Venus Envy, page 22
Finally Mandy whispered, “It can’t be,” yet even as she opened her mouth the scent was stronger and she felt an inexplicable happiness.
The telephone, that invention from the bowels of hell, broke the spell. Mandy walked into the next room to answer it. It was Harvey Mclntire, president of the country club, for Frazier.
Frazier grabbed the phone. “Harvey. Hello. Are you calling to tell me I’ve been drummed out of the country club?”
“Uh—what?” Harvey was thrown off balance.
“Are you going to eighty-six me from the club? I mean, everyone else is on my case. And I know I’m not the only homosexual in the country club. I’m just the only person honest enough to admit it.”
“Mary Frazier”—Harvey’s gravely voice soothed as he spoke—“your private life is your business.”
“Thank God,” Frazier exclaimed in relief.
“Now, girl, don’t let this get you down. I know how people can carry on in this town. Just remember it’s the best fruit the birds pick at first. Let me tell you why I’m calling. This year the Dogwood Festival has decided to use fireworks to herald in spring, shall we say? We want to celebrate on the lawn, pretty much like the Fourth of July, and well”—he cleared his throat—“we need the extra revenue. We’re going to charge a little more for this party and the ball that follows. Black tie.”
“That’s a great idea.”
“Would you do the honors? I know it’s a last-minute call but I didn’t want to involve you until I had the approval of the festival board.”
“I’d be delighted.”
After more chitchat Frazier hung up the phone. “Mandy?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s not such a bad day after all. Harvey and the club are putting on a special festival with fireworks and I’m in charge, as usual.”
“While you were on the phone so was I. It’s a very good day. They bought the Munnings.”
“Yahoo!” Frazier clapped her hands together and then in unison both Frazier and Mandy sniffed the air.”
That made them laugh.
46
WHEN MONEY LEAKS OUT OF A RICH PERSON’S PURSE HE OR she hopes no one sees the dribble. The word generally employed in such circumstances is discreet, as in “be discreet,” which is what Frazier was hearing. Kelso McConchie, owner of a gargantuan estate in Orange County, a stable of show jumpers, and a wife who wasn’t an easy keeper, was no longer leaking—he was hemorrhaging.
Frazier walked through the 15,000-square-foot mausoleum appraising works by Sir Edwin Landseer, Henry Alken, Jr., Jacques-Laurent Agasse, John Ferneley, J. N. Sartorius, Jr., John Wootton, Francis Sartorius, George Stubbs, Ben Marshall, Rosa Bonheur, and sculptures by Isidore Bonheur and Herbert Haseltine. As McConchie still couldn’t bear to part with his nonsporting art, Frazier tactfully circumvented the issue by suggesting to Kelso that if he ever wanted to sell the Caravaggio, she thought she knew of a buyer.
On the drive home the pastures shone like emeralds, thanks to the spring rains. The dogwood dotted the forests and velvet lawns; splashes of creamy white and beguiling pink lifted the spirits. The country club picked the perfect time for a Dogwood Festival and dance. A few early azaleas were opening, the colors ranging from white to the deepest magenta. Life. Spring is life, and the tears spontaneously ran down Frazier’s face as she relished the frolicsome charm of being alive.
This private rapture and humility in the face of Mother Nature’s bounty vanished when the car phone rang. Not only could the invention of Alexander Graham Bell jolt you out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, take you away from dinner or an emotional conversation, it could now reach into your automobile, the last bastion of personal privacy in America. Some fools even put fax machines in their cars. Perhaps these modern conveniences made people feel in touch, as they say, able to communicate instantly with whomever they chose, but the communication was never a poem by Shelley or an elegant cartoon. It was “Meet me here” and “Pay this” or “When will the job be finished?” The fax machines and telephones escalated the demands one person made upon another, whether it be business or a wife asking you to remember to pick up the dry cleaning. The violent thrust for efficiency and more productivity came at the expense of the quiet each human being needs in order to replenish. Ultimately, the machines destroyed the people who used them, for in losing playfulness, poetry, and solitude in the mad rush for productivity and profit, people became less efficient. There were moments when Frazier felt strangled by all these electronic nooses, but her clients and other dealers expected it. Not to funnel thousands of dollars into the latest car phone, fax machine, Xerox, VHS, and high-definition television meant you were falling behind. God forbid. And if you were falling behind, maybe you weren’t keeping up with trends in your profession. The logic spiraled downward from there until a person looked hangdog and who would want to do business with you?
So, both furious and disappointed at this rude interruption, Frazier picked up her car phone. Then she was really furious. Mother.
“Mary Frazier, your attitude about your brother’s marriage appalls me. I do not appreciate your behavior and I especially do not appreciate you and Carter ganging up on me this morning. I am going to tell your father. I don’t want to, he’s got enough on his mind, but this is the limit. Do you hear me? The limit.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Libby’s voice crackled as the car dipped below a small spur of the Southwest Range, a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains that lay across Orange County like a long rat’s tail.
