“Tell me about him,” I said.
She sat down beside me, and I took the brush from her lax grip and began to pull it through her dark, springy curls. “Well,” she said, “he’s very smart and funny. And idealistic.”
“An idealistic corporate
lawyer
?” I teased, but I was already envisioning a Hepburn–Tracy movie romance, with the exciting added edge of competition between them. Like Ev and I used to be, I thought, and I understood then that I was envious of my own child, just starting out. The very sin I’d accused Ev of committing.
“Mother,”
Suzy scolded, bringing me back.
“Is he handsome?” I asked.
“Very, but not in the conventional sense. He looks a little like a gangster.”
“They all do. So, is this serious?”
She leaned against me, with the same absolute trust she’d displayed when she was very young, and I could feel her solid grown-up weight and the heat of her flushed skin. “Yes, I think so,” she said.
“Darling, that’s wonderful,” I said, relieved to realize that I truly meant it. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
When Ev and I got married, I was newly pregnant with Suzy. It wasn’t exactly a shotgun wedding—we had already decided to marry, only not right away. We were going to give our writing careers, our calling, a chance to develop first. But now this unknown baby became the abiding idea and the chief character in my imagination, while Ev was hustled into a suit and tie and his family’s printing business.
My father will die, I kept thinking, my father will kill me. He was still in deep mourning, and I’d never dared to mention Ev to him, or ever really told him that Arthur was no longer in my life. My mother was the one I needed to tell. I was sure that she would have approved, and that she would have been the buffer between my father and myself.
I called Violet and she immediately volunteered to come to Iowa to be our witness. She and Eli were still living in New Haven, because Eli had a teaching fellowship in the philosophy department at Yale. Their own young marriage was in trouble by then, although I don’t think Violet knew that yet.
She tried to dispel my worries about my father. “He’ll get over it,” she said with a shrug when I picked her up at the airport. “Those old birds are tougher than you think.” My father wasn’t that much older then than we were now. “And you’re making him a grandfather, besides. Maybe you ought to give him the good news first.”
We had both grown up overhearing every medical “bad news, good news” joke in the book, and we thought some of them were pretty funny, but I was afraid there would be nothing amusing about my father’s reaction to the news of my marriage to Ev.
I’d decided to do it in person. My father’s aversion to the telephone might influence his response, and how could he resist the irresistible presence of my delightful new husband? But even Ev’s good looks and witty charm, and our obvious love for each other, didn’t win my father over. He seemed to rise up out of his grief to attain a fresh level of disapproval of me. The worst part, he said, was that I had done this behind his back, and I had to acknowledge that there was some truth in that. I might have been a teenage girl again, caught smoking in the schoolyard. But I’d only held off his displeasure in order to hang on to my own bliss a little longer. All love affairs are private, anyway; they’re always behind someone else’s back.
In retrospect, I realize that I probably should have broken everything to my father in slow, easy stages, even if the chronological order was off: the split with Arthur, Ev’s courtship, our wedding, my pregnancy. Or maybe Violet was right, and I should have leavened the rest of it by giving him the “good news” first. I don’t think any of that finally mattered, though. With my mother’s death, he’d lost control of his neatly ordered world, and this was only another blow, another challenge to his autocracy.
After Suzy left, I waited impatiently for Ev to come home from work, and I told him about Suzy and George as soon as he walked in, as if I were giving him a conciliatory, homemade gift. “Guess what!” I said. “Suzy’s in love.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said coolly. “That’s good.” Nothing else.
I don’t know what I expected—that Suzy’s love affair would somehow rekindle ours? No, of course not. Only maybe that he would be reminded of us, of the powerful connection we’d had that led to our having Suzy, and that eventually led her into the thrilling, risky business of giving yourself to someone else.
Later, I heard him talking to her on the telephone in the boys’ bedroom, his voice full of the affection and enthusiasm he’d withheld from me. I went into our bedroom and shut the door. Then I sat down at my computer and sent an e-mail to Michael. “What’s going on?” I wrote.
