The boys had always seemed so mutually self-reliant … And when you linked them up with their father, when they became the Ives triplets, it was hardly surprising if Bianca often felt superfluous, almost like an outsider. So there was some small comfort in discovering that when she was torn away from home, the normally smooth-running household disintegrated.
Some small comfort, yes. But mostly it brought guilt. She’d entered another period of real crisis, and she was mishandling this one, too. She wanted so much to be strong—helpful and good—but it was as though her body wasn’t built for such crises. Her nerves were shot, she had diarrhea most days, she couldn’t make herself eat enough. She felt so bad for the boys, who didn’t know what had hit them. They only knew that almost as soon as Mom announced she was pregnant, the world began to crumble. Wasn’t she setting them up to resent their little sister bitterly?
She could foresee, with a vision that seemed to open across decades, a new vast network of family problems, a whole new generation of problems, intersecting with other, deeper, ancestral networks of problems … It was as though the family wounds, the hurts were independent. Like some cancer, they weren’t out to harm their host; they merely wanted to replicate. (Distant words from Uncle Dennis came back to her.) But were fiendishly clever when you sought to halt their replication.
What she couldn’t foresee was where this was all heading in Chip’s head. Something was happening to the boy. He’d suddenly turned far more nervous than Matt—asking an endless round of trembling-lipped questions. Can blind people see in Heaven? Do dogs go there? What about rats—if you were a good rat, could you go there?
And Chip’s nervousness only made Matt nervous, and resentful. And it made Grant nervous and resentful too—for he was no more successful than Matt at calming the scared little boy. A rift was opening among the triplets.
Only Bianca could offer some small mercy of reassurance, though the boy’s jittery questions never stopped. Why did Grandpa have a stroke? How does God choose who will be sick? Why does God let lizards grow back missing limbs, but not people?
The questions were all so bewildering, and unnerving, it took her a little while to see what so obviously linked them: nothing less than Death itself. Chip wasn’t too small to find himself abruptly confronting the largest puzzle of human existence. When posing his fearful questions, he sometimes shook his head in a strange new tilted way—it looked like a sort of tic. It was as though he’d gotten a rank whiff of mortal decay up his nostrils and couldn’t get rid of the smell. He was suddenly far more burdened than Matt, or even Grant, and how could she, susceptible flesh and blood herself, relieve his distress?
And then Grant tottered and gave way, which in retrospect was inevitable. Why should Grant be immune? She knew how painfully vulnerable he was underneath. She’d known this ever since the day she left him a note on the kitchen table, and he showed up glassy-eyed at the Poppletons’, on whose front walk he’d issued that inhuman howl.
From that first evening when Papa had telephoned—“I need you to come”—Grant had been nothing less than wonderful. She could imagine marriages where a wife couldn’t confess to her husband that her mother was a thief, where the shame and awfulness would be too great, but never for a moment had she considered not telling Grant. She’d returned home that night and cried and cried and cried, and he’d done nothing but comfort her. Never—there was never a hint of accusation in his tone, no hint of superiority. Bianca must do everything she could for her mother and father now. And he would take care of the boys.
Then came the night when Bianca took Mamma to the movies (more of Uncle Dennis’s advice—getting Mamma out of the house) and Grant stayed home with Papa, listening to the radio. When Mamma and Bianca returned, only Edith was home, who reported that Papa and Grant had gone out for a walk.
Out for a walk? Grant and limping Papa?
What on earth for?
Bianca sat with her mother in the kitchen, waiting for the men. Bianca was feeling anxious—the whole business was so odd—and wishing with all her heart for a cigarette. She’d gotten up twice during the movie for a smoke in the ladies’, but there was no way to smoke in this house, other than to lock herself in the bathroom, which she did consider …
It was after eleven when the men showed up. They were red-faced and disheveled. Papa had been drinking heavily. Grant was flat-out, stumble-down drunk.
