Terms of Endearment (12 page)

Then, for no visible reason, while they were all sitting quietly holding their brandy, Alberto’s spirits suddenly plunged. One minute he seemed fine and the next he was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks, his chest was heaving, and he shook his head mournfully from side to side.

“So good,” he said, gesturing at the remains of the meal. “So beautiful…” and he turned his eyes to Aurora. “I don’t deserve. No, I don’t deserve.”

Aurora was not surprised. “Alberto, surely you’re not going to cry,” she said. “A wonderful man like yourself—I’m not going to have it.”

“But no,” Alberto said. “You feed me this meal, you are so nice, Emma is so nice. I don’t know… I am old and crazy. I don’t sing no more…. What do I do? I sell bassoons, electric guitar, harmonica. Is no life. What am I gonna offer?”

“Alberto, I’m taking you right out in my garden and you’re going to get a lecture,” Aurora said, rising. “You know I’m not going to allow you to disparage yourself this way.” She took his arm, made him get up, and walked him off into the darkness. Emma sat for a moment. Alberto must have gotten worse, for she could hear him sobbing, and her mother’s voice over the sobs.

When the sobs were silenced and the two of them still didn’t reappear, Emma got up and began to clear the table. One of her mother’s firmest principles was that Rosie was not to be burdened with the remains of her parties. While Emma was scraping the plates her mother stuck her head in the kitchen door.

“That’s nice of you, dear, but it can wait,” she said. “Could you come and make your goodnights? My friend is better, but he is still somewhat crestfallen. We had better walk them to their car.”

Emma left the dishes and followed her mother. Alberto was standing in the living room looking small and sodden, and Alfredo, barely awake, was yawning on the front porch. Aurora had
stuck the heather in a great green vase and put it by the fireplace, and the irises and anemones were on the window ledges of the deep curved windows.

“Emma, I am sorry, honey, I have ruined the party,” Alberto began, but her mother went up to him and imperturbably tucked his arm in hers and began to lead him toward the door.

“Hush, Alberto,” she said. “We’ve heard quite enough out of you this evening. I don’t know how I’ll be able to sleep now, your banter has stirred me up so. Why a man with your taste in flowers wants to stand there belittling himself is more than I can fathom. But then I don’t know that I’ll ever understand the male of the species, clever as I am.”

They all walked out and stood for a moment on the front lawn, Alfredo dozing, Alberto standing sadly with his arm around Aurora’s waist. There was a soft breeze, and thin clouds were moving overhead.

“I do love the nights this time of year,” Aurora said. “The air here is at its best just now, don’t you think, Alberto? I’ve always supposed it was because of the trees that our air is so soft. It has a kind of weight, you know. I believe trees have something to do with the making of air.”

She looked down at Alberto fondly. “How are the nights in Genoa, dear?” she asked. “You’ve hardly mentioned your own birthplace all evening, you know. I’m afraid you sometimes take my little strictures a bit too seriously. You really can’t allow me to suppress you, Alberto. It can’t be good for you, that I can see.”

“Yes, in Genoa I was another man,” Alberto said. “We were there… you remember?”

Aurora nodded and put him into his car. Alfredo was guided down the driveway without incident. The car was a Lincoln, and even older than Aurora’s Cadillac. It was a relic of Alberto’s heyday as a tenor.

“All right now, you call me at the crack of dawn,” Aurora said once Alberto was under the wheel. “Otherwise I shall worry about you. I’m sure we can devise something pleasant to do next week. I do think you ought to promote Alfredo, though, dear. He’s your own son, and he’s been in harmonicas too long. If he grows discontent, then the next thing you know he’ll follow in my
daughter’s footsteps and start having babies by someone you may not approve of. I’m not sure I’d care to see Alfredo have a baby just yet.”

“Maybe he could sell guitars,” Alberto said doubtfully, looking out at the two women. He tried to gather himself for a last gesture.

“Was wonderful,” he said. “The mother is wonderful, the daughter is wonderful, just alike, my darlings. I am starting.” And as the car shot forward he took both hands off the wheel and began to blow them both kisses.

“Oh, dear, there goes Alfredo, it seems,” Aurora said, watching him slump onto the floorboards as the Lincoln pulled away. It only pulled away from them, however; as soon as Alberto removed his hands from the wheel it veered straight for the curb. Alberto wrested it into the street, but not before there had been a hideous scraping of tires.

