The Birthdays (29 page)

Fuck Gregory Peacock,
he murmured to himself. He sighed. He was tipsy and well on his way to drunk. “I’m getting drunk,” he said, though it seemed no one heard him.

Hilary’s fork scraped her plate. He supposed it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she stayed at his house—he just hoped she wouldn’t do something careless and burn down the place. Perhaps he could introduce her to the shop owners and the other summer homeowners they knew here. Perhaps someone could hire her to do something. She’d appreciate that—and she’d appreciate him for doing it. She’d have to. He could help her get her feet on the ground, and after all, she would be on the East Coast now. Not across the country. Not in their parents’ house, as Liz had told him was her earlier plan, reliving her youth. It was a start, at least.

Ellen had a faraway look on her face—she was probably still thinking about the MFA.

“I loved loved loved pretending that museum was our house,” Jake said, aware that his words had slurred from his
mouth. “It felt kind of sad, pulling into our little driveway after a snow day there.”

“Well, be happy you had a driveway,” his father said. This was a version of his clichéd refrain, especially when they were younger and Jake and his mother played their game of imagining the great things they would buy if they had a million dollars.

“Of course, Dad,” Jake said. “I’m sorry, I’m just a little drunk.”

“If I could have bought you all the Gardner, I would have.” It sounded almost as if he were mocking them.

Jake wondered what his father thought the first time he saw their wrought-iron gates and the long driveway lined in dogwoods and the groomed lawns at their house in Portland. On that morning they first visited, Jake had been so busy chatting with his mother he hadn’t paid much attention to Joe. Now, when Jake thought of it, he remembered the man fidgeting with his sweater sleeve, looking around and above himself as if he had just landed on the moon. Jake refilled his wineglass and took a long sip. Wasn’t his father at all proud?

Evidently Hilary knew nothing about her mother or father as people separate from the family. She knew nothing about anyone in the end, only what she thought she knew. Her accusation seemed only to draw her parents closer. And her mother’s reaction to her admission about her baby’s father. A married man! Well, Ellen certainly could’ve thought worse—was she now thinking that the two possible fathers were brothers, or criminals, that Hilary conceived the baby during conjugal visits at San Quentin? Ellen sat wilted in her chair, overwhelmed.
She seemed to have grown grayer, and her eyes droopier just over dinner. Hilary glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only six-thirty. Was it possible to age visibly in just two hours? She now regretted saying anything at all. Later, she would take her mother aside and apologize for doubting her and tell her that she would visit her and her father often, and to keep that guest room ready for her.

But she would also say that she still didn’t understand the tone of her mother’s voice in those moments over the phone, and what all that secrecy between her and MacNeil was about, and why the mention of love? Why did her mother need to call him and tell him about this weekend? Was he really just a friend, and if he was, did that make things any better? Hilary guessed that certain friendships lasted longer and plunged deeper than many marriages.

Everyone had planned to leave the island Sunday evening, after Joe’s birthday dinner. Ellen had a dentist appointment the next morning and Jake a meeting with the partners back in Portland. But given all that had happened, they decided to stay on another night. The appointment and meeting could certainly be postponed. The only person who was hesitant about staying on was Brenda, but in the end she’d agreed.

They would save the cake until a little later, they’d decided, until they weren’t so full from dinner. As they cleared the dishes and tidied the kitchen, Hilary stepped into the living room to see whether anyone had left glasses or dishes on the coffee table. Jake followed close behind, and bumped into her when she stopped short in the middle of the room. “Oops!”

“Careful,” she mumbled, and flashed a look at Daniel, who
sat near the couch in one corner of the room. Brenda was in an easy chair in the opposite corner. Hilary went to the couch. “Hi Danielle.”

“Hi Larry.”

Was there room for so much sadness in one marriage? She kept her eyes on the floor. “What kinds of projects are you doing for work lately?” she asked him.

Jake came over to the couch and sat at the end of it, practically on top the wheelchair, but Daniel seemed barely to notice.

“It’s okay,” he said to Hilary. “You can ask about it. I mean—” and he glanced at Brenda, who nodded. Hilary guessed that Brenda liked her, at least sort of. Brenda liked that she was self-deprecating and utterly nonthreatening, that she adored Daniel in what she saw as an innocent, younger sister way.

