All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  If anything happens to my husband this evening, do not call this house. We are having a party.

  I sat cross-legged on the bed. I twisted a strand of hair with my finger, a childhood habit, as the sun rose higher and the bright streak grew longer across the room. Beside me, Dean slept. He sleeps like a child sometimes, I was thinking. The deep crease between his eyes smoothed out only in sleep.

  The plan, now canceled, had been to go from the American Hotel directly to the LIE and from there to the airport and from there to our honeymoon. We had a borrowed villa in Santa Margherita Ligure, south of Rapallo, lent by a friend of my parents for a ten-day stay. That we needed to get back to the house instead struck me as both unfair and urgent.

  The night before, when Dean and I had left the reception, we’d driven down a side road to the beach. The tide was out, and the moon illuminated my white dress as we walked to the water’s edge. He rolled his trousers; I held my hem up to midthigh, the scalloped edges draped over my forearms as we waded in to our knees. The sounds of the party were distant, and down the beach the lights from the neighboring houses were all going out. Bedtime. We watched the water for a long time before we got back in the car and drove to the hotel. I wished, at that moment, that I were one of the guests on the dance floor, not the one for whom the day, the week, held such a complexity of import. I thought of the girls whose stories I had heard, those whose wedding dresses had fallen off while they danced. Under the tent, they were playing a loud reggae beat; there was whooping and laughter. I thought, So much planning, and I don’t remember a single thing. The wedding is over. How was it, I don’t remember—did I have any fun?

  I stared at Dean’s sleeping form, willing him awake. And so Dean woke up the first morning of our marriage with his wife staring at him.

  He reached out as he came awake and lightly held my ankle. I could tell by this small gesture that he remembered too, immediately upon waking, what we were up against. We both looked down and saw our wedding bands at the same time. I put my hand close to his. Two bright gold rings, entirely new, unscathed.

  “Mine looks so little,” I said.

  “Mine feels huge,” Dean said. He took his hand away and swiveled the ring on his finger. “It feels like a cigar band,” he said. He flexed and unflexed his fingers. Then he darted his hands up in the air. “Weird.”

  “Does it bug you?”

  “No, I’m just thinking, it might mess with my jump shot is all.”

  His hands made shadows along the wallpaper as he poked the air. The ring shone in the sunlight.

  “I’ve just never worn a ring before. I’ll get used to it.”

  “We’re down here,” Helen said into the phone, “hiding out in the guest quarters, honey. Daddy’s playing tennis with the kids.”

  On the tennis court, the Jacksons were once again playing doubles. When we arrived, Helen had resumed her position on the slatted lounge chair, knitting. It seemed to be her safe place for the weekend. Upstairs in the big house, it seemed possible that my mother had forgotten that any of them existed.

  On the tennis court, Raymond hit one past his son and Helen called it out from the sidelines.

  “C’mon, Mom, cut the guy some slack,” Chris said.

  “Cut me some slack, Mother,” Raymond said. “I’m on vacation.”

  Helen’s sister-in-law, Dean’s aunt Anita, was hollering at her husband outside as they packed up their car.

  Helen ran out to the gravel road, the pleats of her tennis skirt flapping against her leg. “QUIET,” she said. She held her hands to her cheeks. “There’s a family in crisis up the hill, Neet. Please.”

  The night before, as Dean and I were preparing to drive away, outside the car, through the windshield, Helen was waving. “See you on the flip-flop,” she kept shouting, “go have fun!” as the wedding guests swirled around her with fistfuls of rose petals they threw at the car.

  Now, the day after, she stood in the driveway outside the cottage, watching as her brother and sister-in-law loaded her mother, Nonnie, into the car and drove away, back to Rhode Island. She waited a while as their car rumbled down the driveway, then watched it turn onto Lily Pond Lane. She came back to the tennis court.

  “Time-out. Let’s just review the rules,” she said. She clasped her hands.

  Raymond and her kids paused their game and stood quietly while she walked out onto the court. “I want to get out of here,” she said to her husband. To me she said, “Honey, you guys have a lot on your plate. We need to leave.”

