She had pantomimed, “Do you have a date tonight?”
I didn’t. I was supposed to. We had planned to go to the movies, like normal people. And afterward we were going to buy hoagies stuffed to the brim with saturated animal fats. And after that, who knew?
However, normal people aren’t homicide cops, and neither are the folk who keep homicide cops busy. This morning, just before I toodled out to the suburbs for Sunday brunch, C.K. Mackenzie had called in his regrets. Our date was off because it was his turn on the wheel to be assigned, and a fingerless corpse had been found on a brick-littered lot up in The Badlands near Germantown Avenue. Recently, the city has tried quashing drug dealers by demolishing their lairs. The de-digitized corpse had been left on the rubble of a former crack house. Mackenzie would undoubtedly work well past a normal shift.
Philadelphia does not give its police compensatory time off. Instead, it pays overtime, which is no time at all. This policy enlarges wallets, shrinks social lives, and allows significant others to experience only the others part. After nearly a year of nearly knowing Mackenzie, I was still much fonder of him than of his job, and I still didn’t know what to do about it, since the two appeared only in combination.
But the point was, I didn’t have what anyone might call a date tonight. As if she had overheard my brain synapses, my mother turned. “Mandy!” she said with an air of discovery. Sometimes I look at my mother and see myself, gently distorted as in, perhaps, a kindly fun-house mirror. She is smaller, rounder, her features not truly mine, but definitely their source. We both have precisely the same auburn hue on our heads, although now hers is mostly chemical. She achieved the match by holding up swatches of my hair—my head still attached—to every box of chestnut, auburn, brown, and red dye in the pharmacy.
Unassisted nature made our eyes the same confused green, which a seriously yuppified acquaintance described as the color of overhandled money. But whatever their tint, there is a horrific optimistic innocence in my mother’s eyes that I hope is missing in mine.
“No,” I said firmly. “I have things I absolutely must—tomorrow is a workday and I have papers and—”
“It’ll be fun.”
“Not for me. I’ll drive you there, I’ll pick you up, but I really don’t want to go to—”
“A once in a lifetime chance.”
“For what, Mom? Please.”
“Show people. Household names.”
In my household the names were Amanda and Macavity Pepper, and I already knew them. I shook my head. I’m adulation-challenged. I lack the celebrity-gawking gene, the part of the DNA that makes people line sidewalks and stage doors in hopes of glimpsing a famous face. I don’t even understand the urge. And even if I were into such behavior, in this case the household name produced a soap opera I’d never seen. The potential thrill quotient was absent.
“Just for dinner,” my mother said. “Okay? We won’t even stay late. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even meet somebody. Those actors can be very handsome, you know.”
I envisioned my mother scanning the room for potential sons-in-law, then climbing on a chair and auctioning off her single daughter-overstock to the highest bidder. The closer I crept to thirty-one—and I was now only days away—the more panic-stricken she became. “Please, Mom!” A whine I thought I’d outgrown along with my training bra was back in my voice. I reminded myself that I was a mature woman with a mind and life of my own.
My mother raised her eyebrows. “I only meant you might meet a man who spends his time with people who are still alive, unlike your policeman friend.” She laughed warmly, maternally, slyly.
Like I said, she was getting desperate. “I don’t know Lyle Zacharias,” I said. “I never heard of him before today. Whatever your ties to him might be, he’s not connected to me in any—”
“Cindy was Lyle Zacharias’s first wife.”
I looked at my sister. She looked at me. We both looked at my mother. My father, on the other hand, looked away.
“Who,” Beth and I said in unison, “is Cindy?”
“Cindy.” My mother spoke loudly, as if our incomprehension was a hearing problem. “Of course you’ve heard of her. She was your father’s foster sister.”
Repetition of the name made it seem dimly familiar, part of ancient hazy childhood impressions, but nothing more.
“You even met her. They lived in New York and we didn’t see them much, but you did meet her.”
“You’ve never talked about her,” I said with awe. Bea Pepper, the Scheherazade of family gossip, she who trolled all lines for a nibble twenty-four hours a day, the village chronicler of Philadelphia, had remained silent about a foster sister of her husband’s?
