In-Laws and Outlaws (2 page)

Only after Stuart and I had married did I start to understand what it meant to be a Decker. An only child of an only child of an only child, I had a little trouble getting used to having so much family around me all the time; sometimes I felt I was drowning in Deckers. But they were perceptive people and made it as easy for me as they could, the way they did with everyone who married into the family. And that's what you did when you married a Decker; you didn't marry just
that
Decker, you married the family.

You couldn't make it as a Decker without an extraordinarily strong sense of family; Deckers-by-marriage-only like me learned that rule pretty fast. Even semibohemian Stuart never seriously considered living his life without the rest of the clan to fall back on whenever it suited him. I think I was a little envious of them, of their unlabored closeness and their easy assumption that any member of the family had the right to ask any other member of the family for help when help was needed. “A place to go to recharge your batteries,” Stuart had once said to me.

Stuart and Raymond's parents were dead, but the two brothers had two sisters who were very much a part of Decker life. Annette and Michelle were twins, the
twinniest
twins you could imagine. They shared everything, and I do mean everything. No, they didn't dress alike or play tricks on people; I doubted whether they'd done that even as children. But they thought the same things and did the same things; they were in complete harmony about everything in the world, and I never saw one spark of rivalry between them. They didn't know which of them had been born first, for their parents had never told them. Oh, I suppose they could have consulted hospital records or asked the doctor who delivered them; the fact that they never did suggested they liked not knowing which of them was the elder, even if only by minutes. Now in their forties, they were undoubtedly the same competent, self-assured women I'd known years earlier. Annette and Michelle were one person in two bodies—a trifle absurd in middle-aged women, perhaps, but there it was.

Annette had married a cardiac surgeon, Dr. Thomas Henry, and it was their son Ike who'd been one of the three youngsters to die earlier in the year. Ike had inherited the Decker genes—black hair and eyes, a body that was tall and slender. Annette took it for granted that one day young Ike would join the family business, but Dr. Tom wasn't so sure; Ike had started showing an interest in science at an exceptionally early age. Annette herself had gone to work in the firm as soon as her education had been completed.

So had Michelle; the venture capital firm of Decker and Kurland trusted their own. The “Kurland” part came from Michelle's husband, Rob, who'd married not only into the family but into the family business as well. Rob would not be in sole charge now that Raymond was dead, because the twins had long been equal partners. Technically, I suppose the firm should have been called Decker, Henry, Kurland, and Kurland—brother Raymond, sister Annette, sister Michelle, and husband Rob. But the twins made sure outsiders always understood they were Deckers; they'd introduce themselves by saying
I'm Annette Decker Henry
or
This is my sister, Michelle Decker Kurland
. Michelle and Rob were the parents of Bobby, so recently and so surprisingly dead, and Joel, the sole survivor of that ill-fated generation.

The last dead youngster was Lynn Ferguson, the daughter of Aunt Elinor and Uncle Oscar. Elinor was the Decker, Raymond and Stuart and the twins' aunt but only eight years older than Raymond. She'd married late, with the result that her daughter Lynn had been born the same year as Bobby Kurland, her niece Michelle's child. Elinor's choice of husband had been Oscar Ferguson, a Massachusetts state senator at the time; Decker money and influence had helped put Oscar in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Fergusons divided their time between Washington and Boston, and like all the other members of the Decker clan spent part of every summer at Martha's Vineyard.

The last time I'd seen young Lynn Ferguson she'd been engaged in a half-teasing, half-serious argument with Bobby Kurland over whose turn it was to take the wheel when their Uncle Raymond took the sailboat out that day. That was my last summer at the Vineyard, not more than six months after Stuart had been struck down by a speeding van that never stopped to see if help could be rendered to a dying man. The entire Decker clan all the way down to young Joel had opened their arms and hearts to me even while struggling with their own shock and grief. They couldn't have been less selfish in their concern; I was made to understand I would always have a home and a family to support me.

