After the Reunion (8 page)

“Look, here’s your mother!” Jane Baldwin said happily.

“Say what?” said Elizabeth, and laughed.

“Her favorite TV program,” Jane said. “Don’t you think she sounds like George Jefferson?”

“I don’t know,” Daphne said, embarrassed. “I don’t watch much television.”

“She’s become addicted to reruns. Do Mork. Elizabeth, what does Mork say?”

“Na-noo, Na-noo!” Elizabeth said.

“Good God,” said Daphne, and gathered her into her arms.

The small body was soft and warm. Elizabeth wriggled away after a moment and pulled Daphne off to look at her dolls. They were perched on the pillow of her neatly made bed, and lined up on the bookcase filled with picture books. “Doll,” she said, as if patiently explaining, slowly putting her finger on each one. “Doll.” It was still difficult to understand her speech.

“I know. They’re so pretty. I gave them to you, do you remember that?” Elizabeth smiled and didn’t answer. “And guess what I brought you today,” Daphne continued brightly. She held out a brightly colored package, and helped Elizabeth open it. “Another doll for your collection.”

“Say ‘thank you,’” Jane said.

“Thank you.”

“How much she’s learned,” Daphne said wistfully. “It used to seem so impossible. Sometimes I wish …”

“That you could take her home?”

“Or that we’d kept her. But it was all so impossible.”

“You ought to remember,” Jane said kindly, “that this is a stubborn little girl and she’s her own person. She needs a lot of time, and sometimes she’s difficult. But mainly, she’s happy. She has friends. We’re her family.”

“But I’m her family too,” Daphne said. “I was a stubborn little girl, and I’m sure my mother thought I was difficult when I insisted on doing things even though she was frightened to death because of my epilepsy.” How easily the word came out here … epilepsy. Nothing was embarrassing or forbidden here.

“Why don’t we have lunch?” Jane said.

In the dining room Elizabeth ran in her awkward little gait to sit with a favorite friend. Daphne followed her and sat beside her. Every time she came here she went through the same mental list: the pros and cons, why Elizabeth was here instead of with them, and always she had the distinct feeling that when she left it was she who grieved and never the child. And, of course, it was easy to be the visitor, not responsible. She could go away, and she always did. Life went on. You did the best you could. You did what you thought was right. The majority ruled. She had other children to worry about.

But her other children seemed to require so little worry. She supposed Richard would say that was because she
had
done everything right.

After lunch she had to leave. It was a long drive. She kissed Elizabeth good-bye and watched her go off cheerfully with Jane. Just like the first time. It would always be as painful as the first time … her smiling baby in a stranger’s arms. But then, at one point on the way home, as the scenery changed it seemed life changed too, and Daphne returned to her other world. Everybody was so happy in that other world, and it was she who had made them so.

Richard came home very late. “How was your day?” he asked her.

“Fine,” Daphne said. “Uneventful. And your business dinner?”

“The only thing more boring than having to go through it would be having to describe it.”

Neither one knew the other had lied.

The days went by peacefully in their safe haven. It was Friday again, an extraordinarily beautiful summer afternoon. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue, and sunlight splashed on the polished wood floors of Daphne’s house and washed the pale, carpeted stairs in a golden glow. From the kitchen came the scent of a cake baking, and from the open windows the perfume of freshly cut grass brought in on the light breeze. Everything was clean: the silver-framed family photos with their dustless glass on the rich mahogany baby grand piano, the rows of books in their bright jackets in the large bookshelves, the polished silver coffee service that she often used. Those Radcliffe evenings so long ago flashed through Daphne’s mind; the demitasse served in the dorm living room after dinner, poured by the House Mother and whichever trembling girl had been chosen to help that evening, and she thought how without even being conscious of it her life had turned out to be the “Gracious Living” they had been taught. She had laughed at the idea at the time, but it had happened to her, and she liked it.

It was very quiet. The boys were all occupied elsewhere, the dogs were asleep. Daphne went upstairs to her bedroom to read, feeling the security and peace of the house around her.

When Richard came home and had changed into casual clothes the family gathered for dinner. All except Jonathan, still working in his attic photography studio. The dogs were barking at his door.

