Family Matters (19 page)

She smoothed her hair as she hurried to the front of the house; you never knew, it might be someone wanting an interview.

It was a sharp-featured young woman in a maternity dress.

“Yes?” Emily inquired. Definitely not a reporter, more likely an antique nut gaga over the fanlight and wanting a private tour.

“Are you Emily Loftus?”

“I am.”

A trembly smile, tears in the eyes. Could it be a fan? Too young, surely.

“I think you may be my grandmother,” said the young woman.

Fifty years on the stage had prepared Emily to deal with most shocks, and she dealt with this one. “Come in,” she said calmly, “and tell me why you think so.” Only her hand on her heart betrayed her. Her heart's flutterings weren't visible. She breathed deeply, to calm herself, and led her visitor into the living room.

The molding, the fire screen, the wide-plank floors—the woman didn't notice any of it. She sat herself down on the sofa, heavily, and applied a handkerchief to her eyes.

Emily didn't help her out. She sat up steely-straight in the wing chair and waited.

“My name is Betsy Ruscoe,” the woman said finally. “I've come all the way down here from Syracuse to find you—well, to find my grandmother. I suppose there's always a chance you're not the right Emily, but—” She had the handkerchief ready. “You look so much like my mother!” She pressed it to her mouth, to stifle something between a sob and a giggle.

“And your mother is—”

“Violet—Violetta.”

Violetta. She hadn't allowed herself even to think the name in years—thirty years? thirty-five? Hearing it uttered aloud was like the breaking of a spell. She looked helplessly at Betsy Ruscoe. It was a long time since she had given way to the kind of emotion she felt now.

“She's my daughter,” Emily said. “She was born right here in East Haddam. And you're my granddaughter.” She groped in her pocket for a tissue and found one. “You look just like my brother Henry.”

They sat blowing their noses, laughing awkwardly, not knowing, out of the cornucopia of things that must be said, what to say next.

“I suppose we could have tea,” Emily said finally and wiped her eyes. She stood up, thinking: Why did she have to catch me in my old gardening dress?

“Is it all right?” Betsy was asking. “I mean, I'd love to stay, but if you're busy—”

“My dear Betsy Ruscoe!” Emily went to her and took her arm. “You're my granddaughter! Do you think I'm going to let you go that easily?”

Her blush and tentative smile—Emily had to press her hands to her heart again—were like those of her Violetta, long ago, that bright-faced girl with the long, soft hair. It was frightening, the way the past could rise up like a club and knock you down.

In the kitchen, the cats lay in a heap in the late afternoon sun. They stirred slightly and stretched, not opening their eyes. Their sweet dopiness soothed Emily: it was why she kept cats. That bland, dumb, graceful acceptance was, she believed, instructive for an old lady.

She took down the big brown teapot and smiled. “I guess I'm the typical little old lady—cats, tea.…” She raised one foot. “Even sneakers. I used to be quite glamorous, you know,” she added, running water into the kettle. “But it's hard to keep it up at my age. I'm seventy-two.” She said it proudly, and added, “A few years ago I wouldn't have admitted it. But I've found that I like having people tell me I don't look my age.”

“That's what they always say about my grandfather,” Betsy said; she was on the floor with the cats, being shy.

“Your grandfather?” Emily frowned over the tea—she'd lost count of how many spoonsful she'd put in.

“Well—my mother's adopted father. Frank Robinson. He's seventy-seven and absolutely marvelous.”

“Oh, of course, Frank. Yes, I'm sure he is.” She threw in another spoonful and turned to Betsy. “You look quite pretty with the sun on you. Not nearly so much like Henry. You know, that dreadful woman stole my baby right from under my nose.”

Betsy looked wondering, as well she might.

“That Marion Palmer,” Emily explained. “She took her away in the night.” She sat down on a chair, shaken. It was something else she hadn't let herself think of in years. Oh, there would be a rough couple of hours ahead if she didn't stay on her guard.

“But she was legally adopted, wasn't she?” Betsy prodded when Emily said no more.

