Good Family (4 page)

I drop my voice. “Dana needs me. And we’re taking Mom off the blood-pressure medicine. The Coumadin. Everything.”

There is a long, static-y pause at the other end, and I wonder if we’ve lost the signal. Finally, Ian says, “You’re letting her go? Just like that?”

But Ian should know all about letting go.
Let go and let God.
How many times had we heard it at AA meetings—the sanctimonious if correct response to our shared frustration about the inability to control our lives? Ian calls his higher power Betty.
Let go and let Betty,
he says.

“Yeah.”

“This makes me very, very uncomfortable.”

“You?” I’m indignant. “She’s not
your
mother.” But having listened to me describe them in detail over the years, Ian has always felt proprietary about my family.

“Maddie,” he says, “this makes me very sad.”

And I realize that’s what I’ve been trying to get to. The sadness of it all. My father is dead, and my mother is dying, and none of this is going to last. All the clichés like This
Too Shall Pass
really are true, and I hate it, because it means the good as well as the bad. You have to feel it, and I never wanted to, none of us did, anything but that. So here’s Ian, a thousand miles away,
on the way to pick up his corned-beef-and-rye. I can see him now. His Adam’s apple going up and down, his pale Lutheran hair thinning, his narrow shoulders stoically immune to any attempt at getting buff. He is dodging someone on the sidewalk, graceful as a dancer in the coursing midtown river, a universe away, but essentially here and with me in this gloomy, old dining room, explaining to me the best he can that my mother’s death evokes sorrow.

“Thank you, Ian,” I say as I hang up the phone.

A
s I unload bags of groceries onto the kitchen counter, Dana tells me who is coming and when. On the wall in front of me is my cousin Derek’s drawing of Louisa, childhood nurse and guru of the kitchen, long dead, sorely missed. I make a note to construct a little shrine to Louisa before the cousins arrive, something involving chocolate chips and butter. I have gone to the IGA grocery, where I have found and chosen to ignore plastic-wrapped produce as withered as the lettuce in our refrigerator. Instead, I have loaded up on toilet paper and cereal, six-packs of Ensure, and the strawberry-flavored Snapple that Miriam drinks, bottle after bottle, saying,
Sweet Jesus. This weather.

Jessica’s coming tomorrow, Dana tells me. In her voice, I hear resignation, trepidation, even longing. I want to ask about Jessica’s current state of mind and if the two of them are talking again. Instead, I ask about Adele, object of Ian’s fascination. Older than I by ten years, Adele—the most beautiful of the cousins—married young and frequently.

“Open-ended,” says Dana, telling me that Adele’s current incarnation doesn’t allow for making plans.

“What about Sedgie?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Sedgie has had a tenuous career in the theater. Now he is going through his second divorce, though this one, like my marriage, hardly counted, so brief was it, so obviously influenced by cocaine and a rebound from the actress he’d lived with for seven years.

“Why didn’t he just marry that actress?” I say.

“If he’d married the actress,” Dana says evenly, “he’d be on his third divorce.”

I stare at the can of Campbell’s soup I hold in my hand. “Have you ever read these labels?”

Still, mushroom soup goes with everything, and I’m determined to make this cooking process seamless and not too taxing. Ian calls the Midwest “The Land of Creamy Mushroom and Mayonnaise,” and as if to prove his point, I’ve bought three bags of Ruffles potato chips and dip to match.

“Who else?”

Derek on Wednesday, she tells me, with or without his French wife. I try to focus on the small-print recipe for creamy mushroom chicken thighs. Derek, artist, seer of cousins, translator of truth and beauty, real or imagined, maker of worlds. His name still evokes in me a mixture of giddiness and nausea.

“But Beowulf, for sure,” Dana adds, referring to Derek’s ostentatiously named son.

It strikes me again how much time is spent at Sand Isle discussing people and their plans—not only those of our family, but the arrivals and departures, the ramifications and nuances of our friends’ and neighbors’ lives.

As if she is reading my mind, Dana says, “You remember Larry Hobson? He’s getting divorced.”

I haven’t seen Larry Hobson for years. Still, that anybody other than someone from
our
family should get divorced on Sand Isle attracts my keen interest.

“Why?” I ask against my will, not wanting to be drawn back in, but fascinated, nonetheless. “Surely no one’s having an affair with Larry
Hobson
?”

Dana shrugs. “His wife is asking for the cottage.”

“The Hobsons’
cottage
? She’s crazy. It’ll never happen.”

