Three Story House: A Novel (41 page)

They stood in front of the door and for the first time since she’d arrived at Spite House nearly a year earlier, Isobel stretched out her hand and knocked. In a similar gesture, Elyse reached forward and pushed the doorbell.

“That’s probably overkill,” Lizzie said. She offered a strangled laugh and leaned against the doorframe. The sounds of someone fumbling with the lock made everyone straighten. Elyse pulled up the neckline of her shirt, Lizzie pulled her hair out of its ponytail, and Isobel stopped biting her thumbnail. They’d never locked the door in the daytime and it made opening the door take a thousand times longer.

“Girls,” Aunt Annie said, stepping out of the house and drawing them into an embrace. The openness of the gesture confused Isobel, as did her aunt’s appearance. She hadn’t seen her in person in several years, but the image in the Christmas cards over the years had been one of a comfortably plump woman with shoulder-length hair dyed several shades too dark to cover the gray. The woman wrapping them in hugs bore only the slightest resemblance to those photos. She’d let her hair go gray and it was cut in a chin-length bob that didn’t look so much chic as severe. Her skin, although tan, had a yellowish cast and was loose with a crepey texture that Isobel associated with the elderly. She’d lost enough weight that she was thinner than any of the Triplins.

“You look—” Isobel searched for the right word.

“Terrible,” her aunt finished.

“Oh, don’t say that,” Elyse said. “Skinnier is always better.”

“If you’d had the year I’ve had, I’m not sure you’d say that. I had so many problems that I feel like my body has been to war the past year. Really too much to go into and now is not the time.”

Lizzie found her voice. “Are you well now?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Let me just say that you shouldn’t drink tap water in Russia,” Aunt Annie said, ushering them through the doorway and down the hall. “I made cookies.”

Isobel cleared her throat and exchanged glances with Elyse as they entered the kitchen. “I’m not sure today is the best day for cookies.” Earlier, they’d agreed that their job was to stand as witnesses for Lizzie. To be the people she could dissect the conversation with afterward. Elyse had explained the concept of an advocate in health care to them at the bar. When people were under stress, they weren’t able to process information in the same way. As Isobel understood Elyse’s explication, advocates came along to doctor’s appointments and listened to what was said, occasionally asking questions to clarify information or to support the needs of the patient. Over drinks, Elyse had asked Lizzie a series of questions about what outcome she wanted from the confrontation with her parents. They’d promised to keep quiet unless they felt that Lizzie needed help.

“We might as well talk over food,” Aunt Annie said, practically pushing them into the kitchen and into chairs around the table.

“Where’s Jim?” Lizzie asked, casting her eyes around the space as if there were a crowd of people.

Lizzie’s mother passed around cookies. “I can’t believe what wonders you all have done with the house.”

“Mom, I asked where Jim was.”

Aunt Annie sighed. “Just give me a minute. I haven’t seen you in three years and I want to pretend for a minute that we’re going to be okay. Your father will be here soon. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Is it true?” Lizzie asked.

“Let me explain.” Aunt Annie took a cookie and nervously broke it into increasingly smaller pieces until it was a pile of crumbs. She licked her finger and dipped it into the crumbs and then brought her finger to her mouth, licking off the cookie fragments.

“Explain what?” Lizzie slapped her hand on the table. “How you lied? How you managed to sleep with a teenager? Why you married him after so many years apart?”

“If you want to know, you have to listen.”

Elyse reached out and laid a hand on Lizzie’s arm. “She’s right. Let her get it all out.” Isobel made noises of agreement although she had no idea what course of action would be best. If it were her mother, she’d probably throttle her and ask questions later. Wasn’t that a useless thought? Her own mother hadn’t ever bothered to explain her behavior.

Lizzie nodded, although to Isobel the savage way in which she inclined her head seemed to convey “fuck off” more than it did her cousin’s willingness to let her mother speak. Aunt Annie pushed the crumbs away from her. “Nothing tastes the same.”

