Family Matters (5 page)

“
You
think, but what about him?”

Betsy flushed. “We love each other.”

Her grandfather took her free hand, so that they stood linked, as if for a dance. “Then get married, Betsy.”

Get married: only because it's not proper for the granddaughter of Frank Robinson to live in sin. She checked her exasperation because—honesty with herself being an intermittent compulsion—she wished it, too. “I imagine we probably will, before long,” she said lightly.

She disengaged her arm, but kept his hand. “Come on, I'll go out and apologize to Aunt Marion and finish my dinner. I'm very starving.”

It was a childhood expression of hers, and they grinned at each other.

“You're a good girl, Betsy,” her grandfather said, and she made a face at him—only partly ironic, because she knew she was.

She crept up behind her great-aunt, who pretended not to hear her coming, and planted a kiss on her gray, dated upsweep.

Aunt Marion turned to her with troubled eyes. “What did I say, honey? I never meant anything by it.”

“All is forgiven, all is forgotten,” Betsy said, sitting down and slicing into her meat. “And I'm sorry I said such an awful lot of crap. I didn't mean half of it.”

“Which half?” Violet inquired slyly.

“I knew you didn't like my suit,” Aunt Marion said, restored. “In fact, I said to myself when I bought it, Betsy'll hate this.”

“Then why did you buy it?”

Aunt Marion drew back in mock hauteur. “As if I dress for my thirty-five-year-old great-niece!”

“Thirty-four.”

“As if I care what you think of my clothes!”

“Well, it's not dignified. Why don't you wear good cotton and linen? At least a skirt?”

“Listen to this!” The hauteur was less mock. “You've got to
iron
cotton and linen. When was the last time you had an iron in your hand, miss? Or put on a skirt?”

“I don't have to be dignified yet. I've got years.”

“Oh, shut up, both of you. How can I eat anything when you're squabbling like this?” Violet spoke with her hand on her heart. She had finished all her meat and salad, but Betsy forebore to point this out.

“Truce, Aunt Marion,” she said. “What's for dessert, Grandpa? M and M's?”

“Now don't start in on your mother,” he warned.

“I must say, you're in top form, dear,” said Violet. “You're on vacation now, aren't you?” She spoke with emphasis.

“Yes, but I have a project or two to keep me busy,” Betsy said, with equal emphasis, and Violet smiled.

“That's good,” said Frank. “I hate to think of all these college professors wandering around all summer, out on the streets, with nothing to do. It's a national scandal.”

“What about all these retired septuagenarians?”

“We're busy keeping an eye on our families,” he said.

“A full-time job!” put in Aunt Marion, not kidding.

“For them what likes it.” Betsy stood up and began stacking plates. “I'll load the dishwasher and make coffee. Coffee, everyone?”

“Bourbon for me,” said Violet. “Plenty of ice.”

Betsy caught her grandfather's eye; he nodded.

“One bourbon, three coffees.”

From the kitchen, Betsy heard her great-aunt's voice: “I don't care, I still think he has the look of a philanderer.”

“You can't be a philanderer if you're not married,” said Frank.

“That's exactly what I mean!” Aunt Marion replied triumphantly.

“You should be grateful they love you so much.”

“Oh, I am, I am.” They were in bed, drowsy. She listened attentively to the echo of the word “love” before she went on. “But what is it about old people? I don't pry into
their
lives. I hope I'm not like that at their age, living through my descendants. If any.” She didn't mean all that she said, nor was her dismissive tone completely sincere; she spoke the words for Judd's benefit.

“You won't be.”

“Feeding on them, drinking them up.”

“You exaggerate. What was this big stink about, anyway?”

“Well—um—er—
you
!” said Betsy, parodying extreme embarrassment and feeling it at the same time.

“Me? Where do I come into it?”

Her heart sank; what a thing to say.

“They were miffed that you didn't come with me.” It was the most she could manage. She had meant to say a good deal more—everything. She was beginning to despair of its ever being said.

“And you defended me.”

“Of course! I said you were much too busy and important to bother with the likes of them.”

