by Rona Jaffe
“Maybe.” She thought about what it would be like, and because she knew that with their jobs and lives all scattered around and settled where they were it would never happen, it seemed like paradise.
31
THAT YEAR THE WEATHER was a vicious antagonist to the entire country. Fires, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, blizzard after blizzard, apocalyptic and strange. People who remembered the old days said this was what nature used to be like, and what we had known more recently had been only a respite. And then the nation woke up and turned on the news one morning in January to discover that Los Angeles had been struck by the worst earthquake to happen in Southern California in this century.
Apartments collapsed, freeways fell down, buildings were condemned and lifelong possessions were shattered to bits. It was so soon after the fires, and now Olivia was glued to the TV and the radio again, worrying. There was no way to get phone service in or out, but the family eventually discovered from the news reports that the area where Taylor, Tim and Baby Cody lived was, although shaken, relatively undamaged. They and their home had come through again. As for Kenny and Pam in Santa Barbara, they were not close to the earthquake and they were fine. The epicenter had been in the San Fernando Valley, with what seemed to be a separate quake in Santa Monica. Kenny called to reassure the family, and eventually Tim called, too. But for others who were not so fortunate, everything was gone.
“I wouldn’t live in California,” Aunt Myra said to Olivia, making her round of phone calls. “I’d be too scared.”
“Taylor is very hardy,” Olivia said. “She’s a survivor.”
“I feel sorry for her, with such a little baby to take care of. I like New York.”
“You won’t even go out in the street at night; you’re afraid to get mugged,” Olivia said, not unkindly.
“I take a taxi.”
“So we do the best we can.”
By February, a month later, there were reported to have been three thousand aftershocks. Boarded up, evacuated, waiting to be rebuilt, certain parts of Santa Monica and the Valley still looked like a war zone. But, Olivia thought, parts of the South Bronx looked—and felt—like a war zone all the time. No, it wasn’t so great here, either. She was thankful again for her safe, comfortable life, and concentrated on it.
She received a note from Taylor with a current photo of Cody. He was six months old already, and he was adorable.
Dear Olivia—Being a new mother is a full-time job and I love it. I’m managing very well. We set up a system of lights so I can hear the baby when he cries. I worried so much about how my mother would behave, but it’s working out fine. When he was born she came from Santa Fe and stayed a week. She was bored with Cody after the first day. She never liked kids. She only came once more, for three days at Christmas. So I can see she won’t be a pest. She’s not rushing back here so soon!
I wish you could get to know him. He is so much like Grady. Do you think you and Roger will ever get out this way? You’re always welcome.
Love,
Taylor
“I feel bad for Taylor,” Olivia told Roger. “Nobody from here has seen the baby. And he’s our cousin, after all.”
“He’s only six months old,” Roger said. “He has a lot of childhood yet to come.”
“I know, but it disappears so fast. Taylor’s always felt like an outsider. I think someone should visit her, and it seems I’ll have to be the one. I’m going to go for a weekend.”
“It’s nice of you to do that,” Roger said. “You’re always so thoughtful and good.”
“It’s for myself, too.”
It would only be for a weekend, but that would be enough. She was aware that the visit would be just as important to her as it was to Taylor. It had something to do with the closeness of their childhood and the mystery of the separate time between then and now, an attempted recapturing of their escaped lives. She didn’t suggest Roger come with her, and he understood and didn’t volunteer. And when they kissed each other goodbye, she knew that this time while she was away she could trust him.
* * *
Taylor and Tim picked her up at the airport. The baby was not with them; he was at home with their housekeeper, asleep. The California sun was warm on Olivia’s face through the car window, and it was a surprise and relief to be away from the snow and here in such a mild and sunny place.
As they drove through the canyon, Taylor pointed out damage from the fires. “Look!” she kept saying. “Look! Look at that!”
There were twisted blackened trees on bare terrain covered with gray ash that looked like a moonscape next to underbrush burned brown, and next to that, places of untouched lush green. On the mountainside above the narrow road there were weathered sandbags that had been placed there to prevent mudslides after the rains. You could see the bricks where the foundations of houses were all that was left, a geometric design. On one burned-out home site there was a satellite dish, incongruous there among nothing else at all.
“Look what the fires did,” Taylor said. “Look.”