“You sure, Bren?”

“It’s your family, after all. Of course you want to tell them about it.” She spoke as if Hilary weren’t there.

Joe came in and sat on the arm of Brenda’s chair, and they listened to Daniel’s story of that Friday evening, of Brenda’s creeping fears and her abdominal and back pains. Of Vanessa (Hilary would look her up—she sounded interesting) and Freeman Corcoran and the rain, of the doctor and the operation and the old woman carrying daisies. As they spoke Hilary conjured several possible scenarios: She could move in with them and her baby would, by its sheer proximity, become like theirs. Or she could just give them her baby or find an apartment close to their house and spend most of her time with them. But these options seemed more like fantasies than anything else, and not necessarily realistic or even welcome remedies to anyone’s problem.

“Dan became obsessed with the donor,” Brenda said quietly. “He made up a whole personality for him.”

“Really?” Jake said.

“It’s amazing to me that he won’t find out what happened to us,” Daniel said.

“Maybe he will,” Hilary suggested. “Will the sperm bank tell him?”

“Not unless the autopsy shows that it had something to do with his sperm. But the doctor said it’s unlikely they’ll find anything,” Daniel said. He paused. “Maybe it’s better for him not to know. I guess there’s no point in upsetting the guy.”

“Did I just hear you say that?” Brenda asked.

“It probably is better,” Jake said. “I mean, do you really want to involve him now?”

Hilary looked at Daniel. “What was he all about in your head, Dan? What sort of person was he?”

“We called him Jonathan White,” Daniel began, then looked at Brenda and shook his head. “It’s silly, I don’t want to get into it. I’m sure he’s a nice person.”

“What about his job? His personality?” Hilary asked. “I bet you thought of that.”

“You know what?” he said slowly. “I just don’t think I should talk about it.”

Joe said, “There are always other people who come and go from your marriage—your kids and friends and family. But it doesn’t change the thing that connects the two of you.” He wasn’t normally the sort of person to bestow truths or sage advice, but he stretched his arms and went on. “It doesn’t change that thing that brought you together in the beginning and all the years you’ve gone through together.”

No one moved. Hilary looked at Brenda, who was gazing
out the window. Jake stared at Daniel, as if waiting for him to agree.

“Dad, you’ve become sentimental in your old age,” Daniel finally said.

“I suppose I have.” Joe smiled.

“I don’t like it,” Hilary said. “I don’t want to be the only cynic left in the family.”

“What about me?” Daniel said. “I taught you everything you know.”

Jake groaned. “Oh, please. Hil, you were born cynical. Dan had nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t know. I like to think I had an influence,” Daniel said.

Hilary rolled her eyes at him.

Jake mumbled something under his breath.

“What was that?” Daniel asked.

“I just said that you two can be insufferable. You act like you’re the only two people in the world.”

“What does that mean?” Hilary asked.

“Maybe you could remember that there are other people in the room?” He gestured toward Brenda. She glanced back and forth between them, probably thinking about her own family and missing them right then. Hilary knew she was particularly close with her mother—Daniel had mentioned their outrageous phone bills at the end of each month.

“You okay?” Daniel asked his wife, and she nodded. He looked at Jake. “I’m not seeing the problem here.”

Jake curled his lips into his mouth.

Ellen stepped into the room. She went to the couch and took a seat right next to Jake. It seemed none of them could be close enough to Daniel.

“Forget it,” Jake finally snapped.

“Forget what?” Ellen asked.

“Jake thinks we’re excluding him again,” Hilary said. Too many times, they’d had some version of this asinine conversation. Too many times when they were younger, Jake had tried to sabotage her relationship with Daniel by telling him the “bad” things she’d done (stolen Jake’s toy, used Daniel’s skates without asking him, and later, drank, smoked dope, had too much sex) or by telling Hilary that she should stop being such a puppy to him and tailing him everywhere, that she’d eventually drive him crazy. And it wasn’t just
their
friendship that Jake couldn’t stand. It was Daniel’s many friends, it was Hilary’s many boyfriends. It was all the friendships and intimacies in his life that Jake had never been invited inside.

