Homecoming (12 page)

You’ve gone too far, he thought instantly. Now
that you’ve done it, you don’t know how to handle it. Poor Mother. And pity surged in his chest.

Of course it was clear now why she had been so definite about ten o’clock. She had wanted to make sure that the cars might not pass each other on the narrow country road and have a reason to turn back.

Annette collected herself admirably. As if this were any ordinary arrival, she greeted, kissed, offered chairs, and suggested fresh coffee. But still no one moved.

Lewis spoke first. “What is this, Mother? Is this your idea of a joke? It’s a very bad one, if that’s what it’s meant to be.”

“Not at all. Plainly and simply, I wanted to see my sons together.” Her heart was trembling, but her voice was steady.

“With all respect,” said Daisy, “this was a very bad idea. Lewis and I have come all the way from Washington. We’ve been worried. Frankly, we thought you were ill.”

“Does a person have to be ill to deserve a visit from you?”

“Of course not. But you have made a dreadful mistake.”

“Let the men speak for themselves, please.”

There they were, the brothers, not looking at each other, not saying anything, just standing there ready to flee. They were handsome men, much alike in their dignity, their dark hair slightly silvered at the temples, as if they were playing the role of distinguished citizens in an advertisement for an investment bank. Their heavy eyebrows, straight and thick, and their rather sensitive, expressive lips were like their father’s. Handsome men, but still not as handsome as their father, Annette thought loyally. He would have a few thoughts for them if he were here. If they think I’m going to let them leave this room, they have another think coming.…

“A dreadful mistake,” repeated Daisy. “I’m sorry to say so, Mother. It hurts me.”

Annette was angry. Daisy was making her more angry, with her frosty courtesy. A long time ago she had spent a year at an English boarding school and had never gotten over it, in her kilts with the safety pins and her make-believe accent. You tried to like her and mostly you did like her well enough, but there had been times when you didn’t, and this was one of them.

“And I’m sorry you feel that way, Daisy. But I am their mother, and I want peace between them.”

Then Lewis spoke up again. “It’s too late.”

“Nothing’s ever too late while you’re still alive.”

“Water over the dam, Mother.”

“That’s ridiculous.” She was surprising herself by being able to talk straight and stand straight, while her heart was performing so madly.

“Ridiculous?” Gene repeated. “I don’t know how you can say that.” The last time he had seen Lewis, they were leaving the courthouse with their lawyers. They were not speaking then and would certainly not speak now. At any rate, he thought, not after what I’ve been through. “When people testify against each other in a courtroom, it is hardly a laughing matter.”

“You’re right, Gene. I withdraw the word.
Tragic
is the right one.”

“Oh, please,” said Cynthia, addressing nobody in particular.

She was pitiful. Gene wanted to catch his niece’s eye to show, although she already must know it, that this feud with her father had nothing
to do with her. But she was looking down; her face was shadowed, and terribly thin. Her fashionable suit—so unlike Ellen’s conservative choices—seemed only to emphasize the change in her. He had seldom seen her since her unspeakable tragedy and then only on those few occasions when they happened to be visiting Ellen at the same time. He supposed that her visits to Ellen were rare because they were too painful. Freddie was almost as old as those twins were when—

“Come, Cynthia,” Daisy commanded. “You don’t need this on top of everything else.”

When they left, Annette stood barring the door. “Now I ask you two to listen to me. You owe me that much. Please sit down.”

“Out of love for you, I will sit,” said Lewis. “I don’t want to upset you any more than you already are, but—please, Mother, this is very painful, very unfair. Surely you can’t have forgotten what I’ve been through! Between lawyers and newspaper reporters, I’ve had more than a fair share of misery. I’ve been pilloried. Must I go over it all again this morning?”

“You’re missing the whole point,” Annette replied softly. “What I’m asking you both to do is
to put all that away. It was a—a disease. Yes, a time of sickness and suffering. Would you want, if you had been sick in the hospital, to keep reliving those weeks for the rest of your life? Wouldn’t you rather try to forget about them?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. That’s exactly why Daisy and I moved to Washington, where I’m working on something very worthwhile, I hope, for the general good. So I am already putting it all behind me.”

