Listening to Billie Read online

  Catherine was asleep upstairs—Catherine, with whom Eliza had been pregnant as she listened to Billie that night on Fifty-second Street. Thinking of Catherine asleep, Eliza, even with tears in her eyes, considered that her life could be much worse: that bad-sad marriage was over, if dreadfully; her small blond daughter was for the most part a joy. And if she, Eliza, was not doing much—was certainly not doing anything as important as poetry—on the other hand she was coping with her life: her daughter, friends and lovers, the necessary part-time jobs that came her way.

  But all in all that evening had been odd, those hours with the new young man. He turned out to be less a friend of Daria’s than of someone named “Smith Worthington,” whom he, the young man, described to Eliza as Daria’s fiancé—although this could not be true; Daria would have told Eliza. The two women, despite the ten years’ difference in age, were very close. (Daria was Josephine’s child by her third marriage, Eliza by her first.) And the obligatory conversation of two people yoked by an absent third had been curious. Eliza’s feelings about her delicate, difficult, sometimes crazily impulsive sister were strong but not readily expressed. (Daria was sometimes crazily generous: Eliza could hear her thin voice saying to an almost stranger, “Oh, you’re going to San Francisco? Well, you must look up my sister Eliza Quarles.”) How could she talk about Daria to this Bostonian stranger, who was using a pompous word like “fiancé” and an improbable name, “Smith Worthington”? Of his own name, she had all evening been unsure. Bill?

  He was curiously monochromatic, that “Bill”; he was all the same pale shade of red. Was that his name, then—Red, not Bill? Very likely his body hair would be the same color—and that decided Eliza: no, she would not make love to anyone with a mat of red hair on his chest. What was odd was that she had even thought that she would, that she could. And then she saw what it was strange that she had not seen before: she had for several years been forcing love, or, rather, sex.

  After Evan’s death and her move to California, although she met a lot of people, men who took her out, for a while she was obstinately celibate. Even when a man appealed to her, she would turn him down, and later go to bed alone and wonder why; surely no one else would turn out to be like Evan? And then came the period that perhaps just then was ending, a time during which if she liked a man at all or if he seemed to expect it, she would go to bed with him. But not that night. Not Red.

  Red began, just then, determinedly to kiss her, grasping and pressing and pulling, as Eliza resisted him, almost absent-mindedly, still thinking.

  Then he muttered, “Come on, baby, you know you want it, too,” in an accent quite unlike the one he had been using earlier—tough, threatening, street vowels.

  At which she was mobilized, “Get out—go away,” she managed to say, pulling back from him—as, ghoulishly, on the radio Billie began to sing, “I’ve got a right to sing the blues, I’ve got a right to moan and sigh …”

  He didn’t believe her; or he thought that her struggle was a come-on? That she was being coy?

  Anyhow, the struggle went on and on; it was purely and simply a fight, the sex had gone out of it. And so, at last, when Eliza said, “Okay, you’re stronger than I am, you’ve proved that,” and lay back on her sofa, submissive, actually she had won.

  “Well, shit.” Bill, or Red, pulled himself together, and with what dignity he could find he left.

  But could he have been a friend of Daria’s? Could Daria have a “fiancé” named Smith Worthington?

  Alone, hunched up in her large bed and hearing the louder, more menacing wind, Eliza did not cry, although that was certainly what a part of her would have liked to do; she sensed that somewhere within her there was a woman weeping, or perhaps it was a terrified child, its heart already broken.

  3 / In Maine

  The next summer, a little over a year after Billie’s death, Eliza, perhaps reminded by the music on the record player, tried to describe the night on Fifty-second Street to her sister Daria Paulus, who was only a child that night when Billie sang.

  “But really? You were there and saw Billie? Alive? How come you’ve never told me before?”

  They were sitting in adjacent white wicker chairs, next to the suspended sofa, both facing the lake, so that from time to time either woman could look out to the water. Not confronted with each other, it was easier for them to talk.

  Eliza said, “I thought I had.”

  “Never. What was she like?” Daria then looked fully at her sister.

  “She was beautiful, but it’s hard to remember. So many years ago, and I’ve spent so much time since thinking about her. Listening to her records.”

