The Violet Hour: A Novel (6 page)

“Nah, better get on with that sauna,” he said. “But who knows. I might be moved to have a few words with God out there.”

She frowned, her usual response to his ideas. “Well, I’m sure He’d love to hear from you.” Howard didn’t quite know what she believed in other than the importance of regular church attendance. If she spoke with God herself, he hadn’t heard her—not that she’d be inclined to let him witness her in a position as vulnerable as prayer. Even naked, she was in charge: in the tub with her hair slicked back, her breasts announcing themselves to the water, the skin on her shoulders startled pink by her ceaseless, hard-scrubbing hands.

Howie came into the kitchen looking not quite full enough for his western shirt and slacks. “Do I have to wear a tie?” he asked his mother. He was fifty years old and over six feet tall, and still, he asked these questions.

“Come on, son,” Howard said, teasing. “Don’t they know how to dress out west?”

Howie’s face was milky and opaque. He stooped as though he didn’t trust the ceiling. “It’s a little more informal. I can’t remember the last time I wore a tie.”

“How about the last time you went to work?”

“Not usually, no.”

This was news to Howard. His son the elected official didn’t wear a tie to work?

“You look fine,” Eunice said to Howie. “Ties aren’t required in church anymore either. Which you’d
know,
Howard, if you ever attended.”

Before he retired, he hadn’t gone a single day without putting on a tie. It was simply the way one dressed. He found it ludicrous that his wife was suddenly pretending to have developed a more casual view. There wasn’t anything in the world she’d want more than for Howie to wear a damn tie. Preferably a dark one.

“If it’s all right with everybody,” Howie said, in a tone that suggested it didn’t really matter what his parents wanted anymore, “I’ll just stick with this.”

“Good,” they answered in unison, equally unsatisfied.

“Have fun, then,” Howard said. He pressed his toes into the ground, feeling the pleasing return of sensation. It would be a good day for sauna building. “I’m framing out the roof this morning.”

“The roof,” Eunice repeated. “When are you going to hire someone who actually knows what he’s doing?”

“Hard part’s over,” Howard said. “Plumbing, electrical. The carpentry’s a piece of cake. You oughta know that.”

“And you ought to know you’re not as young as you used to be. You could stand to let someone help you.”

Howard glanced at his son, who never offered his assistance anymore, not that he’d have been much use. The few times he’d helped in the workshop as a boy, Howard had felt fortunate they’d both made it out with all their fingers. Still, he could probably pass Howard rafters. A near-sighted grandchild could do that.

“All right, all right,” Howard said, not even annoyed. “Get on with your worship.”

Something in his tone amused Howie, who smiled with such sudden magic that Howard nearly abandoned his morning plans to share a pew with his bewitching only son. Perhaps if he spent some thoughtful time in his company, taking in the stained glass depictions of Christ’s red-and-purple life while listening through the sermon for the hidden sounds of Howie’s own particular silence—perhaps this might help him understand what made his son his son. But then Eunice shouted, “The coffee!” and the moment soured, and passed.

After they’d gone, Howard poured his mug and stood in the kitchen waiting for the caffeine to liven his senses. Was his son gay or merely shy? He couldn’t bring himself to ask, not because he disapproved—the older he got, the less he cared about any of that—but because he didn’t want to violate Howie’s privacy. If only there were a way to say he loved him, would love him no matter whom he loved.
He knew men his own age who’d raged against their sons’ romantic choices, feeling they’d somehow lost a son because he hadn’t bedded a woman they might’ve liked to bed themselves. Ridiculous. His son was hardly lost. He was right there in town, visiting him for the week, the same mystery he’d always been.

If anyone was lost, it was Abe, his former son-in-law, whose handiness Howard had sniffed out the first time Cassandra brought him around, putting him to work on home repairs almost immediately, tasks for which the young medical student seemed actually grateful. Howard couldn’t look at his oldest daughter now without mourning a little for her sturdy, provider husband who’d really made something special of his life. It had happened so suddenly. They were married—happily, he thought—and then they were not. As though Howard needed any further reminder that nothing in this life was permanent.

