Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “Ah…divorcing,” Lorna said. “I’ll have to decide…”

  Here was a new concern; she hadn’t troubled about the details of a divorce—she and Armand-Loup had agreed about him selling his house, and how she wouldn’t ask for support forever. If they did divorce—by consentement mutuel, they didn’t want expensive acrimony. Now she saw she needed advice on this point—support—she was at sea: Where, France or America, was the best place to get a separation including some financial help? She understood that alimony was now a thing of the past, but her generation was used to it, and had not prepared themselves for self-sufficiency. Perhaps judges allowed for age-related deficiencies. She maybe hadn’t internalized the new realities, but she still needed a little money, just for a while, to get her on her feet.

  11

  A love of art is as universal as admiration of fame.

  In France, in Pont-les-Puits, the bibliothèque, which occupied part of the city hall—the mairie—had an exhibition space in which it was planning to hold a display of articles related to the painter Russell Woods, now that he had turned into someone so posthumously famous. He had left his brushes and painting gear in the hotel where he’d lived year in, year out, along with a paint-bespattered windbreaker, a straw hat, some letters and papers; and these would form the basis of a permanent exhibition, the way in other places Van Gogh’s notebooks were shown, or matchbooks Picasso had doodled on.

  These artifacts had come to Mayor Barbara Levier’s notice when they had to open Woods’s boxes looking for something with his DNA on it. Like Madame Grogue, his landlady, who had packed up his stuff after his death, Barbara was not comfortable reading English, so had given no more than a glance at the letters, looking for return addresses or an address book, which could be a source of next-of-kin information. Eventually, English-speaking art experts would come to read Woods’s letters, she supposed, though they hadn’t at the time of poor Monsieur Woods’s death.

  She’d been overjoyed to find an envelope addressed to Lorna Dumas, since Madame Dumas was someone they all knew and could get in touch with. Woods had directed this letter to Lorna’s former French address but had never sent it, its contents a program from an art show in Toulouse. Madame the Mayor planned to forward it now, supposing Monsieur Dumas would have Lorna’s current address. Maybe Lorna would appreciate having a communication from beyond the grave from her old friend Woods, with whom she’d spent a fair amount of time, two Anglophones both interested in art, who found themselves to be the two Americans in a small French town.

  Madame Levier knew Lorna Dumas, the American wife of the respected Monsieur Armand-Loup Dumas. There had been these American wives around town before, although Monsieur Dumas’s earlier two wives had been French. It was too strong to say Madame Levier hated Lorna, but she never liked any of these American wives of French husbands, trying to be more French than the French, inevitably with plenty of money, swanning around being stupid about the simplest things, and they were souillons, slobs, in their jeans like tourists. The cookery Americans who flocked to the village were all right, reverent and cooperative, eager to learn, but the American wives were apt to have a certain triumphalist air—whether to have captured a prize, that is to say, a Frenchman, or proud to have escaped from their own terrible, racist country with its daily lynchings and gunfights, and who could blame them? Their efforts to speak French were pathetic, especially if they’d studied it and prided themselves, because then they thought they knew French and tried slang. The junior-year-abroad types were the worst. To be fair, Madame Dumas gave herself no airs about her French. Madame Levier didn’t like Lorna, but she would have to keep trying to call her, as they needed her in the matter of Monsieur Woods’s bones.

  12

  Family feeling is important if sometimes misplaced.

  For Mother’s dinner, poor Peggy Willover had to drive one hundred fourteen miles down U.S. 101, mostly four-lane, to San Francisco from Ukiah to the north, but once in the city, or, as San Franciscans called it, the City, she’d stay over and sleep on Mother’s sofa, and she could drive Mother the following day to the airport to get her plane to Bakersfield. Peggy was a little spooked; it seemed to her as she pulled out of her garage that she’d seen the loan shark parked across the street. Had he been planning to accost her about starting her payments? Had he been thinking of renewing his hint that if she slept with him, things might go better with her attempt to annul the thing she had unwisely signed? She had thought of a better way out of her contract—she would just not accept the money she’d theoretically borrowed. Then there could be no interest owed, though she’d probably still have some payoff penalty or fees. She’d tell the bank not to accept any automatic deposits in case he tried to force her to accept the money. Could he compel her to take it? Would he sue her?

