Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Anthony Trollope,” Betsy had said thoughtfully when Violet repeated the joke to her. “Trollope died laughing.”

  Violet always fell asleep after a chapter or two, and Frank closed the book and crept downstairs to make his daily call to Dr. Baird. Violet’s day sleep was sacred and precious because her nights were becoming so restless. Her illness had taken them all by surprise: it was real, and she didn’t complain. All her life she had exaggerated and lied, whined over imaginary illnesses, turned colds into pneumonia, missed school, carefully calculated the number of sick days she was entitled to at work and took them all. But a year ago when she began getting the pains in her joints, and the swellings, and the bouts of fatigue, and all the rest of it, it took her months (valuable months lost) before she told anyone, and another four weeks before she’d consent to see a doctor. She wanted to try dolomite, cranberry juice, deep breathing, until Frank and Betsy stormed at her. When all her ailments were taken seriously, and tests (three days in the hospital, with wires, tubes, and needles) showed advanced lymphogranuloma, a rare form of Hodgkin’s disease, and Dr. Baird gently told her there was little hope for a cure (in his eyes, she saw “no hope”), she took it placidly. Her last cold had aroused more passion and resentment than this, her last illness.

  “I’ll be with Will,” she said to her father soon after the diagnosis, and though tears came to his eyes he didn’t really believe in her remark, at once so romantic and so stoic. He thought she got it out of a book. Though they all noticed Violet had stopped complaining, no one noticed she had stopped lying.

  “If only Betsy was settled,” she also said, meaning: Otherwise I die content, Judd’s name never came up in the family discussions of settling Betsy. There were sighs all around. “Settled” meant “married,” but it wasn’t so blunt.

  Violet had a fair amount of time to think and she thought about the thing that nagged at her, trying to identify it. It wasn’t only Betsy’s unsettledness that was bothering her. There was another “If only …” It was when she began to mull over the past, the years with Will (boning up before the reunion), the 365 wonderful days of 1941 (minus Pearl Harbor, though she remembered that she and Will were dancing cheek to cheek that morning in the kitchen, and she had new shoes, when they’d heard it on the radio), that she figured it out. Her real mother. Not that she’d forgotten she was adopted. Like her love for Will, it was always at the back of her mind. But she hadn’t been aware of the intensity of her curiosity, and then she saw that article in the Times and took it as a sign.

  Often, when she lay there and seemed asleep, she was going over and over what she knew. Loftig? Was that what Marion had said? Or Lofting? She had asked her aunt once. One Thanksgiving, after dinner, when Frank was snoozing in his chair and Betsy was off wherever Betsy went, she had said to Marion, “Tell me what you know about my adoption.”

  Marion got sullen and stubborn. “It was a mistake ever to spill the beans to you, Violet,” she said in a low voice, glancing over at Frank. “I won’t say more than I did then. You know, and that’s that. You don’t need to know more. My sister Helen was your true mother, the one who raised you and cared for you.”

  “But my real, actual, biological mother, Marion! How can I help being curious? Did you know her? What was she like?”

  “It’ll do no good to dredge all that up,” Marion whispered fiercely. “It’s dishonoring Helen’s memory. And Frank! Hasn’t he been a good father to you?”

  Her father snoring quietly in the corner, full of turkey, full of love. It had been a pleasant family dinner. Betsy had been in a good mood for once, Marion had brought a fruit cake and wine, the turkey had been just right. It was their first Thanksgiving without Helen. It was nicer without her. Violet had repressed that thought, just as, faced with the turkey, she had repressed her vegetarian ideals. And she retreated in shame from the conversation with her aunt. I let her get away with it, she thought now, remembering how easily Marion had cowed her. It’s my right to know! It said so in the Times.

  “And don’t you say a word to your father about this, unless you want to break his heart” were her aunt’s last words on the subject.

