by Rona Jaffe
She looked around. Right in front of her was Uncle Seymour, the silver-haired patriarch of the Miller family, who still ran the store even though he was eighty-one; and his wife, Aunt Iris, who had been a great beauty. Their son Charlie the Perfect ran the store with him, and he was not here today because he was in Europe on business, but their daughter Anna the Perfect was, in her tight little suit and her neat little haircut just like her mother’s. How the other girl cousins had resented, growing up, hearing from their mothers how perfect Anna was!
“Anna is taking dancing lessons,” Olivia’s mother Lila had said in that smug voice she saved for comments about the family, “and she’s such a beautiful dancer they asked her to teach.”
“Mother,” Olivia said, “it’s aerobics.”
Never mind—it was Lila’s family and it was Swan Lake.
Uncle Seymour turned to look at Olivia and gave a little nod, glancing around for Roger. Of course his daughter Anna the Perfect’s husband was there, a dutiful family member, even though he and Olivia had gone through entire parties without exchanging a word, and sometimes she thought he didn’t recognize her.
From the next row of chairs Kenny the chubby heart surgeon, here from Santa Barbara, turned and smiled at her, although his eyes were grave. Olivia smiled back. Looking at Kenny was like looking at an age-progression drawing someone had superimposed on his baby face—it was unreal, imaginary. He would always seem the same to her. He had lost some hair, his nose was bigger, and there were lines, but she still saw the sweet and slightly fey kid she had played with during the long country summers of their childhood.
She remembered how at her mother’s funeral he had hugged her and then unexpectedly said, “You’re my sister.” She had been touched because they were both only children and she hadn’t known he felt that close to her. Now they met only at events of family significance, and occasionally he would call her from California, but she also knew he had been to New York many times to theaters and museums with different girlfriends and never called to say he was in town. Maybe that still meant he was like a brother, maybe that was how some brothers behaved. He did, however, always stop by to pay his respects to Uncle Seymour, which was how she had found out he was there.
Down in the front row she recognized, with a rush of love, her cousin Jenny’s dark curly mop of hair, like a berserk chrysanthemum. When she was young and conflicted about whether or not she ever wanted a child, she used to carry Jenny’s baby picture in her wallet and pretend Jenny was hers. But Jenny was too close in age to be her child—she was more like a little sister. Like Olivia and Kenny, she had no siblings. Their family bred late and infrequently, but Jenny was making up for it, with five children under the age of twelve. Jenny Cooper was the only cousin who had a full-time career and children too; she wouldn’t have it any other way. She and her husband Paul, a professor, were here from Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the day with their oldest two.
The music had changed to something very soft and classical, and then faded away. The small room was full. Their cousin Grady, Aunt Julia’s grandson, got up to deliver the eulogy. Olivia had known him and his younger sister Taylor since they were babies, sent back East from California every year to spend those crowded family summers at Mandelay, when everyone was still alive.
Grady Silverstone was thirty-four, a stuntman, as his father Stan had been; handsome, well built, broad-shouldered, strong and wiry. But there the resemblance ended. Stan had looked like a cowboy, but Grady looked like a Marine. Perhaps Stan would be different today, if he had lived, but it was the way she remembered him. Grady had the posture of someone who had gone to military school, and even though he was a superb athlete there was always something held back and rigid about him. His curly little smile held secrets.
“When Julia was a little girl,” he said, “her mother would dress her up in a beautiful clean dress, with a big bow in her hair, and Julia would disappear. Where she wandered on her adventures no one knew, but every day she came home bedraggled and dirty, no matter how she was scolded. She felt there was so much in the world to do and see. When she was older she was a flapper. She liked to sing and dance, and her dearest ambition, although it was never fulfilled, was to be an actress. All her life she was so alive, until her long illness. Her mind was always there; it was only her body that betrayed her. But now her lively spirit can at last fly free. Fly, Julia. Fly and be happy.” Grady sat down. Olivia was crying.
In front of Olivia, Uncle Seymour turned in confusion to Aunt Iris and whispered, “What is he, some kind of life-after-deather?”
Taylor got up and went to the front of the room. She had been deaf since she was seven, and over the years her speech had deteriorated into the nasal tones they were now all used to. She was terribly pretty, and as golden as Grady was dark. Sometimes strangers took her for a Scandinavian person speaking in some foreign accent. Most deaf people Olivia had seen had very expressive faces to enhance their communication, but Taylor always had a look of forced calm, except when she was talking to Grady. She had learned to wear a mask—they both had.
“I love you, Grandma,” Taylor said. “You took care of us, you were always there. I will miss you very much. I love you.” She sat down. Her husband, Tim, leaned over and touched his cheek to hers.
It was over. Short and simple. Outside, the cousins hugged hard.
On the way to find the limousines Olivia saw a woman who looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember who she was. She was a large woman with gray-streaked fair hair and a face wrinkled and puffy from years of obvious dissipation. There were faint signs that she had once been very pretty, and Olivia tried to picture her as she had been in the past; it was annoying not to know, some memory nagged at her. The woman was hanging back diffidently, being ignored. It was as if she knew no one liked her, that they were annoyed that she was there.
