Family Matters (8 page)

Betsy hurried downstairs with the package. All was still, and within her circle of light even Violet now slept. Betsy's presence had been enough to make her sleep, and smile in her sleep, her head back and awry. Betsy leaned over her. It's how she'll look dead. But the thought didn't touch her—Violet with her high color looked so remote from death. What did jar her briefly was the sudden bereaving realization that she alone was awake in a house full of old people sleeping. She wished Judd were with her, and then acknowledged the ridiculousness of the idea: Judd coming with her on these nocturnal visits, poring patiently over faded letters for clues to the past! Judd was pastless; the present was his natural element.

Betsy turned on the light by the easy chair and sat down with the letters. She untied the brown twine that bound them and flipped through the envelopes—all alike, each with its flowery script and faded carmine stamp—half-thinking that, in spite of her curiosity, she might doze off herself. She was tired, as much from the tension of leaving Judd as from the hour, and it showed in her face. Even in the flattering lamplight, she wasn't a pretty woman, no matter what her mother said. Her resemblance to Violet was strong but generalized; in details she was sharper and plainer. She had too much nose, and a secretive, scared look that thick, arched brows and wide, hooded eyes—not unattractive in themselves—only accentuated. She could look like a bird at bay, and she had the figure of a bird, too—stout through the middle, bosomy, hippy, with slender legs. At best, she looked interesting, with the paradoxical contrast between bony features and generous body; at worst, she resembled a pigeon.

She dozed briefly, and dreamt the letters were simply tedious, full of shopping lists. She rubbed hard at her eyes and then got up, making no noise, and crept downstairs to get herself a cup of coffee.

She knew every inch of the house, from the missing stair post to the location of the coffee jar. It had been her home from the time she was seven until she went to college, the big brick house with the casement windows and the odd mix of furniture—Helen's mother's late-Victorian relics, pieces from Helen and Frank's early married days, massive mahogany monuments to their later affluence, a few modern things Violet had picked up. In her own old room, there was a white iron bed, an oak washstand complete with towel rack (on which she had hung hair ribbons), a rickety upholstered rocker, a threadbare Oriental rug, two new dressers in heavy maple. There was also a picture of the Virgin Mary crowned with thorns and framed in bamboo; Betsy hated the thorns but loved the pretty, impervious face of the Virgin, which, bedewed with blood drops though it was, gazed upward with a look of unutterable calm and sweetness. Betsy never wished for the picture to be removed, any more than she would have suggested replacing the rocker, on which you couldn't rock without some part of it coming loose and falling off; she merely sat still on the rocker and ignored the thorns and the blood, a stoic and reasonable child who learned early to accommodate herself to inconvenience (as the Virgin, apparently, did). It would have done no good to complain to Helen, anyway, any more than it helped to complain to God. Violet and Frank could usually be won over without trying, but Helen had little indulgence for the whims of childhood, and in the end it was Helen who ruled, in a monarchy that was absolute.

While the water boiled, Betsy ate some cold asparagus out of the refrigerator, and then she made a cup of coffee and carried it upstairs. Violet was still asleep, curled comfortably into her pillow and breathing regularly. Betsy knew her mother could sleep like that for hours once she went off. She settled herself in the chair again and picked up the letters.

The top one was postmarked October 13, 1921, a year and two months before her mother was born. She paused before she removed the letter from its envelope. The handwriting, unmistakably her great-aunt's, had faded with time, and the fading distanced it from the loud woman in the upsweep who disapproved of Betsy's sex life. It seemed wrong to read this woman's letters, as it wouldn't have seemed wrong to read Aunt Marion's.

But she opened it. The paper was expensive and had endured. Was this the time of Marion's prosperity? Her
Pride of Passion
period? No, the triumph of her muse hadn't occurred until 1927. The paper was either an extravagance or a gift; both had figured largely in her early, unfettered life.

Dear Helen, I will come to you at Thanksgiving. You must stop giving way to these morbid streaks, and to call it the unspeakable thing is no way to begin to cope with it and accept it. Helen, your religion should teach you this. Have you talked to anyone? (I mean clergy.) You worry me, that you don't get over this sorrow, when you were, I always believed, the strong sister, and the churchgoer. Dear, don't speak of punishment, not for you or for him. Leave it to God. I must see you, just carry on til I come. Your loving sister, Mamie.

