Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  Julie was the only child of Lorna’s only daughter, Peggy, and Peggy’s ex-husband, Dick Willover, a rather Ran-like man, in Lorna’s view; she thought him, though attractive, assertive and cheap. They do say that girls marry their fathers, at least the first time, and in Dick Willover, Peggy had done that, maybe even a slightly worse version—in Lorna’s view. Lorna and Ran had loved Dick at first.

  Julie was finishing her sophomore year at Berkeley, majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS). (“Fuck-all knows what that might be,” Dick had protested, when asked to pay for Julie’s college, “let her do something practical and then I’ll cough up.”) Peggy’s divorce settlement had not required him to do so.

  Dick Willover, an avid tennis player, spent a part of almost every day at the Cal Club and would hang around the bar after his game, picking up stock tips, or just yakking, hail-fellow-well-met. His coming out had not affected his habits or social life in any way, though he had left Peggy for a man seven or eight years before, someone he was no longer with. There was a certain amount of suspense in the family about which was his natural inclination, which the aberration, as he hadn’t taken up with anyone else of either gender since breaking up with Tommy. Peggy had been devastated by what seemed to her as a rejection not only of her person but of her whole sex. She was only now beginning to feel some return of confidence in herself as a woman. Julie had accepted her parents’ divorce as part of the times.

  Dick was an architect, the author of the reliably selling guidebook Bridges of the World. He was also a devout Episcopalian—perhaps explaining Julie’s bent toward the Circle of Faith, some gene-driven inclination toward spirituality or good works. He was known for his good works and goodwill, except toward Peggy. The court had not insisted he give her any money, and he didn’t, figuring that since she got the house in Ukiah, that was enough. He also didn’t give money to his daughter Julie, except intermittently, though there had been a court order about child support in force till she was eighteen and he had complied with that.

  Julie Willover’s beauty and resolve had been apparent from the time she was a toddler—she was now twenty. One of her earliest resolves had been to get out of Ukiah, California, where she was raised, but till now she had only made it as far as Berkeley, California, and Berkeley was not far enough; hence this plan to go to Greece.

  Julie lived with three roommates in a house they rented together in the Richmond District, and she commuted by BART to the Berkeley campus for her classes, which took an hour each way. She’d managed to work her schedule so she only had to do the trip three times a week, and the other days she worked part-time at Macy’s. She hoped to be kept on in some temp capacity or other throughout the summer, and had been interviewed for the billing office. She knew she was spread a little thin when her grades had dipped in the winter semester, but she needed the money, so what was the alternative?

  Her hapless (in Julie’s view) mother Peggy would have liked to help with the Greek project, but couldn’t see why Julie needed to go all that way away, and had hoped that she would major in something practical, be a veterinarian, for example, or an athlete; in childhood she’d been wonderful at track. Peggy, as mothers will, had at times indulged a vision of Julie breasting the tape at the Olympics, then harvesting endorsements, being photographed, then moving into modeling or film. It was not even that unrealistic, except that Julie felt no inclination for sports, or animals for that matter, and was strangely indifferent to her own looks, having been gawky as a child, the self-image that remained with her.

  Julie happened to have her brochure from UC about studying in Greece. She’d been showing it at the Circle of Faith. She tucked it into Lorna’s market basket:

  We will be choosing students who are creative, adventurous, and turned on to life. You have to be self-motivated, self-aware, poised, and someone who can forget Self in the service of others. And, yes, grades count too.

  That was Julie to a T. The cost was forty-two hundred dollars for the semester, not including airfare, but including expeditions and side trips, board and room. Could Lorna help?

  Dear Grandma Lorna, this is the program I told you about.

  xoxo Julie

  8

  Hope springs eternal and is sometimes justified.

