Family Matters (10 page)

After Judd left, she remembered she had no car, and she called her grandfather. “I need my car. Maybe you could drive it over and then I'll take you back on my way to the library.”

“How's your flu?”

“I'm okay. I felt great last night, but I guess I celebrated too soon. I ate like a horse, and it all came up again this morning.”

“I'll send Terry over with your car.”

“Will she mind doing that?”

“She offered.” Her grandfather seemed brusque.

“Did I get you in the middle of shaving or something?”

“Nope. I'll send Terry over now. Your mom's having breakfast and I'll go sit with her.”

Waiting for Terry, she could hardly stay awake. She stretched out on the sofa and had fallen into a doze when the doorbell rang.

Terry bounded briskly up the steps. She was very young under all the starch and glamour, Betsy realized, yawning—maybe twenty-three or four.

“How are you doing today?”

“I've still got it, but not as bad.”

Terry handed Betsy the car keys and settled down on the sofa. “I like those photographs.”

“Thanks.”

“And your bookcases. I like that natural wood.”

“Thanks. They're new.”

“It goes away in the evening?”

“What? The flu? It seems to. Actually, I felt OK all day yesterday, but I was afraid to eat and I slept a lot.”

“And then this morning?”

“I paid for last night's debauch. I had all the things you told me to avoid.”

Terry didn't smile. “Your grandfather asked me to ask you—” She stopped and looked fixedly at the bookcases. “Maybe you should have a pregnancy test.”

Betsy went clammy again and then flushed. Her heart seemed to have stopped. Everything seemed very quiet.

“Have your breasts felt tender?”

She swallowed. “A little. But I'm expecting my period.”

“It's late?”

This is an incredible conversation, Betsy thought. “I'm not sure. I'm not very regular.”

“Well, you've got the classic symptoms.”

Joy rose in her throat like nausea, and she coughed before she laughed. “Do you think so? Do you think so?”—taking Terry's two hands. “It never occurred to me it could be morning sickness. I can't imagine why. Do you really think so?”

Terry frowned. Her hands were unresponsive. “You don't—mind?”

Betsy's laughter bubbled up again. “Mind? Heavens, no. Judd and I both love children. He's the man I live with, you know. I'm sure you know all about it.”

“Well—” Terry was embarrassed; her shrug encompassed all the overheard gossip. Or perhaps Frank had told her. He had confided to her his fears about Betsy's nausea, after all. This fact astonished her, and for some reason it delighted her. The idea of her grandfather going to his daughter's nurse with the problem—a young girl of twenty-three advising Frank Robinson!

Betsy laughed again and squeezed Terry's hands. “Judd's a photographer. He's done some fine work with children. He does buildings now, but not exclusively. That's all his work, on the wall. He's marvelous with children. He has a real rapport with them.”

“And you think he'd be glad to have one of his own?”

“Glad? Of course!” But as she said it, the certainty left her. Glad? She had no idea. What had she been thinking of when she stopped taking her pills? Of a picture Judd had taken of little Bert hanging upside down from a tree branch. Another of two solemn little girls playing dress-up, for an insurance company ad. One of a Suzuki violin class playing in unison: six bent arms, six bows, six faces fiercely concentrating. Of the afternoon they spent hiking with Judd's brother's kids. Of her last chance. Of Judd, settled. Of joy. Of nothing. She had thought of nothing that could be linked with reality. It was a Norman Rockwell pregnancy. I must be crazy, she said to herself, and imagined a future of empty closets and gaping drawers.

Terry was standing up, looking relieved. “It's a happy occasion, then, after all.”

Betsy looked up at her. “I'd better have a test before I celebrate, I suppose.”

Terry sensed her deflated mood and said, to cheer her, “I'd put money on it.”

“Well, don't be too positive about it to my grandfather, Terry. I mean, if I
am
, I really ought to tell Judd first.” Betsy forced a conspiratorial grin.

“You're right, of course.” Terry beamed. “He is an awfully inquisitive old man, though. Wonderful for his age.”

“He's seventy-seven.”

“As old as the century. And you'd think he was no older than Mrs. Ruscoe.”

“She's wonderful for her age, too. All things considered.”

