Three Junes (33 page)

After my evening out with Lucinda (my second betrayal to undo my first), I went home and changed into ordinary clothes. Mal did not want me to go to his flat before dawn, but I did not want to sleep. I sat in my living room, Rodgie beside me, and wrote down ideas for making this room a happier, more stylish place. I fell asleep despite myself and woke, my face in Rodgie’s fur, to the wail of a car alarm. It was six, the sky an indeterminate gray.

I hurried into shoes and a coat. What must not occur was an early-morning visit from Lucinda. She had, more than once, shown up in Mal’s kitchen just after sunrise bearing fresh bread and fruit. He had not liked these visits, but he understood her anxiety. She would have been awake for hours, just waiting for the earliest possible time her arrival might seem acceptable.

I stood for several minutes outside Mal’s door, key in lock, before I could let myself in. The first thing I saw was Felicity, her gorgeous red plumage a flame in the strengthening light. She slept on the chrome railing of the gypsy caravan; its circumference must have felt just right for her feet. When I closed the door, she raised her head and called to me. She flew to my shoulder. At moments, she looked so startling in her surroundings that she reminded me of the angel in paintings of the Annunciation. What were the angel’s first words? Fear not.

I stood and listened. I heard nothing. I walked through the orderly kitchen past the loo and down the hall. It was still nearly dark in the bedroom, but I could see Mal. He lay face down, his head and one arm hanging over the edge of the bed. I listened again. My greatest fear had been that I would walk in on death throes, unearthly groanings, the kind of breathing I had heard from my mother before she died. My greatest hope had been that I would find an irate insomniac Mal, reading or watching the telly, saucer of pills and pitcher of vodka untouched on the table beside him.

I looked at the table. Empty saucer. Pitcher three-quarters full. The plastic bag unused; something about that consoled me. I did not know if Mal was dead, but he was still. His face lay against the side of the mattress. The bony fingers of his fallen arm rested on the floor. What if he were merely asleep? As I moved closer to the bed, I smelled something awful. The exposed sheets looked wet or stained. Out of terror more than sorrow, I began to cry.

Felicity brushed her head against my ear, knocked her beak on my temple, the signal that she was impatient for food. I reached up and touched her. I pulled myself together.

I pushed Mal’s upper body back onto the bed. It was astonishingly light, like the body of a lifeless songbird. His skin felt cool, but it might have been cooled by sweat. I felt no breath; I did not want to try to detect a pulse, and he had not asked this of me.

I went to the file cabinet and pulled out the medical folder he had shown me. It was thick with photocopied prescriptions. I had never paid close attention to the particulars of Mal’s medicines, to the cause-and-effect connections of this symptom with that drug, this drug with that life-sustaining cellular process. The names of the drugs were surprisingly few, but their repetition, over sheet after sheet, astounded me. They read like an inventory of the important things in life I refused to know.

If it looked as if Mal had succeeded, I was to find and remove all prescriptions for the pills which Mal had used to kill himself. They were clipped together at the back and had come from three different doctors. Mal did not want to risk incriminating them—or have his mother blame them.

When I had folded the incriminating papers and stuffed them into my coat pocket, I took Felicity into the kitchen. From another pocket, I took a bag of seeds and emptied it into a teacup. I took an apple from a bowl of fruit and cut it up. I left her on the counter, eating.

I felt calmer. I returned to the bedroom and looked around, everywhere but at the bed itself. I did not know what I was looking for. A final memory for deliberate imprinting?

What caught my eye was a red leather box on the floor beside the bed. It was the kind of box used to file photographs. The label inside the small brass frame read
CHRISTOPHER
.

Christopher? I sat on the floor and, weak-willed as ever, took the lid off the box. Inside was a scant collection of papers and photographs. Fifteen or twenty photographs, mostly of a child, a boy. One of Mal’s little nephews? But in a few pictures, the boy was much older, at least sixteen. In the latest, he was graduating from high school. Among the papers were two letters addressed to Mal in a careful feminine script, the return address in New Hampshire. (That far I did not go; I set the letters aside.) There was also a letter, older, postmarked May 2, 1968, from Lucinda. It was addressed to Mal at college.