Then suddenly she knew. It was Earlene—Big Earl, as Grady called her behind her back, Grady and Taylor’s mother. Stan’s widow. Aunt Julia’s daughter-in-law. Olivia had heard that she was living in Santa Fe now, but no one ever saw her but Grady and Taylor, and they as infrequently as possible. Olivia didn’t know why Earlene had made the long trip, since she didn’t seem to even much like Julia.
When they all finished piling into the limousines to go to the cemetery, Earlene had disappeared.
* * *
Olivia had not been to the family’s cemetery in years, in fact none of them had, except when they had to bury somebody. It was so far away, in Queens. The family paid for Perpetual Care. When Julia’s coffin had been lowered, Olivia wandered around, looking at the weathered gravestones that belonged to their clan. She supposed there was a space for her somewhere if she wanted it. She turned around to see that her cousin Melissa had detached herself from the others and was now walking with her.
In every family there is the Pretty One—in theirs it had been Olivia, and later Melissa. When Melissa was growing up she looked uncannily like Olivia, but now that she was grown they looked quite different, although Melissa was still a beauty. She was very thin, nervous, intense; she never ate. She was now Melissa Ardon, a well-dressed suburban Houston, Texas, wife and mother of three young children; she was very sweet, and she would never be caught in a bathmat coat with Mickey Mouse on it.
“How do you feel having your parents buried in two separate cemeteries?” Melissa asked sympathetically. “It must be strange.”
“It’s awful,” Olivia said. She remembered how she had hated leaving her father in that big empty plot all by himself. “But it was what Grace wanted. She said since it was a second marriage for both of them, neither of them could be buried with their first spouse; they had to get a new place. She said it was a religious law.”
“What law?”
“I don’t know. I can’t decide if I want to be buried with my mother or my father, so I’d rather be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the ocean.”
“Maybe you’ll get married again.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well,” Melissa said cheerfully, “you’ve been with Roger longer than with either of your husbands.”
“Longer than the total of the two of them,” Olivia said. “I think that was the point of our arrangement.”
They walked on in companionable silence. Her mother had died of cancer when her father was already quite old, and when he had remarried people were at first surprised. Her mother had spent the final years of her illness teaching her father how to make his own meals, and it had never occurred to her that when she was gone he would prefer to find a younger woman to dine out in restaurants with him. Grace immediately got rid of all the furniture Olivia’s parents had had for over forty years, and tried to throw out all the family photographs. “You’ll never look at them,” she had snapped as Olivia adamantly carried them away.
How could anyone be so heartless as to destroy a family’s history? How could she not want to keep the childhood picture of her mother Lila with her ruffled dress and solemn face, of Aunt Julia with the big bow in her hair . . . Olivia remembered reading about how some Holocaust survivors had kept pictures of their parents hidden inside the soles of their shoes through all the horrible years until the Liberation. But second wives, and their husbands, had been obliterating the existence of first wives for centuries. It was probably part of nature. As for Grace, after Olivia’s father’s death she had gone back to her children from her first marriage, and she and Olivia had not been in contact in two years.
“I think I want to be buried here,” Olivia said. “With my mother and the grandparents. Some sense of continuity. Will you remember?”
“It won’t be for a long time,” Melissa said.
“So?”
“Okay.” Melissa looked uncomfortable. Her own mother was buried here, with a place waiting for her father, Uncle David, but like all the other cousins who had moved away, Melissa and her husband had bought a family plot in their hometown. Jenny and her husband had done the same, as had Kenny.
The mourners were walking to the limousines, and Melissa headed back, but Olivia stood for a moment looking over the neat rows of headstones lined up into the distance until they finally disappeared into the low mist of the damp, darkening winter afternoon. Many, many generations ago there had been only one cemetery, and everyone was buried there. Now there was no room, and even if there had been, people had gone away. The past seemed so simple. It made her feel sad.
* * *
Back at Aunt Julia’s apartment the relatives were eating ravenously from a buffet. Olivia wasn’t hungry. She looked around. There was the covered silver candy dish from the living room in Mandelay, and the four antique side chairs with needlepoint seats, which the children never sat on because they were itchy. And there next to the phone sat the TTY with its computer screen and keyboard, which Julia had used for her long-distance talks with Taylor.
In the living room Aunt Myra, Jenny’s mother, the youngest of the aunts, who had no sisters anymore, was sitting close to her two older brothers and her sister-in-law, looking small and vulnerable. The “girl” cousins were talking about their children and schools, the “boy” cousins were talking about the family business (because even though most of them had chosen other occupations, the whole family still got money from it) and no one was discussing the departed.
Grady and Taylor were sitting by themselves in a corner, conversing rapidly in sign language, their faces bright and animated, the way they were only with each other. Her graceful hands flew like two tan birds. What were they saying? They had had a habit since childhood of signing instead of speaking when other people were around, mischievously hiding in their private, secret world. A world none of the others had tried hard enough to enter. . . .
