll be dead and the bank account will be empty. There’ll be nothing left. The house will fall down around you and you’ll have Caroline to take care of, and that’ll be the end.”

“It was only a few checks. Just saving you some trouble.”

“I wish you knew how to,” Wain said.


The week after arriving, Vivian, sitting at her grandfather’s dark desk against the wall in the unfinished study, wrote a letter. Dear Philip, it began.

She always wrote Dearest Philip. Was this an unintentional lapse or was it something more? Bowman felt a kind of foreboding, a chill going through him as he read the strangely unfamiliar words. No one could possibly know what had happened in London. That was in another world, another completely. Nervously he read on. Caro is about the same. It’s very hard for her to talk and I feel like she gets tired of trying to make herself understood and she gives up, but you can tell things from her expression. It’s mainly me who takes her out, me and grand-dad. Apart from that we watch tv or she sits in the kitchen with me a lot. Nothing much gets done on the house. Cook is really useless. He’s in town doing what, I don’t know, or back in the shed. But that’s not why I’m writing.

Bowman turned the page over. He was reading quickly, apprehensive.

I’m not sure how to put it or why it is, but for a while now I’ve had the feeling that we’ve each been going our own way without a lot in common. I’m not talking about a particular thing (?)

Here, his eye skipped ahead. The question mark frightened him, he didn’t know what it meant, but there was nothing. I guess I can’t blame you. And I don’t blame myself. Probably it’s always been this way, but in the beginning I didn’t realize it. I really don’t belong in your world and I don’t think you belong in mine. I feel like probably I should be back where I fit in.

The words unaccountably went through him like something fatal. It was a letter of parting. Two nights before she’d left they’d made love with a pillow doubled beneath her like an innocent naked child with a stomachache, and he felt her become engaged in a way that had never happened before, perhaps because of how they were going about it or perhaps they were entering another level of intimacy, but now he saw with a sudden and poignant regret that he’d been wrong, she had been responding to something else, something known to her alone.

Daddy would probably have a fit if he heard me saying this, but I don’t want anything, any alimony. I don’t want you supporting me for the rest of my life. We haven’t been married for that long. If you could give me three thousand dollars to help me temporarily, that would be fine. Be honest, I’m not wrong, am I? We really weren’t meant for each other. Maybe I’ll find the right man, maybe you’ll find the right woman, at least someone more suited to you.

Her daddy. Bowman had never had a strong masculine figure in his own life to teach him how to be a man, and he had been drawn to his father-in-law despite himself and the real distance between them. There was no connection—he had no idea what his father-in-law thought or would do. He remembered him sitting with almost criminal ease, buttering a piece of toast and drinking coffee at breakfast the morning after the big snowstorm in Virginia when they all slept over. He remembered it clearly afterwards.

The day after having written the letter, Vivian happened to see her uncle Cook coming along the side of the house pushing a wheelbarrow with something heaped in it, and then with a shock she saw a foreleg hanging over the rim. She hurried out as Cook set the wheelbarrow down by the front door.

“What happened? Is he hurt?” she asked anxiously.

“I found him out by the shed,” Cook said.

The dog’s eyes were closed. She took its paw.

“Is he dead?”

“I think so.”

“You’d better call the vet. You’d better tell grand-dad,” Vivian said.

Cook nodded.

“He was just lying there,” he said.

Her grandfather came out to see. He was wearing an old straw hat, like a country lawyer. They could hear Caroline calling out something slurred. Wain stroked the dog’s foot and then slowly, as if thinking of something else, began to gently smooth its fine black coat.

“Should we call Dr. Carter?” Vivian asked.

“No. No,” Wain said. “No use calling him.”

Tears were running down his face. He seemed ashamed of them. Dr. Carter was the bow-legged vet who couldn’t see out of his left eye—he’d been hit on the head one time. He’d hold up a hand, “For instance, I can’t see my hand,” he would say.

Cook was standing silent and, to his father it seemed, emotionless. Wain was remembering what Cook had been like as a boy, mischievous but companionable, and what had gradually happened to him. He had a vision of what was to come, Cook, sullen and still handsome coming down the stairs to face foreclosure, naked legs first, wearing his gray paisley dressing gown, his silver hair uncombed. Tired and looking as if he had a headache, having spent it all.

“Well, what is it you want?” he would say.

Without any idea of what he would do, and Caroline slumped in her wheelchair, past trying to make herself understood.