Family Matters (7 page)

Violet couldn't remember talking much to her mother. Helen was a woman of harsh silences. Frank had probably talked to her too much, Helen too little. She used to ask him why Helen was so mean to her, just to see the look that came over his face, of despair and boundless love.

“It's not meanness, Violetta,” he would say. He called her Violetta when he loved her most. “She's a complicated woman. She does love you, but it's not so simple for her.”

To Violet, Helen was—among other things—the Catholic Church, and she disliked the church all the while she was growing up because it belonged to her mother. When she was grown, and Will dead, and she could have profited from religion, it was too late; all it meant was cruelty. For years Helen had taken her to Mass and drilled her in catechism for her first communion and kept a rosary in her apron pocket, and it was Helen who yelled and slapped and came up with cruel deprivations. It was just like her, to worship a man bleeding on a cross. Frank was an Agnostic (to Violet it was some kind of religion, like Catholicism, but infinitely more sensible and kind), and never set foot in a church, and yet was loving.

“Be patient with her, Violetta,” he said sadly, but what impressed Violet about such exhortations was their goodwill rather than their content.

She didn't enjoy thinking of Helen, but she didn't try to block her out, either. Everything might help, any little thing. And it was, in fact, with Helen in her mind that she remembered the letters. Of course—she had discovered them as a nosy teenager foraging in the attic. Letters from her aunt to her mother, dated 1922, the year of her birth. She had known instinctively not to ask her mother about them, and somehow she had shrunk from asking her father, though now she couldn't remember or imagine why. But she had asked her aunt Marion about them on her next visit from New York, asked her shyly during one of those excursions when Aunt Marion tried to make friends with her. Were they out for ice cream? She tried to picture it: a lemon soda at Schrafft's, the long spoon, the chunks of ice in the vanilla, and Marion … She paused, groping down the years. Marion had told her never to speak of them; she had been harsh with Violet, and Violet had cried.

She could recall the look of them, the creamy paper, the fancy, old-fashioned handwriting (hard to decipher), the red stamps, even the tone of them—reasonable, consoling, unlike Aunt Marion in her seventies, who tended to be unreasonable and irritating. But what they were about eluded her utterly, besides the sense they had imparted of the grown-up world as a yawning pit. She had, instinctively, rejected them, hadn't even plowed through them all. But they had registered in her mind. Why, though? Oh, it wasn't fair, what the years did to your memory.

She thought they must be still in the old cedar chest where she had found them, up in the attic back under the eaves. She had kept them in her own room for a while, but then, nervous about being caught, had restored them to the chest before Helen found out she had them. She'd been—what? fourteen? (She'd had a white angora sweater set that year, and breasts.) She set herself to remembering what was in the letters; they had been strange and shocking, that was all that came back to her. They had puzzled and repelled her. Scared her. But now she had no memory of the contents of those thick, squarish envelopes. She concentrated: creamy paper, black ink, red stamps, “Your loving sister,” and the 1922 postmark …

Urgently, before she forgot everything, she called Betsy.

Chapter Three

Betsy

At three o'clock Monday morning her mother called again. Betsy awoke just too late.

“Jesus!” Judd was out of bed. “What kind of crackpot—”

The phone was in the kitchen; she raced him for it and won.

“Hello.” She motioned Judd back to bed.

“Betsy? It's me again.”

“Hello, Mother.”

Judd looked murderous and made strangling gestures with his two hands before he marched back down the hall, muttering. The bedroom door slammed behind him.

“I know it's late, Betsy, but this is really important.”

Betsy calculated quickly. The call would set a pattern if she took it without protest. She made a decision even before her mother's sentence ended: to endure the nocturnal calls without complaint, even if they became chronic. It's the least I can do for her, she thought. She was responding every bit as much to the curses and the slammed door as she was to her mother's last whims, but a silent and vague “to hell with him” was the closest she came to articulating this.

“It's okay, Mom. I don't mind. What's really important?”

“I just remembered I have a pack of letters of my mother's—Helen, I mean, not my real mother—”

“Yes, yes. What letters?”

“From Aunt Marion, when she was living in New York. I looked at them once, years ago. I suppose, technically, they're my father's, but I remember finding them and appropriating them and reading them—when I was a teenager, poking around one day.”