  Up at the house, my mother had written out the day’s menu in green Magic Marker on a yellow legal pad, as she did every morning. It included chicken salad and French madeleines with local raspberries for lunch, and stuffed striped bass for dinner followed by sugar pie.

  In the kitchen, the yellow sheet was taped on the white Formica kitchen cabinet. Johanna tied her hair in netting for the day, then sat down to cut the crusts off thin slices of white sandwich bread.

  On the beach my teenage nephews, usually on their surfboards at this hour, lay ever so slightly hungover on large orange towels, napping in the sun. They lay with their arms slung over their eyes, some curled on their sides like castaways. They wore T-shirts and baggy trunks, a few in baseball caps, the visors pulled low over their foreheads.

  “The sign of a good wedding,” my cousin Pierre was telling my sister Darcy, “is bonking.” The two of them were on lounge chairs on the front deck of the house. As I arrived, he asked me, “Hey, there you are. Did anyone, to your knowledge, bonk last night?”

  He circled one bare foot in the air as he spoke. “It should have been me, but it wasn’t me,” he reported. “God knows I tried. It would have been me if there had been any cute gay boys in the house.”

  He thought. “I could have had William Gaines.”

  “Whoa, what about William Gaines?” I said. He was the husband of our second cousin Diane.

  Pierre shook his head. “He’s gay.” He lit a cigarette. The plume of his exhale circled lazily in the breeze.

  “No way, sorry,” Darcy said. “That’s a big fat lie.”

  “Scout’s honor,” said Pierre. “I never get my gaydar wrong, girls. The only people who don’t know it are his wife and the rest of you all. In fact, let me revise that. I’d actually put money on the fact that Diane knows. She’s not in that marriage for bonking purposes, I can promise you. I never get gay wrong. But Raymond Jr. is the hot one.”

  “He’s not gay, I promise you.”

  “Which is such a total waste. That beard of his. Hot.”

  A brilliant summer day opened up as the sun rose high. The contrail behind a plane fragmented in the blue sky as it passed far off over the sea.

  “Okay, so maybe I did bonk someone,” he said.

  “Someone?”

  “But not William Gaines and not Raymond Jr. So the rest is immaterial. All in all, I just did it to bless the wedding. The proceedings needed a little flesh on flesh in the dunes.”

  “Thanks for taking care of that for us, sweetheart,” I said. “Because I feel pretty certain Ruth Ann Middleton forgot to put that on her to-do list. ‘Beach bonking at ten p.m. Bonking starts on time or my name isn’t Ruth Ann Middleton.’”

  “That woman was a mess of fabric with five o’clock shadow,” Pierre said. “Where do they dig up people like that? I was impressed by the horror.” Then he added, “Technically, it was closer to midnight.”

  “What was?”

  “The bonking.”

  “Don’t say ‘bonk,’ dearie.” My mother came out on the porch. “It’s ved-dy unattractive.” She stood with her hands on her hips and looked at me.

  “There you are, Mrs. Jackson,” she said. “It’s high time.”

  “I’m not Mrs. Jackson, Ma, if it’s me you’re speaking to.”

  “I daresay it’s not I,” Pierre added.

  “‘I daresay it’s not me,’ as in ‘It’s not me to whom she is speaking.’ You know that, Pierre. C’mon.”r />
  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m keeping my name.”

  “Oh Lord, dearie,” she said next. “Don’t be so extravagant. I simply don’t have the energy for any attitude today.” She sat down on the edge of Pierre’s chaise and put her hand out for his cigarette. She took a long drag. “There’s way too much to do, and for starters you need to get your wedding presents out of the way. They’re cluttering up the dining room and the foyer.”

  “Have you even called about our father?” I asked.

  “He’s holding steady. I spoke to the ICU doctor on duty.” She lowered her voice. “Speaking of which, when are they leaving?” She pointed Pierre’s cigarette in the direction of the cottage. “I can’t have them here past lunch. I simply cannot. There’s much too much to do around your father. This is a household in crisis, not a welcome wagon. It’s your responsibility to get them out the door.”

