Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (6 page)

“We could try to hide him. People are going to Canada.”

“Thank you for not telling me it’s going to be okay,” she said. They stayed on the phone all night talking about the ways they could save Ben and save the world and save each other. Fern’s window turned dawn-blue. She woke up still holding the phone to her ear. “Edgar?” she said into it but he did not answer. Then she listened again and heard his steady breathing, sure as sure.

—

Before Halloween, Edgar told his mother that he wanted to have Fern’s family over for Christmas dinner. Mary saw in her mind the effort and peril of a white-linen tablecloth and a roast goose, a hundred side dishes, each of which could be ruined a hundred different ways. “You had better really like this girl,” she said. Nothing would secure their stead better than a marriage into such an old family, Mary knew. She also knew that she would have to be the one to prove their worth again and again to these Old Moneys. For the next six weeks she thought of nothing but Christmas Eve. She had the cook practice each dish six times. She tried twelve different floral arrangements. She opened every drawer in the house every day, sure that on the night of the party someone would go
snooping and find a mouse nest in the one place she had forgotten to check. Mary was a woman at war.

On the first of December when the light displays started to go up, Mary drove to the suburbs with a notebook and drew sketches of each façade. No one had colored lights—the houses were all haloed in white like rows and rows of humble angels. Eaves were always decorated and it was acceptable to entwine a well-sculpted hedge. There was always, always a wreath with a red bow on the door. The oldest mansions were lit with reservation and the newer colonials were overdone. Mary aimed at a mid-mark. It was hardly their first light display but Fern’s family would be the highest-ranking dinner guests they had ever had and behavior over the holidays was the basis of the social rankings for the following season. Mary knew that her invitation to exhibit a bouquet in Champion Bancroft’s spring flower show depended on her performance now. She knew that she would either be invited back to Fluffy Turner’s book club or told it was going on hiatus, though of course there would always be six cars parked in the drive on Tuesday evenings.

Edgar came home two weeks later reading the Communist Manifesto. He and Mary sat together at the big dining table while she polished the four-hundred-piece set of silver and he read aloud. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,” he read.

“Edgar, I have no idea what any of that means.”

“Here’s where it gets good,” he said, starting again. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.”

“Which are?”

“Which are that the proletariat is forced to fight for decent pay and rights. It’s class war, Mother.”

“You do know where you grew up?” she said. “You do know whom you have invited for Christmas Eve dinner?”

“Fern’s different,” Edgar said. “We’re both different.” He left the table with his book. He tried sitting in his room, but it was the room of a rich kid. He tried sitting in the living room, but the walls of leather-bound books in mahogany shelves could not be described as proletariat. He tried sitting on the porch, but it was twenty-five degrees outside. Finally, Edgar settled in the barn. He had to overlook the horse tack and the fact that it was heated (he was sure Russian horses did not need heated stalls), but at least it smelled like animal shit. At least the ground was covered in hay.

—

Christmas Eve arrived with Fern in a red velvet dress with a wide skirt, her hair pinned in a neat twist and her mother in the usual black, her hair short, her lips red. Mary hugged the girl and Fern hugged her back. She was warm and pretty and complimented the light display. “You are very sweet,” Mary said. Edgar took Fern to the parlor window to look at the snowfort he had built behind the house. It was bluish in the dark and almost glowing. “Will you move in with me?” he teased.

“How many bathrooms?” They both laughed.

“I can’t believe they wouldn’t send Ben home for Christmas,” he said.

“I dreamed that he was drowning and my dress was too heavy to save him.”

In the window were their reflected ghosts. They took hands and looked at the image of themselves. How very much this joined pair comforted them.

The fathers drank their drinks and talked over the particulars of a horse race they had both heard about but had not seen. Paul felt surprisingly good. It could shift at any moment, he knew, but for now he was enjoying the clear-headedness. Hugh asked after Ben. “He’s on a base in Indiana,” Paul said. “He seems all right so far. Probably no different than a college dorm.” The statement sounded like a question.

