Family Matters (26 page)

Inside, she kept it good and warm. She ate bread and thick soup and rich desserts, and she drank sherry, always putting on a few pounds. She would pat her plumper hips and say, “I'm at my hibernating weight.” The word “hibernating” was not lightly chosen; there was truth in it. The winters seemed to her longer and harder, and there were weeks at a time when she didn't venture out. Groceries were delivered. Most of her friends had gone south. There was nothing much to go out and risk a fall on the ice for. So she stayed inside, hugging herself to herself like a small animal in its den.

This winter she had something else to do besides listening to music and reading and eating. She had heard Betsy's silent reproaches, and, trying to nerve herself up for a spring trip to Violet's bedside, she had been forcing out her memories and looking at them hard—the bad memories, the ones she had spent thirty-five years successfully repressing, until Betsy found her and brought them all back.

And the snow … She looked out at the snow and let her mind go slack, and the snow drew the memories from her. It had been winter the first time she saw Frank Robinson—really
saw
him. Until then, she had considered the young married couple next door to be unutterably boring. So that was marriage! Helen with her dreary pregnancy, Frank with his dull job in a law office. No, thanks! Then, in November, Helen's baby had been born and died, and the Robinsons took on a new interest for her. There were rumors of the ferocity of Helen's grief, tales of madness. Helen's sister Marion (reputedly no better than she should be) came from New York to nurse her. Once Emily heard hysterical sobbing through the windows. Frank Robinson took to walking in his backyard at dusk, smoking cigarettes under the bare trees in the cold. Brooding. That was where she used to watch him, from her bedroom window, and he looked different. He struck Emily as a romantic figure, a man of sorrows. She thought of Mr. Rochester and his mad wife.

Gradually Helen seemed better, and her sister returned to New York. But Frank continued to brood under the cherry trees. Once Emily had seen him out there, bare-headed, in the midst of a snowstorm; whatever his secret sorrow, it must be tragic indeed to drive him out in the snow. The gossip had been that Helen blamed him—his heredity, specifically—for the baby's death and now barred him from her bed. Emily kept her eye on him, inventing twists on the tragedy, and one evening at dusk she put on her boots and went boldly out to talk to him. She had never conversed with a man of sorrows. They talked of music out in the cold. He too was a fan of Victor Herbert. Emily had gone to see
The Red Mill
with her parents, downtown at the Empire; he had been there, too. They talked until her mother called her, and she went to the woodshed for an unnecessary armful of wood before she returned to the house.

She began to seek him out, listening each evening for the dreadful noises of his car coming home, and before long she was officially the Robinsons' little friend—running errands for Helen during the worst of the winter, keeping her company after school, singing for them in the evenings (even as a girl she was renowned in the neighborhood for her voice). Her parents approved of their daughter's friendship with a mature, domestic woman; they believed Emily, who was frivolous, could profit from her association with Helen, who was anything but.

Emily didn't like Helen. She didn't like her looks, for one thing. She looked more like an old maid than the wife of a man like Frank—though she was at her prettiest when she was sick, Emily thought charitably. Against the stark white of nightgown and sheets, she looked colorful by contrast. Her hair wouldn't stay skinned back into its mousy knot, so she wore it in two loose braids along her cheeks, and it softened her features. But she could never be called a pretty woman, Emily used to say to herself with satisfaction—she was too
ovine
, like old pictures of Queen Victoria. And she never had much to say. She couldn't even show her gratitude for Emily's favors; she had an aristocratic way of accepting them as her due, as if she really were Queen Victoria.

But it was Frank Emily was doing the favors for. She began slowly to worship him. She had never seen a man so tall and handsome, and, at twenty-two, he made the raw boys in her high school class look like babies—and act like babies, too, with their stupid jokes, their shallowness. Eddie Mason, who played football and whom Emily used to consider a god, now seemed a silly ape with pimples on his neck. She quit the dramatic club at school (though she stayed in the chorus, where she was principal soloist) and spent her spare time hanging around the Robinsons.