“Go on,” Elyse said, and Isobel admired the way her cousin was able to change the tone of her voice to one that encouraged without intruding. Without intending to, Isobel took one of the cookies and ate it. She wondered what a witness was supposed to do, what she could do. Her only expertise was in observing others. In learning how people’s faces looked when they experienced different emotions. It didn’t seem that she was born knowing how to mimic emotion like so many of the other actresses she knew. That Hollywood man, the one she’d fallen too far in love with, was the one who’d taught her the trick of face watching. After it was over and done with, she’d decided that he was a cipher—that he had never felt a real emotion in his life, but had learned his whole life to fake it, which was why he was such a good actor. Isobel watched her Aunt Annie, paying attention to the way her body shifted, the way she was unable to settle into one position. Occasionally she turned her gaze on Lizzie to see if she’d softened her posture or opened her face. She did this as Aunt Annie explained the past.

“This place was different when I was growing up. Grandma Mellie was angry. She’d been angry her whole life—trying to make up for the mistake she made in marrying my father. I know I should have told you about that before too, but now that you know what sort of house I grew up in and what people knew about us, you can understand why I kept Jim from you. It wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to be. I’d made plans my whole life to get out, but then life came and I didn’t leave. I got a job clerking down at the courthouse and it was a good job. The sort where I’d meet the kind of men who had the ability to get me out of that house with my mother. I know you don’t want to hear this part, but I think it is important. You need to know how sheltered I was, how, when I decided to go to Boston with Mr. Lauderbach, I might have been twenty-four, but I felt like I was just out of high school.

“Lauderbach was a young attorney and he ended up marrying a girl he’d met in college whose father owned a small practice in Boston. They specialized in probate. He’d told me to write him if I ever wanted to leave Memphis. And I did.

“He wrote back to me to ask if I wanted to spend the summer as a nanny. His wife had just had her second child and needed help looking after the two-year-old. Something had gone wrong with the birth and she’d need to be in recovery all summer. I didn’t even tell my mother I was leaving. I wrote him back that I’d be on the next bus up there and to let me know the exact address. He was nice. I think he’d wanted a Southerner to lessen how foreign everything was up there. He had me cook for him too. Nothing special, but cornbread to go with dinner or pimento cheese sandwiches. I taught his wife how to do that when she was feeling better at the end of the summer.

“They were good to me. I had Sundays and Mondays off and mostly I spent them walking around the city. Some people thought I was crazy because it was so hot that summer, but you know how after you live in Memphis, nothing seems hot. I met your father when I was walking around. I’d broken the heel off my wedge and he rescued me. Took me to a shoe shop in the building where he worked. He told me he was in college and I said that I was also, too afraid to admit the truth. After that, we met on my days off and talked about everything except ourselves—I mean the part about who we were and where we were from. I guess now that it was because we were both lying that we didn’t talk about it. At the time it felt romantic, like we had so much in common that we didn’t need to discuss the boring stuff. It also felt impermanent, meaning I knew it wouldn’t last and that I could be my true self with him and also the person I wanted to be.”

Aunt Annie swallowed hard at this point in the story. Isobel watched her trying to work up to the part about getting pregnant. She appeared to make peace with the idea and her face softened. She finally settled into one pose, with one leg drawn up underneath her, her elbows on the table, and her head resting on her palms. Glancing at Lizzie, she saw that the story was having the opposite effect. If possible, she looked stiffer and angrier—her hands balled into fists that swung back and forth hitting her own legs.

Lizzie curled up her lips. “So you didn’t know. That’s the reason for all this deception? That you didn’t know how old he was?”

“She didn’t say that,” Elyse said in her measured voice.

Aunt Annie smiled. “It’s okay. She’s jumping ahead a bit in the story. No, I did know, or rather I found out and I told myself it didn’t matter. The relationship had become physical by then and like I’d said before, I wasn’t about to let go of spending time with someone who I trusted enough to be my true self. The summer ended and I went home, not expecting to hear from Jim again, but for the first time in my life making real plans to leave Memphis, to leave my mother. I’d planned to go to New York and get hired by one of those prestigious nanny services and then make enough money to go to night school to become an accountant.

