Back When We Were Grownups (26 page)

“That’s all right, Poppy,” she told him. Then she stepped closer to him and whispered in his tufted ear, “A toast to welcome Will.”

“Will! Yes!” He raised his glass. “A toast to Will! To welcome Will!”

“To Will,” everyone murmured—everyone except Barry, who sang out a ringing “Hear, hear!” in what Rebecca could have sworn was a British accent.

“Thank you,” Will said, lifting his glass a few inches. He gave a slight cough. “And a toast to Rebecca, too; is that okay? To Rebecca, for being so lovely and gracious and cheering up my life.”

Rebecca felt her face growing pink. She was conscious of everyone’s eyes on her, and she felt a brief silence spreading around her before the others chimed in.

It was more than she had even thought to fantasize: her entire family, gathered in one room, hearing for the first time that somebody thought she was lovely.

*  *  *

At dinner, Will said, “I see you’re taking good care of my plant.”

“
You
gave her that plant?” NoNo asked.

Rebecca broke in quickly to say, “It’s doing well, don’t you think?”

It had grown at least a foot and put out two enormous new leaves, even though it was hidden away in the dimness of the dining room. (She had moved it there in the hope that it would attract less attention.)

Mercifully, NoNo just raised her eyebrows.

Rebecca’s original plan was to seat Will on her right. But Poppy seemed to have a case of clinginess this evening, and he plunked himself there first, scooting his chair close enough so his knees could keep a reassuring contact with hers underneath the table. And Barry was already settled on her left. She had to point Will toward a spot several spaces away, down between Patch and Biddy.

“Oh, what a treat!” she told Barry. “I get to have you next to me.” (Why did she always have to say the opposite of what she was thinking?) “Tell me,” she said, picking up her fork, “do you find you’re feeling at home with us yet?”

“Yes, absolutely,” he said, but he was shaking his head instead of nodding, she noticed.

Biddy was saying to Will, “I trust you have nothing against hearts of palm.”

“Is that what these are?”

“I thought they’d make a nice symbolic touch; don’t you agree? But I see you’ve moved yours to the side of your plate.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure, you see, exactly what they were.”

“They’re the innermost core of the cabbage-palm stem. Very high in vitamin C.”

“Palm trees have been cut up for this?”

“Well, yes.”

“Is that a fact!”

“Broccoli plants are cut up, after all; asparagus shoots are cut up . . . Don’t tell me you’re one of those food avoiders.”

“No, no, I just, I’m not all that much for experiment.”

“Hearts of palm aren’t an experiment!”

“To me they are.”

“
Sea urchins
are an experiment. Hearts of palm are just salad.”

“Yes, but, at home, you see, I generally have chili.”

“Chili.”

“I make this really excellent chili on Sunday afternoons—that would be tomorrow—and I divide it into seven containers for the seven nights of the week.”

Biddy sat back in her seat and looked at him without expression.

Poppy was beginning a story. “In the fall of 1939,” he told Hakim, “I experienced a dental emergency.”

Jeep was discussing football with Troy, who was nodding attentively although his eyes had a sort of glazed look.

NoNo was talking to Zeb about . . . ballpoint pens, it appeared. “Once a week, almost,” she said, “he tells me he needs ballpoint pens for school. Or maybe once every other week. In any case, way too often. I say, ‘What did you do with those pens I just bought you?’ He says he must have lost them.”

Rebecca leaned forward a few inches to check on Will. He seemed to be dissecting a strip of roasted red pepper. Each tiny dot of char was set carefully to one side.

Min Foo was nursing Abdul, which flabbergasted Patch. “Min Foo! Do that in the other room! You can’t breast-feed at the table!”

“Why not? I’m decently covered. I’m not sitting here undressed.”

“We’ve got company! What must he think?”

Min Foo turned a placid gaze on Will. “I’m sure you’ve seen a woman nursing a baby before,” she told him.

“Well,” he said, “yes. But not at the table.”

Patch said, “See there?”

Min Foo stood up, with the baby a squirming bulge beneath the hem of her tunic. She spun on her heel and strode out of the room.

Will said, “Oh, dear.”

“Go after her,” Biddy told Patch.

“I will not go after her! She’s finally off in the parlor where she should have been all along!”

