We Never Told

by Diana Altman

  “Everybody needs people.”

  “I don’t.” Did she think I didn’t see the book on her bedside table? It was What to Say After you Say Hello, a book written to help awkward people make a good impression and feel more comfortable in social situations. It advised her to make eye contact.

  “I’m lucky,” she said “I like my own company.”

  When her cat had kittens, she couldn’t bear to part with them so five cats prowled her house and kept it free from rodents, slept on her bed at night and cuddled with her when she watched television, and were the recipients of much stroking and fond baby talk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The house Leo and I bought in Newton, Massachusetts, was a thirteen-room Victorian with a wrap-around porch, a wall of stained glass, three fireplaces, and original oak woodwork. Yes, it was old but we would modernize it, paint the walls white. How come the old lady who gleefully sold it to us kept a blanket over the stained-glass window? Why would anyone want to hide such beauty? We found out when the weather changed. The lead that held together the Tiffany panes had shrunk over the years so freezing air leaked in. We wondered why someone would put up wallpaper instead of just painting the walls. We found out when we peeled off the paper and plaster billowed to the floor. By mid-winter, we wore heavy socks and long underwear under our pajamas. We joked about buying bed caps. Our house, we discovered, was famous for its beautiful stained-glass window so we often saw pedestrians pause to admire it and cars slow down for a second look. It was just like a person—it seemed one way but was quite another when you got to know it.

  We now had two daughters, Hannah and Chloe. They had a playroom and each had her own bedroom, and I had an office of my own. They had a clubhouse in the attic and swings in the backyard. I wanted to take care of my daughters, did not want them to come home to a maid in the kitchen. I did not want them to have to stay at school all day in the after school program and not get home to their own things until it was dark. I did not think I could endure the panic of rushing home from some office when the phone rang telling me one of my children was ill. Leo and his partner had a thriving architecture business, so I was lucky that I didn’t have to go out to work. I liked being a freelance writer and now had contacts at various publications. I was proud of the title “Contributing Editor.” We were able to send the girls to camp, give them piano and dance lessons.

  Massachusetts was on its way to becoming an East Coast Silicon Valley. Digital Equipment, Data General, Wang, and Apollo Computer transformed the abandoned textile mills in Lowell into hives of activity. Leo designed new buildings on Route 128 for high tech corporations that were the happy recipients of defense contracts, favorable tax credits, and federal grants. Leo’s firm designed condos for the expected influx of high-tech employees. He renovated office towers in Boston and redesigned banks. We modernized our kitchen, shocked purists by getting rid of the pantry.

  Then Wang Laboratories, employer of more than 33,000 people, went bankrupt. The Massachusetts Miracle collapsed and Massachusetts suffered the worst real estate recession in state history. Condos languished on the market. New office buildings became ghosts. The bank called Leo’s loans. Each morning, with no bounce in his step, he went to his office where the phones were dead quiet.

  At night, sitting at the kitchen table, we still dunked Milano cookies in milk but now Leo looked up from the Sports section to bark, “Get that damn cat away from the table!” I took Pillow off my lap and set him on the floor. Leo’s worries were needles, his melancholy stung me. His moods set up a vibration that filled the house. His agitation was my agitation. Optimism sapped, he kept getting colds, honking his nose, sniffling. Sitting upstairs at my desk, writing, I’d hear his car pull into the driveway, hear the back door open then shut, and think, “Damn. He’s home.”

  I suffered a gnawing envy of my mother’s wealth. I became a glowering infant. Even if she didn’t share her money, I wanted her to acknowledge that it was a struggle to pay the mortgage, heating oil, telephone, gas, electric bills. She bragged about her stock market victories. “I bought Duggy Chemical for ten and now it’s up to twenty. I made a hundred thousand dollars!” She thought I’d say, “Atta boy!” I clamped my lips shut so I wouldn’t say, “Then give some of it to me.”

  She plowed her profits back into her portfolio. It wasn’t money to her. It was a game she was playing with her dead father. She bragged that she had more than doubled her inheritance, now owned a portfolio worth five million dollars. If Joan or I suggested that Mother spend some of her profits, meaning share some with us, she became confused, as if we suggested she maim her cat. She couldn’t understand why I thought I had any right to her money and of course I didn’t. I embarrassed myself. But I did think that grown children did have some right to ask a parent for help in an emergency. Leo was a victim of circumstances. He had done nothing to merit the collapse of his practice. He had no clients because there were no clients. No one was building anything, at least not in Boston. Mother was puzzled by my resentment because money to her was not the stocks in her portfolio but the money in her checking account at the bank. There was just enough in there to pay the household bills. The companies represented in her portfolio were game pieces that she moved around and had nothing to do with money. Since each month she used up the funds in her checking account, she believed she was living close to the bone. When we went out to dinner she either let Leo pay or else said, “Shall we split it?” I felt like shouting, “No! You pay! You’re loaded and Leo can’t meet payroll!” Leo broached the subject of estate planning. Violet said, “Apre moi, le deluge!” Leo persisted, “But you don’t want the government to get it all.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “I love America. The government does good things.”