“I expect you worry about him,” Hugh said, having seen Ben at the library a few months before, his big body hunched over a book about lilies. He corrected himself, knowing his wife would cut his tongue out if he ruined this night. “Just as we all do. Worry about our children, I mean. I’m sure he’s going to be just fine.”

The mothers took a tour of the house and Evelyn politely noticed the pleasing shade of white of the crown molding in the sitting room. Mary thanked her but the comment sent a shot of rage down her spine. To compliment a shade of white was to insult everything else.

“Yes, I’m very careful about whites,” Mary said.

“One must be,” said Evelyn. “The wrong white can ruin a room.”

The goose came out hot and glistening and the mashed, stewed, baked and broiled sides were all pristine. Mary said quiet prayers of thanks. If she could have, she would have gone upstairs for the rest of the evening to cry tears of relief. Conversation was pleasant, wine was poured at the correct rate, the children looked at one another across the table in a way that made the adults nostalgic for their youth. It was the Christmas Eve they had all been hoping for, until Fern’s father turned to Edgar and asked him about his studies. “I’m studying Marx,” Edgar said. “And I’m finding it very interesting.”

Fern’s father was quiet, as one ought to be if one wants the
dinner to proceed without incident, but Hugh could not leave the statement alone.

“You give your child everything and he comes home from Yale a communist. Aren’t we busy fighting a war over this?”

Edgar muttered something about the war being criminal and the family being a bourgeois institution.

Fern had no map for getting her beloved out of this tangle.

“Edgar took a Greek History class,” Fern said. “I would love to visit Greece.”

“It’s sweet of you to try to rescue me,” Edgar said to Fern, “but I don’t need rescuing. My father should know that I disagree with everything he stands for.”

Fern’s mother excused herself and went to the powder room. Hating the world was plenty familiar but saying so in better company was unacceptable. Paul sat very quietly, arranging butter on his bread. Edgar said things about private property and the capitalist agenda and heavy progressive graduated income tax and his father said, “You are a spoiled shit,” and his mother, whose hands were pink and shaking said, “What did I do to deserve you for my only child?” When Evelyn returned they all went quiet for a moment, remembering their manners. Fern wished hard for her brother, a person whose eyes could always settle her. The absence of Ben was thunderous, much louder than the boy himself had ever been.

Edgar stood up. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I shouldn’t have brought up such topics on a holiday.” He looked at the faces of his parents, his sweetheart, her parents. “I asked for this evening for a reason,” he said. His voice started to crack and he wrung his napkin. “I wanted to ask Fern . . . Fern,” he said, turning to her. “I wanted to ask you to marry me.”

Before her father wondered whether
his
was the approval the
boy should have sought first, Fern stood to meet him and took both of his hands. “Of course I will,” she said.

“I thought you just said family was a bourgeois institution,” Hugh tried to say.

“Shut up,” Mary told him. “Shut up right now.”

The boy and girl did not hear his parents fighting and they did not hear her parents try to find enough air in the room.
There she goes,
thought Evelyn,
just as I expected. Next she’ll call to say she’s pregnant.
Paul felt a needle-stab of pain. No one had ever looked at him the way the young couple was looking at each other.

In front of everyone, Fern and Edgar leaned close and kissed.

—

Mary was up all night and the words that banged in her head were
Fuck it
. Fuck the roast goose and the four hundred pieces of silver. Fuck the book club and the flower show and the appropriate light display. She went into Edgar’s room and found him reading by candlelight.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s all bullshit. The entire thing is bullshit.”

He kissed her on the forehead, the second most important kiss of his life and both in the same night. But she would not relinquish her worldly possessions and join the movement to unionize the workers. She was not going to rage against private property or call for socialized medicine. By morning, by the time the Christmas sun rose over the pale pink bricks of their home, Mary had made a different kind of upending.

There was French toast on the table and Edgar and Hugh each had an envelope on his plate. They sat down, poured orange juice. “Open them,” Mary said. “Those are your presents from me.”

Hugh went first. In his envelope was a hand-drawn map of an island with little palm trees and arrows pointing to various features including a mermaid lagoon and a harbor. “We still have to work out the details,” Mary said.

