Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  * * *

  —

  It was twilight when Lorna’s taxi pulled up to her friend Pam’s apartment building. Following the instructions Pam had sent her, she collected the key from a wary-looking doorman, who noticed her lack of luggage. She let herself into Pam’s flat, a place that Pam, her friend since grade school, had claimed not to need for a couple of months, Pam recovering from a knee replacement down in Ojai with her daughter. Since Lorna had nothing to unpack, she just plunked herself down in a chair by the window and tried to calm herself by looking at the expansive and beautifully nuanced pink and gray San Francisco landscape of buildings, bridges, the cobweb of mist over the Bay, details that were the glory of this view from the top of Russian Hill, in an otherwise nondescript building, though it had doormen.

  Inside, her friend’s apartment had the brave but losing look familiar among Lorna’s contemporaries, of belonging to a downsizing person of a grandmotherly age and former affluence: too much furniture, too many books and family photos, some art objects crammed in, everything slightly faded or dated, as if long shut up for some archaeological reason. She looked around. She peered into the bedroom closet, where Pam had considerately pushed her own clothes to one end to leave some hanger space for Lorna. Pam’s shoes—too big for petite Lorna—looked forlorn on their tidy rack. She could get along here very well and hoped to God her friend would stay away awhile longer. The apartment’s musty, uninhabited smell would soon dissipate, as would the old-clothes, thrift-store odor of the closet, a scent of sachet mingled with the oxidizing smell of an older person.

  She’d have to go out for provisions, there was likely nothing in the fridge; nobody had been here for months. Lorna had lived like this in borrowed apartments before, on tours, and had a basic kit she knew it would be necessary to lay in of coffee and tea, a bottle of Chardonnay, a loaf of bread, butter and jam, milk, apples, and corned beef hash, things that always tided you over. She didn’t know if there was a convenience store in the neighborhood, but the doormen would know.

  Screaming sirens now drew her attention back to the window and a developing scene ten stories below, distant figures moving up Jones Street, and two dozen motorcycle police, blue lights flashing in the twilight, the screaming of their sirens filling the resonant canyon formed by the walls of this building and its counterpart on the other corner, where the imposing escort was just pulling up. A curious detail: on either side of the doorway of that building stood men wearing black top hats, red tights, and red-skirted minidresses with white ruffs and crimson stockings, the costume worn in travelogues about England. They were carrying pikes, as if to skewer anyone trying to go in.

  The pikemen stood at attention as several other men alighted from a Lincoln Town Car and walked toward the door, two of them a respectful distance behind the third. It was easy to conclude that this was a dignitary going to visit the former governor who lived in the penthouse of this ritzier building catty-corner across the street. An English dignitary, she inferred from the Beefeater costumes, which looked ridiculous in San Francisco, but maybe it was a film shoot. Wasn’t there a hotel downtown that had those costumed doormen?

  Ridiculous or not, the scene touched Lorna unexpectedly. Though she’d lived abroad for two decades, she still understood and shared the internationalist aspirations of her native city, its hope to be more than just an exceptionally beautiful and remote, hilly little port town yearning for significance. Here it was, trying its hospitable best to make an Englishman feel at home. She found rather sweet the idea of hiring people in costume to make some dignitary feel at home, though it was embarrassing, too. Mostly, she was beyond feeling embarrassment for any form of naïve San Francisco provincialism—she’d made enough gaffes in her French life not to sympathize instead with the anxious protocol official who had thought this up.

  Who could warrant such effort? Surely it couldn’t be Prince Charles? From her perch, it was impossible to tell; it could have been Prince Charles who walked quickly into the building without glancing at the Beefeaters. But what would he be doing in San Francisco? She pulled herself away from the window, then turned back at the rising sound of a crowd, and chanting, the oompah of a tuba. A little scrum of new people was streaming into the intersection of Jones and Green, waving placards she couldn’t read from here. Now they were milling around, and the policemen were letting them. Never mind, she found a market basket in Pam’s rudimentary kitchen, put on her jacket, and got the elevator down, happy to be back in California, in a meaningful world of politics after her years in an insignificant, though peaceful, French backwater.

