Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “But you have family now, Emily.”

  Betsy delighted her—a shy bird, but tame. She did take her hand. “That’s true, I do. My old convent has been stormed by a whole horde of relations.”

  “Not much of a horde.” Betsy smiled. “Me and my mother.”

  “And a great-grandchild on the way. Was ever woman so blest?” She believed she truly was, to have a pregnant granddaughter in her kitchen.

  She fed the cats, who had unbraided themselves and were meowing in chorus, and asked Betsy to stay to dinner. When she consented, Emily went further and made her check out of the motel and spend the night. While Betsy was gone, she put clean sheets on the guest-room bed. She would make a good dinner, and then she’d get out her albums and show Betsy all the clippings.

  She saw the two of them as characters in a play—one of those predictable ones, all talk, about a person from the past who steps in and changes, irreversibly, the present. Of course this visit from Betsy would change her life, might even change her unless she could prevent it. She rather thought she could. She had no intention of traveling to Syracuse, New York, that was for sure. Abominable city, full of wretched memories. She had played the Strand there, the Crescent, the Empire—flitting in and out, keeping the real business that took her there under her own hat, and singing and dancing in spite of it with as much spirit as she could muster so Helen would read about her in the paper and mope. But after 1941 she had never gone back again. She had kept the image of her sweet, happy Violetta in her heart. And she surely wasn’t going back now to watch Violetta die. I’m a hardhearted old lady, she thought, but she excused herself: I’ve worked hard for this life, and I aim to keep it as it is. The play had better not go beyond Scene 1.

  Emily realized it might not be possible to achieve what she wished to achieve: intimacy, friendship, family affection between herself and Betsy, but on her own terms and with East Haddam as the locus. She saw Betsy and her little one spending summers with her—a baby on a blanket in the backyard, a toddler running on the grass, a child on the swing they’d hang from the apple tree. She’d buy such lovely presents for it, like the knitted French underwear she’d given the Potter grandchildren, and those life-size dolls that woman in Essex made. She’d take it out to lunch, see to it that the child knew how to behave properly, take it to the opera, start it young.… There was no room in the picture for rotten memories, bitter confrontations, a woman wasting away in that awful city. It might be an impossible picture, but she would fight for it with all her strength, which—in view of her age—was, she felt, considerable.

  As she worked, readying the guest room and then chopping eggplant in the kitchen, she caught herself humming “Sempre Libera” from La Traviata, and stopped short. A bad sign. She never sang; her voice was completely gone in the upper register. And she had kept herself unsullied by that opera for years, refusing to see it or hear it or—she’d had the chance once, on the road—sing it. Why had it come to her just now, when she needed all her armor on? She switched deliberately to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, humming it a full octave lower than she used to sing it. She would tell Betsy about that Canadian tour and about her great triumph, when Peggy Allard got sick and she took her place as Matilde in Elisabetta and the Toronto paper had hailed her as the new Mary Garden—overoptimistically, as it turned out. Ridiculously. But still …

  She laughed at herself. She often thought—and said so, charmingly, to friends—that her true childhood had come to her in old age. She had always worked hard, gone on the stage at eighteen, and here she was in her seventies with her little house and her pets and her toys, as happy and occupied as a girl of seven. She stood at the stove and looked out over her perfect backyard—the herb garden, the gnarled apple tree full of green fruit, the rare dolphin weather vane on the roof of the bam, the sundial, and her comfortable old wicker chairs—and decided that, absurd though her vanity might be, she was entitled to it. If Betsy was bored by her clippings and her tales of a lifetime in the theater, so be it. Youth must respect the crotchets of age. And when the daughter of your bastard daughter turns up on your doorstep, it’s your right to direct the conversation toward safe paths, lest it be too great a shock to your poor old system.

