The Road Taken (35 page)

“Oh, no,” Ginger said, and laughed.

Of course Peggy wasn’t there. She would have come to a formal wedding, not to a cocktail party whose purpose was undeclared, but Joan wasn’t going to change her plans just to lure Peggy. I have my own life now, she thought, and the sooner I get over her the better.

Perhaps because she felt guilty, Peggy sent an extravagant gift.

Chapter Forty-Three

Markie Glover was sixteen now, and all she wanted was to escape from the suburbs. She had waited for years to be old enough to get her junior driver’s license, and now at last she had it, but it was not enough. She yearned to find out about the outside, she dreamed of freedom. She hated Larchmont: leafy streets full of pretty houses with the same nervous people in them having the same tedious lives. She knew that years ago her parents had come to this place thinking it would be such a paradise for their children to grow up in, and that now they were surprised and disappointed that Peter had not turned out to be what they had expected, that Markie was discontented, and that, since Angel wanted to do whatever Markie did, Angel was already restless too.

We did it for you, their parents said, looking at their estranged and confusing children. We would have been so happy to have your life. Their parents’ domestic heaven was basically just a small town where there was nothing for a teenager to do. You could go over to a friend’s house after school and watch television or fool around, there were the Saturday football games in season, where Markie was a cheerleader, which she liked; or once you could drive, you could go to Cook’s in New Rochelle, a nondescript restaurant with mediocre food that was the only place where kids from all the neighboring towns could meet each other. Although the towns were all similar, the newness of seeing unfamiliar kids had somewhat of the romance of Europe, so there was a sexy, electric atmosphere in Cook’s. People fell in love. Fights broke out.

At sixteen you couldn’t legally drive out of the city or the state, or drive after eight
P.M.
, but you did. The kids drove around and around through the boring suburban streets, getting high on pot. Everyone smoked pot, including Markie. It wasn’t hard to get.

On rare occasions only, because their small town was a self-contained world that they hardly ever left, a group of them would get on the train on Saturday night and go into Manhattan, with their driver’s licenses that they had altered to make themselves older, and go to clubs, where they would listen to music, and drink sloe gin fizzes or vodka gimlets until they got drunk and nauseated. Then they would go back to the suburbs and sneak into their houses and pretend they were all right and go into their rooms and shut their doors before their parents started trying to “talk.”

The seventies’ suburban parents wanted to be friends and advisors to their teenage children, but all they saw was the outside of closed doors. They tried to be hip but they hadn’t a clue. Markie thought it was hilarious that her mother thought the booty referred to in the song “Shake, Shake, Shake Your Booty” was a shoe. God, she wished her mother wouldn’t try to get into her world; it was a lost cause and embarrassing. She didn’t want to get into her mother’s world.

Sometimes Peggy tried to explain to her that she, too, had thought her mother was old-fashioned, but Markie secretly thought Grandma was hipper than her mom. Nothing really bothered Rose. She had such a sweet nature, and was so accepting. Of course, there were things you wouldn’t tell her, but that was normal. The one Markie confided in was her Aunt Joan.

Their friendship had started slowly. At first, Markie had been going into New York more frequently than the other kids, with her friends Bronwyn, Larry, and Michael, her posse, her group—despite Peggy’s constant protests that the city was filthy, crime-ridden and dangerous. After all these years Peggy still acted as if the forbidden city, less than an hour away, was at the end of the earth. Peter had lived there ever since college. He had his own apartment, with his latest live-in girlfriend, and was going to film school. Before that he’d gotten a master’s degree, and then he had studied writing. The student, the family called him, not exactly thrilled, since he was twenty-five.

Peggy always wanted to know where Markie and her friends had been on these reckless nights, and what they had done. “I dropped by to see Peter,” Markie often said, although she hadn’t. There was quite an age difference between them and he couldn’t be bothered. That’s nice, her mother would say. And what else did you do? Markie couldn’t pretend she’d been to see Grandma (why would she go to see her grandmother anyway?) because her mother would find out she hadn’t, and she wouldn’t go to look up Aunt Ginger because not only was Aunt Ginger a serious and dedicated grown-up but also she was usually busy. Apparently there was a theory now that cancer was caused by a virus, and Ginger and the other researchers were excited and working harder than ever.

“Oh, I saw Aunt Joan,” Markie said after one trip, although she hadn’t done that either. To her surprise, her mother didn’t like that idea at all.

