Gillyflower Read online

  At The Tall Ship I surprised my surprise party by going immediately to the gents and slipping out the back way to head for Milty’s in the nearest cab. Once there I ordered whiskey and something with a heavy sauce over a pungent red meat and settled down for an indulgent hour before being discovered by Leon and the loyal leftovers from the small party; they had followed my trail to Milty’s in order to force me to enjoy the celebration of my imminent demise. I did indeed feel that my demise was more imminent than usual that night because, no doubt owing to my imprudent choice of entree, my stomach was having a rather raucous party of its own. My skinflint heart would simply not allow itself to pump forth the wherewithal for any extra digestive energy, birthday or no.

  Leon took me home after testing my damp and trembling brow with his cool, steady hand, dosed me with the most potent of his English-born remedies, and put me to bed in flannels. He had a little leather case of medications that he had cajoled my London medics into entrusting to him (they didn’t want to risk giving over my care to colonials) and the longest list of instructions for their administration I had ever seen. At times I almost delighted in feeling ill, such were dear Leon’s histrionics.

  Whatever he gave me that night certainly did the trick. Not only did the pain in my stomach immediately cease, but I lost all feeling below the waist in a matter of minutes. I was lightheaded and feeling most lovely, and my last conscious thought before falling headfirst into a deep, salty tide pool of sleep was that death might be beautiful if one could die simultaneously with achieving one single instant of perfect, unbidden harmony with another soul. Even in my doped-up state, I remember thinking that that was a very peculiar goal, not to mention its being rather an awkward one to realize.

  And, as the old song goes, that night I dreamed the strangest dream. I was on the set of a film I had recently made in California, doing a scene in which I was positioned on the roof of a small frame church, musing under the moon. In the film, that’s all there is to it, but in the dream I dreamed that night I fell off the roof, slowly, tumbling over and over in the air and feeling my shirt loosen and flap and rewrap itself around me, a miniature shroud. (Even as the dream progressed, my conscious mind wondered about the shirt: was this a dream prescient of my death?) I landed, finally, unhurt upon the grass, and looked up into the eyes of a young woman I did not know. I looked at her for a long, long time, and thereby came to know her. She was not beautiful but she had hypnotized me, and when I woke up I felt extremely lonely.

  3. Nora

  Belinda drove us all into the city early that afternoon, and after diddling about looking for a perfect place to park her beloved Saab, we found we had over an hour to kill before the theater would open. (This was, of course, my fault, for in my panic lest we be late I had shepherded everyone out the door when they were barely dressed.) It was a nice afternoon, not too hot, not too crowded, and we strolled about for a while, just four women on the town, taking the necessary photographs of each other and voraciously window shopping.

  At last we could stroll no more, and we found ourselves in an expensive theater-district deli, complete with theatrically made-up fifty-year-old waitress, ten-dollar-per-person minimum, and out-of-order restrooms. The management had, however, considerately arranged for its customers to avail themselves of the restrooms in a bar across the alley, and there I proceeded, needing a moment alone before the big event and suffering somewhat from caffeine nerves and a grossly rich carrot cake, prescribed by my sister for what she called my “galloping fan syndrome.” I guess she thought having a lump in my stomach would calm me down, but the sugar made my head spin.

  I took as long as I decently could in the stall, and as I washed and looked in the mirror, I looked into the face of a stranger. The new silk dress was fine, my hair was okay, there were no runs in my stockings, and the effect created by my long seashell earrings was, I thought, very nice indeed. But the face, the face was wrong—it seemed not to be mine at all. The eyes were strangely shining, slightly sunken; the mouth was a little drawn and very pale; and, oddest of all, the face looked ageless—not youthful in an attractive way, or mature in a meaningful way, but flat and funny, like a face in a second-rate pastel portrait done on a boardwalk. I tried to fix it up a little with lipstick and blush, but I couldn’t effect much change.

