Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Once, sitting outside in the sunshine, with the flowers blooming all around her—opening up, turning gross and helpless, and falling—she had said to Betsy, “The roses only make me sad.”

  Betsy’s hopeful smile faded away, and she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mother,” with her special grieved look, so that Violet knew it was her disease Betsy was thinking of. The worm eating away at her insides. The insect gnawing out her bones. The beetle in the heart of the fruit.

  “I didn’t mean anything, Betsy,” she said, but Betsy took her hand and kissed her knuckles, with the easy affection Violet loved so much in her daughter. “I’d like a little bourbon, honey.” Betsy had to get it for her, of course, although it was barely noon. Crazy, how upset they all would get over nothing, Violet thought, breathing deeply. The ice rattled in the glass because her hands were trembling.

  The bourbon always made her sharper. Every hot swallow cleared some of the mist off things, and, drinking, she would glance alertly around her, with her old birdy look. She smiled at them all, hearing their thoughts: Well, it’s good for her, let her have it, whatever helps let her have, even though nothing helps. They were thinking, too, of Will, she bet—Will’s blunt fingers curved around a glass. “Let’s have a drink to celebrate,” he would say, and with that strange avidity get out the bottle. Oh, the dear man, with his baroque conversation, his lovely strong shoulders, his sketch pad. And that old dog of his he’d loved so … She smiled around at them, loving them all, her family. I will have a loving death, she thought, and refused to let the word scare her. She was far beyond fear. Death was a word on a door: open it, and there was Will.

  They were all present, gathered in the backyard for the ritual steak. She didn’t like meat. She hoped there would be garlic bread, and a nice dessert. There was wine, but she refused it for bourbon. Let’s have a drink to celebrate. I am happy, Violet thought. Better than happy, I am amused. The pursing and unpursing of her aunt’s little lips amused her, and her father’s veiny, ribbed hands messing with the steak. I won’t live long enough to get those liver spots, she thought. Betsy making them all laugh with her gossip—where had she got such a sharp-tongued daughter? Violet wondered, laughing hard. How they made her laugh, even that time she opened her eyes to see that man’s hairy hand on Betsy’s knee, creeping up—they’d thought the bourbon had put her to sleep. Even that amused her, though she had burst out at them querulously; it was the pain that made her. The pain could pounce as swift and sudden as memory, with jaws and claws that bit and scratched.

  She sank back into her shawl, drinking. She would try. He was not the man she would have chosen for Betsy, her dear Betsy—so wrong, why couldn’t she see it—but she would try to like him. The attempt would be her legacy to her daughter, all she had to give. Narrow-eyed and clearheaded, she watched him from her seat under the rotting lilacs, forcing a smile when he looked her way or pointed his camera at her. But why must he go barefoot? she thought. Like a hippie. And with such hairy toes.

  Chapter Five

  Betsy

  Telling Judd the news was beyond Betsy’s strength. She waited, as she waited with a toothache, hoping it would resolve itself somehow and make a visit to the dentist unnecessary. I’ll wait for him to notice, Betsy thought, and imagined Judd’s face transfigured by joy when, caressing her, he comprehended the changes in her body. I’ll wait until it shows, she thought. Until I’m more used to it. Until it’s absolutely necessary.

  What she was truly waiting for remained unvoiced: for him to suggest marriage. That the desire should come before the necessity was all she asked—but she didn’t ask. She kept silent, waiting.

  The baby was thoroughly real to her from the beginning. She felt friendly and at ease with the full-grown person who would sit at a table with her someday drinking coffee, who would drive a car and go to college and have her own babies. She imagined it, always, as a daughter—hoping, in fact, so vehemently for a girl (sensing that she didn’t comprehend boys well enough to bring one up) that she was appalled, and wouldn’t let herself speculate on the baby’s sex at all. But soon she began to believe that such powerful desire was prophetic, that the baby must be a girl, and she stopped worrying.

  They went as promised, to dinner at her grandfather’s. Judd brought his camera, further alienating Aunt Marion, who pretended to be flattered but hated having her picture taken.

