The Angry Woman Suite (14 page)

“I wouldn’t have called Matthew a musician!” Mother cried.

“Well, then, Mother dear, what other musician was there?”

Mother raised her head, straightened her shoulders. I’d forgotten what a force she could be. Her eyes bore into mine. Her enunciation was crisp:
“There was only one real musician, and I did my best by
him.”

Of course.

I turned to
him.

But Aidan was doing that strange thing he sometimes pulled, acting like no one else was in the room with him.

“I make a much better historian than a musician,” he said, as if this had just occurred to him. “I can still tell a mean story. So if you remember what I told you about Matthew Waterston and reaching for the stars and the moon, then you must also remember the story of a boy who made angels sing, he played piano so beautifully. You were just a boy yourself when I told you that, Francis. But do you remember? That other boy’s name was Jamie.”

Jamie.

Mother groaned. “Aidan,
no.
”

I wanted to kick a wall down. I wanted to kick a dozen walls down, all those walls of abuse and smothering and neglect that had held me hostage my entire life. But I got a grip.

“Jamie?”

“James Witherspoon.”

I sucked in a breath. “
The
pianist?”

“James Witherspoon Waterston.
He
was Matthew Waterston’s son. And, yes,
the
musician.”

“You don’t mean the pianist who wrote and recorded—?”

“‘Dazed.’ That’s right. ‘Dazed’ was the big hit of the 1920's.
Jamie
was a huge hit.”

“James Witherspoon is
your
Jamie? But don’t tell me
he’s
my—”

“To read on the train,” Aidan said, pressing his journal to my chest. “The beginning is mine, how we started, and the middle is mine, too. But I made copious use of your grandfather Grayson’s notes. He’d planned on writing a book about the colony someday.”

“The colony?” I said stupidly.

“You don’t know shit,” Aidan said, picking up my trumpet case and heading for the door. “All you ever cared about was the music—but you’ve got to know that nothing is what you think, Francis. You’ve got to know that truth is hidden all over the place. And you’re old enough for truth now, or most of it anyway. Now, go on, get the rest of your things. And say goodbye to your mother.”

I knew enough about music to know that James Witherspoon, an orchestra leader whose signature had been sappy ballads, had disappeared from the scene many years ago, in the early 1930's, after having a breakdown on stage.

Aidan broke the stiff silence between us, talking over the steering wheel of Mother’s car. “Someday you’ll forgive your mother. She
is
a good woman, Francis. In fact, she’s exceptional. She gave up a lot. She didn’t follow her heart. She used her head. Read what I’ve written. You’ll understand.”

I didn’t mean it, but I said I’d read his journal, and that I
might
someday forgive Mother.

“Check your pocket for the money,” Aidan ordered.

“It’s all there.”

“I’ll call Buster for you, let him know what happened, why you won’t be playing next week. You’ll phone me when you reach Manhattan?”

I told him I would.

“If history is any indicator, Francis—and I’ve had my share of dealings with your family, so I know what I’m talking about—your hitting Lothian is going to make for a big story. Bigger than you think. People will be out looking for you. Lothian will see to it. Assault is
a crime.” Aidan braked in front of the station. He faced me, expression grim.

“You’ve got to put a stop to the temper, you hear me? You can’t go around assaulting people regardless of what’s said to you, or done.”

I started to hum.

“And stop the humming. This isn’t the time or place. Now, I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to you. If I could’ve, I’d have changed more. So would Matthew—”

“Did he know me?” I interjected.

“Matthew Waterston? No.”

“Then what about Jamie? What happened to him, your Jamie?
He’s
the bigger part of me, isn’t he? Did
he
know me? And why does Mother hate me so much
she
could never tell me the truth about my real father? Jamie’s my real father, isn’t he? And Lothian, she hates me too, because of Jamie—”

“Your mother doesn’t hate you, Francis. She loves you. And, second, until now you weren’t old enough to understand the story about your mother and Jamie and Lothian—and me. And, third, you’re doing it again. You’re making the wrong assumptions even more wrong because you don’t have enough information. The information you’re missing is here, in this journal. Read what I wrote.”

I leaned into Aidan then, suddenly more scared than I’d ever been.
He
was my experience of a father.

