‘He didn’t want to. He started a completely new life without them.’
But for the first time I realize the enormity of what Daddy did when he was only sixteen and that the probability was he loved some of the seven siblings or one or both of his parents and that he must have lain awake at night in the hostel in Salt Lake City aching for his family’s love and missing them and even wanting to go back up the mountains to them. When I think of the young man’s loneliness, it makes my heart slide and my mouth taste salty. I remember the tiny white scar that I saw today ringing Daddy’s wrist and my heart is suddenly struggling like a fish which has flipped out of the stream, leaping and dipping.
‘When did he come to California?’ asks Rougemont.
‘Well, I don’t exactly know. He was certainly here by the time he was in college but I’m not sure how old he was… I think he funded his studies by working in an auto repair shop at some time.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Not exactly. But in Utah he sure learned how to fix things. He carried on fixing things right to the end of his life. He fixed old cars, tractors, jeeps, anything.’
‘When did he meet your mother?’
The chasms in my knowledge gape at me. Years and years, Daddy’s years, between high school and meeting Mother. They must have passed slowly enough at the time, the people and events probably seemed then to have their own importance, but now Daddy is dead those years are lost. No friendship survived it, there were no stories about this period, they have occupied no place in my imagination, they have yielded no landmarks. Ten, no, fifteen years have disappeared completely and can never be re-found.
I tell him how Mother and Daddy met and how she named all the geological layers in the wedding cake and how she liked to tell me the story.
Michael Rougemont somehow, without me noticing, seems to have moved closer and is watching me through the dim light which hangs between us.
‘Was she a good mother?’ he asks.
I eye him in the half-darkness. He must already know the answer to this. ‘My mother’s schizophrenic.’
‘She’s always been that way?’
‘Eventually she was diagnosed as an episodic schizophrenic. That means she has periods between psychotic breaks but they get shorter and shorter. By the time I was fourteen she pretty well lived at the clinic.’
‘When she wasn’t psychotic, she was at home looking after you?’
I swallow. ‘Well, she was at home. I wouldn’t say she looked after us. Her behaviour was unusual and it got worse. By the time I was in second or third grade I hated her leaving the house because she was guaranteed to do something embarrassing.’ Like, laughing uncontrollably during the Pledge of Allegiance at school open day. Then staring at the Principal in ashen, unsmiling horror when he told a funny story. Or stopping the car to accuse some shocked pedestrian of following her.
‘But Lucy, your mother wasn’t always sick. Not when your father married her and she named all the geological layers. Not when you were small. Was there anything that triggered it, I mean the first time it happened?’
I don’t tell Rougemont about the trip to Arizona we took right after my baby brother died. I don’t tell him how Mother’s misery exploded right there on the burning blacktop as though the Arizona sun had heated her grief to boiling point. I don’t tell him how hard I’ve tried to recall the words I heard her yelling from inside the canyon. I say: ‘I was just a small kid. I don’t remember. It took years for them to diagnose her as schizophrenic but when they did we understood a lot more. It’s a chemical imbalance of the brain, it doesn’t need an emotional trigger.’
‘It was all pretty tough on you, Lucy,’ remarks Rougemont. The sand, which was dry when I sat down on it, has absorbed some of the ocean’s dampness now and the night air is thick with moisture. I stand up.
‘Luckily, I had Jane. Why don’t you talk to her about all this?’ I shift one foot from side to side so that the sand bursts up between my toes as though animated.
‘I already did. But no one knew Eric Schaffer the way you did. No one. Not even Jane.’
He’s right. I wouldn’t say this out loud to anyone, least of all Jane, but I’ve always believed, guiltily, secretly, that I was Daddy’s favourite. Or maybe he had the knack of making each of us think we were favoured.
I say: ‘I’m staying with my aunt. I should go back there now.’
Rougemont nods. Between sitting and standing there is a moment of stiffness and of pain, then his face clears. We collect our shoes and without speaking make our way across the reluctant sand. At every step it seems to rearrange itself around our feet with a small sigh. The constant fretting of the ocean grows fainter. As we cross the dunes, our legs and arms working hard as though in deep snow, Rougemont puffs and his breath heaves. He falls behind me. When we reach our cars, his parked too close to mine, the traffic which swishes past us illuminates Rougemont’s face and I see it is wet with sweat and the lines across his forehead and around his mouth look long and deep. I realize for the first time that he is old, not so old as Daddy, but not so very much younger.