  “Me? You want to take me?” She lifted her head out of its nest of chins and jowls. “I’ve never yet had a good picture taken of me.”

  “The camera doesn’t lie, Marion,” said Violet from the chaise. The glass of bourbon had become a matter of course.

  “Oh, but it does,” Judd said, squatting low to get the chins in. “It lies all the time, that’s what’s so maddening about it.” Three quick clicks while he talked.

  “I always photographed well, I must say.” Violet’s tone was petulant, and Judd, sensing a summons, abandoned her aunt and pointed his camera at Violet. “Wonderful light on you, Mrs. Ruscoe.” He went down on one knee with the bare pink sole of one foot pointing up, while behind him Aunt Marion patted her upsweep and put her glasses back on.

  Violet raised her drink and ventured a smile, her head on one side. “How’s this? What angle makes me look least like an old bag?”

  “You look great,” Judd said. It was true, Betsy thought; her mother was still youthful and pretty. But she had seen, in Judd’s studio, a stack of rough prints of her family, and she was appalled at the death in them—her mother’s face all bones, her grandfather ropy with veins, her aunt a puffed-up cadaver. Judd seemed pleased with the photographs and flipped through them, smiling faintly.

  “You really must hate them,” she accused him.

  He looked at her in surprise and anger. “Betsy, I’m a fucking photographer. These aren’t your mother and your grandfather—they’re pictures.”

  “You’ve made them look so old and ugly, Judd. They’re not like your other things.” She was afraid he was getting together a new book, of brutally real portraits of the elderly. His first book, with its sunlit evocations of small-town squalor, had been a modest hit; she knew the publisher was agitating for another.

  Judd ignored her words and peered closely at a shot of Violet with her head thrown back and her eyes closed. “I must say, though, your mother has gorgeous bones. Look at these shadows.”

  To Betsy, it was as if her mother was already dead, nothing left of her but the beautiful bones and the shadows they cast. She turned away from the photographs.

  Now, on her grandfather’s back lawn, she leaned toward her mother with an involuntary protective gesture, and Violet held out her glass to be filled.

  Judd began to tell Violet about a cat show he had once photographed. It was one in his stock of funny stories, produced to distract his subjects from the camera, and Betsy listened fondly, laughing to cue Violet in case pain or dislike made her inattentive. She wanted to say, “Isn’t he marvelous? Do you see how wonderful he’s being, how he wants so much to get along with you all?” She laughed prematurely at a cat story, and her grandfather gave her an odd look, then laughed himself.

  “You’ve certainly had the life, Judd,” he said. “When you’re my age, you’ll certainly have more to look back on than a lot of musty legal cases.”

  “That’s for sure,” said Aunt Marion, keeping a wary eye on the camera; it might have been a gun.

  Judd looked through the viewfinder at Frank. “I can’t think of anything more interesting to look back on than your career,” he said, snapping quickly before Frank got up to turn the steak on the grill. The smell of steak had wiped out the smell of roses and rotting lilacs, and when Frank did get up they all watched him hungrily. “I’ve often wished I’d gone into something more solid, Mr. Robinson—like the law. Something more predictable.”

  Betsy tried to imagine Judd in a business suit, sitting at a desk behind a telephone with buttons on it, and reading briefs at home in the evening as her grandfather had, instead o
f listening to records and looking at photographs. It was worse than trying to imagine him a baby, or a little boy playing in a dusty road.

  “Wouldn’t suit you,” Frank said, and flipped the steak onto a platter.

  “Maybe not.” Judd wound up the film and put his camera back in its case. “Sometimes I wish it would.”

  Violet’s voice came sharply from her corner under the lilacs. “Would you say you’re. settled for good in the Syracuse area, Judd? Finding plenty of work here?”

  “More than I can handle.” Judd smiled at Violet and then turned to Betsy. “I like it here,” he said, taking her hand to help her up. “Beautiful country.”

  Betsy tossed the salad, hiding her smile.

  “Now if you could just get that blush of hers on your black-and-white film,” said Frank, looking approvingly at his granddaughter.

  “Under thirty it’s a blush; over fifty it’s a hot flash,” said Aunt Marion.

