The Players Come Again Read online

  “Where is the bank?” Kate asked when they were once more happily ensconced. They could hear the telephone ringing in the distance. “Wonderful things, answering machines,” Kate said. “I fought them as I have fought every new dehumanizing device that has come along, but in the end one succumbs and has to admit to the benefits. I have arranged whole events without ever speaking directly to the other person involved. Is it progress or disaster, or are these just another name for convenience?”

  “The bank is in England,” Anne said, grinning at Kate to show she agreed about the telephone machine, but would honorably avoid any temptations to defer discussing the important subject before them. “In London. The nearest one at the time. I’ve gone on paying all these years for the vault, which has been a bit of a burden, but Eleanor, bless her, agreed to contribute once I’d told her the story of the papers. She even gave me a retroactive sum, so to speak. Eleanor is great. Really great.”

  “I liked her very much,” Kate said. “Am I being invited to accompany you to London for the first real look at Gabrielle’s leavings?”

  “You are. I thought of asking Eleanor, but she’s a bit old for traipsing around, strongly as I consider it her right. Sig’s money of course, but it was Eleanor who had the instincts about Gabrielle and Nellie. Eleanor always had the right instincts, except in choosing a husband. But even there, she wouldn’t have been able to help the Foxxes if she hadn’t married Sig.”

  Kate had by now caught on to the fact that Anne may have appeared to ramble in her conversation, but her topics and observations, as well as her emphases, were as carefully orchestrated as any musical score. Kate put down her glass and leaned forward to address Anne with body language as well as words.

  “Look here, Anne, I’ve been handled by the three of you—you and Dorinda and Nellie, I mean—with all the delicacy of some spy operation. I don’t want to say I feel set up, that would be a bit crude and not accurate, but I do have the sense of being about to receive a proposition that is going to be startling and very carefully thought out. Do you think I might have it? That is, of course, if you and Dorinda and Nellie have decided you’re the ones to inform me and today’s the day I’m to be informed?”

  “You’re hard to set up,” Anne said, laughing. “You were supposed to ask me about Sig; that was your next line: a question about Eleanor and Sig. I like to take things in order.”

  “That,” Kate said, “is fairly obvious. All right, consider yourself asked the appropriate question about Eleanor and Sig. Like why should you care what their relationship was, apart from what you’ve written in your memoir?”

  “I showed the memoir to Eleanor, or rather, I read it to her. She was only ninety then, or nearly, but she preferred to listen. Eleanor always was a good listener; I guess listening was the major part of what she did, apart from arranging to make everyone’s life easier.” Anne sipped her beer. “Eleanor liked my memoir. I apologized for what I had said about the Goddards’ generosity; it sounded a little mean-spirited when I read it out that way, but Eleanor wouldn’t hear a word of it. ‘You got it just right, Anne,’ she told me, ‘and so did Gabrielle. You all sensed the truth even if you didn’t know it. Did you never guess?’ Eleanor asked me. ‘Guess what?’ I naturally said.”

  “Another mistaken father?” Kate asked.

  “Clever! You are clever,” Anne said. “Though of course I didn’t have the example of Nellie’s parentage to give me a hint, as you did. Anyway, I didn’t guess at all, and poor Eleanor wondered if she ought to have mentioned it. In the end she told me. I think she always meant to; I think one of the things she had decided on when she grew old was honesty, getting through the lies we live, and tell ourselves, and tell each other. Well, you’ve had no trouble with it.”

  “I wasn’t really involved,” Kate said. “It’s easy to guess things you haven’t an emotional stake in.”

  “Sig was my father. That was why they were so willing to take me in, even if my mother did have her doubts. But at least it wasn’t charity. The one thing I never understood about my mother was why she was willing to take charity; she was so proud, and so insistent on holding up her end, holding up her head she used to say. But if he was my father, he owed me. Only me, never her. She never took a thing from him, never gave him the time of day again, although they met from time to time.”

