Family Matters (31 page)

Marion waited, as if for a clock to stop striking, and when Betsy was silent, she said, “That was uncalled for, Betsy—especially under the circumstances.” She raised her eyes in the direction of Violet's sickroom, but Betsy didn't look up to see her do it. “And it wasn't true, either. Any of it. I know you think I'm nothing but a silly old woman—”

“No, no,” Betsy said more calmly. “I think you're a tragedy.” She got hold of herself and raised her head, fearing to see her own face again across the table. But Marion was Marion, and she looked hurt and affronted.

“I'll tell you something, Betsy,” she said, raising her voice. “I don't want peace, I don't want my days to be empty and quiet and—nothing. You call me a hoper, a waiter—whatever absurd things you said, I don't remember, thank God. But I need my emotions. I need to be in love. You can laugh, I know it's ridiculous at my age—”

“I'm not laughing.”

Her great-aunt did, her quick, harsh bark. “It's what makes the world go round, after all.” She sobered quickly, and her face crumpled again. “But if he should go, Betsy—I'd be lost, lost. I mean that seriously, and I don't care what you think of me for it.”

Betsy murmured vaguely. She was thinking, thinking, and anger continued to simmer in her. It had been simmering—brewing, germinating, all those metaphors for quiet readiness—a long time, all through her lonely pregnancy, maybe all her lonely life. It was anger against all the men in her life: her father, who died; her grandfather, who ruled; her boyfriends, who failed her. And against the women, too—against Helen's tight-lipped rage, and Emily's twenty duped years, and Violet's saintly passivity, and now Marion's long, fruitless devotion. And—God knew, here's where the anger was concentrated, coiled into a hard, harrowing ball—against her own long-suffering acquiescence to things, her own fatal adaptability. She was like the Virgin, who, when the blood dripped from the thorns down her face to her lips, licked it away, smiling.

Marion honked into a tissue. Betsy picked up her cup and sipped at her coffee. She would deal with the blood and the thorns later. They had nothing, after all, to do with her great-aunt. It was time to change the subject.

“Tell me about Helen and her baby. And how she adopted my mother.” They had gone over some of it already, but not this part. “Tell me how it all happened.”

Marion seemed glad of the request. She put away her tissue and sat up straight, thinking. “Your grandmother was a complex woman,” she said finally, “with exaggerated ideas about sex. We were brought up in fanatical strictness, and it affected both of us badly—though in rather different ways,” she added with a short laugh. “She thought her baby's death was her punishment.”

“For what?”

“The sins of the flesh—what else? For giving in to—well, I'm sure even my sister Helen had a little niggling bit of lust. I saw how she used to look at Frank in the old days.”

“But then adopting my mother, her husband's bastard—”

“As a chastisement to them all, Betsy. She told me that. As a reminder. Rubbing their noses in it.”

“My God!” Betsy had a quick recollection of Helen, in tears, on her knees in that dark bedroom, her teeth bared in anger.

Marion looked at Betsy, then away. “You resemble her—Emily Loftus. Both you and your mother do—your mother, especially, but you have more of that
look
—”

“What look?”

“That look she always had.” Marion shook her head, disapproving. “I can't describe it. You know what I mean.”

“I don't!”

Her great-aunt said triumphantly, “There! You've got it now, that snotty, self-contained look—like a bird with a big fat worm all to itself.”

“Oh, Aunt Marion, cut it out.”

“Well, I'm sorry. I suppose I'm still upset at the things you said. You're always so sure you're right, even when you're dead wrong, and you get that look of yours—it's straight off her face.” In the fading light, her eyes shifted and became distant, looking back. “I was always on my sister's side, of course. I couldn't see what she got out of that marriage, right from the start. Frank Robinson always had such a
picture
of himself—”

Marion spoke bitterly, out of years of resentment, and Betsy wondered if the picture was like hers: the Arrow collar man with the burning eyes.