“Don’t get started with her,” her mother said, her lips tight. “She hasn’t got our values.”

Of course she doesn’t, Markie thought; she’s interesting and worldly—she’s in publishing and her husband is an actor. Her mother’s obvious disapproval, which she had noticed before, now made Markie curious to get to know Aunt Joan better. So one day she telephoned Aunt Joan and said she was coming in on Friday night with her best girlfriend, Bronwyn, and asked if they could come by to see her. Aunt Joan immediately invited them to dinner.

“Trevor is in rehearsal for his play,” she said. “So you and I and your friend could go to a restaurant together. We’ll go to Maxwell’s Plum, you’ll like it.”

Maxwell’s Plum was glittering with dozens of colorful Tiffany glass chandeliers, and there were ceramic animal heads hanging on the walls It was big, noisy, overdone, hip, and funky. The bar was crowded with single people trying to meet each other, and with couples who had already met. “Friday night is the big singles night,” Aunt Joan said. “Not that I care anymore.”

She was as chic as ever in the black she wore as faithfully as an Italian widow, and Markie thought she shone with her own kind of light next to all the bright psychedelic fashions. They were seated at what Aunt Joan told them was a good table, and while the two girls drank the sloe gin fizzes she had calmly let them order she regaled them with stories about her world, her life, famous people she had spent time with, things in New York they should do. She knew the museums, the galleries, the theater. Bronwyn was speechless, her big eyes open wide. Markie was glad they had come.

When the food arrived, Bronwyn, who weighed barely ninety pounds, hardly touched her green salad with no dressing, which was what she always ordered as her entire dinner, and Aunt Joan understood right away. Most adults didn’t really notice, except for Bronwyn’s mother, who nagged her all the time to eat, for all the good it did, since her mother was anorexic too.

“When I was a kid,” Aunt Joan said seamlessly, “my mother had two friends, two fat sisters, who lived in the neighborhood, and they decided to go on a diet. They didn’t eat anything but apple skins and black coffee for an entire year.”

“Ugh,” Markie said. “What happened to them?”

“They died.”

“Died?” Bronwyn said.

“Mmm.” Aunt Joan lit a cigarette. The two girls glanced at each other, looked at her, and then pulled out their own. She didn’t object. “When you look around,” Aunt Joan said, “you’ll see that nothing is really new in life. People do the same crazy things. They think they know, but they don’t.”

She would have been a good mother, Markie thought. What she liked about Aunt Joan was that she was supportive and subtle. You knew she was really looking at you, and that she had an opinion, but she didn’t tell you what to do. Nonetheless, you were well aware that she knew better than you, that she’d been around and had learned things, more than she’d told you, even though what she’d told you was enough to impress. She and Trevor had apparently decided not to have children, or perhaps they couldn’t, and Markie thought it was a shame.

“I’m glad you came in to town,” Aunt Joan said.

“Oh, so are we,” the girls said.

“Maybe sometime you’ll come in and stay overnight, and we can see a play.”

My mother will never let me, Markie thought, but she nodded agreeably because she didn’t want to hurt her aunt, who had been so gracious. Markie was mindful that before she got married Aunt Joan had been considered the family slut, which of course made her more interesting and accessible; but now she could understand the real reason why her mother wouldn’t want her to hang around with Aunt Joan. It was not about morals. It was about grabbing the world and chewing it up. She could see why Peter had always liked her, and why her mother was afraid of her. Aunt Joan knew how to have fun.

After that Markie began spending more time in the city with her aunt, without Bronwyn. She came in on a Saturday afternoon, or on a Friday or Saturday evening, although she couldn’t stay over. She never told her mother what she did in New York because, although she rather enjoyed annoying her mother, the consequences could only have made her sorry. It was easier to say she’d seen a play with her friends, when the fact was she’d been at the matinee alone with Aunt Joan, or with her at the Museum of Modern Art seeing whatever the latest exhibit was, followed by an ancient movie, and then drinks and conversation about art and about life.

They could even talk about sex. It was good to have an adult to talk to about your doubts and fears, and peer pressure. Markie was still a virgin, although some of her friends were not, and Aunt Joan told her it was sensible to wait until college. Markie couldn’t imagine her mother taking such a calm and flexible attitude about the charged issue of her virtue, and chalked up another plus for her aunt.

