All the Finest Girls (12 page)

When I was very young, Hank had taken a prestigious chair in New Haven and become an impassioned political activist, teaching to packed classes. The students embraced him as a happening counterculturalist. Selma, Vietnam, Cambodia — Hank saw it all coming; he knew the score. Of course, he hadn’t prophesied the mellowing of the nation’s consciousness a few years later. In the self-improvement seventies, Hank’s point of view became at best irrelevant and at worst a real drag. By the time the tall ships sailed up the Hudson in all their vain Bicentennial grandeur, Henry Abraham had flamed out.

I read my father’s work until the library shut down. Then I went back to my dorm room, pulled out a couple sheets of notebook paper, and wrote him a long letter, posting it to Vermont, where he was on sabbatical with his bride, Linda, whom he had finally married. He’d sent me a postcard with news of his wedding and a return address, “if you need anything.” Mercifully, I’ve forgotten much of what I wrote. I did devote some space to an exigesis of my father’s hypocrisy, enumerating the ways in which he had betrayed his own philosophy. I questioned why he had married my mother, a rich woman, why he had married at all, given what we knew of the horrors of Materialism, the deceptive nature of Love, man’s propensity for cruelty. “You seem, ultimately, to have missed the point, Professor,” I wrote with such fury that I can still remember how the ballpoint pen dug into the page. As I recall, I signed off the letter with one last toxic dart. “I hope your honeymoon offers you the kind of rest you so richly deserve. Perhaps you’ll be glad to know just how big a break you’re getting. I’ve enrolled in a snappy little course on contemporary American philosophy. You are not on the syllabus. Your loving daughter, Adelaide.”

Not surprisingly, I didn’t hear much from Dad after that. He tried some — a phone call every birthday, notes attached to a magazine piece or newspaper article he thought might interest me — but I wasn’t very encouraging, and after a few years he gave up. What I knew of his life came from my mother, who, for her own complex reasons, kept in occasional touch with him. Eventually, he moved back to the city, where Linda had been offered a high-paying job as a translator for a large corporation. My father took a position teaching undergraduates at a college up the Hudson, where he no doubt waited for the cycles of history to spin around and lift him up again to his brief, former glory. For my part, I took comfort in a philosophy constructed in direct opposition to his beliefs: I embraced my own very human right to ignore his existence.

I’m sorry.

So now I was sick, really disgustingly sick, and my encounter with my father ran a viral course through me.

I’m sorry.

These last words of Dad’s played like a scratched record in my head, in the end drowning out the rest of our exchange. His thin lips moved, disembodied, before my eyes, exhorting me, taunting me, until I was cramped with nausea and crawled to the bathroom, where I began to expel everything my body could offer up.

For the next few days, I was in and out of consciousness. I guess I had surges of physical strength, because I managed to move around the apartment with some indeterminate purpose. I pulled a few things out of the refrigerator — milk, jam, a jar of honey — and left them, untouched, on the counter. I ran a bath, probably hot at one time, but I doubt I ever stepped into it. At one point, I remember waking and striking my head on something flat. It took a few moments before I could figure out that I was wedged for some reason partway under the couch. A clot of dust had lodged between my lips.

Boxes were removed from the cramped storage spaces in my closets, cleaning products unearthed from beneath the sink, sofa cushions reassigned to the floor. Were a stranger to have wandered into my apartment after these four days (and a stranger was exactly what I felt like when I returned to reality), he might imagine that whoever created that mess was either crazy or had been searching long and hard for something. That, anyway, was my conclusion when I stood on the fourth morning, my legs weak as two blades of grass, and surveyed the scene. If I had found something, though, I have no idea what it was. My place looked like a hastily planned yard sale.

I had a little patch, a half day or so, of wellness toward the end of my odyssey. I remember taking some soup and aspirin, changing into a fresh nightgown, and answering the phone once when it rang. My friend Reid (we’d met in a cooking class at the New School — my last attempt at clubby socialization — and he was the only person with whom I spoke on a regular basis) offered to come take care of me, but I was too embarrassed by the bizarre state of my apartment to accept.

