“Out of necessity. To feed you, to clothe you, to send you to school, to give you piano lessons and toys. And later, of course, I wanted to. I did love my work, and I needed to escape …”
“To escape from the constant demands of a helpless baby.”
“Oh, darling, not from you, never from you. I always avoided any temptation to topple your father from the pedestal you put him on. But perhaps it’s time to face facts.”
Annie has had enough. Why can’t she just burrow under the covers, stick the pillow over her ears? “I don’t want to hear anything more,” she says.
“Hardly surprising. Nevertheless, right now you need to. I’ve been beating around the bush long enough. I’m going to come right out with it before I lose nerve.”
As if Ursula would ever lose nerve. “If you must,” Annie concedes, “though it doesn’t mean I’m going to believe you.”
“The same old story.” Ursula sighs. “Hortense was my best friend—now I utterly shiver at such a cliché—my sole friend in Passamaquoddy. In retrospect, I realize her appeal for me was partly due to her name. Hortense and Ursula in a world of Peggys and Bettys and Sues. “Stupidly, I asked her to look after Henry while I was away.”
“Which is only natural.”
Ursula shrugs. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Those checks I wrote to the Passamaquoddy Community Players, all those boring, mortifyingly bad performances I attended. Hortense was a terrible, wooden Auntie Mame, though I never told her so; in fact, I acted as her coach, for which she never expressed the slightest morsel of gratitude. Instead, she ignored all my instructions about timing and inflection. So amateurish.” Ursula pours more brandy into her glass and nods at Annie’s.
Annie closes her fingers over the top of the snifter. “I’ve had enough.”
“Haven’t we all,” her mother groans, her body a study in world-weariness. She leans forward. “And yet with Henry, for a while, I enjoyed being a part of a community, a respectable mother and wife, so enchantingly ordinary. A woman like others, with a best friend, with neighbors and rosebushes in her front yard and tomato vines in the back. Naturally I would have done the gardening myself if I didn’t need to preserve my hands for my career.”
Ursula holds up her beringed, pampered hands, hands that at bedtime are swabbed with lotions and placed into white cotton gloves, hands that hide from daylight like vampires, the skin silky soft and pale, the nails perfect ovals varnished scarlet three times a week—hands that have never pruned a rose or planted a tomato seed.
“I was in love,” Ursula continues. “Blinded by love.”
“What are you getting at, Ursula?” Annie asks, hurrying along the narrative. Despite her own efforts at denial and her mother’s tendency to dramatize, she has a pretty good idea of where this is going. She remembers Hortense—squat and dull, a horrible Auntie Mame, an ingratiating, phony adult—call me Auntie Hortense, she used to order Annie, who nevertheless could not bring herself to add the Auntie in front of the Hortense.
“What’s embarrassingly ordinary is how it ended. The same old scene I’ve played on stage for years and years. Yet I, like the most preposterous ingénue, never saw it coming. Hortense having dinner and drinks with Henry. Hortense even taking you to rehearsals, letting you play with that spoiled, yappy terrier of hers. Bringing you lollipops.”
“Rachel is not Hortense,” Annie insists. “There is no comparison.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Annie cuts her off. “I never liked Hortense. I could tell she was a fake, even as a kid.”
“And rightly so. You were precocious that way. Like me, though I suspected nothing. But then, who can ever know what is in another’s heart? I thought I did.”
Had Hortense and her father been looking at refrigerators too? Annie wonders now. Did it always start with kitchen appliances and then move on to mattresses—the testing of them, the sharing of them?
Ursula pats her daughter’s knee, tented under its downy duvet. “It gets worse,” she warns. “Little did I anticipate what a failed businessman Henry turned out to be. Why? Because, frankly, he was almost as good of an actor as I was an actress. Did I, in my wildest dreams or worst nightmares, imagine I was going to have to support this man who appeared so established in his career? Never! Alas, he had no head for commerce—though he had a head for many other things, which I prefer not to enumerate.”
“Ursula!” Annie squirms like a teenager.
