Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

He had had to miss the last two Saturday night dinners—another tradition going down the drain.

  “She’s just the same,” Betsy said.

  “She sounded just the same on the phone the other night.” He grinned. “Morning.” Ah, that was the official line: no resentment, just that irrepressible Violet. She adjusted herself to it.

  “She has a new bee in her bonnet.”

  “As usual, you’ll be the one to get stung.”

  “Well—yes. She wants me to find her mother, for my summer project.”

  “Her what?”

  “Mother. Remember, I told you she’s adopted? She wants a family tree. She read an article.”

  “A bit late …”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Among other things.”

  “But you’ve got the job. I mean, you took the job.”

  “Of course.” She spoke sharply. “Judd, she’s dying. You don’t say no to a dying woman. You don’t tell her anything is too late.”

  “And what happens when you find out? When all your poking around in libraries and courthouses leads to a cemetery? Do you get an old lady from central casting?”

  “I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Maybe it’s not hopeless, Judd.”

  “Oh, come on.” He forked in the last of the omelet, ate the parsley, and gulped coffee. Betsy began to clear the table; it made a pause during which they could both back off.

  “I’ve got to get going. Let’s hope my blasted car starts.”

  “Do you have that map?”

  “No! Bless you, Betsy Wetsy.” He grabbed her and kissed her forehead. “Where would I be without you? Out in the middle of nowhere looking for a shopping center.”

  He hunted through his desk, located the map, and said, “You know, you can’t be sure your mother’s adopted.”

  “What?”

  “You know how she makes things up. Nobody else has ever mentioned it—right? Are you sure she’s not just trying to inject a little drama into her situation?”

  It was a reasonable question. Even an imaginative one. Nothing to get mad at. Judd’s callous, almost flippant attitude toward her mother’s state always pained her. Maybe it was healthy? Or a desperate denial of death that was to be pitied? But it pained her.

  “Could be. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. I suppose I’ll find out.”

  “To me, she looks like your grandfather. From certain angles.”

  He kissed her good-bye with passion, holding her tight. He reached inside her kimono for a piece of breast, and then he pulled her down on the sofa on top of him.

  She fitted her body to his.

  “This is ridiculous. I’ll be late.”

  “You started it.”

  He watched her with his pale eyes half-closed while she unbuckled his belt and pulled down his zipper, and then she untied her kimono and awkwardly slipped it off.

  “I love it when I’m all dressed and you’re all naked,” he said lazily, and cupped her breasts in his two hands. She moved so he could close his lips around one while they made love. Almost at once—it was something about the way they fitted each other, they had never been able to analyze it—she began to come. She lay on him with her teeth in his shoulder, tasting shirt. He clutched her buttocks, gasping deeply, and let loose the flood of endearments that came only with orgasm: “Oh, my baby, my love, my little love, oh baby, baby—”

  After a minute they looked at each other and laughed.

  “Now you can go,” she said.

  “God, you are terrific. Ah, what an ass—tits—the tightest little cunt—”

  “Enough.” The words still embarrassed her, and she kissed him to hide the fact. Then she stood up and put her kimono back on. He lay at ease, unwilling to get up; a shaft of sun across his face made his pale blue eyes look almost sightless, like the eyes of a statue. We are made for each other, she thought.

  “You’ve lost that map again.”

  They found it on the floor. He adjusted his tie and kissed her again, with no less passion.

  “Judd! What’s come over you?” Oh, it was good, it was lovely; no house of cards could be this solid, this beautiful.

  “You. You came over me.” He grinned. “A pun.”

  “Har har.”

  She saw him to the door. He kissed her neck. “Give my best to the family. I’ll try to be home by eleven.”

  Back in bed, she hugged his pillow to her breasts, thinking: Judd, Judd, Judd. She felt her vagina contract, sucking in any errant sperm, and then she closed her eyes and, with her arms around the pillow, slept until noon.