Bianca drove Grant’s convertible on the way home. Grant sat in the passenger seat and apologized and apologized and apologized. He was slurring his words. “It’s not the end of the world,” Bianca kept saying.
Grant had tried to keep things within limits—he wanted her to know how hard he’d tried—but Papa was so adamant. Drink up, drink up, he kept saying. “What was I supposed to do? It’s so seldom he gets that way, so damn insistent. But when he does … Well, you know how he is.”
“’course I do. Look, Grant, it’s not the end of the world.”
“He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“It’s all right.” It was. “It’s Papa’s way of trying to talk to you—to get close to you. He’s been going through hell.” Her voice caught in her throat. “Actually, you did the right thing. It’s what he wanted. Maybe it’s what he needed. You did the right thing, honey.”
But there was no convincing Grant. He went on apologizing and repeating over and over that he’d tried to keep things within limits. He didn’t understand how things had exceeded the limits. He’d tried to keep to the limits with things, but he’d exceeded them. The limits.
“It’s all right,” Bianca murmured, but there was no calming him down.
His getting so drunk didn’t disturb her so much. But the frantic, unappeasable, abject man revealed by the drink—he made her very nervous.
“You remember when I got into such hot water at the firm?”
“’course I remember. Those lakeshore properties. It’s nothing you need to—”
“And you remember what lake it was.”
“It was Lady Lake,” Bianca said.
“I knew just what that lake meant to you. You’d told me so many times. About always going out there. As a kid. How much you loved it. I knew what it meant to you. And how it’s the last place where your parents and the Poppletons ever really got along.”
“That’s right …”
“I wanted to make things right again,” Grant said. “Wasn’t that clever? Me and my big ideas, I was going to put things right again.”
“I didn’t know, quite. Until now,” Bianca said. “That that’s what you were thinking, Grant. It’s very sweet. But darling, I don’t think anybody can make things right again.”
“Clever, huh? We could buy a cottage and invite everyone to the lake. Start over. And this time people would get along again. Smart, huh?” The bitterness in his voice frightened her.
“You were just trying to help …”
“And I only made things worse,” Grant said. “That’s me: I only made things worse.” There was a silence, and then Grant said something that made her want to cry. In the darkness of the car, a small voice from the passenger seat said, “I keep thinking you’re going to leave me.”
“Oh honey,” she said. “That’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous.”
“I keep thinking you’re going to leave me again.”
“Grant, darling, listen to me: that’s the most preposterous … No one’s going to leave you.”
“You did before.”
“Grant, I did not. I went off to Cleveland, for heaven’s sake. And you came and got me. Just the way I knew you would. You must have driven a hundred miles an hour. Just the way I knew you would. I hadn’t been at Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace’s twenty minutes before you showed up.”
“I made a bargain with you then. And part of the bargain was, I wouldn’t have more than a drink a day. And I keep telling myself, if I just keep up my end of the bargain, she won’t leave me.”
“Leave you? For heave
n’s sake, Grant, I’m going to have your baby. And no one minds if you have an extra—”
“You already had two sons of mine, two little two-year-old boys, and did it stop you from getting on that train? You got right on that train. Bang. Straight out of town. You do what’s right. It’s like Bootmaker.”
The milkman? “Grant, what are you talking about?”
“I tell you you have to fire him and do you? Hell no. You do what’s right. And when I make an ass and a fool of myself, chasing after fat little Maggie, when I have you for a wife, is it going to stop you that you have two-year-old twins? There isn’t any stopping you, Bianca. You made your point.”
“Honey, listen to me: I didn’t even know what point I was making, only that I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. Now hush, darling, enough. Enough, enough—you’re getting worked up over nothing. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here. Carrying your baby. And in May I’m going to present you with a daughter, our Maria, to hold in your hands.”
She wanted to cry. It was all too much—Grant’s confessions, his dwindled, slurred voice in the car’s darkness. She went on driving. The big white castle of Sears was coming up on the left. They were nearly home.
