Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “No one is quite sure. His wife gets the odd postcard.”

  “I hope she realizes she’s a partner, she’ll be liable for the money he took out.”

  “I’m sure he’s left things in good order,” Ran said, not sure at all.

  Thinking about Curt made Ran think guiltily of the last time he’d seen Curt’s wife Donna, right about the time Curt had woken up. He’d gone as usual to Curt’s care facility, on Q Street below Parnassus, and parked along the driveway where Donna’s car had pulled in. The driveway was reserved for clients—God knew where the staff attendants were expected to put their cars. Sometimes it was still possible to park around there, one of the few parkable areas left in town. This care facility had at one time been a residential duplex, now converted, with handrails, sterilizers, and ramps, faintly smelling of benzene, rubbing alcohol, and pee.

  During the coma, the ritual was to peek into Curt’s room, stand in the doorway for a few minutes, as if staring at him would make him stir, until discomfort—pain—overtook you, and you gently closed the door. He had learned to let emotion take him instead of trying to come up with cheerful, bullshit thoughts about the probable prognosis. Ran had schooled himself to tamp down the anguish he always first felt seeing his son like this, prompting recollections of Curt as a little boy getting them up at night for drinks of water or to dispel his fear of wolves under the bed.

  His daughter-in-law had usually been sitting reading in the living room–cum–waiting room and would get up dutifully to be pecked on the cheek. He remembered once noticing she looked unusually attractive—he didn’t usually think about her looks—and wondered if something was improving in her life. Peggy and Lorna, and perhaps others, had always believed that Curt would one day wake up. Ran, a more pessimistic and also better-informed person, at that point didn’t, but didn’t really know. Donna reverted to pieties about God’s will. When he had gone to sit at Curt’s bedside, twice a week at least—perhaps less often as time wore on—there would be Donna sitting there. He remembered the last time he’d seen her.

  “The nurse told me he opened his eyes last night. She didn’t see it happen, it was on the night report. The doctor is coming, which is why I’ve stayed.”

  Her fidelity had given him a better impression of her than he’d once had, revising his less-than-enthusiastic welcome of their marriage. At first he hadn’t liked her, found her insipid, short, and vague, not that pretty, even if she had been homecoming queen when she was at U. Delaware, the main thing anyone ever said about her. As always, he found her too passive and quiet now, kind of permanently stunned-seeming, though she did have a trim little figure. Some bloom of duskiness shone under her skin—Italian grandparents, she had said, but he thought maybe Hispanic, or a Southern octoroon thing wouldn’t have surprised him.

  Donna and Curt had met in some tech environment where they both worked, but she left off work as soon as they were married—she was pregnant already. She’d quickly produced two small twin boys, Marcus and Manuel. How strange it was, this onslaught of twins in the world, an in-vitro-fertilization phenomenon but surely not in this case. What a good mother Donna seemed to be, the twins always immaculate in matching little denim jackets and hats, always with skinned knees, like real boys.

  Ran knew she had money problems, with huge mortgage payments, the absurd school fees for the twins—whom he thought of as Romulus and Remus—God knew what other expenses. Donna’s problems interested Amy, who liked her—they had the tech world in common.

  Since Curt’s escape to Thailand, Donna had hung on the cusp of belief, tipping toward the side of mistrust, anger, despair, and she could see that her father-in-law Ran was tipping, too, toward the same idea that Curt didn’t mean to come back at all, sticking her with maxed-out credit cards, small children, nursery-school tuition of more than fifteen hundred a month and that’s just for the morning, three-days-a-week-only program, so she couldn’t go back to work, and the jumbo mortgage with staggering payments, which Curt had said not to worry about. And now the bottoming out of the housing market meant she couldn’t sell if she had to. She was sick with worry, which Ran could well understand.