They finally reached the house. Olivia had been there only once, after Grady’s funeral, when it had been filled with mourners. Now it had a happy feeling about it, the living room floor was covered with toys, and there were a high chair and a baby’s carry seat in the kitchen. The furniture was very eclectic: partly traditional, partly modern, partly antique. It almost worked.
“Do you remember Grandma’s paintings?” Taylor asked, pointing. “And her loveseat, and her tea set?”
“Yes.”
“I like having things from the family.”
“Do you have any of Grady’s stuff?”
“No,” Taylor said. “I couldn’t bear to look at it. Now it’s all gone in the fire anyway.”
Tim took Olivia’s duffel bag into the guest room. It was done in Santa Fe style, obviously with great care, as if Taylor had been dreaming of someday having a visitor she really welcomed, not just her mother.
“How pretty,” Olivia said to her.
“Thank you.”
“Now I want to see Cody.”
Tim nodded. “I think he’s up.”
The third bedroom was the baby’s room. I wonder if he really is Grady reincarnated, Olivia thought unexpectedly as she walked down the hall. The door was open and she went in, alone. Their housekeeper, a pleasant-faced, middle-aged Hispanic woman, was holding Cody in her arms.
He was a large baby, with pale, translucent skin and delicate baby features, his round head covered with a fuzz of straight dark hair. He looked at Olivia the moment she entered the room, and immediately his face lit up. He smiled and began to wave his arms and legs wildly, giving little sounds of recognition and joy.
I know him, she thought. He knows me.
She felt flooded with love and relief. She beamed at him. “Well,” she said, “it’s nice to see you again.”
Apparently he felt the same way. She and the baby kept looking at each other, their eyes intently locked, smiling happily, communicating, and he kept making those excited little noises.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” the woman said, surprised.
“No?”
“No. He’s usually very shy.”
Olivia kissed him on the head. His hair was as soft as down and he had that wonderful, sweet infant smell that was partly baby powder and partly himself. How sturdy he was. She wondered if she was looking at a future stuntman, or if he would grow up to be something entirely different, a physicist, perhaps. He would get older, learn to speak and to sign, and he would forget that he had recognized her from his previous life. Do you remember your cousin Olivia? they would ask him, meaning from the last family event, but he wouldn’t even remember that: he would look blank and a little embarrassed. How would he remember? she would say. He was so young. She would never see his face light up in exactly that way again.
Taylor and Tim were in the room then, watching. “He’s Grady come back, isn’t he?” Taylor said.
Olivia nodded. “But this time you’ll give him a happy childhood,” she said.
Tim’s hands flew, translating, and for the first time, Taylor smiled.
They had dinner at home. Tim barbecued swordfish and vegetables on the deck under the trees, and Taylor made the salad while Olivia watched Cody rocking on all fours and babbling.
“He’ll know three languages: English, Spanish, and sign language,” Tim said. “He’s going to be a man of the world.”
It was too cold to eat outside so they ate in the dining room. “Tim made this table,” Taylor said. It was a free-form shape, of pale caramel-colored burled wood that had been polished to feel so satiny it was a pleasure to touch.
“It’s lovely,” Olivia said.
“He made the chairs, too.”
The chairs, of that same wood, had pieces of metal set in them. It made them look like art. “You’re very talented,” Olivia told Tim. He smiled and shrugged.
After dinner they had coffee in the living room in front of the fireplace. Baby Cody was half asleep in Taylor’s lap, sucking on his pacifier. Tim lit a fire. For an instant Olivia thought of the recent devastating flames, and then she looked at the fire, domestic and contained behind its screen, and thought how cozy it made the room look. Shadows danced on the beamed ceiling.
“I thought I would never see all this again,” Taylor said.
“I know.”
“I’ll try to make my son happy,” Taylor said. “I try every day. And I know he’s Cody. I’m going to treat him like himself.”
“That’s wise.”
They sat there for a while in silence, each with their own thoughts. Taylor was stroking the baby’s hair. “There’s something I never told you,” she said. “A few years ago, Grady told me he was gay. He had tried to go straight when he went with Miranda, but it didn’t work for him. He said he’d had an affair with one of his male friends, one of the stuntmen, and it was the most satisfying relationship he’d ever had. He said he finally knew what he was. I was upset. I told him I didn’t want to know about him being gay. I said he was never to mention it to me again. I said it’s your life, you can live it the way you want, but I don’t want to know about it. I feel very guilty now.”
