The Angry Woman Suite (37 page)

Mother wouldn’t speak with him either, and Daddy broke two weeks later. At dinner after too many glasses of wine. Reiterating how he hadn’t meant for anything to happen to Jack, how much he’d loved that dog, sobbing like everyone and everything he’d ever loved had been stolen from
him.

“The women!” he cried. “It was the women!
They
started it! They ruined everything for me!”

Mother sighed and left the table, and Daddy’s side of the see-saw plummeted, pounding Daddy way back inside himself. I watched it happen, and despite my vow to hate him forever, Daddy looking so beaten to the ground made me uneasy.

As time went on, Daddy didn’t get better. He just got weirder and sadder, more pathetic. And with Mother’s corresponding migraines and admonishments to step quietly around Daddy, there weren’t enough church confessionals in the world to ease the sticky guilt that managed to wind itself around me, choking off the hate that had kept me protected from the mean Daddy. My studied air of detachment dropped away. I went to the fields and began praying fervently to Stephen Eric, asking for direction, and for forgiveness for being such a rotten person, for wielding this incredible power I had for making Daddy feel like holy shit, and worse, for having pushed my family to the precipice. Family was the most important thing in the world, yet look what I’d done with it. Just look what I’d done! How could I fix us?

Papa had always said that real winners play from the center. I prayed for the center to appear.

I was almost fifteen years old the year our family drove back to Pennsylvania to visit Daddy’s family. While Grandmother Magdalene hosted a reunion at Grayson House for the Delaware Boys, I left Bean helping Mother dress, and went looking for clues to Daddy’s murdering women. I poked in corners and drawers. I studied the large rectangular portrait of Magdalene in the front room. The real Magdalene looked remarkably the same as the young woman in the portrait, except her features were softer now. More to the point, she didn’t look like a murderess. And she didn’t act like one, either. She was extraordinarily kind. I moved in closer to the portrait, entranced. It had been painted by Matthew Waterston, the artist whose illustration graced the cover of a book that had captivated me as a child. A river curled around Magdalene’s head, in the distance, like a halo. Behind the river, amongst trees, was the outline of a male. Just an outline: I couldn’t make out anything else about him, and when I tilted my head the figure seemed to disappear altogether, so cleverly had he been blended into the trees. Who was the boy-man, I wondered, and what did he mean to Magdalene? Or was it only to Matthew Waterston that he’d had special meaning?

Aside from the portrait, and of course Magdalene and Stella’s present occupation of Grayson House, the only other evidence of its women was a smattering of framed photographs. A much younger Stella was in one, standing beside a teenaged Magdalene and another pretty teenager who I guessed to be Daddy’s other aunt, Lothian. I still knew little about Lothian, other than she’d left Grayson House as a young woman, and that she didn’t look like a murderess, either. But I couldn’t say as much for the older woman in other photographs—the girls’ mother? She had a handsome, stern face—but suddenly, just as I wasn’t sure that a stern countenance had anything to do with a murdering proclivity, I also realized I wasn’t sure what a real-life murderess
should
look like, or
who
it was that had actually been murdered.

Or, it suddenly occurred to me, perhaps it was a “what” that had been killed. Perhaps it wasn’t a “who” at all!

Mulling this over, I arrived back downstairs in time to see Uncle Earl on the verge of becoming a fall-down drunk, and Aidan making his entrance with a dark-haired woman who resembled Jackie Kennedy, more elegant even than Mother. Everyone was making a huge fuss over the woman, and when she kissed Daddy full on the lips and called him “Frankie baby,” Mother worked her face up into a squishy mess and ran back upstairs. I didn’t understand Mother’s reaction—I mean
everyone
was making a fuss over Daddy. But Bean and I ran after her, to the room she and Daddy shared on the third floor. Mother had thrown herself across the bed and was crying hysterically.

Daddy followed us into the room. “Leave this to me, girls.” His shoulders shook. Bean and I sidled past him, but I looked back, seeing him bend over Mother. “You’re the one, Diana,” Daddy said, in a voice soft as mist. “You’ve always been the one.”

“Did you know?” Mother cried.

“That Elena would be here? No. She and Aidan go way back, and I’m sure he found himself in a spot, her in town at the same time. Of course he had to bring her.”

