Real Life (5 page)

Hugo was mooching along the bank. As she watched, he stooped down and unlaced his sneakers, took them off, and tossed them up on the grass with his socks. Then he waded gingerly into the pond, his jeans pushed up to the knee. She imagined the mucky bottom sucking at his bare feet; she hated it, the way some people cringe at a nail scraping a blackboard—the glutinous slime against her skin. She never swam in the pond.

Hugo reached down into the water and came up with a net of weeds. He held it up to untangle it, and the red stripes on his T-shirt gleamed in the sun. His arms, even at this distance, looked white and pudgy, muscleless. He flung the weeds from him, then bent for more and flung them away again, found a stone and tried to skip it. She watched him stand still for a moment, looking out over the water, before he proceeded further along the bank toward the waterfall and the Verranos' property, beyond the trees, out of her sight. She was startled by a mild disappointment; she had thought he would come in. She needed to know what he liked for dinner. Maybe they could drive into town for groceries, have a talk on the way. “I want to get a couple of things straight, Hugo,” she said aloud, softly. “I'm not very good company. I work very hard. Don't expect me to—”

She took the rubber band from her hair, brushed it out, and braided it, looking in the mirror at her white, untannable face. The lines cut deeper every day between her nose and the corners of her mouth, giving her a snout like a chimpanzee's. Aunt Dorrie. Hugo's maiden aunt. Perfect.

She used to imagine herself with children. Once, when she was still going with Mark, she had even made up names for them: Eleanor, Daniel, and Jane, two girls and a boy. She wondered if they would look like her or Mark: Mark, she hoped. She had pictures of herself and Phinny as children: thin and tall for their ages, with skin so white it was nearly blue, dense black hair, light gray eyes. They had looked like no one else, not even their parents, who were both short and brown-haired; it was often assumed that Dorothea and Phineas were adopted. There were snapshots, though, of relatives in Ireland, her father's mother's people. When her father was stationed in England during the war he had visited them in Dublin, and had photographed their narrow pale faces burdened with too much black, lusterless hair—faces and hair and tall thin bodies just like hers and Phinny's. She liked going over the pictures with her father. She liked the narrow gray streets and, in one picture, the mammoth carved doors of a church—in another, a house with window boxes brimming with flowers. All the girls were in limp cotton dresses with falling-down socks, the boys in short pants and caps, the parents unsmiling and dim, keeping back. “They don't look healthy,” she said to her father.

“They weren't.” He told her how poor those far-off cousins were, how it hurt him to share their scanty food, how he had tucked two pound-notes under the teapot when he left. For years he sent them an international money order at Christmas, but they scattered as they grew up, and he lost touch with them, so that all that was left was the photographs, which no one but Dorrie ever looked at, of the poor unhealthy Irish cousins in the forties.

She still had them, had come across them, in fact, during her search for the clipping about Iris. She stood looking in the mirror, wishing now that she had produced those imaginary children, that they were at this moment fooling around with Hugo down by the pond, fishing out weeds and skipping stones, barefoot. She imagined herself calling them to come in: “Eleanor, Daniel, Jane!” She went downstairs and out on the deck, and called, not very loud, “Hugo!” There was no reply, and she shouted it again. Her voice sounded unfamiliar, and embarrassed her. She waited a few minutes, but Hugo didn't answer or appear. The sun was in the west, and it heated the dock. She shaded her eyes against it. The pond reflected the sky, flat blue. The hell with Hugo, it was too hot. She went back inside and looked at the new issue of
Ceramics Monthly
that had come in the mail.

Hugo returned, eventually, for dinner. He was subdued, though when Dorrie asked him about school he talked a little. His favorite subject was math, music was all right, English wasn't. He had liked his history teacher, Mrs. Selnick, but he didn't like history. He had taken Latin for two years but didn't like it. He had made a bird house in shop and given it to David's mother.

“She likes birds?” Dorrie asked. “So do the Garners. They go out nearly every Sunday. Maybe they'd take you with them.”

“I'm not interested in birds,” Hugo said.

