“She was in shock, but still, to sustain a compound fracture. And then get herself on a red-eye flight for New York—” “She did get to go First Class,” Liza interrupts her husband.
“Even so. But then to go to your own gallery opening, well, it’s pretty amazing. Of course the ortho department at Columbia-Presbyterian is absolutely tops, really lucky she got there and got to Kiernan, he’s the best. Does mostly knees but he’s first-rate—”
“Lucky her new friend Calvin took her there,” puts in Liza.
“Oh indeed. Compound fractures can be very tricky. Have to be reset, ugly stuff like that.” Saul, like many psychiatrists, is extremely happy (he is happiest, Liza has thought) when dealing with or discussing problems that are strictly medical. Such a relief to have a concrete issue, Liza imagines, rather than the nebulous, often contradictory dark strands of neurosis.
“Sage has always been extremely brave,” puts in Caroline, her mother. Then adding, thoughtfully, “In her way.”
The three of them, Liza, Saul and Caroline, are having an old-fashioned picnic (so they all have termed it) in Julius Kahn Playground, on the grass—from which they are protected by several very old-fashioned steamer rugs, one of Caroline’s most durable legacies from Molly Blair. The heavy wool protects them from the still-damp, still-cold earth; they could in fact be said to be celebrating what is at least a lull in the season of rain, if not the onset of spring. The day is warm and bright, the sky a pale washed blue, with giant billowing white clouds along the horizon, above the cypress-and-eucalyptus woods, and out across the bay, above Marin.
The two women are dressed in a way that suggests a hope of spring, Caroline in flowered cotton, pink espadrilles, and Liza in her usual denim skirt, with a lemon-yellow T-shirt, more or less the color of her hair. Even Saul, in his khaki pants and sleeve-rolled blue workshirt, looks as though he believed in a change of weather.
This being a Wednesday, Saul has his day off—and Caroline, somewhat to Liza’s surprise, had announced it as her day off too. “The nice Guatemalan lady comes, Ralph loves her, she can get him anything he needs.” It seems to Liza (in fact she is sure of this) that a couple of weeks ago her mother said she never went anywhere.
However, at the moment Liza is too preoccupied with the vagaries of her sisters to give much thought to her mother’s possible inconsistencies.
Today Caroline has outdone herself in the matter of sandwiches, as her daughter and Saul (the clear if unacknowledged favorite son-in-law) have told her. Crustless cucumber and watercress, breast of chicken, cheese and ham. With sturdier fare for the children, fried chicken, peanut butter and raisins, their favorites. And a big lemon cake for everyone. “I must be in a really retrogressive Molly phase,” Caroline has explained. “So English, at her best with sandwiches and cakes. Absolutely hopeless with vegetables, or fish.”
Now the baby sleeps in her canvas basket between her parents, and the two others are off in the sandpile, from which from time to time they return, to report to the grownups.
“You haven’t heard any more from Jill?” Liza now asks her mother.
“No, and I must say it is a little worrying.”
Jill called Caroline and simply said that she was staying with a friend, that she felt like lying low for a while. She had taken some time off from her firm. She would check back in, which so far she has not done.
“Well, at least there’s nothing more in the papers.” For several days, perhaps a week, there had been photographs of everyone listed in Buck Fister’s book, of Roland Gallo, and of Jill—Jill, in a bathing suit, even, at someone’s Woodside party; Jill, laughing and very sexy. Recalling all that, out of her multiple reactions Liza sighs, and then asks her mother, “But weren’t you even tempted to ask her how on earth she knew Buck Fister?”
“I didn’t think I could, you know. None of my business.” Caroline has always had a strong regard for the privacy of her daughters—too much so, they have all at one time or another thought. They have sometimes wished to be asked more, all of them. To be more certain of her interest.
“I couldn’t have resisted asking her.” Although Liza now reflects, the fact that Jill should know Buck Fister is not actually so odd, not in itself; Jill, as the phrase once went, gets around a lot, she is out almost constantly, in restaurants and bars, at gallery openings, she goes to all sorts of parties with all sorts of people. Liza thinks of all this with what she has to admit is another small breath of envy, her own life being so very much more restricted, necessarily. For the moment (she hopes it is only for the moment).
