Family Matters (12 page)

Betsy tried to imagine Judd in a business suit, sitting at a desk behind a telephone with buttons on it, and reading briefs at home in the evening as her grandfather had, instead of listening to records and looking at photographs. It was worse than trying to imagine him a baby, or a little boy playing in a dusty road.

“Wouldn't suit you,” Frank said, and flipped the steak onto a platter.

“Maybe not.” Judd wound up the film and put his camera back in its case. “Sometimes I wish it would.”

Violet's voice came sharply from her corner under the lilacs. “Would you say you're. settled for good in the Syracuse area, Judd? Finding plenty of work here?”

“More than I can handle.” Judd smiled at Violet and then turned to Betsy. “I like it here,” he said, taking her hand to help her up. “Beautiful country.”

Betsy tossed the salad, hiding her smile.

“Now if you could just get that blush of hers on your black-and-white film,” said Frank, looking approvingly at his granddaughter.

“Under thirty it's a blush; over fifty it's a hot flash,” said Aunt Marion.

“Listen to the epigrams,” Betsy said.

“What's in between?” asked Violet.

“Just nervousness,” her aunt said sourly, getting up and smoothing her pant legs down. “Nervous coloration.”

“Whatever it is, it's very becoming on Betsy,” said Frank, and set the steak firmly on the picnic table, closing the subject.

When she was with Judd and her family, Betsy saw the group as two teams—herself and her grandfather on one side, her mother and aunt on the other, Judd the ball they tossed around. It was an odd game, in which her side repeatedly passed the ball to the others, who speedily' returned it, as if it burned the fingers. The score so far had been decidedly in the other team's favor.

But this evening over the steak and salad Judd devoted himself to charming them. Betsy watched closely: Violet laughed at Judd's anecdotes, even waited expectantly for more, glass raised and lips parted in her flirtatious smile. Aunt Marion's laughter was more reluctant, but it did burst out of her now and then in small explosions that she got tipsy trying to drown in wine.

“That boy has a gift for telling a story,” she said to Betsy after coffee, the winy laughter still simmering. “I'll bet he's an entertaining fellow to have around sometimes.”

“A laugh a minute,” Betsy assured her absentmindedly. She was watching Judd take leave of her mother; not a false step, the right mix of courtly admiration and filial deference. Scoring points right and left. Oh, isn't he wonderful, she thought, taking his arm and beaming around at them all.

Her grandfather walked them to the car. “Can I cut you a few roses to take, Betsy?”

“You know me, Grandpa. I'd just forget them and they'd petal up the whole house.”

He chuckled. “You're a vegetable girl, Betsy. Like your grandmother.” The word meant Emily to her now; with an effort she applied it to Helen.

“But she liked those roses, too, Grandpa.” They paused by the yellow floribunda hedge and impulsively she tore one rose off. “Here, Judd—” She stuck it through his buttonhole. “A boutonniere,” she said, and stopped abruptly because it suggested weddings.

Her grandfather talked roses to Judd, Judd listening respectfully, even asking a question or two. It astonished her every time she saw him in one of these commonplace transactions. He was so miraculous, so special. To engage in normal human intercourse seemed delightfully quaint in him, another proof of his powers: that such a magical being could manage it.

“Well done, my lad,” she said as they drove home.

“What do you mean—well done? I wasn't performing.”

“A little, you were.”

“Nonsense! I like your family. I enjoyed myself.”

Betsy turned it over in her mind. She had spent the evening in a glow: that he had worked so hard to ingratiate himself with her family was a sign of his love for her. Now it appeared he hadn't been working at it. Was that better or worse? Surely it was better that he could be natural with them.… On the other hand, he could be deliberately disclaiming any efforts to get along with them in order to exhibit his indifference to
her
.

She wanted him to like her family, and not only for her own sake, or theirs. He had no relatives except his brother's family. He had been orphaned young; he and Derek had, in fact, witnessed the gruesome death of their father in a hunting accident. A few months later had come the drowning—possibly not accidental—of their mother. The boys had been raised as wards of the state of Texas. Was he then invulnerable to family feeling? Did he grudge her the little circle of doting relatives?

She shut her mind to the endless calculations and sat close to him, with her hand resting on her stomach. “They like you, too, Judd.”

“Well, good. I'm glad.” He reached an arm around and hugged her.

She moved her fingers lightly over her belly, calculating, always calculating: when to tell him, and how.

She badly needed the child. She had always, it seemed, needed a child, beginning with Samantha, her first baby. She had escaped to the attic—where she had set up for herself a private corner—to change Samantha's diapers, spank her rubber bottom, dress her up for church, sing to her. Sometimes she simply rocked her doll, staring out the dusty attic window at roofs and trees, while in the rooms below her grandmother irritably cooked, her mother went dreamily through her library books, her grandfather worked at his big desk.

She had been a morose, solitary, intelligent, patient child whose best friends were her father's old black dog and her doll. She had played with Samantha long past the age when little girls cease to play with dolls. Her grandmother disapproved, and eventually she had to steal away to Samantha and cuddle her in furtive silence. Then, gradually, this no longer eased her—it seemed silly—and she laid Samantha away forever in her wicker carriage, wrapped in her sprigged blanket and dressed in her Sunday best.

Life overflowed with losses: her father lying red-faced on the floor of the shop, and her mother's terrible, low moaning; the old dog, Poochie, stiff in his dog basket; her grandmother's sharp tongue silenced, lowered into the earth with her worn-out body; and her lovers, that small and far-from-choice collection, and only one of them her lover in the strictest sense of the word.…

She thought sometimes—always with resentment—of Alan, who had sneaked away from his frigid wife to see her when she was his student in graduate school. They had met at her apartment, where they lay on the floor and drank wine. He was the only man, before Judd, she had been really intimate with, but he had insisted they stop short of the sexual act itself. “I don't want to get that involved,” he said.

“How could you be any more heavily involved, Alan?” Betsy used to ask. “You say you love me—isn't that about as involved as you can get?”

“That's different,” he said nervously, and pulled down her underpants. He would never take them completely off, and with their clothes down around their ankles and up around their necks they made love as best they could. Betsy pleaded with him and nagged him, and when he objected, “You're satisfied, aren't you?”, after bringing her to climax with tongue and fingers, she had to admit—though not to Alan—that what she wanted was the thrill of possibility, the knowledge that a baby could be made. Horrified at her motives, she threw herself so passionately into the contrivances of their lovemaking that when Alan left for a new position in Wisconsin he had the vague notion of divorce. But he never called or wrote; he disappeared into the Midwest as if he had died there, and Betsy didn't allow herself to grieve. When a year later she heard that he and his wife had had a baby, she went home and wept.

And now she had done it. She couldn't help viewing her pregnancy as a triumph, something she had pulled off. As she sat with Judd in the evenings, reading and listening to records, her hooded eyes would crinkle into the start of a smile and she would feel her stomach lurch with excitement, and wonder if the baby could feel it. At such moments Judd ceased to exist—just for a second, two seconds—and when they were over she would look at him tenderly, apologetically, and jump up to make coffee or bring him a bedtime snack.

In the patchwork of memories Violet had made for her of Will, her father, Betsy had stitched one of her own. She is very young, she seems to recall a tricycle in the picture, and she and her father are sitting on the front steps with Poochie. Behind them is the magical sign-painting shop where she loves to go with him, but it's a hot afternoon and they sit outside. There is some vague tension. Have her parents had a fight? Or is it the heat? If she concentrates, Betsy imagines she can recall the sunsuit she had on—pink and blue check, with ruffled straps that cross in back. Her father is talking to her, and out of the silken web of words he used to spin comes this, in a fierce whisper, “It's you and me against the world, kiddo,” as he picks her up and hugs her. It's hot to be held so close, but she hugs back, sniffing in his nice, fruity whiskey smell.

