The Society of S (29 page)

We left the truck. The house was gray, with two stories, symmetrical and plain in design, with a large, empty yard off to its left.

“That’s where she had the rose garden,” he said, speaking to himself. “Looks like it got dug up.”

He stood slightly behind me on the front porch as I rang the bell. The porch was well swept, and the windows above it were hung with lace curtains and Venetian blinds.

I rang the bell a second time. We heard it echo inside.

Mr. Winters said, “Well, you know —”

Then the door opened. A woman in a shapeless housedress looked at us with eyes that were the same color as mine. She was shorter and stouter than me. We stared at each other. She smoothed back her chin-length gray hair, then rested her hands on her neck.

“Good heavens,” she said. “Are you Sara’s girl?”

Mr. Winters left us soon afterward, but he wrote his telephone number in pencil on an old gas station receipt and handed it to me, with a wink, as he went out.

It wasn’t an easy reunion.

Aunt Sophie, it became clear within minutes, had been thoroughly disappointed by life. Again and again, people had let her down. She had been engaged once, to a man who later left town without saying goodbye.

While her accent was similar to that of Mr. Winters in its treatment of vowels, hers was higher and harsher in tone and more correct in grammar. I much preferred to listen to Mr. Winters. In fact, as I sat on the overstuffed, uncomfortable sofa in the parlor, lace doilies perched precariously on its arms and head, I wished Mr. Winters were related to me, instead of this person who clearly loved to talk and didn’t care or know how to listen.

“Your mother” — she paused to widen her eyes and shake her head — “hasn’t been in touch with me for years. Can you imagine a sister like that? But of course you’re an only child, Arabella. But not even a Christmas card. Not even a call on my birthday. Can you
imagine
?”

If I hadn’t recently consumed the best lunch of my life, I might have told her that yes, I could imagine. I might have added that my name wasn’t Arabella. I might even have walked out. She was boring, and repetitive, and condescending, and selfish. Within minutes I knew she’d been jealous of Sara all her life, and I suspected she’d treated my mother badly. But the joy of discovering oysters lingered, made me forgiving and tolerant. The world wasn’t such a bad place that afternoon, even if Aunt Sophie was in it.

She sat on the edge of her chair, ankles in pale nylons neatly aligned above low-heeled black pumps, as if she were the guest in the house. She looked to be in her late fifties; her mouth had a permanent downcast purse, and her skin a sallowness that I’d expect to see in a much older, thinner woman. Yet her eyes suggested that once she’d been pretty.

Her hands were jammed into her apron’s pockets, and her elbows looked dry and red. The room was decorated in beige and white, the furniture square and uncomfortable. A glass-fronted curio cabinet imprisoned porcelain figurines of impossibly cheerful children. Not one thing in the room felt genuine.

She had a way of beginning a story, then interjecting irrelevant comments of disapproval (“Your hair is so
long
” was one). After a while I stopped trying to make sense of it and simply let the words wash over me, knowing I’d sort them out later, if ever.

When she invited me to spend the night it was with such reluctance, such an odd, questioning note in her voice, that I was tempted to leave. But she was my aunt. She knew things about my mother, even if they were half-articulated. So I decided to stay.

We dined on chicken salad scooped onto leaves of iceberg lettuce, with green seedless grapes for dessert. Afterward, in the spare bedroom, I felt disappointed and deflated. I took a hefty swig of tonic and reminded myself that, besides Aunt Sophie, the world contained oysters, Roger Winters, and my mother — that is, if my mother was still alive. I pulled out my journal and began to write.

Sophie had last seen my mother thirteen years ago, soon after my birth. (She didn’t say that, but I figured out the dates, lying in bed.)

My mother had shown up on her doorstep one afternoon.

“Just the way you did,” Sophie told me. “I guess people are too busy to call first.”

“Was your phone number unlisted then, too?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, making the word last three syllables. “I don’t remember that. You know, I had to have my number taken out of the telephone directory. A man kept calling here, and he
said
he dialed the wrong number, but I knew from his voice what sort he was. It’s not an easy life, living alone.” And off she went on a rant about the sorrows of spinsterhood, and being too poor to live in a gated community, and how she’d had to buy her very own revolver.

Anyway, my mother had arrived in sorry shape, Sophie said. “She looked terrible, and she hadn’t even packed a bag. And she wouldn’t tell me a thing — she wanted some money, and of course I don’t have any.”

For three minutes I heard about the loss of the family fortune two generations back, and the sorry circumstances that forced Sophie into a menial job at a local rose nursery.

The thing about my aunt’s mind — its meandering was infectious. Soon I found myself thinking in weird loops and tangents, Sophie-style. So it took considerable effort, as I lay in bed that night, trying to pull together the facts.

My mother had shown up. She’d looked ill. She’d asked for money. She said she’d left Saratoga Springs for good, that she was headed for a new life. She asked Sophie not to tell anyone she’d been there.

