Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  “Oh, come on, Mother. You didn’t even want to try. At least Dad wanted to try.”

  “It wasn’t that, Nina. Or it was. But … but he wanted to—I don’t know—just close over the past. He wanted something from me. If he could have let go of me, just let me go on, it might have been all right. But it would have been starting all over. With all new rules. And I just didn’t have the strength. I’m glad for your father—and for Tony—that they have that energy. But I wouldn’t have wanted to begin again.” She looked up at me, and her face shifted, became sly. “He suggested therapy to me.” It was like a joke she was trying to share.

  I felt a quick pulse of anger at this, at what seemed a request for my allegiance, for my betrayal of my father. “So?” I said, the fifth-grade taunt.

  “As though I could be cured of turning away from him.”

  “There are cures for some things. Didn’t you agree to that when you sent me off for mine?”

  “Nina!” She had started to reach for her glass again, but now she froze. “We hardly sent you off. What an expression!”

  “Forced me to go, then.”

  “And are you sorry?”

  “Of course not. It did cure me. Or it helped. But that’s what I’m saying.” I sat down in my chair again. “You know, sometimes I think you and Dad got locked in so early to the terms of your argument that you’ve never even tried to negotiate, or compromise. You’re absolutely stuck.”

  Her face was white suddenly, shocked. “You may not speak that way to me, Nina. About your father and me. We worked hard to be loving to each other. Harder than you know.”

  “Yes, for Randall’s sake. And then when he died, that was it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well, it sure wasn’t for my sake, was it? Or Mary’s or Sarah’s. Clearly none of us ever even counted in this mess.” My voice was shrill again. I could feel my heavy heartbeat.

  “Nina, how can you say that? If you knew the love I felt for all of you …”

  “But I do know that love. I know that love so very well, and it’s completely conditional. It’s be quiet, be good, be happy, be well. Be well. And I’ll love you. I’ll love you, my perfect baby.” I had started to cry.

  “Nina.” Her voice was pleading. I could see the pain I was causing her.

  But I didn’t care. I was suddenly lost in my own pain, a pain I would have sworn I’d left behind long since. But now the ancient child in me had come to life. Lost in my drunken sorrow, I wailed, I could hear my own noise as though someone else were making it. What I wanted, I think, was for someone to hold me, but not this mother, not mine. It was an impulse, a desire more abstract and primitive than that.

  And my mother seemed to understand that. She didn’t rise, she didn’t rush to embrace me. She sat with her pouched, sad face and watched me and waited for me to stop.

  And when I did, finally, and was blowing my nose, she said quietly, “Nina, no one gets love without some conditions. It’s not in human nature to love that way, even your own children. You want certain things from them. You want things for them. I wish I could have loved you, all of you, that much. But that’s not in me. It’s not in anyone.”

  “You loved Randall that way. Randall got love like that.”

  She looked anguished. “Oh, Nina, don’t you think I wish I could have loved Randall with all those conditions? What a gift that would have been! That’s the only kind of love I ever really wanted to feel. The other kind … who would want to feel that unless they had to?” She waited, but I didn’t answer. “Nina, I know I wasn’t a good mother. I railed at you, and … I hit you. There’s no excuse. But I loved you all so much. Couldn’t you feel it? At all? It had so much more of me in it. It had all of me, in all my terrible weakness. The other kind. It asked too much. It was too hard. Maybe it used up too much of me. But I gave you whatever I had.”

  She leaned forward on the couch, toward me. “Nina, when you have children …” I turned my body sharply in the chair. “You will, lovey. I know it. And when you do, you’ll want to love them … imperfectly. That freedom, Nina, to be who you are, in loving. Not better than you are.” She sat back. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, almost hoarse. “Randall got that. You’re right, of course. But I wish you could understand. It made me feel … yes, a kind of excitement in some way. I rose to it. I admit that. And part of me loved that—rising to it. I wouldn’t change that in my life. It’s just … part of who I am now. But it was my love for you other children that I loved. It was that love that held me to the earth.”

