Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  I look at Sand Isle, at the Dusays’ yacht, at the threatening sky. At the worst, Jessica and Beo will spend the afternoon shopping for T-shirts if they become marooned by the storm. Waves slap the bow, and the wind plasters Mac’s hair back. With the sharp focus of a filmmaker coupled with the desperate desire to look anywhere but at my old boyfriend and his wife, I notice that Mac’s hair is receding. I envision him at forty, fifty, and wonder if he’ll still be ferrying families to and from Sand Isle. Fiona has wrapped her head in a scarf that looks uncannily like the Pucci ones my mother used to wear. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her whispering to Jamie, see Jamie respond with a vehement shake of his head.

  The driver, Mac, clears his throat. “I’ve seen your film.”

  “Excuse me?” I can’t tell where Mac’s eyes are fixed behind his mirrored Ray-Bans that he insists on wearing in spite of there being no sun.

  “The one on Ralph Feingold.”

  Ralph Feingold, theorizer of universes. He named all his children after galaxies and constellations—Andromeda, Pleiades, and Cassiopeia that he mercifully shortened to “Cassie.” Ian and I documented Ralph’s life, his early obsession with telescopes, his vampirish sundown to sunup existence. “Where on earth did you see that?”

  Mac pushes his sunglasses back on his head. We are almost to the other side. His eyes are alert, excited, and, to my mind, highly intelligent. “I’m a physics major. Everyone in the department is into that film.”

  “Wow,” I say, torn between the urge to preen and that of distancing myself from my other life. In Sand Isle, I am Maddie Addison, daughter of Richard and Evelyn, sister of Dana, granddaughter of the formidable Bada, great-granddaughter of Edward, who was the son of Josiah, maker of cough medicine and suppositories. Like all the begats of the Bible, we know our place. It is heretical to expose it as otherwise.

  I notice Jamie monitoring the conversation. I wonder if he’ll comment on my filmmaking, my divorce, my absence, or any other component of my life. But Jamie is too polite to inquire beyond the health of my mother.

  “Pleiades,” says Mac, naming Ralph Feingold’s second child. “How could you live with a name like that?”

  Almost four o’clock when the squall hits, and still no word of Jessica and Beowulf. Against Dana’s wishes, Philip has set out in our old Boston Whaler to retrieve them. As a wall of white moves toward us from the west, we drag in cushions, rush to fasten windows, place towels along the sills. I remember my mother years ago in her bra and girdle struggling against the French door in the master bedroom, her hair blowing straight back, a cigarette clenched in her lips as she tried to wrestle it shut. It took the two of us to secure that door. We were both drenched and laughing. We never would have laughed like that if the weather had stayed calm.

  Miriam plants herself in a chair next to Mother, and swears she’s never seen weather like this in all her days. And the weather is odd—so much rain this summer, and now the eerie calm before the storm in which the lake fuses with the sky. The change in barometric pressure is so sudden, our ears pop. The gutters whine and keen. The trees come to life. Possessed by the wind, they buck, twist, rend their hair.

  “Damn it, Philip,” says Dana, her voice almost inaudible against the wind.

  Thinking back to that Indian woman we picked up hitchhiking so many years ago, I remember her prognostications about the astronauts and the changing climate. I mention this to Dana.

  “What Indian woman?” she says.

  Derek, who spends much of his time up in trees with a chisel, seems unconcerned. He is trying to match the tone of the wind with his recorder—a bent B-flat, he tells me, but the sound is so creepy, I think it will conjure ghosts. Water strafes the windows facing the bay. I watch the trees rocking and hope that most of the weak branches already came down in the storm two nights ago. Most summers, we get only one violent patch of weather, but this summer seems to be under the spell of distant hurricanes or tidal shifts, the ill-omened approach of the millennium. The lake is leaden and mottled with whitecaps. The darkest part of the storm moves through, followed by a barely perceptible lightening of the sky until, like the gradual ebbing of a labor contraction, the wind lets up. A few rays of sun spike off the drenched leaves as Philip blows through the door with Jessica and Beowulf. The three of them are soaked.

  There is much fussing and huzzaing around Philip, who grows progressively more patriarchal as the twenty-year-olds gush about the rough crossing. Philip strips off his jacket as Dana rushes toward him, exasperated that such an endeavor even took place. The kids could have stayed in town. And what was he thinking taking that old Whaler?

