Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
“You really ought to call Malcolm. You haven’t phoned him since we got here.”
“What’s there to say? That an assortment of New York weirdos don’t know their asses from hot rocks?”
“Lissie went to the best specialists,” Honora’s hands were trembling as they curved around her waterglass, yet she spoke with a faint trace of that English remoteness that commanded respect from everyone.
“That obese slob can’t be the best.”
“The point is that Lissie needs training, and so do you. She’s cut off from the normal ways of communicating, so you have to teach her other means—we’re lucky she’s so very quick—”
“Except in the hearing department. There she’s slow.”
“Malcolm can be transferred home.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Joss, you’ve never hidden from the truth.”
“Since when are you an expert on babies? I’ve read enough books, I’m a mother. Children develop at different speeds, you know.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“How should I talk to you, when you keep insisting Lissie’s defective?”
“You’re not ten years old, Joss. The last thing Lissie needs is a mother who snipes at everyone and gives off hateful signals.”
“That two-ton quack and his cronies admitted
they couldn’t be exact. I say Lissie simply hasn’t reached the stage where she can respond to their booming and banging and bone oscillating. In her own good time she’ll learn.”
“Never.” Honora’s eyes were shadowed and wet. She went around the table to put her arms around her sister’s shoulders. “Joss, you’ve got to accept Lissie’s deafness. Otherwise you won’t be able to help her.”
Joscelyn couldn’t take any more. Shrugging away from Honora’s embrace, she leaped up, overturning her chair.
“Lissie is not deaf!”
she screamed at the top of her lungs.
“She is not deaf!”
* * *
When Joscelyn arrived at the Daralam airstrip, Francie Duchamp and Mary Curtiss were in the narrow slot assigned to waiting females, both of them waving their covered arms.
As they took the diaper bag, the car seat, the burdensome overnight bag, Joscelyn said quickly, “The kid’s fine. Not a thing wrong with her. I guess Malcolm and I were out of line, expecting her to be a genius all the way around. She’s just not very quick on the aural side.”
At home, she phoned the shack that was field headquarters for Pump Station 5.
Malcolm’s first words were: “How’s Lissie?”
Joscelyn’s throat seemed to close, and air could not get to her brain. She was hyperventilating.
“Joss? You still there?”
“She’s fine. I guess we were out of line, expected her to be a genius all the way around.” Joscelyn said, repeating by rote. “She’s just not very quick on the aural side.”
“That’s all? It’s developmental?”
“Yes,” Joscelyn gasped.
“Hey, and I’ve been too chicken to call and ask about my little sweetheart. Give her a big kiss and tell her Daddy misses her and loves her.”
Thursday night, makeup freshened, hair shampooed and blown-dry, Joscelyn hurled herself into her husband’s arms.
“Welcome home,” he said in a low sexy voice. “Welcome home, baby.” He kissed her as if they were lovers, not a married couple.
For a few more seconds she luxuriated in his embrace, then she blurted, “Darling, doctors are such dumb asses.”
His body tensed, and his arms fell away from her. “What does that mean?”
“The premeds never were the brightest, remember, just the ones who got the grades—”
“What the fuck did Weller say about Lissie?”
“Please don’t shout at me. I can’t explain properly when you’re this way.”
“You better get yourself straightened out, Joscelyn, I’m warning you. If there’s something the matter with
my
kid, the last thing I want to hear is your lies.”
“It’s complicated, Malcolm. They don’t know Lissie the way I do. They played with some electrodes and gave her this imbecilic unscientific noise test—
I
couldn’t even hear some of
the sounds. With a baby this young they aren’t sure anyway. I’m the one who knows her, and I can see she’s perfectly fine. Sit down, let me fix you a drink—”
He thrust his boyishly handsome face pugnaciously toward her. “What the fuck did they tell you about
my
daughter?” He punched her upper arm.
It was a mean blow, and as she staggered back a step, the past week’s assortment of thin, fat, Jewish, Oriental, didactic and reticent specialists, the biting spells of vertigo, Honora’s dark, worried eyes, and Lissie—most of all, Lissie, peacefully sucking on a rubber toy while the last trump sounded—roiled up inside her like vomit.