I unlock my car. When I turn back to Rougemont I see his hands are shaking. He can’t slot his key into the lock. He tries to put his body between me and his failure but I stand right by him, watching his efforts, staring at his big hands. I recognize old man’s hands. Daddy’s. Gregory Hifeld’s. The bigness of the knuckles, the prominence of the veins. I step forward and gently remove the key from his fingers. It hangs on a ring with just one other key, a door key. Rougemont’s house. Rougemont’s car. Twin axes of his existence bound by a small circle of metal. Most people, by the time their hands shake, have accumulated a weightier key-ring. They carry keys to friends’ or relatives’ houses, back door keys, summer house keys, office keys, the key to a spouse’s car, a secret box, a filing drawer. But Rougemont travels light. I remember that he talked of men who lost their family, how it was the price you paid if you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put them at the centre of your life. I slip the key into the lock and turn it for him.
‘Thank you, Lucy,’ he wheezes. ‘I appreciate the help you’ve given me. I’ll be seeing you real soon.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Rougemont.’
I reverse the car and swing south. In the headlights I capture a large sign by the side of the road. It reads: ‘Big Brim Beach. Danger, swimmers! Cross-currents!’
13
The apartment is thick with the smell of cooking. Aunt Zina urges me to kick off my shoes in the living-room and relax while she makes the evening meal.
‘Oh.’ She has seen the small piles of sand which spill from my shoe. ‘You have surely been to Big Brim beach. Did it bring you closer to your papa?’
‘No,’ I admit, easing off the other shoe.
‘There was a telephone call for you,’ she tells me. ‘A man. I think he was calling from New York where people so often speak like machine-guns. I was unable to understand a word, not even his name. No doubt he will call again.’
‘Jay Kent?’ No one sounds more like a machine-gun than Kent.
‘Possibly,’ she says, going back to the kitchen. ‘Yes, it might have been that name.’
A little later, Sasha comes home. He offers me a whisky.
‘I’m very glad, Lucia.’ Sasha smiles benignly when I accept. ‘Whisky is the perfect relaxant.’
He hands me a drink and watches as my face curls when I sip it:
‘Your quality of life would greatly improve if you could acquire a taste for whisky.’
‘It sort of burns my mouth.’
‘Then I shall make it more palatable.’ He disappears and returns with ice in the glass, clinking like money.
Settling himself in his own chair, his leather jacket and the chair both creaking, he asks: ‘Lucia, when is the funeral?’
‘I don’t know. I saw Jane and Larry and Scott today at the beach but we agreed to talk about all the business stuff at Daddy’s house tomorrow.’
‘I can
guarantee a good turn-out of aunts, uncles and assorted cousins. But my question is this: will Aunt Tanya be there?’
The usual guilt at the mention of Mother. I confess: ‘To be honest; Sash, I hope not. In case she does something awful.’
‘Lucia, Aunt Tanya should certainly be at her husband’s funeral. I offer, for myself and for my mother, to undertake all necessary care on that day. We can pick her up, look after her, take her back to Redbush.’
‘But supposing she…?’
‘She has great physical frailty these days. However, to please you, I will walk with her arm in mine. I can assure you that I have an iron grip.’
‘She used to scream and shout sometimes.’
‘Also unlikely these days, but at the first hint of such behaviour I will remove her from the room.’
‘Well, thanks. I’ll ask Jane…’
‘No, no,’ Sasha insists. ‘I want you to make the decision. The way you make decisions in New York.’
I hesitate. Then I accept his offer.
‘I believe that to be the right decision.’
‘Thanks, Sash.’
‘A fascinating and pleasing relation, the cousin,’ he says. ‘More than a friend but perhaps less than a sibling. Now what happened today?’
