Misfortune

by Nancy Geary

  “Albert is harmless. He entertained Frances for most of the afternoon. Blair was asleep. Apparently she skipped her morning nap, so went down promptly at three. Besides, Bea was here for a while when we first arrived.” Aurelia tried to sound calm, organized, as if the afternoon had been planned perfectly.

  “A twenty-year-old baby-sitter is hardly adequate defense,” Richard admonished her, referring to Bea. He moved toward Aurelia and reached out to touch her forehead, as if feeling for a fever. “Maybe we should get a housekeeper, someone to live with us, to help you,” he said patiently, his voice calm. “You need some time to yourself, for your painting.”

  “I thought you of all people would appreciate my efforts to provide a moment of comfort to someone in need.”

  “Don’t do that, Lia. I am not attacking your sentiment, only questioning your common sense.”

  “Well, I think I’m perfectly sensible. It’s important to meet people, to experience the world, to get out of this Park Avenue apartment. We miss things up here on the fifteenth floor, stuck in our routines. Albert has lived through hell. All he needed was someone to talk to, to treat him like a person.”

  “Why did that duty fall to you?”

  “It didn’t fall to me. He didn’t harm anyone. I enjoyed talking to him. I admire his introspection.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that he’s not like the people I spend time with. He’s open. He examines his own faults. His universe is so unlike our insular one. It’s good for me, and good for our daughters, even if they’re too young to realize it.”

  “I doubt what’s-his-name would appreciate being the guinea pig for your social expansion.”

  “That’s not fair, Richard. We were talking, that’s all. He seemed lost. Perhaps I did, too.”

  Aurelia had often wondered whether these words, her admission of her own troubles, had been Richard’s undoing. Thirty-four years later that fateful conversation rang in her ears, each word, Richard’s tone of voice and facial expression ingrained in her brain. Richard had turned and walked out of the room. Lying in bed that night, she had wanted to leave, to run to Albert, to huddle under a mildewed blanket on the concrete pavement by the Museum of Modern Art, to smell him, even to taste him, but she didn’t move from between her flannel sheets.

  Within the week Richard hired Mrs. Bassett, a heavyset woman of fifty-eight with big forearms, who wore her red hair in a bun at the base of her neck, a black uniform, and hooked boots. “Marriage isn’t perfect. You’ve no business expecting it to be,” she chastised Aurelia on more than one occasion. Loyal to Richard from the very beginning, Mrs. Bassett stayed in his employ even after Aurelia left with the girls.

  Aurelia refolded her letter and stuffed it into her pocket. She eased herself onto the floor, sitting cross-legged to scan the patchwork quilt of correspondence in front of her. She ran her hands over the piles of letters, feeling the varied textures of paper. Her eyes rested on an envelope covered in the rounded cursive letters of Frances’s hand. It was postmarked July 22, 1972, more than six years after she and Richard had separated.

  July was Richard’s chosen month with the girls under the terms of their separation agreement. He took them to Southampton, to the home he and Aurelia had shared during their marriage. That left Aurelia at liberty for thirty days each summer. She traveled, exploring cities in Europe and South America, always alone, un-scheduled. Only rarely did she make any effort to meet up with friends or acquaintances; instead she ambled unfettered.

  The summer of 1972 found her enrolled in the American Academy in Rome, taking a painting course entitled Luminosity and Color. Days spent watching the light move across a porcelain pitcher, nights engrossed in spirited conversation with a fellow student ten years her junior, carafes of Chianti and plates of prosciutto-wrapped breadsticks, had rejuvenated her. She even flirted with changing her name to Venus, Juno. A goddess.

  Aurelia removed a single sheet of cream-colored paper from its envelope. It had a sunflower in each corner.

  Dear Mom, an eleven-year-old Frances had written in black script. Dad says you are going to be a great painter. Is that true? I hope so. Blair does, too.

