“What happened? Did my father see her?”
“He spoke with her. Your mother told him everything, and when she was finished, he went to the phone and called her.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. Your Mom walked away—”
“She what?”
“She couldn’t be there—that was how she put it to me.”
Gert found her drink at her lips. There was less left in it than she’d realized. When the glass was empty, she said, “You must have asked Dad what they talked about.”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
Victoria shook her head. “He wouldn’t say anything. He just looked away and kept silent until I changed the subject. At first, I thought it might be too soon for him to discuss it, but no matter how much time elapsed, he wouldn’t speak about it.”
“What about Mom? Did he ever tell her?”
“She refused to ask him. She said if he wanted her to know, he’d tell her. I may be wrong, but I think he was waiting for her to ask him, which he would have taken as a sign that she had truly forgiven him.”
“While Mom was waiting for him to come to her as a sign that he had truly repented.”
“Exactly.”
“Jesus.” Gert searched for the waitress, couldn’t find her. “How long—after she and Dad spoke, how long did Elsie Durant last?”
“Two weeks.”
“Not long at all.”
“No.”
“How did they find out?”
“The obituary page in the Times,” Victoria said. “I saw it, too, and let me tell you, I breathed a sigh of relief. As long as Elsie Durant was alive—not to mention, local—she was . . . I wouldn’t call her a threat, exactly, but she was certainly a distraction. They could have moved, someplace out of state, but your father traveled as much as he ever had. With Elsie permanently out of the picture, I assumed your parents would be able to go forward in a way they couldn’t have before—free, I guess you might say, of her presence. I had half a mind to drop in her funeral, just to make sure she was gone.
“As it turned out, I got my wish.”
“You were there?” As soon as the question had left her mouth, its answer was evident: “For my father: you went to find out if he went.”
“Your mother was convinced he would attend. To be honest, so was I, especially after his silence about his and Elsie’s final conversation. Of course, I didn’t say this to your Mom; to her, I said there was no way he’d be at the funeral. I mean, if nothing else, the woman’s husband would be there, and wouldn’t that be awkward? She didn’t buy it. It was all I could do to convince her not to go, herself. For God’s sake, I said, stay home. Hasn’t this woman had enough of your life already? Why give her anything more? That had more of an effect on her, but in the end, I had to promise her that I would attend. If anybody asked, I figured I could pass myself off as a sympathetic neighbor.”
“Did my Dad—”
“Yes. Elsie Durant’s funeral was held upstate, at St. Tristan’s, this tiny church about ten minutes from the Connecticut state line. It was a pretty place, all rolling hills and broad plains. I don’t know what her connection to it was. The church itself was small, much taller than it was deep, so that it seemed as if you were sitting at the bottom of a well. The windows—some of the stained glass windows were old, original to the church, but others were more recent—replacements, I guess. The newer ones had been done in an angular, almost abstract style, so that it was if they were less saints and more these strange assemblies of shapes.
“Your father and I sat on opposite sides at the back of the church, which still wasn’t that far from the altar. The funeral was a much smaller affair than I’d expected: counting the priest and the altar boys, there were maybe ten or eleven people there. The rest of the mourners sat in the front pews. There was an older man with a broad back who appeared to be the husband, a cluster of skinny women who were either sisters or cousins of the deceased, and a couple of nondescript types who might have been family friends. Honestly, I was shocked at how empty the church was. I—it sounds silly, but Elsie Durant had been such a—she had loomed over your parents’ lives, their marriage, over my life, too—she had been such a presence that I had imagined her at the center of all sorts of lives. I had pictured a church packed with mourners—maybe half of them her illicit lovers, but full, nonetheless. I was unprepared for the stillness of—you know how churches catch and amplify each sob, each cough, each creak of the pew as you shift to make yourself more comfortable. That was what her funeral was to me, an assortment of random sounds echoing in an almost-empty church.
“After the service was over, before they’d wheeled the coffin out, I snuck out and waited in my car. Not only did your Dad shake Elsie’s husband’s hand—and say I can’t imagine what to him—he accompanied the rest of the mourners as they followed the hearse on foot across the parking lot and into the cemetery. He stayed through the graveside ceremony, and after that was over, the coffin lowered into the ground, everybody leaving, he remained in place. He watched the workmen use a backhoe to maneuver the lid of the vault into place. He watched them shovel the mound of earth that had been draped with a green cover into the hole. Once the grave was filled, and the workers had heaped the floral arrangements on top of it, he held his position. Finally, I had to go: I hadn’t been to the bathroom in hours, not to mention, I was starving. I left with him still standing there.”
“He’d seen you—I mean, in the church.”
“Oh yes,” Victoria said. “We’d made eye contact as soon as I sat down, glanced around, and realized he was directly across from me. I blushed, as if he were the one catching me doing something wrong, which irritated me to no end. I kept my eyes forward for the rest of my time there—when I left, I stared at the floor.”
“What did he say to you about it?”
“Nothing. We never discussed it.”
“What? Why not?”
“I assumed he would call me; it was what he’d done before. And I was—frankly, I was too pissed-off to pick up the phone, myself.”
“Because he’d done what you thought he would.”
