Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Free Page A

same ocean.
    "All I want to do is get through the summer," she told him on the day he arrived for an interview. "I came with Mr. Carroll to this glacier of a coast because I fell in love with it in June. The rest of the year it's like Poland. You don't like weather, do you?"
    Oh no, he had said, and because she saw he was telling the truth under his flaky tan, she hired him. Now he thought: that is all I really wanted myself, to get through the summer. And now it didn't appear as if either of them would. Somehow it hadn't mattered when he lived in a place where summer went on and on. One always got through in the tropics by getting by. On gimlets, on Coppertone and Chapstick, on filmy Roman shirts unbuttoned to the belly. What he wouldn't give right now, he thought, for an air-chilled car on a hot, still night. He didn't know, as the image leapt at him, whether it meant he wanted to go back to the tropics—to Florida, say—or on to the next improbable harbor, set on a summer angle to the sun. He looked over at the dead woman and tried to think what he could do for her. Then he lay back and shut his eyes to keep from crying. He couldn't think of a thing.
    He must have fallen asleep, because he knew it was late when he heard the knocking on the french doors. Ten o'clock. For all he knew, there was a law in Massachusetts that said you had to report a death within three hours. Because he was groggy from being asleep, it didn't seem odd at first that someone was knocking at Mrs. Carroll's balcony doors. He had been enough of a servant long enough to feel that a knocked door had to be answered. He got up, stretched the muscles in his face and grimaced as he passed the mirror, trying to wipe the sleep away, and went toward the door.
    "Beth," a voice called from the balcony, "are you there?" And David woke up and whirled around and saw the body again. This was someone Mrs. Carroll knew out there. Someone who wasgoing to getupset. I don't want all this to start so soon, David thought. Give me a minute more. He stood still, wishing the intruder away, determined to wait it out. Slowly he turned back to the doors and tried to see in the half-light how they were locked.
    "Beth?" The voice was louder, the first ripple of panic rising in it. Then, suddenly, as if to prove that nothing would wait for very long, the doors opened toward David, and Phidias strode into the room.
    "David?" he said, stopped in his tracks, and David could tell he knew something was wrong. But unlike David, he wasn't going to wish it away. For the second or two before he walked past and saw Mrs. Carroll on the bed, he stared into David's eyes and silently demanded to be told.
    "Phidias, I was going to call you."
    But David's moment had passed, and now Phidias had moved past him and stood at the foot of the bed and took it in. "Oh Beth," he said, and the mildness coming into his voice shamed David and shook him so that he began to cry. He turned to the bed and watched Phidias shake his white head as if to say no, his unbrushed hair as wild as a sailor's. Phidias seemed to mean, when he called out Mrs. Carroll's name, that he had to scold her first. Beth, why didn't you tell me, he seemed to be saying, at the same time saying that it was all right. As if she might feel guilty or sorry to go without a word. Death, Phidias made it clear, was something that had to be put in its place. Is this all it is, he seemed to say, that you're dead? He sat down on the bed and rested his hand on hers where it had disarranged a tidy stack of papers at the end. The intimacy of his touch lay in its lightness. His hand sought in hers its proper repose, and lightly he let it be known that nothing had changed.
    "Were you with her, David?" he said. He was crying easily, and David wasn't.
    "No. I came in with her dinner." David was standing at the dresser, his hand darting from one to another of the curios, the porcelain boxes and ivory brushes, the hand mirror face down on a folded scarf.