  “You could have drowned!”

  Stalwart Philip, rescuer of wayfarers, repairer of cups, stares at Dana. He starts to speak, then stops. For a moment, I feel a rare allegiance to Philip—our kinship sealed by the common experience of Dana’s disapproval and aversion to risk.

  “He was just trying to help, Dane. He didn’t want them stranded.”

  Clamp-lipped, Dana shakes her head and turns away.

  The French doors have failed to keep out the rain. The sheets on Mother’s bed are damp. Before mopping up the puddles that have seeped through the windows and doors, I help Miriam change the covers. We pull back the top sheet. Mother is wearing a pale pink satin nightgown, exposing her arms and legs upon which bruises have blossomed like septic roses.

  “How much does she weigh?” I ask Miriam.

  “I’d put her at eighty-five.”

  My mother was never heavy. She had gorgeous long legs that survived the cut of Bermuda shorts and pedal pushers, broad shoulders and lovely breasts that filled sweaters and jackets to perfection. Now I can practically see through her, her skin like the filmy sheath shed by a snake.

  “Can we move her?” I say.

  Together we lift Mother, who feels light as a fallen leaf, up onto the pillow. For a moment, I hold her right hand—her “good” hand. I detect (or imagine I do) the faintest clasp of fingers. While Miriam flings open a clean, dry sheet, I let Mother’s hand rest in mine.

  We cover her with a field of pink cotton that matches her nightgown, replacing the damp blanket cover with fresh white piqué edged with faggoting. “She looks ready for the Queen,” I say.

  “You hear that, Evelyn?” Miriam says. “Her Highness has given you the seal.”

  Miriam gathers up the old bedding, shoots me a stern but vaguely amused look, and flounces out of the room.

  I sit on the bed. I study my mother’s face. “I saw Jamie today,” I tell her.

  Her right eye flickers. I’ve always wondered how my mother felt about Jamie. Does she think I should have married him? Was she glad when we broke up?

  “His wife was wearing very expensive shoes.”

  Mother makes the palest wheezing noise. I wonder if the laxative is working. She used to laugh so hard with Bibi Hester—their off-color jokes at other people’s expense. Now Bibi won’t come to see her, Mother being a grim reminder of what’s down the road.

  “Do you think I should have married him?” I ask Mother. I’ve never asked her before. Did she see me as the wife of a bag baron? Or did she want something else for me?

  When my parents were first married, my father gave my mother a little pendant fashioned like a scale: the Addison & Sons logo. She wore it for years.

  “I saw Mr. Marks today,” I tell her. “He asked after you.” I pause. She’ll never tell me her opinion on Jamie. Or on Angus. She stopped giving me her opinions after my father died. Since then, as far as she was concerned, my business was my own. “He said…Mr. Marks…he said you were always his favorite.” I study her intently for a reaction. A flicker. “You got something going on with him?” Now the corner of her mouth twitches slightly. I nod. “Just as I suspected.” I cross my arms. “Is he good enough for you?” I shake my head. “It’ll be a scandal, you know.”

  Dana appears at the doorway. She looks from Mother to me. “Who were you talking to?”

&nb
sp; Once again, the rain is falling steadily, we have a fire crackling, and it’s too early for dinner. Miriam has gone for a “lie-down” after being rattled by the squall. The lights have flickered off and on. A puzzle is splayed out on a table—shards of the Mona Lisa with a few truant pieces gone missing. Derek is in the Love Nest, playing his recorder; everyone else picks desultorily at a book or a backgammon game. Sedgie paces up and down the room, reciting lines from Ibsen. Every now and then, he tries to get the attention of a meditating Adele, who sits cross-legged, eyes closed, in front of the fire.

  Finally Sedgie throws up his arms and, in a melodramatic voice, says, “Sardines!”

  Dana puts down her knitting and quickly says to Sedgie, “You’re it!”

