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ISBN: (MS71-02848-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
sunlight, looking down the terraced hill and across the street to their
own house—from which they have been temporarily expelled by
those five daughters, who are giving a welcome-home party for Ralph
and Caroline. A somewhat delayed welcome back: their actual re-
turn from Portugal, where they spent most of those five years, took
place in January. In any case the daughters, Sage, Liza, Fiona, Jill
and Portia, are "doing it all," bringing food and drink and even
flowers—quite foolishly, Caroline thinks, her garden is full of flow-
ers. It is the sort of party that has been discussed and discussed,
and that Caroline has all along tried somehow to prevent, but has
not. And now it is almost upon her. Upon them all.
The food will be almost entirely done by Fiona, the middle, highly
successful food-person daughter: "Fiona's" is an extremely trendy,
very popular (this year) California-cuisine restaurant, on Potrero
Hill.
Everything about this project has contributed to Caroline's un-
ease, now expressed in her restless posture, and her large strong
hands that gesture helplessness from her lap. "I'd like it so much
better if they were all doing it, and not just Fiona," she says, with
a small worried frown. " O r if I were doing it all myself."
"If you were doing it all." Ralph laughs at her, gently. "Come
on, Caro."
But Caroline insists. "Well, it is our house. Even if food is what
Fiona does. Ostensibly. So funny, she really can't cook. I don't
know, it just all seems wrong. Everything," she vaguely finishes.
"Our rich kids," Ralph supplies.
"I suppose that's part of it. T o have two such extremely successful
ones, in ways I never knew about or even imagined."
Ralph makes an ambiguous sound, expressing to Caroline the fact
that she has said all this before, more or less. But she does not mind
this comment from Ralph, whom she loves (usually); she has needed,
repeatedly, to say how she feels about these particular daughters,
the very rich ones: Fiona, at thirty-three the well-known restaurateur
(does anyone say "restaurateuse," Caroline wonders?), and Jill, at
thirty-one a very rich young lawyer-stockbroker.
"Well, there's always Portia," Ralph put in, now in his turn
repeating himself. "We can count on her not to get ahead, I think."
5
Portia, twenty-five, is the one and only daughter from the marriage
of Caroline and Ralph.
"Well, you're right about Portia," says Caroline, about this
youngest, most problematic child. "And then there's Sage," she adds,
with a sigh for her eldest daughter, a bravely unsuccessful, highly
talented (in her mother's view) ceramicist, whose strange, small,
intensely expressive figures sell rarely or not at all, in their occa-
sional viewings, in local galleries. Sage, now forty-one, is the product
of Caroline's very early (at nineteen) marriage to Aaron Levine, who
died in that war, in 1943, before Sage was born. Subtle, dark Sage
is the image of her father. She seems given to trouble: fairly soon
after the demise of a spectacularly unfortunate love affair with a
local lawyer-politico, she married a man named Noel Finn, who is
overly handsome (again, in Caroline's view), a carpenter, some seven
years younger than Sage.
"Sage will be the first to come today," says Caroline, who is now
beginning to speak her thoughts aloud. "And she'll bring some pres-
ent that I won't quite know what to do with. A n d there'll be some
excuse about Noel."
Caroline is right, as things turn out, but before that happens she
and Ralph get up and walk about, and they talk about how much
San Francisco has changed since they left it in 1980 (Reagan's year,
as they think of it), and how much they like their house, despite
neighborhood changes.
house was in bad shape at that time, sagging and neglected; Caro-
line, who is skillful with houses, had it all fixed up—and in the
course of that long process (she kept running out of money) she
grew to love the house but could not afford to live in it. Also, her
next (second) husband, D r . James McAndrew, did not like the
neighborhood, at that time considered "bad," too close to what was
then known as "the Fillmore," an area where mostly black people
lived. A n d so, with Jim, Caroline moved to a "better" neighbor-
hood, and she rented out her house. (Liza, now thirty-five, and then
Fiona and Jill came in an orderly succession during that marriage
of Caroline's to Jim—whom she divorced in 1959 in order to marry
Ralph, by whom she was then pregnant with Portia.)
As Caroline herself would have been the first to admit, she was
stubborn and foolhardy about the house, rather than prescient. She
did not have an instinct for real estate, she did not think in those
terms. Her feelings about the house's drastic rise in value are am-
bivalent, to say the least (upper Fillmore Street was "gentrified,"
the black people "relocated").
