Family Matters (18 page)

“If this was the weekend, you'd be sleeping in your car,” she told Betsy with satisfaction. She was elderly and wore an askew blonde wig and pancake makeup the shade of a tan. Betsy wondered about Emily. She kept imagining her in black lace to the floor, with her honest gray hair in braids around her head. She would probably be loud and pants-suited like Aunt Marion, with a red wig and blue eye shadow, Betsy told herself, bracing for the worst. But the revised image refused to take over; if Emily was imaginary, she might as well be ideal.

“What's the attraction around here?” Betsy inquired. It seemed godforsaken enough; on the map the insignificant little towns were spaced far apart. In the
Connecticut AAA Guide
her grandfather had given her, Haddam had rated one attraction: a nine-hour boat ride down the Connecticut River to Greenport, Long Island.

The woman shrugged. “The river. The scenery.” She waved one hand toward the window, which looked out on a Mobil station.

An old man behind her, seated on a folding lawn chair, said, “Nature,” and added helpfully, “You may not know that Connecticut is two thirds forest.”

“Then there's the opera house over in East Haddam.”

“We got a state park right here,” said the old man.

“Don't forget Gillette Castle. Take a trip up there.” The woman pushed a folder at Betsy. “And go over to Essex on Sunday for the brunch at the inn.”

Betsy left, armed with folders. The old couple were natives of the area and old enough to have known Emily. Maybe that should be her method—go around and ask, “Do you remember a young pregnant girl named Emily who was here back in nineteen twenty-two? She had a baby around Christmas—do you know where she went after that?”

The cabin was just big enough for bed, desk with phone, and huge television. Betsy lay down with her hands folded on her belly. The bedspread smelled musty; there was mildew up in the corners of the room, around the ceiling. Outside, a pigeon bubbled, the sound of contentment. Somewhere in the world, Emily Somebody, née Loftus, was sitting down to afternoon tea, or being fed an early supper in a nursing home, or dandling a great-grandchild, or sitting in a motel on her summer vacation, or moldering in her grave.

Betsy looked over her notes. Her new information, still scanty enough to fit on the piece of blue stationery, with room to spare, read:

named baby Violetta—probably opera fan?

Harold and Cora Loftus left Syracuse late 1922(?)

Emily aged 17 at baby's birth,

The whole thing was riddled with question marks and vague suppositions. It was hopeless. But she would go to the courthouse next day and see what there was to see. What else could she do? She had never once, she believed, failed to do her duty.

She had dinner at a locally famous restaurant, where she let the friendly waitress talk her into Indian pudding for dessert. It sat heavily inside her like a bag of sand.

The waitress refilled her coffee cup, smiling broadly. “I can't help but notice,” she said, indicating Betsy's maternity dress with a nod. “I just had one in April. A girl, my first. When are you due?”

“January or February,” she said meekly enough.

“Oh wow! You're lucky it isn't in leap year—right?” The waitress's face was genuinely relieved. “You could have it on the twenty-ninth, the poor thing.” She brightened up. “Mine was a real pain, no pun intended. I was in labor twenty-two hours.”

“My goodness!”

“Well, my husband was there the whole time. Believe me, it helped. He was great. Do they let the fathers in where you're having it?”

“I believe they do.”

“It makes all the difference, take it from me. I mean, it's scary if you're by yourself. I don't care how nice the nurses are.” She set down a tiny tray with the check on it. “This isn't your first, though, is it?”

“It is, as a matter of fact.”

The waitress pursed her lips as if to whistle.
At your age
, the whistle would have marveled. “Well, good luck,” she said, touching Betsy on the shoulder. She began to pick up Betsy's dishes. “Hey! You didn't finish your pudding. You're eating for two, you know.”

Betsy gave an apologetic smile. The cheery waitress, with her trim figure (in a brown uniform with a long, squared-off white collar as if she were a waitress at the first Thanksgiving), her supportive husband, her long, proud labor—the woman depressed her utterly. Betsy compared herself and longed for such normalcy. She wondered for the first time who would be with her when she gave birth. No one, of course. Nurses. Her subtly disapproving obstetrician. Not her grandfather (obscene!), not her great-aunt (God, no!) … Crawford Divine? John Alderman, in gratitude for having her Pope seminar for a semester? Mrs. Brodsky? Violet, miraculously cured?