  6

  They say there is no such thing as coincidence, but we have all had coincidences.

  As she set out for provisions, in the street, much to her surprise, Lorna spied there among the protesters, or whatever they were, milling around at the corner, someone who looked like her own granddaughter, Julie Willover, her daughter Peggy’s girl, noticeable for her strident beauty and queenly presence. Julie was hoisting a placard that said carry the rainbow. Julie must be twenty by now, with the flowing, caramel-blonde locks girls all wore, and, in her case, black-lashed blue eyes widened in surprise. Did they spy their grandmother? Yes, Lorna saw Julie see her. Had Julie seen Lorna see Julie?

  Lorna felt a wave of jet-lagged fatigue sweep over her; she had the distinct feeling of having been caught in some petty crime, having to face sociability when she just wanted to creep into Pam’s, eat a little supper, and crash. Instead, here came Julie, and of course Lorna’s heart swelled despite itself with grandmotherly pleasure at her embrace.

  “Grandma! What are you doing here?”

  “Julie dear! How amazing. Staying in a friend’s place; I’m here to give a lecture, well, in Bakersfield. I was just going out to buy some eggs and whatnot. I came literally a half hour ago.” She’d explain further to Julie when she felt stronger.

  “Can I help you? Let me go to the store for you.”

  “No, thank you though, you have your picketing. What is it for?”

  “The Circle of Faith. We’re supporting an important British politician working with Rainbow, the Circle of Faith’s outreach program. It’s about cultural diversity. The Circle meets in that building, where he went in.”

  “I’m hoping your mother will be coming down here tomorrow,” Lorna said. “We’ll all meet. Will she know where I can find you?” Lorna for now planning to say goodbye, put her head down, and scurry along Green Street toward where she thought there might be a 7-Eleven. She knew it was unnatural for a grandmother to evade her grandchild, but she couldn’t face other people just yet, and Julie’s energy exhausted her just to feel it, she who normally had plenty of energy of her own. But Julie had seized the market basket and trotted at her side toward the Fog Corner Convenience Store.

  And in the convenience store—horrors—there was another person she knew, and hadn’t seen for forty years, and couldn’t avoid: there was Philip Train, now the Reverend—maybe even Very Reverend—Phil Train, standing at the counter. Philip Train had been at Stanford in their undergraduate years many decades before, a popular campus figure and a friend. She’d heard he was a successful cleric now, and he was indeed wearing a turned collar and black jacket, and had an efficient close haircut, gray and crisp, like a football coach’s.

  For an instant, she thought of turning and creeping out without saying anything. She recognized him—would he recognize her? Or had she aged so much as to be no longer recognizable as herself? She had a moment of self-consciousness about her looks but banished it: she was a nice-looking woman of a certain age, hair a lighter color now, of course, than when she was twenty, like everyone who had altered their natural hair color, which meant, in France, everyone.

  It was not a pleasure to see him, because, as with seeing Julie, this collusion of coincidence defying her wish to be unnoticed seemed to portend an intention on the part of fate or San Francisco to res
ist her wishes; yet it was also strangely gratifying to be in a place where you might run into people who knew you.

  From the slightly furtive expression that had crossed his features for a second when he saw her, she thought he might have the same mixed feelings, or maybe had been buying cigarettes. If so, he had hastily annulled them. The cathedral, she remembered, would be just nearby. He recognized her immediately, just as she had recognized him, as if no decades had intervened and there was nothing strange about them both being in a Russian Hill convenience store.

  With the practiced sociability of the cloth, he engaged her directly: “Lorna Morgan! My dear old friend!” They exclaimed about the interval—forty years? Nearly fifty? She introduced Julie, who then tactfully absented herself among the shelves, picking up the eggs, a packet of bacon, the coffee.