He put a hand on my cheek, momentarily, near where Lothian had burned me, and I thought he’d say something nice to make up to me. But I beat him to the punch. I said, “I love you, Aidan.”

But Aidan said the strangest thing back.

“Then let your children know this history. From the beginning, Francis. Read my journal. Could be, maybe, knowing all the facts, your children might, just might, one day forgive us both.”

ELYSE
Sacramento 1955

Papa used to say that the only time any of us really suffer is when we start believing something that doesn’t square with the real deal.

“What’s the real deal?” I’d asked.

“The real deal is the real truth of things
, Liebling.”

Of course—talking truth was one of Papa’s most favorite things in the world, and that was because truth was a shifting thing, according to Papa, which is what made it so interesting—like the way my second father was so obviously talented, but would forget it when scared, which was often—or the way he’d overplay his hand when he got to thinking he was God’s gift.

But this is just one woman’s opinion, of course.

Still, I sometimes think the most fearful person I’ve ever known had to be Mother, who could be so loving one minute and distant the next—just with family, though. With everybody else, she was pretty much constant, so that if I’d ever told anybody outside family about how Mother would abandon us to go live in her head, they’d have never believed me. How I knew this, I’d no clue. I just did. And I know Francis came to know it, too—oh boy, did he ever.

One time, Mother and Grandma got into a fight about the truth of things, and Mother, who rarely yelled or used nasty talk, was nonetheless a contender—and I’d actually thought it pretty brave of Mother, or foolhardy depending on point of view, to call Grandma out, because Grandma’s nasty talk could pretty much nail a regular person to the wall.

The fight
seemed
to start with Bean—Bean who was so little she didn’t appear to count for much other than a nightly bath and food at regular intervals. Otherwise, Bean was a shadow being, an afterthought, a toddler who seldom fussed, didn’t seem to want or need attention, and would just sit and view the world for long periods of time, apparently okay with the way it was spinning.

Grandma had just come in from working the night shift and changed out of her nurse’s uniform into nightgown and robe, and was sitting at the kitchen table with me and Aunt Rose, focused on breakfast and a hand of pinochle, and not Bean on her lap, who Mother had hastily deposited while getting Bean’s cereal ready before leaving for work—and Mother was already running late, which she’d told us twice.

Suddenly, Mother snapped at Grandma, “Would it kill you to actually pay some attention to Bean? She’s Stephen Eric’s, too, you know!”

Everybody froze. Grandma couldn’t have looked more stunned had Mother poured that baby cereal right over her head.

“Now, just whoa down there,” Grandma started off, tone still pretty neutral, probably because she was so surprised.

“I will not,” Mother said, slamming things down on the kitchen counter. “I will not, I will not, I will not!” And then my always composed mother folded herself over at the waist and made her long hair hang down and cover her face. Great hulking sobs rose out of the edifice she made. I ran for Papa, in the garage.

“Something’s wrong with Mother!” I shouted. “She’s crying like she’s cut herself, and she screamed at Grandma, too—” Papa, who was very deliberate and always made every move count for just so, ran into his workbench and then the door from the garage to the kitchen in his haste to get in the house. I followed, hot on his heels.

“Nobody helps me!” Mother was sobbing when we burst into the kitchen—and that’s when Grandma lit into Mother, dropping a still silent Bean into Aunt Rose’s lap as she hoisted all of her 350 pounds to her feet.

“Oh, for God’s sake, are you still on that rag?” Grandma yelled at Mother, tears streaming down her face, too. “Goddammit all to hell, Diana! Pull yourself together and don’t even think of pulling a scene with me because I’ll fucking knock your block off! You think I don’t know Bean is Stephen Eric’s kid! Well, I do—and I also fucking well know my son’s dead, just like I fucking well know you were too chickenshit to go to the hospital the night he died! He died asking for you! What do you think of that? He died asking for his chickenshit wife—so take
that
and put it in your pipe and smoke it, Diana!”

