Family Matters (2 page)

“But, Mom, she's probably—you know—dead by now.” It was a difficult, desperate word to use, in any context. “She'd be a very old woman.”

Violet shook her head. “No. I've got it figured out. She was probably an extremely young girl. Who else would find herself in that predicament but a young, innocent girl?” Violet raised a finger in the air. “I have a picture of her in my mind. A young girl no more than eighteen. She looks very much like you did at eighteen, or like I did. But dressed a la nineteen twenty-two—bobbed hair, dropped waist, trying hard to be sophisticated. But a sad little girl underneath …” She laced her fingers together again, neatly. “So—” As if her sentimental vision were conclusive proof. “If she was no more than eighteen when I was born, she'd be no more than seventy-three today, and probably less. I see her as a
very
young girl. She may be barely seventy.”

“But I thought there was some story—” Betsy faltered. Her mother had told her the tale of her adoption years ago, when she was in college, and she was embarrassed to find she had forgotten most of it. “Wasn't she married? What was it? She and her husband lived next door to your parents—I mean Grandma and Grandpa—and they couldn't keep the baby—you, I mean—for some reason, and—what was the story?”

Violet dismissed all this with another flutter of her hand. “All nonsense,” she said complacently, and went on, “Now, Grandma never spoke a
word
to me about this. It was Aunt Marion who told me—feeling it was her duty before I got married to tell me I was adopted—and it was. A child should always be informed of such things. Not that I was a child. I was nineteen years old by then, and working. Oh, God, Betsy! The shock!”

She leaned back on her pillow and closed her eyes. She wasn't bothering with her glasses most of the time, and her eyelids looked large and creamy, framed by wrinkles and by the two wings of her eyelashes. “I'll never forget it, to my dying day.” Tears had come to her eyes when she shut them, and she dabbed with a clean handkerchief: a theatrical woman.

“But how could you not have known?” Betsy demanded. “For nineteen years! No one let it slip? There were no hints? It seems incredible.”

“Betsy, you have no idea what a refined family you come from,” Violet said, with a tiny, ironic smile. “How
genteel
everyone could be—especially in those days. Adoption meant there was illegitimacy somewhere, and what could be a worse disgrace than that? That's why I don't believe that story,” she continued. “Why would a respectable woman give up her baby? It's just not plausible. No, Marion made that part up, so the story wouldn't seem so—low. But it was the part that got to me, that this woman didn't
have
to give up her baby for adoption. Until I realized, thinking about it while I lie here, that her version was cleaned up for my sake, and I began to see my mother as a young girl, confused, seduced—oh, who knows? But with no alternative but to give me up. And here was this childless couple—your grandma and grandpa—their only child had died at birth, and they wanted a baby more than anything. So you see.”

Violet's hand hovered over the last Mars Bar and finally took it. Betsy threw the empty cardboard and cellophane package into the wastebasket. It overflowed with wrappers.

“Will you find her for me? It's important.” Violet chewed steadily, but her eyes were troubled, and she kept them eagerly on Betsy's face. “You know how important it is, honey. Everything is important to me now. Before I die. I want her.”

The tears came again and were blinked back before she took another bite. Betsy was overcome with sadness and had to blink back her own before she could speak. It was hopeless, of course. It was pathetic, just as the hand embroidery on Violet's bedjacket was pathetic, and the cheery books by her bed, and the damned candy bars. Nothing seemed worth doing, worth anything, just at that moment. There was death all over the room, but she spread her hands and said, trying to dole out equal parts of hope and deflation, “I'll try, Mom. It's all I can do.” Was it better that her mother hoped or didn't hope? Did it matter? Did it matter?

“Don't tell your grandfather,” Violet said, looking pleased and sitting up straighter. “I don't want to hurt him. He doesn't even know I know. And that article—it says there might be resentment on the part of the adoptive parents.”

“But if I should find her—”

Violet considered, carefully. “He may have to know then, but let's wait until it's absolutely necessary.” She lowered her voice. “The worst of it is he may even know who she is, where she is. He could give us a good lead. But we can't ask him.”

“You're sure? If he knew her name it would save a lot of time.”

“Promise me you won't say anything to him, Betsy! Or to Marion! She'd be blabbing it to Grandpa before you could draw breath.”

She was agitated, and Betsy soothed her. She patted her hand. Violet finished her candy bar in one bite.

“Just tell me what you know,” Betsy said, looking for paper. She had scholarly habits; she would write it all down. She found blue, stationery across the room on her mother's dresser.

“There's pens in the top drawer.”

Betsy groped and found one. “All right. Now.”

“Well, my parents—I mean Grandma and Grandpa—”

“I know what you mean, you don't have to say that every time. If we keep qualifying what we mean we'll never get anywhere.”

There was a pause.

“I'm sorry, Mother.”

Violet sighed. “Try to be patient with me, Betsy.” She leaned forward to Betsy and stretched out a hand, but didn't touch her. “I'm sorry I dragged you out of bed. There are maroon shadows under your eyes.”

“It's okay, Mom, honestly it is.”

“Are you using that moisturizer, Betsy? It's important that you keep your looks if you want to—to—” Keep your looks and keep your man: the shadow of Judd reduced Violet to incoherence because the last thing she wanted Betsy to do was keep Judd. Betsy, who personally felt she didn't have much worth keeping in the way of looks, saw the problem bogging her mother down. The moisturizers and cold creams and mascara wands and blushers she pressed on her daughter were keeping that man in her bed. Betsy stood up and hugged her mother with an affection that was suddenly exuberant. “I'm using it, don't worry about it. Just tell me what you know about my grandmother.”

Violent returned the embrace with surprising strength, but then she lay back, looking drained. She stared at Betsy. “Your grandmother!”

Betsy nodded, pleased with the notion. “My grandmother! Maybe she'll leave me all her money, maybe she's really wealthy, maybe I'm the granddaughter she's been longing for.”

Violet giggled weakly. “Oh, Betsy. Do you know, I never thought about her being your grandmother. Isn't that odd? Oh, we do get self-centered when we get old.” She smiled happily and settled into the pillows with a contented wiggle. Her bouts of contentment always amazed Betsy. She's
dying
, she thought.

“Well. Anyway.” Violet frowned, addressing herself to the paper in Betsy's lap. “My parents and I lived at six sixty-six Spring Street. I'm not sure I'd remember the address if it weren't for those three sixes—we moved from there when I was little. And my real mother—we can call her Emily, by the way—”

“Why Emily?”

“That was her name.”

“How do you know?”

“Marion told me.”

“You know her
name
?”

“Well, I'm not at all sure of her last name—wait, Betsy, we'll get to that part. I'm ahead of myself. Wait.” Violet touched her brow with her long forefinger and closed her eyes. “She must have lived at six sixty-eight, on the right of our house as you went up the hill because—wait, the numbers went down—yes, the Rebhahns lived on the left, and that must have been six sixty-four, in fact I know it was.” She opened her eyes, triumphant. “Yes. She lived at six sixty-eight Spring Street—
if
it's true that she lived next door, and I think it was. That has the ring of truth. When you tell a lie, you keep to the truth as much as you can.” You should know, Betsy thought. “I suspect Marion only lied about the marriage. Let's accept the rest as true.”

“What else can we do? We've got to have something to go on,” Betsy said, thinking: hopeless, hopeless.

“Right. So she was a young, unmarried girl living at six sixty-eight Spring Street, and her name was Emily something, like Lofting or Loftig.”

“Aunt Marion told you this?”

“She told me the name, but I didn't catch it right. To tell you the truth, I didn't pay that much attention. I was in shock, Betsy. Imagine if you were to find out that
I
wasn't
your
mother? Or that Daddy was never your father?”

Betsy couldn't imagine it. She brushed the attempt away. Besides, anytime she wished she could look in the mirror and see her mother's bird face—eyes and beak, sharpened.

“And, of course, this was thirty-five, thirty-six years ago that she told me. But it was something like that. Lofting. Or Loftig. There were a lot of German families in the neighborhood. Say Loftig. But check Lofting.”