“He wanted to be a great lawyer, and I think he had visions of going into politics, too. His association with Emily queered that, of course. There's always somebody who knows about these things. They always get dredged up—we all know what politics is like. He wouldn't have had a chance. But back in the old days, he saw himself as a leader of men, and he needed a quiet, domestic wife, one who'd stay in the background and keep his house upright—a politician's wife. Helen was just the thing, a quiet little mouse who worshiped him. Oh, but she was misguided, Betsy, marrying him. Look what her life became.”

Helen's famous hard life: there was plenty in it, after all. “I've seen those letters, the ones you wrote her when all this was going on.”

Marion looked startled, then pleased. “I knew she'd saved them, she told me she did. She said they gave her strength.” She spoke with pride, as an author who touched hearts. “Lord,” she went on. “It all seems far away now. Helen and her poor baby, dead and gone.”

There was a pause, during which the words echoed like a bell: dead and gone, dead and gone. Betsy listened, but there was no noise from upstairs, and the baby had settled down inside her. There was no sound at all but the snow blowing crisply against the window and the furnace rumbling in the basement. It was nearly dark. Betsy and Marion sat without a light, and the kitchen looked gray and ghostly in the dusk, with only a faint glow from the streetlight outside. Dead and gone, dead and gone …

“How do you remember her?” Marion asked abruptly. “My sister, Helen—how do you think of her?”

Betsy welcomed the distraction. The present was painful, the future uncertain; talk of the past could do no harm, at least.

“In the kitchen,” she said promptly—surprising herself, that she should recall Helen at her best. Helen in the kitchen, with her sallow cheeks red from the heat, her mousy hair frizzed, her thin lips pursed over a spoon: she came alive there. In the kitchen, unless you were in her way, she could be almost pleasant, offering samples on a long spoon, cooling hot fresh applesauce with her own breath, saving the frosting bowl for Betsy to lick. But she could turn unexpectedly mean and order Betsy out of the room for no good reason, just because she was there, and she could knead bread with fury or work her big knife through a pile of onions as if they were little girls. That was the thing about her good moods—you couldn't count on them. They didn't last, and she would do nothing to preserve them. She gave way to the least flutter of ill temper and let it take her over and sometimes would not speak a civil word for a week. The agony of the dinner table, with Violet and Frank and Betsy making stilted conversation over the noise of Helen's silences … No back was ever so straight as hers, no lips were ever so set and thin, no eyes so dark with scorn.

“Surprisingly, she was a good cook,” Betsy said.

“Why ‘surprisingly'?” asked Marion, tartly.

“Well—that she enjoyed food—enjoyed anything—and let us enjoy it.”

“Don't exaggerate your grandmother's faults. She was a real person, you know, like you and me.”

Betsy didn't doubt it. She was remembering the corn. Helen would have her big black kettle on the stove, boiling madly, and the butter and salt and corn-shaped spiked holders on the table, and she'd say to Frank, “Ready!” and Frank would take his knife out to the garden and sprint back with a dozen ears. The four of them would strip off the husks and silk on a newspaper, and then the corn would go into the pot. Helen would clap on a cover and wait five minutes by the clock, and then, with tongs, pluck the ears one by one from the boiling water, and they would make a meal of it, with a plate of sliced tomatoes on the side. “Corn is not worth eating if it's not fresh,” Helen always said. It was a religion, though if anyone had said so she would have snapped out something about the first commandment. You couldn't even say, “It's heavenly” or “It's divine.” The sweet corn, crunchy and salted and dripping butter, and the chunks of tomato sprinkled with parsley: it was late August, Betsy was ten, and out the kitchen window the sun was low and hot.…

There was silence again in the warm kitchen. Betsy leaned her head on her hand and almost dozed, with Helen in her mind. A witch in the kitchen mixing potions: punishment potions for her husband, good behavior potions for her granddaughter, back-to-the-Church potions for her daughter. The motto over the sink: Pray without ceasing. Who knew what awful prayers Helen had offered for her loved ones? All those prayers, all that cooking. Helen came toward her with something on a spoon, and she knew she mustn't eat it.…

“What I want to say, Betsy, is this.” Marion broke into her reverie. “I'm here if you need me. I don't know if you
want
me, I hope we'll be closer from now on, that's all.”