Terry's face went somber. “It's a privilege to see her through this.”

“How long, do you think, Terry?”

“Impossible to tell, it's such an unpredictable thing.” She frowned, flattered she was asked. “But I think she's got a way to go.”

Involuntarily, Betsy put her hand on her stomach. She felt strong and optimistic again. The nausea had passed, her tiredness had left her. She came, after all, from a stoic family. Though crowned with thorns, her head would hot bow.

“Funny, isn't it?” Terry indicated Betsy's stomach.

“Funny? Yes, it is funny,” Betsy said. “It is damned funny.” She looked approvingly at Terry's white uniform. This would be her world for a while, the world of nurses and urine samples and personal questions. All the special, healthy, feminine world of pregnancy, with its arcane processes and vocabulary, would be hers, like a club. She patted her flat stomach; it felt good and ripe beneath her hand.

Betsy took a bottle of urine downtown to the Planned Parenthood Clinic the next morning as soon as Judd and her nausea were gone. She was assigned a friendly young woman named Peg who took her into a cubicle and dropped a puddle of urine on a test paper with an eyedropper. She explained everything as she went along. Betsy had thought it was rabbits, and her pint jarful embarrassed her. Why hadn't they told her they needed only a drop? Peg explained about the rabbits, and Betsy tried to look intelligent, but she wasn't hearing a word. She was looking at a framed wooden cut on the wall of the little room—a mother and child. There was infinite tenderness in the tilt of the mother's head, in the circle of her arm about the infant.

“Positive!”

Peg poured out Betsy's pint and washed her hands. Betsy sat and watched in silence.

“Are you pleased?” Peg had a tiny lisp, and thick red arms like legs.

“Yes,” Betsy whispered, and then said more loudly, “Yes, I am. I'm not married, though. But we may decide to, now. We may.”

Peg dried her hands on a paper towel and sat down facing Betsy. Her face was full of the desire to help. “Do you have a gynecologist?”

“Yes.”

“Better make an appointment right away. Do you want me to sign you up for some counseling?”

“You mean, don't I want a nice abortion?”

Peg's face went even kinder at Betsy's hostility. “I don't mean that at all. It's simply that women in your position can sometimes use advice. Someone to talk to.”

“I can talk to the baby's father. That seems the logical choice.” It was all bravado, but Peg didn't know that. She shrugged her shoulders and spread her big hands wide. One of them still held the paper towel, wadded up. “Of course,” Peg said. It came out, “Of courth.” The paper towel fell to the floor and she bent to pick it up. The interview was over.

Why did I get so nasty? Betsy asked herself. What in hell am I doing, anyway? Her condition was incurable, like her mother's; there was no going back on life any more than on death. She saw herself and her baby in a circle of love. She saw the baby as a piece of herself, transmuted, glorious. But she didn't see Judd at all.

Chapter Four

Violet

Violet lay, or sat propped, in her bed by the window, peacefully thinking. Her placidity was becoming a legend in the family. She could see them look at her with admiration; in turn she looked back at them, amused. Someone—who had it been? Marion? doing her duty by her dead sister?—had asked if she wanted a clergyman, a priest, and Violet's laughter had bubbled over. She had no need of priests, with the image of Will before her. A priest! She pictured a timid and platitudinous man in black, like the one who'd staged her mother's funeral. At least there would be no priests and no lugubrious chanting at hers. She had specified: no music, no flowers, no church. She had toyed with the idea of having them play “Stardust”—their song—and smiled at the picture of Frank and Marion, Betsy and Judd, fox-trotting at her funeral.

Violet kept her mind, when she could, on her death, preparing herself, examining her conscience, as she'd been taught to years ago by Helen. (You ran through the long list of possible sins and kept a scorecard on yourself.) But she didn't think of her transgressions—and they were few enough, it seemed to her—as sins. Mistakes, rather. The only one that mattered was Betsy; somewhere she had steered her daughter wrong. Oh, if Will had only lived things would be different, Betsy would be married years back, and there would be grandchildren to see her casket lowered into the ground.

