Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  Hams had married a woman, aptly named Misty, who had flirted with Scientology, but now they were both in a Brazilian religion that Lorna gathered had something to do with sacrificing goats and enabled you to fix your vacuum cleaner with beams radiating from your hand. Peggy had seen Misty do it.

  Misty and Hams were expecting a baby, their first. Misty, though she’d done graduate study in psychology, worked in a dry cleaner’s. Lorna had always found Misty a little scary, with her several piercings and hair dyed a startling red not found in nature, a look widespread in their East Bay set. Lorna also found it hard to imagine someone with those nose rings and studded eyebrows pushing a baby stroller, but knew she was old-fashioned, and that Misty was at bottom a normal middle-class girl. She also knew Misty and Hams would need help with the baby and asked herself how she could help when the time came.

  After Peggy, she telephoned Hams. Not home. However much she loved him, she was slightly relieved not to get him on the phone, as Hams always had some problem to discuss that was usually expensive and beyond her means to help, especially now, with life on a shoestring. Though helping him, and her other children, was her principal resolve.

  4

  Who was it who said, “Brighten the corner where you are?”

  Lorna’s daughter, Peggy Willover, sitting in her patio in Ukiah, had been engaged in trying to help Mother’s book along when she got Lorna’s call. She had had a sense that things hadn’t been going well in Pont-les-Puits, so she wasn’t entirely surprised at Lorna’s news now from New York. After her divorce from Father, nearly twenty-five years ago, Mother had enacted the fantasies of freedom and glamour her children themselves were too busy to fulfill, and shortly, very unwisely from a career point of view, Mother had married a Frenchman. It had seemed that her future would be French, and the horizons of the family had expanded in the delightful direction of soirées and cassoulets, though the children had worried that Lorna might be becoming Eurotrash, the sly suggestion put forth by their father, Lorna’s first husband, Ran.

  Once installed in France, till now Lorna had given the family no warning signs of trouble, but had lived in domestic harmony in a remote village in southeastern France, welcoming them in vacation periods and whenever they could come. Now the downsides of her return rained on Peggy like a shower of arrows: Mother without a husband at her age, nor money—was it a health problem? What really was the matter?

  She and Lorna talked a bit longer, and then Peggy went back to what she’d been doing with a renewed sense of its importance. She had been writing on Amazon, under various names, reviews of Mother’s recently published book: Painters Despised. The first review began “I heard one of Lorna Mott Dumas’s wonderful lectures a few years ago, and it changed my life. It turned me into an art lover and an art history buff! She’s a fantastic scholar. I’m thrilled that her talks are now being printed as a book.”

  “Having loved Mrs. Dumas’s lectures since I heard them once in Baltimore, I rejoice to have a print copy, especially her essay about the small Redon landscapes, and also her work on the neglected painter Ernest Meissonier…”

  She’d already forwarded that one to a friend, Nellie L. Brown, to sign and send from Los Angeles, in case Amazon could somehow tell if all the reviews were coming from the same computer or the same city. Could they? She cranked out a few more paragraphs, planning to forward a third letter to her brother’s wife Donna to send from San Francisco.

  Privately, she had always been afraid her mother’s lectures might be light and superficial. She didn’t herself feel competent to judge, but she found embarrassing the stagy English voice, well-rehearsed poise, and theatrical gestures with which Lorna delivered them, on the podium so unlike the real-life woman and far from motherly, a transformation that unsettled Peggy even at her age. Onstage, Mother’s voice acquired an unfamiliar resonance, and her gestures had a practiced confidence, as if, were you to stop her and she had to start over, they would come out exactly the same each time, same flutter of the hand by her left ear accompanying certain phrases, evolving to a dramatic, emphatic finger-pointing at the audience, a gesture possibly learned from watching YouTube videos of the historic British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Peggy and her siblings had seen Lorna watching Mrs. Thatcher on tape over and over, a scene of the Iron Lady confronting a coal-mining official, and they were pretty sure this is where the voice and gestures came from.

  Peggy didn’t tell her mother she was writing these reviews, because Lorna would definitely forbid it, even though she wouldn’t be displeased. A related scruple kept Peggy from checking to see whether her reviews had ever been posted by Amazon; she just flung them out spontaneously like broadcast seeds, hoping one would flourish in the vast Internet topsoil and start some crop of virus in behalf of Lorna’s book. They all, the whole family, badly needed money, they seemed hopeless about this commodity, and Peggy, she knew herself, was among the worst. Well, their father didn’t need money, of course, married as he was to a Silicon Valley millionairess.

  Now to the Weekly Standard’s art critic, in the guise of Lorna herself:

  “Sir, I am not confident enough to imagine you have heard of my work, but I’m encouraged to send you this copy of my recently published lectures by your continuing defense of painters that I too have championed, Meissonier among them—perhaps you will like my observations about the realism of his equestrian painting, nothing finer since Bonheur, and so much better than the more admired Stubbs, if one can compare French and English painters…”

  She went on a little in this vein, borderline plagiarizing from a Victorian novel she was reading and from her mother’s own text. Here she signed her mother’s name and just hoped Mother would never find out. She began another: “Dear Mr. Silvers…” She signed this review with her own name, Margaret M. Willover, but omitted spelling out her maiden name, Mott, so that the connection with her mother wouldn’t be too obvious. She didn’t want to deceive, exactly—Amazon could easily look up the M in Margaret M. Willover. She thought it unlikely that Mother would find out about any of these efforts on her behalf. Lorna claimed to scorn social media, as was probably true for many in her demographic, though in Peggy’s view, if Lorna was coming back on the career track, she really ought to apply herself and master some Facebook skills.