  In her endless musings on them, her four and a half months with Judd sometimes came to Betsy as a series of photographs—not unlike Judd’s southwestern series that lined the walls of the living room. Odd, because she didn’t feel comfortable with those photographs. It wasn’t just the subject matter—the dead main streets of forlorn Texas towns, garish Mexican roadside shrines commemorating auto accidents, fat women in bars, leathery men with lizard eyes and ten-gallon hats; it was more the way these subjects were presented, in a sunlit, low-contrast style that to Betsy seemed romanticized. The photographs made her uneasy, particularly because Judd was fonder of the series than of anything else he had done. Knowing this, Betsy had studied them intently, wondering what affinity he felt with such bleak memorials, what need to place them in a sunny haze of his own making, but they said nothing to her. They expressed a part of Judd she had no knowledge of and perhaps no liking for, and so to her they were simply false to reality. But her mental photographs had their own falseness.

  CLICK! Judd himself, alone, a subject he never would have taken but that she sees clearly. He is doing nothing—at most, half-listening to music he knows every note of by heart, maybe an old Eddie Heywood piano solo or a Billie Holiday record. His ability to do nothing enchants her, he simply sits, the way an animal simply sits, eyes shut, long fingers clasped on chest, where they rise and fall with his breathing. (Her own fingers curl around a book; her mind disciplined to withdrawal by years of drilling, she can concentrate on her reading even in his disturbing presence, but now and then she looks up and takes this photograph.) His hands rest together between his red suspenders, he is wearing a collarless shirt and the wool pants that don’t zip but button, and his feet are bare. (Remove him from stereo and Oriental carpet and transport him to a sunny riverbank, and he might be a character out of Huckleberry Finn—some drifting ne’er-do-well, maybe a gambling man.) He is barefoot because he believes feet need to breathe. (When she asked him once why feet need to breathe and armpits and crotches and navels do not, he obligingly removed all his clothes.) His closed eyelids are long and narrow—fish-shaped—fringed in stiff black lashes. He has five o’clock shadow all day, and now—at just about five o’clock—he verges on being bearded, the rough skin of his cheeks and chin nearly hidden. He is from the Southwest, and she knows the snow-belt winters make him homesick; behind his closed eyes she imagines he travels into his photographs, down dusty, unimaginably sunburnt roads. She has been west only once, to read a paper at the Modern Language Association convention in Denver; she remembers snow, and awesome blue mountains circling the city. But his West is different from hers, and when he smiles, now while she watches, she worries about his memories: Mexican bars, hot nights, peyote, the Tex-Mex food he misses, and raven haired women with mysterious sexual arts. She imagines lurid versions of scenes from Carmen, and marvels at his tameness, stretched out on her Sarouk listening to piano music, with snow falling outside the window.

  He opens his eyes and catches her watching; he grins. “All right, damn it, you win—my feet are cold.” She runs for a pair of his wool socks, but that’s not part of her photograph, though it may be of his: a tall, serious-faced woman, hippy and busty in blue jeans and a high-necked sweater, who not only brings him the warm socks but kneels and puts them on his feet.

  CLICK! Spring comes coyly to upstate New York, with many false promises. On one such deceptive day, Judd and B
etsy take a long walk through the city. They leave the Westcott Street apartment and walk down to Genesee Street and out towards the suburbs, exclaiming every time the sun emerges from the clouds. It is a bright gray day, and in an occasional front yard before the shopping centers take over there are crocuses and snowdrops. Betsy’s photograph encompasses the crocuses but not the traffic or the stores or the grayness; it is composed of flowers, sunlight, and Judd striding easily along with his hand in hers. But the afternoon extends past the edges of her picture. They stop at a deli for cheese and rolls and fruit, and when they reach their destination—a small park off the road, hemmed in by parking lots and laundromats and restaurant chains—they sit on the greening grass and eat. Perhaps Betsy’s photo goes even this far, but there it ends, when the clouds cover the sun for good, and a cold wind comes up, threatening rain. In seconds Judd turns angry and unpleasant, like the weather. They gather up the remains of their lunch, Judd stuffing rolls into a trash container, which he then kicks, while Betsy wraps the uneaten cheese. They stride off toward home, underdressed, walking west into the wind. Betsy carries the bag of cheese and pears. Judd keeps his hands in his pockets and walks slightly ahead of her. He is mad at the weather, mad at her for suggesting a picnic on such a day, mad at the printing problem waiting in his studio that he had taken the day off to escape. They had been discussing, in their oblique and random way, the death of Judd’s mother by drowning, and he is also, Betsy knows (trailing along behind him, cold and chagrined), mad at mortality. (The talk had been part of her continuing effort to get him to tell her about himself, but it was like—as Violet might have put it—“pulling him along by his eyeteeth.” He had, for example, told her in detail about his brother Derek’s reaction, dismissing his own with the observation, “It didn’t seem real,” his pale blue eyes staring opaquely at her, daring her to probe.) She forces herself to think about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, which she will be lecturing on the next morning, while the wind blows back to her the curses he mutters at it. In her mind’s darkroom, the sunny photo is already formed, and when, a month later, she refers happily to “that nice smelly cheese we took on our picnic,” he will look at her in silent amazement.

