Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Joy rose in her throat like nausea, and she coughed before she laughed. “Do you think so? Do you think so?”—taking Terry’s two hands. “It never occurred to me it could be morning sickness. I can’t imagine why. Do you really think so?”

  Terry frowned. Her hands were unresponsive. “You don’t—mind?”

  Betsy’s laughter bubbled up again. “Mind? Heavens, no. Judd and I both love children. He’s the man I live with, you know. I’m sure you know all about it.”

  “Well—” Terry was embarrassed; her shrug encompassed all the overheard gossip. Or perhaps Frank had told her. He had confided to her his fears about Betsy’s nausea, after all. This fact astonished her, and for some reason it delighted her. The idea of her grandfather going to his daughter’s nurse with the problem—a young girl of twenty-three advising Frank Robinson!

  Betsy laughed again and squeezed Terry’s hands. “Judd’s a photographer. He’s done some fine work with children. He does buildings now, but not exclusively. That’s all his work, on the wall. He’s marvelous with children. He has a real rapport with them.”

  “And you think he’d be glad to have one of his own?”

  “Glad? Of course!” But as she said it, the certainty left her. Glad? She had no idea. What had she been thinking of when she stopped taking her pills? Of a picture Judd had taken of little Bert hanging upside down from a tree branch. Another of two solemn little girls playing dress-up, for an insurance company ad. One of a Suzuki violin class playing in unison: six bent arms, six bows, six faces fiercely concentrating. Of the afternoon they spent hiking with Judd’s brother’s kids. Of her last chance. Of Judd, settled. Of joy. Of nothing. She had thought of nothing that could be linked with reality. It was a Norman Rockwell pregnancy. I must be crazy, she said to herself, and imagined a future of empty closets and gaping drawers.

  Terry was standing up, looking relieved. “It’s a happy occasion, then, after all.”

  Betsy looked up at her. “I’d better have a test before I celebrate, I suppose.”

  Terry sensed her deflated mood and said, to cheer her, “I’d put money on it.”

  “Well, don’t be too positive about it to my grandfather, Terry. I mean, if I am, I really ought to tell Judd first.” Betsy forced a conspiratorial grin.

  “You’re right, of course.” Terry beamed. “He is an awfully inquisitive old man, though. Wonderful for his age.”

  “He’s seventy-seven.”

  “As old as the century. And you’d think he was no older than Mrs. Ruscoe.”

  “She’s wonderful for her age, too. All things considered.”

  Terry’s face went somber. “It’s a privilege to see her through this.”

  “How long, do you think, Terry?”

  “Impossible to tell, it’s such an unpredictable thing.” She frowned, flattered she was asked. “But I think she’s got a way to go.”

  Involuntarily, Betsy put her hand on her stomach. She felt strong and optimistic again. The nausea had passed, her tiredness had left her. She came, after all, from a stoic family. Though crowned with thorns, her head would hot bow.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Terry indicated Betsy’s stomach.

  “Funny? Yes, it is funny,” Betsy said. “It is damned funny.” She looked approvingly at Terry’s white uniform. This would be her world for a while, the world of nurses and urine samples and personal questions. All the special, healthy, feminine world of pregnancy, with its arcane processes and vocabulary, would be hers, like a club. She patted her flat stomach; it felt good and ripe beneath her hand.

  Betsy took a bottle of urine downtown to the Planned Parenthood Clinic the next morning as soon as Judd and her nausea were gone. She was assigned a friendly young woman named Peg who took her into a cubicle and dropped a puddle of urine on a test paper with an eyedropper. She explained everything as she went along. Betsy had thought it was rabbits, and her pint jarful embarrassed her. Why hadn’t they told her they needed only a drop? Peg explained about the rabbits, and Betsy tried to look intelligent, but she wasn’t hearing a word. She was looking at a framed wooden cut on the wall of the little room—a mother and child. There was infinite tenderness in the tilt of the mother’s head, in the circle of her arm about the infant.

  “Positive!”

  Peg poured out Betsy’s pint and washed her hands. Betsy sat and watched in silence.

  “Are you pleased?” Peg had a tiny lisp, and thick red arms like legs.