She paid her check and left.
Star Wars
was playing at a theater she passed on the highway, and she bought a ticket. She and Judd had meant to go, but never did. The theater was full of teenagers who seemed to know the plot by heart. Betsy had come in in the middle, but she caught on quickly that the nice, human-looking people were the good guys, and the ones who looked like Nazis were the bad guys. The teenagers applauded whenever a bad guy was zapped; they cheered the pair of heroes and the princess. Betsy relaxed and began to cheer up, and by the time the bad guys' space station was blown to bits she had begun to believe that, in her researches on the morrow, she'd unearth a whole clan of Loftuses, who would rally round her and her baby. She left the theater in a warm glow, borne along by a horde of teenagers.

But the courthouse yielded nothing. The clerk wasn't the old man she'd pictured, but a youngish one, dark and skinny like Judd. She kept looking at him, at the strong, graceful way he moved, and his long legs. There were times when she missed Judd desperately. Inspired by the paired-off teenagers at the movie, she had halfheartedly masturbated the night before in her little cabin, and awakened that morning from an indefinably gruesome dream, wanting a man worse than ever.

The clerk, whose name was Dave, had a beard and gentle brown eyes. He seemed much nicer than Judd. He dragged old records off shelves and out of filing cabinets until he sweated, but there was nothing beyond the birth certificate. He and Betsy gazed at it earnestly, their arms almost touching on the counter top, and then exchanged a hopeless look. He seemed as let down as she. He called the library and had them check the town directories for 1922 and 1923. No Emily Loftus. He made two more phone calls, checked another file, shrugged, and sent her over to the Historical Society. She left reluctantly. She'd half-hoped he'd ask her to lunch, they were getting along so well. But he only wrote down the address for her and wished her luck, that was all. Why should she expect more, pregnant and clumsy as she was? She caught sight of her reflection in a window; to herself she looked blooming and beautiful. How did she look to others? The thought frightened her. The old woman at the motel, when she looked into the mirror to put on her wig and her pancake makeup, probably thought she was beautiful, too.

She stayed all afternoon at the Historical Society. There was a clutch of historically minded women there, glad of a customer, who happily racked their brains—going through old photographs, checking cemetery records, recounting tales of luck and skill in their own genealogical researches.

One woman—Mrs. Hall—pointed her forefinger to her temple suddenly like a gun and barked out, “Wait!” She had interrupted a long and rambling account of the finding of a
Mayflower
ancestor, but the rambler was silenced. They all looked tensely at Mrs. Hall, who tapped her temple and pursed her lips. “That—name—is—familiar,” she said, nodding on each word. “Emily Loftus. I—have—heard—that—name.”

The women relaxed and smiled at each other. They were on familiar ground: on such intuitions whole dynasties were reconstructed. Mrs. Hall went, muttering, into the back room. While the women chattered, Betsy kept her eyes on the door she had disappeared through. She longed to go in after her, but a sign above the door said “Staff Only.” Had Mrs. Hall only gone out for tea? But no, she was back with a cardboard folder tied up with tape, looking pleased with herself.

“I knew it!” she said, waving the folder, and the
Mayflower
descendant subsided once more. They watched with respect as Mrs. Hall sat down and opened the folder. Inside was a huge genealogical chart that she spread out on the table. “This is the West family chart; there was a man in here just a few months ago looking at it. That's how I remember the name—Loftus! There!” She jabbed the chart with her gun finger. “Emily Loftus! Married Eliot West of Essex, they had five children: Horace, Arthur, Emily Delight, Jocelyn, and Eliot. See there?”

Betsy looked, and the woman in the hat peered over her shoulder. “But, Nancy, this woman was born in eighteen seventeen.”

“Well, of course she was.” Mrs. Hall glared at the woman and then smiled at Betsy. “I don't mean this is the gal you want. But it must be the same family. You track down these Loftuses, and mark my words—you'll find your Emily. This woman probably had a brother who moved to Syracuse and started a line. This one will turn out to be a great-aunt. A great-great-aunt. You'll see.”