Betsy looked up blankly. Across the room her mother slept and smiled, oblivious. Betsy glanced at the envelope again. Sure enough, her grandmother's name and address and, inside, the signature was the nickname no one had used in years but that she still identified as her great-aunt's. And yet it all seemed to concern strangers. What sorrow? Was it the death of Helen's baby? And why punishment?

She flipped through the letters. There were eight of them, the envelopes all alike, and the stamps. The dates ranged from October 1921 to March 1923. Betsy began slowly to read them. It took some time to decipher the florid, faded script. She could understand why the young Violet, inquisitive though she was, had given up on them, and the more she read the more she thought it was a good thing she hadn't gotten all the way through. What would an impressionable teenager have made of them?

By the third letter Betsy was fully awake and relishing the slow pace. It was four-thirty, and she didn't want to go home. The curses, the slammed door, the light going on like a slap in the face awaited her there. It was another world from the world of her grandfather's house, a world of quiet, peace, safety, with her mother deep in calm and blessed sleep. Even the letters: Odd and wretched though they might be, the love between the sisters was unmistakable, like something in a book—but her great-aunt was real, her grandmother had been real, and the love was real, too. It was what was missing back at her apartment, that kind of secure and comfortable love. But she needn't go home while the letters lasted. She finished her coffee and read.

They continued to make no sense, or, rather, they had their own logic but it bore no relation to anything else, so far as Betsy could see. The first four letters were similar: attempts by Marion to calm Helen in her sorrow. They were all from late 1921 and early 1922. Betsy frowned over the inspirational tone. This was Aunt Marion, then, back when she was Mamie, and wasn't so far removed from the prose of her family's religion, and wasn't so outspoken that she couldn't adjust her responses to the feelings of her audience. An ardent young woman full of affection for her grieving sister. But why grieving? Nothing specific was said about the baby. And though it was never mentioned, Betsy sensed that Helen might have been suicidal—certainly badly depressed. But why?

Betsy thought about her grandmother. Helen had been old even when Frank still seemed young. She was little and hard, with a brown face, and tiny hands with blunt fingers. She was a devout Catholic. She kept a sampler on the kitchen wall on which she had stitched, as a girl, the awesome injunction, “Pray Without Ceasing,” and what she prayed for was the conversion of her husband and the reconversion of her daughter, who had bolted the Church after her marriage. She took Betsy to Mass every Sunday while Violet slept late. Helen was not patient with little girls; she seemed to prefer cooking. Once Betsy had surprised her, on her knees and weeping, in her bedroom, and she had turned on Betsy with her hand, tangled in rosary beads, upraised, and unprecedented fury in her old brown face. She was morally incorruptible, with principles of steel, and, never averse to taking Betsy's schoolgirl quarrels in hand, she was a master of the devastating phone call. (“This is Helen Robinson, Betsy Ruscoe's grandmother. I wish to complain about an ethical matter involving your daughter and my granddaughter.” And Violet rolling her eyes in the background while Betsy trembled, afraid the fight had been her fault, after all, and she'd catch it. You could count on her grandmother to get the truth.) Betsy had felt an abstract love for her, as for a small god, but it was complicated by humiliating dependence. When Helen died, she felt fear and relief equally: fear that the world would come to an end, relief that her grandmother wouldn't be there to rub it in. And there was sorrow, too, that was partly personal. If Helen could die, anyone could.

Betsy's memories seemed to have no relation to the woman of the letters. Helen weak and morbid and needing the encouragement of Marion? Marion, as she herself rightly pointed out, was the weaker sister, the prodigal living a life of shadowy sin in the big city, never holding a decent job or a decent man, getting by (precariously) on her wits. “You know my aunt Marion always has a liaison going,” Violet had revealed to Betsy twenty years ago, before Marion had descended to pants suits and the largesse of Frank, on whose bounty she now lived in a suburban condominium. (Her last, chaste liaison.) But Helen … was this the same hard, brown grandmother, to whom her sister could write, “Get hold of yourself for the sake of your husband and your future. Good can come out of evil if you refuse to bend before it”? Betsy tried to picture her grandmother without a hold on herself, or bending. These were not Helen's postures. The recollection of her sobbing over her rosary was the only connection Betsy could make. It must have been a family crisis of magnitude for Helen and Marion to change roles.