  This conversation took place on a late summer afternoon, at one end of the long porch of a large gray-shingled house (Josephine’s—their mother’s—house); at the other end were a porte-cochère and a parking area.

  Daria was thin and dark and delicate. Her long eyes varied from yellow to green to brown to gray; her hair was filmy, black-brown. And Eliza, at almost thirty, looked stronger; her face had more definition than when she was simply a pretty girl. Fine lines had appeared in the corners of her eyes. But she could still be described as small and round. Both young women resembled their fathers: Caleb Hamilton, who, like Evan Quarles, committed suicide, after the stock market crash in 1929, before Eliza was born—a ghastly coincidence, whatever one chooses to call it, which has never been discussed as such between mother and daughter; and Jason Paulus, Daria’s father, referred to by Josephine (tactlessly, in Daria’s view) as “that Greek shit, but terribly good-looking.”

  The two women sat tensely forward; they were smoking a lot and drinking iced tea. Below the porch, a flat, well-tended lawn stretched forward to a narrow white beach of rough sand—to the lake. Now the dark water was smooth, barely lapping at the shore, and in the green-white leaves of the clumps of birches there was hardly a stir. Later, in the cool, brisk fall, there would be brilliant, wind-torn days, when the lake was churned with waves into whitecaps, like a small and troubled sea, and the birches bent down with wind. But now the whole scene was quiescent, at peace, and the distant mountain peaks were obscured in a golden haze.

  Daria was to be married the next day to the man named Smith Worthington; it was true what Red-Bill had told Eliza, in San Francisco, last summer. And the small family—Josephine and her two daughters, and Eliza’s daughter, Catherine—had assembled itself for the wedding.

  Daria, still preoccupied with the fact of Eliza’s having actually seen Billie Holiday, asked her sister, “I wonder why the dog bit the man’s hand, her manager. Were they married, or was he her lover?” Billie’s beauty, and the dog and the bitten hand were the only details that Eliza had been able to remember, so far.

  “I don’t know, at all,” Eliza answered, musingly. “Sometimes I wonder if I saw another man, somewhere else, with a dog on a leash and a bandaged hand. Maybe Billie came in late, all by herself. Of course that’s what I remember best. Her face.”

  Then, having said all that, Eliza suddenly wondered why they were talking about Billie so much, or why at all, when tomorrow Daria was going to marry Smith, a promising young man, if a little colorless—in both respects a contrast to Daria’s usual friends (Eliza’s, too), who have been, in Josephine’s phrase, “more than a little odd”: shy, anxious, difficult boys, usually very poor. Why were they not talking about Smith, the wedding, their future as a couple?

  Daria’s wedding was to be, romantically, in the orchard in back of the house. The orchard of gnarled apple trees, with their thick green leaves—a space crossed with low gray stone fences and bordered by dark woods of pine and fir and hemlock. Farther within those woods were huge boulders, dislodged in some ancient Ice Age, now submerged in roots and overgrown with underbrush, scattered with pine needles, almost camouflaged.

  The wedding was planned by Josephine—the successful writer, but not a poet: some essays, biography, travel. A couple of early short stories. Liking to be in charge, Josephine was g
ood at plans.

  “Or did she ever marry anyone?” asked Daria, still speaking of Billie. And then in a softer voice she asked, “Was Evan with you when you saw her?”

  Intimacy between the two sisters had been uneven, partly because of the difference in age; not, Eliza thought, because of separate fathers. Eliza had seen their friendship as marked with dark areas of reticence, like craters, or whatever they are, on the moon. But, she wondered, does there come a time when all areas should be explored, illuminated? Should she then say: Evan and I weren’t getting along, and then he fell in love with someone else, someone forbidden?

  Daria’s thin face was sharpened and flushed with intensity; her eyes were gray and luminous.

  Gently, Eliza said, “Yes, I was with Evan. Not long before we were married.” And lightly she added, “Billie was one of the few things we agreed on. We were both crazy about her.”

  “Smith and I like Billie, too,” said Daria, and then added, with one of her infrequent jolts of humor, “I hope that’s not a bad sign?”