  “He didn’t dance with her at Dorinda’s wedding?” Kate asked. “That was someone else?”

  “Definitely someone else, though I think she danced there as a kind of abandon, a moment when the pretense didn’t need to be maintained. After all, she had been invited as my mother, because I was so much part of the Goddard family; nothing could change that. That’s an odd thing for you to ask, really.”

  “Her dancing impressed me,” Kate said. “Does Dorinda know?”

  “Dorinda and Nellie both know now. I think, I really do think, we all three know everything worth telling.”

  “Sig was dead by the time you read your memoir to Eleanor.”

  “Long dead. It’s odd to think of; I still muse about it, in a humorous sort of way. Sig always wanted a son, and he got two daughters at almost the same moment. Hilda wanted a son, and she got a daughter too, at almost the same moment. We were all three close when we were young, and we’re close again now. It’s as though Dorinda had gone under a spell for a time, and we all went under it with her; I’m glad it’s over. More than that,” and Kate had the sense of Anne’s saying something she had not quite formulated, not quite intended to say for a while yet, “we all have a second chance, a chance to live our friendship, to attend to what matters. And, most of all, a second chance for Gabrielle. Do you think all women really have a second chance, even if life hasn’t given them a clear first chance?”

  “The history of the English novel is like that,” Kate said, sensing the need for an interval of impersonality. “From the very beginning, from Tom Jones and Moll Flanders up until Hardy, it was all about second chances. Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a fine example. And then with Hardy, second chances lost their force. Think of The Mayor of Casterbridge; an obvious example, but there are many others. I have a feeling now that, for women at any rate, second chances may be coming back.” Kate drank her beer and smiled at Anne.

  “What did Dorinda say about Sig being your father as well as hers?” she asked.

  “She said it shows you female genes are more powerful, at least for women, since we don’t look any more alike than our mothers, whom we both resemble. Nellie actually looks more like Sig, but she’s the daughter of his sister. Dorinda very nicely said we couldn’t have been closer if we had known we were half-sisters, and that’s quite simply true. And now it’s even truer, since we know.”

  “Nellie seemed more obviously a relation,” Kate said. “Yet you and Nellie were as closely related as the other two. It all seems to go to prove how little difference fathers make.”

  “Except to the fathers. What Nellie told you about herself made an enormous difference to Emile, I assure you. And if Eleanor had been anyone other than who she was, that fact of my father would have made an enormous difference to her.”

  “Was your mother really married?”

  “Oh, yes. I think she despised him, although no one ever spoke of him. In fact, when I asked her about him, she said he made no difference to me and I should not bother my head about him, which was closer to the truth than I ever guessed. He took off when my mother became pregnant; he didn’t want responsibility. Not that he knew I wasn’t his. I did ask Eleanor that. She said he never knew, and my mother wanted it that way. He died sometime later; that she did hear, but she never married again. I don’t believe any one of her sisters knew the truth; I’m sure they didn’t. They probably just thought my mother was being smart when she let the Goddards take me over.”

  “Do you think Eleanor always knew?”

  “Oh, yes. She was the one who helped my mother to
get work, at which she was really very successful and highly paid. She only died a few years ago, you know, and she’d saved a good bit which came to me; I only wish she’d managed to spend it a little more wildly in her old age, but thrift with her was a passion. I realize now that when Dorinda suggested my coming to live with them, Eleanor seized on the idea, although she no doubt made it appear that Dorinda was once again getting her own way. I never changed a word of that memoir after I found out the truth. And yet, now you’ve read it, you know nothing in it contradicts that fact when you discover it. Yet nothing really required it either. I think it’s a lesson in biography; perhaps facts don’t matter all that much.”

  “I’m afraid my position is asking impertinent questions,” Kate said. “But you said your mother left you ‘a good bit,’ and Nellie said you were hard up. I know ‘good bits’ are of different sizes, but was Nellie telling the truth?”

