Tommy’s Aunt Elizabeth—his mother’s youngest sister, the one with the huge brown eyes whose photograph hung in his parents’ bedroom—was telling Mrs. Steer about the time she was desperately in love with Geoffrey Steer, Mr. Steer’s brother. Tommy’s aunt and uncle had come from Grosse Pointe for the holiday and also for the deer hunting, which his uncle liked to do with Tommy’s father. “Desperately,” his aunt was saying as Tommy came by with her drink. “He was my first real beau. Maybe I was just grateful, but I thought I was desperately in love.” She sounded wistful. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t so desperate about it as I.” His aunt laughed at the memory. “One of my sorority sisters found me sobbing in my room. Sobbing!” Her voice was full of wonder. “Just sobbing! Jeff had simply stopped calling, and I was devastated. I didn’t dress well enough for his fraternity brothers or something. At least that’s what I always thought. I’m sure I looked perfectly terrible.” She laughed again, and sipped at her drink. Tommy had trouble picturing his pretty, stylish aunt ever looking terrible. She always appeared very elegant to him. “My clothes were all hand-me-downs, you know—what there were of them—and my best dress probably looked like something Louise would wear, though I think it was Clara’s.” Clara was her oldest sister, the one whose eyes matched her ice-blue dressing gown and who had an apartment in Chicago. Louise was another sister who’d married a farmer and lived in the country. She had a hand pump in the kitchen. Nobody talked much about Louise. She’d gotten very sick when she was nineteen and had never been the same after that.
“We were very poor then,” his aunt said. Tommy’s Aunt Elizabeth was the only person in his mother’s family who ever mentioned their having been poor. “I remember asking my mother, when I was a very little girl, ‘Mother, why did we used to be so rich’—it did seem as if we’d been rich once—‘and now we’re so poor?’ We hadn’t seen our father since he arrived with fur coats for each of us—Mother, Clara, Tommy’s mother Emma, Louise, myself—even my brother Christian. Can you imagine? I was five years old and had a fur coat! Father left a few days later with our brother Jonathan—he was the oldest of us all—back out West to make another fortune, and none of us ever saw him again. Mother never even mentioned his name. I didn’t know until I was grown up that he’d gone bankrupt, and I certainly didn’t learn that from Mother. We never saw Jonathan again, either. Mother got a telegram two or three years later saying he’d died of tuberculosis and been buried in Portland. That was the only time I ever saw a tear in her eye—sitting in the kitchen, holding that telegram. Right after they left, poor Mother took all the fur coats and sold them—how I loved that coat, and how I cried when it went!—and eventually she opened the flower shop. For a long time Christian and I kept waiting for Father to walk in the door in the evening, bearing extravagant gifts, and when he hadn’t shown up by bedtime we would whisper together in the dark about whether he would be there in the morning when we woke up, and what the gifts might be. We knew they’d be splendid!” She laughed again. “Later, I sometimes told people my father was dead—and eventually he was. I think his going away affected me more than it did the others, except for Christian. Clara, Emma, it never seemed to affect them. They were a lot older, of course, and they were more like Mother. Strong. She never looked back. I never heard her utter a word of complaint, and she insisted on keeping the flower shop until she died. I don’t know who Christian and I were like, but I don’t think it was Mother. Of course, we were so young. Now I can’t even remember what he looked like. . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her deep brown eyes seemed suddenly full. She grasped her drink with both hands and looked off into the distance, as if, Tommy thought, her father might suddenly appear there and come toward her, maybe carrying a fur coat over his open arms. Tommy stood rapt, immobilized, riveted to the spot, and flooded with a sense of her loss. Mrs. Steer seemed under the spell, too. Tommy imagined his aunt as a little girl—the poor little match girl in the story—and his own eyes filled with tears. The enormous sadness of her story was like something out of a fairy tale but it lacked a fairy-tale ending. He waited for his aunt to supply one, and after a moment she resumed talking but she was back on the subject of Jeff Steer.
“Jeff simply dropped out of my life without so much as a word,” his aunt said, “and when my friend found me crying my eyes out, she took me in hand and dictated this letter to Jeff. Oh, it really told him off! And I mailed it. I mailed it! Can you imagine? I was so embarrassed afterwards.”
