The Violet Hour: A Novel (7 page)

The next day he’d awakened wanting to give his mother a gift, to show her he understood. But she was happily married now; what could he give her that she didn’t already have? He’d puzzled over the question for days until he came upon the orchid. Though Ruth was a master gardener, she focused exclusively on stuff you could eat; everything had to have a use. He, on the other hand, was a pure aesthete, worshipping jazz, shots of espresso, high cheekbones and high-fashion photography, the movements of European footballers, the poetry of Eliot and Pound. It was beauty he worshipped most of all. It drove him wild half the time, and whenever he tried to explain it, he found himself shrugging foolishly without the right words.

With the orchid, he hoped they could reconnect. He rubbed a petal between his forefinger and thumb, then ran his hand over the pebbly bed, grazing the top of a perfect round stone. He turned it over a few times in his hand, admiring its smoky blueness and parallel white stripes. The garage door opened; his mother and Ed were home. On reflex, he put the stone in the pocket of his pants.

“Toby!” Ruth cried, setting her reusable grocery bags on the floor. “You’re home, you’re home!” He let himself be hugged and thanked—“An orchid! Sweetheart, it’s gorgeous!”—feeling at the same time that there was probably something wrong with him that he wasn’t happier to see her smile.

I
N HER PARENTS
’ kitchen that afternoon, Cassandra filled a teakettle with water. Eunice, back from church, sat at the counter behind her, clipping coupons and watching her husband through the casement window. She saved every coupon she needed and plenty she didn’t, just in case.

“Eighty years old,” Eunice said, shaking her head. “It’s foolish.”

“He’s had projects every year of his life,” Cassandra said. “We’re supposed to tell him he has to stop now that he’s having a certain birthday?”

Eunice’s scissors snipped angrily. “You could tell him. He doesn’t listen to me.”

Cassandra peered out the window at her father, whose head and chest were sprouting from the rafters of his gentle gable roof. Light gleamed through the remaining strands of his slicked-back, old-man hair.

“He’s looking steady to me.” She felt somewhat ashamed to have chided him earlier. Her mother’s pernicious influence.

Eunice snorted. “I’m not the one with emphysema, I’ll tell you that.
You’re gonna break your neck, Howard! It’s eighty-five degrees out there!
”

“Let him be,” Cassandra said, igniting a gas burner under the kettle. “He’ll finish much faster if we stop interrupting.” She took her sketchbook from underneath Eunice’s stack of unclipped coupons. “I’m going out front to watch for the kids.”

“They should’ve been here already,” Eunice said, on to the next disappointment.

Cassandra forced a smile, refusing to let her mother’s spirit win out, though in this instance, they were pretty much in agreement. Elizabeth and Kyle were late, and part of her was starting to worry. “She’s had a busy couple of days. Anyway, shout when the water’s ready. I know you will.”

The front porch of Fabricant Funerals looked out over a busy intersection, coursing with SUVs that hurtled like rhinos escaped from the National Zoo. A cluster of office buildings, hotels, and posh new condominiums encircled her, rising taller than they did in downtown Washington, where zoning restrictions kept just about everything short and squat, which was supposedly more European. Kitty-corner from the Fabricant home was a high-end hotel and public plaza, complete with large sculpted bushes, a regular rotation of
street performers, and an elliptical fountain that was illuminated with pink and orange lights after dusk. At the front end of the plaza, just behind the fountain, a subway entrance spewed forth commuters, tourists who preferred sleeping in the suburbs, and teenagers in idle packs.

Abutting all this activity, the Fabricant porch was not the sort of place one sat for peace and quiet, but Cassandra took a stubborn comfort in watching the world expand while her parents heroically maintained their ground, clipping coupons and building saunas, as though their neighbors were still the butcher and the dentist, rather than the investment banker, the real estate attorney, and the uniformed concierge. She sketched a quick study of the hotel, a jagged early-eighties thing that was the opposite of a tree.

Her parents’ time had been the sixties, when the surrounding area still had a farm or two. Back then, there were large, airy spaces between buildings, family-run restaurants and gas stations, and ample parking on every street. The Fabricant house was a reminder of that past. Built in the colonial revival style in 1922, its white columns and red brick façade made it a kind of architectural driftwood, bobbing perplexedly on a glittering sea of mirrored office windows and flashing modern lights. It had remained largely through Howard’s perseverance, and because—such luck—its foundation cleared regulations when the Metro came to town. Washington and its suburbs had never felt old, but lingering among the sharp edges of new, her parents’ home was a relic.