By the time Frazier replied, the transmission was clear. “I have nothing to say, other than Carter should have left that bitch years ago.”
“What a way to talk about your sister-in-law, who is one of the nicest people—why, everyone in the Garden Club adores Laura.”
“Mother, I haven’t liked her from the day Carter brought her home. You like her and I don’t. You’re not going to change my mind—well, actually, the only person who could change my mind is Laura. And I sure know I’m not going to change your mind.”
A small pause on the other end gave evidence that Libby was firing up her pistons. “You people don’t believe in marriage. That’s the root of the problem with Carter. You’re swinging him your way.”
“My people?”
“Gay people. Just flit from one person to another. I know all about these things.”
“How wonderful. I have a mother who’s an expert on queers.”
“You people have different values. No permanence to the relationships. No marriage papers. That’s what’s going on.”
“Might I remind you, Mother, that every gay person comes from a straight home. If you have a problem with my values, then you’d better examine your own. And I happen to believe in marriage with all my heart and soul, for your information.”
“I made you gay? I knew you’d get around to that. Everyone blames the mother. A criminal goes on a killing spree. Who was his mother? Did she drink and beat him? Oh, I knew you’d sink this low. I can’t wait to hear how I made you a, a—I can’t say that word. I hate that word.”
“Lesbian? I’ll spell it for you. L-e-s-b-i-a-n.” Actually, Frazier didn’t much like the word either. A dolorous quality attached itself to it. Perhaps it was the number of syllables or too many consonants. Gay pleased her. It had a frivolous, lighthearted quality and it made her laugh, especially when she thought of the opposite of gay—grim. Maybe she’d start calling straight people grims, or how about dire straights? If people wanted to start name-calling, then everyone might as well do it. Turnabout is fair play.
“You think you’re above it all,” Libby growled.
“I’m not blaming you. I am what I am. To me it’s the difference between being right-handed and being left-handed. I’m left-handed in a right-handed world. Simple as that. But you could use your left hand if you had to and I can certainly use my right. Nothing is ever as clear as we think it is.”
“You are telling me, your mother, that I could be a, a you-know-what?”
“Only if you’re lucky.” That was a smart-mouthed thing to say but Frazier was steaming.
“Are you trying to make your brother one too?” Libby’s voice was ice-cold.
“No, Mom, only you could do that.” Frazier argued against her original point, which she truly believed, but at this moment she felt like hurting her mother.
“You said just the opposite. What’s the matter with you?”
“Wanted to get your goat. Because I am sick of this, Mother, absolutely, positively sick of this!”
“Everything in this family was fine until you had to go and tell. Why couldn’t you keep it to yourself? We don’t need to know.”
“I thought I was dying. Hell, I thought I was doing you and everyone else a favor by being honest for a change. Honesty is the best policy, and didn’t you tell me that over and over as a child?”
“This is different!”
“No, it isn’t. You either love me as I am or you don’t love me at all. And maybe that’s my lesson too. I’m not going to change anyone unless it’s myself. So if you or Carter or Mandy are in my life, then I take you as I find you.”
Libby switched tactics and hit the offense button again. “Are you sleeping with Mandy? Have you converted her?”
Frazier saw red. “No!”
“She’s extremely beautiful for one of those people. And wouldn’t it be like you to compound the problem by taking up with a person of another race? Miscegenation may be off the law books, my dear, but it certainly exists as a social concept. You can’t go about breaking every rule in the book.”
“Mother, you are so vile I can’t even reply to that flowering”—she passed a huge dogwood—“of racism.”
“If God meant for us to be one color, we would be. To each his place. You haven’t answered the question.”
“You have no right to my life, but no, I am not sleeping with Mandy. I haven’t even thought about it and to tell you the God’s honest truth, Mother dear, I think she’s too good for me, apart from the fact that she has never given any indication of liking women physically.”
“Too good for you?” Libby was baffled.
“Yes. She’s true blue, she’s kind, and there’s no falseness to her. She just puts it right out there, Mother—rather the opposite of you and me.”
A long silence followed this revelation. “If you want to ruin your life, so be it. Leave Carter alone.”
“I love him.”
“Then let me ask you this. Do you love me at all?” Libby demanded. Love sounded like a balance due being called in by a solicitor.
Now it was Frazier’s turn to be silent. She noticed that her foot was heavy on the accelerator and she eased off. Was she really committed to the truth? Then she had to tell it. “No. No, Mother, I don’t love you and I haven’t loved you for many years, but I thank you for all that you have done for me. I don’t think any child can ever pay back the work that a parent does for her.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.” Libby hung up the phone.
As Frazier turned left at Somerset store, heading down Route 231, her mind boiled over. She couldn’t know what it was to be a mother, although perhaps, if fortunate, she would find out someday. Frazier loved children but would only consider being a mother herself if she was in a long-term relationship and if the father was a dear friend. Billy crossed her mind. He was going to be a father. How curious. She wondered if it would change him.