Mrs. Steer laughed. “Yes, Elizabeth, I can well imagine,” she said, “and I know what the letter said, too.” Tommy’s aunt looked astonished. “I’ve never forgotten it. It said: ‘You needn’t think you’re the only clothespin on the line just because you’ve got a wooden head.’ Wonderful!” Mrs. Steer laughed again, but nicely.
“Varla, how did you ever—”
“Jeff showed it to me,” Mrs. Steer said. “I was his great confidante in those days. He was the youngest. He told me all his troubles, and believe me, you were one of them.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” his aunt said.
“Don’t be,” Mrs. Steer replied. “Jeff was smitten with you. He was at least as desperately in love with you, but he thought you were too good for him.”
“She thought so, too,” said Tommy’s Uncle Roger, who’d come up at the end of the story. Uncle Roger was Aunt Elizabeth’s husband, and he liked to tease. “They all thought so, those Bigelow girls. Their mother told them, and their mother was a Hopkins, and you know what that meant. And of course they were right.” He squeezed his wife’s hand. “But they all found men who could support them in the style that was their due, even if we weren’t quite good enough—didn’t you, Elizabeth?” Tommy’s uncle was laughing, but his aunt looked annoyed. “Smart girls, those Bigelows. Except for Louise. Now, if only Christian could have done the same. . . .” Christian was Tommy’s bachelor uncle. He was witty and sophisticated and always treated Tommy as if Tommy knew what was going on. Uncle Christian lived with Tommy’s rich Aunt Clara and Uncle Andrew—he worked for his Uncle Andrew—and, like Clara, always carried a book with him—Proust, Gide, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Beerbohm—not quite like the books in Tommy’s house, which came in the mail from the Literary Guild or else looked as if they’d been there forever: the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, sets of Dickens, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emerson, the Harvard Classics, that sort of thing.
“Roger! Stop that!” Tommy’s aunt stamped her foot. “You’ve interrupted Varla’s story. You could get us a drink, that would be something you could do. Varla,” his aunt said, turning to Mrs. Steer, “what must you have thought of me?”
“I thought you must be very clever,” Mrs. Steer said. “I’d never seen a letter like it. It seemed very funny, and very American. I told Jeff to stop moping around, that he’d probably deserved every word of it. He was a socialist then. As you know, he’s changed a lot.”
“Well,” his aunt said, “I never went out with Geoffrey Steer again. If he ever knew how hurt I was! But I found someone else. I was determined to find someone else. He was a Sigma Nu from...oh, I don’t know, Wisconsin, I guess...and when he visited me at Ann Arbor I would put on my very best outfit—not Clara’s castoff; I made this one myself—and parade him by Jeff’s Phi Delt house, pretending to ignore it, of course. I would have plucked out my eyes before I’d glanced in that direction. Oh, I was shameless,” she said, sipping the drink Uncle Roger had brought her, “but it was such innocent fun, such silly, sweet, innocent fun.”
Emily Sedgwick, who always seemed to move in a cloud of perfume and fur, face powder, cocktails, and cigarette smoke, had heard the end of his aunt’s story. “Oh, Mrs. Chase,” she said to her, “that must have been sweet revenge. All the Phi Delts think they’re the cat’s pajamas. I prefer the Betas, myself.” She smiled quickly, blinked her eyes, and paused, waiting for the response. Tommy’s brother John was a Beta, and Emily was wearing his fraternity pin linked with a fine gold chain to her o
wn sorority pin, the one with the secret words in Greek. “All us Pi Phis—I guess I should say we Pi Phis—prefer the Betas. It was the same in my mother’s day. She was a Pi Phi, too, you know, and so was my grandmother. I was a double legacy.” Tommy’s aunt and Mrs. Steer seemed to know that but they murmured appreciatively, although Tommy knew that Mrs. Steer thought fraternities and sororities were a lot of foolishness. Emily Sedgwick was lovely; everyone said that. She played a nice game of golf and a better game of bridge, and she and John made an attractive couple. Everyone expected they would have a charmed life ahead of them.
