Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Are you saying you’d stay with me if I had an abortion?”

  “I don’t know. I’d certainly planned to stay with you, if you wanted me to.”

  “You’re getting back at me for it!” she burst out, her voice as harsh and alien as his had been. “I know you’re going to leave me, why not do it? Get out, leave me in peace, don’t torture me.” She laughed a little at the melodrama, but he dropped her hand and turned his face impassively toward the window.

  “Betsy, this is your doing. I thought you were on the God damned pill. You tricked me into this.”

  “I know that. Haven’t I said I’m willing to take the consequences?”

  “I don’t want us to split up!” he said, and she knew he meant it. “We were just beginning to work everything out—didn’t you see that? Everything was fine.”

  It’s true, she thought, but it struck her in a detached way, like old history. What a nice country this was before the revolution, the coup, the assassination. “I suppose I’ve been stupid,” she whispered. She spread her fingers across her belly, not really believing what she said. A drizzling rain had begun, washing down the window. She watched its senseless pattern. “I suppose I’ve been stupid.”

  Judd sat hunched, with his head in his hands. “You look weary,” she said again, gently, and reached out to stroke his hair.

  He looked up. “I hope we can part friends, at least.”

  It was what she had waited for, it was what she had been marshaling her strength for all these weeks for, but it caught her unawares.

  “What difference does it make?” she asked him, immediately in tears.

  When she was a little girl she used to fear that Poochie, the old dog she’d inherited from her father, would be killed by one of the cars he chased down Stiles Street. Instead Poochie died peacefully in his basket. To Betsy it was all the same: she had no dog.

  “Why do we have to part at all, Judd? It’ll be my baby, I won’t let it bother you. We could work this out.” She had come up with that idea last night, while he slept beside her. It was what people did, they worked things out.

  “Come on, Betsy.” His face was stone. She could see it was an effort for him not to shout at her. “Try to face life for once like a big girl. Spare me the crap. You choose. Me or it.”

  She comprehended him briefly as a heartless and brutal man, with the face of a monument—very briefly, before her love came flowing back, but it helped.

  “Me or it.”

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

  “It’s something I wasn’t ready for. It’s all you, Betsy.”

  “I know, Judd. I’m sorry.” She gave one sob and swallowed sourness. It was late afternoon, but nausea threatened her. “I wanted to keep you, Judd,” she said with effort.

  “Then get rid of it!” he shouted, not taking in her past tense. He gripped her arm. “Betsy, I don’t want to leave you, damn it. Get rid of it!”

  “I can’t.” She broke away from him and ran to the bathroom, slamming the door.

  She stayed there. She heard him make coffee. He could never remember not to fill the teakettle all the way up. It took forever to boil, and she heard him sigh through his teeth with impatience. Finally he poured a cup and sat down with it. A newspaper rattled; the evening paper had come.

  After a while he came to the door. “Betsy?”

  “I’m all right.” She had the crack in the tile floor memorized; it looked like the southern boundary of New York State.

  “I’ve got to go out. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Sure.” Where are you going? Where? She sat with her head on her knees. The nausea had passed, leaving her empty. Her bare knees were cold, her wet forehead colder.

  “I was thinking, Betsy.”

  Silence.

  “I’d like to pay for this. The hospital and all that. You have the bills sent to me.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, I offered.” He seemed to be searching for something else to say. “The offer stands.”

  “Okay.” Where? Where?

  “I won’t be long. I can’t miss this appointment.”

  She racked her brain automatically: What appointment? What had he said that morning? “No, I know. I’m okay.”

  “We’ll go out for dinner later.”

  “Yes, okay, fine.”

  He left, and she continued to sit on the bathroom floor, crying weakly. Then she scrambled to her feet and looked in the mirror. You don’t go crazy, she said to her face. You pull yourself together. The words came to her involuntarily. She wondered if Emily had said them to herself fifty-five years ago, and if she’d inherited them. You don’t go crazy: a family maxim.

