Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  It was only when she had one of her dreams of being abandoned that she wanted Emily. There was snow—sometimes just darkness—and she was alone, searching (sometimes for home, sometimes for a thing that had been lost—a locket once, Betsy once), and she suddenly realized that the other searchers had left her, and she was alone, not knowing where to turn for help. In the dream, the illuminating thought was always the same: Of course! My mama! Emily will help me! And she called for her. Sometimes she awoke then to hear her own voice and to see Betsy there, or Terry, in tears. She didn’t like to make anyone cry, especially Betsy. It was wrong to make children cry, the way her mother had made her cry. She raised a hand to wipe Betsy’s tears, but it fell back, and there was Terry with a glass and a pill.

  She listened to Betsy and Frank talking back and forth. They kept their voices low because of the nurses and because of her. It was a secret, but she knew they were talking about Emily. They argued. Don’t, she wanted to say. It didn’t seem important—only on those long rides back from sleep did she want Emily, when she was lost in the snow and the dark. It must be the pills, the needles. Awake, she didn’t care. She had her father, her daughter, the comforts that remained to her, and the scenes inside her head.

  “I did it for my mother’s sake.”

  “I suppose you know everything.”

  “It’s time someone knew!”

  “That damned woman!”

  The pill took hold, and she drifted away to the sounds of their voices, Will in her mind, always Will. He rose up before her, lifting a glass. When Betsy bent over her, she looked in vain for Will’s large, candid features in Betsy’s sharp face, just as she used to try to force memories from the child. It was no use. She wouldn’t find Will in Will’s daughter. But she had him, all the same, stored away for herself, and that was enough. She hugged him to her heart.

  “She won’t come, Grandpa.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Partly. And she has troubles of her own.”

  “My God, the woman is unreasonable. It’s been years. Years!”

  It’s all right, Violet would have said if it wasn’t for the drug. But their voices were like distant music to her.

  It was pleasant to lie listening to them. She liked some noise—the radio, the TV, people in the room. When she was little, it had been so deathly quiet in the house sometimes, with no sound but the rustling of her father’s newspaper or the pages of the briefs he brought home with him. Her mother banging an occasional pan in the kitchen. And then, in 1931, they bought a radio, and when she was in bed they tuned in Bing Crosby. Her father put down his paper, her mother came out of the kitchen, and Violet, upstairs in her room clandestinely reading, fell asleep to the sound of the music and her parents’ voices talking low—even that rare sound, their mutual laughter. It was so much better, they were all happier with the radio. Helen loved it. She used to listen in the daytime as she worked around the house. And the television—she was a great fan of the soaps. They could get to her as real people couldn’t. Her mother had had a stroke a month before her death, and she spent that last month in bed in front of the TV, the remote control in her one good hand. She had died during Search for Tomorrow, but it was a while before they found her, and by that time her dead eyes were watching The Edge of Night.

  When she died, the whole house brightened, and breathed easier. It was like a good spring cleaning, all Helen’s anger and piety swept away. Betsy became a plumper, happier child. Violet never again had to cower in her room and cry while Helen spanked Betsy, no longer had to make it up to her daughter: all those trips to the 5 & 10 for presents, those white barrettes with the yellow flowers, the Japanese fans, the cup-and-ball trick, the cowgirl suit. After Helen’s death, the presents continued, but for the joy of them, not as compensation. Violet loved any excuse for gift giving.

  This Christmas had been hard for her. They put the Christmas tree in her room, but she cried because there were no presents under it from her.

  “I wanted to give you something pretty,” she said to Betsy. Something colorful, a scarf to wear next to her face, maybe a blouse that tied in a bow under the chin, something to soften and brighten. Violet let Betsy dab at her eyes with a laceedged handkerchief. Betsy didn’t like her tears any more than she liked Betsy’s. At least my daughter has loved me, Violet thought, as Betsy’s big eyes and thin nose leaned over her: Elizabeth Jane. “It’s a girl,” Will had whispered as she came to. A bunch of flowers, and whiskey on his breath. “It’s a beautiful little girl, Violet, she looks just like you.” He put his head down on the pillow beside her and whispered that he loved her.

