Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (19 page)

“Except everyone secretly believes that it would for
them
. Everyone wants a chance to try.”

“And you? Do you hate money?”

“Not as much as Edgar does. I hate that other people don’t have enough but if I was going to fight for something it might be for other people’s lives to be more like mine than mine to be more like theirs. I wish money didn’t exist but that doesn’t mean I want to be hungry and cold.”

“What about your parents?”

“They just died. Last winter.”

“Both of them? I’m sorry.”

“Both of them.” She did not elaborate on the unusual double death. “And they turned out to have spent everything. My childhood home will be sold to pay the taxes. Which is why I think we have to move back here and why Edgar might have to become a steel man, which is why he kissed Glory Jefferson and why he thought I was going to screw John Jefferson and why I’m in this car with you.”

The giant let this list hang in the air. “Wow. Okay. Do you have siblings?”

She did not say that in addition to escaping and punishing her husband, the other reason she was in this car was that the giant reminded her of her brother. Fern pictured Ben, tender and strange, always more inclined to speak with birds than people. She thought of the shadow of him behind her in high school while she laughed with the pretty girls and boys. She thought of him in the expensive, ivy-crawled institution, looking more like a university than a mental hospital. If Fern ever wanted to make herself cry, she thought of Ben alone in that room, the quiet pressing him flat to the bed after a day of electroshock treatments.

“I had a brother. He was not as big as you but he was big and possibly crazy but it wasn’t his fault and they killed him by trying to save him and you can’t fix it. Can we be finished?”

“That all sounds so difficult.” He paused. “I think you should see the house,” he said finally.

“If I agree to stand in front of the house where my parents died, will you stop questioning me?”

—

In the last years, Fern’s mother’s hips had started to click and ache. Evelyn’s knees had hurt. Her body had been out to get her all along, but aging had been the grand finale. At the country club the young women had all been smooth-skinned and tan in precisely the same way. They were beautiful for the purpose of enjoyment by men and envy by women while Evelyn had become invisible—someone to be politely moved aside.

At the country club Evelyn had stopped a much younger woman, her skin luminous with tennis sweat. “I’d like to sculpt you,” she had said to the girl whose name was almost definitely either Sue or Betty, like all the others. “You’re so young and enchanting. Would you mind?”

The girl pinked up and smiled and said, “I have actually done some modeling. For catalogues.”

A few days later the Sue or Betty—Evelyn never bothered to sort out which—had arrived at the studio with her hair curled and her lips stung red. She had sat on the stool. Evelyn had taken out her clay and worked it into a twelve-inch person-shape quickly. “You know what would be really beautiful,” she had said, “is a nude. That’s the real art form.”

The girl had hesitated. Her outfit had been carefully chosen and it seemed a shame to lose it. Like everyone with a near-perfect body, she had had a catalogue of the tiniest faults.

“It’ll be tasteful. Legs crossed. I won’t be specific about your nipples.” Evelyn had known that the gracious thing would have been to go outside to give the girl privacy to prepare herself—it was a smaller humiliation to be seen naked than to be seen undressing. Which is exactly why Evelyn had stayed and also why, once her subject had been bare, Evelyn had opened a window to let the cool air in. It had also been why she worked slowly, worrying curves she had known she would fix later, as the girl’s skin had puckered and she had struggled to sit still. The sculpture would never come to much. It had not been meant to. The real purpose of art had been to give beauty back its discomfort. To remind this girl that her body had ways of harming her.

In the club, Fern’s father had tried to tell the stories of his ancestors and his wife’s ancestors but the young men had no idea when their relatives came to this fine land. The future was the thing, they said. “Time to look ahead, old man,” they had said. They had talked openly about money, earned and spent. They had talked about cars and boats and dance clubs, and they had talked about women. Not ladies, but women, and their parts and
the things the young men had done to them, or wanted to. Fern’s father sometimes faked headaches even when he had none.