When Trevor’s play closed Markie went out occasionally with both of them. But Aunt Joan seemed to prefer having her to herself—two women of the world, the young one learning, the older one teaching—and Markie was flattered. She’d always been somewhat intrigued by bad Aunt Joan, a background figure in her life, a relative stranger with an air of mystery about her; but now she admired her and felt lucky that the two of them had become such good friends. Aunt Joan has saved me from mediocrity, Markie thought.

Sometimes she thought of telling Angel about these stolen afternoons and evenings and even asking her along, but she didn’t. She supposed she was being selfish, but she just couldn’t. When you had a slightly younger sister who’d always been in your life, following you everywhere, wanting to be you, no matter how much you loved her sometimes you just wanted to have something special that was only yours.

One time Markie admitted to Aunt Joan how she’d been sneaking around in order to see her. Maybe it was rather tactless, but there wasn’t anything she couldn’t admit to her aunt. Aunt Joan wasn’t shocked everyone in the family knew that she and Peggy didn’t get along. “I was always very secretive too,” Aunt Joan told her. “I think in that way you’re like me.”

“Like you?” Markie said, smiling happily, totally flattered. “I’d love to be like you.”

She thought it was odd that Aunt Joan, although she smiled back, suddenly had tears in her eyes. She hadn’t thought of her aunt as a very emotional or sentimental person, but you never knew.

Chapter Forty-Four

The shade tree in the Carson garden was so big that it had to be trimmed back again so there could be light inside the house. The ivy on the front of the house had long since grown all the way up to the roof, giving the building a classical, English look. Ben had been amused to hear that adult ivy was expensive now, if you wanted to buy it that way because you didn’t have the patience to wait for it to grow. People were in a hurry. Little did they know, Rose thought.

Time passed and people were gone, or changed, in the wink of an eye, it seemed. Markie was applying to colleges. Rose had two great-grandnieces in high school in Bristol, descendants of her older sister, Maude. Beautiful Maude, elderly and overweight, had died of a heart attack just two years ago. How sad; dearest Maude, who had been like a mother to her in her early childhood, now vanished. Busy with their own lives, she and Maude hadn’t talked to each other as often as they should have, Rose thought, but still, each of them knew the other was there, and just knowing that was always a comfort. Rose felt empty without her.

Heart trouble was the family curse. Their father had died of heart failure, they knew, but no one had ever seemed able or willing to determine why their mother, Adelaide, had died. Now, more than ever, Rose would have liked to have that information, even though it was impossible to find. She wondered if bad hearts ran in the family, although her doctor told her she was in excellent health, particularly for her age. Many people born before and around the turn of the century didn’t live long lives, not as long as people born later did. Medical knowledge and good nutrition were changing things. He praised her for her good health, although she didn’t know what she had done to deserve it.

After Maude’s death poor Walter, feeble and failing, had moved in with one of their children; an aged man living with his old child, a burden, a worry, an expense, but no one wanted to warehouse him away. Another year and he, too, was gone, as if Maude’s passing had robbed him of his last bit of will. No one in the family but Ben is older than I am now, Rose told herself in a kind of shock.

The tragedy she’d had the most trouble dealing with was when her younger half sister Daisy had succumbed to the breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones and organs. Radiant Daisy, who caught my bridal bouquet, shrieking, when I left for New York on the train . . . not a shadow of the future fell across our lives that day, Rose thought. It seemed so long ago now. Daisy’s had been a difficult death, and she had been sick for a long time. But the obituary in the newspaper did not have to say “after a long illness” because former First Lady Betty Ford had gone public with her breast cancer in 1974, although Betty Ford had survived. Each of them was a different statistic, one of sorrow, one of hope.

Viruses weren’t blamed for cancer anymore. Now Ginger’s research into the causes of cancer dealt with damaged genes that went crazy causing certain cells to reproduce too much. Oncogenes, they were called. The tumor suppresser genes didn’t work against them. Heredity, Ginger said, and environment, and cell error, were to blame. It was a side effect of evolution, she said; cells replicated and made mistakes. Imagine cells with a life of their own, Rose thought. Why, it’s like a science fiction movie.

Four years ago the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal for every woman who wanted it. Rose remembered when even birth control information had been forbidden, and Margaret Sanger had gone to jail for trying to give it. And she remembered Maude’s illicit abortion during the depression because she couldn’t afford to feed another child. . . . Maude had been lucky she didn’t die right then. All those days of desperation, so long ago, and now there was “a woman’s right to choose.”

