Then their mother Fay showed up. She did this every now and again, whenever a liaison broke down or she had to see her lawyer about increasing her remittances. She was bored easily, loved to travel, loved to meet new people. She was very skinny and very lively and dressed with tasteful flamboyance, wound around with Parisian scarves and Italian costume jewellery; her hair was a metallic red, cut like a boy’s.
It was the first time she had visited her daughters since Lily’s marriage. She had been living in Paris just then and was unable to attend the wedding because of undergoing an unspecified procedure. All she told them about it now was: ‘You don’t want to know all that . . . But guess what: I’m a widow.’ They didn’t understand which husband she had lost, till she revealed that it was Celia’s father. They hadn’t heard her refer to him as anything but ‘that loser’, but now she became sentimental, remembered early days – ‘Fay and Harry! Crazy kids!’ – and then felt sorry for Celia, for being fatherless, orphaned. ‘You’re still here,’ Celia pointed out, which irritated her mother; those two never could be together for long without irritation.
Now they had to live together, for although Fay felt most at home in hotels, she couldn’t for the moment afford to move into one. Celia’s apartment was large – the same one in which she remained for the rest of her life – but, with Fay there, it was no longer large enough. Fay suggested that the front part, Celia’s office where she saw patients, could be made into a charming bed-sitting room for herself. ‘You don’t see your crazies all day,’ she argued, promising to make herself scarce during office hours. Failing that, she felt it to be appropriate to move into the bedroom now given over to Gavin and Lily. ‘They should have a place of their own,’ she said. ‘It’s working class for a young married couple to be living with their families.’
‘They’re looking,’ Celia lied. But they weren’t, and she even suspected that Gavin had kept his old apartment and continued to live there the way he had done before his marriage.
Lily agreed that it was a waste for the married couple to have the larger bedroom when she herself was mostly alone in it. One morning, while Celia was busy with her patients, Lily helped Fay carry her load of possessions into the room she willingly vacated. Even Gavin, arriving from one of his excursions, didn’t seem to mind that his clothes were now scattered over various closets. Also, since their new room was too small for two of them, he made himself comfortable on the living room sofa. He kept the light on all night to read, while playing records very softly so as not to disturb anyone. He was always considerate, more like a house-guest than a husband.
The second Sunday after Fay’s arrival was the day they drove her to meet Gavin’s family in the country. A traditional Anglo-Saxon lunch of roast lamb had been cooked by Elizabeth, Gavin’s mother. Her kitchen still had its old appliances, which had become antiques, but Elizabeth coped very efficiently, even providing a special dish for Lily, who was vegetarian. The cavernous dining-room had been opened up, and as far as possible the dust wiped out of the convoluted furniture. Only its smell remained pervading the air. There was no smell of food, since the family usually ate in the kitchen.
In outward appearance and manner, this family now seated around the table was also more or less traditional. Besides Elizabeth, who sat at the head, there were two uncles, her brothers-in-law who lived in the house with her; both wore three-piece suits, their waistcoats and bow ties slightly spotted with food. The visiting guests were three of Gavin’s sisters, two of them with husbands and some children, and a few relatives introduced as cousins. All spoke in the same loud voices, guttural with good breeding and unchallenged opinions. The conversation consisted mostly of amusing family anecdotes recounted by the two uncles. At the punchline, each uncle rapped the table and coughed with laughter, which made tears rise to their sorrowful, faded eyes. Elizabeth too laughed as at something she had never heard before; and she looked around at her guests to make sure they absorbed this family history, which it would one day be their turn to pass on.
At the end of the meal, when the sisters and cousins had driven off to visit other relatives embedded in the neighbourhood, Elizabeth invited Fay on a house tour. Several rooms had to be kept shut up because of the cost of heating and the lack of domestic staff, and here the furniture – New York State and valuable – was shrouded to protect it against bat droppings. The paintings and the statuary testified mostly to the taste of the ancestors, whose portraits hung all around the house they had built and rebuilt. They featured the same type of men and women through the generations, the original tall, bony merchants and farmers – they operated gravel pits and flour mills – still visible in the later portraits of New York clubmen living on trust funds.
