Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “That’s what they always say about my grandfather,” Betsy said; she was on the floor with the cats, being shy.

  “Your grandfather?” Emily frowned over the tea—she’d lost count of how many spoonsful she’d put in.

  “Well—my mother’s adopted father. Frank Robinson. He’s seventy-seven and absolutely marvelous.”

  “Oh, of course, Frank. Yes, I’m sure he is.” She threw in another spoonful and turned to Betsy. “You look quite pretty with the sun on you. Not nearly so much like Henry. You know, that dreadful woman stole my baby right from under my nose.”

  Betsy looked wondering, as well she might.

  “That Marion Palmer,” Emily explained. “She took her away in the night.” She sat down on a chair, shaken. It was something else she hadn’t let herself think of in years. Oh, there would be a rough couple of hours ahead if she didn’t stay on her guard.

  “But she was legally adopted, wasn’t she?” Betsy prodded when Emily said no more.

  Emily sat looking at the cats. “Oh, yes,” she said finally. “In his position, there could be no other way, though in those days people weren’t often so scrupulous. But the papers were all signed. And then—she told me, you see, that I could have a few days more—” She broke off, shaking her head. “It was the dead of winter, and we were in the middle of a spell of good weather. They told me it was better for her to leave with the baby right away, before the weather changed. Better for the baby!” she said bitterly, and she leaned forward and put a hand on Betsy’s shoulder—an old woman with white hair in a fluff around her face, her skin criss-crossed with fine lines like a map, the tears in her eyes magnified by gold spectacles. “Can you imagine what it’s like to wake up in the morning and reach for your baby to feed it and find it gone? It’s like an amputation, that’s what it’s like.” She reached for her tissue again, blew her nose, and managed to smile. “Oh, I don’t care anymore. It all worked out for the best, I suppose. Maybe it was even the humane way to do it” She could still feel it, that sick emptiness and the horrifying knowledge that it was to be permanent, and to get rid of the feeling she said, “I want to hear about you. Tell me all about yourself. You can tell me about your mother later when I’m a little more used to this.” She wiped her nose and aimed her tissue at the wastebasket, resolving not to need it again. “I’m sorry I’m being so emotional.” She made a basket and smiled. “Now!” she said, looking expectantly at her granddaughter.

  “I never thought what effect this would have on you,” Betsy said. “It never occurred to me that—well, that you might not want to be found. Maybe because I never really thought I would find you.”

  “I was a needle in a haystack, I suppose,” Emily said.

  “It was sheer luck that I looked you up in the phone book. I spent all day trying to track you down, at the courthouse, at the Historical Society over in Haddam. And you’re in East Haddam, of course.”

  “But no one had so much as heard of me?”

  “Not a soul. And there was no record of you at all.”

  The kettle boiled, and Emily got up briskly, thinking: Sic transit so-called gloria.… “I used to pray for this day to come, Betsy,” she said. “And then I stopped letting myself think about it.” She poured water into the teapot; the familiar act restored her calm completely, and she said, “I’m glad you found me. Really I am. I’m delighted!” Her face creased into a wide smile. “I now realize a granddaughter is just what I’ve always wanted. Now tell me all about yourself.”

  Betsy cuddled one of the cats, looking at a loss. A nice girl, Emily thought. Not used to talking about herself. Not much stage presence!

  “Are you musical?” she encouraged her.

  Betsy laughed. “Not very. I had the usual piano lessons, but I turned out bookish. I teach English at Syracuse University—eighteenth-century literature, Pope and Johnson chiefly.”

  “Do you really?” Emily sprang up. “It’s in the blood—look!” She left the room and came back with a pillow bearing a needlepoint motto: “It is better to live rich than to die rich.”

  “Dr. Johnson.” Betsy smiled. “Did you do it?”

  “Another of my little-old-lady vices—needlepoint. But go on. Do you like teaching English?”

  “I suppose I do. I’d rather just read and write about it, but I need to make a living. I’m a good teacher.”

