Good Family (24 page)

Life was simpler then.

“I was Amish,” says Sedgie.

“I saw that film,” says Ian, nodding sharply, his mouth full of pesto and potatoes. “Flawed, but
you
were brilliant.”

Kiss-ass, I think.

“So,” says Dana, “what are you doing tomorrow?”

“Is Maddie taking you swimming?” says Philip.

“I’m a terrible swimmer,” Ian says.

“So’s Maddie,” says Dana.

“I’m taking him on a tour,” I say. “Ian has been fetishizing about Sand Isle for years, so I want to debunk his romantic notions.”

“Too late,” says Ian. “I’m already besotted.”

I
have taken Ian to see Mother. He stands at the door, taking in her diminished size, her staring eye, her sacrosanct stillness, and her improbable hairdo sticking straight up from her head.

“It’s okay,” I say, nudging him in. “She hardly knows we’re here.”

“She’s so…” His voice trails off.

“Mother?” I say.

She takes a sudden, deep, shuddering breath. Ian clutches the doorframe. I cross to where Mother is lying, beckon him over.

“This is Ian,” I tell her.

Her right eye drifts toward him. The clot that traveled to her brain, stealthy as a thief, landed in her right lobe, and robbed her of oxygen. The X-rays showed a small white mark the doctors called an “infarction”—the kind of word that would have made me snigger as a child. This mark—barely perceptible as an aberration in the folds of the brain—is, in fact, the epicenter of her disease. From it, paralysis reverberated like an aftershock. Deprived of its ability to instruct her left side, her mind interacts only with her right. Her left eye, therefore, remains closed.

“Mrs. Addison?” says Ian. He leans in close, takes her hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

For the first time in weeks, the right side of Mother’s mouth draws upward into something resembling a jack-o’-lantern smile. Her eye beams around and settles fixedly on Ian’s face. She makes a sound like “Ga.” It is the first sound she’s spoken in my presence since I’ve been here. It is as profound an utterance as I have ever heard. I say so to Ian.

“It’s my winning smile,” he says as he meets Mother’s gaze. “You know a good man when you see one, don’t you, Mrs. Addison?”

“Ga.”

“Don’t call him names, Mother,” I say, glancing up at Ian. “She was always calling my boyfriends dreadful names.”

“I’m not your boyfriend, Maddie.”

“Except for Angus. No name for him.” I look back down at her. “He was a ‘no-name’ husband, right, Mom?”

Her lopsided smile doesn’t waver. Her gaze bounces off me, but I swear her eyebrow drifts up. It’s nearly nine, and the horizon is glowing red. Sailor’s delight. From downstairs, the clatter of dishes being put away followed by a jazz riff on the piano. Outside, the drumbeat of waves. Ian and I stand on either side of Mother like acolytes. I touch her hand. The hospice ladies said that dying seeps in from your fingertips and toes. Mother’s once-vivid nails are cold and brittle as mica.

“I’m
not
her boyfriend, Mrs. Addison. Maddie’s got to get it through her thick skull. She’s incredibly dense about these things.” He winks at me, but elicits only a pale smile in return. This pattern of amusing Mother at my expense is frighteningly reminiscent of Angus. But Ian doesn’t stop. He leans into Mother. “The thing about Maddie is she doesn’t realize that she’s smart and funny and beautiful, and she doesn’t have to be such a bottom-feeder, don’t you agree?”

Mother starts as if an electrical pulse surged through her. I think Ian has alarmed her, but when I look at her face, I see a facsimile of glee. She’s having a marvelous time. In her heyday she might have mocked Ian’s Adam’s apple, his thin blond hair, his uncanny resemblance to Ichabod Crane; now I can see she adores him. She used to say she’d take up with a gay man if something happened to Dad.
They’re so much more fun
, she said, and
they never bother you in that way
.

Y
ou’re a hit,” I say to Ian as we sit on the deck drinking coffee under the night sky. “Everyone thinks you’re brilliant and witty and fascinating.” I look at him. “Yesterday, they didn’t know who you were, Ian. I swear to God.”

“Ye of little faith, Maddie.”

“I’ve never had faith. You know that.”

“Ye of little hope, then.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Ah.”

“Tell me.”

Ian considers this while gazing out on the horizon, where Venus hangs like a Hester diamond. From the living room come hoots of laughter, Dana’s exclamation of,
Where’d you find
that? Bats dart and dance in the dusky sky, predating insects. “Hope,” Ian says finally, “is the acknowledgment of infinite possible outcomes.”

I blow the steam from my mug. “You sound like Ralph Feingold.”

“You asked.”

I take a sip. Someone has put on an old record, but I can’t quite make out the music. Stars are awakening in the night sky and winking madly back at us. If there are infinite possibilities, why did everything always feel like it was written in stone? There were no choices, only acceptable and nonacceptable paths. Possibilities, perhaps—but few alternatives.

