Equal Affections (36 page)

“I thought that was the last of Solomon Bloch, until one afternoon, just before you were born, April, we were in Filene's basement, and suddenly Louise turned white and ran away to the ladies' room. Didn't say a word, just turned and ran. Naturally I was surprised. So I looked around to see what had upset her, and what should I see but a fellow in a black hat with a beard, going through this big bin of underwear. Now nature doesn't offer you opportunities like that every day, so I sort of sauntered by where he was standing. He was actually quite handsome, when I think about it. He had a wife—a pretty wife—and two little
boys. When Louise finally came out of the ladies' room, I suggested we say hello, but she wouldn't hear of it. She said if we didn't leave right then, she'd throw up. It was that afternoon she made me swear never to tell anyone about it. She was very ashamed.”

He looked down at his lap; for a few seconds all of them looked down at their laps.

“So what happened after you got married?” April asked. “Was that when she went to work as a welder?”

“Oh, I guess. The war was on. I was in the Navy and working on my degree, and she was working at the shipyard. She certainly was the prettiest one in the factory, so pretty that Ma—she was the forewoman—Ma wanted Louisy to come work for her in a whorehouse she ran on the side.”

“Ma,” Danny said, and remembered his mother making a tuna fish sandwich for him to take to school. “That Ma,” she had said, “she used to bring these wonderful sandwiches to work—meatballs and sausages in hot sauce—and I'd bring tuna fish. Well, Ma thought tuna sandwiches were the most delicate, ladylike things in the world, and she wanted to trade. I think I got the best end of that deal.”

“She told me about Ma,” Danny said.

“Then,” Nat said, “there was your mother's friend Lena.”

“Lena?”

“Lena lived with her three children at the dump, and when she decided to get married, she came to your mother to ask her if she should wear white. People came to your mother a lot for advice in those days.”

“What did she tell her?” April asked.

“Yes, I suppose,” Nat said. “She was partial to the affirmative. You know, she didn't get paid as much as the men, which made her mad. But what could she do? A war was on.” He took a swallow of coffee. “There were a lot of guys at that shipyard who really liked Louise. Jerry Stern, Mike Spivack. You know, we met Mike Spivack a long time later, in Mississippi, of all places, when I was doing a seminar down there. That was when your mother was asked to be one of the judges for the Miss Mississippi contest. She and Mike spent the whole weekend dancing and dancing. I had work to do, of course.” The shadow of a faded, ancient anger passed over Nat's face. “After that, Mike ended up marrying one of the girls from the contest. Betty Ann, her name was. They're up in Chicago now.” He shook his head. “Mike
Spivack,” he said. “Oh, you were a wild one, Louise Gold! Boy, it was hard to catch you. It was just like those
Road Runner
cartoons, and she was the roadrunner, and I was that stupid coyote, and every time I'd have her, the next thing I'd know, she'd just slipped away. You know what they called that in my day? Moxie.”

“Moxie,” April said.

Outside, the sun had finally gone down, the crickets had started up in the trees. They were shrieking wildly. No one had noticed them; no one had even noticed the advent of dusk.

“Those crickets,” Nat said. “Why, just yesterday, before I left, the damned robins were screaming in the pyracantha bush. Remember how the robins get drunk on pyracantha berries out in the yard, April? Louisy hated it, she used to go out in the yard and shake her fists at them and say, ‘The drunks!' So now, when I hear the crickets, that's what I think of. The robins, and the pyracantha, and Louisy saying, ‘The drunks!' You didn't know that, did you, Danny?”

He shook his head.

