Family Matters (11 page)

If only Betsy would settle down with a nice man, a fellow professor, maybe—a man with some charm, who knew how to talk to a prospective mother-in-law, who didn't growl over the phone, who came to dinner when he was invited, who observed amenities. Judd was ruining her last days, she thought sometimes when she felt crabby and unwell. He was an intrusion, like pain. Maybe it was the way Betsy looked at him, maybe it was those pale little eyes, or his shirts unbuttoned too far, or the closed-up look on his face—or the endless camera clicking: endless, and then he never showed them the photographs.

It became easier and easier, though, to put the problem from her mind. In fact, as the days went on, the present slipped further from her. Company could keep it close. While Frank sat with her, or Terry (the sticky perfumy smell!), or Betsy, Marion, the occasional friend, the past lurked just out of reach like a cat in a tree, waiting. And as soon as she was alone it pounced with its velvet paws.

Sometimes she would nap briefly and awake to find the sun moving across her thin yellow blanket, and the blanket was the yellow mass of roses on Helen's coffin. The roses were from Frank, and he had tears to contribute as well, as if tears and roses could wash death away and mask its smell. Frank's tears had frightened her, and Betsy's, too, because they were not weepers. It was Violet, the weeper, who had no tears for Helen. Any tears she had she was still spending on Will; for Will, they were an endless resource, not to be spent on this imitation mother. Nearly thirty years hadn't dried them up.

Once, with the tears on her cheeks, she had opened her eyes to see the sun gone from her blanket, and Judd standing by her bed.

“I've brought the book,” he said. “Betsy got held up at a meeting.”

He laid it on the table—some book or other Betsy had dug up for her in the library—and then he took a handkerchief and gently wiped at the tears.

“Don't cry,” he whispered, and when she opened her eyes again it was Frank, waiting to read. A dream, it was—or the pills—though there was the book. She never asked.

Her days were full of such puzzlements. She accepted them, and then she forgot them, the things that happened between sleep and waking.

Once there had been her father's voice, loud as thunder, and her mother's had come in, tap-tapping, tap-tapping, a hammer on a nail. The two voices had been woven together, then wrenched apart with a tearing sound. She was a child, alone in her overheated room, in bed at night, and they were fighting, of course, over her. The crashing, tapping, tearing was all her fault. She pulled the covers over her head, so that the stuffy darkness, which she usually loved, scared her, and the sounds muffled that way were dreadful and strange. They were troll sounds, like the trolls in
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
that made her shut her eyes and cover her ears when her father read it, only his arm around her keeping the nasty trolls at bay and the fear delectable. She raised her head free of the blankets, listening, and the noises ceased except for the tap-tapping and she thought: Mother has won, and she's building something with her hammer—which so terrified her she woke with a scream to see Terry, and her high-protein drink, and a thermometer, and to hear the rain dripping from the gutters.

“I think that storm has pushed your fever up, Mrs. Ruscoe.”

The days passed in dreams. Pain was still experimental, tentative. Violet could still sit back and look at it, surprised, as if a puppy had nipped her in play. But it made her suspicious and inattentive; she had to stay tuned to the teeth in her flesh.

She didn't really like leaving her bedroom, but the rest of them thought changes of scene were good for her.

“Nothing is good for me,” she said to Frank. He was helping her out of bed. “Just as nothing is bad for me.”

Her father just set his face and held out her robe to her, but Marion looked shocked and said, “I wish you wouldn't go on like that, Violet.” The two of them helped her down the hall and down the stairs and, now that the weather was so good, out to the green backyard. They sat her in the chaise under a shawl, where she could reach up and touch the lilacs. “Their smell is so sweet and cool,” she said when they bloomed. “I like it so much better than roses.”

“Well, the roses will be out any day, too,” Frank said. He looked forward to them, especially now that he'd given up his vegetable patch. She knew he loved the roses; she was glad Betsy didn't. Betsy grew useful things, like vegetables, with a row of marigolds put in only to keep the bugs off. Last summer she'd sat in Betsy's backyard with her, watching her weed and cultivate, so much like her grandfather. She could remember Frank, before his hair turned white and disappeared entirely on top, so handsome and lean in his old-fashioned undershirt, with a kettle of mashed-up tomatoes in front of him, scooping them into jars. While he worked he sang old songs no one else ever sang anymore: “Courting songs,” he said, winking at Helen's turned back.

“Will I live to eat your tomatoes this year, Betsy?” They all pretended she hadn't said it; perhaps she hadn't.

Then the roses came out (first the climbing Peace roses on the trellis, then the floribunda hedges) and spread their sick smell all over the yard when the breeze was right. Excessive, like too much cologne, like hair spray. Then the Japanese beetles on the old, overgrown raspberry canes. A memory crept up and surprised her; for a second, Helen was in the backyard with them—over there, by the old garden patch, in one of her zip-front housedresses, as real as Betsy. Violet grimaced. Anyone watching her would have thought the pain was particularly bad, but it was the memory: Helen squashing the beetles between her fingernails with a crunch, and crushing tomato hornworms with her bare heel. Ugh! Her mother's brash fearlessness was almost inhuman—and Lord, you'd never have guessed it from her mousy face.

Remembering Helen and the insects, Violet developed a fear of the roses and avoided looking into their hearts lest there be a bug there, a worm curled about the stamens. She laughed at herself. It was like something out of a book, some heavy symbolism. But she recoiled from the roses. And though it had been Helen who prompted her horror, Judd took over as the sun unfolded the blossoms. If she were putting that particular symbol in a book or a poem, the worm in the rose would be her daughter's lover.

Once, sitting outside in the sunshine, with the flowers blooming all around her—opening up, turning gross and helpless, and falling—she had said to Betsy, “The roses only make me sad.”

Betsy's hopeful smile faded away, and she said, “Oh, I'm sorry, Mother,” with her special grieved look, so that Violet knew it was her disease Betsy was thinking of. The worm eating away at her insides. The insect gnawing out her bones. The beetle in the heart of the fruit.

“I didn't mean anything, Betsy,” she said, but Betsy took her hand and kissed her knuckles, with the easy affection Violet loved so much in her daughter. “I'd like a little bourbon, honey.” Betsy had to get it for her, of course, although it was barely noon. Crazy, how upset they all would get over nothing, Violet thought, breathing deeply. The ice rattled in the glass because her hands were trembling.

The bourbon always made her sharper. Every hot swallow cleared some of the mist off things, and, drinking, she would glance alertly around her, with her old birdy look. She smiled at them all, hearing their thoughts: Well, it's good for her, let her have it, whatever helps let her have, even though nothing helps. They were thinking, too, of Will, she bet—Will's blunt fingers curved around a glass. “Let's have a drink to celebrate,” he would say, and with that strange avidity get out the bottle. Oh, the dear man, with his baroque conversation, his lovely strong shoulders, his sketch pad. And that old dog of his he'd loved so … She smiled around at them, loving them all, her family. I will have a loving death, she thought, and refused to let the word scare her. She was far beyond fear. Death was a word on a door: open it, and there was Will.

They were all present, gathered in the backyard for the ritual steak. She didn't like meat. She hoped there would be garlic bread, and a nice dessert. There was wine, but she refused it for bourbon. Let's have a drink to celebrate. I am happy, Violet thought. Better than happy, I am amused. The pursing and unpursing of her aunt's little lips amused her, and her father's veiny, ribbed hands messing with the steak. I won't live long enough to get those liver spots, she thought. Betsy making them all laugh with her gossip—where had she got such a sharp-tongued daughter? Violet wondered, laughing hard. How they made her laugh, even that time she opened her eyes to see that man's hairy hand on Betsy's knee, creeping up—they'd thought the bourbon had put her to sleep. Even that amused her, though she had burst out at them querulously; it was the pain that made her. The pain could pounce as swift and sudden as memory, with jaws and claws that bit and scratched.

She sank back into her shawl, drinking. She would try. He was not the man she would have chosen for Betsy, her dear Betsy—so wrong, why couldn't she see it—but she would try to like him. The attempt would be her legacy to her daughter, all she had to give. Narrow-eyed and clearheaded, she watched him from her seat under the rotting lilacs, forcing a smile when he looked her way or pointed his camera at her. But why must he go barefoot? she thought. Like a hippie. And with such hairy toes.