How easy it would have been! That last summer on Martha's Vineyard I felt myself burrowing deeper and deeper into the family cocoon, letting Raymond and the others make my decisions for me, taking it for granted that I was included in all the Decker plans for the future. That sense of safety and of being looked after by those capable of doing the job properly can work as an anaesthetic; I was being numbed into the same lethargic, why-think-about-it state that had made Connie Decker so passive and do-less. I looked at Connie and I looked at me; I couldn't see much difference.

Fortunately, I had the same itch that Stuart had had; I woke up one morning realizing how desperately I missed the theater. I missed its excitement and its uncertainties; I missed
doing
things. I couldn't just sit still and be taken care of the rest of my life, as enticing as that prospect might appear. I had to go back. But I knew I could never divide myself between theater work and Deckerdom the way Stuart had done; I couldn't function under the burden of a split allegiance. It had to be a clean break.

So I told everyone goodbye and headed back to New York. It was a struggle; it's amazing how fast people can forget your name in that town. I did my best, but my best turned out to be not quite good enough. I did not become the hottest director on Broadway. Hollywood did not clamor for my services. I did get a job with a State Department goodwill tour, directing a theater group that traveled in China for four months. Then for a while after I got back, I worked for an agent, scouting off-Broadway productions in the hopes of finding publishable plays. Eventually I ended up in my present position, running a smallish theater museum in Chicago. My dreams of Tonys and Oscars were over; they'd never been very realistic dreams anyway. But I'd had my shot. And I didn't regret one minute of it; I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Also, I liked the work I was doing now; all in all, I was reasonably content.

I was content, that is, until I looked at the obituary page of the Chicago
Sun-Times
and its notice of
Death elsewhere
caught my eye. Going back into the Decker world wouldn't be easy under any circumstances, but on the heels of so many tragedies it just might prove impossible. But Lynn Ferguson had been my niece too, and Bobby Kurland and Ike Henry had been my nephews. I needed to find out what happened to them.

My secretary came in to tell me I was booked on a 6:10 flight to Boston. I gave her Connie's number and had her make the call; Connie's near-hysteria and half-formed accusations had gotten to me. Some
body
had set fire to the house on Martha's Vineyard, she'd said. In effect, she was saying Raymond Decker had been murdered.

If I were to catch a 6:10 flight, I needed to go home and pack. I notified one of the security guards I was leaving and passed four schoolgirls salivating over a gown Katharine Cornell had worn when she'd played Juliet in Chicago. I'd steadfastly resisted the use of docents ever since I took charge of the museum. Guided tours had their place, but people should be allowed to linger in a theater museum. Especially this one; Chicago had once been a big theater town, a worthy rival to New York. It wasn't now, of course, and hadn't been for some time; but its theater history was worth preserving.

Stuart hadn't been the least interested in the theatrical past; for him everything had to be
right now
—a vicarious rebellion against so much family tradition? Possibly he was just sowing wild oats, as the Deckers might see it, and eventually would have settled down in the family business. But I didn't think so. Stuart honestly loved performing on a stage, and he had a way of making a restless audience fall silent when he was speaking that is always the mark of the truly gifted. No, Stuart belonged on a stage, not in an office making money. There were enough other Deckers with that particular talent; the family business could get along perfectly well without Stuart.

But Stuart was dead, and I had broken off with my in-laws years ago to keep from being suffocated with kindness. Yet they'd stood by me when I needed them, and now they were the ones with trouble. If Connie Decker needed someone to talk to, then I would listen as long as she wanted me to.

2

In the cab from Logan Airport I began to get cold feet. I wasn't worried about meeting Connie again; she'd asked me to come, after all, and she'd never been very intimidating anyway. But the others … they'd all be gathered at the funeral tomorrow, certainly; hardly the place or the circumstance for a family reunion. Michelle and Rob Kurland and their remaining son Joel, Annette and Dr. Tom Henry, Congressman Uncle Oscar Ferguson and Aunt Elinor—they'd all be there. My choosing to live my life apart from them … well, they were bound to feel insulted. I'd worried about that before, but not a whole lot since we were separated by geography as well as by lack of fellow feeling. But now we'd all be there together, at Raymond's funeral, and they were sure to resent me. They'd see me as rejecting everything they had to offer in favor of what to them was nothing more than petty pursuits. They wouldn't be human if they weren't offended.