  And now this man Avon seemed to be saying that Curt had also borrowed $1,750,000—nearly $2 million—against his share of the company Curt, with Avon and two others, had started, with capital they in turn had borrowed from the Bank of America two years ago. That is, Curt had taken this money out of the company—in what form? And used it for—what? They couldn’t find it; notes were due at the B of A.

  “Did he ever mention what he did with it?”

  “I have no idea,” Ran said, stunned and mistrustful. “His mortgage, maybe?” Ran was a professional man, a physician, ergo no businessman, didn’t know much about Curt’s world, and found Avon mysterious and slightly off-color, too slick.

  Ran had been disappointed, ever so slightly, in Curt’s career, had certainly never mentioned his hopes that Curt would have gone to medical school, at Stanford like him, or at least UCSF. Instead, Curt had got an MBA at the Wharton School, whatever that was, doubtless due to the baleful influence of Lorna, who had been more at home than he on the East Coast because of her lecture venues. Like Lorna, Ran was born in California and went to Stanford; though she had wandered off far into the great world, they were both Californians all through— that is to say, optimistic most of the time.

  “I’m not sure I can get hold of Curt,” Ran told Avon. “You’ve probably tried yourself. We don’t hear from him.”

  “He’ll have to come out of this Fu Manchu phase eventually. I guess he’s living high on the hog over there?”

  “I’ve wondered about his finances,” Ran said, truly enough.

  Donna was in his thoughts also because he had heard recently from his wife Amy that she planned to do something especially handsome for the absent Curt and the abandoned Donna by paying off the enormous mortgage they had unwisely incurred before Curt’s accident, when he had been on his way to doing well, and which was now in danger of being foreclosed. People were losing their houses across the nation, something about rot in the bond market, or—nobody knew why. Maybe Amy understood it. Ran had counseled against her paying off Curt’s giant mortgage on general principles, for the moment.

  “It’s underwater as it is,” Amy said. “These high-end properties are liabilities. I suppose things will recover, but at the moment…”

  “That’s a lot of money,” he mildly observed, knowing full well the mortgage was more than three million dollars. Would this protect Donna from Harvey Avon or just give her an asset he could sue to acquire? He said nothing.

  “They can pay me back when they sell someday,” Amy said. “When things get back to normal. It makes no sense to just let the bank have the house and lose all that equity. Nor to keep paying the loan for that matter. Even if it is underwater. It probably is, but the value will come back. The interest alone would come to more than a million by the end of the term.”

  Ran thought, uncharacteristically, about his other children and their problems that money could help mitigate. Well, Hams and Peggy—Curt apparently went off with some money. He would like to have said “What about the others?” but had a rule never to bring up his Lorna children to Amy, especially their limitations, as she was touchy about them. He believed she saw them as incompetent and retarded. It was just a look she had, with a tiny shake of the head when she heard of yet another of their screwups. Unfairly healthy when their own child had heavy afflictions. Ran didn’t ever push or promise on their behalf, but gave limited help when he remembered. Mostly, the problems of his Lorna children could be construed as their own doing, stemming from lack of application or the wrong spouses, but the problems of Curt and Donna lay with fate, were not their fault, were deserving of her pity and help.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” he warned her.

  10

  Someone will always say
“I told you so.”

  Lorna spent a restless, jet-lagged night in Pam’s unfamiliar, once expensively upholstered bed, decorated in the distant past in a very pretty Colefax and Fowler print, the fabric now faded and shredded around the bottom, the work of some former or absent cat. Despite not sleeping well—unused to the urban sirens wailing all night at the foot of Russian Hill and through North Beach—Lorna, taking stock, could see already that she hadn’t thought through a number of other potential problems she might be facing: whether to drive, where to live, would anyone ever ask her to dinner? She’d been focused on her lectures and her professional reentry, but there was much more to reestablishing yourself in your old social life, too. Eventually, she’d have to face the DMV. Which restaurant to invite the children to tonight?

