Almost Famous Women (9 page)

Her pace, and then Vincent's, quickens, probably because they're talking about Cora. She's the one topic capable of dividing them, and they both tend to get anxious when she comes up. Taking a longer stride causes the backs of Norma's shoes to rub against her heels and she winces. Vincent had called her to New York in a letter, saying, “We'll open our oysters together.” But Cora had come too.

“We can't just put Mum on the shelf,” Vincent says, dodging a lamppost. “You know that.”

Norma nods, though she's ready to be young and free in the city, and Vincent's extreme loyalty to their mother baffles her.

“We'll
all
be offstage,” Vincent says. “Heard but not seen.”

“Fine,” Norma says, not wanting to fight.

At night, in their cramped apartment, Cora peers over her small spectacles and refuses to drift out of young conversation like most women her age. “I, too, slept around if it suited me,” she announced one evening at dinner, a candlelit meal over a rickety table that included one of Vincent's literary suitors, a kind but unathletic man who couldn't hide his shock. “Why shouldn't my girls do the same?” Cora continued, nonchalant.

Norma was embarrassed, but not surprised, while Vincent laughed heartily and poured her mother another glass of wine.

Vincent is the sun they orbit now, not quite a mother figure but a revered one. One night, when they'd been drinking, she asked Norma to sweep the kitchen.

“I
always
clean the kitchen.”

“Oh don't be revisionist. We all cleaned the kitchen growing up.”

“Who do you think kept house when you went off to Vassar?”

“Tell me,” Vincent said, pausing in the doorway, owning every inch of her five-foot frame. “What kind of ride is it, on my coattails? Is it good?”

In the morning, Vincent groveled, but Norma waved her off. We're all hustlers, she thought. I may have come into the theater
on Vincent's coattails, but I've stayed because I'm damn good at what I do.

Norma has held a gun, silhouetted onstage, lights dark. She's been a mermaid, then a barmaid, in Djuna Barnes's
Kurzy of the Sea
, taken direction from Eugene O'Neill, when he's sober enough to give it. She's delivered a monologue in a subterranean city of the future in a costume shaped like a pyramid, a halo over her head dangling from a well-bent wire. She's been the highlight of a bad production, a critic writing, “Even Norma Millay's superb acting couldn't save this show . . .”

And Charlie—Charlie has seen her talent. Dear, grumpy Charlie, who acts but just wants to paint, even though in her heart of hearts she believes he isn't as talented as he thinks; are any of them? But that's part of his charm, the vulnerability packed alongside the swagger and hot temper.

If Charlie is busy tonight, or in a foul mood, or painting, she thinks, I'll go home and share a bed with Vince and Mum.

When she's standing on the stage it's easy to believe that she's nearly famous, that she has achieved something, but there are times, like during a half-empty matinee, when the gig feels insignificant. Groundbreaking or not, they are, after all, a troupe that began in a neglected fishing shack that smelled of rotted wood and dead cod.

Later that night, snow hurls itself against their barred window in the Village, while Norma covers her head with a pillow to drown
out Cora's snoring and the sound of Vincent making love to a poet in the kitchen. “Renounce me,” she can hear Vincent saying. “Renounce me.”

“Plumblossom, I
need
you to be brave,” Vincent slurs. “Hurry the hell up!”

They're on the screened-in porch at Steepletop, and Vincent is agitated and starting to loosen the waistband of her trousers. The flies hurl themselves at the lanterns; Vincent's farm doesn't have electricity and is surrounded by impenetrable darkness on nights when the moon is small. The sisters have eaten what feels like their weight in blueberries, swum naked in the pool made out of the stone barn foundation, and downed two bottles of wine. Vincent's husband, Eugen, is passed out on the couch inside, and she's thumping a syringe of morphine with expert hands.

“I don't want to,” Norma says, crushing her eyes shut. “This isn't good for you.”

“You'll do it,” Vincent says, exposing the white flesh of her backside. “Hunk, I
need
you to do it. Who cares how we raise the devil?”

Vincent has burned through more than one advance, clutches her stomach constantly, complains of her guts aching, and washes her
meals down with gin, wine, anything. She still packs auditoriums for her readings, but if they could only see the track marks on her legs, Norma thinks.

“How can you turn your back on me?” Vincent says. “After everything I've done for you?”

“Just tell me how much,” Norma says, sighing, throwing up her hands. “Though I feel like you're asking me to kill you.”

“I'll die if you
don't
do it,” Vincent says, “and that's the truth. I won't use caution. I'll plunge a syringe into both thighs.”

“You won't.”

“Are you daring me?”

“Just use the damn syringe, Hunk.”

“Write down the dose in the notebook,” Vincent says, nodding to one on a glass table nearby.

Norma can see the lucidity in her eyes slipping away, but the imperial quality is still there. When Norma looks at the notebook she's horrified by the entries, morphine on the hour some nights. Vincent's cheeks already look flaccid, the whites of her eyes yellowed.

Perhaps Cora knows how bad things have gotten, but Cora is in Camden now, feeble and focused on her own writing, children's
books and verses. And Kathleen is paranoid, and not to be trusted. No, this is my secret to keep with Eugen, she thinks, though anyone seeing Vincent now would know the truth.

“Don't look at me with compassion,” Vincent mumbles in a harsh, dry voice as she reclines on the divan she keeps out on the porch. “I don't want it.”

Norma sits on the cool, hard floor and leans against the wicker base of the divan. Vincent reaches for her hand, and she gives it, and when she wakes in the early morning, her shoulder socket aches from reaching up for so long. In the early hours, when the sun is coming up and before the birds have started singing, Norma walks to the guest cottage and climbs in the single bed with Charlie, keeping the windows open. Startled by the roar of an engine, she wakes in time to see Eugen and Vincent speeding down the dirt road, top down, raccoon coats on to take the chill off the morning, her sister's hair raised by the wind.

