The Ashford Affair (47 page)

There wasn’t a Dresden shepherdess in sight. Instead, everything was light and modern and surprisingly functional, a white couch, a glass coffee table, a pale blue carpet, and abstract seascapes—Clemmie thought they were seascapes—on the walls. There were sliding doors off the far end of the living room onto a minuscule balcony furnished with a metal table and chairs. The entire effect was light and airy and uncluttered.

Her mother came out with an entire tea ensemble on a lacquered tray, china pot and teacups, silver strainer, cookies on a plate, and tiny napkins folded into triangles.

“The new place looks great,” Clemmie offered.

Her mother set down the tray on the glass coffee table. “It’s rather nice finally having a place of one’s own,” she said, surveying her domain with something like satisfaction. “I’d never bought my own furniture before.”

“Not even with Dad?” The words were out before Clemmie had a chance to rethink them. Her father was generally a verboten topic. But that was what this was about, wasn’t it? Getting rid of those old taboos.

Instead of shooting her down, her mother simply said, “Your father had very firm tastes. And with two young boys, there really wasn’t much I could do other than try to make sure there wasn’t anything too breakable.”

Her mother began setting out the tea things, turning the cups right side up on their saucers, lifting the lid to check the progress of the tea in the pot. She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. There was still a pale mark where the ring had been. Curiouser and curiouser. Clearly, more than interior decoration had been going on in the past few months.

“I owe you an apology,” Clemmie’s mother said. Clemmie gaped at her as she set a silver strainer over the cup nearer to Clemmie. “I should have told you about your grandmother before. That was wrong of me.”

Clemmie blinked at the patch of sunshine on the carpet. The world really had turned upside down. She’d thought she was going to have to drag the conversation to Granny.

“Thanks,” she said in surprise. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—I mean part of what I wanted to talk to you about,” she added quickly, before she could open herself up to charges of bad daughter–dom. “I’ve been trying to put the pieces together, about Granny Addie and your mother.”

“There aren’t that many pieces,” said her mother in her usual brisk way. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.” Clemmie watched as the steaming liquid poured out of the pot, brewed rich and dark. That was the one familiar item in her mother’s new world, Granny Addie’s teapot. It was French, Limoges, with gold edging and tiny blue and purple flowers. She had seen Granny Addie pouring tea from that pot a thousand times in the dining room back at 85th and 5th.

Her mother moved the strainer from Clemmie’s cup to her own. “I’m sure Anna’s told you her own version.”

“Yes,” said Clemmie. There was no point in trying to hide it. Aunt Anna must have told Clemmie’s mother that they’d met. Mother’s relationship with Aunt Anna had always baffled Clemmie. They couldn’t stand each other, but they spoke weekly. “She thinks Granny Addie kept your mother away. Or something like that.”

Her mother shook her head. “Poor Anna,” she said, surprisingly. “She hurts herself so. The truth is that our mother left us.”

Clemmie looked up sharply from her tea. “You mean—”

“No, not like that. At least, not that I know. Like Anna, I’ve always wondered.” She tipped some milk into her tea. On the milk before versus milk after debate, Clemmie’s mother felt very strongly about milk after. “What I meant was that she’d left us long before. If it hadn’t been that accident on safari, she would have run off with someone, probably within the year. I was old enough to see it all. People do tend to talk in front of children.”

“You didn’t,” pointed out Clemmie. Her parents’ divorce had come out of the blue. One moment they were living with Dad outside L.A.; the next they were packing up her mother’s old car and driving cross-country and Clemmie wasn’t supposed to talk about Daddy or ask about Daddy. What she knew she had picked up later on, piece by piece, eavesdropping on adult conversations she wasn’t meant to overhear.

Her mother sighed. “I wanted to protect you from it. We conducted our fights behind closed doors, after you were asleep. My parents—” She took a neat sip of tea and set the cup firmly back on the saucer. “They did not conduct their fights privately.”

“You mean your real parents,” Clemmie clarified. Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick had “discussions” that occasionally verged on the snippy, but Clemmie couldn’t remember either of them ever raising their voices. They weren’t the fighting kind.