My fever spiked again on that last bad day, and then I had a night of dreaming that I can still recall with almost perfect clarity. In fact the very obviousness, the almost hyperreal quality of the images is what made them hard to forget. They didn’t show much creativity. If anything the dream seemed pedantic, designed to insure I didn’t miss a thing. It was as though, in all that retching, I’d popped the top on some moldy, musty trunk full of my uninvited past. When I awoke, I felt buried by the dust of it all.

In the dream I was well again, and returning to work after all those days off. I showered and had coffee, caught the crosstown bus, did everything suggestive of an absolute reality. It was that kind of a dream. The sort where you tell yourself,
Well, I know I’m not dreaming, that’s for sure.
At the south entrance of the museum, Segundo the guard was minding his post, his dolorous face fixed on the surveillance television. Life as usual. When he saw me on the screen, he swiveled on his stool and raised his bushy thatch of eyebrow.
Good to have you back, Addy. Your show is very fine,
he said.
What show?
I asked.
Your show,
he said. His opacity confused me, but thinking little of it, I crossed the Great Hall and took the elevator to the second floor. Making a left, I walked down through the Japanese Gallery and was just outside the American Wing when the landscape suddenly got strange.

Where usually there hung Binghams and Bierstadts and Eakinses, I saw instead the distant outline of figures that appeared intensely, personally familiar. I stood back and looked above the doorway. In gilt gallery lettering were these words:

Adelaide Abraham: A Life

How clever, I said to no one. Just like the title of my grandfather’s biography.
Noah Kane: A Life.
Did they know? Never mind. The rooms were empty and quiet.

On the first wall I discovered a white tapestry featuring an intricate pattern of multicolored balloons. I leaned in close to inspect the cotton fibers and their patches of age and discoloration. Without any surprise I acknowledged what I was actually viewing: the top half of a set of bedsheets from when I was very small. On more than one occasion I’d woken up in the middle of the night and screamed, mistaking the balloons for an army of bugs. Eventually the sheets had been thrown out. Or so I thought.

On the succeeding wall hung a Lucite box and inside it, an unframed painting of my mother on a beach towel, rubbing oil into my father’s tanned back. At the bottom of the picture were a toddler’s toes, as though I’d grabbed the family camera and sloppily snapped a photo. Beyond the box, a small pen-and-ink in an oversized gilt frame depicted a scene from a similarly childlike perspective. A gas pump and the white clapboard of the station were background for the red sleeve of a child’s coat pressed up against a car window. Rain streaked the glass. Yet another, gouache, was an angle of my grandmother’s wide front porch and the blur of a dark, skirted leg crossing the threshold into the day’s waning light.

On and on went the show, some of the pieces mundane and others rich with drama and danger. Although the media were various, all of the work was masterful and precise, and difficult to turn away from. Some felt like tableaux vivants, and more than once I expected the people in the paintings to talk to me.
They’re paintings, Addy,
I had to remind myself. Each one was carefully hung, and I was horrified and a little excited to think that they would be admired and rejected, analyzed and dissected by the museum-going public. I forged ahead for what seemed like an eternity, until an earpiercing caterwaul froze me in my place. Looking up to the cross-hatch of gallery skylights, I saw the dirty pads of an alley cat striding across the glass. I woke with a jolt, my heart pounding. The feline wail of an ambulance passed by my building and continued down Broadway. On my pillow was a stain, a small, angry fist of blood, the source of which I couldn’t find. It was early morning, and my fever had broken.

I returned to work for real that morning. But I don’t suppose I was ever the same. I didn’t feel like me at all, but as though I’d been kidnapped from myself and dropped at an unmarked crossroads with no identification and no map. The museum struck me as completely alien terrain, some unfamiliar, nearly lunar plane. It frightened me. That place of infinite beauty and perfect light suddenly became my betrayer. I had always relied on the museum as a place where I could disappear. I felt cradled and cosseted there, as though the vast scope of the place could minimize, annihilate my anxieties and fears. Now I saw the museum as something else, wholly indifferent to me. A place of cold marble and ghosts. Tombs. Dead things.

