Good Family (33 page)

A
dele clings to me, her eyes glistening, her fuzzy head tickling my cheek.

When we were children, it seemed like forever until the following summer. I cried every year when it was time to go. We’d send the trunks ahead filled with Petoskey stones, but the train returning to California at the end of August was never as happy as the train heading east in June.

The horse and carriage are waiting. “Sed-GIE!” Adele screams in a dreadful imitation of Aunt Pat. In her current incarnation of destitution, Adele has no place to live, so she’s going to New York with Sedgie. For a moment, I feel incongruous, unbearable love for her.

“Oh, Adele,” I say. Her body feels like a broomstick in my arms.

Sedgie pushes through the front door with his duffel slung over his shoulder, Ian following him. Sedgie mutters something about the Citroën, then stares balefully at Adele. “Just when I thought I was single.”

“You offered,” she says, smacking him on the shoulder.

“Drive safely,” we call after them.

“See you in New York!” yells Ian, blowing Sedgie a kiss.

“Really?” I say, turning to him.

T
he next morning, I take Ian to the airport. Standing at the gate, Ian shifts on his feet. Then he looks down on me with those gray eyes that have been anchoring me for the last decade, given me meaning and hope.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“I mean, when everyone leaves?”

I smile back at him while they call his flight number. “You’re a kind man, Ian.”

I watch his back as he climbs the stairs of the plane. In a couple of days, I’ll follow him.

W
e’re down to the last of us. Derek is going to push off with Beowulf and try to make Gary, Indiana, by midnight. I hear the last trills of a recorder before it is put into its case. In the living room, Beowulf picks out the
Appassionata
—his homage to Mother before he departs.

“I think she enjoyed your playing,” I say as Beo leans down to kiss me good-bye.

Beo squeezes Jessica tightly. From where I’m standing now, it looks like the embrace of affectionate cousins, nothing more.

“Good-bye!” Beo yells as he heads down the steps. “Don’t let Dana sell the house!”

I turn to Derek. “So.”

He tells me he needs to work things out with Yvonne, but if she doesn’t come back, he’s going to go to Vietnam.

Derek, the Conscientious Objector.

“You’re finally going?”

“I need to understand what happened to Edward. You want to come along?”

But what happened to Edward hadn’t begun in Vietnam. If it began anywhere, it was here with the beady eyes of ancestors staring down from the wall.

Derek pulls a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and hands it to me. I take it from him, unfurling it to see an intact image of my childhood staring back.

“It’s pretty good,” I say. “When’d you draw this?”

“I call it
Maddie on the Stairs
. You must have been, what, ten?”

“Twelve,” I say. The summer of Chippy.

Derek touches my head and descends to the sidewalk, turning back once to sing,
“But he’s touched your perfect body with his mi-ind.”

I laugh. He heaves his duffel into the wagon and starts down the walk. I raise my hands and frame him. The camera pulls back; the film becomes grainy; the shot disappears.

B
efore she left, Adele hauled Mother’s hospital bed away and moved the original mahogany frame into the tower so she could overlook the lake. Adele’s sense of entitlement endures regardless of her circumstance, and no one was inclined to argue with her.

“She’s got the shrine thing going on the drop-lid desk,” says Dana, sitting beside me on the rockers in the afternoon sun.

“Good thing I found Grannie Addie’s diary on the bookshelf before she took that over,” I say.

“What diary?”

So I tell her how our great-grandmother’s loss of her daughter sent her into blackness and a sanitarium where she stayed for years. When she was “cured,” she came home to her husband, returned to Sand Isle, built a kitchen, and wrote a cookbook.

“In a weird way, I relate to her.”

“It’s amazing how resilient people are,” says Dana. “You, for instance.”

It is as close to an acknowledgment as I have ever heard from my sister. We were taught never to praise each other because it would ruin our characters.

“Do you believe in lucid dreams?” I ask her. I could swear Sadie came to me last night, holding the hand of an older woman. They seemed to be telling me something. This morning I awoke with the resolve to send half of our daughter’s ashes back to Angus.

“Your ghost?”

“Adele says ghosts are projections of our previous lives.”

“You’re not taking Adele seriously?”

“Why not?”
They’re not so far-fetched
, Dr. Anke said,
your cousin Adele’s notions about past lives
. But Dana and I have always seen things differently. When I showed her my train film, she said,
It’s interesting, Maddie. But I don’t remember it that way at all
. “It’s hard to come home,” I say.

“That’s the difference between you and me,” says Dana. “I find it hard to leave.”

The sound of the screen door opening, and Jessica pushes through, dragging her suitcase, the door banging in her wake. Her roots have grown out, but she looks softer than when she arrived. Maybe I’ve grown accustomed to the tattoos. “You two look thick as thieves,” she says. Fixing her eyes on me, she adds, “It’s our ‘pinup’ girl.”

I look from her to Dana. “Whatever happened to our time-honored tradition of keeping family secrets and letting them fester?”

Ignoring me, Dana says, “We should replant the garden. If we don’t take care of this house, where will we come to find each other?”

“I thought you were worried about the cost.”

“Are we really that broke?” says Jessica.

“It all depends on you,” I say. “What are your prospects?”

“Me?” Her eyes widen. “I’m going to be a movie star. Just look at me!”

I have to admit she
is
beautiful…the most beautiful in our family. Probably because she’s adopted. “Do you have any talent?” I say.

Jessica smiles confidently. Again, the virtues of adoption. “Ian says he’s going to give me a screen test.”

“Ian is totally grandiose.”

Philip yells from below that it’s time to go.

“C’mon,” says Dana. “We’ve got to get you to the airport.”

