Good Family (5 page)

Especially with a corset and three layers of petticoats.

Hand me your handkerchief, Father. I am feeling faint.

Or giddy? Had she noticed my great-grandfather—a fine example of Presbyterian righteousness (prone to stuttering, but attractive nonetheless with those deep green eyes, that finely cut coat that he insisted on wearing even in that heat)? If she’d looked closer, she might have noticed that, fine fellow though he was, he’d had a sip or two—discreetly, of course—of Kentucky bourbon. Her father, the traveling missionary from Dayton, a hero in his own right having lost an eye at Gettysburg, saw the opportunity in the piety and tipsiness of young Edward. A pragmatist—my great-great-grandfather, the missionary, who crawled off the fields of Gettysburg with one eye intact and all of his limbs. Crossing with similar resolve the sea of checkered clothes and now-folded parasols and newly lit lanterns, he presented his handsome but introverted daughter who read too much and lived in a world of her imaginings to the minister of the Cincinnati First Presbyterian Church, who
in turn presented her to my great-grandfather. The introduction thus made, the tantalizing blink of aroused fireflies began in the dusky Ohio sky.

Miss Boothe?

Mr. Addison?

Fade in to a shot of my great-grandfather with his mustaches, my great-grandmother with her center-parted hair, their expressions dour in the daguerreotypes that hang on our walls. The spring before my grandfather was born, construction began on the Aerie. My great-grandmother’s letters from those days wax hopeful about the prospect of shared poetry and piousness—a gentile reprieve from the manufacturing and marketing of medicines. Besides, no one could
breathe
in those industrial river valleys with their sweaty summers. Sand Isle was parceled off and sold to a covey of like-minded people whose social, moral, and spiritual values were aligned. At which point, my great-grandfather, if he harbored any notions of bourbon before bed, was sorely disappointed. The bylaws of the association read that no alcohol was to be served on the premises of Sand Isle, a rule that remained until 1945 (Addison’s Cough Medicine excluded). Thus alcohol went underground. It was hidden in log piles, in the Bible holders of wicker chairs, behind the curtains, beneath the mattresses; it was smuggled by train and ferry. In 1896, a renter was barred from future rentals by the board of directors after openly serving wine at supper.

So, too, were fishing and the playing of games on Sunday prohibited. As for swimming, “suitable attire” was required between the hours of 6
A.M.
and 9
P.M.,
leaving one to assume that after 9
P.M.,
these Presbyterian paragons could, with impunity, cast off their clothes and swim flagrantly in their birthday suits beneath the cover of darkness.

Even in my moviemaking imagination, I find it challenging to envision my great-grandmother cavorting nakedly. In every picture—even those on the beach—Grannie Addie is fully skirted, her collars starched, her hair done up, a little hat perched jauntily beneath a parasol. The remains of these outfits are now costumes in a box. The last time Sedgie opened a parasol, it exploded in a puff of dust and rotted silk.

But back to Sadie and Edward and the construction of the Aerie. Fast-forward the men reshaping the dune with shovels and plows, the carpenters laying a foundation on the stumps of felled trees. Up goes the house in a matter of seconds—studs, bead-board, shingles, shiplap, more shingles, and the obligatory garlands above the windows. The house is painted a sober green, and—behold!—my great-grandparents, along with their first son and my infant grandfather, waving from the porch.

According to Grannie Addie’s letters, the house originally had no kitchen. All meals were to be taken communally at the clubhouse—what was later to become the yacht club. Neither was there any plumbing; thus, the Byzantine pipes that came later. And it wasn’t until 1900, after the kitchen was built, that Sadie Addison started writing down her recipes for tripe and tongue. By then, she had lost a daughter and, allegedly, her mind. Infections of the time killed more than a third of American children before their fifth birthdays. Statistically, Sadie and Edward’s family was right on the money. One child out of three succumbed.

H
ospice has come to show us how to help our mother die. Two mild-faced women at the door. They remind me of Mormons. I resist the urge to open the door and say in a Lurch-like voice,
You rang
?