  So at last we sat in our front-row seats: my mother on the aisle, then me, Belinda, and Fran. The edge of the stage was less than six feet away, on a plane just above my shoulders. The curtains rose and I fell headlong into the play—a familiar one I’d read before. Nearly ten minutes elapsed before Hugh made his first appearance, and when the audience applauded his entrance I was shocked, having forgotten altogether where I was.

  But there he was. It was like seeing an old, dear friend. He did not look well, but he looked commanding; he was phenomenally thin and terribly tall. His hair was very short and, oddly, multicolored. He was wearing a dark coat and leaning back on his heels and rocking back and forth with the rhythm of his lines. As he walked toward the front of the stage his onyx eyes beamed out over the auditorium, stilling everyone, and when he smiled they lit up like rockets. His smile would have melted the Ice Queen herself, and I was touched to see that, up close, his teeth were less than perfect. I settled into my seat in bliss, thanking the playwright silently for having written long speeches for Hugh’s character in almost every scene. I reveled in his voice, in the soothing theatrical cadences, in every nuance of his performance, trying desperately to chisel each moment into my mind to remember from that day on.

  At intermission, Belinda couldn’t shut up. She was all a-dither, flapping about in her seat like a sparrow in a dust bath. “God, he’s so marvelous,” she gushed. “But doesn’t he look older than you thought he would?”

  “He’s fifty-six or -seven,” I said.

  My mother looked at me. “How do you know that?”

  “I read it somewhere,” I said.

  Fran looked over at me and winked. What was she winking for? I wondered, resenting her conspiratorial air at the same time I welcomed her congenial intention. Hugh was my private business.

  “Well, he’s fabulous, fabulous, blah, blah, blah,” everyone babbled on, and I tuned them out and left them to discuss things. My sister went out for a cigarette, but though I needed one desperately myself, I found I couldn’t join her; all I wanted was for the play to begin again, though I knew that would only rush its inevitable ending. I’d probably never have the opportunity to see Hugh Sheenan again, and even if by some miracle I did see him in another play, or even catch a glimpse of him on the street in the city, it would never feel like today.I was so very happy.

  It was near the end of the final act when it happened. Having read the play before, I knew the last scene was coming up quickly, and while I had barely taken my eyes from Hugh the whole play through, for the past ten minutes or so I had been concentrating on his every facial gesture, fairly memorizing his face, so eager was I to give my inebriated brain every possible chance to keep that face alive forever.

  Our seats were nearest the left of the set, and there on stage an uncomfortable-looking chair had been placed, though up to then no one had used it, most of the action having taken place either center-stage or on the other side. With great joy I realized that Hugh was making his way toward that chair, which stood about six or seven feet from us. Before sitting down, he stood next to it and paused, listening intently to the other players. He was so close to us I could see a faint makeup line under his chin, and as he rocked there, almost imperceptibly shifting from foot to foot and waiting to speak his next lines, I stared into his face for all I was worth.

  Thinking back, it was a terrible thing to do, for as everyone knows if you stare at a person long enough, no matter what the circumstances, he’s almost bound to look back at you—but I didn’t think of that then. I only thought, he’ll never be this close again, and then suddenly he was looking into my eyes. Our eyes had absolutely locked. His eyes had gone outside the play, o
utside the make-believe, and were staring back into mine with a ferocity that sent a sickening bolt of fear from the top of my head to somewhere in my gut. Actual chills radiated from my spine, and sweat literally burst out in my armpits. My stomach clenched painfully. I felt as though I’d been shot; I was terrified, but I couldn’t take my eyes away. He looked almost angry—angry, I suppose, that someone had interrupted the flow of the play for him—but he kept on staring nonetheless. And then finally, after what seemed like five minutes but was probably less than one (try staring into someone’s eyes for a full sixty seconds—it’s a century), he broke his eyes away and spoke his next lines, and I looked down at my hands and breathed for the first time in all that staring. As soon as our gazes unlocked, the splintering pain in my head and stomach ceased.

