Double Happiness

Double Happiness

Also by Mary-Beth Hughes
Wavemaker II

MARY-BETH HUGHES

Stories

Copyright © 2010 by Mary-Beth Hughes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

These stories first appeared in the following publications:
“Pelican Song” in
The Paris Review
“Horse” in
The Saint Ann's Review
“Blue Grass” in
The Georgia Review
“Rome” in
The Mississippi Review
“Israel” in
Ploughshares
“Double Happiness,” “The Widow of Combarelles,”
and “May Day” in
A Public Space

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-8021-9687-3 (e-book)

Black Cat
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
.

For Claire,
and for Timmy,
with love.

Pelican Song

Horse

Blue Grass

Roundup

Rome

Israel

The Widow of Combarelles

The Aces

May Day

Guidance

Double Happiness

Double Happiness

I
WAS THE KIND OF THIRTY-YEAR-OLD WHO HAD ONLY
recently left adolescence behind. I was mostly a modern dancer. I rehearsed, I went to class. I worked the concession stand in an art-movie theater where actors and filmmakers ushered. A novelist with strong powers of concentration manned the ticket booth. I had a studio apartment in Gramercy Park that looked out on an ivied brick wall. When I wanted to get out of the city I would take the bus to visit my mother in central Jersey. My mother was far along into her second marriage. She and her husband had built a house in an abandoned peach orchard with the proceeds from the sale of my childhood home and his antique-car-supply boutique. They acted as their own general contractors and saved a lot of money. Now that the house was finished they had their collective eye open for an investment scheme.

Like the ticket taker, the man my mother married was really a novelist. My mother created an author's den for him in the
upper portion of their beautiful new house. She decorated it with my lost father's old desk, very attractive and manly with brass inlays, and his leather chair. Everything faced out over the inground swimming pool and the putting green, and beyond that to the old orchard and then the woods. Couldn't be more inspiring, everyone said.

My mother, always interested in words, took seriously, in a way lost to the world with my generation, the role of helpmate. She typed her husband's manuscripts, judiciously editing them as she went along. She served lunch on a tray, left atop a small marble pedestal outside the den door. And she checked the mailbox at the end of the long drive for the latest news from his literary agent. If there was another rejection waiting, she prepared the gentlest delivery.

At the art-movie theater in the West Village we took failure for granted. In the house in the orchard the stakes were much higher. Each time a rejection letter came, though often flattering, even encouraging, it represented an enormous blow to the whole enterprise. Even so, I decided to try my own hand at fiction writing. I joined a group. I wrote one-paragraph stories that I liked to read out loud to my mother over her kitchen speakerphone while she was preparing the meals that went upstairs. For Christmas that year, my mother's husband gave me a lovely, quite serious pen, with a kind note folded inside the box. But at the movie theater no one allowed my ministories
any more importance than my modern dance performances. My biggest obstacle to respect, however, had to do with men.

I had an odd figure for a modern dancer. Rubenesque, my composer boyfriend called my body when pressed for compliments. This was long before I found the tiny crimson panties tucked beneath his buckwheat pillow. I also heard him say Rembrandt. My mother, it's worth noting, took figures very seriously. I often felt this was another feature of her generation, like the typing and the meals on trays. In my time, I believed, a body could be different and still be okay. But when the composer mentioned Botero, I lost confidence.

After the panty disclosure, I started seeing a painting student. He ushered part-time and still lived with his parents on the Upper East Side. His beard had developed only under his mouth and nose so far, and though born at New York Hospital he spoke with an English accent. Some days I'd meet him after class at Cooper Union. He was a freshman. I felt like his nanny waiting at the curb. But he was understanding, in a way I think was more intense because he was still living at home, when I began getting the late-night phone calls from my mother.

The calls started some time after the Christmas I received the pen. I'd come by myself for the holiday; the painter had his own plans with his mother and father. I stayed Christmas night in the guest suite next to the writing den. My presents made a nice
pile at the foot of the bed, and I must have slept late, because when I got up the sun was high over the snow-covered putting green and I could smell coffee long past its first perc wafting from the room next door. My mother's husband tended to stay all day in the writing den so I didn't change out of my pajamas, just went downstairs to find my mother and scare up some breakfast.

At the foot of the stairs I heard a loud bang. My mother was a big redecorator, so I assumed she was moving a sofa, and then I heard a louder bang, more like a chest of drawers against a wall. Voices like growls could only be the television tuned to a low volume, so as not to disturb the writing process.