“
I
shall go,” Hakim announced, and he rose with dignity and laid aside his napkin. A pause followed his departure. Then voices came from the parlor, and the cranking-up sound of the baby fussing. Hakim started singing in a low, cracked, rumbling voice. Some Arab lullaby, no doubt; something wandery and plaintive that Rebecca couldn’t quite catch.

She looked brightly around the table. “Will has a teenaged daughter; did I mention that?” she asked.

Nine faces turned in her direction.

“The most intriguing person! Seventeen years old.”

“She’s very difficult,” Will said.

“Difficult in what way?” Biddy asked him.

“Well, for one thing, she detests me.”

“Yes, that
would
be a drawback,” Barry said with a snicker.

But NoNo, dead serious, looked across at Will and said, “You know what, Will? I get that she’s going to be fine.”

“Excuse me?”

“I get that within the next eight months, she’s going to develop a liking for you.”

Will looked helplessly at Rebecca.

“NoNo sometimes . . . sees into the future,” Rebecca told him. “That’s what she means when she says she ‘gets’ something.”

“It’s genetic,” NoNo explained.

“Genetic!” Will and Rebecca echoed together. Rebecca had never heard this before. “Who supplied the genes?” she asked NoNo.

“Dad’s second cousin, Sophie. You knew that.”

“I didn’t even know he
had
a second cousin!”

“Sophie was the family oracle,” NoNo told Will. She was spearing a slice of ham as she spoke. “Nobody made a move without consulting her. Marriages, job changes, major purchases . . . They would come to her and ask, ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ She always knew the answer.”

Poppy said, “
That’s
who you take after?”

“Why, yes.”

“Cousin Sophie Davitch?”

“Yes.”

He started laughing. NoNo said, “What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“Okay: first, Cousin Sophie was three times divorced. And this was back in the 1920s, when
nobody
got divorced.”

“So?” She reached for the mustard.

“So if she was so good at predicting, how come she couldn’t predict that her three husbands would be mistakes?”

“Well, that I couldn’t say,” NoNo said. “All I know is, Grandmother Davitch told me I inherited my abilities from Dad’s second cousin.”

“And furthermore,” Poppy said, “consider the woman’s method. Do you happen to know
how
Sophie made her predictions?”

“Well, no.”

“You’d come to her and ask, oh, should you take an ocean voyage. Then she’d turn it around and ask
you
questions. Had you ever traveled before, where had you gone, how had you enjoyed yourself. Let’s say you told her you had so far only been on a train trip, and that was only to Philly, and you hadn’t thought all that much of the place. Cousin Sophie would ponder a while, pull on her lower lip, stare into space; and then she’d say, ‘My advice is, don’t go. The ocean voyage won’t be a success.’”

NoNo waited, fork poised in midair, but Poppy seemed to have finished. “When is dessert?” he asked Biddy.

“In a minute, Poppy.”

“Oh, good.” He dabbed his mustache with his napkin.

“But what was her method?” NoNo asked him.

“Hmm?”

“Cousin Sophie’s method. What was it?”

“Why, everything that you told her had happened in the past, she just turned it around on you. Claimed it would happen again. If you could really call that a method.”

“It would do,” Will said. He was smiling; he seemed genuinely amused.

But NoNo said, “I’m sure there must be more to it than
that,
” and she popped a bite of ham into her mouth.

Out in the parlor, Hakim was still singing. Rebecca suddenly recognized the tune. It was “O Danny Boy,” of all things. “
O Abdul boy,
” he rumbled, “
the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .
”

“At any rate,” NoNo told Will, “I get that your daughter’s about to start liking you. Take my word for it. And
I
didn’t ask a thing about your past, now, did I.”

“No,” he said, still smiling, “you didn’t. Well, thank you very much. I’m encouraged.”

The others were smiling too, all around the table. Rebecca had one of those moments when her family seemed extraordinarily attractive—the girls with their animated expressions and black silk hair, the men so handsome and intelligent-looking, Poppy lending an air of distinction with his stately mustache. She let her eyes rest on each face in turn, feeling privileged and nourished, while Hakim sang softly in the parlor. “
’Tis I’ll be here! in sunshine or in shadow,
” he sang. “
O Abdul boy, my Abdul boy, I love you so.
”

*  *  *

It was a sign of how well the evening had gone that everybody stayed on after dinner. Min Foo got over her snit and agreed to accompany people on the piano; Troy and Biddy did their Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald routine; and Barry turned out to be a wonderful tenor, although perhaps “The Lord’s Prayer” was not the piece Rebecca would have chosen. It was nearly midnight before they all left.

