Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

Regina returned to Rolling Meadows, but not to the independent-living quarters. She was placed in a special unit on the other side of the grounds for Alzheimer’s patients, even though she hadn’t been diagnosed with the disease. After “the incident,” the powers that be (mostly benevolent, but by no means infinitely tolerant) had made the decision that she could not be trusted. She had to be watched. My mother and I found her sitting in a small bare room — nearly identical to my own hospital room at Payne Whitney but with no view of the East River — on a grim cot with a blue cover, her beautiful long white hair disheveled and hanging around her face. When my mother walked through the door, Regina cried out, “Laura!” and stretched her arms out for her friend. The two hugged each other and then, still in the embrace, rocked back and forth for a minute or so. When they separated, Regina looked at me as if she were searching, and I realized that the fallen Swan had forgotten my name, possibly my entire being, but my mother rescued her comrade by identifying me as soon as she understood that I was missing from Regina’s mental storehouse.

The two women talked, but Regina talked more. She chattered about her ordeal — the tests, the kind doctor and the nasty one, the endless questions about presidents and the time of year and could she feel this pinprick and on and on. She broke down and blubbered but recovered quickly and within seconds began to wax nostalgic. Hadn’t it been wonderful on the other side, in Independent? She had her apartment there with all her “lovely things,” and they had been only a short walk away from each other, and oh my dear, the spider plant, had anyone watered it? And now look at her, in exile with “the crazies” and the people who “drooled and peed and dirtied their pants.” If only she could get back to the other side. I saw my mother open her mouth and then close it. If Regina wanted to remember the “home” she had detested as a paradise, who was she to destroy the illusion? As we were leaving, the old woman lifted her head, tossed back her messy locks, and beamed. She blew kisses to us and sang out in a high brittle voice, “Come back, Laura. Won’t you? I’ve missed you terribly. You will remember to come back.”

Just before I closed the door, I took a last glance at Regina. She looked deflated, as if the theatrical good-bye had taken all the air out of her.

Outside in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, “It’s so bitter.”

“What, Mama?”

“Old age.”

* * *

The Lola, Pete, Flora, and Simon soap opera had been one of repetition without much difference, as Lola herself had acknowledged, but now circumstances conspired to make some difference, and the difference was money. As much as I liked my Chrysler Buildings and had indulged Lola by listening to her business plans, I hadn’t been optimistic. The poor young woman had had little time to devote to her jewelry and, all in all, the prospects for success had seemed poor. And then, out of the blue, just as it happens in novels, especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, Lola’s godmother, a single, frugal lady who had worked as a bursar at St. Joseph’s College for fifty years, died, and this elderly deus ex machina left her goddaughter a complete set of Wedgwood china and a hundred thousand dollars. (Let us be fair: This happens all the time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century LIFE; it just happens less often in twentieth- and twenty-first-century NOVELS.)

And so, at least for a while, Lola was flush, and more important, the money was hers, not Pete’s. In the same week, a small store in Minneapolis agreed to sell Lola’s creations. They were partial to the architectural earrings, especially the Leaning Towers of Pisa. Joy was abroad at the neighbors’. We celebrated Friday night after a hard week with the witches. (I will report on that later. Chronology is sometimes overrated as a narrative device.) My mother, Peg, Lola, and the two poppets were in attendance. I invited Abigail, but she was too weak, she said, to make the journey, even though we offered to drive her the few yards to the Burdas’.

Lola wore pink. My mother wore Simon most of the evening, and the two had a high time. The little man was singing. When my mother sang to him, he sang back, admittedly in tones that were unconventional, possibly even bizarre, but he sang nevertheless, and his flutelike emissions were the source of much hilarity. Flora ran wild and wigless and whispered to Moki and stuffed cake into her mouth. I was careful to fawn and crow over her so she would not feel that her infant brother won every cuteness battle. Peg shone brightly. At a family gathering, she was in her element, and her presence added sugar to what was already a sweet occasion.

I asked Lola if Pete was traveling, but no, her husband had stayed home. He had felt uncomfortable, she said, as the only man, and he had urged her to go alone and have fun. While Peg and my mother occupied her children, Lola and I stepped into the bedroom where we had all spent the night in the king, and she told me that having the money made her feel different. “I didn’t do anything to earn it,” she said, “but now that it’s mine, I feel more important, somehow, freer, and Pete’s happier. It’s like he can breathe a little and not worry so much. And then there’s the Artisans’ Barn, and suddenly they like my stuff, so he doesn’t think my jewelry is just useless tinkering.”

We stood together and looked out the window. I had become attached to the view and to the summer sky, especially when the sun fell and colored it in blues ttle. Peg avenders and pinks, and I could watch the cloud formations above the field and the copse of trees and barn and silo that grew black and flat as the evening progressed. A study in repetition. A study in mutability. And Lola said she would miss me when I went home, and I said I would miss her. She wondered what I was going to do about Boris, and I told her about the wooing, and she smiled. From the other room, I heard the women laugh and Flora squeal and, after a few seconds, the noise of Simon crying.

Lola and I stayed put, however, for another few seconds, just looking out the window in silence before she made her way back to the party to comfort her baby boy.

* * *

Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. I found the sentence in a work by that grand old pessimist Sigmund Freud, but it apparently comes from Plautus. Sad but true. Look around you. Look even at the little girls, at their grasping for status and admiration, at their ruthless tactics, at their aggressive joys. As their “I”s continued to revolve from one child to the other during the week, I sometimes lost track of which person was playing whom, but they had no such problems with identification. Although there were few further revelations, the story I had entitled “The Coven” began to take shape. Ashley had been toppled. She fell with her lie. I doubt whether she would have felt any genuine remorse had she not been caught, but she suffered her loss of power keenly. She was a survivor, however, and began to adjust to her new role in the group: On Wednesday she made a formal apology to her victim, and this, whether sincere or not, helped lift her reputation among the others. Emma had been jogged hard by the mention of her ill sister, but the sympathy the girls felt for her lot as the healthy but ignored sibling softened her considerably, and she volunteered amendments to the story and her role in it that I thought were brave: “It made me happy when Alice cried.” Jessie’s narcissistic platitudes had taken a beating. She understood that she had believed in herself too much. She’d fallen for the wicked plot with hardly a thought. As the week went on, Peyton cried less and less and relished her roles as the other girls more and more. The catharsis of theater. In fact, by Thursday it was obvious that a tacit script had already been written, and the children had thrown themselves into their own melodrama with gusto. Alice lost something of her stature as romantic heroine, but her suffering was acknowledged by all, and she entered the lives of her tormentors with such zeal that by Friday, Nikki cried out, “Oh my God, Alice, you like being the mean one!” Joan, of course, agreed.