My Dearest Friend (22 page)

“Look,” Daphne said. She pointed to a photo: Cynthia at four, at Christmas, with the brand-new Baby Betsy in her arms. The little girl in the picture had long ringlets of white-blond hair, and rosy pudgy cheeks, and plump elbows and knees, and she was wearing a dress Daphne had made for her, a long dress of white velveteen with pink bows
and ribbons and lace everywhere. Cynthia looked like a doll herself, or like a sculpture made from candy.

“It’s hard to believe,” Jack said. “Hard to believe that Cynthia was ever that small.”

“I know,” Daphne said. “She’s so terribly grown-up these days.” She ran her finger over the picture of her young daughter, as if she could actually feel Cynthia as a child again. “Those were the sweetest days,” she said. Without realizing it, she almost crooned the words. “I sang her lullabies every night of her life until she was five. ‘Sweet and Low.’ The old Brahms favorite. A southern thing my mother used to sing to me. I think some of the happiest moments I’ve ever lived were spent rocking Cynthia in my arms in her dark bedroom, with the little shepherdess night-light glowing nearby. Everything seemed so good then, so safe. It was almost as if
I
were being held in someone’s arms.” For a moment all three adults sat in silence, remembering, staring deep into the fireplace, where the solid logs that had once been branches, trees, now smoked and flared, spinning before their very eyes from wood into smoke and ashes and into golden heat, rushing light.

The sound of thumping brought them back into the present.
Thud thud thud thud,
and here came Cynthia into the room with Alexandra toddling along behind her as fast as her fat baby legs would take her. Cynthia had brought down the cardboard box full of stuffed animals, dolls, dress-up clothes, all the very favorite old toys, all the things that she had insisted not be part of the various tag sales and toss-outs in the past sixteen years of her life.

“Look!” Cynthia said, grinning. She knelt on the floor and began to take things out and hand them to the enchanted Alexandra. “See this teddy bear? This furry thing—look, it’s a hand puppet.” She slipped it on and the green caterpillar began to writhe over to tickle Alexandra under the chin. “And oh, here’s my Alice!” she said, taking out an expensive Alice in Wonderland doll in a blue dress with a white apron. Cynthia looked at her mother. “I’m giving all these to Alexandra,” she said.

“Oh!” Carey Ann exclaimed, enraptured, and fell on the floor next to the box to join in the discovery of the treasures. “Look, Lexi, a kitty!”

Jack saw Daphne’s body tense. But still she smiled, and her voice was light. “Really, Cynthia, are you sure you want to?” she said. “I mean, it’s sweet of you, but all these things—your favorites …”

“Oh, Mother, don’t be sappy,” Cynthia said. “I loved these things once, but that was when I was little. They mean nothing to me now, and they just clutter up your house.”

Daphne rose and went over to stab the brass poker around in the fire. When she straightened up and looked back at her daughter her face was flushed from the heat. “I don’t mind having them around. I like them. They have memories for me too. And I thought you might want to save them for your children.”

Cynthia was sitting on her knees, and now she leaned back on her arms, looking up at her mother. “Oh, Mother, I’m not going to have
children
for a million years,” she said. “Give me a break. I mean, really.”

Daphne was moving around the room, taking up the champagne bottle, filling the glasses. Carey Ann and Alexandra were having an orgy in the toy box.

“You never know,” Daphne said. “You might fall in love in college. Girls are changing, things are changing. People are having babies young again. In their twenties.”

“Not this girl,” Cynthia said. “
I’m
not getting married. I’m not having babies when I’m in my twenties. Uggh!” She shuddered in her extreme distaste. She was very beautiful, so blond, her skin as sleek as an otter’s, her eyes clear. She was precocious and sexual and she had her own powers now and knew it.

Daphne could not look away. Her daughter was the most beautiful thing in the world.

“Oh, Mom, I might as well tell you now,” Cynthia said. She stood up all of a sudden and brushed at her skirt, although nothing was there. She tossed her head and gave her mother a defiant look. “Dad’s on sabbatical next year. He’s going to teach in England. I’m going to go too. I’m going to see if I can get into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. If not, I’ll try any other acting school.”

