Any Minute I Can Split (31 page)

“The farm has been an escape for you, hasn't it?” he said.

She nodded.

“I suppose it's the best kind of therapy, work. That's what I've always found.”

“Mmmm,” she said. “Kneading bread, milking goats, there's something soothing about that kind of thing.” On a short-term basis, anyway.

Silence.

“Come with me, Margaret.”

Hesitantly, ashamedly, suspecting what he was about
to do, she followed him to the big leather-topped desk in the far corner of the room, where he made out a check in her name for $100,000 and handed it to her.

“I'll need three days to cover it,” he said.

Reparations. But for which crime? She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. She was about to start crying all over again but then suddenly realized with disgust that crying had become her natural condition in the past week.

“I—thank you, Cowpey.”

“Margaret! Where the hell are you?” Roger's voice boomed through the house.

“I'm coming!” She walked out of the study, through the hall. Roger was just coming out of the parlor.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, looking at her curiously.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was crying.”

“Where's Crowley? Did that old fuck—”

She shook her head.

“I wanna get out of here. He's not giving me the money. Sillsy'll come through from her own money if Dr. Schmucksig approves. I'm not holding my breath.”

She handed him the check. He looked at it for a long time, then laughed ironically.

“I knew it was a good idea to bring you along.”

She smiled wearily.

His expressed changed to wariness. “What went on before you got this?”

“Come on, Roger,” she said in a low voice.

“What made him give it to you?”

“He asked why I was crying and I told him it wasn't about the money, I was thinking about my mother. Then I told him about my mother. It really threw him.”

“And that was it?”

“And that was it, he said he guessed the farm had been therapy, and then he made out the check.”

“In other words,” Roger said, grinning, “you did a little number on him.”

“I guess you could call it that.”

“I hope you don't expect me to be grateful.”

She shrugged. “I have mixed feelings.”
I always have mixed feelings. My ambition in life is to have an unmixed feeling.
“Part of me is disgusted with myself for doing that number.”

He nodded.

“How about you?” she asked, beginning to feel hostile.

“You mean am I disgusted with you?”

“No, Roger,” she said irritably, “with yourself. You did quite a number, too, it was just like the old days.”

He paused to consider. “No,” he finally said. “It's the only way to deal with them. They're not real people.”

The dinner bell rang.

“Let's get out of here,” he whispered.

“No,” she said firmly. “We have to stay through dinner.”

Crowley entered the hallway, walked past them without speaking and into the parlor.

“Cowpey,” Sillsy's voice trilled through the archway, “did you know that Roger has given up smoking?”

“T
HE
funny thing is,” she said later in the car, “I wasn't even thinking about my mother. Crowley was holding my hands in that, you know, flirty-paternal way he has, and I was thinking about my own father. I went to Boston just before I went to the farm. I guess I haven't mentioned it.”

“No.”

“It was right after I left home, you know, I was still pregnant. He didn't even recognize me.”
I didn't know whether to laugh or kill myself; there didn't seem to be anything in between.
“When he did recognize me, he was miserable. Guilty. There was a young girl there. Taking care of him or something.”

Roger laughed. “Where there's life there's hope. As a matter of fact, sometimes there's hope where there's no life.”

Purely enraged by his own father, he was purely amused by hers.

“I was furious.”
It was them I really wanted to kill, not myself
. “I didn't say anything, of course. I made some dumb joke.”

“No point in anything else.”

“Still, I wish . . . you're going to think I'm crazy.” It had been coming over her ever since her session with Crowley. “I'd love to go see my father.”

“You're right. I think you're crazy.”

“It's not so much that I want to see him as I want him to see his grandchildren.”

“You want him to say they're beautiful.”

Silenced by the simple truth.

“Don't you know they're beautiful without hearing it from the old fart? Do I have to travel an extra five hundred miles just to watch you trying to wring blood from a stone?”

“It's not five hundred miles,” she said, unable to quibble with his larger points.

“Damn close,” he said, “by the time we come all the way back across Massachusetts.”

“The thing is,” she said slowly, “I really want to do it.”
I long to make the connection between them, Roger. They're my children and he's my father; their lives should touch.
“I mean, I'm definitely going to take them to see him.”

“All right,” Roger said. “So you're going to take them to see him. Why now?”

“Why not? It isn't as if we really have to be back in such a hurry, that was just a story you made up for your mother.”

“True,” Roger said. “As a matter of fact there may be a tactical advantage in taking our time.”

“I think so, too,” she said, pleased.

“All right,” he said suddenly. “We'll go to Boston and then we'll go to the Cape for a couple of days.”

“Not to Aunt Margaret's,” she said quickly. Without thinking of how it would sound, only reacting to the memory of the last time she'd been there. With David.

“When did going to the Cape mean anything else?” he asked curiously.