“Well, of course the second she left, I was on the phone to your father,” Sophie said. “He’d called me a month or so before, to see if she was here. Can you imagine — running away from a newborn baby?”

What could I say to that? But it didn’t matter, since she was already talking again.

“Your father, he’s a strange fellow. Don’t you think so? Such a handsome boy he was, and so full of life. All the girls were half in love with him — why he chose Sara I never will know, she had such a temper. Raphael — we called him Raff — was such a good dancer. So full of life. Then he went off to England. Something must have happened to him over there. By the time he came back, all the fire was gone out of him.” She nodded emphatically. “England,” she said, as if the nation itself were to blame.

The next morning, after a meager breakfast of stale biscuits and butter that tasted old, I thanked Sophie for her hospitality and told her I planned to move on. “My mother didn’t tell you anything about where she was going?”

“She said she was headed south.” Sophie adjusted the crocheted tablecloth, whose irregular loops and bumps suggested it was homemade. “Does your father know where you are?” She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly sharp.

I’d taken a sip from my juice glass — ruby-red grapefruit juice from a can — and its tart yet saccharine flavor made me want to spit it out. Instead, I swallowed. “Of course,” I said. Then, to deflect her, I asked, “Do you have any photos of my mother?”

“I threw them away,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “I mean, all those years of never hearing from her — not even a birthday card, only that cheap postcard —”

“She sent you a postcard?”

“It was a picture of an animal, some sea creature. Vulgar-looking.”

I tried to be patient. “Where was it sent from?”

“Someplace in Florida.” She pressed her hands against her forehead. “You can’t expect me to remember everything. Aren’t you going to finish your juice?”

I said I thought I’d better be on my way.

“Don’t you want to call your father?” Again, her eyes changed from vague to sharp.

“I spoke to him yesterday,” I lied.

“Oh.” Her eyes went vague again. “You have one of those cellular telephones?”

“Yes.” I picked up my backpack and moved toward the door, hoping that she wouldn’t ask to see it.

Although Aunt Sophie’s attitude toward me had been close to indifferent, it now blossomed into a wavering show of affection. She put her hand on my shoulder, staring disapprovingly at my hair. “Where are you going today?” she asked in a bright voice.

“South.” I had no idea where I was going. “I’m going to stay with friends.”

“You know, it’s a strange thing.” Sophie patted her hair, which didn’t need patting — it seemed lacquered into place. “Your mother always made a wish when she saw a white horse. She was superstitious to a fault.” Sophie’s voice went dark. “That ridiculous wedding, held in the dead of night.”

“You were at their wedding?”

She turned and walked out of the room. I stood by the door, my backpack on, wondering,
What now?
I wondered if my aunt was senile, or if she’d always been this way. The small, beige-walled dining room, antiseptically neat, looked as if it had been rarely if ever used. Suddenly I felt sorry for her.

Sophie came back, carrying a green leather photo album. “I’d forgotten I had this. Come and sit in the parlor.”

So we went back to the uncomfortable sofa, and this time she sat next to me. She opened the album. And there they were, my mother and father, looking back at me. My mother — to finally see her face! She looked radiant — her eyes wide, her smile joyous, her long auburn hair shining. She wore a white evening dress that shimmered like a fire opal. My father looked elegant in a tuxedo, but his face was blurred.

“Can you imagine wearing a dress like that at your wedding? And no veil.” Sophie sighed. “Not a good picture of Raff. None of them turned out well.”

She flipped the page. Another photo of my parents, this one taken by candlelight against a background of bamboo trees. “They had the wedding outdoors in a garden down in Florida.” My aunt’s voice sounded bitter. “Way down in Florida. Sarasota, it was called. They took us down there on the train.”

“Sarasota?”

“She chose it because of the name.” Sophie made a clicking sound with her tongue. “That was the way Sara did things. Did you ever?”

I turned the next page, and the one after it. In each photo, my mother looked beautiful and serene, my father indistinct. “She’s so lovely.” I had to say it.

Sophie didn’t respond. “You can have it, if you want it.”

It took me a second to understand. She thrust the album toward me.

“Thank you.” I took the book, and looked across at my aunt. Her eyes were sad, but they changed even as I looked, sharp again.

“How are you traveling, Missy?”

I couldn’t tell her my plan: to be an invisible hitchhiker again. “I thought I’d take the train,” I said.

She nodded briskly. “I’ll drive you to the station.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said, but she refused to listen.

I stood outside, watching her back her car out of the garage. It took a while. When I got in, I asked her, “Whatever happened to your rose garden?”

Her face turned sour. “It was a never-ending battle with Japanese beetles,” she said. “I tried every kind of pesticide you can think of. Nothing fazed them. They made me so mad, I even shot some of them, but that damaged the rosebushes. One day I decided it wasn’t worth the struggle, and I pulled them up by the roots, every last one of them.”