“A map?” he asked.

“It’s an island. It’s in the Caribbean. I’m buying it for you. For Christmas.” Mary’s voice was flash-bright.

“This is not real.”

“I don’t care anymore,” she said. “I don’t care what all these people think. We have so much money. We should be having fun. From now on, fun.”

Hugh could not get to his wife fast enough. He picked her up in his arms and kissed her hard on the neck. “What else will we buy?” he asked.

“Cars,” she said. “Boats. A plane. We can go anywhere we want.”

“An island?” Edgar was disgusted. “Have you thought about the people who already live there?”

But no one was listening to him. His parents were kissing in a way he had never seen them kiss. In a way that made him feel extra, unwanted, in the way. Quietly he opened his own envelope. In it was a piece of paper that read
Ticket
at the top. Below it said:
Your Freedom. Go be a communist. Travel to Africa. Learn to play the flute. No questions asked.

“What is this?” Edgar asked.

Mary broke from her embrace, her face pink and full. “When you’re ready, you can come back and earn a living with us. I’ll put enough in your account to hold you and Fern for a few years. You don’t have to keep the money if you don’t want to. Give it to the natives. Or you can keep it but believe it’s evil. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

“What if I don’t come back?”

“You’ll come back. You’ll see.”

The room sounded different. The whole house. They ate too much for breakfast and too much for lunch too. It was a good day to be a family, freedom sudden as a drug in their veins. They walked outside and admired the dry, solemn tendrils of a weeping willow and the steady green of a pine.

“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” Hugh said. “Tomorrow, we shop.”

“You know I really disagree with what you’re about to do,” Edgar said.

“I know you do, sweetheart. And we think your ideas are nonsense.”

None of them could remember having been
happier.

1976

F
RESH
SCHOOL
SUPPLIES
were a small consolation for Cricket, but neither of her brothers was comforted by a bouquet of sharp pencils. On the last day of summer, the lurk of school at their doorstep, Cricket and the boys put their bathing suits on and spread towels all over the yard. The Boston heat was a blanket over everything. They brought magazines outside. Cricket had her first beauty magazine, found on the beach on the island. Everything she had not known to worry about yet was contained within—pimples and periods and hand-holding and a flatter tummy and shaving and dancing with boys. Her body was still little-girl and would be for several years—she was nine—but she could feel the presence of that cliff in the distance. The twins at six were still deep in childhood’s safe hold.

She studied the shapes of the teenagers in the pages and the spread of five girls in bikinis. How could she ever make that transformation? The magazine was not a map or a comfort—only a catalogue of concerns. When she opened it each time it was with anticipation, but by the time she closed it the only feeling left was shame.

The twins dog-eared a catalogue of baseball cards with nothing but delight and hope in their voices. “The Hank Aaron in pristine condition is worth like eighty dollars,” Will said. “Just think what we could buy. Pogo sticks, new bikes, a model ship.” James looked at Cricket’s page, which was a color wheel used to decide one’s clothing palette. He didn’t get it. Being a girl seemed like a choice Cricket could make or unmake. Why not always build and dig and explode and collect? Cricket pulled her long braid around and studied the color of her hair in the sun. It was dirty blond but in the light there was red. She looked at the color wheel. She was in the blues and greys, never the greens or reds.

The boys suggested they play in the hose, but Cricket shushed them. “We don’t need the hose. We’re pretending we’re at the beach.”

“But,” they said.

“Like it or lump it,” she told them, repeating her mother. When the twins went to the yard’s edge to pluck ladybugs from the tiger lilies, Cricket told them to watch out for jellyfish. The boys dug up dirt and tried to build a sandcastle. It was full of threads of roots and earthworms. They hung towels from the laundry line and pretended they were the sails of a ship with which to tack and jibe against the wind. Eventually they all fell asleep in the sun and their backs turned pink, which they secretly loved. That night, in the bathroom, they would brush and wash and then sit on the floor, pressing a finger into the burn of a shoulder to watch the white print turn red. They would take their sunburns to school with them, and their skin would hurt under the blue and white uniforms. At least there was that, at least there was proof that they had once been free.

