All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  But all we knew is what we knew from what both she and our father had always told us: “When we go, we want to be together in Lake Lugano.” A lovers’ pact, made back when they were still lovers. When their life together looked long and unimpeded. “Let’s be together for always.”

  I remembered something from Lugano. On my birthday, probably my third, I couldn’t sleep through my nap, so I snuck out on a long terrace outside my bedroom. In my mind’s eye, I see the yellow of my pajama feet against the cool white tile of the terrazzo floor and, off to a corner, a pile of pink and white birthday presents, delicate, cheerful, their slender ribbons swaying in the afternoon breeze.

  My mother was using some of the money left to her by our father for this trip, and she made constant reference to the “estate.” Maybe because of her sudden financial authority, we fell mindlessly into line behind her as we entered the hotel, following like a gaggle of ducklings as she led us up a deep red, thickly carpeted stairway to our rooms.

  The Hotel Splendide was large, and glistened pink in the sunset off the lake, like a fairy-tale castle made of spun sugar. Though it meant nothing to anyone but her, she had booked us into the same rooms we’d had twenty years earlier. She settled in a large suite with a view of the lake and put my sisters and me in an adjoining room she called the “baby-and-governess room.” “MB and the boys,” as she called them, were given smaller rooms across the hall with no view. Within minutes Keith was back in our room, pacing, opening window shades and bureau drawers. “I look out over a brick wall,” he said, and slumped in an armchair.

  Our mother was out on the terrace that joined our two rooms, a long white marble terrace with woven rattan bistro tables and chairs placed in pairs. She waved a “Bar and Room Service” menu in her hand. “None of this was here before,” she said, pointing the menu at a cluster of apartment complexes and a casino across the lake. Mainly, she was talking to Catherine because, to her, Catherine was the only one who had not been to Lugano before. “Except she was once, really,” she pointed out. “In my tummy.”

  My sisters and I stood on the terrace. In our mother’s photo albums, there were dozens of photographs of Darcy and me posed there: in matching terry cloth bathrobes, in sundresses, in our nightgowns. In a few we wore Swiss nurse costumes someone had given us, with red crosses on the hats. On our necks, in the photographs, we wear stethoscopes. Catherine stood with us and watched the lake with her arms crossed, her eyes on the unfamiliar landscape. Sometimes, I knew she disliked being the youngest; if she could, I knew she’d find something in all of this she could remember.

  “I remember the terrace,” I told my sisters, but I never told our mother.

  One summer long ago, my parents must have looked out on this terrace onto the lake and vowed to each other that their ashes would be scattered in Lake Lugano. I tried to imagine such a conversation between them. Probably late at night, after dinner and maybe a dance down in the garden below to the music of the trio that played nightly, maybe they had one last drink on the terrace of our suite, sitting on the bistro chairs, gazing out as the lights across the lake in the houses on the hillside reflected in the water, their two small daughters curled in the bliss of innocent sleep in the adjacent bedroom. What in the protocol of love takes romance to this precipice, where decisions about death are made with an eye toward eternal union? Did they ever think, I wondered, during the years that followed, when their backs stiffened and strained and gradually bent over time, when they grew ever distant, when disappointment became an ache, a blindingly thick overlay to everything else, did they ever in moments remember, We have this pact, we’re in this together for eternity? I liked to believe that they did.

  At dinner that night, my mother wreathed us around a table on the hotel veranda under a web of tiny lights. As we were seated, she greeted waiters as though they were long-lost dear old friends. “You probably remember these two from when they were babies,” she said, pointing to Darcy and me. “Bambini!” one crooked old waiter cried out and nodded. Another went back to the kitchen and returned with an elderly woman in a housekeeping apron. A small woman, her face wizened but her eyes bright. She clasped her hands to her cheeks when she saw us. She came and gave us each a kiss on both cheeks. “Lo ricordo,” she said. “Sì. Sì.” I remember. Yes. Yes.

