Things Unsaid: A Novel (13 page)

When Jules and Mike walked in, Charlie rose from his chair and hugged Jules tightly, shook Mike’s hand, and then motioned for them to sit at the end of their side, nearest the door. The family side.

“My dad wanted you to have this, Jules,” Charlie said, handing her an envelope. “It was extremely important to him, and I promised I would give it to you. It was one of his last wishes.”

Jules hesitated, mumbled “Thank you,” then Charlie returned to his seat. She glanced at Mike, and he shrugged. She fumbled to open the envelope. With Mike looking over her shoulder, she read the note—written in an elderly hand, the letters almost quivering off the page: “To My Sweet Jewels, the only one in her family who knows and understands what obligation and duty truly mean. To protect and love you.”

As Jules read the note, a beautiful secretary, dressed elegantly in a cobalt-blue suit that made her look very lawyerly, rolled in a cart with teapot, coffee urn, and cookies laid out on a silver tray, and exited without a word. Hawkins cleared his throat and handed out the documents.

“We want to make sure you understand the intent of Mr. Wilson Whitman’s will.”

Jules was a fast reader—one of those Evelyn Wood speed-readers, a remnant of her days at Northwestern, where she frantically revved up her reading speed for exams. But the legal jargon in these documents slowed her down, and she kept stumbling over the boilerplate in the paragraphs. So Mike, ordinarily a slow reader, was the first to catch the bottom line. Jules heard him make a little gulping noise.

Hawkins cleared his throat. “Mrs. Foster, I believe you are the named party and benefactor who is to receive a sum not figured into the annuity of the trustees.”

“Huh?” That was all Jules could say. What was this all about? She was mystified.

“You have been bequeathed a gift today as instructed in this will. Hawkins and Davis have a fiduciary responsibility to carry out the
instructions on behalf of the deceased. If you prefer, we can have the total inheritance deposited directly into your account, after you provide us with the necessary information for an electronic transfer. But we have written the check in the event that you would like to take it with you, since you are returning home to Carmel right after this meeting, I am told.” The lawyer handed her an envelope.

Jules couldn’t understand what Hawkins was saying. Was he speaking English? Mike elbowed her; he looked confused, too. She slowly slipped her index finger under the lip of the sealed envelope and pulled out a greenish-blue check—what she would call a “Ghostbusters” color, a Halloweeny, ghoulish hue—for $300,000. Almost exactly the amount her father had owed his brother for Charlie’s medical tuition, taking inflation into account.

“Jules, your uncle just left you $300,000,” Mike said, looking over her shoulder. He seemed elated. “It couldn’t have arrived at a better moment for us! Your uncle always was a master of timing—not just in his ability to pull in a catch.”

Jules felt in dreamland. A Disney kaleidoscope that had made her problems dissolve. How had she been so lucky! Now she could pay for both her parents and their daughter’s needs.

Charlie walked over, inviting her with open arms. “My father loved you like a daughter. Like the daughter he never had. We always knew you were not like the others in your family. And we are so happy for you.”

Jules cried.

That night they splurged for a room upgrade at the hotel. Jules felt flushed—with desire for Mike, joy for Zoë, and an exuberance and relief for all of them. No more mother-daughter fault line. No more decisions made against her better judgment. No more barely missing the rocks, avoiding a tempest. Jules exhaled upward, fluttering her bangs.

“See, darling? Everything turns out fine in the end. No need to be an Eeyore.” She kissed Mike passionately, undressed slowly, playfully, throwing her underwear, humming to herself. She hadn’t felt this light, almost giddy, for so long, and it felt so good.

Jules hated their lengthy volley of he said, she said, over all these years of dealing with her parents and their bailout. Now was their time. She savored the moment.

Afterwards, they FaceTimed their daughter.

“We have exciting news for you, Zoë,” they said in unison, looking down at the minimized image of themselves, foolishly grinning up at Zoë on the monitor. Jules laughed as Zoë and her friend Deirdre jumped up and down in front of the computer screen.

Life would be good after all. Problems solved. She and Mike would deposit the inheritance into two banking accounts as soon as they returned home: half of the funds for Zoë and half for her parents’ debts. End of story.

It was never too late. The three of them had a special kind of love. It might have been in remission for a while, but it had only been waiting to resurface, just as sweet and delicious as ever. They
could
have it all. Who said bitter disappointments always turned cancerous?

J
oanne was convinced that Jules was the lucky one—and her brother said so, too. Andrew confided in her, “Did you know that Jules got an inheritance from Uncle Wilson? Who thought he would give her anything? Mother wheedled it out of Zoë.”

She hadn’t known about the inheritance. No one told her anything. But Joanne was happy for her older sister. She knew she took advantage of her sometimes, just like her parents did. But what else was she to do? Sometimes she had no one else to turn to.

Joanne didn’t think she was the preferred daughter, though she knew Jules and Andrew thought so. Sure, she was the baby of the family. A good sport. Willing to do girlie things like makeup, shopping, and all that stupid stuff with their mother.

Sure, she still loved putting her mother’s eye shadow on and comparing different shades. Going to monthly salon appointments with her. But sometimes she thought she would like to do something else—maybe read a book, or paint. Jules didn’t care about all that copying mother stuff, and that made her different. Or it seemed that way anyway. Jules studied even though their mother made fun of her and called her a wallflower and an egghead. She envied that. But on the other hand, her mother was right, too: Jules needed to do something so she wouldn’t look so plain. Why didn’t her sister seem to care about those things, important things?