“Oh, give me a break,” he laughed. “I was just thinking that it would be considerate to include Brenda in this conversation, or Dad, since it is his birthday.”

“I’m all right,” Brenda said.

“Well, good,” Jake said. “I wasn’t sure.”

“You were just trying to be thoughtful,” Joe added. He was maddeningly diplomatic.

“I wouldn’t call it thoughtful,” Hilary said. “I’d call it insecure.”

“Hilary,” Ellen hissed.

“You know what, Hil?” Jake said. “I don’t think I want you staying in our house after we leave. I don’t even want you living on this island, to be honest.”

“Fine. That’s fine with me,” Hilary said.

“Jake, come on,” Liz interjected.

“You don’t appreciate one goddamned thing anyone does for you,” he said. “You expect everyone to take care of you
and support you in every idiotic choice that you make. And the thing is, they do! This whole family thinks it’s great that you’re pregnant, that it’s just so great that there’s some man out there who doesn’t even know he’s got a baby. I guess I just don’t understand this, and I don’t understand how you take it for granted that everyone else does.”

Hilary blanched. “You know what? I actually do. I appreciate it enormously when people treat me with respect, and like I’m an adult, which, I hate to tell you this, I am.”

“Really? Because you’ve never seemed like one to me.”

“Jake, stop it,” Daniel said.

“You shit,” Hilary said to Jake.

“Hilary,” Joe said.

“You insecure, judgmental piece of shit,” she said to Jake.

“HILARY,” Joe boomed.

She stood, rushed down the hallway and into her bedroom and slammed the door shut as hard as she could. She grabbed her clothes on the floor and began stuffing them into her bag. A moment later she heard a tentative knock on the door, then a slightly louder knock. “It’s me,” her father said, and reluctantly she let him in.

“What are you doing?” he said, eyeing her bag. “You can’t leave yet.”

“I think I should.”

“Hil. Put down that shirt and stop moving for a second.”

She squeezed the shirt in her hands but stood still for a moment. Her whole body seemed to be palpitating.

“Jake doesn’t think you’re a bad person. He doesn’t think you’re a child or a slut or anything else, for that matter.”

“Would you like to place a bet?” she said, and sat down on the bed.

“He just wants to be more a part of things, he always has. You know that. And he knows just what to say to get under your skin.” He paused. “He knows the things that you think about yourself.”

She put down the shirt and sat on the bed. “What do you mean?”

He looked at her, then sat down beside her. “You don’t exactly hide them.”

But earlier Jake had chastised her about her not having informed the father of the baby about her situation. He had chastised them all, in a sense, for allowing her to do this and, by extension, for allowing her to get pregnant in the first place. This was pure Jake. This wasn’t him sensing her deepest worries and exploiting them in some warped attempt to draw closer to her. This was simply him proclaiming his verdict on her. She pulled the blanket over her face as her eyes began to fill. She considered her father’s words again, and wondered if there wasn’t a hint of truth to them. “He’s such a very enormous dickhead,” she said into the blanket, and Joe said, “He can be sometimes. But I don’t think he means to be.”

“Dan and Brenda shouldn’t have to deal with this sort of crap tonight.”

“I’m guessing Jake’s thinking the same thing.”

He was probably right. She let go of the blanket. What would come of Daniel? And Brenda? What would come of Hilary for that matter? “Dad? Do you think I’m going to be a terrible mother?”

“No.”

She lifted her head. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t even know how to change a diaper. I’ve never changed one in
my life. Not even one,” she said, and he leaned toward her, set his hand on her arm and said, “That’s what we’re here for.”

She looked up at the ceiling. “I hate Jake.”

“I know. But sometimes you don’t.”

“Most times I do.”

He squeezed her arm and sat quietly beside her, probably more distressed than she was right then.

“I know, ‘hate’ is an awfully strong word,” she said, after a while.

“It really is,” Joe said.

Hilary and Joe
gently interrupted Jake’s reading of the ferry schedule (even inebriated, Jake loved to organize and plan). “How about you open your presents now?” she said to Joe, her eyes red and raw. Jake looked at her, then at Joe, and agreed this was a good idea, and just like that, the air in the room seemed to loosen.