Dana and I invite them into the living room. They are winded from the stairs.
So many stairs
, they say.
How do you sweep them all
?

“We don’t,” I say, pouring tea.

Dana beams the two women an earnest smile. Perhaps
they
hold the possibility of a solution. “Our mother,” she begins. The two women lean forward. “She hardly eats. Ice cream, vodka. I try to get her to talk to me, but she won’t.”

One of the women purses her lips, reminding me of my current shrink, the eternally patient Dr. Anke. Dr. Anke nods in response to all my rants of victimization. She eggs me on.
Your mother
, she says.
Why was your mother always napping
?

Dr. Anke is my third therapist. The first two were abysmal failures—more my fault than theirs. I wasn’t even sober. I moved back to New York and, within a year, got into a program. When I got out of treatment, the hospital referred me to Dr. Anke. I liked her name. It was like the Egyptian sign for life.

Are you Egyptian
? I asked her.

Swedish, actually.
She had long, blond hair swept back in a ponytail. She wore glasses to make herself look older, but she was smarter than her age. Together, Dr. Anke and I have mapped out the terrain of maternal pathos—a long-forgotten garden choked in weeds.
Why was your mother not supportive?
With pruning shears, we’ve attacked my mother’s drinking, the way she took to her bed. Hack, hack. We pulled back wayward ivy and thorny stems.
Do you think your mother was happy with the choices she made in her life?
Hack, hack, hack.
What do you think she would have done differently?

The first time she asked me this question, I considered it carefully. I even stroked my chin. But Dr. Anke’s eyes bore into mine until I finally said,
My mother’s choices were limited to marriage and children, and after we were grown, what? Garden club and bridge? Martinis at lunch?

I then added what I already believed to be true: that my mother simply lacked interest.

That’s very sad,
Dr. Anke had said.

“It’s very sad,” one of the women from hospice says in response to Dana. “But death is a natural part of life. Without death, life would have no meaning.”

I want to dispute her on this point. What about work? The meaning of friends? But her statement carries the finality of one of my mother’s needlepoint sayings.

“It’s all about contrasts,” the other woman says. “Letting go. It’s quite beautiful, really.”

Let go and let Betty.

Dana says, “So you think you can help her?”

“Normally, we work with people who are terminally ill with cancer. But in this case…because she
is
terminal, according to Dr. Mead…we can help you cope. At least, we can tell you what to expect.”

One of the women begins to hand out brochures. These, she tells us, will explain the process of dying. An infection may occur, taxing the lungs. Or, in the case of a stroke, brain capacity shuts down, compromising organs. “The body dies slowly,” she says.

I want to tell her she is wrong. The body can die in an instant, that it can be breathing one second in the nursery upstairs, the fontanel pulsing with life, and in the next moment, cease to breathe. Simply stop.

“Ultimately,” the hospice woman goes on, apparently having read my mind, “the breathing simply stops.”

I look at the woman sharply. She is older than I, maybe fifty. Her hair is gray, while her friend has dyed hers assertively red. The gray-haired one keeps putting on her reading glasses as she cites passages in the brochure, then taking off her glasses and staring at Dana and me. She earnestly wants us to get it. She is an interpreter of death. Like my father’s secretary, when I turned twenty-one, laying before me spreadsheets and columns, interpreting the numbers of what my grandmother had left me, making sure I understood. It meant nothing to me at the time. A number, fixed in ink, nothing plastic that could be reshaped or adapted. A sentence, not a choice.

“So,” I say. “How long?”

The two women exchange glances. I have the feeling my question is predictable, unenlightened. And like Dr. Mead, they look at me a little regretfully. If they pat my hand, I’ll scream. But they do not touch me. Instead, they say it will happen in time—in the body’s time, in Evelyn’s time. We will see the changes, though. The subtle blue in the extremities, the irregular breaths, the fixed stare. Things will become very focused. Our world will become small.

