The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (5 page)

“We've been on the road since six
A.M.
,” I said.

Ray helped himself to a deviled egg, then another. “Don't bother. I'm gonna head out so I can get a good seat.”

“I don't think you have to worry about a crowd,” said Frederick. “She outlived every one of her friends.”

“I lost my wife at a young age,” said Ray, slipping an arm around my waist. “So good genes mean everything to me.”

I moved a discreet step away and said, “My other grandmother died at sixty-two of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”

“I did the brunch,” said Frederick.

I said I might lie down for a short rest myself before the limo arrived, if they'd excuse me.

Ray grinned. “These doctors! They can catnap on a dime. I swear—ten minutes of shut-eye, and she's up for a triple bypass.”

Frederick smiled knowingly.

Ray's eyes narrowed. “I'm not saying that I'm well versed in this lady's personal habits—if I read that smirk correctly.”

Unfazed, Frederick blinked and turned to me.

“I've never done a triple bypass,” I said. “I've never even watched.”

6.
Alice Makes Up Her Own Mind

COVERING FOR OUR VACATIONING PASTOR WAS A WOMAN WITH A
crewelwork stole, who ruined the funeral by eulogizing my grandmother as “Barbara.”

At the fourth or fifth misstatement, my mother barked from behind her handkerchief, “Betty!”

The minister looked up; smiled indulgently at the grieving heckler.

“Her name wasn't Barbara,” clarified a male voice in the back.

Everyone knew it was the homely pin-striped stranger who'd arrived ahead of everyone else and whose signature was first in the guest book: Raymond Russo, Boston, Mass.

“Betty,”
repeated the minister. “How careless of me.” She smiled again. “My own mother was Barbara. I think that must say something, don't you?”

My mother was having none of it: Her stored grief found a new cause, a new enemy, in the rainbow-embroidered figure of the overly serene Reverend Dr. Nancy Jones-Fuchs, who was told in the recessional, in frigid terms, that her services would not be needed graveside.

Ray was the only one who had thought to slip the Book of Common Prayer beneath his overcoat. My aunt Patricia suggested we honor my grandmother Quaker-style, which was to say, in silence. After several minutes, Ray opened the prayer book. We looked over. He offered it to my mother first. “I couldn't,” she said. Nor could Aunt Patricia, which left my father, who looked to me.

“I could read a psalm,” Ray offered. “Or just say a few words. Whatever you think she'd like.”

“Read,” I said.

“The Twenty-third Psalm is on page eighty-two,” whispered the funeral director.

Ray's recitation was from memory, eyes closed, and more heartfelt than I expected. When he finished he said, “I didn't know Betty, but I wish I did.” His voice turned breezy; he tapped the coffin genially with the corner of the prayer book. “Sorry you have to have a virtual stranger here, Betty, reading the last prayer you'll ever hear, but I guess I know you at least as well as that lame minister did. Boy, was that annoying. And I think you and I would've been great pals if we'd crossed paths earlier.” He looked to my mother, who nodded her permission to continue. “I should be an old hand at this, but I didn't have the composure to say anything at my wife's grave. She passed away around this time last year. So maybe this is God's way of giving me another shot at it. Which reminds me—if you run across Mary up there, maybe you can buy her lunch and tell her it's from Ray.” He raised an imaginary glass. “So here's to you, Betty: Ninety-four rocks. You had, what? Like, twenty presidents? Four or five wars? I hope you kept a journal or you talked into a tape, 'cause I'd love to hear the high points.”

“She did,” said my mother.

“Which?” asked Ray.

“Videotaped. On her ninetieth birthday.”

“God bless her,” said Ray.

“Amen,” said the funeral director.

“Amen,” we echoed.

“Now what?” asked my mother.

EACH LUNCHEON ATTENDEE
was called upon to share her indignation: What an insult. What a besmirching of Betty's memory.
Imagine
living for ninety-four years and getting eulogized under another name. And who the hell was
Barbara
?

When the crowd thinned and the cousins drove away, Ray and my mother moved on from ministerial misdeeds to fiber art. I had to remind him that we had a long drive ahead, and that I had to be back at work at six
A.M.

“You're not staying over?” my mother cried.

“We've discussed this,” I said.

“One day off for the death of a grandparent?” my father said. “What kind of hospital is that?”

