The Beresfords (41 page)

“Have you heard from her?” my uncle muttered to Jonathan.

Jonathan swung his bag from the carousel and extended the handle. “No.”

“All right, then, son. Join us for dinner.”

“Thank you. No.”

“Then come by soon. Tom would like to see you.”

“I will.”

Another round of muted hugs. Jonathan kissed his mother on the cheek and then me. He had never done that before and I made a startled movement. His eyes flickered to mine. “We have to bear up now.”

I nodded, half-guiltily. My only wound was to my vanity, and, after the initial shock, I found it little more than a scrape. But Jonathan’s sadness was deepening. He had circles beneath his eyes and tired, set lines around his mouth. I wished he had accepted Uncle Paul’s dinner invitation because I pictured him going back to his apartment in Mountain View and eating a bowl of cereal at midnight, alone, if he ate anything at all.

After Tom’s hospital discharge, the Beresfords had installed him in the downstairs study, pushing aside Uncle Paul’s desk and armchairs for a Niagara adjustable twin bed and various sickroom accoutrements.

“Did Tom not want to go back to his apartment?” I asked on the drive home, when Uncle Paul explained the arrangements. What I meant was,
what about Marcy?

“He needs care at this point. Probably for the next several months. It’s more than a girlfriend could handle. Not to mention, Tom still doesn’t remember Marcy,” my uncle added. “It would have been awkward. Too much to ask.”

“Your uncle covered the rent,” put in Aunt Marie.

“This way we can manage Tom’s medications and help him out and take him to physical therapy,” Uncle Paul rushed over his generosity. “A nurse will check on him a couple times a week.”

Tom looked even worse than I imagined. When we came in, Paola was helping him into a wheelchair. His jaw was wired shut, as Jonathan told me, but he neglected to mention Tom’s shaved and partially bandaged head, his bound ribs and all the weight he’d lost. A scar ran across his discolored cheek. I found myself swallowing hard. I’d always thought Jonathan the handsomer of the two brothers, but when everyone else tells you from the age of six that your cousin Tom is a young Apollo—

“Frannie—
mija
—” Paola beamed at me when Tom was settled. I ran forward to hug her, relieved to see her peaceful face. She, at least, looked the same.

“
Frrr—ie
?” That was Tom.

“Hello, Tom.”

He was frowning and working his lips laboriously. “
Frr—ie
!
Hrr
.” He pointed at my hair.

“Oh!” My hand flew to it and I gave Uncle Paul a questioning look. My uncle brushed his eyes furtively and mumbled, “His memory.” And then, more loudly, “Yes. Frannie got her hair
permed
several months ago. Before her birthday.”

“
Nhss
.
Phhrrtee
.” Nice. Pretty.

“Thank you.”

Tom thumped the armrest of the wheelchair and nodded his head once, a hideous grimace stretching one corner of his mouth. “
Frr—ie
uhhsthhz
me.”

“I do,” I replied, “understand you. You don’t sound that different than when you’re drunk.” Clapping a hand to my mouth, I began gabbling apologies, but Tom’s eyes screwed shut and he grimaced even more hideously and hunched forward, giving a pained bark and groan. Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie rushed to either side of him, not knowing whether he’d torn something or burst something, or whether they should prop him back up, or return him to the hospital, or dose him with painkillers, or all of the above. Only when he pushed them away and pointed at me, slapping his knees, did we realize he was
laughing
.

I couldn’t recall a single time Tom laughed at anything I said. Or at least a time he wasn’t laughing
at
me. I gave him a hesitant smile. He reached for me. I gave him my hand and he squeezed it. “
Grrd
.
Yrr
ohmm
.
Gdd
.”

My smile widened. I returned the squeeze. “Thank you, Tom. I’m glad to
be
home.”

My life fell into a new routine. In the mornings I checked on Tom. Usually he was still sleeping, but if he was awake I sometimes helped him shuffle and lurch to the bathroom or measured his medications for Paola to put in his morning fruit juice. Then I would go to the high school for a couple hours to meet with the English teacher during study hall or labor over quizzes and papers in the library. For the first time, I found the reading torture. When I studied
King Lear,
Regan and
Goneril
morphed into Rachel and Julie, indifferent to their father’s time of crisis. Rachel continued living with Eric and answered no phone calls. After a time Greg ceased to call, informing Uncle Paul by a terse note that he and Rachel were divorcing. Greg Perkins’ parents switched churches because they blamed Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie for their daughter’s waywardness. As for Julie—Julie was distant and full of excuses. No, she hadn’t known a thing about anything between Rachel and Eric, but it was just like those two, always thinking of themselves. No, she couldn’t come home right now—her internship wouldn’t let her. She was sorry about Tom, but Tom would be fine. He always was. And as for Caroline leaving Jonathan—well, maybe those Grant twins were identical after all.

King Lear
was followed by
Madame
Bovary
,
which fared no better with me. I read Caroline Grant into Emma Bovary’s dark eyes, her restlessness and charm. But even Emma Bovary’s marital dissatisfaction could be traced to her dull, plodding husband Charles—what was Caroline’s excuse?

We did not see much of Jonathan that fall. If he visited Tom, he tended to come during the day, when he would be spared seeing his father and—perhaps—me. When Uncle Paul finally cornered his younger son by telephone, he learned that the marriage counseling efforts had failed. Caroline rejected the first counselor, and then, after two visits to the counselor of her own choosing, she refused to go altogether. Too busy with law school and anxious to make a fresh start and put all this behind her. She was sorry, but there it was.

