Family Matters (33 page)

It was a bad beginning. It took him a while to charm the two of them, to get permission to see Violet again, but in the end he won them over, even Helen. “He can certainly tell a story,” she said once, and on another occasion, “That man could charm the skin off a fish.” For Helen, this was a giddily colorful remark. Violet thought Will was a good influence on her mother—he loosened her up.

Mrs. Ruscoe did her best, but she never took Violet properly to her bosom. She was always the usurped, the abandoned, and Violet knew Will's mother thought a wife and family were bad for his heart. She died, of the family curse, not long after Betsy was born. Will began to fear, from that time on, for his own life. (Was that when the sketches turned angular and harsh?) The shocked look on his face—Violet had found him in the shop where he fell, stretched flat—couldn't have been caused by the surprise of death: he'd expected it. She believed it was caused by his vision of paradise. He had always scoffed at Violet's hope for an afterlife, as if it was in the same class with her vegetarianism or her experiments with the tarot pack—and there it was, a lovely surprise. He was waiting there for her now. But it was dark, very dark, and she stumbled, searching for him. Will! Will! The others were gone, she was all alone, afraid in the dark—when suddenly she remembered: Emily! Of course! Emily, my mama, she will help me, Emily.…

She slept and dreamed, and woke. There was always music now, distant singing in her head. Funny that Emily had been a singer, funny that she would never hear her sing. The snow fell steadily on the maple bough and on the Mannings' roof. Terry had French toast ready for her. She didn't feel like eating it, but she let Terry feed her a couple of bites.

“I'm getting used to your eye shadow, Terry,” she said, and she was shocked when two unmistakable tears hung in Terry's eyes and spilled over. “Don't!” she said. It seemed to her that Terry was trying to wash away the blue eye shadow. “Really, Terry, I do like it.” Remorsefully, she ate another bite of French toast.

Food didn't interest her anymore. It seemed strangely irrelevant, and it stuck on the way down. She would rather remember how she and Will had cooked together. She had liked making big pots of things; he had liked the finicking details. When he died, it was months before she could so much as peel an onion. Oh, the meals they had eaten together, the good times they had, beginning with that first evening at Lorenzo's. They loved to go out: first dinner, then dancing. People don't dance anymore, Betsy and Judd never went dancing. She and Will went out all the time. He loved to have her dress up. Silky skirt, nylon stockings, brocade bag. The pearls, the rhinestone clip, the jade necklace. The hat that was nothing but a big red rose with a black veil. The time she had put on her black V-neck satin and he had knelt before her and pressed his face to her, raised the skirt, rolled down her stockings, and right there on the bedroom floor … Oh God, the things he used to say, the things he did, such soft skin he had, and he was strong as a bear—he could lift her up and carry her, even when she was heavy with the baby. He shouldn't have, maybe there shouldn't have been so much dancing, either. But it was so lovely, clinging together late at night, drowsy, and then going home.…

Her father had paid all their bills when Will died. There were more bills than she had ever imagined, and the business was further in the red than she had thought a business could go without collapsing. Frank didn't grudge any of it, just totted up what was owed and paid it. “Will never asked for a dime,” he'd said with a kind of stunned admiration when he was done. “Seize the day,” her mother had commented, with her mouth turned down, “and let tomorrow go to the devil.” But Frank shouted at her. “The boy's gone, Helen—let him be, for Christ's sake.” And then Helen had railed at Frank for the blasphemy, until Violet distracted them both with her weeping.

She had never thanked her parents adequately for taking her and Betsy in, and she wondered sometimes why Helen had let them come back. Without knowing why, she was aware that her mother didn't love her. She had been indecently glad when Violet got married and left the house, almost as glad as Violet herself. It must have been Betsy Helen wanted—not that Helen was easy on her—that was never her way or her philosophy—but Violet could see her trying to be, at least, just. She was a marginally better grandmother than she had been a mother. All the same, Betsy preferred Frank, just as Violet had. To Violet, her mother had been a stern figure of dread—short, hard, mousy, dour, religious. She could never recall Helen's virtues. But as she lay in bed there came to her, for no reason, Helen's laugh—a loud, hoarse bellow: “
Woa ho ho
!” It was infectious, and always a shock because it was so noisy and rare, usually called up by something on television. When it sounded in her mind, Violet laughed softly and looked around for Frank, but Terry was there, and she couldn't tell her—Terry had never known Helen.