Brenda trudged to the corner of the room where their suitcase sat in a small pile. Daniel watched her rifle through her clothes and noted the container of ashes next to her toiletry case. He tried to give her a sympathetic glance when she turned around, but she avoided his gaze. He shouldn’t have agreed to stay on another night—she obviously didn’t want to. She was somewhere else in her mind again—where? Back at their house, chatting with Morris Arnold on his porch? More likely she was across the ocean, on that dusty blue couch
beside her mother, the two of them talking nonstop. And most likely, in her mind, Daniel wasn’t in the room with them. She placed their present on the table and returned to the easy chair.

“You didn’t have to get me presents,” Joe said as Hilary and Liz set more boxes on the coffee table before him. “You know I don’t need anything.”

“Oh, just go ahead and open one,” Ellen said. She sat in the other easy chair, her legs crossed at the ankles. “No need for the disclaimer.” Daniel thought of Hilary’s strange accusation during dinner, and then he thought of the Gardner Museum, that enormous dark house near Boston. He’d gone by himself one rainy Saturday when they first moved back to Massachusetts. Brenda had dropped him off and then gone to run errands downtown for a few hours. He remembered sitting beneath Sargent’s painting of Isabella Stewart Gardner in a black short-sleeved dress with strands of pearls and rubies around her small waist, a ruby around her neck. She stood before burgundy and ochre wallpaper. The design on the paper made it look as if an autumn tree grew from her head, the focal point of the painting. Her skin and face and hair did not match the richness and luxuriousness of the rest of the picture, the fall color of the wallpaper and the warmth of her rubies. Her skin was the color of winter and her hair light rust, a neatly piled wreath. But most striking was her expression. Daniel remembered staring up at this woman’s pursed face that seemed to have been caught mid-sentence. The pink corners of her eyes, the lines that held her mouth—she appeared afraid, or angry, as if what stood before her were not these priceless paintings and sculptures and furniture but something much more disappointing. The way her mouth
looked, she could have been saying,
Stop
or
Hold on a moment.
He remembered wondering what made Sargent want to capture this particular look.

Jake and Liz gave his father a version of their annual gift: a short-sleeved blue-checked shirt and a beige cotton old-man cardigan. He held them in the air before him and thanked Jake and Liz politely.

Hilary handed him three small boxes wrapped in black paper. She was so predictable in her aversion to color, even down to her choice of wrapping paper, and it was one of the things Daniel adored about her, her absolute, unwavering consistency. In each was a small framed photo. “Past, present and …” Hilary said, pointing to the empty frame, “future. To come: a photo of me and my baby.”

“Ah! What a sweet idea,” he said. “You’ll come home sometime and help me find the right place for them.” He set them in a small pile on the table.

“Who’s next?” his mother asked. “Daniel?”

Brenda handed the silver box to Joe, who held his head down as he tore off the paper and carefully lifted each book. He was never comfortable receiving gifts. He much preferred giving them, and avoiding the spotlight at all costs, or at least shining it on someone else. Daniel could sympathize with him.

“France, Germany,” Joe recited. “How wonderful.” He fanned through the photographs of each country, then placed the books on the table and looked around the room. “This has all been too much. And just because I’m getting older. It’s a funny tradition, isn’t it? Celebrating this day that brings you closer to the end?” He spoke lightly, as if the gravity of his words hadn’t occurred to him.

“Wait, wait! We’re not done yet,” Ellen announced, hoisting
herself out of the easy chair and shuffling into the kitchen. She returned with a few small boxes wrapped in pale blue paper. The first contained an ornate silver tin of jasmine tea that Daniel suspected was more something his mother liked than his father. The second was a Red Sox cap. “His old one is about to fall apart,” she explained, and his father unwrapped the final present slowly, carefully peeling off each piece of tape, folding it neatly and setting it aside.

“Go on,” Ellen said. “There’s no need to save the paper.”

Inside a small rectangular plastic box was a deck of playing cards, each with the same photograph of their family on one side. “I found this shop in the mall that makes your photos into decks of cards,” she said. “Now when we play hearts or gin we can think about you all. They also made coasters and place mats, but I couldn’t imagine setting a drink or my dinner on your faces.” She smiled and folded her hands on her lap as he examined the cards.