In the fifth letter, written in the spring of 1922, there was a clue. “You can go on, dear. I see your strength is there. Accept your baby's death, and think of this as another chance. And then you can go on.” Betsy sighed with relief; there it was, then, the family tragedy laid out plain: the baby who had died at birth. But then, in the next letter, was the incomprehensible sentence, “Talk of sin and retribution, of the grotesque and the monstrous, that way madness lies,” as well as a few brisk lines of sympathy for Frank's cold. A welcome break in the gloom, Betsy thought. A cold was a normal affliction, neither grotesque nor monstrous, and not a sword in the heart but something to dose with honey and lemon (Helen's invariable remedy). It must have helped distract her from her agonies, whatever they were.

The penultimate letter (December 29, 1922—Violet was nine days old) came to the point at last. The prying eyes of young Violet could never have read this far:

I have seen the child, a lovely little girl. The mother is healthy, the baby is perfect. Let this not be part of your pain, dear, but something fruitful, a chance at life. You can have her for the new year if your heart inclines to it. The mother is quiet and agreeable, there will be no trouble.
There seems to be no resemblance
. You will warm to this baby, Helen, if you let yourself. I know you have the strength to put aside your sorrow and your anger and open your heart.

Betsy looked up from the letter and tried to order her thoughts. Helen was distraught because her baby was dead. Normal enough, though there seemed to be an intensity to her grief that worried her sister—and a strange duration, too. By this letter, in which Marion still talked of sorrow and anger, Helen's baby had been dead—how long? Well over a year. But all right, the death affected her strongly. Then a baby born out of wedlock to the girl next door must indeed have seemed a gift.…

But there was more to it. The letters clouded as much as they revealed. What was the source of Helen's hate? Why all the talk of unspeakable sin? Violet had reminded her of Helen's exaggerated notions of propriety—was it adopting a bastard that bothered her? And why should she hate poor Emily so much that she had to be assured the baby didn't resemble her? And then her own baby—did Helen see its death as a punishment? What on earth for?

Here was the first mention of the mysterious Emily—healthy, quiet, and agreeable. The letter bore out Violet's notion of her as a young and inexperienced girl, but it gave no real information as to age or circumstances or name—as if any mention of these would be too painful for Helen to read. Idly, Betsy inspected the envelope. It was postmarked Haddam, Connecticut. She looked at the others; all were from New York. Another fact: In late December of 1922, Emily was living in Connecticut. Presumably Violet was born there. Interesting, possibly useless. What did one do with a fact like that?

She opened the last letter, hoping for clarification. It was postmarked March 19, 1923. The three-month hiatus might mean Marion went to stay with Helen and Frank when they received the baby, to help out; it was hard to imagine Helen coping on her own. Had Marion, in fact, been the courier who brought the baby to Syracuse from Haddam? The last letter was cryptic, and the sermonizing sounded weary. Helen must have been maddening.

You're making too much of this. Please, please resign yourself, Helen. It's the way of the world, but it's all over now. You must rejoice in the baby. And as for the other, you must forget at last. You will ruin your life if this goes on, and you now have a responsibility toward the future. Isn't it
just that
that everyone wants? Count your blessings, Helen, for once. Some people would look at your life and, even knowing all, say
she has everything!
I will be with you when I can, possibly early April. Keep writing to me, dear, unburden yourself, I am here to help, but
try
. Love to the pretty little one. Your loving sister, Mamie.

It was almost five-thirty, dawn; Betsy could sense it rather than see it in the lit room with the shades down. The birds were beginning. Betsy reached up and turned out her light. She was inexpressibly weary, and the letters, for all their warm affection, had finally begun to weigh on her like a personal sorrow. What
was
it with Helen? Her strict, upright grandmother was gone forever, and in her place was a grief-mad depressive. She would try later to analyze it. She would spend the day in the library trying to make practical use of her information. All this so that an old woman could be brought to this room to gaze on her wasting child, so that Violet could press her mother's hand and die content. Betsy pictured this scene and found it terrifying, like her juvenile visualizations of her parents in bed conceiving her, kissing and moaning or whatever it was. The horror of grown-ups' secret, exclusive lives. She blanked the whole thing out of her mind and discovered Judd there in its place, naked, slamming a door. She would think of him later, too. Schemes to counter his impatience and disapproval were more than she was capable of. A fearful question blazed dramatically through her mind like neon in the dark: Do I want anguish to be my life's work? She slept on it.