  Betsy was either impossible to bore or even more intelligently tactful than Emily had realized. They sat up until midnight with Emily’s scrapbook. She had saved every mention of herself. Even the one-liners were clipped neatly and pasted in: “Miss Emily Loftus acquitted herself with grace and talent in the role of Sybil … “The sweet lyric soprano of Emily Loftus more than did justice to the librettist’s flawed conception of the housemaid.…” “There is more beauty and elegance in Miss Emily Loftus as the heroine’s sister than in …” As her career progressed, the clippings got lengthier. She had been interviewed in dozens of small towns where she’d toured or appeared in summer stock; her interviews almost always commented on her slender figure and marveled at the loveliness of her voice. (“It’s not pasta that makes a good singer,” she’d been quoted more than once as saying. “It’s discipline!”) There were notices from papers in England and Canada and Australia. She had played Contrary Mary in Babes in Toyland in a Toronto revival when she was fifty-five, and sung Adele in Die Fledermaus at the age of fifty-eight to great acclaim in Dallas. She had gotten away with Micaela until she was well into her forties. She had done television commercials and had been written up in the Times (“Aging Trouper Finds Success in New Sphere”). It became obvious from the scrapbooks that she had worked without ceasing as Helen had prayed without ceasing, and had for her reward not heaven (as yet) but a wisely invested and tranquil old age.

  “My voice went, in the space of a month, when I was sixty. Not that it was as good by then as it had been when I was younger. I had a pretty voice, completely untrained.” This too was a mark of pride with her, mentioned in all her interviews: never a lesson, a natural musician. “Do you know, my earliest memory is of myself singing? But, of course, I was losing the lightness, the ease as I got older, and I had a terrible time with the high notes. But the winter of sixty-five—” She stopped, thinking back on it, the second great and terrible tragedy of her life. “I came down with a cold, then the flu, and when I recovered all I could do was croak. I was a contralto all of a sudden, and not a very good one. And I didn’t want to retire, Betsy. At sixty! I felt like a girl—but I sang like a witch.” She laughed. “That’s when I hired myself out for TV. I did a commercial for denture cream—you have to have all your own teeth for denture-cream commercials! And then I did one for Alka-Seltzer, rather an amusing one. And suddenly I was in great demand. But I didn’t make that many. No matter what I may have told the Times, I felt silly and degraded. Did I show you that Toronto clipping? Another Garden! Selling patent medicines! It would have broken my heart if—” She almost said, if I had a heart to break; it was one of her perennial lines. “If I hadn’t had the great resiliency I’ve been blessed with. So I quit. I rested on my laurels, such as they were, and retired up here, ten years ago. I always loved this town, in spite of its sad memories for me. And this house.” She looked around at the lamplight falling on glowing wood and smiled tenderly at it all. “After a life in small-town theaters and music halls, I’m living in a stage set for a drawing room comedy.”

  “It’s a lovely place,” Betsy said.

  “I’ll leave it to you!” Emily exclaimed, for the pleasure of seeing her granddaughter horrified at the idea. She went on quickly, “I never had a home before, after I left my parents’ house. Furnished apartments aren’t homes. Rooming houses. Hotels. I’d saved my money. I knew what I wanted. I’d admired this house when I was just a girl. I was seventeen when I came to East Haddam. It was spring and the town was so pretty. My favorite buildings were that huge cake of an opera house and this place. I used to take tremendous walks on my time off, all that spring and summer and into the fall, until I got so big Myra wouldn’t let me.…” She lapsed back into memory, recalling Myra Bell’s attempts to hum
iliate her, and her inability, surprising even to herself, to feel any humiliation at all. She had felt only dreary sorrow—more like disappointment—and even that could lift at the oddest times. On her walks around town, for instance, the lines of this old house had gladdened her heart. But she felt no shame. Hadn’t it been a child of love? That thought had warmed her for twenty years, until in the space of a few minutes—that afternoon in 1941, at the Onondaga Hotel, when she had retreated under the bedclothes and refused to come out until he left and took his lies and false promises with him—it had turned chilling. Sometimes she cursed her innocence, and sometimes she thought that without it her life would have been empty.

  Betsy did more leafing through the scrapbooks. Admirable girl! She had come dressed for dinner, had put on earrings and stockings and ridiculously high heels, considering her condition.… Well brought up, thank God. They looked together at a picture of Emily from 1932—at her height, such as it was, when she was in New York and regularly on Broadway, in small roles or the chorus. Betsy looked fondly at her sculptured curls, her eyelashes, the pretty curve of her lips.