Rose had been married for fifty-two years. Sometimes she felt it had been all of her life. People were gone and you carried on. The Thanksgiving table became smaller. The Christmas presents massed under the tree were often mailed now, to relatives scattered everywhere. You got photographs of growing children instead of hugs from them. When she had been young, people had died in droves, it seemed, and now they just moved away.

The world around her had changed so many times, and she had changed with it, and Ben had tried. But Ben, grown frail in ways that had been almost imperceptible to her because she saw him every day, who was eighty-one, had begun finding the world perplexing. He had always tried, but now he was like an elastic band that had stretched and stretched until it could move no more.

You didn’t have to adjust to the outside if you didn’t want to. There were so many ways to remain the same. Not for her, because she was always interested in the new, but for him. He refused to change their telephones to Touch-Tone service because he was used to a rotary dial, even though it would have been easier for his gnarled fingers, and an answering machine was completely out of the question—too complicated—although Rose would have liked to get messages. Ben was rereading the classics because, he said, the new novels had too much sex in them. So just skip those parts, Rose said, laughing, but he answered that he would have to be
reading
it before he realized what it was.

Rose hummed along cheerfully when the Bee Gees sang “Stayin’ Alive” or “Night Fever” on the radio to the disco generation, but Ben made a face and moved the dial to classical music. She remembered when he had liked modern music, but that had been different modern music. He said there was too much bad news in the newspapers, and the crime statistics upset him. Turn to something more cheerful, Rose would tell him. Think about it, she would say; we have all read much worse news through the decades, and we survived. Remember all those wars. . . .

And did we survive! she thought. Two years ago she and Ben had had their fiftieth anniversary party, with all the generations there, perhaps the last time she would see them all together, she had suspected rightly, and Rose felt like the old woman in the shoe. Looking at them all, so dissimilar, gave her even more strongly a sense of history—family history and the history of their times.

Joan liked to say that there was nothing new, that people did the same crazy things in different ways, and Rose tended to agree.

Rose read magazines and she knew what was happening. People her grandchildren’s age went to dance at Studio 54 and Xenon, in outfits she considered ridiculous, starting their evenings at an hour when she was glad to be ending hers, and she thought of speakeasies in her own youth. Her daughters’ contemporaries—although thank God not her daughters—sometimes went to Plato’s Retreat, where there were orgies, and Rose remembered with a smile when a simple extramarital affair was considered enough. Hugh marched in gay pride parades commemorating the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, where being a sprightly senior citizen gay activist gave him a kind of status in a young man’s game, and Rose remembered when no one in the family knew about him. Teddy, although he was proud of Hugh, stayed at home so that no one would know about
him
even now.

I am lucky to have lived so long, Rose sometimes thought, although she was only seventy-seven and, with her doctor’s blessing, had no intention of dying yet.

But Ben did not have her same need to hold on to life. One cold winter afternoon he said he felt a little odd and went upstairs to have a nap. And while Ben was asleep that afternoon he died peacefully; his heart just gave out. When Rose went upstairs and found him gone she was shocked and grief-stricken and in awe of his kindness. He had slipped away after a happy lunch in front of the fire, with his loving wife by his side and a glass of wine in his hand; instead of lingering in ill health and helplessness, instead of turning her into an overworked shadow from taking care of him, and himself into an angry, bewildered shell, like so many other people she’d known. The angels had done him a favor. And he had done her a favor. He had died near the beginning of his decline, just when he had begun to believe he would not mind missing what was to come in the world.

Ben had always been good and chivalrous and courtly, in life as in death. He had been her best friend.

When Rose, after a few moments of getting used to the reality of his passing, remembered for how long Ben had been her best friend, she found herself lying on their bed sobbing. Then she wondered if she were crying for herself too, for her vanished youth, and she pulled herself together.

She was flooded with memories. You kind and gentle man, she thought, softly kissing his dead face. You gentleman. Thank you for all my adventures. Thank you for changing my life. When she had said her private good-bye to Ben she called the doctor, and the funeral parlor, and finally, dreading it, her children. A funeral was only the beginning, not the end. There was much work to do.

People surrounded her, too many people, they pressed into the corners of the house, they messed up her kitchen, they asked where things were. Everyone had an opinion, they wanted to be helpful. Ben, long ago retired from wills and trusts, had nevertheless efficiently arranged to take care of his wife financially for the rest of her life. Rose could do whatever she wanted to now.

