The Violet Hour: A Novel (5 page)

W
HEN THEY FINALLY
made it down the pea-soup-carpeted stairs, across a hallway smelling strongly of rose-petal potpourri, and into the chapel where the funerals were held, the sight of the body in its open casket wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Elizabeth had hoped. It was a middle-aged man’s, slightly rubbery, with a patina of chalk around its face and a chest that seemed to collapse at the center, like a cake several minutes out of the oven. With its eyes closed, it looked sort of like a person taking a nap, but more than that like a costume of a person, to be zipped on for the next Halloween. She felt bad for this body that it had to be dead, but what could she do?

As she stepped down from the little stool her grandfather had provided, she couldn’t help feeling that her parents had been wrong to worry. She hadn’t seen anything she regretted, and she wanted to laugh at the idea of having bad dreams, or whatever it was they had feared, over the sight of this quiet rubber suit lying obediently in its box.

Even now, she remembered nothing about the original body’s face—whether it was broad or pinched, big-nosed or small, freckled or tan, or marked by any kind of scar. The face she did remember, in that sober, wallpapered room, was her mother’s, normally animated
by some favorable charge that made her eyes and mouth seem larger than other people’s, and her skin paler and more interesting to watch. That evening, after Elizabeth had released her hand to step up to the bier, her mother had receded into the rows of stackable chairs arranged for future mourners. When Elizabeth next glimpsed her, her face was in disarray. She seemed to have allowed her features to fall out of connection with one another, her mouth slack, her eyes wobbling in and out of focus. She looked, in that instant, utterly lost inside herself, as though her body were also a costume that had somehow slipped askew.

Now, at twenty-six, Elizabeth recognized the wisdom of her father’s warning, though she was too young to recognize it then. There were some things you couldn’t unsee. An anonymous body was just science. But a mother struggling to inhabit her eyes, to press herself back into place? What seven-year-old could forget the sight?

E
VERYONE CROWDED
into the restaurant to watch as Lucie and Rob, having taken lessons with a choreographer, performed their obnoxious first dance, mixing waltz steps with florid rump shakes to a mash-up of crowd-pleasing tunes. Just when Elizabeth thought she could bear their specialness no longer, the band appeared with horns and backup singers at least ten musicians strong, and the rest of the evening was a whorl.

There were shots at the bar and a war zone of desiccated limes left behind. There were break-dancing kids, and a body-rolling boyfriend who kept hogging the center of the floor. Three pork-necked cousins played air guitar, and put their ties around their foreheads, and screamed every word of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Chris tried to dip Becca, and fell, both of them lying on their backs, laughing soundlessly. Elizabeth’s flailing arm broke somebody’s glass. Someone else lifted a girl into a light fixture.

Then, for an excruciating interval, a screen came down and it all stopped, and they were forced to watch a slide show of photos
from the night—the night that was theoretically still happening. There was Lucie with her eyes closed getting powdered in black and white. There were the rings in someone’s hand in sparkling color. There was the ceremony they’d all just seen, already a perfect memory. Women throughout the crowded made fawning sounds; Jane appeared to be wiping away tears. Chris gripped Elizabeth’s arm. “This is
killing
the party,” he hissed. “Are they serious?” Off to the side Lucie and Rob stood embracing and pointing at themselves on the screen. Elizabeth went and ate a piece of cake, which she was pleased to find rather dry.

At last the screen withdrew and the band struck up another tune. The older guests began gathering themselves toward the exit, but enough young people were still huddled by the dance floor that the party was able to go on. Rob conferenced with the band leader, earning a last song seven more times. Jane was seen talking to a man twice her age who was later seen puking in the harbor. Kyle hugged Hank like a brother and everyone smoked cigars outside. Elizabeth swung Lucie’s hand back and forth and said she couldn’t be happier for her, and out there in the evening harbor air, which was finally beginning to cool, she knew she really meant it, just as she’d meant all the sad and bitter things she’d said and thought before. Funny how honesty worked, how divided she could be against herself.

