Good Family (30 page)

“Bullshit,” says Sedgie. “I had nothing in common with my father.”

My memory of Uncle Jack is of a jokester—the loudest and crassest of the uncles, seldom serious, flaunting the virtues of his wife’s family the way a rebellious teenager mocks his parents. I refrain from pointing out the similarities to Sedgie.

“Weren’t Uncle Jack and Uncle Dickie, like, Republicans?” says Beowulf, picking off the pepperoni. “I mean, they had that company.”

“That
company
,” says Philip, “has been very good to this family.”

Ian has focused in tightly on Sedgie, who has a dab of grease on his lips. I fiddle with my fork. The camera drifts from face to face.

“At least Uncle Halsey was a war hero,” says Sedgie, referring to Derek and Edward’s father. “He didn’t weasel out like
my
father.”

We all knew the story about Sedgie’s father’s bum back that kept him home pushing papers. Aunt Pat defended his contribution as an essential administrator, but my mother told us Uncle Jack never got over women handing him the white flower of cowardice, assuming him to be someone who had “bought” an exemption.

“What do
you
think, Derek?” says Ian, focusing on him.

“I think,” says Derek, his voice assuming moral authority as he stares directly into Ian’s lens, “that evolution is arbitrary, not purposeful. We don’t consciously select for our environment. Our environment selects for us.”

We chew our pizza contemplatively.

“Buddha says that corporeal life is a mirage,” says Adele. “As opposed to the spirit, which is constant.”

“Expand,” says Ian, caressing Adele’s exquisite features with his camera. “In your own words.”

In the final edit, Ian may feature Adele’s fiddling with her spoon or the slightly blank look on her face. The down on her head is filling in, and I notice it’s flecked with gray. “Aunt Ev, for instance,” she says finally. “Where is she now?” She looks from me to Dana. “Is her spirit still flowing within us?”

“We’re nothing like our parents,” says Sedgie.

“I don’t even know who my parents
are
,” says Jessica. Ian cuts quickly to her.

Philip clears his throat and opens his mouth to say something, at which point Dana jumps in and, much like my mother, changes the subject. “We need a new dishwasher,” she says.

“We don’t need a dishwasher,” says Adele, the pizza uneaten upon her plate. “Louisa did for years without a dishwasher.”

“Louisa, my darling,
was
the dishwasher,” says Sedgie.

“What about
paper
plates?” I say.

“Miriam needs a job,” says Sedgie.

We look around. Ever since they took Mother’s body, Miriam has been almost invisible. It occurs to me that this is Miriam’s loss as well. How many people has she ushered through the last stage of life, making it possible for them to transition with a minimum of discomfort?

“That is so racist,” says Jessica.

“Work is work,” says Sedgie.

“The most successful systems,” Derek says, nodding, “find a way to adapt.”

I wonder if Derek should be shot from below to give him authority? Or from above to diminish his stature?

“Yeah?” says Sedgie. “How much money do
you
have?”

Derek opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, the racket of a vibrating knife stops us all short. Wedged into the table seam, the knife crescendos deliriously while Beowulf—the apparent mastermind of this prank—shrieks with laughter.

O
h, God help us,” says Sedgie, holding up an album with Neil Diamond on the cover. “Whose is this?”

Dana holds up her hand and confesses to having gone through a major Neil Diamond phase. Tossing it aside, Sedgie seizes on another album, whisks out the disc, sets it on the turntable. With a skip of the needle, the voice of Steve Winwood fills the air. “Get down!” says Sedgie, who jumps up and sweeps me into a clumsy waltz, the two of us, in giddy three-quarter time, twirling around the room to “Heaven Is in Your Mind.”

At first, we’re the only ones dancing, then Adele and Jessica grab each other’s arms in a sort of hip-hop minuet. Sedgie throws me back as the instrumental takes over. In slow motion, I fall into the arms of Derek, who catches me, our bodies colliding like galaxies. His arms are strong and familiar. I freeze, but he turns me and lifts my arms into a dance position the way he used to pose me. The guitar and percussion of “Dear Mr. Fantasy” starts.

My feet don’t move.

Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune…

Derek sways me. I stare into his eyes. It’s the sort of song that sent me reeling as a teenager, full of base and plaintive lyrics and a rock-me-baby tempo. Derek’s hips brush against mine; our bellies touch.

I break away.

Ian has filmed all of this. For a moment, he lifts his head from the viewfinder and follows me with his naked eye. I pretend to study another album cover while Derek stands alone in the middle of the room. Angus wasn’t much taller than Derek. At our wedding, he twirled me around. Jamie and I danced together in my dorm room, our bodies locked, my head crooked in his neck the way Sadie’s was crooked in my mother’s. But this is the first time I’ve danced with Derek.

What does Ian mean by that look? Is he adding up the pieces of the story I tell at AA meetings?

My name’s Maddie. I’m an alcoholic…

The resounding response of,
Hi, Maddie!

And then I would tell them. About the train times. About hiding in the wood room, the comfort I found in darkness.

Our father was stern. My mother cut her nails.

I’d tell them about Angus. I’d tell them about Sadie. And sometimes I alluded (but only vaguely) to this thing I had for my cousin.

Ian keeps the camera running as I stride toward the stairs.

A
dele’s question stays with me. Where
is
my mother? Is this world one of our imagining where we all transcend existence? Now I search for meaning in the empty room of my mother. It is where my great-grandparents slept, even after the death of their daughter when Grannie Addie wrote to her friend that the view from the room was wasted. After she died, Bada and Banta slept here until they, too, were gone (their essence, according to Adele, immutable, but assuming other forms). At one time or another, the Halseys, Aunt Pat, and finally, my parents—all denizens of this room.

If it was up to me, I would tear down the window coverings, move the bed (the old mahogany one, not the hospital rental) close to the window, where I could see the lake. I would fill the room with flowers cut from my
great-grandmother’s garden. Those that currently adorn the room are store-bought, tight-knit arrangements of Johnny-jump-ups and bachelor’s buttons. Like demons, I will cast them out in favor of the Victorian beauties of my ancestors.

Already, the bureau is filmy with dust, the initialed ivory brush set of my great-grandmother cracked. Opening the little desk, I rifle through its contents. The tiny bottle of vodka stares back at me. My mother, the pragmatist, must have stuck it into her purse during an airplane flight. Derek’s touch has brought back memories of longings and awakenings, and I crave that vodka, its shill’s siren song of hope. Making a silent plea to Betty, I slam the desk shut.

Above the desk is a bookcase filled with an assortment of old and venerable titles along with a smattering of John Grisham and Danielle Steel. I trace my fingers across the spines of the books. Between
Little Women
and
The Late George Apley
, I find a small, leather-bound book that, when I open it, is filled with my great-grandmother’s arabesque. I look at the date of the first entry. July 1890. Downstairs, someone has put on Frank Sinatra singing Cole Porter, but there are shouts of protests, and Frank is replaced by Cat Stevens’s
Tea for the Tillerman
. I pocket the book.

I scan the titles, remember Miriam replacing one on the shelf.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. I Heard the Owl Call My Name. The Untenable Teen
. I pull down this last one, page through it, and find a dog-eared chapter on “Sex and Pregnancy.” Did my mother look to these pages for hope and solutions when she discovered her elder daughter was with child? I can see her smoking and poring over the fine print. It must have been a hell of a summer. Adele and her Italian, me and my Harold Robbins, Dana in hysterics because she was in trouble, and it was going to kill our father. Did they plot together, Dana and my mother? Did they call Mr. Marks and ask him for a doctor’s name? I have a vague memory of my sister coming home that fall, but it is convoluted with another, earlier memory of her saying,
I don’t
need
the Pill
.

I open
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and out falls a flower. Not even a flower—the mere silhouette of one. I hold in my hand, like a dead butterfly, one of Miriam’s pressed, desiccated memories. I open more books, and more flowers fall out. Book after book, until the floor around my feet is strewn with the paper-thin shards of our lost summer days.

O
nce again, I wallow in the delicious sleep of childhood. Usually, I wake an hour before dawn, but last night I stayed up until after midnight, reading the purloined copy of Grannie Addie’s diary, especially the entries from that unhappy summer.

