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  “The General’s from a military family,” Rosie reminded her. “He’s as much trouble as five or six military families, but I doubt he’s lost a wink of sleep in his life.”

  “You’re quite wrong,” Aurora said. “I’ve caused him to lose thousands of winks of sleep. One of the few powers I can still claim is the ability to upset Hector sufficiently to keep him awake until I’m ready for him to start snoring.”

  General Hector Scott, Aurora’s resident lover—a category not to be confused with that of the several nonresident aspirants—was eighty-six, and not happy about it; he was even less happy about the fact that only three weeks before, he had managed, in defiance of all the known laws of physics, to turn a golf cart over on himself, breaking both legs and one hip. He was recuperating, at a pace much too slow to suit him, on the glassed-in patio next to Aurora’s bedroom, on the second floor of her house.

  The fact that he was in de facto confinement on the second floor was another thing General Scott was not happy about. Aurora had had him carried upstairs over his stern, almost violent, protests. The boys who brought him home in the ambulance, perhaps unaware that he had been a four-star general, took their orders from Aurora and ignored the thumps he attempted to give them.

  General Scott at once concluded that Aurora could have had only one motive for consigning him to the second floor: she intended to make free with her other suitors on the first floor, where he could neither see, hear, nor interfere with anything she might decide to do.

  The most threatening of the other suitors was a little Frenchman named Pascal, an attaché at the French consulate. The General couldn’t stand Pascal, and didn’t conceal the fact—indeed, General Scott concealed few facts, and in the past few months had even ceased to conceal certain parts of his own anatomy that both Aurora and Rosie would have preferred that he conceal.

  This new propensity of the General’s was on both women’s minds as they left the Pig Stand and prodded the old Cadillac along its homeward path, toward the well-tamed forests of River Oaks.

  “Has he flashed lately?” Aurora asked. “Sinner that I am, I hardly thought that I could have committed enough sins to earn me a grandson in jail and a flasher on my patio.”

  “Yep, he flashed this morning,” Rosie said. “Then he had the gall to complain about his eggs.”

  “How, exactly, did he flash?” Aurora asked. “For an ancient person on crutches he’s developed quite an extensive repertoire.”

  “He left his pajamas unbuttoned,” Rosie said. “I think the next time he goes that route I might spill a glass of ice water in his lap, or a little hot tea or something.”

  “Yes, do that,” Aurora said. “At least he didn’t pull the crutches trick, which he’s very prone to pulling when I’m his target.”

  “What’s the crutches trick?” Rosie asked.

  “He hoists himself on his crutches and then contrives to let his bathrobe fall open,” Aurora said. “Then he just stands there grinning. He looks like a mummy on crutches.”

  “Well, he’s eighty-six,” Rosie said, softening her stance a bit.

  “Why is that relevant?” Aurora asked. “You yourself are not exactly a maiden, but you don’t stand around lolling out of your bathrobe.”

  “I’m too flat-chested, there’s nothing to loll,” Rosie said. “We may not be no spring chickens but we ain’t really old like the General, either.”

  Aurora gave her maid a quizzical look. “I’m afraid I don’t quite take your point, if you have one,” she said. “Is there any reason why the old shouldn’t be expected to behave as well as the middle-aged?”

  “Middle-aged?” Rosie said. “Do you think we’re still middle-aged?”

  “Well, why aren’t we?” Aurora asked. She opened the glove compartment and poked around in it hopefully—she had the vague suspicion that she might have hidden some money in it at some point.

  “You’re kidding yourself,” Rosie informed her. “We ain’t been middle-aged for twenty years.”

  To her delight, Aurora discovered just what she had been hoping to find: twenty-four dollars, tucked into a city map.

  “Why, there’s my twenty-four dollars, let’s stop at the flower shop,” she said. “As for middle-aged, you’re quite wrong. There’s a category called late middle age which has rather indefinite boundaries. I think we’re both still well inside them—or at least I am.”