“There, you see what happens?” Aurora said to Emma, gritting her teeth at the sound. “I trust you won’t be so quick to criticize my parking after this. In all likelihood he will have a flat in the next few days.”

She had put on her sandals to dine but kicked them off at once.

“You were awfully nice to Alberto,” Emma said.

“I don’t see why that should be worthy of comment. After all, he was my guest.”

“Yes, but you’re so mean about him when he’s not around,” Emma said.

“Oh, well, that’s just my way,” Aurora said. “I’ve been allowed to become sarcastic, I suppose. Your father made little effort to correct me in that regard. It’s a general failing in our family—the men are never adequate to correcting the women when they need it. It’s certainly not likely that Thomas will ever correct you.”

“I’m not sarcastic,” Emma said.

“No, but you’re young,” Aurora said, going in the front door. She stopped in the living room for a moment to admire her flowers.

“He does have wonderful taste in flowers,” she said. “Italians often do. What you don’t seem to comprehend is that people of
any substance are often much better in person than they seem in the abstract, when one is merely left to think about them. Everyone likes to gripe about people who aren’t there. It doesn’t mean one has no feeling, you know.”

Together they attacked the kitchen and dispatched their chores rapidly. Emma took a big sponge and went out to the patio to wipe off the table, and Aurora soon trailed after her carrying a hairbrush and a final bowl of watercress soup. She also had some scraps of bread to put in her bird feeder. Emma sat at the table and watched her mother crumble the bread, humming as she crumbled.

“I do believe I hum Mozart better than Alfredo can play him,” she said when she came back from the yard. She sat down across from her daughter and ate every last drop of her soup. The night had a hum of its own and mother and daughter listened to it awhile and were quiet.

“Are you as nice to all your suitors as you are to Alberto?” Emma asked.

“By no means,” Aurora said.

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t deserve it,” Aurora said. She began to brush her hair.

“Would you ever marry him?”

Aurora shook her head. “No, that’s quite out of the question,” she said. “Alberto is just a fragment of himself now. I’m not sure but what that stroke might just as well have killed him, because it robbed him of his art. I heard him at his best and he was very fine—first rate. He behaves well, for a man who has lost the best thing he ever had—and that is saying much.”

“So why do you rule him out?” Emma said.

Aurora looked at her daughter and continued to brush her hair. “No, I’m far too difficult for Alberto,” she said. “I knew both his wives and they were empty as birds’ nests. He never had the skill to handle me, and now he hasn’t the energy either. In any case his tradition has only prepared him for compliant women. I’m deeply fond of him but I doubt that I could remain compliant very long.”

“Then don’t you think it’s wrong of you to lead him on?” Emma asked.

Aurora smiled at her daughter, who was sitting demurely in her nice yellow dress and challenging her motives.

“You’re lucky to have caught me when I’m mellow, if you’re going to say such things to me,” she said. “I’m afraid our points of view are twenty-five years apart. Alberto is not an adolescent with his life ahead of him. He’s an aging man who’s been seriously ill, and he might drop dead tomorrow. I have told him many times that I couldn’t marry him. I am not leading him on, I’m merely doing the best I can by him. It may be that he cherishes impossible hopes—I suppose he does—but at his age impossible hopes are better than no hopes at all.”

“I still feel sorry for him,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t want to love somebody I couldn’t get.”

“It’s not the worst fate, whatever the young may think,” Aurora said. “There is at least a certain stimulation in it. It is certainly a good deal better than getting somebody you find you can’t love, when all is said and done.”

Emma thought about it for a moment. “I wonder where I’ll be when all is said and done,” she said.

Aurora didn’t reply—she was listening to the sounds of the night. Apart from a drop more soup, there was for the moment nothing she really wanted, nothing she really missed. Few things gave her quite the same sense of serenity as knowing that her food had been well prepared and well received, and that her dishes were done and her kitchen clean. In such a mood nothing could vex her deeply. She looked over at Emma and saw that Emma was looking at her.

