Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Free Page B

He flushed as he looked over to the bay window, where Mrs. Carroll's dinner sat, half eaten.
    "Did you know about us?"
    Did he know what, David wondered. Then, when it dawned on him, he saw how far behind he was. He should have wondered from the first why Phidias came in from the balcony, up the spiral stairs from the garden. And why so late at night. David looked at the old sunburnt farmer and thought: the worst part is happening now. If Phidias was somehow her lover, then he, not David, was the most alone here. David had always survived by being the most alone in a given crisis. He had expected Phidias to help him, and he realized that he was not the one most in need of help. When he answered "No," he let out a sob, and he knew he was crying for himself.
    "Well, now you do," Phidias said. "Will you leave us alone for a minute?" Mildly. As if to say: "I'll get back to you in a minute, David. Everything is going to be all right."
    David went out through the french doors and pulled them closed. On the balcony he could look down on the garden court, the marshes, and the dark acres of the sea, but he stayed close to the door and looked up at the starred sky, his hands behind him gripping the door handles. He stopped crying almost at once. He still didn't know what he was going to do, but his release from the death-room had stopped the question whispering in his head. The silver polisher in him, the dustman and short-order cook, had been living day by day since he arrived at Mrs. Carroll's. And that, he promised himself, was what he was going to continue to do as long as he could. Finish up the night. Get up in the morning and see what had to be attended to. The present, he knew from practice, was all that was safe.
    "I don't understand," I said, pillowing my head on my arms as I lay back and looked at the sky. The unexpected turnabout had already blurred the simple fact of Mrs. Carroll's death. It was hard to keep it in focus that, in the middle of this growing comedy of lovers, someone died. That is what David was trying to tell me, I suppose. I don't know why, but I got madder the more I knew.
    "Why didn't you figure it out before?" I asked him. "That's the sort of thing you're good at."
    "You mean I'm nosy and a gossip," he said tartly. "Just because you aren't."
    "I didn't say it was bad. I've always said it. You have a real gift for other people's secret lives."
    "Rick, what do you want from me?"
    "Nothing. You said they were lovers. I don't understand. Why did they have to hide it from you?"
    "They were always lovers. For fifty years or something. Their meeting at night didn't have anything to do with me. From the time they were young, they were together only at night, because Phidias had his work on the farm, and they both had families. Their being lovers was a whole extra life."
    "They must have got by on next to no sleep," I said.
    "Can you imagine?" David said, and for a moment he sounded as sad as the story might have been. "No wonder Mrs. Carroll took so many naps."
    "It's the sort of thing people used to do."
    So it happened that David had never seen Phidias and Mrs. Carroll together before. Phidias had run the dairy business before he retired. The work was done now by his three milk-fed, big-shouldered sons, and Phidias had moved on to become the overseer of the whole estate. Where once there had been a staff of eleven in the main house and a work force of thirty-five for the gardens and the cows, now there was only one here and one there, and Phidias had to keep it all together. Since there was so much of the Carroll place, no one else but him knew where anything was. So he was always putting his head in at the kitchen door, armed with his list of projects.
    "Tell her," he would say to David, "that I've got someone coming to rewire the boathouse. Tell her the gray pickup is all wore out. My boys are going to junk it for parts."
    David would make a mental note, and he passed it on when he went up with her lunch.