Caroline's Daughters Read online

  “Portia’s car has died.” Ralph has come out to stand beside them, on the deck that Caroline has so filled with pots of flowers that very little room is left for furniture, or for people. Roses, mostly. Two rose trees, full and white, and smaller bushes of yellow, peach and pink and lavender (Sterling Silver, a delicate favorite of Caroline’s), but also two lemon trees, and three large wooden tubs of poppies and ranunculuses, all now in bloom. And smaller pots of thriving marguerites, all over.

  Below the deck and down in the garden are still more roses, tall rose trees and bushes of roses, all placed at rather formal intervals, in tidy beds that súrround a circular area of brick. In the farthest bed, at the very back of the garden, are two enormous twin camellias, now profusely flowering, dark scarlet. It has been so far an exceptionally sunny spring, leading to talks of drought, and Caroline has feared for her flowers, just now so lovely.

  “You might as well open your present,” Sage instructs, indicating the box, with a smile that to her mother signals pride.

  Caroline works at the taped-down flaps, and then for no reason that she can think of (except that she always makes guesses, as she opens presents) she says, “I know, you’ve made me a birdbath.”

  “Jesus, Mother. I hate you, I really do.”

  Dismayed at the accuracy of her intuition (and, having had it, why on earth did she have to blurt it out like that?), Caroline sees that what Sage has brought is a birdbath: a wide, shallow, blue-glazed bowl, with tiny birds, a small frieze of birds perched here and there on its ridge. “But darling, it’s so beautiful, that glaze—”

  “But how did you know what it was? Jesus, Mother.” Sage’s thin lovely face is pulled into a frown. Her pale-brown skin is lightly freckled, her eyes troubled but golden, clear gold.

  “I don’t know, it was just a lucky guess. Let’s put it over here. Look, it’s perfect.”

  “All that noise has got to be Fiona,” says Ralph.

  “Besides, you always think of what I really lust for,” adds Caroline, to Sage. “I did want a birdbath. I need one, and this is ravishing.” She goes over to give Sage a quick light kiss.

  Fiona’s arrival is a big production, taking place as it does from her restaurant’s big white van. FIONA is emblazoned on one side. And Fiona has brought along an assistant, a fat, very pretty young woman who immediately begins to unload a series of white food boxes.

  “You didn’t exactly leave me a lot of room,” is Fiona’s opening remark to her older half-sister, Sage.

  “I didn’t know you were bringing that truck, I thought the Ferrari.”

  “How could I get all this food into the Ferrari?”

  “How many people did you think were coming?” asks Ralph, as boxes are passed into the kitchen, either stacked or piled into the refrigerator.

  “Well, isn’t Liza bringing her kids?”

  “She only has three, and they’re little,” Caroline reminds her.

  “Oh well.”

  Fiona’s pale-blonde hair is very long; all three of Caroline’s daughters by Jim McAndrew have wispy blonde hair, as he does, and they have his eyes, very large and pale gray. Fiona dresses smartly, always, “dressed for success,” as the advertisers (and her sisters) put it. Today she wears very tailored pale linen, two shades of brown, and trim brown shoes—in which she now walks about the deck, inspecting flowers, then looking into the birdbath. “Terrific,” is her mild comment.

  Fiona is thin, very thin, but nature intended her to be otherwise, or so Caroline thinks, observing this daughter. Caroline sees Fiona’s wide bones, quite like her own, stretching the pummelled, pampered skin.

  Sexy Fiona, how odd that she seems to have no lovers, thinks sexy Caroline.

  “Where’s Jill?” Fiona then asks. “She’s coming?”

  “I guess, but we haven’t heard from her.”

  “Some big deal in her life, no doubt,” sniffs Fiona. To say that Fiona is ambivalently pleased by the success of her younger sister would be to put it mildly.

  “Portia’s car died,” contributes Ralph.

  “Lord, what else is new?”

  “Well, it must be time for drinks, what would everyone like?” Caroline and Ralph say these things at almost exactly the same moment, then laugh at themselves for so doing.

  Sage wants wine with some ice in it. “I know that’s awful, Noel the purist would die, but it’s just so hot.”

