Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  Donna was already waiting at the restaurant, standing by the bar, not drinking anything. She looked younger than Lorna remembered, and she’d learned to dress more elegantly than when she and Curt were first married, less like a girl in the Hispanic soaps, back then all gold crosses on chains and low-cut pink blouses, now a Pacific Heights matron in Ralph Lauren. She looked happy. When they had sat down, she began to tell them something she said they would find amazing.

  “I have this incredible news.” Lorna’s pulse quickened with the expectation that she’d heard from Curt.

  “Hello, I’m Honeur Chu, your chef,” interrupted a young Asian woman in a toque and apron, coming up to the table. “Is everything all right? Would you like to order? The salmon tonight…” Everyone studied the menus, and there were some questions about the dishes.

  “I’m having the hundred-garlic chicken.” Hams began discussing it with the chef and a waiter, who’d appeared next to her. Hams had cooked this dish at home and wondered about her methods. Lorna now took in the vaguely fusion nature of the decor, watery dragons woven into the brocade wallpaper, and smart wooden screens. She looked down at the prices. Oh thank God, not a cheap Chinese restaurant. She’d intended to splurge, to take them somewhere expensive, and it was.

  “The salmon? Is it farmed?” Donna asked.

  “No, no! Line caught,” Honeur assured her. “Bio.”

  “Ah, okay,” Donna said. “I’ll have that to start.”

  Lorna noted that Donna chose lobster, the most expensive dish, for her main course. She had instructed Peggy, when she first began to date, never to order the most expensive thing if someone else was paying, but apparently Donna had not been told this.

  “Any word from Curt?” Peggy asked Donna.

  “Not directly since last week, but a friend of his called and he’d heard from him, something about their business. A postcard, just like he sends us. But just let me tell you what’s happened…”

  “Do we know what his business is?” Lorna asked. “It’s been kind of a mystery to me. In Thailand? It sounds so much like illegal drugs or arms smuggling, not exactly the mild-mannered financial planner.” She was joking, of course. But it did sound like drugs or arms, Curt’s being in Thailand.

  “It sounds to me like a gay lifestyle change,” said Hams. “That’s why people go to Thailand—for the boys.” He smiled to show he, too, was kidding, remembering Donna never got jokes. If it was a joke.

  Predictably, she objected. “There’s nothing gay about Curt.”

  “It’s so nice to be here with the rest of you,” Lorna said, meaning to head off discussion of Curt’s sexuality or incipient felonies, let alone of her own reasons for being here. “It’s wonderful. I’m so happy to be back, though sorry about Armand-Loup and all of that. Americans are just meant to live in America, I’m afraid.”

  “Doomed to live in America,” said Peggy gloomily. “You won’t find it like it was when you left. People evicted from their houses, living in the streets.”

  “The rents, I agree,” Lorna said. “I saw some apartments with Ursula Aymes this afternoon. I was stupefied.” But none of them pressed her further about the reasons for her return. Was their incuriosity out of delicacy? She was their mother, after all; they didn’t like to pry, were aware of the shadow of defeat that was implied in her ending up where she began. She could read in their faces that they saw her return as defeat and didn’t understand that she saw it as a new beginning, a flower unfolding.

  “This is the salt-and-pepper fried squid,” Hams said as the dish arrived. “I hope it’s good. I ordered it for the table.” His take-charge manner suggested he had stepped into Curt’s role.

  “I’ve been dreaming of spicy food,” Lorna said. “In France you just don’t often get it. The French don’t like things spicy.”

  “What did you miss the most there?” Misty asked.

  “Enchiladas.” A discussion ensued about food you would miss when exiled to another land. Lorna stuck to enchiladas, but the others specified hamburgers, too, as if hamburgers didn’t exist in France. Lorna found herself defending French hamburgers. “Though they do put a fried egg on them,” she admitted.

  “I have this incredible news,” Donna broke in. They continued to head off her soliloquy. It was bound to be more whining.