“I will.” Violet watched anxiously as Betsy wrote them both down. “Anything else?”

“Not really.” Violet's eyes became faraway. “Except I saw her once—did I tell you that?”

“Really saw her?” How she dramatizes, Betsy thought. “Really? Or imagined—wished—”

“No, really. I was working at Chappell's, in hats. I made fourteen dollars a week, Betsy. Can you imagine that?” She chuckled, but it was a faraway chuckle. Betsy had heard many times, especially lately, about her mother's brief fourteen-dollar-a-week job, and the lunch she treated herself to every payday: a chicken salad sandwich, iced tea, and a hot-fudge sundae at Schrafft's, all for fifty cents. “So one day your grandpa came in, and there was a woman with him. I was kind of surprised to see him, but I guessed he was going out to lunch, and maybe the woman was a client. He came in the front door with this woman. It was right near the hat department. He didn't come over to me or anything. They just stood there, he and I waved and smiled, but the woman just stood looking at me, and then they left. Then, a couple of months later, when my aunt told me I was adopted, she said remember that woman in the store with Frank? Well, that was her. Emily. She wanted to have a look at me.”

“But what was she like?”

“Well—I didn't notice her much, Betsy. Why would I? It was my father I kept looking at, trying to figure out what on earth he was doing there and why he didn't come over. I asked him, by the way, and he said something about this client he took out to lunch and she wanted to stop in and pick up something for somebody, a gift, I don't know, and then changed her mind. I hardly remember. But the woman … I know she was tall, like us, and she had a lot of brown hair. I have no idea how old she was. She looked very chic, I think. Most of all I remember she looked
happy
. Now isn't that odd? She looked—joyful. Seeing me, I suppose. Seeing with her own eyes that her daughter was well, was grown-up and healthy, had parents who looked after her, with your grandpa a prosperous lawyer—a pillar of the community and all that. I suppose. But I could tell, even though she did nothing but stand there and look, that she was full of happiness, and then she took my dad's arm and they walked away.”

Betsy looked at her piece of blue stationery. It read:

1922

668 Spring St., Syracuse

Emily Lofting/Loftig—unmarried?

1941, seen Syracuse, Chappell's Dep't. Store, with Grandpa tall—brown hair—joyful—chic.

“It's not an awful lot to go on Mother.”

“It's enough,” Violet said confidently. “The woman in that article had less. What did you do with it? Read it.”

“It's right here. I will.” Betsy folded the clipping inside the blue stationery.

“Will you get started right away?” Violet was smiling with excitement.

“I give my last exam tomorrow—today. I could start Monday.”

“Start with the voting lists. The city directory. Birth records.”

“What does your birth certificate say?” Betsy asked suddenly.

Violet looked at her wide-eyed. “I don't know.”

“You must know. You had to have it when you got married, didn't you? Where is it?”

Violet was thinking. “Grandma. Grandma. Your grandma. She went down to the county clerk's office …” There was a pause while she frowned and tapped her forehead with her finger. “Think. Think.” She shook her head. “I can't remember. I will, though, and I'll call you.”

“We'll be over for dinner Saturday.”

“But not a word in front of your grandpa!”

“No, I know.”

“Oh, what was it? My mother
did
something about my birth certificate when I got married. Now what?
What?
”

“It'll come to you. I'll see if I can get a copy of it at the courthouse.” Betsy stood up. “Can I go home to bed?” She grinned, lest she be accused of testiness.

Violet stopped frowning and smiled back. “You've been wonderful, honey, coming over here and listening to my ramblings.”

“Mother, I'm fascinated!”

“Oh, good, good, good,” she said with the gleefulness which, Betsy thought, nothing could ever diminish. “Now just do me one favor. In the kitchen, up in the cupboard over the toaster? There's a big bag of M and M's. Get it for me?”

Betsy got it, in the dark, thinking: A whole package of Mars Bars and God knows what else and now a bag of M & M's. What's it all doing to her? But she gave it to her mother, even ripping off a corner, feeling betrayed, feeling also that she should be amused, but not being. Violet poured herself a handful, greedily. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”