“Of course!” she said. “It’s winter.” She didn’t say any more because of the look of sorrow on Terry’s face. It puzzled her, but she figured that out, too. She was going to die, and it made Terry sad.
“People die all the time,” she told Terry later that day, but it was Betsy. Betsy came close to the bed and leaned down where Violet could see her. She was crying.
“Don’t,” said Violet. It wrinkled her face so. There was a flurry of movement, and the room was full of people blocking the light. “I can’t see—” They moved away. The was snow-brightness, and she could see it wasn’t Betsy. It was an old woman. Emily?
“Violet,” Emily said. “My dear child.”
Violet could hardly hear her for the pain. It gathered all its forces and rushed into the empty spaces.
“Will!” she said before it burst from her, and he was there with flowers.
Chapter Eleven
Emily
Telegrams were dispatched to distant relatives—Will’s sister in California, and the wife (remarried) of Frank’s long-dead brother, Ted. Regretful telegrams were received back. Frank’s friends called up and Betsy spoke to them. Flowers were received, in spite of Violet’s wishes, and were banked around the closed casket at the funeral home—Henderson’s, because Frank had known Chuck Henderson for fifty years and handled both his divorces. Even Frank sent flowers, in spite of Betsy’s protests—a blanket of yellow roses.
“I can’t stand to have her go into that cold ground without flowers, Betsy,” he said, and insisted that Violet hadn’t meant it about not wanting flowers, it was only to save them trouble, it was just like her. The tears came, and Betsy gave in about the yellow roses.
“My mother detested them,” she said to Emily.
“They’re for him,” Emily said, imagining them draped over the coffin like fancy frosting.
Emily didn’t believe in funerals at all. She had once said to a group of friends, “I’d like to be put out on a hillside, and let the crows and the little animals pick me clean, like they do in Africa.” As soon as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The idea was horrible—crows pecking out her eyes! But it was well received and was considered one of Emily’s charmingly cracked notions. She almost said it to Betsy but refrained, fearing Betsy would act on it at her death.
Emily didn’t go to the funeral home to receive sympathizers. She could see Frank didn’t want her to. He didn’t say so, explicitly, but it was there in the turn of his head and the flicker of his eyes when he said, that first day at lunch, “I’m not going over there for long—Violet didn’t want a fuss.” Before he could propose that Emily stay home and rest—she could see it coming—she suggested it herself, for reasons of her own, and the relief that smoothed out his troubled face amused her.
“That might be best, Emily,” he said. “All things considered.”
“What things?” Betsy asked.
He didn’t stop eating; he forked up a piece of meat. “You know what I mean.”
Betsy gave Emily a look expressing mortification and anger and apology: Frank’s transparency obviously embarrassed her. “I’m not sure I do,” she said. “It seems to me that it’s absolutely fitting for Emily to go. She’s my mother’s mother!”
Frank set down his fork. “Betsy—”
“You don’t even have to say who she is, Grandpa—just say she’s an old friend.”
“I’m not going, so you can both forget it,” Emily said firmly. “I don’t want the sympathy of a pack of people who are strangers to me. And I’m too old to tell lies about who I am. I’m seventy-two years old! I like to stay home in the evenings. And it’s snowing.”
“But, Emily …” Betsy said.
Emily nodded at her grimly. I know, the nod implied, we’re letting him get away with it. She pushed back her plate, no longer hungry. She was aware of something Betsy didn’t see, that Frank would prefer his hugely pregnant unmarried granddaughter to stay home, too. The two fallen women, Emily thought with glum amusement. The traviatas.
But Betsy didn’t stay home. Emily saw the two of them off, and when they were gone she turned on the television and sat before it all evening, unseeing, while the beginning of a grudge worked its way into her heart. The next night was the same, except that instead of watching television she wandered around the house, touching nothing, breathing the air of Frank’s study (looking without curiosity at the shelf of photographs), Betsy’s room (with its odd mixture of furniture, its melancholy Madonna, and Your Guide to Pregnancy and Birth on the bedside table), Violet’s sickroom (where the flat smell of illness lingered), and finally the guest room, where she was installed. She snuggled up there under a blanket with a murder mystery and her resentment, and let Betsy come looking for her when she and Frank returned—Betsy looking white and stern, Frank oblivious.