She was adding the Metro entrance to her scene when Elizabeth and Kyle appeared, as though conjured, two sweaty torsos rising from the underground, laden with bags and leaning on the escalator rail. Waving to them across traffic, Cassandra congratulated herself for having resisted the urge to call to check on their progress.

In the front hall, she relieved them of their things.

“You must be exhausted!” she cried, kissing her daughter fervently on the cheek. “Was your train late?”

“Right on time,” Kyle said, receiving a hug of his own.

“Oh?” Cassandra looked at her watch. It was nearly four.

“We missed the early one because the subways were running local,” Elizabeth explained, wiping the last beads of perspiration from her forehead.

“How annoying!”

“Lizzie was annoyed, all right,” Kyle laughed. Elizabeth frowned. They’d been dating for almost two years.

“Well—you’re here now,” Cassandra stuttered. “Come in, come in. Come see Grandma and Grandpa.”

Eunice met them halfway to the kitchen, scissors still in hand. “There’s my granddaughter!”

“Hi, Grandma.” Elizabeth stooped and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Eunice squeezed back, stiffly, then turned to take in Kyle.

“And who’s this?” She glared at him, as though no one had told her he was coming. He stood young and large, a full foot taller than she. The pinched corners of her mouth turned down.

“Mrs. Fabricant, I’m Kyle Christensen. It’s wonderful to finally meet you.” He took her hand between his two, dimpling and showing his teeth. “No need for the weapon. I assure you I’ve been a perfect gentleman when it comes to your granddaughter.”

“Well, listen to this!” Eunice raised her eyebrows. Nothing pleased her more than a tall, flirtatious young man. “A gentleman! Come have something to drink. You want a soda? I’ll get you a soda.” With her little hand firmly on his wrist, she led Kyle into the kitchen. He looked back over his shoulder, shrugging and smiling as though he couldn’t quite believe the force of his charm.

Elizabeth turned to her mother. “What did I say? She loves him.”

“Of course she loves him. He’s a man.” Howie, the only boy, had always gotten the most praise, even before Cassandra fled home, married a man of dubious parentage, and disgraced herself in divorce. Even now, after all her worldly success. “I mean, really. What is the deal with that? Are boys just easier?”

“Not worth pondering, Mom. It’ll only make you angry.”

The kettle was whistling when they entered the kitchen, but
Elizabeth hardly heard it. Her eyes immediately found her grandfather. Framed perfectly in the window, he was floating ten feet off the ground in the middle of a wooden structure she’d never seen before.

“Mom!” she cried. “How can you let him do that?” Her whole life he’d been a tall man but now he looked tiny in the space between the rafters.

“Hasn’t he made wonderful progress?” Cassandra asked. She poured the boiling water into a large glass pitcher loaded with tea bags. Steam rose in a column as she stirred, hovering around the strong kitchen lights. “He’s nearly done with the exterior.”

“Howard!” Eunice called out the door, much louder than was necessary. “Lizzie’s here!”

“One minute!”

Using a pot holder, Cassandra set the pitcher on a trivet near the sink. “Don’t touch this, anyone. It’s very hot. But it’ll be iced tea by dinnertime.”

“You’ll finish it later!” Eunice called to her husband. “Come see Lizzie now!”

“In a
minute,
Eunice!”

“Crazy old man,” she muttered, her lips tightening. She took a can of Coke from the refrigerator for Kyle, who was sitting politely in the breakfast nook. “Hold on, I’ll get you some ice.” She reached over the steaming pitcher of tea to open the cupboard where she kept her knock-off Waterford tumblers. On the way back down, her arm brushed the pitcher’s edge and, jolted, she dropped the drinking glass in the sink, where it broke with a violent crack.

“Are you all right?” Cassandra rushed over to have a look.

“
I’m
fine,” Eunice crabbed. “But my tumbler! What are you doing leaving that pitcher there?”

“Christ, Mom, I
told
you it was hot.” Cassandra lifted the largest piece of glass from the sink. The tumbler had broken right along the crest of one of the diamond cuts. Feeling the tickle of a tiny shard on her fingertip, she began pitching the chunks of glass into the garbage.