“You didn't.”

“Right. I didn't.”

“Is that what you think?”

“No. I guess I was a little hurt, though. Just nicked. For their sake.”

“Next week I'll go. It's just been a series of—you know? It's not that I don't like your family. And you—I like to see you with them, playing the little girl.”

She was startled. “Do I do that?”

“Often.”

They were nose to nose. In the dark she saw his teeth and eyes, smiling.

She sighed and turned over, and he folded his body against hers.

“Goodnight, kiddo,” she said, but after a few minutes: “Do you really think those killer whales like the ones in the movie are capable of lifelong fidelity to a mate?” It was a loaded question, though she was no longer sure what the ammo was.

“I can't answer. I'm asleep.”

“Really—do you?”

“Nope. Now go to sleep.”

“I guess that was a preposterous movie.”

“Ridiculous. Go to sleep.”

“It's interesting, though, how a trashy film like that carries on the
Moby Dick
tradition. I mean, the epic tradition of doing battle with a monster. How it perverts and exploits it. And how it still appeals.”

He didn't answer. She lay awake for a long time after he went to sleep, wondering why she was lying in that particular bed, beside that particular man. After a while she turned, put her arms around him and drew him to her, but he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, grunting. He was a sound sleeper.

Chapter Two

Violet

Sometimes, when Violet woke up, it was 1941. She was wearing a blue jersey dress with a flared skirt and big, carved ivory buttons down the front. She'd paid for it herself, and she had it on when she met Will Ruscoe.

He was an artist, and a drinker. For a living he did drafting in an architect's office down on Warren Street, and later he had a sign-painting business. Violet didn't care what he did: he was as handsome as God, and a great talker. On their first date he drank whiskey after whiskey, and she watched his face get rosy with it. He spoke to her in a crooning voice that almost made her laugh. “You have a fine medieval face, Violet,” he said. Then he ran his thumb down her cheek, and she shivered. He told her she had the look of a saint, but a passionate saint. She hadn't known the saints were passionate. “Those heavy-lidded eyes, meant to see visions …” His fingers moved down to her jaw and neck. “Ah, I would paint you if I were only worthy of it, Violet. In ten years, I would be ready to paint you, if you were still speaking to me.”

In eight years he was dead, and he never did paint her. She was left with notebooks full of sketches of her eyes and mouth. “I'm a lazy cuss except when I have a sketch pad in my hands,” he told her. It was true. He thought he was preparing himself to paint, but his pen-and-ink sketches were his passion and his forte.

Violet and Will went dancing every night until they got married, and then they stayed home and made love and danced to the radio. They moved to Rochester soon after the wedding. Will didn't give up drinking, but he cut way down. His sign-painting business never prospered; meagerly, it supported them. Betsy's first drawings were made on bits of discarded poster board, and her clearest memories of her father were of fanatical neatness. Even in the shop, there was never a mess—never a brush left uncleaned, never a scrap left on the floor.

He had a congenital heart condition that kept him out of the war. He would have been a good soldier, being neat and brave and likable, and he volunteered in '41 and again in '43, when they were taking anyone. Violet always believed the rejection killed him. He fretted over his 4-F classification, and he knocked himself out working for civil defense, and in 1949 he dropped dead in the shop.

“Do you remember your father?” Violet used to ask Betsy. Her daughter's resilience alarmed her; a week after his death Betsy wanted to be in a first-grade Easter pageant.

“He was tall,” Betsy would reply, after thinking for a moment. The only image that came to mind was of her father ruling off spaces for letters. “He could draw good horses,” she said.

By the time she was eight she seemed to have forgotten him entirely. “He was nice,” she would say to Violet, when pressed. “He was the best father a child could have.” She stood there, glibly praising, and her thumb stole slowly to her mouth, a sure sign she wanted to be somewhere else.

“How could she forget him?” Violet wailed to her father. By this time they were back in Syracuse, living with Frank and Helen on Stiles Street.