She did have an instinct for houses, perhaps an atavistic inheri-
tance from her English mother, the actress-playwright Molly Blair.
She bought the house, really, because it was small and beautiful; she
felt that it would suit her perfectly, and she was quite right. But
Ralph, when they first married, did not want to live in the house
for an opposite reason to Jim McAndrew's: for him the neighbor-
hood was much too fancy, he felt (Ralph is a former longshoreman,
later a political writer).
Then, in 1980, Molly Blair died, and a subsequent revival of
interest in her work, publication of new editions of her plays, gave
Caroline, her only child, a fair amount of money. And Reagan was
elected. A n d Ralph had a mild heart attack. "Take it easy. Change
your life," he was fairly forcefully advised.
For a combination of reasons, then, after distributing much of
her money among her daughters, Caroline and Ralph took off for
Portugal, where they spent almost five years—during which the ten-
ants of the house were elderly friends of Caroline's, who died within
months of each other this past year, a strong reason for the return
from Portugal of Caroline and Ralph. They returned to a valuable
and perfectly maintained house; sheer practicality helped to per-
7
suade Ralph to live there after all. Their south garden, a treasure,
widely coveted in San Francisco, grew bountifully—just now, in
April, full of roses and camellias, rhododendron, white wisteria.
"It's a perfect house for two people," in their sunnier moments
Caroline and Ralph have remarked to each other. A n d , at darker
times, "How can the two of us possibly occupy a whole house? with
all the homeless people—"
In their walk about the park, marking time until the arrival of the
daughters and the pre-emption of their own roles, in their own
house, Ralph and Caroline have touched lightly on all these topics,
including that of the beauty of their garden.
"It must be in my genes," Caroline has earlier remarked. "The
way I respond to gardens. I absolutely fall in love."
"Except that I really like the garden too," Ralph tells her. " M y
Texas genes?" Ralph's parents, grandparents, great grandparents
all were Texans, a fact often manifest in his voice. Especially as he
ages, Caroline thinks, he sounds more and more Southern. Texan.
And they now return to the more pressing topic of their daugh-
ters.
So many! Whatever have I done to deserve five daughters? rueful
Caroline has been heard to remark, and there does seem a certain
illogic to that fate, in her particular case. (And it was in many ways
the presence of all those young women in San Francisco—like many
California offspring, those five cannot imagine life elsewhere, for
themselves—that kept Caroline for all those years away in Portugal.
"I simply don't want to be so present in their lives," said Caroline.)
"I sometimes don't think Sage really likes Fiona very much,"
Caroline next remarks. " O r for that matter Jill."
"How could she? All that money that both of them seem to have."
Ralph tends to speak more succinctly than Caroline does; conver-
sationally he does not wander, as he sometimes accuses Caroline of
doing.
"But she and Liza always seem great pals."
"Everyone likes Liza. She's the most like you."
This is a remark that Caroline often hears, not only from Ralph—
so often that she is tired of responding to it. What she might say,
Caroline's Daughters
of herself and Liza, might be: W e only sort of look alike, both being
large, and she has three children. But we've got very different char-
acters, lucky for her.
rose trees and bushes of roses, all placed at rather formal intervals,
in tidy beds that surround a circular area of brick. In the farthest
bed, at the very back of the garden, are two enormous twin camel-
lias, now profusely flowering, dark scarlet. It has been so far an
exceptionally sunny spring, leading to talks of drought, and Caroline
has feared for her flowers, just now so lovely.
"You might as well open your present," Sage instructs, indicating
the box, with a smile that to her mother signals pride.
Caroline works at the taped-down flaps, and then for no reason
that she can think of (except that she always* makes guesses, as she
opens presents) she says, "I know, you've made me a birdbath."
"Jesus, Mother. I hate you, I really do."
Dismayed at the accuracy of her intuition (and, having had it,
why on earth did she have to blurt it out like that?), Caroline sees
that what Sage has brought is a birdbath: a wide, shallow, blue-
glazed bowl, with tiny birds, a small frieze of birds perched here
and there on its ridge. "But darling, it's so beautiful, that glaze—"
"But how did you know what it was? Jesus, Mother." Sage's thin
lovely face is pulled into a frown. Her pale-brown skin is lightly
freckled, her eyes troubled but golden, clear gold.
"I don't know, it was just a lucky guess. Let's put it over here.
Look, it's perfect."