Thirty years later, with her palm pressed to her belly where Will's grandchild hurries toward birth, she thinks, smiling, “It's you and me against the world, kiddo,” while her lover lies at her feet drinking coffee.

It was still early when they returned from her grandfather's. They went outside to sit on the back steps. In the dying light the backyard—so bland and sunny in the daytime, with its squared-off garden plot and long border of berry plants—looked mysterious and inviting. Betsy had a fleeting vision of herself and Judd lying together on the soft grass under the maple. They had never made love outside, hadn't been together long enough—only since January. But we have years, years, she thought, and turned her head slightly to see his long-nosed profile. He looked sleepy and content—domesticated. It will never be the same between us, Betsy thought. Look your last at that particular face. After tonight it will change forever.

Behind them, in the first-floor apartment, they heard the Brodsky's television. Music, then voices, then music and voices together. Betsy sweated with nervousness; she knew it was time she spoke. Talking wasn't what they were good at. They sat mostly in silence while she rehearsed: Judd, I'm pregnant. No. Judd, I'm going to have a baby. No. Judd, we're going to have a baby.

They watched the sunset colors wash out of the sky, and then everything go dark except the sky, which was pale and then smoky-gray against the precise silhouettes of trees. When the stars came out, Betsy said, “I once spent a summer in the country. There were millions more stars out there than in the city. And the sky was much blacker.”

He didn't answer. The perfume from the wilting rose in his buttonhole came faintly to them. She touched his arm with hers. It scared her about him, the worlds he had traveled without her. There were times he traveled them still.

Betsy moved her aching shoulders to relax them and felt sweat run down her sides from her armpits. Her chest hurt with the tension. She took a deep breath. “Judd, we're going to have a baby.”

It was a mistake to tell him in the dark; she needed to see his face. He said nothing. He seemed not to breathe.

“Judd?”

“You mean you are,” he said at last.

Her heart began to pound, her ears hurt, her teeth hurt. All right. All right, then.

“Yes. I mean I am.”

“That's why you've been throwing up.”

“I'm afraid so.”

“You were on the pill.”

“I went off it”

Further silence. Love which does not prosper dies: Betsy firmly believed this, in spite of the example of Eloise and Abelard, about whom she lectured passionately to her students each spring in her Pope seminar. Under the stars, she said it over to herself (love which does not prosper dies), expecting it to give her comfort. But she felt as cold and hard and comfortless as a stone.

“Judd?”

“What about an abortion?”

“I want this baby.” Her heart leapt; they could discuss it.

“You see my position, Betsy.” He lifted his arm to run his hand through his hair, and when he put it down it was no longer touching hers. “I'm not the marrying kind. As they say.”

“I'm not asking marriage,” she said, chucking it then and there.

“Or the settling-down kind.”

“Ah. Well.”

“I don't want to be anybody's father.”

But you love children! You'd be a good father! She wouldn't let these cries escape her. She felt their falseness. The world had turned around in five minutes. The stars should be under their feet, the Brodskys' TV the roar of the apocalypse.

“So you see my position.”

“Yes, of course.”

They sat awhile longer, and then she said, “I suppose we might as well go up.”

At the door she saw his face in the light from the back hall. It was sorrowful. “I wanted us to be together, Betsy.”

He followed her upstairs. In bed she wept in his arms, and then they made love. He thrust furiously into her, as if to rip from her womb whatever of himself was there. It was the first time their lovemaking had failed to move her, but she pretended it did, as a bon voyage present.

But nothing happened. In the morning, while she retched in the bathroom, she fancied she heard him dragging out his suitcases and throwing clothes into them. When she emerged, he was scrambling eggs, whistling, wearing a red tie.

“Feel better?”

“I think so,” she said, and breathed deeply to calm herself. Her heartbeat was audible. She was afraid to speak: there was a spell, and if she broke it he would walk out the door forever.

She made tea while he bolted his eggs. “I'm late—got to get this printing done by noon.”

“You'll be in your studio?”

“Till noon.”

And then? and then? She lifted the hot tea to her lips; it warmed her but she couldn't yet drink. “And then?”