Family Matters (6 page)

“Why did you have to tell me
here
?” Violet burst out. “Didn't you know I'd cry?” She stood up. “I've got to go. I've got to see Will.”

“Wait!” Aunt Marion took her arm and walked her over to the front door. Violet was crying quietly; no one seemed to notice. It was a horrible restaurant, Violet thought. Full of people eating, full of the smell of food, full of mouths opening and shutting …

By the time they reached the front door she was sobbing noisily. “Sit here.” Her aunt—her former aunt—pushed her into a chair. Violet always remembered the chair; rose and tan brocade, the colors of her aunt's hat and suit. There was a pair of potted palms. Violet stared at them through her tears until Aunt Marion returned, check paid and lipstick repaired.

“Is it really true?”

“Yes, it is, Violet.” Aunt Marion squeezed her shoulders with more tenderness than Violet could remember her ever showing. She didn't even know her aunt—her nonaunt—very well. She was the loose-living New York aunt who came to visit them once a year, bringing exotic, indulgent gifts that her sister Helen disapproved of—lace underwear, perfume, fancy fruits bottled in brandy. “I know it's hard, but they're still your parents. They love you so, Violet. You're the light of your father's life, and your mother—”

“My mother! She's never been my mother! She's always hated me!”

A party of people came in, women in hats like Marion's, and looked curiously at Violet (a big, striking girl with long brown hair, standing stiff and unresponsive, holding back tears, while a smartly dressed older woman tried to comfort her). Violet glared at them with loathing. She pulled away from her aunt and went out the door.

“Violet! That's not true!” Marion hissed, following behind. “Violet!” She heard Marion groan, and knew the sound expressed remorse for telling her, for stirring it all up practically on the eve of the wedding. Violet slowed and allowed her to catch up.

“I'm glad you told me,” she said coldly. She couldn't call her “Aunt.” “I'm just upset.”

“Come on, we'll go home in a taxi.” She took Violet's arm again, but Violet shook it off and then relented and let her take it.

But when they got to Stiles Street, Violet stayed in the cab. “I'm going over to Will's.”

“Oh, Violet—”

“It's all right. I'm grateful to you for the news. I'll be home for dinner, but I just don't want to go home right now.” She gave the driver Will's address, and though she didn't look back she imagined her aunt staring after the taxi in dismay. Violet huddled on the seat, trembling. She wanted Will. Will would be her home, her real family, from now on.

“Mrs. Ruscoe?”

Violet opened her eyes. Oh, that eye makeup. “Good morning, Terry.” Wasn't there some kind of nurses' code that forbade such excesses?

“Here's your breakfast”

Ah. Strawberry preserves for the muffin, and an egg in a cup, and melon, cubed. She ate greedily and didn't care, to fill the emptiness. It worked, too, with certain foods—candy and bread, especially. She had two muffins.

Frank came in, just shaved and smelling good. A handsome old man, and picturesque since his hair had gone on top and left a thick white ruff around the sides. “How's the bridge, Dad?”

“It's going to be all right,” he said, moving his jaw left and right to test it. He kissed her head. “Feel up to some reading today? Maybe we could finish
Three Men in a Boat
.”

They had read an article about a famous magazine editor who had cured a serious illness with vitamin C and Marx Brothers movies. Violet rejected the vitamin (“It's all bull,” she said, “bull” being her strongest epithet), but she agreed to try the humor, and Frank read aloud to her most mornings after breakfast: P. G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain and Eudora Welty and James Thurber. Now they were in the middle of Jerome K. Jerome, at the part where Harris tries to sing a comic song. They both looked forward to it, as a way of spending time together without talking about what was on their minds. They had, in fact, forgotten the purpose of the readings, but her aunt asked, when she heard about them, “Does it make you feel any better?”

“Not really,” said Violet. “But I'll die laughing.” Her rare mortality jokes always embarrassed her aunt, who said, “Now, Violet.”

“Anthony Trollope,” Betsy had said thoughtfully when Violet repeated the joke to her. “Trollope died laughing.”

Violet always fell asleep after a chapter or two, and Frank closed the book and crept downstairs to make his daily call to Dr. Baird. Violet's day sleep was sacred and precious because her nights were becoming so restless. Her illness had taken them all by surprise: it was real, and she didn't complain. All her life she had exaggerated and lied, whined over imaginary illnesses, turned colds into pneumonia, missed school, carefully calculated the number of sick days she was entitled to at work and took them all. But a year ago when she began getting the pains in her joints, and the swellings, and the bouts of fatigue, and all the rest of it, it took her months (valuable months lost) before she told anyone, and another four weeks before she'd consent to see a doctor. She wanted to try dolomite, cranberry juice, deep breathing, until Frank and Betsy stormed at her. When all her ailments were taken seriously, and tests (three days in the hospital, with wires, tubes, and needles) showed advanced lymphogranuloma, a rare form of Hodgkin's disease, and Dr. Baird gently told her there was little hope for a cure (in his eyes, she saw “no hope”), she took it placidly. Her last cold had aroused more passion and resentment than this, her last illness.

“I'll be with Will,” she said to her father soon after the diagnosis, and though tears came to his eyes he didn't really believe in her remark, at once so romantic and so stoic. He thought she got it out of a book. Though they all noticed Violet had stopped complaining, no one noticed she had stopped lying.

“If only Betsy was settled,” she also said, meaning: Otherwise I die content, Judd's name never came up in the family discussions of settling Betsy. There were sighs all around. “Settled” meant “married,” but it wasn't so blunt.

Violet had a fair amount of time to think and she thought about the thing that nagged at her, trying to identify it. It wasn't only Betsy's unsettledness that was bothering her. There was another “
If only …
” It was when she began to mull over the past, the years with Will (boning up before the reunion), the 365 wonderful days of 1941 (minus Pearl Harbor, though she remembered that she and Will were dancing cheek to cheek that morning in the kitchen, and she had new shoes, when they'd heard it on the radio), that she figured it out. Her real mother. Not that she'd forgotten she was adopted. Like her love for Will, it was always at the back of her mind. But she hadn't been aware of the intensity of her curiosity, and then she saw that article in the
Times
and took it as a sign.

Often, when she lay there and seemed asleep, she was going over and over what she knew. Loftig? Was that what Marion had said? Or Lofting? She had asked her aunt once. One Thanksgiving, after dinner, when Frank was snoozing in his chair and Betsy was off wherever Betsy went, she had said to Marion, “Tell me what you know about my adoption.”

Marion got sullen and stubborn. “It was a mistake ever to spill the beans to you, Violet,” she said in a low voice, glancing over at Frank. “I won't say more than I did then. You know, and that's that. You don't need to know more. My sister Helen was your true mother, the one who raised you and cared for you.”

“But my real, actual, biological mother, Marion! How can I help being curious? Did you know her? What was she like?”

“It'll do no good to dredge all that up,” Marion whispered fiercely. “It's dishonoring Helen's memory. And Frank! Hasn't he been a good father to you?”

Her father snoring quietly in the corner, full of turkey, full of love. It had been a pleasant family dinner. Betsy had been in a good mood for once, Marion had brought a fruit cake and wine, the turkey had been just right. It was their first Thanksgiving without Helen. It was nicer without her. Violet had repressed that thought, just as, faced with the turkey, she had repressed her vegetarian ideals. And she retreated in shame from the conversation with her aunt. I let her get away with it, she thought now, remembering how easily Marion had cowed her. It's my right to know! It said so in the
Times
.

“And don't you say a word to your father about this, unless you want to break his heart” were her aunt's last words on the subject.

Well, it would be her secret project. Wasn't she entitled to a secret project, now that her days were numbered? She blotted out the Thanksgiving scene and went back to 1941. She concentrated fiercely. She could recall the toque, the suit, the lobster, her blue dress, the chair, the palms.… Betsy. Betsy would be her salvation. She would turn it all over to Betsy. She smiled, knowing she'd begun to depend on Betsy lately like a child depends on its mother, and dialed her number, realizing belatedly that it was four in the morning.