I can imagine, thought Betsy, knowing how her mother could poke around. She had, over the years, gone through Betsy's drawers, read her letters, eavesdropped on her conversations, picked the locks of her diaries.

“I can't remember what's in them; they went on in a sort of religious way, I think, which strikes me as odd, now, since they were from my aunt Marion.”

“What do you mean?” There was no sound from the bedroom. Please let him have gone back to sleep. Betsy stretched the phone cord to its limit, to the far side of the kitchen, and spoke as quietly as she could. “What were they about?”

“I can't remember!” said Violet in a restrained wail: she too, had to keep her voice down. “I don't think I even read them all, Betsy, the handwriting was hard to read. I think if there was anything to understand in them, I wouldn't have understood it. But now they might make more sense. There were a lot of them, and they dated from around the year I was born.
That
I remember very well. I think that's what must have attracted me to them, that and the fact that they were hidden, of course. In my mother's old cedar chest, under a pile of winter underwear. And they were horrifying, Betsy, in some way, though I can't remember why.”

Betsy felt her patience going. “Somehow I doubt they'll tell us much, Mom,” she said, keeping her voice even and the weariness out of it. “If they were from Grandma to Aunt Marion, we might get something out of them, but not the other way around.”

“No no no no no no, Betsy,” came the confiding, confident voice. “I think you're wrong. My aunt is the blatherer. My mother was very close-mouthed. There may be hints.” She told Betsy how Marion had reacted to her questions about the letters, how Marion the blatherer had become a Helen, closemouthed and secretive and curt.

Betsy looked at ther watch. Three-fifteen. He must be asleep—otherwise he'd have the light on to show her he was up and fuming. “I'll come over and check them out before I go to the library. Nothing to lose.”

“Come over now, honey.”

“Mother!” But she had expected it.

“Please?” Had she not noticed the weakness of her mother's voice until it turned plaintive, or had Violet deliberately faded out? Betsy was well acquainted with her mother's dramatic gifts. “I want so much to see them, Betsy. I'm sure there's something in them, and it's …” The voice faded, strengthened, died away again on a sigh. “Oh, I know it sounds selfish, it sounds awful, but—this is my best time, honey, I feel so well and enthusiastic at night, Betsy, you don't know what it does to me to upset your routine like this, to call you over here at this terrible hour, but I want you so much—”

“Mom.”

There was a final gathering of strength. “Betsy, I can't
sleep
without those letters. Please, honey, it won't happen again.”

“Okay, Mom, I'm coming.” She would have answered sooner but for tears. The weakness wasn't faked or exaggerated; if only it was. She could hear the shortness of breath, the pain behind the words. She wiped her nose on a table napkin. “I'll be right over.”

“Bless you, honey.”

She pussyfooted by the bedroom door. She was wearing a short nightgown, and she grabbed a sweater from the hall closet and keys from the table. Again she carried her sandals and let herself out without a sound. Just before she pulled away from the curb she saw a light go on in the apartment. Hell!

She lived on the other side of town from her grandfather's house, but she could have made the trip with her eyes shut. She drove speedily through the deserted streets, afraid. She had just seen her mother on Saturday night, but she never knew when she would find her weakened, deteriorated beyond recognition. A sudden change was possible, the doctors said. Or she could live for months, hanging on. She hadn't sounded good on the phone.…

Betsy took her mother's dying personally; it was simply the latest episode in life's ruthlessly waged war on her. There was no need to pity Violet, whose saintly smiles stirred all of them to admiration. Frank had overheard her snapping her fingers and singing “Stardust” one day as she sat on the bedpan, and had reported it to Betsy sternly, as if to say: At my age I have more respect for death. But it was wonderful, they acknowledged, that Violet would go down singing—like the medieval martyrs who went down praying.

It was the left-behind living, as the funeral directors said, who deserved pity and needed comfort: Frank, helplessly watching Violet sink into death while he remained hale; and Betsy, losing her mother at a time when—she felt—she needed a source from which to draw strength for the living of her own unsettled life.

But Violet greeted her joyfully, arms outstretched, from her oasis of light. “My good daughter! And how pretty you look all tousled!”

