Family Matters (29 page)

Emily thought about it. “It makes her sound
less
unbalanced, it seems to me,” she said. “I mean, a deformed baby is a
reason
.…” She remembered the beauty of her own baby, the magical perfection of her. “If I had known about Anna, I would have had a lot more sympathy for Helen.”

She meant it and was surprised at herself. It was the first pang of regret she'd ever felt for Frank's wife.

“The poor woman,” she said, and another thought struck her. “You really stacked the cards against her, didn't you?”

“Only because I didn't want to lose you,” he said placidly.

“Frank!” At her tone he turned and looked at her, then back at the road, frowning. “Frank, love doesn't excuse
everything
.”

He put one gloved hand over hers on the seat. “I thought it did. I'm sorry.”

Exasperated, she pulled her hand away. “So no one knew but you?” She knew he wanted to drop it, but she persisted. “You and Helen?”

“Marion knew. It's probably the only real bond between us.”

“She knew, and I didn't.”

She saw that he was undeceived by her forced lightness of tone, as she had meant him to be. “She was
there
at the time, Emily. She was Helen's sister! It wasn't a conspiracy—she was at the hospital.”

“The meddling bitch.” It was crazy, to be jealous of Marion Palmer, a worn-out old tart, and of course it wasn't Marion—not only Marion—she was lashing out at; it was his whole, full, populated life contrasted with her own. He could even love, all his life, the poor deformed baby he'd held only briefly fifty-odd years ago. Easy enough, to love a memory … But, damn it, he'd had a real, actual daughter to bring up, and a granddaughter, too, and she'd had none.

They rode in silence for a long time. The years had been erased last night, but now they came back with all their torments. Emily felt old and creaky and galled.

At random, she asked, “Did you ever go to bed with her? Marion Palmer?”

He didn't answer, and she stared over at him. “You did!”

He made a gesture of impatience. “We had an affair, back in—oh, I don't know—years ago. It was nothing.”

“Nothing! My God, Frank!”

“And you never had another man, all those years when you refused to see me?”

“Refused! You make it sound like you were battering down my door. If I recall, there were two letters and one phone call!”

“Answer my question.”

“Of course, I had other men. But that was different—you know it was different, Frank. Marion Palmer!” She saw an exaggerated Marion, all corpulence and makeup and flabby thighs spread wide. Her men, at least, had been thin, narrow, neat, sober—like Frank.

“I don't see the difference,” he said. “You had a grudge against Marion—I never did. She was handy and, God knows, she was willing. And I owed her a lot”

“I can't believe it. Marion Palmer, of all people.”

“Jesus, Emily! It was years ago!”

She would have screamed at him, would have called him some terrible name, but the car swerved just then and skidded across the road, where it plowed into a snowbank. She gave a little cry and pressed her hand to her heart.

“It's all right,” he said. “No harm done. Let me just get us out.”

He put the car in reverse and they heard the wheels spin when he gave it gas. He shifted to forward, back to reverse. The car rocked, the wheels whined against the snow, but they stayed put.

“I could get out and push,” he said dubiously.

“You'll do no such thing!” cried Emily. The feeling in her chest scared her—it was as if a large dog had sat down there, suddenly. Her pills were in her suitcase, her suitcase was in the trunk. He tried the car again, and this time it stalled and wouldn't start again.

Outside, in the swirling snow, there was no ground, no horizon, no perspective. Then the wind stopped and they could see the highway. Two cars crept slowly by at long intervals.

“We'll wait,” Frank said decisively. “Somebody'll stop or alert the troopers. Damn these roads! All the plows do is make them slick.” She could tell he was embarrassed by his inability to get them out

“We were crazy to come,” Emily said with difficulty.

He moved closer to her and kissed her cheek. The wind blew the loose snow against the car windows and away again. “There'll be a trooper along soon,” he said. “Or another snowplow. We could follow the plow right to New York State, maybe. You know, speaking of Marion, she told me I should get a CB radio. Wanted to give me one for Christmas. I should have listened to her, for once.”