I rise with them, but Jessica puts her hand on my shoulder. “Good-bye, MaddieAunt.” I can tell from her expression that she needs to be alone with her parents. For a second, it pierces me, but I reach out and grab her, embracing her as I might have held my own daughter, wrapping her tightly the way a mother should, telling her that she’s fine, that it’s okay to go. As she and Dana head down the steps, I ache for my mother. I wonder what she would have told me if she could have spoken at the end.

I
won’t miss this weather,” says Miriam. “Not in the least.”

Standing by the porch rail, we watch from the porch as Philip, Dana, and Jessica board the carriage. Miriam has on her “traveling” wig and is dressed in a double-breasted yellow pantsuit. Her eyebrows are sharper than ever, and her lipstick looks suspiciously like one of my mother’s.

“What do you think, Miriam?”

“Oh,” says Miriam, “she’ll find her way. They usually do, even the ones who have to learn everything the hard way. You know the type.”

“I wasn’t talking about Jessica.”

“Me neither.”

After a pause, I say, “I was talking about the family.”

The two of us flop down in the rockers. Miriam adjusts her wig so that it’s even more crooked. “I’ve lived with plenty of families over the years. You get down to the bone—family is family. Nothing much special about this one.” She begins to rock. “Your mother, though. She was something special.”

Sitting next to the old, black home-care nurse who wiped my mother’s bottom, I, too, begin to rock.

T
he last page of my great-grandmother’s diary is smudged. I read until 1
A.M
. and have woken before dawn to read again. Grannie Addie returned to this house, haunted by memories. She awoke to the sound of a child crying in the night. In several pages, she alludes obliquely to hearing voices, but like my cousin Edward, she grew cagey about whom she told.

About her own Edward, she said,
My husband follows me everywhere.

Their life went on. Grannie Addie came to herself and persevered. She was, after all, a wife and a mother when that was a woman’s highest calling. She watched the nineteenth century become the twentieth, saw the horse and carriage give way to the automobile, gaslight to electricity, the communal dining of Sand Isle replaced by a kitchen of her own. In 1915, Einstein crafted his Theory of General Relativity. The following year, Grannie Addie’s older son rode through Turkey on a camel, but managed to avoid the war. To my great-grandmother’s horror, he returned home with yards of silk, a hookah, and “a bit of a hashish problem.” A year later, her second son, our grandfather, married our grandmother, thus assuring a lineage to uphold the Aerie.

By the time the vote was granted to women in 1920, Grannie Addie had lost a granddaughter (my infant aunt) to influenza. Throughout this loss, her mind stayed intact. In the meantime, appalled at the influx of Catholics to Sand Isle, Grannie Addie entertained the Presbyterian minister, stitched sachet pillows with her lady friends, and wrote down recipes for tripe. But in her scrawled prose, I detect the vestiges of trauma.

Almost three decades earlier, while Grannie Addie was incarcerated in her “rest home,” two French brothers named Lumière created one of the first motion pictures by casting light through transparent, contiguous images, resulting in the film
The Arrival of a Train
. So realistic was the impression of a train advancing toward them that the frightened audience fled the theater. Ralph Feingold would say that film is an apt analogy for the sly subterfuge of matter. But those Edwardian innocents, seeing the train conjured out of nothing, were convinced that they’d gone mad.

S
oon, the sweeping will start, and then the first light. The house creaks, whispers—the chatter of joist and shingle. In a few weeks, it will be boarded up, and after that, autumn leaves will drop and languish until spring. I, too, could lie here all winter, but I need to get up and pack. The letters and diaries of my great-grandmother, themselves like fallen leaves, clutter my bed. I fell asleep to Grannie Addie’s description of the shocking arrival in the harbor of the Baileys’ yacht, the
Little Annie
. She thought the vessel nouveau and garish. We, her descendants, perceive it as a charming example of faded glory.

You can’t go back to the train times. I breathe in deeply the Michigan air. Tomorrow, I will be inhaling traffic fumes and New York heat, deafened by the sounds of sirens. For a moment, I savor the lake and the pine, the mildest aroma of lavender.

She’s here with me. I can feel her all around. Dana says there are no such things as ghosts, but I disagree. I have come to believe we are all part ghost—full of archaic notions and the bequeathed DNA of skin and hair, reconstituted beliefs like modified recipes, a mishmash of dishes, old photographs, and pen marks on the wall. Ghosts lap at us like the tongues of small animals. I see ghosts in the lines of Grannie Addie’s letters, in my
own habit of putting on shoes at dinner, in the imprint of a hand pressed against a window, in the needlework of women trying to cling to their minds.

There! Do you feel it? She is with me on the bed. A woman with mut-tonchop sleeves on a black lace dress. She leans over and pulls my head to her shoulder, embracing me like a mother would a child. She whispers words of comfort and encouragement. She says,
Dearest, let me tell you about the house
.

First, my deepest gratitude to my real-life family, who indulged this project with good-natured enthusiasm—my sister Tracy and my extraordinary cousins who over the years have bestowed upon me the gift of solidarity, humor, and love.

And to the ladies—the “girl-pies” as Suzanne says—bound by more than words, true sisters all: Alison Sackett, Mary Beth McLure-Marra, Suzanne Lewis, Sheri Cooper Bounds, Phyllis Florin, Elissa Alford, and Linda Schlossberg. Thanks for your honesty and your tenacious faith.

Once again I am blessed to work with Jennifer Brehl, brilliant editor, and Carole Bidnick, agent and friend, whom everyone should have in their lives.

Peggy Knickerbocker, Tamara Hicks, Maria Hekker, Hathaway Barry, and Peter Boyer for invaluable feedback.

To Mary Pitts for unfailingly finding loveliness in plainness.

And always to my husband and children—Peter, Chapin, and Anna—who have grown accustomed to sharing their world with imaginary people and mythical places.