  Fiona wants a Perrier.

  In the kitchen, faced with all those boxes of food, Ralph and Caroline exclaim to each other, “Look at all she’s brought, it’s terrible, we’ll have to take it all somewhere—some shelter, a food bank.”

  “Well, anyway, here’s Liza and her gang.”

  And indeed, trooping up the steps are two small children in impressively white clothes, followed by their parents: Liza, carrying a baby, a very small one; and Saul Jacobs, the father, psychiatrist, carrying several paper sacks and also a very large bunch of oversized pink peonies. (And Caroline thinks, as she sometimes has before, how very much she likes this shrink son-in-law, this Saul—and how little she seems to feel for the children. Her grandchildren. They’re quite nice enough, in their way, but after all only children. And she wonders, perhaps her strong affections for the very young are simply worn out, nothing left?)

  Liza is as large as, in Caroline’s view, Fiona was meant to be. In her invariable blue denim prairie skirt, her white lace Mexican blouse, blue beads, she bustles in and kisses everyone present in turn, with effusive greetings for all. “Mom, you look super, you look home. Ralph, don’t you love your house? Does the garden give you enough chores to keep you happy? Skinny Fiona, what on earth have you brought in all those boxes, goodies to keep the rest of us all happy and fat? Darling Sage, you look so beautiful, where’s Noel?” And, turning back to her mother and Ralph, “Where’re Jill and Portia?”

  “Portia’s car,” they tell her. “We haven’t heard from Jill.”

  “Noel had to work,” Sage adds.

  By this time, Fiona’s helper is carrying boxes out onto the deck, and, assisted by Ralph, Fiona begins to arrange an assortment of salads, cold pastas and thick cold soups. And cheese and fruit and pastry. Mustards, relishes. Breads and special butters, in crocks.

  We’ll never be able to eat all that, Caroline begins to say, and then does not, not wishing to sound unappreciative of her daughter’s largesse. But it isn’t really largesse, she reminds herself. It’s “free,” in the curious sense that expense-account meals are free, and certain trips. All are part of an extremely expensive bit of unreality, the unreality in which the very rich spend all their time, insulated, as though in capsules. Including Fiona and the absent Jill.

  And then, more practically, she thinks, Well, Liza can take home some leftovers. Picnic lunches all week for the kids. And she thinks, At the rate Saul’s going he’ll certainly never be rich. (Saul donates considerable time, most recently to an emotional-support project for people with AIDS.)

  A light confusion then takes over the party, and reigns for the next several hours, actually. There is not enough ice: how come Caroline had not emptied and refilled all the ice trays early on? (It is Caroline who demands this, aloud, of herself, Ralph not being given to that sort of petulant nagging.) The children want a variety of soft drinks, mostly ones not there. “I’m not about to go out to any market, so just settle down,” Saul, their stern father, tells them. And isn’t it time to eat? All the cold food will warm up in the sunshine and lose its flavor, according to Fiona.

  Then from the doorway is heard a voice, high-pitched and quite familiar to them all: “This fucking van, where in hell do you expect a person to park?”

  And there is Jill, her pale-blonde hair short and sleek, a small cap, a helmet. Jill, in pale-pink silk, looking slightly rumpled, and flustered—and, as Ralph has said, very sexy.

  “I thought I left plenty of room. You do look fabulous, Jill.”

  “Hurry up. We’re just starting, my kids will eat it all up if we
don’t.”

  “Where on earth have you been?”

  Thus more or less in chorus is Jill greeted by her sisters. She chooses, though, to answer only Sage’s somewhat accusing question. “I had some work to do,” she tells Sage, and then, “Where’s Noel? He’s working too?” She laughs again, and seems not to expect an answer. “I will have a glass of wine,” she tells Ralph. “It all seems so festive, I feel rather festive myself.”

  As though deliberately, the three blonde daughters have clustered together, Liza, Fiona, and Jill, all happily out in the sunshine, in their summer clothes, with plates of summer food before them. Sage, isolating herself somewhat, chooses a shaded corner of the deck, near a budding yellow rose.

