Good Family (17 page)

Maybe when I was fresh from the divine, I knew more. But nothing seemed so sharply focused now. The world was shot through a Vaseline haze of postpartum bafflement. I would wake up in the night and wonder where I was.
You were colicky
, my mother told me as if that explained why she had taken to her bed after I was born.
You always cried
. But I wondered, too, if it hadn’t been my infant scowl, already accusatory, that was the final straw in a world that measured my mother and happily found her wanting. She navigated it as best she could—with a stalwart smile and cordial, empty words, the occasional utterance under the breath.

“How did you do it?” I asked suddenly.

Without asking me to elaborate, my mother lit another cigarette and pressed her gray, cotton-candy-stiff hair. I waited for an honest answer, one that would explain her compromises, but in the end, her smile wavered, and she said, “I was lucky to have your father.”

T
hat night, I made a videotape of all of us dancing. After a dinner of veal cutlets, stewed tomatoes, and green beans, someone had put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The album was crackly and familiar, the horns and the beat sufficiently contagious to override our reticence and inspire us to move. Jessica, who was only eight and still good-natured, showed off her break dancing. Aunt Pat and Uncle Jack did the fox-trot, my father tapped his foot, and even Adele joined in—communing, no doubt, with the spirit of our great-uncle who had ridden across Turkey on a camel. My mother lifted Sadie from her bouncy seat and held her to her cheek. Together, they waltzed her around the room.

In the shadows, Louisa clung to the doorframe. When I moved the camcorder toward her, she waved me off, but I could see she was pleased, even when she covered her face with her napkin. Playing peekaboo, she revealed her eyes, her mouth. Her face was wrinkled from chronic smiling and the steam of countless soups.

“Louisa,” I said, “how old is your latest grandchild?” I focused the camera on her.

Every summer, Louisa still left her family to come live with ours. While she was gone, her daughters and grandchildren fished in the Ohio River and caught fireflies in a jar. A smile cleaving her face, Louisa jerked her head at Sadie. “Same age as her.” In the fall, when she returned, they would open the jar and present her with the luminescent memories of her missed summer days.

I panned the camcorder back across the bookshelves, the fireplace, and the swaying heads of my relatives. But it was on Mother and Sadie that my lens finally landed—the folds of Sadie’s neck; my mother’s throat swanning over her. My mother was humming something in three-quarter time, waltzing to music that bore no resemblance to Herb Alpert’s south-of-the-border beat. Sadie had cried the hour before dinner, but now she was half-asleep, lulled in my mother’s arms. That morning, we had held her up to the wall in
the dining room and measured her. She stood as tall as my grandfather had in 1887.

“Let me have her! Let me have her!” Jessica said to my mother. Everyone wanted to hold Sadie. Had my mother ever danced this way with Dana and me? Or had Louisa whisked us off for a bath? I couldn’t remember—could remember only hands pulling me from my father, my outstretched arms. Now the camcorder felt good in my hands. I tightened my grip, focused closely on my daughter’s face.

S
adie was napping, as was my mother, but everyone else was on the beach. The day was muggy and buzzing with insects’ shrill chorus, and Louisa was baking cookies—strange since everyone had been too enervated with the heat to finish the vichyssoise she had served for lunch. I had wrapped a towel around my bathing suit and was waiting for Sadie to wake up so we could go down for a swim. The phone started ringing. As I ran to answer it, my flip-flops made a thwacking noise across the floor.

“Addison?”

“Angus,” I said. He had been calling me daily, asking when I was coming home, telling me he missed us, and that he wanted to see Sadie.
You don’t know what you want
, I started to say.
You can’t even tell the truth
.

“I miss you,” he said.

“And the project?”

“We’ll be finishing up in a day or so, and I’ll have a week to play.”

I stared at a photograph of my grandfather at the helm of the
Green Dragon
. Next to it, a tintype of my great-uncle, my grandfather, and their sister Elizabeth, who died. Beyond the doors of the butler’s pantry, I eyed the monitor on the kitchen table. There is a clucking sound a baby makes, along with apparently random mews and trills. One becomes totally in tune to this symphony of noises, the way one becomes engrossed in a baby’s smell or the way her face contorts like an inebriate upon waking up.