Tommy’s aunt, though, had spoken as if it were different being a grown-up married woman, a member of the Junior League and the Boat Club, the wife of a physician in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and not nearly so much fun as parading by the Phi Delt house in her fancy dress on a weekend afternoon. Tommy’s Uncle Roger had been a Deke at Stanford—“that’s the Harvard of the West, you know,” his aunt often said, and said again that afternoon to Mrs. Steer—and she’d met him while he was going to medical school at Ann Arbor. She fell in love with his car, she said with a laugh. Uncle Roger played the banjo and the mandolin, and Tommy thought he was a lot of fun.
“Medicine runs in our family,” his aunt told Emily and Mrs. Steer. “All those Hopkins on our mother’s side with dreadful names like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Asachal—whatever that is—were physicians back in New England. Or if they weren’t physicians, they were clergymen. Always doing good, you know. And one of them was a commanding officer in the Revolutionary War. We could be Colonial Dames, but who’d want to be? They’re so stuffy. Well, Emma and Clara might. Not because they’re stuffy, of course. Emma is certainly not stuffy. She always said she threw her hip out of joint carrying me around when I was a baby, but I notice she’s still able to dance. I love to dance, myself, but now it practically takes an Act of Congress to get Roger onto the floor, at least with me. And then he makes me feel like a barge with a tugboat.” Tommy laughed. His aunt was so tiny and so pretty that nothing could make her feel like a barge, and his uncle didn’t look much like a tugboat, either.
“Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Steer, also laughing, “you’re the first ninety-eight-pound barge I’ve ever seen. He should dance with me. He’d think he had the Queen Mary in tow.”
“Well,” Tommy’s aunt said, “at least I get the damage treated free. That’s one advantage of marrying a doctor. And after all, I was only trying to keep up the family tradition as best I could.”
“Which tradition is that?” Tommy asked.
“Medicine,” his aunt replied. “Medicine, of course. Emma or Clara has some of our great-great-grandfather Hopkins’ letters. He had a beautiful hand—he was said to be famous for it—but the letters read like sermons. Long, boring sermons.” His aunt talked rapidly on, seized by the subject of her family. Maybe she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “He was writing to his grandson—that would be your great-grandfather, Tommy. He was a real pioneer. The first white settler in Saginaw or Coldwater—one of those places. He built a cabin and then a stockade and the town grew up around him. Clara says the cabin is still there. He took his medical books with him from the East—practicing medicine without a license, I suppose, though in those days and in those places I don’t imagine any license was needed, just a healing hand. He went back to Connecticut for his bride, and then she delivered the babies.”
Emily Sedgwick rummaged through her bag for a cigarette and asked if anyone would like one. She called them coffin nails. No one did, and Tommy’s aunt scarcely paused. “Tommy, your great-aunt was a nurse in the Spanish-American War and then went to medical college in Philadelphia.” She turned to Mrs. Steer. “She married a Harvard man, but he never amounted to much. They moved to San Francisco because of her lungs, and she wanted to help fallen women.” His aunt flashed a weak smile. “I guess she thought there were a lot of them in San Francisco.” She took another sip of her drink. The glass was almost empty. “She should have stayed home. My father’s brother married a whore! Of course I didn’t know that then. I only saw her once. She came to call to find out where my Uncle Tom had gone and my mother wouldn’t receive her. Christian and I had to tell her that Mother was resting. Mother never rested! We didn’t know where Uncle Tom had gone. We scarcely knew him, but I liked him. He was kind.”
Tommy’s mother had been standing near them, talking to Mrs. Hutchins and Tommy’s Aunt Martha, but Tommy could tell she had one ear on their conversation, and she came over to them when Emily asked Mrs. Steer if she had a match. “It would be nice if you’d go entertain your cousins, Tommy,” his mother said. “You’re letting Amy do all your work.” She turned to his aunt. “Elizabeth, where do you get these stories? Surely you’ve told enough.”
“But they’re true,” his aunt said. “Don’t you remember?”
“No,” his mother said, “I don’t. I’ve never heard those stories.”
“And don’t you remember that Father’s other brother, Christian’s namesake, committed suicide?”
“Elizabeth,” his mother said, “he died in a boating accident. You do have the most active imagination. She always did,” his mother said to Emily and Mrs. Steer.