  After a long silence I asked, “And what about your love for Daddy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. When we came back together … something had happened. And then of course we had to get through everyone’s adolescence.” She laughed. “Minefields. And we knew why, that it had to do with everything we’d done to you, everything that had happened. It brought it all back, it made us—I don’t know—so … so careful with each other. Considerate. Even making love.” She reached for her glass now, held it a moment, then sipped.

  “I think maybe I can’t forgive him, that’s all. For reacting so differently. For wanting to make the best of it. For wanting to put that part of our lives—the part that had cost me so dearly—behind us. To move on. To move on? Nina, I couldn’t. How could I?”

  I sat there, thickheaded, and tried to think whether I needed to answer her. And then I felt, suddenly, as though I couldn’t anyway. The accumulated emotion of the evening seemed to press in on me with a rush, and I felt as though I might fall asleep in the chair if I continued to sit there. “I … I have to go to bed,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I got up and started down the hall, almost staggering in my fatigue. But halfway to the guest room, I stopped. I turned around and went back. She was sitting just as she had been. “I’m sorry, Lainey,” I said.

  “Oh, darling, me too.”

  And then I went back to the guest room and shut the door, and fell nearly instantly into a heavy, befuddled sleep. But at the usual witching hour, I woke again, quite suddenly. The light was still on in the hall, the crack at the bottom of the door a luminous wand. Everything in the room glowed dimly in its light—my clothes heaped on the back of the chair, the hulking trunk and boxes. My mind was working frantically, running over the events of the evening, and I realized, staring at the shadowed medallion in the center of the ceiling, that I’d never heard Lainey speak of forgiving or not forgiving my father before this night. That through all he’d done to her with his passionate belief in one particular version of Randall’s illness, she’d never let on that she saw herself as injured or damaged by him. And even tonight, of course, she hadn’t spoken of that ancient, deep wound that had sat at the center of their marriage for so many years. But I felt that it was there, it was the source of the anger she clung to. For wasn’t the thing she found unforgivable his wish to move away from it? From Randall, and what she’d become in response to him, of course; but also from what my father had done to her. Maybe, I thought, when life has bent you, has changed you in the cruel ways it bent and changed Lainey, it’s too much to ask that you ever move beyond it. Even in the name of health. Even in the name of happiness.

  It seemed to me then that although my father was right in his wish for my mother to move on with him, she was right, too, to want to cling to the memory of that earlier time when she’d lived a life whose dimensions were so cramped by duty and love but also so spiritually expansive. Lying in the dim light, I could see what they both wanted, and why. And I realized that I held them blameless for that. I had the peaceful sense of forgiving each of them on behalf of the other, as I drifted back to sleep.

  About halfway through the wedding reception, our parents, the grownups, as I couldn’t help thinking of them, had for the most part retreated into the kitchen and dining room of Tony’s house, surrendering the hot, crowded living room to us, the kids, men and women in their thirties and a few in their early forti
es. There was some drifting back and forth by a few brave souls, but then Al Baker and Mack began playing records in the living room, and even that pretty much stopped.

  I had stepped out onto Tony’s deck and pulled the sliding door shut behind me. It was so unseasonably cold out—it had been for a few days—that the students she had hired to help with the party had stacked the cases of champagne out here. I’d noticed, the last time I’d come out for a couple of bottles, both that there was a light snow falling (what will be the portents, Nina?) and that the deck was already gaily dotted everywhere with popped corks.

  Now I stood outside for a few moments. The bare ground was still warm, and most of the snow had melted at the rising touch of its dark heat; still, the white laced the grass delicately, it lay in a thin, transparent sheet on the deck, it lightly veined the branches of the trees. It stroked my face like cold tears.

