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“My mother called me Lavinia,” she said finally.
He smiled down at her, and as he leaned forward she could smell the rich yeast of his breath.
“See—” he cupped her neck in his palm “—didn’t I tell you?”
That’s as much as she would ever reveal about what happened that evening in the garden. My grandfather on the other hand was more forthcoming. He once told me how even though he had noticed the wedding band, even though she was just a slip of a girl with a bitter tongue and even though her face was twisted in contempt, he had still looped her up by the waist and pressed his mouth against hers. He was drunk, he was angry and he saw in her the same anger at everything. Perhaps it was an act of consolation or the comfort of two strangers who found in each other a sense of kinship. Perhaps I am being too sentimental. Perhaps it was only ever meant to be just a kiss.
Later, when her husband would decide to go home and start to look for her, she would appear next to the table with the punch bowl, and he would ask if she’d had enough and wanted to leave, and she would say, gladly.
On the ride home, my grandmother said, she wrestled with herself. She thought about Cal’s words while she twisted her wedding ring. She conjured the faces of her cousin and her family, of the last time she ever saw her mother and finally of the pink curtain she had slashed to ribbons. The weight of it all, of all she knew and hated and all she wanted and was too afraid of, made her sag in her seat. For once her husband seemed to notice. He leaned over as he steered the car down the thin tree-laden lanes and, holding her hand he said, “Are you okay, Anne-Marie?”
And just like that she broke.
When I think of a time when things could have been different and then when something happened to make it so that they could never be, I find myself back at that garden party. If it were possible to undo that one thing, then everything else in time would unravel with it and we’d be left clean and renewed with hope.
Before I went to bed that night I dialed Ava’s number. It was late but I didn’t care. In the end it was the answering machine that picked up. Usually I would not have left a message but this time was different. This time I said, “I’m going back. I thought … well someone has to look over things and I don’t want Mom’s stuff sold off to a pack of strangers or gossip-hungry neighbors. I was thinking … I don’t … I wondered if maybe you may want to come with me—just to see what stuff you’d want to keep to remember them by …. No, why would you, right? I know. But I am going. I just thought you should know.”
I put down the receiver and lay supine on my bed. I knew I would dream that night, but I did not care. In the silence behind my mouth I said to myself, Let them come.
As if they needed an invitation.
3
AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-ONE, WALTER HATHAWAY had cancer of the colon. That was the only reason his eldest son had come back. He had been diagnosed in the office of an oncologist upstate, a specialist recommended to him by Lou Parks, who had gone to college with the man and had followed his career with a respect tinged with envy.
After a series of tests and weeks of waiting he had driven back up to the doctor’s office, where after a few minutes of chitchat and polite conversation, the doctor had told him that not only did he have cancer of the colon, but that there was also nothing they could do to save him.
“Bullshit,” said Walter.
He had picked up his hat and thanked the man, who, after taking a moment to recover, was still hastily trying to explain that with his symptoms Walter would be dead within a year. Despite the doctor’s protestations, Walter left him with little more than a curt nod of acknowledgment. He refused to believe that death would be coming for him so soon, and so when he came home and sat before the dinner his daughter had made for him, all he’d said when she asked him where he’d been was that he had spent the day in a meeting with a supplier.
But then four months later he had woken up in a pool of his own shit and blood and saw death beside him sitting in a wicker chair. So he had lain back into his pillow, sighed and said, “Okay, you win.”
It was then he began to talk about his eldest son and how to bring him home.
It was also the first time he had mentioned him in over sixteen years.
When he was laid up in his bed and the doctor had given him his medication, he gritted his teeth against the pain and curled his fingers into claws so that they dug tunnels in the sheets. Twisting in agony he beckoned to his daughter and told her, “Go find your brother.”
“Sure, Pa, I’ll go get him for you,” said Piper. A few minutes later and she came back with Leo, who winced when he saw the state his father had become.
Walter closed his eyes and sighed irritably.
“No, not him. I mean your brother Cal. Get Cal.”
Piper felt Leo stiffen beside her but she dared not look at him. She stared at her father but the old man had his gaze fixed to the ceiling, battling against the forces of his own body, and she saw then what she would become despite everything she was now and her back sank beneath the weight of her revelation.
“Pa?”
“Didn’t you hear me, girl? You making me talk when I got no energy to talk. Do as I say!” he shouted and then doubled over into himself. Piper went to help him but he smacked her hand away. She looked desperately for Leo but he’d already left the room.
When she went down the stairs she found Leo standing on the front porch, his fingers splayed against the fringe of the roof that hung over them. He was staring out onto the drive. Without looking away he asked, “Is he dead yet?”
“What the hell is wrong with you? Of course not,” said Piper.
