The Road Taken (44 page)

Chapter Fifty-Five

Rose, who had been born with the birth of the century, was often amazed not only at the many changes that had taken place in her lifetime, but that she was still here to see them in 1999. And Hugh was still here too, still living in her house, surrounded by his family’s energy and love, and with a life’s purpose, his hospice. He went there faithfully every day—a man who’d had a happy life and a second chance—all of which, she thought, was what was keeping him alive.

He was as feisty an old man in these dwindling years of the nineties as he had been a decade before, although he was over ninety years old. He carried a cane these days, claiming it was because he thought it looked dapper, but actually as a necessary aid for walking; he was glad to use the staircase elevator in the house (Ah, well, Rose had been using it regularly herself at last,
sic transit gloria mundi
); he had lost some of his hearing but could hear well enough when he recognized it as gossip; he’d had laser surgery and lens implants for his cataracts and said he could see like a young man; and his grasp on his memory was surprisingly firm. When Hugh turned ninety he had insisted on giving a big birthday party at the house, and then at the last minute he felt oddly guilty and turned it into an AIDS fund-raiser.

His idol was George Burns, who was older than Hugh. Burns had been planning to appear again on the stage on his hundredth birthday, if he lived that long. George Burns was funny, he remembered his lines, he smoked cigars. When he passed away in 1996, at one hundred, after not achieving his wish, Hugh was very sad, and felt almost betrayed. Hugh had read that during his long lifetime, George Burns still talked to his deceased wife, Gracie Allen, as Hugh still did to the departed Teddy. Sometimes Hugh mentioned this, as casually as if everyone spoke to spirits. However, he was one of the few to whom the spirits spoke back. “The other day, Teddy said to me . . .” Hugh would say.

“New Age Hugh,” Rose called him, laughing. While she prayed to Ben’s spirit in heaven, Rose never actually thought of talking with him in a normal conversation.

New Age Everyone, she thought often these days, watching the changes rush by so dizzyingly. She still read the newspaper with the magnifying glass she favored over her eyeglasses, she listened to the radio and watched television, she kept up.

Cloning of vital tissues and organs was being developed. Every fall she went for a flu shot. With the new protease inhibitor some AIDS patients had almost literally returned from the dead—it was called the Lazarus Effect. Kids who were once called brats were now said to have Attention Deficit Disorder, and were being given the drug Ritalin, which Joan said she had taken in her disco days, although she had taken it to stay up. And heart surgery had become almost routine, perhaps ending the “family curse” for Rose’s own descendants.

Even now, Rose sometimes thought about her mother’s mysterious early death. You never forgot such a trauma; a part of it remained inside you forever, even if it seldom emerged. If they had known what was wrong with her mother they might not have been able to save her anyway. Perhaps they
had
known, Rose thought now, but they had been forced to be fatalists, and why would they burden a child with information about awful things?

Eventually there would be cures that one could hardly imagine for diseases. The government’s Human Genome Project, Ginger had told Rose, was mapping every gene in the body: what it was, how it worked, what it did. For a while now it had been believed that breast cancer was caused by genes and could be inherited—mothers and daughters, sisters and aunts, all dying too young from their own “family curse.” Now a woman could actually be tested for genetic defects that caused breast and ovarian cancer; gene mutations called BRCA 1 and BRCA 2, and if the news was bad she could opt for preventative surgery. In 1998 the drug Tamoxifen was approved. It had already been in use for women who had survived breast cancer, to prevent a recurrence, and now it was being given to women at high risk
before
they got the disease. This could benefit the family, since Daisy had died from breast cancer.

Angel and Juan had a baby now, a dark-eyed, adorable boy they had named Rafael, and the former Angelique confided with proud amusement to a rather appalled Peggy that everyone thought Angel was a Spanish name.

“We WASPS are a dying breed,” Ed said ruefully. “The middle-aged white male has become an object of ridicule on comedy shows, shot down by female comedians. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

He was a little bewildered at what had happened in his lifetime, although he tried to adjust. He invited some of the black inner-city kids he worked with to come to a July Fourth picnic with his children and grandchildren on the lawn of his house in Larchmont, bringing them all in a hired bus, chaperoned by some of their mothers, and his next-door neighbor complained. “Fuddy-duddy,” Ed said, and invited them again for the next year.

Peggy secretly agreed with the neighbor, but she’d already had one argument with Ed before the event (Who knows what they’ll steal, she had said), and now she thought it best to keep her opinion to herself.

It was interesting, Rose thought, to see Ed and Trevor trying to be friends now that Ed knew that Trevor was Markie’s biological father and had made peace with it. “At least it’s someone we know,” Ed had told Peggy.

Markie and David had struggled with the question of whether or not to try to have a third child. Since neither of them could bear to destroy their frozen embryos they decided to go ahead; after all, maybe it wouldn’t work, and if it didn’t they wouldn’t go through the whole procedure again, particularly since at nearly forty she didn’t have so many eggs anyway. To their surprise it did work: Their third and last child, a healthy boy they named William after Markie’s great-grandfather and the future king of England, was born in the beginning of 1998.

Peggy and Joan were being kind to each other again, Rose had noticed, and although they didn’t share a social life and never would, at family functions they sometimes even made one another smile, in a way that seemed totally genuine. Rose had despaired of ever seeing the day when this would be, and now she was relieved. She was glad Joan had finally told Markie the story that had torn their family apart for so many years. Now everyone knew, and so they could forget.

