Family Matters (21 page)

“It's a lovely place,” Betsy said.

“I'll leave it to you!” Emily exclaimed, for the pleasure of seeing her granddaughter horrified at the idea. She went on quickly, “I never had a home before, after I left my parents' house. Furnished apartments aren't homes. Rooming houses. Hotels. I'd saved my money. I knew what I wanted. I'd admired this house when I was just a girl. I was seventeen when I came to East Haddam. It was spring and the town was so pretty. My favorite buildings were that huge cake of an opera house and this place. I used to take tremendous walks on my time off, all that spring and summer and into the fall, until I got so big Myra wouldn't let me.…” She lapsed back into memory, recalling Myra Bell's attempts to humiliate her, and her inability, surprising even to herself, to feel any humiliation at all. She had felt only dreary sorrow—more like disappointment—and even that could lift at the oddest times. On her walks around town, for instance, the lines of this old house had gladdened her heart. But she felt no shame. Hadn't it been a child of love? That thought had warmed her for twenty years, until in the space of a few minutes—that afternoon in 1941, at the Onondaga Hotel, when she had retreated under the bedclothes and refused to come out until he left and took his lies and false promises with him—it had turned chilling. Sometimes she cursed her innocence, and sometimes she thought that without it her life would have been empty.

Betsy did more leafing through the scrapbooks. Admirable girl! She had come dressed for dinner, had put on earrings and stockings and ridiculously high heels, considering her condition.… Well brought up, thank God. They looked together at a picture of Emily from 1932—at her height, such as it was, when she was in New York and regularly on Broadway, in small roles or the chorus. Betsy looked fondly at her sculptured curls, her eyelashes, the pretty curve of her lips.

“You were just lovely, Emily,” Betsy said sincerely. “My mother was very pretty when she was young, but you were beautiful.”

Emily smiled with pleasure. How long since anyone had told her that? To think she had been eager for this agreeable girl to leave. There would be time enough to mull things over in solitude. The thing to do now was to keep her here as long as she could.

Betsy was saying, “I guess the family beauty got watered down a bit as it was passed along.” Ruefully, wistfully, she examined the old, yellowed pictures of Emily in the book.

Emily said, firmly, “You are very attractive. You have a nice, fresh bloom about you, Betsy. And when you smile and let your face light up—”

Betsy gave an exaggerated smirk, waving away the compliment, and turned the page. “Somehow I'd expected to see you in the role of Violetta, in
La Traviata
. Isn't that a good lyric soprano part? But you don't seem to have played it at all.”

Emily's smile went bitter, “it's not exactly one of my favorites.”

“But didn't you name the baby—”

“Ah, I was a pathetic little thing, Betsy. He took me to the opera—it was
La Traviata
—the night your mother was conceived. That's why I say the whole thing was Helen's fault, though I don't mean only the opera ticket. That was just the end of it. It was her coldness, too, and the way she carried on about her baby's death. And something else—there were times I thought she engineered the whole thing for perverse reasons of her own. She practically threw us together, and that's the absolute truth.”

Emily frowned peevishly; Helen was probably the only person she had ever hated. “But the opera—she came down with one of her imaginary illnesses and refused to go, so he took me, little Emily the music lover!” Emily gave a harsh agitated bark meant to be taken for a chuckle. “Oh, I can laugh now, but at the time I saw that night as the most important night of my life. And would you believe he kept me dangling for twenty years?” Her guard dropped with a crash, and she raced on. “Until the day I met him in Syracuse, so I could see my daughter. He came right out then and told me—for Violet's sake, was what he said. We were going to leave together at last, after twenty years of promises, but he thought it over, and he couldn't do it. Overnight, it was finished. Oh God, the scene I made, but of course there was nothing left for us. The worst of it was I had to go on stage that night—”

“Emily—who? You can't mean my grandfather?”

“You never knew, did you?” she went on recklessly. Let the girl know. All the old resentment rose up and choked discretion. “He wouldn't have the guts to tell you. And Helen—you'd never get it out of her, that's for sure. She thought it was the end of the world—and then she decided it wasn't and she devoted herself to punishing us both. She'd found her calling in life! She only adopted the baby to spite me.” Emily smiled, with her hand pressed hard to her heart. “Oh, yes, Betsy, Frank is your grandfather—yes, indeed!” And her eyes behind her spectacles gleamed with something like glee, like relief, at seeing the skeleton tumble at their feet.

Chapter Seven

Betsy

Betsy had been back at school for over two months when Crawford Divine's prophecies of scandal came true.

Until then, the semester had gone quietly enough. Betsy had settled into pregnancy as into a comfortable garment, and ever since the baby had begun to kick she had lost that dazed feeling the book had warned her about, of being a cow in a pasture, or a madonna in a frame. It was as if the baby kicked her into alertness. At school she was. energetic and even amiable, even in the Johnson-Boswell seminar for which she'd thought she'd lost her enthusiasm. Boswell seemed no longer a dull dog but the delightfully neurotic reporter who always tickled her. “Remember the dignity of human nature,” he had written in his youthful enthusiasm for virtue. “Remember everything may be endured.”

Betsy wondered what Boswell would have done, if he had been a woman and in her situation? what Johnson would have done? what Rose Deasy would have done, pregnant out of wedlock and forced to face the world with the wages of her sin? Thrown herself into the Thames, probably. Boswell and Johnson would have gotten out of it, somehow; Rose Deasy would have perished on it. Betsy thought of all the women in literature who had been in the predicament, the Hetties and Effies and Hesters and Carries. She thought of Emily and her lasting bitterness and regret, and she patted the growing mound of her belly with affection and joy. It was good to be no longer childless—to be childful, to know the child was dreaming within her. Her own dreams became gentle and childlike and gay—dreams of small animals, of quiet, enclosed places, of celebrations.

At the university, her usual claque of prize students was on hand, hanging on her words but not afraid to argue. Every professor had them, but hers tended to be female, vocal, and exceptionally bright; there was a shortage of women teachers to rally round. One of her students, an intense girl named Rachel Grace who was actively committed to a staggering variety of causes, was doing her thesis on Boswell under Betsy's direction, and the project had roused again Betsy's interest in an article she was planning when Judd moved in, on Boswell's relationship with Belle de Zuylen. She might even get another book put of it, about Boswell's women and what his relationships with them revealed about him. She began to glow faintly with the ambition she had burned with before her life split into pieces; the pieces were reassembling in (she felt) a neater, more interesting pattern. Something was tightening up inside her that had snapped and gone loose.

Violet continued to sink, but so slowly, so imperceptibly that it seemed years, decades, whole lifetimes must pass before she died. She grew thinner and had given up candy bars. She slept a lot, with the help of drugs. She was gentle and at peace. Even her demands to see Emily had diminished to mere wistfulness. She seemed satisfied with the account of Emily's unearthing and with the two letters Emily had written her: “My dear, long-lost daughter, What a satisfaction it is to me to have news of you after all these years, and to know that I have a family at last, how I wish I could be with you. I wish it were possible.…” Betsy had emphasized Emily's elderliness, her reluctance to travel, her goodwill toward her daughter. She hadn't told Violet of Emily's fear of death—both her own and Violet's—nor about Frank, and she didn't let her know that Emily spent the month of October in England as she always did. (She suppressed the postcard, addressed to Violet at her address as all the letters were, which said: “Having a wonderful time resting up for the hard winter ahead, wish you could all be with me,” marveling at Emily's oblivious cruelty.) Nor had she reproached Emily for any of these negligences, now that she officially understood her grandmother's many hesitations about traveling to Violet's bedside. She understood Emily, but she thought she was damned unreasonable all the same.

We found her too late, she thought regretfully in her more indulgent moments. Emily was like a prisoner who had spent her life in jail and who, on release, can't face life on the outside: before long, she's back in. Betsy had watched her grandmother enact this ritual over and over again during their talks—back off and advance and back off again, in the end leaving the biggest barrier intact, her refusal to see Violet. Betsy thought she could wear her down, but Violet's time might be running out.

“What is she like?” Violet asked her many times, waiting with childish impatience for Betsy's answer. It was a fairy story, a bedtime story to be told and told again.

“She's like a grandmother in a book,” Betsy said sometimes. “She lives in a narrow brick house with a fanlight over the door and an apple tree in the backyard. She has three cats named Jennie, Nellie, and Geraldine. She's tall and very slender, with fluffy white hair.”