  Asked about herself, Lorna found herself as they stood there telling him more than he must have wanted to know about her lecture plans and her new book. She knew she was nattering on, but she felt anxious to defend herself as a person of some professional seriousness and was rather wounded that he hadn’t heard of her, though she didn’t expect it, either. Her account of herself had been honed by the interview she had given over the phone for Publishers Weekly when her book came out, not that she was so famous, but in the art history world she had a certain stature, as she had to keep reminding herself.

  “…and now that my lectures have come out as a book, I’m on the road, book touring for a few weeks, and, finally, after all these years, am back home. For the moment, I’m staying at Pam Linden’s apartment up the street—that is, Pam’s away. I’ve stupidly leased my house in France…” Of course it was more complicated than that.

  “I live in France most of the time. Or did. In Pont-les-Puits, in the south, I’m married to a Frenchman…I’m ostensibly an expert on the tapestries of Angers…” The clerk, who had been listening, moved off to do something else.

  “Didn’t you marry Ran Mott?” Phil remembered her first husband.

  “Yes, well, a lifetime ago,” she agreed. “Randall Mott. I still use the name Mott professionally, along with Dumas, my married name now. Lorna Mott Dumas.” Morgan her maiden name. “Lorna Morgan is long gone.”

  Phil Train didn’t contribute anything about his own life during the intervening years, the convention being, she supposed, that a clergyman’s life had been too upright and uneventful to bear recounting. Long ago at Stanford, he dated a girl in her dorm, Cerise Boatwright, she remembered, and he’d been a notorious binge drinker, an Alpha Delt. The Somewhat Reverend Train.

  * * *

  —

  Lorna was not in touch with her first husband, Ran Mott, father of her three children, formerly a dermatologist, now morphed into the admired, exemplary philanthropist Randall Mott, who during their marriage had been abusive and drunk. After their divorce, he’d dried out, shaved, and wooed his now wife—Amy Hawkins, a girl-woman—who’d made a fortune in Silicon Valley. Looking at this upstanding, attractive man, people they knew tended to blame his former problems on his unhappy marriage to Lorna Mott, and blamed Lorna herself for being career minded, restless, arty, and not much of a housekeeper.

  A few years after his marriage to Amy Hawkins, Ran Mott had given up his dermatology practice and now did God knew what, managed Amy’s money probably, and took her to charity openings. Amy was no doubt perfectly nice, but Lorna did feel an occasional pang at the caprices of Fortune who had landed Ran so firmly on his feet, when she, hardworking, serious, and not getting any younger, hadn’t a home of her own or a bean to her name, plus the cares engendered by their three adult children, whom Ran had more or less washed his hands of. She explained to Phil Train about her second husband, Armand-Loup, and all those years in France, and about her recent reentry.

  “You must come give one of your lectures to our Altar Forum, they have a cultural series. How pleased they would be! There’s a lot of interest in art in the Bay Area.”

  Though he meant to be welcoming, these words struck Lorna with much more force than their actual significance; they brought back the maddening things she’d experienced as a young art historian when she’d first begun to lecture. Because she was female and married, people had expected her to give her lectures for free and pay her own way. Their assumptions had been that a woman should be thrilled to be lecturing at all, would not expect a fee, and would donate her time and expertise (such as it was) to worthy community groups.

  The same assumptions lurked behind this invitation now, nothing had changed. She would like to tell Phil Train she had lectured at the Louvre in Paris, at the Doria Pamphili in Rome, at the Whitney Museum in New York—but these would mean nothing to him. She didn’t mention her forthcoming trip to Bakersfield. She saw how it was going to be—she would be drawn back into the West Coast, small-time, amateur world, and she had no alternative, and no energy to transcend it. Coming back to San Francisco, she was finished.

  * * *

  —

  As she and Julie walked home to Pam’s apartment, aspects of her life she didn’t go into with Phil Train came rushing into her mind, deepening the sudden onset of partially jet-lagged gloom. Thinking about what she had described to him, she was almost resentful that her anonymous arrival today for a stay potentially restful and not engulfed in memories and family problems had been assaulted in the first half hour by not one but two representatives of real-world responsibility and duty, a grandchild and someone who had known her in college. Now thoughts could not be kept back, pushed in like paparazzi or bill collectors.