12
The next morning the doorman buzzed me on the intercom to say I had a delivery, and did I want the package man to bring it up. My first foolish thought was that Ev had sent me flowers as a peace offering, although I knew that wasn’t his style. My father, on the other hand, had been a florist’s dream customer. He seemed to have had whole formal gardens decimated for my mother’s pleasure, his exotic offerings arriving regularly in a white van. Any flowers I’d ever received from Ev were delivered in person, clutched in his fist, and they had been bought from a street vendor on the impulse of love, or the onset of spring, or for no apparent reason at all. Daffodils and daisies, usually, that looked as if they’d just been plucked from a meadow.
When he wanted to apologize—a pretty rare event—or to make up after an argument, he was more likely to ambush me with an embrace at the kitchen sink, or bridge the distance between us in bed with his entire body. “Let’s stop this, okay?” whispered huskily into my hair or my neck was the closest Ev ever came to an act of contrition.
The delivery turned out to be a large carton filled with the back issues of
Leaves
I’d ordered. There was no note enclosed, only a standard packing slip buried under those Styrofoam peanuts that cling weightlessly to everything, especially your fingers. The journals themselves were so crisp, they might have come right off the press, except for a slight yellowing of the covers and the edges of the pages.
Sunning,
I think rare-book dealers call it, a cheerful word for the ravages of age.
As he’d promised, Tom Roman had flagged those issues containing my mother’s poems, with yellow Post-its affixed to the pale gray covers. There were a number of them, and my hands trembled as I opened the earliest issue. Her poem, called “Minor Surgery,” about slicing radishes, was short and delicate, until the last line. I tried to imagine how she must have felt, seeing her name in print, and those broad, clean margins around the poem, like breathing space. I could almost hear her voice in my head saying the lines with me as I read them aloud. When I reached up to dab at my eyes, a packing peanut drifted silently out of my hair onto the page, like a comical sign from beyond.
My mother’s contributor’s note in the back of the magazine said, “Helen Brill lives in Riverdale, New York, with her husband and daughter.” It was typical of new writers in those days—women, anyway—to identify themselves by their domestic arrangements.
I scanned the other contributors’ notes for recognizable names and there were a few, including Phil Santo, our workshop leader in Iowa, and a poet whose single collection came out quietly, almost stealthily, from G&F in the 1980s. One or two writers were said to be have finished novels or volumes of poetry, but I guess they were never published. So much for fame and fortune, I thought, surprised that the bitter ache of rejection was still so easily revived.
My mother’s poems in the other issues of
Leaves
were all familiar to me; there had been drafts of them in her accordion folder. I observed the way her contributor’s note had evolved over the years. For the issue with her third poem in it, she’d written, “Helen Brill lives in New York with her husband and daughter”—deftly discarding unhip, suburban Riverdale— and from then on, “Helen Brill’s work has appeared in previous issues of
Leaves
and other journals,” disposing just as neatly of my father and me. I also noted, on the copyright page, that
Leaves
had been published in Menemsha, Massachusetts. Wasn’t that on Martha’s Vineyard, right next door to Chilmark?
That afternoon there was a letter from Thomas Roman in the regular mail delivery. He said that he had been thinking about my request for anecdotes about my mother. “I wonder if the following might be useful for your memoir.” I had almost forgotten that particular lie. “In one of her early letters, Helen told me that you’d contracted chicken pox, and how difficult it was to keep you from scratching at the rash. ‘My poor little Alice,’ she wrote. ‘It comes over her in a frenzy, and I have to hold her hands and sing to distract her. Songs like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” seem to work best, although by the third or fourth round, I’m usually starting to itch, myself. Thank goodness she bites her nails!’ ”
This excerpt from my mother’s chatty letter gratified and disappointed me at once. I realized how eager I was for anecdotes about my early days that I could no longer hear from my parents, and I was pleased that she had chosen to write about me to a literary friend. But at the same time I felt strangely let down by the bland familial content of the letter. I was still looking for passionate secrets, the parts of her life I didn’t know about. Maybe Tom Roman had kept the more significant letters to himself.