“We ought to have the casket open, Betsy,” he kept saying at the dinner table. “She looked so beautiful toward the end.”
“She didn’t want to, Grandpa,” Betsy always said patiently in return.
He seldom replied, but made a noise expressing the disappointment, bewilderment, and frustration he felt. He would have liked to gaze on his dead daughter’s face each night—he would have liked to hear people say how lovely she was, how peaceful.
“She had the face of an angel,” he exaggerated to Emily.
The night before the funeral, the two of them were sitting in Frank’s study—Frank in the swivel chair at his desk, Emily in the wooden armchair with the orange-and-blue university seal on it. They both held themselves very straight, as if to impress each other with their physical fitness or their self-control, but, though Emily remained clear-eyed, the tears ran down Frank’s cheeks as he talked.
He had been talking—always with tears—since the night Violet’s body was removed. He had talked far into that night, long after Betsy had gone off to bed, and Emily—nearly dead from exhaustion (as she put it to herself)—had had to force herself to stay upright and awake. But she had done it. She had listened for hours and hours, that night and the next day and now again, to his talk, his tedious old-man ramblings—or rather, she had stopped listening after a while and, absorbed in her own thoughts, had just let him rattle on, like a television show she wasn’t interested in.
Her own thoughts were not pleasant—weren’t even decent, probably. She was ashamed of them, but there they were: what could she do about them? She had come all the way here in a snowstorm, risked her life in an accident—her heart banging around in her chest like a bird caught in a barn—thanks to Frank’s foolish faith in his own driving. Seventy-seven years old and rash as a teenager; you couldn’t tell him anything. And then a state police escort, of all things, across half New York State—so that she could arrive to find a wan, wasted woman who didn’t even recognize her, who died at her approach as if she were a blight.
Emily too had wept a little at first (while Frank’s voice droned on), but she wept for her baby, the little Violetta who had been snatched away while she slept. She had no tears for the dead Violet. The woman was nothing to her. The suspicion that she would feel nothing had been half of her reluctance to come; the other had been that she would feel too much. Well, she had let them push her into this grotesque family reunion, and she had faced up to her failure. And now she wished only to be rid of them all—Robinsons and Ruscoes, the gloomy rooms, the weepy nurse who kept dropping in, and that frightful old Marion Palmer. She wished for nothing more than to be back home hibernating in her snug house, with the cats curled around her, and the kettle on.
Frank talked, his face glowing and rapt with the painful pleasure of reminiscence. It was Violet he talked about, filling Emily in on their daughter’s unremarkable life. She had been a sweet, vague, simple woman, Emily gathered—a loving daughter, a daughter to be mourned. Frank’s mourning was garrulous. But no matter how he talked of his loss, it was only Betsy who moved her grandmother’s sympathy—and that was probably (Emily admitted sternly to herself) because the girl was pregnant.
Even pregnant women on the street touched her; it was only natural that her own granddaughter should inspire tenderness. The poor girl, with no man to stand by her, and her mother wasting away before her eyes. She had watched Betsy, in the two days since Violet’s death, drag herself around the house, taking the phone calls and doing the cooking, her eyes red-rimmed and curiously vacant-looking, and she had longed to comfort her—to sit and talk with Betsy instead of with Frank. But Betsy, though affectionate, seemed glad to be alone with her thoughts, and seemed to relish the chance to throw her long-estranged grandparents together. Emily excused herself to Frank from time to time and went in search of Betsy; the girl had taken to sitting, down in the living room, in a hideous flowered armchair, looking out the window at nothing. Once when Emily came upon her, she was dozing, with her swollen ankles stuck straight out from her maternity slacks and her hands clasped high on her belly. Seeing her thus, Emily’s heart overflowed with pity and tenderness. It was herself she saw there.
Back in the study, the cold winter light, reflected through the north windows off the blue snow, lit the room dimly. Emily turned on the desk lamp and sat back down. Frank picked up his story where he had broken off, tears polishing his face. He didn’t bother to wipe them away. Perhaps he thought she would do it for him, but Emily sat stiff in her chair and made no move toward him. Let him weep, she thought, I’ve done my share.
