Family Matters (32 page)

“Mother.” Betsy clutched her hand again. “Mother, I need to ask you this. Have you had a good life? Really?”

Violet squeezed Betsy's hand, just a little. “Oh, yes,” she said with her gentle smile. “A wonderful life.” She closed her eyes, but the smile remained, and the raspy breathing. “A wonderful life, Betsy. I don't regret any of it.”

Life is the great adventure, she used to say. Had she believed it? Had it, somehow, been true?

“Mother!” Betsy said again.

Violet's eyelids flickered as Terry gave her the injection. “Don't be sad, Betsy. Really. There's no need.” Her voice was a whisper; she was sinking into sleep.

“There is need, Mother,” Betsy said, but she doubted Violet heard her.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. Frank and Emily had had a minor accident, they had been delayed, they were at a trooper station near Albany, and they would be there soon.

Chapter Ten

Violet

The empty spaces in her body were beginning to fill with pain. Sometimes, coming back from sleep and feeling the pain gather in her, Violet saw it as another person inhabiting her body. This alien being's force was too much for her. It was straining to get out, pushing at her bones and beating on the inside of her head. When the invader got out, the emptiness would take over and she would die.

Violet had lain quietly in bed, day after day, but her mind raced. She thought how there was no one else on earth who remembered Will as she did. She took pleasure in the thought of him. It seemed harmless to believe she was traveling toward him; it seemed, in fact, plausible—inevitable. She saw it as a reunion of bodies, not merely of souls. There had been a look of innocent surprise on his dead face. He would show the same surprise at their reunion. “Why, Violet!” he would say, holding out his arms, and a slow smile would spread over his handsome, beloved features. It was absurd—it wouldn't be like that—she had no idea how it would be—but it would be something, of that she was positive, and she lay in bed, contented enough, while the pain slowly gathered strength.

It was only when she had one of her dreams of being abandoned that she wanted Emily. There was snow—sometimes just darkness—and she was alone, searching (sometimes for home, sometimes for a thing that had been lost—a locket once, Betsy once), and she suddenly realized that the other searchers had left her, and she was alone, not knowing where to turn for help. In the dream, the illuminating thought was always the same: Of course! My mama! Emily will help me! And she called for her. Sometimes she awoke then to hear her own voice and to see Betsy there, or Terry, in tears. She didn't like to make anyone cry, especially Betsy. It was wrong to make children cry, the way her mother had made her cry. She raised a hand to wipe Betsy's tears, but it fell back, and there was Terry with a glass and a pill.

She listened to Betsy and Frank talking back and forth. They kept their voices low because of the nurses and because of her. It was a secret, but she knew they were talking about Emily. They argued.
Don't
, she wanted to say. It didn't seem important—only on those long rides back from sleep did she want Emily, when she was lost in the snow and the dark. It must be the pills, the needles. Awake, she didn't care. She had her father, her daughter, the comforts that remained to her, and the scenes inside her head.

“I did it for my mother's sake.”

“I suppose you know everything.”

“It's time someone knew!”

“That damned woman!”

The pill took hold, and she drifted away to the sounds of their voices, Will in her mind, always Will. He rose up before her, lifting a glass. When Betsy bent over her, she looked in vain for Will's large, candid features in Betsy's sharp face, just as she used to try to force memories from the child. It was no use. She wouldn't find Will in Will's daughter. But she had him, all the same, stored away for herself, and that was enough. She hugged him to her heart.

“She won't come, Grandpa.”

“Because of me?”

“Partly. And she has troubles of her own.”

“My God, the woman is unreasonable. It's been years. Years!”

It's all right
, Violet would have said if it wasn't for the drug. But their voices were like distant music to her.

It was pleasant to lie listening to them. She liked some noise—the radio, the TV, people in the room. When she was little, it had been so deathly quiet in the house sometimes, with no sound but the rustling of her father's newspaper or the pages of the briefs he brought home with him. Her mother banging an occasional pan in the kitchen. And then, in 1931, they bought a radio, and when she was in bed they tuned in Bing Crosby. Her father put down his paper, her mother came out of the kitchen, and Violet, upstairs in her room clandestinely reading, fell asleep to the sound of the music and her parents' voices talking low—even that rare sound, their mutual laughter. It was so much better, they were all happier with the radio. Helen loved it. She used to listen in the daytime as she worked around the house. And the television—she was a great fan of the soaps. They could get to her as real people couldn't. Her mother had had a stroke a month before her death, and she spent that last month in bed in front of the TV, the remote control in her one good hand. She had died during
Search for Tomorrow
, but it was a while before they found her, and by that time her dead eyes were watching
The Edge of Night
.