“How’s the Unit?” Angus said—Unit being one of his favorite names
for Sadie, along with Cheese Breath and—for some unfathomable reason—Ebenezer.

“She cries a lot,” I said, adding rather testily: “She’s asleep at the moment.”

“
Still
crying?” I could hear him smiling three thousand miles away. “Can’t Louisa fix that? Hasn’t your mother put vodka in the formula?”

“Ha ha.”

“And I”—he made a clucking noise—“cad that I am, sleeping through the night.”

“So…what do you want?”

“Are you seriously asking me that question, Addison? Because if you are—”

“Why’d you make up stories, Angus? Your father is living in Las Vegas.”

But Angus didn’t seem to hear me. “What I want is to see you looking a little less like Joan of friggin’ Arc.” He paused. When I had no comeback, he said, “We don’t all get fathers like yours, Maddie.”

On the wall, the photograph of my grandfather in a sailor’s cap, jowls resting on a starched shirt collar. Next to it, a photograph of my grandmother with her children arranged according to height. A picture of my parents, their arms around each other, gazed happily at the camera, meeting my eye.

“Perhaps,” I said, “I need a job.”

The line crackled. In thousands of miles of telephone wires from here to Los Angeles, electrons like tiny messengers were shifting and pulsing at warp speed, carrying our voices, our silence.

When Angus said nothing, I pressed on. “I do, Angus, I really do.” The tediousness of it all, the barren lack of creativity at not having something—something!—outside the home that required some degree of vision or intellect or, God forbid, effort. “I’m suffocating,” I finished. The smell of cookies filled the house.

A pause. Electrons waited, panting, then were once again activated by Angus saying, “Have I ever told you not to work?”

My father was coming up the front steps. His thinning hair glistened—either from perspiration or the mist of lake. Through the dining-room window, I could see him resting his hand on the banister as he caught his breath. For the first time, I realized,
He’s getting old
, though he was not yet seventy. I’d seen him board the
Green Dragon
that summer, pulling himself gingerly out of the dinghy, coiling lines deliberately with arthritic fingers; his famous squint as he set the sails, barked the orders, called for the proper trim.

“It’s not you,” I said to Angus.

My father came through the front door, a look of distress contorting his face.

Angus said, “Then what in God’s name
is
it?”

“I need to get to the bathroom,” my father said. “I feel sick.”

I cupped my hand over the phone. “Dad?” I screamed for Louisa. To my father, I said, “Sit down. Sit down!”—as his knees buckled, and he slunk to the floor.
“Louisa!”

From the phone receiver swinging like a pendulum, Angus’s voice was indecipherable. Louisa scurried in, shrieking
Mrs. A!
at the base of the stairs.

“Damned ulcer,” said my father.

Then I remembered Angus. The receiver was still dangling like a noose, the air thick with the smell of burned cookies. “Angus?” I said, picking it up. “Angus?” But the line had gone dead.

I
n retrospect, I can find omens in the slightest thing. A burned batch of cookies. My father’s sudden attack. Like a palm reader, I could have decoded stains on the tablecloth or a cobweb glistening with dew. But what would they have told me?

My father had spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, but showed up at breakfast the following morning. Dana and I sat at the table facing him with Sadie in the bouncy chair between us.

Wiping Sadie’s nose, which had been running constantly, I said, “Tell us about this ulcer.”

He rustled his
Wall Street Journal
. “Nothing to tell.”

It was the family’s common response to illness. Uncle Halsey’s shrinking away to nothing before expiring on vomited blood; Uncle Jack’s eventual demise from an unnamed pathology involving insufficiencies in the heart—all described in terms of how well the surviving aunts had behaved. The highest praise my father could bestow on someone facing a crisis was to say he was a “brick.” Upon hearing me describe this years later, Dr. Anke would observe with some irony that my family was prone to denial of unpleasant facts.

My father turned the page. “No use having
you
worry.”

Don’t talk to us as if we’re children
, I wanted to say, but something in my father’s demeanor stopped me. My father was only seven when the market crashed in ’29, and though there followed long lines for the soup kitchens, everyone still used Addison’s cough medicine. Indisputably effective (its alcohol content was thirty proof), it was in great demand by the Prohibition-parched, economically depressed masses. In this way, the family had profited from despair.

