The Violet Hour: A Novel (17 page)

B
y the second full day of mourning, Elizabeth was finding herself surprisingly capable of ordinary human behavior. She ate, went to the bathroom, went for a run, and otherwise did as she was told. She’d even watched, and chuckled at, a movie on TV. But observing her family and Kyle, she found their behaviors strange. Her grandmother spoke at length to people she’d always claimed she didn’t like; her mother looked drunk, even when she wasn’t. Was it natural to be so quiet, as Kyle was? He stayed near her, like a bodyguard, but his hugs were somehow less firm, as though she had a contagious virus he didn’t want to catch. He hadn’t done a voice in days; he’d barely cracked a joke. He was never this somber when they were alone, never this traditionally respectful. Why the act now, of all times?

For a while on Tuesday, Eunice introduced her to everyone who came through the front door. Policemen and butchers and librarians—but mostly wives and mothers. A few of them tried to talk to her about a hurricane in New Orleans, as if to—what? Make her feel that her loss was small? “He would’ve volunteered his services,” one of them told her. “If he were with us, he’d be there right now.” She wasn’t sure about that, actually, but she smiled at them all and tried to think the best of everyone, until Eunice, perhaps sensing her fatigue,
finally sent her upstairs to sort through photographs for display at the next morning’s wake.

“Bring me all the best ones,” she said, “and I’ll choose.”

In the third-floor study, Elizabeth settled herself on the floor, legs extended, a cardboard box balanced on her lap. Kyle sat on the edge of the folded-up sofa, leaning forward and bouncing his knees.

“You sure you don’t want ice cream?” he asked.

“I can still barely eat.” She tossed another snapshot of her grandfather in a black suit onto the pile of possibilities.

“What about a beer?”

“No. Thank you.”

“You’ve gotta want something.”

“I want you to stop bouncing your knees.”

He was still, his voice pathetic. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, reflexively. “I didn’t mean it.”

But she did mean it. Why did he irritate her so much? He’d done nothing but touch her and look at her and talk to her on her terms for two years. From the moment she’d picked him up in Rob’s friend’s smoky kitchen, he’d been ready to follow her map. “Take the Brooklyn Bridge,” she’d told the cabdriver, en route to Kyle’s apartment, where she’d never been. “I won’t argue with a woman!” Kyle had said. “Me neither, man!” the cabbie said. “They always right!” Elizabeth had been drunk, but she still remembered Kyle’s teeth winking in the dark, how proud she was to have conquered the cutest boy at the party.

“It’s all right,” he said, trying a different approach. “Did you see Dorothy’s shirt? She looked like Liberace.” He held his kneecaps down with his palms.

“Maybe I do want ice cream. Will you go?” She had to get him out of the room. Even at a distance of five feet, he was sitting far too close.

Vindicated, he stood up. “What flavor? What kind?”

“Surprise me,” she said, out of character. She always knew what she wanted.

Alone, Elizabeth continued to peel through photographs. Her teenage mother holding a 4-H ribbon in front of a table of frosted layer cakes. Her uncle Howie on a pony with a cowboy hat on his head. How nice to live only the life shown in photographs—a life of prizes, parties, and fun.

Before long, the room was invaded again, this time by the twins.

“I
hate
it down there,” Estella said, slamming the door behind her. “So loud.”

“Yes, it’s much quieter up here,” Elizabeth said sharply.

Max scowled by the window, the backyard below him: a pile of tools, an unfinished sauna.

“Your boyfriend left.” Estella knelt down next to Elizabeth. “He looks like Matt Damon. What are you
doing
?”

“I’m looking through pictures for Grandma.”

“Not Matt Damon, moron,” Max said.

“He does,” Estella insisted.

“You mean Mark Wahlberg.”

“
Mark Wahlberg
?” Estella was disgusted. “No.”

Kyle always reminded people of a movie star—any movie star, it hardly seemed to matter which one. Women became bolder when they spoke to him, or shier, depending on their feelings about celebrities and themselves. Older men wanted to be his advisor, younger men his friend. He was always connecting with people, or otherwise being discovered, which was probably a useful quality for an aspiring performer to have.