Ben—his life, his death—had shadowed Evelyn and Paul always. Evelyn had known that she had not cared for him well. She had thought of the call from the hospital, reporting his death as if it had been just the next in a series of developments they had been monitoring:
Patient exhibits schizophrenic behavior
;
patient does not respond to electric-shock treatments
;
patient undergoes prefrontal lobotomy
;
patient experiences death.

The body had been sent by car so that Ben could be buried in the family plot. Fern and Edgar and Cricket had flown in and taken a taxi straight to the cemetery. Evelyn had asked Edgar to carry the bronze cast of a sculpture she had made of Ben when he was four, old enough for his parents to know that he was unusual but too young to realize how much it would matter. In this bronze Ben was hugging a small dog and the dog was licking his cheek. The statue made Fern endlessly sad. The companion Ben would have wanted forever was Fern. They had been born together and he wanted to live together and die together. Here he was, dead, with only a metal dog to love him.

After that, Evelyn had spent money to have the entire garden in the country torn out and replanted with something less soft than English roses. The roof had had to be replaced. The basement had flooded. Fern’s father had made large donations to libraries and zoos that he did not tell his wife about. Paul had given and given, each sum larger than the last. It had not occurred to him that he would one day reach the bottom of a reserve that had always seemed utterly endless. Giving money had been the only way anyone thanked him anymore.

Evelyn had gone to the doctor and said, “I’m so old all of a
sudden.” As she had said it she realized that she had not known very many truly old women.

“Are you ready for your prescription? I don’t want to rush you, but I recommend having it around earlier rather than later. One never knows how these things will progress.”

“My prescription?”

“For when your body is no longer able to house you properly. For when you are ready to move on.”

She had remembered learning in school that women lived longer than men and thinking,
Not here
. Even as a girl, Evelyn had been aware that women died politely. Almost always in bed, having bathed and tidied up, called the children and grandchildren to say goodnight. Lucky men died of heart attacks, usually while playing a beloved sport. It was considered a good way to go. Racket in hand, having just sent into the sky a gorgeous, sailing volley. Unlucky men wound up in a home where someone mashed their green beans and helped them with their diapers. But well-bred women never died in public and they were almost never so decrepit that they had to be sent away. Now she understood why.

“What is it?” Evelyn had asked.

“Just sleeping pills. Strong sleeping pills. I’ll give you more than enough. I think you’ll feel better having them around.”

Paul had given money to the National Association of American Thoroughbreds, the Lakeshore Beautification Campaign, The Poor.

By Christmas, Evelyn had made a plan. She had thought of her daughter in her nice house with her nice husband and children. Fern had turned out as expected. She could take care of herself. Evelyn thought of her son and hoped that whatever kingdom had taken him in could care for him better than she had. Evelyn thought of Paul, his headaches, and decided easily that they would
need to go together. She had not told her husband the plan. She hoped the pills would be sufficient for them both. She bathed, encouraged her husband to bathe. Though the maid would not be there until morning, she hung up a tag on the bedroom door that they had received on an African safari decades ago:
Resting
, it said.

“The doctor gave me something that he said would make us sleep better than we have in our whole lives,” she said to her husband. “Shall we?”

He reached out his same old hand and she had poured eight pills in. “This is a lot of pills,” he said.

“It’s the regular dosage, apparently.”

“Cheers.”

Evelyn leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. It had been a long time. Their lips had felt different together than they used to, but hardly.

Fern had gone home alone to bury her parents, flown in and out the same day and seen only the cemetery. She had been sure the men and women of the North Shore were disgusted with her decision not to hold a proper funeral with all the fixings, but she had not cared. She had cared about seeing the boxes that held the bodies. She had cared about watching them as they descended into the earth beside her brother. After that, she had eaten something in the airport and gone home.