“I realize how hard this is for you, darling,” Ursula grants. “Nevertheless, it’s best you know everything. Alors, I helped out quietly, from behind the scenes—no one caught on; his facade was so grand; a big shot in the chamber of commerce and those other silly men’s clubs with their secret handshakes and adolescent rituals. On his walls hung as many awards as those arrayed along my own mantel.”
“Because he was respected,” Annie feels obliged to add. “Because he earned them. I used to dust them as a child. When I visited his office. When he let me play secretary and took me out to lunch.”
Ursula’s voice softens to a whisper. “How could I point out that the emperor had no clothes?” She squeezes Annie’s knee again. “I blame myself. I loved to travel; I got tired of Maine; I longed for my apartment in New York. And I had the theater. Henry liked being married to an actress, liked my comfortable bank account, my celebrity, and obviously grew to like that I was so much out of town. I gather there were more dalliances beside Hortense. All, of course, while you were at school. Your father always protected you.”
Annie covers her ears. “I’ve heard enough.”
But her mother’s on a roll. “I never even confronted Hortense. Who, I learned later, ran off with a tree surgeon to Edmonton, Alberta. Imagine!” She shakes her head. “My only choice was to leave. Even though”—she strokes her daughter’s hair—“even though you, my daughter …” Her throat makes a choking sound, strangling her words.
“It didn’t matter. As Daddy said, we were complete, the two of us.”
“Of course it mattered. If you only …” She straightens up. “It’s my own fault for throwing Hortense in my husband’s path—also for doing too much for him when he should have been standing on his own two feet. Enabling, they call it.” She stops. She waits a beat. She looks at Annie. “Enabling,” she repeats. “The way you enable Sam.”
“That’s not true,” Annie says.
“I threw Hortense into your father’s path,” she states, “just as you’re doing with Rachel.”
Annie jams her fist against her mouth and turns her head to the row of windows framing a fairy-tale world of twinkling lights.
For a long time, neither of them speaks. The hall clock chimes. The radiator pipes clang. An elevator glides. Her mother’s controlled, drama-school-steady breaths rise and fall from deep within her diaphragm.
Ursula breaks the silence. “It’s all right, darling. You don’t have to say anything. Your face speaks for itself. Volumes.”
As if on cue, the doorman’s buzzer sounds. A deus ex machina just in time to save them both from awkwardness. Ursula walks to the front hall. Annie hears muted voices, the clank of silverware, the click of a closing door. In the lighted apartment across the avenue, she can make out the shapes of a family sitting down to dinner under a sparkling chandelier. A family of four or five. Not two. A normal family. Parents. Children. Are they laughing? Finishing each other’s sentences? Are they discussing schoolwork? The mundane events of each person’s day? Though she can’t see it, she imagines a fire crackling in the fireplace, a dog curled on its hearth, a homemade apple pie in the oven, wafting the scent of nutmeg and cinnamon.
Ursula reappears. “Voilà!” she says.
Annie turns toward her. The tray she is carrying bears the most architecturally gorgeous hamburgers and most sinfully divine, salt-encrusted pommes frites that Annie has ever seen.
Ursula puts down the tray. She twirls. She snaps her fingers. “Forget the pâté and quenelles,” Ursula says.
“Sometimes a girl just needs a lift.”
* * *
Later, after the last French fry lies abandoned in its soggy puddle of ketchup, after Ursula has eaten two of the toothpicked quarters she’s chiseled from her own burger—proving that she can transform anything into elegance—and after Annie has devoured hers whole, Ursula piles the leftovers onto the tray. This she places on the floor outside the bedroom door as if she’s expecting room service to whisk it away. Once more, she settles into the curve excavated by Annie’s knees and reaches for Annie’s hand. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I guess,” Annie allows. “Nothing that a hamburger and fries can’t cure,” she says, her tone a mixture of good-sport effort and an appreciation for her mother beyond mere food choices. Is she okay? She’s not so sure. What about Sam? And Rachel? Though she remains convinced that neither of them would ever … Would they?
Then there’s the puzzle of her mother and father. Up till now, she’s always been so sure about who was the good parent and who was the bad.
