Off Season (20 page)

“Well, okay then,” I said sniffily, knowing I had been childish and cruel. I began to cry. Wilma leaned his head against my leg, and I reached down and patted him.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said, choking on the words.

“Don’t be. The last thing I want for any of you is to give up your loves. I don’t plan to give up mine.”

My father made a small, strangled sound, and she pulled her robe tight around her and went to him and slipped her arm around his waist, and they walked out of the bathroom together. I looked furtively at the swell of her breasts under her satin robe. Which one was it? Surely there would be a difference. But there wasn’t. Not then, anyway.

The still gray time that is Washington at Thanksgiving came wheeling past. We were accustomed to having Thanksgiving dinner at the Chevy Chase Club, because neither of my parents had living mothers and fathers, and my father’s brother had a large family of his own and tended to take his brood to the huge old hunting lodge in Arkansas, where Gregory’s in-laws held impossibly lavish four-day celebrations, with servants and cooks and legendary bird-hunting trips, and everyone dressed formally for the game dinners that followed.

I had always liked having just us, together again, in the beautiful old dining room we knew so well, with, as my mother once said a bit ironically, everyone who was anyone in Washington around us; course after course of traditional holiday food, sumptuous desserts, the great Christmas tree in the lobby already shining, and elegant old Frost to greet us at the door.

Frost never forgot anyone’s name. I always wondered how he did it.

It was my custom to save a fat drumstick for Wilma, but we didn’t go to the club that Thanksgiving, and so I saved the drumstick from the turkey that Flora and Emma cooked and gave it to him in my bedroom. He was as happy to get a home-cooked drumstick as he had ever been to receive a Chevy Chase one, and capered all over the house with it, dragging grease and seasoning over every available rug. My parents, who had come into the sitting room after complimenting Flora and Emma effusively, had lit the fire and put a little Haydn quartet on the record player. Rain had begun to tick against the diamond-paned sitting-room windows, and the fire snickered softly and smelled faintly of the old apple tree that had died in the backyard over the summer, and the Haydn rippled and purled sweetly. Wilma brought his bone and curled up on the fire rug and attacked it, and I sat on the little corner settee and looked at my family and listened to the music and smelled the sweet smoke and was unaccountably very happy. Right then, just for that moment out of careening time, we were all stopped and stilled in pure grace, and nothing could touch us. My mother lifted her head and looked at me and smiled, and I knew that she felt the magic too. My father had his head back against his chair and his eyes closed; he frequently napped thus after meals. I did not, somehow, believe he was asleep, but if he was, I hoped his dreams were as sweet as this room on this day.

The weeks before Christmas had always been a giddy, heart-lifting time to me on Kalorama Circle. It had always been a time of decorations going up, of vanilla and cinnamon swirling out of the kitchen, of fresh pine greenery and the sharp fragrance of poinsettia with which my mother forested the drawing room, of carols on the radio and baroque music on the phonograph, of the first melting chocolate cherry from the drugstore box that always sat on the table behind the big sofa, discreetly shielded by its more elegant Godiva companions; of the cold fragrance of the big fir that came in fresh from the lot behind the Avalon Theatre; of tissue paper crackling and boxes stowed in bedroom closets and, always, laughter from the drawing room as my parents’ friends came for Christmas eggnog or Tom and Jerrys; and sometimes the whisper of fat wet snowflakes against the diamond panes of the big front windows.

A long time later I told Cam about those Christmases and he said, “Pure Norman Rockwell. Do you know how lucky you were?”

“I didn’t then,” I said. “I do now.”

The Christmases had always included nighttime drives to see the decorations on the embassies, and, of course, the great tree on the lawn of the White House. But we did not go that year. For one thing, my mother loathed Lyndon Johnson and said to my father that he had probably hung bull testicles all over the tree.

But it was more than just the hulking new Texas President. Something had happened when John Kennedy was shot, something that seemed to leach joy and safety out of the world. Terrible things that had never before seemed possible, now were. I think of it as the time when America hunched its shoulders and lowered its head, waiting for the next blow. They were not long in coming.

