by Julia Glass
“Ça va,” she said, not the least bit unnerved, damn her, and even broadened her smile. When I told Mal about this encounter, upstairs later that evening, he dubbed my sister-in-law the Cuntesse. Of three visits he made with me to Tealing, he met her only that one, last time; if he had seen her much more often, there might have been fireworks.
David actually stands. “To Dad, I owe my very sense of self, my sense of having a weight in the world, the capacity for true impact on my fellow creatures . . . and the sense of familial continuity, the legacy not just of this wonderful house and countryside but all the wits and smarts we’ve been passed down from branch to branch of the McLeod family tree . . .” He acknowledges each of us with a thrust of his glass; we are an intimate five, since the three little girls are in bed. I feel as if what he’s saying belongs in a larger setting, a larger clan, as if the formality of his words is just a few sizes too grand for our gathering. Perhaps his toast was planned, and he’d have aimed this “legacy” bit at our nieces—generous, I admit. Some people who long for children of their own hold back with other people’s children, too fearful that they might actually grow to love them—and to painfully envy their parents. Others dive right in to partake of the pleasure they still hope will one day be theirs; and if not, they’ll take whatever morsels they’re thrown of someone else’s share. David, I am happy (and sheepishly surprised) to say, falls in the latter camp. As brusque as he can be with the rest of us, he knows how to play with the girls, to honestly amuse them: he’s taken them for jostling cross-country rides in the bed of his pickup, helped them sit astride their first pony, milk their first cow, listen to a kitten’s heartbeat through the stethoscope he carries everywhere as if it safeguarded his own vital signs.
I find myself wishing the girls were here at the table, and they would have been if David and Lil had not returned so late—at nearly nine, full of awkward apologies but no explanation, not even a veterinary crisis to blame. At eight-thirty, there was a brief disagreement between Dennis and Véronique; she insisted that the usual bedtime be enforced. As always, she prevailed without much of a row, feeding Laurie, Théa, and Christine in the kitchen while Dennis added candles to the table he’d already laid outside.
David ends with a remark about commending our father’s soul not to eternity but to our lives’ work, to the people whose happiness we care most about securing. I’m beginning to wonder what he’s saved up for his church eulogy when I see that he and Dennis are looking at me, waiting to raise their glasses again. Feeling like a grizzled, androgynous Cordelia, I bow my head to buy time. My mind is blank as a flagstone till I hear myself say, “Here’s to Mum. Here’s to how she made Dad’s life so . . . full of pleasures. Dad would want us to remember Mum too. May they rest peacefully together.”
Glasses chink again, though the murmurs of agreement seem muted this time. Véronique is already reaching for the cheese plate. “My favorite!” she exclaims as she slices into an Explorateur, kissing Dennis on the cheek.
David leans toward me. “I do think Dad was the one who made his own ‘pleasures,’ you know. I just feel I ought to say that, for the record.”
“Meaning . . .?”
“Just that Mum was terrific, but she did things as she pleased, went her own way most of the time.”
“Meaning she was too self-involved?”
“No more than the rest of us. But she wasn’t one of those women who theoretically ‘make’ their men or even stand behind them.”
I look quickly at Lil; she appears more intent on her salad than our conversation. Véronique, however, is paying close attention and jumps in with “Oh écoute, you pair of hens. I never met her, your mother, but if she is who Denis describes”—she pronounces my brother’s name the French way, Denee (Lil’s Leelee-ahn, David Dahveed)— “she was the right kind of woman, a woman who makes herself before anyone else, then lets the man she loves—if he is deserving it—make heemself to fit the curves of what it is she has sculpted.”
Dennis grins. “Me, exactly!”
“You, exactly,” says David, “are a pushover. Or, in keeping with your wife’s metaphor, putty.”
“No,” says Lil. “You, exactly, are a genie. You’ve outdone yourself tonight, Dennis. Your dinner was magnificent, and I’m sorry we nearly spoiled it. I’m sorry the girls couldn’t join us. We’re so seldom together like this, the whole family.” Though they’ve been married longer than Dennis and Véronique, David and Lil have no children, and when I hear her say we, not you, I’m reminded that she does not even have siblings of her own, no cousins or other kin that I know of. I feel doubly sorry for her; she deserves to be at the center of a big, noisy brood, and I know that’s what she’d like, what she must this minute be wishing for; her sadly cloying manners are a mask.