  “The backyard’s nothing but flowers, why do you want to buy more?” Rosie asked. She was not keen on stopping at the flower shop.

  “You’re right, go home—flowers are a job for Pascal,” Aurora said. “I’ll call him and tell him to bring over twenty-four dollars’ worth next time he shows up.”

  “What if he don’t want to? Pascal ain’t rich, you know.” Rosie said.

  “No, but I don’t see anything extravagant about asking him to bring me twenty-four dollars’ worth of flowers, since that’s the precise amount I found in my glove compartment,” Aurora said, grinning. “How could anyone argue with the logic of that?”

  Rosie didn’t care about the logic—it was the first time Aurora had smiled since leaving the prison. If it cost Pascal twenty-four dollars, it was worth it.

  Still, she had not quite finished making her point about the General and his new fondness for flashing. That was one subject, but it was connected to a second subject, and the second subject—of profound interest to Rosie—was whether Aurora and the General still had sex.

  Obviously the General was plenty randy in his head, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was randy elsewhere, nor did it offer the slightest clue as to Aurora’s position on the matter. And Aurora, no prude, and no enemy of plain speech, either, had ceased to be either forthcoming or plain about that aspect of her life with the General.

  Rosie ached to know, partly out of simple curiosity and partly because a little more information might help her with a dilemma of her own—her boyfriend, C. C. Granby, once as feisty as a rooster, seemed to be losing his roosterlike propensities at an alarming rate. Rosie couldn’t figure out if it was her fault or his, and could not quite get up her nerve to apply to Aurora for an opinion.

  “What I meant about the General not buttoning his pajamas or letting his bathrobe flop open is that we’re all getting old, and I guess old people have a right to get their kicks some way,” she said nervously.

  They had just pulled into the driveway of Aurora’s home. Rosie covered her nervousness by beginning the lengthy business of aligning the Cadillac with the narrow doors of the garage. The car was nearly as wide as the opening—there was only a little more than an inch to spare on either side: another reason Rosie’s automotive fantasies were so focused on a Datsun pickup. Aurora, who otherwise could scarcely drive, always whipped the Cadillac right into the garage, whereas Rosie, who stubbornly refused to have her cataracts attended to, could scarcely see the width of the front seat and was always in terror of crumpling one of the fenders or scraping one of the doors, in which event she expected to be dismissed instantly despite more than forty years of faithful service.

  “Stop!” Aurora commanded, looking at her maid sharply.

  Rosie was just on the lip of the driveway; she liked to align the Cadillac as a golfer might a long putt, before committing herself to an approach that wouldn’t work.

  “I’m getting it centered, I ain’t gonna scrape nothing,” Rosie assured Aurora, edging ever so slightly to the left in her approach to the garage.

  “You stop!” Aurora said. “I want to talk to you and I want to do it right now. You can destroy my car a little later.”

  Rosie stopped and sat looking at Aurora’s nice Spanish Colonial house. She had helped maintain it for so long that she considered that it was, in a sense, hers, too. At the moment she longed to be inside it—from the look in Aurora’s eye it seemed likely that her remarks about the aged and their kicks had not been well received.

  “I ought to know when to keep my mouth shut, I guess,” she said, hoping to blu
nt the force of whatever attack might be coming.

  “Oh, stop cringing,” Aurora said. “You ought to consider changing your hairdo. At the moment it’s far too frizzy.”

  “I wish I was bald and had a wig,” Rosie said. “I’ve tried my hair every way there is to try hair, and look at it! Lots of wigs are nicer than my hair, but I don’t know . . . I guess I just ain’t the wig type. Every time I try one on I get the giggles.”

  “I agree you probably aren’t the wig type, but there are always new hairdos one can try,” Aurora said. “I’ve tried quite a variety myself. Now, what was that you were asking about my sex life?”

  Rosie sighed deeply but said nothing. She didn’t want to admit that she had asked Aurora about her sex life.

  “They say curiosity killed the cat,” she finally ventured.