“Stop that racket,” Richard called out, as if the dogs knew he was talking to them anyway.

“Teddy, go get your brother,” Daphne said. “And put the dogs outside if they won’t behave.”

“Yes, Mom.” Teddy was out of the room in a flash, up the stairs two at a time, twelve years old and overflowing with energy. The others went into the dining room and began to sit down at their places. And then they heard Teddy scream.

“Mommy! Daddy!” He hadn’t called them Mommy and Daddy since he was four.

“What the hell?” Richard said, frightened. They all ran up the stairs.

The dogs had stopped barking. The attic door was open. Teddy was standing there, his small face drained of color. And inside the room … The first thing Daphne saw was Jonathan’s blue running shoes, dangling four feet above the floor, then his clean white socks and faded jeans, and all of his body, up to his fragile bent neck and distorted face; her son hanging dead from the noose he had made of a rope and tied around one of the ceiling beams.

It was no longer Jonathan they were staring at, but her. She was lying on the floor, in a pool of her own bodily wastes, and she knew what had gone before: she had had a major seizure. She remembered that look on young faces—half horror, half revulsion—from her childhood, when the faces were those of her classmates, not her children. She had been writhing and groaning, eyes sightless, mind asleep. Her children had never seen this happen to her, neither had Richard, for it had been so long … For an instant she forgot what had made it happen, and then she remembered, and Daphne wished she could stay unconscious forever.

No one touched her. Richard went over to Jonathan and very gently cut him down, holding his body in his arms as though he was not heavy at all. Then he put his son on the studio couch and carefully arranged a cushion under his head, as if he was not dead at all either. But he
was
dead.

“Call the doctor,” Richard said. Matthew and Sam ran down the stairs.

“Mom …?” Teddy said, in a scared little voice.

“I’m all right,” Daphne said. Where had the courage come from, to speak, when she felt as if hands were squeezing her throat, choking her? That innocent white neck, bent and broken … Jonathan …“It was the shock; I’m all right now.” Teddy was afraid to touch her, and so, apparently, was Richard. Then Teddy walked over slowly and held out his hands to help her up.

“Who’s the doctor for?” he asked.

Who indeed? “Jonathan,” she said.

Richard turned and walked out of the room.

She could not believe he had done it; she felt as if he had stabbed her in the heart. She went over to where Jonathan was lying and put her arms around his body, and then she turned to look at Teddy. She knew she was still in a kind of shock because she had not shed a tear; she was holding on, denying it while she knew it was true, trying to keep Teddy from falling apart. The tears would come later. Perhaps they would never stop.

“I’ll wait with you,” Teddy said.

“You don’t have to,” Daphne said gently.

“I’m not scared,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Holding her dead fourteen-year-old son, rocking his body as if he were a drowsy infant, Daphne thought how many years it had been since she had shown this depth of physical affection to any of the boys, and how long it had been since they had let her do so without embarrassment. Her busy, boisterous, healthy boys. Who had made them all so formal, so damn proper? Richard? Was it her
fault? Jonathan
, she thought,
why did you leave us? What did I do to make you go? I didn’t even know you were unhappy
.

Richard hadn’t looked at her; he’d just run away. Was he overwhelmed by emotion because of his son, or repelled by his wife? At this moment, holding her dead child in her arms, Daphne didn’t even care. Teddy walked over, slowly, noiselessly, and put his hand on her shoulder.

And so that house, that safe, pretty house, was forever transformed into a house of horror; and the sun-splashed stairs would forever after lead upward not to restful rooms but to the memory of dark, terrible surprises.