  Apart from her house worries, she was looking forward to seeing her mother; it had been nearly a year since Lorna’s last visit. Talking to her friends, Peggy had come to realize that, as mothers went, Lorna, though seemingly defective in motherliness, at least had an interesting life, unlike her own. It would be nice to have her in America for a change. Peggy planned to help with the task of apartment hunting, and otherwise to make herself useful if she could, suspecting it was a tough time for Lorna, she was going through something.

  She brought a few letters that had come for Lorna, including, it looked like, one from the French city of Pont-les-Puits, the same people who kept telephoning. Peggy was about fed up with fielding calls from the people in France, who had a tendency to forget the time difference and dial when they got to their offices in the morning, midnight in California. She had taken to putting Lorna’s phone number on her own answering machine and turning off the ring when she went to bed. The result when she listened to her messages in the morning gave her some sense of the turn Lorna’s life there had taken—here were the mayor, agents immobilières, and the cemetery people about Russell Woods’s DNA. The speakers all had parody French accents when they spoke English: “Zees ees Barbara Levier, Pohn-lay-Pwee.” Once, Mother’s husband, Armand-Loup, in his somewhat-British-sounding English, left a brisk message related to a house sale. Poor Mother. Not surprising that she didn’t want to talk about it all. Still, Peggy did wonder what had gone wrong between them. Lorna had been vague, things just not working out, the usual.

  Another of the messages for Lorna had been from Peggy’s sister-in-law, Curt’s wife Donna, gasping strangely, promising “news” when they saw each other, which gave Peggy a stab of elation, for it could only mean good news about Curt, though this was followed by a chill of dread of bad news of some kind. Donna, who had a knack for saying the wrong thing, had a few days earlier planted a new fear in Peggy: about Lorna’s coming home, Donna had said, “Oh, I hope she’s okay. People like to get nearer their children when, you know, they get sick or older.”

  “I haven’t heard she’s sick.”

  “Didn’t her father have early dementia?”

  “Mother is fine,” Peggy said, hoping that was true.

  “What about the husband?”

  “I don’t know,” Peggy had to admit.

  “Women have midlife crises, too, you know. Not just men.”

  Peggy was as usual bemused by her mother and became more than a little worried about what Lorna’s sudden return might portend. When Lorna was safely somewhere else, Peggy and her siblings were reassured that their mother was fine; with her return, the usual considerations people had to face regarding aging parents reared up: Midlife crisis? Or was Lorna ill? Was she getting—odd? Would she get odd in the future? As the daughter, Peggy knew all the care would fall to her, whenever it reared. At least if their father got odd, his rich wife could deal with it.

  She would be appointed the caregiver on account of the banality of her life. Nothing better to do. Dad and his rich wife, Curt and his nearly fatal injury, poor hippie Hams struggling in Oakland—his life was not ba
nal, and he got fun out of his music and being a chef, Peggy imagined. Hers was the only boring life in the family; she knew that but didn’t know how to fix it, or if she even wanted to. She was pretty happy, but knew she’d be happier if she had the energy to do one or more of the things people were always advising—take a dance class or life drawing, join a church group, volunteer for orphans. It was that she felt she took up too much space at a dance class, say—was too tall or too shy—something. Mother, whenever in the country, was always telling her to tint her hair, which was the color that used to be called dishwater blonde. In her heart, she admired her brother Curt for disappearing.