  Never myself having been the victim of current events, I sometimes thought Leo’s plight was his own fault. If he were more ambitious, smarter, more talented, better connected, we wouldn’t be in such a fix. This, I knew, was unreasonable. All Leo saw when he looked at me was Demand and all I saw when I looked at him was Worry.

  Meanwhile our children were growing up and, the next thing we knew, we were nagging Hannah about finishing her admission essays for college. Grandma Greenstone had started a college fund for the girls when they were born so there was enough money for tuition. We were in that stage of parenting when all conversation was about this school being better than that school, who applied where, who got in, who was waitlisted. Then Hannah was gone and there was no one in her room at night, and when she came home during vacations, she seemed a stranger.

  Then it was Chloe’s turn to leave and our big house was empty, and I saw myself as cliché empty nester and cursed myself for not having a career, for believing that mothering was enough of a job. At the same time, I didn’t want a job because I was writing a book but how could I write a book when we needed some income? From my window, I watched neighbors get out of their Volvo station wagons and trudge with heavy briefcases into their houses. As lights came on in windows, I wondered if I too looked that old. Our children had tied us together but now nothing did. We didn’t bother with neighborhood parties anymore. Gone was the slap, slap of dribbling on the street outside and the shout, “Car alert!” as the children ran to the sidewalk. The basketball hoop on the telephone pole was drooping. The boy who used to fly off the curb on his skateboard was now married and in Seattle. Gone was the child doing pirouettes on his bike.

  Gone were the amps attached to electric guitars that shook our whole house and the posters for Chloe’s band, Daredevil Nurse. Both girls were working in New York and living in their own apartments. We kept their rooms like shrines, the empty gerbil cage next to the abandoned dollhouse. “I don’t want any of it,” Hannah said from her office in New York. “I told you that, Mom. Throw it all away. You and Dad are like the caretakers in the museum of my youth.”

  Chloe, from her office, said on the phone, “Can’t you keep it?”

  “Where?”

/>   “In the basement?”

  “Are you ever going to use that dollhouse again?”

  “I don’t know. It’s my dollhouse.”

  “But your dollhouse is taking up room, and Dad wants this room as a study.”

  “But it’s my dollhouse.”

  “Then take it.”

  “Come on, Mama. It’s my dollhouse.”

  “Okay. We’ll keep it.”

  Both girls agreed to humor their grandmother and stay at her house when the year 1999 turned into 2000. All of us knew so little about computers that a rumor about their intrinsic maliciousness took on the weight of fact and appeared as headlines in the newspapers. Pundits told us that as the clock struck midnight, computers would explode with the Y2K bug. At the dawning of the millennium, all our vital records, bank accounts, medical histories, real estate transactions, would be erased and we would be as naked as baby mice. There would be no telephone, electricity, or heat.

  My mother believed this and insisted that on New Year’s Eve we be together, Joan and her children, Leo and me and our children. This, she thought, would be the last time we would ever see each other. Driving up the driveway in the eerie stillness of night, I turned the corner and came upon a huge house with lights in only two windows, the living room and upstairs in her bedroom. The rest of the house seemed dead. I was used to how Mother’s high standards of house keeping had relaxed but my daughters were surprised by the dust on the bureaus, the torn shades, the green in the bathroom sink, and the unmade beds. As Violet aged, the work her gardens required became overwhelming. No one raked up the leaves in the fall or took the flower boxes in at the end of summer. She refused to hire a housekeeper, said she didn’t want anyone hanging around. She never replaced her handyman, Carl, after he had a stroke. Sometimes she admitted on the phone that she hadn’t been out of her house for two or three weeks. “Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. “I keep busy.”

  That New Year’s Eve we searched in the linen closet for sheets. In the old days, when I opened the linen closet, I had the satisfaction of precision, like looking at the Rockettes lined up. Now sheets and towels were stuffed in every which way. We spent some time unfolding and sorting. “Wait. Here’s a queen flat.”

  “That looks like a king to me.”

  “What does the label say?”

  “Where’s the label?”

  “I don’t know. There must be a label.”

  “Wait. Here’s the label. But it doesn’t say.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does, Mama, put on your glasses.”

  We wore New Year’s Eve hats and blew horns and ate bagels, cream cheese, and lox that Joan brought from Zabar’s. We drank good champagne and watched the clock in Times Square on mute so we wouldn’t have to listen to the hysterical emcees. When the ball came down, we hugged and kissed, looked around, heard no explosions, and relaxed in front of the fire. “Mother,” I said, “should we try your computer?”

  “What for?”

  “To see if it works.”

  “I’m not turning that thing on,” she said.

  “What’s the password,” I said. “I’ll go do it.”

  “I’m not giving you my password.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you snooping around my business.”

  “Snooping around your business? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know very well what that means.”

  It was now five after midnight and officially the year 2000. “Mother,” I said getting up from the sofa, “what’s your password? Let’s see if all the computers crashed.”

  “That’s just an excuse.”

  “For what?”

  “You know very well for what. For looking at my accounts.”