  Sedgie has hidden. We clustered in the living room, eyes closed and counting while he disappeared. Once the count was finished, we began to roam the house. Now we steal glances at one another as we open cabinets, look under beds. After checking the coat closet off the dining room, I start downstairs to the maids’ rooms and the storage, avoiding Miriam’s since she is resting. I examine a trunk containing a Venetian mask, polka-dot bloomers, chiffon scarves, wraps made of dead, furry animals of indeterminate species, and a large sombrero that must have come from California. From there I check Louisa’s old room. It is a narrow room with one window looking out into the woods. When Louisa was alive, she covered her bureau with pictures of her two daughters, who grew up invisible to us except for those photographs. We saw them go from wearing tiny braids to straightened hair in the sixties. I remember one daughter in cap and gown, the pride in Louisa’s voice when she told us that daughter was going to the University of Cincinnati. It meant little to me at the time. All of us were going to college. It was as inevitable as sailing classes and dance school.

  Adjacent to Louisa’s room is Derek’s old studio. The walls are now bare; the shades are drawn. An old glass jar, caked with dry paint, sits on the window ledge. I open a drawer to find a couple of Strathmore tablets, a packet of unused brushes, a watercolor sketch of a boat. No lingering smell of linseed oil. No Derek to sing “Suzanne.” All traces of my fourteen-year-old self are expunged. That long-ago morning, Derek had found me sitting in a flotsam of shredded paper. I had started with the nudes, but once I got going, I tore at everything—art-school portraits of models, sketches of the lake. None of them escaped my fevered tearing. The room had become a tickertape parade of body parts—torn elbows and faces, genitalia and hands.

  I head into the boat room, where Edward used to sleep. A couple of faded and useless life jackets hang from a wall while other hooks fix oars to the ceiling. Edward’s cot is still there. I try to imagine what it was like to see the world through Edward’s eyes. Did it all appear bent and threatening? The panes of glass looking out onto the garden are lacquered with grime. They make the outside world seem dark, subterranean. I have the urge to find a cloth and wipe them clean, but I remind myself that it is Sedgie, not Edward, I’m searching for.

  I move on to the bathroom, pushing back the shower curtain hanging over the claw-foot tub. A peppering of mouse droppings dots the floor. The bathroom smells of mildew and dry rot. Someone has left an ashtray full of butts on the windowsill. There is rust in the toilet and a skid mark where the sink faucet drips. In this house, pipes appear randomly—protruding from a ceiling, disappearing through a wall, reappearing in the room below. When winter comes, they will be drained and bled out like ancient Egyptians for mummification, the shutters across the front windows like coins upon the eyes.

  I push through a door onto an outside landing connected to my grandfather’s office. Philip uses this room as his office these days. It is neat and square, with windows on three sides, some files, and a rolltop desk covered with stacks of yellow legal pads and sharpened pencils. Mainly, Philip looks after his client’s affairs, moves her money into treasuries and stocks, makes her monthly transfers, advises her on charitable remainder trusts, philanthropic bequests, generation skip trusts, and probate. She has been planning her death for half a century. Thanks to Philip, when she finally goes, it will be a thing of beauty.

  There is a comforting gravitas to my grandfather’s desk. With its drawers full of leather-bound ledgers, it gives the impression that someone is still in charge. Anchoring a copy of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal to the ink blotter is a coffee mug that reads THINK BIG on the side. I wonder where we came by such a mug at the Aerie and make a note to ask a friend who does ceramics to make a new cup for Sedgie with his name on it. Surely someone in the family must have “thought big” at some point (why else this house?), but the philosophy is as out of fashion with our generation as the bathing costumes and woolly knickers in the photographs of my ancestors.