“Oh, Arabella,” Ursula says now, reading her mind. “You must feel utterly overwhelmed. Especially after what you’ve just been through. I dreaded telling you. I hated to cast a shadow on your image of Henry. But it became imperative. It seems so clear to me that your marriage is at risk, that you need—yes—a mother’s advice.” Ursula snuggles closer, wraps her arms around Annie. “My darling baby,” she croons. “The lawyers I consulted assured me I would win custody. Which I longed for. You have no idea.”
Annie looks up at her mother, whose face now bears the same ravages of loss she so famously demonstrated in A Doll’s House when she played Nora, forced to abandon her children for what she thought was their own good.
“But how could I take my daughter away from the father she loved?” Ursula pleads.
Chapter Nineteen
For the first time since the surgery two week ago, Annie wakes up neither sore nor woozy—a good sign, since today’s her postop appointment with Dr. Albright. If she receives a clean bill of health, she’ll be able to go home. When she turns her head, she’s astonished to see a breakfast tray magically transported to the night table. She smells freshly roasted coffee; she admires the buttered toast slotted into the silver rack the staff at the Connaught gave Ursula when she checked out of the Grosvenor Suite; she marvels at the hothouse tulips in their crystal vase.
The chink of ice reserved in Annie’s heart for her mother is starting to thaw. Not that Ursula is turning into Marmee or Ma Ingalls. Did she ever sew on a button or drive a carpool or chaperone a field trip or carve a pumpkin? Did she stay up all night applying a cold compress to a feverish brow?
Well, nobody’s perfect. Even her father, it turns out.
Except for a few minor flaws, the person in her life who is perfect, perfect for her, is Sam. Any complaints about him—his messiness, his forgetfulness, his inattention to detail, his medical students’ disease, his dependence, his occasional thin skin—count as inconsequential given her changed circumstances. Maybe she purged any grievances by committing them to the manual; her illness and subsequent return from the dead seem to have put such concerns into perspective. Lately she’s been focusing on all the good things, both the big ones—love and friendship and values and ethics and kindness—and the small, sweet moments too—the time he hired a calligrapher to copy onto parchment one of her poems, which he framed as a Valentine’s Day surprise; the time he took her father’s watch to be repaired, adding a smaller wristband so she could wear it; the time he secretly packed up the baby’s layette and donated it to Newborns in Need.
She clears her throat and attempts the first paragraph of the Gettysburg Address. To form a more perfect union is actually audible. Her voice sounds stronger, if not still quite her own. It’s the right moment to call Sam. She reaches for the phone. She yanks her hand back. Shouldn’t she wait until the official medical okay? Until she has all the facts? She sprints out of bed and performs a series of increasingly vigorous jumping jacks. No chest pain. No breathlessness.
She wants—rather, she needs—to hear Sam’s delight when she tells him she’s coming home. She’ll save the real story of her illness for when she can see him in person, confront him head on. He’ll be furious she kept things from him, but if all goes according to what Dr. Albright indicated at the hospital, he won’t be able to help but be overjoyed at the outcome. Ursula’s right. Anyone who passes through the valley of the shadow of death should be forgiven all crazy behavior. Under such circumstances, whose thinking wouldn’t be skewed? Who wouldn’t panic and act illogically? Sam will understand. Won’t he? She misses her own lumpy bed with its trough down the center encouraging her and Sam’s nightly slide into a full-body collision; she misses her work, neighbors, best friend, customers, car, empty streets, the sounds of taxi-free silence, frosted sidewalks, sludgy drifts of snow. She’d exchange any number of Ursula’s sachets and candles and eau de cologne for a whiff of Sam.
It’s not as if she’ll be giving anything up. She’s sure that, in the future, she and Sam will visit Ursula, attend Broadway plays and eat choucroute garnie and sushi and tandoori lamb, admire Rothkos and Sargents, watch the ballet, walk in Central Park, explore the High Line. They will laugh about those weeks when they were so foolishly forced apart. And then they’ll return home.
Always home.
She decides not to wait. She picks up the phone, a cream-and-gold French model with a rotary dial repurposed from a stage prop. The numbers spring off her fingers as if they’ve been coiled, ready to pop.