“A five-hundred-bed teaching hospital,” I said.

“The show must go on,” said Ray.

“Call her department. Let them page the goddamn head of surgery,” my mother said. “Tell him it's an outrage. I need my daughter here.”

I darted between my father and the kitchen door. “Dad,” I said. “Please don't. It's not like a regular job. We don't take sick days. No one asks for a day off unless it's life or death.”

“Which this is,” my mother said.

Ray took her hand. “Mrs. Thrift? What if we stayed for another coupla hours?”

“Alice makes up her own mind,” she said.

Ray guided her to a dining room wall where they stood in front of
Flotsam and Jet Set
. “Of the ones on the first floor, this is my favorite,” said Ray.

In docent fashion, my mother asked if he could explain why.

“The seaweed. The lobster claw. It reminds me of home.”

“Can you tell that the wood is charred? I think it must have been kindling for a clambake.” She pointed to a crumpled piece of paper. “This was a contrivance on my part, but I'm not apologizing for it.”

Ray moved closer, cocked his head, and read, “Nokia Issues a Profit Warning.”

“From
The Wall Street Journal,
obviously. Which I found in the trash and not, strictly speaking, on the beach.”

“Do all your canvases tell a story?” he asked.

My mother said they did, but not
her
story. The beholder's. Each composition was a Rorschach test. If someone saw, for example, capitalism or disorder or impotence—whatever one would call it—that justified her flexing her artistic muscles to add, for example, a piece of newsprint that wasn't necessarily organic to the site.

“I'm all for flexing artistic muscles,” said Ray.

“The majority of my pieces are pure fiber. This one's atypical, and for some reason I felt it belonged here, around food.”

Ray said he'd entered this room solely for the artwork, but as long as he was here, he'd have a few shrimps for the road. What a spread. What generosity. What a wonderful family we were.

I FOUND FREDERICK
and my father at the stove, drinking scotch and eating Frederick's signature spiced nuts directly from the sauté pan.

“Way too much food,” said my father in greeting.

“I
told
Joyce that people don't eat after a funeral, but she's always afraid of running short,” said Frederick.

“How's this: Next time you'll pretend to follow her orders, but you'll only make what you think is the right amount,” said my father.

“Just what Frederick needs,” I said.

“What's that?” asked my father.

“More authority.”

“Your daughter's employing irony,” said Frederick. “She thinks I wasn't as obsequious as I should have been with her boyfriend.”

“Ray is not my boyfriend,” I said.

“I just can't see it,” he explained. “Someone as serious as Alice—not just academically but also in the
joie de vivre
sense—who takes up with a traveling salesman. Your parents didn't send you to MIT and Harvard so you could practice medicine from a trailer,” said Frederick.

I told my father I had to speak to him in private. He led the way to the pantry and I followed. “You know what he's basing all of these insults on? Fudge! Isn't that ironic? Someone makes a living cooking little pastry triangles and decorating platters with dots of liquefied fruit pulp, and that makes him a judge and jury.”

“Can someone earn a living in fudge?” asked my father.

I said I had no idea. None. In fact, we had never discussed the fudge business before this trip.

“I'm not siding with Frederick,” my father said. “What if people judged me on my wife's product?”

“Don't be rude, you two,” called my mother from the doorway. “People are leaving. They want to say good-bye.” And to Frederick, “Alice and her father always had this bond . . .”

“I think we both know she's the son he never had,” said Frederick.

How could he say that? He must have known that my younger sister, Julie, was too short-haired and pierced for my mother's taste, and that I was, by default, increasingly her hope for a wedding and grandchildren.

My father and I ventured back.

“I'm coming up to visit you soon,” my mother said.

“Me?”

“In Boston. Do you realize I haven't taken one day off since Nana went into the hospital? It took me this long to realize that with a mother's death, the umbilical cord is finally cut. Not that I resented it. I loved that umbilical cord. I used to brag about it: that ours—mine and Nana's—was made of some space-age material. Indestructible and indomitable. Now I have to form new alliances and visit some museums.”

I said, “You have Julie, too. She's a good candidate for a new alliance. I think she's got an easier schedule than I, so it might be more satisfying for you.”

“Julie,” said my mother, “thinks that I don't like her friends.”

“You don't,” said my father.