It’s ten-thirty now: almost but not quite dark, the generosity of the late June sun in Scotland something I always forget till I feel it directly again on my smog-soaked hide. The sun seems to pause, languorously, not hustle down as it does most everywhere I’ve been in the States and farther south. At this hour in this season, it seems to imply that we northerners deserve its presence more, that our company is the most enjoyable on earth. Here, the sky weaves its pinks and violets and arctic greens for more than an hour. In the lingering dusk, the candlelight flatters my brothers, who both look to me precisely as they did when we were last together. But in this medieval light, the women do not fare so well. The taut hollows beneath their cheekbones and eyebrows deepen. On Véronique’s fair skin, the light brings out the nascent creases framing her lips, the pucker lines that form only in French-speaking women at such an early age, that will harden into something resembling a spiderweb. And Lil, poor Lil, looks worn out; it’s obvious that at some point tonight she was crying.
Now that I recall David’s mention of a doctor’s appointment, I wonder if it was one of her visits to the fertility specialist they’ve been seeing, something David mentioned briefly, very businesslike, when I foolishly teased him on the phone last Christmas (“So when will the urge for fatherhood overtake you?”). Dennis—who’s heard the nitty gritty from Véronique, who heard it from Lil—told me this afternoon that it’s become the grim focus of their life, that Lil endures all sorts of painful delvings and injections, all timed to the crucial millisecond according to her monthly “clock.”
She’s put on weight, I notice now—maybe a side effect of anxiety and sorrow, but then I remember how a friend of Mal’s went through this ordeal and confided every grisly detail, which he, in turn, insisted on repeating to me. “She gets the weepy blues, the raging reds, can’t eat anything but lettuce and sprouts or she balloons to a twelve. Worst of all, her husband has to give her these horrid shots directly in the butt with a horse syringe—some hormonal brew distilled from the urine of nuns at one particular convent in northern Italy who eat a lot of rapeseed or other peasanty staple that makes their piss high in progesterone or some such fecund elixir.”
Seeing my skepticism, he said, “I’ll have you know I’ve read about them in Jane Brody. And what’s so odd anyway? Monks produce jams and liqueurs for a living; why shouldn’t nuns proffer up their urine, for God’s sake? Or, should I say, for the sake of urban professional women who waited too long to get pregnant the usual way.”
Perhaps Mal’s soliloquy comes back to me because of the bit about the horse syringe—unsavory images of Dennis injecting the meat and of the expertise David would so conveniently have were it necessary in another context. . . . But stop, I tell myself, admitting as I must the odd things queens dream up about heterosexuals and their “usual ways.” Jane Brody aside, Mal always did have a touch of that typically Freudian phobia of women’s bodies and women’s belongings. Once, when I tossed him my wallet so he could pull out a twenty to buy himself lunch, he laughed and said, “Takes me back to all the times I thought nothing of reaching into Mom’s pocketbook to filch the loose change. I mean, a loose Ben Franklin wouldn’t tempt me now. A woman’s purse . . . you j
ust never know what you’ll find in there.” The last bit whispered, with a vaudeville shudder.
It’s midnight when Dennis presents a tray of frozen lime custards. In their pale blue ramekins, they look like tiny swimming pools. The color of Los Angeles, I might have mused in different company. I say instead, “I suppose I’m a little out of the loop, but I’m trusting everything’s set for day after tomorrow—all the liturgy and whatnot.” I don’t wish to draw attention to how little practical help I’ve given (though yes, I did fill out a lot of ridiculous forms at the airport that morning), but I’d rather do it in mixed company than when I’m alone with David.
“I’ve reserved Saint Andrews for eleven,” says David, and I’m thankful he ignored my pompous little whatnot. “There’ll be two hymns, a homily, the usual prayers, and I figured the three of us could each say something brief. Brief. Dad wouldn’t want this business all drawn out and sloshy.”
“And the plot, you’ve taken care of that?” Saint Andrews is what you’d have to call the Church of Our Forebears; in the well-shaded churchyard out back are buried my father’s father’s father’s father and those aforementioned subsequent fathers, all encircled by wives, sisters, sons, daughters. It’s where our mother’s buried and where, with apologies to all occupants who may have swiveled seismically down there at my instigation, I expect to end up.
“Fen, this isn’t a funeral in the usual sense.”
“So what was all that about having a ‘proper funeral’?”
“What I mean is that we’re not doing the churchyard thing. Do you know how many people are showing up?”
“You keep harping on that, as if we’re holding some affair of state. So fine, we just do the immediate family ‘thing’ while they all go freshen up their faces and meet us back here. Isn’t that how it went with Mum?” I think of the broad stripe of green awaiting Dad between our mother and his father. Quite the estate for a box of ashes.
“Dad did ask to be cremated . . .”
“Well no. No, he didn’t. But you imagine getting a whole body, in the subtropics in June no less, shipped from a technologically prehistoric island where the only English most people know is ‘Go ahead, make my day.’ You didn’t exactly volunteer to go over there, and I couldn’t leave, so I—”
“I’m not cross, David. I’m just curious about what he wanted. It’s a safe assumption, isn’t it, that he wanted to be in the family plot? What’s Mum doing there otherwise?”
Using his spoon like a scalpel, David works carefully at peeling the last entrails of custard from his dish as he mutters, “I’m not sure that would’ve been Mum’s first choice, either.”
“There’s plenty more!” says Dennis. “I made ten!”
David smiles briefly at him, then looks at me. “You’re going to think I’m irrational at best, but I’ve been thinking of taking his ashes back to Greece—after all, we will, or I will, have to deal with his belongings in that house—and spreading them there, out to sea, maybe in view of the house itself, where he—”
“Oh, we could make it a family trip; we close the restaurant for two weeks in August . . .” Véronique, putting in her personal tup-pence.
“Where’s all this allegiance to the ‘McLeod family tree’?” I say to David, running her over.
He stares at me, and in the candlelight it’s hard to make out whether he’s cross, distracted, or confused. “Look, Fenno, if you’re going to insist . . .”
“You say that as if I made a habit of insisting on things.”
Dennis begins to look concerned. “Well I always assumed the family plot was where we’d all wind up, like a permanent reunion.”
Véronique says, “Not our family, chéri. Our family will rest at Neuilly.”
This calls us all to an awkward halt. Lil, who’s stacking plates, says, “To be crude about it, Davey, ashes don’t spoil. You can think about it after the service, can’t you?”
Dennis stands. “Well, everybody, a soup’s waiting somewhere for me to make it.” He heads for the kitchen and, with the ease of a relay runner, scoops the stack of plates away from Lil.
At the same time, Véronique snakes a sisterly arm around her waist. “Viens. We will go up and look on the little ones.” Ah, dull-witted fertility, I think. In all likelihood, Véronique is expecting again. French women can hide a pregnancy halfway through; just a minor one of their deceptive arts.
And I want Lil to stay, want to spirit her away for myself. We barely talked on the drive from Prestwick because David wanted to give me the details (none surprising) about our father’s will.
Lil is more to me than a charming relation. She represents an emotionally precipitous moment in my life, a point of no return. Before she met David, I knew Lil from a distance at Cambridge. I was in my last year when she was in her first; she was pointed out to me, at a crew match, as not just a countrymate but a countymate of mine. She, too, was from Dumfries. That in itself earned her no distinction with me (I wanted out of that county, that country, the entire befuddled empire—though it would take me a few years yet to plot my escape). What did impress me, months later, was Lil as a performer. This was back in the allegedly world-changing early seventies; her small claim to avant-garde fame was starting a modern dance troupe. I’ve never cared much for dance, but when word got around that a few blokes had joined, the audience for Lil’s troupe swelled. With different though equally philistine motives (from ravishment to ridicule), we male spectators were eager to leer at our peers in leotards—as if the sight of ourselves in bell-bottoms wasn’t loony enough.