  “And what does your husband do?”

  Betsy flushed. It makes her look prettier, Emily thought. “I don’t have a husband.”

  “But—” Emily’s gesture was meant to indicate Betsy’s pregnancy; she regretted it as soon as it was made.

  “Yes, I’m due at the end of January. I’ll be bringing it up myself. Marriage wasn’t feasible.”

  She could see her granddaughter wondering: What about you?

  “It’s in the blood,” Emily said again with an ironic smile, and was relieved to see Betsy smile back. Tactless old bat, she admonished herself. She had to say one more thing. “Don’t let anyone take it from you.”

  “I won’t. I’m looking forward to it. I think things must be different now than they were in nineteen twenty-two.”

  “A damn sight different!” Emily poured tea, wondering what her life would have been had she kept the baby and raised it: God-awful. She could have told Betsy, but didn’t, how her family, while not exactly casting her out as a sinner, had cold-shouldered her for years, not only for sowing and reaping her wild oat, but for going on the stage to complete her downfall. Enough was enough! Only her brother Henry had approved, his approval rising out of his own stage fever. (He’d never given in to it, and worked for the railroad all his life, a good son to his parents.) She could have told Betsy how her mother—Cora Ann Smatt Loftus—had held Helen Robinson up to her as an ideal—a role model, as they call it now—and how her father had said, as he put her on the train for Connecticut (alone, with her lunch in a basket and her clothes in a carton): “Em, if you like it up there at Myra’s, you stay on.” He said it shamefaced (the poor man, he’d been put up to it by her mother), and she had refused to kiss him good-bye. But she’d seen him and Cora in Dayton often enough over the years, and though her mother had never really forgiven her for not leading the kind of normal life people like Helen Robinson led, Emily forgave her mother for her wishes and her father for going along. Nobody ever mentioned the baby to her, never so much as inquired whether it had been a boy or a girl, except Henry, once.

  Betsy came to the table, and the cats stretched and reformed their pile.

  “You’re a brave young lady to be doing what you’re doing,” Emily said.

  “You mean the baby?” Betsy tossed it off as if it required no more courage than plucking a tomato from a vine. “I got myself into it. I’m not a teenager. I wanted a baby.”

  “They say that every woman who has a baby wants it”

  “Not you!”

  “Well—” She spread her hands, disconcerted as always by their marks of age. Where were they, her beautiful white tapering hands? “I didn’t care what happened, I suppose. I was so desperately in love.” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she sat looking at her hands, remembering what it was like to be young and willing on an unseasonably warm night in March.

  Betsy put one of her plump, firm hands over Emily’s. “Please,” she said warmly. “Will you please tell me who you are?”

  Emily told. After the baby was bom, she had run away from East Haddam, to New York, at the age of eighteen. She liked the thriving river town, but she didn’t like being Myra Bell’s housemaid. Myra was her father’s cousin, and she had a rooming house in town, the kind of place where the maid was run off her legs to maintain the house’s reputation as a comfortable place to put up in. Myra sat in the front room entertaining the lodgers, chiefly traveling men; a few years before, when the opera house was open, they were usually actors, but the house had degenerated. While Myra made coffee and listened to men’s jokes, Emily beat carpets and polished furniture and changed linen pra
ctically up to the day she gave birth. And she’d stayed on there awhile, not knowing what else to do.

  Emily’s parents had moved back to Ohio, where her mother’s people were, and Emily had no wish to go to Ohio. She wanted to be a singer. She used to wander over to the old Goodspeed on her afternoons off and look up wistfully at its faded, lost glamour. It had closed two years ago. If only it were still going, she used to think. She saw herself wandering timidly into a rehearsal, being asked to sing.… The more she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, and finally one spring day she realized that it could happen—it could—though not in East Haddam. She would have to go to New York. New York! Of course! Was there any other way? Any other place?

  She boarded the train, taking with her the suitcase she had lifted from Myra’s attic, and she went directly from the train to the stage door of the old Music Box Theatre.