  “Yes,” Betsy whispered, and then said more loudly, “Yes, I am. I’m not married, though. But we may decide to, now. We may.”

  Peg dried her hands on a paper towel and sat down facing Betsy. Her face was full of the desire to help. “Do you have a gynecologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better make an appointment right away. Do you want me to sign you up for some counseling?”

  “You mean, don’t I want a nice abortion?”

  Peg’s face went even kinder at Betsy’s hostility. “I don’t mean that at all. It’s simply that women in your position can sometimes use advice. Someone to talk to.”

  “I can talk to the baby’s father. That seems the logical choice.” It was all bravado, but Peg didn’t know that. She shrugged her shoulders and spread her big hands wide. One of them still held the paper towel, wadded up. “Of course,” Peg said. It came out, “Of courth.” The paper towel fell to the floor and she bent to pick it up. The interview was over.

  Why did I get so nasty? Betsy asked herself. What in hell am I doing, anyway? Her condition was incurable, like her mother’s; there was no going back on life any more than on death. She saw herself and her baby in a circle of love. She saw the baby as a piece of herself, transmuted, glorious. But she didn’t see Judd at all.

  Chapter Four

  Violet

  Violet lay, or sat propped, in her bed by the window, peacefully thinking. Her placidity was becoming a legend in the family. She could see them look at her with admiration; in turn she looked back at them, amused. Someone—who had it been? Marion? doing her duty by her dead sister?—had asked if she wanted a clergyman, a priest, and Violet’s laughter had bubbled over. She had no need of priests, with the image of Will before her. A priest! She pictured a timid and platitudinous man in black, like the one who’d staged her mother’s funeral. At least there would be no priests and no lugubrious chanting at hers. She had specified: no music, no flowers, no church. She had toyed with the idea of having them play “Stardust”—their song—and smiled at the picture of Frank and Marion, Betsy and Judd, fox-trotting at her funeral.

  Violet kept her mind, when she could, on her death, preparing herself, examining her conscience, as she’d been taught to years ago by Helen. (You ran through the long list of possible sins and kept a scorecard on yourself.) But she didn’t think of her transgressions—and they were few enough, it seemed to her—as sins. Mistakes, rather. The only one that mattered was Betsy; somewhere she had steered her daughter wrong. Oh, if Will had only lived things would be different, Betsy would be married years back, and there would be grandchildren to see her casket lowered into the ground.

  But if only Betsy was settled.… This sorrow drove out the thought of death and narrowed to an irritation: Judd. Betsy’s chosen lover. Violet flinched at the word but forced herself to use it. What else to call him? The Ann Landers column in the evening paper was full of facetious suggestions, but when you came right down to it a man and woman living together were lovers, pure and simple. (No, not pure, and probably not simple, either.) Or else they were husband and wife. In this case, better a lover than a husband; lovers by definition were temporary. But you never know. He is unfathomable, Violet thought—a deep one.

  She forced on herself the possibility that he might, for whatever unsavory reason of his own, be persuaded to marry her daughter after all—a man with nothing pleasant or engaging or amiable about him, no politesse. Brought up down in Texas someplace by a fat woman with ten children and her front teeth out. He’d told
them that: “I was raised in foster homes. I spent six years with a woman named Bobbie-Dora Prince and her husband Ray Prince. Bobbie-Dora was fat and illiterate and just about toothless, but she had a heart of gold. At one time she had ten of us homeless brats. Her mother had her sterilized when she was sixteen because she thought Bobbie-Dora was mentally defective—she’d already had two babies, both dead. But she was just a good, simple woman who loved kids. Ray was all right when he was sober, he used to play the banjo, but it was Bobbie-Dora who took care of us. I sent her Christmas and birthday cards until a couple of years ago when I heard she died. Actually, she was shot to death by a boy she took in.”

  He told them that when he met the family for the first time. What was anyone to say? Especially the way he told it, so unemotional, and then he changed the subject, anyway. Betsy, sitting beside him with that moonstruck look as if where she really wanted to sit was at his feet.