  “You were just lovely, Emily,” Betsy said sincerely. “My mother was very pretty when she was young, but you were beautiful.”

  Emily smiled with pleasure. How long since anyone had told her that? To think she had been eager for this agreeable girl to leave. There would be time enough to mull things over in solitude. The thing to do now was to keep her here as long as she could.

  Betsy was saying, “I guess the family beauty got watered down a bit as it was passed along.” Ruefully, wistfully, she examined the old, yellowed pictures of Emily in the book.

  Emily said, firmly, “You are very attractive. You have a nice, fresh bloom about you, Betsy. And when you smile and let your face light up—”

  Betsy gave an exaggerated smirk, waving away the compliment, and turned the page. “Somehow I’d expected to see you in the role of Violetta, in La Traviata. Isn’t that a good lyric soprano part? But you don’t seem to have played it at all.”

  Emily’s smile went bitter, “it’s not exactly one of my favorites.”

  “But didn’t you name the baby—”

  “Ah, I was a pathetic little thing, Betsy. He took me to the opera—it was La Traviata—the night your mother was conceived. That’s why I say the whole thing was Helen’s fault, though I don’t mean only the opera ticket. That was just the end of it. It was her coldness, too, and the way she carried on about her baby’s death. And something else—there were times I thought she engineered the whole thing for perverse reasons of her own. She practically threw us together, and that’s the absolute truth.”

  Emily frowned peevishly; Helen was probably the only person she had ever hated. “But the opera—she came down with one of her imaginary illnesses and refused to go, so he took me, little Emily the music lover!” Emily gave a harsh agitated bark meant to be taken for a chuckle. “Oh, I can laugh now, but at the time I saw that night as the most important night of my life. And would you believe he kept me dangling for twenty years?” Her guard dropped with a crash, and she raced on. “Until the day I met him in Syracuse, so I could see my daughter. He came right out then and told me—for Violet’s sake, was what he said. We were going to leave together at last, after twenty years of promises, but he thought it over, and he couldn’t do it. Overnight, it was finished. Oh God, the scene I made, but of course there was nothing left for us. The worst of it was I had to go on stage that night—”

  “Emily—who? You can’t mean my grandfather?”

  “You never knew, did you?” she went on recklessly. Let the girl know. All the old resentment rose up and choked discretion. “He wouldn’t have the guts to tell you. And Helen—you’d never get it out of her, that’s for sure. She thought it was the end of the world—and then she decided it wasn’t and she devoted herself to punishing us both. She’d found her calling in life! She only adopted the baby to spite me.” Emily smiled, with her hand pressed hard to her heart. “Oh, yes, Betsy, Frank is your grandfather—yes, indeed!” And her eyes behind her spectacles gleamed with something like glee, like relief, at seeing the skeleton tumble at their feet.

  Chapter Seven

  Betsy

  Betsy had been back at school for over two months when Crawford Divine’s prophecies of scandal came true.

  Until then, the semester had gone quietly enough. Betsy had settled into pregnancy as into a comfortable garment, and ever since the baby had begun to kick she had lost that dazed feeling the book had warned her about, of being a cow in a pasture, or a madonna in a frame. It was as if the baby kicked her into alertness. At school she was. energetic and even amiable, even in the Johnson-Boswell seminar for which she’d thought she’d lost her enthusiasm. Boswell seemed no longer a dull dog but the delightfully neurotic reporter who always tickled her. “Remember the dignity of human nature,” he had written in his youthful enthusiasm for virtue. “Remember everything may be endured.”

  Betsy wondered what Boswell would have done, if he had been a woman and in her situation? what Johnson would have done? what Rose Deasy would have done, pregnant out of wedlock and forced to face the world with the wages of her sin? Thrown herself into the Thames, probably. Boswell and Johnson would have gotten out of it, somehow; Rose Deasy would have perished on it. Betsy thought of all the women in literature who had been in the predicament, the Hetties and Effies and Hesters and Carries. She thought of Emily and her lasting bitterness and regret, and she patted the growing mound of her belly with affection and joy. It was good to be no longer childless—to be childful, to know the child was dreaming within her. Her own dreams became gentle and childlike and gay—dreams of small animals, of quiet, enclosed places, of celebrations.