He turned to face her.
“Well, by God I wish he were. I wish he’d hurry and up and go before he does something stupid.”
“I don’t want to hear you talk like that.”
“That man up there is not my father.”
“He may be more of your father than you’d like.”
Leo lurched himself forward down the porch steps.
“What do you want me to do?” Piper called after him. He turned around, and when he did his face was half in shadow.
“Get a gun and end it. If it were a horse you wouldn’t think twice.”
Piper leaned back and clasped her hands over her skirt.
“Well then, don’t ask me again,” he said, his profile throwing up long shadows as he walked home.
After a while it seemed that the medication began to take hold. Her father was weak but quiet, as if he had resigned himself to his fate. Sometimes as she passed the hall that led to his bedroom she would hear his voice and wonder to whom he was talking. She mentioned it once to Lou Parks, who said not to worry, one of the side effects of the treatment was hallucinations. He asked her if she wouldn’t want to move their father to some palliative care place that would help control his pain before he died, but Piper refused. She had nursed her mother in that same bed before she died and she felt it was only right to do the same for her father. Lou Parks shrugged and touched the rim of his hat as he left her. She went to the kitchen to prepare dinner.
But then a few days later, Lou came into the living room, where she was mending linen, and said gently, “Your pa is asking for Cal.”
“What?” she asked, startled.
He stepped gingerly into the room, cautious to avoid any mines. “Walter won’t stop talking about the boy. He wants to see him.”
“Could this be the effect of the medication?” Piper asked hopefully.
“No, more like the effect of dying and the regrets that come to you before you do.”
“Oh,” said Piper as she sat back in disappointment. “I see.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Cal? Of course I do.”
“It’s just what with Walter feeling how he did about him I thought…”
“I never stopped talking to Cal,” said Piper. “I just didn’t do it in my daddy’s earshot.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
Later that night, Piper went down to Leo’s house, a small honey-colored place he’d built half a mile down from the main house. She knocked on the door and walked in to find her sister-in-law wiping flour from her hands.
“Hi there, Elisa,” she said. “Is Leo home?”
“Sure is, he’s upstairs having a bath. You wanna wait?”
Piper nodded. “I think I’ll have to.”
The women sat in the kitchen and chatted while Elisa put the finishing touches to her pie. Then quietly Elisa said, “My sister is pregnant again.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” said Piper before she had time to stop herself. Elisa smiled down at her fingers as she licked cherry juice from them.
“Yes, it is. I’m very happy for her. I do love playing with my niece and nephews. She was a little afraid of telling me, I think, on account of the troubles Leo and I have been having, but I’m glad she told me. She must feel so full of purpose.”
Piper kept silent but she watched the back of the woman’s head keenly. Usually she would reach out and touch her, but she could not afford to do so at a moment like this, not with what she had to tell her brother; not with knowing that she had approximately thirty seconds to say what she needed to before she was sent packing out of the house.
When Leo came downstairs, he nodded at his sister in greeting.
“I told Piper about my sister’s baby,” said Elisa as she dusted the pie in sugar. Leo gazed at his wife and then as if conscious of his sister watching, coughed into his hand and turned away.
“So you stopping for supper?” he asked.
“No, not exactly.” Piper placed a hand on her stomach, willing the courage to come, but it would not. So instead she leapt forward anyway, hoping that its inability to show itself was merely a product of delay rather than a sign of total absence.
“I think we should send for Cal.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Elisa’s hand hover in midair and then gently resume shaking the sugar over the crust. Her hand beating against the sieve was the only sound in the room.
Finally Leo said, “Now what in hell gave you that idea?”
“Pa is dying. You should respect a dying man’s wish.”
The chair scraped on the floor as Leo seated himself level with his sister.
“You ever think that maybe you should respect the wishes of a man when he was sane and well, rather than hallucinating and sick? That in his right mind Pa would never ask for such a thing?”
“It’s not just for Pa. Cal has a right to know.”
“For what?” Leo snorted. “He didn’t want to know for how many years now? Did he want to know after Ma died?”
“I think Daddy is ready to forgive.”
“I think this is horseshit.”
Piper stood up from the table and spread her fingers in a fan against the edge. She made herself tower over her brother.
“I believe we are better than this. I believe we are better than some people who would just let their own interests get in the way of doing what is right and I believe that even if Cal came back it wouldn’t make no difference to anything other than Pa would finally stop asking for him and could get some peace before he dies.”
Leo’s jaw worked thoughtfully at this last part. Piper saw it and pressed her advantage.
“You have to trust that Pa would have recognized what you’ve done, Leo. You’ve been here, Cal hasn’t. Maybe things were meant to work out differently to that, but they didn’t. We won’t lose anything by having him back. Once upon a time this is what you would have wanted.”