I look back over my day. The valley gaping at us as the detective and I played at reconstructing Daddy’s life. The shoe heel curved in the palm of my hand, the snap of the undergrowth, the toy tow truck silently traversing the valley floor. The waves at Seal Wash banging against the cliff. Scott sobbing at the beach house, Daddy’s bruised face at the mortuary, Rougemont’s line of tin soldiers.
I say: ‘I broke a coffee cup.’
Sasha’s eyes glint. ‘Nu tak. Did it shatter symbolically as we might expect of a falling cup in a play by, shall we say, Chekhov? Or was it merely chipped?’
‘It broke into three pieces.’
Sasha sips his whisky and licks his lips.
‘Not so satisfying as a thousand tiny splinters but, all the same, let us see what symbolism we can read into the three tidy pieces… perhaps they represent the perfect circle of Larry, Scott and Jane which is now in danger of breaking, breaking from within.’
I muse on this. ‘With Daddy they made a perfect circle. It seems the four of them saw each other almost every week, mostly at the beach house, sometimes at Daddy’s house or at Jane and Larry’s apartment.’
‘Aha. Yes, I see that with Uncle Eric gone the balance of relationships will change and the circle is certainly under threat. So you see, our cup may have a symbolism.’
I look at him with admiration. He shrugs modestly. ‘Two degrees, a doctorate and God knows how many years with a cultural foundation must surely enhance one’s interpretative skills if nothing else.’
Aunt Zina arrives with a tray of small, salty delicacies.
‘Eat these, please, while you wait for your meal,’ she insists. ‘It will not be cooked for at least a half hour and no meal can be truly appreciated by the excessively hungry. I know for a fact that Sasha was too busy in a meeting to eat his lunch. And, as for you, Lucia, melancholy can stimulate the appetite.’
She returns to the kitchen and we reach for the tray.
‘What was the meeting at lunchtime?’ I ask.
He rolls his eyes towards me.
‘Lucia, there was no meeting. Simply Mama called the office and my assistant had been instructed to disseminate this misinformation. I was doing a crossword in a small café one block away.’
‘But why can’t you admit that you take a lunch hour?’
He sighs. He selects a nut-sized appetizer from the tray. He describes his tyrannical boss and other colleagues in unflattering terms and this makes him cheerful. He pours more whisky. I laugh at his caricatures. He dissolves into the high pitched giggle I remember. It feels good to sit here and talk with my cousin. My whole body relaxes into the chair until it feels as though the chair is a part of me.
‘How about that woman who answers the phone?’ I ask.
‘Natasha.’ The change in his voice is barely perceptible.
I say: ‘When I called from New York we had the briefest of conversations. It just couldn’t be brief enough for her.’
‘Her conversation, like her skirts, is very brief.’
‘Oh-oh. I get it, Sashinka.’
Sasha’s broad face grows pink.
‘Get what?’
‘That’s why you’re not married to Marina any more. Am I right?’
The pink is deepening to red. He glances rapidly at the kitchen.
‘Lucy, Lucia, how could I forget about that formidable perception of yours? But, how did you know?’
‘From your voice when you said her name.’
‘God, women. I mean to say, women.’ He leans towards me and speaks in a whisper. ‘Listen, Lucia, she’s twenty-one and she has legs which stretch all the way to the second storey. And perhaps I should inform you that our office is on the eighth. She’s straight out of some Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, sensational body, and I do mean sensational, lonely in California and thinks, I’d like to believe with certain justification, that I’m wonderful. What’s a hot-blooded guy to do?’
‘All these meetings Aunt Zina says you have to attend after work… are they meetings with Natasha?’
‘Indeed, you have correctly detected that Natasha is often the other participant in my meetings. How grateful I am to you for staying in our apartment and amusing Mama while Natasha and I are working so very hard together. Previously many meetings had been confined to early mornings, a time of day most people find too unromantic to alert suspicion.’
‘Does Aunt Zina disapprove of Natasha?’
‘There is no need to inform her of the relationship to gauge her reaction. It is entirely predictable.’
‘I certainly won’t be informing her.’
‘Thank you, dearest Lucia.’ Sasha pours himself another drink as Aunt Zina appears, laden with food. ‘Thank you, I love you.’