—

Since they had come home from the island the day before, Edgar had not wanted to look Fern in the eye. He had gone out early and
come back late. Then he had called from his writing studio to tell Fern that he had made a dinner date for them with another couple. “A double date?” she had asked, and it sounded like high school.

“Sort of,” he had said. “Wear something nice.” He had told her he would pick her up at seven o’clock.

She dressed and redressed: wide-leg red pants and matching vest, a long daisy-print dress, a jumpsuit she had never figured out how to wear and the pale blue dress, now so old-fashioned-looking, she had been wearing when she first danced with her husband when she was seventeen. She remembered the feeling of floating inside her own body. She had been the sea and the swimmer both, and the water was saltsoft and in it she was buoyant.

At Fern’s feet, the dog searched around for anything dropped to eat. She bent her front paws and muzzled under the dresser.

“Stupid dog,” Fern said, “there’s nothing for you here.” Fern felt unfastened. She was getting dressed for a man who had suddenly taken the place of her husband and all her resources were scarce. Everything around her—the house, the furniture, the manner of life—was poised to evaporate. She was a soft body trying to prepare herself for the unknowable future.

Fern looked out the window at her brood, three bathing-suit nappers in the yard. She could almost feel their sunwarm skin on her palm. The sweat on their scalps. Fern could see Cricket’s magazine, could almost hear the clink of a lock as her girl entered the room of self-doubt. She wished hard that there was a world in which Cricket would not have to pass through this stage, or ever enter the next.

Fern knew that the children would stumble in soon, slow and happy, looking for something to eat. She should scold them for being uncareful about the sun, but the school year would start in the morning and that seemed like punishment enough.

The dog fell asleep for a moment. She twitched in a dream almost immediately. Fern had been trained to distrust a faulty body. She had been kept at a distance from her grandparents the moment they showed their age, as if it was contagious. And when Evelyn had started to shake slightly—for each intended movement, dozens of tiny stowaway movements jangled in her body—she had begun to decline the invitations to parties as a courtesy to the other guests whose dinners she imagined her mortal body would ruin. She was fifty-eight. Not old, not sick. But her mother’s body had betrayed her, and she was sure that no one wanted a decrepit woman for a wife or a friend. And then Evelyn had called two years before, so happy, to report that her doctor had suggested she have pills that would end her life before her body gave way.

“Your doctor suggested this?” Fern had asked.

“This is good news, Fern. I wanted to tell you so that you knew it was a possibility for you too, down the line.”

“You aren’t going to do it, though,” Fern had said.

“When it’s time. It’s not suicide if it’s time.”

Her mother had had the pills for a year before Fern had received the call from her parents’ maid saying that both mother and father were tucked in bed and neither of them was alive. “Father too,” Fern said, coming to understand.

The maid had been hysterical. She thought it must either have been a divine act or a murder, but Fern knew that it was a little bit of both: her mother’s attempt to save them both with a benevolent boost into a lighter kingdom, and a killing. These deaths had taken place six months ago, at the coldest point in winter yet only weeks before crocuses split the earth. Fern remembered standing at the phone that day, the house still morning-cold, and saying out loud to the maid on the other end of the line, “I am an orphan.”

Today Fern understood her mother’s distrust of her own body better—she felt like the shell-less hermit crab Cricket had brought to her on the beach during the summer, the little pink spiral of a creature in the girl’s hand, the gulls already circling. She was young still but without the protection of wealth, she felt exposed, perched. The dog looked up with milky, cataract eyes and seemed not to recognize her own life. Maggie had shown up on their doorstep three years before and they did not know how old she was. Older than they thought, maybe. To Fern she looked like an animal that was about to fall apart.

Here Fern was, a small person in a big house, quite alone. There were decades of need ahead of her and three children and she was just a woman with no money. Edgar could save them or he could let them starve—she did not get to decide. The dog looked up, pan-eyed. There were grey patches in her fur and her back paws twitched under her efforts. She seemed very old suddenly, helpless and sad, and Fern was a woman with nothing extra. Fern checked her watch to see that she had time for an errand before the dinner. Still wearing the first-date dress, she scooped the animal up into her arms and carried her out of the room, down the stairs, through the hall, out the front door and down the steps and into the brown station wagon. Maggie whined all the way to the vet.

