The Evening Star (40 page)

“The trouble with Aurora, she’s a bad winner,” she said to the General. “She’s a good loser—it’s when she’s losing that you can’t help liking her. But when she’s winning it’s a different story. When she’s winning she ain’t interested in nobody but herself.”

“I think you’re right,” the General said. “She certainly isn’t interested in me anymore.”

Once he thought it over for a minute, Rosie’s theory looked better and better. Aurora had always had a tendency toward arrogance, and any sort of success was apt to magnify this tendency.

“When she’s winning, it’s like dealing with a queen,” Rosie commented, as she and the General selected their hands.

“It’s like dealing with an empress,” the General corrected.

As always, when talking negatively about Aurora, Rosie
began to feel guilty. After all, Aurora had done her many kindnesses. It was Aurora who had sat up with her in the hospital all night when her youngest boy, Little Buster, had almost died of rheumatic fever. In fact, in every serious illness or other crisis with her seven children, it had been Aurora, not the male currently in her life, who had stood by her until the crisis passed.

Only this week Aurora had flown to L.A. to help Melanie and Bruce find a nicer, safer apartment; it wasn’t true that she never did anything for others when she was winning. All that was
really
true, Rosie admitted to herself, was that Aurora was now in love with Jerry Bruckner, a man much too young for her; and that, being in love, she had neither time nor interest enough to hear Rosie’s complaints about Willie—and Willie was turning out to have quite a serious downside, one element of which was that he was a heroin addict. In his own defense, Willie claimed that all prison guards were heroin addicts, a claim Rosie didn’t accept. She didn’t see how
all
prison guards could be heroin addicts, but then again, it wasn’t her problem.
Her
problem was that the one prison guard she was sleeping with was a heroin addict. Willie had only revealed his problem the week before in the course of a discussion about marriage—Willie was
really
anxious for Rosie to marry him, and Rosie would have admitted that she was considering it if Aurora had demonstrated any interest in hearing the admission. But Aurora hadn’t, and—if that weren’t enough—Rosie had just discovered that she was about to be a great-grandmother. If Melanie hadn’t miscarried, Rosie would have felt okay, knowing that Aurora was going to be a great-grandmother again at more or less the same time; but Melanie
had
miscarried.

Also, the fact that she was staring great-grandmotherhood in the face was a serious element in her thinking about Willie’s marriage proposal. Look at it any way she could, it just seemed a little tacky for a great-grandmother to be screwing around. What would she tell her kids and grandkids, not to mention her great-grandkids?

But Aurora, a great-grandmother herself, and certainly
likely to be one again within a year or two, since Melanie and Bruce seemed to have every intention of continuing to try, was definitely screwing around—and with a man who was only going to break her heart, sooner or later. After all, Aurora was thirty years older than Jerry: there was only one way, in Rosie’s view, that the story could end.

The General meanwhile was studying his hand while attempting to ruminate about Rosie’s new-sprung theory that Aurora was a bad winner. The more he thought about the new theory, the more he decided he believed it. But there
was
one bothersome aspect to it: what was Aurora winning just at present to make her so neglectful of the two of them?

“Why is she treating us this way?” he asked. “I don’t see that Pascal is such a prize. I intend to shoot him if I can, but even if I miss and he gets away, there’s still no excuse for her acting like a goddamn empress.”

“Aw, don’t be shooting Pascal,” Rosie said. “Pascal ain’t so bad. If you shoot him they’ll just put you in Huntsville and Willie will have to guard you. You don’t need to be in jail and Willie don’t need no more murderers to guard.”

“Well, I can see that, I guess,” the General said.

Rosie sighed.

“Now you’re sounding like Aurora,” the General said. “Both of you are always sighing. Wait until you’re my age. Then you’ll really have something to sigh about.”

“It’s your lead,” Rosie mentioned.

The General, perversely, in her view, led with a double blank. It was the equivalent of not leading at all. But then, he was a crazy old man, and Aurora’s neglect was making him crazier by the day. Of course, Rosie knew that living with the General and waking up every morning to the sight of him sleeping with his mouth open must be a sore trial. One of her lifelong pet peeves was men who slept with their mouths open. Willie snored like a truck, but at least he snored with his mouth shut.