The woman nodded as if this prophecy were conclusive, but Betsy looked dubiously at the chart. There it was, certainly: Emily Loftus. The sight of it made her heart pound. Emily Loftus in a long calico dress, a bonnet, with her five children clinging to her skirts, with Violet's eyes and smile. But gradually the excitement ebbed. This Emily was over a hundred years old when Violet was born. How did you track down the family of the great-great-aunt of your grandmother?

“I don't have any information on these Loftuses,” Mrs. Hall was saying. “Best to hire someone for this; you'd have no idea how to go about finding them.” Betsy looked at her respectfully: she could read minds, then, as well as prophesy. “I recommend Henry Bemis, in Hartford,” she went on. “I can give you his card, in fact. He's a genealogical researcher, and he's a wonder. Now I'm pretty sure these Loftuses were not from this area, but Henry will go over to the state archives for you in Hartford and dig them out. Let me just—”

She went off in search of the card. The woman with the
Mayflower
ancestor said to Betsy, in a low voice, “It looks kind of tenuous to me, actually,” and the other woman nodded. “A long shot.”

“But still—” The women looked at each other and shrugged. “You know Nancy. She does have a knack.”

Mrs. Hall gave Betsy Henry Bemis's card, and there was a chorus of good wishes. Betsy smiled and took the card, but without hope. There was nothing to link this 1817 Emily with her own Emily but the bare fact that she had married a Connecticut man in 1839. Emily Loftus West shrank and faded until she was just a name on a chart. With a last, skeptical look at it, Betsy left.

She had checked, earlier, to see if
La Traviata
had played at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam in 1922. That would be a nice, neat fact; if it had, Emily had probably seen it and named her daughter after the heroine. Violet would like knowing that. But the Goodspeed had closed in 1920, and remained so for forty-odd years. Emily had fallen for Violetta and Alfredo somewhere else.

On the way back to her motel, Betsy drove by the old opera house. It was freshly painted, flower-decked, and down behind it the river glittered with coins of sunshine. There was a revival of a 1928 Gershwin musical playing. Betsy thought of Judd, who loved such things, and wished he were with her. They could have dinner, go to the theater, return to the motel together.… Her trip would be transformed into a joyous quest—what would it matter that it was unsuccessful?

Betsy returned, alone, to her room, more discouraged than she'd expected to be. She'd thought she was prepared for such a failure, and perhaps she was, but not for its aftermath: Violet's disappointment. It was this that haunted her. What if the hope of Emily helped to keep Violet alive? She couldn't shake the idea that the failure was her failure. Somewhere, a stone had been left unturned, and because of it Violet might die without the clasp of her mother's hand.

Emily Loftus West was not that stone. She dropped Henry Bemis's card into the wastebasket. She would have to ask Marion—no: she'd go right to Frank. She'd risk it all—anger, hurt feelings, whole cemeteries of dead ancestors rising up to shake their bony fists at her.…

In the musty cabin, she lay down on the bed and let dejection and relief wash over her in equal parts. She hadn't found Emily; she would turn it all over to her grandfather, as she had always turned things over to him. It was a defeat, but her object hadn't been personal triumph. Her object had been the finding of Emily for Violet. Frank would accomplish it more effectively than she ever could—might, in fact, already have the secret in his possession. But as she lay there, the spirit of … She wondered afterwards what spirit it could have been. St. Anthony, patron of lost things, Helen would have said. Your own common sense—nothing spiritual about that, Frank would snap. Helen, guiding from the grave, making things right. Her own unborn child, wanting its family tree. The tranquil confidence of Violet, reaching east.

Whatever it was, it impelled her to pick up the phone book and leaf through it. There could be Loftuses in the area. Lobell, Locke, Lockwood Farm, Lodynsky, Loeb, Loeb, Lofting … Betsy gave a scream and hugged the phone book to her chest, and then she looked at it again. “Loftus, Emily,” it read, “19 River Rd. E. Had.” With her face transfigured by joy, she looked (had she but known it) just like her grandmother.

Chapter Six

Emily

Emily was on the phone with Jean Wood when the doorbell rang. Jean was telling her about her annual European vacation—a series of complaints: high prices, red tape, heat, exhaustion. Emily, who had spent the last ten summers in East Haddam, had given up trying to persuade Jean to do likewise. When the doorbell rang, she wasn't entirely sorry. “Damn it, Jean, there's the door. I'll have to call you back.”