  Caroline is moved to go over to her, though not to say what is most in her mind, not to say, You’re worried over Noel, you shouldn’t be, he’s just not worth it. Although that is what she would have liked to say.

  And Caroline sighs, with the further self-critical observation, How much a mother I do seem still to be! So annoying, no wonder I haven’t done much else with my life.

  To Sage, though, what she does say is, “How’s your work going these days? Do I get to come to your studio any time soon?”

  Two

  Sage is not sure why she feels that she must tell her mother and Ralph that she is just going for a walk, “I’ll just walk around for a while, check out Pacific Heights,” when she is actually going to see her stepfather. (Or, former stepfather? These designations have become unclear.) Nevertheless, that is what she says.

  She is actually going to see Jim McAndrew, former husband of Caroline and father of Liza, Fiona and Jill. Who lives in a condominium not far from Caroline’s house. Sage is off to see Jim, while Caroline and Liza are dealing with one of Liza’s kids, who threw up. And Ralph and Saul are packing leftovers into Saul’s old Ford wagon, directed by Fiona—as Jill buzzes off in her yellow Mercedes.

  And Sage announces her walk. “I’ll be back in an hour or so to pick up my car, but you guys will probably be taking naps by then.”

  “That sounds right.”

  Has she always, all her life, been in love with Jim McAndrew? Sage has wondered this, and she took it up, repeatedly if not very fruitfully, with the psychiatrist to whom she briefly went—at the end of a love affair with a man of about Jim’s age, a married man, a father. Roland Gallo, a well-known local lawyer-politico, a semi-friend of Ralph’s.

  But it did not much matter what name she gave to her strong, surviving emotions in Jim’s direction, both she and the shrink concluded. Entering her life when she was at the very tender, very vulnerable age of less than three, as the first San Francisco suitor of her widowed mother, Jim was and has remained for Sage the ultimately desirable and finally unavailable person. “Friends” is the word she generally uses to describe her connection with Jim, and very likely that is how he too thinks and speaks of it, if he ever does mention this connection. “Sage and Jim have remained the greatest friends; it’s slightly odd, I suppose, but extremely nice, and quite natural when you think of it. After all, he was her father for all those years,” is how Caroline has been heard to describe it.

  Sage did not much like the lunch party. Or, she wonders, are her nagging, ill-defined worries over both Noel and her work enough to prevent her enjoyment of anything, even in this soft blue April weather? It is easier to ascribe the mild depression that she now experiences to the multiple presences of her sisters, her three half-sisters. Three halves: the very phrase suggests wrongness, no one should have three half-sisters, much less four.

  Not for the first time Sage considers the fact that of all those women it is Caroline, her mother, who seems most truly her sister. Although she is indeed fond of Liza, and of the absent Portia.

  Suppose she did a group of those female figures? Suddenly seeing that possibility, seeing the circle of small clay figures—perhaps at a table? chairs? No, standing would be better, more scope for individual postures—Sage stops in her tracks, stops right there on the sidewalk, which happens to be at the crest of a hill, the height of Pacific Heights. She stops to think, and to see.

  How amazing, really, that she has not thought of this grouping before. Or for that matter not done it long before.

  But now she will.

  From where Sage stands, had she been looking down to the bay she would have seen a flutter of white sails, all over the blue. A Sunday regatta, through which, all slow and stately, a long black freighter moves deliberately outward, toward the Pacific, the East. Bearing exports, probably, to Japan.

  Much closer to Sage, in fact she can smell them, are the thick dark woods of the Presidio, the eucalyptus and pines, the weird wind-bent cypresses.

  She is or has been taking the long way around to Jim’s condominium, where she is not due for almost half an hour (she called; she does not drop in on Jim, a busy bachelor-doctor). She takes this route both to kill the time and because she has always walked this way. Below her on Pacific Avenue is the row of large, dark and quite splendid houses, some Maybeck, a Julia Morgan, an Esherick, in one of which Roland the married lover lives, there across from the playground and the woods, with his view of the bridge and the bay. In the bad old days of the end of that affair Sage used to disguise herself in scarves and bulky sweaters (she hoped she was disguised) and to haunt the small area of playground just across from his house, trying to read messages from its handsome façade: lights in what must be the master bedroom (that most horrible, wounding phrase), or drawn shades. What was meant—by anything?