Daphne thought: In all the fairy tales, it is the old woman who is the bad one, it is the old woman who is the witch that traps Rapunzel in the tower, that gives Snow White the poisoned apple, that tries to turn Cinderella into a kitchen slave, and now I know why. And for a split second she felt herself transforming right there in the living room, she felt her fingers contracting into gnarled and twisted claws, her nose growing long and sharp and wart-covered, her chin curving up to meet her nose, her back humping over. She was a hag. She was a hideous old hag, a cackling evil thing.

Why tell me this now?, Daphne thought, and immediately answered herself.
Because she thinks the Hamiltons will provide protection. I won’t freak out at her in front of them.

All these thoughts flung themselves through Daphne’s head like a throng of birds, flashing through, now here, now gone. She was left standing with a glass of champagne in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. She felt such grief at this casual announcement of her daughter’s that she knew she could crush the bottle back into sand in her hands.

“How wonderful for you, Cyn,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to live in England. How splendid that you’ll have the opportunity.” She poured champagne and drank. She crossed the room and curled up in a chair. “If you take a battery from Baby Betsy and put it in the monkey’s back, it will beat the drums,” she told Carey Ann and Alexandra. She was as normal as oatmeal, except she had forgotten to set the champagne bottle down and was holding it, unwittingly, in her right hand.

Cynthia blinked at her mother’s understated response. She sank down onto the floor and helped Carey Ann with the electric monkey. So much of its fur had worn away, it looked sick. “Well, I may not get into RADA,” she said. “And it isn’t
certain
that Dad’ll go to England. But pretty certain.”

“Have you been to England?” Daphne asked Jack brightly. So brightly. She was like a faculty wife at a tea party.

So on they talked. They made conversation for almost another hour, until Lexi began to show signs of exhaustion. To her great delight, when the time came to go, Jack put all the dolls and animals back in the huge cardboard box, then put his daughter in on top of them all. She clapped her hands and giggled with glee. Jack staggered out the door and down the road, lugging his daughter and her new box of loot. Carey Ann followed, calling good-night.

It was a clear cold night, no wind. Daphne shut the door against the fresh frosty air and turned briskly back to the house. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she began to bustle. Dishes off the table and into the kitchen, glasses off the floor, bustle, bustle, while her daughter trailed along behind, making attempts to help. Actually Cynthia got in the way more than anything. Daphne was so quick at grabbing up everything, it seemed she had fourteen hands. Daphne’s face was set in a pleasant sort of look but her eyes were deep and glazed. She turned to put the apple pie in the refrigerator just at the moment Cynthia moved to put the butter there.

“Let’s leave these dishes till morning,” Daphne said. “I’d like to sit and relax by the fire for a while.” She wandered back into the living room, where she grabbed up the half-full bottle of champagne by its neck and plunked down, not on the sofa, but in front of it, leaning back against it so that she could stretch her feet out and warm them at the fire. Still her face was frozen.

Cynthia sat down on the floor next to her mother, her back to the fire. “Mom,” she said intently, and then was quiet for a while, as if she had just explained everything. Finally she began again. “I hope you understand. About my going to England. I mean, this might be my only chance in my entire life.”

“Well, of course I understand, dear. Whatever did I say that made you think differently?” Daphne said, giving her daughter a cocktail-party smile.

“Mom.” Cynthia sighed. “I knew you would do this. I knew you would. Mother, I’m not leaving
you.
I’m not choosing Dad. I’m choosing England, I’m choosing excitement, possibilities, things I just couldn’t have if I stayed here. Oh, Mom, come on.”

Daphne cocked her head, bright as an innocent, stupid little bird. Her heavy earrings swung against her face. “Why, Cynthia, I haven’t said one thing against it. I’m delighted for you, dear!”

Cynthia banged her feet on the floor in exasperation, something she hadn’t done since she was five. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Just stop it, Mom! I know you. I
know
what you’re thinking.”

Then Cynthia saw the anger flash up in her mother’s eyes as brilliantly as the fire behind her, and fade as quickly as it had come.

“Cynthia,” Daphne said, “I do mean it. I really am delighted for you. I’m only tired, dear—this dinner party was a lot more work than I’m used to these days.” Her voice was very gentle.