“In any case, I want to say I’m sorry,” he mumbled in a different tone of voice. Now he sounded a little lawyerly.
“For what?”
“For getting so emotional just now.”
“I like it when you do. It makes me feel less lonely. Bia is overemotional. Papa’s only said that a million—”
“You’re not angry?”
“I’m not angry.”
Grant did seem calmer, and dozed off, or nearly did. But once they were home and Bianca had paid the babysitter, and the two of them had climbed into bed, Grant started right up again. He was still slurring his words.
“I keep thinking you’re going to leave me.”
“Honey, don’t. You’re working yourself up over nothing.”
Bianca put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him toward her. Grant’s body seemed bigger and heavier than usual. He was a big man—six feet one, and probably closer at the moment to 210 than to 200 pounds—but his athlete’s agility usually made him appear lighter than he was. Because it had been so long since she’d seen him really drunk, she’d forgotten the way alcohol bulked him up. She’d all but forgotten that big man who often drank too much and whose lurching presence seemed to imperil every perishable thing in the house: the china, the crystal glasses, the framed paintings on the walls.
Clumsily, bulkily, his hunching body crawled and slipped down her pregnant body, until his voice emerged below her collarbone: “I had to learn my lesson. But I learned it.”
“Honey, you must stop. Please stop. I love you and I’m carrying your baby and now you’ve got to stop.”
“I learned I’m not my father. I don’t have to be my father. Chasing anything in a skirt. There I am in a goddamn bathroom, necking with Maggie-the-tramp, and the next thing I know my wife has left me.”
It pained Bianca to realize how satisfying it was to hear her best friend in the world described as a tramp, but it didn’t pain her too much. She said, “I do think Maggie deserves some of the blame. It’s the thing that drives me craziest about her: she never has to take the blame.” Bianca laughed. “Even Papa couldn’t get angry when he discovered that she’d been hiding a pair of shoes under our front—”
Grant interrupted: “The next thing I know? My wife has left me. Gone. An empty house. And I’m standing in the kitchen reading a note in this artful handwriting—even your handwriting is artful, Bianca—and I know suddenly I’m the biggest goddamn fool who ever lived. And yes, I drive all the way to Cleveland at a hundred miles an hour, picking up a speeding ticket on the way. Did you know I got a speeding ticket?”
“I didn’t know that …”
“Of course you didn’t,” Grant said, with an unexpected touch of vanity. “I never told you. I’m surprised I didn’t get two of them. And my hands are shaking on the steering wheel the whole time.”
“But that’s what’s been happening to me! These last couple of weeks, I’m driving to and from Mamma’s and my hands—”
But it was as though Grant couldn’t hear her now. He was in the grip of his own story, which perhaps was the central story in his life—the one from which so many other stories constituted an amplification, an afterthought, a consequence, a parenthesis. “And ever since then, I keep thinking you’re going to leave me again. I don’t mean every minute, but it’ll be some day I’m just driving home, and suddenly it hits me: I could arrive home and find a note on the table.”
The words hit her with such an extraordinary cringing rawness that she felt it all completely: you could be a man named Grant Ives, you could come home and find nothing but a note on the table … And in that imagined kitchen a door swung open, and she stepped through it, into an emptied, echoing room wherein it was evident how little she understood this man she was married to—this easygoing, lovable man with all his needless, gnawing fears.
“It’s one of the reasons I like taking the boys out,” Grant went on. “Because I know you’d never leave without them.” All over—his big body—he was trembling just like a little boy. “I know you’d never leave them.”
“Oh darling, please,” she said. “Oh darling.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
Back and forth, back and forth went Uncle Dennis’s gray Lincoln, pulling into town out of blizzards and sleet, wind and rain—on top of everything else, it was a messy winter. He would stay with Bianca’s parents, briefly, usually just a night, and yet it seemed with each trip something moved forward, something came unstuck or unlocked. A shiny red-and-yellow “For Sale” sign went up on Inquiry. The house Uncle Dennis was so keen on, over on Reston Street near Indian Village, was actually purchased, with a fixed move-in date of February first—less than two months away!