“All I know,” said my mother, “is that Julie had boyfriends all through high school, that she was even a little boy crazy, and now I'm supposed to forget that and embrace her . . . so-called lovers.”

“It could be a phase,” said my father.

“It's biochemical,” said Frederick. “It's not a choice.”

“Please,” said my mother. “It's all about sisterhood and politics.”

The kitchen door swung open to reveal the politely inquisitive face of Ray. “Someone must have taken the wrong coat,” he said. “There's one left on the coatrack and it doesn't belong to . . .” He looked toward the foyer, then pronounced, “Mrs. Gordon.”

“Gorman. I'll handle this,” said Frederick.

We waited. The dispossessed Mrs. Gorman raised her voice and cried, “In January? I'll catch pneumonia with nothing more than a coat thrown over my shoulders.”

“Why me?” moaned my mother. “What kind of idiot goes home in the wrong coat?”

“Frederick's taking care of it,” said my father.

“Maybe we'll leave now,” I said.

“Unless we can help with the coat mix-up,” said Ray.

“You'd be doing us a favor if you took some food back to Boston,” said my father.

“No problem,” said Ray.

Frederick came back through the swinging door and went straight to the phone. He punched some numbers, tapped his foot, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and whispered to us, “She knew
exactly
what the problem was: two black Max Maras, same fur trim, different sizes.”

“Polly's?” asked my mother.

“Polly's,” Frederick confirmed.

My mother said, “Let them work it out on their own turf.” She opened the door and said, “Marietta? Polly's not home yet. Can you just swing by her house tomorrow and swap the coats? I'm exhausted.”

“Hers is enormous,” said Marietta.

“
Maybe
a size ten,” Frederick whispered. “More likely a twelve.”

“Can't you just roll up the sleeves?” asked my mother. “Or borrow something for the ride home?”

“I can't believe she could even get into mine,” Marietta whined.

I left the kitchen and said to Marietta—the bridge partner famous for wearing a size zero and having quadruple-A feet—“I know it wasn't your fault, but you might consider name tags or a laundry marker.”

Marietta burst into tears, prompting my mother to do the same.

“You two aren't crying over the coats, are you?” I asked.

My father joined us and demanded to know what I'd said to my mother to provoke this outburst.

I said, “She's crying because Marietta's crying.”

“Take your mother upstairs,” he said. “I'll drive Marietta home.”

“You didn't bring your car?” I asked her.

My father said, enunciating carefully, “Alice? I don't think you understand that Marietta lost her own mother last fall, and sometimes when someone's crying about a lost coat, it's not about a lost coat at all.”

How was I supposed to know that Marietta's mother had died? All I'd ever heard about Marietta was that her life was an endless, frustrating search for clothes and shoes that didn't fall off her body. I said, “I'm very sorry for your loss. I hope it wasn't painful or prolonged.”

Marietta sank a little, so my father propped her up by her bony shoulders.

He shook his head and mouthed a string of indistinct words that turned out to be
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

“Which was hell for her and hell for me,” Marietta shouted. “So I haven't had much time to sew
name tags
in my clothes.”

“Alice didn't know,” said my father.

Ray joined us by the coatrack. “Hey!” he said. “I could hear you from the back porch! What are you yelling at Alice for?”

I told him that Marietta's mother had succumbed to a long, drawn-out, and debilitating disease, which no one had told me about until now.

“Then take a page from my book,” he told her. “My wife died recently but I know how to conduct myself at someone else's funeral.”

My father was trying to console Marietta at the same time that he was signaling Ray to refrain from uttering one further syllable.

Now barefoot and seated on the stairs, my mother murmured, “It never fails.”

“What never fails?” I asked.

“Your social graces,” she said. “Or lack thereof.”

“Maybe Alice is too busy devoting her brain to medical science to bother with some of the niceties that other people have time for,” said Ray.

“I have friends who are doctors who could be anchorpeople,” sniffed Marietta. “Or social directors on cruise ships.”

“Are they surgeons?” I asked.

My mother sighed. My father looked to Ray.

“Maybe I'll take Alice home now,” he said.

WE STOPPED TWICE
for coffee. I didn't say much—even less than usual—because I was working up to something like an expression of gratitude. Between sips I said, “I don't go home a lot because I usually manage to say something tactless, and everyone stays mad for a couple of weeks.”