There was no trace of candy bars, except for a basket full of wrappers. Nor was the night nurse evident.

“Mrs. Foster asleep again?”

Violet nodded mischievously. “Who needs her?”

“Mother, she's getting paid to be on call here.”

“Well, she is on call. Don't be so crabby. She's only in the next room, and I have my little bell.” There was a silver dinner bell on the bedside table.

That bell. “Grandma's?” When it rang, everything had to be dropped, you had to run.

Violet nodded, pleased at her daughter remembering. “It's been sitting in the china cupboard all these years. Mrs. Foster feels better about her naps knowing I have it.”

Betsy sighed. Let it go for now. “Shall I go up in the attic and look around for those letters?”

Violet smiled radiantly. “I'd be so pleased. Honey, look in your grandma's cedar chest. We hauled it up to the attic when she died. They may still be in there, just where I found them—under a pile of long underwear.” She made a face. “That darned underwear. Or try the old rolltop desk; your grandpa may have put them in there. Oh, I hope he didn't destroy them, Betsy.”

“Well, I'll look. Do you need anything before I go up?”

“Not a thing.”

Her grandfather slept in the ground-floor bedroom; a prowler in the attic wouldn't wake him. Next door, in the guest room, Mrs. Foster lay lumpy and fully clothed on the bed, snoring. Betsy shut the door on her.

The attic was stuffy but cool, with a hint of mice. Was it a smell, or the suggestion of tiny movements in the walls? Betsy stood at the head of the stairs and sniffed in her childhood. She used to escape up here; she remembered the loud rain on the roof. There was her old wicker doll carriage, covered with dusty transparent plastic. There was probably a doll in it—maybe Samantha, that once-loved child. She didn't look. Bad luck if Samantha should be gone.

Her grandmother's cedar chest was pushed under the eaves. It bore her initials, carved within a wreath of leaves—H.P.R.—and it was thick with dust that hadn't been disturbed for years. Gingerly, Betsy lifted the top, expecting mice, and found a pile of salmon-pink girdles. Ah, underwear, at least. She pawed through the chest. It was full of old clothes, some of them her own—cotton blouses, yellowed nylon slips, a bag of white linen collars, camisoles, baby things, and on the bottom the underwear, well-worn long johns of all sizes. Under that: nothing.

She dumped it all back in haphazardly (the ghost of Helen stood over her, frowning) and went to the desk. It was Frank's as unmistakably as the cedar chest was Helen's: a massive oak piece, handsomely carved. It stood in the middle of the floor near the chimney, with canning jars piled on it. These, too, were Frank's; he used to supervise the hot, August canning sessions, stripped to his undershirt, seeding tomatoes—the produce from his backyard garden—by squashing them in his hands. The canning jars contained dead flies. Betsy rolled back the sloping top of the desk. Inside, it was dustless and full of papers. There were twelve pigeonholes, two small chambers with doors, two secret compartments that she knew of—he'd shared with her one day their secret mechanism, the two pillars that could be pulled forward when a bit of carving was rotated. Patiently, Betsy thumbed through everything. It was mostly old tax records, bank statements, paid bills, correspondence from lawyers and accountants. She checked all twelve cubbyholes and went through all the drawers, perversely saving the secret compartments for last. And, of course, each of the compartments contained a tied-up bundle of letters. Betsy flipped through one of them without untying it; the letters were addressed to her grandfather, and whosever they were, why ever they were saved, they were written in a strong, angular hand, not her great-aunt Marion's wispy, artistic script, with its loops and flourishes.

Betsy picked up the other package. There they were, loops and flourishes all over them. Her first reaction was pleasure in the continued workings of Violet's memory. Her second was disappointment. The very fact of her finding the letters seemed to insure that they were harmless. They weren't even hidden terribly well; the trick pillars were an open secret to all of them. Presumably, Frank had stored them there after Helen's death. If they had told all, surely he would have destroyed them. In fact, if they revealed anything useful, Helen would not have hung on to them. On the other hand … the date was there—1922—and “Mrs. Frank Robinson” at the Spring Street address. Violet had it all correct. Heavy in her hand, the letters held some sort of promise, after all.
You never know:
that's what Violet would say.