When she died, the whole house brightened, and breathed easier. It was like a good spring cleaning, all Helen's anger and piety swept away. Betsy became a plumper, happier child. Violet never again had to cower in her room and cry while Helen spanked Betsy, no longer had to make it up to her daughter: all those trips to the 5 & 10 for presents, those white barrettes with the yellow flowers, the Japanese fans, the cup-and-ball trick, the cowgirl suit. After Helen's death, the presents continued, but for the joy of them, not as compensation. Violet loved any excuse for gift giving.

This Christmas had been hard for her. They put the Christmas tree in her room, but she cried because there were no presents under it from her.

“I wanted to give you something pretty,” she said to Betsy. Something colorful, a scarf to wear next to her face, maybe a blouse that tied in a bow under the chin, something to soften and brighten. Violet let Betsy dab at her eyes with a laceedged handkerchief. Betsy didn't like her tears any more than she liked Betsy's. At least my daughter has loved me, Violet thought, as Betsy's big eyes and thin nose leaned over her: Elizabeth Jane. “It's a girl,” Will had whispered as she came to. A bunch of flowers, and whiskey on his breath. “It's a beautiful little girl, Violet, she looks just like you.” He put his head down on the pillow beside her and whispered that he loved her.

Now the sketches came back to her, the fragments of herself that had obsessed her husband. Over and over he had drawn her—mouth and eyes, mouth and eyes, sometimes with the suggestion of the curve of her cheek or chin, sometimes with a bit of nose. She would sit and read, or they would have the radio on, and he would have his sketch pad on his knee, the black-and-silver pen moving languorously over it with a soft scraping noise. His concentrating frown looked like anger, and she would cry, with a pretended pout, “Smile or I won't let you draw me anymore,” and the frown would smooth out, he would laugh and close the sketch pad, and take her in his arms.

Later she would look at what he had done and find those bombed-out fragments of her face. Sometimes the lines and curves were harsh and spare and thickly inked, sometimes all delicate detail, but the subject was always the same.

She used to study her face in the mirror. She did have a remarkable mouth, fine eyes—the face of a passionate saint, he said. She would have liked a portrait, she was always asking for one, and after Betsy was born she thought how striking a portrait of the two of them would be. Mother and child. Betsy's soft, light curls. The same eyes. The two of them on the wine-colored sofa. She could wear her black taffeta and the pearls. But he just frowned over his sketch pads, rendering the bits of her more and more harshly, raggedly—and even these less and less frequently as the years went by. The last sketches, from the summer of 1948, were crude and angular, not like her at all, and Violet destroyed them when she and Betsy moved to Syracuse.

She would ask him (she thought, lying in bed and smiling secretly), she would make him tell her, once and for all, why he had never drawn her whole face. He used to joke, say her beauty overwhelmed him, he could only take it in a little at a time. But she knew it was something in him, not in her, and now she wanted to know. In those days, back in the blessed forties, she hadn't understood him enough; she was too busy making sure he understood her. She had been twenty-seven when he died, still learning. I will be a better wife to him this time, she thought. Sometimes, in her snow dreams, it was Will she sought or Will who came to her aid, and she awoke with his name on her lips.

The Christmas tree was so beautiful, so beautiful, and the smell was like youth and health and splendor returned. She and Will had always cut down their own tree, out in someone's woods. Will probably shouldn't have, with his bad heart, but he swung the short ax strongly and had the tree down in two shakes. Little trees for their little apartment. “Infanticide,” Will said, hoisting it on his back. Betsy with her bright cheeks in that hat with the yellow yarn braids. Her one doll, the well-beloved Samantha—was it Samantha? Will, stringing popcorn, put the needle right through his thumb one year after too much Christmas Eve cheer, and the blood bubbled up over his nail. His face went dead white. She grabbed the thumb herself and pulled out the needle and sucked the wound clean, and had to laugh at his astonishment. How she used to love to get her mouth on him.…