  Julie’s grandfather, Lorna’s first husband, Randall Mott, had remarried. He and Amy Hawkins, the second wife, a much younger woman who had made a fortune in the dot-com world, lived in the woodsy community of Woodside, down the peninsula, nearer to Palo Alto than to San Francisco, on three acres, in an ivy-covered house older than those that most other dot-com millionaires were given to building themselves, but with a patina of comfort and charm that came only with the decades-old planting, and a purposeful indifference to fashion, with gables, outbuildings, vines. There was a tennis court, a pool fenced in against deer and other animals and toddlers, a stable, and a gabled quadruple garage with a second story and a weather vane atop a little cupola. To the basic house, several rooms had been added in an ell when Ran and Amy’s child, Gilda, was born, for the nanny, for Gilda’s nursery, and a playroom.

  Gilda Mott, Ran and Amy’s daughter, a lovely girl of fifteen, had been born a few months after their marriage and was their only child. Gilda had met but barely knew Papa’s first family, and longed to know them, and loved them from afar, that is, from Woodside, where she, Papa, and Mama lived, thirty miles from San Francisco, in a suburb of lofty trees and the rustic, horsey air of privilege, the scent of pine and oak, large houses discreetly invisible through the landscaping and pool fences.

  Gilda had much to regret—her name, Gilda, pronounced “Zheelda,” a whim of her father’s, mad for Verdi at the time of her birth; her only-child status; and above all her birth defects: she had been diagnosed at the age of seven with childhood diabetes and was obliged to wear a little machine to monitor her blood sugar continuously, an embarrassment every time she felt the gentle buzz against her hip and had to step into the girls’ bathroom to prick her finger; and she often had to go to the hospital—a lot more often than other people.

  Mostly she bore these afflictions with patience, the result of a sweet nature, but sometimes she felt a fiery bubble of resentful tears gather in her chest, with a pressure almost intolerable till it burst and trickled away under the impress of reality: there was nothing she could do. Sometimes she fantasized about letting insulin go wild in her bloodstream so she would lose consciousness and not have to deal with any of it and maybe not wake up.

  Also, by a strange collusion of genes that neither of her normally pigmented parents had been aware of having, she was nearly an albino. Though it gave her very beautiful silvery hair, it also gave her pale eyes with a lashless look—she had experimented with mascara, but it was not allowed at her school—the inability to sit in the sun, and an unearthly walking-dead pallor that made people stare. “Like a vampire,” she said of herself. She had read up on this condition, too—oculocutaneous albinism—and was reassured to learn that unlike diabetes it wouldn’t shorten her life.

  She attended a well-regarded Episcopal girls’ school, Saint Waltraud’s, that did a good job of shielding her from the realities the public schools might have exposed her to, like getting called a freak. Her parents adored her and tried to protect her from every harsh prospect, though she didn’t especially want to be protected. She had read that the life expectancy of childhood diabetics was not very long, but she kept from her parents that she’d ever come upon such a crushing fact, and she tried not to dwell on it herself. She felt alive. Her mother donated heavily to the Children’s Diabetes Foundation and other diabetes-focused charities in the expectation that something would be discovered in time. Gilda expected so too, and hoped so; for it to be otherwise would spoil everything.

  Though he no longer practiced, her father Randall Mott kept up with his medical field. He hadn’t been sorry to close his office for the practice of derm
atology—dermatology had begun to bore him long since (“If it’s wet, dry it out; if it’s dry, moisturize”), and he saw his present role as being more important in the long run, steering his and Amy’s funds toward the right causes, especially medical ones where his expertise counted. And especially toward subspecialty research bearing on diabetes, the horrendous affliction suffered by his child with Amy—his most beloved child by far. The three with Lorna, settled into their more or less unattractive early-middle-aged lives, he had loved with equal ardor when they were little, he supposed, but he couldn’t remember that phase exactly, and the joys of child-rearing, raising that batch, had been compromised by constant friction with Lorna.