Don’t tell me about small, I think. Don’t tell me about death. I’ve been there, ladies, and I’m not thrilled to go again. I ignored the baby monitor,
and Sadie stopped breathing—and now you’re asking me to sit and wait and gauge my mother’s breaths as she creeps out of life on her own damn time?

“Well, then,” says Dana. “We’ll just have to keep her comfortable.”

Leaving their brochures spread all over the coffee table, the two women ask to look in on Mrs. Addison.

“Certainly,” says Dana, rising.

“Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

After they leave, I pick up a pamphlet, but I can’t concentrate. I want to believe my unspoken declaration to Miriam that
I’m not of this place,
but the letters in my grandmother’s hand say otherwise. Her letters from the time the house was completed in 1887 up until 1890, the year of Elizabeth’s death, are demure examples of Victorian optimism. They never speak of money. They never mention my great-grandfather’s surreptitious drinking. They are sunny letters that begin with cozy and familiar wording such as
Let me tell you about the house.

But in the summer of 1890, after Elizabeth’s death, the tone of her correspondence changes. Curling up in a wicker chair, I read the letter she wrote to her father, the one-eyed Presbyterian:

One might think that, with a thirty percent mortality rate, parents of the time would be better braced for the loss of a child. Who would risk becoming fond? The photos I’ve seen of Elizabeth show a fat-cheeked infant with brown eyes drowning in cascades of ruffles and lace. The tintype in the oval frame on the dining-room wall displays her seated in the lap of my grandfather, my great-uncle looking on. T
wo
weeks later, she started crying, exhibited a rash and a fever and, within three days, was gone. Scarlet fever wasn’t an epidemic in 1890, but there were outbreaks. In 1887, each and every one of the children in the village of Harrison, Ohio, perished. Perhaps one of the maids in Cincinnati brought it to Sand Isle. Perhaps another child.

I can imagine my forebear kneeling by nine-month-old Elizabeth’s crib—the same crib, perhaps, in which my daughter, Sadie, died. The original Sadie Addison, in her cotton skirts and silk blouse, prayed in the confines of her summerhouse, where she and her husband have planned their Elysium far from the shores of the Ohio River. Surely, the vicissitudes of life—the dank pollution, the rotting, sulfurous air—can’t reach them here. The child’s cheeks are flushed—not with health, but fever. Elizabeth’s eyes glisten, the brown eyes of the child’s matching those of my great-grandmother.

There is no poetry left in my hand,
she writes.
I am bereaved beyond words.

Reeling, I return again and again to my great-grandmother’s letters until my mind is suddenly on gardens. I start thinking about gathering flowers to put in vases in the cousins’ rooms. Surely something can be resurrected from the weeds below the porch. Cornflowers for my niece Jessica. Sunflowers for Sedgie. Black-eyed Susans for Adele. Roses or cosmos for Derek.
I will hack away and excavate them from the overgrowth, the grasses and brambles that have smothered them. From beneath the campanula gone to seed, the opportunistic tendrils of myrtle, I will ferret out the leafy remnants of my great-grandmother’s garden, breathe new life into them, finger them for a pulse.

R
eady about!” I say as I come around a corner.

My father bought the Malibu station wagon new in 1964, and at one time, its lines must have appeared sleek and modern. Even so, it has less than ten thousand miles on it because it only gets driven in summer—airport runs, the IGA, and, when we were teenagers, long, winding drives out the shore. After I turn the wheel, seconds seem to pass before the rest of the car decides to follow. Like a cartoon limousine, it snakes around curves.

Jessica’s plane was due in at 3
P.M
., but planes seldom land on time this far north. Some flights are canceled for days.
But the Baileys’ cocktail party!
Dana groaned when she heard that Jessica would be delayed for hours. At which point I offered to pick up my niece, relieved for the excuse to dodge my parents’ friends whom I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Their questions, good-natured and wholehearted, inevitably gloss over their true opinions of my absence.