I could vividly recall having chicken pox, the violent itching, those unsightly spots. I’d caught it from Violet, like all the other childhood diseases, and despite my mother’s best efforts to keep me from tearing at my own flesh I still bear two faint scars, one on my chin and the other just under my hairline. The mention of my bitten nails reminded me of what a ticky child I was—the way I twirled one particular strand of hair until it finally fell out, and that blinking I did in my tenth year.
What was it I hadn’t wanted to see? So many things, starting with my own scowling, pale face in the mirror, those nearly invisible eyelashes and eyebrows. I looked something like Pinky, the pet rabbit in my classroom at Chapin. I practiced wrinkling my nose the way he did, but that, at least, was one tic I didn’t acquire.
“It wouldn’t kill you to smile, Alice,” my father used to say, unsmilingly. And, “Watch out, or your face will freeze that way.” I took him literally, of course, believing that my sour expression might be forever fixed, especially in winter, when everything was frozen into place. Blink, blink, and he would be gone, along with his ominous predictions. But there was another unsavory sight that refused to rise to the surface, that dove under the skin of memory and made my chest tighten whenever I tried to think of it. Why couldn’t I remember what that was?
When the phone rang, I found myself hoping that it would be Ev, even if he’d only called on the pretext of some household matter. I still felt alienated from him, but I also missed him, perversely enough, and nothing had been resolved between us. Or maybe it was Scott; I’d hardly spoken to him since that painful conversation on his street. Despite Ev’s cynicism, I’d tried to assign purer motives to Scott’s unexpected visit to Carroll Graphics than merely copping a plea, and I had put in a call to him the night before, leaving a message on his tape. “Hi, Scotty, it’s Mom. I just wanted to say hello, and that I’m really happy you went to see Dad the other day.”
It was only Violet on the phone, but I was even glad to hear from her— I guess I couldn’t stand being at odds with everybody at once. She didn’t apologize for siding with Ev and criticizing me; she just resumed talking to me as if nothing had ever been wrong between us. And I didn’t really mind. As Violet herself once remarked, too much time and energy are wasted on the social graces.
“Violet,” I said. “Do you remember when you gave me the chicken pox?”
“You never forget a favor, do you?”
“No, listen. I got a letter from this man my mother used to know, Thomas Roman. He was the editor of a small literary magazine about a million years ago. It was called
Leaves.
”
“How come he wrote to you?”
“It’s a long story. Actually, I wrote to him first. He published several of my mother’s poems. Anyway, I don’t know why, but I think she may have had an affair with him.” Was that something I
wished
had happened?
“My God,” Violet said. Then, “But what does that have to do with the chicken pox?”
“Nothing, really. But you know that something has been bothering me, right?”
“Duh, yes.”
“Well, maybe this is it.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You’ve completely lost me now.”
“Do you remember when we were ten, and I started blinking and my parents took me to that awful Dr. Pinch?”
“Am I on
This Is Your Life
?”
“Violet, wait. That bad feeling I’ve been having? I think it has to do with that, with my blinking, with my father and mother, and something I couldn’t stand to look at.”
“I thought it was just a midlife crisis.”
“Well, maybe that, too,” I conceded.
“So what couldn’t you stand to look at?”
“That’s the thing,” I said, feeling the air go out of my elation. “I don’t really know.”
“Then why don’t you try finding out?” Violet said, gently for her.
“You mean, go to see someone?” I asked, beset by a sudden wave of panic. “I’m liable to start blinking again.”
“It doesn’t have to be a Dr. Pinch. How about that psychologist you saw after you lost your job?”
“Andrea Stern,” I said, and I remembered sobbing in her office as she studied me with contemplative sympathy. I was surprised and pleased that Violet had brought her up, since she hadn’t found her for me. Lucy Seo, my friend at G&F, had recommended Dr. Stern as “literate and compassionate.” “I did like her,” I told Violet. “And at least that was short-term therapy.”
“Alice, you
quit.
”
“I suppose so. But why go digging up things that might not even be true? And I hate all that recovered-memory crap. Do you remember the travesty in that nursery school in California? What am I supposed to find out, anyway—that my father abused me?”