Emily sat looking at the cats. “Oh, yes,” she said finally. “In his position, there could be no other way, though in those days people weren't often so scrupulous. But the papers were all signed. And then—she told me, you see, that I could have a few days more—” She broke off, shaking her head. “It was the dead of winter, and we were in the middle of a spell of good weather. They told me it was better for her to leave with the baby right away, before the weather changed. Better for the baby!” she said bitterly, and she leaned forward and put a hand on Betsy's shoulder—an old woman with white hair in a fluff around her face, her skin criss-crossed with fine lines like a map, the tears in her eyes magnified by gold spectacles. “Can you imagine what it's like to wake up in the morning and reach for your baby to feed it and find it gone? It's like an amputation, that's what it's like.” She reached for her tissue again, blew her nose, and managed to smile. “Oh, I don't care anymore. It all worked out for the best, I suppose. Maybe it was even the humane way to do it” She could still feel it, that sick emptiness and the horrifying knowledge that it was to be permanent, and to get rid of the feeling she said, “I want to hear about you. Tell me all about yourself. You can tell me about your mother later when I'm a little more used to this.” She wiped her nose and aimed her tissue at the wastebasket, resolving not to need it again. “I'm sorry I'm being so emotional.” She made a basket and smiled. “Now!” she said, looking expectantly at her granddaughter.

“I never thought what effect this would have on you,” Betsy said. “It never occurred to me that—well, that you might not want to be found. Maybe because I never really thought I would find you.”

“I was a needle in a haystack, I suppose,” Emily said.

“It was sheer luck that I looked you up in the phone book. I spent all day trying to track you down, at the courthouse, at the Historical Society over in Haddam. And you're in
East
Haddam, of course.”

“But no one had so much as heard of me?”

“Not a soul. And there was no record of you at all.”

The kettle boiled, and Emily got up briskly, thinking:
Sic transit so-called gloria
.… “I used to pray for this day to come, Betsy,” she said. “And then I stopped letting myself think about it.” She poured water into the teapot; the familiar act restored her calm completely, and she said, “I'm glad you found me. Really I am. I'm delighted!” Her face creased into a wide smile. “I now realize a granddaughter is just what I've always wanted. Now tell me all about yourself.”

Betsy cuddled one of the cats, looking at a loss. A nice girl, Emily thought. Not used to talking about herself. Not much stage presence!

“Are you musical?” she encouraged her.

Betsy laughed. “Not very. I had the usual piano lessons, but I turned out bookish. I teach English at Syracuse University—eighteenth-century literature, Pope and Johnson chiefly.”

“Do you really?” Emily sprang up. “It's in the blood—look!” She left the room and came back with a pillow bearing a needlepoint motto: “It is better to live rich than to die rich.”

“Dr. Johnson.” Betsy smiled. “Did you do it?”

“Another of my little-old-lady vices—needlepoint. But go on. Do you like teaching English?”

“I suppose I do. I'd rather just read and write about it, but I need to make a living. I'm a good teacher.”

“And what does your husband do?”

Betsy flushed. It makes her look prettier, Emily thought. “I don't have a husband.”

“But—” Emily's gesture was meant to indicate Betsy's pregnancy; she regretted it as soon as it was made.

“Yes, I'm due at the end of January. I'll be bringing it up myself. Marriage wasn't feasible.”

She could see her granddaughter wondering: What about you?

“It's in the blood,” Emily said again with an ironic smile, and was relieved to see Betsy smile back. Tactless old bat, she admonished herself. She had to say one more thing. “Don't let anyone take it from you.”

“I won't. I'm looking forward to it. I think things must be different now than they were in nineteen twenty-two.”