She smiled weakly. “Never, I guess.”

“Then what was that about?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It's probably full of people.” She wasn't going to risk their good feelings by telling him.

“Twelve hours away from the farm and you're crapping out again.”

It was true.

“At the farm,” she said, “I feel as though I'll have someone else if you get mad and leave me.”

“I don't leave when I'm mad,” he said. “I leave when I'm bored.” It was an echo of De Witt; only the qualifications differed. “Anyway, it's the bullshit that makes me mad, the truth never does.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly. “It's going to the house. I was there in the fall with David.”

“You WHAT?” The car swerved off the road onto the grassy shoulder, where he braked so hard that her head nearly went through the windshield and both twins rolled across the mattress into the seat backs and woke up crying. “Are you telling me,” he shouted, “that you brought that little fuck to the house at the Cape?”

“You said the truth wouldn't make you mad.”

“Well, I was wrong, goddammit!” he bellowed, pushing back Rue, who was trying to climb over the seat into the front.

Margaret got out of the car and stumbled through the grass toward the trees. Roger came after her.

“Don't you run away!” he shouted after her. “Don't you fucking run away or I'll drive off and leave you here!”

She stopped and turned. He looked grim in the white light from the overhead highway lamps.

“It wasn't the way it sounds,” she said tearfully.

“You're always telling me it's not the way it sounds.”

“It wasn't a romantic idyll, Roger. It was when I just met him. On the way to the farm. We just needed a place to flop for the night.”

“It's a fucking Bible story.” Still at the top of his lungs.

“I was still pregnant, for Christ's sake. I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.”

“The little tit-sucker must've been crazy about you.”

“You're still getting more mileage out of my one—”

“Whaddya mean, ONE?”

“All right, damn it, TWO! One and a half! Whatever! You're still getting more mileage out of my two piddling infidelities than I got out of the whole endless stream of girls you've been fucking me with practically since we got married!”

“I never took anyone to the house on the Cape!”

“What's so sacred about the house on the Cape?” she screamed. And then stopped. Dumbfounded at their reversal. Rue had climbed out of the car and onto the empty highway, then run onto the grass. Now she clutched Margaret's leg and screamed to be picked up. Margaret ignored her.

“You don't mean that,” Roger said.

“It just came out.”

“You were using anything to win an argument.”

“You
always said there was nothing special about the house.” He'd always said it but she'd always known he loved it almost as much as she did. It was a happy place. The repository of much of the pleasure in a large, otherwise drab and unsensual family.

“But
you
did, Maggie. You thought it was special and you took that fucking kid there.”

“I felt . . . it never occurred to me that I shouldn't. I really never thought you'd care. I didn't think you cared about me at all.”

He regarded her thoughtfully. “Some of the best times we ever had were at that house.”

“I know,” she said. “That's why I felt awful about going there with you now. I felt guilty that I was last there with
him
, even if I didn't make love with him there.”

Silence. She finally responded to the baby's wailing and picked her up. In the car, Rue's less mobile sister sobbed gently.

“You keep saying what amounts to that my infidelities
are worse because I care more. But what it really is, obviously, is that mine hurt you more and yours hurt me more. That's all.”

More silence.

Then Roger said, “I'll take you to your father's. But we're not sleeping there.”

She smiled. “I doubt we'll be invited.”

“We'll drive right through.”

“You're not too tired?”

He shook his head. “We'll get there in the morning, stay a couple of hours. Then we'll go to the Cape.” He waited.

“All right.”

“And we'll stay there for a couple of days. I'm in the mood. We'll pick up bathing suits, anything else we need. I want to do it now more than I did before.”

To exorcise young boys and other bad spirits.

“I hope there's room,” she said. “At this time of year . . .”

“If there's no room indoors,” he said, “we'll buy sleeping bags and sack out in back of the house.”

B
OSTON
. She bit off the long ragged nail of her right thumb.

“Well,” she laughed nervously, “here we are.”

It was just past seven in the morning and the street was still reasonably quiet. The twins had awakened at five; they'd stopped for breakfast at six. Now Rosie had dozed off again and Rue was playing with the box of diapers.

“He gets up early, doesn't he?”

“Sure. Six-thirty. Breakfast at seven-fifteen; lunch at twelve; dinner at six.”

Roger laughed. “How could I forget?”

She looked at the brownstone, flashed back to the moment in her last visit when the girl had opened the front door, briefly now found her own body refusing to get out of the car.

“Well,” Roger said, “here goes nothing.”

He took Rosie and she took Rue. Up the front steps. He rang the bell. She felt nauseous; only a conscious effort held down her breakfast. The door opened almost immediately and there was her father, gaping at them in the sunshine.

“Hi, Dad,” she said, “It's us. Your family. Together again.”
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