East Side Story (27 page)

She discovered, however, that she now had a value to her aging siblings and aging cousins quite other than that of historian. It was not, however, particularly gratifying to her. She found herself frequently invited to spend weekends or even weeks with relatives who in the past had found bids to dinner over Christmas or Easter a sufficient recognition of the connection. Of course, it was her nurse's training that elicited these bids. How comforting it was to have staying in one's house, and at no expense except for her meals, a competent medical practitioner whom one could consult at one's ease about one's back or hip or throat or heart, or whatever organ or limb the evening of life was eroding!

Worst of all was her sister, Betty, who considered Loulou only too well compensated by her presence in the big breezy villa on Long Island Sound, not only for her temperature takings and back rubbing, but for her secretarial assistance with bills and correspondence.

Though handsome enough as a young woman, Betty had broadened with the years, and her limited imagination and unlimited ego, plus her confirmed status as a
malade imaginaire,
had rendered her not only less easy to look at but less easy to live with. Yet Lionel Harrison still saw her as the "marble beauty" with whom he had fallen in love decades before, and her children, taken in by the claims of her self-esteem and shamed by her unjustified complaints of family neglect, hovered around her with constantly proffered love and sympathy. Loulou could never forget how, on a family trip to Europe in their younger days, the prurient Betty had flung her copy of
Anna Karenina
over the side of the ocean liner, outraged by its vision of adultery. There had been, however, no violation of the marriage vow in her own union. Life had filled Betty's lap with treasures: her husband's ample means as well as his blind devotion, healthy and obedient children, and doctors who catered to her every whim. Yet she persisted in believing that she had kept her head up under an avalanche of misfortune.

Loulou had been invited to Long Island for the Christmas season and had been asked to help with her sister's Yuletide greeting cards. Betty, in the grip of one of her periodic and pointless fits of economy, had decided that by using the cards sent to her the previous year, cutting off the front flap with the picture and scribbling her name and greeting on its verso, she could save herself the trouble and expense of acquiring new cards. She was even fatuous enough to assume that such friends as might thus receive back their own mutilated card would appreciate so wise a saving.

Loulou at last drew the line. She threw down her pen. "No, Betty, I'm not going to write another one for you. You can't send this trash to the family. It's a disgrace."

"But we're saving our national forests!" Betty declared grandly. "Recycling Christmas cards! Isn't that the kind of thing you're always advocating? Take Lionel's office, for example. It has a hundred employees. If each one sends a card to the other ninety-nine, that's ten thousand cards! To and from people who see each other daily!"

"It's madness, I grant. But why not give it up altogether?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that. Everyone sends them. It's an expected thing."

"Well, it's not expected to do it the way you do. I shan't address another envelope."

"And of course I wouldn't dream of asking you to. But I must say, Loulou, you don't show much gratitude for what Lionel and I have done for you."

"Nor do I feel any. You're lucky I don't send you a bill."

"Loulou! How dare you say such a thing!"

"Well, that's it. I've said it, and I'm glad I said it. I think I'll go back to town tomorrow."

"Loulou! You can't do that. You promised me you would stay till after the New Year!"

"Well, I've decided to join David and Janetta on their Mediterranean cruise."

"And when did you decide
that}
"

"Just now. I'm not going to be a free nurse anymore for a family that's too cheap to pay for one!"

But Betty was now ready to give as good as she got. "And what do you think Janetta wants you for?" she sneered.

"For her heart, of course. David is my one honest cousin. He makes no bones about why he's asking me. But he offers me a first-class cabin on a luxury cruise, and he sees to it that I'm free to take every expedition in every port in which we stop."

"David has always been one to get his money's worth," Betty retorted with a sniff.

"Damn right he is. Because he's willing to pay the price. You always know just where you stand with David."

A month later, steaming toward Sicily on a benign sea, Loulou reclined on a deck chair beside David Carnochan and told him of her encounter with Betty. Janetta was sleeping the sleep of the unjust in the cabin behind their chairs.

"It will make no difference in your relationship," he assured her. "Betty will always be willing to have you back. On her own terms."

"And I'll probably be fool enough to go. The Bettys of this world never seem to get their comeuppance."

"Don't be too sure of that. Old age approacheth."

"And for me, too, David. But I shan't need much of a comeuppance. I haven't made much of my life."

"As much as any of us."

"Oh, David, don't say that. Not anyway from the pinnacle of your success."

"Such as it is. And what is it? You know what my marriage is. And as for the great law firm I dreamt of running my own way, I've had to share it, first with a bossy father-in-law, and now with a bossy partner whom I detest. And with whom I've even had to share my beloved son."

"Oh, but you've had so much else. Your being able to take this cruise, for example. Whenever you like. And even being able to take a poor old cousin along. Who, incidentally, is enjoying it very much."

"Mind you, I'm not complaining, Loulou. It was you who brought the subject up."

"Fair enough. And, of course, anything bad that happens to any member of a family like ours is more or less that member's fault. For each of us started with a pack of advantages. It was up to each to use them as best he or she could."

"Except for my darling sister, Estelle, who was given only twenty-three years of life."

"Which she made the most of! I wonder if she wasn't the happiest of us all!"

"You know, in some ways I think she was."

Loulou thought they had now said enough on the subject, and she rested her head against the back of her chair to contemplate the blue infinity of the motionless sea. She thought of her young cousin Estelle, and a pleasant peace stole over her. She had been a few years younger than this lovely and popular relative, but the latter had always been particularly kind to her, insisting that Loulou had qualities just as fine as any possessed by her prettier sister, Betty. She recalled now Estelle's little cry: "Never forget, Loulou, that you're
somebody
!" And glancing now at the austere profile of David beside her, she felt a sudden impulse of real warmth toward him. He, too, had loved Estelle, though she had never had to convince him that he was somebody!