Chapter Five

August, 1982

My name is Teddy Caldwell and this is my secret journal. Nobody in this family ever talks about the things that really bother them or the things that really matter. I used to be able to talk about things with my brother Jonathan, but last week he killed himself, and now I have nobody to talk to, so I decided to start this journal and talk to it. The funeral was yesterday. It was the first funeral I ever went to, because when some relatives I didn’t really know well died I was too young to go. I think people should be able to go to minor funerals before they have to go to a big one, so they can get prepared. The funeral of my favorite brother was an awesomely horrible event for me. I kept thinking it wasn’t really happening, and I kept hoping it wasn’t, but I also knew it was. I felt dead too. Of course, I don’t know what dead is really like, but Jonathan does. I wonder what he thought it would be like to be dead before he killed himself. I’m sure he thought about it a lot. He wasn’t the kind of person who would kill himself on an impulse. We talked about a lot of private things but we never talked about either of us being dead. We didn’t like to talk about anybody we cared about being dead. Dying means your parents. At least that’s what I always thought it meant before.

At the funeral we all tried to act calm and not cry. Afterward my father told us we had been “good.” I don’t know what’s so good about that, but it was what he and my mother wanted. Everybody in this family pretends to be perfectly happy all the time, even when they’re not, and if they can’t be happy then at least they have to be brave. I know that even though he won’t admit it my father hates that my mother has epilepsy. She told me about her epilepsy after I saw her have a seizure, and she told me that I don’t have it and never will. I asked her if my father knew she had it before he married her, and she said that was a funny question. I said I didn’t know why it was so funny, and then she said he didn’t know for years. Right away I could see it all. It’s just like he is with us. We have to be the best. The best in school, the best in sports, and be popular and happy and healthy. It’s as if he doesn’t care about us being that way for us, but for him. He would be embarrassed if we weren’t what he calls “winners.” One day we all went swimming and he yelled “The last one in is a loser!” I kept thinking there always has to be a last one unless it’s a tie, so there always has to be a loser, and that isn’t fair. I wonder if Jonathan thought he was a loser?

Jonathan was a genius. I don’t just say that because he was my brother: His photos were brilliant. He did scenery, and empty rooms, but he didn’t like to take pictures of people. He said they never looked the same to the camera as they did to him, and he couldn’t figure out if the way they looked to him was the way they really looked or if the camera was right, or if maybe he just wasn’t a very good photographer. Jonathan worried about things like that, but he was really a happy person, and I don’t understand how he could kill himself. I mean he had everything. Everybody liked him. And if something was so terrible that he wanted to die, why couldn’t he have talked to me first about it?

I have to stop now because they’re calling me for dinner. If dinner is anything like breakfast and lunch were, everybody is going to talk about things that don’t matter, and they’re going to pretend Jonathan never existed. But that makes it worse. He’s sitting right there at the table, in his usual place, and he’s never going to go away. That’s the worst part, that he’s never going to go away but he’s not here either, and I need him.

Chapter Six

That fall the results of the questionnaire that had been sent to their class appeared in
The Ladies’ Home Journal
. Emily was a little disappointed that after spending a whole week trying to frame proper responses she was not even quoted by name. There were some quotes, but they were credited to “a housewife in Seattle,” or “a college professor in Vermont,” and the rest of the article was divided between a compendium of the kinds of information that had been gathered and six interviews in depth with women the author had found interesting, or perhaps typical. Emily thought how ironic it was that if she had written the truth about herself and her life all these years she probably would have been one of the six women who was chosen. Marriage immediately after graduation to the perfect catch, followed by a perfect home and family life, and then a nervous breakdown! A woman who had wanted two perfect children and then had wanted to kill them! What a story that would have made for all her classmates.

She was back at the analyst, but this time it wasn’t because of herself so much as it was because of Ken. Dear old Dr. Page, who had been middle-aged when they started her analysis. Emily felt as if they were two old warriors together, they had been through so much. She sat down in the worn brown leather chair facing Dr. Page across the huge, scarred desk. Years ago she had wondered if patients had stuck knives in it to make those pits and marks, but now it just seemed like a symbol of comfort. They were all scarred and recovered, in some way.

“You know, it’s so unfair,” Emily said. “Ken is still sexy and attractive to me. I remember his wrists, when I first went out with him. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist, and he had that sandy hair on his arms … I thought it was so sexy I got a weak feeling in my stomach. In those days I thought hands and mouths were the sexiest parts of a man, and I guess I still do. It doesn’t matter to me if his body gets older. We’re all human. But it doesn’t seem to count for a woman. We have to stay young and firm and never change or else the men complain.”