  As we ate there was music, a trio of musicians in white tie and tails. Keith had been taking a series of hustle lessons in Florida, and he danced with each of us while his brothers watched. As he danced, he coached. “One two three, one two three,” he whispered in our ears, and “We’re turning here,” before he held his arm out for a spin. I didn’t mind it, but it drove my mother crazy. “Come on, Keithie,” she said, stopping in midglide. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

  When we were young, our father used to dance with us, holding us out at arm’s length and sweeping us across the floor, the pleats of our dresses flying up behind. Often, when people saw us dancing, they beamed. They’d come over and ask our names and our ages. Sometimes they guessed wrong and called him “grandfather.” When my parents danced, though, he up on his toes most of the time, she gliding into his steps with grace and knowing, head held high, no one asked questions. They watched.

  “It’s one of the things that made me fall in love with your father, girls,” our mother used to tell us. “He was such an elegant dancer.”

  “Oh, honey,” our father would add whenever she said this, “it takes two.”

  Maybe that was what marriage was, I often thought. Dancing together. If I could freeze that moment. My parents on the dance floor: a surety and synchronicity of step, so that when one moved backward, the other moved forward to meet them there, reflexively, confidently knowing where their partner was at all times and following where they were going. That’s what marriage ought to be, at any rate, the perfect marriage everyone aspires to. A long and intricate dance between present and past, moving always together in step toward the future.

  The morning in Lugano was bright and warm. Outside the bedroom window the hotel was already a clatter of movement. China clinked in the restaurant below, and car horns blew on the narrow side street.

  A soft lake breeze brushed past us as we filed down to the hotel dock at noon. When we got there, there was a motorboat, picnic lunches, and a pile of yellow beach towels waiting because, my mother decided, if we’re going to be out on the water anyway, we might as well make a day of it. “Technically, it’s illegal to do what we’re doing here,” she had explained to us the night before at dinner. “It’s considered littering, putting anything foreign in the water. The Swiss have very strict pollution laws these days, and they’re proud of them. The driver will look the other way if we make it look like he’s hired to take us out for a day’s picnic. I ‘greased his palm,’ as your father would say, so he’ll be fine.” Then she looked at my sisters and me. “Girls,” she said, “you have to remember this, because you’ll be back here again someday. With me.”

  The hotel had packed easily enough food for twenty of us—sausages, cheeses, fruit, wine, bread, sparkling water in blue bottles—all packed into white plastic garbage bags that fluttered, in the breeze, like a flock of nesting gulls. Somewhere along the line, Keith transferred our father in among the bags, tucking his white leather tote bag in alongside a shiny thermos of coffee and a basket of fruit. When our gear was loaded, we climbed tentatively one by one into the boat, all knees and elbows as we shifted around to get settled. The driver was a young man with muscular arms and reflective aviator glasses. “Do you wish to eat first?” he asked.

  “No, no. After,” my mother said, busily arranging a wadded-up towel between the side of the boat and her lower back. Then, “Allons-y,” she said, turning to all of us, her mouth zipped into a tight grin.

  When the boat rushed out of the dock, in a sudden dart, it shook us from our sleepy dazes and whipped away our breath. Bouncing across the lake, we had the wild, light-headed feeling of being scooped up by something fast, something p
owerful, something practically out of control. As we picked up speed, the lake opened around us, curving, snakelike, between hilly villages on both sides, past squared-off acres of farmland, past stone churches and tall campaniles. “Ten years ago,” the driver shouted over the motor, “the lake was so polluted they had to dredge it. Now,” he said, “it’s clean again. Really, really clean. After lunch,” he added, winking at my sisters and me, “waterskiing!”

  When the boat came to a stop, we were in the middle of the lake, and the scenery on either bank looked like everything else we had passed. In the sudden silence of the cut motor, though, we heard birds singing, and far away a bell rang in a church tower, or on the neck of some wandering cow. For a moment, we all turned our heads this way and that; then slowly we dropped our eyes down and stared at our knees. Keith fished the gray plastic container out of his white tote bag and walked to the back corner near the motor. Beside me, trying to be quiet about it, Rod cracked his knuckles. Our mother had her head down, one hand supporting her forehead. “Unh,” she said once, a deep, dark sound from somewhere inside her, but no words.