"All that noise has got to be Fiona," says Ralph.
"Besides, you always think of what I really lust for," adds Caro-
line, to Sage. "I did want a birdbath. I need one, and this is ravish-
ing." She goes over to give Sage a quick light kiss.
"How many people did you think were coming?" asks Ralph, as
boxes are passed into the kitchen, either stacked or piled into the
refrigerator.
"Well, isn't Liza bringing her kids?"
"She only has three, and they're little," Caroline reminds her.
"Oh well."
Fiona's pale-blonde hair is very long; all three of Caroline's
daughters by Jim McAndrew have wispy blonde hair, as he does,
and they have his eyes, very large and pale gray. Fiona dresses
smartly, always, "dressed for success," as the advertisers (and her
sisters) put it. Today she wears very tailored pale linen, two shades
of brown, and trim brown shoes—in which she now walks about
the deck, inspecting flowers, then looking into the birdbath. "Ter-
rific," is her mild comment.
Fiona is thin, very thin, but nature intended her to be otherwise,
or so Caroline thinks, observing this daughter. Caroline sees Fiona's
wide bones, quite like her own, stretching the pummelled, pam-
pered skin.
Sexy Fiona, how odd that she seems to have no lovers, thinks
sexy Caroline.
"Where's Jill?" Fiona then asks. "She's coming?"
"I guess, but we haven't heard from her."
"Some big deal in her life, no doubt," sniffs Fiona. T o say that
Fiona is ambivalendy pleased by the success of her younger sister
would be to put it mildly.
"Portia's car died," contributes Ralph.
"Lord, what else is new?"
"Well, it must be time for drinks, what would everyone like?"
Caroline and Ralph say these things at almost exacdy the same mo-
ment, then laugh at themselves for so doing.
Sage wants wine with some ice in it. "I know that's awful, Noel
the purist would die, but it's just so hot."
Fiona wants a Perrier.
In the kitchen, faced with all those boxes of food, Ralph and
Caroline exclaim to each other, "Look at all she's brought, it's ter-
rible, we'll have to take it all somewhere—some shelter, a food
bank."
*3
some leftovers. Picnic lunches all week for the kids. A n d she thinks,
At the rate Saul's going he'll certainly never be rich. (Saul donates
considerable time, most recently to an emotional-support project for
people with AIDS.)
A light confusion then takes over the party, and reigns for the next
several hours, actually. There is not enough ice: how come Caroline
had not emptied and refilled all the ice trays early on? (It is Caroline
who demands this, aloud, of herself, Ralph not being given to that
sort of petulant nagging.) The children want a variety of soft drinks,
mostly ones not there. "I'm not about to go out to any market, so
just settle down," Saul, their stern father, tells them. A n d isn't it
time to eat? All the cold food will warm up in the sunshine and lose
its flavor, according to Fiona.
Then from the doorway is heard a voice, high-pitched and quite
familiar to them all: "This fucking van, where in hell do you expect
a person to park?"
And there is Jill, her pale-blonde hair short and sleek, a small
cap, a helmet. Jill, in pale-pink silk, looking slightly rumpled, and
flustered—and, as Ralph has said, very sexy.
"I thought I left plenty of room. Y o u do look fabulous, Jill."
"Hurry up. We're just starting, my kids will eat it all up if we
don't."
"Where on earth have you been?"
Thus more or less in chorus is Jill greeted by her sisters. She
chooses, though, to answer only Sage's somewhat accusing question.
"I had some work to do," she tells Sage, and then, "Where's Noel?
He's working too?" She laughs again, and seems not to expect an
answer. "I will have a glass of wine," she tells Ralph. "It all seems
so festive, I feel rather festive myself."
As though deliberately, the three blonde daughters have clustered
together, Liza, Fiona, and Jill, all happily out in the sunshine, in
their summer clothes, with plates of summer food before them.
Sage, isolating herself somewhat, chooses a shaded corner of the
deck, near a budding yellow rose.
Caroline is moved to go over to her, though not to say what is
most in her mind, not to say, You're worried over Noel, you
15
shouldn't be, he's just not worth it. Although that is what she would
have liked to say.
A n d Caroline sighs, with the further self-critical observation, How
much a mother I do seem still to be! So annoying, no wonder I
haven't done much else with my life.
T o Sage, though, what she does say is, "How's your work going
these days? Do I get to come to your studio any time soon?"