The absolutely unmentionable question is: just in what way did Jill know Buck Fister, who is now under indictment for running a ring of call girls?
Caroline, although she seems in many ways a contemporary of her daughters, is nevertheless of another generation; she must find it simply peculiar that Jill would know such a sleazy fellow, know him well enough to be entered in his engagement book. To have had lunch with him, probably.
The further possibility, that Jill could actually have been one of Buck Fister’s “girls,” would not even enter Caroline’s mind, Liza thinks.
It has, though, entered Liza’s mind, and, she has to admit, with a certain air of plausibility: Jill might easily think a little minor hustling was fun, or far out, or off the wall. However Jill might put it. And God knows (and Liza knows, they all know) that Jill loves money, deeply, passionately.
Or is she, Liza, simply fictionalizing her sister’s life? It comes to her rather easily, Liza notes: She can see Jill in some very posh hotel suite (it would have to be posh, for Jill) with some guy who was lined up to have sex with her. For money. Some john. Very easy to imagine. Jill in fact would be terrifically turned on by the whole scene. She would probably come, even if, supposedly, real hookers never do.
But this cannot be true, Liza next thinks. It is only my own very sleazy imagination. Not to mention disgusting rivalrous-sibling feelings.
“The point is,” says Caroline now, “I really don’t know where she is.”
“These are the best sandwiches,” Saul tells her, in his serious way. And then, “Have you asked Fiona?”
“Asked Fiona where Jill is? Well of course not, I couldn’t. What an idea.” Caroline laughs nervously at the very idea of using one daughter to spy out another.
“She might know, though.”
“Even so. And come to think of it I’m not exactly hearing a lot from Fiona these days either.”
The park is relatively unpopulated at this hour, despite the beautiful fresh new weather. At the moment only one other picnic group sits gingerly on their blanket, some distance off: two very blonde young women, probably au pairs, speaking either Swedish or German. And much farther away, in another part of the playing field, is a small cluster of people, impossible to tell just how many, all huddled on the grass.
Thus, as soon as she enters from across the way, from her dark Pacific Street mansion, Joanne Gallo, coming across the park, can be seen by Caroline, Liza and Saul. Very clearly. Joanne on what must be very high heels is stumbling nearsightedly along the damp ground, her small sad thin daughter pulled along beside her. Both mother and daughter in pink.
“Oh God, Joanne Gallo,” Liza whispers to Saul, who gives her an ambiguous look.
“Oh, is that—?” whispers Caroline (much too loudly, as she much too obviously stares, in Liza’s judgment).
Joanne seems not to see them, although their group blanket lies directly in her path. But then, as she is almost upon them and as Liza is thinking, Shit, now I have to introduce her to everyone and she’ll probably stick around—just then Joanne seems to see them. All at once her face contorts, as though with conflicting expressions, and she mutters a greeting that seems (curiously) to be addressed to Saul alone, and then she veers off toward the swings and slides, walking as though blind, and still pulling her child along, who also seems unsteady.
Liza has instantly understood that Joanne is a patient of Saul’s, and so she only remarks, “How odd.” Saul not only does not gossip about his patients, he will not even tell Liza who they are; she finds out sometimes inadvertently, and uncertainly, like this. So that now she thinks, Well, good, I hope it’s true. Saul will help her if anyone can.
Caroline, though, seems uncharacteristically interested in Joanne. She who has been accused by her daughters of a fundamental lack of interest in most people—this same Caroline now remarks, “What a very odd-looking young woman. Honestly, white lipstick? And she looked so unsteady, could she possibly be a little tipsy, do you think?”
“I suppose she could be,” is Liza’s guarded response. She feels that under the circumstances (Saul) she should not say that she has fairly often seen Joanne Gallo fairly drunk, although that is indeed the case. Although she and Saul will never discuss his patient, she feels the need for a certain discretion.
Saul is simply staring into the distance—in the direction opposite to that taken by Joanne Gallo, Liza notes.