These portraits were the only part of the house tour of any interest to Fay. While hardly listening to Elizabeth’s detailed biographies, she stepped close to examine them; but none of them in the least resembled fair, slender Gavin. At last she asked Elizabeth, ‘I suppose he takes after your family?’ But no – Elizabeth’s family, professional people from an adjoining county, were mostly, like herself, short and sturdy. Gavin was the first to look like – well, what he was: a poet.
As they crossed an upper landing, they saw him on the stairs; he was arguing with Celia, who called to them, ‘Gavin says he’s going back to New York!’ They walked up together to join their two mothers on the landing. Celia was angry; she said, ‘He has to meet some writer from Poland.’
‘Fixed up weeks ago,’ he regretted. ‘Just the sort of stupid thing I do. It’s not even a writer, it’s a critic. But I’m not going to spoil your fun. I know Mother has a whole programme for you this afternoon. The Shaker Museum; the old almshouses. It’s just my bad luck . . . Don’t look at me like that, Celia, as if you’re seeing right through me. You scare me.’
‘I wish I did. Maybe then you’d be nicer to Lily.’
‘Oh my Lord! Ask Lily who, who could be nicer to her than I?’ He pecked her cheek as though grateful to her for her compliance, and she watched him, lithe in his linen suit, run lightly down the stairs.
Later, Fay and Celia were standing by the window in the bedroom allotted to them. It was a bright gold afternoon, but they looked only at the figure sitting on an ornamental bench under the largest maple, which was still magnificent though half-destroyed by storms.
‘She’s sketching,’ Celia said.
‘Have you ever actually seen . . . ?’
‘Gavin says she has talent.’
Lily was sitting very still. Perhaps she was taking in the scene to interpret it later. She could often be observed sitting this way, gazing in front of her, her hands folded on the sketchbook in her lap: maybe watching, maybe waiting, definitely patient.
Fay turned away impatiently. ‘I couldn’t bear to stay the night in this creepy room. No doubt they all died in that bed. Let’s go: I don’t need to be entertained any more. And surely the Shaker Museum is a joke.’
‘No. And neither are the almshouses.’
‘You just love to torment me, Celia, you’ve always loved to do that.’
But she wasn’t serious – she was relieved to have Celia with her. Although so different in every way, she and her daughter were both out of their element here. Unlike Gavin’s ancestors, theirs hadn’t tilled this land nor built their houses on it. Their great-grandmothers and grandmothers had long since looked to Europe for their sustenance; this was evident in both Fay and Celia, in the cast of their thoughts as well as in their chic appearance.
Only Lily was a throwback to earlier, simpler, simply American girls. She came in, as so often barefoot, her white-blonde hair wind-blown; she was holding a branch with a few leaves on it. She said at once: ‘Where’s Gavin?’
‘Doesn’t he tell you anything?’ Fay said, and Celia, eyebrows raised: ‘The Polish critic?’
‘I’m really stupid,’ Lily said. ‘I forget everything. Look, there’s Elizabeth. She’s pruning a rosebush. She’s always busy; sh
e does a million things. Can’t you see her? I wish you’d wear your glasses, Mummy.’
‘I don’t need them. I don’t need to see anything more. I did a house tour; I sat through an entire lunch. I’m starting a headache and I want to go back to New York.’
Lily didn’t look at her but trailed the branch she was holding across the faded flower pattern of the carpet. She said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Elizabeth. If we left. It wouldn’t even be polite. It would really be very rude. I mean, if it were me, I’d think these were really very rude people.’ Still intent on her branch, she missed the look of wry resignation that passed between her mother and her sister.
Lily became pregnant. At first she said her stomach was upset, and as for her periods, they were always irregular. When Celia wanted to take her to a doctor, she didn’t want to go because doctors always discovered something horrible. ‘But supposing it’s not horrible,’ Celia said. ‘Supposing it’s something you’d like, you and Gavin?’