Violet let Terry wash her; Dr. Baird was coming. “It's still snowing,” she said. She could just make out the big flakes falling. She had been having a blank about snow. It entered her dreams readily enough, but what it was
like
eluded her, she kept thinking it was dark, dark.… She hadn't wanted to ask. Maybe it was the feel of the cool washcloth on her skin, but suddenly she got it.
Snow was cold and wet
. They all came back to her, the thousand and one snow-belt winters, and she smiled happily at Terry.

“Of course!” she said. “It's winter.” She didn't say any more because of the look of sorrow on Terry's face. It puzzled her, but she figured that out, too. She was going to die, and it made Terry sad.

“People die all the time,” she told Terry later that day, but it was Betsy. Betsy came close to the bed and leaned down where Violet could see her. She was crying.

“Don't,” said Violet. It wrinkled her face so. There was a flurry of movement, and the room was full of people blocking the light. “I can't see—” They moved away. The was snow-brightness, and she could see it wasn't Betsy. It was an old woman. Emily?

“Violet,” Emily said. “My dear child.”

Violet could hardly hear her for the pain. It gathered all its forces and rushed into the empty spaces.

“Will!” she said before it burst from her, and he was there with flowers.

Chapter Eleven

Emily

Telegrams were dispatched to distant relatives—Will's sister in California, and the wife (remarried) of Frank's long-dead brother, Ted. Regretful telegrams were received back. Frank's friends called up and Betsy spoke to them. Flowers were received, in spite of Violet's wishes, and were banked around the closed casket at the funeral home—Henderson's, because Frank had known Chuck Henderson for fifty years and handled both his divorces. Even Frank sent flowers, in spite of Betsy's protests—a blanket of yellow roses.

“I can't stand to have her go into that cold ground without flowers, Betsy,” he said, and insisted that Violet hadn't meant it about not wanting flowers, it was only to save them trouble, it was just like her. The tears came, and Betsy gave in about the yellow roses.

“My mother detested them,” she said to Emily.

“They're for him,” Emily said, imagining them draped over the coffin like fancy frosting.

Emily didn't believe in funerals at all. She had once said to a group of friends, “I'd like to be put out on a hillside, and let the crows and the little animals pick me clean, like they do in Africa.” As soon as she said it, she knew it wasn't true. The idea was horrible—crows pecking out her eyes! But it was well received and was considered one of Emily's charmingly cracked notions. She almost said it to Betsy but refrained, fearing Betsy would act on it at her death.

Emily didn't go to the funeral home to receive sympathizers. She could see Frank didn't want her to. He didn't say so, explicitly, but it was there in the turn of his head and the flicker of his eyes when he said, that first day at lunch, “I'm not going over there for long—Violet didn't want a fuss.” Before he could propose that Emily stay home and rest—she could see it coming—she suggested it herself, for reasons of her own, and the relief that smoothed out his troubled face amused her.

“That might be best, Emily,” he said. “All things considered.”

“What things?” Betsy asked.

He didn't stop eating; he forked up a piece of meat. “You know what I mean.”

Betsy gave Emily a look expressing mortification and anger and apology: Frank's transparency obviously embarrassed her. “I'm not sure I do,” she said. “It seems to me that it's absolutely fitting for Emily to go. She's my mother's mother!”

Frank set down his fork. “Betsy—”

“You don't even have to
say
who she is, Grandpa—just say she's an old friend.”

“I'm not going, so you can both forget it,” Emily said firmly. “I don't want the sympathy of a pack of people who are strangers to me. And I'm too old to tell lies about who I am. I'm seventy-two years old! I like to stay home in the evenings. And it's snowing.”

“But, Emily …” Betsy said.

Emily nodded at her grimly. I know, the nod implied, we're letting him get away with it. She pushed back her plate, no longer hungry. She was aware of something Betsy didn't see, that Frank would prefer his hugely pregnant unmarried granddaughter to stay home, too. The two fallen women, Emily thought with glum amusement. The
traviatas
.