“It’s interesting that there hasn’t been any more in the papers about Roland Gallo.” Liza cannot help saying this, and then she notes a distinct lack of response from her husband and her mother. “I mean,” she runs on alone, “I do wonder what that big friendship between him and Buck Fister was all about. And I wonder if he’ll run for mayor. What does Ralph say?” she then asks Caroline.
“I don’t think Ralph has seen him for a while. He hasn’t mentioned him.”
“Sage should go up to U.C. to get her arm checked out as soon as she’s back,” Saul now says—as though Sage had been the subject of his scowl. “But I suppose they’ll tell her that at Columbia.”
“Her arm must seem the least thing on her mind,” Caroline begins to beam. “The show going so well, it’s all quite marvellous, and startling.”
“It is marvellous,” Liza agrees, although it occurs to her that it is a little strange that they are only just now getting around to Sage’s success; and they have been together, the three of them, for well over an hour.
At Sage’s opening, described by Sage in phone calls to both her mother and to Liza (and also to Noel? no one seems to know just how closely in touch they are), five more pieces were actually bought. “And not all by Ms. Hoover’s pals either, that would make me feel truly meretricious,” Sage has said. Bought by perfectly okay people (in Sage’s judgment) who for whatever reason came to the opening and who very much liked Sage’s small groups of figures. “Despite the totally crazy prices this Crome person has stuck on them.” This was said with a great laugh from Sage, a laugh not entirely understood by Liza; she takes it as a reference to Mr. Crome, rather than to his prices. “Crome person,” though, is surely a suggestive phrase. Something must be going on between those two, Liza thinks, and she also thinks, Good, just what rotten Noel deserves. She now asks her mother, “You haven’t heard from Noel?”
“Not since those two rather peculiar calls.”
Noel called Caroline on the day of Sage’s supposed departure to say that he had been out a lot, had Caroline heard from Sage? This was odd, in that Caroline had heard from Sage that they were having dinner the night before she left, to celebrate that first crazy sale. Also, if Sage had called Noel, she could have left a message.
And then Noel called again a few hours later to say that he had indeed talked to Sage. Too bad about her arm, he said, but great about her show. He might fly to New York to help her celebrate.
But between those two calls Sage herself had called Caroline to say that she had taken the First Class red-eye, as she put it, and that she had fallen and hurt her arm at the airport; Calvin Crome had taken her to Columbia-Presbyterian, her arm was okay. She might stay a little longer in New York but she hoped Noel wouldn’t bother to come. “It’s really not his scene,” she said, somewhat ambiguously.
From all of which Caroline and Liza had (separately) worked out that Sage and Noel were not exactly in close touch.
“But there’s really no reason I should hear from Noel,” now muses Caroline. And then, “I did hear from Jim, your father. Speaking of odd phone calls.”
“Oh?”
“He said that Sage called him from New York, which I would not have thought unusual. But he sounded so happy about it. He said he hasn’t heard from her for a month or so, I guess that was the unusual part.”
“Their whole connection is unusual,” is Liza’s comment, as she reflects that it is also unusual for Caroline to talk quite so much about her other daughters; Caroline must be quite seriously concerned about Sage and Noel, is Liza’s verdict.
“My Liza has a pornographic imagination,” Saul tells Caroline.
“Well, Saul, come on, you must admit it’s a little intense. My father and Sage.”
“Just don’t give me your theories about it,” Caroline addresses her daughter. “More cake?” She gestures with her knife.
“I think Sage will have some trouble adjusting to success, that’s my real theory,” Liza tells them. She is looking at Saul, although she knows better than to expect an opinion from him.
And his response is true to form. “Well, maybe. She could.”
Liza laughs. “Such tremendous fun for the rest of us, though,” she says.
And Caroline, “Yes, how we can bask in reflected glory. Well, if you two won’t have more cake I will. I can’t just take it all home to Ralph.”
“I’d better check the kids,” Liza tells them.