It is raining, and the wipers barely make a dent. I take back-country roads, coasting past farmland and orchards separated by islands of deciduous woods. When I finally arrive at the airport—a cinderblock building and
an asphalt strip in what would otherwise be a pasture—the rain has lifted, and my hair is curly with the humidity. I could spend hundreds of dollars in New York to get this look. The downside of all this humidity is the perspiration on my forehead, the little pimple forming next to my brow. Nearly forty, and I still break out.

I get out of the car and search the sky, blooming with thunderheads, for Jessica’s plane. Pulling my mildewed foul-weather gear tight, I lean against the door—anything but go inside, where stubble-chinned teenage boys play Doom or Mortal Kombat in a haze of greasy hamburgers.

“Maddie?”

A figure is coming toward me, calling my name. I push back my hair and squint into the wind.

“Jamie,” I say. “Wow.” My old boyfriend, whom I haven’t seen in twelve years, still looks the same. I, on the other hand, have frizzy hair and a zit.

We awkwardly kiss at each other’s cheeks. It seems a perverse gesture for two people who have once been so intimate. Jamie has a Burberry raincoat slung over his shoulder and a briefcase, and his hair is slicked back, which, in my opinion, looks a little eighties, yet on Jamie, undeniably attractive. No gray in his blond. Darkly tanned. I smile inanely and try to expunge the image I have of him in my college dorm room, completely naked, his bath towel dangling from his erection like the white flag of surrender. The last I’d heard he’d become president of his family’s company. They’d made their money in plastic garbage bags, later expanding into a wider panoply: bags that zipped together, bags that withstood heat, bags that burped.

Thank God for trash and leftovers
, I used to say to him, but the forty-four-year-old man standing before me looks humorless compared to the boy of my college memories, and I doubt the old joke would amuse him.

“I didn’t know the flight was in,” I say, noticing he still has that mole on his cheek. “I’m waiting for my niece.”

Jamie scans the sky. “North-worst,” he says. “They’re always late.”

I used to wish Jamie and I had met for the first time when we were in our thirties instead of when we were kids. If only we’d done some living
prior to meeting each other, our timing would have been perfect. But looking at him now, I suspect I was wrong. My life is leagues away from Jamie’s—like sailboats whose courses diverge by one degree and end up on separate continents. The last time I laid eyes on Jamie, it was from a distance. He was standing on a dock. He had slicked his hair straight back from his face, and was running his hands over it, back arched, his elbows splayed. It was an exquisite gesture—something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Brylcreem ad. I felt I was seeing him through water, like a face on a boat you see as you slip below the surface and sink.

“You heading out, then?” I ask him.

“Just got in,” he says, jerking his head toward the tarmac where the private planes are parked. There used to be a line of single-engine prop planes, the occasional twin engine. Now there is a fleet of Learjets and Gulf Streams, one of which appears to be Jamie’s. Ever so faintly, I hear Aunt Pat’s voice saying,
You didn’t try hard enough
.

Jamie cocks his head. “Haven’t seen you around here for a while. Why the honor?”

Eleven years exactly. “My mother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, you know,” I go on, doing something spastic with my hands, “Dana’s here. The cousins are arriving. The typical scene.”

Jamie smiles. Again, I have that sensation of being submerged. For the first time, I notice his teeth are unnaturally white. His eyes I can’t read.

“It’s a great family,” he says.

I fail to suppress a hiccup-y sort of laugh. I can’t tell if I’m nervous or merely incredulous. “A great family,” I repeat, looking away. “That’s for sure.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I’m great, too.”

“I mean, where are you living?”

“New York. For years now.”

He nods, and I see a flicker of that wounded, wary look he used to give me. “Well, then.”

“Yeah,” I say, giving him a little wave. He turns and walks away. Remembering my manners, I call after him, “Say hi to…”

He turns back, a questioning look on his face. “Fiona,” he finishes for me.

“Yes,” I say. “Fiona. Give her my best.”