“Yes. But—”
“You were afraid of what he might say if you did talk.”
“All things considered, wouldn’t you have been?”
“What did you tell Mom?”
“Pretty much what I said to you: that he’d been at the back of the church and I’d left before he did.”
“Did you mention him standing at the grave?”
“She didn’t need to hear that.”
“I assume they never talked about it.”
Victoria shook her head. “No. She knew, and he knew she knew, but neither wanted to make the first move. Your mother discussed it with me—for years. I would come over and we would sit at the dining room table—this was when you were in the house on Trevor Lane, the one with the tiny living room. However our conversation started, it always ended with her asking me what your father attending Elsie Durant’s funeral meant. Needless to say, she was certain she knew what his presence in that back pew had implied. Well, that’s not it, exactly: she was afraid she knew its significance. Who am I kidding? So was I. Not that I ever let on to your Mom. To her, I said that your father hadn’t been doing anything more than paying his respects. If he’d loved Elsie Durant that much, he never would have ended things with her; he wouldn’t have elected to stay with your Mom. All the while, I was thinking, What, are you kidding me? Maybe he changed his mind after he called things off. Maybe he wasn’t the one who ended the affair: maybe she did, and in a fit of pique, he made his confessions. Maybe—God help me—he was in love with two women at once. The possibilities were—it would be an exaggeration to say that they were endless, or even that they were all that many, but they were enough.
”We would make our way through a bottle of red, repeating what had become a very familiar argument. Your Mom would have the little
statue—the souvenir your Dad had brought her, the Venus of Willendorf—in one hand. While we talked, she’s turn it over in her palm—by the end of the night, her skin would be raw from the stone scraping it. On more than one occasion, that statue’s pores were dotted with blood.
“After one of those conversations, I had a nightmare—years later, and I can recite it as clearly as if I’d sat up in my bed this very minute. Your Mom and Dad were standing in a dim space. It was your house—it was all the houses you’d lived in—but it was also a cave, or a kind of cave. The walls were ribbed, the grey of beef past its sell-by date. Your parents were dressed casually, the way they were sitting around the house on a Sunday. They looked—the expressions on their faces were—I want to say they were expectant. As I watched, each held out an arm and raked the nails of their other hand down the skin with such force they tore it open. Blood spilled over their arms, streaming down onto the floor. When enough of it had puddle there, they knelt and mixed their blood with the material of the floor, which was this grey dirt. Once they had a thick mud, they started pressing it into a figure. It was the statue, the Venus, and the sight of it sopping with their blood shot me out of sleep.
“You don’t need to be much of a psychiatrist to figure out what my dream was about; although, given how your parents have been looking these past few years, I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t just a little bit predictive. But I think about them—I have thought about them; I imagine I’ll keep thinking about them—alone in that big house with that space between them, that gap they’ve had all these years to fill with their resentments and recriminations. Visiting them, there have been times I’ve been sure I could feel . . . I don’t know what. A something there in the house with us. Not a presence—a ghost, no, I don’t think they’re being haunted by the spirit of Elsie Durant, but something else.”
Gert thought of standing in the hallway looking at the door to her parents’ room and not seeing anything there. She said, “What? What do you mean?”
Victoria said, “I don’t know.”
Returned at last, the waitress took Gert’s empty glass and her request for another with an, “Of course.” Once she had left, Gert sat back in her chair. “So that’s it,” she said. “The outline, anyway. Jesus Christ. If anyone had bothered to talk to anyone else . . . Jesus.”
Victoria remained silent until after the waitress had deposited Gert’s second drink on the table and Gert had sampled it. Then she said, “I understand, Gertie. When I arrange everything into a story, it seems as if it would have been so easy for the situation to have been settled with a couple of well-timed, honest conversations. But when I remember how it felt at the time—it was like having been dumped in the middle of the ocean. You were trying to keep treading water, to keep your head above the swells. If all of us had been different people, maybe we could have avoided this . . . it’s quite the clusterfuck, isn’t it?”
“It’s my life,” Gert said, “mine and Web’s. This . . . what happened . . . what’s still happening . . . ”
“I understand,” Victoria said. “I’m sorry; I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I tried—we all tried. But . . . ”
“Sometimes that isn’t enough,” Gert said. “It’s just—why? Why did they stay together?”
“I told you, sweetie: your Mom and Dad love one another. That’s . . . I used to think the worst thing in the world was falling out of love with someone. Now, though, I think I was wrong. Sometimes, you can stay in love with them.”
III
One week after her lunch with Aunt Veronica, well before she had come to terms with much if any of what they’d discussed—well before she’d shared the details of Elsie Durant with Dana—Gert found herself opening the front door to her parents’ house. She had spent the day a few miles up the road, surrounded by the luxury of the Mohonk Mountain House, at which she’d been attending a symposium on estate law that seemed principally a tax-cover for passing the weekend at Mohonk. While Gert could have stayed at the hotel—which would have allowed her to continue talking to the attractive young law student with whom she’d shared dinner and then an extensive conversation at the hotel bar—she had arranged to stay at her parents’, whom she’d felt a need to see in the flesh since Aunt Vicky’s revelations. That need, together with a sudden spasm of guilt over having spent so long in the company of another woman so clearly available when Dana was at home, working, sped her to the hotel’s front portico, where a valet fetched her Prius without remarking the lateness of the hour. Her reactions slowed by the pair of martinis she’d consumed, Gert had navigated the winding road down from the mountain with her palms sweaty on the wheel; with the exception of a pair of headlights that had followed her for several miles, while she worried that they were attached to a police car, the drive to her parents’ had been less exciting.