“I’m sure we were invited tonight because we’d be the only people there who knew Cindy and that time in his life. A tragic time.” She sighed and stopped looming over my father and, instead, sank onto Beth’s chintz-covered love seat. “Right, Gilbert?” My father appeared to be visiting outer space, and to be having a good time there.
My mother put her hands up. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.” Whenever she is truly upset with my father, she speaks of him only in pronouns. “Lyle kept a gun in his house. For protection. They lived in New York, after all. We told him it was a bad idea, dangerous. Then one day—it’s so horrible—Cindy’s little girl found it and killed her mother with it.”
“Accidentally.” My father’s blissful obliviousness had been replaced by a perturbed expression. Cindy was making it through the drug barrier. “They have laws some places for that now. He’d go to jail nowadays for leaving a gun where a three-year-old child could find it.” He shook his head, still appalled.
“When did all of this happen?” Beth asked.
My mother began her infamous circular computations. “Let’s see, it was just after Uncle Lewis’s seventy-fifth birthday, so when would that be? He and Aunt Gloria had a big anniversary party—their silver—the same day as your first birthday, Mandy, and I remember he married late in life, he was a famous bachelor around town, which means that by then he must have been—”
“For heaven’s sake!” my father said. “Cindy died nearly twenty years ago.”
When I was ten or eleven. How could I have missed an accidental homicide in my own family? What else could have occupied my attention back then when puberty hadn’t even kicked in? Beth looked equally baffled.
“Well, it happened in New York in their home,” my mother said. “You barely knew her, anyway. She never lived near us. Besides, you were away at the shore at the time, visiting Grandma. What was the point of going out of our way to tell you terrible news about somebody you didn’t even know? Parents are supposed to protect their children from bad things when they can. That’s what we did.”
I appreciated the sentiment, but I nonetheless felt uncomfortable. Family secrets jutted like hard-edged foreign objects under the smooth skin of our lives.
“What happened to his little girl?” Beth asked softly.
“Betsy?” my mother said. “She wasn’t Lyle’s, biologically. Cindy was one of those flower children. And then she became one of those flower mothers. The flower father was nowhere to be found.”
My father looked away from us, as if he still found Cindy’s history embarrassing.
“Did he keep her—the little girl—Betsy, after…” Beth’s voice dribbled off.
My mother shook her head. “He was all to pieces, beside himself. Hattie, Lyle’s aunt, who raised him, took the baby. Lyle couldn’t be around her. Your father and I talked about adopting her.”
“Look,” my father said, cutting to the chase, “the…um, natural father was back from Vietnam by then, and when he found out what had happened, he took Betsy. He wouldn’t speak to the family after that.”
My mother stood up. “And we weren’t so much better. Never really tried to see Lyle after that, poor man.”
“He should have kept the baby. Besides, he did fine without us.” My father sounded uncharacteristically hostile.
“I hope nobody ever told that little girl what she’d done,” Beth said, provoking a long, heavy silence.
My mother finally broke it with a pragmatic return to the issue at hand. “I still think it would be wrong to stay away from his party. He wants so much to make peace finally. Did you see the invitation, girls?” She walked to the hall table and rummaged in her pocketbook, returning with a large, cream square.
At first glance it looked quite standard. Heavy stock with bold engraving. It might have been a wedding invitation, except that it was so verbose, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Most of life moves double-time, too quickly to see each individual frame or even to make sense of it. But the half-century marker is a time to pause, take stock and seriously consider the course. I’m very excited about my next fifty years as I switch from one rodent image (the rat race) to another (the country mouse).
But now, before I move on, I want to believe that you—and I—can go home again. Please join me back where my voyage began, to celebrate the points along the way where our lives touched. You are a part of my story, and I of yours, and the only birthday present I want is a chance to see my life in front of me, whole, in your faces, to heal what needs healing and to drink a toast to auld lang syne.
Beth let go of her half of the invitation. “Forgive me, but I think it’s weird,” she said. “Slightly creepy. Inappropriate. Sounds like he has a lot of enemies, for one thing. And then—oh, maybe he just needed an editor, a more careful choice of words. But the way he said it—seeing his life before him—that’s not a birthday wish, that’s what’s supposed to happen to a dying man.”
It wasn’t like my sister to be morbid, so her words struck with extra impact. Which is not to say they deterred my mother.