“Then I hope…”

“What?” says Ian.

“Good question.” I recognize the music now—one of Dana’s old Traffic albums. “
Seems I’ve got to have a change of scene
…” I sing along softly.

“You have a terrible voice,” says Ian.

“
But someone’s locked the door and took the key
—” I break off. “What do
you
hope for, Ian?”

Ian smiles inscrutably, raises his eyebrow, and rocks his chair. “MaddieAddieAddison. You know better than to ask.”

“You’re not dying, Ian. You’re not even sick.”

“Ah, yes.” He looks at me. “What I hope, Maddie, is that, in the meantime, you can lighten up.”

It seems to be a running theme. If I could unclench my fists, life would
be better. I would have more fun, not to mention friends. I might even date. Instead, I change the subject. “So, what do you make of Sand Isle?”

“Sand Isle?” The name sounds exotic coming from Ian, like some far-off place he’s visited. Inside, someone starts the song over. The light from the house is reflected in Ian’s eyes, making them almost feverish. I hear Adele laughing, and Derek saying, “No, no—the other one!” And over it all, Sedgie bellows to the music. The air is sweet with the perfume of lake and leaves. Ian sets down his coffee, folds his arms behind his head, and kicks off his loafers. “Sand Isle is a dream, Maddie. Like some strange, beguiling dream of childhood. You could sit right here and think the world makes sense.” He looks at me. “It’s crazy.”

“Exactly,” I say.

F
or the first time in two weeks, I awake feeling rested. It’s a peculiar feeling, reminiscent of some long-ago place in which I was completely happy. A memory of cards spread across a table between Mother and Dana and me, my mother’s throaty, smoke-filled voice as she laughed and said,
You two!

I stretch, squint, and only then realize that the room is ablaze with sun. The yardman has swept and gone; the horses are making their rounds; and from downstairs—the sound of Dana laughing hysterically and the smell of something buttery.

Ian, I think.

Pulling a sweater on over my nightgown, I head down to the dining room. Ian is telling Dana a story about how we shot ten times the normal amount of tape on Ralph Feingold, “…just so we could find something—
something!
—that we could make sense of. Everything the man said was obscure. You didn’t know whether to fall on your knees and worship the guy or call 911.”

I take stock of the stacked pancakes on the sideboard; the heap of scrambled eggs with herbs; something that looks like runny brains but
which, I suspect, is Irish oatmeal. It’s still too early for Sedgie to have risen, much less play chef.

“You?” I say.

Ian winks. I have told him about the breakfasts Louisa used to make, getting up at 6
A.M
. to slice strawberries or wash blueberries for pancakes. As a child on Sand Isle, I never once rose without the smell of coffee brewing and bacon frying.

“You’ll spoil the group.” For the first time, I notice how big Ian’s hands are. Farmer’s hands.

“I told everyone to be here by eight-thirty,” Ian says. “Miriam’s taken Evelyn’s Ensure up to her, and Philip’s down on the boat.”

I cross my arms. “Anything else I should know?”

“Adele and Derek have gone to meditate on the beach. Sedgie, alas, is still asleep.”

I try not to laugh. “Oh, Ian, you think you can corral this bunch?” But just as I say it, Philip pushes through the front door, and Jessica comes downstairs. Ian looks at his watch. Within minutes, Adele and Derek have materialized, along with Beo and Jessica.

“Oh, my God!” says Jessica, staring at the sideboard.

It seems to be the universal sentiment. Even Sedgie, staggering down at the last minute, seems impressed.

Ian has assumed the superior look he gets when he tells his life story at AA meetings—a saga that is generally met with a similar level of disbelief. I, myself, didn’t believe it at first—a debacle full of such delirious highs and gut-wrenching lows as to make my own story of taking to my bed to drink myself into oblivion pale by comparison.

You actually woke up in Barcelona?

Madrid
, he said.
And yes
.

For three years after Sadie died in her crib, I would wake up after a night of drinking unsure what day it was. Sometimes, I didn’t know the season. I found an apartment when I left Angus and crawled into sodden hibernation like a bear.

“Look at these!” says Jessica, fingering the pale pink place mats edged with lace.

“There are drawers full of linens,” Ian says. “And silver that needs polishing.”

And in the pantry—china. Place settings for twenty or more, ten different patterns. Simple white breakfast china with fluted edges. Flowered tea china. Gold-edged dinner china. Pyrex pitchers mixed in with the Waterford, orange-and-yellow plastic next to the Minton. Chipped cups. Useless cups. Bowls for consommé and fingers.

Ian points out the tea set that sat on the sideboard for years until Aunt Pat announced it was a nuisance to maintain and insisted it be put away. Now Ian has resurrected it along with my great-grandmother’s gold-and-turquoise dessert plates, a silver toast rack, and the Salton hot plate my mother bought in the seventies.