The conversation seemed inadequate to the occasion. Shouldn't something formal have taken place? An exchange of vows? I, Dorothea Gilbert, hereby swear I will do my best to—what? bring you up? be responsible for you? be a mother to you? And I, Hugo Gilbert, swear to be a good boy, to stay out of the way and not be a nuisance, and most of all to be nothing like my father.

“Birds all look alike to me,” Hugo said.

“Was she nice—Mrs. Wylie?” Dorrie asked him.

He looked up at her from his plate of tuna salad, the first time he had met her eyes since she sent him out with his basket of clothes. “I wish I was back at Grandpa's,” he said. “I wish he hadn't died.”

“Oh, Hugo, so do I,” Dorrie said.

They both had tears starting, and this agitated Hugo so much he left the table and went outside. She watched him out the back window, running down to the dock, a shadow among shadows. She washed the dishes and then sat in the living room, trying to think, to take it in. If she looked out the window again, she knew she would see him, a small dimming figure huddled with his grief. The pond would be darker than the sky, and gradually they would merge, the sky going navy blue, then black. Hugo invisible. But there, still there.

2

Dome's father, Martin Gilbert, had taught Victorian literature at a small, second-rate Connecticut women's college that had shocked and dismayed him when, in the early seventies, it began admitting men: “The Invasion of the Barbarian Hordes,” he called it. He never altered his opinion that coeducation leads to mediocrity. He blamed his own disillusion with teaching on the invasion, but the truth was that as he aged he found his job more and more futile and tedious, and he was aware that his students considered him boring and old-fashioned and hard. He even grew tired of his subject. Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning wearied him; their world seemed far removed from his own. He knew by heart the novels of Trollope and George Eliot (from which he had named his children), and he didn't want to read them anymore. After he retired, he hardly read anything at all except magazines and the newspaper, and he discovered television.

But this was years after Dorrie had left home for good. During her childhood, her father had been ambitious and full of schemes. At the college, he served on committees that fought for stiffer entrance requirements, tougher grading policies, more rigorous courses. On vacations, he worked at his cluttered rolltop desk making notes on cards and annotating the margins of his books and filling out grant application forms. He drove all over New England looking in secondhand bookshops for works on his subject, for art books and old prints. He had a true admiration for the sanctimonious paintings of the Victorian age, and he and his wife had dinner table arguments about art, Anna defending modernism, pure form, experimentation, Martin going for realism and moral uplift. The arguments were sincere and informed and a trifle self-conscious: the Gilberts were proud of their ability to carry on a civilized discussion about an interesting subject, and the friction of mind against mind, opinion against opinion, was good for the mental development of the children, even though it was obvious that Dorothea daydreamed through dinner and Phineas bolted his food and then slumped glassy-eyed in his chair until he was excused to go out with his pals.

Martin wrote articles for scholarly journals, and occasionally but not often one of them was published—never in the prestigious publications. His great love was the book he worked on throughout his forties and fifties, a study of the interrelationship of Victorian art and literature. When he finally sent it to a small university press (Anna practically had to pry it out of his hands), it was returned with a letter saying half of it was out of date and the other half had already been done; he hadn't kept up with the scholarship. He burned the manuscript in the fireplace, a few pages at a time, while out in the kitchen Anna pounded her fist on the countertop, cursing the insensitivity of publishers. And then, that evening, they had beef stew for dinner—Martin's favorite—and wine, and apple pie for dessert, and a rousing discussion of Pop Art. Dorrie's parents were as jolly and sanguine as ever. The book was never mentioned again, and the rejection seemed to have left no mark.

Anna Gilbert was a failed artist as surely as Martin was a failed scholar. Failure was her way of life, a source in its own way of pride—proof that she was above the common herd, that her violent, murky oils were a rare and special taste. “I apparently haven't caught the knack of pleasing the masses,” she used to say. Her true-grit smile had a wry twist to it, just in case she wasn't a good enough painter for such false modesty. Each time Anna took the train to New York with her portfolio, or sent slides of her work off to a gallery, or submitted pieces to one of the big art exhibitions, Dorrie knew as sure as winter that nothing would come of it—just as she knew that Martin's neatly typed articles would come back speedily, rejected, and that he'd be passed up for promotions and fail to get the grants he applied for. And she knew that his few unimpressive publications, and her mother's occasional group shows in New London or New Haven, were nothing but variations on failure.