Close the box, I admonished myself. Close the box. I intended to, but before I did, I pulled from the very bottom a newsletter. It was called
Notes in a Major Chord,
dated Summer 1967. On the front page was a picture of a pretty teenage girl, clasping a cello between her knees, and two boys, one at a harpsichord, the other holding a flute. The story was headlined “Spirited Young Trio Delve Boldly into Baroque.” They were posing, not playing, and the flutist, with a homely brush cut but an adorable smile, was Mal. He rested one hand on the nearest shoulder of the cellist.

The cellist—she had to be; of course she was—she would be the one with whom he had fallen “a little in love.”

I looked again at the boy in the gown and tasseled cap; I looked at his eyes. Pale and incisive, they were so unmistakably Mal’s. And then I did close the box—though how desperately now I wanted to read those letters. How much did Lucinda, mother of mothers, have to do with this boy’s life, with his very being? Back then, had there even been a choice for the pretty young cellist, even without Lucinda’s persuasive meddling?

Like a fever, a series of feelings that seemed entirely wrong for the moment but which I could not suppress overwhelmed me: envy toward the cellist who had been Mal’s lover, if only once perhaps, if only as a misguided tribute toward her talent; irritation toward Lucinda, though I could only guess her place in this drama; and a creeping contempt at the lie Mal had told about Jonathan to cover up what he must have looked back on as a crisis he should never have allowed to change his life the way it did. Or maybe it had freed him. I would never know, because this time, between life and nonlife, there had been no choice, not as Mal had seen it.

And then I thought of the lie I had told about one of my own brothers, to cover up a folly of my own.

Kneeling beside the bed, I rested my cheek in the small of Mal’s back. I stayed that way a long time. Then I moved to the living room, where I sat facing the street for another two hours, composed and silent, until the phone rang.

“Hello there, you.” Lucinda, hungover and footsore but thrilled to hear my voice. She’d had such a wonderful time that she felt as if she’d been a faithless wife. “But never mind; do you think we could do it again?” was the last happy thing I heard her say until, in May, she called me from Vermont and asked me to help with a memorial party.

I told her right away what I had found, as if I had just dropped by, just to check in. By the time she arrived, she had guessed at my collusion. She said coldly, before her emotions took over, “He wasn’t yours to let go.”

She wouldn’t let me touch her. Through the comings and goings (police, medical examiner, neighbors from below and above), she did not look at me once, but I made myself stay. In the late afternoon, when the light was the same shade of gray it had been when I came over, I tucked Felicity into my coat and crossed the street. Poor, neglected Rodgie had wet the bedroom carpet; he looked at me with shame, not reproach. I cried, for only the second time that day, as I hugged him and put on his leash.

When we returned from a long walk, I played the two messages on my answering machine. One was from Ralph, asking where the devil I’d been all day, why hadn’t I opened the shop, and the other was from Dennis, the first part muffled by clinking coins and laughter. “. . . You’ve got to forgive me I didn’t ring the minute she came out, I’ve been just insane, dashing every which way, living this incredible dream! She’s like this tiny . . . God, this tiny angel, I mean literally, everything but the wings! And Vee’s in super shape—she was a force of nature! I’m sending pictures by overseas express. Ring and tell me if she doesn’t look just like Dad, I swear. But wait, don’t try to reach me, I’ll ring you later. I’m the happiest madman who ever lived! I’m going to need weights in my shoes!” Two days before, on the first of March, Laurie had been born.

Within weeks, Ralph broke off with the architect. We resumed our spinsterish dinners, and I listened to him rant about the cruel vanity of our gender (from which Ralph claimed exemption). The architect had harped on him constantly to work out, play tennis, run, do anything to rid himself of his middle-aged gut. This was about his
health,
for heaven’s sake, and how, in this day and age, could you turn your back on
that?

“Well just let him try to captivate some studly young washboard. Good luck to him,” seethed Ralph. As a consolation prize, I gave in on souvenir totebags, as I had given in on T-shirts. We had now hired two full-time workers, and Ralph’s latest notion was that we should open a branch in the Hamptons (“Brookhaven’s yet to do in the birdlife!”). As further succor to his maimed ego, Ralph began shopping for a house in Amagansett or Montauk, already fantasizing about retirement. When I told him that another shop would stretch us too thin, he said teasingly, “And there’d always be a room for you, my dear.” I would wait to give in on this one.