  With a sort of relief both women laughed; they lit new cigarettes and concentrated on their tea, in which most of the ice had melted.

  “Or,” said Daria, “is it a bad sign that Smith and Josephine are so uneasy with each other?” At times Daria’s voice was curiously old; it became tight and dry.

  Eliza reassured her, “Not really. I think it’s the idea of husbands. Evan, and her own three. Marriage itself.”

  Then Daria asked, “What about Billie—did she always support herself? I wonder how much money she earned.”

  And that question was understood by Eliza as an oblique reference to and question about Smith, an economist, who presumably was interested in money, and who would probably earn a lot. Eliza had understood several things at once: Daria was purposefully not talking about Smith, and her marriage to him—perhaps out of nervousness, reasonable in any wedding circumstances, Eliza thought. And also Daria was wondering about Eliza’s marriage to Evan. What really happened? why were they getting a divorce? why did Evan kill himself?

  “I don’t know,” Eliza said, of Billie and money. “I don’t think money was exactly her thing, somehow.” She was unable not to say this defiantly, money not being her thing either. Then, afraid as always of having too great an influence on her sister, and of sounding opposed to Smith, she modified: “I think she was pretty careless about money.”

  And she wondered: did she say that for Smith’s indirect approval? She had so far very little sense of Smith. He had a kind of anonymous pleasantness, but he smoked a pipe, and Eliza had a vague prejudice against pipe-smokers.

  “In any case, there they are,” said Daria, as a car was heard being jolted over bumps, then harshly braked. “Why must she always drive?”

  “She doesn’t trust anyone else.”

  • • •

  Behind the orchard a narrow road wound into the woods; at the beginning it was pine-needled, passing the hidden boulders and the thickets. Then it became hard, white-surfaced, winding between strict dark Norway pines, past small grassy meadows and an occasional farmhouse. The barns were connected to the houses by closed passageways, against heavy winter weather, and when the barn was larger than the house, it meant the man was in charge, as Josephine had pointed out to Smith in the course of this afternoon’s excursion. She had for the first time noticed that in this area most of the houses were larger than the barns—and why? Her practiced writer’s mind noted this for possible exploration.

  The white road then reached a narrow black asphalt highway, where it ended. The highway returned eventually to the lake, which was glimpsed at intervals between pine woods, or beyond a hillock of grass. There were cemeteries of broken gray or old white stones, a logging camp, then a crossroads with a grocery store and a small library.

  Josephine and Smith had traversed all that this afternoon; she had chosen errands as a not terribly original way of getting to know Smith. The “Evan experience,” as she thought of it, not to mention her own three marriages—none madly successful, she sometimes sighingly said, at those moments forgetting the adored middle husband: Franz, killed in Spain, by whom she had no child—all that had made her nervous about the marriages of her daughters. Daria at twenty seemed incredibly young, and so vulnerable, much more so than Eliza at that same age. Eliza had always been strong—unlike her father, thought Josephine, remembering Caleb Hamilton. Like both her daughters, Josephine married at twenty.

  In the back seat was Catherine, Eliza’s daughter. Catherine, fat and blond, pleasantly self-sufficient, affectionate and rather quiet—qualities that were to describe her for life, more or less.

  The afternoon had been nice enough, but unsuccessful—Smith had not let himself be known. He was exceptionally polite—though not, thank God, with those elaborate manners Evan had, but then poor Evan was so Southern. And Smith had an air of innocence—that smooth, clear white skin, those wide and opaque brown eyes. But how could a brilliant young economist—Harvard, summa cum laude, a Ph.D. at twenty-four—possibly be so innocent? Josephine had tried to draw him out about politics—to her, always crucial in an assessment of people—but with considerable unsuccess. He was unenthusiastic about the Kennedys, as she was herself, but she was unable to tell from which point of view: her own, which was vaguely Marxist, or from the right.

  At least his features were not bland: Smith was a decisively handsome young man, with thick dark brown hair above a fine high white forehead, and eyebrows that flared up slightly at the ends. Only his chin was a little blurred. Thinking ahead, Josephine decided that he would look even better in middle age: distinguished, properly graying. Perhaps he would go into politics.