“You live with someone your whole life and you think you know them. But there are always secrets, aren't there? So many things you don't know about Louise, so many things Louise and I don't know about you. Things no one knows. Finally you're alone. That always used to frighten me, but I'll tell you kids, the older I get, knowing I'm alone is more and more a relief.” He smiled. “Why, I remember that day Eleanor told me Louise had gone off to Alabama, I thought I'd go crazy. I loved her so much I thought I'd die from missing her. And now, looking at how things turned out, I can't help but laugh at how I behaved, thinking I couldn't make it without her. I used to call her the Ice Princess, because of a movie we saw together. And when she went off to Alabama, I called her there, I called her and said, ‘Louisy, whenever you come back, I'll be waiting for you.' You know what her answer was? She said, ‘Nat, don't wait for me because I'm never coming back.' Well, she came back, just like her mother predicted, with her tail between her legs, she came back so scared I wouldn't want her anymore, she was shaking when she asked me. But I did, and the next thing I knew, she was smothering me with kisses and telling me it was only me she'd ever loved, and would I forgive her, and life wasn't worth it without me. And we got married. And the thing was, it wasn't
magic. It was just life. It was just our lives.” He shook his head sadly. “Later, after you were born, Danny, things changed.”

“How?” April asked.

“I don't know, quite. All I can tell you is, after Danny was born—well, nothing was ever good enough for Louise anymore. I mean, things go badly for everyone sometimes, and in a marriage each person is bound to do something sometimes that hurts the other or upsets the other person. But it seems to me at some point your mother just stopped seeing the good altogether; she started only seeing the bad, and pitying herself. She never wanted to go out for dinner or movies. It seemed like the slightest little thing could tick her off. You know, I have a friend who thinks that some people are just genetically more inclined to be optimistic, to look on the bright side. If I say so myself, I think I'm one of those people. But your mother—sometimes I think she was just born to be unhappy, no matter what the circumstances.”

He looked at his plate, at the fish skin and char, the squeezed-out slice of lemon. April had already sucked the juice from her own slice, was gnawing away the zest.

“That's called blaming the victim,” she said now, softly.

“What?”

“I said, that's called blaming the victim.”

“Your mother was not always a victim, April,” Nat said. “Believe me, there were plenty of times when she was decidedly not the victim. And later—well, frankly, it was a role she liked to play. It became a crutch for her, a way to avoid taking responsibility for her own behavior, for changing it. Anyway, I'm not blaming her for anything, I'm just explaining something about her—character.”

“I love,” April said, “the way you are suddenly such an expert on her character. It's like your saying it doesn't matter what the circumstances of her life were, it doesn't matter that you were trying to stay away from her as much as you could, or that she had cancer. No, Mom wasn't unhappy because of the circumstances of her life, she was unhappy because of some genetic tendency.” She put her lemon slice down. “If you ask me, that's just an excuse to convince yourself you're not responsible so you don't have to feel guilty. I mean”—and here her tone softened—“I'm not saying there isn't any truth to what you're saying, I'm not saying she
wasn't
in certain ways—depressive. But the fact was,
things changed
between
you, not just
in
her. No one person is responsible. You two were fighting all the time.”

“This really isn't the right time to talk about this, April—”

“When is the right time?”

“When we get home, I will be more than happy to make an appointment with Dr. Hirschman and the three of us can talk this thing out in the proper environment. But in the meantime, I think it's time for me to call it a night.” He stood up, stretching his arms so that his shirt pulled loose from his pants. “So if you all will excuse me—”

“You don't want some more coffee?” Danny said.

“No, thanks.”

“Do you have enough towels?”

“Plenty.”

“Okay, then. Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Only April hadn't said good night. As Nat moved toward the bedroom, he stopped to hover over the place where she was sitting. Very tentatively he placed his hand over her hair, as if he were thinking of running his fingers through it; she pulled back; lifting his hand, he patted her on the shoulder.

“April, honey,” he said, “please believe me. I'm not trying to shirk off responsibility for anything or anything like that, I'm just trying to tell the story—the way it felt to me. I thought you wanted to know how it felt to me. That's all.”

“Good night,” April said.

Nat sighed and coughed. “Good night.” Then he went into the hallway and closed the guest room door behind him.

They all got up. April immediately opened the patio doors, went outside, and stood in the wind. “Guess I ought to do the dishes,” Danny said, starting to collect plates, but Walter said, “Whoa, boy, hold on. I'll do them tonight. You keep April company.”