Joanne had lived alone with her parents after Jules had left for Northwestern and her brother had left for George Washington Military Academy. And she had missed Jules and Andrew. Having her brother and sister there to share in the parental attention. Once they’d left, it had been all on her. For ten long years—a decade that felt like two. Perhaps that was why she married him. Al.

The year Jules left, 1968, there was political turmoil throughout the country. Civil rights. The Vietnam War. A nascent feminist uprising. Joanne was only thirteen, almost fourteen—a vulnerable age. And she had her own turmoil. All her friends had always been so jealous that she had a big sister to look after her. She’d felt special. And all of Jules’s friends had always fussed over her, saying she was so cute. But she knew she would never be as eye-catching as her mother still was. Even now, as a mother of two teenage girls, she yearned for her mother’s beauty. She couldn’t reach her level. No matter how hard she tried.

“Joanne, you’re the pretty one, the one who will take after me in my old age,” her mother often said as they sat in salon chairs, hoisted up so they could admire themselves in the mirror. Their stylist, cutting first her mom’s hair and then hers, moved easily from one bob to the other. Identical haircuts. When she was done, she passed them each a mirror, and Joanne and her mother would smile first at each other, then at the mirrors in their hands. The same thing every time, ever since she was a teenager. Now middle-aged, she was still gazing at mirrors with her mom.

It was really all about Mom. She had never worn shorts or an old skirt to pick Joanne up from school. No way! Instead, she looked as if she had just walked off a television set—maybe
The Donna Reed Show
, her father’s favorite. The other mothers looked normal. Funny looking, though.

Girls smuggled
Seventeen
magazines into the bathroom at Our Lady of Sorrows under their blazers. The nuns told them the magazine was indecent and they would go to hell, but that made it even more exciting. They would pore over the photos to find out what “normal” girls wore—that is, girls who didn’t have to wear uniforms with plaid skirts hanging down almost to the ankles and navy-blue blazers with suede elbow patches every day. Some of the nuns thought Jules was going to be a novice once she graduated. They were sure wrong about her.

Joanne never wanted to dress up as a nun, not even for Halloween, the way Jules sometimes did. For laughs, but still. Jules sprayed different color paints in her hair as soon as school was over, the wash-off spray-paint kind. Said she liked doing it because it reminded her of fun times with their mother when she was a Brownie. Joanne always thought it was a bit theatrical.

Everyone believed the Whitman girls had the mother they all wished for back then. “Oh, your mom’s so much fun. My mom’s not cool and my dad thinks your mom looks like some movie star,” Ann had said on more than one occasion. But what did her high school friends know?

Deirdre, Ann’s older sister, was Jules’s best friend, and Ann was Joanne’s. And Pat, Ann and Deirdre’s mother, was their mom’s best friend. They liked keeping friendships in the family. Easier that way—if the mothers wanted to see each other, the daughters could be together, too.

Ann came over almost every day in the summer during those high school days. Too hot to do anything but go to the pool or experiment with art or makeup, sometimes both. Ann had trouble telling the difference between the two: makeup and paint. Both had to do with the imagination—Joanne had plenty of that. Ann didn’t. But Joanne liked drawing: snakes, tarantulas, and Nazi swastikas, preferably all in the same picture. No color. Just ink and charcoal, so she could get all the details just right. Her friend liked conventional, colorful, pretty things: flowers, leaves, nothing scary.

Their house had a pseudo-Victorian/French sensibility. There was a “solarium,” not a TV room; a “foyer,” not a hallway; a “salon,” not a living room; four “boudoirs,” not bedrooms; and a “
salle de bains
,” not a bathroom like other families had. Dark-green wallpaper with white dogwood flowers lined the walls. Her parents’ boudoir had a Duncan Phyfe mahogany dressing table banded in brass, with a seat in striped beige-and-gold satin. Joanne would sit down carefully on the seat, as if she were sitting on a throne, and she and Ann would spritz each other with perfume from beautiful purple and gold atomizers and translucent glass, spraying and spraying until they sneezed. Joanne once powdered Ann’s cheeks and nose—gently dusting the makeup on her friend’s upturned face—before remembering that her mother dusted her panties with that puff. She didn’t tell Ann.

They always ended their makeovers by staring at the photo on the dressing table—her mother in almost the exact same pose and color blouse as Elizabeth Taylor in the cutout magazine photo taped to the side of the frame. Joanne could admit that there was some similarity, if she stretched her imagination a bit. But she never said that to her mom.

Her mother’s special ring—a sky-blue topaz ring, the size of a beetle, surrounded by diamonds—sat on top of a special stand, a tiny altar. The two of them would fight over who got to wear it first, and longest. But Joanne always gave in to Ann. After all, her mother had promised her that ring someday. “You know, sweetheart,” she’d said, “you are so much more like me than your older sister. This ring is for you. I’m saving it for my special girl. I promise.” That ring had her name on it.

When her brother and sister went away to college, Joanne’s parents let her have Ann sleep over even on school nights. Less trouble, her mother said, than putting up with her neediness. How was she needy, she wanted to know? But she never asked.

They’d watch TV, make pizza, and talk of becoming movie stars as they sought refuge from her parents in the solarium. Joanne never got to make pizza, but her mother wanted to be nice in front of her friend.