  Now the sketches came back to her, the fragments of herself that had obsessed her husband. Over and over he had drawn her—mouth and eyes, mouth and eyes, sometimes with the suggestion of the curve of her cheek or chin, sometimes with a bit of nose. She would sit and read, or they would have the radio on, and he would have his sketch pad on his knee, the black-and-silver pen moving languorously over it with a soft scraping noise. His concentrating frown looked like anger, and she would cry, with a pretended pout, “Smile or I won’t let you draw me anymore,” and the frown would smooth out, he would laugh and close the sketch pad, and take her in his arms.

  Later she would look at what he had done and find those bombed-out fragments of her face. Sometimes the lines and curves were harsh and spare and thickly inked, sometimes all delicate detail, but the subject was always the same.

  She used to study her face in the mirror. She did have a remarkable mouth, fine eyes—the face of a passionate saint, he said. She would have liked a portrait, she was always asking for one, and after Betsy was born she thought how striking a portrait of the two of them would be. Mother and child. Betsy’s soft, light curls. The same eyes. The two of them on the wine-colored sofa. She could wear her black taffeta and the pearls. But he just frowned over his sketch pads, rendering the bits of her more and more harshly, raggedly—and even these less and less frequently as the years went by. The last sketches, from the summer of 1948, were crude and angular, not like her at all, and Violet destroyed them when she and Betsy moved to Syracuse.

  She would ask him (she thought, lying in bed and smiling secretly), she would make him tell her, once and for all, why he had never drawn her whole face. He used to joke, say her beauty overwhelmed him, he could only take it in a little at a time. But she knew it was something in him, not in her, and now she wanted to know. In those days, back in the blessed forties, she hadn’t understood him enough; she was too busy making sure he understood her. She had been twenty-seven when he died, still learning. I will be a better wife to him this time, she thought. Sometimes, in her snow dreams, it was Will she sought or Will who came to her aid, and she awoke with his name on her lips.

  The Christmas tree was so beautiful, so beautiful, and the smell was like youth and health and splendor returned. She and Will had always cut down their own tree, out in someone’s woods. Will probably shouldn’t have, with his bad heart, but he swung the short ax strongly and had the tree down in two shakes. Little trees for their little apartment. “Infanticide,” Will said, hoisting it on his back. Betsy with her bright cheeks in that hat with the yellow yarn braids. Her one doll, the well-beloved Samantha—was it Samantha? Will, stringing popcorn, put the needle right through his thumb one year after too much Christmas Eve cheer, and the blood bubbled up over his nail. His face went dead white. She grabbed the thumb herself and pulled out the needle and sucked the wound clean, and had to laugh at his astonishment. How she used to love to get her mouth on him.…

  She didn’t often rage at her fate, and she didn’t for long on Christmas. She lay back and opened her presents, lazily. What did you give a woman with no earthly future? Books. A tiny TV with a screen like a snapshot. A quilted bad jacket from Marion. They hovered, hoping they pleased her. Of course they pleased her, everything did. And why not? They seemed amazed that she took the waiting so well. They had no knowledge of the bewitchment of a contrac
ted world. I have three complaints, she said to herself, trying to order her thoughts. There is my fear that the pain will get worse and be bad for a long time before it bursts out of me. Happiness will come hard if the pain is great: waiting won’t be easy. But I don’t think of this often. And there is my longing for Emily—but it only comes when I dream. It’s enough—almost—to know she exists and loves me. And there is my regret at leaving them, Betsy unsettled and my father so blue. How will they get on without me? But life is short, it won’t be for long. There was always comfort if you looked for it. That man, at least was gone—that hairy man of Betsy’s—gone and left them all in peace.