“You were older—grown up, really,” his aunt said. “It’s always the youngest who remember. You remember how we called Aunt Polly ‘Auntie Doctor’ because she hated her name, don’t you? She said it was only fit for a parrot.” His aunt laughed. So did his mother.
“Yes,” she said, “I do remember that.”
“Maybe you’ll grow up to be a doctor, Tommy,” his aunt said. “That would be nice.”
Tommy didn’t think he’d want to be a doctor if he had to be like those people with names like Jeremiah, but if he could be like Dr. Randolph or his Uncle Roger, that might be fun. His brother David told him that Uncle Roger had bought him his first pair of long pants. David had to wear short pants and then knickers until he was thirteen. So did John. Tommy’s mother had promised him that he wouldn’t have to wear knickers, and that he could have long pants when he was ten. That was doing better than David and John, but it still seemed a long way off, almost three years. His mother said she liked him in short pants. She also liked him in the golden curls he’d had until he was two and a half, and she still kept a lock of that severed hair between tissues in the big Bible that his father’s grandfather had carried from Scotland to Canada, and that Tommy’s own grandfather had brought to America. “You used to be such a sweet child, with such a lovely, even disposition,” his mother said with a puzzled shake of her head. “What happened to that sweet child?” she would ask when he misbehaved, or cried, or was angry. Tommy was glad he couldn’t remember the curls; it was enough to have to hear about them.
Tommy’s mother moved off to attend to her guests, and his aunt began telling Mrs. Steer about a lunch she’d had recently with his Uncle Roger’s sister at the Boat Club. Janet was older than Roger, she hadn’t married because she feared every man who asked her was after her money—“and it’s not even that much money,” his aunt said—and she was a problem, a difficult problem. Mrs. Steer interrupted her before she’d finished her story about the problem of Janet and the lunch at her club. “Is this the life you wanted, Elizabeth?”
“Why, of course it is, Varla,” his aunt replied, surprised. “Isn’t this the life you wanted?”
“It’s the life I have,” said Mrs. Steer.
Tommy’s aunt looked nonplussed, the way Tommy’s father used to describe Fred Barger. “He was the only man I ever knew who was stumped for an answer when you said ‘Hello,’” his father said. Mr. Barger had also died that fall. A lot of people died that fall, and his parents seemed to visit the funeral home often.
“Thank God for the funeral home,” Tommy’s mother said to Mrs. Sedgwick and his father’s sister Martha, who had come back for Thanksgiving to pick up some of his grandmother’s things. “It’s so much easier on everyone than it used to be. When Mother died we kept her at home, and it
was hard on all of us but especially hard on the boys. It was even worse when they found Grandpa MacAllister—the closed coffin, so many months after his actual death—but at least we weren’t living in the house then. I don’t know why Evelyn kept Fred at home.”
His mother was perched on the edge of the comfortable couch where Mrs. Sedgwick and his Aunt Martha were sitting. Tommy had been sitting there, too, but his mother told him his fidgeting was disturbing Mrs. Sedgwick, so he got up. They were talking about the Bargers and how, when Mrs. Barger’s dog died a few years ago, she’d had him stuffed—just like the animal heads and the Aldriches’ little fox on the Island, Tommy thought—and he now stood on rollers in a corner of Mrs. Barger’s house.
“Rollers,” exclaimed his aunt. “The first time I saw that I damn near fainted!” Although Tommy’s father didn’t like it, his sister Martha talked like that. She had married a divorced man, and his father didn’t like that either, though he liked Charlie. “I thought of asking Evelyn if the dog had his walk today, but I was afraid of the answer.”
Mrs. Barger once told Tommy and his mother that when her dog died, she thought she’d die, too. He was just like a child to her, and she liked to see him right there with her, and being able to move him from place to place made her feel as if he were still alive. It was a great comfort, she said. When Mr. Barger died, and Tommy’s parents were leaving to go to the Bargers’ house, his father said that he expected to find Mr. Barger stuffed and sitting at the dining table. “I hope we don’t have to shake hands,” he said, and he repeated the story as he passed drinks to the three ladies.
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