It was shortly after one of his visits that Edith, sitting with Bianca at the old kitchen table, made a peculiar announcement: she was to be “in charge of the move.” Edith being Edith, it didn’t occur to her that nobody need be in charge. “Uncle Dennis asked me to be in charge of the move,” she announced, her voice proud but tentative, as though expecting to be challenged. But Bianca saw instantly what a brilliant idea this was—one of Uncle Dennis’s finest.
Of course Edith pursued her job with clipped efficiency. Summer clothes? Nobody needed them before the move—into boxes they must go. The silver? The china? Into boxes. The garden tools? The muffin tins? The pewter candleholders? All neatly boxed, all neatly labeled.
Bianca had to stop Edith from packing up the Christmas decorations. “We don’t really have time for Christmas this year,” Edith actually declared. And Bianca pleaded with her sister: “But you know how Mamma loves Christmas. You know how Mamma loves gifts.”
Unfortunately, Edith’s decision to undertake the job did not mean she’d accepted the move for herself. Although she no longer talked of remaining on Inquiry—living in the house alone—she was adamantly refusing any transplantation to Reston Street. One of her counterproposals seemed worrisomely plausible: she would find a room in student housing at Wayne. Since she lived by day in the school library, maybe it made sense to live by night on campus … But how heartbreaking if Mamma and Papa were to purchase their new house and begin their “fresh start” with none of their children beside them. Somehow, Edith must be made to come around.
Up and down Woodward Avenue went Bianca’s Studebaker. She visited her mother every day. They often went to afternoon movies. Or they did their grocery shopping together. Or they even went out to lunch at a soda fountain. This new routine established its own protocol. It soon grew evident that Mamma didn’t want a lot of suggestions; too many choices bewildered her. Bianca simply presented her mother with the day’s plan—and Mamma, with a touching and sweet and painful docility, went along.
Bianca was especially on the lookout for comedies and the two of the
m saw pretty much every movie in town that might provide a laugh or two. It was balm for the soul: to hear Mamma chuckling beside her in the blue darkness. She’d always had such a wonderful, girlish laugh—an airborne string of giggles, perfectly spaced.
For all Edith’s notions about sacrificing Christmas for efficiency’s sake—a return to the spirit of wartime rationing—the coming holidays offered multiple benefits. Gaiety was in the air, particularly downtown, where Hudson’s shop windows were even more spectacular than usual, but what else would you expect from the world’s tallest department store? And there was the welcome chore of gifts to buy, each requiring much earnest consultation. Christmas shopping took Mamma out of herself.
Still, it was a chore weighted with psychological burdens. Whenever the two of them entered a store, Bianca watched her mother like a hawk, while pretending to be doing no such thing. Bianca was certain—she felt nearly certain—that Mamma had learned her catastrophic lesson and could now be trusted, until the end of time, not to shoplift so much as a stick of gum. But still …
Still, after a shopping expedition with Mamma, when Bianca climbed into her car with a groan, she wouldn’t make it halfway down the block before lighting a cigarette. Still, she was talking to herself; still, she was getting the shakes, and having trouble eating anything wholesome, and suffering from diarrhea; still, she was having trouble sleeping …
There was an old comfort to be derived from the drawing up of lists: to-do lists and grocery lists, lists of Christmas presents bought and needing to be bought, Christmas cards sent and needing to be sent. Some nights, sleepless, she would sit at the kitchen table with pen and paper, putting things in order. “I’m turning into my mother,” she declared aloud, not for the first time, but the more likely danger was that she was turning into herself—reverting into that troubled waif of a girl who had sat up nights in the old kitchen on Inquiry, drawing up lists of who’d sat where in her earliest school classrooms, a slave to the ludicrous notion that if she couldn’t remember a classmate’s name, particularly a boy’s name, he might meet a terrible end: his soldier’s blood would be on her hands.
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