“What a great idea, Ell,” he said. “Maybe these cards will bring you good luck. Maybe you’ll finally win a game.”

Daniel’s parents loved to be the bantering couple, but he knew the banter turned darker once the two were alone. He’d grown up listening to them argue about money or Joe’s job or Ellen’s friends in the bedroom next door as he was trying to fall asleep. The arguments were consistent, if nothing else: Ellen had always wanted more of something—for Joe to be home more, for him to be more social with her friends, more interested in her latest interests, and Joe had always maintained that he was only capable of so much, that he had limits, that the world had limits and that this fact was not such a terrible thing—one had to just accept it at some point in one’s life. Daniel remembered slipping farther beneath his sheets
and trying to block out the noise of their sharp words by bunching his sheet and blanket next to his ears. And the next day, as if they’d now purged themselves of something poisonous, they’d joke with each other and sneak a kiss or two when they thought the kids weren’t looking. They’d laugh and flirt, and all would be well for a few weeks or longer, until Ellen’s moods would start to turn. In the end, Daniel couldn’t imagine being married to someone for as long as his parents had and still feeling playful together. Perhaps in moments of nostalgia, but newfound playfulness? It seemed impossible.

Daniel saw that on the cards was a photo taken at least ten years earlier, when Hilary had come home for Thanksgiving. The five Millers stood on their front stoop, and Daniel remembered it had been their neighbor who’d taken the picture, Mr. Simons, or Mr. Simonson, was it?—a widower who listened to talk radio so loud they could hear it from their living room. None of the spouses were in the photo, and Daniel wondered whether his mother had purposefully excluded them (would Brenda be offended?), and why she’d chosen such an old photo, one taken, he realized, before he was in his wheelchair.

“Look at us,” Hilary laughed, grabbing one of the cards. “Look at me! My hair is so blond it’s green!”

“God,” Jake mumbled, burping into his fist, “I must have been ten pounds fatter there.”

Daniel took a card and saw that indeed his brother was rounder then, before he’d met Liz, before he’d grown more disciplined about himself and his life. And his mother’s hair was a little less gray. His father stood on the far right, his shoulder touching hers. He wore a faint smirk, an expression hard to read, and one of his eyes was just slightly closed.
Daniel himself appeared in the middle of the group wearing an old sweatshirt, still faintly tan from the summer. His hair was longer then, and fell just over his eyes. He stood with his legs apart, his hands on his hips. He’d just met Brenda and would soon bring her home to meet them, once he’d finally told her he loved her, he remembered thinking now.

Brenda ran her hands through her hair. She was so pretty, he thought as he looked at her, an objectively beautiful woman. But so much about her had changed and continued to change, or
was
it even she who was different now? Maybe it was more the way the air circulated when they were in a room together—maybe it was only this that had changed. Whatever it was, she was gradually stepping away from him in order to save herself. This much was obvious. His heart seemed to grow thick in his chest.

Persistent thoughts about Brenda’s miscarriage (was it a stillborn? At six months it seemed closer to that than a miscarriage), and the conversation with MacNeil, and Hilary and Jake’s argument suddenly vanished, and Ellen found herself merely buoyed by feelings of kindness and gratitude toward the improved weather and the smell of the ocean, toward her children and Joe. “Oh, it’s good to have my five kids here with me tonight,” she said. She now sensed that choosing a photo of just the blood family for the cards might have been a little exclusionary, but at the time it seemed more a fond nod to the past than any statement about the present.

She leaned back in the soft chair and thought of Vera. Maybe in fact she was here right now, a part of the air. Maybe she and Ellen’s parents and grandmothers were in the room
with her and her family, watching them. It was a comforting thought, that the dead never truly left.

Daniel, Joe and Jake chatted about taxes. Liz muttered to Hilary, “You’ll stay here. Jake will be fine, just leave it to me,” and although Hilary seemed reluctant, the two did begin to discuss the logistics of living here. Brenda looked on, listening to their conversations. None of them were alone here. In this moment, no one Ellen loved was truly alone.