They're going to town, perhaps, and it's understood that Norma should feed the dogs and horses. It is understood that she might pluck a tomato and eat it for dinner alongside some fresh eggs. It is understood that she should sense where she is needed and assist, and not drink the last of the wine.

A storm comes, and Norma must close up the big white barn across from the house. Her long white hair trails behind her as she runs across the damp grass in her yellow raincoat. The rain clouds her black, horn-rimmed glasses. A dark sedan is coming down the dirt road—no one comes down this road unless they're looking for her—Steepletop belongs to her now.

She enjoys having something people want. A smile plays at her lips, but she tamps it down. She leans against a maple tree on the edge of the road, presses her back against it, pulling one foot up on the trunk of the tree, flamingo-like. She lifts her chin and looks into the breeze so that it lifts her hair from her face.

I still know how to own a scene and cut a figure, she thinks.

The car slows, and a man rolls down the passenger-side window.

“Is this the Millay place?”

“Perhaps,” she says, coyly.

She walks toward the car and leans forward, one hand on her hip. She likes to think of herself as a hard-boiled heroine, and lets her eyes do the talking. The men are in their forties, thin and well-dressed.

“We were hoping to speak to someone about Mrs. Millay's papers,” the man on the passenger side says politely. She can see his jacket draped across his knees.

“Of course you are.”

“Can you help us?”

“I could. But I might not.” She raises an eyebrow, which she keeps neat and plucked.

“We have Mrs. Millay's legacy in mind.”

“You're one in a hundred, you know that? I see your type every month.” She shakes her head.

“We won't trouble you long. We have a letter of introduction.”

“You all do. Let me think about it. Come back in the morning.”

“We just drove up for the day, and are headed back to the city—” The passenger seems desperate, and this delights Norma. This is what she has come to live for, reeling people in only to release them.

“Come back in the morning.”

She turns her back to the idling car and heads up the steep hill to the farmhouse, where she pours herself a glass of red wine and scrambles an egg.

She likes to sleep alone in Vincent's bed, in Vincent's fine linen sheets with the too-long monogram, especially when the fall winds shake the apples from the trees and Charlie is chain smoking and painting nudes of another college student in his studio across the road. Was this how it was for Vincent on her last October night? Lonely? Too quiet? The hunters at work in the woods, a glass of wine in hand?

And what position is the college student in? Norma wonders. Legs splayed open, draped in a red cloth, that same damn piece of red cloth he put over everyone? Does it matter?

She turns down the covers. She can reach the bureau from the bed and its contents, the book Vincent was reading the week she died, the rings she left in a ceramic dish. Norma slides her sister's rings over her arthritic fingers, on and off, on and off.

“How can you live like this?” Charlie has asked her.

She doesn't let him in Vincent's bed. She won't let him empty Vincent's yellowed mouthwash or move her suitcase. Squirrels have nested in the divan on the porch, and one made fast work out of books and a windowsill in the library. Cobalt-blue morphine bottles still glitter like sapphires in the trash pile. The kitchen ceiling is dotted with wet, circular spots of mold. But she doesn't want to change anything; adjusting a piece of sheet music on the piano, disturbing a ceramic deer on the kitchen shelf, moving the biting instructions Vincent left for the help, unfolding the towels in the bathroom—it might rob the place of her sister's spirit.

Norma can't sleep well that night. It isn't that she hasn't seen Charlie, or that the tax bill has increased, or that the termites are nibbling away at the cottage. Something about the aspiring biographer worries her, or maybe it's the realization that she's now in her seventies and when she passes away someone
will
get the papers, someone will see the insides of Vincent's drawers. Though it's still dark outside, she pulls on pants, boots, and her yellow slicker and, armed with matches and a bag of Vincent's belongings, walks the quarter mile to the trash pile in the woods. She passes Cora's grave surrounded by an iron fence, and then the two heavy stones for Vincent and Eugen, surrounded by moss and fallen leaves.

I can't give away everything, she thinks. I'm not ready.
She's
not ready.

When Norma reaches the trash pile, she looks around to make sure she's alone. Young poets come out here, screwing each other desperately in the woods, carving their names into the trees, stealing glass bottles, hoping for magic to find them.

Maybe it does.

Norma doesn't mind the poets. She lets them sleep in the cottage. She lets them sleep with Charlie too, and she's made love to more than one. She may be old, but they want to get close to Vincent and she's the best option they have.

Certain she's alone, she arranges kindling and starts a fire, onto which she tosses a handful of nude photographs, a few
desperate-sounding letters, and Vincent's ivory dildo, which refuses to burn for a long time, but finally disappears into a dark, indeterminable object.

Chilled, she retraces her steps through the woods and returns to Vincent's bed, half-listening for the wheels of the dark sedan groaning over the gravel. Norma's silver hair is spread out across Vincent's pillow. It took her months to wash the linens after coming here. It took her months to find her appetite, to bring herself to look at the last poem Vincent wrote, the one that must have landed like a feather on the stairs next to her body after she fell.

She thinks of the catamounts slinking through the forest, the brown bear lumbering through the blueberry bushes in the early dawn. She knows how the farm is, and how it was, and that it is still a place where she can be alone with her sister.

On quiet mornings like this, Norma can most vividly picture Vincent in her blue robe, a little hunched, head surely aching, walking barefoot over the lawn with a notebook in hand, settling onto the ground, one small foot tucked underneath her body so that she could watch a fawn until the dew seeped into her nightgown, and the loyal doe returned.

Romaine Brooks, self-portrait, 1923.

Photo reprinted with permission of the Smithsonian

American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY.