Family Matters (25 page)

Roger kissed her on the lips. Crawford didn't look back; he stood at the end of the walk, stonily waiting.

“Betsy?” he called finally.

She broke away, breathless. “I'm coming, Crawford.” She made a face at Roger—wry, deprecating, chagrined—but it was doubtful he saw it in the dark. She went unsteadily down the path.

“Take my arm,” Crawford instructed.

Obediently, she did so, looking back at Roger, but he was just going in, outlined in the light from inside and then cutting it off as the door shut.

She took several deep breaths and said to Crawford, “It's cold out.”

“I suppose it is.” His voice implied that small talk was beneath him. They didn't say anything else until they got to Betsy's front porch. Crawford was breathing heavily, and he leaned the carton of books on the porch railing while she fumbled with her key, her breath visible in the light and her nose numb. Through the Brodskys' front window the television was a pastel square. Betsy wondered if they had waited up for her.

“It was awfully nice of you to carry those for me, Crawford,” she said, hoping he would dump the carton and leave.

“I don't mind.” He climbed the stairs behind her, grunting, and deposited the carton on the floor of the living room. Relieved of his load, he looked pleased, as if he hadn't known he could do it. “A cup of coffee would be most welcome, however,” he said, gazing around the room with interest.

“I was just about to offer you one,” Betsy said belatedly. All she could think of was Judd under the same circumstances. She could feel his hands on her still. She shouldn't have kissed Roger. The nippy air had sobered her, and she knew, with a kind of advance disgust, that she'd feel terrible about it in the morning.

Crawford looked through her bookcases while she made coffee in the kitchen. When she came in with two mugs, he turned to her and said, “Why do people always do this? Inspect each other's books?”

“I suppose they tell us a lot about each other.”

“It always amazes me”—he sat down on the sofa beside her—“when I catch myself doing something everyone else does. It's reassuring.”

Betsy didn't answer. She didn't want to talk about Crawford and what amazed and reassured him. She wanted him to drink his coffee and go so she could fall into bed.

“I'm very drunk, Betsy,” he said after he had taken a sip.

“So am I, Crawford.” The heat of the apartment had, in fact, restored the champagne's effects. Muzzy, she thought: it was one of her mother's words. Violet never got tipsy—only a little muzzy.

“But that doesn't have anything to do with what I'm going to say. Drunk or sober, it wouldn't make any difference.” Crawford spoke slowly, emphasizing each word, the way he did at department meetings when he was making an announcement. “It's not the booze talking.” He paused portentously. Betsy didn't know what to do. She was sure of one thing. Whatever it was he was going to say, she didn't want to hear it.

“You and I could get married, if you wanted to.”

It was worse than she'd expected. It was unimaginably bad.

“I need a wife,” he said. “My kids need a mother. And you—” He smiled sidewise at her. “You could use a husband.”

“Crawford—”

“Wait.” He set his mug down carefully and took her hand. “I know I'm considered a figure of fun by some people. I honestly don't know why. I am, after all, chairman of the English department at a large and respected university. I think of myself as an intelligent, ordinary, hardworking man. That's all I want to be. I don't understand why people think I'm pompous or silly. I hope you don't think it.”

“I don't, Crawford,” Betsy said, ashamed of herself because she did. She had never heard him speak so simply. It seemed to be from the heart. But she felt hysterical laughter gather in her.

“We could be happy, Betsy. I've put on a little weight, but I think I could get rid of it if I were happier. I'm a good father. Of course, a father can't do everything. Children need a mother. And I think you and I, together—”

She released it, but it wasn't laughter. It was the torrent of tears she had anticipated when she put her hand on the pile of children's books, but it was Crawford who released it, not Winnie-the-Pooh or Doctor Dolittle. She put her hands over her face and wept, rocking forward and back.

Crawford patted her awkwardly and then put his arms around her. “I'm sorry, Betsy, it was just a thought.” He cradled her, and she leaned her head on his chest and sobbed harder. She thought she might sit there forever, sobbing, until he started kissing her neck. Then she sat up with a start and moved away from him, but she continued to cry, pressing her two hands to her mouth.

Crawford sat facing her, looking drunk and sorrowful. “I'm really sorry, Betsy. I'm not doing anything right. Maybe I should have said that I'm very, very fond of you, and have been for some time.”

She let him hold her again, she felt so sorry for him, but she couldn't stop the tears, and they streamed down her face onto his sweater. He patted her back, but he didn't attempt to kiss her again. She tried to set her mind on something neutral, but every aspect of her life struck her as tragic. She reflected that not long ago she had thought herself happy, and she was appalled. Her mother dying, the gossip about her pregnancy spread all over campus, her bastard baby due in a couple of months, her job in jeopardy, her lover gone off with another woman, and now Crawford wanted to make her Betsy Divine, mother of his children and supervisor of his diets. Everything that came into her mind brought fresh tears. Life held no comforts.

Eventually, she managed to give Crawford his coat and maneuver him toward the door. “I'm sorry, Betsy,” he said again. “I still think it might work out.”

The tears slipped down her cheeks, and she shook her head back and forth until he turned and went down the stairs. Then she closed the door behind him and sank down on the rug, crying softly. It wasn't fair, she thought to herself, fully conscious of the childish irrationality of the words:
Its not far, its not fair!
As if, in the years beyond childhood, fairness ever had anything to do with it. But it's
not
, she thought stubbornly (her tears subsiding, and only the sound of crying left), it's not fair—that the man she wanted languished in the arms of another woman, while the man she didn't want carried her books and proposed marriage.

She would have liked to call Emily and ask her where she'd gotten her strength, but—drunk though she was—she couldn't bring herself to drag an old woman out of a sound sleep at midnight to listen to her angry woes. She took them to bed with her instead and hugged her pillow for comfort—as, back in her
Doctor Dolittle
days, she used to hug her doll.

The semester ended two weeks later—two weeks in which Betsy scurried in and out of the Hall of Languages as if escaping from snipers, arriving as her classes began and disappearing immediately after, avoiding her own office, where Roger could waylay her, and the English department offices, where Crawford lurked. She tried to make herself stop doing it, to face up to life instead of hiding from it, to open herself up to experience for her baby's sake. “You'll smother it!” she told herself in her grandfather's words, but she continued to sneak around, and, at the end of her last exam, she drove to her grandfather's house to curl up in the chair in Violet's room and mark papers while her mother dozed.

As the winter days went by, as the sad Christmas came and went, as the snow piled up like cement along the streets, Betsy spent more and more time in the quiet, dim-lit sickroom. Though Violet's coming death and Frank's hostility lodged there with her, it was the place where she felt safe. “It's ridiculous to drive over here every day on these roads,” her grandfather said one January afternoon, and eventually she brought a suitcase and lived there for days at a stretch, sleeping in her old room with the grieving Virgin and the broken rocker, and spending the days with her mother. She worked on her Boswell article, or she read, or she talked to Terry—or she simply sat, watching her mother sleep. Her grandfather often sat there, too, but across the room, and they seldom spoke. She was very pregnant, and very large. In his presence, her big belly embarrassed her, and she could see that the signs of her pregnancy irritated him. If she, on standing, pressed her hand to the pain in the small of her back, if she kicked off her shoes to ease her swollen feet, if she pushed away her dinner uneaten, he would turn away from her with thinly disguised disgust. His protest against her daily drive in the snow hadn't, she suspected, been an invitation to move in, but she had willfully interpreted it as such, and she defied him (sitting across the room, watching him across the sleeping form of Violet) to cast her out But she sat with the afghan tucked around her, to hide the evidence of her rebellion against his wishes. “Your great-grandchild!” she pleaded silently, and in vain. “Your own flesh and blood!” He kept his eyes turned from her, and Betsy thought she began to see what Emily had been up against.

Meanwhile, the promised pain had invaded Violet, and it was necessary to keep her almost constantly drugged. As they watched her sleep, they could see its approach. She became restless, her thin hands—white and small, and mapped now with blue veins—groped among the blankets as if searching for something lost, and if her eyes opened the look in them would be anguished and bewildered.