The next morning I drive out to Daddy’s house wearing a blue dress which I found among the clothes Scott gave me. I remembered it as soon as I pulled it from the bag and when I slipped it over my head it seemed to slide against my body with a small shudder of recognition. It is slighter than the clothes I wear now, sleeveless and with a looseness that feels as though it’s following me instead of encircling me. Aunt Zina threw up her hands with approval when she saw it. ‘Beautiful, and, you know, you look very like your mama in it. She also wore blue dresses.’
I said: ‘She’s crazy, Aunt Zina, I don’t want to look like her.’
Aunt Zina slipped an arm around my shoulders.
‘Before Tanya was crazy, she was beautiful, and often still is,’ she said, pulling me close. ‘You do not share your mother’s illness, Lucia, but her great capacity to love. Such capacity has high value. Many lack it.’
I pulled back and looked into Aunt Zina’s watery blue eyes. ‘Love?’
‘This surprises you? Her illness certainly took her away from you but in your early years she loved you as fiercely as any woman ever loved her child. And you her. Indeed, you were inseparable.’
I tried to remember my mother’s love. I tried to remember a time when loving her didn’t lead to disappointment.
‘Lucia,’ said Aunt Zina softly, ‘only to you she spoke Russian.’
I shook my head because, outside her Russian family, Mother never spoke her native language to anyone and certainly not to Jane and me. When she was in a relatively stable condition we sometimes asked her how to say hallo, how are you? but she refused to respond and, when I announced that I was taking Mr O’Sullivan’s Russian Stage One in junior high, Mother became so restless and tormented that I switched to German.
But Aunt Zina was insistent. ‘She spoke to you often in Russian and you responded. You learned rhymes, songs. Don’t you remember singing with her?’ She shakily murmured a few bars of nursery music, miming something with her hands, perhaps a bird. I
was sure I had never heard the song before.
‘Will you visit her today?’ asked Aunt Zina and, blushing, I explained that I had arranged to meet the others at Daddy’s house, to organize the funeral and other formalities.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ I said.
Driving now towards Daddy’s house, up and down the low hills, I try to remember that other mother, not the one I dread visiting at Redbush clinic but the engaging, exciting mother from whom I was inseparable. But I can no longer catch her. She is the hem of a departing dress, perfume in motion, a warm, rapid touch and a low voice. She cannot be reached.
I bump up the drive and there, parked right in front of the barn where Daddy used to leave it, is his old grey Oldsmobile. It is rusted in places and there is a noticeable dent in its front fender but I warm to its familiarity. Since I am first to arrive, I take the space right next to it.
Heat swells the air here and when I get out of my car the blue dress seems to float around me. I finger the Oldsmobile’s faded paintwork. The car is battered. Daddy liked its oldness, the constant need to replenish its oil and analyse each new squeak. He fixed worn machines compulsively and if he was ever happy it was when he was absorbed in an engine. In the barn is a tractor he was fixing for years; before that there was an ancient printing press, a pick-up, a motorbike, a generator.
I try the driver’s door. I am not expecting it to open so I almost fall into the car when it does. It is empty. Not a newspaper or a sticker from a parking lot or even the rag Daddy usually kept here for wiping windows. I sink into the driver’s seat and close the door. It seems to me that, very faintly, I can smell him in here. That sweet, soft, oily smell which clung to his overalls or his torn plaid shirt when he worked in the yard, fixed the car, changed one piece of metalwork for another on his old tractor. For a moment, Daddy is right in the car with me, a pencil behind his ear, his square fingers oily, thinking hard about some machine, concentrating in a way that involves his whole body.
When I unlock the house the heat inside it bounces out at me like an excitable dog. I lay a hand on the wall as though to steady it. The surface feels warm. I pin back the door and walk right in and the first thing I notice is that there is light where there should be shade. The hall light is on. The light in Daddy’s den is on. I shrink back into the dark edges of the hallway, suspicion an instinct. Who has been here since I locked the house yesterday and left for the coast? I conclude that the police must have come inside to leave Daddy’s car keys, and I am looking for them when I hear a voice.
Summertime Page 13