They hung around long after the music had stopped, making their own on a convenient baby grand, drinking down the half-empty wine and scotch glasses they found scattered on tables inside. Lucie and Rob got into their limo, sailing off to their first married sex. The cabs started coming soon after, one by one in a safe yellow line. Jane gave her good-byes and got into one alone. To another, Becca hauled a tie-headed cousin and hastened them all in behind her. Elizabeth had nearly folded herself onto Kyle’s lap when she heard, like a voice from the past, someone shouting her name.

“Elizabeth Green? Elizabeth Mirabelle Green?”

“Hold on, guys,” she said to the packed car, sliding herself out to the curb.

Now standing, she saw that it was the greyhound waiter. In one hand, he held up her tiny black evening bag, in the other her driver’s license. She stared. In the photo, her eyes were half-closed, and she was twenty-two. It would expire in less than a month.

“That’s me,” she said, remembering. She’d left the bag on her chair.

“Mirabelle.” He said, as though she’d made a joke. “Should’ve been your first name.”

She looked back at the cab, where Kyle was yelling something jovial at the driver and everyone was still struggling to fit. “Yeah, it’s Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth is good,” he agreed. “But Mirabelle is a song.”

“Okay.” He was weird, but he seemed familiar somehow, the line of his nose a line she knew intimately, like a rooftop seen daily from her window. All at once she remembered Henri, the French boy she’d met at a gallery opening for her mom, who’d gone down on her one night in the kitchen while her parents were still murmuring in their room. He was a waiter and his nose had been linear, too. She wondered where he was now, if he’d ever gotten his Ph.D. “What’s your name?” she asked impulsively.

He answered as though she worked for the government. “Ferdinand Toby Steinberg.”

She burst out laughing. “Shut up! Ferdinand was my dog. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person named Ferdinand before. What were your parents thinking?”

He was laughing, too. “I think they were thinking about the discovery of America—you know, Ferdinand and Isabella. Or sailing around the world like Magellan. There’s a Ferdinand in Shakespeare, too.”

Those had been her father’s reasons for naming the dog. She felt the sidewalk rock beneath her feet as she recalled her Ferdinand bracing himself against the waves. Try as she might, she could not escape that sailing trip, the great tempest of her life.

“Crazy,” she said.

He held up his hands in mock defense. “Hey, that’s my name you’re talking about. I had nothing but nice things to say about yours.”

It was true. What had he said—melodious?

“I go by Toby, though,” he was saying now. “So you won’t have to confuse me with your dog in the future.”

The cab was calling for her, beckoning her still further into the night, to more freedom and more fun. She waved at the waiter and before long she was in, stretched on her back across Kyle’s lap and the legs of her college friends, coasting uptown, away from the water, the monuments of New York rolling over her like sky, outdoing the constellations.

S
HE AWOKE TO
the chaos of a vibrating phone, spinning itself on her nightstand. There was morning light and Kyle’s body incubating beside hers. All over the floor she saw their clothes.

“Hi, sweetheart! You must have had a late night!” Cassandra spoke in a caffeinated tone borrowed from infomercials, her cheer studied and well performed. She’d arrived in Maryland the day before, and she wanted to know what foods she should buy them, what train they’d be taking, if there was anything else she could do.

Since the sailing trip, Elizabeth’s mother had changed. An initial period of conversation-stopping silences, mostly empty glasses of red wine left on bathroom vanities, and what must have been a record number of consecutive appearances by her ratty rose terry-cloth robe, soon gave way to a reformed, more positive Cassandra. She’d started seeing a therapist that summer, and started running, and by the time she and Elizabeth were in Cambridge, rounding up freshman dorm furnishings, it was as though she’d been cloned, fully Stepford-wived, so determined she was to smile and sublimate herself to the needs of others. Elizabeth had never known stackable plastic storage crates could stir a person so profoundly until her mother discovered them in an intra-aisle ziggurat at the bedroom superstore. “Sweetheart,” she’d said, clutching one. “These are
so you
.” It was alarming,
even more so than the earlier bouts of bathrobe grief. Those, at least, Elizabeth recognized from romantic comedies.

She squeezed her temples and assured Cassandra that they’d be fine with anything she bought. They were aiming for an eleven o’clock train. She heard a rustle of activity in the background, the birthday preparations already under way. Grunting, Kyle dragged himself to the bathroom.