  “And the rest is history,” she said to Betsy, not forgetting her ironic smile. “Well, no, I suppose it isn’t. I was never what you’d call famous. But I made it. I was always there. Light opera, musical comedy, occasionally even grand opera, on tour—whatever there was, I was always there. They used to call me the eternal Emily. I didn’t play leads, not usually. I played the second leads—the friend of the heroine, the villainess, the comic relief, the suffering sister, the woman of ill repute. I played them all. And touring? I loved to tour! No ties anywhere! I made sure I never got knotted up in any.” She paused, sipping her tea, absorbed.

  “Wasn’t it a lonely life?” Betsy looked ready to pity, and Emily jumped on her. Anything but that.

  “Lonely! My goodness, no! I always had friends in the company, and if I was alone I didn’t care. I liked my solitude. Ah, what a gift for a traveling singer, Betsy.”

  “For anyone.”

  Emily nodded, absent again. A solitary life was to her taste, and had been ever since she was willing to remember. It might sound like bravado, but it wasn’t. Even now … this interesting granddaughter would be gone, finally, and she would be left to unravel the experience and reweave it into sense, alone with herself.

  Someone had once told Emily her life seemed to encompass every interest but human interest, but this was nowhere near true. In addition to her house and her cats, her needlepoint, her collection of opera recordings, her visits to the public library, her morning Times, her solitary trips into Hartford for movies and lunches, or to the same English hotel every October—besides all that, there were her friends, and they loomed large in her life, always had.

  She was sought after as a confidante, even though she never confided. Her reputation rested not on reciprocity, but on her utter discretion and intense interest and ready sympathy—far more flattering, really, than bartered personal gossip. Emily cultivated her friends as she did all her interests. The lives of other people were like theater—occupation and escape. And the friends who began by finding her mysterious concluded that her mystery—her oddity—lay in her absolute simplicity. She confided no secrets because she had none. Not that there weren’t men; she drew them. But there were no intrigues. She had a talent for making an affair last just so long and no longer, and for turning her lovers into friends in the end—friends who, needless to say, confided in her.

  Emily’s attention flickered back to her granddaughter. “You look like a loner yourself.” It was in the secretive, timid eyes.

  “I suppose I am. Not entirely by choice. But I’ve always liked being by myself.”

  “And your mother?”

  “No—not my mother,” Betsy said slowly. “She needs people, maybe too much. She gets along wonderfully with people, though—I’ve always envied that. She had a perfect marriage with my father.” A tendency to idolize, Emily ticked off in her head. “He died when I was little. Since then she’s lived with my grandfather—Frank. My grandmother—I mean Helen—died years ago.”

  “Helen. Yes.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Oh, yes. I lived next door to the Robinsons, you know. Helen Robinson, with her everlasting headaches and churchgoing! I’ve never met anyone with such a knack for turning something small into something big, and vice versa. Like binoculars. Amazing woman.” She spoke out suddenly, with vehemence. “It killed me to have her bring up my child!”

  “Then why—?”

  Emily waved this away, as a digression. She was still angry. Her pale lips turned down and tightened. “And it was her fault, all of it.” There was a long pause. “It was,” she went on almost in a whisper. “If you were tracing back to final causes.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Betsy said hesitantly.

  “Forgive me,” Emily said, and turned her lips up again. “There’s a lot you don’t know—and perhaps won’t,” she added with what she knew, from experience, to be a benign twinkle in her eyes.

  “I won’t ask,” Betsy said, pretending to be concentrating on the cats again. “It’s your past, and it’s not my business. It’s your present I’m interested in. I want you to come to Syracuse with me and see my mother. She’s not well. She wants very much to see you.”

  “You’ll be a good mother, Betsy,” Emily said, as if her granddaughter had said only half what she’d said. “Generous.”

  “But will you come?” Betsy demanded, looking at her directly.

