The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (30 page)

I was too little to tell her that I was crying for the little girl.

It’s not Lydia’s fault that she handed me off but it is her fault that she took her damn sweet time about taking me back. Grandmother forced the issue so she had no choice, but she did decorate a room for me. Pink. By the time I and my two suitcases arrived, Lydia owned a co-op on the West Side and I was
twelve. We moved my things into the converted maid’s room and had a stiff little dinner at Café des Artistes to celebrate. By then her lovelorn column was syndicated, showing up in all the best papers, and Larry had left her well fixed. She could afford the best boarding school, the best prep school, and the best summer camps, and I went to them all. During the holidays, Grandmother took up the slack.

I think I was something of a shock.

Wait. You have opinions?

Pretty much.

Well, keep them to yourself. I have to work.

Enough with the imaginary dialogs, lady. We’ve spent too much time together in my imagination, and not nearly enough in real life.

I came up here to west nowhere with
no idea
what my mother and I would say to each other in adult life, alone in a room, but here we are.

So, will we end up ordering takeout or has she actually laid in groceries? Or did she schedule one of her usual diversions at her favorite country inn, with cameos by the manager and neighbors who eat there every night, so we won’t have to face each other? It’s the first time in a long time that Lydia and I have been alone, with no entrances and exits, no scene breaks—our first crack at being together as adults.

It’s almost thrilling. Terrifying. Both.

But here we are.

Then we aren’t.

He taps on the window—lingering landscape gardener, I wonder, painter with a question, paper boy, I don’t know—but Lydia jumps up. It’s odd. Gerard’s arrival could be staged, as ordered and on schedule, like the other chic little visitations we’ve had today. Unless he’s embedded, a man who comes in any old time, any old way he wants.

Whichever, he enters Lydia’s fussy little living room and whisks my mother’s mouth with an all-too-casual kiss. All Lydia’s lights go on as he kicks off the lizard Tony Lama boots, stingrays, like hers.

“Sweetie, this is Gerard.” As if I need no introduction, she plays to him, but she is working me. Lydia the director in full cry: this is the superb portrait photographer I told you about, he took that amazing portrait of me,
protégé
, really, he comes to me for career advice. All he needs is the right dealer, the right art house to publish his photos and the world will recognize him as the first-class artist that he is, in fact I’ve been making some important contacts for him.

And me? But she is distracted. That has to wait.

He’s brought food. She thanks him with a hug and gets busy setting the drop-leaf table in the dining area with the vintage Willow ware she found at the sweetest little place in the next town. Oh, Marie, note the embossing on the ornamental hinges of the table, she had it specially made to fit, see how nice the teakwood looks against the brass.

Grinning, he jerks his head in my direction. She goes back for a third plate—right, she forgot somebody—and this reminds her to say, “Oh dear, Gerard, you haven’t met Marie.” Pretending I’m her
BFF
and not the grown daughter she couldn’t possibly be old enough to have.

He uncovers platters from the local caterer—if they hold all Lydia’s favorites because she phoned in the order and secured it with her credit card, she covers, gushing the way she does whenever presents come. Then with a look I recognize she opens a bottle of wine and I think,
Oh God, don’t let him sleep over
. It is that obvious.

While Gerard assesses me I smile, more for Lydia than for her newest acquisition. So this is her new friend that I’ve heard so much about. Negotiating this visit, she actually giggled and fluttered on the phone. For her sake, I murmur and nod and make a fuss over the supper Gerard brought and wait to see how this evening with my mother will turn out.

It isn’t about me.

It was never about me. What else explains his cashmere V-neck, same this-year’s-color, same high-end designer as hers? After dinner she fusses in the kitchen while he sits in the center of my mother’s silly velvet sofa like a rajah granting me an audience. Unless I am the audience.

