Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “For love!” Frank spoke the words much too loudly, and he turned away from her after he said them. “You know what I mean, Emily. For sex. For the pleasure of it.”

  They were in the sitting room. Helen was quiet upstairs. Emily put her hand on his arm. She understood everything; though she was not yet seventeen, she had read hundreds of books. “How terrible for you,” she whispered.

  He faced her, looking stricken. “I shouldn’t tell you these things.”

  “You should,” she assured him gently, leaning against him. He pulled her close and kissed her silently, over and over.

  Things went on like this all that winter, until the evening of the opera.

  Helen was feeling too ill to go and suggested Frank take Emily, who loved singing and had been so nice. Thus Frank reported his wife’s words to Emily’s mother when he went next door to invite her. His composure awed her; she hadn’t dared look at him. She fled to her room to change into her dark brown lace, and then she was beside him in the car, unable to speak. He chattered to her all the way to the theater, and she sat through the overture in misery. Was this all, then? Was he just taking little Emily to the opera because she loved music and had been so nice?

  Then the opera began and she forgot him; Violetta and Alfredo and their friends took over. After the intermission she saw that Frank was watching her and she became self-conscious. It had never occurred to Emily that her passion for music was charming—her own pretty voice, yes, but not her thirst for the voices of others. She saw herself in his eyes, pretty and precocious and flushed with happiness, and her heart beat fast with excitement, as much at what she had learned about herself as anything else. But when the curtain went up again, it was as if he and she were the stage people and Violetta and Alfredo were real life. He held her hand, finally—discreetly, between the seats—and she sat through the end in a daze. Every bliss was hers: music, love, beauty!

  Afterward, they drove out to the lake, where he pulled her lace dress up to her waist and gently, gently deflowered her. It was more rapture than she knew existed, to make him so happy, and she wept in his arms, explaining carefully that they were tears of joy, that she felt proud and noble, that she loved him desperately. The music still echoed in her head.

  They sat by the lake—it was an unusually warm evening, with a false hint of spring—and he made his first promises and told her explicitly of Helen’s rejection of him. The marriage couldn’t last, he said. Deeply though he pitied Helen, he couldn’t endure such a mockery of all that marriage could be. He kissed Emily as she hadn’t dreamed people kissed. Someday, somehow …

  Soon after that evening Helen got unexpectedly better. She came downstairs in the evenings and sent Emily home early, with an admonishment to do her homework. Emily fancied that Helen looked at her, sometimes, mockingly, and she wondered what Frank’s wife knew. She began to avoid the Robinson house; it was a different place with Helen up and around. She and Frank met only twice, briefly, for desperate kisses at night out under the cherry trees.

  Then she missed her period, and she told Frank. They waited, anxious and unamorous, for a month. Spring was coming in earnest by then, with so many places to meet, but they hardly noticed. When her period still didn’t come, he made her an appointment with a doctor way over on the south side, picked her up after school, and took her there.

  “We’ll get married, Emily,” he said on the way back. He looked dragged out. “We’ll get married.” The words restored her boundless joy, and she saw that there were tiny pale-green leaves on all the trees.

  It didn’t work out quite that way. Talk of marrying stopped abruptly. First Frank went home to Helen, and then he was closeted with Emily’s parents for an hour. When he left, with a grave look at her, he seemed allied with them against her: grown-ups against children. Her father, silent and sad, beat her, and she was sent to Connecticut the next day. Her mother wouldn’t speak to her; she stayed in her room and cried. Her father put her on the train without a word of encouragement, glad to have her gone. She cried all the way to Utica, where the miracle happened: Frank leapt onto the train. But the miracle hadn’t quite the depth and breadth she expected of it. They weren’t eloping. He was merely, in defiance of Helen and the Loftuses, escorting her to East Haddam. They couldn’t marry. Her parents wouldn’t allow it; she was underage. And Helen—Helen had lapsed back into her half-mad melancholia. Her sister was with her again. He couldn’t leave her yet. Give it a year—when Emily would be eighteen.…

  They sat with their hands entwined. It was a long trip. As the train steamed along the Connecticut River, Emily conceived a daring plan. They would stay at a hotel together that night. Her father’s cousin Myra wasn’t expecting her; Emily was simply to appear, with a sealed letter from her father and her tail between her legs. What difference if she got there a day late? And Frank had to stay over, anyway; there was no train back until morning. Why shouldn’t she stay with him?