  At the university, her usual claque of prize students was on hand, hanging on her words but not afraid to argue. Every professor had them, but hers tended to be female, vocal, and exceptionally bright; there was a shortage of women teachers to rally round. One of her students, an intense girl named Rachel Grace who was actively committed to a staggering variety of causes, was doing her thesis on Boswell under Betsy’s direction, and the project had roused again Betsy’s interest in an article she was planning when Judd moved in, on Boswell’s relationship with Belle de Zuylen. She might even get another book put of it, about Boswell’s women and what his relationships with them revealed about him. She began to glow faintly with the ambition she had burned with before her life split into pieces; the pieces were reassembling in (she felt) a neater, more interesting pattern. Something was tightening up inside her that had snapped and gone loose.

  Violet continued to sink, but so slowly, so imperceptibly that it seemed years, decades, whole lifetimes must pass before she died. She grew thinner and had given up candy bars. She slept a lot, with the help of drugs. She was gentle and at peace. Even her demands to see Emily had diminished to mere wistfulness. She seemed satisfied with the account of Emily’s unearthing and with the two letters Emily had written her: “My dear, long-lost daughter, What a satisfaction it is to me to have news of you after all these years, and to know that I have a family at last, how I wish I could be with you. I wish it were possible.…” Betsy had emphasized Emily’s elderliness, her reluctance to travel, her goodwill toward her daughter. She hadn’t told Violet of Emily’s fear of death—both her own and Violet’s—nor about Frank, and she didn’t let her know that Emily spent the month of October in England as she always did. (She suppressed the postcard, addressed to Violet at her address as all the letters were, which said: “Having a wonderful time resting up for the hard winter ahead, wish you could all be with me,” marveling at Emily’s oblivious cruelty.) Nor had she reproached Emily for any of these negligences, now that she officially understood her grandmother’s many hesitations about traveling to Violet’s bedside. She understood Emily, but she thought she was damned unreasonable all the same.

  We found her too late, she thought regretfully in her more indulgent moments. Emily was
like a prisoner who had spent her life in jail and who, on release, can’t face life on the outside: before long, she’s back in. Betsy had watched her grandmother enact this ritual over and over again during their talks—back off and advance and back off again, in the end leaving the biggest barrier intact, her refusal to see Violet. Betsy thought she could wear her down, but Violet’s time might be running out.

  “What is she like?” Violet asked her many times, waiting with childish impatience for Betsy’s answer. It was a fairy story, a bedtime story to be told and told again.

  “She’s like a grandmother in a book,” Betsy said sometimes. “She lives in a narrow brick house with a fanlight over the door and an apple tree in the backyard. She has three cats named Jennie, Nellie, and Geraldine. She’s tall and very slender, with fluffy white hair.”

  “And she wanted to know all about me?”

  “Everything,” Betsy lied. Emily’s indifference to the grown, dying Violet was something else she kept to herself. “I sent her some pictures of you. She has always had a great love for you, Mom. She calls what happened the greatest tragedy of her life—giving you up.” That, at least, was true.

  “Then why won’t she come to see me?” Violet asked this only once or twice, in the beginning.

  “She’s old, Mom, and very set in her ways. She’s afraid to do something that would upset her too much. She seems to have a bad heart.”

  Violet accepted this with the same pacific acquiescence with which she accepted everything. Betsy wondered if she sensed it, that Emily couldn’t bear to see her die.

  When she pondered all the things Emily had told her, Betsy saw them—as she had seen her life with Judd, now so distant—as a series of photographs. Old ones this time, browning and age-speckled: Frank, looking like the Arrow collar man, his hair abundant then and slicked back, his eager eyes bright with passion and ambition; his cold, drab wife, with the maniacal gleam in her eyes and the corners of her mouth just beginning to turn down hard; and Emily dressed for the opera, radiant with the promise of it all. “I was under the spell of the music,” Emily had said, her neatly wrinkled face rapt even now. “It seemed heroic to be together.”