  Well, it would be her secret project. Wasn’t she entitled to a secret project, now that her days were numbered? She blotted out the Thanksgiving scene and went back to 1941. She concentrated fiercely. She could recall the toque, the suit, the lobster, her blue dress, the chair, the palms.… Betsy. Betsy would be her salvation. She would turn it all over to Betsy. She smiled, knowing she’d begun to depend on Betsy lately like a child depends on its mother, and dialed her number, realizing belatedly that it was four in the morning.

  Waiting for her daughter, she dozed, and awoke with the empty sensation in her body that wasn’t hunger but something worse, something bad. She waited quietly for it to pass. It seemed hours since she had called Betsy. Why didn’t she come? She dialed the number again: a man’s voice. Him. She hung up. The emptiness ran along her arms into her hands and down her legs to her feet. She couldn’t feel her body at all. Maybe that’s death, she thought. When I’m all hollow I’ll be dead. She would be one of those chocolate Easter rabbits she never used to let Betsy have and Frank used to sneak into her basket. She reached for a candy bar, thinking of her daughter.

  Elizabeth Jane. Betsy had always been a good child, she couldn’t have asked for a better. If only she got along more easily with people. With her mother and her grandfather, with selected friends, she could be so charming, but Violet knew the charm could desert Betsy, and she got scared and tongue-tied and less pretty when she was flustered. Betsy’s diaries, when she was in high school, had been painful to read, full of humiliations and rejections. Life was hard for Betsy as it had never been for Violet. Violet drifted through; Betsy struggled.

  The emptiness came and went. She tried to keep it straight, all that she had to tell Betsy, but it drifted away from her. She had read a book about remembering once and used to joke, “I can’t recall a word of it!” Her memory was getting worse, but she lay in bed placidly enough, chasing it. There was no hurry.

  That paradox pleased Violet. Without much time left, she had all the time in the world. She loved the way time had slowed, loved lying in the bed she’d had for so many years, with all her comforts at hand, thinking. She could lie there in her old maple bed and think forever. Remembering details about Emily was like being in a detective story. There was so little, and so much, to be made out of it. Like Peter Wimsey or Adam Dalgliesh she pondered and worried her clues until they connected and a pattern formed.

  The house on Spring Street, number 666. They had moved from there when she was little. She could recall the Rebhahns at 664. She used to play with David and Clara. David used to urinate on the rosebushes in the backyard, Clara used to hang by her knees from a branch of the cherry tree with her dress over her head. The Rebhahns had shocked Helen; she’d never liked them. Violet suspected it was David and Clara, as much as Frank’s prosperity, that had driven the Robinsons away from Spring Street. But who lived next door, on the other side? The Loftigs—it didn’t sound at all familiar. Had they moved when Emily disgraced herself? What would a family do? Surely not continue to live next door to their illegitimate granddaughter and her adopted family. They would move away, and take Emily so she could start a new life. Maybe just across town; “across town” was further away in those days. But it would be kinder to Emily to move right away from there. Imagine running into Helen somewhere, wheeling her baby.… No. They would have left the city, if they were kind, and if it was possible. The whole family would be under a cloud—or could you get away with such a thing, in 1922? Send Emily away …? She’d have to leave school—on what pretext? And once the baby was born and safely adopted, would she come back?

  Sometimes the pattern refused to form, and all that was clear to Violet was Emily’s intense misery. Her heart overflowed with sorrow, and her head swam. She would leave it to Betsy. Betsy’s head never swam when it came to the crunch. That book
she had gone to England and Chicago and God knew where else to do the research for. She had brought Violet a Staffordshire dog in her suitcase, picked up cheap in London. Violet thought it was ugly, but she loved it because she liked to think of Betsy out on her own, adventuring in foreign lands: poring over old manuscripts in a library, roaming London, actually going into a musty shop and dickering with the owner. “I got him to come down five pounds solely on the strength of my briefcase,” Betsy had laughed. “Women simply don’t carry briefcases in London. And it only had my lunch and a murder mystery in it.” Betsy could amaze her. Violet had long ago taken as her motto, “You never know!” And it applied better to her daughter than to anyone else, except possibly to her father.