“You want to know what’s wrong, I’ll give you what’s wrong!” Joscelyn shouted. “She’s deaf! Our beautiful, perfect daughter is profoundly deaf!” At this, her first self-admission of Lissie’s handicap, Joscelyn’s heart was banging against the walls of her chest like a wrecking ball. “She’s deaf. Three different sets of specialists said
your
daughter’s cold, stone deaf!”
Panting, she awaited physical retaliation. Malcolm bent his head and closed his eyes, standing in his sweat-stained work khakis with enforced stillness. She saw a tear squeeze from his right eye. Had he looked like this when bullied by that monster, his father?
“Darling, I’m sorry, so sorry . . .” She was crying, too. “I shouldn’t have yelled it out, but I hadn’t let myself believe it before. I’ve blocked
it all the way. Oh God, and she’s so perfect otherwise.”
“It’s permanent?” He didn’t look up.
“The eighth cranial nerve is damaged in both ears. The doctors all said the same thing. No hearing in the high frequencies, practically none in the low. There isn’t any surgery to correct nerve damage. She’ll always be deaf.”
His sigh shook.
“The doctors said we ought to go home,” Joscelyn said. “The sooner she starts her education, the better. And we both have to learn how to help her.”
He wiped his eyes with a grubby knuckle. “There’s no deafness in my family,” he said in a pleading tone.
“Nor in ours. I feel such a failure.”
She reached out to him. They clung together, swaying back and forth in their shared, accepted grief that the child born from the tangling of their imperfect lives was flawed, too.
* * *
A few minutes later, after Malcolm had bathed, both Urquharts came over with Double U’s inevitable welcome home to Lalarhein, a tuna noodle casserole. Joscelyn, putting Lissie down, could hear their conversation.
“Nothing’s really bad with the kid,” Malcolm said. “But she does have a hearing problem that needs a little minor correction, so it’s my guess she and Joscelyn will ship home soon. If it were anything major I’d go with them like a shot, but since nothing’s vital, I’ll stick it out until the pump station’s finished. Besides,
there’s the groundwork I’m doing with Khalid, you know, on the big airport project Ivory’s hoping to sew up.” Malcolm’s voice lowered casually, as it always did when he insinuated he was in the epicenter of big doings, a trick of his performed so ingenuously that most people took his self-aggrandizing hints at face value. “I’ll hang in here.”
There hadn’t been time for them to plan their departure, but Joscelyn had never considered it would not be
en famille.
The air conditioner came on with a blast, and she could not hear them anymore, but she was realizing with a jarring misery that their daughter’s handicap was even more unbearable to Malcolm than it was to her.
He’s going to try to ignore it
, Joscelyn thought.
He’s going to lie to himself and everybody else; he’s going to act as if her deafness doesn’t exist.
She continued to smile down at Lissie, but her hands shook as she tucked the yellow sheet around the baby and her favorite giraffe.
In Taormina, that final week in December of 1966 was like summer.
Crystal, in a white bikini, lay on her back by the pool. Pads called mouse bras covered her eyes. One knee bent, arms at her sides, she shimmered with a cream concocted specifically for her by a Zurich dermatologist who had taken into account the Sicilian latitude when he charted the maximum number of minutes she should expose herself to full sun. No skin-corrugating mahogany tan for Crystal Talbott, but the palest of ambers to honor her fair pigmentation, blond hair and blue eyes.
The pool was a hundred vertical feet from the tile-roofed villa, a polished blue fingernail on the landscaped finger of the little isthmus that jutted out from the cliff halfway to the sea. Steep ledges carved in Roman times led from the house to the pool and thence down to the dock; however, modern inhabitants preferred the glass-enclosed elevator that clung to the rock.
Crystal’s timer buzzed.
She slipped on an eyelet beach robe, moving to the shade of a flowered marquee. From here
visitors invariably described the view hyperbolically, calling it the most gorgeous in Sicily, Italy, Europe, the world. To her left, the town of Taormina tumbled from the medieval outcropping of Castel Mola to the azure Ionian Sea, a picturesque jumble of red roof tile, pastel stucco, maroon bougainvillea, spired church domes and square gray Crusader towers. Taormina was tethered both to history and the point of the bay by its most eloquent relic, the massive red brick ruin of the Greco-Roman theater. Crystal turned to her right, craning to see the abrupt rise of Mount Etna: a thin curve of smoke feathered above the volcano’s uneven cap of snow.