  “Good lord, Rosie,” Aurora said. “We’ve known one another for more than forty years. I’m not going to maul you just because you asked me about my sex life. The truth is, I thought you never would ask me about it.”

  “I’m asking, what about it?” Rosie said.

  “It’s a short story—Hector can’t do it,” Aurora said.

  “Oh,” Rosie said.

  They sat in silence for a minute as the shadows of the great trees began to extend themselves across the house and the yard.

  “I knew that stuff you read in magazines was probably lies,” Rosie said.

  Aurora looked at her calmly. “What stuff?” she asked.

  “That stuff about men being able to do it until they’re ninety-five or a hundred,” Rosie said.

  “Yes, we’ve been reading the same magazines,” Aurora said. “In other words, the ones I subscribe to. Those stories do give a rather misleading impression of male capacities, at least as I’ve experienced them.”

  “You think you’ve got problems? C.C.’s just sixty-eight and he won’t even try,” Rosie said. “Trying to get him to do something is like trying to corner a bobcat. Sometimes I feel like giving up.”

  “I’ve considered it myself,” Aurora admitted.

  “Yeah, but you got beaus,” Rosie reminded her. “You got Pascal, and then there’s Louis and Junior and Cowboy Bill.”

  It was Aurora’s turn to sigh. “Just hearing their names depresses me,” she confessed. “There was a time when I could command a more impressive assortment. I rather like Pascal, but it must be admitted that he’s mostly talk.”

  “I think he’s scared of the General,” Rosie said.

  “I’m afraid the truth is he’s scared of me,” Aurora said. “Of course the fact that Hector lives here probably does discourage my beaus. Unfortunately, the fact that they seem a little too willing to be discouraged is beginning to arouse my contempt. I may clear the deck of the whole lot of them pretty soon, Hector included.”

  “Maybe the General’s just in a slump,” Rosie speculated. “They’ve got all these new medicines for your glands now. Stuff a few of them down him and see what happens.”

  The shadows touched the car and Aurora’s mood turned. She remembered Tommy’s face, so young and so closed; she remembered the stolid guards who led him away.

  “Put the car in, it’s getting dark—you’ll knock down my garage,” she said.

  Rosie, who had been thinking the same thought, edged forward, correcting her course by minute degrees as she neared the garage.

  “I shouldn’t be thinking of these things,” Aurora said. Her mood was sinking fast. “I’m an old withered thing now, what does it matter?” she asked. “You’re younger, of course you should be concerned about C.C. But I’ve got a grandson in prison, another grandson who’s in and out of mental hospitals, and a granddaughter who’s pregnant and is not even sure she can identify the father. Why should I care about male capabilities, or male anything? I should just forget it.”

  They edged safely into the dark garage.

  Rosie, exactly one year younger than her boss, reached over and squeezed Aurora’s hand.

  “Hon, you got to think of yourself sometime,” she said. “You’re human, like the rest of us. You got to think of yourself sometime.”

  “What I think is that I wish you’d hit that pillar so this garage would fall and make an end of me,” Aurora said. She gathered up her purse and her box of Kleenex and quickly got out of the car.

  3

  “Another bad thing about Hector’s state is that I now dread going up my own stairs,” Aurora said. She had more or less finished another long cry, and was in her kitchen, drinking tea.

  Rosie, who had become a news junkie in her late maturity—a phrase gleaned from the very magazines that had contained the misleading information about male capabilities—was peering through her contacts at her idol, Tom Brokaw. “Lithuania’s not looking so good—I hope Gorby knows what he’s doing,” she said.

  Aurora had little patience with Rosie’s late-blooming interest in world affairs. In her view, Rosie was not so much a news junkie as an anchorman groupie, and, to make matters worse, had fixed her affections on the wrong anchorman to boot. She herself much preferred the urbane Peter Jennings.

  “Lithuania will have to look out for itself—anyway it’s Truman’s fault,” she said. “If General MacArthur had had his way all those communists would have been dealt with long ago.