  “My dears,” Lorna began, struggling to express her stab of happiness to be among her children, in a normal American restaurant that was nonetheless very nice, even French people would admit. Even Armand-Loup, that is. Most French people were enthusiastic about America, but he tended to condescend; but even he would admit this was a nice restaurant. Yes, she was so happy to be here with her handsome family—Hams a bit scruffy, but Misty not even looking that odd, with her piercings merely colorful in the indefinable chic of an expensive San Francisco restaurant. She had lovely eyelashes. Donna not as irritating as Peggy and the others claimed. She looked rosy and excited—could she be pregnant? What was the time frame? No, couldn’t be, Curt had been gone too long.

  “How are the twins? I can’t wait to see them,” Lorna said. “I’m just so happy to see you all, and I feel I’m going to slide right back into San Francisco life as if I’d never been away. Contentedly.”

  “Please!” cried Donna. “This is important!” Realizing it could be about Curt, they put down their chopsticks and listened.

  Donna took an audible breath and in an unusually loud voice said, “Amy is paying off our mortgage.”

  Startled into silence by her shout, they all waited for clarification. Donna and Curt’s huge mortgage had been much discussed by the others behind Donna’s back, and they all knew it was a jumbo. But what was she talking about? Lorna felt a chill up her spine, as if the ice fairy had touched it. She was sure the fairy touched Hams and Misty, too, the chill of something unnatural stealing into the room and poisoning the food.

  “Amy called me two days ago. She decided to pay off our mortgage. Is just paying it off, just like that,” Donna explained, her voice muffled with emotion. “Just when I really couldn’t make the next payment, all was lost—about to be lost—this month. Things were really dire. Frankly, I faced imminent foreclosure this month. I’d talked to the bank and nothing could be done, they were so horrible, and then suddenly, Monday, out of the blue, Amy calls and tells me.

  “All she said was, ‘Please don’t say anything about this. You can pay me back when you sell it someday.’ I have a feeling she doesn’t want anyone to know about her good actions. She asked for the mortgage papers and deeds and all that. She said she thought in our situation the best thing was to just pay it off, and I could pay her back when I sold someday. And I hadn’t discussed it with them, not at all. She said, ‘These adjustable mortgages are going to rise to the stratosphere, I have such a bad feeling about what’s going on.’

  “Now the bank is totally obsequious—when I went in with the papers they couldn’t do enough about asking me to sit down and bringing me coffee.” She went on about this miracle, her emotions, how it had unfolded, how thrilling it had been to walk into the bank and say, Well, about my mortgage, since you’ve been such pigs I’ve decided just to pay it off. To say, in effect, shove it, though she hadn’t used those very words.

  Donna didn’t name the sum, but the others could figure it out. Peggy followed real-estate prices, and there’d been much family discussion when Curt and Donna had first bought their palace, for which Peggy had privately calculated that they must have paid around three and a half million. This meant a mortgage of at least three million dollars! Now Peggy’s mental calculator speeded up. She wasn’t sure how much repayment would come to with the payoff penalty, but she guessed it had to be more than three, perhaps three and a half, or in that ballpark, that their stepmother Amy was coughing up for Donna. Why? What estate financial planning move did this reflect, what will rewritten? What strategy of trusts, annuities? What did i
t mean for the rest of them?

  A second of silence suggested that questions and complications were occurring to each of them, except Donna, who went on rapturously describing her own reactions, her joy, her hope that Curt, wherever he was, would hear that they’d been saved from financial ruin.

  Finally speech came to the others. “But that’s incredible! How wonderful! How amazing!” They all expressed their joy, their astonishment at Amy’s generosity; no one admitted to the strange uneasiness, the sense of swallowing something that could grow inside you, like a tapeworm, the tapeworm of selfish hope or maybe of jealousy. Three million dollars for Donna. Nothing, so far as anyone knew, for the rest of them, at least until now, but there was a niggle of hope, not to be jinxed by articulating it, that Amy was systematically planning to help all of them, at the behest of their father, and that she would turn her and Ran’s attention to each of them in turn. Peggy’s own foreclosure problem. Julie’s tuition. Hams and Misty’s impending new baby and their living in a slum.