The Robinsons couldn't afford a hired girl. Frank was just a law clerk, and Helen hadn't—as Emily's mother put it—“brought anything” to the marriage. Emily often helped Helen in the kitchen, and if Helen was feeling particularly poorly, Emily read to her after dinner—from the
Catholic Devotional Weekly
or the more chaste popular novels. Sometimes she sang hymns, unaccompanied.

No one knew what was wrong with Helen or in what her delicateness consisted. Months after the birth and death of her baby she was still moping, still tired and apathetic. She had been pronounced well by her doctor, and her sister had felt she was fit enough to cope on her own. There were times when she seemed almost normal. But some days she scarcely left her bed and lay all day with her head turned to the wall. On the wall was a crucifix. In the next room was the bed where (Emily knew) Frank slept; his brushes were on the dresser, his old maroon bathrobe on a hook behind the door. It was supposed to have been the baby's room, but when the baby died Frank moved in. Everything had been taken away except a dresser scarf embroidered with yellow ducks holding umbrellas. No one seemed to notice it, even though Frank set his brushes on it every day, and Helen, on her good days, dusted around it. Frank slept in a white iron bed, little more than a cot. Emily, poking around, used to go in and lay her head on the pillow, smooth the quilt, look at the yellow ducks. She took a couple of hairs from Frank's hairbrush; for years, she kept them in the blue velvet box with her locket.

One day she got Frank to kiss her, by the simple expedient of grabbing him around the neck and pressing her lips to his. She thought she would die from the scary joy of it, but she didn't. I've come alive, she said to herself. She got him to kiss her again, and before long that was her sole purpose in going to the Robinsons'. She helped Helen with the wash and chopped nuts for Christmas cakes, and all the while she was stalking Frank.

It was a profoundly moving experience for Emily to wash up their dinner dishes in the kitchen at night. Usually Frank was in the sitting room reading the paper, Helen was asleep upstairs, but her own parents didn't expect her home for over half an hour. She didn't hurry over the dishes—washed them, in fact, lovingly, being especially tender with the cups and glasses. His lips had rested there! Sometimes she sang to herself the old hymns she'd been singing for Helen, but she kept her voice low. At the first restless squeak from the bed upstairs, she would have been off home; she had had enough of Helen.

But when the dishes were washed and dried and the dish towel hung up, she went into the sitting room, where Frank sat with his newspaper. Invariably he had already laid it aside, hearing her approach; invariably, he rose eagerly when she entered the room and caught her in his arms. “Ah, God, Emily,” he would whisper, and kiss her several times before he gripped her shoulders hard, looked sorrowfully at her, and said, “We can't continue like this.” This, too, was invariable, and his soft groan when he pulled her to him again. They always continued.

She didn't share his anguish. She felt herself bloom with bliss after these encounters. Sometimes they met in the pantry, quickly, if Helen went upstairs for a minute—sometimes Emily followed him outside—once he stumbled down the cellar after her when she went for potatoes. Always, he clutched her as if she was a part of himself that might get away if he didn't keep it pressed close. She held him and kissed him, gladly, every chance she got. The evenings when Helen took to her bed were the best, those long minutes in the sitting room. One night, without a word, he had turned her around, trembling, his breathing ragged, and undone her buttons. She had let her blouse fall down around her waist, and her camisole with it, and he had closed his eyes and worshiped her breasts with his lips and fingers. She had stroked his soft brown hair, and, looking down at his closed eyes, his rapt, reverent face, she had felt her mind go blank of everything but her love for him. Later, going over the scene in her room, she realized he had banked the fire first—for her, to warm her nakedness.

