Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette Page A

believe everything I read. You didn't get old."
    "I am a miracle of modern science, Phidias. Anyway," she said, holding her hands up to frame her face, "some people say this is all a mask."
    "What do they say is behind it?"
    "Well, opinions differ. Some say the real me is mummified, and what you see is a sarcophagus. Others think I died long ago, and someone has replaced me with a doll."
    "So it's all done with wires now."
    "Yes. The ones who make me cry myself to sleep, though, say there is nothing behind it at all. They think I do look old."
    "But you haven't started to listen to anyone else, have you?"
    "No. If they get too close, I break their windshields."
    This dialogue, rapid-fire and tough-guy, went very fast. It sounded like the scene where the detective is called in by the beauty to find her vanished, very rich husband. The detective and the beauty used to be a thing, and look at them now, not quite over one another. One can be exact about these things because Madeleine wisecracked her way through the very part in Full House in 1942. The film is not really part of the serious canon, but it is distinguished by the fact that she smokes about four packages of Camels during the course of events, and does not bat an eyelash when Robert Taylor, having found her out, shoots her from four feet away. She never talks this way in public, opting for yes and no and the riddle of her half-smile. She does talk this way to me if we are both in a good mood. But as she had not seen this man in thirty years, I couldn't believe she could begin again so furiously, as if in mid-sentence. No bullshit at all. You could tell, for instance, that neither of them had wasted any time in the intervening years missing one another.
    There was a pause, and they eyed each other closely. They were gauging what waited to be said, and how long it might take at the rate they had chosen. The death of Mrs. Carroll was the project for this June afternoon, and yet neither of them appeared to feel trapped by it. If they could have been free instead to wander at will, they would have come up against Mrs. Carroll at every turn anyway. And they might have been much less willing, if she had still been alive in her curtained bed and they had found themselves alone together outside her hearing, to give over to each other the unique Mrs. Carroll each had known. If they had been too free, they would have remained tough-guys, very classy and very melancholy. Because she was dead, you could see in their clear-eyed look that they planned to hold nothing back.
    "But you don't know my friend Rick," she said, putting her hand on mine and holding on for a moment. It was a gesture meant to fortify her, I think, not me. She looked over at David as Phidias and I measured each other directly. "I know he's our friend, David, I'm not being possessive. But I know you by reputation, remember. On the evidence, you aren't my dream of a friend."
    You can't say that line nicely. Still, she spoke levelly and with sufficient wryness that she purified it of moralizing and condescension. She wanted to make it plain that she could be as honest with him as she could with Phidias and me. She was warning him to treat me right, of course. But further, she was warning him not to assume that his charm and good humor and swimmer's build could absolve him of the truth here. Her own looks, after all, could have beaten a rap of first-degree murder, so she knew about the uses of power. And since her voice, her sexual pitch, and her social graces had lined her corridors with honors and made her a totem figure for fifty years, she had the wit to urge a man like David on, to wish him well at seduction and spells. But not here. Here, she was saying, we are among friends. And she wanted him to think over the gravity of the word.
    "I'm working on it," David said.
    "Here's your chance. Phidias is about to have his arm twisted, and it's going to take him a couple of hours to show me all the places where I