  “Have you ever thought about politics for yourself?” she asked.

  “Never,” said Smith, more firmly than he had said anything so far.

  Using an old phrase of her own, Josephine thought, He’s a Money Person. (A phrase in which she never saw any irony: to many people, including her daughters, she herself, being a rich woman, could be called a Money Person.)

  Josephine had looked the same for the past twenty years: a tall thin woman with very white hair and bright blue eyes, a smoothly tanned skin. Still somewhat Thirties in her behavior, left-wing Thirties with its bohemian overtones, she tended to dress in ways that could be described as peasanty; her daughters so described her longish flowered skirts and billowing blouses. She was aware of that view, but did not care at all; a secure woman, she knew that that was how she liked to dress.

  She parked the car in the clearing beyond the portecochère, and she and Smith walked around to the porch with Catherine. Daria got up to greet them. Eliza had gone inside to turn the record off.

  At dinner, as she sometimes did, Josephine talked more than anyone else, and with an unaccustomed lurch of sympathy Eliza thought: poor Josephine, she’s more unstrung than any of us are. The meal was one of Josephine’s worst; deeply uninterested in food, except abstractly, Josephine regarded attention paid to cooking as frivolous. Tonight she had underdone both the chicken and the corn.

  Eliza, in her mind, was writing a letter to a man with whom she was still involved, The Lawyer. The night with Red-Bill marked the end of “sleeping around”; rather arbitrarily she settled on The Lawyer for monogamy, and although he was dull she sometimes thought of marrying him, in moods in which she thought that she should marry. “This house is from another world,” she was writing, in her mind. “Certainly another century. Actually my mother inherited it when her parents died, and it has survived all the storms of her life, the husbands and her work, Daria and me. I think she would die if she lost it, and it is a wonderful house. The rooms—the halls—kitchen—the pantry that smells of apples—all the windows looking out to the lake. The attic full of books, and generations of dolls. Dolls’ houses.” She imagined that after dinner she would go upstairs and write that letter; very likely, Daria and Smith would want to be alone, and Josephine always worked at night. She had said that she was well into a
book about Dorothy Thompson, whom she knew and greatly admired.

  “It will actually be more like a party than a wedding, a nice informal family party. Just a few neighbors, old friends.” Josephine had said all this before, several times, in the course of the day. “Smith, dear, won’t you have another ear of corn? Catherine?”

  Smith declined; Catherine said, “Yes, I’ll have at least two more.”

  But later, in her room, although seated at her desk, Eliza did not write a letter; she worked on a poem, or perhaps it was a poem. She played with images of the house and the lake, a kaleidoscope of words, of patterns of words—and she smiled to herself with pleasure as she worked.

  The night was very warm for Maine, in late August, and just then it was whitely illuminated by the moon; moonlight made long shadows across the lawn, below Eliza’s window, and out on the lake there was a glimmering path of moonlight. Once, a long time ago, she and Daria had gone out in a canoe at night to follow such a path: Eliza could see them clearly now, as though from the shore—herself, much taller, paddling in the stern, and small Daria in the bow, putting down her paddle and turning excitedly to exclaim, or to ask something.

  Now, on an impulse, Eliza decided to go outside for a moment, to abandon what was not yet a poem, and to see the lake and the moonlight.

  It seemed silly to dress again; she left her room and tiptoed down the hall, naked beneath her linen robe. She remembered a childhood time of terror in that hall: she had been reading Scottish Chiefs, and imagined that English ghosts lurked there. She passed the room next to hers, in which Catherine was sleeping, passed Josephine’s room. Daria and Smith had tactfully been given adjoining rooms at the far end of the hall, in which, Eliza supposed, they were sleeping, or making love.

  She went down the wide steps, tiptoeing, guarding against creaks, across the broad entrance hall, and she opened the door to the porch.

  Someone was out there, someone sitting on the chair where that afternoon she herself had sat, next to Daria on her chair, as they talked and listened to Billie. A man was there. But before she had time to be frightened, she saw that it was Smith. Smith Worthington, still fully dressed, with his unlit pipe in one hand.