They never stopped trying, either of them. There was always hope, always a new scheme: a gallery opening up, a grant available only to World War II veterans, an acquaintance with connections—or, in Phinny's case, a different school psychiatrist, or an innovative program for wayward boys.
MAKE THE BEST OF IT,
Dorrie thought, should be engraved on their tombstones. And she often wondered how they had produced her and Phineas.

Dorrie's one close friend, Rachel Nye, a fat girl with braces, was even more soured on life than Dorrie. Her witty cruelties made Dorrie feel, by contrast, like a nice person. The two of them used to sit at either end of Dorrie's ruffle-trimmed bed while Rachel ticked off, in alphabetical order, their classmates, first at Chiswick Elementary School, then at Shoreline High, and commented on them one by one. She was impartially nasty. She invented nicknames for the kids they despised most—the popular girls, the goody-goodies, the dumb macho boys they both secretly lusted after. Mary Gonorrhea Harper, No-Tits Farina, Nicholas the Prickless, Gross Gretchen … though, even as they sat there laughing until their faces ached, Dorrie wondered if, in another frilly bedroom, No-Tits and Gross Gretchen were cracking up over Horse-Face Gilbert and Fatty Nye. When she said as much to Rachel, Rachel looked at her with what seemed to be loathing and said, “Oh, for Christ's sake, Gilbert, who cares what those jerks think? Are you going to squander your entire precious youth worrying over trivial crap?”

She did, actually. She spent long hours, whole days, enormous chunks of her precious youth worrying: about her looks, her social failures, her unrequited crush on Nicky Moore, and what she would do if she got her period in the middle of English class; about overdue library books whose fines she had to pay out of her allowance; about where she would go to college and what on earth she would study there; about what hanging around with Rachel Nye was doing to her image; about a dream in which she was passionately kissing Lawrence Wynn, the creepiest boy in the class.

And then Phineas. Merely living in the same house with him seemed wrong, a crime against nature, as if a dear little kitten and an evil, no-good polecat were confined in the same cage simply because they belonged to the same family. There were times Dorrie was tempted to make to her parents what seemed like a perfectly reasonable request, that Phineas be sent somewhere else to live, that a foster home be found for him with people of his own kind. What did a person like Phineas have in common with Anna's pressed wildflowers, the threadbare Oriental rug in the hall, Martin's research on the names in Trollope's Barsetshire novels, Dorrie's place on the honor roll, the reproduction of
Guernica
on the dining room wall?

And yet Dorrie had known forever that no matter what outrages he committed or virtues she cultivated, no matter how her mother cried when he slammed out of the house or her father sat at his desk with his head in his hands—no matter what, her parents would always prefer Phinny.

“Oh, you are something,” Anna said to him once after one of his dreadful crimes and his ingenious, hypocritical apology for it, and she enfolded him in a hug with a look of such fearful bliss on her face that Dorrie, who had been lurking in the vicinity, had to back away as if from a painful light.

When Hugo thought of his father, he always remembered the last time he had seen him. He wished that day didn't stick in his mind; he would much rather have remembered the day they had walked on the beach and picked up shells, or their drive to New Jersey to see his father's friend Connie, who had a swimming pool, or any of the dozens of nice things they had done together that were fun or exciting or a little crazy, but not that last day at Rose's.

His father had drunk too much beer, for one thing. Also, he and Rose were smoking marijuana. Hugo hated it when they smoked. He hated the look of glee on his father's face as he rolled a joint—though he admired the magical deftness with which he did it, and he liked the texture of the little paper squares his father gave him to play with; they would almost melt when he touched them with his tongue. But he hated the burning smell that was like cloth smoldering, and he hated the way they laughed at what wasn't funny, and he hated it that, while they sat and smoked and laughed, his cousins were allowed to get away with more murder than usual. It was on one of those marijuana afternoons that Shane and Monty, tired of his tagging after them and his chatter, had forced him into the spiderwebbed old chicken house, padlocked the door, and then forgotten him, and no one heard him yelling until after it got dark.