“Are you in pain, Mrs. Ruscoe?” Terry would say, and give her an injection in one of the fine blue veins, and Violet would sleep again.

One January day, Betsy rose late and breakfasted alone in the kitchen. Sleep was a struggle. It was hard to settle her heavy body comfortably in the narrow old bed, and she tended to fall asleep toward dawn and wake up with the full snowy light of late morning in her face—greeted by the silent scorn of her grandfather, who had the elderly habit of early rising.

Though it was close to noon, she felt as if she hadn't slept at all, and when Frank came into the kitchen she was yawning over her coffee.

“Takes a lot out of you, does it?”

She smiled at him. “It kicks all night.”

“Hmm,” he said, and then gave a belated, grudging smile. “You look a lot like your mother, when she was—” He gestured vaguely.

“Pregnant with me?” she finished for him, pleased.

“Mm. She was huge. She and your father were living in Rochester, and your grandmother and I used to go up and see them.” He didn't sit down, but he leaned against the counter with his hands in his pockets. Betsy rejoiced. He hadn't talked to her—really talked to her, about anything but her mother's illness—in months. “She was so big we expected twins at least, but she looked so pretty, so young and lighthearted through it all—your mother—”

He had to turn away.

“Grandpa—”

“I'll just go and see if the mail's here.”

He wouldn't let her comfort him. He was, solely, the father of his dying girl; grandfatherhood didn't interest him, and great-grandfatherhood repelled him. Betsy sighed and went up to Violet's room. She would never forgive him for not telling her, for not including among his occasional reminiscences the fact that her mother was his and Emily's child. She would not forget his hostility toward her own child—that the public man who cared what people thought had got the better, even briefly, of her loving grandfather. Poor Emily, she said to herself, poor Emily. She would call Emily later when she went over to her apartment to water the plants and pick up her mail.

Terry gave up the chair when she came in and made a whispered inquiry about Betsy's condition. It was her theory that the baby was due any day, though officially there was over a week to go.

“Anything yet? Any pains?”

“No.”

“Won't be long, though,” she said. She kept her voice soft, knowing instinctively that Frank disapproved. Or did they discuss it? Betsy wondered. Her grandfather had become an enigma to her.

Terry went downstairs in a wave of perfume. Every day at this time she made a high-protein milk shake for Violet to drink on waking—and they would all watch anxiously as Violet, sip by sip, got it down. She had lost all interest in food. “She's trying to starve herself to death,” Frank had said once, and they had retreated in shocked silence from the idea, and no one had mentioned it since. But it seemed to Betsy to be true. In the last few weeks, death seemed to have crept perceptibly closer, to have taken part of her already. Her pale skin that had been so firm seemed suddenly slack, with furrows from nose to mouth and between her eyebrows. She was thinning out, looking more like Emily. Ah, if only Emily would come. Betsy sat in her chair, imagining Violet waking to find her mother at her bedside instead of Terry with a milk shake. Her face would get radiant and girlish, all the lines smoothed out, and she would roll out of bed with her old, easy gusto, scrub her face with hot water and soap in the bathroom, and march downstairs barefoot to make a big pot of vegetarian bean soup. “Good for what ails you,” Violet would say in her old voice, raising a spoon to her mouth. “This is just what I needed.”

Betsy woke with a start. The book she'd been trying to read had fallen from her lap, and Violet was murmuring from the bed. Betsy thought she was asleep, but when she went over to her she saw that her eyes were open.

“I want my mama,” Violet whispered once, and then, more loudly, “Betsy, I want my mamma! I want Emily! Why won't she come and see me?” As her voice rose to a wail, Frank came upstairs and stood in the doorway, pale as death.

Chapter Eight

Emily

Emily enjoyed her house in winter as much as she did in summer. Once the snow fell, it stayed—in large, bare tracts across the backyards, crisscrossed with animal tracks, and on the back of the dolphin weather vane like foam, and frozen into brown-sugar ruts on the streets, where the white houses stood stark and clean against it.