He looked at his watch: quarter of eight. His project awaited and the day, which he could feel emanating through the kitchen window, was going to be warm. He’d just set down his mug when Cassandra and Mary appeared in spandex, their hair ponytailed, their foreheads mirrored, back from a morning jog. They had never looked or talked alike—Cassandra low-voiced, pale and redheaded, like a person existing only in paintings; Mary blond, solid, and eternally flushed, a cheerful instruction in every breath—and yet they favored the same exercise attire. The same complicated athletic shoes, the same grafted racerback tanks. Looking at them, he felt that sometimes people’s similarities were the greater truths, their differences merely distraction.

Mary was immediately in the bread box, humming and pulling out loaves for her kids’ breakfast, while Cassandra hung back in the doorway, scratching her hip, deciding something. The oldest, she had been his first hope for the future, having taken a surprising interest in the preparations of decedents as a kid. What had she been—eight? She was the kind of child who couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. “It has a propeller on top, so it can go into space!” she would tell him, zestfully, as she drew him a flying house. She was not that way now,
slinking through rooms like a tidy cat, hoping to go unnoticed. It saddened him, how interior she’d grown, how small she seemed to want to make herself, almost in spite of her success.

“You girls are up early,” he greeted them.

Cassandra came forward now to kiss his cheek. “Morning, Pop.”

“It’s too hot to go any later in the day,” Mary said. Ever suspicious of contamination, she was examining a loaf of raisin bread through its clear plastic sack. “We had a nice run, didn’t we?”

“We did. I always forget how leafy it is out here.”

“Find any new trees?” Howard asked. Cassandra had been consumed with work since her divorce, installing glimmering forest patterns into the bedroom, living room, and dining room walls of the West Coast elite: high-tech millionaires and venture capitalists, the owner of an NBA franchise he hadn’t even known existed, an Oscar-winning actress he’d most often seen in campaigns for climate awareness. Her work on the actress’s house had been featured in one of those celebrity magazines Howard sometimes browsed in the pharmacy line, just to see what it was that Americans were now supposed to want. To his eye, it didn’t much differ from what they’d wanted in the past: a pool, nice hair, an audience real or imaginary.

“Actually,” Cassandra said, pausing to blow air at her forehead, “I haven’t done a tree in several years.”

Howie didn’t wear ties; Cassandra wasn’t doing trees. Maybe he hadn’t been asking the right questions. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “The fad lost steam. There are only so many of these super-rich people, and most of them know each other. At a certain point, you top out. They don’t want to look like copycats. Truthfully, it’s a good thing. I was losing steam. It was really just the same thing over and over again.”

“Like funerals,” he said.

Cassandra’s hand rose halfway to her mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that!”

“It’s all right.” Howard laughed. “Most things are the same thing
over and over. Personally, I always liked the chance to perfect it. Do each time better than the last.”

She considered this. “I wasn’t close to perfection. I think I was just ready to be done serving the rich and their grand ideas of themselves.” He appreciated her discomfort, was even proud of it a little. It seemed to him that her work was a varietal that grew especially well in California, where life was a movie, a constant visual metaphor that everyone mistook for real. He’d felt it when he’d gone out to visit her: those redwoods, those expensive juice bars that grew grass behind their counters. People there coveted natural splendor along with wealth, so that when they were finally rich enough to build their own dramatically situated homes, they had to hire her to bring the natural world inside. Merely seeing it through floor-to-ceiling windows wasn’t enough.

He thought of his sauna, which would be a natural world in itself. Its volcanic temperatures, its heater stones, its simple northern woods. “Well, if it doesn’t bore you too much, maybe one day you can make a tree for me,” Howard said. “For the sauna. That might be nice.” A simple tree carved into the wood, to remind him where everything came from. Perhaps he’d been too quick to judge her wealthy clients.

“And how
is
that sauna?” Mary asked. “Coming along?” She removed the lid from a jar of red jelly and sniffed.

He nodded. “I’m starting on the roof.”

“What does that mean, the roof?” Cassandra asked.

“What does it mean? It means the top, the cover, the thing that keeps the rain out.”