  Normally Lorna was not introspective. After the storms and sobs of her first marriage, she had realized there was no point to it. You just got on with things. But now she felt her heart speed up at recollections of the general mistakes of her life: one divorce and probably another in the offing; her present shaky finances; her daughter Peggy’s financial problems and the imminent foreclosure of Peggy’s house; the ongoing problems of her son Curt, his wife Donna’s possible need to sell their house; the amount of the note Lorna had signed on Curt’s behalf; her own trouble concentrating on her work, the reentry problems, the humiliation of hustling for lectures and trying to find new subjects, the pathetic fees you got for the occasional book review…

  All these cares tumbled through her mind during the simple five-minute walk from Fog Corner to the intersection of Green and Jones, no one problem formulated clearly, just a general sense of having botched her life, with opportunities for fixing it getting more limited the older she grew—all this reflection brought on by the simple expression of interest from a clergyman doing his job of appearing interested.

  His face had clouded with sympathy with the word “divorce.” And how odd that the Very Reverend Train remembered her long-ago marriage to Randall Mott. And she had always found it odd that old divorces were assumed to be wounds, life failures, and scars on the psyche; she had loved that divorce and never thought about it now, all these years later. She should have reassured Phil Train she didn’t feel it now, she was preoccupied with her new divorce. She sometimes wondered if she’d recognize Randall Mott on the street.

  Yet, though they had been divorced for more than twenty years, Ran was still a presence in her life as a permanent source of resentment, in that via his dot-com millionaire second wife he could have assumed a lot of the continuing costs of their three now middle-aged children if he wanted to. But he didn’t. She hadn’t seen him in decades and could almost have forgotten their personal relationship except for this abiding, pointed lack of help. Her ex-husband Ran’s new wife (not new, at least fifteen years or more, guessing their child was fifteen)—his wife Amy had hundreds of millions and was generous with them, but his pride, a spurious emotion masking genuine malice, wouldn’t let him ask her for anything. Ran had said, “I’m not asking Amy for money for those children,” as if they weren’t his children but only Lorna’s. As if his pride was more impor
tant than the children’s life needs.

  When it came to Ran, Lorna had mostly guarded herself from bitterness and judgment—she generally accepted the idea of karma—but serenity wasn’t easy. Here was another thought—memory—to be squelched, of him saying: “I’m not paying Peggy’s mortgage, she’s a grown woman,” though he’d put it more rudely than that.

  She thought of all this now as she and Julie retraced their steps. The protesters had vanished; the Lincoln Town Car still stood in the intersection, with several motorcycle police, but the costumed Beefeaters were no longer there. Julie had rolled her banner on its stick and carried it like a cane.

  Julie was taller than her mother Peggy, and towered over Lorna. She had something of her father Dick Willover through the eyes, though Julie’s were large and blue where his were brown. Her hair was dark golden and she had always carefully washed it with Lite N Brite to keep it from darkening, according to Peggy’s instructions, which had in turn come from Lorna. Lorna thought of this now, how pretty Julie was, and could she help her?

  “Grandma, are you here for a while? How long are you staying?” They would see each other soon, Julie was sure, embracing her outside Lorna’s building.

  How long was she staying? She by now with reason mistrusted the idea of permanence as a cynical hoax: the metaphor for real life was earthquake, and unwittingly, she was back in the right place for one.

  7

  We mustn’t expect to have our hopes fulfilled immediately. If ever.

  When her grandmother had gone inside, Julia Willover walked down to North Beach, disappointed that Grandma Lorna hadn’t invited her up, or asked about her life; but she understood that Lorna, whom Julie hadn’t seen in two years, must be tired, had just arrived from Europe. Still, it would be so easy to have shown her the material for the Greek studies program she was hoping to sign up for through her major at UC Berkeley, explain costs and what a great opportunity it was. She also hoped that Grandma Lorna would be interested in donating to the inspiring and virtuous Circle of Faith they had been rallying in support of just now on Russian Hill, hosting a visionary British politician, their sponsor.