B008KQO31S EBOK (22 page)

I started to admit the truth, but demons seized my tongue. It was an evil thought, but then again, it beat being gay.

And what harm would it do?

“Oh, Nick, well, I didn’t want to get your hopes up, Mom. We’ve been seeing each other for a while...”

“You should have told me, especially before your father spoke to Jeffrey.”

“Well, no one asked my opinion of that before it was done, and as I recall, no one was interested in much I had to say about it.”

“Which just shows the value of a little honesty with your family. Your father is humiliated, you know, and he’s been impossible to live with since yesterday.” I refrained from observing that he’s pretty much always impossible to live with. “You’ve made him look like a fool, Philippa, and it’s not a role he relishes.”

She had some trouble with that last word.

“Then he shouldn’t have set me up without asking me first.”

“Philippa!”

“It’s true.”

“This is all your fault and I hope you understand that there will be consequences.” My mother sighed a martyr’s sigh. “Not that I can imagine this
man
is worth the trouble. Philippa, Jeffrey said he looked quite disreputable and was rude on top of it.”

“He’s certainly no Jeffrey McAllister,” I conceded, silently thanking the gods for that.

“Oh, this just goes to show what appalling judgment you have, Philippa. I suppose you’ve
slept
with him. No, wait, I don’t want to know...”

Her voice trailed off suggestively, because of course, she did want to know.

Sometimes trouble is impossible to resist.

I sighed with apparent rhapsody. “It’s just great, Mom. I could never have believed that it could be so good...”

“Philippa! Bite your tongue!” She inhaled mightily, no doubt taking on a flagon of sherry in the process. “If things are that serious, then there’s nothing for it. You’ll just have to bring him to your father’s birthday dinner on Saturday so we can assess whether you’ve made an acceptable choice or not.”

Okay, I’d forgotten about my father’s birthday bash—in a classic ‘forget about it and it can’t be real’ strategy. But it was the second part of what she said that really made me mad.

“What? It’s not up to you who I date.”

“Oh, Philippa, don’t get foolish with me. Of course, it matters to us and of course we’re going to ensure that you make a suitable decision. It’s well known that you have the worst judgment possible in men and this certainly doesn’t sound like a promising choice. We’re talking about the rest of your life, Philippa, and I am not going to stand by and let you cast it aside on a poor marriage.”

Now, she had my full attention. “Because you made such a good one?”

Jack Frost danced down the telephone line.

“I beg your pardon?”

I sat back and folded my arms across my chest. It was about time I had my say. Enough of passive resistance—I was ready to make my position clear.

“You know, Mom, I’ve never understood why you think marriage is such a great institution when yours is so lousy. Maybe I’ll never get married. Maybe I’ll just take in men like stray dogs and have a couple of dozen kids out of wedlock.”

“Philippa!”

“I’ll certainly never marry a guy like Jeffrey McAllister, who’s more worried about pleasing his boss than who he spends the rest of his life with.” I snapped my fingers. “Maybe I’ll marry one of these unsuitable men I keep finding, maybe I’ll marry Nick just because he looks disreputable.”

“Philippa, you had better bring this young man to dinner...”

“Maybe I will. Come to think of it, Mom, you probably remember Nick Sullivan. You know, the guy who went to jail? I tell you, there really is something to that bad boy charm.”

She sputtered but I tossed the phone back into the cradle and didn’t answer when it rang again.

My hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t draw worth a poop. It didn’t feel nearly as good as I had thought it would to toss my two cents into the ring. I didn’t feel triumphant or proud of what I’d done.

And the truth was, I’d just made more of a muddle of things. Not only had I told my mother—and by extension the entire gossip network of Rosemount—that Nick was back in town, but I’d practically said I’d drag him in like a prize boar on Saturday night.

I wished that I knew where he was, because this was one time that I would have liked to prove my parents wrong.