But what Lil had accomplished disarmed us, and no one so much as snickered. Lil herself was astonishingly graceful—and, in retrospect, brave. I’m sure the whole production was sophomoric at best, but the mere look of the unorthodox movements she staged was something even the most skeptical among us had to sit back and admire. Musically, for one thing, it wasn’t what we expected: instead of Stravinsky or Copland, we heard Hendrix and Holiday—familiar, all of it, but new in this context, and new, also, as only American things could feel new in those days.
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was the last song in the programme. Lil danced solo, in skintight indigo blue, and I remember sitting forward in my wooden folding chair, almost the instant she came onstage, with the ecstatic shame of public arousal. At the time, I was sharing my narrow bed with a fellow literatus (my first prolonged if still closeted liaison), and the sensation that Lil’s appearance caused me was electrically hopeful. Was normalcy within my reach, despite my having renounced it? Could I circumvent the subterfuge and mortification I’d just seized as my martyrly lot? Four minutes of this apostatic relief, another four of enthusiastic ovations and bravos (the loudest a frenzied brava for Lil; I wasn’t alone), and then I was out in the prim scolding of February air. As I walked alone to my rooms, as the crowd thinned away quickly, I felt a kind of falling. Leaving the warmth of the makeshift theater, I had been imagining how to tell Rupert—who would be waiting—that my passion had been an aberration, a computing error made by a wayward gland. There would be awkwardness, anger, apology; I would be ostracized by a certain clique which held court at a favored refectory table. How joyfully I would brave this social flaying!
But looking up at the lights in the Gothic towers around me, I thought again of Lil and saw her effect on me turned inside out. I saw her, ironically, as an icon of everything I had begun to accept, not of what I wished to turn backward and choose instead. I saw her Peter Pan torso, her newly militant hair (flame red and shorn to a boot camp bristle), and I saw, sadly, the fine chameleon act her dance had been: the way her body had seemed to absorb and then refract, like a genuine glow, the acrid five o’clock shadow of Bob Dylan’s voice. She proved to me exactly, now, what she had disproved not twenty minutes before.
From a distance, every few weeks, she still captivated me as a creature of spirit. When the weather grew warm, I enjoyed catching sight of her on her bicycle, dressed in some filmy neo-Isador
a dress thrown over a leotard, bangles jingling at her wrists. She became a Girl to Meet—for boys who wanted to meet girls. For me, she was a remote, nostalgic breeze, a favorite artifact in a favorite, familiar museum.
That summer I moved to London to read manuscripts for a scholarly press (cruelly giving my father hope that this would lead me on a dignified independent path to the Yeoman). Proudly, childishly out of touch with my family for months, I returned home at Christmas to a shock of simultaneous delight, petty rage, jealousy, and awe when David walked in the front door of Tealing with Lil, who wore a red brocade dress like something out of The Faerie Queene and beaded earrings so long they brushed her clavicles. They had met in town over the summer; our grandfathers, they reported to me quite giddily, had played tennis together at university way back when. “An unbeatable doubles team!” Lil exclaimed, at which my mother threw me an offstage roll of the eyes, but one which told me she’d long since given this girl her seal of approval. Years later, in an irrational corner of my mind, David and I are still (as if we ever were) jousting for Lil’s affection—just a symbol, some shrink would say, of our mother’s approval.
Now, the sudden departure of everyone else from the dinner table leaves me alone with David. We size each other up; David, to give him credit, is the first to give in and laugh. “We do know how to break up a party.”
“Speak for yourself, Dr. McLeod.”
“Which reminds me.” He stands and pours us each a glass of wine; the bottle is all that remains on the table between us. I think he’s about to propose a private toast, but he says, “Have to call in; I’ve taken on an intern to cover after-hours emergency calls, at least for small-animal stuff. Lillian talked me into it; she’s been reading some insidious American book on stress. She thinks I need what she calls ‘down time.’ All I can think of is ‘putting down’ and ‘going down’—terms of death in my profession.” He laughs self-consciously. “I suppose you’d agree with her, though.”