  Peggy could not have described her own complicated emotion, but was able to exclaim “Donna, that’s incredible!” with the others. Her second (not her first) reaction was genuine gladness that the dark threat of foreclosure had been removed from Donna and Curt’s future. Threatened in the same way, she was conscious of how millions of other people all across the country were facing foreclosure because of the cupidity of unknown people swindling them. Not her—she’d made her own mess, she was beginning to see.

  Her third reaction, which began to seep slowly into her thoughts for the rest of the dinner, was a mix of curiosity—why was Amy bailing Donna out?—and envy, since she herself was in need of rescue, and the hope that Amy intended something of the kind in her own case.

  “I never heard of anything like this—this generosity. I know it’s your father’s doing, getting her to do it. Paid it off! Just like that!” Donna went on and on. Amy, her stepmother-in-law, who had never even been around to see Curt during his period of coma, as far as Donna knew, but she didn’t say this for fear of seeming critical of Amy, now in her view a goddess.

  “Of course Ran likes me. We often saw each other at Curt’s bedside,” she said.

  This passed without comment. “When does this happen?” Hams asked. The transaction was in process, it was less straightforward than just mailing a check, she’d had to gather up deeds and papers and give them to Amy, she hadn’t been sure where the papers were, whether everything was there…Trips to the safe deposit, questions for Mrs. Aymes, who’d drawn up the purchase agreement.

  “But it’s wonderful! How generous!” Hams and Misty exclaimed in the same vein. Lorna was thinking: Wonderful, but what about Peggy, what about Hams? And she was envious that Ran was able to help the children when she herself could do so little.

  “I’m sure she is doing it because Ran asked her to, he was always there by Curt’s bedside…,” Donna began, as if echoing Lorna’s thoughts. She broke off, probably realizing it sounded like reproach, since Lorna had been in Europe all this time and, pleading the pain of it, had seldom come back to look down on his inert form; almost as bad as Amy.

  “Isn’t it several million dollars?” Lorna asked. Lorna was of the generation of women that grasped mortgages and finance perfectly well but were expected not to display too much understanding; but this was family.

  “It’s three million,” Donna admitted. “A bit more.” She didn’t go on to say that even three million dollars hadn’t got her off the hook entirely. She was facing a number of bills Curt had run up—for clothes he needed for his new business situation, whatever it was, but also his sexy BMW, and even his bicycle, the one that was wrecked, had turned out not to be paid for, or not entirely. Who could have thought that a bicycle could cost more than ten thousand dollars? His beautiful jackets, his cleanly folded slacks hanging forlornly in his closet. He’d wear them someday, of course, but had lost an awful lot of weight during his coma. You probably couldn’t sell used men’s clothing. Curt’s personal bills came to more than forty thousand dollars and more seemed to come in daily.

  She weighed whether to tell his mother and siblings about the bicycle, the suits. “I still have to come up with this month’s payment myself, but that’s the last one.” She had been afraid to talk to anyone about still needing money for these extra bills, especially Curt’s father and stepfather, for fear they’d think she was asking for more money yet. Curt’s mother? She must be getting a chunk from the Frenchman, and remained a possible source; but hitting up Ran and Amy again was of course out of the question. She weighed whether to call Ran to tell him she’d had another postcard from Curt, it looked like from Laos.

  Donna pushed on, her mind racing with concerns about how much to say: she hadn’t known quite how to process the joy she felt, the feeling of exoneration and justification. Was it a reward for her goodness in the face of Curt’s difficulties? Her instinct, not usually reliable, served her this time to tone it down when talking to her in-laws about her good fortune. She was insanely grateful for having her mortgage paid, a brilliant break, but she continued to experience a frisson of terror whenever she thought of what had been averted.