  It was nine o’clock when they reached Middletown. They got off there and checked into the Dart Hotel as husband and wife. Alone with Frank in the hotel room, Emily forgot she was tired after the trip and the sleepless night before: he made her forget. He was infinitely gentle and patient, he kissed the bruises the beating had left on her back and buttocks, and she was thunderstruck to discover that the pleasure could be hers as well as his. They slept at last, and she awoke at noon anxious to try it again.

  In the afternoon, they went out for a walk. It was a fine April day. He wanted to buy her a bracelet they saw in a shop, but she wouldn’t let him. She’d been in their house often enough to see how little money he had. He bought her a pincushion instead—pink satin, with “I Love You” embroidered on one side and “Souvenir of Middletown, Conn.” stamped on the other. It cost a quarter, which seemed reasonable to Emily. (Twenty years later, when she threw it out with the rest, she thought it was cheap and tawdry—typical and symbolic.)

  She understood that marriage was not to be discussed. It was a sweet dream for the future. Frank had to “work on” Helen. The original plan was for Emily to keep the baby. As the months went on this was revised. Frank had a new plan, and he took the train to Connecticut to tell her. He and Helen would keep the baby, and someday Frank and Emily and the child would all be together. It would take time. This revision dulled Emily’s joy somewhat. She wanted the child she carried, she didn’t want promises. The shininess went out of her life. Everything was flat: she was only an unwed mother working, in disgrace, as a maid in a rooming house.

  It was that flatness that prompted her to flee to New York the next spring when the baby had been spirited away and Myra was working her harder and harder. She would supply her own future, and if the sweet dream came true as well, then it would. But she had grown up, and the rule for growing up was: Rely on yourself.

  Whenever she appeared in Syracuse, Frank came to her. Helen knew it. Emily wanted to see the little girl, her Violetta, but Helen wouldn’t allow that. Emily saw her once, when she took a taxi past their house on Stiles Street and Violet was playing in the yard. She was seven or eight then. Emily had the driver go around the block and then cruise slowly by again. The little girl waved and smiled. The third time they went by she was gone. And then there was the time in the department store, when Emily thought that because Violet was engaged to be married, she and Frank would be together at last. But it turned out that it was impossible simply because Violet was engaged. “I can’t do it to her, Emily,” he said miserably. “She has her whole life ahead of her.” They were in the Onondaga Hotel, between Emily’s matinee and evening performances. Emily sank down in the bed and pulled the covers over her head. In the darkness a great light dawned. It would always be impossible. “Go away, Frank,” she said from under the blankets. He pleaded with her and made excuses and promises. He pulled the covers off her but she got back under. “Go away,” she said. Finally, he did, and she got up and took a bath and sang Micaela in Carmen that evening, and never saw him again, until he rang h
er doorbell that January, thirty-five years later, in the middle of a snowstorm, just as she had decided to stop thinking about him.

  She knew him immediately. The bald head didn’t surprise her; he’d begun losing his hair in his thirties. To her, he didn’t even look especially old. He just looked sad and worn out. They stood, measuring each other.

  “So it’s you,” she said, and moved aside so he could come in. She felt perfectly calm—this calm was the only surprise. “In a way, I’ve been expecting you.”

  There were snowflakes on his head, melting. She took his coat into the bathroom and let it drip into the tub. When she returned he was still in the hall, looking up the staircase in bewilderment.

  “It’s not a Bulfinch, of course—just a local imitator,” she said.