“No finger bowls?” says Sedgie.

Everyone is standing around with their hands in their pockets, looking like hick guests at a too-fancy wedding. However accustomed our parents may have been to being served—and graciously at that—time has scoured the taste for luxury out of our generation like plate off base metal. We could no more have a Louisa in the kitchen than a chauffeur in livery. None of us knows exactly how to respond to Ian’s charming but weird replication of our childhood family breakfasts.

Except for Adele, who has shown up in a batik sarong and with sandy feet. With less than a moment’s hesitation, she grabs a plate and starts enthusiastically piling it. I notice fine fuzz forming on her scalp.

“Thatta girl,” says Ian. “Got to keep your energy up for all that transcendence.”

Adele throws back her head and laughs. One by one, we follow her to the sideboard, reverentially selecting eggs and melon balls and curly, crisp bacon as if it were Communion. We pour coffee from the ancestral silver, use a monogrammed spoon to ladle oatmeal. We take our seats, each of us naturally gravitating to where we sat as children. Ian takes the head of the
table, bestowing his presence like that of a revered minister. Pulling up his chair and shaking out his napkin, Ian announces that, since early this morning, he has been talking with Adele about reincarnation, and that Adele has informed him that her inheritance is karmic, having to do with past-life experiences of impoverishment and destitution.

“We were talking about guilt,” Adele says, serenely chewing on eggs. “And who we were in previous lives.”

There is a moment of silence, and then everyone chimes in about who they think they might have been. Jessica insists she was Vietcong, now forced to live with American capitalists. Beowulf thinks he perished in the Holocaust because his music is so morbid. Adele calmly informs us she was Mary Magdalene, Nefertiti, and, after an interim stint as a maid in medieval Japan, David Livingston’s wife. “At least, those are the lives I have hits on.”

“A
maid
, Adele?” says Sedgie.

“Don’t people always assume they were someone important?” says Jessica. “Like Mother Teresa?”

“Mother Teresa’s not dead,” says Dana.

“Whatever,” says Jessica.

“What-ever,” Philip says, mimicking her. “Fine talk for a Communist.”

“What does this all have to do with guilt?” I ask.

“Money,” says Sedgie. “Filthy lucre. The ill-gotten inheritance of wastrel scum.”

“Good estate planning,” says Philip.

“And you, Maddie?” Ian asks.

I push a melon ball around my plate like a tiny head. “What past life caused me to end up in this one?”

“Make a stab,” says Sedgie.

But I’m at a loss to explain what past-life scenarios would manifest in my now being among cousins in a too-big summerhouse, waiting for my mother to die.

“C’mon,” says Dana.

A vision or a memory: I am seated in a canoe, shaded by a fringed bit of silk. There is a bundle in my lap. A baby in a blanket. With my free hand, I stroke the water and smile into the face of my husband, whose mutton-chop sideburns, mustache, and high-collared shirt speak of a different era.

“Grannie Addie?” I say weakly.

“Foul,” says Sedgie. “You can’t be the incarnation of a family member.”

“Isn’t that, like, incestuous?” Jessica says.

My eyes flicker to Derek, who seems to be regarding his oatmeal. Who was that husband in my dream smiling back at me? Who was that baby in my lap?

“You’re all nuts,” says Miriam from the landing on the stairs, where she has been listening to the last few minutes of our conversation. “Do you really think that once you’re through with this life, you’ll get another try?”

“Sit down for a change, Miriam,” says Sedgie. “Have a plate.”

“You
do
believe in the transmigration of souls?” says Adele, her eyes following Miriam’s dark head as she approaches the sideboard.

“Mmm,” says Miriam, her attention riveted on the remaining pancakes. She fixes a brimming plate, joins us at the table.

“Life after death?”

“Oh, yes I do,” says Miriam, digging in.

“Do you realize that before the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, reincarnation was an accepted premise of Christianity?”

Miriam’s eyes narrow. “The council of
what
?”

Adele leans forward eagerly. “The bishops met to select the gospels—”

“The
bishops?
” says Miriam, outraged. “Girl, that is the
Word
you’re talking about, and the
Word
says we’re going to be raptured, and those who aren’t are going to be left behind.”

“That’ll be us,” says Sedgie happily. “Stewing in our own juices.”

“The heretical Presbyterians,” says Ian the Jewish Lutheran, nodding solemnly.

“Infidels,” adds Sedgie.