“You’ll go with me, won’t you? It could be awkward,” she said to me, “without your father there. It’s important.”
And because of the need in my mother’s eyes, the image of a long-dead flower child, and the odd wording of an invitation, I wound up borrowing panty hose and a cocktail dress from my sister and going to a party for a man I didn’t know.
And that, in turn, meant that later in the evening I was there to witness it when, just as Beth had suggested, Lyle Zacharias got his wish and saw his life pass before his eyes. Exactly the way a dying man is supposed to.
BASED ON MY DEEP PREJUDICE about the glitz set, I would have expected Lyle Zacharias to hold his gala at the Museum of Art—after he had it refurbished to his taste, of course. Certainly something splashier than a former boardinghouse turned into a small hotel in a not superglamorous neighborhood—even if the small hotel had been written up in travel magazines as a place to be.
If I had to go to the party, I wanted it to be more spectacular, even vulgar, so I could sneer. “Why The Boarding House?” I asked as we drove.
“He grew up in Queen Village, across the street from it,” my mother answered. “That’s where Hattie lived and raised him. And if I recall correctly, when she was a young woman, she lived in the real boardinghouse itself for a while. Or if not that one, another one. Of course, back then we didn’t call it Queen Village, just part of South Philly, and it was pretty hardscrabble.”
So Lyle’s desire to go home again was not pure metaphor. This was half party, half pilgrimage.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, clearing brief glimpses of street scenes between blurred and aqueous blindness. Driving was difficult and unpleasant and I felt very much the martyr.
I drove past the edges of Society Hill and crossed South Street, its mix of chic and funk on and off visible, like wet strobe lights.
“Did I really see that?” The wipers had cleared a view of a pink awning that stood out even in the rain and dark. “A store called Condom Nation?” My mother’s voice squeaked just a bit.
“Clever wordplay, huh?”
“I try to be modern and up-to-date, but honestly…” She seemed relieved when the brick row houses became more modest and the stores less outrageous. Even here, however, there were signs of creeping gentrification in the scaffolding around buildings and the flower boxes that matched brightly painted window frames and front doors.
My mother sat low, huddling inside her ancient Persian lamb, as if afraid someone might spot her. She was horrified about wearing fur, but refused to buy a replacement because she had no need of a winter coat in Florida. Beth and I reminded her that lambs were not on the endangered list, but in truth, the particular lamb whose curls my mother wore had most definitely been endangered while becoming a coat, so that argument seemed weak.
Thoughts of the sacrificial lamb made me think again of my father’s surprising revelations: a foster sister, a baby, and a terrible accident. The radio played a suitably melancholy song as background to my mulling.
And then an announcer, sounding self-important and solemn, replaced the music. My mother automatically upped the volume. She had become a weather junkie since moving to Boca Raton, and was transfixed by meteorological excesses. Obviously, retired life in Florida didn’t offer a whole lot of excitement. “Forty below in Fargo!” she’d exclaim. “I can’t believe it! Why, at home it’s probably seventy-five or eighty.”
It was always seventy-five or eighty at home, even when it was actually a hundred and twelve or in the midst of a hurricane. I guess it meant she was a happy transplant, but I found it hard to take.
“Flash floods from Paoli north,” the announcer said, even before getting to world news. My mother rolled her eyes and tsked. Only now with the weatherman’s statistical reassurance could she truly believe in the torrential rain pelting the car. She sighed with pleasure. “I’ll bet it’s hot and sunny at home.”
“It’s not sunny at night. Even in Florida.”
She changed the subject. “I feel bad that I’m not using the room Lyle rented. I hate to waste things.” The radio duly reported news of revolt, bloodshed, and inhumanity. My mother turned down the volume.
I had agreed to be my mother’s date. I had agreed to wear my sister’s black and white beaded dress after I’d tried the excuse that nothing I owned suited champagne and caviar. I had tolerated being allowed back in my house only long enough to feed Macavity, check my silent answering machine, and retrieve my lipstick and black silk shoes. But I drew the line at lingering at the event one minute longer than I had to, and that definitely included sleeping over. The Boarding House’s rooms were for Lyle Zacharias’s out-of-town guests. I fit neither category. Nonetheless, my mother was disappointed. I suggested, as tactfully as I could, that she was behaving rather cavalierly about my injured father.