Chapter Five

Betsy

Telling Judd the news was beyond Betsy's strength. She waited, as she waited with a toothache, hoping it would resolve itself somehow and make a visit to the dentist unnecessary. I'll wait for him to notice, Betsy thought, and imagined Judd's face transfigured by joy when, caressing her, he comprehended the changes in her body. I'll wait until it shows, she thought. Until I'm more used to it. Until it's absolutely necessary.

What she was truly waiting for remained unvoiced: for him to suggest marriage. That the desire should come before the necessity was all she asked—but she didn't ask. She kept silent, waiting.

The baby was thoroughly real to her from the beginning. She felt friendly and at ease with the full-grown person who would sit at a table with her someday drinking coffee, who would drive a car and go to college and have her own babies. She imagined it, always, as a daughter—hoping, in fact, so vehemently for a girl (sensing that she didn't comprehend boys well enough to bring one up) that she was appalled, and wouldn't let herself speculate on the baby's sex at all. But soon she began to believe that such powerful desire was prophetic, that the baby must be a girl, and she stopped worrying.

They went as promised, to dinner at her grandfather's. Judd brought his camera, further alienating Aunt Marion, who pretended to be flattered but hated having her picture taken.

“Me? You want to take me?” She lifted her head out of its nest of chins and jowls. “I've never yet had a good picture taken of me.”

“The camera doesn't lie, Marion,” said Violet from the chaise. The glass of bourbon had become a matter of course.

“Oh, but it does,” Judd said, squatting low to get the chins in. “It lies all the time, that's what's so maddening about it.” Three quick clicks while he talked.

“I always photographed well, I must say.” Violet's tone was petulant, and Judd, sensing a summons, abandoned her aunt and pointed his camera at Violet. “Wonderful light on you, Mrs. Ruscoe.” He went down on one knee with the bare pink sole of one foot pointing up, while behind him Aunt Marion patted her upsweep and put her glasses back on.

Violet raised her drink and ventured a smile, her head on one side. “How's this? What angle makes me look least like an old bag?”

“You look great,” Judd said. It was true, Betsy thought; her mother was still youthful and pretty. But she had seen, in Judd's studio, a stack of rough prints of her family, and she was appalled at the death in them—her mother's face all bones, her grandfather ropy with veins, her aunt a puffed-up cadaver. Judd seemed pleased with the photographs and flipped through them, smiling faintly.

“You really must hate them,” she accused him.

He looked at her in surprise and anger. “Betsy, I'm a fucking photographer. These aren't your mother and your grandfather—they're pictures.”

“You've made them look so old and ugly, Judd. They're not like your other things.” She was afraid he was getting together a new book, of brutally real portraits of the elderly. His first book, with its sunlit evocations of small-town squalor, had been a modest hit; she knew the publisher was agitating for another.

Judd ignored her words and peered closely at a shot of Violet with her head thrown back and her eyes closed. “I must say, though, your mother has gorgeous bones. Look at these shadows.”

To Betsy, it was as if her mother was already dead, nothing left of her but the beautiful bones and the shadows they cast. She turned away from the photographs.

Now, on her grandfather's back lawn, she leaned toward her mother with an involuntary protective gesture, and Violet held out her glass to be filled.

Judd began to tell Violet about a cat show he had once photographed. It was one in his stock of funny stories, produced to distract his subjects from the camera, and Betsy listened fondly, laughing to cue Violet in case pain or dislike made her inattentive. She wanted to say, “Isn't he marvelous? Do you see how wonderful he's being, how he wants so much to get along with you all?” She laughed prematurely at a cat story, and her grandfather gave her an odd look, then laughed himself.

“You've certainly had the life, Judd,” he said. “When you're my age, you'll certainly have more to look back on than a lot of musty legal cases.”

“That's for sure,” said Aunt Marion, keeping a wary eye on the camera; it might have been a gun.

Judd looked through the viewfinder at Frank. “I can't think of anything more interesting to look back on than your career,” he said, snapping quickly before Frank got up to turn the steak on the grill. The smell of steak had wiped out the smell of roses and rotting lilacs, and when Frank did get up they all watched him hungrily. “I've often wished I'd gone into something more solid, Mr. Robinson—like the law. Something more predictable.”