Her mother nodded. “My mother hated the farm. She missed London. She had been a debutante—which meant a very different thing then than it does now. She’d had a title, servants, her picture constantly in the papers. She went from that to being mewed up with two children in a remote farm in a remote country with a husband who was more interested in agriculture than in her. That’s how she saw it.” She took another sip of tea, cup perfectly balanced, back perfectly straight. “I don’t think she liked any of us very much.”

Ouch. Clemmie didn’t know how to respond to that. She resisted the urge to ask whether her mother had liked her own children; that wasn’t the point. Clemmie thought her mother liked her. Most of the time.

“But particularly me,” her mother said, adding delicately, “I was the reason they had to marry.”

It took Clemmie a moment for the meaning to click. “Oh. You mean—”

Her mother nodded. “I remember my mother throwing that up to my father. She accused him of ruining her life.” Her lips twisted. “He held his own, though. He called her all sorts of things, horrible things. It wasn’t the sort of thing a child should hear.”

They sat in silence for a moment, steam curling from the teacups, cookies sitting forgotten on their plate.

“You never told me any of this,” said Clemmie, feeling a bit lost. She’d never thought of her mother as a child, other than the obvious, the stories about the farm and the pet dik-dik, a sort of
Leave It to Beaver
meets
Out of Africa.
She’d never thought of her mother as an accidental child, unwanted.

The way Clemmie had been. Not that her mother had ever made her feel unwanted, but, as her mother had said, children knew. Sometimes, Clemmie wondered whether her parents would still have been married if she hadn’t intruded, a noisy intrusion into their otherwise empty nest.

Of course, there had also been Jennifer-the-Journalist, so maybe it wasn’t all Clemmie.

“Why would I?” Her mother reached for a Petit Ecolier, dark chocolate over a butter biscuit. “It was all so long ago. There was no need. Not to mention,” she added, “that I was far more concerned about you and keeping a roof over your head.”

The classic maternal one-two punch. “Fair point,” Clemmie muttered.

“I know that Anna thinks that Addie ruined everything and broke up our happy home, but it was really quite the opposite. We didn’t have much of a home until Addie came.”

Clemmie watched her mother munching her biscuit and blurted out, “Do you think she was still alive? Your mother?”

Her mother set down the decapitated Ecolier. “If she was,” she said, her voice like steel, “then staying away was the kindest thing she ever did for us.”

All righty, then. “Wow,” said Clemmie.

Her mother gave her a patient look. “I’m not saying your grandmother—your adopted grandmother—was a saint. She wasn’t. She could be stubborn and overbearing and meddlesome. But she did what she did out of love.” She looked pointedly at Clemmie. “I just want you to remember that when you tell your daughter about me. Intentions matter.”

“If I have a daughter,” Clemmie murmured.

Her mother was silent for a moment. “I was so concerned about your marrying too young. It never occurred to me that—” She broke off. “I didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I made.” She looked up at Clemmie. “Your Granny Addie tried to stop me marrying your father, you know. She was furious about it. We didn’t speak for years.”

Clemmie hadn’t known that either. “Do you wish you’d listened?” she asked tentatively.

Her mother folded her napkin and set it back on the tray. “You can’t look at it that way. If I had it to do over—no, your father wasn’t the man for me. I was too young. It was a bad idea, all around. But if I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have you or your brothers. You can’t take the one without the other.”

She rose to her feet. The interview was clearly over.

Clemmie stood, too. “Can I help you clean up?”

“No, that’s all right. Leave it.” She glanced at her watch. “I have an engagement this evening. I should get dressed.”

“An engagement?” There was something about the way she said it that gave Clemmie pause. “You mean a date?”

“Clementine!” Ah, the joy of an older-generation parent. Her mother had never submitted to the kind of familiarity her friends’ Baby Boomer parents encouraged. Pert, she called it. This time, though, she surprised Clemmie by saying, “Yes, actually.”

“Seriously? I mean, that’s great. Really. Who is it?”

Was her mother blushing? No, it had to be just a trick of the light. Her mother busied herself collecting teacups. “Just a gentleman I met at the Mostly Mozart series. You really should join us one of these days. The music is excellent.”