“Violet, she's a child,” Frank would say. “It wouldn't be healthy for a child to grieve deeply. Do you want to see her moping around, in tears?”

“Yes!” Violet's eyes were permanently red-rimmed. It took two years for the intensity of her grief to die down. She missed Will every minute.

Her mother, who had always been a stern and distant parent, was kind in Violet's bereavement. She accepted Violet's inaction patiently. But she was harsh with Betsy, and the child spent most of her time in the attic, with her dolls, or out in the garden with her grandfather. Helen, all the more ferocious because Violet slept late, dragged Betsy to church every Sunday, taking out Violet's defection on the child.

In 1951 Violet got a job as a secretary-receptionist in a large printing concern. Eventually, she had a listless affair with the boss, and the end of it coincided with Helen's death in 1953. She quit to keep house for Frank and Betsy, who was, by then, twelve. She continued to mourn her husband; she channeled her grief into theosophy and Yoga and vegetarianism, but nothing diminished it. Her dead husband was her true calling, her most passionate enthusiasm, and as Betsy got older Violet talked to her more and more about Will.

“Can't you remember, honey?” she would ask. “That little stuffed dog? And when you had the measles and Daddy made ice cream? Remember when you locked Daddy in the cellar?

She could see Betsy trying and failing. In the end, Violet had to tell her all the stories. It was a great joy to her to make Will real to his daughter. Eventually, Betsy would sometimes fail to distinguish between memory and tale, and this pleased Violet most of all.

Nineteen forty-one was the crucial year in her life. Having a job had been the first big event. She only worked, in fact, for three months, but she always recalled her hat-selling job fondly as the big break for freedom, and she never forgot the feel of her own money, in its little brown envelope, tucked into her lizard purse, greener and more promising than money doled out by her parents. Meeting Will was the second event of significance, totally eclipsing the job. It never occurred to her to continue working after they were married; a pot of stew on the stove at six became the point of her life, and Will coming up from the shop, and their evenings together. Her lizard purse got shabby, and there was never much money in it. But Violet remained not only undaunted, but as happy as a heroine in the magazine stories she read. It was a noble calling, to live for your man.

Her lunch at Tubbert's with Aunt Marion, up from New York for the wedding, also took place in 1941, and also helped set that year apart for Violet forever. Violet (lying in bed listening to her heart beat) recalled it eagerly (though it had hurt her at the time) along with the happier memories.

“There's something I think you ought to know before you're married, Violet,” her aunt had begun, after a discussion of bridesmaids' hats.

For one daft moment Violet thought her mother had deputized Aunt Marion to tell her the facts of life. She shoveled in her lobster Newburg, keeping her eyes on it, thinking: This is the most embarrassing moment of my whole life.

“Did you ever think you were adopted?”

Adopted? Violet put down her fork with a clatter and wiped her mouth. She would eat no more lobster Newburg. Adopted? Did I ever think I was adopted? Did I ever think I was Santa Claus, or Mrs. Roosevelt? Did I ever think the earth was flat? Adopted?

“No,” she said to her aunt.

Aunt Marion was wearing a rose-colored toque and a two-piece gabardine suit with shoulder pads. She had done her lipstick like Joan Crawford, but it was coming off with lunch, and her mouth looked as small and prim as Helen's. I'm not related to you, Violet thought, in a panic.

“You were adopted when you were a tiny baby.”

“That's a lie! Why are you telling me this?”

“It's not a lie, honey,” her aunt said patiently. “Your parents don't intend ever to tell you, but I thought you should know, now that you're getting married. It's true. Your mother's name was Emily Loftig. She lived next door to your parents on Spring Street. She had a baby and couldn't keep it. She and her husband moved away, and your parents adopted the baby—you. They'd had a baby of their own and it died.”

“I don't believe this,” Violet said, but she did. It made absolute sense, and it explained why her mother had never loved her.

“It's true, Violet, and I thought you'd better know it. She came and saw you, not long ago. She was here in town. She came into the store with your dad to get a look at you, and then she left. She won't be back. I'm telling you this for your own good. It's not right that you don't know.”