“She was a harsh, angry person, but she’s all I have.” Gerard corrects himself. “Had. For warmth and kindness, I had the nuns. Mam was who she was, but the sisters were the only mothers I had. They taught me to read and write and do fractions, and when I was big enough to go on the bus alone, they sent me into town to the Christian Brothers’ school. I got my high school education in that town; I took art classes at the local university extension and worked full-time, although she didn’t need the money, Mam wanted me at home, and I wanted to give something back to the nuns. I worked for a studio photographer on Main Street, yearbook pictures, wedding photographs. I was twenty, twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-eight, but every night I came home to the housekeeper’s cottage where Mam and I lived. I was broke, but that wasn’t the real reason. My mother expected it. After all, she said, ‘I took care of you. Now
it’s your turn to take care of me.’ She never liked me, but she was one woman alone, and I was all she had.” That sigh. “I stayed with her to the end. I couldn’t pack up and leave my old life behind until she died.”

Note the past tense. Figment or fact, Gerard says his mother is dead, and although she is, frankly, old enough to be his mother, Lydia’s girlish heart rushes out to him. Does she not see the differences between them?

Does she not know that he sees it too, and takes it for what it is? Gerard’s voice drops, striking a note so sad that even I want to make him feel better. “It was last March. You might as well know, I drove thousands of miles from Minnesota and the Benedictine rule, but I didn’t come far. Remember, I grew up with the nuns. I don’t know many people, but I’ve always been at home with the sisters. Mother Ignatia sent Mother Therese a note and they took me in at the abbey here. I do a few things for the community, and in return …”

That night, before she releases me to the Hide-a-bed in her guest cubicle, Lydia shows me her boudoir, as if to prove that tonight, at least, Gerard isn’t sleeping here. She takes my hands and pulls me down on her lush velvet quilt. “What do you think?”

I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to say but it won’t matter because in every circumstance, no matter what mess she’s walking into, Lydia talks on.

She says, “Gerard is very religious.”

“I gathered.”

She says, “I think he’s in love with me.” She means she is in love with him.

What to say, what to say? “That’s sweet.”

“Do you think he’s too young?”

North of forty, at the very least
. “Depends.”

The next time she summons me to the country I table all my excuses and go. People go to
NASCAR
tracks for some of the same reasons: being at the rail in case there’s a crash, but my real reason is, I think, oddly, altruistic. I take the train to the bus that will drop me in that claustrophobic small town because it’s time to tell Lydia what I think.

I won’t accuse her of robbing the cradle, which is more or less the case. I think the cradle is robbing her.

Turns out Gerard is away, which is probably why she pulled my chain; the woman languishes without an audience and in spite of the growing cast in her farmhouse drama, she doesn’t make real friends. Gerard is back with the nuns
in Minnesota, settling his mother’s affairs, and Lydia has taken this opportunity to open up to me.

We reach her silky boudoir via a short trip from the local bus stop to an exquisite but long, long dinner at the night’s designated country inn, with plenty of staff circling, buzzing her table to chat her up, and enough regulars coming in to drop small talk into all the empty places. Note that she staged my arrival so our day together would be short and end mercifully soon.

Oddly, instead of leaving me to put fresh sheets on the Hide-a-bed, she pours two glasses of port and summons me to her boudoir, which occupies the entire second floor. Only Lydia has a boudoir. One more set she can decorate with her exquisite vision of herself. Now she’s sitting cross-legged on the velvet quilt, holding her feet like a college drunk just back from the party of her life.

“Oh, Marie. Oooohhh, Marie.” She’s rosy with self-importance, confiding as though we really are BFFs, “We’re so in love.”

“I’m glad.” I can’t be here, listening to this as she slides closer, words boiling over.

“It’s just that …”

“Do you mind if I?” The bed dips in the middle; if I don’t get up now, while I’m close to the edge, I’ll slide into the dip. “It’s been a long day.”

“My heart is breaking.”

I do not say,
You’re shitting me
. “I have to …”

“Gerard wants me to marry him.”