If only the weather holds for the Saudis
, she thought. The Talbotts had invited the Saudi Arabian commission in charge of planning highways to “an intimate weekend” at the beginning of January.
Luxurious entertaining was the villa’s purpose.
Crystal, mistress of those artful, seemingly noncommercial friendships that give one the advantage over competitors, last year had determined that their second home, which sprawled along a fairway on Carmel’s Seventeen Mile Drive, was too stodgily bourgeois in this jet-set age. So when she heard from her old friend, Imogene Burdetts Lane Steenberg Capelli, that an Italian film star fallen on hard times was selling the spectacular Taormina property at a substantial loss, she flew over. One quick walk through convinced her. The
modernization that had retained the villa’s eighteenth-century charm, the remnants of the original Roman estate and—most of all—this view would seduce any prospective client. Gideon groused about buying a vacation home in such a remote spot: however, having years earlier accepted his second wife as an indispensable part of his business (because of Crystal, Talbott’s had a substantial backlog even during cyclical slumps) he finally agreed to the purchase in his gruffest tone. And Crystal had bargained the desperate actress to an even lower price. The Talbotts had owned the villa ten months and thus far it had already paid for itself twice over with the contract to plan and oversee Egypt’s Mitwan Dam, where Gideon had been for the last three days, since the day after Christmas. He was returning to Sicily late this afternoon.
Boisterous masculine laughter rang over the roar of the sea, and a moment later Alexander appeared on the terrace, followed by Gid. Droplets shone on her sons’ dark tans, and their hair was plastered down with seawater. Both carried snorkels, fins, masks.
Gid’s infant resemblance to Gideon had become more pronounced, the same top-heavy torso and burly calves. His dripping thatch of curly hair was brown, he had Gideon’s round brown eyes and the heavy jawline, on which a scattering of zits showed.
The likeness, though, went only skin deep. Gid lacked the self-confident drive, the righteousness of his father. An innately decent,
good-natured boy with a mild sense of humor, he kept his thick shoulders slightly hunched, as if to shrug off the adolescent doubt and insecurities that swarmed around him. His even white teeth, now displayed in a disarming smile, were the one feature he’d inherited from his mother.
Alexander, fifteen months younger, had shot up this past year and was an inch or so the taller. He had the long, narrow, Sylvander bone structure. Slight in comparison to his brother, not as physically mature, he moved around the pool toward her with a graceful assurance that made Crystal catch her breath.
Her second son was beautiful, no doubt about it.
His hair, darkened now by seawater, had the same gilded brightness her own had possessed naturally in her teenage years, and he wore it in the longer style of that irritatingly loud musical group from Liverpool, the Beatles. Alexander’s nose was fine and tilted slightly, like hers; he held his head at an arrogant backward tilt. His long, tawny eyes presented a continuous if subliminal reminder of Curt Ivory: because Crystal loathed the sire while adoring the son, she never consciously let herself dwell on where Alexander had gotten this particular feature.
Not only in appearance were the two Talbott boys near polar opposites. At Menlo, their prep school, Gid went out for team sports—soccer, hockey, football, baseball in season—while Alexander concentrated on tennis and golf,
games that in Crystal’s mind would benefit him later.
A
was for Alexander, while Gid earned
C
’s and
B
’s. Gid seldom inhabited the detention room. Alexander was a regular: he had been involved in several prep school scrapes, the most recent involved a marijuana cigarette. Though Alexander had vituperatively and repeatedly denied culpability, Gideon had deprived him of his Vespa for the Christmas break, grounding him over Crystal’s protests.
“Mother,” Gid said, holding out his large, clenched hand. “I found something near the wreck.” This rocky bay had claimed armadas of ships from different millennia. “It’s for you.”
“Thank you, dear,” Crystal said, half rising. Gifts gave her a charge. Gid, knowing this weakness and knowing also that he was bottom man on the fraternal totem pole, spent much of his modest allowance on small presents for her. “Show me.”
Gid opened his fingers to display a thin, irregular disk thick with encrustation.
“It’s a Roman denarius,” Alexander said.
Gid turned. “You told me it was probably a shilling.”