Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  Over the years, when meeting her mother’s friends, Laura was aware that she was not what they expected, perhaps a disappointment, and it made her feel bad about herself. Today, however, her natural reserve and sober disposition suited the occasion, and she didn’t feel as though she had anything to prove. She sensed that people were impressed by her quiet dignity, her restraint and composure.

  At one point Laura got trapped by a man who was talking much too loudly, standing much too close, his breath smelling of scotch and ham. When she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, a female guest came along and rescued her.

  She was older than Laura, possibly in her sixties. “It must be exhausting,” the woman said, “being the receptacle for everyone’s feelings for your mother.”

  Interpreting this as an apologetic preface to her own monologue about Bibs, Laura smiled and waited for her to begin, but instead the woman continued on this train of thought.

  “It doesn’t leave much room for you own feelings,” she reflected. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but there was something arresting about her face. It was her eyes, Laura decided, which were as blue as they come. She didn’t color her hair or wear any makeup.

  “It doesn’t,” Laura agreed. She hadn’t thought of it that way, but it explained the fact that she hadn’t cried at the service. She’d told herself she’d held it in for Emma’s sake, but the truth was she’d been numb. All week she’d been unable to feel anything.

  She was about to thank this woman for her helpful insight, when along came Stephanie. “Excuse me while I borrow Laura for a moment,” she said.

  “Your father’s still not here,” Stephanie gravely informed her. She looked annoyed by Laura’s unfazed shrug. “People are asking for him and I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you last saw him over there,” Laura pointed vaguely into the crowd.

  Stephanie looked unsatisfied but nodded. “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

  Laura glanced over her shoulder, but the woman was gone. She hadn’t gotten her name.

  The afternoon dragged on.

  Emma appeared, sporting a Coca-Cola mustache. “I’m bored and I have a stomachache,” she announced. “When can we go home?”

  “Not until the end, I’m afraid,” Laura told her. “Why don’t you go play with Baby Nick.”

  “Not allowed.” Emma crossed her arms and let out a defiant sigh. “Stephanie said I was too hyper.”

  Laura glanced across the room to where Stephanie was keeping vigil over her son’s stroller.

  “Nick-Nick-Nick-Nick, Nick-Nick-Nick-Nick,” Emma sang, “Nickel-o-de-on.”

  “Remember, Stephanie doesn’t like that song,” Laura said.

  “It’s not a song,” Emma said. “Can we go to Jackson Hole for dinner?”

  “I suppose so, when it’s time to leave.”

  “Yesss.” Emma made a fist and pulled her arm toward her chest before dashing off.

  Laura spotted the woman across the room. She was wearing a coat and appeared to be on her way out. Laura felt a twinge of panic—at the very least she wanted to find out her name.

  The crowd had started to thin, but this only made it more difficult for Laura to navigate her way across the room because she was more visible. Every step she took there was another person wanting a word with her. One of these people was the minister.

  “Laura,” he said, and, in the manner of an old friend, clasped both of her hands in his.

  Laura nodded respectfully and waited to be released, but the minister was in no rush to move on. Her parents’ relationship with the church was based on its convenient location, social affiliation, and their ability to pay its annual suggested dues and then some. This particular minister had officiated a handful of ceremonies Laura had attended over the years, but they’d been formally introduced only that morning. No history or connection existed between the two of them; that he insisted on pretending otherwise stripped him of any spiritual credibility, even integrity, in Laura’s opinion. Moreover, a while ago he had left the church to return to his previous occupation as an auctioneer for Christie’s, only to come back a year or two later, telling the Times, in a write-up about his career switch, that the two professions “aren’t really all that different.”

  “The service was beautiful,” Laura told the minister, when he persisted in standing there, pretending they were having a moment. “Thank you.”

  “It was a privilege,” he said. “She was an extraordinary woman.”

  Laura was eager to extract herself from his holy presence when someone tapped her on the shoulder. Again the woman had rescued her!

  Her name was Philomena, but she told Laura to call her Phil.