But Betsy didn't stay home. Emily saw the two of them off, and when they were gone she turned on the television and sat before it all evening, unseeing, while the beginning of a grudge worked its way into her heart. The next night was the same, except that instead of watching television she wandered around the house, touching nothing, breathing the air of Frank's study (looking without curiosity at the shelf of photographs), Betsy's room (with its odd mixture of furniture, its melancholy Madonna, and
Your Guide to Pregnancy and Birth
on the bedside table), Violet's sickroom (where the flat smell of illness lingered), and finally the guest room, where she was installed. She snuggled up there under a blanket with a murder mystery and her resentment, and let Betsy come looking for her when she and Frank returned—Betsy looking white and stern, Frank oblivious.

“We ought to have the casket open, Betsy,” he kept saying at the dinner table. “She looked so beautiful toward the end.”

“She didn't want to, Grandpa,” Betsy always said patiently in return.

He seldom replied, but made a noise expressing the disappointment, bewilderment, and frustration he felt. He would have liked to gaze on his dead daughter's face each night—he would have liked to hear people say how lovely she was, how peaceful.

“She had the face of an angel,” he exaggerated to Emily.

The night before the funeral, the two of them were sitting in Frank's study—Frank in the swivel chair at his desk, Emily in the wooden armchair with the orange-and-blue university seal on it. They both held themselves very straight, as if to impress each other with their physical fitness or their self-control, but, though Emily remained clear-eyed, the tears ran down Frank's cheeks as he talked.

He had been talking—always with tears—since the night Violet's body was removed. He had talked far into that night, long after Betsy had gone off to bed, and Emily—nearly dead from exhaustion (as she put it to herself)—had had to force herself to stay upright and awake. But she had done it. She had listened for hours and hours, that night and the next day and now again, to his talk, his tedious old-man ramblings—or rather, she had stopped listening after a while and, absorbed in her own thoughts, had just let him rattle on, like a television show she wasn't interested in.

Her own thoughts were not pleasant—weren't even decent, probably. She was ashamed of them, but there they were: what could she do about them? She had come all the way here in a snowstorm, risked her life in an accident—her heart banging around in her chest like a bird caught in a barn—thanks to Frank's foolish faith in his own driving. Seventy-seven years old and rash as a teenager; you couldn't tell him anything. And then a state police escort, of all things, across half New York State—so that she could arrive to find a wan, wasted woman who didn't even recognize her, who died at her approach as if she were a blight.

Emily too had wept a little at first (while Frank's voice droned on), but she wept for her baby, the little Violetta who had been snatched away while she slept. She had no tears for the dead Violet. The woman was nothing to her. The suspicion that she would feel nothing had been half of her reluctance to come; the other had been that she would feel too much. Well, she had let them push her into this grotesque family reunion, and she had faced up to her failure. And now she wished only to be rid of them all—Robinsons and Ruscoes, the gloomy rooms, the weepy nurse who kept dropping in, and that frightful old Marion Palmer. She wished for nothing more than to be back home hibernating in her snug house, with the cats curled around her, and the kettle on.

Frank talked, his face glowing and rapt with the painful pleasure of reminiscence. It was Violet he talked about, filling Emily in on their daughter's unremarkable life. She had been a sweet, vague, simple woman, Emily gathered—a loving daughter, a daughter to be mourned. Frank's mourning was garrulous. But no matter how he talked of his loss, it was only Betsy who moved her grandmother's sympathy—and that was probably (Emily admitted sternly to herself) because the girl was pregnant. Even pregnant women on the street touched her; it was only natural that her own granddaughter should inspire tenderness. The poor girl, with no man to stand by her, and her mother wasting away before her eyes. She had watched Betsy, in the two days since Violet's death, drag herself around the house, taking the phone calls and doing the cooking, her eyes red-rimmed and curiously vacant-looking, and she had longed to comfort her—to sit and talk with Betsy instead of with Frank. But Betsy, though affectionate, seemed glad to be alone with her thoughts, and seemed to relish the chance to throw her long-estranged grandparents together. Emily excused herself to Frank from time to time and went in search of Betsy; the girl had taken to sitting, down in the living room, in a hideous flowered armchair, looking out the window at nothing. Once when Emily came upon her, she was dozing, with her swollen ankles stuck straight out from her maternity slacks and her hands clasped high on her belly. Seeing her thus, Emily's heart overflowed with pity and tenderness. It was herself she saw there.