Dream House (28 page)

Jeff left a vexed-sounding message:

“Gina, having trouble reaching you—we've got an emergency here with the neighborhood outreach meeting—pretty stiff opposition. Expect an email from our neighbor Henchew—something about aquifers and wild parrots. Anyway, Mitzi's very upset and would appreciate a call from you. Thanks.”

“An emergency,” Gina thought, frowning at the irony. She checked her email and sure enough, there was a message from H. H. Henchew, the owner of both a major airline and the nation's top pet food chain who'd built a seventeen-thousand square foot mansion in the style Gina dubbed “Chateaucoco.” He'd typed his email in uppercase as if lower case wouldn't have made his points loudly enough.

RE: NEIGHBORHOOD OUTREACH MEETING FOR STONE RESIDENCE. MULTIPLE NEIGHBORS OPPOSE THIS PROJECT BASED ON

1) THE DISTURBANCE OF EXISTING AQUIFER CAUSING
FLOODING DOWNHILL OF THE HOUSE

2) DISTURBANCE OF SUBTERRANEAN HABITAT

3) POSSIBLE DISTURBANCE OF EXISITING UNKNOWN FAULTS THAT COULD CAUSE EARTHQUAKE

4) OVERSIZED WINDOWS ON UPPER LEVELS POSE DIRECT THREAT TO THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL WHO WILL FLY INTO GLASS DURING MIGRATIONS AND FALL TO THEIR DEATH.

WE LOOK FORWARD TO DISCUSSING THESE CONCERNS AT THE MEETING.

It would be a long fight but not an unfamiliar one. Gina's stomach complained; anxiety tugged at her. She turned off her phone and ate half the sandwich she'd bought while people swam about, speaking with urgency. The child slumped in his mother's arms, staring at Gina through glazed eyes: a fever—a high one she could tell. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall.

“Gina? Are you all right?”

When she opened her eyes, Lester was peering at her.

Before she could answer, the nurse was over them, standing so close to Lester that her pillowy stomach touched his hand. “I'm going to take you two into the exam room. But I can't guarantee you'll be seen right away,” she said.

“That catnap did me good,” Lester said when they were settled and alone.

The room was tiny and windowless, but the air conditioning felt heavenly. Gina gave Lester the sandwich half, and he nibbled at it.

“I think I was a bit heat-stricken. The painkillers are helping, too; I feel downright zippy. Just can't for the life of me figure out how I could've landed on my rear end so fast! What an old man. Annie's gonna let me have it!” He laughed, and Gina laughed too, amazed and
relieved by his good humor. “How did it go today?” he asked.

“Oh, I just went to the house.” She considered telling him about measuring but was afraid he'd ask her why and what would she say?

“You did, eh? Bring back old times?”

“Oh, yes . . . you know . . . the best of times, the worst of times . . .” Gina laughed but without warning, her eyes flooded.

Lester noticed and reached over and gave her a pat. “You know, things were very different, back a generation,” he said. “All those rules. What you talked about, what you didn't.”

The silence that filled the room was so dense it was hard for Gina to breathe. In her experience, nobody in Maine ever talked about
anything,
and here Lester was, plunging right into something deep. She felt disoriented, as if she'd stumbled into the middle of someone else's conversation.

“People,” Lester said. “I even got into trouble talking about my high school kids with their folks. People didn't air their laundry the way you all do. You just rolled with it.”

Airing laundry? Gina tingled with anticipation, remaining silent so she wouldn't interrupt Lester's stream of consciousness. It had to be the painkillers that had made him so forthcoming.

“Your mother—she was expert at putting on a good face in public. Not so good at it at home, I suspect.” Finally Lester turned and looked at her with such kindness she had to look away. “Listen to me; I'm a lunatic!” he exclaimed. “Have I said too much?”

Gina did her best to feign unconcern but noticed she'd slid to the edge of her chair. “No, no,” she said. “You're right, Lester. Please keep going.”

“Your mother was a chipper gal around all us pals. But one night . . . I remember . . . you and Cassie were little tykes, and your father called looking for Eleanor. She'd stormed out and hadn't said where to. It didn't sound so serious; what housewife didn't get worked up
every now and then? But your dad, he was one distraught man. I could tell there was more to it. I told him, ‘Talk to her doctor,' but Ron and I both knew she wasn't the kind of person who took orders. In all those years, he and I never spoke about such a thing again.”

Was that all, Gina wondered, after all that build up?

“Things seemed to settle down, anyhow,” Lester said. “Ron and Eleanor, they were good . . . good
together.
Remember how your father used to say, ‘Can you imagine me without Eleanor? A boat without a rudder!'”

Casa senza donna, barca senza timone.
Gina inwardly cringed; her father's adage had made him sound proud of his inadequacy.

And Lester: she chafed at his loyalty, his apparent determination to tie up her parents' marriage with a bow. She swallowed a lump in her throat. “There were two children in that boat,” she managed to say, “and the rudder was broken.”

Gina hesitated, worried about speaking so openly. But the unscripted way in which they'd been thrown together seemed to forecast that rules were going to be abandoned. “Lester, Mom was always wailing that she wanted to die,” she blurted. “My whole childhood, I was gauging the level of danger I was in of losing my mother.” Her eyes filled with emotion, but she pushed onward. “She terrified us. And she accused Dad, insulted him, and he never stood up to her. About anything.” She wanted to keep going, wanted to say, “He never stood up for us,” but didn't dare; her cheeks burned from the shock of her own allegations.

Lester appeared unphased by her outburst. “Now you're not talking about your mother. You're talking about some demon in her that took over and waged war.”

Gina realized now that he knew much more about what went on in their house than he'd first let on. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “A doctor I once talked to called that demon ‘agitated depression with
borderline personality disorder.'”