"Estelle would have been proud of you, David."

"Oh, my dear, you don't have to say that. Estelle saw me through and through."

"That's what I mean."

The next day they were anchored off Girgenti in Sicily, and David and Loulou went ashore with the group that was to visit the line of ancient temples looming over the harbor. Janetta, who was suffering from a cold, had chosen to remain on board and confine her acquaintance with the ancient world to what she could espy from her deck chair with field glasses.

As they ascended the rocky pathway that led to the largest and best preserved of the temples, David asked Loulou if she had not been there before.

"Oh, yes," she replied, "on a summer cruise, not unlike this one, with my parents when I was seventeen."

"Is it the same now?"

She looked up at the front columns of the temple they were approaching, and suddenly and startlingly, she felt again the thrill that had penetrated her whole body at her first visit to the scene. Where could it have come from, that long-forgotten sensation? That early visit had provided her with her first sight of an old Greek temple, and the dramatic surging of it before her eyes, in place of all the photographs and prints she had seen on schoolroom walls, had filled her with a strange ecstasy and a curious but elated conviction that she was going to have a wonderful life!

"It
is
just the same," she replied at last in answer to David's question. And then she added: "And this path is just the same."

"They might have fixed it up a bit in all those years."

But she ignored a comment that had nothing to do with what was happening to her. Looking ahead at the backs of the members of their group who were preceding them, she had become mysteriously conscious of quite other backs. What she saw now in her mind's eye, but just as clearly as if she had turned the page of an old family album, was the ascent of another group of tourists on the mild gradient of the same path to the edifice above. All the figures were familiar to her, though she viewed them only from behind. She recognized her mother, who seemed about to stumble, for her father had a hand on her elbow, and a boyish Gordon, who was hurrying ahead of them. She also recognized the stout outline of Mr. Talbot, the cruise lecturer, and the big ugly black hat and broad shoulders of Mrs. Otis T. Lanier (how in those days people used to stress the middle initial of familiar society names!) and the small bobbing figure of her paid (and probably underpaid) companion, Miss Trimble. And then the picture disappeared as abrupdy as if someone behind her had reached over her shoulder to slam the album shut.

Yet she knew, she knew of a certainty, that what she had seen in her mind was a moment of the past preserved precisely as it had been on that particular Sicilian summer morning of 1907. She was familiar with all the scrapbooks that she herself had put together about family excursions, and there was no such photograph in any of them. But why had this particular and not very interesting vision been saved so carefully in the dark archives of her mind?

It was all very well for her to argue to herself that there didn't have to be a reason for one memory to be kept and another lost, that the mind contained a jumble of impressions that didn't have to make sense, but she could not deny the little flame of ecstasy that the vision had excited in her heart. All during their subsequent visit to the temples, she tried to put together this vision and her reaction to it in such a way as to tell her something about herself, and the only answer she could arrive at was that both were somehow twined about that strange prognostication inspired by the temples when she was a girl that she was going to have a wonderful life! Was it simply the irony of her existence that she had just been telling David that such a life was precisely what she hadn't had?

When, back on board that night, she told David of her experience, he nodded in some bewilderment, but made a conscientious effort to take her tale with at least some of the seriousness with which she endowed it.

"Well, there you are, Loulou. It's as I was saying. You
have
had a wonderful life."

"Is that what a wonderful life is?"

"It seems so. It doesn't necessarily follow that you have to
feel
you've had a wonderful life."

"And might that be true of you, too?"

"Very probably. We seem to be an ungrateful pair, you and I. But there is one thing, now I come to think of it, that strikes me about what you call your vision. What you saw was everyone's back. It was entirely a rear view, I take it?"

"Entirely. No one turned around."

"And haven't you yourself, as you have told me, spent a lot of time recently looking backward? All those family albums and charts?"

"You think it might be a warning to me to start looking forward? But to what?"

"No, it might be just the opposite. A hint that you should go on with what you're doing. Write a memoir about the family. Tell the whole truth, at least as you see it."

"Oh, I could never do that!"

"Why not? You don't have to publish it. Not in your lifetime, anyway."

Janetta now joined them, and they had to tell her of their excursion, carefully modifying the account so as not to make her feel that she had missed an important sight.

"We didn't really see anything that you couldn't see with your field glasses," David assured her. "The columns and pediments are really all that's left of the temples."

Loulou told herself that she wasn't capable of writing a book, but she didn't for a minute believe it. David's idea had so deeply excited her that she hardly dared dwell on it for fear that it might evaporate. For the rest of the cruise the concept of a family history kept jumping up and down in her mind, and when the cruise was over, and she found herself once again in her small apartment, a return that she had once dreaded, she was elated at the prospect of really starting the project.

But the calendar reminded her that the time had come around for her next chest X-ray, and when it was taken, it showed that her cancer was back—and fatally so.

W
ELL, HOW MUCH
did it matter, she asked herself over and over in the dreary months that followed. Were not the albums, with all their monotonous contrast between the stately poses in the studio and the high jinks that people used to feel obliged to affect before the candid snapshot, and all the dates of births and deaths, even the tedious lists of favorite sports and recreations, the fatuous self-appraisals in reply to her ceaseless interrogatories, a sufficient record of the Carnochans?

Indeed, was there even such a thing as a family? With royalty the constant intermarriage of cousins preserved a certain physical resemblance, such as the Hapsburg lip, but was that such a good thing? Didn't she have to recognize that such impact as the Carnochans had made on the social scene had been largely through the multiplication of the name due to the unusual preponderance of male births? Hadn't she been planning a species of novel with what was at best a collection of short stories?