Frazier couldn’t know the trials she’d inflicted upon her mother: the vases broken, the chicken pox, the golf lessons, the broken leg, the orthodontist, the ferrying back and forth to private school, the absurd recitals, the constant call for clothing and new this and new that, and worst of all, the constant interruptions with those childish voices piercing the quiet, “Mommy—” How could she know? She hadn’t been awakened in the middle of the night with a kid throwing up all over the bedroom. She hadn’t taught a child to skate or endured slumber parties or the steady flow of teenaged boys as they courted her daughter. Nor had she hauled herself out of bed Sunday morning after a Saturday night dance at the club to make certain the family went to church on time. At all these sacrifices Libby excelled. And for these sacrifices Frazier felt gratitude.
Before hearing the shadowing wings of Death’s vulture she hadn’t given much thought to what her parents had done for her, other than the knee-jerk response in public to thank them. She was reexamining everything, everyone, and, most of all, herself.
Libby did everything just right. She was the perfect mother, except that she never sat and listened to either child. Oh, she was harder on Frazier than on Carter but that was to be expected. Libby wanted external results, children praised by her friends. She didn’t want to know her children as people. They were display objects, further proof of her prowess as wife, mother, and lady. For Libby, everything was an extension of herself, and Frazier had picked up on that while she was tiny. She couldn’t have understood it but she had felt it. Now she understood it. Libby physically did everything just right but she never loved her children—not real, accepting, nurturing love. She probably didn’t have it to give, and what Frazier felt she needed to do was forgive her mother. Libby might be able to be more open, to be giving, but that was Libby’s struggle, a struggle she seemed to sidestep or ignore. Or maybe her mother was so far away from her own self she didn’t even know how empty she was.
As Frazier pulled into her driveway and saw Curry’s and Basil’s faces in the window she realized those two furry creatures had given her more love than her mother had ever given her. Maybe her example of goodness in this life ought to include her cat and her dog. Maybe she should strive to be more like them and less like a human. At any rate, she knew she didn’t want to be like her mother and she prayed that she could forgive her mother. It sounded easy enough but it was proving ferociously difficult.
If Libby and Frank proved templates, her primary examples, she feared her own ability to love. Forgiving her mother was going to have to take a distant second to reaching down in there and trying to make a place in her heart and her life for other people. She’d spent three decades steeling herself against people, hiding, and not just because she was gay. She trembled at the thought of being inadequate even more than at the prospect of being hurt. But those infernal letters had taught her who did love her and that was a beginning. Surely, she had done something right in this life and she was going to have to learn to do more.
47
A THIN BLUE LINE OF SMOKE HOVERED IN THE AIR OVER THE heads of Frank Armstrong, George Demerius, Pickens Oliguy, Randy Milliken, and Larry Taylor. With the exception of Larry, in his late thirties, all the men smoked, but then Larry also didn’t drink, worried about high cholesterol, and wore sneakers. He’d spent too much time out of Virginia, but on the positive side he evidenced a sharp business mind.
The temperature dropped rapidly as yet another cold front whirled in from the west, blustery clouds visible even in the fading light. Frank glanced out the restaurant windows and wished he were closer to home. He’d be driving forty-five minutes in whatever rolled in behind those clouds.
Lately his mind wandered in and out of the moment. He’d find himself vividly alert, interested in his immediate surroundings and the conversation, and then he’d be back decades, standing in front of the sagging chain-link fence where he first set up business. He could smell the oil that he laid down over the dusty bluestone. He could feel the worn gears grind under his feet when he shifted the ancient dump truck. He felt the energy that filled his young body. He worked morning, noon, and night. He’d walk down the driveways of people he didn’t know to ask if they wanted a load of stone or if they wanted to move up to asphalt. Yes, it was much more expensive, but depending on the quality you put down, it lasted seven to fifteen years and he would guarantee it. He patched holes for free. He sweated in the sultry Blue Ridge summers and he shivered in the raw frost of countless gray winters. He plowed out neighbors’ driveways in the snowstorms for nothing. He lent equipment to struggling friends. He gladly shared his experience with other paving men and he soaked up whatever they could tell him too.
The years sped by until, like Sambo’s butter, they ran together in a golden path. He remembered Frazier taking her first baby steps. He remembered Carter’s tree house, which he’d helped him build. He especially remembered Frazier’s last high school lacrosse game, but when he thought of his children he could recall only isolated incidents. Yet when he thought of his business he could recall the color of the ink on his first set of books. The day Mildred, in a crisp sundress, knocked on the ramshackle building by the Rivanna River, the steam floating up even though the hour was 8:30 A.M. He remembered her perfume on that August morning and although he never made love to the woman—hadn’t really thought of it—he came to realize he loved her more than anyone, other than his daughter, on the face of the earth. Why? Because she learned to love the paving business too.
Not content to do just the books, Mildred started to go out on bids. She studied the various surfaces one could use and she studied soils. She learned good grading of roads from so-so. She inspected culverts, drove trucks when a man called in sick, and still got out the bills on time as well as the correspondence.