“Of course, none of that happened. I got home and several weeks later I realized I was pregnant. I didn’t tell your father. I went back to work at the courthouse and Grandma Mellie took care of you. It turned out she was a terrific grandmother. In all the ways she’d failed me as a mother, she succeeded with you. After your father graduated from college, he tracked me down, but I was dating someone—a man I thought I’d end up marrying—and I didn’t ever call your father back. He tried again a few years later, this time showing up at Spite House and having coffee with Mellie until you returned home from school and I returned from work. I was engaged at the time to the other man, but the moment I saw your father and you sitting together, I knew I’d have to marry him.”

“That doesn’t explain why you lied to me all these years about who my father was.”

Isobel watched as her aunt got wordlessly up from the table and called up the stairs to her husband. “This is the part I need your father to explain to you.” She settled herself back at the table and they waited. She looked at the floor. “It’s such a pretty tile. I wonder why my mother ever covered it up.”

Lizzie’s father entered the kitchen with red eyes and a handkerchief clutched in his hand. Isobel remembered Uncle Jim as having laughing eyes, the sort of crinkled, good-natured look that made you want to tell the man a joke to see him laugh. She’d never seen him as old, but in the kitchen, with his back hunched, he might as well have been seventy as fifty. Annie looked more alive than he did at that moment. He exchanged a wordless look with her that appeared to convey the entirety of the conversation they’d had with their daughter.

Lizzie stood. “Whatever you have to say, I’m not sure it’ll be worth my time.”

“Let him say it,” Elyse said. “He’s your father.”

“What is it they say about the sins of the fathers?” he asked. “I didn’t want them to be yours. At the time it felt like nothing to keep it from you. I thought we could have the best of both worlds—that I could be your stepfather and never have to worry about your real father because I was that too. And I loved your mother so much that I couldn’t see making her less in your eyes. Anyway, we figured that to tell you and to admit to those around us what had happened would change how everyone looked at you.”

“Not just me,” Lizzie said. “You—both of you would be exposed.”

He hung his head and scuffed at the floor with the toe of his shoe. “We’ve tried to make it up, be the sort of people who make the world a better place.”

“You did that out of guilt. All of it—joining that church, serving the mission, all your good deeds weren’t done out of goodness, but out of obligation,” Lizzie took a step toward her mother. “Did you think you were forgiven when they dunked you under the water?”

“Lizzie, it wasn’t like that,” her mother said. “How could any of it be like that? It was the best we could do at the time.”

“And when I asked, kept asking, why didn’t you find a way to tell me?”

Lizzie’s father coughed. “You were right. It was more about us than about you. But once we’d made the decision, there never seemed to be a way out of it.”

“I saw what my mother went through having married her uncle, and I didn’t want to be that person known for the one sin I’d committed at the very beginning of my being an adult. My mother only got over it when I had you. With you, she was someone other than a sinner, a freak, and I wanted that. I kept telling myself that if we waited until you had your own family, it wouldn’t matter.”

“But I needed a father,” Lizzie said. She was inches from her mother’s face. “I needed a dad more than you needed to forget what you’d done.”

“I’m here,” Lizzie’s father said. “I’ve been here ever since I knew you existed. Can’t that be enough?”

“You want too much from us,” Lizzie’s mother said.

Lizzie drew back her hand and slapped her mother across the face. The echo of the sound silenced the entire house. Her father stepped in between them. “We were wrong,” he said. “We’re probably still doing it all wrong.”

“I want you to have the house.” Her mother rubbed at her cheek, where an imprint of Lizzie’s hand had started to form. “After Drew called us to let us know what had happened, I realized that this house no longer belonged to me. I called a few people and found a nice place to rent starting next month out east with a big yard for the kids and closer to your father’s work.”

“I did all of this for you,” Lizzie said.

“I know.” Jim ran his hands along the countertop. “You thought you needed to make up for something. I can’t even imagine for what—”

“For failing,” Lizzie said.

“Oh, honey,” Lizzie’s mom reached out and wrapped her arms around her daughter. Isobel didn’t even realize she was crying until Elyse handed her a napkin. “You’re the best of us. Even in failure you can’t lose.”