‘Oh, you think it might be a baby? Well, why not. I am married.’ She looked at her sister out of those very candid, fairy-tale eyes that made people love and trust her.
On being informed: ‘Is it possible?’ Fay asked Celia.
‘Of course it is,’ Celia said. ‘You hear about it all the time. I have friends you’d never think – and then suddenly they spring a grown-up son or daughter on you, visiting them over Christmas.’
Fay also had such friends with unsuspected offspring. But still she said, ‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Can’t imagine what?’ Celia said, the more irritably because she also couldn’t imagine: not about Gavin and, if it came to that, not about Lily herself. But there she was, pregnant, an indubitable fact.
Gavin’s mother Elizabeth had no doubts at all. She came travelling up to the city and took Lily to her own gynaecologist, who confirmed that everything was fine, and also that the scan showed a boy. Elizabeth was delighted – another grandchild, and this time the son of her only son. She advised plenty of exercise for Lily, plenty of walking, plenty of good food and fresh air.
Lily did plenty of walking but the air she was taking in was not altogether fresh. It was what she liked best in the world – street smells, petrol fumes, leaking gas pipes, newly poured tar, pretzels, mangoes from Mexico, Chinese noodles, overblown flowers – the exhalations of the city, the densely populated streets that she traversed from one end to the other, walking lightly on sandals so flimsy her feet might have been bare and treading on grass. On warm days she wore a very light summer frock – no more than a shift – that blew with any breeze wafting up from the subway or from leaky steam pipes. She avoided parks and other open spaces unless they were from a building recently demolished; and if she sat for a moment to rest, it was on the steps of a Masonic temple or a storefront, from which she was sometimes chased away. When it rained, she sheltered under an overbridge, though she liked to get wet – very wet, with the drops trickling from her hair down her face so that she flicked out her tongue to taste them and refresh herself. She stopped occasionally to sniff the flowers arranged in the front of a grocery store. On raising her eyes to the sky, she was perfectly satisfied that all she could see of it was a bright patch inserted among tall towers. If it was night – for she wandered around for many hours – there was sometimes a slice of moon and helicopters flitting and glittering around like fireflies.
Celia summoned Gavin to her office. ‘I hate it,’ she told him. ‘The way she walks around everywhere by herself and at all hours. It’s not safe. She’s not safe.’
‘Lily?’ He was gentle and smiling, patient as no patient of hers ever was. ‘But Lily is always safe. Don’t you feel that about her – that nothing could happen to her?’
‘Maybe it’s happened already.’ She was trembling a bit – at what she was saying, the danger to Lily, but also at his calm, the way he sat there, cross-legged and slightly swinging one foot in its narrow shoe. She said, ‘You know how innocent she is, how trusting.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled in recognition of these qualities in his wife, and he assured Celia, ‘I love and adore her as you do.’
‘I’m her sister. I love and adore her in a different way. All I’m asking is that you should stop her from wandering around the streets. Or help me stop her. Please be home tonight so that we can talk to her together.’
‘Yes, we should – but unfortunately, tonight, what a pity.’
‘Tomorrow, then?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ he promised. ‘Definitely tomorrow.’
But it was on that same day that he met Lily to report on his talk with her sister. They met where they usually did, in a church in midtown. It was the place where they had first seen each other, amid a sea of empty pews with here and there a few bowed figures, some come to pray, others only to fall asleep for want of food or a home to go to. Everyone was alone, maybe lonely and certainly in deep need. If Gavin and Lily were in such need, it was at least partly satisfied that time when they first met each other.
On the day of Gavin’s talk with Celia, they did not go in but sat on the steps of the church. He ran down for a moment to buy them two pretzels from a cart, and a drink to share. They picnicked there on the bank of a river of traffic, rushing and foaming in the street below. They sat close together at the side, undisturbed by people walking past them. Gavin informed her of everything that Celia had said to him and the way she had said it; he concluded, ‘She thinks you may have been . . . attacked? By someone. In the street?’
‘No. No.’
‘Then what happened? If you want to tell me, that is.’