In the orange-walled office smelling of animal pee, Fern put Maggie up on the stainless table. She had dinner-party makeup on and wished for a way to hide. Her hands in the animal’s fur were disorganized. She could see that the vet was as worried about the woman as the dog. “I think she’s suffering. Is she suffering?” Fern said.

The vet listened to the dog’s heart and felt her soft belly. He shined a light into her eyes and ears. “She’s definitely aging,” he said. “Everyone has a different tolerance for decline.” He had bread
crumbs in his thick blond mustache—he was not the person to ask about saving oneself from the small humiliations.

“Is it awful for her? Look at her. Maybe it would be kinder to let her go.” Fern fought the need to cry. It seemed terribly dangerous to be a living creature, a body in need of nourishment and love for the duration of its existence.

“She’s slowing down. Tired. Possibly sore in the joints. She probably has more time, though, if you aren’t ready to let her go.” Maggie looked confused and sad to Fern. Or maybe it was only her own reflection in the animal’s eyes.

“Will you keep her overnight for observation? I don’t know what to do.”

The vet agreed to watch the animal for twenty-four hours and had Fern fill out the intake forms. Maggie was crated in the back with the barkers and whiners and sleepers and Fern bent down to reassure her. “Let’s just see what happens, okay?” she said, touching the dog’s wet nose through the grate. “You’re a good dog. A good girl. A sweet and good girl.”

On the way home, the car was silent. The city slipped by. Fern drove along the Charles where a dozen white triangles of sails tried to find wind. Fern tried to believe in generosity. She tried to believe in reprieve.

—

Fern stood on the curb feeling too old to stand on curbs. Edgar finally pulled up from his day in his dark green sports car and she straightened up to greet him. She put her thumb up but he did not smile at the joke.

“You can’t wear that,” he said. Discomfort ticked in his eyes.

“I couldn’t decide.” She already regretted the reminder of their beginning. Their young selves joined them in the car but
they were not entirely welcome. Too much was not the same. It seemed unfair, to love that hard with your heartmuscle still so wet and new.

They had a little time, Edgar said, patting her knee. The sound of their takeoff rattled up Fern’s spine to her brainstem. She put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry that my father gave everything away. I never wanted you to have to do something you hate.”

“Clearly money will find me and trap me no matter what I do,” he said. Edgar did not feel like less of a stranger than he had the past four days, to himself or to Fern.

He parked near Harvard Square where everyone was young and unpressed and lovely and encumbered with books. Inside the shop, a girl put dresses in a line. Edgar said, “Let’s see you get beautiful.” He was a different person than she was used to. He had opened his top button and deepened the part in his hair and wore his low brown boots and jeans and he hadn’t shaved in four days. He was twitchy and nervous.

Fern had to be zipped and unzipped every time so that even the unflattering dresses were seen by the girl. “No, no, no,” the girl said about one. “Don’t let him see you in that.” And then, “This one does a lot for you.”

Each time Fern did the walk from the silk-draped dressing room to the center of the store where Edgar was sitting on a sofa. He gave a thumbs-up or -down. He asked her to turn around so he could see the back. Sometimes she saw in his face a jag of pleasure, sometimes she was a question he did not have the answer for.

“Just tell me which one you want me to wear,” Fern said. She did not want to keep trying, to keep being naked in front of this young maiden who tugged at the seams, trying to get them to lay flat against a too-deep curve.

“The long red one,” he said. “She’ll wear it out.” It had a plunging V, draped over her shoulders, shushed across the carpet.

After they paid and left, the shopgirl ran outside after them. She came up close to Fern and Fern thought she was about to be kissed. The girl’s breath was mintsweet; she had thought of every single manipulation of her little body. Out of her hand came a small tube, and she said, “Open your lips,” and in three sweeps, she lipsticked Fern. Top, top, bottom. “Now,” she said, “press.”