“But she’s beautiful!”
Mother wailed.

“Elena’s always been beautiful,” Daddy said, still tender. “But not like you. Never like you, Diana.”

We were back home in San Diego just one week when Daddy had his first
official
nervous breakdown. I didn’t see it happen, and Mother was spare with the details. All I knew was that the night before, at dinner, Daddy had begun twitching like he could barely contain himself from slapping somebody upside. Mother had shooed me and Bean to our room, and by breakfast the next morning Daddy was at a “special hospital” in San Bernardino called Patton State Hospital—but that part was a secret, the hospital. It was our business, Mother said, where Daddy was
exactly
. The whole world didn’t need to know the Grayson family business. Mother told our neighbors that Daddy had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing special treatment at an out-of-town facility, and while
she
drove up to San Bernardino regularly, she said Bean and I didn’t have to go. So we didn’t. We stayed with neighbors.

Ten months later, on the morning Mother was to bring Daddy back home, my grandmother died. I cried my head off when Mother told us why Aunt Rose was calling, even more than I’d cried when JFK died. When Mother arrived home from San Bernardino with Daddy, my face was still puffy from crying, and although I waited for Daddy to say something about my grandmother’s passing, or that he’d missed me and Bean while he was in Patton, or that he was mad because we hadn’t visited him, or that he was sorry he’d screwed up our lives, he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even acknowledge us. It was as if we were his invisible children. He moved gingerly, as if nursing multiple compound fractures, and sat down in the living room recliner. And that’s where he stayed, silent and motionless as a snake, all through dinner that night and all through the next day. Mother said he was medicated, and I believed her: Daddy wasn’t shaking at all anymore.

Bean started a special education class, which was just the start of what I overheard Mother say to Aunt Rose on the phone. Bean’s got to
relax,
the psychologist said, also what I heard Mother tell Aunt Rose. Elective mutism is a form of anxiety. Generally preceded by trauma. But fear of the unknown was enough to get it going. Plain old garden variety fear. Reward Bean when she speaks, the psychologist advised, but let her take her lumps when she doesn’t.

I heard Mother say to Aunt Rose, “So I said to him, ‘You mean punish her?’ And he said, ‘No, I mean don’t protect her unduly.’”

I was stunned. I’d never thought of Bean as protected. Ignored was more like it. And because Bean’s mutism was as familiar to me as my own face, I’d never considered her silence part of an agenda, either. I didn’t believe Bean even knew about agendas. But the even bigger surprise coming down the pike was that it would be
Bean
, eventually, who’d make the most pivotal move in our family’s game.

And, as it would turn out, it would be Bean’s last stand.

Medicated as he was, Daddy was of little use, and so it was Uncle Buster who kept our car tuned and polished, and fixed the occasional drippy faucet, repaired the doorbell, and dug up the crabgrass. Every weekend I cut the lawn. Bean did the ironing, and we rotated on dusting and vacuuming, all those things Mother did before getting her sales job at the May Company. I was in high school, getting real homework for the first time, and with studying and chores there was scarcely time for friends—as if I’d have considered bringing anyone home, what with Daddy sitting in his recliner looking like he didn’t even know who I was. And there was no time for the fields. I longed to walk them, to think my solitary thoughts, but it was pointless to wish for something I couldn’t have. There were too many responsibilities, and Mother was counting on me and Bean to hold things together.

Aidan kept in touch. There had been some mysterious trouble with Earl, which he’d no time to get into, but when it was resolved he’d head our way for a visit.

Aunt Rose got divorced for the second time, and that was when she made the “big decision” to lease out our old house in Sacramento. It was early morning when she and Papa arrived in Pacific Gardens, pulling a trailer behind Papa’s Impala, and Morningstar Street was still quiet. I ran out to greet them, anxious to explain about the drawn curtains and Mother’s closed face and Daddy looking like he’d just had a lobotomy. Then I could turn over the horrible power I had for making people break down, and Aunt Rose and Papa would take it and release it and I’d be free of the guilt game. Free of responsibility and the last vestiges of shame. I could almost see myself running through the fields, arms stretched wide, wind against my face, free at last, free at last!