Waiting for her daughter, she dozed, and awoke with the empty sensation in her body that wasn't hunger but something worse, something bad. She waited quietly for it to pass. It seemed hours since she had called Betsy. Why didn't she come? She dialed the number again: a man's voice. Him. She hung up. The emptiness ran along her arms into her hands and down her legs to her feet. She couldn't feel her body at all. Maybe that's death, she thought. When I'm all hollow I'll be dead. She would be one of those chocolate Easter rabbits she never used to let Betsy have and Frank used to sneak into her basket. She reached for a candy bar, thinking of her daughter.

Elizabeth Jane. Betsy had always been a good child, she couldn't have asked for a better. If only she got along more easily with people. With her mother and her grandfather, with selected friends, she could be so charming, but Violet knew the charm could desert Betsy, and she got scared and tongue-tied and less pretty when she was flustered. Betsy's diaries, when she was in high school, had been painful to read, full of humiliations and rejections. Life was hard for Betsy as it had never been for Violet. Violet drifted through; Betsy struggled.

The emptiness came and went. She tried to keep it straight, all that she had to tell Betsy, but it drifted away from her. She had read a book about remembering once and used to joke, “I can't recall a word of it!” Her memory was getting worse, but she lay in bed placidly enough, chasing it. There was no hurry.

That paradox pleased Violet. Without much time left, she had all the time in the world. She loved the way time had slowed, loved lying in the bed she'd had for so many years, with all her comforts at hand, thinking. She could lie there in her old maple bed and think forever. Remembering details about Emily was like being in a detective story. There was so little, and so much, to be made out of it. Like Peter Wimsey or Adam Dalgliesh she pondered and worried her clues until they connected and a pattern formed.

The house on Spring Street, number 666. They had moved from there when she was little. She could recall the Rebhahns at 664. She used to play with David and Clara. David used to urinate on the rosebushes in the backyard, Clara used to hang by her knees from a branch of the cherry tree with her dress over her head. The Rebhahns had shocked Helen; she'd never liked them. Violet suspected it was David and Clara, as much as Frank's prosperity, that had driven the Robinsons away from Spring Street. But who lived next door, on the other side? The Loftigs—it didn't sound at all familiar. Had they moved when Emily disgraced herself? What would a family do? Surely not continue to live next door to their illegitimate granddaughter and her adopted family. They would move away, and take Emily so she could start a new life. Maybe just across town; “across town” was further away in those days. But it would be kinder to Emily to move right away from there. Imagine running into Helen somewhere, wheeling her baby.… No. They would have left the city, if they were kind, and if it was possible. The whole family would be under a cloud—or could you get away with such a thing, in 1922? Send Emily away …? She'd have to leave school—on what pretext? And once the baby was born and safely adopted, would she come back?

Sometimes the pattern refused to form, and all that was clear to Violet was Emily's intense misery. Her heart overflowed with sorrow, and her head swam. She would leave it to Betsy. Betsy's head never swam when it came to the crunch. That book she had gone to England and Chicago and God knew where else to do the research for. She had brought Violet a Staffordshire dog in her suitcase, picked up cheap in London. Violet thought it was ugly, but she loved it because she liked to think of Betsy out on her own, adventuring in foreign lands: poring over old manuscripts in a library, roaming London, actually going into a musty shop and dickering with the owner. “I got him to come down five pounds solely on the strength of my briefcase,” Betsy had laughed. “Women simply don't carry briefcases in London. And it only had my lunch and a murder mystery in it.” Betsy could amaze her. Violet had long ago taken as her motto, “You never know!” And it applied better to her daughter than to anyone else, except possibly to her father.

With Helen she had always known. Helen did nothing to make life interesting—Violet's criterion for loved ones—and in fact did her best to make it dull and hemmed in. No, Violet didn't love her, though she didn't comprehend that fully until adolescence, when Helen's gloom and sternness became almost malevolent at times. She had been punished for every minor transgression. For forgetting to set the table, the penance was dinner alone in the kitchen. For coming in late: isolation in her room. For lies: slaps. Once, for saying “damn,” Helen had locked her in the cellar.