  Balancing himself against the rim of the boat, Keith held the container carefully over the edge. From where the rest of us were seated near the driver’s seat, all we could see was Keith’s back, and his elbows jutting out at angles from his waist.

  For a while, there was the familiar noise of water slapping methodically against the boat and the occasional rustling of plastic in Keith’s hand. No one spoke. After a while the rustling stopped. There was that certain buzz of quiet that comes when sound loses meaning.

  Part Two

  XII

  The Visit of Holiday Whales

  Camden, Maine, 1986

  The card went out a month before Christmas. It was a holiday card—that much was immediately apparent due to the red envelope. The photograph on the front of the card was a line of smiling faces in jeans and sweatshirts. Behind, a rugged mountainous landscape cut the cloudless summer sky.

  Inside the card, Raymond Jackson had typed up his annual holiday newsletter. It was printed on red paper and folded neatly in quarters to fit inside the envelope. Helen had gone down to MacBride’s on Main Street to have it copied a few hundred times. It was going out to everyone on their list, all the friends and relatives who liked a greeting at this time of year. Helen liked to make a lot of lists, and the Christmas list was one of them, an ever-expanding work in progress over the years.

  “Dear folks, hail and hello from the Jackson family on High Street,” it began.

  It’s been a booming year for all of us. I’ve had a steady run in my work and fun. The boat publishing business continues, and on the leisure side, Helen and I got out on the water for four days in August with our kids on a double-ended schooner. Went all over Penobscot Bay last August with Dean and his bride, up from New York City. She goes like a dream. Hoping one of these days these kids will produce some boat-nut grandkids for this old fud to teach some sailing to. (Hint hint, kids!)

  We’re looking forward to having all our kids home for Christmas, as well as Helen’s mother, Nonnie. Raymond Jr. will be coming from Seattle, with his fiancée, Claire. Jessica is coming in from San Francisco, and Chris will be in from the Farm (the University of Maine in Farmington, for all you out-of-staters). We hope those of you nearby will drop in to toast the season! Helen will be making her usual arsenal of traditional holiday cookies. To those far away, you are nearby in our hearts always. To all we send our best wishes for 1987!

  With our family’s love, as ever, to yours.

  Helen and Raymond Jackson,

  Christmas 1986

  Helen had studied calligraphy at Skidmore, and she addressed each card in her careful script. “People like things personalized,” she said. “It never fails to make an impression.”

  “You know, I read these things and I want to throw up.” My mother was smoking on her side of the couch in her living room. The Jackson card had arrived with the morning mail on her breakfast tray a few weeks before Christmas.

  “I just had to call you and vent,” she told me. “I mean, really. It kills me, to think that a child of mine is caught up in this.”

  What bothered her about it was the lineup, specifically my presence in it. “What is a daughter of mine,” she said, “that’s what I’d like to know, what’s a daughter of mine doing in someone else’s Christmas card. It doesn’t seem natural somehow, I’m sorry. There I’ve said it. I’ve said my piece.”

  But she hadn’t yet. Her piece. She wasn’t done saying it, and she was digging right in.

  “I mean, ‘folks,’ please. Your father would roll in his grave. Using ‘folks’ that way is tacky, dearie, plain and simple. It’s ‘folktale,’ ‘folk dance,’ ‘folklore,’ fine, permissible. But not as a form of greeting. People are not ‘folks,’ they are people. Their tradition is folk. ‘Folks,’ no. I’ve always told you children that. And now here you are, caught up in it.”

  “In what, exactly?”

  “It, dearie. You know full well what I mean. You should be home for Christmas. Not gallivanting off. With some other family.”