Again, I feel that peculiar sensation of happiness. In a past life, Ian woke
up in Madrid and spent the day at a bullfight with a man whose name he didn’t know. Upstairs, with glacierlike tenacity, Mother moves toward a new incarnation that is seemingly open-ended. Reincarnation is something I used to think about, seeing Sadie in giggling, hair-tossing girls who were the age she would have been. Thus my fixation on a Band-Aid-covered knee, the scuffed sneaker, a raveled braid, a cry of
Mommy!
Even though I suspect it is a fantasy, I flirt with the notion that her soul somehow appeared in another baby just after she died. I wanted to believe Sadie was still with me. I want to believe it now.

L
eaving the cousins to do the cleanup, I finagle Ian to myself. We make our way through the ruined garden. I push down the collar on his Lacoste shirt, but he flips it back up and picks the dead head off a sunflower. The boards on the walk are loose or rotted. Some have completely broken away. Virginia creeper encroaches; worse—poison ivy. I steer Ian around a particularly virulent-looking patch. Decades ago, after contracting a vicious case of poison ivy, Sedgie drew a map showing the way to the beach. Since then, his drawing has been pinned next to the refrigerator, yellowing and curling with age. It depicts a bird’s-eye view of the house rendered in colored pencils, the flight of stairs, the flagstone path through the myrtle.
Beware the spiders!
it says.
Beware the poison ivy!
—with a arrow drawn to a scribble of green covering the dunes.

Ian crosses his arms and stares up at the facade of the house. Rising from the sandy soil of the garden is the boat room. Above that sits the porch and the tower room, where carved garlands once decorated the fascia. Three stories up, a bank of bedrooms, including Mother’s, overlook the lake. This is the south side of the house, baked by the sun in summer, battered by storms in autumn, gutted by ice in winter. It wears its face like a once-beautiful woman who has known sorrow and happiness, and who wasn’t afraid to live.

“It needs paint,” says Ian.

“Every three years.”

“Not recently, from the look of it.”

It occurs to me that perhaps we’ve missed a cycle—that after Aunt Pat died, Mother forgot to call the painters. It also occurs to me that after Mother goes, the task will fall to us.

“Adele tells me she has no money.”

I push back my hair. It needs cutting, and I’m sure the gray is coming in. “Yeah, well, you know the situation.”

Ian shrugs. He knows the details of my own finances as intimately as if he were my spouse—more so, in fact, given that when Angus and I were married, I kept the stark facts of my inheritance to myself. It wasn’t until we signed our first joint tax return that Angus said,
Bloody hell, Addison. Why do you want to work?
By the time I left him, Angus had ferreted out every detail, and he wanted to be compensated.

But wealth is relative, and what seems like a windfall in your twenties looks paltry when you need serious money to produce a film. Ian and I have leveraged my meager fortune to garner grants, loans, investors. Still, we make our films on shoestring budgets, and the fact of our house needing paint seems daunting.

“What do you suppose it costs?” says Ian.

I, too, cross my arms and scan the building. It’s more than paint; it’s corroded hardware and broken panes and lost shingles and dry rot. The Dusays allegedly spent millions to build their shiny new house. Even split among six cousins, our old house will require thousands from each of us to maintain.

“Kiss our budget good-bye,” I say.

Neither Ian nor I has ever owned a home; we are both chronic renters. But own the Aerie I will when Mother dies—along with Dana, Sedgie, Adele, Derek, and the long-absent Edward. Together, we will have to decide when the dishwasher needs replacing, the stairs repaired, a piece of furniture tossed.

“It’s too depressing to contemplate,” I say.

“Can’t we rent it out for movie sets?”

I stare at him in disbelief. “And what’s with this
we
?”

We continue down to the beach, passing through the cedar and overgrown lilac that form a gloomy cave around a landing.
Enter at your peril!
Sedgie wrote on this section of his map. From here, the stairs trace steeply down the dune and end at a boardwalk that disappears altogether as we come out on creamy sand edged by rock and the lapping waves of Lake Michigan.

Ian gasps. “It’s lovely, Maddie. It’s as beautiful as any beach I’ve seen.” The tenacious pulse of waves, the rattling rocks. Seagulls catch the wind, caw, dip. The air is fragrant with pine and fish. “Imagine your Victorian ancestors kicking off their shoes and stockings, hoisting their skirts, and showing a bit of flesh.”

“And bloomers,” I say.

“How did they pee?”

I try to imagine my starchy Victorian ancestors hiking up their ruffled taffeta and lowering themselves over chamber pots. They took umbrellas to the beach, had staffs of seven or more, but the call of nature was unavoidable, and the plumbing, such as it was, allowed for little dignity.

“What’s this?” Ian says, regarding Derek’s burgeoning mound made of rock and wood. “A beehive? A
stupa?
”

“C’mon.”

We make our way up the beach, scrambling over wooden cribs that were built to retain the sand. The windward side of the island is overgrown with scrubby pine, beyond which oak and maple and alder stand nobly. The houses of Sand Isle are perched on the hill, half-obscured by the trees. A few leaves have started to turn.