“Mrs. Douglas mentioned a gold bracelet, Eddie, don’t forget the gold bracelet.”
“You mentioned a gold bracelet, Mrs. Douglas.”
“I said she found a gold bracelet she thought she’d lost.”
“In a drawer.”
“In a drawer, behind a drawer.” There was something about the gold bracelet Charlotte wanted not to think about. Marin had dropped the bracelet on the kitchen table and told Charlotte to keep it. Marin had called the bracelet “dead metal.” Charlotte wished suddenly that she had not mentioned the bracelet and she also wished suddenly that Leonard were not in Nicosia. Or Damascus. Or wherever he was. He had written out the cities and the hotels and the telephone numbers on a legal pad upstairs but Charlotte had not looked at it since he left. Her left temple was beginning to hurt and she resented the FBI men for remembering the gold bracelet.
“Now we get to the part where I call the Chinese couple and ask them to do the Peking duck.” She could hear the edge in her voice but could not control it. “All right?”
“We’re back to the Chinese couple, Eddie.”
“Caterers,” the man the others called Eddie said.
“Not exactly,” Charlotte said.
“They come to your house? They cook dinner?”
Charlotte nodded.
“Then they’re caterers. Wasn’t that kind of an exceptional thing to do, Mrs. Douglas, telephoning these caterers?”
“I don’t quite see the exceptional part.” Charlotte wished that the FBI man would not insist on calling the Chinese couple “caterers.” They were not caterers, they were a couple. Under certain circumstances which had not yet arisen they might come to the house on California Street not as cooks but as guests. Charlotte knew a lot of couples like the Chinese couple who did the Peking duck. She knew the Algerian couple who did the couscous, she knew the Indonesian couple who did the rijsttafel, she knew the Mexican couple who were actually second-generation Chicano but who did the authentic Mexican dinner, not common enchiladas and refried beans but exquisite recipes they had learned while vacationing at the Hotel Inglaterra in Tampico. She knew the Filipino couple, she knew the Korean couple. She had recently uncovered the Vietnamese couple. In the kitchen of the house on California Street these and other couples regularly reproduced the menus of underdeveloped countries around the world, but usually for twelve or twenty-four people. Charlotte had never before called one of these couples to cook for fewer than twelve. This time she had. That might be the exceptional part. She began to see calling the Chinese couple to do Peking duck for herself and Marin in a different light, a light not necessarily more revealing but different.
In this light the gold bracelet she had made Marin take had been too loose on Marin’s wrist.
In this light Marin had been too thin and pale for a child who skied and played tennis and was supposed to have spent the week before celebrating Thanksgiving off Cabo San Lucas.
In this light Charlotte had lit the fire and turned on the record-player and called the Chinese couple for the same reason she had insisted that Marin take the bracelet: to keep Marin from the harm outside.
“I mean a catered dinner for two must be quite an expensive proposition,” the FBI man said.
“They’re quite reasonable.” Charlotte spoke automatically. “Considering.”
“Catered dinner for one,” the FBI man said. “Technically. Since Marin didn’t stay.”
“Marin had a paper to finish before she went skiing, I told you.” Charlotte avoided the blank gaze of the FBI men. “She had a paper to finish for her seminar in I think Moby Dick.”
The fat FBI man spoke for the first time since the arrival of the others. “She’s not registered as a student, Mrs. Douglas, I suppose you know that.”
“Actually you should try this couple.” Charlotte spoke very clearly to shut out his voice. She did not know why she had said it was a seminar in Moby Dick. Marin had never mentioned any seminar in Moby Dick.
“She hasn’t been registered for two quarters, and the quarter before that she took all incompletes, but I’m sure you know this.”
“I mean if you like Cantonese food at all.”
Moby Dick had something to do with Warren.
At nineteen Charlotte had written a paper on Melville and Warren had failed her. Warren had failed her and had rung her doorbell for the first time at midnight with the paper torn in half and a bag of cherries and a bottle of bourbon and they had not left the apartment for forty-eight hours. For the first three she called him Mr. Bogart and for the next forty-five she called him nothing at all and it was not until the third day, when he took her to his apartment and asked her to clean it up and she came across the letter from the department chairman advising him that his contract would not be renewed, that she ever called him Warren.
Still not looking at the FBI man Charlotte stood up and began placing their coffee cups on a tray.
“They also do a marvelous Szechuan beef thing.”
The fat FBI man signaled the others to leave the room.
“Marin’s father taught a seminar in Moby Dick once,” Charlotte said before she broke.
After the FBI men left that morning Charlotte went upstairs to Marin’s room. The Raggedy Ann Warren had sent for Marin’s twelfth birthday was on its shelf. The teddy bear Warren had sent for Marin’s fourteenth Easter was on its chair. The guitar once used by Joan Baez was on the windowseat, where it had been since the night Leonard bought it for Marin at an ACLU auction. The embroidered Swiss organdy curtains were as pristine as they had been the day Marin picked them out. The old valentines beneath the glass on the dressing table were unchanged, the tray of silver bangles and bath oil and eye shadow untouched. All that Marin had removed from the room was every picture, every snapshot, every clipping or class photograph, which contained her own image.
3
ONE IMAGINES A SWEET INDOLENT GIRL, SOFT WITH BABY fat, her attention span low and her range of interests limited. Marin approved of infants and puppies. Marin disapproved of “meanness” and “showing off.” She appeared to approve equally of Leonard and Warren, and tailored her performance to please each of them. When Warren came to San Francisco she would appear instinctively in the navy-blue blazer no longer required by the progressive Episcopal day school she attended. For Leonard and his friends she would wear blue jeans, and a dashiki which scratched her skin. On principle she “adored madly” the presents Warren occasionally sent, although by her fifteenth birthday these presents still ran to the sporadic stuffed animal in a box bearing the charge-plate stamp of whatever woman he was living with at the time. In principle she was tolerant of Leonard’s efforts on the behalf of social justice, although in practice she often found the beneficiaries of these efforts “weird” and their predicaments “unnecessary.” That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim “the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude,” and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase “realistic but optimistic” appeared in a school communiqué she read it as “realistic and optimistic.”
That was Charlotte.
Not Marin.
Marin would never bother changing a phrase to suit herself because she perceived the meanings of words only dimly, and without interest. Perhaps because of her realistic but optimistic attitude Marin was easily confused by such moral questions as were raised by the sight of someone disfigured (would a good God make ugly people?) or the problem of dividing her Halloween candy with the Episcopal orphans (do six licorice balls for the orphans equal one Almond Hershey for Marin, if Marin dislikes licorice?), and when confused could turn sulky, and withdrawn.