While her mother made a show of cleaning up the mess, and her grandmother stood by stubbornly, virtually blocking the trash, Elizabeth flashed Kyle a look of desperation, which he returned with a sympathetic grimace. The embarrassment had already begun, no more than ten minutes into their visit. “My tumbler,” Eunice repeated into the garbage, this time in a more wounded tone.

“Well, you’ll just have to buy another one,” Cassandra said. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“There’s no need to be hostile. You’re the one who made me drop it.”

“What now?” Howard appeared at the open back door. Leaning into the frame, he mopped his sweating forehead with a grime-stained handkerchief.

Before anyone could respond, Elizabeth was hugging him. “Been working hard out there, Grandpa?”

“Oh, I keep busy,” he said, patting the back of her head. If Eunice preferred boys, Howard most certainly preferred his girls. And Elizabeth, who was everything a young girl ought to be—pretty, low-voiced, and clever—was far and away the best. When she first declared as premed, long after he’d given up on keeping the funeral home in the family, he liked to joke with her about going into business together. “Just keep me in mind when you’re making referrals,” he’d say, and she would laugh, not at all alarmed or offended, the way he knew some people would be.

“How come you never write?” he teased her now. “I don’t mean e-mail. What ever happened to good old-fashioned letters?”

“She’s too busy to write,” Eunice said.

Shush, Mother, shush,
Cassandra told herself, as she mopped the counter with a cloth. With her therapist, she’d come up with an arsenal of strategies that would keep her from speaking her mind in potentially ugly situations. Admonishing Eunice now would only embolden her more. Better to clean the counter and pretend she was cleaning her mother’s attitude.
Shush, Mother, shush.
Her silent mantra for the week.

“Can’t trust the mail these days.” Here was Elizabeth to the rescue. “What if it got lost?”

“You’d be taking a risk all right,” Howard agreed.

It was something he knew all about. He’d spent his youth somersaulting from one risk to another, first as an unpromising high-school graduate, stocking hardware shelves in St. Paul by day, getting smashed out of his mind by night. Then in the army, with the war and all its muck, both human and topographical. Surviving that, against such enormous odds, he joined his cousins in a trucking venture, ferrying bales of foodstuffs and equipment from Minnesota to California, from California to Arkansas. When he was driving, he’d test the limits of the truck, pushing her to eighty, ninety, even over a hundred in the blistering Nevada sands; when he rode shotgun, he liked to hang out the window for a thrill, feeling the dirt in his teeth, his tongue dry as one of the reptiles that were always skittering away from their wheels.

Marrying Eunice had been another kind of risk. By then, he’d been making more East Coast deliveries and had taken a liking to the studious bluster of Washington. It turned out to be packed with guys like him, guys from the middle with military service but no other background to speak of. Finding themselves alive at the end of a war, they’d come to realize they’d been pretty successful serving their country and might as well try to keep on. In Washington he felt like a member of their great big American club. He wore a gray felt fedora and went to restaurants and saw himself as a man with countless possibilities.

What he needed next was a woman. After losing his mind and a good portion of his lousy savings to a walking pinup named Rose, he decided he’d be better off with a no-fuss wife who would do her part. Have a few sensible ideas, maybe bust his chops a bit, force him to make something of himself. And no sooner did he come to this conclusion than he found himself at a church dance, walking across the floor to talk to Eunice, a plain but queenly woman who stood up straight and looked at him as though she were the best-looking person
in the room. She had ideas all right, the loudest of which was that a business needed a product that was always in demand. And maybe she
was
good-looking. Certainly he found her attractive. Adhesive, even. She was the kind of woman who would stick to him until she fixed him, and it made him feel manly to matter so much in her life. Of course, this arrangement had its own hazards, but it was better than being alone.

And so, in 1951, he put his G.I. Bill benefits toward a mortician’s course and a stately house in Bethesda. The embalming equipment cost him more than he’d estimated, so he also had to pawn their wedding silver and his wife’s two heirloom brooches until he could make up the difference. When he finally moved Eunice and their baby, Cassandra, into the house, he still hadn’t bought a single piece of family furniture. There were chairs and sofas for the main chapel and his hand-built bier at the front; upstairs they had nothing but a bureau, a secretary desk rescued from a Dumpster, and a foam-padded mattress on the floor. But Eunice had been right: there was money in funerals, and furniture soon came by the truckload, in the same used Buick that Howard had bought to convert into a hearse.