Joan had taken Rose to see the hit movie
Titanic,
and afterward the both remarked that Rose was the name of a survivor. Of course
she
hadn’t had to deal with a sinking ship, but she had always tried to be modern an had always adjusted. There were some things she couldn’t deal with any longer, though. She had been through classical music and jazz and the blues, popular music, ballads and swing, disco and rock, new age and alternative, but she couldn’t understand that wretched hip hop and she didn’t care if it
was
part of the mainstream now.

Rose had also decided she didn’t need to learn how to use a computer. She was sure she was the oldest person seen taking money out of a cash machine—it was kind of an adventure, she wanted to keep her independence, and Peter always insisted on going with her so she wouldn’t be mugged—but that was about as technological as she intended to get, and she thought, in a way, it was too bad that people had gotten so dependent on getting things done quickly. She had liked chatting in the bank.

With Rose’s hundredth birthday coming not so many months from now, Trevor called the
Today Show
on NBC to ask them to have her be one of the people whose hundredth birthday Willard Scott announced on television—photos of their old faces framed by an ad for Smuckers jam. Trevor and Joan, and Hugh, and Peter and Markie and Angel too thought it would be fun for Rose to become a momentary celebrity. Peggy and Ed were, as usual, a little alarmed. Ginger said, wryly, “Good luck.” But Trevor reached only a recording, and to everyone’s astonishment except Ginger’s he was told that there were one hundred to one hundred twenty-five applicants weekly, from which the twelve were chosen.

“I could have told you there was a lot of competition,” Ginger said. “And those are only the people who apply.”

The show chose the oldest, the recording said; and men, because centenarian men were fewer. People whose birthdays fell on weekends were ineligible for the TV announcement anyway, since there was no show then. Looking at the calendar Peter discovered that January 1, 2000, would be a Saturday, so in any case Rose would get only a congratulatory letter. The family was disappointed; she was relieved.

“You don’t think I want to tell the world how ancient I am,” Rose said, her eyes twinkling. But the truth was, she didn’t want to see herself on television. It was not her style. Besides, being so old was an accident.

She had settled things for after she was gone. She had gathered her three grandchildren together and spoken to them, and afterward she had left her house to them in her will; however, she had also stipulated that Hugh was to be allowed to live in the house until his death, and that Peter and his family could continue to live in it as long as they paid the bills. Peter had been very kind to her all these years, and besides, Rose didn’t know where he could go. But if Peter didn’t want to live in the house after Hugh was no longer alive, the three grandchildren could sell it; or if Markie or Angel wanted to move back in at some point with their own families they could, since it would be theirs too. Peggy and Ed had agreed to help pay the taxes.

The three grandchildren had all been civilized and generous at the meeting, and Rose hoped that after she was gone they wouldn’t fight. Money had destroyed many families, she knew, and she just had to trust that their love would overcome their need to be rich. The house, she was now told, was worth two and a half million dollars. Maybe, ironically, it would be Peter who would want to sell it, since he could do a lot with his share, and he was the one who had the smallest income.

She was going to be buried in Bristol, along with so many of her family, and dear Ben. Rose wondered if any of the New York descendants would bother to go to visit her grave. It didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be alone.

But she still had one more thing to do.

The past and the present swam in her mind, so many memories of so many things. If you could cast away the terrible parts and keep the good, what richness there was in remembering! Although she still kept up with most of her activities, she needed nearly as many naps as Rafael and little William now. On Sunday family afternoons, the three of them slept in the same house, dreaming: the children looking forward, herself looking back. Lately part of her day was always spent in looking back.

Sometimes she told Hannah and Henry, her teen-aged and almost teen-aged great-grandchildren, stories about the past, about what their country was like. You had to tell stories to the children, how else would they learn? She told them about the two World Wars, about the Automat, about the Great Depression, about her favorite desserts that didn’t exist anymore, about being able to walk into a movie at any time and stay through it all over again.

Rose thought she should have told those kinds of tales to her own children, even though they had been right there for the playing out of some of them; or to her grandchildren, in the role of family historian. But Peggy and Joan hadn’t been curious about the old days, and while they were growing up, Rose herself had been young and too busy living her life to reminisce. Ginger had cared, but later she’d gone off to her own future and lost interest in the past. And Rose’s grandchildren, from the elusive Peggy, had all been so inaccessible when they were small. And so these days, if they were willing to listen, Rose told whomever was around.

This was the one last thing she had to do, her last chore, although it was in many ways a pleasure because it allowed her to relive her memories.

Maybe later they would care enough to look up her stories in family photographs, in history books, in old magazines, would see them in old movies, might glance at objects at yard sales that had once been the admired and hard-won manifestations of people’s daily lives. Or maybe they would be like her and pay no attention, until they looked back, as she now did, to see to their surprise that the past was still there, unrolling like a skein of bright silk, filled with shadows. She wanted to tell them about her rich and vivid and vanished world before it was too late, before she was gone, before it was all forgotten.

Rona Jaffe
(1931–2005) was the author of sixteen books, including the bestselling internationally acclaimed novels
The Best of Everything
,
The Road Taken
,
The Cousins
,
Family Secrets
,
Mr. Right is Dead
,
Mazes and Monsters
,
The Last Chance
, and
Five Women
, as well as the classic bestseller
Class Reunion.
She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Ms. Jaffe was a lifelong New Yorker.