Then she led Will to the kitchen—“Just to keep me company while I see to what can’t wait till morning,” she said—because she figured that would jog Poppy into going to bed. She was hoping she and Will could have a little privacy.

But no, Poppy came along with them, claiming he needed warm milk in order to sleep, and while he was waiting for it to heat he took it into his head that Will should be shown the family album. This came about because of a chance remark that Will made to Rebecca. “I had a little trouble,” Will said, “sorting out who was who. Why is that one stepdaughter Chinese? And that person Troy: is he Biddy’s husband? He seemed, er, not the husband type.”

“Boy, have you got it wrong!” Poppy crowed, pivoting from the stove on his cane. “Min Foo is not a stepdaughter; she’s Beck’s daughter. And she isn’t Chinese, either. I guess you were fooled by her name. And Troy for
sure
is not Biddy’s husband; he’s queer as a two-dollar bill.”

“Three,” Rebecca said.

“Huh?”

“Queer as a—”

Oh, Lord, she was turning into her mother. “Poppy,” she said, “aren’t you exhausted?”

“No, not in the least,” he told her. “I believe I’ll go get your friend the family album.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she said. “Basically, he’s seen the album.”

She meant the refrigerator door, with its multiple layers of photos. But Will couldn’t have known that; so when Poppy asked him, “You have?” Will said, “Why, no, I don’t think so.”

“I’ll be right back,” Poppy said, and he left the room.

“Now you’re in for it,” Rebecca told Will. She switched off the gas beneath the milk. “Did you enjoy the evening? Did you like my family?”

“Yes, they were very interesting,” Will said.

“You didn’t see Min Foo at her best, I’m sorry to say. She’s not usually so short-tempered. I’m worried she’s beginning her same old pattern: have a baby, ditch the husband.”

“Of course, they’re all of them quite . . . outspoken,” Will said.

“It’s kind of like those nature programs on TV, where the female does away with the male after he donates his sperm.”

“Pardon?”

Poppy said, “Here we are!”

He wasn’t even in sight yet, but they could hear his cane pegging rapidly down the passageway. “Every light in both parlors was turned high as it could go,” he told Rebecca as he entered. “You seem to think you have to siphon off excess electricity in case it might explode or something.”

The album was clamped under his free arm—an ancient cardboard scrapbook bound with a tasseled string. He set it on the table and lowered himself, stiff-legged, into the nearest chair. “Sit down, sit down,” he told Will, patting the chair beside him. “We should start with my late wife, Joyce. She passed away in 1969. I miss her to this day. Now, where are we. Let’s see. Trouble is, there’s no order here. Everything’s jumbled up.”

Rebecca poured Poppy’s milk into a mug and placed it next to the album, using the excuse to set a hand on Will’s shoulder as she leaned past him. He looked up at her and smiled.

“What I’m hoping to find is the picture of Joyce when we met,” Poppy said, turning a page. “She wore the most fetching hat. It resembled two bird wings.”

“I bet this is the one you call Patch,” Will said. He was looking at a snapshot of a child with a bunch of balloons. “I recognize her freckles.”

“Oh, then we’re way too recent,” Poppy told him. “I met Joycie long before Patch came along.”

“And this is the one you call NoNo, I think.”

Rebecca wished Will wouldn’t refer to the girls as “ones,” as if they were specimens of something. She settled in the chair across from him. “Yes,” she said, peering at the upside-down picture, “that’s NoNo at a birthday party. And here is Biddy. Doesn’t she look cross? She used to hate to dress up, is why. She said dress-up dresses itched.”

“So many
parties,
” Will said.

“Isn’t that the truth,” Poppy agreed. He reached for his mug and took a loud sip.

“Everywhere I look,” Will said, “—the refrigerator, the album—everybody’s celebrating. We just get through drinking a toast and then you sit me down and show me pictures of other toasts, years of toasts. Even the children are drinking toasts! Do you really think that’s wise?”

“We give them only a sip,” Rebecca told him.