“Thanks, Walt,” Danny said. He followed his sister out onto the patio. The heavy moon had cast a roadway of light across the water. Had their mother walked that roadway, out past the horizon, to the place where hurricanes swell into being and are born?

April had her hands on the railing of the porch. When Danny put his hands on her shoulders, her fingers curled more tightly around the
spokes. His presence was light as mosquitoes on her neck, his breath warm.

The ocean in all its furious glory reminded them both of nothing more than a sinkful of suds.

“Do you think she had a terrible life, our mother?” Danny asked.

April looked intently at the moon for a moment, as if she were mulling his question over, and then she said, “Yes.”

___________

And yet Danny could not leave it at that—could not let April's grim summation, stated with such an air of resignation and finality, stand as the final fact, the last word on his mother's life. Even if he had set her up with his question, taking advantage of her fondness for the dramatic in order to assure it was she, not he, who said the words both of them had been thinking for days, for months, he could not let it stand. You shake a life out, you turn it over and see what falls to the ground. What do you find? A piece of cake with a flower and the letters LOUI written on it. A half-finished baby bootie. Two pillboxes—one blue with a pink top, one mirrored inside and laced with the words “Within you see what pleases me.”

He sees his mother in her lacy pink bathrobe on a warm spring morning, sitting down at the little kitchen desk to pay a few bills. There is the pillbox, sitting just where it has sat for—how long? Twenty years? She picks it up. It is egg-colored, painted with tiny ribbons and flowers, as well as the famous inscription, which she reads again. And though she has done it a thousand times before, though of course it no longer holds any hope or surprise for her, she lifts off the top. Her face looks up at her, or part of her face, haggard, maybe fearful, and like a girl, she smiles, grateful to know that in that tiny stadium at least she will never not be loved.

Part Three

I
t is a sunny, cool spring morning. Louise is sitting at the kitchen table in her best gray tweed suit and pearls, drinking a cup of coffee and inspecting the crossword puzzle she finished the night before. Periodically she looks up at the clock, hoping it will tell her the time has arrived when she can reasonably leave. To make the minutes go by faster, she has been trying to remember the other occasions in her life when she wore a formal suit: the afternoon she accompanied Eleanor to court, she supposes, and a few of those faculty wives' luncheons, and several of the early doctor visits, when she was called in to hear the bad news. She was scared of the doctors then, humbled; she felt she had to dress up for them. Those days have passed. Now when she goes, she wears jeans, loose sweaters, whatever she happens to have slipped over her neck. Today she has been dressed—dressed up—since seven.

When it is finally a reasonable time to leave, she gets up, goes out the door into the chilly midmorning, astonished, suddenly, by the colors of the world: the red of a hummingbird sitting on her feeder, the brilliant purple of the lilies Nat planted in neat rows. She gets into her car, heads out the driveway and into town. She has sprayed perfume on her neck and breasts, as if she were on her way to have an affair, which, in a sense, she supposes she is. On the radio, men with nasal voices describe traffic disasters that cannot touch her. She is driving down
affluent tree-lined avenues where people are polite, looking for a street name she double-checked on the map the night before. It finds her easily, she turns a corner, and then, just a few minutes early, she is there. It is a surprisingly modern building, low, the color of soap. A long corridor lined with spade-shaped windows connects the church with a solid, houselike building she supposes must be the rectory. Alongside it stretches a neatly pared lawn.

She gets out of her car. The doors to the building are heavy and dark, but they glide open easily when she presses her hands against them. Inside, a woman at a desk looks up at her. She says who she is and is told to sit down. She waits in a dark, cool antechamber, twisting her gloves in her hands, and then the woman at the desk appears and informs her that Father Abernathy is indeed expecting her and is ready to see her. She stands, her chest suddenly heaving with anxiety, and follows the woman into an uncluttered office.

Father Abernathy is a man in his sixties, slightly paunchy, with white hair. When he stands to shake her hand, she notices that his skin, like hers, is mottled with pale pink blotches.