Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “You need to ask your parents. Your mother helped Peggy, I happen to know, and she probably helped Curt. Your father helped, too, probably, but they never do anything for us.”

  “You’ve got parents,” said Hams. Misty laughed in derision. Her parents, elderly pensioners, had been high-school teachers, had never saved a penny, and lived in Watsonville in a double-wide.

  “You’ll take this seriously when we have the baby.”

  “I take it seriously now, I just don’t see any way.”

  After dinner, riding back to Berkeley in the BART train, Misty turned on Hams in another rage, or a continuation of their fight coming over. In the face of Donna’s news, he’d said nothing to his mother about the probability that their unborn child would die in the crossfire of random bullets flying on their Oakland street, and Misty didn’t mention that Hams worked at least two jobs, while the horrible Donna had nothing to do but drive her bratty twins to their posh nursery school and live mortgage-free in her multimillion-dollar château in Pacific Heights.

  “Wasn’t there something about Martha and Mary in the Bible?” said Hams in his mild way. “Where the poor, modest one was the beloved?”

  Misty stared indignantly at his callous, uncharacteristic use of biblical allusion. “Yes, the decorative, idle one was the one who got everything,” she said. “Just like in life.”

  However downscale their lifestyle now, Misty and Hams had, in common with all bourgeois American children, in contrast to those who had been brought up poor, a belief in the intrinsic fairness of things, above all within their own families, and that life would work out. Hams said, “I think it’s likely Amy is planning to help each of us. She wouldn’t do one of us without the other. Donna’s problems are just the most imminent.” This might be wishful thinking; they had yet to hear from their rich stepmother Amy on any subject whatever, though Ran, Hams’s dad, checked in from time to time. They had been disappointed in another way at dinner; they had hoped to borrow some money from Hams’s mother, and instead had gathered she had no money at all.

  15

  What is the opposite of Schadenfreude?

  When they had embraced and said good night to Hams, Misty, and Donna, Peggy and Lorna walked back up the hill from the restaurant to Lorna’s digs at Jones and Green. Peggy was especially eager to talk to her mother about the startling development, Amy’s more than generous help to Donna: Did Lorna think money would be forthcoming for the rest of them? Conscious of a vast understatement, she said, “Donna’s windfall. That’s amazing! Do you think there will be something for the rest of us?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know the woman, remember,” Lorna said. She had never laid eyes on Amy, and it had been years, in fact twenty-four years, since she’d laid eyes on her ex-husband Randall. Hearing about the three million dollars, she was conscious of her own ambivalence, glad for Donna and Curt, of course, but sorry and a little resentful that she could not be helpful to them herself. Glad for them, but not without other apprehensions, perhaps superstitious: good would not come of unearned windfalls. She hadn’t recognized that she had such a puritanical streak, but she felt this. They discussed Ran’s probable agency in steering Amy’s money toward Curt and Donna, but neither had much expectation for the others.

  “Ask your father about it,” Lorna added.

  Though it was only 10:00 p.m., Lorna felt her jet lag and turned in. Peggy tucked up on the sofa with an extra blanket and pillows and lay wakefully into the night. In the bedroom, at 4:00 a.m., the predictable waking hour of the jet-lagged, Lorna’s eyes flew open, too, a swell of apprehension in her bosom that Ran was sowing mischief, as he always had done, by favoring Curt, by urging his rich wife to favor Curt with this one-sided largesse—to the tune of three million dollars—with nothing for his other children, nothing for poor little granddaughter Julie hoping to study in Greece, for example.

  Rage took her. She recognized a familiar cast to this rage; it was the rage at Ran she had felt when they were married, its power presenting itself undiminished. Rage had lurked here more than two decades. She shouldn’t have come back within range of it. Mistake, mistake.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, things looked brighter, as they always do. They were sitting over their coffee when Peggy’s cell rang. It was Misty. Misty and Peggy didn’t often talk but were friendly and often saw eye to eye on things Hams was against. Hams’s siblings wondered what anyone could have seen in him and were grateful to Misty for straightening him out, up to the point he was straightened out. In Peggy’s view, Misty was weird herself, and apparently that’s what it took, someone pierced and tattooed, evidence of a psychic fragility that brought out his manly need to protect her, or whatever the psychodynamic was. She liked Misty despite these manifestations, believing a normal middle-class girl lurked behind the tattoos. