Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  “I gave it back!” Kevin yelled. “I threw it to you, and you dropped it and the thermos broke!”

  “Ah!” all the parents said at once.

  “Two parties misinterpret the same incident. Happens all the time in the courts. I teach about it in my class,” Mr. Lewiston said. Everyone laughed.

  “Now, Mrs. Harrington, I think both these young men owe each other an apology, don’t you? Kevin for taking Ernest’s lunch, and Ernest for saying he threw it at him.”

  “Boys,” Mrs. Harrington said, “will you shake hands and make up?”

  The children eyed each other suspiciously.

  “Come on,” Mr. Lewiston said to Kevin. “Be a good cowboy, pardner.”

  Kevin, like a good cowboy, reached out a swaggering arm. Sheepishly, Ernest accepted it. They shook.

  “All right, all right,” Mrs. Lewiston said. “Now why don’t you two go play with Timmy and Danielle?”

  “O.K.,” Kevin said. The two ran off.

  “And we’ll all get a drink,” Mr. Lewiston said.

  The adults emerged from the bedroom and made their way through the crowd. All of them were relieved not to have to face the possibility that one of their children had done something consciously malicious. But Mrs. Harrington had to admit that, of the two, Ernest had come off the more childish, the less spirited. Kevin Lewiston was energetic, attractive. He had spirit—took lunch boxes but gave them back, would go far in life. Ernest cried all the time, made more enemies than friends, kept grudges.

  Small children, dressed in their best, darted between and among adult legs. Mrs. Harrington, separated from the Lewistons by a dashing three-year-old girl, found herself in front of a half-empty bowl of chopped liver.

  A trio of women whose names she didn’t remember greeted her, but they didn’t remember her name either, so it was all right. They were talking about their children. One turned out to be the mother of the boy from Princeton. “Charlie spent the past summer working in a senator’s office,” she told the other women, who were impressed.

  “What’s your daughter doing next summer?” the woman asked Mrs. Harrington.

  “Oh, probably doing what she did last summer, working at Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Or, perhaps, living in another town.

  The ladies made noises of approval. Then, looking over their heads to the crowd to see if her children were within earshot, Mrs. Harrington saw someone she had no desire to talk to.

  “Excuse me,” she hurriedly told the women. But it was too late.

  “Anna!”

  Joan Lensky had seen her; now she was done for. Her black hair tied tightly behind her head, dressed (as always) in black, Joan Lensky was coming to greet her.

  “Anna, darling,” she said, grasping Mrs. Harrington’s hand between sharp fingers, “I’m so glad to see you could come out.”

  “Yes, well, I’m feeling quite well, Joan,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  “It’s been so long. Are you really well? Let’s chat. There’s a room over there we can go to and talk privately.”

  Regretfully, Mrs. Harrington was pulled away from the crowd into an empty room. She did not enjoy talking to Joan Lensky; the details of their histories, at least on the surface, bore too much resemblance to each other. Up until his death, Joan’s husband had been famous for making advances to his female graduate students—so often, and so clumsily, that his lechery had become a joke at the faculty wives’ teas.

  Mrs. Harrington’s husband was more serious; he left her suddenly and flatly for a law student, quit his job, and moved with her to Italy. After that Mrs. Harrington stopped going to the faculty wives’ teas, though most of the wives remained steadfastly loyal—none more so than Joan, who seized on the wronged Mrs. Harrington as a confidante. It made Mrs. Harrington nervous to realize how much she knew about Joan’s life that Joan herself didn’t know—Joan, with her black poodles, her immaculate kitchen. Nevertheless, she put up with this demanding friendship for many years, chiefly because she felt sorry for the old woman, who seemed to need so badly to feel sorry for her. When she got sick she changed her priorities. Now she only saw Joan when she had to.

  Tell me, then, how are you?” Mrs. Lensky asked her gravely. They were sitting on an Ultrasuede sofa in a small sitting room, close together. Mrs. Harrington could feel Mrs. Lensky’s breath blowing on her face.

  “I’m all right. I feel well. The kids are doing fine.”

  “No, no, Anna,” Mrs. Lensky said, shaking her head emphatically. “How are you?”

  She couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer.

  “All right. I’m on the tail end of radiation therapy. It’s about fifty percent effective.”

  “Oh, you poor, poor dear,” Mrs. Lensky said. “Is there much pain?”

  “No.”

  “And your hair? Is that a wig?”

  “No, I have it specially cut.”

  Mrs. Lensky looked toward the ceiling and closed her eyes rapturously.

  “You are so lucky, my dear Anna, you don’t know,” she said. “My sister has a friend who is going through terrible ordeals with the radiation. All her hair. She weighs seventy pounds. Terrible. Don’t let them increase your dose! Or that awful chemotherapy!”

  “All right,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  “You must avoid chemotherapy. I know a woman who died from it. They said it was the treatment that killed her, because it was worse than the disease. Another woman I know was so sick she had to stay in bed for three months. She’s still so pale. Also during surgery make sure they don’t leave any of their sponges inside your stomach . . .”

  Mrs. Harrington counted her breaths, thought, It’s all she has to live for, other people’s sorrows to compare with her own.

  “Have you heard from Roy? Is he still married to that child?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Harrington said. “He is. She’s actually very nice. They’re quite happy.”

  Mrs. Lensky nodded. Then she moved even closer to Mrs. Harrington, to deliver some even greater confidence.

  “I heard of an organization I thought you would want to know about,” she said. “It arranges for . . . things . . . before you go. So that your children won’t have to worry about it. I’m a member. The dues aren’t heavy, and they take care of everything . . . just everything.”

  She handed Mrs. Harrington a small slip of paper that she had produced from her purse. “That’s all you need to know,” she said.

  At that moment, thank heavens, the door opened.

  Jennifer had come to rescue her mother. To help her out.

  “Mom, I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Joan,” Mrs. Harrington said, standing. “We’ll talk.”

  Thank you for rescuing me,” Mrs. Harrington whispered to her daughter.

  “Mom, you’re not going to believe it,” Jennifer said. “Greg Laurans is here. And he brought those people with him.”

  “You mean from Young Life?”

  “Them . . . and some others.”

  In the dining room, the mass of guests had separated into small clumps, all engaged in not looking at the sunken bowl of the living room, not listening to the music rising up from it.

  Mrs. Harrington glanced down curiously. Seated around the fireplace, by the Christmas tree, were Greg and a group of cherubic young people, all clean-cut, wearing little gold glasses and down vests. One had a guitar, and they were singing:

  “And she draws dragons

  And dreams become real

  And she draws dragons

  To show how she feels.”

  Mrs. Harrington looked behind her. Mrs. Laurans was dropping an olive into a martini; this, she thought, is cruel and unusual punishment.

  Then she noticed the others. There were three of them. The boys were dressed neatly in sweaters. One had dark blond hair and round eyes. Occasionally the girl next to him had to take his chin between her thumb and forefinger and wipe it with a Kleenex. The other boy was darker, squatter, and could not seem t
o keep his head up. Every few minutes, the girl with the Kleenex would lift up his chin and he would look around himself curiously, like a child held before an aquarium. Near them was a dwarf girl with a deformed head, too large, the shape of an ostrich egg, and half of it forehead, so that the big eyes seemed to be set unnaturally low. Yet they were alert eyes, more focused than those of the boys. From the corner where they were gathered, the three sang along:

  “An se dwaw daguhs

  And de becuh ree

  An se dwaw daguhs

  Ta so ha se fee.”

  “They’re from the state hospital,” Jennifer told her mother. “They’ll probably live there all their lives. It was really amazing that they let them go to come here. It’s incredibly nice, really, even though it’s pretty horrifying for us.”

  “And for Greg’s mother,” Mrs. Harrington said, distantly.

  She stared down at the circle of singers. Now some of them were shoving pieces of paper and crayons into the invalids’ hands.

  “And she draws unicorns

  And makes us all free

  (An se dwaw oonicaws).”

  “Come on,” the pretty young people were saying. “Draw a daguh. Draw an oonicaw.”

  “This is the cruelest thing of all,” Mrs. Harrington said to her daughter.

  She turned around again, but Mrs. Laurans had disappeared. Quickly she walked toward the bedroom. She rapped on the door, opened it. Ursula Laurans lay on her bed, on top of fifty or sixty coats, crying.

  Mrs. Harrington sat down next to her, rubbed her back.

  “I’m sorry, Ursie. I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why does he do this to me?” Mrs. Laurans asked. “He was getting so much better, he went to synagogue. For Christ’s sake, he was a physics major, a goddamn physics major. Then one day he comes home and he tells me he’s found Jesus. He tries to convert us, his parents. You don’t know how it upset Ted. He tried to argue with him. He wouldn’t even accept the theory of evolution. A physics major! He thinks everything in the Bible is true! And now this.”

  “I’m sorry, Ursie,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  Ted Laurans entered the room. “Oh, God,” he said to his wife. “Oh, God. I’ll kill him. How can he do this?”

  “Shut up,” Ursula said. “It’s futile. You gave him all that bullshit already, about questioning. He’s beyond reason.”

  Why were they telling her this? Mrs. Harrington tried to be comforting. “Oh, Ursie,” she said.

  Then, very suddenly, Ursula Laurans launched up and landed against Mrs. Harrington. She fell against her, dead weight, cold and heavy. Mrs. Harrington’s arms went around her instinctively.

  Ted Laurans was crying, too. Standing and crying, softly, his hands over his face, the way men usually do.

  “Maybe this is his way of trying to reestablish a relationship,” Mrs. Harrington offered. “It’s very kind, bringing them here. No other person would have done it.”

  “It’s all aggression,” Ursula said. “We’ve been seeing a family therapist. It’s all too clear. I wasn’t enough of a mother to him, so he took the first maternal substitute he came across.”

  Mrs. Harrington chose not to say anything more. Soon Ted Laurans ran into the bathroom, leaving the two women alone with the coats.

  Eventually, Mrs. Harrington emerged. Many of the guests were leaving; in the kitchen she bumped into the dwarf girl, who was washing a glass in the sink with remarkable expertise despite the fact that her chin barely reached the counter.

  “Excuse me,” she said quite clearly. “I get under people’s feet a lot.”

  They both laughed. The dwarf girl smiled pleasantly at her, and Mrs. Harrington was glad to see that she had the capacity to smile. The dwarf girl wore a houndstooth dress specially tailored for her squat body, and fake pearls. She had large breasts, which surprised Mrs. Harrington; she wore a gold necklace and a little ring on one of her fingers. Obviously she wasn’t as retarded as the two boys.

  Mrs. Harrington turned around to look for her children. Then Ernest ran into the kitchen. He was crying again. He held his arms out, and she lifted him up. “Oh, Ernie, you’ll get sick from so much crying,” she said.

  “I want to go home,” Ernest said.

  “What’s wrong? Didn’t you have fun?”

  “They ditched me.”

  “Oh, Ernie.”

  Three little children, two boys and a girl, ran into the kitchen, laughing, stumbling. As if she were a red light, they screeched to a halt at Mrs. Harrington’s feet. “Ernie, you don’t want to play anymore?” Kevin Lewiston asked. All the children’s faces stared up, vaguely disturbed.

  “Go away!” Ernest screamed, turning in to his mother’s shoulder.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Mrs. Harrington said. “I think you kids better find your parents.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison. Then all three ran out of the room.

  Mrs. Harrington was left in the kitchen, holding her child like a bag of wet laundry. He would probably want to sleep in her bed tonight, as he did all those nights he had to wear the eye patch, to deflect lazy left eye syndrome. “We’ll go home, Ernie,” she said to him. Then she noticed the dwarf girl. She was still standing by the sink, staring up at her.

  “Roy’s in the bedroom with some boys and they’re smoking pot,” Ernie mumbled to Mrs. Harringston’s shoulder, which was now soaked through with tears and drool.

  “Don’t be a tattletale,” Mrs. Harrington whispered.