  Peace. From her windows she could see a long, down-curving branch of the big side-yard maple, the Mannings’ porch with the shutters up for winter, three trees in the line of oaks that marched down Stiles Street, gray skies over the Mannings’ porch, where she used to watch the summer sunsets. In the summer the view had been full of green, with roses climbing over the trellises, the shutters down and stored, people on the porch, glasses clinking, chatter, like a play. She had grown fond of the people on the porch, and she missed them now that winter was here, but she was fond of the gray sky and the snow, too. Peace on earth. After a storm, when all the branches were outlined and weighted down with snow, her heart leapt with excitement. It seemed years ago that she had gone downstairs or to the hospital or outside. She had missed those things, too, at first; now the window and her pretty room were enough, more than enough.

  She used to tell lies to spruce up her life. It was a flat one after Will died, even a lonely one. There had been a couple of men-friends. Jack Denslow at work had been the last. What a disaster he had been, with his wham-bam lovemaking and football talk. And then she had stayed at home, keeping house for her father and daughter, both of them gone all day and coming home with stories of school and office. She’d lied to survive, harmless fibs and exaggerations: who had telephoned, what the butcher said, the antics of the neighbors. She improved on things, changed them by running them through her own richly colored mind. Lying made her present to others; she had a horror of being a woman no one noticed.

  But now there was no need to embellish. Life was so full, so concentrated, she had to close her eyes sometimes to shut it out and withdraw to the cool recesses where Will was. They thought she was asleep, and the music began.

  “Grandpa, it wasn’t fair!”

  “It was my business.”

  “How can you? Don’t you understand anything?”

  Don’t use that sharp tone to your grandfather, Betsy. We must be kind to him, kinder than ever.

  “I won’t have your mother grieving like this! I’ll drag that woman up here!”

  Violet understood from the music that Frank was somehow, miraculously, her father. He should have told me—the words paraded through her mind like words on a banner, until the pills took them away. She slept, and it was 1941.

  Will came in with his mother to buy her an Easter hat. Mrs. Ruscoe had raised four boys, and they were all dead but Will—the heart condition. There was a daughter, too, but she was in California with her husband. Will was his mother’s pride and happiness. This was obvious to Violet when Mrs. Ruscoe tried on hats, primping. They had decided on a crazy thing with blue roses and veiling. Will had been magnificent—just right with his mother, flattering and teasing, but no mama’s boy. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Violet; both Violet and Mrs. Ruscoe had noticed. He had come back the next day, alone, to take her out for dinner after work. He’d given her no room for saying no; he just took her. They walked down Salina Street to Lorenzo’s. It was early for dinner, and she had a Coke while he drank bourbon. He dazzled her with talk, but she made sure she held her own with him and didn’t just sit and gape. She told him about selling hats to get him laughing; she was still new at the job and made mistakes. She kept watching his big, handsome, pink face, wondering if he was getting drunk—she had never seen anyone drunk—but he acted no differently as the evening went on except that his compliments to her became more florid and ingenious. She wore her cream two-piece with the rose-printed blouse. They had a long, leisurely dinner, and he took her home in his old Ford. She had forgotten to call home after work. “We’ve been worried sick,” her father said. He had been waiting at the door, looking ready to beat them both. Her mother, as usual, was in the kitchen, but she came out in her apron and said, “Who is this man?”

  It was a bad beginning. It took him a while to charm the two of them, to get permission to see Violet again, but in the end he won them over, even Helen. “He can certainly tell a story,” she said once, and on another occasion, “That man could charm the skin off a fish.” For Helen, this was a giddily colorful remark. Violet thought Will was a good influence on her mother—he loosened her up.