  “You better not let General Scott hear you talking about MacArthur,” Rosie cautioned. General Scott had once been a subordinate of General MacArthur’s, and it had not been a happy experience, to hear him tell it—and Rosie had heard him tell it many times.

  “I have no doubt that whatever happened between Hector and General MacArthur was entirely Hector’s fault,” Aurora said. “Besides that, he was jealous.”

  At least the gumbo they were making for dinner smelled good. She sipped her tea and enjoyed the good smell. She had always loved her kitchen—but then, she had once loved her whole house. Now it seemed the kitchen was the only place she was likely to feel happy. It was to the kitchen that she repaired when she needed to recover some sense of esprit.

  Once she had made the window nook in her bedroom her haven, when seeking to recover a bit of esprit, but the window nook was no longer reliable in the way that it had been. Hector Scott was far too likely to hobble in and scatter whatever little blossoms of spirit she had managed to gather.

  “Come to think of it, everything bad that happens in this house is Hector’s fault,” Aurora said with a flash of bitterness. “I once loved going up my stairs, but now I dread it because I never know what I’ll find at the top of them. Even if Hector doesn’t decide to flash, he’ll be angry because I went off and left him.”

  She sipped a little more tea. “Old men are so dreadfully selfish, and there’s little one can do about it,” she said. “They can’t simply be put down, like old dogs.”

  “You better go up and speak to him, selfish or not,” Rosie said. She was waiting patiently for NBC to cut back to Tom Brokaw. She herself had never been to Lithuania, or anywhere farther from home than Las Vegas, where C.C. had taken her for a giddy weekend when their relationship was just firing up—but from what she could tell, life in Lithuania consisted mostly of standing in crowds in front of parliament or somewhere else official, protesting for more freedom and better government.

  Actually, from what she could tell, life in most of the rest of the world consisted of standing in just such crowds, protesting for more freedom and better government. An exception was Israel—or perhaps it was Palestine; she was not entirely clear about the distinction—where youths with handkerchiefs over their faces threw stones at soldiers, who then shot tear gas at them.

  Rosie had long since decided that if the U.S. government ever threatened her freedom, or raised taxes one more time, or did much of anything she didn’t like, she would join a crowd of protesters herself and see if it did any good—or, at least, see if it was any fun.

  From what she could tell, though, protests always seemed to be rather similar. She was always glad when Tom Brokaw came back
on and told them how things were going with the protesters.

  Aurora contemplated going upstairs and informing Hector that he would have to leave. Several times in the last year or two she had composed a little speech on that subject, and once had even made a tentative approach to it by asking him what he would do if she abruptly died.

  In her thinking about her own demise, Aurora always supposed it would be abrupt. She did not propose to linger in a hospital as her beloved daughter Emma had. Poor Emma had taken months to die, but Aurora had no intention of following her example. Something would happen that she didn’t feel, and she would just be gone.

  She outlined just such a scenario to Hector one afternoon. He had looked startled, and his Adam’s apple wobbled for a bit. He looked at her as if he considered that she had almost lost her mind. He seemed momentarily to be about to cry; but he didn’t cry—nor did he speak. He had been watching a golf tournament, and he resumed his watching.

  “Hector, we really should think about it,” Aurora insisted. “I certainly shall die someday, I imagine. Hadn’t you better be thinking of arrangements? I know they have some very nice military homes for distinguished old soldiers such as yourself. You could sit around with your peers and talk over the Battle of the Somme or something.”

  “Aurora, I was eight years old when the Battle of the Somme was fought,” the General said. “You need to get your world wars straight. There were two. The Battle of the Somme was in the first. I fought in the second.”

  “You would be pedantic just when I’m attempting to discuss something serious,” Aurora said. “We weren’t talking about which war you fought in, we were talking about my untimely demise.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your goddamn demise,” the General said. “I was watching my golf tournament. Who says your demise will be untimely anyway? You’re no longer a young woman, you know.”