Emily drew a little away from him. “You do botch things up, don't you?”

He gave a short, mortified laugh. “I don't believe anybody's ever accused me of that but you, Emily.”

“Maybe I'm the only one who was in a position to notice.”

They were silent for a while. The drifting snow was beautiful to Emily—the whiteness of the earth in its old age seemed appropriate. But the car was cold, and her chest hurt; the heaviness wasn't passing as she'd thought it would.

He drew close to her again and said, “It's never too late, you know, Emily.”

“Too late for what?” Her voice frightened her.

“For us. We could get married.”

“Why now, Frank? Why all of a sudden—after thirty-five years?”

They sat in silence; Frank smiled out at the snow. Looking at him, Emily felt her heart lurch, as if the big dog had gotten up, shaken himself, and plopped down again.

“Frank?”

“I'm thinking, Emily—trying to sort things out.”

“No—it's my pills. I need my pills. I need my pills.”

He turned to her. “Oh God, Emily, where in hell are they?” She could see that her appearance frightened him.

“My suitcase—the trunk.” She pressed her hands to her chest, but when he started to get out she stopped him in panic. “No! Don't leave me! Frank—” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“Emily, for Christ's sake! Let me get them!”

“Please, Frank, I'll die if you leave me!”

They were still at this impasse when the troopers arrived.

Chapter Nine

Betsy

In the house on Stiles Street, they waited.

Violet, waiting in the dim-lit sickroom for her reunion with Will, slept and woke, slept and woke, listened to the silence made by the snow and wondered what it was. Betsy and Marion sat in the kitchen waiting for the phone or the doorbell to ring. Marion kept the radio on. The “Storm Watch” with a mixture of pride and horror announced that it was the Northeast's worst since the famous blizzard of '88. Marion listened with the same mixture, in which satisfaction was lightly mingled: she had told him so.

“But I don't worry about Frank,” she said, keeping her back resolutely to the window. “Frank can take care of himself.”

“Why don't they call?” Betsy asked for the twentieth time. She had heard nothing of Frank and Emily since early that morning, when her grandfather had phoned. “Your grandmother is coming with me,” he'd said, and his voice was noncommittal. “Tell Violet her mama is on her way.”

Betsy couldn't ask him not to come, to wait out the storm at Emily's house. Violet had been asking for him—but she didn't tell him that, either.

“You could have called us last night,” she said. “We've been worried sick.” She was stiff with him; they hadn't parted on good terms. She had slept badly, the harsh words they had exchanged tumbling in her mind all night while the blizzard raged outside.

“What was there to worry about? The storm wasn't so bad yesterday.”

“It's bad now.”

“We'll take it easy.”

There was more she would have liked to say, but she couldn't bring herself to it. She could only resurrect the old upbeat voice she used to use with Violet and urge him to drive carefully.

And where was he now? Where was Emily?

“Maybe we should call the state police,” she said to her great-aunt.

“What on earth for, honey?” Marion's condescending patience made Betsy want to scream, though she knew it was put on and that Marion was as worried as she was. “It's going to be a long, slow trip, and that's all there is to it. Bothering the troopers in weather like this won't accomplish anything.”

She knew that—calling was simply something to do, and she spoke irritably. “Neither will listening to that damned radio!”

Marion tightened her lips, but left the radio on. “I
told
him not to go out in this,” she muttered, as if to herself.

Terry came and went, aimlessly moving from sickroom to kitchen to the front window, where she stood for minutes at a time watching for the car before she scurried back to her patient.

Violet had eaten her bits of French toast and then fallen into a long, oblivious doze, but Betsy—though urged by Terry and Marion to nap, to rest—was unable to sleep or even to sit still for long. Aside from her anxieties about Frank and Emily, and about Violet, the baby's activity kept her restless.

“He's tired of being cooped up!” Marion said when Betsy complained. “He's kicking to get out!”—in the unnatural saccharine tone she had decided was proper for her to adopt.