  She wondered what news Donna had for Lorna. Curt’s family didn’t really like Donna—a short MBA from the world of biotech: brittle, overinterested in money, East Coast, but without the possible advantages of East Coast–ness, like a nice island in Maine, or a woodsy camp somewhere with antler chandeliers. Donna was from Delaware—she had an MBA from the school in Philadelphia Curt had seen fit to go to, who knew why, and he’d come back with this degree and a bride, her. Donna was pretty, but not that pretty—that is, not pretty enough to explain Curt’s going to the trouble of importing her to California, and flouting all kinds of unexamined assumptions about a suitable wife. Brown eyes, too, the only brown eyes in the family—until now, their twins, Marcus and Manuel. It had flitted across the family’s mind that Donna could be Jewish, those brown eyes and dark hair…not that that would be anything against her, far from it, “We could use a genetic upgrade,” Peggy had approved. Or Donna could be Hispanic, despite her maiden name Donofrio. Her exotic origins could explain why her reactions were not always in sync with what the rest of them would likely think.

  Donna was a good mother—the twins were cute—but she was overprotective. You could just see the food allergies and tantrums coming on. From the way Donna scoured the floors and—surely apocryphal detail—washed the clothesline; they believed this although no one had clotheslines in Pacific Heights, there was an ordinance. Misty had eventually reminded them it was the prime minister of Israel’s wife, not Donna, who supposedly washed the clotheslines.

  But Dad’s wife, stepmother Amy, liked Donna, presumably because they both came from the tech world and shared a vocabulary of bytes and binaries. She and Amy had long talks about at-home start-ups Donna could create, and an idea Donna had for a product-testing website, though anything she might have got going after the birth of the twins was on hold now because of Curt. Though the others didn’t really like her, they were sorry for her not having some real family in the area, some natural constituency that would mitigate her slightly tense tactlessness. They also thought she was bossy and that she whined.

  “She’s like someone who suffers from an orphan disease,” Peggy once said. “Wanting all the labs to work on her case only.” They did admire her poise and courage during Curt’s coma, given the threat of Curt’s probable death and the consequence, omnipresent and incapable of being mitigated, of foreclosure and ruin. So enormous was Donna and Curt’s mortgage—so beyond any hope given his condition, problem, whatever they were to call it—the only way to live with her situation was to talk about it a lot, with her sister-in-law Peggy, with Hams (she did not get on with Misty), and presumably with her own family, though no one had ever met any of them, in faraway Delaware. The Mott siblings indulged her but considered her a whiner.

  About a year before Curt’s accident, and before the bottom dropped out of the housing market, Curt and Donna had bought a house in Pacific Heights, at Jackson and Spruce, paying too much, as everybody had to do then to get any house at all, and they considered themselves unbelievably blessed to find this one, so exactly what they wanted, with enough bedrooms for their growing family, and enough pretensions to reassure his start-up investors, and a curious resemblance, purely coincidental, to their mother’s house—Armand-Loup’s house—in France; that is, in a French farmhouse style with the giant fireplace in the kitchen, beams, floors of polished terra-cotta, parquet in some rooms, the quintessence of Architectural Digest comfort and charm. Curt and Donna were not candid when it came to disclosing the price except to say they’d gone a little crazy but values would catch up. Mrs. Aymes, their real-estate broker, had advised them to make the stretch. “Even if you have to scrimp a little more now, eventually it will seem like a bargain, this is practically a law of economics,” Ursula had assured them.

  “It is a law of economics,” Curt had said to Donna, “Ponzi’s Law if there’s a crash.” Little had they thought of the kind of crash he would soon experience. Their mortgage payments were more than eighteen thousand dollars a month.

  Since Curt’s accident, Donna knew—was constantly being told—she should sell, but at first she couldn’t give up the belief that Curt was going to wake up soon, and what would it be like to tell him his house was gone and they were homeless, living somewhere like Pacifica or Daly City, and would have to start over? She knew that happened—the news was always showing foreclosed people. The newscasters reported in voices of unctuous sympathy that barely concealed their scorn for people who had overreached or allowed life to treat them badly. People who were living in their cars.

  13

  So many things are begun or settled over family dinners.