  She felt herself repaired the next morning, and braced to call the other children to announce her return, make dates with them, hear the news, offer support and sympathy. She was now ashamed of her selfish evasions of the night before. She would call her granddaughter Julie first. She bounded to the shower, found something of Pam’s to put on, dried her hair. What joy that her thoughtful hostess had arranged for the San Francisco Chronicle to be tucked under the door, or else had forgotten to cancel it: reading the paper postponed the interface with reality.

  But she found she had only the most passing interest in the local news. It hadn’t changed for twenty years—bickering among the supervisors, shootings, the same calendar of events, the same events and even the same sponsors. She scanned the social columns without success for the names of Amy Hawkins Mott and Randall Mott.

  When she went into the tiny kitchen and opened the cupboards looking for a plate and a cup, a feeling rose again of displacement and defeat, Pam’s can of stale Folgers coffee a rebuke. Some people didn’t move on to Nespresso pods, didn’t throw out jars of spices years old, slept in faded beds. Some people came back where they started, but the worse for wear.

  From New York she had spoken to Peggy and emailed Hams and Donna that she was coming back to America, without explaining why. She had not felt that she needed to explain (never apologize, never explain). But she had been rather startled when not one of them expressed any surprise, as if it were foredoomed for a grown woman with grown children who’d been so unwise as to flit off to France in middle age with a French husband. They had also seemed to find it normal that a person living abroad would eventually come back to California. California was like France in that if you began there, you always came back. Their adolescent disapproval when she’d left made it more painful now to acknowledge they’d been right.

  At about ten, Lorna confronted checking in with them, though she was still uncertain how to explain her return to America except as a career move, not a defeat. A feeling of maternal excitement, jolted by having seen her granddaughter Julie the night she arrived, intensified, prompted her to gather them all for dinner that night.

  She began by telephoning Peggy, who had already heard the story, and who knew she must be in San Francisco by now. But questions were postponed when Peggy told her at once about the strange phone call from France about the catastrophe that had befallen the cemetery. At first Lorna laughed merrily, remembering the tumbled graves and imagining the civic consternation. Also very funny that the village of Pont-les-Puits thought she was related to Russ Woods.

  “If I were his heir, that would be one thing,” she said, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “They spoke of billing and charges, Mother,” Peggy said. “I think you better make it clear that you aren’t.”

  * * *

  —

  She and Peggy spoke a bit longer, about Peggy’s life, Lorna ready with maternal advice. In Lorna’s view, Peggy’s problems were more existential than practical: in a rut, stuck somewhere in her forties, without money or profession, she needed to find direction. Luckily she had inner calm, or was it just a slightly bovine nature? As her mother, Lorna could propose some sensible mitigating measures: a better haircut, refinancing, taking a class, losing ten pounds, joining something—that commonplace stratagem for meeting people. Lorna might urge her to get a job—something that would put her out into the dynamic world, instead of devoting herself to making stained-glass wind chimes to sell at a loss.

  After her worries about Peggy, her reflex worries about Hams prompted her to call him and Misty next, to propose dinner, a restaurant of their choice, since she didn’t know the restaurants anymore. Could they suggest a restaurant nearby? In France she would have roasted a big leg of lamb in the medieval fireplace of Armand’s—their—former house, but she didn’t feel she could organize groceries and cook in Pam’s little kitchen.

  Hams and Misty, who lived penuriously in Oakland, had nothing to suggest in the way of San Francisco places to eat, nor did Julie, who had a night class, so after they hung up, Lorna walked around and reserved at a little restaurant on Polk Street. It didn’t seem very grand—she’d hoped for a little more festive splash. She suspected that the ease with which she was able to get in meant it wasn’t chic, possibly not good, but it was within walking distance, so she hoped for the best. People had told her you had to book weeks in advance for good San Francisco restaurants now, they were always crowded with adolescent vegan dot-com millionaires drinking fabulous vintage wines. Would Hams and Misty think she was taking them to a down-market restaurant? Or maybe it was a fashionably plain restaurant? Would Donna scorn it, she who was probably used to better, living as she did in splendor in Pacific Heights? Where were the good restaurants now?