And suddenly I didn't want to offend them, I didn't want them to resent me. The Deckers were the only relatives I had, even if they were relatives-by-marriage only. My own people were dead, and I was reasonably sure I didn't have any unknown distant cousins floating around somewhere in the world. I was astonished at this sudden longing for
family
that came over me. For the very first time, I questioned the wisdom of having broken away from the Deckers.

The cab was taking me to Mt. Vernon Street on Beacon Hill, to the house where Raymond and the twins and Stuart had all spent their childhoods. The house had been built by their great-grandfather, and to the subsequent generations it remained the family homestead. Raymond had moved back in when his parents died; by then he had a wife and a child to move in with him. The others in the family maintained homes in Brookline and Dover and other places nearby, no one ever really straying far. The Mt. Vernon Street house was one of the few free-standing buildings on Beacon Hill, two or three times as wide as its neighbors. But I remembered Connie's once saying they really could use more room, considering the amount of entertaining she was expected to do. Raymond wouldn't hear of it; family tradition would be upheld come hell or high water.

Connie was waiting for me. Her appearance was appalling; it had been a long time since I'd seen her last, but it was more than the advance of age that had changed her so. Shadows under the eyes, creases down the cheeks, clenched jaw, eyes preternaturally bright. “Hello, Connie.”

“Gillian? Oh, you've changed so much! I'm not sure I would have known you!” She practically pulled me in through the door, as though afraid I'd change my mind and go away again. Obeying orders, I left my suitcase in the hallway and followed her into the family room.

Connie hadn't stopped talking from the moment she'd opened the door. The gist of it was how glad she was I'd come and she didn't know what to do and she was about to go out of her mind. I resisted the urge to tell her to stop being melodramatic. That was uncharitable and, besides, perhaps she was none too stable at that; she was sounding less and less like the Connie I remembered. “Gillian, they just won't listen to me, none of them,” she was saying. “They never did listen to me, but this time … this time it
matters
, don't you see?”

What I saw was an extremely distraught woman. What I had yet to see was if there was any realistic basis for her distraction. “Connie, try to calm yourself. This can't be good for you. Try taking deep breaths.”

She did; it helped a little. “Oh, Gillian, I'm sorry. It's just that everything is so … I could do with a drink.” She fixed us both one and then suddenly remembered her duties as a hostess. “Oh—are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

“I ate on the plane.” I took a sip of the drink I didn't want and waited.

Now that she did have someone to listen to her, Connie didn't know what to say. I watched her struggling for words, and then without warning all of her nervous energy seemed to go out of her like air from a deflating balloon. She collapsed onto a sofa, slopping a little of her drink over her hand. “I know how this must look. The shallow wife unable to cope without a husband to lean on. That's what they all think.” She sounded bitter. “But it's not that! It's not that at all. Somebody hates us, Gillian! Somebody's out to kill us all!”

This was worse than I thought. There was a stack of crystal coasters on the table beside the sofa; I took Connie's drink as well as my own and put them down. I sat next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. “Connie. Do you know how
that
sounds?”

“Paranoid, no doubt. Oh Gillian, I wish Raymond were here! I miss him so.”

Of course she did. I knew the feeling well; I'd been through it myself, that debilitating loss of your life's partner. There's nothing else quite like it in the world.

It's never easy losing a spouse, but Raymond's death would leave a gap in more than just his wife's life. He'd be missed by all of them, intensely so. Raymond had been the cornerstone of the Decker family—its driving energy, its direction-setter, its final arbiter of disputes. As for myself, I'd not seen him in ten years, and I wished—too late—that I'd not waited so long to come back.