—

Mac followed Fern’s directions to her old house. There had been much new development since she had last been back. Big houses, uglier by a thousand degrees than their predecessors. Fern said, just as her mother would have, “It’s wretched what they’ve done.” White columns had replaced brick, old trees were cut, lawns were unearthly green, vibrating with color much too late in the season. She figured
the interiors would have been filled with flash and bright colors, mirrors, shiny white plastic. Fern felt old. She had not expected to miss what had come before so much. She had not expected to be a skeptic about the way things were going, the future outlook.

And then came the old wooden fence, the familiar driveway, and they turned down it and the old house was the same cream color with blue trim, the same stone geese sculpted by Fern’s mother out front, the same pink geraniums in the window boxes.

They parked and stood outside looking at the house. Fern had planned to take a moment, maybe walk the perimeter, but now she went to the door and knocked. Of course it went unanswered. Of course it was locked. But there were so many entrances and Fern knew all of them. They tried the screened porch, the kitchen, the garage. At the maid’s entrance the doorknob turned easily and they stood in the laundry room where there was still a load of whites hanging on a drying rack.

The house, awaiting the legal process, was exactly as her parents had left it, exactly as they had died in it.

Fern stood in the living room and smelled the wood of it, the fibrous old-age rugs. Mac pulled out a huge leather-bound edition of
The
Pilgrim’s Progress
. The pages were half dust. The room was breathing, was what it felt like, and Fern had to sit down on the floor because the chairs were all too familiar. All those same books, all those same pictures, the fireplace and the nooks beside it for reading. Her grandfather had built the house for a happy family, the children tucked away with books and the mothers and fathers on the porches with their sketchpads and tall glasses of iced tea. Outside: bees, butterflies, a constant parade of roses in the garden, dripping fountains. It had been a true dream, sometimes. Fern running through the wildflowers and grasses; supper
on the porch by candlelight; lying on the dew-grass at night while the stars poured down.

Fern thought of her brother. Ben, inside alone with a gardening catalogue, a pair of scissors and a roll of tape, rearranging the plants so they were grouped by family, rather than alphabet. “Lily, lily, lily,” he said, pressing garlic beside onion beside a picture of a massive white bloom, like an outstretched hand. The floor around him was covered in bits of paper like so many snowflakes. Ben, making better sense of things. He had been safe in this house and should never have been made to leave it.

Mac stayed downstairs but Fern went up the creaking stairs. Her parents’ door was closed. There was a hang-tag on the knob and Fern remembered the trip it had come from. They had all gone on safari when she was ten, had watched the beating heart of a water buffalo slow down while a lion untangled the ropes of its muscles with her teeth. Fern had been able to smell the blood. It was sweet in her nose and the lion looked right at her while she ate the buffalo’s living leg.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Evelyn had said. “The cycle of life.”

Ben had had to turn around. He was watching the clouds change. “Tell me when it’s over,” he had said. Fern watched, trying to prove strength to her mother.

Fern, standing at the doorway to the room where she knew her parents had died, had to choose to enter or walk away. She knew the bodies had been buried but she was still afraid that she would find some leftovers of them lying in bed. Bones or blood. She had to tell herself to stop being crazy but crazy was what she felt as she let herself in, knelt at the edge of the bed, which was empty, of course it was empty, and tried to hear them or smell them or sense the residue of their death in the room.

The rug was warm; the sun must already have passed through.

Surrounding Fern were the trappings of a good life. The house was stately and big, the lawn rolling, miles of prairie with trails through the wildflowers. Hardwood furnishings, a silk rug, crystal chandelier, a closetful of dresses and suits. Here were the belongings with no one to belong to, so many objects sitting dumbly where they had been placed. It seemed almost obscene to Fern, this huge remainder, when the lives themselves had ended.

Fern opened the bedside table drawer and found a handful of pens, a tube of lip balm and four index cards with her father’s shaky script. On each was a name: Evelyn Westwood, Paul Westwood, Ben Westwood, Fern Keating. There was nothing else written. Fern imagined her father lying on this bed, his brain liquid with pain, trying to remember the names of his family members. She imagined him holding her card as if the mere fact of her could calm him. She wished she had offered more, anything more.