The children, though, are fine, playing so cheerfully with three others, probably the charges of those blonde au pairs, that Liza decides not even to go over to them; if they see her they could quite suddenly decide that things are not fine, they do not like their new friends after all, and they urgently need their mother for arbitration, or more cookies, or something. And so Liza moves back to stand in the shadow of the little clubhouse.
Standing there for a moment, unseen by her children, her mother or her husband, Liza thinks, as she fairly often does, of her total failure in attempting to woo back (she had to admit that this is what she was doing) any former lovers, if only for an afternoon of talk. Not one word from a single one of them. An interesting fact, Liza is not quite sure what it means. Most likely, she thinks, it means that I’m supposed to stay very faithful to Saul, and to confine my fantasies to paper.
The horizon clouds look both larger and darker now, with menacing areas of gray, shading into black. And although the air is still warm, Liza can clearly feel that threat of cold. Soon enough she will have to gather up the children, toys and Pampers. Her life.
What I really need is a lot more time alone, she thinks, and she sighs for what is most unavailable to her.
Returning then to Caroline and Saul, she sees them in what looks to be urgent conversation, and she hesitates, aware of several impulses, and impressions. One impulse tells her to leave them alone, to let them say whatever they have to say to each other. Another thought, an impression, is of how very attractive her mother is, and she thinks, Caroline could probably still have lovers if she wanted to, couldn’t she? It must be hard on her, with Ralph so sick; it’s unlikely that they can do it any more.
But at that moment Saul sees her and gestures her over, so that Liza has no choice except to join them.
And so she is in time to hear this urgent speech from Caroline: “I’ve been having this curious fantasy,” Caroline tells them, her sea eyes large and intense, very serious. “I mean, it comes to me like a message. It’s a vision of homeless people taking over, marching on the rest of us and occupying all our houses. All that space where we all now sit so warm and smug and protected. I mean, who could blame them?”
“You’re remembering the Thirties,” Saul tells her, gently. “The marches on Washington.”
“Actually I don’t remember those marches. I was a very protected Connecticut girl, remember? But I do sort of remember my father talking about how anyone who wanted a job could find one, I guess he really believed that, it’s a basic Republican idea. And I remember those shacks under the George Washington Bridge. People living in orange crates. Hoovervilles. My father blamed those people for living there. And I knew he was wrong, I really did. And maybe when I have this fantasy about their marching, taking over, I am sort of thinking about those people.”
“This is what I like best, a dream I don’t have to interpret.” Saul smiles, very sympathetic to Caroline.
“Actually I know perfectly well what it means,” she tells him. “It means I’ve got to find something useful to do. Cut out all this bleeding-heart hand-wringing. You can see I’m quoting Ralph, such a bad habit,” she adds.
“You could have worse,” Saul tells her. “I think you’re talking about a violent sense of injustice. As though the imbalance were so great that it must correct itself.”
“That’s exactly what I do mean.”
“Well, it’s how I feel myself.”
“Ralph sees only political solutions, that’s the problem with him. With talking to him, I mean. He’s so opposed to what he calls charity, he says it’s bandaiding, prolonging the pain. I don’t mean he’s ungenerous, of course he’s not, you know that. But.”
“He’s an old lefty. Semi-Marxist.”
“Oh, I know, and I’m simply not political in that sense, aside from voting. And the peace marches in the Sixties, but of course they were so much fun.”
Attending to this serious discourse between her mother and her husband, Liza has also been watching the group in the far corner of the playing field, the indistinct people who have now got to their feet, are standing about in the waning sunlight. Three young black men, and two women, they look to be. Having picked up their blanket, they still have not moved on, they all have an indecisive look, and stance. These could be homeless people, maybe plotting their march on the rich? Liza starts to say this but then does not; it has a frivolous sound, although in a way she means it.
She continues to watch, as, “mysteriously,” those people replace their blanket on the grass and sit down again—as though, having discussed alternatives, they conclude that for the moment they have nowhere to go—or so Liza imagines.
She is prevented from further speculation by the shrill sound of impending children, her own—she would know their voices anywhere, from any distance. Just as, she is certain, they would always know where to find her. To track her down, no matter what she was doing.