  Aurelia felt a laugh spill out as she imagined her two young daughters discussing their mother’s artistic portent. The letter continued with details of Frances’s day, tennis clinic, a play date to the pizza parlor. As she flipped the page to read the back side, Aurelia felt her heartbeat quicken. When are you coming home? I don’t like it here anymore. Clio is weird. She pats my behind when I come inside after swimming to see if my suit is still wet. I don’t like it. Dad says Clio doesn’t want us to ruin the furniture, but I’m careful. I really am. I dry off outside. I don’t even sit in the living room. I’m not bad. She just says I am. Please hurry back.

  Aurelia felt a tingling behind her eyes as she stared at the paragraph. Despite the passage of time, her daughter’s plaintive words resonated anew. How many times had Frances begged her not to go away, begged not to be left with Clio? How many times had Aurelia issued the same insincere instructions: “She is your father’s wife, and he loves her very much. You must do your best not to upset her.” Aurelia could see Frances’s face clearly, her round cheeks streaked with tears, her hazel eyes rubbed red. She had expected Richard to remarry, had wanted him to find someone else. She just hadn’t expected Clio.

  Aurelia replaced Frances’s letter in its envelope and repacked the correspondence. No good could be gained by reliving the past. Aurelia needed no prompting to draw on her well of memories, the consequences of her selfishness. She closed the box, pushed it under the eaves, and left the attic.

  The late afternoon light cast a gray pallor through the house. Aurelia rubbed at the cramped muscles in the back of her neck as she made her way to the bathroom. Her legs hurt, too, her body’s way of reminding her that she had aged. She turned the chrome faucet of the tub, waited a few moments for the water to run hot, and added liquid lavender suds, swirling her hand in the water to stimulate bubbles.

  She pulled her white smock over her head and hung it on a peg behind the door. As she moved she caught a glimpse of herself in the floor-length mirror. She stopped and turned to squarely face it. Why did her appearance surprise her? The mirror never seemed to reflect what her mind told her should be there. Folds of white skin streaked with purple veins hung from her stomach, behind, and legs. She ran her hands along her flesh and squeezed the fat of her upper thighs. In another era she might have been considered voluptuous, an erotic Aphrodite, but her physique was incompatible with late-twentieth-century visions of beauty. There were times when her body distressed her, when its shape compelled her to lie on the floor and lift her legs in endless repetitions of ineffective exercises, but most often she could not be bothered. She had grown comfortable moving in a larger frame and failed to think of herself as heavy, until the sight of her nakedness reminded her.

  Aurelia turned off the water. Steam clouded the mirror, which she rubbed clear with a hand towel. She sat at her vanity table and removed a red lip-liner pencil from the top drawer. She stared at her face, the crow’s-feet around her eyes, the crevices on either side of her thinning lips, the deep lines in her forehead. Then she began to draw, marking each wrinkle on the mirror, first with tentative lines, then bolder and thicker, accentuating the epithelial ravines. Her reflection became mutilated by red. When she sat back her face disappeared from view, but the lines remained, an abstract self-portrait.

  What had she done? Richard had survived, had found Clio and been given a second chance. Even with his deteriorating health, he would look back on a good life, one that he had enjoyed. But Blair and Frances had grown up desperate to forget their childhood. Her girls remained scarred by her decisions. Unless she could think of a way to make amends, her cavernous corpse would be buried with the pain she had inflicted. She wished more than anything that there were some way to undo the past.

  Wednesday, May 27

  I hope you l
ike sashimi. I couldn’t remember,” Clio said as she pushed the black-lacquered tray toward Blair.

  Blair looked down at the well-arranged assortment of raw fish. “I love it. I didn’t know there was a good place to get Japanese food around here.”

  “There isn’t.” Clio picked up a small piece of raw tuna with her chopsticks, dipped it into a shallow porcelain dish of soy sauce, and ate it. “Hannah took some lessons and makes it herself. She gets great fish out here, as you might expect, but we bring the seaweed, wasabi, that sort of thing, out from the city.”

  Blair liked that people from Manhattan referred to it as “the city,” as if there were no other place in the world that qualified as such and that she, as part of an elite group, knew what the reference meant. Blair looked at the pickled ginger, arranged carefully into the shape of a rose. “Hannah is a great cook.”