“Oh.”

“He’s gone to Minnesota to bring back his mother’s engagement ring.”

“She was engaged?”

“Yes. It’s a very sad story.”

I can’t begin to guess what I’m grieving for, but it makes me bitter. “I know.”

“How could you possibly know?” Oh, Lydia, the scorn. All this grief and her hair is sleek and her face impossibly smooth. I would like to meet her plastic surgeon. “This is real.”

“So what’s the big problem?”

“He’s in Minnesota, with those fucking nuns.”

“I thought he was getting the ring.”

The noise inside her breaks out, smashing her slick surface. Her age shows in her voice, every single year of it. “I don’t understand it, but I’m a divorced woman and in spite of everything he’s some kind of Catholic. He has to choose between me and God.”

“Why can’t you just.”

“Because we’re not married!” Oh, that face. Lydia’s face, just then. Her voice clots. “He says we’d be living in sin.”

Oh, this is so odd. Odd and awful. Whatever is going on with Gerard, she gives lovely presents, he takes from her, he comes as he goes as he pleases, but
oh, Lydia
, whatever is going on with Gerard stops short of this great big bed.

“Did you hear what I just said?
It’s this Mother Therese. Monday I’m going to see this Mother Therese and straighten him out.” Lydia is,
OMG
, on her feet, teetering on the soft mattress in a drunken fighter’s stance. Lydia, preparing for a fight to the death. “By the time he gets back this will be settled, so wish me luck.”

“Yeah,” I say, because she is too drunk to hear anything I say. “Yeah, right.”

I don’t sleep much. Although Gerard is doing whatever Gerard does a thousand miles from here, I wake up edgy and pissed off, prowling the living room, fingering priceless small objects in the eighteenth-century cupboard in the little dining ell in my mother’s house. I can open her desk and discover all her secrets if I want to, or dance naked in the lavish bathroom, studying my profile in her mirrored walls, and Lydia won’t know. She’s never up before noon. Something in the narrow, depressing kitchen smells so bad that I wonder:
what does this woman eat?
All I find are stale water biscuits, left over from some party. A can of smoked oysters. A banana too old to peel. While I wasn’t looking, my aggressively young mother turned into one of those people who, you’re afraid to look into their fridge. It yields a bottle of Cuervo and two glasses in the freezer, rimmed in rock salt and on the shelves below, nothing but a half-bottle of olives, some shriveled carrots, and forgotten clamshells filled with dried-out leftovers from dinners out—nothing a person could eat.

Because everything in the nice new town where my mother is staging her nice new life is much too close to everything else, I take my laptop out for coffee as soon as it gets light.

It’s easy enough to find the abbey. The place is famous, perhaps because it and the local writers’ colony are symbiotically linked. People whose names you’d recognize have gone to the abbey to detox, finish that book, retreat from life long enough to regroup. No wonder the rising starlet came here at the height of her career. No wonder she stayed. Climbing the hill, I wonder.
Is Gerard here to detox or because he’s trying to write a book?

Then I think it doesn’t matter whether, or which. I need to suss out the woman Lydia is girding herself to confront.

It’s easier than you’d think.

There’s a nun in the kitchen garden that runs along either side of the drive, tying up tomato plants and raking between rows. She’s wearing the flowing medieval habit that old nuns cling to like the past, but with the sleeves rolled back and the skirts tucked up. Instead of the starched wimple and flowing veil I expected, the white headband and perfunctory veil look like something you’d clamp on a little girl out trick-or-treating as a nun.

“Um, Sister?”

“Hi.”

“I’m looking for Mother Therese? I’m here about.”

“Gerard.” Oh, how fast her face changes! “Tell me you’re not one of his.”

Don’t finish!
“No. But my mother is.”

“Oh, Gerard. Gerard.” Her expression tells me everything. “We’re all very fond of Gerard, but you might as well know. I’m losing patience with him.”