Emmeline admonished me for not allowing her to visit, a decision I didn’t remember having made or uttered. I knew I’d lost some weight and probably didn’t look terrific. But it was her tense solicitude, and the repeated suggestion I see a doctor, that convinced me how truly bad off I must have been. Something weird and mighty had gone to work on me, and it showed all over my hollowed face.

When my mother called me with news of Louise’s death, I’d been back at work, in a desultory daze, for two weeks. The information lit a fuse in me, one I was seemingly powerless to extinguish. I called Marva and shamelessly pressed myself on her. I spoke of my grief and expressed my condolences until she was nearly forced to make me an invitation. When she did, I accepted immediately. Of course I changed my mind the minute I hung up, but I knew that by then it was too late.

I told Emmeline that an aunt to whom I was very close had passed away in the deep South, bought a ticket, and got on a plane. It’s likely Emmeline didn’t believe me, by which I mean she didn’t believe any relative of mine had died. I’m not a very persuasive liar. But she probably figured I was heading toward some place for deep psychiatric evaluation or intensive cure. If that’s what she thought, then she wasn’t entirely wrong. I guess I was making a bid for self-preservation, backing out like a mole from my tunnel of darkness. Whatever. I had to go, and so I did.

11

N
EVAH MIND HER
.”

Lou squeezes my hand as we step off my grandmother’s porch, her fingers wrapped around mine in a brown-and-pink fist. The field that separates Further Moor, Edith’s summer house, from the Bay Shoals Road is parted by a long driveway of sand and broken clamshells. We walk quickly, Lou’s whole body pitched forward in a dark slant. It’s our second night in Bay Shoals, and Lou and I have plans to see a movie. But now we’re running late.

August.

Here’s the familiar long slatted shadow, like a picture negative of the widow’s walk, laid across the heather in the late afternoon. Here’s scrub oak, and goldenrod, and fat, goosey gulls cruising inward from beyond the cliff. Blackberries, thorns, halyards pinkeling against their masts, the briny intake of sea air. Here is
Van Riper, your lunch is ready
that comes like a yodel through the privet from the beach club just next door. Sand in my bed, sea monkeys growing like germs in a mason jar on the windowsill, Orange Popsicles, stacks of library books dragged back to Edith’s in a red wagon, the forever unfinished
Self-Portrait
under a curtain of dust in my grandfather’s studio.

Further Moor is far enough away from Coldbrook to stop twice off the highway for bathrooms and lobster rolls.
WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS!
Miles and miles along Basket Alley, a two-lane highway strung together by shops selling saltwater taffy and wicker. A long road away from
You imagine I don’t know what you think of me, but I do, I do know exactly
and
Darling, what are you saying
and
Your contempt is positively viscous; I do believe it’s choking me
and
You’re crazy; what are you saying
and
Fuck you or fuck whoever it is you’re planning on fucking, I’m sure

My father almost never comes here
I’d rather put a bullet in my head
and now he’s too many miles away to think about. I imagine unweaving every basket until the brown threads are laid end to end. Unimaginably far, that’s how far away we are. We have arrived for August at Further Moor and I am with Lou.

I have her.

She is mine.

The smell of summer berries in the warm after-dinner air hangs juicy, blue. Mom is in California, acting in a movie. She’s playing a mother.
Don’t even have to try,
she says. Neither do I. I’ve wished her away, and she is gone.

Edith was in the kitchen and that’s why we’re late.

“Good God, what is that?” she said, looking at my Mocko hat.

“Keeps the Jumbies away,” I told her, running a tongue over and over through the hole where my two front teeth used to be. Lou and I had made the hat that afternoon. It was the Jumbies, Lou said, that had been at me. Evil spirits giving me badways. The hat would make me scary, like the Mocko dancers back home in St. Clair. The dancers dress to chase the Jumbies away.

This will set yah right again

The detergent box that makes the base of the hat sprouts two horns, branches from an apple tree on the back lawn. Seaweed hangs down in soggy strips from the crown, and a veil of moth-eaten lace we found in the attic droops down the back. I painted the sides yellow and brown and pasted macaroni on the front. In the hat I see myself toothless, smelly. It makes me feel strong.