  Hugh’s next task on stage was to curl up his long, long limbs into that silly chair (it had a pine-tree green velveteen seat, I’ll always remember), but he almost knocked the chair over at first try, muttering under his breath lines that were certainly not in the script. I had upset his balance. He did not know who I was, but I had upset his balance.

  4. Leon

  Hugh thinks I’m simple. No, he’s really much too smart to think that, but he needs to pretend that I’m uncomplicated enough, selfless enough, to serve him wholeheartedly as wife, mother, secretary, valet, and occasional confidante. Serve him wholeheartedly I do; selfless I am not. It’s just that I love him. He pays me a great deal of money for these services as well, so I can’t complain on any score. But I am not simple. No simple soul could stand to stay around Hugh Sheenan.

  Hugh doesn’t fool me—never has. I met him in the navy, where he was making a terrible mess of things. He tells people that it was while we were in the navy that he snatched me from the clutches of a lovely young maiden in Delhi, but that is a slight embroidery of the truth. Had he not snatched me away from her, I would have extricated myself quite soon. The woman was not worthy of either of us. Hugh and I are nearly the same age, though now of course he looks quite a bit older, and I was drawn to him at first the way many of us in the company were: drawn to his physical radiance, his wit, his intelligence, his clownish disregard for royal rules and rigmarole, his boozing, his womanizing, and his booming Irish voice. Like me, Hugh came from quite a poor family (his Irish, mine English), and while I had educated myself as best I could and managed to improve my vocabulary and accent to a tolerable degree, I knew I could never make as grand a piece of work out of it all as he had, and I more than admired him for what he’d done.

  Hugh was a young actor on the very brink of fame in those days (he’d already met with some success on the stage before joining the navy), but it wasn’t the promise of glory that drew people to him; perhaps more than anything else it was his eyes. His eyes were—still are—impossible to resist. They are X-ray eyes, a true and explosive black, but one could not call them exactly beautiful. They frighten, they seduce, they command attention. And they convey highly complicated worlds. What they do more than anything else is examine. Hugh’s eyes will dangle you over a stream as if you are a kitten, and then either drop you mercilessly or gather you in. Once in, in you stay. Once in, you are his, but more than that, he is yours, and you have made him vulnerable.

  I had been among Hugh’s ever-broadening circle of friends in the navy for some time when he finally gathered me in. I should explain that neither of us ever made it to sea in that navy (we did go to India that once, but our stay there was truncated by a threatening epidemic of an exotic fever); it was just past wartime, and neither of us was seagoing material. So we found ourselves enslaved in the Office of Personnel and Domestic Affairs—or Piss and Vinegar, as we called it—with various important and boring tasks to perform in the service of our Queen. We were, fortunately, virtually unsupervised; what supervisors we did have were too far sunk in their own quicksand of paperwork to give us much trouble.

  Our collective habit (there were six of us in that sweaty pen, from six in the morning to six at night, six days a week) was to bully our way through mountains of paperwork at top speed until lunch, then make whatever plan was necessary to pull things into order for the next day and head for the pub. We’d always leave one man in charge, for emergency’s sake, but once at The Dragon’s Tail we’d forget whoever it was in an hour, though each of us honestly intended to go back and check on the poor bastard before day’s end.

  Popular as he was, Hugh rarely had to spend an afternoon at Piss and Vinegar—everyone wanted him at the pub—but every now and then, his natural sense of fair play coming forward, he’d volunteer to stay. I always wondered what he did there alone on those days. Though I knew him fairly well, I didn’t really know him, and I imagined him capable of anything. I usually fancied him at his desk with a liberal supply of Galoises, a huge mug of steaming, rum-laced tea, and Miss Haverstock, the curvaceous company secretary, on his lap.