She didn't often rage at her fate, and she didn't for long on Christmas. She lay back and opened her presents, lazily. What did you give a woman with no earthly future? Books. A tiny TV with a screen like a snapshot. A quilted bad jacket from Marion. They hovered, hoping they pleased her. Of course they pleased her, everything did. And why not? They seemed amazed that she took the waiting so well. They had no knowledge of the bewitchment of a contracted world. I have three complaints, she said to herself, trying to order her thoughts. There is my fear that the pain will get worse and be bad for a long time before it bursts out of me. Happiness will come hard if the pain is great: waiting won't be easy. But I don't think of this often. And there is my longing for Emily—but it only comes when I dream. It's enough—almost—to know she exists and loves me. And there is my regret at leaving them, Betsy unsettled and my father so blue. How will they get on without me? But life is short, it won't be for long. There was always comfort if you looked for it.
That man
, at least was gone—that hairy man of Betsy's—gone and left them all in peace.

Peace. From her windows she could see a long, down-curving branch of the big side-yard maple, the Mannings' porch with the shutters up for winter, three trees in the line of oaks that marched down Stiles Street, gray skies over the Mannings' porch, where she used to watch the summer sunsets. In the summer the view had been full of green, with roses climbing over the trellises, the shutters down and stored, people on the porch, glasses clinking, chatter, like a play. She had grown fond of the people on the porch, and she missed them now that winter was here, but she was fond of the gray sky and the snow, too. Peace on earth. After a storm, when all the branches were outlined and weighted down with snow, her heart leapt with excitement. It seemed years ago that she had gone downstairs or to the hospital or outside. She had missed those things, too, at first; now the window and her pretty room were enough, more than enough.

She used to tell lies to spruce up her life. It was a flat one after Will died, even a lonely one. There had been a couple of men-friends. Jack Denslow at work had been the last. What a disaster he had been, with his wham-bam lovemaking and football talk. And then she had stayed at home, keeping house for her father and daughter, both of them gone all day and coming home with stories of school and office. She'd lied to survive, harmless fibs and exaggerations: who had telephoned, what the butcher said, the antics of the neighbors. She improved on things, changed them by running them through her own richly colored mind. Lying made her present to others; she had a horror of being a woman no one noticed.

But now there was no need to embellish. Life was so full, so concentrated, she had to close her eyes sometimes to shut it out and withdraw to the cool recesses where Will was. They thought she was asleep, and the music began.

“Grandpa, it wasn't fair!”

“It was my business.”

“How
can
you? Don't you understand
anything
?”

Don't use that sharp tone to your grandfather, Betsy. We must be kind to him, kinder than ever.

“I won't have your mother grieving like this! I'll drag that woman up here!”

Violet understood from the music that Frank was somehow, miraculously, her father. He should have told me—the words paraded through her mind like words on a banner, until the pills took them away. She slept, and it was 1941.

Will came in with his mother to buy her an Easter hat. Mrs. Ruscoe had raised four boys, and they were all dead but Will—the heart condition. There was a daughter, too, but she was in California with her husband. Will was his mother's pride and happiness. This was obvious to Violet when Mrs. Ruscoe tried on hats, primping. They had decided on a crazy thing with blue roses and veiling. Will had been magnificent—just right with his mother, flattering and teasing, but no mama's boy. He hadn't been able to take his eyes off Violet; both Violet and Mrs. Ruscoe had noticed. He had come back the next day, alone, to take her out for dinner after work. He'd given her no room for saying no; he just took her. They walked down Salina Street to Lorenzo's. It was early for dinner, and she had a Coke while he drank bourbon. He dazzled her with talk, but she made sure she held her own with him and didn't just sit and gape. She told him about selling hats to get him laughing; she was still new at the job and made mistakes. She kept watching his big, handsome, pink face, wondering if he was getting drunk—she had never seen anyone drunk—but he acted no differently as the evening went on except that his compliments to her became more florid and ingenious. She wore her cream two-piece with the rose-printed blouse. They had a long, leisurely dinner, and he took her home in his old Ford. She had forgotten to call home after work. “We've been worried sick,” her father said. He had been waiting at the door, looking ready to beat them both. Her mother, as usual, was in the kitchen, but she came out in her apron and said, “Who is this man?”