Betsy sat mesmerized by the raging snow outside, imagining the baby being born on a deserted road in a blizzard, being born on this very kitchen floor, in need of oxygen or blood or rare drugs that no one could get through to the hospital for, the baby born dead, choking, retarded—and her grandfather's Cadillac skidding off an embankment somewhere in Connecticut—and Violet breathing her last in great pain. She sat immobile, chewing the cuticle around her thumbs, drawing blood, until she felt compelled to get up and move about the house.

She would have liked to be alone. It seemed to her she had a great deal to think about—though, in fact, her mind was dulled and blank. She would have liked to sit by Violet's bedside, without Terry or Marion, wrapped in her mother's silent, painful peace. She didn't want to share her dolors. But Terry hovered, full of lugubrious self-importance, and her great-aunt had settled into the spare room with a small suitcase. She knew Marion had come for her sake, to keep her company while her grandfather was away. Betsy tried to be grateful, but her thoughts were of peace, quiet, space—of these and of the morbid ideas that Frank and Emily had perished on the road somewhere and that her mother's death was imminent.

Violet had become somewhat worse since Frank went off into the blizzard, as if his presence in the house had been a prop that sustained her. For the first time, the injections against her pain seemed ineffective. Violet moaned weakly in her sleep and woke often, asking for the drug.

Dr. Baird had struggled over early that morning. “It won't be much longer,” he had said, and, though when she pressed him he wouldn't be more specific, Betsy felt it was only a matter of days, perhaps less. “She's as comfortable as she can be,” the doctor said, hinting at his disapproval that Violet was being allowed to die at home. He had given up recommending her removal to a hospital. “As comfortable as she can be, considering …” Betsy, looking at her mother's placid sleeping face, watched it crease with pain and then smooth again, and thought ahead, with grief and trepidation, to the day when she would be left alone in the echoing house.

Still she longed, perversely, for solitude. Marion's chatter was driving her crazy, and the staticky drone of the radio was unnerving, but she kept returning to the kitchen where they both were, drinking cup after cup of coffee, not knowing what else to do or where to go. She wandered up to Violet's room, but Terry urged her to stay downstairs. “I'll call you if she wakes,” Terry promised. Her tone was passive.

“
Any
change.”

“I'll call you.” Terry looked as glamorous and efficient as ever, but her eyes were red, and tears spilled over at odd moments as she sat by Violet—not reading or knitting, just watching.

“How does she stand it?” Betsy said to Marion.

“Who?”

“Terry. To spend her life watching at deathbeds.”

“Oh, I doubt it's as bad as all that. Most of her cases recover, I'll bet.” Marion cleared her throat. “No one said your mother's on her deathbed yet, anyway.”

The false words gleamed in the air, then went out. Betsy had nothing to say; she stared out at the snow.

Irresistibly, she told herself her rosary of troubles, over and over. There was no comfort or happiness for her that she could see. Her mother was at the threshold of death, any day she would—alone and unfriended—give birth to a fatherless babe, and her grandparents were missing in the snow.

The argument with her grandfather oppressed her. “I'll go and get her if I have to drag her,” he had said. “I won't have your mother grieving like this.”

“Grandpa, Emily's got troubles of her own—let her be.”

He was taken aback at Betsy's easy mention of the name. Then he brushed her words aside; he was hearing nothing but Violet's request:
I want my mama
. “That damned woman!” he muttered, and Betsy knew he meant Emily.

“How can you call her that?” she demanded. “After the way you treated her!” She had resented Emily's aloofness; now she defended her to this thick-skinned, predatory male.

He turned on her in a rage. “You two are mighty chummy, aren't you? Got the whole story, didn't you?” They were in Violet's room. He took Betsy's arm and steered her out the door, and they stood in the hall, shouting at each other.

“It's about time I knew—time
someone
knew who my mother's parents were. You kept it from us all these years—it wasn't fair!” There it was again, the childish lament.

“It was my business. Damn the woman! Damn her for telling it to you, for dragging up all these dead issues. What does it matter now? The interfering old bitch!”