  Arriving at Lorna’s friend’s apartment, Peggy braved the faint sneer of the doorman, who took her ancient Subaru off to be parked out of sight, and went up to the tenth floor. Lorna embraced her. Her mother was looking well and no older, Peggy noticed with relief, though it crossed her mind that Mother’s hair color, tinted a very French brownish-reddish gold, a color seldom seen in America, would be hard to duplicate here. Hams and Misty also turned up at Lorna’s (Pam’s) apartment, soon after Peggy got there.

  Lorna found her daughter-in-law Misty as scary looking as ever, with metal rings hanging out of her eyebrows, and now thinner than Lorna had remembered. With the clarity of vision that lasts only a few minutes when you arrive somewhere, before familiarity distorts the reality, Lorna could see her children clearly. She found Peggy no thinner and as badly dressed as ever, and not disguising the gray that was starting—early, it seemed to Lorna—and Hams was suddenly a middle-aged man. She saw he’d put on weight and had the coarsened skin of adulthood and a not-unpleasant male smell.

  Lorna’s heart stirred with motherly concern. What would these people do without her, someday? They’d be fine, of course; she had deserted them once already by going off to France, and they’d been fine. Ambivalence, the most insupportable of states, tore at her, too complicated to be borne. She was grateful that Hams was happy enough, but in the past, their meetings were always tense and involved him asking for things she couldn’t provide, chiefly money and, once, her car, or, when she had the house in France, that she welcome droves of his wandering hippie friends or appear at meetings of the New Age organizations they tended to join and abandon. She blamed herself for his easy, morally fragile, sponging mentality; she feared it was the legacy of her going those few times to EST or those Big Sur spas back in the sixties, before the children were born.

  That had been her ski-bunny phase, but things were so different then. Her own children had never had ski-bunny phases, had moved directly from college into a sort of attenuated form of semi-adult life, except for Hams, who remained stuck in the seventies. Just as the Victorians must have been shocked by the bawdy free-love ways of their parents’ generation of eighteenth-century freethinkers, so Curt, Hams, and Peggy would have been shocked if they knew some of the things their mother and her friends had been up to, before her marriage to their father, of course, and a little bit after it. It was the times. Now no one looking at the polished, soignée art lecturer would imagine a raffish past.

  When Lorna gave them a glass of sherry out of Pam’s drinks cupboard (remember to replace), Misty refused in reproachful tones, adding, “After all, I might be pregnant.”

  “But that’s wonderful! What
great news!” Lorna had a moment of compunction. Would Hams be an adequate father? “In France, they think a glass of wine is okay,” Lorna said. “Here not, I gather.” She’d forgotten the sanctimonious health preoccupations of Americans, which the French derided but ended up emulating.

  “Fetal alcohol syndrome,” Hams explained, as if France, in its ignorance, was rife with it. Would Hams and Misty think of their baby as “the fetus”? Lorna was dismayed to see that Misty seemed to think she would poison her own grandchild, “fetus.”

  “Centuries of mothers have been drinking a glass of wine,” Lorna persisted. “Maybe in the first few weeks…” Her brain whirred. Had she damaged her children’s brains with alcohol? Been a good-enough mother to Hams, that he should turn out to be this shabby person married to a dry-cleaner employee? No, of course she hadn’t been a good mother, she’d been too preoccupied, all those years when his infant soul was yearning for attention and direction…She had mostly learned to manage these floods of remorse that could so suddenly course through her. Her friends all agreed that remorse was a normal, natural part of being a parent and even a grandparent; but peer support could only go so far to assuage it.

  * * *

  —

  As they had put on their coats, needed in the June San Francisco chill, to walk down to the restaurant, Lorna had a moment to glance at the letters Peggy had brought. One from a legal office in Toulouse. She took a quick peek: Armand-Loup had filed some official paper in France, mentioning desertion.

  They walked down Green Street to the Point d’Honeur restaurant. From Jones and Green, in one direction they could see the Bay Bridge ignite its festoons of lights; the city lay in the other; pink infused the sky. Where was it more beautiful than here? Lorna remembered that one of the Hearsts used to live in the brick house there, and the Vietnamese nail salon was no longer where it used to be.