  He hadn’t yet spoken; he stared at her. The look on his face she considered pathetic, though it used to melt her: the look he wore when he asked forgiveness. But he was still a handsome man. His wrinkles were fine and neat—they seemed to hold him in like netting. His face hadn’t slipped down, as with so many people, the old flesh gathering in jowls and chins. Nor had hers. They were alike. She had thought so in 1922, and she thought so still, in spite of herself.

  She felt suddenly afraid of him. There had been a time, best forgotten, when she had been happy just looking at his ears, running her fingers over his hand, observing the length of his spine.…

  She shivered, and he took her in his arms. “Emily,” he whispered, as if it was a precious secret he’d been saving up all these years.

  They sat next to each other on the sofa, drinking whiskey and trembling.

  “I suppose you’ve come to take me to her.”

  “Yes,” Frank said, wiping away tears. “She keeps asking for you. Betsy told me where you were. Betsy told me everything.”

  “I’ll come,” she said.

  For the moment they left it at that.

  They exchanged lives. She listened grimly to his tale of successes—she could have predicted it all, it sounded so dull. She’d been better off racketing around in small-time theater than as the wife of a lawyer. But she was gratified when he said, “If I’d only known then what I do now, Emily, I would never have let you go.”

  She looked away from him, out through the fringed curtains at the snow, but the lamps were lit and all she saw was her reflection, drooping and old. “That you preferred that woman to me!”

  “Never!” He turned her around and made her look at him. She could read the chagrin in his face, for the disloyalty she had forced from him so soon; but she saw also that it was true.

  “I did nothing for myself,” he said.

  “Or for me,” she said, with scorn.

  “Maybe I thought we were the stronger ones, we could take it.”

  “Rationalization after the fact!” She glared. It was the old stuff again.

  “Oh, Emily—” He sighed and moved to put his arm around her.

  “Actions speak louder than words,” she snapped at him like a schoolmarm, stiffening, and then the whole thing struck her as absurd, and she took his two hands, remorseful because he looked so forlorn. “It doesn’t matter now, Frank.”

  Surprisingly, it didn’t. All her bitterness was gone—all of it. She felt as light, as free from the weight of years as she had that day when he jumped on the train. Was that all it required? For him to come to her looking so humble and swearing he’d always loved her? admitting his long mistake? Or was it the thirty-five years—as simple as that, the passing of time? Here they were, two old people who had once been lovers, drinking together.

  “Here, Frank,” she said, pouring him out another glass. “Put this down where the flies won’t get it.”

  He wanted to take her out, but she insisted on making dinner for them while he sat, watching, in the chair Betsy had sat in. She gave him potatoes to peel, noticing the long, bumpy blue ropes of veins on the backs of his hands, just like her own.

  “That Betsy is something,” Emily said. “Tracking me down the way she did. And having that baby and hanging on to it.”

  He didn’t answer at first, and then he said, “Things have changed, Emily.” His voice was gruff, and she wondered at it. “It’s a different world.” Did he resent it, then—that the world was so much more hospitable to his granddaughter than it had been to his old love?

  Emily thought back to that world of fifty-five years ago. No one had ever suggested she keep her baby and raise it herself. The idea had been to get her out of sight as quickly as possible, and then to dispose of the baby, and then to pretend it never happened. She had thought one of her parents—her father—might bring it up in old age, not to apologize, not to regret, but just to get it out in the open. To see how she’d felt about it: another subject that had never come up. But they had wasted away quietly out there in Dayton, and when Emily went to see them she talked investments with her father, and Henry’s children with her mother. They seemed to have forgotten it. She was with her father when he died; the last thing he said was, “Put the coffeepot on for me, will you, Em?”

  “Why did you let her do it, Frank?” She turned to face him.

  “Who?”

  “Your sister-in-law. Marion Palmer. Why did you let her take the baby like that? Did you think I wouldn’t give her up?” They had gone over it all fifty years ago, but both of them had forgotten. “I was no fool,” Emily went on. “And I was no Betsy. I was seventeen years old, I’d quit school, my parents were out in Ohio, I had a job as a housemaid in a rooming house—what would I do with a baby? You didn’t have to kidnap her.”