After five rings, the machine clicks in. She checks her watch. He must have left earlier than usual. “Hi, it’s me,” she addresses the recorder, noting that her voice, though improved, is still exhibit-A hoarse. “I’m sorry about not returning your calls or messages. That’s why Ursula emailed you—I’ve been stuck in bed with this cold”—she coughs—“which I must have picked up on the plane. It’s turned into laryngitis, so it’s hard to talk. But I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. Love you. I’ll try you later at the shop.”
When she finishes the coffee and toast, she wraps one of Ursula’s ostrich-trimmed, chin-tickling robes over her nightgown and opens her laptop.
My darling Sam, she types, I tried to call. I actually have a voice. Feeling much better and hope to make plans to return soon. Let’s discuss, when we can talk on the phone. Meanwhile, though, there’s serious mother-daughter bonding going on here—all to the good. I know you’ll approve. Will explain in detail when I get home. I miss you desperately. Truly, madly, deeply. Thinking of special souvenirs you might like from New York, but hoping the best souvenir will be me. xxxooo Annie
She presses send, then tiptoes into the living room. Her mother is a night owl, sleeping until noon, cosseted by her blackout draperies, her black silk eye mask, and her white-noise machine.
Surprise! Ursula is sitting upright on the sofa, fully dressed, her makeup and hair impeccable, reading the New York Times. “It seems wide-legged trousers are in again,” she informs her daughter. “I find them terribly unflattering. Here”—she peers closer at the pages, nose wrinkled in distaste—“they’re paired with cropped tops that expose the navel. Really, who can carry off such styles except teenagers?” She looks up. “A restful night?”
“Very. I feel so much better. How about you? You’re up early.”
“I refuse to fritter away any mother-daughter moments in the arms of Morpheus. Besides, now that you have been staying with me, I find myself turning in somewhat earlier than is my usual modus operandi.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. In fact, I owe it all to you that those dreadful bags under my eyes have entirely vanished. Which means I no longer have to recline for an hour every day with cucumber slices on my lids.” She folds up the newspaper and sets it on the coffee table. “It’s rather mild for the end of February. I thought we might have a brisk walk in the park—or as brisk as you feel up to—before we go t
o see James.”
Even though she’s three states south, Annie dresses for a Maine winter: sweater, turtleneck, tights, corduroys, two sets of socks. While Ursula fusses with her own wardrobe—what scarf matches what gloves match what hat—Annie returns to the bedroom and phones Sam at work. It’s not Sam’s voice but Megan’s that announces “Annie’s Samwich Shop.” Annie’s shoulders sink with disappointment. She leans against the bed. In the background, she catches the rattle of cups and dishes, the burble of the coffee machine, the broad-vowel chatter of the regulars.
“Hey, stranger,” Megan says. “You sound like you have a cold.”
“It was pretty bad, but I’m on the mend. Can I speak to Sam?”
“Whoops. You just missed him.”
“Where …” she begins, then stops. She doesn’t want Megan to think she’s one of those wives who track their husbands like an on-the-case sleuth. Or a female Sam. “I called to tell him I’ll be coming home by the end of the week,” she explains.
“Phew,” Megan says. “That’s good news.” Just a second. You’re next, she informs a complaining customer. “He’ll be totally relieved,” she tells Annie.
“I hope so. How are things in the shop?”
“Hanging in there. But we’re all kind of lost without you.”
Before she can savor this sentence or ponder the collective we versus the singular he, a woman’s voice shouts, Coffee with half-and-half. They’re in a rush, accompanied by the screech of sliding plates, clumping footsteps, the tap of a knife against the cutting board.
“Sorry, Annie,” Megan says now. “It seems like the whole town has just burst through the door.”
“I’ll leave you to it. Will you let Sam know I called?”
“Glad to. See you soon.”
“And give him my love,” she adds, but Megan has already hung up the phone.
* * *
The minute she and Ursula step outside, Annie feels like an animal released from captivity. She and Ursula walk hip to hip, her multilayered arm linked through Ursula’s mink-swathed one. They cross Fifth Avenue and enter the park near the skating rink. “Shall we watch for a while?” Ursula suggests.
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