  “She is. We’re lucky to have her.”

  Blair liked Hannah. Unlike most of Richard and Clio’s servants, who came and went before Blair even learned their names, Hannah seemed a permanent fixture, having been in the Pratts’ employ for the last twenty-two years. No more than five feet tall, she looked nothing like an established cook in an affluent household, capable of tending to the culinary needs of the Pratts and their many house-guests. She wore her blond hair in a ballerina’s bun, tight at the back of her head with each stray wisp rendered immobile from hairspray and styling gel. She had bony hands, a thin nose, and a pronounced clavicle that protruded through her cotton uniform, leaving Blair to wonder whether she ate a single one of the delicious meals she produced.

  “You’re very kind to invite me over. When I called, I’d intended to take you out.” Blair played with the corner of her starched linen napkin.

  “I can’t think of any place in town where I’d want to eat. Practically nothing but potato wedges and oversize hamburgers. The restaurants cater to the tourist palate.”

  “This is much nicer,” Blair agreed. She swallowed hard, trying to rid herself of the lump building in the back of her throat. She diverted her gaze from the well-laid table in front of her and looked about the Pratts’ oak-paneled library. Double-lined damask drapes partially covered the arched windows and spilled onto the floor. A pair of love seats covered in chintz, and two Chippendale armchairs formed a seating arrangement around the fireplace. Over the stone mantel hung an oil painting of Clio that Richard had commissioned shortly after their marriage.

  The round skirted table where the two women sat could fit up to six for family meals and intimate, informal dinner parties. Blair remembered evenings seated in the very same chair, staring through the twin flames of the candelabrum at her father across the table. Clio sat to his right, Frances to his left, Justin, Blair’s half-brother, next to his mother. The light flickered off the King George– patterned Tiffany silverware as her father ate steak au poivre and creamed spinach. “My family all together in this wonderful spot with delicious food, what more could a man want?” Richard asked this rhetorical question more than once. Each time Clio smiled as if she had everything in the world to do with his state of bliss and rested her hand on his. He turned, looked at her, and smiled back.

  To Blair, this repeated interchange seemed deliberately intimate, an effort to distance his two daughters. Watching their obvious affection, Blair had the overwhelming urge to shout, You could ask for a lot more. Just because someone looking through the windowpanes might see a scene of apparent domestic serenity, looks are deceiving. You could ask for your daughters to be well treated. You could ask that they be given privacy, that your wife not rummage through their drawers looking for God only knows what kind of contraband stashed away in their Carters cotton underwear. You could ask that she treat your daughters as well as her own son, that she recognize that we are all equally your blood. The fact that we sit here around your stinking table should not give you comfort. We’re here only because we have no other choice.

  Blair hated her rage, a feeling well buried in the cemetery of her past but so easily resurrected from a memory such as the one she experienced now seated at this table, staring at Clio. Blair tried to distract herself. She cast her eyes toward the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves illuminated by seemingly invisible lights. How many times had she climbed the library steps and run her fingers over the rows of leather-bound books, reading the gold-engraved titles out loud? The library made her think of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, her favorite movie, about a gutter-dwelling flower girl transformed into a magnificent woman by the tough love of an aristocratic professor. Higgins had moved gracefully around his library, removing books from shelves, opening and shutting them as he pondered, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square, eternally noble, historically fair…” Despite Higgins’s lyrics, the men Blair knew hardly earned such esteemed titles. Even her father, so well suited to life in a smoking jacket, failed to insure even the most basic fairness in the treatment of his children.

  “Did you visit Richard this past weekend?” Clio asked, ending Blair’s reverie.

  “Actually, I thought I’d stop in after lunch. I meant to come by on Sunday, but the day just slipped away.”

  “That happens.” Blair couldn’t tell whether Clio’s words were intended to reassure, or chastise, her. Clio often masked her pointed comments by appearing to muse out loud.

  “How is Dad?”

  “You’ll see for yourself, I’m sure.”

  “You’ve been great to him. None of us thanks you enough.” Blair’s flattery was genuine, at least with respect to Clio’s handling of Richard’s stroke.