“That’s not much of a lead,” she commented, playing a five blank.

“It was my lead, not yours,” the General commented.
“Sometimes I think I ought to shoot Aurora and let Pascal live. But I can do without Pascal fine, and I can’t do without Aurora.”

“You need to get shooting off your dumb brain,” Rosie said. “There’s never been a gunshot fired in this house, and the first time one’s fired I’m leaving.”

“Rosie, it’s just talk,” the General said, hastily retreating. “Don’t you ever get the urge to take Aurora down a peg when she’s acting like a goddamn empress?”

“Yeah, but not down
that
far,” Rosie said. “You’re talking about putting her six feet under.”

“It was just talk,” the General repeated. He realized he had gone too far. Rosie not only didn’t look good—now she was looking as if she might cry. He couldn’t understand why women were always taking him seriously when he obviously wasn’t saying anything serious. Aurora did it too. Aurora had always done it. Let him simply voice some idle fancy, something he would never in his life actually do, and the next thing he knew Aurora would have taken him literally and would either burst into tears or stamp out of the room in a fury.

“It’s just talk,” he said for the third time. “Can you imagine me actually shooting Aurora?”

“Yeah, I can imagine you shooting her!” Rosie said, feeling herself slipping out of control. “I can imagine
me
shooting her! I can imagine anybody shooting her—that’s what’s making me crazy! But I ain’t the only one crazy. You’re crazy and she’s crazy and Willie’s a dope addict and I don’t know what’s gonna happen to any of us!”

Before the General could say another word, Rosie burst into tears, swept half the dominoes off the table, jumped from her chair, and tore out of the room. She was having a fit just like one of Aurora’s. He heard her sobbing as she ran down the stairs. He felt terrible. All he had been attempting was an innocent game of dominoes, and now, despite all, a woman was having a fit, just because he had muttered some nonsense about shooting Aurora and her latest lover, Pascal. He wasn’t really apt to shoot anybody, and Rosie should have
known it, but he had touched a nerve, and now the game was over, there was disorder in the household, and he was alone. Rosie was the one person in the world who took the trouble to fix his eggs the way he liked them, too. He wished he could call back his words, but his words were history now, like Omaha Beach. They were not as bad as Omaha Beach, but they were history, just the same. It seemed to him tragic that nothing could ever be changed, once it happened: no word ever taken back, no battle plan revised. Men fell and women had fits and that was that.

The General felt so sad thinking of all the things that could not be changed, or taken back, that for a few seconds his age seemed only to be a source of relief. Soon he would not have to feel such distress in his chest because of a few casual, silly words that caused another woman who was dear to him to have a fit—soon he would be lying with the fallen of Omaha Beach.

It seemed to him it was about time he did just die, but of course he wasn’t quite dead yet, and fits, however painful, just had to be lived through. He sat in his chair a few minutes, squeezing his hands together. Often his hands ached; squeezing them seemed to make them better. He hoped that Rosie would shake it off and come back and say hi, or something, so he would know she wasn’t too mad.

But Rosie didn’t come back and say hi, so the General sat alone, squeezing his hands. He remembered his gun—he could just go shoot himself. It would let the girls off the hook; really, it would probably be the best thing—he had had a pretty good life. He had even made a hole in one once, in Valdosta, Georgia, of all places. Later there’d been some confusion about Evelyn—he’d been so buoyed up by the hole in one that he’d wanted to have sex, though by that time years had passed since he and Evelyn had had sex. Evelyn had been startled—she hadn’t really wanted to. After all,
she
hadn’t made the hole in one, and wasn’t in the mood to change what had been the pattern for years. In the end he went back to the Officers Club and let people buy him drinks. It had been a pretty hole in one.

But that was years ago, before he even met Aurora. It had taken him and Aurora a little more than twenty years to go through it, but now it did seem that they had mostly gone through it. He loved her—wouldn’t it just be an act of kindness to shoot himself and let her off the hook? Also, Rosie wouldn’t have to deal with his fussiness about boiled eggs anymore.