“You’re a riot, Dad, but she’s talking about your process,” Mary said. “Where, exactly, in space are you going to be? On the ground, or balancing fifteen feet in the air on a two-by-four?”

He grinned. So serious, his Mary. She might’ve been a fine funeral director, too, but instead she taught middle school and was used to ferreting out liars. “The second one,” he said. “More or less.”

They looked at each other, as if silently discussing his case before deciding whether to let him proceed.

“You’d better be careful,” Cassandra finally said.

“Everyone’s always telling me to be careful. The way you girls and your mother talk, you’d think I’d never built anything in my life.” He stretched, as if to remind them of all that his body had accomplished over the years—not just the reconstructed dead, but the carpentry work as well. The wooden picnic table, the slate patio beyond the sun porch, the lean-to shed where he kept his tools on their orderly pegboard wall.

“Well, get on then,” Mary said. “The more calories you burn, the more cake you can eat tomorrow.”

He’d always had a sweet tooth. “What kind?”

“That’s for us to know and for you to find out.”

He looked over at Cassandra, who folded her arms in solidarity with her sister. This week, if he had one boss, he had three. Truthfully, he rather liked the way his daughters ordered him around, taking after their mother, though they’d never admit it. There was concern in their toughness, which took him back to his military days, when guys screamed their heads off to keep you from getting killed. What was a harsh voice compared with a chest split by shrapnel, or holding your own brains in your hands?

T
OBY
S
TEINBERG TOOK
his time in Union Station, not wanting to upset the cardboard box he carried, which contained a purple orchid. He was back in DC, and who should he see on the platform but Elizabeth Mirabelle Green, his wedding guest from the night before, laughing and holding the hand of her pushy boyfriend. They passed him in a draft of summer fabrics, too much in a hurry to notice him. It was just as well. Wedding guests were always spirited at the party: they grabbed his arm and joked, they applauded his arrival with food. If they somehow discovered he was a musician, they made exclamations and wished him well; sometimes they even made him dance. But
once the champagne wore off and he met them out in the world they tended to regard him blankly, not remembering, or worse yet, with looks of pity he just didn’t need.

He got off the Metro at Friendship Heights, emerging on a strip of luxury stores that seemed to have fallen off Fifth Avenue and landed, dismayed, in the unfashionable wilds of suburban Washington. He turned away from the main drag and walked the six tree-lined residential blocks to his mother’s house. Letting himself in the front door, he set down his guitar case, then tiptoed into the kitchen, where he unpacked the flower on the granite-topped island. Potted with dirt and pebbles, the
Phalaenopsis,
as the grower had lustily called it, looked as elegant as the day he’d first seen it, in Gallery A of the Rockefeller Center orchid show nearly a month before. It stood out prominently on its table, the single purple flower amid blocks of pink and white. With its faintly ruffled petals and its black, sea-floor veins, it seemed to quiver in anticipation of moisture. He’d had to have it for his mother.

She and her husband, Ed, were gardening enthusiasts. At some point when Toby wasn’t paying attention, they’d become people who couldn’t talk about anything without being reminded of the new fertilizer they’d tested or an excellent tip for fending off pests. For several years now they’d grown the most assertive fruits and vegetables, distributed among a series of rectangular plots contained by railroad ties that Ed had salvaged from a local developer. Titanic eggplants and squash, perilously bursting tomatoes. Trellis after trellis of dainty beans and peas. There was even a mighty column of corn, all within their quarter-acre lot. The garden—and Ed—were evidently here to stay.

All of which aided in bringing about Toby’s recent realization that his mother was a person with desires of her own. He’d been arrested by this idea late one night in his Harlem apartment, while eating a container of wasabi-covered peas and watching a disappointing installment of
Inside the Actor’s Studio
with Renée Zellweger. As he beheld her puffy, evasive eyes, and her discomfort each time James Lipton
asked her a question about her craft, it occurred to him that Renée Zellweger was a separate person from the roles she played, and that his mother—Ruth—was a separate person from her role in raising him. He’d nearly called her on the phone right then, stopping himself mid-dial when he realized it was well after one in the morning.