  As it happened, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. We sailor-boys left Hugh in charge one sweltering July afternoon and were jollying our way through our third round of bitters when I discovered I’d left my billfold in the office. I trotted on back to retrieve it, and as I neared the office door I suddenly remembered that Hugh would be there, and that this was my chance to surprise him at whatever clever or lazy or lascivious thing he was up to. I crept in through a rear door and peered around some cabinets behind Hugh’s desk. I could see his endless legs stretched out in the aisle, and the room was filled with smoke and the odors of sweat and mimeograph ink, but Hugh was not engaged in any activity at all, clever or otherwise. He was leaning full back in his chair, with his great long-jawed head resting on a bookcase behind him, his hands clasped on his stomach, and his eyes closed. He was perfectly still, and I thought, of course, that he was sleeping.

  Being a young fool, of course I decided to wake him up in some humiliating way. I left my hiding place and stealthily seated myself in a chair across the room from where he lay sprawled. I sat there some minutes, and was just narrowing down my choice of wake-up alarms when Hugh’s voice rasped out of his mouth like a bullwhip: “What in the bloody HELL do you WANT from me, Leon?” he said.

  I bolted upright, standing at full attention, like the full idiot I was. “Hugh,” I said shakily. “I’m sorry, old man, I thought you were asleep.”

  He had not moved, or opened his eyes, and as I stood there I noticed something I could barely believe: Hugh Sheenan was weeping. Great, slow tears were running from the corners of his eyes, and with his head still thrown back they ran only the short distance into his hair, which was why at first I had not seen them. The back of his neck and his collar were sopping wet; he must have been crying for some time.

  At this sight my shock evaporated, and I was naturally concerned.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “A death in the family? Can I help?”

  Slowly he sat up, still more slowly he opened his eyes. He took a large handkerchief from his pocket and unabashedly wiped his eyes, his temples, and his throat of tears. He blew his nose, loudly. He then threw the handkerchief into the dustbin. “Always preferred paper hankies,” he said, and smiled. He had focused his eyes on me by this time, and though I was conscious of their fearful scrutiny, such was my concern at this oddest of occurrences that it barely affected me.

  “Please,” I said, “I mean, I’m sorry, old man, didn’t mean to startle you, but . . .”

  Hugh waved his hand magnanimously. “Think nothing of it, Leon, dear fellow. This is a public room, is it not? Your very office, indeed, is it not? The middle of a working day as well. Why shouldn’t you be here? It’s I who should be apologizing. I believe I’ve made a scene.” He pulled at his tie, loosening it, and leaned back again in his chair. The telephone was ringing, but neither of us paid it any mind. He reached out his hand and I gave him my own handkerchief, upon which he honked his nose again before tossing it. “I have been weeping,” he went on, “for my sins, Leon, my sins.” Then he laughed a wonderful, deep-throated laugh and I joine
d him, though I had no idea why we were laughing.

  Therein arose a long silence. Hugh was obviously not at all embarrassed by his tears; indeed, he seemed to have forgotten all about them. He smoked, and continued to examine me, not precisely in a rude manner, but in a, well, entitled one. I was not uncomfortable, but I was sorely perplexed. I wanted desperately to know what had instigated his crying jag, yet I had no idea how to find out. Was he waiting for me to start questioning him? I thought not. I could not imagine, in fact, his greeting any query of mine with anything but amazement and ridicule, and even if he deigned to answer me, I had a feeling he would not tell the truth. I thought of leaving, but it seemed out of the question; I felt I was supposed to stay. There was nothing to do but wait. I waited.

  By this time, it was long past business hours, but the telephone continued to ring intermittently and we continued to ignore it. Finally, I could stand the inactivity no longer. When the phone rang again I picked it up: “Personnel and Domestic,” I said in a long-unused voice that squeaked a bit. From the telephone came a male voice, nothing special about it, asking for Hugh. “I’m sorry,” I said, “Mr. Sheenan has gone for the day. May I take a message?” The man said no, thank you very much, and rang off. I replaced the receiver and looked at Hugh. “For you,” I told him.

  He was smiling like a child, a wide, unfettered smile. He has a roomy mouth. “And did the party leave a name?”