Elisa’s hands provided the background noise to the pause that followed Piper’s words: the opening and closing of the oven door, the scrape of dishes in the sink. Piper willed her brother to show a glimpse of the boy she had known since childhood. She willed it so hard it was almost a prayer, and for a moment as he lifted her head she thought perhaps God had been listening.
“Whatever,” said Leo and he left the room.
She knew better than to look at her sister-in-law for comfort when it came to this subject so she left and made her way back home. Three days later as Leo came in for lunch, she slipped a piece of paper and some money next to the arm holding his corn beef sandwich.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I need you to send a telegram for me.”
“To who?”
“To Cal.”
Leo slapped his tongue against his teeth.
“Will you?”
“I wasn’t planning on going into town.”
“Neither was I.”
They stood there in their silent contest of wills, and as Piper felt herself falter, a shadow passed over her brother’s face and he dropped his sandwich onto the plate. He hunched over as he stood up to leave and she made as if to touch him, but he gave her a look that forced her hand back to her side.
And then her father called for her. She was up the stairs in an instant and when she came back down, she saw the plate was now in the sink and that the money with the piece of paper was gone and she held on to the banister to steady herself as she leaned against the wall.
Did Walter have an inkling of what his simple request had done to the equilibrium of his household? Did he even care? It was a question she longed to ask, but she held her counsel. Instead she thought back to the last time they had all been under the one roof. It was the day of her mother’s wake and she had been thirteen years old. She remembered how she had stared up at the blueness of the sky and at the good china laden with finger sandwiches and cakes from their neighbors and the house full of people, and she remembered thinking that on any other day, to any stranger passing by, how much it would have looked like a party.
She remembered her father sitting in his chair, when he was still strong and intimidating, surrounded by their neighbors and Leo, only two years older than she was, hovering in the doorway looking silently at the shadows Cal threw up on the walk as he stalked up the drive away from them.
She remembered all these things with color, and between the stairwell and the walls she gave up a shudder.
Whenever my grandparents talked about their courtship, they always gave the impression of a passion and romance that could not help but transgress all boundaries. In one sense they were being truthful, but in another how else could they have presented it? Because the simple truth, as Piper loved to point out and did so more frequently the older she became, was that while theirs was a respectable marriage, their courtship had been far from it, with the inconvenient fact that my grandmother was already married.
I have often been struck by the differences in the ways in which Piper and Lavinia laid out the early years of my grandparents’ relationship, and indeed both their versions fascinated me because despite their differences they both illuminated an aspect of their partnership that neither myself, nor my siblings, nor even their own children, had ever witnessed: a time when it was my grandfather, not Lavinia, who had the power.
When my grandmother was still known as Anne-Marie Parks, she and Cal had begun their affair. At first, certainly from my grandfather’s point of view, it was never meant to be serious. He had no intention of staying in Iowa—this was simply a way of passing the time until his father died and he could be free. And he liked Anne-Marie: he liked how she always twisted her hair in her hands on one side of her neck as she listened to him tell stories from his childhood; he liked that she smelled of rose water; he liked how she spoke the truth regardless of consequence or feeling; he liked that she was unhappy.
My grandfather used to have a thing for unhappy women. He could sense them a mile off and he was always drawn to them, because they didn’t expect much and were always more than appropriately grateful for what they could get. But more than that, unhappy women, when you made them happy, relished the thing like a cat basking in a pool of sunshine: they unfurled, they blossomed and their smiles of incredulous delight at this transformation always gave Cal a surge of pride in his own abilities. It made him feel like a good person, before he remembered otherwise.
They would meet a few miles down the road from Aurelia, during the day so that Lou was out at the practice or when he had been called away for a series of home visits. Anne-Marie would park her car behind a turnoff into a clearing shielded by the long prairie grass and Cal would meet her there in his Chevy. They would go to secluded woods, sometimes on long drives to nowhere, where they would park in any cloistered place they could find. They would stay there for hours. My grandmother often said later that she lived for those drives, though she would never have indicated as such to Cal. She knew she could not push him, but she heard tales of Walter getting sicker and she would listen to Cal talk of Oregon and what he planned to do when he got back and she would wring her hair in her hands to stop herself from screaming at him.
She waited on those drives for the moment of inspiration to come, just like it had with Lou. She knew better than to force it, but still she worried. She could not bear the idea of Cal going back to Oregon and she stuck in her house with her husband, looking up night after night over the dinner table and finding him sitting there at the end.
Irritatingly, he had grown kinder to her since the garden party. Since the night she had broken down sobbing and choking in their car he had been more tender, more concerned. She had tried to endure it as best she could.