“Then when Will died she came back to us, Emily. She wasn’t sure we wanted her—can you imagine? It was the happiest day of my life, I think, when she moved into her own room again. And little Betsy down the hall. It was the only thing Violet could do, really—I doubt she could have cared for herself. Of course, Will left debts. I took care of everything, glad to do it. He was a charming fellow, I don’t deny it—and funny! He even made Helen laugh, believe it or not. But improvident Foolhardy. And he drank. Now, I’m not saying he was an alcoholic, but I will say that a good deal of the money that should have gone into other things went for drink. I suppose it shortened his life, too. Of course, Violet went to pieces when he passed away. She adored that man. It was her way, to throw herself into things, to invest everything …”
Emily looked around Frank’s study—the room where, she could see, he had gathered his things about him, as old people do. It was here he had retired to, to this fancy swivel chair behind the fancy desk. Like a big tycoon, Emily thought, instead of an aging and superannuated lawyer in an insignificant provincial city. More sham, more lies. It was pathetic—he was pathetic. If only she had seen it sooner—years back!—before he made her pathetic, too. If only she had seen then what a fake he was, stewed so deep in hypocrisy that it was his natural element. She’d had to come here with him to see it. She’d had to listen to his confession—made almost with pride!—of his affair with Marion Palmer, and his bizarre tale of poor Helen’s baby. She’d had to listen to his callous, selfish ramblings, and to see how he was ashamed of her—of her! after fifty-five years!—and of his granddaughter. Even his wooing of her back in East Haddam three days ago (it seemed years) had had a purpose: to get her to Violet’s bedside. Well, she had come, and what had she gotten out of it? The ramblings of an old man grieving for his daughter. Rigoletto, Act III. She might as well have been a robot or a tape recorder, or Marion Palmer, for all he cared who listened to him. If she left the room he’d talk to himself, he’d talk to the snapshots on the wall.
She didn’t leave the room, though—except to check on Betsy, to go to the bathroom, once or twice to get herself a glass of sherry from Helen’s showy cut-glass decanter in the dining room, and when she did she went right back. There was a fascination, to her, in the way Frank’s paternal reminiscences left her out entirely, the way he rode right over her very existence as if it hadn’t been she who’d given birth to Violet in Myra Bell’s back bedroom, as if she had no feelings at all. Well, maybe she didn’t. I’ll stick this out, she thought grimly. You’re never too old to learn. She’d sit there with him and let the cozy family stories flow. But she didn’t have to listen. She didn’t want to hear his memories—why should she? They had nothing to do with her.
He was an old man, it seemed to her now—no matter how straight he sat in his chair. To live in the past was a sign of old age: it was not for her. And to live for the future was just as bad, she mused. She ought to know. Thanks to him, she’d put her faith in the future for those long twenty years—a future that never came. She was beyond that kind of time travel now. She’d look no further back than yesterday, no further ahead than tomorrow; after the funeral she was going straight home. He’s an old man, and his life is over, she thought (listening to Frank’s voice but not his words). All her carefully nurtured defenses rushed in to prevent her thinking the same of herself. On the contrary: her life could go forward, day by day, with its old comfortableness not only intact but enhanced. She could go forward, really, in triumph; she had conquered this old man, whether he was aware of it or not, and she knew (another unpretty thought, but satisfying) she would outlive him. She could scuttle back to her old life with no harm done—almost as if that poor woman’s death, instead of breaking her as she had feared, had propped her up. Yes, it is wrong, it is unnatural to outlive your child—but it proves you’re strong.
“It was funny, that Violet wouldn’t let Betsy wear lipstick when she was sixteen. It was okay by me, I liked it, but Violet put her foot down. Usually she was so easygoing, but there were times … She didn’t want to lose her little girl, I suppose. Didn’t really want Betsy to grow up.”