“Are you going to marry him?” Estella taunted.

Elizabeth pictured Kyle in his suit, bowed over the bar at Lucie’s wedding. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Guess I’ll have to be your flower girl.”

“Ha. You might be a little old for that by the time we get around to it.”

“So you
are
going to marry him! Has he proposed?” Estella crouched forward on her knees, pressing her fists into her cheeks.

“I thought you were supposed to be a tomboy. You’re as bad as Grandma!”

Estella flinched. “No, I’m not,” she said, already sensing you didn’t want to be like Eunice, even a little bit.

“He hasn’t proposed, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it. Now, help me choose some photos for Grandpa.”

“Okay,” Estella said. Max nodded. Both twins had cried the first night, but were now much less affected. They plopped down on either side of her, their slim memories of their grandfather having already begun to fade.

Together, they flipped through another stack of unsorted photos: 1969, 1981, 1932, date unknown. The twins listened as Elizabeth recounted some memory she had of a photograph—this one was in her mother’s leather album at home, this one was enlarged and framed on the downstairs mantel. But most featured people she didn’t know, in places she’d never been. The images of their mother always attracted the twins’ interest, and at every blonde sighting, they stopped Elizabeth’s hand. “Is that Mom? Is that her?”

After about fifteen minutes, Elizabeth had had enough. Her back was stiff from sitting on the ground, the photographs had made her sad, and the twins had resumed their saucy bickering. Life was going on just as it had. No one seemed focused on the catastrophe at hand.

She looked out the window at the sky above the backyard—the last thing her grandpa had seen before he died. Or had he turned his gaze to the side to see his wife rushing toward him, her face rigid with alarm? She thought about Kyle, out in some gleaming frozen-foods aisle piling a basket full of Klondike bars and pints of Ben & Jerry’s, paying for it all in crumpled restaurant cash. Would he make it as an actor? His opportunities only seemed to grow, if slowly. A number of his castmates and mentors had taken her aside at one loud bar or another to scream into her ear that he was special, that he never held anything back. They knew better than she did, and yet she couldn’t
escape the feeling, when she watched him onstage, that he was somehow trying too hard, that he might do well to hold
something
back—though what, exactly, she didn’t know. It was still possible that he would succeed. But she wondered. If he was really so special, then why did it so often embarrass her to watch him when he performed?

There was a knock at the door.

“Elizabeth?” It was her mother, her voice tentative and sympathetic.

“Come in!”

“Elizabeth, honey, are you in there?”

“I said come in!” Elizabeth shouted, more harshly than she meant to sound, though probably no harsher than she felt. There was a pause, but no indication that Cassandra had heard. They all waited for a moment, still as the faces in the photos that looked up all around them, until at last, Elizabeth stood and flung open the door. Cassandra was leaning against the frame, her eyes squeezed shut, her fingertips pressing her temples. On seeing Elizabeth, her expression opened up and she reached for her daughter’s cold hand.

“You can handle another shock, can’t you, sweetheart?”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Not that bad! Not another death.” Cassandra steered Elizabeth down the stairs to the second floor. “We’ll face this one together, okay?”

“For God’s sake, Mom, what is it?”

A wave of some emotion crested over Cassandra’s face, breaking in the form of an embarrassingly loud laugh. “It’s really an odd thing, and there’s no way to adequately prepare you—other than to say your father’s here. He just arrived, he’s spoken to Mary, and now he’s standing downstairs in the hall.”

Elizabeth peeked around the corner and over the railing. Abe stood squarely in front of the door, straddling a lumpy duffel, his tanned arms freckled and folded across his chest. He was wearing his Giants cap, and his face had the mildly curious expression of a person waiting for an escort he’s never met. She’d last seen him in San Fran
cisco in May. He’d taken her to a seafood restaurant, and over plates of glossy, blue-mouthed mussels, she’d told him she was applying for residencies in dermatology. He’d seemed distracted then, and when he asked her, not even judgmentally, “What happened to Africa?” she nonetheless found herself flailing to ward off the sting of his disapproval. “There are still opportunities to contribute,” she’d sputtered. “You can treat skin disease anywhere.”