  “Listen to the epigrams,” Betsy said.

  “What’s in between?” asked Violet.

  “Just nervousness,” her aunt said sourly, getting up and smoothing her pant legs down. “Nervous coloration.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s very becoming on Betsy,” said Frank, and set the steak firmly on the picnic table, closing the subject.

  When she was with Judd and her family, Betsy saw the group as two teams—herself and her grandfather on one side, her mother and aunt on the other, Judd the ball they tossed around. It was an odd game, in which her side repeatedly passed the ball to the others, who speedily’ returned it, as if it burned the fingers. The score so far had been decidedly in the other team’s favor.

  But this evening over the steak and salad Judd devoted himself to charming them. Betsy watched closely: Violet laughed at Judd’s anecdotes, even waited expectantly for more, glass raised and lips parted in her flirtatious smile. Aunt Marion’s laughter was more reluctant, but it did burst out of her now and then in small explosions that she got tipsy trying to drown in wine.

  “That boy has a gift for telling a story,” she said to Betsy after coffee, the winy laughter still simmering. “I’ll bet he’s an entertaining fellow to have around sometimes.”

  “A laugh a minute,” Betsy assured her absentmindedly. She was watching Judd take leave of her mother; not a false step, the right mix of courtly admiration and filial deference. Scoring points right and left. Oh, isn’t he wonderful, she thought, taking his arm and beaming around at them all.

  Her grandfather walked them to the car. “Can I cut you a few roses to take, Betsy?”

  “You know me, Grandpa. I’d just forget them and they’d petal up the whole house.”

  He chuckled. “You’re a vegetable girl, Betsy. Like your grandmother.” The word meant Emily to her now; with an effort she applied it to Helen.

  “But she liked those roses, too, Grandpa.” They paused by the yellow floribunda hedge and impulsively she tore one rose off. “Here, Judd—” She stuck it through his buttonhole. “A boutonniere,” she said, and stopped abruptly because it suggested weddings.

  Her grandfather talked roses to Judd, Judd listening respectfully, even asking a question or two. It astonished her every time she saw him in one of these commonplace transactions. He was so miraculous, so special. To engage in normal human intercourse seemed delightfully quaint in him, another proof of his powers: that such a magical being could manage it.

  “Well done, my lad,” she said as they drove home.

  “What do you mean—well done? I wasn’t performing.”

  “A little, you were.”

  “Nonsense! I like your family. I enjoyed myself.”

  Betsy turned it over in her mind. She had spent the evening in a glow: that he had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with her family was a sign of his love for her. Now it appeared he hadn’t been working at it. Was that better or worse? Surely it was better that he could be natural with them.… On the other hand, he could be deliberately disclaiming any efforts to get along with them in order to exhibit his indifference to her.

  She wanted him to like her family, and not only for her own sake, or theirs. He had no relatives except his brother’s family. He had been orphaned young; he and Derek had, in fact, witnessed the gruesome death of their father in a hunting accident. A few months later had come the drowning—possibly not accidental—of their mother. The boys had been raised as wards of the state of Texas. Was he then invulnerable to family feeling? Did he grudge her the little circle of doting relatives?

  She shut her mind to the endless calculations and sat close to him, with her hand resting on her stomach. “They like you, too, Judd.”

  “Well, good. I’m glad.” He reached an arm around and hugged her.

  She moved her fingers lightly over her belly, calculating, always calculating: when to tell him, and how.

  She badly needed the child. She had always, it seemed, needed a child, beginning with Samantha, her first baby. She had escaped to the attic—where she had set up for herself a private corner—to change Samantha’s diapers, spank her rubber bottom, dress her up for church, sing to her. Sometimes she simply rocked her doll, staring out the dusty attic window at roofs and trees, while in the rooms below her grandmother irritably cooked, her mother went dreamily through her library books, her grandfather worked at his big desk.