Oh, Mom, you’re all alone, her children said. We mustn’t let Mom be alone. That was the first time Rose realized she was alone, and she wasn’t sure she minded. She felt very tired.

But it was not long after the funeral when the others, particularly Peggy and Ed, began trying to plan her life. It was almost as if becoming a septuagenarian woman without a husband had thrust her into the status of being a child. Peggy and Ed, Harriette and Julius, even Ginger, wanted her to sell the house and move into an apartment where there was a doorman and neighbors to be sure she was all right. Only Joan and Trevor demurred. It was Mom’s own business, they said, and Rose was grateful for their intelligence.

“How could she possibly sell this house with its beauty and its memories?” Joan said. “Hasn’t Mom had enough losses?”

“You were never even here,” Peggy said.

“And were you?”

The others would not give up. They warned her about the crime wave in the Village these days. How could she go out alone? I always did, Rose responded tartly. What do you think I did when your father was alive; wait for him to protect me? They warned her about robberies, murder. Drugs were being sold openly; you could go into nearby Washington Square Park in broad daylight and see drug dealers. Rose remembered when she had been a young mother meeting the other young mothers in that same park, pushing her baby carriage, curious, innocent, and uninformed, but perfectly safe. No one in his right mind would bother to try to sell me drugs, she said.

What if you fall in the house? they said. All those stairs . . . Rose reminded them that the stair lift she’d had put in some years ago for Ben would do nicely for her too, when and if she ever needed it. What if you get sick? they asked. I have Mavis, Rose said. She’s not going anywhere. The housekeeper was old too, but not nearly as old as she was, and she was enough. Often Rose sent her home early with some excuse, because secretly she longed to be alone, to be able to eat when she chose, what she chose, or not at all; to read, to choose her own television programs, play her own favorite music, or just to have silence.

But then, of course, she thought of the silent, companionable hours with Ben reading beside her, and she felt a jolt of sadness. She reminded herself to cherish these memories, not let them depress her. His spirit was still with her, and his love. It would take a while to adjust to her new life, Rose knew, and leaving the house she’d lived in ever since she came to New York as a young newlywed was not the way to do it. Losing the house would be a serious bereavement. It was more than her home; it was the repository of all their vanished lives, of the faces of the children who had grown and gone, of so many happy occasions. It was the day she had seen Joan in the living room when she came back. It was the surprises and the reunions and the laughter.

Rose let them nag her about selling the house and paid no attention. If I can’t stay in my house I won’t live long, she threatened, and they glanced at one another, alarmed, and finally then they backed off, although she knew they were not reassured. Sometimes old age was useful, Rose thought, amused. Peter bought her an answering machine and showed her how to use it, so they wouldn’t worry about her and she’d call them back, Peggy said. Rose remembered all the long periods when Peggy hadn’t called at all. She knew those faithful phone calls would trickle off soon and she would be left in peace.

She decided to redecorate because some of the fabrics had gotten threadbare. It gave her a project, and the young male decorator she hired on Hugh’s recommendation was good company. Hugh helped her too. He loved to fix up houses. How could anyone think I would have nothing to do? Rose wondered. Ginger even had her reading books on tape to give to the blind.

From time to time there was a remark from someone in the family about how prices of real estate had gone up so sharply that this town house that Ben had bought at a bargain so many years ago was now worth millions. But what would I do with millions? Rose said. I’ll leave it to all of you. No, they protested, you’ll live forever, don’t talk about it; but she knew they were thrilled.

Nearly all of her friends in New York were widowed too. So now Rose lived in a world of women, and she liked it. She was the social director, arranging get togethers, outings, nagging them to come with her to the theater or a concert even if they were afraid. She called friends she had lost touch with over the years and renewed their acquaintance. Sometimes they tried new restaurants or went back to old favorites. Oddly, except for their card parties, none of them prepared meals for their friends or entertained at home. It was too much trouble. A plate for one in the kitchen, or in front of the TV, suited a single person who had spent over fifty years taking care of other people. For holidays there was still always family to go to.

This will be the next chapter in my life, Rose thought, and was content. She remembered when Ginger was little and she had thought that of all her daughters Ginger would be the one who would grow up to be her friend and confidante and stay that way forever. It had never occurred to her that Ginger’s driving intelligence would be what sent her into her own world and gave her little time to be her mother’s companion. Rose knew she had encouraged Ginger’s independence and her career to save her life, and now if Ginger was busy and successful it was a reward, not a disappointment. Still, she was a little disappointed. How could you not be?