“You can’t have put it all behind you while you’re still estranged from your brother.”

“Oh, but I can! That’s been my cure. Are you asking me to forgive and forget what he did to me?” Sharp, sarcastic lawyers had shamed him, portraying him as a culprit, a careless incompetent who had not bothered to investigate a serious complaint, indifferent to the possibility of the terrible consequences that had indeed occurred and would torment his dreams forever. Indifferent? Hardly. But Gene had not helped. “Am I supposed to forget the guilt he heaped on my head? It haunts me. I didn’t deserve to be torn to shreds by lawyers and reporters.”

“The newspapers came to me, too, after you sent them.”

Lewis’s voice rose hoarsely. “I sent them? That’s idiotic.”

From his chair, which was as far from Lewis’s chair as was possible, Gene retorted, “It’s very simple. You didn’t like it when I told the truth about your refusal to check on Sprague after what Victor had reported. Very simple.”

“You could have toned down your remarks instead of making me look like a deliberate criminal.”

What could I have toned down? Gene thought. Victor had laid the facts out on the table, and I was under oath. I should have followed up on Sprague myself right at the beginning. But I always deferred to Lewis because he was the elder who’d been in the business three years before I was.

Fresh anger flared, and Gene cried out, “You expected me to lie for you, did you? Oh, it was only a little matter of truth—”

“And honor,” Lewis finished for him. Honor, from the man who had put his own daughter
through hell when she dropped the man he wanted for her and made another choice.

It was all so ugly. And so terrible, coming to a head here in their mother’s house. They might as well be thrusting a knife into her.

“Those poor innocents who died,” Gene said. “And all you think of is yourself, how you suffered—”

“You make me sick. You’re like all these high-sounding talkers whose hearts bleed easy tears for the world, while at home, with your own daughter, you—”

Gene lurched forward in the chair. “Damn you! What has Ellen got to do with all this? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave her out of it, understand?”

Flinging out his arm in his agitation, he knocked the fruit bowl off the table. It shattered to slivers, while apples and tangerines rolled away on the floor.

“Oh, I’m sorry! Sorry!” he cried, stooping to pick up the mess. “I’ll buy you another bowl. Watch the broken glass, you’ll cut yourself.”

It was not glass; it was crystal, Lalique, to be exact, and Annette’s favorite, with its delicate
birds perched around the rim. They had bought it on their twenty-fifth anniversary, when they had gone abroad on the S.S.
France
, and this was the memento of those lovely days.

“Never mind,” she said. “We’ll clean it up later. It’s nothing. No, really,” she repeated, for he, the meticulous, considerate Gene, was red with embarrassment.

“I need to get out of here. Let me get some newspapers and take it off the floor before somebody gets cut.” Then, “I’m sorry, Mother, but let me go home. I’ll see you another time. Next week positively.”

If she did not catch them both now, she never would. Of that, Annette was certain.

“No,” she said harshly. “No. You are two grown men, and I can’t believe that you want to behave like children. If your father were here—” She stopped, feeling the sting in the back of her nose that always preceded the gathering of tears.

“I’m glad for his sake that he isn’t,” Lewis said sadly.

“But I’m here! So for my sake, can’t you—” she began.

“Mother, try to understand. We’ve lived
through disaster. It broke us. You might as well try to put the pieces of that bowl together as to do what you want us to do. Mother, it can’t be done, and the sooner you recognize it, the easier it will be for you.”

She saw them again—so often did the same images recur—in the bathtub together, and dressed on Sundays in matching sailor suits, and wearing mortarboards at their college commencements. She saw them, too, as they must have looked on the terrible night when the hotel crumbled apart.

Why did it matter so much that these men in late middle age were at loggerheads? She did not have any good explanation for why it mattered so much to her. It simply did. Perhaps it was just that life was so short.

“Hate,” Lewis said, “takes a lot of energy, and I need all my energy now to help my daughter. Nothing else can be as important to me except you, Mother. Certainly not my brother. Now if you’ll excuse me, please, I’ll go find my family.”