“Well, what?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Emma said. Her mother was so often outrageous that it was almost troubling to have to think of her as someone who was possibly just as normal as she was—or conceivably even more normal. Seeing her with Alberto had made her realize that her mother had had a life about which, in essence, she knew nothing. What had she done with Alberto when he was younger and could still sing? What had she done in her
marriage for twenty-four years? Her mother and father had been simply
there
, like trees in the back yard—objects of nature, not objects of curiosity.

“Emma, you’re being somewhat evasive,” Aurora said. “That can’t be proper.”

“I wasn’t,” Emma said. “I just don’t know what I want to ask.”

“Well, I’m at your service, I’m sure—if you can decide before my bedtime.”

“I guess I’m just curious to know what you liked best about Daddy. It just occurred to me that I don’t really know that much about you two.”

Aurora smiled. “He was tall,” she said. “It wasn’t always helpful, in view of the fact that he spent such an inordinate amount of his life sitting down, but on those occasions when I could manage to get him on his feet it was an asset.”

“I don’t think that explains twenty-four years, surely,” Emma said. “If it does I’m appalled.”

Aurora shrugged and licked her soup spoon. “I was appalled to find such a disreputable car parked in your street this morning,” she said. “It would be more decorous of Daniel to stick it in a parking lot the next time he decides to sneak in on you at dawn.”

“That wasn’t what we were talking about,” Emma said quickly. “That’s completely beside the point.”

“No, as I perceive it the point is taste,” Aurora said. “You are far too romantic, Emma, and if you’re not careful it will bring you to rack, at the very least, and quite possibly to ruin as well.”

“I don’t follow you,” Emma said.

“You aren’t trying,” Aurora said. “You’re hoping to be allowed to keep your most cherished notions—in my day they were called illusions—but you won’t get to. In the first place I am afraid you vastly underrate appearance. Your father’s appearance was somewhat to my taste, and since he never worked hard enough or felt violently enough to cause it to deteriorate, it continued to be to my taste for twenty-four years—at least whenever he would stand up. Aside from that he was mild and had manners and was never disposed to beat me. He was much too lazy to transgress, so in general we got on.”

“You make it sound awfully general,” Emma said. “You don’t make it sound deep at all.”

Aurora smiled again. “As I recall, we were speaking of longevity,” she said. “I hadn’t realized that we were speaking of depth.”

“Well,” Emma said. She had the beginnings of the odd and not entirely pleasant feeling she often felt when her mother, in her own strange way, set out to lecture her. It was a sensation almost of shrinking, of fading quietly backward into girlhood. She didn’t like it, and yet to her distress she didn’t entirely dislike it either. Her mother was still there, someone to face things with.

“Emma, you are so remiss about finishing your sentences.” Aurora said. “You speak vaguely enough, at best, but I really think you ought to try harder to finish your sentences. You are always saying things like ‘Well,’ and then you go no further. People will think you suffer from a mental vacuum.”

“Sometimes I do,” Emma said. “Why should I have to speak in complete sentences?”

“Because complete sentences command attention,” Aurora said. “Vague grunts do not. Also, because you’re about to be a mother. People who lack the decisiveness to finish their sentences can hardly pretend to the decisiveness necessary to the raising of children. Fortunately you have several months in which to practice.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Emma asked. “Stand in front of a mirror and speak to myself in complete sentences?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you,” Aurora said.

“I didn’t want to talk about me,” Emma said. “I was trying to get you to talk about you and Daddy.”

Aurora tilted her head a few times to exercise her neck. “I was quite willing,” she said. “I’m unusually mellow tonight, perhaps because I drank my own wine instead of allowing Alberto to fill me up with something inferior. Perhaps I’m so mellow that I missed the point of your question, if you had one. Or then again perhaps you phrased it too vaguely for me to get.”

“Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “I just wanted to know what you really felt.”

Aurora waved her hand lightly, swinging the empty soup spoon. “My dear, doubtless there are hundreds of edifices in this
world that rise from shallow foundations, if I may speak elliptically,” she said. “When I’m mellow and the air has a nice weight I do so love to speak elliptically, as you know. Many edifices, some of them even taller than your father, might well crumble if someone came along and gave them a few healthy kicks. I myself am still capable of healthy kicks, I assure you. As for your question, which happily you phrased grammatically, if rather dully, I can tell you quite distinctly that I don’t care if I never hear the phrase ‘really felt’ again.”