Now she was pushing the door shut behind her, gently, with the tips of her fingers, as she had when she was a teenager sneaking home well after her curfew’s expiration. She half-expected to find her mother sitting on the living room couch, her legs curled under her, the TV remote in one hand as she roamed the wasteland of late-night programming. Of course, the couch was empty, but the memory caused Gert to wonder if her mother hadn’t been holding something in her other hand, that weird little statue that seemed to follow her around the house. She wasn’t sure: at the time, she had been more concerned with avoiding her mother’s wrath, either through copious apologizing or the occasional protest at the unfairness of her having to adhere to a curfew hours earlier than any of her friends’. Had her mother been rolling that small figure in her palm, or was this an image edited in as a consequence of Auntie V’s disclosures?
The air inside the house was cool, evidence of her father’s continuing obsession with saving money. His micro-management of the heating had been a continuing source of contention, albeit, of a humorous stripe, between him and the rest of the family. Shivering around the kitchen table, Web and she would say, You know how much you’re worth, right? which would prompt their father to answer, And how do you suppose that happened? to which Web would reply, You took all those pennies you saved on heating oil and used them to call the bank for a loan? at which he, Gert, and Mom would snort with laughter, Dad shake his head. Gert decided she would keep her coat and gloves on until she was upstairs.
Halfway across the living room, she paused. The last time she had stood in this space, the Christmas tree had filled the far right corner, its branches raising three decades’ worth of ornaments, its base bricked with presents. Together, she and Dana, Web and Sharon, Mom and Dad, had spent a late morning that had turned into early afternoon opening presents, exchanging Christmas anecdotes, and consuming generous amounts of Macallan-enhanced-eggnog. It had been a deeply pleasant day, dominated by no single event, but suffused with contentment. Except, Gert thought, that all the time, she was here with us. Elsie Durant. She watched Dana tear the wrapping from the easel Mom and Dad bought her. She sat next to me as I held up the new Scott Turow Web had given me. She hovered behind Sharon at the eggnog.
Nor was that all. Elsie Durant had been present at the breakfast table while she, Web, and their mother had teased their father about his stinginess. During the family trips they had taken, she had accompanied them, walking the streets of Rome, climbing the Eiffel Tower, staring up at the Great Pyramid of Giza. As Gert had walked down the aisle at her high school graduation, Elsie Durant had craned her neck for a better look; when Web’s first film had played over at Upstate Films, she had stood at the front of the line, one of the special guests. Every house in which they had lived was a house in which Elsie Durant had resided, too, as if all their houses had possessed an extra room, a secret chamber for their family’s secret member.
A sound broke Gert’s reverie, a voice, raised in a moan. She crossed to the foot of the stairs, at which she heard a second, louder moan, this one in a different voice from the first—a man’s, her father’s. Her foot was on the first stair before she und
erstood what she was listening to: the noises of her parents, making love. It was not a chorus to which she ever had been privy; although Web claimed to have eavesdropped on their mother and father’s intimacy on numerous occasions, Gert had missed the performances (and not-so-secretly, thought Gert had, as well). Apparently freed of the inhibitions that had stifled them while their children were under their roof, her parents were uttering a series of groans that were almost scandalously expressive; as they continued, Gert felt her cheeks redden.
The situation was almost comic: she could not imagine remaining in place for the length of her Mom and Dad’s session, which might take who knew how long (was her father using Viagra?), but neither could she see creeping up the stairs as a workable option, since at some point a stray creak would betray her presence, and then how would she explain that? After a moment’s reflection, Gert decided her best course would be to play slightly drunker than she was, parade up the stairs and along the hall to her room as if she’d this minute breezed in and hadn’t heard a thing. Whether her parents would accept her pretense was anyone’s guess, but at least the act would offer them a way out of an otherwise embarrassing scenario.
To Gert’s surprise and consternation, however, the clump of her boots on the stairs did not affect the moans emanating from the second floor in the slightest. Unsure if she were being loud enough, Gert stomped harder as she approached the upstairs landing, only to hear the groans joined by sharp cries. Oh come on, she thought as she tromped toward her room. Was this some odd prank her parents were playing on her? They couldn’t possibly be this deaf, could they?
She supposed she should be grateful to learn that her mother and father had remained intimate with one another, despite everything, despite Elsie Durant. Yet a flurry of annoyance drove her feet past the door to her bedroom, past the door to the bathroom, to the door to her parents’ room, open wide. She had raised her hands, ready to clap, when what she saw on the big bed made her pause, then drop her hands, then turn and run for the front door as fast as her legs would carry her. Later, after a frantic drive home, that she had not tripped down the stairs and broken her neck would strike her as some species of miracle.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 18