I turn the page, skip entries that describe housekeeping problems and the weather, pause at her entry of August 20, in which my great-grandmother describes the beauty of going back up the shore that, in happier days, she might have appreciated.

I know that church. It still stands today. The Indian woman Lucille lived close by in a square-logged cabin that smelled of smoke and wet wool not far from where Dana and I dropped off our hitchhiker in 1974.

According to the diary, early in the summer of 1890, the Miners from Louisville stayed in the Lantern Room, where I am sleeping now. The Miners raised horses and dogs, and gave my great-grandparents a gift of a Jack Russell doorstop that became eponymous for the room down the hall. They stayed less than a week. The brief, rather chilly entry in my great-grandmother’s diary reads,
Elizabeth is running a fever. We have sent the Miners away.

Was scarlet fever the gift of the Miners?

A knock on the door, and I rise, squinting fuzzily through the windows at the glorious, blue-drenched day.

“Morning, sunshine,” says Ian, who is mercifully bearing a tray of coffee.

“Bless you,” I say as he climbs into bed with me, the two of us side by side, adjusting our limbs and our steaming mugs, protecting the old stained quilt from yet another indignity. “Why couldn’t you be straight, Ian? You’d make the perfect husband.”

“Straight men never make perfect husbands, Maddie.”

“They have their virtues,” I say, sipping daintily. I push the diary toward him. “Look. It says here my great-grandfather drank. And they put Grannie Addie away.”

Ian touches the book like a holy relic. “Put her where?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they had a nicer name than ‘madhouses’ by then. A sanitarium?”

“She writes about it?”

“Barely. After her baby died, she stopped writing for nearly a decade.”

“God,” says Ian, nuzzling me.

People in New York think Ian and I are lovers because we often walk hand in hand. But we are merely playing at it, both of us afraid of the real thing.

“Can’t we smoke in here?” he says.

“No.”

“Shoot heroin?”

I shove him away. “And listen to this!”

I extract an ancient photo from the diary. It is of my great-grandfather Edward, standing beside a canoe. His pale sepia eyes could have been gray or green. A hundred years later, they have reappeared in Derek.

“You know,” says Ian, placing his cup on the bedside table and scrunching up a pillow behind his neck, “Virginia Woolf had relations with her half brother. And look what happened to her.”

A vision of myself filling my pockets with stones and walking into the lake. At the far end of the island, there are drop-offs. The descent would be sudden and swift; the light from the surface swallowed by the darkness.

“I didn’t have ‘relations’ with…Why are gay men obsessed with Virginia Woolf?”

Ian throws up his arms in exasperation, hitting his coffee cup. A new stain blooms on the bedspread. “You barely share at meetings. You barely share with anyone.”

Wounded, I say, “I share with you. I share with Dr. Anke.”

“Maddie,” says Ian patiently, “don’t you think you’re the tiniest bit repressed…”

I slam the diary shut. Today is the day of my mother’s memorial service. Everyone will come together on the lawn of the yacht club. The Hesters will be there. And the Baileys and the Hobsons, and the Drape Man and his wife. My wardrobe may be bereft of Lilly Pulitzers, but for today, at least, the appropriate color is New York black.

D
ana is on the phone. “I don’t want a European one,” she says. “You can never get them repaired.”
Dishwasher
, she mouths at me as I come downstairs.

Sedgie is at the dining-room table in his Hawaiian shirt, the
New York Times
crossword in front of him. “I told her we should have a meeting to discuss this. But, no.”

“At least someone’s taking charge,” I say crabbily.

“What got into
you
last night? You disappeared before the fun began.”

“I guess I already had my share.”

“You
are
dreary, Maddie.”

By midmorning, all the cousins are scrubbed and ready for the burial and the luncheon. I find Dana in the kitchen, leaving a note for the appliance installer. “Only in Harbor Town could you call and get same-day service,” she says.

“Only at the Sand Isle Yacht Club,” I say, “could you put together a luncheon for two hundred in one day.”

“Or a wedding.”

I watch her write. Her handwriting is flawless and lovely.

“You know, Grannie Addie didn’t have a kitchen for thirteen years,” I say. “Much less a dishwasher.”

“Grannie Addie was nuts,” says Dana.

“How much?”