  With Helen she had always known. Helen did nothing to make life interesting—Violet’s criterion for loved ones—and in fact did her best to make it dull and hemmed in. No, Violet didn’t love her, though she didn’t comprehend that fully until adolescence, when Helen’s gloom and sternness became almost malevolent at times. She had been punished for every minor transgression. For forgetting to set the table, the penance was dinner alone in the kitchen. For coming in late: isolation in her room. For lies: slaps. Once, for saying “damn,” Helen had locked her in the cellar.

  Violet couldn’t remember talking much to her mother. Helen was a woman of harsh silences. Frank had probably talked to her too much, Helen too little. She used to ask him why Helen was so mean to her, just to see the look that came over his face, of despair and boundless love.

  “It’s not meanness, Violetta,” he would say. He called her Violetta when he loved her most. “She’s a complicated woman. She does love you, but it’s not so simple for her.”

  To Violet, Helen was—among other things—the Catholic Church, and she disliked the church all the while she was growing up because it belonged to her mother. When she was grown, and Will dead, and she could have profited from religion, it was too late; all it meant was cruelty. For years Helen had taken her to Mass and drilled her in catechism for her first communion and kept a rosary in her apron pocket, and it was Helen who yelled and slapped and came up with cruel deprivations. It was just like her, to worship a man bleeding on a cross. Frank was an Agnostic (to Violet it was some kind of religion, like Catholicism, but infinitely more sensible and kind), and never set foot in a church, and yet was loving.

  “Be patient with her, Violetta,” he said sadly, but what impressed Violet about such exhortations was their goodwill rather than their content.

  She didn’t enjoy thinking of Helen, but she didn’t try to block her out, either. Everything might help, any little thing. And it was, in fact, with Helen in her mind that she remembered the letters. Of course—she had discovered them as a nosy teenager foraging in the attic. Letters from her aunt to her mother, dated 1922, the year of her birth. She had known instinctively not to ask her mother about them, and somehow she had shrunk from asking her father, though now she couldn’t remember or imagine why. But she had asked her aunt Marion about them on her next visit from New York, asked her shyly during one of those excursions when Aunt Marion tried to make friends with her. Were they out for ice cream? She tried to picture it: a lemon soda at Schrafft’s, the long spoon, the chunks of ice in the vanilla, and Marion … She paused, groping down the years. Marion had told her never to speak of them; she had been harsh with Violet, and Violet had cried.

  She could recall the look of them, the creamy paper, the fancy, old-fashioned handwriting (hard to decipher), the red stamps, even the tone of them—reasonable, consoling, unlike Aunt Marion in her seventies, who tended to be unreasonable and irritating. But what they were about eluded her utterly, besides the sense they had imparted of the grown-up world as a yawning pit. She had, instinctively, rejected them, hadn’t even plowed through them all. But they had registered in her mind. Why, though? Oh, it wasn’t fair, what the years did to your memory.

  She thought they must be still in the old cedar chest where she had found them, up in the attic back under the eaves. She had kept them in her own room for a while, but then, nervous about being caught, had restored them to the chest before Helen found out she had them. She’d been—what? fourteen? (She’d had a white angora sweater set that year, and breasts.) She set herself to remembering what was in the letters; they had been strange and shocking, that was all that came back to her. They had puzzled and repelled her. Scared her. But now she had no memory of the contents of those thick, squarish envelopes. She concentrated: creamy paper, black ink, red stamps, “Your loving sister,” and the 1922 postmark …

  Urgently, before she forgot everything, she called Betsy.

  Chapter Three

  Betsy

  At three o’clock Monday morning her mother called again. Betsy awoke just too late.

  “Jesus!” Judd was out of bed. “What kind of crackpot—”

  The phone was in the kitchen; she raced him for it and won.

  “Hello.” She motioned Judd back to bed.

  “Betsy? It’s me again.”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Judd looked murderous and made strangling gestures with his two hands before he marched back down the hall, muttering. The bedroom door slammed behind him.

  “I know it’s late, Betsy, but this is really important.”