  * * *

  SATURDAY EVENING FAMILY DINNERS AT 136 had been Laura’s idea, but she soon realized they were unnecessary. Douglas was not lacking for company. On the contrary, widowers were constantly invited out, and in return her father routinely hosted weeknight dinner parties for friends and business associates. These were frequent enough that Sandra couldn’t be bothered to adjust the wings of the dining room table to accommodate their smaller family meals, and so there was too much space between their chairs, especially tonight, as Emma had been invited to spend the weekend at a classmate’s country house. Nick Jr. was at home with Colette, his nineteen-year-old Parisian au pair. It was just the four of them: Laura, Nicholas, Stephanie, and Douglas—with Sandra periodically bursting through the swinging door to survey their progress and see if it was time to start clearing.

  Laura saw them through Sandra’s eyes, and it was a vaguely tragic image; there was an unnatural formality to the way they addressed one another, and with Bibs gone, it was more obvious than ever that they took no joy or even comfort in each other’s company. Stephanie made a valiant effort to fill the silences, but her attempts to generate a group conversation were rarely successful. After all these years of being married to Nicholas she was still an outsider, and her attempts to ingratiate herself to their family more often rendered their differences more pronounced. Laura felt like they were characters in a play about WASPs—a satirical production that yielded no new insights, just desiccated clichés. She imagined an Upper West Side Jewish audience getting bored and leaving before intermission.

  At seven-forty-five the brass clock on the mantel chimed, and Stephanie remarked what a nice clock it was—a one-of-a-kind antique, I’ve always meant to ask where it came from. Douglas shrugged absently, and Stephanie smiled stupidly, oblivious to her faux pas. To fawn over a particular object felt like an appeal to Douglas’s pride of ownership, his material vanity, and that wasn’t the nature of his relationship to possessions. Most of their things had been passively acquired, passed down from the previous generation; their existence felt as arbitrary and predetermined as height and eye color.

  As Laura strived to come up with a way to validate Stephanie’s comment about the clock, her father stood up and walked over to the mantel, picked up the clock, and carried it back to the table.

  “Take it home with you,” he said, placing it by Stephanie, who looked thrilled and mortified.

  “I couldn’t,” she balked.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor,” Douglas grumbled. “It’s always driven me nuts, the sound of that clock.”

  “Mom, too,” Nicholas said. “Ding-dong, one hour older, one hour closer to death!” He smiled at his own impersonation.

  “Maybe you would like to have it,” Stephanie said, looking at Laura, who was not smiling.

  “No, no, you take it,” Laura said, and stood up to help Sandra clear the dishes.

  For as long as she could remember, that clock had lived on the mantel. It had felt like an organic extension of the marble, its meticulous tick-tock the pulse of the house. From there on, every time she stepped in the front door of 136, she was momentarily unnerved by the silence.

  * * *

  PHIL LIVED WITH HER DOG on a houseboat in the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin off the West Side H
ighway. It was a temporary situation. She’d recently gotten divorced and wasn’t ready to commit to a new apartment. Maybe she never would, maybe she would move to San Francisco or Barcelona. She wasn’t sure what the future had in store for her. Right now she was enjoying her new life. Her freedom.

  He hadn’t liked to do things, Phil’s ex. Wasn’t interested in trying new food, didn’t appreciate travel or art, wasn’t curious about the world. “A creature of routine and habit,” she summed him up. “No appetite for life.”

  Phil volunteered all this as they waited in line to get their buttons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now it was Laura’s turn to speak. She asked how Phil had known Bibs.

  “From group,” Phil said.

  “Group?” Laura repeated.

  “With Dr. Clarke,” she added. “She only joined last January, but before that we had back-to-back individual sessions on Thursday mornings, so I’d been crossing paths with her for years.”

  “I see,” Laura said.

  “What’s your star sign?” Phil asked, as they headed toward the American Wing.

  “I believe I’m a Virgo,” Laura said.

  “Believe?” Phil repeated, incredulous that one wouldn’t know for certain.