They said good-bye, and Elizabeth lay in bed awhile longer, watching her window curtain dance over the air conditioner and wondering what to do about her mom. Cassandra’s bright affect had endured so long now that it had to be considered somewhat genuine. Even so, Elizabeth worried, knowing its roots were in regret. Whatever her mother’s crimes, they no longer mattered. What’s done was done; both her parents were to blame. Cassandra’s penance was now the harder thing to take. She’d spent the past eight years showering Elizabeth with kindnesses she could never adequately return: handmade pop-up cards for no reason, winter care packages of California citrus, an indefatigable memory for the dates of interviews and exams. As a martyr, she was practically Victorian, a modern-day Tess of the D’Urbervilles, working the postal service the way Tess worked the starve-acre fields. She just couldn’t forgive herself, no matter how much her daughter wanted her to.

Elizabeth exhaled, tasting compost breath and unbrushed teeth. She felt sheepish and unworthy, as she always did after a drunken night. What had they done? She hoped she hadn’t said anything really stupid to Lucie’s mom. Shuddering, she swung her legs to the floor and stepped over her suitcase to the closet, grateful they were skipping the brunch and getting out of town.

F
or his eightieth birthday, Howard Fabricant was building a sauna. His wife was throwing him a party, so it was only fair that he got to have something for himself. They’d all made such a fuss over him recently: Eunice, his daughters, even his son, the city councilman in the other Washington, who was usually about as demonstrative as a spreadsheet. It was as though none of them had expected him to live that long. Having sludged through Guam at nineteen, where bullets had missed him by millimeters, he hadn’t quite expected it himself. Yet here he was, a day shy of eighty, surprisingly able and light on his feet.

The party was on his actual birthday, a Monday, the only concession he’d won. He didn’t want people sacrificing their weekend for him, especially Lizzie, who according to Cassandra was always working or doing things with friends. His children had arrived already: sweet Mary with her twins, Howie, and Cassandra, who greeted him at the airport with a fresh, deep kiss on the cheek. Howie had always lived alone, but Cassandra was the loneliest, divorced several years and still no sign of a new man she might want to introduce to her parents. If his children wanted no part of the business he’d spent his life building, he at least wanted them happily settled, with someone
to care for them when he was gone. He didn’t think it was so much to ask.

This weekend, they seemed to believe they were caring for him, his house suddenly full again with all their voices, arguing over how many cups to buy and when to vacuum the rugs. He was surprised to discover he’d missed the racket of other people—
his
people, the way it ate up empty space. Their other-room murmurs insulated him, cushioning and warming whatever room he was in. His hands and feet had grown numb and tingly over the years, and most mornings he had to flex his fingers and toes for several minutes before he could walk to the bathroom, hold a toothbrush, and give himself a shave. But with his children in the house, he hardly noticed the tingling at all.

He dressed in his work clothes and came downstairs, where his wife was opening and closing kitchen drawers. They’d been married fifty-four years, an astonishing number when you considered her temper, her ungenerous judgments, and her penchant for holding a grudge. He knew there weren’t many people short of sainthood who genuinely
liked
his wife. They’d had their troubles, to be sure, dark stretches he wasn’t proud of when he preferred looking down a bottle to looking at her unrelenting face. But there were fewer agitations now that he was retired and all the kids were grown. And anyway, he was loyal. Once he committed to something, he committed; she was built the same. When she nagged and frowned at and embarrassed their children it was only because she knew, fiercely, as only a mother can know, how capable they were, how much more they could achieve if they tried. And what smart, singular kids they had. Eunice had raised them right; you had to give her that.

“Well, good morning,” she said, as though he’d already made a mistake. She was dressed for church, a ritual he didn’t often indulge her in any longer. “You wouldn’t be coming with us, would you?”

He started the coffeemaker and leaned back against the counter while it did its business. “Us who?”

“Howie’s joining me.” She thrust her chin up, proud, wrinkling
her nose the way she’d always done. It was a cute face, and she knew it. She never quit, his wife. She was different from most people in that respect.