I took a quick look at the manger display my mother had set out in the foyer—sweet, a big part of my childhood. Even the hay was arranged nicely and all the ceramic farm animals had pleasant shapes. I heard the word
cunt
quite distinctly from the kitchen and turned my head. The chest of drawers banged against a wall one more time. My mother had painted an old heavy cabinet with white enamel, and I thought—without really thinking—she might be wrestling it into place.

But then I felt a strange fear that buckled my legs as I rounded the corner into the kitchen and found my mother backed against the wall, her husband pressed up hard against her, his face purple. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, and when they both turned to look at me, my mother laughed but with an odd kind of disdain. She pushed her husband off her. He said something about coffee and left the room through the dining-room door.

I didn't know what to ask, and my head hurt as if it were my skull that had been bounced. My mother attended to her hair. She coughed and smiled. Lifted a hand and her eyebrows as if to curtail the next obvious thing I might say, and walked past me through the door I'd entered to meet her husband at the manger. But he'd beaten her to the foyer and was already upstairs, walking slowly—I could hear him above me—down the long book-lined hallway to the writing den.

My mother's husband didn't just want to write novels, he wanted to write best sellers. At the art-movie theater we understood what he would never believe, which was that no one— we liked to talk in terms of multiple lightning strikes; we weren't entirely original in this—got the recognition they deserved. We tended to read, perform, and scrutinize, often with devastating candor, each other's work. We were envious, back-biting, and deeply critical, even scathing and destructive during lag-time discussions in our polyester smocks. We were lucky though. We had a context, and we had an audience, and there were more than two of us. When things got too painful we switched our shifts. My mother and her husband only had each other, in a house that they'd built to be so graceful and accommodating they'd never have to leave it.

When my mother called me on Valentine's Day eve from the local Hilton, which she said was perfectly charming, two towns away from their home, I was surprised, but not entirely. She just wanted me to know where she was in case I needed
her. She was fine. Her husband was working very hard and wanted a little privacy. Did I think cranberry velvet seat cushions would be pretty in the dining room? I had no opinion on this, and wrote down her room number at the Hilton. The next afternoon she called to say she was home and sending me something special. A beautiful dictionary arrived in a day or so inscribed with love from the two of them.

I was a little worried about my mother, but I had romantic problems of my own. I may have underestimated the maturity level of the painting student because he was such a fine kisser, and his drawings were intricate and intelligent. For Valentine's Day he wrote my name in pink rose petals on the covered stoop of my apartment building and then lay down naked there in the cold, but not snowy, night, and waited for me to come home from the art-movie theater. He was very slender, and the chill he caught kept him out of classes for two full months. His parents didn't appreciate my sickroom visits. The housekeeper looked genuinely alarmed to see a robust thirty-year-old teetering at the end of his trundle bed, so we communicated by late-night phone calls, which his mother listened to, breathing with complete audibility, on the extension. He couldn't wait until he'd gotten through art school so that he could just make his own money and leave. It was oppressive and he had the courage to say so.

My painter friend was still malingering when my mother's husband's father died. An old bear, someone who felt cruelty
was power. And in a way it was. No holiday was ever complete until old Sven had dialed in to ridicule the hopes of his aging son. Novelist-smovelist, his voice boomed through the kitchen over the speakerphone like he was actually making sense.

Just unplug the bastard, I suggested. And though my mother cast a weary eye when I said such things, her husband ignored me. He did this in a noble way that suggested strong men listen to the ravings of their fathers.

But it turned out I was a prophet. Old Sven's brain blew a gasket early in the new year. My mother's husband, who had power of attorney, pulled the plug in record time. And so, during the first big holiday gathering without Sven, the Easter egg hunt, there was a peculiar silence. And everyone, I could sense, believed this was somehow my fault.

My mother called me after that to change our Mother's Day plans. Why didn't I come to the Hilton? she said. There was a great indoor pool, and a sauna. I could share her suite and we could have a really good time. Because it was an unusually mild spring in the West Village, I was able to get the weekend off. Who wanted to go to the movies when cherry blossoms were sprinkling café tables?

I took the bus to Freehold. My mother was waiting in her little blue sport Caddy, wearing wraparound sunglasses from the seventies. Traditionally she liked to leap out of the car and hug me like I'd just finished my first full day at preschool, but today, and maybe she was anxious to show me the pool,
she just started the engine and waved her left hand. I dipped down into the passenger bucket and took a good look before speaking. It wasn't just the sling, it was the way she didn't seem able to turn her head. And when she lifted her free hand to the wheel it was swollen like a mitt, her knuckles strafed with red slashes.