But the plane drowns out the last of my sentence, and I start toward the cinderblock building. “Jerk,” I mutter under my breath, more to myself than Jamie.

J
essica, her hair shorn and bleached stark white against her olive skin, tosses her duffel bag into the back of the Malibu.

Nice tattoo,” I say, noticing the newest pattern encircling her wrist.

Jessica beams, ignoring my sarcasm. “It’s Celtic.”

“That’s appropriate,” I say, mentioning that the Addisons are Scots-Irish from way back.

But Jessica looks about as Scottish or Irish as Miss Saigon. Half-Vietnamese, half-Caucasian, she was given up for adoption as an infant. Dana and Philip, who had tried for several years to have a child before being told they couldn’t, seized the opportunity in spite of our mother’s dubious response to Jessica’s Asian roots.
It’s not that she’s Oriental
, our mother had said.
I just worry she might not fit in
. Given that our mother was ostracized for having red nails and being from Missouri, she felt qualified to speak on the subject. But disparity in bloodlines notwithstanding, Jessica and I have a bond. Her wary dark eyes are not unlike my gray ones at her age.

She slams the door, and we drive off, Jessica cracking the window, lighting up a cigarette.

I cast a sideways look. “Yes, I
do
mind if you smoke.”

Jessica rolls her eyes, draws once more on the cigarette, and flicks it out the window. The stark white of her current hairdo replaces the sinister burnt orange of last fall.

“Great,” I say. “Start a fire.”

She sticks out her tongue where a gold stud is planted like a pea. “Thanks, Mom.”

Jessica was the most enchanting and squeezable of babies. Whenever I was in Pasadena, I’d rush to see her, watching her progress from black-haired toddler to sure-footed soccer star, her serious brown eyes beneath blunt cut bangs. Then came high school.

“Kick the Ecstasy habit?” I say, trying another angle, but the look on my niece’s face says, Don’t. Sullen and closemouthed on the subject, she turns away from me and looks out the window at an orchard speeding past.

I release the steering wheel and hold my hands up. “Scout’s honor. Our secret.”

Now she’s in college. According to Dana, she rarely calls home.

Jessica shakes her head and changes the subject. “You haven’t told me who’s coming.”

So I begin the litany: the ambiguous arrival of Adele, as well as the questionable status of Sedgie, whose grown kids are employed and, thus, have limited time to travel.

“Real jobs,” I say to Jessica, with a meaningful look. Derek’s wife, Yvonne, is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, but Derek, who has flown in from Paris, is due in this week along with Beowulf. “They’re driving.”

“Beowulf,” says Jessica wistfully. “And you think
I’m
the drug addict?”

It’s almost seven now, an escaping bit of evening sun casting a sharp blade across a cornfield. We push on. The State Road turns into the Lake Road, and we descend into Harbor Town and, finally, to Sand Isle. I park the car in our spot, and Jessica loads her duffel into the ferry that is waiting at the dock. The ferry driver—the one who called me “ma’m” the other night—unties the lines, pushes off. He glances at my niece, but says nothing. His radio is turned off tonight. “Ma’am,” he says again, but I don’t mind.

“What’s your name?” I ask the driver.

“Mac.”

“Do you carry a gun, Mac?” I say, indicating his guard’s uniform. His eyes flicker briefly—long enough for me to believe he does. I exhale, close
my eyes, think of Jamie with his jet and his Burberry coat. The channel is patterned with the reflections of clouds and smells of gasoline and fish. Reaching the other side, Mac helps us onto the dock.

S
edgie has called to say he will be getting in late. He is driving from upstate New York, where he’d partied with the cast after the close of their Sondheim review, and now he’s somewhere northwest of Lake Erie, concerned that his car might break down, seeing that there’s no Citroën mechanics in Canada, but I point out he’s not far from Quebec, and surely there must be someone.

“Your geography sucks,” he says.

“So when are you getting here?”

“Days. Weeks. What room do I have?”