  “Why would I look at your accounts?”

  “To see how much money I have. You’re always doing that. You can’t wait for me to die so you can get your hands on my money.”

  Everyone fell silent, the sizzles and crackles of the fire the only sound. “Grandma,” Chloe said, “Mama only—”

  “Don’t call me Grandma.”

  “Why?”

  “I hate that word. I may be a grandmother but I’m not grandma. Ma. Ma. Sounds so common.”

  “But I’ve always called you Grandma.”

  “Well, stop doing it.”

  “Mother,” Joan said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Maybe it’s time to go to sleep,” Leo offered.

  But I couldn’t let the matter rest. “What do I do every time I come here?”

  “Snoop around. You go into my desk drawers, read my investment reports, look at my bank statements.”

  “I do?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t caught you in my office looking at my things. Don’t think I didn’t see you sitting at my computer looking at my accounts.”

  “When did I sit at your computer and look at your accounts?”

  “Let’s go to sleep,” Leo said. “The whole Y2K bug was a false alarm, we’re perfectly fine, everyone’s fine. Let’s call it a day.”

  “Grandma,” Hannah said, “should we call you Violet?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “You want us to call you Violet, Grandma?” Joan’s daughter Jenny said.

  “You’re certainly old enough. You don’t have to go around calling me grandma like some little child. Why, you’re old enough to be married for heavens sakes. You should be married instead of running around being promiscuous.”

  “Mother!” barked Joan. “How dare you say that?”

  Violet raised her eyebrows and made wry lips as if to say I’m the only one here who will tell you the truth. Hannah said, “I’m going up. I’m tired.” Chloe said, “Me too.” Josh said, “Me too.” His sister Jenny, hurt, stared at Violet as if waiting for an apology. But Mother was in some other world, lost in a darkness that drained all animation. “Time for bed,” I said, going over to her as she sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace. “Come on, Mother. Time for bed. It’s late.”

  “You go on,” she said.

  In the morning, I found her dressed in her tattered bathrobe, sitting slumped in a chair looking out at the bleak sky. “Will it ever get warm?” she said to the windowpane.

  “Why don’t you take a little trip to Florida,” I said filling the coffee pot with water. “Or some other warm place.”

  “No. I’d miss the January thaw.”

  When we suggested gardeners, handymen, housekeepers, she flinched as if we were asking her to welcome snarling hyenas. She no longer went to the beauty salon, and her hair was just long white strings with pink scalp showing.

  “I think she’s depressed,” Joan said when we were alone packing up to go home.

  “I wonder if she’s thinking about her baby,” I whispered. “Do you think she thinks about him?” My question really meant, do you think about him?

  “I think she just pushes everything out of her mind.”

  “I think about him all the time. I wonder if we should try to find him and if we did what we’d tell our mother. Do you think about him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  It was one of those endless New England winters, white sky every day, fierce chill that froze the nose hairs, mounds of snow covered in soot pushed to the sides of the roads taking up parking spaces. We counted the months until relief. April wasn’t spring, it only had a spring-like name. May would have its darling buds but not until it was half over. My first book was about to come out. It was a nonfiction book about the Hollywood studio system, the story of how that system came into being and how its collapse was good for some people but ruinous for others like my father. Pillow was on my desk batting at my hand with his paw every time I moved my pen. Then he stood up and pushed his nose into my chin. “I love you too,” I said. “But not now, please.” He shivered, stepped back, then dove into my chin again, almost bursting with ecstatic purrs. I thought, love is a many sple
ndored thing, and lifted him off my desk and set him on the floor where he sat with his back to me saying with his posture that I’d hurt his feelings. The phone rang.

  “Sonya? Our mother’s had an accident.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in the hospital. Some nurse just called me. The tractor turned over on her.”

  “The tractor? What was she doing on the tractor?”

  “Just come.” Joan told me the name of the hospital.

  I marveled at how scared I got thinking my mother was in danger even though I often didn’t even like her. My head didn’t always love her but my body did. It was visceral. My heart was pounding and little moans were coming out of my throat. How could the tractor turn over on her? How could she even be on the tractor? It was the middle of winter. How could she even get to the shed where the tractor was kept? The snow was higher than her boots.

  Leo wasn’t home. He had realized, midway through the recession, that maybe it was just Boston that wasn’t building anything. In North Carolina, construction of new buildings and houses was booming. The attitude in Boston had always been whatever is old is best. The people of North Carolina welcomed the new, wanted to grow bigger. Leo was in Durham negotiating the purchase of some land. He intended to put up an apartment complex near Duke University. This would have been entirely wonderful except I had to rush to New York and Leo wouldn’t be home to feed Pillow. How long does a cat last without food? I poured dried food into two bowls, opened three cans of wet food and hoped they wouldn’t rot, filled two bowls with water, got into my Volvo, listened to it rev then stop, rev then stop then at last catch, buck, and get its stupid self into gear. Never again would I buy a foreign car! I drove slowly in the slushy wake of snowplows on the Mass Pike, windshield wipers sweeping an arc of heavy snow that accumulated at the bottom of the window.