  She thought her face looked very ugly. She was so pale her freckles stood out like blemishes. I look different, she thought. Already, I look different. She rubbed Violet’s moisturizer into her skin and put on some makeup. Like somebody’s mother, she thought. Judd’s mother. She turned from the mirror in disgust.

  She needed a friend, but she didn’t have a friend. Her best friend, Caroline DeVoto, who taught Romance languages at the university, was in Paris on sabbatical. She wrote Betsy letters about the food. Her other friend was Julia Cameron, and Julia had recently married and moved to Maine. She could call her up. It was Julia Betsy had once shared a summer cottage with in the country. But ever since the night, toward the end of their stay, when Julia had climbed in bed with her and embraced her, Betsy had found it hard to talk to her. Julia laughed at everything. She had laughed at what she called Betsy’s prudery. She would laugh at this. She could call Caroline in Paris, but such grand and expensive gestures were beyond her—and what good would it do? “Life is the great adventure,” her mother always said, “but you’re in it alone.”

  Betsy tried to imagine herself with a baby. She couldn’t, except in terms of Norman Rockwell covers, Ivory Soap ads: rocking it in sunlight, singing to it, planting a garden while it babbled in its playpen, the two of them making a circle of love.…

  No. She made herself switch gears: exhaustion, boredom, resentment, badly prepared classes, childhood diseases, soggy diapers, a circle of drudgery. Contemplating these, Betsy was bucked up. There was a set of problems to be solved. All right, she thought, making toast. All right. I’ll have this baby next winter. I’ll need to take the semester off, a medical leave. I’ll have to write a letter. The awkwardness at school. All right, I can cope with that. Then I’ll have this little baby. Little babies need diapers and rattles and blankets and—what? Mobiles over their cribs and teething biscuits. And I’ll need help at first, I’ll need a Terry. All right.

  She ate her toast, talking to herself, and then she made a list. She worked out her finances. She’d be paying all the rent herself now, but it would be, barely, all right. She would get along. She moved through the apartment with her hand on her stomach, figuring. The back bedroom for a nursery, and there the playpen, and she could keep the carriage in the downstairs hall, where Judd’s bike was. She stepped over some of his scattered records, a slide box on the living room floor. It would not be long—how long would it take him to leave her? for her worst nightmares to come true? He’d be gone, records and toothbrush and all.

  She stood in the middle of the living room, holding her stomach with both hands as if it pained her. She was understanding how true it is, that love which does not prosper dies; but it dies slow.

  They did go out to dinner, at a bar with a television set, where they watched a baseball game. They hardly spoke, but there was no hostility between them.

  “When will you go, Judd?” was all she said.

  His answer was oblique. “It’s not easy, Betsy.”

  The next morning they avoided each other and went their separate ways, he to his studio, Betsy to her obstetrician. When she returned, the worst had happened. Bike, slides, records—he had taken all his things, in the space of just a couple of hours. He had sneaked away from her.

  It was harder than she’d
expected. The apartment didn’t exactly echo—nearly everything was hers, after all—but it looked bleak, with disconcerting bare spots. Betsy walked from room to room. It was the absence of the photographs that made it so bare, she realized. He had left only one: a framed photograph on the bedroom wall of the two of them, arms linked, beaming. It was a nice photograph; their heads were touching, they looked happy and fond of each other. Had he forgotten it? or left it behind as a gesture of kindness? or cruelty? Betsy dusted it with her sleeve. What did it matter? Such speculations were unnecessary now. She remembered when Alan had moved to Wisconsin with his wife. This desertion felt something like that one had, and she’d gotten over her love for Alan with dispatch when it hadn’t prospered.

  Later, vacuuming, she found an old sock of Judd’s under the bed. She tossed it into the wastebasket, quickly, before she could do anything so silly as press the smelly thing to her lips, and finished the vacuuming. She cleaned the apartment thoroughly, and changed the sheets on the bed, with the strange feeling that she was cleaning up after a crime.