  “I’ve never paid attention to any of that stuff,” Laura admitted.

  “You know, I credit your mother for my freedom,” Phil told her. “We would talk about our marriages and she would say, ‘It’s too late for me, Phil, I’m an old lady, but you have a chance of finding the real thing out there.’ ” Laura was surprised Phil thought it was appropriate to share this with Laura—that it was something she’d want to hear. She cringed to think at what else Bibs might have disclosed to this roomful of strangers.

  Phil shook her head and smiled. “Which I always thought ridiculous because she was only . . . not that much older than me. Not to mention extremely beautiful.”

  As she said this last thing Phil looked at Laura in a way that conveyed the compliment extended to her, and Laura smiled and nodded, though the whole thing made her very uncomfortable.

  When they’d met at her mother’s service, Laura had had the feeling of being in the presence of someone who saw her exactly for who she was, who possessed a certain wisdom and maturity. In the days leading up to this Saturday at the museum, she’d been animated by foolish expectations of a potential friendship. But this woman was not the person Laura had imagined her to be.

  “She was quite a woman, your mother,” Phil carried on. “Whatever it is that governs our inner child and dictates how we behave as we get older, your mother had a deficit of that, which enabled her to say exactly what was on her mind, eschew social conventions, fully inhabit her emotions, to live a life uncompromised by shame or anxiety or self-doubt. She truly knew how to be present.”

  Was this how people spoke in group therapy? The words sounded lifted from the pages of a psychology manual, Laura thought.

  “To be around her,” Phil continued, “just for an hour a week, made it harder and harder to go to this man who did not inspire me . . .”

  “This has always been one of my favorites,” Laura said, pointing to a painting that, in truth, she’d never seen before. It was of Central Park in the nineteenth century, and featured a group of children sledding at dusk. From their various poses you could imagine the sort of adults they would grow up to be. Some of the children went belly-down headfirst; others took a more cautious approach, straddling their toboggans, dragging their feet along the sides to slow their descent. Some slid down in pairs, the one in the back clutching the one in the front.

  The painting’s inscription didn’t specify the exact location, but Laura was almost positive it was Dog Hill, above the Seventy-second Street entrance. She shared this with Phil, and then felt silly when she neither affirmed nor disputed her hunch.

  “And what does it do for you, this painting?” she asked. “What does it trigger, what does it say?”

  Laura didn’t know how to respond. There was the tranquil beauty of Central Park in the snow, the yesteryear simplicity of the activity, but there was more to it than that. On the painting’s lower-right quadrant, a toddler held a string attached to a red toboggan. She seemed unsure of what to do with it—as though she were waiting for it to make the first move. Off to the side, her mother leaned against a tree, ankles crossed, lost in contemplation. The contrast of their inert figures amidst this swirl of activity unspooled a series of dark thoughts, at the center of which was a question the painter had surely not meant to inspire: What was the point of it all?

  In Laura’s childhood, her mother had had dark moods where she’d ask questions like this and Laura wouldn’t know what to say. Once Douglas had come into the room and sat beside her on the bed. Taking his wife’s hand in his own, he’d recited a fragment of a poem:

  Comb your hair, comb your hair

  Don’t you worry about despair

  Despair is a strange disease

  I think it happens even to trees

  It was one of the more tender moments Laura had witnessed of her parents’ marriage, and remembering it now, it brought tears to her eyes.

  “Life is meant to be enjoyed,” Phil answered for herself. “That’s what this painting says to me.”

  * * *

  LAURA WAS GOING TO INVOLVE Emma in the disposal of Bibs’s ashes, but she’d changed her mind. Emma, being Emma, would become so overwhelmed with emotions that it would be impossible for Laura to feel anything herself. She wondered if it was selfish, but she’d arranged for Emma to spend the afternoon with a classmate, and, after leaving work at the usual time, Laura headed alone to Central Park.