  The deck was in the bend of the L made by the square living room and the narrow dining room. From out here the wide glass doors opened onto the theater in each. The house looked hectic and hot, full of motion, of life. The conversation was muted through the glass, dulled to a gentle roar that reminded me of the constant sound of an ocean. The lights inside were warm and yellow. Candles flickered on the mantel in the living room and on all the windowsills, as though it were already Advent. In their wavering tender light, the men with their suits moved dark as grackles behind the exotic plumage of the women. I saw Tony weaving back to the kitchen through the crowd, her coral dress a brave flag of color.

  The music pulsed under the hubbub. In the living room, Al was dancing with Mary, both of them frowning, intense, comical, looking down at their own working bodies, their busy feet. Her husband, Peter, was standing in a corner of the room, talking earnestly to someone I didn’t know. On his belly was the little striped sling the baby was sleeping in, and he kept stroking the bulge of bright fabric while he talked, with the proprietary air of pregnancy.

  It had been the simplest of weddings, all of us, family and friends, standing behind Tony and my father in the crowded living room while the businesslike justice of the peace went quickly through the service. He was Irish, and he praised them in a thick brogue for a job well done after every successful repetition of his words: “Verry fine; verry good.” When each of them pronounced “Till death us do part,” I had a sense, watching the backs of their heads—the one fleecy white, the other thinning and gray—of the gravity of this promise. I remembered, suddenly, the feeling I’d had when I made the same vow with Will, the feeling, I’m sure, that rang in my defiant voice: it will take death to part us. But Tony’s accepting murmur, and my father’s too, acknowledged death as the sorrow that would inevitably end their marriage, as the irrevocable final stage of their life together.

  Now that I’ve said this vow for a second time, I recognize that there’s at least one other way to mean it. Till death us do part, my husband and I pledged: but we intended it as a wish, a prayer. We were acknowledging that we knew all too well how many other reasons for parting there might be in our lives, acknowledging the power of luck, of chance, to change or govern the course of our marriage. We were hoping for a good fortune, the descent of a kind of grace, a gift, to last us through till then, to hold us fast to our best intentions.

  That night, though, watching my father officially begin his life with Tony, I knew only about Will and me, about our foolish doomed assurance. And when my father at last kissed her and the spontaneous applause and cheering erupted in the crowded room, I’d had to turn my face away to hide the tears.

  Suddenly Mack was standing close to the living room glass, his hands cupped on either side of his face, peering solemnly out at me. He slid the door open, and the noise burst forth with him.

  “Aha!” he cried, too loud. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”

  I bent over one of the cardboard boxes. “Getting more booze,” I said. “Help me open a couple, will you?”

  He shut the door again and stood with me on the deck. Together we unwrapped the thick foil, untwisted the fragile wires, and shot the corks off into the still gray night. Mack’s face had the sober delight of a boy’s at each explosion. He had been drinking too much, which was unusual for him—in recent years he’d grown more careful about booze. He’d been dancing a lot too. He’d taken his jacket off at some point and rolled up his shirt sleeves, and I could see big circles of dampness under each arm and down the middle of his back.

  When we were finished, he helped me carry the opened bottles in. He filled a glass for himself and went off, holding a bottle out in offering, stopping to fill each glass held up to him, talking to each person he served. Periodically after that as I moved around, as I helped Tony serve the trays of catered food, I could hear his voice through the noise, too loud, sometimes nearly frantic.

  A little later Tony took over the records for a while, and the music shifted to big-band stuff, foxtrots, swing. Some of the older group came out again from the dining room, and we danced too, the kids, to the brassy, smooth sounds. I stood by the fireplace through one number and watched Tony and my father moving in that stylized way, as though their bodies had been made for each other. Lainey and my father hadn’t been so well matched, even though they had looked so much alike. They were too much the same size, and she had too much energy. When they danced, she often seemed to be out of his control, as though she were trying to lead. They weren’t graceful together.

  Tony and my father looked as though one brain, one set of directions, governed both of them. They didn’t speak, didn’t look at each other while they danced, but the intense intimacy of their doubled movement was almost embarrassing to watch. When the song ended, he slid his arms around her and bent his head for a moment into the soft cloud of her hair.