  She looked down at the dwarf girl, who looked up at her. The dwarf girl held a glass of water in her tiny fat hand; the owl eyes in the huge head seemed gentle, almost pretty; in the bright light of the kitchen, she wore an expression that could have indicated extreme stupidity, or great knowledge.

  Unmoving, the dwarf girl stared at Mrs. Harrington, as if the big woman were a curiosity, or a comrade in sorrow.

  The Lost Cottage

  The Dempson family had spent the last half of June in a little rented cottage called “Under the Weather,” near Hyannis, every summer for twenty-six years, and this year, Lydia Dempson told her son, Mark, was to be no exception. “No matter what’s happened,” she insisted over two thousand miles of telephone wire, “we’re a family. We’ve always gone, and we’ll continue to go.” Mark knew from her voice that the matter was closed. They would go again. He called an airline and made a plane reservation. He arranged for someone to take care of his apartment. He purged the four pages of his Week-at-a-Glance which covered those two weeks of all appointments and commitment.

  A few days later he was there. The cottage still needed a coat of paint. His parents, Lydia and Alex, sat at the kitchen table and shucked ears of corn. Alex had on a white polo shirt and a sun visor, and talked about fishing. Lydia wore a new yellow dress, and over it a fuzzy white sweater. She picked loose hairs from the ears Alex had shucked, which were pearl-white, and would taste sweet. Tomorrow Mark’s brother and sister, Douglas and Ellen, and Douglas’s girlfriend, Julie, would arrive from the West Coast. It seemed like the opening scene from a play which tells the family’s history by zeroing in on a few choice summer reunions, presumably culled from a long and happy series, to give the critical information. Mark had once imagined writing such a play, and casting Colleen Dewhurst as his mother, and Jason Robards as his father. The curtain rises. The lights come up to reveal a couple shucking corn . . .

  Six months before, Alex and Lydia had gathered their children around another kitchen table and announced that they were getting a divorce. “For a long time, your mother and I have been caught up in providing a stable home for you kids,” Alex had said. “But since you’ve been out on your own, we’ve had to confront certain things about our relationship, certain facts. And we have just decided we’d be happier if we went on from here separately.” His words were memorized, as Mark’s had been when he told his parents he was gay; hearing them, Mark felt what he imagined they must have felt then: not the shock of surprise, but of the unspok
en being spoken, the long-dreaded breaking of a silence. Eight words, four and a half seconds: a life changed, a marriage over, three hearts stopped cold. “I can’t believe you’re saying this,” Ellen said, and Mark knew she was speaking literally.

  “For several years now,” Alex said, “I’ve been involved with someone else. There’s no point in hiding this. It’s Marian Hollister, whom you all know. Your mother has been aware of this. I’m not going to pretend that this fact has nothing to do with why she and I are divorcing, but I will say that with or without Marian, I think this would have been necessary, and I think your mother would agree with me on that.”

  Lydia said nothing. It was two days before Christmas, and the tree had yet to be decorated. She held in her hand a small gold bulb which she played with, slipping it up her sleeve and opening her fist to reveal an empty palm.

  “Years,” Ellen said. “You said years.”

  “We need you to be adults now,” said Lydia. “I know this will be hard for you to adjust to, but I’ve gotten used to the idea, and as hard as it may be to believe, you will, too. Now a lot of work has to be done in a very short time. A lot has to be gone through. You can help by sorting through your closets, picking out what you want to save from what can be thrown away.”

  “You mean you’re selling the house?” Mark said. His voice just barely cracked.

  “The sale’s already been made,” Alex said. “Both your mother and I have decided we’d be happier starting off in new places.”

  “But how can you just sell it?” Ellen said. “You’ve lived here all our lives—I mean, all your lives.”

  “Ellen,” Alex said, “you’re here two weeks a year at best. I’m sorry, honey. We have to think of ourselves.”

  As a point of information, Douglas said, “Don’t think we haven’t seen what’s been going on all along. We saw.”

  “I never thought so,” Alex said.

  Then Ellen asked, “And what about the cottage?”