  “She exaggerated a little. Len—the one in the memoir—lives with me now. He married someone else, but it didn’t finally last. He’s only got his pension and social security, but we like to take expensive trips on our vacations, and he likes to come with me when I travel on business. I think Nellie was adding another incentive to urge you to publish the papers, the hope of increasing my income. And it will increase it if you do, in a most welcome way. Nellie could use the income too, not out of desperate need, but she isn’t paid all that much and her husband makes very little from his books. We all do hope you’ll want to publish the papers.”

  “Do you mind if I talk to Dorinda again before I decide whether to go with you to London or not?”

  “Of course you must see Dorinda whenever you want. You don’t really have to come to London; I could go and ship the papers back. But I’d rather you came.”

  “If I go on with this quite mad scheme, I’ll come,” Kate said. “After all, I have taken the whole year off, and what’s that for if not popping around the world? Besides, the simple truth is that I’m dying to see those papers—consumed, you might even say—so of course I’ll come.”

  Anne rose to leave. “It’s been a lovely afternoon, lovely getting to know you, as the governess said in the song to the children of the king of Siam. The three of us saw that when we were young together.” Anne started to giggle. “I just remembered what Dorinda said when I told her about Sig being my father. ‘Aha,’ she said; ‘I should have known from a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip.’ We read Henry IV, Part I in school. Of course, I wondered, we both did, how he had seduced my mother, whom he must have come across working in his house or someone else’s. But it doesn’t take much imagination. He was a reprobate and a charming one; my mother must have had some profound desires only partly buried. As I noticed when she danced. I never liked her, nor, I think, she me very much, but I did admire her, and I’m glad I saw her dance.”

  Kate walked to the door with Anne, denying herself the many questions still to be asked. Their trust of her was, when you came to consider it, quite amazing. No doubt, having once determined on their and Gabrielle’s second chance, and having decided on Kate as their instrument, there was no turning back. She would see Dorinda again, and perhaps, just for the pleasure of it and because the chance might not be hers for long, Eleanor. Then she would go to London with Anne. After that—well, her decision was at least a clear one. Either she would do what they wanted or nothing at all. There was no other way in which she would tell the stories she had heard from the three of them nor any story she might in future hear.

  In choosing to trust her, they had chosen well, and that, not unnaturally, endeared them to Kate. That other secrets might emerge to be reluctantly revealed was certainly possible. But once you decide to trust someone, you must trust them. Unless you are unmistakenly betrayed, there is never any turning back.

  Chapter Eight

  Dorinda, like Anne, said she would come to Kate’s apartment. Their conversation had reached a point where restaurants could not provide the perfect ambience; nor did Kate want to enter one of the houses of the trio: she preferred to keep her metaphoric vision of them circling in space, like the stars that were supposed to be Ariadne and her children. Dorinda sat in the same chair Anne had sat in, but declined a beer; as the afternoon wore on, she said, she would welcome a sherry.

  “You have really come to know us all,” Dorinda said, looking around her frankly. “Nice room. I gather from Anne that you are now up-to-date on all our murky secrets. We do seem to have gone in for a lot of irregular fathering, not that I can see what difference it makes, except that Anne is now half-Jewish like Nellie and me. I tell Anne that’s where she gets her business sense, but she points out that I’m being illogical in the first place, since with the same father I have no business sense, and racist in the second. She’s right, of course. Her mother had wonderful business sense. Anne always used to win these arguments, but I always ended thinking I had a point and I do now. Without the Sig input, Anne would probably have ended up like her mother’s sisters, without a brain in her head. The Goddard genes vary, they are hardly pervasive, but they add a certain je ne sais quoi. Still, none of us is very Goddardlike as you may have noticed.”

  “So Anne said you said.”