  “Your father is an extremely brave man. There aren’t many of us who could endure what he has to every day and remain eternally optimistic. As for me, I do what any wife would do, or should I say what any wife should do.” Clio looked up from her food and stared at Blair. Then she smiled slightly and returned to her meal.

  Was this a veiled reference to the first Mrs. Pratt? When Aurelia left Richard, he had been in the prime of his life. She never would have deserted him because of an infirmity, would she? Blair wanted to think not, but wasn’t sure.

  Blair fingered her tapered chopsticks, letting the comment pass. The continuing silence felt awkward, as if a warm towel at the base of her neck had grown cold. Blair knew better than to raise the subject of her own mother. Clio had made perfectly clear from the moment she’d moved into the house at Ox Pasture Road that there was to be no mention of Aurelia’s name, no reference to her in any way. Occasionally Blair slipped. She remembered the day she asked to use the telephone to call her mother or when she admitted that Aurelia had given her a new tennis racket. Clio’s focused glare made clear that these comments, innocuous to the outsider, were blasphemous. Any relationship between Blair, Frances, and their mother was nonexistent in Clio’s household.

  Clio balanced a piece of yellowfin tuna adroitly in front of her and remarked, “So, are you out here now for the summer?”

  “Pretty much, yes. I may have to go back to the city once in a while to check on things at the gallery.”

  “How’s your business doing?”

  Blair coughed and reached for a sip of water from the goblet in front of her. “Fine. Pretty good, really, better than I hoped,” she lied. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about the gallery.” She tried to relax back in her chair, but her legs seemed to stick to the cushion, making it impossible to shift her weight without a major movement, a disruption she didn’t want. Blair thought she detected a slight smirk on Clio’s face but decided to ignore it. “Sales are going well. We have a wonderful collection of artists doing a range of work, not like a lot of downtown galleries where everything feels the same, but, as I’m sure you know, it’s a competitive business.”

  “I haven’t been to galleries in the Village in I can’t tell you how long. Richard and I used to make a point of going several times a year, just to keep up with what was being shown. You’re now in SoHo?”

  “No. We’re in Chelse
a. Rents in SoHo have gone through the roof, and more and more dealers are moving to our area.”

  “A little off the beaten track, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I guess it depends on whose track you want to be on.” Blair tried to sound clever, but her tone was defensive. “We’ve got great space, it’s just a little small for our current plans.”

  “And what are those?” Clio rested her chopsticks on the porcelain holder to the right of her plate. Her erect posture seemed impossible to sustain.

  “Well, we’ve had an exciting recent discovery. A sculptor from South America. Argentina.” She tried to sound professional, distant, but felt a bubbly excitement at the mention of his name. “Marco does wonderful bronze nudes.”

  “I’ll have to come and see.” Clio sounded distinctly uninterested.

  Blair stared at the oil painting on the wall in front of her of a haystack in a field that Richard and Clio had loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its show on van Gogh in Arles. The canvas emanated a haunting light. This piece was part of the Pratts’ impressive art collection, paintings and sculpture acquired over the years at auction or from the well-established midtown dealers that remained a league above the Devlin Gallery. On the walls of Clio’s bedroom and study hung early Italian religious art, Masaccio, Gilberti, in ornate gilt frames. Downstairs, a pair of Dubuffet figures graced the entrance to the dining room. Several Picasso drawings as well as a “blue” period self-portrait hung in the living room along with portraits by John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, and Winslow Homer. In addition to the van Gogh haystack, a Georges Seurat park scene and one of Monet’s smaller images of a London bridge in fog filled the library. Even the downstairs powder room contained a Renoir oil of a fruit plate, worth more than the entire inventory of the Devlin Gallery.

  “We were lucky to get Marco. He had an extremely successful show in Chicago. Several New York galleries went out to have a look. When he and I met, he said he wasn’t represented because he had never found a dealer ‘whose vision he admired and whose heart he trusted.’ Those were his words exactly. He’s really a poet as well as an artist. He wants me to represent him.”