But seeing Papa’s slack face through the windshield stopped me dead in my tracks. He looked straight ahead, unblinking, unfocused.

Scared, I said, “Papa?”

Aunt Rose got out of the car and hurried around to the passenger side. “Over here, baby,” she said to me, putting one of Papa’s arms around her neck. “You get the other arm, Elyse, there we go.” And we hoisted Papa up between us.

AIDAN
1965

Magdalene got a spectacle, and then some.

“Let’s run away,” I proposed after things settled down, only half kidding. But Magdalene murmured something about Stella and the upkeep on Grayson House and the expense of traveling—and where would she run to anyway? Besides, she wanted to stay near where Earl was incarcerated. And then there was Jamie. He was accustomed to her visits. No, she just couldn’t up and leave. There was never any running away, she’d learned that much. She had to face it, all of it, everything.

She was definitely on the brink.

“Jamie’s too far gone,” I argued, saying it aloud for the first time. “And we can pay someone to look after Grayson House. And Earl—well, he’ll survive.”

Magdalene winced, but held herself straight as we hashed through the spectacle again, beginning with Earl’s fractured boyhood, through to the one-armed youth returning from war, walking up Grayson Hill with a bottle in his remaining hand, and on and on it went, all the minor infractions since. The arrests for public drunkenness, the useless brawls, and finally, the attempted holdup at Golson’s gas station, outside Media. It was ludicrous, beyond comprehension, the picture the prosecutor painted of Earl brandishing a hunting knife at the station attendant, as if Earl, with one arm, couldn’t have been overtaken. What had Earl been thinking? Of course he’d been overtaken. But why had he done it? He hadn’t needed money. I’d plenty of that and I was no longer averse to spreading it around some. Earl had been unbelievably stupid. Stupid enough to get himself a five-year sentence. And reason enough, I told Magdalene, for her to take a well-deserved break after all that spectacle. She’d been through the wringer with Earl, but might I remind her that not
everything
in the world was her doing? Earl was the one who’d robbed the station, not her. He had been the stupid one, remember? Just how much and how long did she think she had to atone?

“Maybe we can go to California. An extended vacation. It’s a vacation I’m proposing for us. I’m not talking desertion here.”

She looked at me, eyebrow raised.
“Us?”

“Yes.” My heart pounded, but she’d begun nodding even as I said, “You know, it makes sense for us to marry. I’m here at Grayson House all the time as it is … and, well, it just makes sense.” But Magdalene looked so suddenly bleak, I lamely added, “At some point we can even take Stella with us to see Francis and the girls.”

“But do you love me?” she asked quietly.

My heartbeat quadrupled.

Do I love you? I thought. Do I love you? How can I tell you that I have loved you from time immemorial, since that day on the knoll when you looked down upon a golden valley and saw the encroaching savage while I saw only beauty? How can I tell you the agonies I suffered when you married Frederick? And then when I believed it was Matthew you loved? And then Jamie. That was the worst, your loving Jamie, who was like my own. How can I tell you how afraid I am still of saying those three words, of giving even that little of myself away?

How can I tell you how terrified I am of competing with Jamie; for all intents, a dead man. Anyone knowing anything knows you always lose going up against a dead man.

How can I tell you how afraid I am of losing?

I thought of Matthew then, the warrior, the old lion who’d pushed to attain a modicum of reality, all the while trying to make things square with Sahar,
plus
forge a bond with his son. He’d said to me once, “Until and if you ever become truly engaged with someone who’s real and breathing and inconsistent, you’re not even in the race.” And then he’d huffed and puffed his
way to the finish line, winning
his
race, hair ablaze at the end, screaming my name.

He’d
competed.
Matthew had always done everything
his
way.

How can I tell you how afraid I am of the time nipping at our heels? How afraid I am of losing
our
race?

I reached for Magdalene’s hand.

“My life began with you,” I told her. “I’ve always loved you, Magdalene. I don’t know how else to explain, except, please, trust me.”

We didn’t actually marry until 1966, but a week later I had the Philadelphia appraisers at Washington’s Headquarters, making notes and tallying figures. Magdalene was astounded by the numbers, but that was nothing compared to when I took her up to the attic of Washington’s Headquarters. Her anger was magnificent, but I had prepared.