Tony returned to New York in June, not long after I returned from Vermont. He surprised me uncomfortably, of course, showing up at the shop right before a reading, and when I saw him—the sheen of his tanned skin and his hair, now trimmed to a sort of Brideshead Revisited swing—my knee-jerk desire was dampened by a mixture of anguish and boredom. Boredom at the thought of our certain routines, our certain distance. During the reading, we kissed furtively in the garden, but I made excuses and did not invite him upstairs. For two weeks, I kept him at arm’s length, until I felt sure enough to say that I wasn’t in the mood anymore. I wanted something else, or maybe nothing, for a while. He was angry but (yes, Ralph) too vain to reveal it. A few months later he called, and we began to meet again, just once in a while, at our Thai restaurant. We make each other laugh, share the bill, then go our separate ways. Sometimes I feel an itch, but I remind myself that I like him better this way. He still gives memorable gifts, if only on conventional occasions, and his pictures still sit unframed in my cupboard. He doesn’t ask.

By Christmas, I had let two men lure me out of my cave. They didn’t stick, but they did not leave me hopeless. I began to accept, even seek, invitations to leave the city; I let the assistants run the shop for entire weekends. I bought a new couch, a new table and chairs, hired the boy across the street to paint my living room persimmon red. When I saw the room finished and empty, I wanted to weep—“Don’t they call this color ‘bordello’?” said Ralph—but then I got the idea of repossessing Audubon’s flamingo from the shop. Around this great picture, which commandeered a wall, the color found a purpose. And at night, like lipstick, it flattered my occasional guests and made them feel festive.

As I made these changes, Felicity watched with consternation and yodeled an alarm at the arrival of each new object in her domain. I soothed her with papaya, fresh coconut, and frequent visits to the birdbath in the garden. Rodgie was happy; the new couch was deeper and softer. Such plain pleasures, I thought as my animals adjusted.

These are the events I replay, five years later, as I crouch in the attic of the wonderful house which I can never quite believe is no longer my home. Just as I can never quite believe, though now I think I must, that to love me, my family does not need to understand me. There, Mal was wrong.

Perhaps I have been talking to myself, or perhaps the laughter downstairs has become even louder; something, over the rain, must have woken Laurie, because suddenly this small ghostly creature stands at the top of the ladder.
“Onco? Onco, tu es triste?”
she whispers. She climbs up and sits down beside me. She touches my damp cheek.

I put an arm around her. “No, sweetheart, not sad. Not exactly. But
. . . mon coeur est fatigué.
” It is the simplest explanation I can find; how could I tell her that my heart is in fact imploding?

Laurie looks into my face, her eyes wide. “I will get Davi’s
écouteur
!
” she exclaims.

I smile at her sweet logic. “No, no,” I say, patting my chest, “my heart is going to be perfectly fine, it just needs a little rest.”

She looks at my lap, at the box, and I know from her expression that her mother asked her about it, if she’d seen it anywhere. I lay a hand on top of the box. “You know what this is?”

She nods. “Grand-père,” she says quickly, then sets her jaw.

“You know that we’ve been looking for Grand-père.”

She nods again. Now she is the tearful one.

I stroke her hair. “I promise you won’t be in trouble.” A brave promise. “Not in big trouble,” I amend.

“Please don’t throw Grand-père in the ocean,” she pleads. “I heard that! I heard they want to throw him in the ocean. But not you!”

I set the box aside and pull Laurie into my lap. “Oh lass, is that why you’ve brought him up here?”

Another fast nod.

I look out into the night and ponder how to explain this to a five-year-old. I rock her a little as I think; strange how the motion comes so naturally to my arms. “You miss Grand-père.”

“Oui,”
she breathes, in this one word a sliver of a glimpse of the Frenchwoman she will become, voice as much a seduction as hips or legs. “He said he was going to take me to a castle, he said there’s a big huge castle on a hill, with soldiers and cannons, and he was going to show me.”

Out of all our castles (barbaric Scotland mercifully in ruins), I wonder which one Dad promised and realize, of course: Edinburgh Castle, quite unlike any in France, so thoroughly male (even if the soldiers do wear skirts). I will take her at Christmas, but now is not the time to say so. I say, “He would have loved that.”