  To look at, Mother didn’t seem as though she belonged to an older, Facebook-challenged generation: she was slender, unlined, and lively, with pretty, tasteful, auburn–light brown hair and skirts of a fashionable length. Peggy couldn’t help but have the sudden, culpably material realization that one consequence of Mother’s unexpected rupture with her French husband was that she would no longer be able to pass along some of her terrific Paris clothes to the taller Peggy, who had to let down the hems on ones that she planned to wear herself, but the rest she sold on a website, the RealSteal, where she conducted her little Internet business, and did well with French designer clothes. “Givenchy jacket, navy blue, size 36, only worn twice.”

  She was sorry to think that now that wardrobe perk was probably gone.

  * * *

  —

  Her reviews finished, Peggy sat a bit longer on her patio, thinking about Mother’s Paris clothes. Peggy never bought herself clothes. She lived frugally in her little house in Ukiah and had nothing but worries, the newest of which was something she’d signed yesterday, almost immediately knowing she shouldn’t have: a loan application; it sounded like a miracle the way the man had explained it. He’d come to the door, like a hobo, which ought to have been a warning sign, but she’d viewed it as a godsend, given her troubles with house payments, Julie’s tuition, one or two personal bills for craft equipment she expected eventually would pay for itself but was meantime nearly five thousand dollars, and trouble with just day-to-day life.

  “We look up people recently divorced,” he said. “We figure they could usually use some help. Our aim is to help people.”<
br />
  Sure it was. She saw it now. Who believes in disinterested philanthropy? Now that it was probably too late, the thing was signed, harnessing her to an unbelievable, extortionate interest rate, foreclosure if she defaulted, clauses that seemed to have written themselves onto the pages after it was signed. She had tried so hard to avoid depending on her father or, rather, her father’s rich wife, but maybe she’d have to ask them for a lawyer or something.

  The money situation with Father was complicated—he didn’t mind helping Peggy and her siblings, but out of pride they avoided asking for help. For one thing, they didn’t want his rich wife Amy to think they were hopeless, even if they were.

  She’d gone back to hemming batik scarves, with her cell phone beside her, and was surprised to get another long-distance call, this time from France, from the American Consular Services in Marseille, asking for her mother. Peggy explained that Lorna was not there but was expected in a day or two.

  “J’appelle au sujet of the American painter Russell Woods.” The person on the other end explained in franglais that Woods, whose posthumous fame was one of those art market phenomena—his work going from nothing to the hundreds of thousands in value—had originally been buried at the expense of the ville de Pont-les-Puits, and as the practical woman secretary of the conseil, Madame Barbara Levier, who served as mayor and financial officer of the village and was also the pharmacist, had seen a chance to recoup some of their investment, now that they had understood that Woods was somehow the property of, was connected to, Madame Dumas, the other American in town.

  Madame Levier had got Lorna’s address c/o Peggy from Monsieur Dumas and had begun preparing the papers detailing what Lorna would be obliged to pay to rescue Woods’s bones, with the expense of identifying them once they had the DNA of his relatives. She understood that Madame Dumas was not a blood relative, no use in that quarter, but she might know of some relative, someone’s cheek to swab, whom they had not been able to find at the time of Woods’s death. In the meantime, faute de mieux, Madame Lorna Dumas had been designated next of kin for legal purposes, and Monsieur Dumas had given them an address he thought might work for her, and her phone number chez Madame Willover. Armand-Loup had also given them Peggy’s email, mentioning that, as his soon-to-be-former wife Lorna was okay with email but always forgot to charge her cell phone, they might be better off emailing. Instead, Madame Levier, hoping to avoid the pitfalls of English both written and spoken, had enlisted the cooperation of the cultural attaché in Aix en Provence.

  “When we are told about the death of an American in our consular district,” said the consular voice in a heavy, French, Inspector Clouseau accent, causing Peggy at first to suspect some kind of prank, “vee get in touch wiz zee next of kin of the deceased, vee contact zat person by telephone immediately. Only now it isn’t so urgent, parce que la personne has been dead for four years. But there are several important things that the next of kin must do in conjunction with the SCS unit that were never done for Monsieur Woods and thus must be done now before he can be reburied. Technically it is as if he were never buried, if you see…”

  “But my mother is not next of kin to anyone called Russell Woods,” Peggy protested.

  “Si, si, we have her name.”

  “Can I have my mother call you?”

  “Oui, bien sûr, without delay,” said the consular official. “His bones may be identified at any time, and then all haste to do the proper burial. After the DNA analysis, which could take some time…”

  Peggy found this conversation confusing, but carefully wrote down the string of phone numbers and promised to leave a message for Lorna, if and when her mother next got in touch.