I remember how he used to call dibs for sleeping in the bunkroom and needed to keep the bathroom light turned on. When he was a kid, he had freckles like red ants swarming on pale skin and was the first to run screaming if a bat flew down from the attic. Now he walks onstage in front of hundreds of people, invisible behind the footlights, exorcising his fears by becoming someone else.

“The Anchor Room,” I say, naming a room that used to have anchors on the curtains and bedspreads until Aunt Pat replaced them with now-faded chintz.

“Not the Love Nest?”

“Taken.”

“By?”

“Derek’s coming tomorrow.”

“Derek, Derek, Derek.”

I wait for Sedgie to ask about my mother, but he doesn’t. Mostly, Sedgie thinks about himself, which is why he’s driving alone in a Citroën across Canada.

“So, babe,” he says, “stick some Stoli in the freezer, and I’ll see you in
the—” His cell phone cuts out before I can tell him we’ll leave the wagon at the ferry and not to wake us.

Dana and I finish picking up the kitchen, tossing the plastic containers from the take-out burgers and fries. There is something sad and despairing about such a meal in a kitchen that used to turn out standing rib roasts and beef Wellingtons. Even Jessica commented on the dinner, saying it was pathetic and she could do better. Great, said Philip,
why don’t you?

Dana, Philip, and I are bone-tired from that day’s errands and chores. The boats had to be inventoried, dragged down to the beach. Canoes, the sailfish, some obsolete Windsurfers. Even the blunt-nosed rowboat that always sinks stakes a claim on the shore.

And then there are the linens. Most of the blankets are moth-eaten, the sheets torn and stained. The beach towels are threadbare, and the bath towels, once an upbeat color like coral or cherry, have faded to a bland, fleshy salmon, sandpaper-rough and stiff.

“Really pays to get here first,” I say as we tie up the garbage, but Dana flashes me a look that makes me wish I could take it back. I have no cause for complaint. When you disappear for years, you abdicate your right to an opinion.

Furtively, I have read the brochures left by hospice. They tell us how to keep our loved one comfortable. They talk about grief. I turn this pebble of a word over in my mouth. It is a hard thing, rough at the edges, yet small enough to swallow and pass unnoticed through one’s gut unless it sticks in your craw. Sometimes I think my grief is stuck so tightly, I will gag on it. But you can’t vomit grief. I’ve tried. I’ve shoved my finger down my throat or swallowed tequila between retching so that I might retch again.

I’ve heard it said you don’t get over loss, but that grieving shifts when you wake up one morning and it isn’t the first thing you think about. When did I wake up and not think of Sadie, first and foremost, the tug on my breast?

I drag the swollen trash bag two stories down to the wood room. It is cool and vaguely insidious, yet comforting with its familiar dank smell.
I open the trash can, shove the bag into its mulchy gut. For a moment, I am transfixed by darkness. I remember hiding here during a Sardines game more than thirty years ago. How long had it been before Dana found me? I was braver then. I relished the dark.

“Maddie? Are you in here?” I jump, turn around. It is Jessica standing in the door. “What are you doing?”

“Trash,” I say.

“I thought I’d make a fire,” she says, jerking her head toward the woodpile.

I switch on the light. Someone has replaced the old yellow bulb with one of those fluorescent, long-lasting things. It casts us in a faint blue glow, illuminating the wall of stacked logs. Together, we start loading wood into a canvas bag. Jessica’s eyes are heavy-lidded, and she seems quieter than usual. “Glad to be here?” I say.

She looks at me, and there’s something knowing in her look. We share a moment of mute acknowledgment—that heaven, limbo, and hell, like the center of a compass, are all really the same place, depending on how you look at it.

“I want to ask you something,” she says.

“Shoot.”

“Did you ever want to have a child?” She looks hard at me.

The moment drags out. Something is pressing against my chest, and I can’t make a sound.

“I mean,” she adds quickly, “
another
child?”

One by one, the rocks slide off, and I can breathe again. So many years have gone by, twelve months per year.