Everything suggested Violet to him. Over lunch, it was Violet’s food preferences. The snow reminded him of Violet, as a child, on her sled—how red her fat little cheeks used to get! Emily’s lavender sweater recalled the afghan Violet had crocheted the time she broke her ankle. Even his study, his desk, the mechanical bank—if all else failed, he had only to look around him for a chapter of his daughter’s biography. These were the stories that had been going through his head all those long months by Violet’s bedside; now they were his tribute to her, along with his tears.
An old tune from an operetta kept running through Emily’s head. She had sung it—oh, years ago, and right here in Syracuse, too, at the Empire. It was one of her pagan, free-spirit, bohemian roles:
The old times are gone now,
The future’s far away,
So live, love, for the present hour,
Hold fast, hold fast the day.…
She would have liked to sing it to Frank now, had her voice permitted. What would he do if she began, suddenly, to sing in the young, light soprano that had once moved him so? Fall on his knees before her? Repeat the insane proposal of marriage that he seemed to have forgotten all about? Abandon his grief, just for a moment, and clasp her to him in love and gratitude?
Gratitude. That was it, the missing ingredient that—of all the missing ingredients—most rankled. Where was her thanks for coming here to the house he’d shared with Helen? For risking her life—at her age!—to rush to his dying daughter’s bedside? With humiliation she reflected that she had done it for him, that sitting on her sofa with him back in East Haddam she had rejoiced that the burden of anger had been lifted from her shoulders and the sweet dream had taken its place once again—light and lovely as a lace cape.… And what had he ever done for her? Nothing! It was Betsy, after all, who had sought her and found her. He hadn’t bothered. He would have gone to his grave without ever seeing her again. He’d probably considered her an embarrassment, if he’d considered her at all, until it suited his purposes to track her down and, after twenty years, to scatter the old lies before her like birdseed.
And she had eaten from his hand—only to become an embarrassment again, too problematical an entity with which to confront his dried-up old lawyer pals. What if she took a cab over to Henderson’s Funeral Home during calling hours and went around introducing herself: “Hello, I’m Emily Loftus, one of Frank’s old mistresses—Violet’s mother, actually.” She even knew one or two of them: wh
at was his name, that fat man they’d kept running into despite all their precautions? Corelli? Cannoli? Corleone? Nasty man with a dirty mouth, who knew—you could see it in his bleary alcoholic eyes; they stripped her and put her naked into Frank’s bed before the introductions were over. “This is Miss Loftus,” Frank had glibly lied, “an old school friend of my wife’s.” Was he dead of drink or would he be there? “Hello, Mr. Cannoli—remember me? Helen Robinson’s school friend? You weren’t taken in, were you? You knew who I was. And, as a matter of fact, I was Violet’s mother, too.…”
Frank paid no attention to Emily’s stony glares. It was doubtful he saw them. He was chuckling over Violet’s flirtation with theosophy. “She used to carry this book with her everywhere, Emily. By Madame Somebody—her picture was there, a fat woman like a buddha—like a hippo! Claimed to be in direct contact with God! Well, Violet used to go on about that stuff—trying to convert me, I suppose. And then, after theosophy, it was Yoga.…”
They had dinner in the dining room, the three of them. Marion Palmer had packed and gone back across town to her condominium, weeping, shortly after Violet was taken away. She would see them at the funeral home. She left in a hurry, and she and Emily had not said a word to each other beyond, “Hello, Marion,” and “How are you, Emily?” and then good-bye. Marion had been a shock; she had not aged gracefully. Emily wondered how far gone she had been when Frank had his fling with her. She took a grim satisfaction in imagining them in each other’s arms. Betsy, she noticed, had given Marion a big hug and tried to get her to stay, but Emily was relieved when she went, lugging her cheap flowered suitcase out into the snow. Even now, half a century later, she was afraid she would fly at the woman, pull her hair out, claw the bright makeup off her face, and demand the return of her baby.
Betsy had fussed a bit over dinner: fried chicken supplied by Mrs. Manning from next door, hot rolls, wine, and a spice cake donated by the weepy nurse. Betsy got out the good china and cloth napkins and cut-glass goblets. Good for her, Emily thought fondly. She admired Betsy’s strength of character; it was in the blood.
Family Matters Page 26