  * * *

  —

  After talking to Peggy and Hams, instead of mustering all her force to call Curt’s wife Donna, whom they all found difficult, Lorna called the realtor Ursula Aymes. When she had last lived in San Francisco, after her divorce from Ran, Lorna had found a house to rent with the help of Ursula, an agent at Tubb-Brandish, the highly successful real-estate company. Before she spoke to the children tonight, it would be prudent to have a strategy about where she’d be living.

  Ursula was a glamorous Middle European woman, perhaps Czech, always newly divorced from some senior insurance executive or clubman. She had hair tastefully blonde and wore wonderful jackets that could be Chanel, came to galas in Oscar de la Renta, and exuded an air of sandalwood and something else, her personal scent: Was it Fracas? She specialized in understanding what sort of property people like herself, and like Lorna—people of taste—would want; she had considerable cachet, an enviable client list, and all those ex-husbands judiciously chosen from the list; and though none of her marriages had worked out, she always stayed on good terms with husbands, escrow officers, and banks, and even with clients initially disgruntled.

  “Just a pied-à-terre, I won’t be here too much.” Lorna mentioned a reduced budget, but she didn’t reveal to Ursula just how reduced. She wasn’t sure herself what things were going to cost. They agreed that Ursula would pick her up at two that afternoon for an initial look around.

  At two, Lorna went down in the elevator and waited outside the building. Ursula Aymes pulled up in her Mercedes, late model but not ostentatiously brand-new, the de rigueur car for San Francisco real-estate ladies, an inevitable badge or requirement of success in the property market—although male agents sometimes drove BMW convertibles or even Jaguars.

  Mrs. Aymes found Lorna overdressed in a beautiful dress of Pam’s and heels. “Ought to make a solvent impression on landlords,” Lorna explained. As they were old acquaintances, Ursula got out to embrace Lorna. Her eyes flicked over Lorna’s bag, which was impeccably French, like her tailleur. They embraced. “Lorna, you look marvelous.” Ursula also looked marvelous.

  As they set off, Lorna began to explain what she needed: small pied-à-terre, she’d be on the road a lot, only wanted somewhere for her clothes and books. Two bedrooms would be nice, so she’d have a study that could double as a guest room, so grandchildren could stay ove
r. Quiet, if you please, and not in the fog belt; Telegraph or Russian Hill okay, or Nob in a pinch. Or around the Presidio but not on the ocean side…Parking, of course…

  “Lorna!” Ursula seemed to be laughing. “What are you smoking, as the kids all say? Your eyes will open.” Ursula’s slight European accent—what was it?—enhanced her quality of astute reliability when it might easily have been the opposite, suggesting foreignness and deals.

  Lorna had been used to thinking it was the French who lived in crowded little spaces—not in Pont-les-Puits, of course, but certainly in Paris—now she saw it was true in San Francisco, too. The new-built places down by the baseball park had mean little bedrooms and kitchen islands jutting into the living rooms, a feature the French referred to as cuisines américaines, which Lorna had always maintained didn’t exist in America. Larger old Victorian conversions were dark, bicycles impeding the passages; dour modern buildings had been shoehorned in between them, homeless people in pop-up tents outside.

  At the end of three hours, Lorna was overwhelmed with despair, and Ursula had plainly tired of their futile excursion. She mendaciously pleaded another appointment, but promised to keep Lorna in mind if something should come up. “There’s always something out there,” Ursula said in her professionally reassuring voice, but Lorna recognized the lie. “Maybe you should look in Oakland,” Ursula added. “Or even Richmond.”

  Another thing she said, Lorna would remember later: “I suppose you’re getting an American divorce? I hear French judges are hard on Americans, especially the wife. A client of mine—well, you know her, Denise Hope…”