Violet’s silence, fraught with everything unsaid—
You brought this up,
you know. Don’t you want to feel better? What are you afraid of?—was finally, mercifully, interrupted by the beep of my call waiting, and I said, “I have to take that. It might be Ev.”
But this time it was Scott, returning my call. “Thanks for the message, Ma,” he said, “but I don’t think Dad was all that thrilled to see me the other day.”
“Well, I guess he’s still a little mad at you.”
“Way more than a little.”
“Yes, maybe,” I conceded. “But you know that he loves you. He even made a point of telling me that, right after you came to see him. He just wants you to behave more responsibly. Me, too, of course,” I added. I realized that Ev and I were acting in concert, for once, even if he wasn’t actually aware of it, and even if we were working Scotty over like the proverbial good cop and bad cop.
It seemed to be effective, though, because Scott sighed and said, with seeming sincerity, “I’m really trying.”
“Good, dear. That’s all we ask of you.”
That night, alone in bed again, I browsed through my new library of
Leaves,
the way I used to scour other literary magazines, on the lookout for new talent. That was a long time ago, when I was still a real editor at a real publishing house and profit mattered, but it wasn’t
all
that mattered. A couple of the stories were truly promising—Tom Roman had had a good ear and a responsive heart.
I could hear Ev padding down the hallway to the kids’ bathroom, brushing his teeth, flushing the toilet. He’d come home late; his secretary had called during the afternoon to say he wouldn’t be here in time for dinner, that he’d get something downtown. I’d eaten my dinner alone, choosing undemanding nursery foods—poached eggs on buttered toast—with the TV on for company. And now I was listening like a nocturnal animal for further sounds from his end of the apartment. But I didn’t hear anything else, and soon the bar of light under my door went out.
Scott’s narrow single bed had to be confining for Ev; he was such a turbulent, sprawling sleeper. I squeezed my eyes shut and sent him a telepathic message, the way Violet and I used to beam messages to each other over the rooftops of Riverdale, when we were seven or eight and convinced that we had special powers of communication.
Ev,
I signaled, with fierce concentration,
come back to bed. Come back to me.
I lay very still in the waiting silence, but of course nothing happened. So I shut off my light, too, and tried to prepare myself for sleep.
And then the phone rang, with that jarring shrillness it always seems to have late at night. I glanced at the clock—it was almost midnight—before I grabbed the receiver. “Hello,” I said, and I could hear Ev breathing into the extension in the boys’ bedroom. A man said, “Alice?” and Ev abruptly hung up.
“Who is this?” I demanded, identifying the voice on the phone in the same instant. “Michael?” Had the message I’d tried to send to Ev gone that far astray? I switched on the lamp. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “It’s late, isn’t it? Did I wake you up?” I could hear background noises now: other voices; music; laughter in little bursts, like gunfire. He was probably in a bar, but he sounded sober, in every sense of the word.
“No, it’s all right, I was reading. Are you okay?” I realized that I had slid down under the covers with the phone, and I was whispering, the way I did when I was a teenager and a boy called.
“Yes. No.” He gave a dry little laugh. “I guess I’m having some sort of a crisis.”
“With the writing, you mean?”
“Yes. It seems to have stopped.”
I heard Ev’s footsteps again, going past my door this time, heading for the kitchen. The water ran and then stopped with its customary little shriek. “You’ve been really prolific,” I said into the phone. “This might only be a normal pause, you know, to catch your breath, collect your thoughts.”
“You think?”
“I do, Michael,” I said. “I really do.”
Ev went by once more right then, in the other direction. Had he hesitated for just a moment? I couldn’t be sure, and soon I heard the door to the boys’ room close.
“Maybe,” Michael said, doubtfully.
“Some people, some writers, have a fear of closure,” I told him, thinking, with a start, fear of
dis
closure. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Do you know how the book ends? Have you done an outline?” These were questions I usually asked much earlier in a project, but the pages had been coming steadily, so I’d simply assumed his answers—that he did know the whole story, and that a formal outline would have been stultifying.