  She didn’t see the note on the kitchen table until evening. She was throwing together her dinner—unwanted, but a duty to the fetus—when she spotted a piece of Judd’s expensive recycled light-brown professional stationery on the table. She unfolded it gingerly.

  Dear Betsy, It’s been a great five months. Why did you have to fuck it up? Love, J.

  It wasn’t the contents of the note that got her crying; it was the way it had been propped against the saltshaker.

  The next day, Saturday, she went as usual to her grandfather’s for dinner. She parked her car in the driveway, behind his Cadillac, and surveyed with affection the big brick house that for years had been her refuge. It was the house her grandparents had bought at the beginning of Frank’s success—from Spring Street to Stiles Street with a significant leap, not merely across town. It was the house both she and her mother had grown up in, and Betsy’s fondness for the place was ungrudging.

  The cold tyranny of her grandmother, all her growing-up years, had been offset by the love of her mother and her grandfather, their love like a pair of warm boots—occasionally too tight, but mostly comfortable. She used to write her address: 217 Stiles Street, Syracuse, New York, U.S.A., North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Milky Way, Universe. What kid didn’t? But Betsy, dearly though she loved the details of that address, had always imagined another little girl, with the same brown braids and yellow pencil, writing something similar from her home (also red brick) on another street and planet—a comforting little alter ego, almost an imaginary friend, extending life’s boundaries.

  Betsy urgently needed the extension. Her life had been bounded closely by grown-ups. A fatherless child, she felt no need of a father, closely surrounded as she was by mother, grandfather, grandmother. Her family seemed large, endless, and like no one else’s; it wasn’t until she was grown that she noticed what a small family it was, how knotted together. And the knots held. This was why Violet and Betsy had moved back home after Will died, and why Betsy at thirty-four still lived in her hometown. But who knew what that other little girl was up to, on her faraway planet? What sublime, mysterious future was in store for her?

  She walked up the driveway. They were all in the backyard, having drinks. Betsy kissed each of them—Frank, Violet, even her great-aunt—with particular tenderness. Her pregnancy, the finding of Emily, the loss of Judd, all gave family a particular value. It seemed odd to look at her grandfather and think: no relation. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the tie of blood relationship that she sought in him. They were bound by love, with all its subsidiaries. Like—she remembered this from time to time—a look they had once shared behind Helen’s back, a mutually checked grimace in response to a bit of her moralizing when Betsy was eleven. (It was winter, Betsy could have elaborated. In the kitchen, late afternoon. Sweet potatoes. Red gingham curtains. Helen’s text: gratitude for small blessings in the face of large disappointments. The disappointment: Betsy’s not having been invited to Mary Kay Brophy’s birthday party. The small blessing, could Helen but know it: Frank’s moment of disloyalty to his wife shared with his granddaughter. It had been one of the milestones in her growing up.)

  Frank had been the center of everything for all of them. He had always been there before Betsy—busy, involved, important, catered to—as the image of a great man, as what a man should be. A great lawyer, who fought for the underdog but made money at it. An enormous man whose greatness shaded them all. His greatness was different from her father’s; Will Ruscoe’s value lay in his being dead. He seemed never to have really lived, but existed only in her mother’s mind, built out of her mother’s desires. Betsy suspected he hadn’t been great, alive. But her grandfather’s greatness increased continually. Even as an old man, retired, past his prime, he was sought out as a sage. Life in upstate New York couldn’t function properly without Frank. He had a hand in everything—law and politics and real estate and the new arts center and the workings of the university law school. “When he dies, it’s the end of an era,” Aunt Marion sometimes said. (It was the prose of The Pride of Passion; it may have been true, nevertheless.)

  They ate dinner, as usual, in the flowering backyard, and Betsy told them right away about Judd’s leaving. She was too tired to fudge. (Beat, I’m beat—an old expression of Violet’s, one she used to employ on hot afternoons when she came home from work wilting and dropped into a chair with her high-heeled shoes kicked off.) They took it without gloating. Even Aunt Marion didn’t say, “I told you so,” though she practically did.