“And she wanted to know all about me?”

“Everything,” Betsy lied. Emily's indifference to the grown, dying Violet was something else she kept to herself. “I sent her some pictures of you. She has always had a great love for you, Mom. She calls what happened the greatest tragedy of her life—giving you up.” That, at least, was true.

“Then why won't she come to see me?” Violet asked this only once or twice, in the beginning.

“She's old, Mom, and very set in her ways. She's afraid to do something that would upset her too much. She seems to have a bad heart.”

Violet accepted this with the same pacific acquiescence with which she accepted everything. Betsy wondered if she sensed it, that Emily couldn't bear to see her die.

When she pondered all the things Emily had told her, Betsy saw them—as she had seen her life with Judd, now so distant—as a series of photographs. Old ones this time, browning and age-speckled: Frank, looking like the Arrow collar man, his hair abundant then and slicked back, his eager eyes bright with passion and ambition; his cold, drab wife, with the maniacal gleam in her eyes and the corners of her mouth just beginning to turn down hard; and Emily dressed for the opera, radiant with the promise of it all. “I was under the spell of the music,” Emily had said, her neatly wrinkled face rapt even now. “It seemed heroic to be together.”

To Betsy, these portraits were unreal—pictures from a novel, or from someone else's family album. She found it hard to connect young Frank the seducer—the cad who had tormented two women—with old Frank, her sad-eyed grandfather. “He kept me dangling for twenty years,” Emily had said. “He was always going to leave that woman. For years, we used to meet, whenever we could. He never loved her. She was his duty—so he said. But his duty was to me, Betsy. I can't get over thinking that.”

“So it's because of him that you won't come and see my mother,” Betsy had said, meaning only to clarify. But Emily had taken it as attack.

“That's half of it, of course. And why not? He ruined my life, young lady! If it weren't for Frank Robinson, would I be a sour old woman living alone? He's put me where I am, and I'll stay here. Why should I go back now? After thirty-five years? Why should I enter the house that should have been mine? I gave up my life for him, I gave up my baby on the promise that we'd all be together someday—”

The old woman had collapsed in sobs, and Betsy saw that her various griefs had stayed fresh all these years, as perfectly preserved as paintings in a closed cave. Her anger had kept her thin and upright and energetic—even, in a peculiar way, strong and happy. Her grandmother seemed the least theatrical of people—reserved and composed rather than, like Violet, self-dramatizing and volatile—but they kept the curtain down. These revelations, these tears, were terrible blows to Emily's pride. Betsy almost regretted that she had tracked her to her snug fortress and forced them from her. She put her arms around her grandmother, but the sobbing had already begun to subside, and Emily felt bony and rigid and almost intangibly distanced.

“May I tell my mother I found you, Emily? Even that much would make her happy.”

“Tell her, Betsy.” Emily had wiped her eyes, but they looked older and reddened. “Make it all right, tell her I'll write her. I
will
write her, that's all I can do. But don't hate me for it. I just haven't got the strength.”

Tenderly, Betsy reassured her, wondering how she could make it all right. But she had forgotten Violet's saintly passivity.

Not only did Violet not question Emily's curious reserve, but she hadn't said a word about Betsy's pregnancy. Betsy wondered whether she honestly hadn't noticed, or refused to take it in, or accepted it as a fact to be absorbed but not discussed. It worried Betsy more than any of Violet's symptoms because it made her unlike herself. Violet had always been dreamy and placid and sweet-tempered, but she had never been incurious or unobservant. The draining away of her vigor Betsy could accept; her withdrawal from life was harder.

Betsy wanted to tell her that Frank was her true father, but she couldn't find words. And she had an uneasy feeling that she ought to check with Frank; it was his secret. But she couldn't imagine saying such a thing to him—not any longer. What she had learned about him made him remote from her. All Emily's years of hope and disappointment and sorrow were stacked up behind him when she looked at him now, and she couldn't help but think of Judd. She remembered, with chagrin, the times she had tried to see a resemblance between the two men, grandfather and lover—and there it had been all along, their essential sameness. They were men who deserted their women in a crisis. Even now, Betsy thought wryly, even now he's deserting me—meaning Frank and his silent, ashamed outrage at her condition.