  He was successful enough, made a living—not that his photographs were much to look at. All they did was show what was there and pretty it up a little bit. He specialized in long street vistas, the seedier and the more depressing the better, so he could make them seem quaint and nostalgic, with the sun on them and a hazy look he must get by shooting through gauze or Vaseline, like they did Doris Day in the movies. It wasn’t even very effective; there wasn’t an awful lot you could do with parking lots and farm shacks and broken-down storefronts, mostly in dusty southern towns best left forgotten. He’d had a book of these published, but Violet couldn’t imagine anyone buying it but his friends—if he had any. Who wanted to look at such things, even through gauze?

  She supposed his commercial photographs were better, the ones he got paid so handsomely for. Those buildings. And Betsy swore he did beautiful shots of children, though Violet found that hard to imagine, unless he bullied them into cute poses. She pictured him rough and shouting, pushing children around, and charging huge sums for the results. It seemed a shame—that photography could pay so well. She was remembering Will and his sketches—his unsung talent. Now there was a craftsman, she thought (turning uneasily in bed as the pain touched her). Just a man and his pencil, no camera to do the work for him, no darkroom full of expensive gadgets.

  She hadn’t looked at Will’s sketches in years, couldn’t bear to, and the years had covered them with their own gauzy haze. Reconstructed in her mind, their bold, honest strokes were softened. She forgot the economy of his lines and the way he drew, obsessively, over and over, her mouth and eyes, mouth and eyes, sometimes a hand or the curve of her cheek. She forgot her impatience with him for never bringing the pieces together. She would have loved that formal portrait of her he had always intended to paint, treasured it as a memorial to him, not to her. It could have hung on the wall, just there, where she could see it and think of his hands holding the brushes, his frowning face bent over the work. She saw the portrait, in oils, finished and pretty, with her hair done, and completely forgot that he drew her only in rough pieces with black ink.

  The imaginary portrait was part of her peace. So was Emily the imaginary mother. It pleased her to see Emily as a young girl in white, not yet a mother at all, a girl with Violet’s own face, or Betsy’s face. She had turned Emily over to Betsy; for her, only the waiting was left, and waiting was her forte. Lying in bed watching the sun patterns move across the wall, slip into corners, and disappear, Violet was all expectancy. Life, death, pain and relief from pain—all of it was beyond her control, and she was glad to let it go. Only Betsy roused her worry. I will die before I’ve done a mother’s duty, Violet thought. If only she was settled: she said it to herself over and over; the phrase came into her mind whenever Betsy did. And not settled with him. It always came back to Judd. She had been willing to be won over, to take to Judd as Frank and Helen had finally taken to Will—Ah, but that was different, this Judd was no Will, and there had been the decent church wedding, with stephanotis and white roses and herself in white satin and a big, flat hat.

  If only Betsy would settle down with a nice man, a fellow professor, maybe—a man with some charm, who knew how to talk to a prospective mother-in-law, who didn’t growl over the phone, who came to dinner when he was invited, who observed amenities. Judd was ruining her last days, she thought sometimes when she felt crabby and unwell. He was an intrusion, like pain. Maybe it was the way Betsy looked at him, maybe it was those pale little eyes, or his shirts unbuttoned too far, or the closed-up look on his face—or the endless camera clicking: endless, and then he never showed them the photographs.

  It became easier and easier, though, to put the problem from her mind. In fact, as the days went on, the present slipped further from her. Company could keep it close. While Frank sat with her, or Terry (the sticky perfumy smell!), or Betsy, Marion, the occasional friend, the past lurked just out of reach like a cat in a tree, waiting. And as soon as she was alone it pounced with its velvet paws.

  Sometimes she would nap briefly and awake to find the sun moving across her thin yellow blanket, and the blanket was the yellow mass of roses on Helen’s coffin. The roses were from Frank, and he had tears to contribute as well, as if tears and roses could wash death away and mask its smell. Frank’s tears had frightened her, and Betsy’s, too, because they were not weepers. It was Violet, the weeper, who had no tears for Helen. Any tears she had she was still spending on Will; for Will, they were an endless resource, not to be spent on this imitation mother. Nearly thirty years hadn’t dried them up.

  Once, with the tears on her cheeks, she had opened her eyes to see the sun gone from her blanket, and Judd standing by her bed.