“You miss David, don’t you?” Cynthia asked. There was something about her mother’s face just then, as Daphne let the happy mask fall to reveal her tiredness, her constrained sadness, that made Cynthia think she could ask the question.

“Yes,” Daphne said. “Yes, very much.” Her eyes were cast down now, her face slanted away from Cynthia.

Cynthia chewed on the skin of her little finger for a moment, thinking. At last she said quietly, “I can’t be David for you. I can’t stay here for you.”

Daphne did not change her expression or tone of voice. Gently she said, “I never
said you should, Cynthia.”

There was some loose skin around Cynthia’s thumb, which she began to peel. Although she could not articulate it to herself, this strange act felt like something she could
do
while she tried to come up with the right thing to do or say. Daphne looked over at Cynthia, and her face was so full of love that Cynthia felt both thrilled and threatened.

“Do you think,” Daphne said, “that you could remember how to play the Moonlight Sonata? I’d love to look at the fire and hear you play that.”

“Well, I haven’t played for ages, and Dad doesn’t have a piano. I’ll make a million mistakes. But sure,” Cynthia said.

She moved to the piano at the far end of the room. Daphne got up onto the sofa, stretched out, and stared into the fire. Cynthia played. The music was slow and soothing, although Cynthia’s rendition of it was not particularly soothing, with all the clunkers she hit. But the music built and repeated and built some more, and when she had finished, Cynthia looked over to see that her mother had fallen asleep. She crossed the room, took up a quilt from her mother’s bedroom, and brought it into the living room. She bent over her mother’s sleeping figure and tucked the quilt around her so that it would not fall off. Daphne’s breath was deep and regular. Cynthia looked into her relaxed face. Then she turned to put the screen in front of the fireplace, and went up the stairs to her little bedroom in the attic.

When Daphne heard the upstairs door open and close, she opened her eyes. She didn’t move. She lay there looking into the fire but seeing instead an encounter that had taken place between her and Hudson that afternoon.

They had been at the college, in the outer office, on either side of Daphne’s desk, which held, in addition to the usual pile of files and papers, a little artificial evergreen tree that Daphne had decorated with candy canes and red-and-white-striped peppermints. It was almost five o’clock and everyone else had left earlier for the Christmas-carol celebration at the college chapel.

Daphne and Hudson were exchanging Christmas gifts. They did this every year. At first the presents had been small, even silly, but with each passing year they became more serious.

Daphne’s present was rather chiding and mischievous; she gave Hudson a book entitled
Parallel Lives,
a nonfiction book about five Victorian and rather sexless marriages.

Hudson handed Daphne a small velvet box. Inside was a pair of small brilliant earrings: two rubies surrounded by diamonds.

“Hudson!” Daphne said. “I can’t accept these!”

“Please,” Hudson replied. “They will be beautiful on you. With your coloring.”

“But, Hudson, they must have cost the earth. I really can’t accept such an expensive gift.”

“They were my mother’s,” Hudson said.

Daphne looked at him. “Oh, Hudson …” She would have embraced him, but they were separated by the desk.

They were separated by the knowledge of Claire.

In any case, Fred Van Lieu came along then, needing a ride because his car was in for repairs.

“Merry Christmas,” Daphne and Hudson had said to each other. Hudson had left. Daphne had put the little box in her purse, where it was still. She cherished the present. She liked thinking of the two heart-red gems, gleaming valuably, secretly, in the darkness.

She decided to sleep on the sofa tonight. The fire would keep her warm.

That night, after the holiday dinner at the Millers’, it was easy for Jack and Carey Ann to get Alexandra to go to bed. They simply surrounded her in her crib with the dolls and stuffed animals Cynthia had given her, until there was scarcely enough room for the little girl herself. Alexandra rolled luxuriously in her nest, sucking her thumb, looking around her at all the new treasures, the look on her face cherubic and blissful, the look that parents sigh to see.

Jack put his arm around Carey Ann as they left their daughter’s room. He hugged her against him so that when they entered their bedroom, they naturally sank down on the bed together. They lay on top of the covers, on their sides, fully clothed, looking at each other.

“Carey Ann,” Jack said. He was very much in love with his wife.