“Things change,” says Dana, ominously. “You wouldn’t believe the things that are happening.”

“Try me.”

“The Dusays, for instance.”

The name sounds familiar. “The Midland Dusays?” I say, suggesting a family from downstate whose fortune was made from plundering farmland to erect brightly colored, postmodern shopping malls.

My sister nods. “Richer than God. They’ve built a huge house. Huge. Tore down the Bakers’ place
and
the Hewetts’.”

“And built something new?”

Nothing new has been erected in Sand Isle since 1890. I’m alarmed it could happen.

“Totally mansionized,” says Dana.

“Is it”—I look at her slyly—“tasteful?”

Tasteful is one of our code words. Our aunt Pat taught us this. She would say, “NOCD” for “not our class, dear,” or categorize a wedding present of indeterminate description as a “Shovunda”—meaning it should be “shoved under” a bed. She could assess decor with a beady eye and dismiss someone’s efforts by saying,
Lovely drapes.

“Jamie’s here,” Dana says. She says it as casually as she would have said,
Mail’s here
, but I am not deceived. It is her way of testing the water, using her toe before jumping in.

“Well,” I say, using my own forced version of a casual tone, “why wouldn’t he be?” Jamie’s family, after all, has been here almost as long as ours. Jamie of the colorless hair and chiseled face. “Still married?”

“Still is.”

“Two kids, is it?”

“Three.”

I silently ponder the tastefulness of having three children.

“Philip says everything’s changing,” Dana goes on.

Snapping the last of the paper bags shut and flattening it out, I remember Louisa once saying,
Oh, nothing much changes around here.

Dana picks forensically at the edge of the kitchen table where the swirly blue veneer has started to lift and curl. “We should probably do something about this linoleum.”

I think,
Oh, please don’t start with the fixing up.
It’s been peeling for decades. No one has bothered to replace it. Although we have our inheritance, it is not so huge that we might want to fling it away on dry rot and cracked linoleum. And there is a generalized family aversion to gainful employment. Certainly no one has gone into the family business for generations. Addison & Sons has as little to do with us as the Scottish town from which our ancestors came. All we have is this name—like petrified wood, stone hard and calcified, long after the wood has rotted.

B
y midafternoon, I have dusted and swept the living room, the dining room, the porch, as well as the deck. I’ve pulled my hair straight back and dug up an apron my mother gave Louisa,
KISS THE COOK
emblazoned on the front.
Don’t even try,
Louisa used to say, waving us away, dodging our lips, but she rarely took that apron off.

The kitchen seems beyond my capabilities, so I have moved on to the downstairs bedrooms. In point of fact, I have little aptitude for this work. I have gleaned what skill I have from watching housekeepers over the years or by Ian explaining to me about working top down.
Ceiling to floor. Dust first, sweep last.

When my grandmother was alive, I shadowed the housekeeper as she cleaned, carried along by the smell of lemon oil and beeswax. Did I, like most children, think that my world would always smell the same? A stock simmering in the kitchen, the smell of biscuits. After my grandmother died, the men started smoking cigars. It thrills me still to pick up that scent evoking afternoons when the ladies were napping and the children were left alone.

At night, the heady perfume of my mother and the aunts, the talcum of my grandmother. Even today, the smell of mildew, like that of bourbon, is as viscerally charged as one of baking popovers or chocolate cake.

I move on to the Love Nest, so called after my cousin Adele and her first husband, Stephen, took the guest room off the living room—a peculiar choice since the walls were thin, and anyone staying up for bridge or Parcheesi could hear the little groans behind the door. I run my duster across a bureau, one that has been painted so many times the drawers can be opened only by bracing one’s legs and tugging hard. Every surface is cluttered with a potential yard sale of knickknacks. Crocheted doilies anchored by porcelain boxes and figurines. Ashtrays and ivory brush sets, tattooed with unreadable monograms.

On the desk by the window I find a box with decoupaged lid—a relic of my mother’s efforts in summers past. A large letter A from a children’s book (two elves dancing cheek to cheek) is glued to the center, around which ladybugs and mushrooms, butterflies and pixies are arranged in an artful composition.
You have to cut the paper like so
, my mother said when I expressed an interest, showing me how to hold the scissors at an angle in such a way as to shear a perfect edge. Each leaf, each lock of hair had to be precisely separated from the background so that it could be lifted, glued into place, and varnished over. Once, I saw my mother cry after the scissors slipped and the wing of a butterfly she’d been working on for half an hour fell to the floor.