Dana finishes the note, weights it down on the counter with an eggcup. “Seven hundred. And sixty. Installed.”

I whistle and pat the old dishwasher. “Soooo, how much money do
you
have…more or less?”

We were always told to “never touch the principal”—that core investment on whose yield we rely. If you touch the principal, the well could go dry. It is a cardinal sin. But what
is
the principal, exactly? Our Addison stock that has limped along, but, unlike buggy whips, survived? Or is it an abstract number from which a percentage is drawn to underwrite our varied and profligate lives?

I, for one, have been touching mine for years.

Making a little moue of disgust, Dana finally quotes a number. It is substantially greater than my number. Hers is a number born of frugality and reinvestment, the staid and conservative La Cañada life. Mine is not a negligible number, but it has been eroded by divorce and disaster, not to mention what Adele would describe as “following my karma.” Nevertheless, I do the math, estimating the sum total of all the cousins’ numbers. Philip, who seems to have the clearest idea of these things, has told us what it will cost to keep the Aerie.
More or less
, he said.
Count on more
.

I bite my lip. I have the sudden, desperate yearning for a family member who can make some real money. A movie star or a rock star would be nice. “Dana,” I say, “you’re going to have to touch the principal unless we’re all in this together.”

Dana scrunches up her face. “I know. And what are the chances of that?”

A
n hour later, we have buried most of Mother’s ashes in the cemetery on the bluff. At the bottom of a hole the size of a wastebasket sits a heart-shaped rock, retrieved by Beowulf from the beach. Ian filmed the whole thing: Sedgie trying to look tragic, then breaking down into genuine sobs, the rest of us following, until we were all huddled together, weeping. No grown-ups there to tell us otherwise, no one to tell us to stand straight and be a brick.

“A stone heart,” whispered Ian afterward, wiping his eyes. “Think of the symbolism.”

“At least it
was
a heart,” I said.

I
t is just past noon. Already, people are gathering. My parents’ friends come in two types. There are the “old shoes,” who have let time and gravity take its course. Their hair is gray, their footwear practical, their sweaters (draped over their shoulders on this hottest of days) cabled in pink or green. The Hobsons (Aunt Dottie and Uncle Paul) fall into this category, as do the Baileys. The men have lost their vigor due to malfunctioning prostates, and the women (always tough, but disguising it under an ebbing tide of estrogen) have come into their own. They speak their minds in loud voices, saying, “Good Lord, Maddie! It’s like seeing a ghost! If I was your mother, I’d have written you off.” They own large, happy dogs that bark.

Then there are the “well preserved.” In this group, the women, especially, have defied time. Take Mrs. Swanson. Hair insistently ash blond, teased into full volume. That little brown sheath of a dress, spiked heels, gray eye makeup, and skin stretched into seamlessness. She wiggles her fingers at me. Jewels ignite like flashbulbs. “Soooo sad, Maggie.”

“It’s Maddie.”

Ian sidles up with an iced tea and introduces himself to Mrs. Swanson.
He’s looking very Turnbull and Asser with a monogrammed shirt, red tie, blue blazer, and those ghastly shoes.

“A director?” says Mrs. Swanson. “How divine.”

I notice a run in my nylons. I know better than to wear black stockings on Sand Isle. Sand Isle is a bare-legged place, regardless of the occasion.

“I was an actress—well, a model—when I met Gerald,” Mrs. Swanson tells Ian.

“You didn’t give it up, did you?”

I can see Ian framing Mrs. Swanson’s face as she tells him about her life. What Ian doesn’t know is that Mrs. Swanson’s son Tad wrapped himself around a tree in the summer of 1974. The Swansons and the Baileys do not speak. I have half an urge to warn Mrs. Swanson that Ian’s portraits are not necessarily flattering, but she has a ravenous look in her eye. The ice clinking in her glass, she leans into Ian and whispers. After a minute in which I am ignored, she throws back her head and laughs. Ian, too, laughs—a spastic expulsion. He wipes his forehead with his cocktail napkin, watches as all ninety pounds of Mrs. Swanson slither away.

“Well!” he says.

“Well, what?”

“She thinks…” He starts laughing again, which annoys me. This is a memorial service, after all. Just because Ian goes to so many funerals doesn’t give him license.