Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Online Free PDF Page A

all right. Besides, Madeleine was in ruins and needed a day in the country.
    "Madeleine, we've been invited to the South Shore tomorrow afternoon. I gather the arrangements are first class. Do you feel up to it?"
    "Will they know me?" she asked absently.
    "Maybe not. Maybe they're autistic."
    "Sure. Let's go. When is my plane to LA?"
    "Nine P.M . It's not even an hour away from here. We'll be back."
    So we went. Madeleine had been with me for three days, and we both enjoyed them. She was the only houseguest I had anymore. I even found it a luxury to avoid the press, which she insisted on doing in the most flamboyant ways. She gave a single concert a year in Boston, and in thirteen years no one had ever succeeded in finding out how she got there and where she stayed. The Boston press has been slow about celebrity, though. There is no indication during any other week of Madeleine's extravagant year that there is a story to tell about her and me. Perhaps there isn't. Well, there is now , but in June, when she was just a day short of a flight home after thirty-two curtain calls in Boston, we had fallen into our old way of saying hello, calling ourselves survivors, and kissing good-bye. I see now we were not satisfied with that. Put another way, we weren't altogether sure we were surviving.
    "How old are you?" she asked me.
    "Forty-five. Do you know what you just said?"
    "What?"
    "'How old are you?' You used to say 'How old are you.' Don't you think the shift in emphasis is sinister?"
    "You're too sensitive," she said.
    Madeleine says she does not like my car, an old Chevy convertible I cling to in one of my few mild protests against the corporate inevitable. She says I live like a one-lamb-chop secretary who tidies through life without making a ripple. And she moves me when she talks that way. One year I took her with me to the store and bought a blue velvet sofa to please her, around which I made resolutions to pull things together, but it was delivered after she left and was a shambles the next spring when she blew into town again. I am moved to do something for her, not for me. Her years of private planes and sloops, the beach properties in Malibu and Puerto Vallarta, are behind her. She should live like a countess, but her career, like that of a high-roller financier, has peaked and valleyed. I don't blame her for preferring the days of the sealskin slipcovers in the custom touring car.
    Not that she complains. She lives all right in her seventy-fourth year. (The figure is an approximation, of course. I am right about how old the rest of us are, but none of the rest of us has tampered with the evidence. That urge comes later in life, I expect, though it has been stirring in me too for the first time, on bright sunny days all summer.) I bet she makes fifty thousand a year, and she doesn't have to make more than eight or ten appearances. The recordings are reissued, and she has lately had a careful manager, an elderly queen in LA named Aldo who is a giant in computer softwares. I expect he turns to jelly when she sings
     
I don't know who you are,
I have no memory for men.
Was it in Paris? No? New York?
I've never been there at all,
Is it as lonely as they say?
     
    The old recordings, the seventy-eights, sold seven or eight million copies altogether, but she had lousy contracts and managers who were bums and cleaned her out. They were not even her lovers, as far as I know. They were like baby brothers. She is taken better care of now. The audience is smaller but more intense, mostly gay, faithful as postulants, pandemonium-prone when she does the bridge for this or that famous song. There might be as much as a hundred thousand a year. But she doesn't make bids any longer at Swiss jewelry auctions, and that upsets and saddens the faithful.
    "You told me you didn't see David anymore," she said as we threaded our way along the expressway. "Why don't you put the top down?"
    I pulled over. She was not accusing me of hiding anything