  Now he seldom saw them. This was mostly for reasons of geography—Hams in Oakland, across the Bay Bridge, traffic impossibly stop-and-go most of the time; Peggy in Ukiah, obliged to drive through Santa Rosa, also impossibly jammed, also stop-and-go most of the time. And though of course ready to help them if asked, he didn’t feel very involved in their lives. An exception was during Curt’s coma, which brought out both the doctor and concerned parent in him.

  Ran and Amy kept an office/apartment in San Francisco near the Embarcadero, not a medical office but for business or meeting friends up in the city, or where he and Amy could stay over when they went to the opera or a movie. Amy had an office in Menlo Park, too, where she ran her affairs, mostly managing the money she’d amassed investing in early tech start-ups; Ran began each day by driving to San Francisco from Woodside (after the commute hours), reading the papers, then catching up on selected medical periodicals that he subscribed to by mail or online, idly reviewing the general articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and then developments in his specialty of dermatology.

  Ran loved the Woodside house where he lived with Amy and Gilda—it was his love for it that made him force himself to go up to the city and read medical journals every workday, for fear of sinking into the condition he was actually drawn to, that of idle, older househusband of younger rich woman. He needed to elude the pull of this enviable and comfortable state, and the interesting details of Amy’s life, which he tried not to meddle in; she was fully busy with her Silicon Valley–related, mysterious concerns. With his wife so much younger, he needed not to feel old; he played tennis and jogged; and when his gout kicked up, he explained it as a tennis injury.

  * * *

  —

  In a few days, Amy and Ran were to sponsor a fund-raising affair, a dinner to be held after the opera, where half the money, ten thousand dollars a plate, was to go to the opera itself, and half to the Children’s Diabetes Foundation. There was no shortage of people to attend at that price, and the high price ensured that it would have some social cachet. Now that the dot-com generation was beginning to take an interest in civic issues and culture, these fund-raising things were always oversubscribed. Both California senators would be there, and many rich people in San Francisco, the glamorous woman attorney general, and possibly the great diva Anna Katrova Miller, if she wasn’t too tired after her performance (in La Wally).

  It was known by many that the Motts had a seriously diabetic child, though not known whether she was old enough to attend the dinner. Amy herself had no social ambitions, and—Ran admitted to himself—few social graces, and was an unusually forthright person, like many of her Silicon Valley friends. But she valued culture: though Amy Hawkins Mott came out of the dot-com milieu and had kept her many friends there, she had also spent a year or two in France when she was younger and had brought back a certain impatience with the local scale of things, thought the California and Colorado ski areas almost too small to bother with, and took the family to Chamonix in the winters.

  One recent morning Ran had made the drive to San Francisco, fixed his coffee, finished the medical journals, and was just reading the item in the Chronicle about the slipping cemetery of the French village of Pont-les-Puits, an amusing story in itself, featuring, especially, the bones of some saint and of Russell Woods, the painter. The name of the town caught his eye because of his first wife Lorna living there. His view of her had softened over the years; now he understood that during their marriage she had been struggling for her identity—Amy had explained to him about female identity crises. She had no rancor toward the unfortunate Lorna.

  “There she was, stuck at home,” she had sympathetically diagnosed Lorna’s plight in retrospect. “She was overqualified, frustrated. All those little children, no one to help her…” Amy, much younger, had been saved by Silicon Valley, but was well versed in the psychology of the benighted times before women like herself could have interesting professional lives. In Ran’s view, Lorna had been a bitch for sure, and a terrible mother, but even there, with the passage of time and the comforts of affluence, his former rancor had diminished. He didn’t follow her doings and was unaware of her domestic problems, and had assumed she was still over in France, married to the Frenchman.

  Then his granddaughter Julie turned up unexpectedly at his office—Peggy’s daughter, Julie, a nice girl with get-up-and-go whom he was able to steer toward a job. Julie caught him by surprise—he was really not much in touch with his daughter Peggy or her family, though he and Peggy spoke from time to time and he saw her ex-husband Dick Willover at the Cal Club and in summer at the Bohemian Grove. Julie was in college, busy with her life, and Amy hadn’t shown much interest in her, though Amy doted on Curt’s little twins, Marcus and Manuel, and sent them educational gifts, Legos and such.