  5

  There is no ego more fragile than that of a newly published author.

  Before leaving for California, Lorna spent another day in New York, stopping in at Rudolph Lang Cie Art Publications to sign some copies of her book, Painters Despised. These were not visible in the window with their other newly issued titles, so, pink with diffidence, she asked a salesperson if they had it. “It just came out, and I thought I could sign some copies.”

  They were startled to see her; they had trouble dissimulating the fact that the copies were still in the storeroom, even though the publication was recent. “Probably ran out,” they said mendaciously. “So nice to see you, Mrs. Dumas. I expect they are in the stockroom, ready to be shipped. Reorders.”

  In the stockroom, a few boxes were found. Lorna was full of chagrin about having overestimated the degree Rudolph Lang Cie Art Publications would be glad to see her, was ashamed to have embarrassed them, was embarrassed herself to have thought her book mattered at all: she understood that nowadays the public lecture was a bit out of fashion, what with videos and the Internet, and she had found, when she began rather furtively to weigh getting back into circulation, that people had changed; they were jaded by PowerPoint, and preferred YouTube’s blotchy, primitive nineteenth-century film footage of women in big hats at garden parties and bearded old Impressionists in undershirts darting jerkily in and out of the frames. Was the essay, with the lecture, a doomed form? Should she try to find a better publisher? It was all a blow to her newly reestablished but fragile self-esteem.

  * * *

  —

  Things would be more welcoming in California. As her plane neared San Francisco, Lorna’s thoughts left the problems of publishing to fasten on the new set of concerns generated by her personal situation and the reunion with her children, toward whom she felt a normal amount of guilt. Though they were all functioning adults, Lorna couldn’t rid herself of the belief that, without her career, her children would all starve, not literally, obviously, but they had expensive, adult problems—mortgages, medical costs, private-school tuition for their children—and she had always tried to help but felt she should have done more because their father did so little.

  Helping them financially had been her mission for years, until their father had married the mega-rich princess and, she had assumed, would also help them. Her fears were rendered a little amères with the idea of her ex-husband Ran’s smug prosperity or, to look at it frankly, huge wealth. Her fears returned when she saw that he was stingy about helping his children with her because he had this new family—new wife and new child, who must be about fifteen now.

  His new wife was Amy Hawkins, who in her twenties had invested cleverly with some techie friends in Silicon Valley and rather improbably amassed a fortune of millions. With it, she had gone to France to study civilization, something she felt she’d missed out on by focusing too much on the computer screen. She was now over fifty, with a husband—the impressive, cultivated Randall Mott—a child, and many amenities of life, and she had the grace to enjoy and appreciate them. Lorna had never seen her and privately thought that Amy, if not Ran, could be a little more generous to Ran’s children with Lorna.

  * * *

  —

  These thoughts became more immediate as her plane made its approach to San Francisco, sank gracefully to the runway, and barreled along past the salt ponds and parked jets to the gate. Luckily she had a place to go, an apartment her old friend Pam Linden was lending her while she looked for a long-term place. All at once she felt less optimism than before. Or, reassurance mixed with defeat, for coming back to where you started is not what you plan when you start out. When you were much younger. To reinforce this feeling of rootless destitution, the airline had lost her bags between Paris and New York and had promised to send them around when they were found. But lost bags were not enough to reduce her pleasure to see the San Francisco Bay, the pinkish sky and rosy salt ponds.

  She took a taxi from the airport, noting the changes to the San Francisco skyline, changed even since her last visit to sit at Curt’s bedside, maybe ten months ago? Skyscrapers seemed to sprout like beans, overnight. The sight of her native city, like the face of a loved one, despite an unexplained
shabbiness she hadn’t noted before, induced a deeply reassuring return of confidence. San Francisco always looked both familiar and unfamiliar because the light was changeable, and a skyscraper or two had always been added to the panorama.

  Lorna had grown up in San Francisco, but with living all those years in France, her visits to California to see her children and other family members, and of course during Curt’s illness, were not enough to keep her current on the changes to the skyline. Now she was too tired to feel culture shock, or the ambiguous pleasure of being back in her native city; she had only a sense of disorientation, and a surprising, vestigial ability to cope with American transportation, getting herself from New York home to San Francisco and in a few days to Bakersfield. Of course it would be wonderful to see her children, despite their various situations.

  As she passed through the city, her heart warmed with joy, despite things she hadn’t remembered—a few shops newly shuttered, peeling paint, men lying here and there on street corners as she passed. This could not be normal. Of course the nation had just gone through a financial crash; she shouldn’t forget that. She told herself, it was wonderful to be in America, and especially California, which was not like other places, there was nothing like it, though it was hard to say this was a positive; the San Francisco weather was very similar to London’s, and the hills made it unwalkable for many, and it had nowhere near the abundant museums and theatrical events of even the smallest European city. At least she knew where she was, and what to expect, or rather what not to expect—trouble—here safely outside the zones of international conflict and important media events, where all disputes were local and real-estate related.