  “We’ll talk about that.” Emily tried to laugh and pressed her hand to her heart—the old stone heart that blood could occasionally be gotten out of. “You know, I gave up smoking twenty years ago, and there are times I still crave a cigarette.” Ah, the poor girl, looking at her so puzzled and hurt. She took a deep breath. “I can’t bear it, that my baby is old and sick. An old woman! It’s the only thing I fear, Betsy, the only thing in the whole world.”

  Betsy understood what she meant, Emily could see that. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask you to do anything you really don’t want to do. I have no claim on you. But I should say I’m here at my mother’s request.”

  “You say she’s not well. What, exactly—”

  Betsy was silent.

  “Is she dying?”

  “Yes. Very slowly.” Emily closed her eyes. “And very cheerfully, except for this one thing. It would help her so much if you would see her.”

  “I can’t, Betsy, dear.” Emily opened her eyes and looked around helplessly. If she didn’t watch herself, this sweet, determined young girl would destroy everything. “I can’t see her, Betsy. I’m too old. I’m seventy-two, I have high blood pressure and a bad heart. And there’s so much you don’t know—”

  Emily closed her eyes again, feeling the tears cling to her lashes. She recalled as if she were still seventeen the pain and heaviness in her breasts as she waited for the baby to wake. A good sleeper, that baby was—too good. She used to fear Violetta would sleep herself to death. She used to hover over her, willing her to wake up. Her time with the baby would be short, as it was.…

  Betsy, dear girl, cleared her throat and said, “What should I call you? We haven’t decided. Not Grandma!” She pulled her chair forward with a squeak and poured tea, very efficient, changing the subject.

  “You called Helen that, I suppose,” Emily said with an effort, grimacing. She blinked the tears from her eyes unobtrusively. “You’d better just call me Emily.”

  “All right, Emily, I will, Emily.”

  “That’s it. Get used to it.”

  They smiled brightly at each other. The girl is intelligent, thought Emily. Betsy interested her, in a way, more than Violetta did. she was so young and promising, with an innocence about her, really very like Emily’s brother Henry, whom, though he’d been dead for fifteen years, she still saw as a little boy in overalls who cried when she went away.

  “What I wanted to say was that I’m glad you don’t seem to have changed—since my mother saw you, I mean, back in nineteen forty-one in that store she worked in.”

  “She knew who I was?”

  “Aunt Marion told her who you were. And my mother said you looked joyful, that was th
e only way she could describe it.”

  “Oh, I was, I was,” Emily said, faintly sarcastic, and cast her mind reluctantly back, letting her memory nibble on the fringes of that day: the lovely morning, and seeing her pretty little girl, all grown, and the theater that night—a successful tour, with her name in the papers, and imagining Helen’s pique. But her baby, that was the high point; she could call back the moment, intact, though she hadn’t done so in years. The tall, slender girl with the pretty eyes, the happy grace with which she’d waved at them across the hat counter. It was the next day that Emily shrank from remembering.

  “You still look that way,” Betsy said shyly. “I’m sure she would recognize you.”

  “Betsy, I’ll tell you something.” Emily clasped her hands earnestly in front of her on the table. “In spite of everything, in spite of my life’s great tragedy—which it was, believe me, the whole thing, ending with that empty cradle on New Year’s morning—” She broke off and closed her eyes again briefly, revealing creased eyelids that used to be smooth and pale like Betsy’s own, and she thought: No, it didn’t end there, of course it didn’t. She looked at her granddaughter, who knew nothing. “In spite of everything, I have had a wonderful life, Betsy. And I’m still having it.” She unclasped her hands and moved as if to take one of Betsy’s, but didn’t. “I’ll give you one more piece of advice. Don’t let anything get in the way of your own wonderful life. You have a right to it. And that’s not as selfish as it sounds. I don’t need to tell you that a happy life is impossible if it brings grief to someone else.” She tightened her lips again. “I’m thinking of your grandmother, of course.”

  “Grandma wasn’t happy.”

  “Good,” Emily said, and smiled apologetically at Betsy as soon as it was said. “I’m a nasty old woman. I’ve probably been alone too much.”