“Aren’t y’all going to have any parties?” I remember saying to my mother. I pretended to hate them, as I was usually pressed into waitress service dressed in my holiday best. But I missed the before-party bustle, and the hum of adult laughter from the drawing room, and the smell of perfume on cold fur coats in the upstairs bedroom. I always sniffed furs at my mother’s winter parties.

“No. Not until after Christmas. I’ve put the word out. I just want to be quiet this year, no visitors, and then right after Christmas we’ll have a big party and ask everybody. I’ll have to decide what to do about my hair. Maybe you can go wig shopping with me.”

“Maybe we can have a wig made out of your hair. I’ve still got it. It’s in my underwear drawer.”

She laughed.

“Not a bad idea at all, Lilly. Maybe we will.”

But she never did. She wore turbans or scarves at home, and one of her signature slouch hats when, infrequently, we went out. I never thought about her bald head anymore. She became just my mother who had a penchant for scarves and turbans, as if she had always worn them.

Given time, a child can fit almost any horror into his or her world. We did not have such elaborate decorations that year, but there was the customary magnolia wreath on the door, and my father brought home the fresh fir from our accustomed lot, and we decorated it. This had always been a pinnacle moment for me in the landscape of Christmas, accompanied by laughter and reminiscences about the provenance of this battered ornament and that, and hot cocoa. We even draped Wilma in tinsel, hastily removing it before he ate it.

But that year was quiet, even with the crackling fire and the carols and, of course, Wilma. My father brought down the boxes of lights and ornaments, and he and I decked the tree under Mother’s direction. She seemed to have little energy, but in the evening she was usually the weariest. When we were nearly done, we stepped back to survey the tree. It was beautiful, a bit smaller this year but a lovely shape, so fresh that the scent of fir sap joined that of the needles and the fire logs in the room. My father paused over the box and lifted out the decoration that we almost always put on last, a long chain of translucent colored sea glass we had gathered from the beach at Edgewater over the years. He stopped and looked at my mother. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, and he laid the chain back in the box. I said nothing, but my heart was hammering with relief and something else I could not name when the chain disappeared in the box again. We did not speak of it.

Two weeks before Christmas, I woke in the night and heard my parents arguing. They were all the way down the hall from me, and both our doors were closed, but I could still hear my father shouting indistinguishably, and my mother’s voice, higher, and with an edge of hysteria in it that I had never heard before.

“No!” she shouted. “I absolutely will not! I will not have my son come home from school and find me puking my guts out for three days! I won’t spend Christmas with my family tiptoeing outside my door and eating Christmas dinner alone, and listening to me throw up every five minutes. I’ll do it after the holidays, but I will not do it now!”

They finally stopped shouting and the after-midnight silence fell down over the house again. It was a long time before I went to sleep. It took me many minutes to concoct a scenario that fit what I had heard. I finally settled on one of the painful trips to the dentist that often made my mother nauseated for a day or two, and fell asleep with Wilma twitching and warm beside me. No one mentioned it; I would have died rather than ask.

Jeebs came home a week before Christmas. My father met him at Union Station on a raw gray day slashed with blowing sleet, and they came puffing and stamping into the house in the late afternoon. My mother and I were waiting for them in the sitting room, where the tree and fire were lit and Wilma groaned happily in deep doggy sleep on the hearth rug. The rug was grubby and frayed with the years of Wilma, but my mother always said there was no use replacing it while Wilma was in residence. She began to smile when she heard the footsteps, and rose from her chair.

Jeebs came into the room, and she stopped, and we both stared. He was inches taller, and wore an astonishing costume of corduroy knickers, a moth-eaten velvet coat with dull, frayed satin lapels, and round granny glasses on his snub nose. He had striped woolen stockings and what appeared to be unlaced combat boots on his feet, and his hair fell into his eyes so that he had to keep brushing it back off the glasses. He stopped still and stared back at us as if daring us to say a word. Behind him, my father’s mouth quirked with laughter, but his voice was level and placid.