But that and a buck would get me a cup of coffee. I knew I’d have to get down on my knees and eat some Coxwell crow before this was over. I wasn’t, however, going to rush in to dish myself up a plateful.

My family could wait for Saturday night.

Meanwhile, I checked the clock and sketched like a maniac, knowing the gods would have to smile for me to make that appointment at four.

* * *

You’re probably thinking that I should have told my mother off a long time ago, but that’s only because you don’t know the whole story.

I told you already that we moved to Rosemount when I was a little squirt, in 1970, and that my mother wasn’t happy about the move. But there was more to it than that, although it was years before I knew about it.

My parents didn’t fight. They ignored each other, so there was never any chance of overhearing anything particularly good. I vaguely remember one huge argument before that move, but after that, nothing. My father worked longer hours once we were in Rosemount, supposedly because of the commute, and my mother, well, she was always distracted. In fact I have no memory of her being anything other way.

My brothers noticed, though, and they whispered about the change in her. I did notice the change in the pretty decanter that I always wanted to touch because it sparkled in the sunshine. It had juice in it once we got to Rosemount. No one would ever let me have any, but I knew with a toddler’s conviction, that someone else was drinking that juice. The amount in the decanter went up and down, up and down. Not fair, by any accounting.

I must have been about ten by the time I was sure where that juice was going. And that it wasn’t juice. It was sherry, and my mother wasn’t distracted—she was drunk.

My mother is an ugly drunk. When we were younger, she must have had things under more control, or maybe she hid it better. About the time of my epiphany, she must have decided that we could fend for ourselves. And when she drinks, she’s a lot less worried about hiding her misery. She either weeps and is inconsolable or she rages, hurling insults like deadly weapons.

My father, amazingly, can ignore this. He looks right through her, as though she’s not there or doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged. She could be an unfortunate choice of lampshade for all the notice he takes of her. My brothers quickly picked up this trick. There’s something surreal about sitting at the dinner table while a drunk rants and everyone else eats as though there’s nothing amiss.

I can’t ignore her.

I just can’t do it.

Her pain is so raw, her disappointment so tangible. It seems rude to brush it aside, as though she doesn’t count. I suppose that’s what she’s raging about in the first place.

Well, my father worked longer hours once she lost it and my brothers stayed late at school and friends’ houses. Mom had stopped coming downstairs much and usually got pickled in the little sitting room off her bedroom.

I guess she didn’t want to burden any of us with the sight of her.

Sad, isn’t it? Our own mother drinking alone in her bedroom, not wanting to embarrass her family with what she had become.

As soon as possible, my brothers moved away to university, leaving you-know-who with the dirty work. Maybe it’s assumed in a household primarily of men that the women should stick together, maybe my father finally thought I was good for something.

You don’t think I ended up with this hastily feminized name because they were dying for a daughter, do you?

Appearances had always been so important to my mother. That picture of her debut is still on her dresser, like a talisman of a moment when all things were possible, maybe a reminder that anything could go wrong. And both she and my father were determined that our household appear normal, despite all the nonsense going on inside.

Maybe I just played my part in that.

I never bought her booze and I never facilitated her drinking in any way. I just helped her hide the signs. I harvested the bottles from behind the drapes before my father found them. I cleaned up things she’d spilled or broken. And for whatever reason, I got into the habit of hunting my mother down every night and putting her to bed.

It’s normal to sleep in your own bed, not face down wherever you passed out. It’s normal to wear your nightgown to bed, not whatever you were wearing when you started to drink mid-morning. And it’s normal to go to bed clean, not adorned with whatever body fluids happened to make an appearance.

Now, it’s not easy to wrestle a surly drunk into the bathroom, much less into her pajamas. It wasn’t unusual that my mother didn’t want any part of it or of me. She fought me, she struck me, she swore at me, but those insults and accusations always rolled right off my back.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that her anger was really targeted at my father. Compared to the things she said then, these telephone conversations are a piece of cake.