But if only Betsy was settled.… This sorrow drove out the thought of death and narrowed to an irritation: Judd. Betsy's chosen lover. Violet flinched at the word but forced herself to use it. What else to call him? The Ann Landers column in the evening paper was full of facetious suggestions, but when you came right down to it a man and woman living together were lovers, pure and simple. (No, not pure, and probably not simple, either.) Or else they were husband and wife. In this case, better a lover than a husband; lovers by definition were temporary. But you never know. He is unfathomable, Violet thought—a deep one.

She forced on herself the possibility that he might, for whatever unsavory reason of his own, be persuaded to marry her daughter after all—a man with nothing pleasant or engaging or amiable about him, no politesse. Brought up down in Texas someplace by a fat woman with ten children and her front teeth out. He'd told them that: “I was raised in foster homes. I spent six years with a woman named Bobbie-Dora Prince and her husband Ray Prince. Bobbie-Dora was fat and illiterate and just about toothless, but she had a heart of gold. At one time she had ten of us homeless brats. Her mother had her sterilized when she was sixteen because she thought Bobbie-Dora was mentally defective—she'd already had two babies, both dead. But she was just a good, simple woman who loved kids. Ray was all right when he was sober, he used to play the banjo, but it was Bobbie-Dora who took care of us. I sent her Christmas and birthday cards until a couple of years ago when I heard she died. Actually, she was shot to death by a boy she took in.”

He told them that when he met the family for the first time. What was anyone to say? Especially the way he told it, so unemotional, and then he changed the subject, anyway. Betsy, sitting beside him with that moonstruck look as if where she really wanted to sit was at his feet.

He was successful enough, made a living—not that his photographs were much to look at. All they did was show what was there and pretty it up a little bit. He specialized in long street vistas, the seedier and the more depressing the better, so he could make them seem quaint and nostalgic, with the sun on them and a hazy look he must get by shooting through gauze or Vaseline, like they did Doris Day in the movies. It wasn't even very effective; there wasn't an awful lot you could do with parking lots and farm shacks and broken-down storefronts, mostly in dusty southern towns best left forgotten. He'd had a book of these published, but Violet couldn't imagine anyone buying it but his friends—if he had any. Who wanted to look at such things, even through gauze?

She supposed his commercial photographs were better, the ones he got paid so handsomely for. Those buildings. And Betsy swore he did beautiful shots of children, though Violet found that hard to imagine, unless he bullied them into cute poses. She pictured him rough and shouting, pushing children around, and charging huge sums for the results. It seemed a shame—that photography could pay so well. She was remembering Will and his sketches—his unsung talent. Now there was a craftsman, she thought (turning uneasily in bed as the pain touched her). Just a man and his pencil, no camera to do the work for him, no darkroom full of expensive gadgets.

She hadn't looked at Will's sketches in years, couldn't bear to, and the years had covered them with their own gauzy haze. Reconstructed in her mind, their bold, honest strokes were softened. She forgot the economy of his lines and the way he drew, obsessively, over and over, her mouth and eyes, mouth and eyes, sometimes a hand or the curve of her cheek. She forgot her impatience with him for never bringing the pieces together. She would have loved that formal portrait of her he had always intended to paint, treasured it as a memorial to him, not to her. It could have hung on the wall, just there, where she could see it and think of his hands holding the brushes, his frowning face bent over the work. She saw the portrait, in oils, finished and pretty, with her hair done, and completely forgot that he drew her only in rough pieces with black ink.

The imaginary portrait was part of her peace. So was Emily the imaginary mother. It pleased her to see Emily as a young girl in white, not yet a mother at all, a girl with Violet's own face, or Betsy's face. She had turned Emily over to Betsy; for her, only the waiting was left, and waiting was her forte. Lying in bed watching the sun patterns move across the wall, slip into corners, and disappear, Violet was all expectancy. Life, death, pain and relief from pain—all of it was beyond her control, and she was glad to let it go. Only Betsy roused her worry. I will die before I've done a mother's duty, Violet thought. If only she was settled: she said it to herself over and over; the phrase came into her mind whenever Betsy did. And not settled with
him
. It always came back to Judd. She had been willing to be won over, to take to Judd as Frank and Helen had finally taken to Will—Ah, but that was different, this Judd was no Will, and there had been the decent church wedding, with stephanotis and white roses and herself in white satin and a big, flat hat.