  Now Julie, Peggy’s only child, was here, a pretty, cheerful-looking girl, who must be a junior in college by now. Taller than her mother—gets that from Dick—with the blondish long hair girls wore now, very pink cheeks, and quite well filled out. A strong girl, he thought.

  “I really hope I’m not disturbing you, Grandpa Ran.”

  “We don’t see enough of you, Julie, tell me what brings you.”

  She’d been a little reluctant to approach her grandfather; she didn’t know him very well. Certainly her mother was afraid of him, or maybe mad at him, and they didn’t see him often. Peggy and her brothers were all kind of estranged. They felt friendly toward each other, as nearly as Julie could tell, but lived too far from one another in the sprawling Bay Area. Toward their father, some resentment that he wasn’t more helpful; but she got up her nerve. No one in the family needed to know she’d seen him. He’d been perfectly nice, welcoming even.

  She had been much younger the last time she saw him, and then he had seemed old, but now, from the perspective of being older herself, she was surprised at his youthful looks—she wasn’t so sure about the golf shirt and khakis. Probably she’d last seen him when she was about seventeen or eighteen, and probably everyone had looked old to her then, but now at twenty she could see he was a nice-looking man, his hair wasn’t even that gray, he looked physically strong and fit, tan like a jogger, only the least little paunch, or not even—not like a grandfather—but she hoped he felt grandfatherly.

  During the interview with Grandpa Ran, Julie mentioned that she hoped her grandmother Lorna would be helping with her study funds, implying that her grandfather would not want to be outdone.

  “Grandma Lorna hasn’t told me yet how much she can spare, but I can prepare a budget to show you both, with all the figures. Airfare, extras.” Suggesting he would want to equal Lorna in generosity. She added that Grandma Lorna was newly returned from France.

  Ran found this kind of blackmail easy to resist. He proposed Julie could earn some money helping the caterers with the opera dinner he and Amy were giving.

  “Okay, great, I’m happy to do that.” She wrote down the details. “Will I wear a uniform? I guess they’ll tell me.” Her enthusiasm reassured him about her sincerity and willingness to work. She was as pretty as her mother Peggy had been at that age, possibly even prettier.

  “I have no idea what caterers pay, but I’m sure it’ll help,” her grandfather said firmly.
“No need to account to me. I’m sure Lorna will appreciate some numbers though,” as though Lorna were the Shylock of grandmothers, mean and exacting. This scared Julie a little, since she didn’t really know Grandma Lorna very well, either.

  9

  Which is worse, to meddle or withdraw?

  Ran Mott, seeing Julie, had not been able to suppress a little feeling of family-related guilt. Earlier that morning he had had a disquieting interview with a former associate of his son Curt’s, who gave his name as Harvey Avon. Avon turned out to be a slight man in his thirties, beginning to bald, wearing jeans and boots and a black T-shirt, the uniform of the tech world. Avon, not bothering with much in the way of introduction, said he was an investor in one of Curt’s start-ups—a system of software-controlled hydroponics, growing things in water without soil, soil which would be in short supply sooner than we think. Avon had an interest in seeing through things Curt had started.

  “I should tell you I know nothing about Curt’s affairs,” Ran warned Avon. What had happened to Curt was heartbreaking enough, though he didn’t say it to this stranger, without the pain of probing in more detail into his life and businesses, to discover either that a great mind had been wasted, or that his son had been a fool, neither something he wanted to know. He’d also been infected with some of Amy’s rich-person wariness about approaches from strangers.

  Harvey Avon spread his hands to express how little Ran’s ignorance mattered. They were used to people not understanding the details of their software innovations, and investors had to depend on their track record, which, if he did say so, was brilliant, especially when Curt had had it in hand. Curt’s accident had left them all in a bad place, bad, bad, bad, but it was great that he was recovering in—Thailand, was it?