  “Did she? Well, she also said you might do the Gabrielle bit; will you? We all think you would be wonderful, and we have a sort of three-musketeerish pact to revive Gabrielle without reviving her as wife and mother: on her own, you might say.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Kate said. “My problem, frankly, is that I find myself in the center of some sort of spy plot. I mean, each of you seems to have a cover story, and when that is removed, there’s another story underneath. Le Carré has his characters say that no one can resist today’s methods for extracting the truth from spies once they’re caught, but I am not in anyone’s secret service. So how am I to know when I’ve got the truth?”

  “Ask away. We’ve told you all, and will tell you any bits we’ve forgotten if you just mention them. Since I dare say I’m the biggest mystery of the lot—at least so the other two keep telling me—I thought I ought to fill in a few lacunae that may be causing you anxiety, consciously or unconsciously.”

  Kate, who was thinking not so much of lacunae as of gaping holes, nodded encouragingly.

  “Okay. First of all, I frankly admit,” Dorinda said, “that I have played many roles in my time, like Shakespeare’s Jaques, except that mine haven’t gone neatly along according to conventional ideas of age, to say nothing of the fact that I was never a schoolboy with shining face, but I’m sure you see what I mean. You know about my wild and woolly youth from Anne. One would have thought it would reveal to me that men are not the sole and only answer to women’s needs, but it didn’t, at least, not for a long time. Dear Aunt Hilda never learned that at all, of course, and when her mad and superficial world went to pieces, so did she. Went to pieces, I mean, and Daddy had to haul her home on the ‘last plane out of disaster,’ as Auden says, only it was a ship. Unlike Hilda, I didn’t go in for a famous man, I went in for a steady, dull one, equally wrong-headed but at least leaving me some years in which to be cocoonish and develop from a slug to a butterfly. Not that I’m really a butterfly, but compared to what I’ve been, the description is not wholly unwarranted. Do you want to hear about Mark Hansford?”

  “Certainly,” Kate said, feeling as though she were “it” in a game of blind man’s bluff.

  “He turned up at what might be called the moment of my awakening or the beginning of my transformation. He cured me of my past. He wanted my photographs for his book, and he immediately grasped that the way to get them was to diddle me as men do. And he succeeded; I let myself be diddled. Not only that, I found myself mouthing all the truisms of what I call my Arthur period: Anne is too feminist, there is a natural and unnatural way to love, you name it, I mouthed it, as long as it was conventional and not inclined to induce thought. I read a good quote recently,
from someone named Wilson Mizener: ‘I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.’ Truest words ever spoken. Not that what I had could be called faith exactly; armor would be a better description. Anyway, it was when I saw myself going through this idiotic routine with Mark Hansford, and after he’d got the photographs and decided to try again with his wife, like something in a soap opera, I woke up like Rip Van Winkle to find everything changed, but in my case wonderfully so. And I don’t really mind about the pictures, though I think you should use the one of Gabrielle at the window. I have the rights to it, so that will be okay.”

  “Your mother mentioned that Arthur was a bit, well, dull.”

  “Arthur was and is dull, and more than a bit. We’re separating, actually. He’s found a compliant nurse. I dare say he’s been finding them for years, but this one wants marriage, which is bright of her. I’m trying to play the bereft and aging wife, partly for fun and partly on the advice of my lawyer, but it’s uphill work I can assure you. It’s money I’m after, all those years of being a proper wife to Arthur.”

  “Will you get it?”

  “Oh, yes. Arthur really wants his nurse in holy matrimony, and the one who wants the divorce is the one who pays. I have him, therefore, by the short and curlies, a lovely sensation.”

  “You might want to marry again.”

  “I might, but don’t hold your breath. All three of us, you see, ended up being nice to men, and I think I’ve done my share. Nellie and Anne are attached to their guys, who are at least intelligent and caring. I might have that sherry now.”

  As Anne had done, Dorinda came with Kate as she fetched sherry and a beer for herself The beer seemed to provide a certain thread of continuity in the labyrinth into which she had, with slightly less reason than Theseus, plunged. As they resettled themselves in the living room, Kate told Dorinda about that feeling of being in a labyrinth with no thread.