  Al asked me to dance. I did the jitterbug with him to a couple of Glenn Miller songs. He was an athletic dancer. He twirled me around under his arm; he caught my hand exactly on the beat, just as I was about to spin off to some far corner of the room. It felt dangerous and exciting, dancing with him, and I was sorry when he said that he had to take a break. He was panting. He went into the dining room to get something to cool off.

  I did a foxtrot with Peter. The baby in his pouch pushed into my belly and made me silent and awkward with him. And then Mack put on a few more old forty-fives, and the grownups drifted away again. By now he was dancing wildly, blindly, sometimes without a partner. And he was drinking directly from a champagne bottle. He swung it freely as he moved, and people left plenty of room around him.

  When a slow song came on, I asked him to dance. I tried to hold on to him, to contain his motion a little. He stumbled against me, he stepped all over my feet. We ended in an embrace, Mack drooped on my shoulder.

  “Nina,” he whispered. And then suddenly he was weeping, a violent, raw sound in my ear. The next song began, something by Aretha Franklin, and I moved with him quickly into the empty front hall. I stood there holding him, hoping no one else could hear. “This is so hard on me,” he blurted between his gasps for air. “Christ. This is so hard.”

  It was startling to me to hold Mack, to feel the grief shake his body. I wanted desperately to say something, I wanted to be sympathetic. After all, hadn’t just these confused feelings—just this amount of booze—triggered my tears, my grief, with Lainey? But I felt so distant from him that it was like holding a child weeping over an imagined slight or loss—I had that sense of understanding his pain but also of having moved beyond it. I murmured vague comforting phrases and patted his strong back.

  Then Al was there, standing behind Mack. He touched my brother’s shoulder, and Mack turned easily to him. Al was bigger than Mack, built the way his own father had been, and Mack looked slender and vulnerable in his embrace. Our eyes met over Mack’s head, and Al began talking steadily to him. He was guiding him toward the stairs. “Come on, my old friend,” he was saying. “I want you to take a time-out.”

  “Time-out, Al,” Mack said. “I need a time
-out, Al.” They started up. “Al,” Mack said. “My pal Al.”

  I watched them stagger arid lurch over the carpeted steps. “Al, my pal,” Mack was saying. “Al, you’re my brother.” Suddenly he pushed Al away and stood facing him, swaying on the landing, his face a parody of drunken astonishment. “Al, you’re my brother!” he said. “Did you realize that? You—are—my brother.”

  “You’re damn right,” Al said. His arm encircled Mack again, turned him once more to face the rising stairs.

  “Isn’t that great?” Mack said in tender amazement. He was watching Al’s face, touching his chest. “You’re my brother, Al.” They heaved up. Just before they got to the second floor, Mack stopped and yelled, “My brother is dead! Long live my brother!” I turned and looked to see if anyone had heard it. Then he yelled it again, but only a few heads swung in my direction. Most people were talking too loudly over the music or were busy dancing; and Aretha was doing her part, wailing “Dr. Feelgood” on the stereo.

  From across the dining room, though, I saw my father—motionless, tall, and erect. His head was lifted, his smooth face was frozen and attentive, as though he thought he’d heard someone calling for him from across some great distance.

  But then one of the guests must have spoken to him, because he turned quickly and his face opened, he was smiling slightly, sociable and polite.

  Much later I went upstairs to the bathroom and saw, as I passed Al’s old room, that Mack was curled up asleep on top of the bed. Someone had taken his shoes off, spread a red blanket carefully over him. I stood for a moment looking in at him. His hand was loosely fisted near his mouth, and to me his face looked childlike—almost pretty. Before I went back down, I shut the door carefully and quietly so the noise from the celebration below wouldn’t disturb him.

  It was late when I left, but there were still perhaps ten or fifteen people there, scattered through the rooms, talking quietly. My father was in the kitchen with Tony’s daughter, Susan, and another, older couple. I kissed him good night, and he held me hard against his chest for a moment. When I stepped back, I saw that his eyes had reddened behind the thick glasses.