  “I had nothing to do with that, Emily.” How blue his eyes were still, how troubled. “It was all Marion’s doing.”

  “That damned woman. I hear she’s still alive and kicking.”

  “She’s all right. Reformed in her old age. She’s a Gray Panther.”

  “That’s where the men are, I suppose,” Emily said sourly.

  He hesitated. She could tell he wanted to say something, and she waited, but she was thinking of Marion, that vulgar tart, that kidnapper. She was living with a man in New York in those days—living off him, everyone knew that—and she had the nerve to lecture a girl of seventeen, pregnant with a child of love, about morality. “You can still make a life for yourself,” she’d said, something like that. “If you stay away from Frank and Helen. It’s not right to take a man away from his wife.” When it was common knowledge that she—! “You’ve bewitched him,” she’d said. “You took advantage of him when his own marriage was in trouble. You know, it’s practically a crime, what you two did.” She had said all that, and worse things that Emily had blocked out. Marion Palmer. Large, jeweled, made up—dissipated, though she was still in her early twenties. A crime, to love as she had loved Frank, as he had loved her!

  “Violet is dying,” Frank said in the silence of the kitchen, and Emily made a move to shush him but checked it “She’s become rapidly worse since around Thanksgiving, faster than the doctors thought. It’s cancer, Emily—I suppose Betsy told you—cancer of her lymph system, but it’s in her bones now, and she’s in terrible pain, she’s aged twenty years in two months.…”

  Emily forced herself to look at him, but he was gazing out the window, out at nothing, as if his daughter were there. “But my God, Emily! The resignation—no, that’s not right—” The wrinkles on his forehead deepened as he tried to define it. “The contentment, the peace, the happiness about her.” He shook his head in such sorrow that she had to turn her back on him. She went to the stove and stirred the onions, remembering the little girl who had smiled and waved. Had she been wearing a white dress, or was she idealizing the scene? Had she really smiled and waved? The radiant young woman in the hat department … Briskly, she stirred the onions and almost missed Frank’s whisper: “She looks so much like you, Emily.”

  She heard him set down the potato peeler, and she looked round at him. A cat had jumped into his lap. “I hope I can have that kind of peace when it’s my tur
n,” he said. “I don’t expect to.”

  “I can’t imagine going happily.”

  Death hung in the air with the smell of onions until he eased the cat to the floor and came up to her. They embraced again, clinging to the life in each other, but she stiffened when he kissed her and pushed him away. “Two old bags of bones!” she said, with a sob at the end of it.

  “Don’t,” he said gently, smoothing her hair. “Emily, my Emily, my dearest Emily …” She let him fold her in again, and they kissed until the onions burned.

  After dinner, she put on her new recording of Rigoletto.

  “Did you see it on TV?” she asked him.

  He had watched it with Violet. “It reminded me of you. All music reminds me of you.”

  “Remember when I sang Gilda at the old Empire?” She began to hum, but caught herself. “I wasn’t really ready for it, but I think I carried it off.”

  “You could carry anything off.”

  “Except you,” she said with a touch of the caustic.

  “But you’ll come back with me?”

  “I could never refuse you anything,” she said, and he went from the sofa to his knees and buried his face in her lap.

  “As God is my witness, Emily, you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

  “Melodrama,” she scoffed, but when she saw how it wounded him she took his face between her palms and said tenderly, “I never stopped wanting you, Frank. And now it’s as if fifty years have just—gone. We’re back where we were.” It wasn’t quite true—romantic nonsense—but it did no harm, and it wasn’t entirely false, either.

  “Back in all those hotels,” he said. He sat beside her again and held her. “Do you remember that whole week when we were both in New York?”

  “Do you remember that time in Buffalo?”

  “I remember every time.”

  “It was always so good, Frank.”

  It seemed absurd not to sleep in the same bed.