MacNeil had recently stumbled across a new biography of Isabella, one considerably less laudatory than the other he’d given her. In the end, he’d told Ellen, after her young son and later her husband had died, Isabella became the sole proprietor of her house. It was her one motivating force, building the museum and gathering art and filling its walls (this part was common knowledge), but before long she became quite a dictator in this quest. Though she had one of the first phones in Boston, she used it only to summon others, and refused to take any incoming calls. She ordered the architects and landscapers around mercilessly, and after the museum was up and running, she was known to bark at visitors if they overstepped their bounds. “Jesus Christ, madam,” she said to a woman touching everything she saw. “This is no menagerie.” Those paying attention developed a panorama of views about her, and not all were positive. Bostonians thought her greedy and showy. Henry James, across the ocean, had written in his journal, “The negation of work, of literature, the swelling, roaring crowds, the ‘where are you going,’ the age of Mrs. Jack, the figure of Mrs. Jack, the American, the nightmare—the individual consciousness—the mad, ghastly climax … The Americans looming up—dim, vast, portentous—in their millions —like gathering waves—the barbarians of the Roman
Empire.” Ellen had almost laughed when MacNeil first read her these words. They sat in his living room, dissonant jazz clamoring from the stereo. MacNeil called it free-form.

“Such drama,” she said. “How can you fault someone for wanting to surround themselves with beauty?”

“It’s the trying so hard, the need to outdo everyone else,” MacNeil said. “It’s such an American thing, really, wanting to be the best, no, to
have
the best and the most beautiful.”

“But you yourself love the finest art. You love superlatives—and you love the Gardner Museum as much as I do.”

“I do, is the funny thing. Even Henry James, once he came to visit, fell in love with the place.”

“So how do you reconcile this, your scorn and your admiration? How do you reconcile your being an American with your European heritage?” Ellen had only been to Europe once, and that was many years ago. She and Joe had gone to Italy to tour Tuscany and then the museums of Florence. On their second day Joe’s wallet had been stolen, and on their last day Ellen was struck by a stomach flu. In the end they saw far less than they’d planned. Joe liked his domestic vacations: the Grand Canyon, Niagara. He always said what’s the point of traveling so far when you haven’t seen everything in your own country yet?

“I don’t know if you ever can,” MacNeil admitted. “Maybe Isabella made do by cramming so much of Europe into her Boston house. Outside was the gray weather, the naysayers, all the jealous people. Inside was her real life.”

“I am American and happy to be,” Ellen said, and straightened her posture. “My grandmothers struggled in order to get here and build a life for their families.”

MacNeil nodded and smiled, bemused. “My parents did too, you know.”

“I think the only difference between Americans and Europeans is that Americans are more open about their longings. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

“I suppose it’s the lack of subtlety, the inherent gaudiness of it.”

“Everyone experiences desire,” she said.

“I don’t disagree.”

“What does it matter, then, how we show it?”

He shrugged, and before she realized it, he’d changed the subject.

This was the last time she saw him before he left for San Francisco, and she drove away from his house thinking that perhaps he had a point in the end. Everyone in her family was so clumsy in their desires, fumbling aimlessly and openly toward that which they could never fully achieve. Joe groped about for knowledge, bargains, the most efficient, the best this, the fastest that. Brenda and Daniel wanted a child so blindly they’d bought a stranger’s sperm. And now, remembering this conversation, she reluctantly added another to the list: in her ill-informed search for companionship, Hilary had fallen into motherhood.

But no, Ellen decided, MacNeil just could not see the sheer liberation that came from admitting one’s true desire. Without the confession of this desire to another and without attempting to act upon these longings, one was truly alone in the end. A widower in a sparkling, sanitized house. A shrinking old woman in a cavernous museum, who let her stockings split with holes and her dresses grow thinner as she desperately conserved her money for the endowment of the museum. One night close to the end of her life, a servant found Isabella wandering the second floor in her nightgown, approaching a
window. The servant gingerly led her back to her bedroom. No one ever discovered whether she had been sleepwalking or what her true motivation had been this night, if there had been one. Ellen liked to think that Isabella had just been having a sleepless night and gotten up for a stroll to admire her paintings, that the woman, despite everything, had found her favorite things in life and merely wanted to be beside them. The alternative thought was too much, that so much could come to nothing in the end.