  CLICK! They are in Pennsylvania, on a weekend late in April, visiting Derek, his wife Suzanne, and their three young sons. Betsy and Judd take the two older boys on a hike through a nearby woods to a ravine where Derek says there is a beaver colony; it’s the right time of year to see the baby beavers swimming. The boys are very excited; they push gladly into the woods. Hiking makes them thirsty, and there are frequent pauses for cold drinks from the canteen Judd carries in a backpack, but their spirits are high, and Betsy rejoices in their affection for their uncle. Bobby is a cub scout and makes a great show of directing them with his compass; Bertie trips over roots, and picks himself up again and again good-humoredly. But they don’t find the ravine, and when the boys finally get tired they all stop for lunch at a spot where two fallen tree trunks provide backrests and seats. They sing, listening for echoes, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith,” a song Bobby learned in cub scouts, and Betsy and Judd teach them “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.” Then Judd decides they must climb the mountain. It’s no more than a steep hill, rising ahead of them into the brush, but Judd turns it into the Rockies for his nephews, and the boys rouse themselves eagerly. The hill is muddy, with precarious-looking baby trees scattered sparsely over it. Judd says they’ll be able to spot the ravine from the top. He straps on the backpack and off they go. It becomes obvious at the outset that the hill is too much for the children. The steepness and the slippery mud and the lack of good handholds discourage them, and they wish to stop. They look appealingly at Judd, but he keeps his back to them; he ascends steadily, his long legs carrying him easily from tree to tree. Behind him, Betsy and the boys scrabble in the mud, out of breath and enthusiasm. Betsy considers. The climb is not dangerous, merely tedious and dirty and exhausting. The boys are obviously miserable, but they don’t complain; they wish this remarkable and elusive uncle, who treats them like grown-ups, to think well of them. If she calls out to Judd, suggesting they give it up, he’ll be furious—she can tell by the determined angle of his head, by the way his hiking boots bite purposefully into the mud, leaving deep-set prints behind, which the boys step into. She stays silent. Meanwhile, Bobby and Bert get muddier and more fatigued. They have adopted a four-pointed, reptant climbing style, digging into the mud with their hands and the toes of their boots. They are filthy, and Bert’s panting breaths are drawn in almost on a sob. Betsy scrabbles behind them as best she can, until Judd reaches the top—and it is here that her photograph begins to take shape. Smiling, he reaches a muddy hand down to the boys. He helps them up and then Betsy, his gritty fingers clasping hers firmly. “Here we are,” he says to them. “That wasn’t so bad. was it?” He grins a wicked grin, and the boys respond to it with exaggerated boasts. “It was just a little old anthill, Uncle Judd,” says Bobby, and the boys crack up, while Betsy’s heart leaps as it always does when they call him Uncle Judd. They have a drink and walk to the other side of the hilltop. Sure enough, they glimpse water down below, and the boys lead the way, laughing, down the gentler slope. It is Judd at the top, tall and strong, connected to her and the boys by their linked muddy hands, that Betsy preserves in her mental photograph album.

  In the evening, the weather was so fine Frank barbecued a steak in the backyard, and they ate on the flagged patio. Violet had the chaise longue, with three pillows and a tray. Betsy cut Violet’s meat up small for her because it tired her mother to chew.