  It was November—her favorite month. The sky was low and gray and it was the coldest day of the season so far. There weren’t many people out, but there was a sense of habitual activity beneath the surface of things, the plucky endurance of the natural world. Squirrels scuttled about in feverish pursuit of chestnuts and acorns, occasionally pausing in the middle of the path, as if paralyzed by a sudden troubling thought, before abruptly springing back to life, reversing course, and scampering up trees, their cheeks loaded with loot. The air felt clean and decadent with the sweet rot of leaves and the occasional whiff of horse manure. Stripped bare, the arched limbs of the London plane trees that lined the pedestrian walkways appeared in whimsical harmony, like the arms and legs of a procession of ballerinas, choreographed to achieve such an effect.

  Laura hadn’t had a specific location in mind for the scattering of the ashes, but now an idea came to her, which was to divvy them up among Bibs’s favorite spots—to “sprinkle hither and thither,” as The Moosewood Cookbook would say.

  The Boat Pond was deserted. To be outside in Manhattan and not see a single other person! Laura paused by the Alice in Wonderland statue to savor the novelty of it. The buildings that were visible along the perimeter of the park were all prewar; from where she stood, it could be any decade. It felt like the right place to begin.

  Laura had just procured the canister from her tote bag when she noticed a man in a trench coat walking in her direction. Her irritation was short-lived when she realized who it was.

  Laura had seen Woody Allen in the neighborhood before, most memorably when he’d arrived at a restaurant where she and Bibs had met for lunch. (Bibs had tried to make them switch seats so Laura would be visible to him, insisting she was “his type.” When Laura had protested, citing the fact that he was currently involved with Mia Farrow, Bibs had clarified that she’d meant the type of actress he cast in his movies.)

  To see him today, however, and of all occasions! Laura didn’t believe in such things, but this felt like too much of a coincidence: being alone at the Boat Pond with her mother’s ashes, with Woody Allen strolling by at the precise moment she was about to open the lid. Like finding the old-fashioned kind of penny or a four-leaf clover, it was a good omen, an auspicious nod from the universe.

  But as he got closer, she saw it wasn’t Woody Allen—just a small man
with similar glasses. Her disappointment robbed the moment of its spiritual charge, and Laura slipped the canister back into her bag and moved on.

  Immobile, the carousel didn’t feel like an inspired location, nor did the Bethesda Fountain, which had been shut off. Laura tried a few other beloved spots, but none sparked the feelings she’d hoped they would summon. Perhaps it would make more sense to do this in April—Bibs’s favorite month.

  And so she left the park, her bag as heavy as when she’d arrived.

  * * *

  BIBS’S PARENTS HAD DIED TOGETHER in a boating mishap in their sixties. In the wake of the accident, ownership of Round Bush, the Long Island estate where Bibs had grown up, had been transferred to her eldest brother, Percy. Bibs thought this was unfair and lawyers had gotten involved, but in the end the court ruled in Percy’s favor.

  Laura was sad when Bibs forbade them to have any contact with Percy moving forward, not for the loss of her uncle, whom she didn’t really know, but that she would never again be able to visit Round Bush.

  It was called Round Bush because there was a bush in the middle of the circular driveway, and it was round. Laura had always thought it was an informal, family nickname, so she was surprised to see it was her uncle’s address in the Social Register: “Round Bush, Locust Valley.” Just that, no house number.

  She’d looked up his listing a few weeks after Bibs died, but it was several months before she screwed up the nerve to dial it. So as not to get Emma emotionally worked up, Laura told her they were going to see relatives, but didn’t mention they lived in what had been Bibs’s childhood home.

  “It’s like a hotel,” Emma said as they pulled up to the house, a rambling Tudor covered with ivy. Percy’s wife, Emma, had found the house too large, and the east wing had been demolished. Apart from this, it was just how Laura remembered from her visits there as a child. She was amazed to see that her grandmother’s parrot, Arthur, was still alive. He had been trained to say two things: “Hello” and “Vote Republican.” According to Emma, he’d just gone in for his annual checkup, and at sixty-two had been declared in perfect health.