  She certainly didn’t mention that, on the day Amy told her of her good fortune, she had indulged herself, while the kids were at nursery school, by going to Union Square, to Saks Fifth Avenue, even using the valet parker, and buying a purse that cost nearly three thousand dollars. Just this once. By no means the most expensive bag Saks had, which gave her a feeling of thrift. She had decided not to carry it tonight to the dinner with Curt’s family.

  “Ran’s wife has a lot of money,” Lorna said. “She might as well use it to allay human suffering.” Silence struck again. Perhaps they had detected the note of irony in her tone.

  * * *

  —

  “Now, Mother, tell us what about you, what are you doing here?” Hams asked after a bit, like a hostess anxious to cover an awkward moment. “What’s happening with Armand-Loup, all of that? Are you coming back to the States permanently?”

  Honeur came with another platter of salt-and-pepper fried squid, so delicious they all fell to eating in silence. Three million dollars for Donna; the sum hung in the air. They had ginger clams and wok-fried chicken and “long green vegetable.” Lorna reveled in pleasure after all those years of no Chinese food. “The French just don’t have a feeling for Chinese food, but it’s not their fault, there just aren’t that many Chinese restaurants. They do have Vietnamese, toned down.”

  After all the dishes, as they opened their fortune cookies, Lorna was again swept over with a rather unearned, she knew, but welcome feeling of gratitude that she was safely here among her children and they, in their turn, seemed okay, and she herself was still alive, not yet struck with some fatal disease or dementia, inevitable as these were, probably soon, and that for now her troubles were behind her or, rather, overseas where they couldn’t blight this precious time with these loved ones, minus Curt, and, truth to tell, probably a pleasanter dinner without him, since he tended to be overbearing and tyrannize his siblings, and even herself.

  “ ‘Expect good news,’ ” Donna said, waving the tiny strip of waxy paper.

  “ ‘Windstorms,’ ” Lorna’s cookie said.

  14

  We have to let go of our grievances, as we all know, but there’s something we like about them.

  On the BART train on the way over, Misty and Hams had replayed their usual fight. Despite her fierce looks and eyebrow rings, the pregnancy had animated Misty’s desire for a nest, her bourgeois sense of the precariousness of her life with Hams, its drabness and sleazy position on the edge; specifically she felt their need for a better income—a future—and fueled her resentments about Hams’s lack of get-up-and-go and what she imagined was the immense affluence of everyone in his family but them, and now including Donna, but especially Hams’s half sister, Gilda, his
father’s child with the mega-rich woman Hams’s father was married to. There Misty was right; Gilda was a golden girl. Misty saw that their share of Ran’s attention was less than Gilda got, and she tended to blame Hams for not being nicer or closer to his father, for acceding to their rather distant relationship.

  She wanted to move and buy a house. “I just don’t fucking want to bring up our child in this neighborhood,” Misty said, maybe for the hundredth time. Gunshots had rung out at their corner and they were two blocks away from a crack house, which everyone knew was a crack house. There had been one neighborhood meeting; someone had been delegated to find out who the owner was and report him, or threaten him, but nothing had been done. Hams’s father Ran had suggested Hams and Misty get a dog, and Hams still remembered the scorn in Misty’s expression.

  “No one is lending in this market in this neighborhood,” Hams explained to Misty also for the hundredth time. “We would never get a loan.” He hoped they might get a loan down the line, as Misty was steadily employed; they might go into the bank together, impress them as a couple, but she’d have to take out her nose stud for the interview, and he was not about to irritate her by suggesting that. Only a week ago, he had been thinking of phoning Lorna, who ought to be in New York. Asking her for a little cash, a hundred would help with some immediate expenses. They had no hope of buying a house, but a few small treats might cheer Misty up. And he could put in some extra hours at Craig’s Cycles. Craig, Hams’s oldest friend from elementary school, was sort of a bicycle fence, a business the two of them had begun in junior high school. Bicycles came from somewhere, and Craig stripped, filed, painted, and resold them. All these years, no one had ever bothered or busted them. The business was all Craig’s now, but Hams pitched in from time to time, though these days Craig only paid him by the hour.