  “It looks like something for the cat,” Violet said.

  “Eat. Keep up your strength,” urged her aunt. Aunt Marion was Frank’s sister-in-law, a spinster of seventy-six who had once written a historical novel called The Pride of Passion. It was her chef d’oeuvre; since then she had written nothing she considered important, boasting of her forty-five-year writer’s block and keeping her hand in with an occasional letter to the editor of the Herald-Journal.

  “Frank, shoot Violet over another hunk of meat,” she said.

  “No no no no no, I have enough here to last me two hours, Marion.”

  “Potato salad, then. Garlic bread, Violet.”

  “Don’t force her, Aunt Marion,” Betsy said. “She gets plenty to eat.”

  Frank was silent, chewing. He was still getting used to his new bridge, and he had a way of scrutinizing each forkful before he put it in his mouth, checking it out for potential problems.

  “My Betsy doesn’t approve of some of my eating habits,” said Violet, spearing a tiny chunk. “Betsy thinks she’s the mother, I’m the child, and she knows best.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Mother. I don’t care what you eat.” She was missing Judd. His absence embarrassed her. She had no appetite.

  Violet discarded the tiny piece of meat and speared an even tinier one. It was a rebuke. Her petty petulance was something new, and uncharacteristic. It was as if she learned it from Betsy, or from Marion, both of whom were good at querulousness. Violet, the middle generation, was famed for her calm and amiability. Betsy watched, sorrowfully, as her mother fussed over her food.

  “Where’s Judd, exactly, Betsy?” her grandfather asked. They had all sensed the source of her snappishness and were looking at her.

  “On an assignment near Rochester.”

  Aunt Marion sniffed. “I can just imagine what kind of assignment he’s on.”

  “You don’t have to imagine, Aunt Marion,” Betsy said coolly, “because I’ll tell you. He’s photographing a new shopping mall that was designed by a famous architect you’ve never heard of for an article in Architecture Today, which he’s been commissioned to do because he’s the best architectural photographer around, and I’m tired of listening to your snide remarks about Judd. He’s a finer person than you’ll ever be, with more talent than you’ll ever have, and how you can sit there week after week in your polyester pants suits and ridicule him and my relationship
with him is beyond me when you know nothing about it or about anything else.”

  Betsy pushed back her chair and went into the house, heading for the bathroom on the first floor. She locked the door and looked at her face in the mirror. It was perfectly calm, even amused. She felt better after the outburst. She hadn’t taken it seriously, not after the first few words, but it pleased her that her great-aunt had. Her worn, roughed, stunned face had gaped popeyed at Betsy’s diatribe, not because diatribes from Betsy were new to her but because the subject was Judd. Betsy never talked about Judd. Beyond introducing him to the family and bringing him around periodically, she had done nothing to put Judd over. She had never before reacted to one of Marion’s innuendos, and had never volunteered much information. Her relatives discovered he lived with her only when he kept answering the phone, and they had no idea how he, or she, felt about their relationship. Her grandfather got on warily but well with him, her mother disliked him, her great-aunt was fascinated by him and the whole situation.

  Betsy smiled at her face in the mirror. It looked radiantly confident, and the sight pleased her. She examined her coming frown lines—they seemed fainter.

  “Betsy.” Her grandfather knocked on the door. “Are you all right?”

  Betsy opened up. There he was—tall, straight, stern, kind, old—and she put her arms around him.

  “She has no right to make those nasty remarks,” she said, but she was cheerful and he knew it.

  He hugged her, and they walked arm in arm toward the back door. “She’s looking out for your welfare, Betsy. That’s all.”

  “No, she isn’t. If Judd walked out on me tomorrow she’d be delighted. She’d relish it.”

  He smiled at her. “Only because she’d think it was for the best.”

  “Well, she’d be wrong. I think Judd and I are a permanent thing, Grandpa, and I wish everyone would get used to it.”

  “You think, but what about him?”

  Betsy flushed. “We love each other.”

  Her grandfather took her free hand, so that they stood linked, as if for a dance. “Then get married, Betsy.”