“Good riddance,” Gene said when the door closed. He had put the fruit on the tray and was picking up shards with a paper napkin. “That’s
about the only thing he said that I can agree with.”

“Beautiful! A beautiful, worthy sentiment. God help me, could I ever have dreamed I’d live to hear it?”

“Mother.” He held her shoulders and spoke softly. “I know what this must do to you. I never thought I’d live through anything like it either. But it can’t be helped. It’s too deep and has lasted too long. And you still have each of us whenever you want us, you know that. Only, not at the same time, that’s all.”

Annette searched Gene’s decent, intelligent face and shook her head. “I’m ashamed of you,” she said in her bitterness, “ashamed, do you hear? And you both ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Then she wrenched herself free of his hands and went out.

In the meantime Daisy and Cynthia were in the library. Daisy was seething.

“I can’t get over your grandmother. Of all people, so tactful, so Old World, really, to do a thing like this. God knows whether those two men will
come to blows in there—I don’t mean that—or maybe, who knows, maybe I do. They could. Anything can happen. In this world we have to be prepared for any crazy thing.”

“Yes,” said Cynthia, a trifle sharply, as one who should know very well about that.

She was at the window, staring out at gloom, wintry land, frozen pond, and lowering, dark sky. “It looks like snow or sleet or something.”

“Oh, great. I’d like to get back to the city before it starts. I hate driving on ice. Stop twisting your necklace; you’ll break it.”

“If it wants to break, let it.”

Daisy scolded herself: Here I talk about a necklace, when it’s her heart that’s broken. From having had everything, she has nothing. It’s like being bombed, or burnt out, or beaten to death. Damn Andrew for giving her this last blow. Damn him to the ends of the earth. If only there were something we could do for her. We talk and talk, Lewis and I. We think and try to imagine a miracle, of walking in and finding her standing calmly again, in that quiet way of hers, with that touch of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

It had been a bad idea to bring her here today.
This old town had too many memories, the church, the wedding, and the party in this house when they came back from the honeymoon, she coming down the stairs in her lavender dress … And then, the cemetery.

“This is a beautiful room,” she observed. “When your father’s finished in Washington and we’re home again, I think I’ll redo our den in these colors. Annette won’t mind if I copy her, I’m sure.”

“Mom, I’m all right.” Cynthia spoke without turning from the window. “You don’t have to work so hard to cheer me up.”

“It’s not hard work. It comes naturally, darling. And you do seem to need cheering up.”

“I know I’m dull company. I shouldn’t have come. I’m better off working. At least I’m helping people, and that helps me.”

“Well, that’s true.” Daisy, hesitating over a question, decided to proceed with it and ask whether there was anything new happening, any word of Andrew.

“Wouldn’t I tell you if there were?”

“I should think his parents would try to get in touch with you. After all—”

“I suppose they’ve given up. You and Dad haven’t gotten in touch with Andrew either.”

“I wouldn’t care to be there when your father meets him.”

“As far as I can see, he never will, so you needn’t worry.”

Sometimes, when she was unable to fall asleep and lay still counting her heartbeats, Cynthia’s thoughts churned, inventing situations in which she would have to confront Andrew: on the street, in a bus where he would take the seat next to hers and try to argue her into letting him come back, or at the theater where he would be sitting directly behind her and she, feeling his eyes on the back of her head, would be waiting for some vengeful, humiliating move or words from him. And as she imagined that scene, her muscles would tense in dread.

Perhaps, inevitably, she would have to see him in the divorce court. She had no idea whether the parties did have to meet there. If they did, she would act as if he were invisible.

The pond was dark blue. Out in the center beyond the ice, two swans and their young were swimming, their young now, in December, having
grown to be as large as the parents. This was the time of year when, like little birds being driven out of the nest and made to fly, the cygnets were to be sent forth into the world. And Cynthia, who had known about swans ever since her grandfather had raised the first pair, wondered how many generations this present family was removed from that first. She watched now as the big one, the father, rose into the air, flew low and returned to his huddled family, rose again, and repeated the flight. He was teaching them how to fly.