Olivia remembered how, during those long summers at Mandelay, after what the family referred to as the Tragedy, all the cousins had tried to learn sign language so they could continue to talk to Taylor. They had approached it with the brief enthusiasm of children, and afterward, when they all grew up and scattered, they had forgotten most of it. Taylor had been their little pet, their toy. Olivia remembered Jenny at fourteen, sitting so patiently and setting Taylor’s silky flaxen hair into curls, because while Jenny was always trying to straighten her own dark tangled mop and look like Taylor, Taylor wanted only to look like Jenny. In her own way Jenny had spoken to Taylor through the language of her fingers, even then practicing to be the mother she now was.
But now Jenny was at the door, her husband and two older sons in tow. “We have to catch a plane,” she was saying. “I have a baby-sitter.”
Kenny, still chewing, embraced Olivia. “I have to go, too,” he said. “I have a quintuple bypass tomorrow morning.”
He’d better stop eating all that junk or he’ll have one of his own, Olivia thought.
“Come visit us,” Jenny said to Olivia with a wave.
“If I can get away from my patients,” Olivia said.
“And you can visit me,” Kenny said. But they knew nobody visited anybody.
They left. Olivia went around the room hugging everyone goodbye. Then she rode down in the elevator alone. She wondered why the aunts and uncles still made her so anxious. When she had been a child they had all adored her, the bright and cherished little niece. Maybe her mistake had been to grow up. But they were all totally unaware of how they affected her, and probably would have been surprised. She was, after all, the independent one, the untamed.
2
OLIVIA WAS VERY YOUNG when her cousin Stanley Silverstone graduated from high school and left for Hollywood. She remembered growing up hearing about him—he was different, he didn’t like to study, he was unusually athletic, physical, even wild. The family said he was a daredevil. It was the fifties. People wanted security, not adventure. The family department store, Julia’s, named after Stan’s mother, had been intended as a great, glittering career opportunity for the men in the family, and an income for their sisters. If Stan didn’t feel it was for him, well, then he could become a lawyer, or even a doctor like his father, secure and respected. But everyone knew early on that Stan wasn’t interested in a normal life. He wanted to become a stuntman. Who had ever heard of such a thing?
Stuntmen came from rodeos and carnivals, from Hollywood stuntman families and little towns with names like Rabbit Jump; they rode horses and motorcycles and dirt bikes, they had fights, they dove from tall buildings and through plate-glass windows, they crashed cars and staggered from these crashes engulfed in flames. This did not seem like any kind of world for a Jewish boy from New York City who had gone to private school.
He rented a little house in Topanga Canyon, a Western landscape of scrub and chaparral and big trees. His few neighbors were beatniks and artists and reckless young men who dressed in black and rode big black Harleys in packs. While he honed his skills and tried to make contacts to break into the closed world of stunt people, Julia sent him money. He hung around bars called the Palomino and the River Bottom, where he got into fights and drank and made friends, and eventually one of these stuntman friends got him a Guild card so he could work.
It was hard getting work, like trying to be an actor. Once you were a star you would have jobs all the time, but in the meantime . . . Stan kept on practicing, getting better. He learned the importance of safety and planning. Julia kept sending checks. He was likable, talented and lucky, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties he was someone who, while not yet anywhere near being one of the big boys, could at least make a living. Julia was proud of him.
He met Earlene Taylor on a movie, where she was hanging around with the crowd watching them film. She wanted to be an actress, but so far she’d only been waiting tables. She was a big, very pretty, twenty-three-year-old blonde from a small town in Mississippi, who had come to Hollywood to become famous. She had been hoping someone would see her on the s
et and maybe let her be an extra. Stan did the motorcycle gag that had become one of his specialties, where he slid it under an eighteen-wheeler and came out the other side, and when the director yelled “Print,” Earlene ran up and asked for his autograph. Nobody had ever asked him for an autograph before.
When he brought her back East to Mandelay, to introduce her to his family as his future bride, none of them much liked her, but they tried to be as nice as they could. They thought it was typical of Stan to bring home this unsuitable shiksa of limited sophistication, who drank as much as a man. Earlene was completely stunned by the wealth she saw: the rolling hills covered with manicured lawn and huge neatly pruned old trees, the formal gardens, the swimming pool, the tennis court, the twenty-seven-room Gothic mansion which even had an elevator in it that looked like a cage, although the caretaker had disabled the elevator because the parents were afraid the children might try to play in it and get hurt. The family money made Earlene uncomfortable, and discomfort made her hostile.
Olivia was only ten, but she was very perceptive and picked up on all of this. She was rather in awe of Stan, who had become her childhood hero. He was wearing his hair longer than any man she had ever seen, and he had a handlebar mustache and a deep tan, and was dressed like a cowboy. He had cowboy boots and a turquoise bracelet. He didn’t even move like any man she had seen; he was quick and fluid like a snake. He rolled his own cigarettes when he thought he was alone under the trees, and they smelled different from the cigarettes other grown-ups smoked.
“Why is this place called Mandelay?” Earlene asked Stan, on the cool porch with the vista of what seemed like heaven. She was drinking iced tea laced with bourbon she had found in the bar.
“My aunt Lila named it. The store was named after my mother, so my grandfather let Lila name the estate.”