  “I’ve brought the book,” he said. “Betsy got held up at a meeting.”

  He laid it on the table—some book or other Betsy had dug up for her in the library—and then he took a handkerchief and gently wiped at the tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered, and when she opened her eyes again it was Frank, waiting to read. A dream, it was—or the pills—though there was the book. She never asked.

  Her days were full of such puzzlements. She accepted them, and then she forgot them, the things that happened between sleep and waking.

  Once there had been her father’s voice, loud as thunder, and her mother’s had come in, tap-tapping, tap-tapping, a hammer on a nail. The two voices had been woven together, then wrenched apart with a tearing sound. She was a child, alone in her overheated room, in bed at night, and they were fighting, of course, over her. The crashing, tapping, tearing was all her fault. She pulled the covers over her head, so that the stuffy darkness, which she usually loved, scared her, and the sounds muffled that way were dreadful and strange. They were troll sounds, like the trolls in The Three Billy Goats Gruff that made her shut her eyes and cover her ears when her father read it, only his arm around her keeping the nasty trolls at bay and the fear delectable. She raised her head free of the blankets, listening, and the noises ceased except for the tap-tapping and she thought: Mother has won, and she’s building something with her hammer—which so terrified her she woke with a scream to see Terry, and her high-protein drink, and a thermometer, and to hear the rain dripping from the gutters.

  “I think that storm has pushed your fever up, Mrs. Ruscoe.”

  The days passed in dreams. Pain was still experimental, tentative. Violet could still sit back and look at it, surprised, as if a puppy had nipped her in play. But it made her suspicious and inattentive; she had to stay tuned to the teeth in her flesh.

  She didn’t really like leaving her bedroom, but the rest of them thought changes of scene were good for her.

  “Nothing is good for me,” she said to Frank. He was helping her out of bed. “Just as nothing is bad for me.”

  Her father just set his face and held out her robe to her, but Marion looked shocked and said, “I wish you wouldn’t go on like that, Violet.” The two of them helped her down the hall and down the stairs and, now that the weather was so good, out to the green backyard. They sat her in the chaise under a shawl, wh
ere she could reach up and touch the lilacs. “Their smell is so sweet and cool,” she said when they bloomed. “I like it so much better than roses.”

  “Well, the roses will be out any day, too,” Frank said. He looked forward to them, especially now that he’d given up his vegetable patch. She knew he loved the roses; she was glad Betsy didn’t. Betsy grew useful things, like vegetables, with a row of marigolds put in only to keep the bugs off. Last summer she’d sat in Betsy’s backyard with her, watching her weed and cultivate, so much like her grandfather. She could remember Frank, before his hair turned white and disappeared entirely on top, so handsome and lean in his old-fashioned undershirt, with a kettle of mashed-up tomatoes in front of him, scooping them into jars. While he worked he sang old songs no one else ever sang anymore: “Courting songs,” he said, winking at Helen’s turned back.

  “Will I live to eat your tomatoes this year, Betsy?” They all pretended she hadn’t said it; perhaps she hadn’t.

  Then the roses came out (first the climbing Peace roses on the trellis, then the floribunda hedges) and spread their sick smell all over the yard when the breeze was right. Excessive, like too much cologne, like hair spray. Then the Japanese beetles on the old, overgrown raspberry canes. A memory crept up and surprised her; for a second, Helen was in the backyard with them—over there, by the old garden patch, in one of her zip-front housedresses, as real as Betsy. Violet grimaced. Anyone watching her would have thought the pain was particularly bad, but it was the memory: Helen squashing the beetles between her fingernails with a crunch, and crushing tomato hornworms with her bare heel. Ugh! Her mother’s brash fearlessness was almost inhuman—and Lord, you’d never have guessed it from her mousy face.

  Remembering Helen and the insects, Violet developed a fear of the roses and avoided looking into their hearts lest there be a bug there, a worm curled about the stamens. She laughed at herself. It was like something out of a book, some heavy symbolism. But she recoiled from the roses. And though it had been Helen who prompted her horror, Judd took over as the sun unfolded the blossoms. If she were putting that particular symbol in a book or a poem, the worm in the rose would be her daughter’s lover.