  She looked at Pierre. “Pierre, dearie, you can help move her presents up to the attic, can’t you? Except for the canoe. My god. A canoe. Who gives such presents. The canoe needs to go in the garage. I’m sure all those big strapping boys down there in that family can take care of that.”

  “Ma,” I said, “do you think William Gaines is gay?”

  She thought about it. Then she scrunched her nose and smiled. “Don’t you think?”

  “Wait, you do?” Darcy said. She leaned forward. “No shit?”

  “I think he and Diane have an ‘arrangement,’ as we used to say back in my day.”

  “Wow. Pierre nailed it then.”

  “Nailed it, not him,” Pierre said. “There’s a difference, people.”

  “‘Nail.’ ‘Bonk.’ Jesus, you kids,” my mother said.

  We all looked up at the flawless sky.

  “We need to go back over there,” my sister Darcy said after a while. “He’s all alone.”

  My half brother Scott wanted to stop again to pick up lunch. An Italian sub from Villa Italia by the East Hampton train station.

  “We don’t know how long we’re going to be there,” he said. We were in T-shirts in the sandy family station wagon. I can’t remember who was driving, but I remember the mood was not grim, exactly, but unreal. Any element of levity—the summer tunes on the radio, the Sunday morning beach traffic on the highway—seemed an ironic background buzz. On the top-ten station, the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” was playing, which seemed to have its own grim irony as we drove along.

  Once again, we’d arrive at the ICU with a bag of uneaten food that smelled of summer picnics. I once again pictured the six of us wreathed around my father on his hospital bed in a coma as Scott distributed the cuts of sub, the oil shiny on the paper wrap, the air thick with the smell of genoa salami and roasted red pepper. This time, not even the smell would remind us of anything but the person in front of us.

  Every breath you take.

  “No stopping,” our mother said as we left. “You kids had better make tracks and get back here for luncheon.” She ran out into the driveway as we were pulling away. “Do not leave Sissy and me alone with the Jacksons.” To me she added, “This is your responsibility, not mine, remember.” We left her, hands on hips, under the Portuguese tile that read “Quinta de Crianças Brincar.” We drove down the driveway past the party tent on the lawn, the flaps billowing gently in the morning air. The rose petals still clung in spots to the gravel as we turned past the driveway sign near the thicket of wild honeysuckle, past the guest cottage, and out onto Lily Pond Lane toward Route 27 to Southampton Hospital.

  The last time I saw my father that day, his position had not much changed since the day before, other than they’d propped him up on his pillows a bit. Still his head lobbed to one side, his mouth slack. His lips were chapped. The hospital gown hung loose off his shoulders, and his dried hair was standing up on his head, rubbed that way from the pillow, no doubt, though it reminded me of the hairdos we used to give him when we were young, climbing up behind him on the couch, our backs resting against the bookshelf as we combed his hair. Now it seemed strangely yellowed, stale somehow.

  I rubbed my father’s shoulder. I had stared at Dean that very morning to try to will him awake, so perhaps somewhere inside I hoped I could come to the hospital, stare at my father, and miraculously will him awake. Hope. It all seemed absolutely potentially reversible if I stared at him hard enough, and yet at the same time it was so obviously irreversible. The smell of the Italian subs, the ticking of the monitor, the occasional shuffle of nurses in and out, the group of us staring at our father. That was all.

  Every breath you take.

  Earlier that day, my mother had driven over to see my father, but had not told us at the time. I heard about her visit years later, from one of her friends. I had always wondered when she had said good-bye to him, when between the wedding details and the follow-up she had seen him.

  Later that day, long after my siblings and I had returned from the hospital to the house, Dean had driven over to see him but had not told me until later either.

  None of us were with him when, still later, he died.

  My mother, visiting in the very early morning, had yelled. Evidently she had the impression, as many do, that if you yell loudly at a coma victim, you have a better chance of being heard.