  Betsy calculated quickly. The call would set a pattern if she took it without protest. She made a decision even before her mother’s sentence ended: to endure the nocturnal calls without complaint, even if they became chronic. It’s the least I can do for her, she thought. She was responding every bit as much to the curses and the slammed door as she was to her mother’s last whims, but a silent and vague “to hell with him” was the closest she came to articulating this.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I don’t mind. What’s really important?”

  “I just remembered I have a pack of letters of my mother’s—Helen, I mean, not my real mother—”

  “Yes, yes. What letters?”

  “From Aunt Marion, when she was living in New York. I looked at them once, years ago. I suppose, technically, they’re my father’s, but I remember finding them and appropriating them and reading them—when I was a teenager, poking around one day.”

  I can imagine, thought Betsy, knowing how her mother could poke around. She had, over the years, gone through Betsy’s drawers, read her letters, eavesdropped on her conversations, picked the locks of her diaries.

  “I can’t remember what’s in them; they went on in a sort of religious way, I think, which strikes me as odd, now, since they were from my aunt Marion.”

  “What do you mean?” There was no sound from the bedroom. Please let him have gone back to sleep. Betsy stretched the phone cord to its limit, to the far side of the kitchen, and spoke as quietly as she could. “What were they about?”

  “I can’t remember!” said Violet in a restrained wail: she too, had to keep her voice down. “I don’t think I even read them all, Betsy, the handwriting was hard to read. I think if there was anything to understand in them, I wouldn’t have understood it. But now they might make more sense. There were a lot of them, and they dated from around the year I was born. That I remember very well. I think that’s what must have attracted me to them, that and the fact that they were hidden, of course. In my mother’s old cedar chest, under a pile of winter underwear. And they were horrifying, Betsy, in some way, though I can’t remember why.”

  Betsy felt her patience going. “Somehow I doubt they’ll tell us much, Mom,” she said, keeping her voice even and the weariness out of it. “If they were from Grandma to Aunt Marion, we might get something out of them, but not the other way around.”

  “No no no no no no, Betsy,” came the confiding, confident voice. “I think you’re wrong. My aunt is the blatherer. My mother was very close-mouthed. There may be hints.” She told Betsy how Marion had reacted to her questions about the letters, how Marion the blatherer had become a Helen, closemouthed and secretive and curt.

  Betsy looked
at ther watch. Three-fifteen. He must be asleep—otherwise he’d have the light on to show her he was up and fuming. “I’ll come over and check them out before I go to the library. Nothing to lose.”

  “Come over now, honey.”

  “Mother!” But she had expected it.

  “Please?” Had she not noticed the weakness of her mother’s voice until it turned plaintive, or had Violet deliberately faded out? Betsy was well acquainted with her mother’s dramatic gifts. “I want so much to see them, Betsy. I’m sure there’s something in them, and it’s …” The voice faded, strengthened, died away again on a sigh. “Oh, I know it sounds selfish, it sounds awful, but—this is my best time, honey, I feel so well and enthusiastic at night, Betsy, you don’t know what it does to me to upset your routine like this, to call you over here at this terrible hour, but I want you so much—”

  “Mom.”

  There was a final gathering of strength. “Betsy, I can’t sleep without those letters. Please, honey, it won’t happen again.”

  “Okay, Mom, I’m coming.” She would have answered sooner but for tears. The weakness wasn’t faked or exaggerated; if only it was. She could hear the shortness of breath, the pain behind the words. She wiped her nose on a table napkin. “I’ll be right over.”

  “Bless you, honey.”

  She pussyfooted by the bedroom door. She was wearing a short nightgown, and she grabbed a sweater from the hall closet and keys from the table. Again she carried her sandals and let herself out without a sound. Just before she pulled away from the curb she saw a light go on in the apartment. Hell!

  She lived on the other side of town from her grandfather’s house, but she could have made the trip with her eyes shut. She drove speedily through the deserted streets, afraid. She had just seen her mother on Saturday night, but she never knew when she would find her weakened, deteriorated beyond recognition. A sudden change was possible, the doctors said. Or she could live for months, hanging on. She hadn’t sounded good on the phone.…