Lifting the lid, I find postcards and newspaper clippings along with parchment-fine stationery with a faded scrawl. I pick up one of the letters.

Dearest Sarah,
the ancestral cursive begins in a correspondence from my great-grandmother to a friend.
Let me tell you about the house.

I sit on the edge of the mattress—a saggy invertebrate that barely holds me.

I remember that ship in a forlorn heap, my mother’s efforts in the sixties at “brightening.”

When Dana finds me, I have curled into the bed, pulled the covers up. The feather duster lies beside me like the carcass of a bird. “What are you doing?” she asks.

I run my finger across the final paragraph in my great-grandmother’s hand in which she describes how they went into the woods and dug up trillium to plant along the edges of the house. She herself had planted the garden that overlooks the lake, plotting out sunflowers and hollyhocks, bushes of lilacs, summer roses, lilies, and yarrow. She signed her letters
As always, Sadie.

Sadie. The name of my child.

“The telephone,” I say, “is truly a mixed blessing.”

“What do you mean?”

I hold up the sheet of stationery. “This is from Grannie Addie to her friend Sarah. You and I would have had this conversation on the phone, and then…pffft…no one would know or care.”

Dana’s sideways glance. I can tell she is thinking, Why would anyone care what we said in the first place? So I read to her the piece about the schooner and the curtains and the trillium, and soon she is lying on the bed next to me on the swaybacked mattress while I read aloud the words of our ancestor. It was a forest then. No manicured lawns. The beach was a rocky,
wild place from which they would launch canoes, the women in their long dresses with their parasols, the men mustached and grim, their shirtsleeves pulled up for their two-month hiatus from industry.

“Her baby died,” Dana says after I stop reading. “Banta’s little sister. She got scarlet fever and died.”

I know this—our grandfather’s sister who died as an infant, the insidious infections that haunted the country in the late nineteenth century, how my great-uncle, too, had almost died, yet lived, never to have children, but to ride through Turkey on a camel. Our grandfather was sent away to someplace less septic, and when he returned, his sister was dead, his brother living, his mother dressed in the black rags of grief. I have known this, but forgotten, or at least not thought about it for years. Perhaps I’ve blocked out the dead infants in our family, the legendary bereavement of my great-grandmother.

The Aerie,
my great-grandmother wrote in 1887,
shall be a place of respite. When you come, dearest,
she penned her friend Sarah,
we will sit in the trees and paint whatever vista suits us. At night, we shall read poetry.

Poetry, painting, and prayer. My great-grandparents came to Sand Isle with the best of intentions. Their fortune had been made—first by a cough remedy, later by sops and cures for headaches and lice, bad breath and sore throats, constipation, arthritic fingers, and aching teeth. My great-great-grandfather Josiah—Civil War soldier, repairer of roofs—was the embodiment of the philosophy that it’s better to be lucky than smart. The pine tar of his trade had a number of attributes, not the least of which was its medicinal value when combined with peppermint. Later, his son—my great-grandfather—imported eucalyptus from California, where it had been imported from Australia, apocryphally for railroad ties, but more than likely to prevent erosion on denuded hills. Structural lack of integrity aside, eucalyptus proved effective when its vapors were inhaled.

In 1875, Addison’s Curatives, as it was then called, employed Dr. Reginald Sedgwick, an English physician who had traveled to India and Turkey, returning with an antidote for constipation involving almonds, fenugreek,
and caffeine, along with a cure for postbellum malaise using mustard and, as with many Addison products, alcohol.

My great-grandfather Edward succeeded in his courtship of Sadie Boothe (later to become Grannie Addie), a missionary’s daughter from Dayton who was prone to musings about the occult—particularly after the death of her daughter, Elizabeth. I can imagine my great-grandfather in 1880: Edward Moore Addison, son of a particularly prosperous maker of remedies, dressed in a waistcoat at a Sunday picnic along the banks of the Ohio—a river that curved through the limestone bluffs of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, freezing chastely in winter and turning turgid in the spring as the runoff from rain and snow leached into the Ohio River Valley. By summer, the river was a slow brown snake, steamy and sultry, laden with catfish and water moccasins, not to mention garbage from the factories that were growing up along its shores. The condensed air of the valley, the clammy evaporation of the river—all conspired to render the humidity nearly one hundred percent, and the air so cloying, it bound clothes to skin, curled your hair, and made it hard to breathe.