But I only found out why she was so angry with Father years later. I was in my first year at Harvard, after nearly killing myself to get good enough grades to be accepted, and I hated every minute of it. I wasn’t allowed to live in the dormitory—where I might have had some fun—and had to commute.

It wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t even about my mother. It was about my father’s ideas of feminine purity—and his desire to ensure that I kept mine. On the other side of the coin, I knew damn well that Zach was busily spreading the milk of human kindness as far and as wide as he could.

But I was always told it was different for boys. So, I called my little commuter car the Vestal Virgin Express and often took the long way home, just because. I certainly didn’t tell my father that if I wanted to lose my virginity, I could have done it any time any place that I so chose, regardless of where I was living. At the time, I was afraid he’d lock me in the basement if he thought of that.

I’m still not sure he wouldn’t have.

So, one night I came home to find a single light burning upstairs. My mom’s sitting room. My father’s car wasn’t there, but then, I would have been shocked if it was. James was already married by then, Matt had moved downtown for his articling post. Zach was living in the dorm, making merry and getting lousy grades. I’d had a crummy day myself and was having some real doubts about my future as a lawyer. I unlocked the front door and paused at the sound of Mom’s sobbing.

Given a choice, I’d take sorrow over rage any day.

I climbed the stairs, knowing there was no use avoiding the inevitable. She was on her hands and knees, and there was a spilled bottle, leaking sherry all over the carpet. At first I thought that’s what she was crying about, but she turned when she heard me and clutched something to her chest.

It was a letter.

In fact, there were a lot of letters scattered across the floor. They looked old, the corners of the envelopes rounded as though they had been handled a lot. There was a narrow ribbon discarded on the floor, so I figured she’d had them all tied together in a bundle. The envelopes were almost square, and had a deckle edge on the flap, like invitations or fancy stationary.

Or love letters. I saw that the one my mother held was wet in one corner, the sherry having made a stain. She was trying to blot it out, but she was too smashed to make a good job of it.

As soon as she recognized me, she held out her treasure and wailed, beseeching me to fix what had gone awry. It was a horrible sound, that cry of hers, like an animal in pain and I was quick to take the envelope from her. Sure enough, it was addressed to Mrs. R. Coxwell in a bold masculine hand.

It wasn’t my father’s handwriting. He scribbles, prompting jokes from the intrepid that he should have been a doctor.

This was a legible script more typical of an architect. And all the envelopes were addressed in the same decisive hand. The stamp was a commemorative of a laughably small denomination, adding credence to my theory that this was old news.

There are some things you just don’t need to know. I willed myself to not look any further, but took the letter and pressed the liquor out of it while my mother watched. Her crying stopped and she followed my every gesture as though fearful that I would ruin her prize.

Or tell on her. I gathered up all the letters and put them back in that little bundle, carefully tying that bow. Then I handed them to her, told her to put them away while I ran her bath.

And I left.

Because if I had known where she put them, then one day I might have been tempted to see what those letters said. You’ve got to know your limitations and I knew that in a weak moment, I might get curious.

But they weren’t my business. I wouldn’t go through my mother’s drawers—that would be too intrusive—so not knowing exactly where she put them was insurance enough.

When I came back for her they were hidden away. I never saw them again. We never spoke of them. It was as though that night had never happened. Maybe she didn’t even remember it.

I did.

And maybe I did idly flip through the book of commemorative stamps at the post office one day, and maybe I did discover that that stamp was from 1970.

Maybe my mother had another reason for not wanting to move to Rosemount. I guessed my father had an issue with Boston that hadn’t been mentioned to us. I’ll probably never know the whole truth.

But it’s because of those letters, whatever they say and whoever the man was who wrote them, that I cut my mother a lot of slack.

We may not have the same ideals of marriage, but my mother, for all her flaws, only wants me to be happy.

Maybe she can’t imagine that being alone is any better than being isolated in a marriage. Maybe she thinks the four of us make up for my father’s deficits. Maybe she never expected much more.