“A damn sight different!” Emily poured tea, wondering what her life would have been had she kept the baby and raised it: God-awful. She could have told Betsy, but didn't, how her family, while not exactly casting her out as a sinner, had cold-shouldered her for years, not only for sowing and reaping her wild oat, but for going on the stage to complete her downfall. Enough was enough! Only her brother Henry had approved, his approval rising out of his own stage fever. (He'd never given in to it, and worked for the railroad all his life, a good son to his parents.) She could have told Betsy how her mother—Cora Ann Smatt Loftus—had held Helen Robinson up to her as an ideal—a role model, as they call it now—and how her father had said, as he put her on the train for Connecticut (alone, with her lunch in a basket and her clothes in a carton): “Em, if you like it up there at Myra's, you stay on.” He said it shamefaced (the poor man, he'd been put up to it by her mother), and she had refused to kiss him good-bye. But she'd seen him and Cora in Dayton often enough over the years, and though her mother had never really forgiven her for not leading the kind of normal life people like Helen Robinson led, Emily forgave her mother for her wishes and her father for going along. Nobody ever mentioned the baby to her, never so much as inquired whether it had been a boy or a girl, except Henry, once.

Betsy came to the table, and the cats stretched and reformed their pile.

“You're a brave young lady to be doing what you're doing,” Emily said.

“You mean the baby?” Betsy tossed it off as if it required no more courage than plucking a tomato from a vine. “I got myself into it. I'm not a teenager. I
wanted
a baby.”

“They say that every woman who has a baby wants it”

“Not
you
!”

“Well—” She spread her hands, disconcerted as always by their marks of age. Where were they, her beautiful white tapering hands? “I didn't care what happened, I suppose. I was so desperately in love.” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she sat looking at her hands, remembering what it was like to be young and willing on an unseasonably warm night in March.

Betsy put one of her plump, firm hands over Emily's. “Please,” she said warmly. “Will you please tell me who you are?”

Emily told. After the baby was bom, she had run away from East Haddam, to New York, at the age of eighteen. She liked the thriving river town, but she didn't like being Myra Bell's housemaid. Myra was her father's cousin, and she had a rooming house in town, the kind of place where the maid was run off her legs to maintain the house's reputation as a comfortable place to put up in. Myra sat in the front room entertaining the lodgers, chiefly traveling men; a few years before, when the opera house was open, they were usually actors, but the house had degenerated. While Myra made coffee and listened to men's jokes, Emily beat carpets and polished furniture and changed linen practically up to the day she gave birth. And she'd stayed on there awhile, not knowing what else to do.

Emily's parents had moved back to Ohio, where her mother's people were, and Emily had no wish to go to Ohio. She wanted to be a singer. She used to wander over to the old Goodspeed on her afternoons off and look up wistfully at its faded, lost glamour. It had closed two years ago. If only it were still going, she used to think. She saw herself wandering timidly into a rehearsal, being asked to sing.… The more she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, and finally one spring day she realized that it could happen—it could—though not in East Haddam. She would have to go to New York. New York! Of course! Was there any other way? Any other place?

She boarded the train, taking with her the suitcase she had lifted from Myra's attic, and she went directly from the train to the stage door of the old Music Box Theatre.

“And the rest is history,” she said to Betsy, not forgetting her ironic smile. “Well, no, I suppose it isn't. I was never what you'd call famous. But I made it. I was always there. Light opera, musical comedy, occasionally even grand opera, on tour—whatever there was, I was always there. They used to call me the eternal Emily. I didn't play leads, not usually. I played the second leads—the friend of the heroine, the villainess, the comic relief, the suffering sister, the woman of ill repute. I played them all. And touring? I loved to tour! No ties anywhere! I made sure I never got knotted up in any.” She paused, sipping her tea, absorbed.

“Wasn't it a lonely life?” Betsy looked ready to pity, and Emily jumped on her. Anything but that.

“Lonely! My goodness, no! I always had friends in the company, and if I was alone I didn't care. I
liked
my solitude. Ah, what a gift for a traveling singer, Betsy.”

“For anyone.”

Emily nodded, absent again. A solitary life was to her taste, and had been ever since she was willing to remember. It might sound like bravado, but it wasn't. Even now … this interesting granddaughter would be gone, finally, and she would be left to unravel the experience and reweave it into sense, alone with herself.

Someone had once told Emily her life seemed to encompass every interest but human interest, but this was nowhere near true. In addition to her house and her cats, her needlepoint, her collection of opera recordings, her visits to the public library, her morning
Times
, her solitary trips into Hartford for movies and lunches, or to the same English hotel every October—besides all that, there were her friends, and they loomed large in her life, always had.