  I could hear the draw of her cigarette. My mother managed through years of practice to get her smoking to take on expression. This was cigarette smoking in “I just had to call and vent” mode, the indignant inhale, the agitated exhale. Her smoking repertoire was as changeable as her mood. There was dreamy, nostalgic smoking, in which the exhale was long and lazy and the atmosphere thick with anecdote. There was busy smoking—economic quick puffs in rapid succession—or busy with no hands free, speaking on the phone and writing, say, or sorting through place cards for a party, in which the cigarette was held in a clench between her lips. Then there was brooding smoking, the deep inhales and the long, whooshing exhales. Finally, there was dramatic smoking as proclamation, lighting a cigarette, rarely putting it to her mouth but instead waving it like a torch as she made a point or two, letting the ash grow long until it listed to one side and eventually fell off. Even extinguishing a cigarette had meaning. It was an energetic stub, repeated any number of times until the butt was thoroughly smashed in the ashtray. The most energetic of stub-outs usually accompanied the “I just had to call and vent” repeated smoking she did around the time of the holidays ever since I’d been married to Dean. Always, the filter was stained a deep red by the end of it all from her lipstick.

  “Trust me, baby girl. Idiomatically, we don’t speak the same language as those people. Did you even see this picture before it was sent? It’s odd.”

  Actually, there was something somewhat odd about it. Perhaps it was the uneven terrain, or the tilt of the camera, but it seemed as if everyone in the Christmas card photograph was standing on an angle, leaning in on one another as though if one dropped out, the family pose would entirely collapse. At the center was Helen, in a pink sweater and matching windbreaker. The Raymonds, Senior and Junior, were on either end of the lineup, as if bracing us in.

  “To think,” she said, “that a child of mine. Jesus.”

  A week before the trip to Camden, my sister Catherine and I were in my kitchen in New York, trying to make marzipan. We agreed I needed to bring something with me to Camden as a present. Something. We had taken food coloring and mixed it in empty mustard jars. She shaped hers into oranges, bananas, and pears. I was making whales, because I knew Dean’s family liked whales even though I couldn’t be sure they liked marzipan.

  I was telling her about the sleeping arrangements in the Jackson household during the vacation. “Dean and I have to sleep in the master bedroom,” I told her as we mixed colors with the ends of tiny paintbrushes we’d bought at the hardware store. For some reason, the sleep arrangements were what was bothering me. “Raymond is staying on the pull-out in his study, and Helen is staying in her guest room at the top of the stairs, in one of the twin beds—Chris is sleeping in the other.”

  “Why him? Why not the girl?”

  “The girl refuses. Jessica.” My sisters
refused to remember Jessica’s name; they had no room for another sister in my life, even an in-law sister.

  Catherine’s tongue poked out slightly from her mouth as she worked. “I’m really not half bad at this, you know? I think we may have stumbled on something.”

  “Jessica is staying on the couch in the living room, and Nonnie, the grandmother, is staying up in Chris’s room. No one knows what the fuck to do with Raymond Jr. when and if he arrives with the fiancée. They are fighting over whether to get married or not, and they might not even make it. She’s got cold feet. They’re coming from Seattle and they’re planning to erect a tent to sleep in.”

  Catherine was not big on camping trips. “She’s gonna have more than just her feet cold in that case,” she said. “That West Coast girl’s going to have some icy you-know-whats.”

  “They are setting it up in the attic.”

  “Well, we’ll call at regular intervals and check in on you,” Catherine said.

  I brushed elaborate eyelashes and red mouths on my whales. I wanted sensuous whales at the family gathering.

  Catherine watched.

  “These whales,” I said as I worked the brush, “if nothing else, these whales are going to get through this thing with grace and style, even if it kills them.”

  Catherine laughed. “And they are killer whales.”

  In Camden at Christmas, there were annual town rituals. During the week of the holidays a “living crèche” was enacted on the green outside the library, so if you drove up from the south, you’d see actual town residents wearing long burlap robes over their parkas, gathered around a makeshift manger. Organized by the Congregational church, the “Congo,” the shifts were four hours long, pending weather. Originally the holiday committee borrowed livestock from a farmer in Hope to round out the nativity scene, but that had changed a few years earlier due to a runaway sheep. The sheep tore out of the manger, up the road, jumped off the dock outside Cappy’s, and drowned. A papier-mâché menagerie made by the church guild over the summer was pressed into service ever after.