  Just as these days Sage tries to decipher the bruises on Noel’s upper arms (he bruises easily, he says, as she does): small round bruises, the size of fingertips. Fingers pressing, in some extreme of passion. Fingers belonging to almost anyone. Or, as Noel says (although she does not exactly ask him), something he bumped into, at a building site.

  All of which has led Sage to rephrase an old question: was it in Roland Gallo’s case the marriage, and in Noel’s the possible involvements with “other women” that she finds so fascinating, so addictive? Roland was quite bald, thick-bodied, middle-aged. An essentially political person, a lawyer, involved in various local money-power structures, mostly big real-estate deals. Not much in common with Sage, intellectually speaking. (A few quite incredible tricks with oral sex, however.) Noel, although undeniably handsome, is not especially “interesting” either, and in sex, she has to admit, he is somewhat passive, a recipient of love.

  Sage never gets very far with any of this, only further into her normal anxiety (she knows she’s a woman who loves too much, and so what?)—and it gets her, geographically speaking, up to the massive glass doors of Dr. Jim McAndrew’s building, which she has just now reached.

  Their embrace at greeting, Sage and Jim’s, is always faintly indecisive, and there is awkwardness over kissing: cheeks, never mouths are aimed for, but sometimes it all goes wrong and mouths do brush, accidentally. Rather than hugging, they sometimes grip each other’s shoulders.

  And then the ritual comments on each other’s perceived condition:

  “You look—”

  “—great! thin!”

  “—a little tired?”

  “—really rested!”

  Jim in fact looks worse than tired, he looks gray, and exhausted. And too thin, he has suffered the sort of weight loss that withers the skin. However, apparently aware of his effect, he quickly explains, “This great new diet. I know, too fast. I’d never let a patient do this, but I feel really great.”

  “You doctors are such jerks about your own health.”

  Jim laughs, acknowledging accuracy. “Of course we are, we think we can fix anything, including ourselves.” And then, “But how’re you? Still madly in love with that Noel, despite being married to him?” This is an old semi-joke between them: Jim believes that marriages have ruined his love affairs. All two of them; there has only been one wife since Caroline.

  “Oh, I guess I am. For all the good that does me,” Sage tells
him.

  “Well, sit down over here by the window. The view may do you some good.”

  And here we are again, Sage reflects, looking out at the same high green park that Caroline’s house also faces, from another angle. And she and Jim are returned to their old roles; he is doctor-omnipotent, super-dad, with a small New England shading of irony. And Sage, with Jim, feels herself young and sad and bewildered, but at the same time she is a sort of wise-ass, with Jim.

  She never tries to explain that sadness to Jim, though. She never says, Noel worries me a lot, I never know where I am, with him. My work isn’t going very well. I never have any money, and I’m tired.

  But it seems today that Jim really wants to talk to her.

  And he starts right out. “I’ve been in this, uh, situation. This girl, Lord, she’s younger than Jill.” (Amazing that anyone could be younger than his youngest daughter, Jim’s tone seems to say. Much less a girl with whom he has a romantic connection, or whatever.) “Well, I guess you could say I loved her, I was crazy about her, I have to admit it. I even thought, A new family. Hey, why not? A lot of guys my age do it, and I’d read these articles, and some of my patients, they go on about their biological clocks. Girls wanting babies. But she saw a lot of reasons why not, as things turned out, and it wasn’t just my age. For one thing she doesn’t like doctors. Gosh, I thought everyone loved doctors.” (This is only half ironic). “For another thing she has this really pathological obsession about AIDS. No new relationship for her, she says.”

  Jim talks on and on, a boyish man in his early sixties, in the throes of an obsessional love. Sage’s glance and her attention wander out to the terraced park, the dark swaying pines and redwoods, the eucalyptus. And she thinks of the time when she walked through that park in black blind mourning for Roland Gallo, who was only a few blocks away, but could not see her. As Jim has no doubt walked along those same paths.