  Leaving the office and feeling expansive, I pledge to get new cups for everyone. I travel up the next flight of stairs to the porch, where I peer under the glider, then slip through the French doors into the living room. The house is thick with quiet. The three downstairs bedrooms appear empty, as does the kitchen, so I make my way to the top floor. I pass the linen closet filled with antimacassars and blanket covers anchored by the letter A, delicate sheaths for baby pillows, and the garish lime-green-and-yellow Marimekko sheets my aunt bought in the seventies. Beyond the linen closet is the laundry chute, where Sedgie got stuck during a similar game when we were children. I remember his shrieks as Aunt Pat tugged on his legs. Wherever he’s hiding now, I’m sure it affords greater spaciousness, but when I check the bunk room, the Schooner Room, the Lantern Room, the Jack Russell Room, I feel the presence of no one. The only sound I hear is a squeak in the master bedroom, and I wonder if Miriam has risen from her nap. Standing in the doorway, I see Mother lying where Miriam and I propped her last, her head turned slightly toward the window as if she’s watching the rain drip from the gutters. The oppressive, almost tropical air that preceded the storm has lifted. She seems to be sleeping, but in the light of the window, I make out that half smile that appeared briefly when I kidded her about Mr. Marks. Her blanket has fallen partially off the bed and is spilling onto the floor. Then I notice a sneaker-clad foot and realize where Sedgie has hidden.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that this room wasn’t off-limits. We are always taking pains to let Mother rest, to preserve her serenity. Now I stride into the room, pull away the blanket, and lean down to see seven people jammed beneath and behind Mother’s bed. Everyone screams with laughter. Like college kids jammed into a phone booth, they unwind themselves with relief. “It took you long enough,” says Sedgie, obviously pleased at having chosen such an unlikely place. “God, what is it about Sardines that always makes you have to pee?”

  Mother’s calm seems beatific, given that she has loathed large groups for years. Now she can’t get away from us. We bang loudly on the piano downstairs, come into her room to sing, use her bed as a hiding place.

  “Your turn,” says Dana, citing the Sardines rule of the last remaining person being the next one to hide.

  “Fine, fine, fine,” I say, still dazzled by Sedgie’s audacity and the memory of my underpants upon his head.

  Everyone scatters.

  I look back at Mother before I leave the room. She still seems to be smiling as if secretly delighted. “What?” I say.

  While everyone is counting outside, I head down to the coat closet off the dining room. It’s been used countless times, but if I can insinuate myself far enough into its depths behind layers of slickers and windbreakers and tennis rackets and lacrosse sticks and rain boots, I might disappear. The closet is unbelievably musty and full of the rubbery smell of rain gear. Generations of clothing are crammed together, forming a nearly impassable barrier of garments and sports equipment. I whack my knee on a tennis racket. A can of tennis balls and a hat tumble from the shelf. With a lacrosse stick jammed into my rib, I feel the low-belly panic that grips me in confined spaces. Breathe, I tell myself.

  There are footsteps in the dining room. Someone opens the closet door, pauses, and then
closes it. I have become invisible after all. People bang up the stairs overhead. I hear someone say, Did you try the laundry chute? Silence. Then the door reopens, and a hand reaches in, shuffles the boots and the rackets till it touches my leg. I know it is just a game, but it feels as though there is more at stake. I am Anne Frank hiding in that attic. I am Patty Hearst locked in that closet.

  Derek has found me.

  Slowly, firmly, he pushes back the coats. Like Houdini, he snakes into a space barely big enough for a child. The closet is pitch-black; I cannot see his eyes. But I feel him. I feel his breath, his chest, his leg against my thigh. When he puts his fingers to my lips, it is all I can do not to moan.

  The phone outside the closet door rings and rings and rings. I hear cousins calling in the distance, but they sound impossibly far away. I want them to call all-ye all-ye oxen free, but they don’t. It is quiet except for Derek’s breathing and the deafening pulse of my heart. In such proximity to Derek, all the feelings, memories, expectations, and disappointments I have managed to avoid are jamming into the closet like lost relatives. The ghosts of my father’s terse words; the impotent echo of my mother’s responses. The ghost of Aunt Pat by the hose bib as she peeled off our bathing suits to wash us down, sending us naked upstairs to dress. I press myself against the wall, recoiling from recollections of Derek’s drawings of a self-consciously nude fourteen-year-old; memories of Edward saying, No one really sees you. I am prodded in my sternum by Jamie’s wounded, angry eyes; Sadie’s soft head nudges my chest; my throat is gripped by the hot relief of vodka. Dread is upon me in this closet. Five middle-aged cousins still acting like children—we have played this game for years.

  In a low whisper, Derek says, “They can’t find us. It’s too obvious.”

  To which I can say nothing. This is the Aerie, after all. Sanctus sanctorum por pueris eternis. We’ll never really grow up.

  There are voices in the dining room. Someone is saying, Did you check the closet? I checked it, someone says, but Sedgie says, Check it again.