“Oh, I hope so, too,” Betsy said, feeling weepy all of a sudden. She was tired, everything ached, and she was ashamed of her long impatience with her great-aunt—an old woman, with no one to care for but a man who had spurned her, and a dying niece, and her ungrateful self. “I'm sorry—I've been selfish lately.” It was true enough, but she spoke the dutiful words with difficulty.

“It's your condition,” Marion said kindly in response. “Only natural to be wrapped up in yourself.” She was silent a moment, then began to cry softly again, as if the sympathetic sound of her own voice set her off.

“I'm going to sit with Mom for a while,” Betsy said, getting up.

“Do that, Betsy,” Marion said dolefully, but then—as Betsy hesitated, unwilling to leave her alone with her sorrows—she got up, brisk as ever—a tall, stout woman, back in control—and clicked on the light. They both squinted in the brightness. “I'll just freshen up—I must look a sight,” Marion said with some of her old spirit, and Betsy started upstairs.

Violet was very still, eyes closed, but her breathing was labored.

“What's this?” Betsy asked angrily. “She's never breathed like that before. Why didn't you call me?”

Terry shook her head. She looked frightened: as if to say that there was nothing she could do, that dedication and efficiency were useless. “I called Dr. Baird, and he said—” She spread her arms out helplessly. “All we could do is call an ambulance and get her to the hospital.”

“No.”

“I knew you would say that. I told him—”

“You should have called me. Did she wake up? Did she say anything?”

“Just her father. She's been asking for him.”

“You said you'd
call
me!”

Terry shook her head, with her hands pressed to her mouth.

Betsy knelt beside her mother. Her face was beautiful, emaciated and peaceful. Betsy's anger toward Terry subsided; what was left was directed not at the nurse but at the menace invading her mother, stretching the skin over the bones and reducing the hand, so still beside her pillow, to a bundle of blue-veined sticks. Betsy reached out and stroked her mother's hand.

“No hospital, Terry. We promised her. And they can't save her, you know—only prolong it. She didn't want that.”

“I know, but—”

“It's not wrong, Terry. It's the right thing to do.”

“I know, but—” Terry was sobbing softly. “Oh, I wish Mr. Robinson was here!”

“He can't save her, either,” Betsy said sharply. Terry turned away and began to bustle around, sniffing and wiping her nose. Betsy knew Terry wanted her to go, but she stayed where she was beside her mother's bed. She willed herself not to cry. There had been enough tears in that house, enough sniveling women. It wasn't tears she wanted to offer Violet, but the anger that still lingered in her—great, vital transfusions of anger, to beef up the family line. She gripped Violet's limp hand, as if she could communicate this to her. Violet's hazy drift into death seemed dreadful to Betsy now. Her mother's life had been without substance, composed of memory and lies. It had been all wrong, and her death was its logical conclusion. Violet was going to meet it willingly, almost eagerly, accepting death without protest, as she had accepted her flat, circumscribed life. Betsy hung on tight to the frail hand. She would pull her back if she could, and not for her own sake, either: for Violet's sake.

“Don't die Mother,” she whispered when Terry went down the hall on her rubber-soled shoes. “You've hardly lived.”

While she sat there, Violet murmured and opened her eyes. Betsy smiled at her; for a moment, it was as if Violet had heard her and was coming back. Then Violet cried out, and Betsy saw that her eyes were wide with pain. Terry returned, and Betsy heard her preparing the injection.

“Where's my father?” Violet asked in her soft, hoarse voice.

“He's not here … he'll come.”

Violet sighed. “But I want to tell him—”

“Tell him what?”

Violet focused on Betsy in confusion. “No,” she whispered. “I want to tell you, Betsy.” Betsy understood what an effort it was for her to speak, and she leaned close. “I know about the baby,” Violet said. “That you're going to have a baby. Why did you keep it secret from me?”

“I thought it might upset you,” Betsy said. The relief was enormous. Violet had known all along.

“Do you want a baby, Betsy?”

“Yes. I want this baby.”

Violet smiled and then grimaced. “Good. Good. It will be a nice baby. I think Terry had better give me something.”

Terry approached with the hypodermic.