I’ve thought
lots
about that day since, and I think, in general, the difference between Francis and Grandma’s hollering is what happened immediately afterward. Actually, with Francis there was often no comprehensible afterward, because he could act like he hated your guts for a full week after whaling away on you, looking at you with the evil eye, as if considering what else to hit you with, and that was part of the torture, not knowing when it would end—
or
he could turn a full 360 and beg forgiveness, which was almost as awful as the evil eye, because it never failed to send me hurtling into that all too-familiar maelstrom of conflicting realities.

But with Grandma, like a suddenly deflated hot air balloon, it was
always
a millisecond of outburst followed by a hand on the arm or a light pat to the cheek—and then it was over, never to be spoken of again, because, for one thing, it was undisputedly understood that Grandma was never wrong.

But this day it was different, and Papa knew it and it was because of those awful words hanging in the air over us, the ones conjuring up the horrible specter of an agonized Stephen Eric moaning for Mother on his deathbed, and Mother abandoning him.

Papa hesitated for just a breath of a moment and then he bypassed my deflated grandmother and went straight to Mother. He put his arms around her and murmured endearments in German, but Mother stood still and ramrod-straight, jaw tight, staring at the wall, acting like she heard nothing.

After a few useless minutes Papa dropped his arms, but not before I heard him whisper,
“Es tut mir leid
”—“I am sorry,” and then he turned and walked away, and Grandma, with Aunt Rose and Bean, left too, leaving me alone with Mother.

I stood there knocking my hands against my legs, feeling somehow responsible and unsure why.

“Mother?” I finally ventured.

Mother’s eyes flickered.

“Mother—” my voice sounded tinny, out of tune. “What do you want me to do?”

Mother’s odd eyes landed on me, and then she swung her head, making her dark hair swirl back and forth across her face, and when she finally stilled herself and her hair stopped swinging, I could see that her regular face had returned—and, as if to confirm she was regular again, Mother acted as if absolutely nothing had happened, as if that horrible picture of Stephen Eric crying for her, and Grandma punishing her for abandoning him, had been laid to rest.

“I want you,” Mother said to me, “to stop staring.”

With everybody scattered—Grandma, Aunt Rose and Bean to the bedrooms, Mother to work, and Papa, I assumed, back in his garage—I climbed into Papa’s big recliner in the living room and huddled in one of its corners, contemplating the crazy world of adults and what had just transpired; a complete mystery to me, those words that Grandma and Mother had hurled into space, left to linger and for me to figure out.

What had Mother meant by saying nobody ever helped her? She had Grandma, Aunt Rose, Papa and me—me!—to help. What more help could anyone need?

Or was it somebody else Mother had meant; a
who
she missed—Stephen Eric, of course. Was it possible Mother was mad at Stephen Eric for dying, as if he’d had a choice in the matter?

I went to Papa, in the garage. He stood over his workbench looking pained.

“Ja,
it is like passing a kidney stone,” he said before I could open my mouth.

“What is
it
, Papa?”

“The hurting,” Papa said. “The hurting is always caused by someone who loves you and you love back, and that’s what’s so awful about it.”

Papa was referring to Mother and Nellie both when he said that, and how he hadn’t stopped Nellie from hurting Mother, and how, even after all the time that had passed, it still hadn’t mattered to Mother that Papa had never been aware what Nellie was doing to her when Papa wasn’t home, because Mother’s point was that Papa
should’ve
known. It had been his job to know. And Papa had accepted this—he felt responsible all his life about what happened to Mother because of what he hadn’t known about Nellie.

And Papa’s words about hurting have since attached themselves to other pages as well, as an overlay, as preface, to the story of me and Francis, starting with Mother, who that one day, when I was five years old, shared the terribleness of carrying the awful truth about herself around, taking one step outside her castle, showing everyone her big hurt, and then going back inside and hardly ever showing her true self again.

Which is why I think we so often play hide and seek with truth, don’t you think? Choosing to build and believe in our own castles in the sky instead—I mean, it’s a whole lot less painful than getting hurt by people who love you and you love back.

So, I believe an argument
can
definitely be made that there’s a certain practicality to those castles in the sky, which is why I think Aidan was right in thinking Francis never did finish reading the journal. I say this because Francis never got the story straight the way the rest of us came to understand it. Which was because Francis always wanted to believe every story was about
him
. Don’t we all think every story is about us? How many of us ever consider we’re supporting players in
somebody else’s
story?