I felt like I spent the months of September and October and November on my knees, praying who knew what. When the possibility of reconciliation in my cousins’ marriages went by the wayside, I turned to prayers for healing and forgiveness. When prayers for Tom’s physical recovery became less urgent, I began to fear for my uncle. There was no doubt these events had broken something in him. His confidence in himself as a man and father. His illusion of righteous control. When it had only been Tom shaking things up, Uncle Paul managed to explain the aberration: Tom took after him and must sow his wild oats. But to see his older daughter so forget her upbringing—to choose first an ill-suited marriage and then to abandon it, and damn the consequences—and then to see his younger son mistreated and abandoned in turn by none other than the twin sister of that unscrupulous, two-faced young man—!

There was one blessing in disguise. Aunt Terri and Uncle Paul got in a huge argument over whether they should extend an olive branch to Rachel and visit her. Uncle Paul refused. He had called; he had invited. The next step must be Rachel’s. “But the child!” Aunt Terri pleaded. “If we wait till Rachel softens and comes around, who knows how long it will be until we see the child again!” To this my uncle made no reply. Aunt Terri crossed the Rubicon: “Very well. If you won’t go see her, I will. She is still my niece, and the boy is still my great-nephew.” “You do
as you please,” replied Uncle Paul, “but I will not talk to Rachel until she comes to me.” Aunt Terri huffed away and made herself scarce thereafter, to our general relief. I occasionally found bouquets of cut roses on the doormat or was enlisted to pass messages to “that stubborn brother of hers,” but she had chosen her side and had no intention of giving ground. If the Price inheritance was to be too yielding—my mother to physical temptation and my aunt Marie to indolence—the Beresford flaw was obstinacy.

My uncle shrunk, in weight and presence. As Tom’s hair grew back in, his father’s fell out. Even Aunt Marie noticed after a while. “Frannie—don’t you think your uncle needs a vacation? I tell him he needs a vacation. I insist on it. Tom is getting better, and you’re old enough, aren’t you, dear, that if we went away for a few months, you would be okay?” It didn’t matter. Uncle Paul had no intention of giving up his work, the only escape he had left. The Beresford obstinacy. Aunt Marie, as was her habit, dropped it.

With no Aunt Terri and rarely Jonathan, the only visitor who came with any regularity was Marcy. Tom might not remember her, but she remembered him and was determined to win him all over again. After her unfortunate comment at the hospital where she suggested spiking Tom’s liquid diet, she finally began to clue in to the atmospheric change. Partying was out. The new Tom was quieter, forced by circumstances to learn endurance and regret. He had a mountain to climb, and he was determined to climb it. The Beresford obstinacy in action. He would do the hours and hours of physical therapy so that he could walk on his own again. He would wean himself from the painkillers, cost him what it might, so that they didn’t own him. Marcy, who only drank, really, to keep him company and appeal to him, gave it up overnight, becoming quite the Sober Sue.

When she was around, she insisted I give over any nursing tasks to her, but she was eager and clumsy, and I frequently saw her jostle Tom or clutch him in a way that caused his face to go white. But the new Tom—whether because his jaw was wired shut and Marcy couldn’t understand him anyway, or because he had learned grace—refrained from lashing out at her. At first Marcy would try to shoo me away, but if Tom got tired of writing things or trying to make himself understood, she would call me back. Eventually, she just let me stay, and we became quite a threesome. I would read the Yeats’ poems my teacher assigned aloud to them. Tom particularly liked “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree
.” I think it reminded him, as it did me, of the cabin in Tahoe—the Waterhole, the pines, sailing, and those better summer days where “peace comes dropping slow.”

“
Aggn
,
Frrr—ee
.”

“
‘
I will arise and go now,’” I recited obediently, “
‘
for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,/ I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’”

Another blow fell that autumn. But for my uncle, after nearly being crushed by Tom’s accident and his two children’s failed marriages, this one failed to have the impact it might have otherwise. And, of course, if Julie’s brothers’ and sister’s lives hadn’t gone up in flames as they
did, she might never have done something so rash. But they did, and she did, and it was in November—right around my 19
th
birthday—that Aunt Terri left a note in the mailbox to announce,
via Rachel
, that the real reason Julie wouldn’t come home again was that she had eloped that past summer. With her siblings’ marriages collapsing right and left, fear of reprisals drove her into her lover’s arms and she had run away. With none other than that old family favorite, Tom’s friend Steve. Or was it Dave?

The last, last upheaval in that season of upheavals came from Jonathan.

It was my nineteenth birthday, and we were gathered around a table heaped once more with Paola’s fried chicken, another
tres
leches
cake waiting in the refrigerator. We were a sadly reduced group from the year before: Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie, Tom, Marcy, and Jonathan. On the bright side, Tom’s jaw had been freed from its wire cage, and he gingerly enjoyed his solid food, cut lovingly in baby bits by Marcy.

When the muted toasts and well-wishes had been gotten through, Jonathan tapped lightly on his glass. “I have an announcement. Not directly related to Frannie, but I hope she’ll find it welcome news.”

There was a glow in his eyes I hadn’t seen for some time. My breath caught and a million thoughts darted through my head. Caroline changed her mind. She dumped Rob Newman. She and Jonathan were back together.

Jonathan smiled into the silence. Some version of what went through my head must have gone through everyone’s because his gladness faltered. “Not news of that kind—no. Entirely different. I’ve been accepted to Moore College in Sydney, Australia. I’m going to be studying Theology for a couple years, to get my Master’s. It starts in February.”

His eyes met mine briefly. Then he looked away to face his father.