  She had been a morose, solitary, intelligent, patient child whose best friends were her father’s old black dog and her doll. She had played with Samantha long past the age when little girls cease to play with dolls. Her grandmother disapproved, and eventually she had to steal away to Samantha and cuddle her in furtive silence. Then, gradually, this no longer eased her—it seemed silly—and she laid Samantha away forever in her wicker carriage, wrapped in her sprigged blanket and dressed in her Sunday best.

  Life overflowed with losses: her father lying red-faced on the floor of the shop, and her mother’s terrible, low moaning; the old dog, Poochie, stiff in his dog basket; her grandmother’s sharp tongue silenced, lowered into the earth with her worn-out body; and her lovers, that small and far-from-choice collection, and only one of them her lover in the strictest sense of the word.…

  She thought sometimes—always with resentment—of Alan, who had sneaked away from his frigid wife to see her when she was his student in graduate school. They had met at her apartment, where they lay on the floor and drank wine. He was the only man, before Judd, she had been really intimate with, but he had insisted they stop short of the sexual act itself. “I don’t want to get that involved,” he said.

  “How could you be any more heavily involved, Alan?” Betsy used to ask. “You say you love me—isn’t that about as involved as you can get?”

  “That’s different,” he said nervously, and pulled down her underpants. He would never take them completely off, and with their clothes down around their ankles and up around their necks they made love as best they could. Betsy pleaded with him and nagged him, and when he objected, “You’re satisfied, aren’t you?”, after bringing her to climax with tongue and fingers, she had to admit—though not to Alan—that what she wanted was the thrill of possibility, the knowledge that a baby could be made. Horrified at her motives, she threw herself so passionately into the contrivances of their lovemaking that when Alan left for a new position in Wisconsin he had the vague notion of divorce. But he never called or wrote; he disappeared into the Midwest as if he had died there, and Betsy didn’t allow herself to grieve. When a year later she heard that he and his wife had had a baby, she went home and wept.

  And now she had done it. She couldn’t help viewing her pregnancy as a triumph, something she had pulled off. As she sat with Judd in the evenings, reading and listening to records, her hooded eyes would crinkle into the start of a smile and she would feel her stomach lurch with excitement, and wonder if the baby could feel it. At such moments Judd ceased to exist—just for a second, two seconds—and when they were over she would look at him tenderly, apologetically, and jum
p up to make coffee or bring him a bedtime snack.

  In the patchwork of memories Violet had made for her of Will, her father, Betsy had stitched one of her own. She is very young, she seems to recall a tricycle in the picture, and she and her father are sitting on the front steps with Poochie. Behind them is the magical sign-painting shop where she loves to go with him, but it’s a hot afternoon and they sit outside. There is some vague tension. Have her parents had a fight? Or is it the heat? If she concentrates, Betsy imagines she can recall the sunsuit she had on—pink and blue check, with ruffled straps that cross in back. Her father is talking to her, and out of the silken web of words he used to spin comes this, in a fierce whisper, “It’s you and me against the world, kiddo,” as he picks her up and hugs her. It’s hot to be held so close, but she hugs back, sniffing in his nice, fruity whiskey smell.

  Thirty years later, with her palm pressed to her belly where Will’s grandchild hurries toward birth, she thinks, smiling, “It’s you and me against the world, kiddo,” while her lover lies at her feet drinking coffee.

  It was still early when they returned from her grandfather’s. They went outside to sit on the back steps. In the dying light the backyard—so bland and sunny in the daytime, with its squared-off garden plot and long border of berry plants—looked mysterious and inviting. Betsy had a fleeting vision of herself and Judd lying together on the soft grass under the maple. They had never made love outside, hadn’t been together long enough—only since January. But we have years, years, she thought, and turned her head slightly to see his long-nosed profile. He looked sleepy and content—domesticated. It will never be the same between us, Betsy thought. Look your last at that particular face. After tonight it will change forever.

  Behind them, in the first-floor apartment, they heard the Brodsky’s television. Music, then voices, then music and voices together. Betsy sweated with nervousness; she knew it was time she spoke. Talking wasn’t what they were good at. They sat mostly in silence while she rehearsed: Judd, I’m pregnant. No. Judd, I’m going to have a baby. No. Judd, we’re going to have a baby.