Of course, the problem was, one never knew how women would react. Even if he left a suicide note explaining that his death was intended to be an act of kindness, the girls might not take it that way. Rosie might blame herself—so might Aurora. They might spend the rest of their lives blaming themselves—he had seen that very thing occur in the families of suicides.

The General sighed a few sighs of the very sort he hated to hear Aurora or Rosie sigh. He had nearly talked himself into suicide, but then, proceeding logically, had talked himself out of it again. He would just have to go on, disorder or no disorder. As a first act in the drama of going on, he carefully got down on his knees and began to gather up the dominoes Rosie had scattered across the floor.

18

“Granny, I’m not criticizing you,” Teddy said, wondering if the old Cadillac was going to get so hot it boiled over.

“Perhaps you should be, though,” Aurora said, polishing her rings. When in doubt, she polished her rings—lately they had been treated to a lot of polishing.

The two of them were stuck in traffic on I-45, the freeway that led to Huntsville and the prison. She herself intended to remain true to her vow: she did not intend to go into the prison and see Tommy. But Teddy argued that, however perverse Tommy was, he was still one of them. The family could not simply abandon him. He was planning to go in and visit Tommy himself, leaving Aurora in the car. Jane had been against it—she felt Tommy ought to sit and cool his heels until he felt like behaving a little better. Rosie was for it, the General was of two minds, and Aurora herself of at least two minds. Every thought or mention of Tommy upset her.

“Where is the little red needle?” she asked, peering nervously at the Cadillac’s temperature gauge. The traffic ahead of them and behind them seemed to be congealed—she was very hot, but of course there was no thought of using the air
conditioner in such a traffic jam. They had been totally immobile for several minutes. Using the air conditioner, even for a minute, would probably cause the old car to erupt. It had erupted in similar circumstances several times, but on those occasions Rosie had been with her, and Rosie seemed to know what to do about erupting cars. In time they had always made it home.

Of Teddy’s mechanical skills she was far less sure. It seemed to her Teddy was shaking more; his increasing shakiness was one reason she had agreed to go along to Huntsville. If at all possible, Ted must be kept from shaking himself back into a mental hospital. His problem was not Jane and her lover, either. When Teddy showed signs of becoming destabilized, Jane was as patient and supportive as anyone could be. Everyone in Ted’s life was patient and supportive at such times. Rosie made him pies, Mr. Wey helped him on his shift, and Aurora herself made sure that she spoke with him several times a week.

Still, somewhere inside Ted, the gyroscope was wobbling. He was seeing Jerry Bruckner regularly now, at her insistence. Despite her doubts about his training, Jerry did seem to be a helpful therapist. A constant stream of the mute and the crushed seemed to flow through his office; Rosie’s boyfriend Willie, who had stunned them all by revealing that he had been a heroin addict for twenty-eight years, was now seeking help from Jerry. Rosie even reported a decline in Willie’s irritability since he had begun seeing Jerry.

“The red needle’s okay,” Teddy said. “It’s not quite touching the H yet. If we can just get some movement, we’ll be fine.”

He had no sooner said it than three ambulances screamed by them, on the shoulder.

“People are dead up there—or else they’re dying,” Aurora said gloomily, wiping the sweat off her face. “I don’t like feeling like a hot animal, which is exactly how I do feel.”

The traffic surged ahead a few yards, then stopped again. Teddy decided to get off at the next exit, if they ever made it to another exit. Driving along the frontage road would at least
be a little bit of an improvement. The car would cool down, and so, perhaps, would his grandmother. She was not an easy person to be with when she was discontented, and at the moment she was pretty clearly discontented. Her new lover, Dr. Bruckner, didn’t seem to be working out too well, but she obviously wasn’t in the mood to give up on him just yet.

“Nobody’s criticizing you,” he said again.

“Not to my face, but that’s because I’m known to be fierce in rebuttal,” Aurora said. “I’m sure you and Jane think it’s pathetic, a woman my age throwing herself at a man young enough to be her son.”

“You’re too hung up on age,” Teddy said nervously. The red needle was now touching the H—he thought he might have to take to the shoulder and move on to the next exit. It seemed unfair not to just wait in line like everyone else who was stuck; on the other hand, if the Cadillac exploded, it would only make the traffic jam worse.