“Behold the prodigal son,” he said.

Jeebs scowled. He had not, I knew, wanted to come home for Christmas, having been invited to ski with a classmate at his parents’ lodge in Aspen. But my father had put his foot down. Jeebs glanced at my mother’s pretty red satin turban, and then looked quickly away, as if he had inadvertently beheld something obscene.

Mother rose and went to him and put her arms around him. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

Jeebs took a step backward.

“Grotties don’t hug,” he said.

“Well, this Grottie damned well better hug his mother at Christmas or he’ll find himself matriculating at Harry Truman High next semester,” my father said, his voice shaking with rage. Harry Truman High was in the heart of the projects, and spawned more juvenile crime than any other institution of higher learning in Washington.

Jeebs hugged my mother gingerly, and, when her arms dropped, stepped back once more.

“Well, look at you,” my mother said, her voice just a little too high. “I rather had in mind blazers and white shirts and ties.”

“Everybody wears this stuff when they’re off campus, Mother,” Jeebs said. For the first time he looked uncomfortable in his moth-eaten finery. “We get ’em at thrift shops and sometimes costume shops.”

“Should save a bit on clothes,” my father said dryly.

“I’ll go up and change,” Jeebs said. “Am I still in my old room?”

“Darling, where else would you be? Of course you are. No one’s touched it except to clean it since you left.”

Jeebs muttered something and went upstairs. He left his luggage where he had dropped it in the hall. When he came back down he was in the khakis and crewneck we were accustomed to, and somehow had become Jeebs again, not just a Grottie.

We had the family powwow late that afternoon, by the tree in the sitting room. It did not go well. I was just beginning to understand the import of my mother’s illness and was struck dumb by it, and Jeebs stubbornly refused to confront it at all.

It was, as we had been told, cancer, my father said, and my mother had had her left breast and some tissue from her underarm removed. There was no sign of cancer in the lymphatic glands that the surgeons had removed, but it had been a tumor of some size and had apparently been there for quite a while, so, to be sure, my mother was getting chemotherapy treatment, and would later receive radiation.

“The treatment is sometimes worse than the disease,” my father said. “Chemotherapy destroys the malignant cells, but it destroys the white blood cells that fight it, too. Your mother will possibly be very sick for a few days after she gets the chemo, very weak and nauseated. She hasn’t been so far, but they say that the third treatment is when the sickness usually starts, and she’ll be getting that . . . soon.”

He paused, and all of a sudden I understood what they had been arguing about. She had been due a treatment now, and had refused to have it until after Jeebs had come home and Christmas was over.

“After the first course of chemotherapy they’ll take another look at her and see where we are. We all hope that there’ll be a remission. The doctors think it’s highly possible. But if there isn’t, we’ll do another course. We very much hope that after this course, or between others, she’ll feel much better and gain weight and some of her hair will begin to come back. But it could be a rough time, especially for her, and really for all of us. We may have to make some changes. I may take some time off from the university. We’ll probably have an overnight nurse from time to time. Jeebs, we may have to ask you to come home for a bit now and then. We—”

“Wait! No! I can’t leave school my first year; it’s when the college admissions are fixed! Everybody says so! Harvard tracks you from the very beginning!”

Jeebs was on his feet, his face blanched white.

“Jeebs, if your grades are good enough I’m sure both Groton and Harvard will see fit to make an occasional exception for serious family illness,” my father said in a dangerously level voice.

My mother said nothing.

“But I mean . . . it’ll be over soon, won’t it?” Jeebs squeaked. “I mean, with all that chemo stuff and all—isn’t it just a matter of time till it’s over?”

“A matter of time, yes,” my father said. “But it could be a very long time. You can’t just turn cancer on and off. You live with it—if you’re lucky, a very long time—but no one can predict how long. The waiting is hard and the ups and downs are even harder. Cancer can be a fatal disease, Jeebs. We don’t think it will be in your mother’s case. But you can’t just go on thinking it’s something temporary that will work out after a while, because it’s not.”

“You mean we might not ever really
know
?”