  “He seemed pretty distant last week,” Frank said. “Things didn’t seem right between you.”

  “It was inevitable,” said Aunt Marion, tearing a roll in two and smearing butter on it for Violet.

  “Why was it inevitable?” Betsy asked in an attempt at indignation.

  “Don’t jump on me! I only meant it’s always inevitable. Isn’t it?” She looked around the table. “Isn’t it?”

  On her chaise longue, Violet, who had known true love, looked as if she might disagree, but she only smiled to herself. Frank said nothing.

  “Well, it is,” Marion concluded. “Take it from me.”

  “I’m not devastated by it,” Betsy said. “For the record.” She didn’t know yet if this was true or not, and was not sure how devastation was measured. Her tears had had a limit, the empty feeling seemed limitless. But the brave front was vital; of that she was sure. “I think I’m taking it rather well,” she said, with a smile she took pains to make genuine and unforced.

  Violet squeezed her hand. The relief on her face was astonishing. Betsy hadn’t understood the extent of her mother’s hatred for a hippie photographer with love-’em-and-leave-’em written all over his face: thus, in better days, had Violet expressed it to Frank and Marion.

  “A woman is better off alone,” Aunt Marion said with firmness.

  “Bull,” said Violet, her eyes bright. “You’ll find someone else, Betsy. Someone fine and good.” Her voice drifted off, and she crumbled a bit of roll between her fingers.

  Betsy said nothing about the baby. Her grandfather didn’t mention it; she wondered what Terry had told him. He had taken to watching her quietly, sizing things up as if she were an accused criminal on the witness stand, waiting for her to make a slip so he could pounce on her. At the news of her breakup with Judd, he sat up and sent her a knowledgeable, grieved look. He accurately guessed it all. But still she didn’t confide. It was hard, with a family, not to be a child again, and pure—the real Betsy, who’d been lost somewhere and had her place usurped by this fallen adult, this criminal. Loving them though she did, she’d never been much of a confider, anyway. Having secrets held them off—not far, but enough to get a little stretching room. The emptiness she would keep to herself. The fullness that both sustained her and contributed to the emptiness—the child she carried—that would be found out soon enough. It wasn’t a secret that could be kept long.

&nb
sp; There was a change in Violet that was absorbing all of them; even Betsy’s news didn’t entirely break their concentration. Part of her light was extinguished. She seemed to be permanently turned inward, listening to her disease. Her private voices made her inattentive. Aunt Marion had to tell her twice about Louise Rallender’s sister’s new house before she understood, and then she forgot and asked about it. She ate several bits of meat with her fingers before she caught herself and picked up a fork. She spilled bourbon. She seemed as dreamy as a pregnant woman—“with death” the way Betsy was with child. She didn’t take Betsy aside to ask about Emily, and Betsy said nothing yet about the Loftuses on Spring Street. She’d wait until she had Emily a little more firmly within her grasp.

  She went home to her empty apartment. She lived on the middle floor of a three-family house. Upstairs lived a nurse who was hardly ever home. Downstairs were Mr. and Mrs. Brodsky, the landlords, who watched television in the evenings and would have been friendlier to Betsy if they’d dared. They had been gathering courage for a day and a half. Now, when she came up the front steps of the house, they both appeared at their door.

  “How’s your mother, Betsy?” Mr. Brodsky asked. It was rehearsed: he’d ask after her mother, and then his wife would pop the question.

  “Not very good tonight.”

  “You tell her we were asking. She’s in our prayers.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  There was a pause during which Betsy almost eluded them. Mr. Brodsky nudged his wife, who said, “Was your young man moving out, then, yesterday?” She was born in Ireland; Mr. Brodsky met her in New York when he was just starting out in the fruit business. Her voice had kept its lilt, especially when she asked a question.