  Mrs. Ruscoe did her best, but she never took Violet properly to her bosom. She was always the usurped, the abandoned, and Violet knew Will’s mother thought a wife and family were bad for his heart. She died, of the family curse, not long after Betsy was born. Will began to fear, from that time on, for his own life. (Was that when the sketches turned angular and harsh?) The shocked look on his face—Violet had found him in the shop where he fell, stretched flat—couldn’t have been caused by the surprise of death: he’d expected it. She believed it was caused by his vision of paradise. He had always scoffed at Violet’s hope for an afterlife, as if it was in the same class with her vegetarianism or her experiments with the tarot pack—and there it was, a lovely surprise. He was waiting there for her now. But it was dark, very dark, and she stumbled, searching for him. Will! Will! The others were gone, she was all alone, afraid in the dark—when suddenly she remembered: Emily! Of course! Emily, my mama, she will help me, Emily.…

  She slept and dreamed, and woke. There was always music now, distant singing in her head. Funny that Emily had been a singer, funny that she would never hear her sing. The snow fell steadily on the maple bough and on the Mannings’ roof. Terry had French toast ready for her. She didn’t feel like eating it, but she let Terry feed her a couple of bites.

  “I’m getting used to your eye shadow, Terry,” she said, and she was shocked when two unmistakable tears hung in Terry’s eyes and spilled over. “Don’t!” she said. It seemed to her that Terry was trying to wash away the blue eye shadow. “Really, Terry, I do like it.” Remorsefully, she ate another bite of French toast.

  Food didn’t interest her anymore. It seemed strangely irrelevant, and it stuck on the way down. She would rather remember how she and Will had cooked together. She had liked making big pots of things; he had liked the finicking details. When he died, it was months before she could so much as peel an onion. Oh, the meals they had eaten together, the good times they had, beginning with that first evening at Lorenzo’s. They loved to go out: first dinner, then dancing. People don’t dance anymore, Betsy and Judd never went dancing. She and Will went out all the time. He loved to have her dress up. Silky skirt, nylon stockings, brocade bag. The pearls, the rhinestone clip, the jade necklace. The hat that was nothing but a big red rose with a black veil. The time she had put on her black V-neck satin and he had knelt before her and pressed his face to her, raised the skirt, rolled down her stockings, and right there on the bedroom floor … Oh God, the things he used to say, the things he did, such soft skin he had, and he was strong as a bear—he could lift her up and carry her, even when she was heavy with the baby. He shouldn’t have, maybe there shouldn’t have been so much dancing, either. But it was so lovely, clinging together late at night, drowsy, and then going home.…

  Her father had paid all their bills when Will died. There were more bills than she had ever imagined, and the business was further in the red than she had thought a business could go without collapsing. Frank didn’t grudge any of it, just totted up what was owed and paid it. “Will never asked for a dime,” he’d said with a kind of stunned admiration when he was done. “Seize the day,” her mother had commented, with her mouth turned down, “a
nd let tomorrow go to the devil.” But Frank shouted at her. “The boy’s gone, Helen—let him be, for Christ’s sake.” And then Helen had railed at Frank for the blasphemy, until Violet distracted them both with her weeping.

  She had never thanked her parents adequately for taking her and Betsy in, and she wondered sometimes why Helen had let them come back. Without knowing why, she was aware that her mother didn’t love her. She had been indecently glad when Violet got married and left the house, almost as glad as Violet herself. It must have been Betsy Helen wanted—not that Helen was easy on her—that was never her way or her philosophy—but Violet could see her trying to be, at least, just. She was a marginally better grandmother than she had been a mother. All the same, Betsy preferred Frank, just as Violet had. To Violet, her mother had been a stern figure of dread—short, hard, mousy, dour, religious. She could never recall Helen’s virtues. But as she lay in bed there came to her, for no reason, Helen’s laugh—a loud, hoarse bellow: “Woa ho ho!” It was infectious, and always a shock because it was so noisy and rare, usually called up by something on television. When it sounded in her mind, Violet laughed softly and looked around for Frank, but Terry was there, and she couldn’t tell her—Terry had never known Helen.

  Violet let Terry wash her; Dr. Baird was coming. “It’s still snowing,” she said. She could just make out the big flakes falling. She had been having a blank about snow. It entered her dreams readily enough, but what it was like eluded her, she kept thinking it was dark, dark.… She hadn’t wanted to ask. Maybe it was the feel of the cool washcloth on her skin, but suddenly she got it. Snow was cold and wet. They all came back to her, the thousand and one snow-belt winters, and she smiled happily at Terry.