Sometimes, on evenings when Helen had some energy, the three of them talked. Emily got a queer, special pleasure out of talking to Frank and Helen together about her concerns. She caricatured her classmates and teachers, and was triumphant when she got a chuckle from Helen. Helen, in fact, was the first person ever to say to her, “You should go on the stage.” Frank was endlessly amused by her; this seemed to make Helen's laughs all the more rare. Emily was conscious of wanting to be the little ray of sunshine around their house, and Helen's lack of response didn't daunt her. It wasn't Helen's response she wanted, and she knew the contrast of her sparkle with Helen's gloom suited her—although, if she could cheer Helen up a little, so much the better, she thought in her high-minded moments. Helen would need all her strength, she would add when optimism took over from charity. For every tiny pang of guilt she discovered in herself, there was a reasonable argument that said: Helen never discourages my visits, Helen is always kind to me, Helen needs me to help her.… And behind all this was her suspicion that Helen had something in mind for her, something else besides hymn singing and washing up. She never for a second doubted Helen's complexity; her bland little face could wear an expression of frightening intensity. Emily would put nothing past her.

She would have liked to discuss Helen's state with her best friend, Virginia Baldwin, but there was something about the Robinsons that she felt herself unable to talk over with Virginia. The something, she vaguely understood, was her feeling for Frank, and though up to that point she and Virginia had told each other everything, she knew she couldn't discuss the fascination Helen had for her without including the fascinations of Frank. It felt odd, having these secrets from her friend, and it wasn't easy. At times, she had to appear almost rude. With a pang, she saw Virginia turn to Betty Schmitt—walk home with her, trade homework, pass her a copy of
Rose in Bloom
. It was the first Christmas since they were eight years old that she and Virginia didn't exchange handkerchief sachets. Proudly, Emily sought out Frank, feeling herself removed from silly high school girls. The Robinsons gave her a copy of
Great Operas of the World
for Christmas.

What Helen liked best was Emily's singing, and the preferred hymns—not necessarily Catholic ones; she liked them all, drinking them in the way an alcoholic will take anything he can get. Frank only tolerated the hymns. He would have preferred some light opera, something from Gilbert and Sullivan or Victor Herbert, but he put up with anything for the sake of hearing Emily. “Whatever I sing is a love song to you,” she told him once with deliberate sentimentality—it was one of the ways she made him laugh, her eyes going all fluttery and a simper in her voice—and he caught it and smiled at her, but they both knew she meant it. When she sang, Frank didn't look at her. He sat in his big armchair and looked fixedly at his hands clenched together in his lap.

Once, Emily sang for them a new hymn she had learned, dismal and passionate:

Flee as a bird to your mountain,

Thou who art weary of sin,

Go to the clear-flowing fountain,

Where you may wash and be clean …

When she recovered from the effects of her own singing—a cappella, she was always particularly struck by the clarity and accuracy of her voice—she saw that there were tears running down Helen's face. Frank took his wife up to bed.

“What's wrong with her?” she asked him when he came down.

He had replied with hesitation. “I think she feels guilty about the baby's death.”

“But why? It happens to everyone. My mother had two babies die!”

“Helen is very religious, Emily—” Frank looked fierce for a moment and then said, more mildly, “She seems to feel she's being punished, the baby's death was her punishment.” He spoke in the detached lawyerlike tone that Emily later learned covered deep feeling when he used it with her. But his detachment seemed cruel to her, and she burst out, “Punishment? But Helen goes to church every Sunday, even when she's sick!” It seemed the height of goodness; her own family slept late on Sundays, and her father read the newspaper in bed. “Punishment for what?”

“For love!” Frank spoke the words much too loudly, and he turned away from her after he said them. “You know what I mean, Emily. For
sex
. For the pleasure of it.”

They were in the sitting room. Helen was quiet upstairs. Emily put her hand on his arm. She understood everything; though she was not yet seventeen, she had read hundreds of books. “How terrible for you,” she whispered.

He faced her, looking stricken. “I shouldn't tell you these things.”

“You should,” she assured him gently, leaning against him. He pulled her close and kissed her silently, over and over.

Things went on like this all that winter, until the evening of the opera.

Helen was feeling too ill to go and suggested Frank take Emily, who loved singing and had been so nice. Thus Frank reported his wife's words to Emily's mother when he went next door to invite her. His composure awed her; she hadn't dared look at him. She fled to her room to change into her dark brown lace, and then she was beside him in the car, unable to speak. He chattered to her all the way to the theater, and she sat through the overture in misery. Was this all, then? Was he just taking little Emily to the opera because she loved music and had been so nice?