  Dean, when he visited, had matched my father’s labored breathing. In his studies in neurolinguistics, he had learned that if you match the breathing of someone in a coma, you have a better chance of being heard.

  My mother yelled about remembering things. She yelled that she hoped he remembered how many times they had promised each other, if either was to be incapacitated beyond recovery, the other would sign the “Do Not Resuscitate” document that guaranteed no extreme measure would be taken.

  Dean heaved as my father heaved, while behind him the nurses shuffled out and left him alone. All he had said at first to my father’s heaving body was, “Just stay in the moment.”

  But what was “the moment,” exactly? The Jacksons had packed up, having hauled the green canoe, supposed to be the centerpiece of the festivities, off the top of the car. Vincent, the gardener, had helped them haul it into the garage, the ribbons still on. No one had bothered to untie them. There the canoe would stay out of sight as the scene changed from a wedding, a boat to paddle into the happy beginning of a new life, over to something that was, if not death, then something very close to the end of life.

  Dean had taken long, steady breaths as he spoke to my father, matching his breathing, breath for breath, speaking in a calm, even voice. As his family was heading back across the Long Island Sound on the ferry to New England, and Pierre and I were stowing the wedding presents in the attic, and my mother was speaking on the pink princess phone in her bedroom to the lawyer—who guaranteed her he would be returning early from vacation on Cape Cod first thing in the morning to help her get things sorted out—Dean sat with my father in the hospital. He told him the score of the Yankees game. They were both fans, and he passed news to my father, often sending him postcards with the score on it when my father was traveling during baseball season. In July, when my father had been at the Carlton House and too drunk to leave his apartment, Dean would go over and watch the game with him, seated on the couch while my father nodded in and out of sleep, his jaw resting on the lapel of his smoking jacket, eyes cloudy and half open.

  “Well, it’s done, John, I got the kids married,” my mother yelled.

  “I’d like to tell you about the wedding, John, you would have been proud,” Dean said.

  “Remember? You didn’t want us to do anything heroic to save you if you no longer had your dignity,” my mother yelled. “Just like I didn’t if it was me.”

  Dean said, his breath heaving, “The day was bright, the weather held, and the sun set just as we said our vows.”

  “Remember, that was the promise we made to each other. No extreme measures. We promised to let each other go if it was past all hope of a good life,” she yelled.

  I wonder
if, outside my father’s room, the nurses clotted together at the doorway listening to this last exchange between a husband and wife: “So we’re not going to do that, John. Tonight, we’re going to unhook all these things and let you go.”

  “So, it’s okay, you can go now,” Dean said softly to my father. “It was a beautiful wedding and we could feel you there. Everyone thought about you, and it really, really is okay to go now. We love you, John.”

  “Remember that we love you, John,” my mother said.

  “Remember that we love you, John,” Dean said.

  “The kids are coming over, but after that, the hospital team is taking you off all these machines,” my mother told my father.

  “We all wish you’d been there at the wedding, John,” Dean said.

  “I couldn’t believe you weren’t there with me at our daughter’s wedding, John,” my mother said.

  “Just before the wedding started, the minister talked about you, how you couldn’t be with us, but it was your wish, and that of your family, that the wedding go on,” Dean told him. “We figured you’d want us to go ahead. So, you were there with us too, in spirit.”

  “The doctors have given up hope!” my mother yelled.

  “I have such great hopes for you,” he had told me the last time we’d spoken, the week before the wedding, “and great hopes for your life.”

  “I hope you know how much we love you,” is the last thing I had told my father, when I could think of nothing else to say.

  “We love you very much, John,” my mother said.

  “We love you very much, John,” Dean said.

  I would like to know what else my mother said that day. I hope that she told him she loved him, and squeezed his hand and called him Jean-Jean, as she did when she was being affectionate. But I don’t know. I do know she signed the DNR order and returned home, to where the rose petals from the end of the party were still sticking on the gravel of the driveway, flattened by the tire treads of so many cars leaving late at night, long after the petals had been thrown at Dean and me, pelted in our wake as we ran toward our car.