She did – and it was relatively easy sitting so close and he listening with the sympathy and selfless love that he always showed her. ‘It was raining,’ she said. He nodded; he understood that she was sheltering somewhere. ‘Yes, under the 59th Street bridge. The rain was coming down really hard and I only had this –’ she indicated her diaphanous dress – ‘I didn’t want to stay there because you know what it’s like under a bridge that people who don’t have anywhere else use for their, you know, their toilet, and also to store whatever they have, from the trash or whatever. No one spoke to anyone, like they don’t in church, because of having so much else to think about? Different things. Except there was one person, maybe he didn’t have too many worries to consider, I mean he was maybe too young to have them.’
‘How young?’
‘Seventeen. He told me he’d come from – I’ve forgotten – some African country. He’d come here to start a restaurant. That was his dream. He was looking for a job to be a waiter where he could save enough money to open his own restaurant with the special food from his African country. He was very, very hopeful that it would happen. I was the first girl he met to talk to since he’d come here. He did what you always do – touched my hair and then let it sort of run through his fingers. He was very sweet, gentle also, till he got excited. He got like . . . frantic? No, I wasn’t scared; I understood he got that way because he hadn’t met any girl here, so it was my fault really, in a way. And afterwards he was very nice again and said he wished he had something to give me to keep for myself. I didn’t have anything either, so I told him I’d come back next day and bring him something.’
‘And did you?’ Gavin asked, playing with her hair the way she said the boy under the bridge had done.
After a moment she admitted it. And after another moment: ‘I thought: maybe he’ll never have the restaurant, maybe not even a job in one, nothing that he expects will happen, ever happen, such a lot of disappointment . . . I gave him a silver chain Fay had brought me from Peru. I’d never liked wearing it, it was so heavy, like being put in irons. But he was glad to have it and to see me again. I think he thought I wouldn’t come back.’
‘But you did.’
She hung her head but raised it again before answering frankly: ‘That time we didn’t stay under the bridge. We walked to the park; it wasn’t raining that day but the ground was wet. It
was chilly but much nicer than under the bridge. This was the day before you and I drove to the country with Fay and Celia, and all the time we were there, I kept thinking how he didn’t have a sweater or anything, and what if he caught a cold and had nowhere to sleep except under the 59th Street bridge? So when we got back to New York, I went there with a blanket and a sweater, but he’d gone. And I keep hoping he went off to a job as a waiter in a restaurant but also I think – what if he got ill being out in the open? And it turned into pneumonia and he was taken to a hospital where they take poor people?’
‘Boys of seventeen don’t catch pneumonia,’ Gavin affirmed clearly. ‘He’s working as a waiter and saving money for a restaurant. You have to believe me. I don’t want you to worry in any way or have disturbing thoughts, because that’s bad for our baby. OK? Promise. Only nice thoughts.’
‘About you.’
‘About me, if that’s what you want.’ He took her hand and kissed it.
Next day he took her to the country to stay with his mother. Lily liked to sleep late, and in the mornings, when Elizabeth herself had already been up for many hours and completed many tasks, she sat beside her frail daughter-in-law and the precious unborn child where they lay in a deceased great-aunt’s great bed. Elizabeth was nearing seventy, strong and stocky, with apple cheeks and bright blue eyes. Although her connection with the family was only through marriage, she was an expert on each degree of their convoluted relationships and of their convoluted stories. These stories, which she was passing on to her pregnant daughter-in-law, were mostly of domestic or social interest. No one had held high office or distinguished themselves in any wars. But they had involved themselves in local politics, built additions to the house, engaged in lawsuits with neighbours about boundary lines. There had been some scandals: divorces as long ago as the beginning of the century, also the stigma of gambling debts, and more than one case of temporary confinement in a mental institution. But mostly they had led long and uneventful lives, with several of them celebrating their hundredth birthday. They had done some travelling – honeymoons and study tours in Italy, safari in Africa – but they had all spent their last years at home and with each other. In the end family loyalties triumphed over everything, even property disputes between brothers and sisters.
At the End of the Century Page 38