Lester grinned at Gina's big, hairy words, and she felt as if she were shrinking in her chair. It
was
pathetic, wasn't it, to be rehashing your deceased parents' parenting to one of their best friends lying in the emergency room? But this was the conversation she'd been waiting all her life to have with her mother.

“Your mother should've seen a doctor, yup, but she wouldn't,” Lester said. “And should your father have fought with her to? Be glad, my dear, that he did not. He wouldn't have done anything that might've caused him to lose his family. If Eleanor had gone to a doctor, she'd have denied everything, refused help. You
know
that's true. What good would a diagnosis have been?”

“It might have helped us—Cassie and me.”

“How so?”

“My doctor's diagnosis of Mom was an explanation—the only one ever offered me—for why she raged and seemed to have no empathy about how it affected her kids. A diagnosis made it possible for me to tell myself she wasn't a bad mother, just
sick.
”

Sick,
Gina thought. Such an ugly word.

Lester was silent. Finally he said, “Did
sick
make it more possible for you to love her?”

Gina's chest tightened in the chilled air. “I don't know. No. Maybe. I don't know.” It was the truth, and she felt ashamed.

Lester's warm smile reassured her. “‘Sick' doesn't explain everything.” He thumped his chest and cleared his throat but remained quiet for a few moments. Finally he said, “Your mother . . . you know, she had dreams. There was . . . well, for starters, she'd wanted a career. She'd wanted to go to art school. She worked in that publishing house in Boston so she could make enough money to go. Then she met your dad up here, and . . .” He stopped. Then he said, “But you know all that. Maybe what you
don't
realize is that your mother certainly loved
your father. You'll have to believe me about that. But then things . . . things happened fast for them.”

Lester stopped abruptly. Gina opened her mouth to say something that would urge him on, but already their conversation had been so rousing that she felt suddenly shy, like when you were on a date and good things were happening too quickly.

“Ginny,” Lester said, “get out of this refrigerator and go stretch your legs.”

Gina left the room disappointed; Lester had seemed on the verge of spilling something important. As nervous as she was about all she'd said, she felt somehow powerful, too.

Her mind shifted to matters beyond: Annie, Paul, Mitzi. As she got to the end of the corridor, her phone chimed; she realized there'd been no service in the exam room. Paul had tried to reach her twice. She checked with the receptionist to see if Annie had called the hospital—she had—then ducked into a small lounge area to phone Mitzi.

“Gina, thank God!” Mitzi's pitch rose an octave. “The neighbors are like a
mob . . .
They don't speak to us on the street! Except one older woman who said to me, ‘Why do you
need
all this? You don't even have children.'” Gina couldn't stifle a gasp. Mitzi began to cry. “I don't judge them; why do they judge me? I mean, they have no idea. Me and my mom, when I was a kid . . . we lived in studio apartments—
eight
of them in eighteen years! Jeffrey and I are going to make this house so beautiful. Why do they hate us so much? How can we ever live there after this?”

The rawness of Mitzi's pain touched off a sudden protectiveness in Gina, and she wished she were there in person to put her mind at rest. “Mitzi,” she said calmly, “it's a tough neighborhood you live
in. A lot of powerful people without enough to do. Try not to take it personally. This happens all the time on projects. They don't hate you; think of them as bored dogs patrolling the fences around their castles, barking at whatever comes near. You've excited them. They like excitement.”

“They seemed determined to shut down the project. Should we sell the house?” Mitzi sniffed.

“No,” Gina said, “of course not! Everything we've planned is legal, and we've done all our homework with respect to engineering and soils reports. After we meet with the neighbors, we'll thoroughly address each of their complaints in a way you and Jeff are okay with. Then we'll meet with them again. I'm completely confident that the mob will disperse. I know this seems unbelievable, but my experience has been that once you finish the project, your neighbors happily welcome you because then you're one of
them.
”

“Really?” Mitzi said weakly. “It's so hard to imagine.”

“I know, but I see it every time.”

Mitzi was quiet. Then she took a deep breath and said, “Ohmygod. Okay, so I just have to not let them get to me. Okay. Okay. Now for the good news: I'm pregnant!”

Gina filled with a joy that seemed to silence all the nerve-wracking noise around her. “Aw, Mitzi, that's wonderful! I'm thrilled for you!”

When they hung up, Gina felt lighter. She tried to reach Paul, and when his voicemail picked up, she left a message telling him about Lester.

She made her way back down the corridors to Lester's room, marveling at how Lester, who'd been only an old family friend just two days ago, suddenly had become a confidant, and a challenging one at that. Would he reveal more or be regretful of having shared so much already? When was the right time to tell certain truths to the
next generation and how much should one tell them? Too soon or not enough could frighten them; too much could burden.

“Why did we always stay so short?” She remembered Esther's penetrating question.

How and when would Gina explain to Esther why they hadn't spent more time in Maine? In guiding her children, what would she choose to reveal about her history, her mistakes and regrets?

For the first time since she'd left her family in San Francisco, she dared to feel how much she missed them. She'd traveled even further from them than she'd intended—across a continent and then, unexpectedly, deeply into the past.

It is not in the designer's power determinately to vary degrees and places of darkness, but it is altogether in his power to vary in determined directions his degrees of light.

John Ruskin,
The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Chapter 12

Lester was out of the room when Gina returned, but soon he arrived on his gurney, pushed by a young attendant.

“Good news!” Lester announced. “The X-ray says no breaks, no surgery. But I'll have to stay and see the orthopedic guy in the morning.” When the attendant had left the room, Lester pointed at her phone. “Taking care of some business on your little miracle machine there?”

“Yeah.” She laughed. “Believe it or not, it does make things easier to manage.”