Never in a million years would she have guessed he’d turn up here. Her parents didn’t see each other; they didn’t even speak. Her father, who had seemed so normal and upright—so thoroughly boring—had, out of nowhere one day, stood and flung himself from their boat, but not before barking in a truly terrifying manner like some kind of police dog ordered to attack. The word
fuck
was used a lot, another shock. It wasn’t so much the sound of the word, which she’d heard him use on numerous occasions, but rather its connotation that shocked her. This time it meant something vile and specific, something her mother had done.

Elizabeth had sat on the boat in her musty hooded sweatshirt and understood all at once that every petulant resentment, every claustrophobic moment, every sneaking teenage suspicion she’d ever had that her parents were wacko, unbalanced, or just plain not normal had turned out after all to have been right. Cassandra had taken a lover, and while she flashed with hatred for her mother at this sickening but all too imaginable thought, she hated her father even more for forcing her to know it and then immediately clearing out. “You know, Dad, the brain holds on to things it sees,” she had wanted to tell him later that week when he started loading cardboard boxes and junky desk lamps not to mention Ferdinand—her pet—into his car. “I’ll have this memory with me forever!” The memory of her father and her dog, driving away together down the road.

But one thing about her parents was that she’d never been able to stay mad at them, even about that day. They exerted such a sustaining force on her that even when she’d wanted to shut one or both of them out, even for the briefest of spells, she couldn’t. She felt light-headed,
empty, and vaguely panicked when she tried to imagine her life without them. So, after a few days of clumsy uncertainty, in which she kept setting a dinner plate for her father that her mother never filled, and in which the way things were had not yet become the way they’d always be, she eventually adapted to living alone with her mother, and then, once her dad had secreted himself into an anonymous condo building in San Francisco, to throwing her bag into the car and driving over the bridge for a few nights with him and Ferdinand. For the rest of the summer, neither mentioned the other, not even to acknowledge the place from which she’d just come. It was as though they believed they were each her sole parent and that she only materialized from time to time, having been off doing whatever it was that teenagers liked to do. “You always have plans,” her mother would say. “There you are,” went her dad, as though they were trying to respect her privacy instead of intensely safeguarding their own.

When it came time for college, she harbored a grim hope that everything would blow over while she was away, that all would be back to normal by the time she next came home. But college was basically the same: a call to one of them one night, to the other one the next. And it was the same when she returned. On those early breaks—Thanksgiving with Abe, Christmas with Cassandra—she occasionally waited, as one waits for the lights to come back on after a power outage, for one of them to ask how the other one was doing. But the power never did return, and she soon became accustomed to living two lives, both slightly in the dark. It wasn’t the best situation, but it wasn’t the worst, and the truth was, she was flexible as long as she had some kind of routine. With enough time and reinforcement, she felt she could get used to anything.

Yet here, again, was a disruption. A disturbance in her routine. A reminder that the way things are is not necessarily the way they’ll always be. And once again, her father was the source of the disturbance. What spell had come over him, he who never strayed from his course, who never admitted a fault?

She ducked back behind the wall. “So this is it, then? You’re breaking your vow of silence?”

Cassandra cringed. “He’s downstairs, isn’t he? What choice do I have?”

“You could refuse to see him, like you’ve always done.”

“I never refused. It just never happened. There’s a difference—a world of difference.”

Elizabeth looked away. Cassandra felt wild, fearing she was about to lose her biggest ally: the one person who’d never leave her. “Are you okay with this, Lizzie?” she asked. “I have to know that you’re okay.”

“
I’m
fine. Let’s just get it over with,” she said, and strode to the top of the steps.

“Hi, Dad,” she called.

Abe looked up to see his wife and daughter leaning over the rail, like passengers on a ship from which he’d jumped. And wasn’t that fitting? Wasn’t that probably just how they looked that day, had he bothered to glance back and see them? He was jet-lagged; his eyes watered; the world swiveled and sharpened in its frame. There they are, still on the boat, he thought for a maudlin moment, before he remembered that Cassandra was his
ex
-wife, no longer his wife at all.