Clemmie shrugged into her coat, grappling with the bizarre image of her mother picking up men at Lincoln Center. “Sounds like it.”

Her mother gave her a look. Someone was being pert.

Her mother’s face cleared. “I nearly forgot. Your grandmother wanted you to have these.”

“Have what?”

Clemmie trailed along after her mother into the hallway as her mother disappeared into the bedroom.

“These.” She came out holding three framed prints piled on top of one another. They were the pictures that used to hang in Granny Addie’s bedroom. “You’ll need a bag.…”

Clemmie slid her arms under the stack, grappling for a good angle. “That’s all right. I’ll just take a cab.” She leaned over to kiss her mother’s cheek, accidentally bumping the wall with one of the frames. “This was really … nice.”

Her mother pressed her cheek to Clemmie’s. “Don’t stay away so long.”

Clemmie hitched the pile of pictures against her hip. “I won’t.”

Her mother frowned at the unwieldy stack of pictures. “It would only take a moment to wrap those up properly. Are you sure you don’t—”

That was the parent she knew. “No, I’ll manage. Don’t fuss.” She waited until the door was almost closed before adding, “Have fun tonight!”

She could have sworn she heard a “Clementine!”

Her mother dating. Good for her. The divorce had been final nearly thirty years ago now. That was a long time to wait. Unless, of course, there had been other people in the interim. There might have been. Clemmie hoped there had been. But she rather suspected otherwise. The wedding ring had never come off before. The new man seemed to go with the new apartment and the new, sleeker haircut.

The top picture slipped and Clemmie grabbed for it, staggering to keep from dropping the whole pile. Damn, damn, damn. Her mother had been right. Clemmie inelegantly braced the stack against the wall, trying to wedge them between the wall and her body. There were three, and her mother had turned them so that the ones on the top and the bottom were glass side in, less likely to break that way. Clemmie jabbed at the elevator call button, trying not to lose her grip on the pictures.

The backing was tearing off the one on the top. It was nothing expensive, just plain black matting, graying with age and beginning to peel. Beneath it, she could see the shiny back of the picture, photo paper with something written on it in a narrow, spidery hand.

The elevator pinged open. Clemmie ignored it. Carefully, as carefully as she could, she set the pile of pictures down on the ground. Kneeling down beside them, she peeled back the black paper.

DOVE MOUNTAIN
, it read. And under that,
1976.

It was the same handwriting she had seen on the photos in Granny Addie’s bedroom.

Arizona, 1972

“Where are you from?” The cabdriver had been trying to strike up a conversation with her since Tucson.

“New York,” said Addie, watching out the window as the familiar urban sprawl gave way to a landscape of the sort she had never seen before, red mountains, stark and imposing, presiding over long stretches dotted by scrub and brush.

“You don’t sound like you’re from New York.”

Addie smiled politely into the rearview mirror and returned to her window, hoping that would effectively repress further conversation.

This was one of those times when she wished she were capable of driving herself. She had never learned to drive, not properly. Living in New York, she hadn’t needed to. Usually, when she needed to be driven somewhere, Marjorie took her. After all those years in California, Marjorie was entirely proficient behind the wheel.

But she couldn’t ask Marjorie to drive her this time. Not where she was going.

“It’s a long way from New York,” the cabdriver tried again.

Poor man. It wasn’t his fault that she wanted to be left alone with her thoughts, wanted time to compose herself, as if the eight hours on an airplane and the night in a Tucson hotel room hadn’t been time enough.

“Yes,” said Addie. “Yes, it is.”

Sunlight beat down on the cab, through the windows, making her skin prickle. Even with the air-conditioning on, wheezing away in the front, she could feel the heat.

She had dressed carefully for the occasion, in a lemon-yellow sheath with matching shoes and hat. The skirt was already crumpled from sitting on it, her jacket sweat stained, her gloves grubby. The yellow leather pumps had given her a blister.

Dimly, she remembered feeling like this before, on a train from Mombasa, with the red dust of Kenya staining her suit and sweat beading beneath the band of her cloche hat. She had been so young then, in retrospect, so young and untried. For a moment, the jolting of the cab became the jolting of the train and she was twenty-six again, in a pearl-colored suit, on her way to see Frederick.