Olivia just looked at her. All Taylor’s denials, the inconsistencies, the blank spaces in her memory, her calm acceptance and befriending of Grady’s lover made sense at last. Of course Taylor had known. Olivia didn’t know what to say that wasn’t a reproach, so she said nothing, but Taylor read her expression.
“You don’t understand,” Taylor said. “You’re sophisticated. The bulk of America isn’t like you. The bulk of America thinks it’s bad. I’m like them. I think it’s bad. I can’t help it.”
How could she avoid being prejudiced? Olivia thought. She’s Stan the Stuntman’s daughter; the tough old cowboy, a macho man. And Grady was his son. Stan would have hated having a gay son, and Grady knew it. Sometimes the dead are as with us as the living.
“I wish I could undo that now,” Taylor said. “I wish I had said something kinder.”
That night, before she fell asleep in Taylor’s guest room, Olivia imagined she could hear the whole household breathing. It was a sound of such security and comfort to her that she lay there for a while listening to it, thinking of Jenny and Paul and their five children, of Melissa and Bill and their three, of happy families sleeping everywhere and how few of them there were. She thought of Roger, and Wozzle and Buster, and breathed with them, and then she slept.
In the morning Taylor was in a good mood again. She made cranberry pancakes for breakfast and then they all went out sightseeing in the car, the baby too, strapped into his little car seat, flirting with Olivia. “Let’s show her where Grady’s house was,” Taylor said. Tim headed up into the canyon.
It was gone, of course. There were what had been the rooms, outlined by the stones of the foundation; and the fireplace, the only part still standing, sticking up like a large tombstone. The view below was breathtaking. With so many houses burnt to the ground, you could see for what seemed like miles. Olivia could understand why Grady had wanted to build a deck in just that place.
Around the foundation, where the garden must have been, tiny fresh greenery was beginning to grow again, irrepressibly, pushing up among the white crust of ash wherever there was a space.
“It’s too bad you never saw his house,” Taylor said. “It was nice.”
They drove past several horse ranches, behind split wood fences, and Olivia could glimpse horses through the trees. In his car seat Cody was babbling cheerfully.
“I ride here,” Taylor said, pointing to one ranch. “I have a favorite horse. He’s so great.”
“She’s good, too,” Tim said.
“Don’t sign when you drive,” Olivia said. “You make me nervous.”
Tim smiled.
“You never saw the house I grew up in,” Taylor said, as if it had just occurred to her.
“No,” Olivia said, surprised at the realization that she never had. She had imagined it so often the fantasy had seemed more real than the reality.
“Let’s go see it. Tim, you know where it is.”
They drove on through the narrow canyon road, past houses that had survived the fire seemingly untouched, and then Tim stopped the car.
“Well, here we are . . .” Taylor said. She seemed confused.
There was no need to get out—the house was completely gone. All that remained was the foundation; not even the ubiquitous tombstone fireplace disturbed the flatness. Olivia looked at what must have been the front doorway, and thought of Grady as a child being locked out that cold night by Earlene, and Taylor helplessly watching. This was the house where all those terrible things had happened, during all those years. Little patches of new growth moved in the wind.
“It’s gone, too,” Taylor said. “Damn, ain’t that a bitch!” She looked pleased and amazed. “Let’s get out and look.”
They climbed out of the car. Taylor took Cody from his safety seat and held him up so he could see it.
The past is over, Olivia thought. At least in this small way. It’s a beginning. Tim put his arm around his wife and child.
“Let’s go home now,” Taylor said.
* * *
On the way back to their house Olivia closed her eyes, daydreaming. She thought of the surprises and diversity of all their lives, down through the chain of generations. Next to her in the car the baby had her finger clutched tightly in his fist. Abe Miller’s great-great-grandson, Julia Miller Silverstone’s great-grandson, Stan the Stuntman’s grandson, Taylor’s son, christened Cody Bay.
Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) was the author of sixteen books, including the bestselling internationally acclaimed novels The Best of Everything, The Road Taken, The Cousins, Family Secrets, Mr. Right is Dead, Mazes and Monsters, The Last Chance, and Five Women, as well as the classic bestseller Class Reunion. She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Ms. Jaffe was a lifelong New Yorker.
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