“Angus is coming,” I said to no one in particular, wiping some spit up from Sadie’s chin.

“Glad to hear it,” my father said. “Another hand in the regatta.”

Dana said nothing. I focused keenly on my father, searching for his true opinion of Angus.

His eyes tracing columns of numbers, my father cleared his throat. “Good, good, good.”

I lifted Sadie out of the bouncy chair. She was wearing a stretchy terrycloth jumpsuit with a high collar that made her look like Elvis. From the kitchen, the rattling of dishes. Louisa—God bless her—entered with a platter of sausages. My father cleared his throat.

“Here, Louisa,” I said, replacing Sadie in her chair, “let me help you.”

Together, Louisa and I stocked the sideboard with that morning’s fare.
Aunt Pat appeared, wearing a quilted robe. A caftan-clad Adele emerged from the Love Nest bearing shadows under her eyes as if she was becoming deranged from conjuring too many spirits.

“Someone needs her diaper changed,” said Aunt Pat, setting her coffee down in its saucer and digging into a plate of sausage.

Y
our daddy’s coming,” I whispered as I carried Sadie upstairs. “He’s going to nibble your toes.” Sadie, of course, didn’t remember who her daddy was. Her world, like mine as a baby, was the sound of relatives talking, the clink of china, the lap of waves. I set a towel on the bed in the nursery and stripped her down. Naked, her arms and legs jerked like deep-sea coral ruffled by the tides. Her eyes were fixed on the windows, and I wondered how far away she could see. Could she make out that squirrel on the tree outside? The clouds? Only four months out of the womb, and she was already holding up her head. Those tiny toes. Those grasping hands. I made a raspberry on her belly and dressed her in something pink my mother had given her—embroidered rosebuds and smocking. We lay together on the narrow bed while I nursed her, her eyes heavy with the deliciousness of it, both of us peaceful. Just us.

“Shhh,” I said. The horse and carriage clomped by. It was our own little world. No one could find us here.
“Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-looking,”
I sang. And Sadie, who didn’t know my voice was dreadful, fell asleep.

H
ospice was right. Death comes slowly. It is the eight restless hours of night, the sixteen of day. It is muffled talk, slamming doors—or worse—one gently closed. Telephones ring, the slow descent down the stairs. Words become air bubbles, winnow for the surface, effervesce, pop, and vanish. There’s too much light; there’s not enough.

And then there’s the reliving that consumes hours, days. You find yourself emerging from the subway or getting out of a cab, and you don’t recall the ride. Or the conversation. Or the person. This is years later.

In cinematic progression—the low rumble of a train, rain on a window, the taste of consommé and 7UP Louisa used to give you when you had the flu. None of these have anything to do with what is happening. You buy flowers. You think, What’s the use? In the screening room, the film winds down to test numbers.

How long is a heartbeat?

Dying goes on for years.

E
ven before I opened that door, I knew. Maybe it’s instinct or premonition. Your skin tingles, and you suddenly feel sick. People often say they don’t remember a traumatic event, but certain details haunt me. The rosebuds on the smocked dress my mother gave her. The tiny crescent of nail, slightly peeled, the skin beneath it blue. Her head was pushed into the corner of the crib between Tigger and Pooh, and she didn’t move. One of her booties was off. Hearing my screams, Dana thought a raccoon had gotten in. Mother was in her dressing gown, and her hair wasn’t combed. Down by the bicycles, Aunt Pat yelled,
“Dickie? Is it Dickie?”
My father’s low voice on the phone—was that before or afterward?—and that horrible sound in my mother’s throat. To this day, I can’t remember yanking Sadie from the crib, trying to rattle her eyes open, but I remember the taste as my mouth closed over hers, the crust around her nostrils. Later, it was Dana who clutched me in her arms.

T
he doctor prescribed for me. Everyone was kind. The Swansons and Aunt Bibi sent flowers and soup. The phone rang. I could hear them saying,
Not now
. My mother played solitaire, her bracelets jarring everyone. Adele sat with me, telling me stories.
Keep your religion
, I told her.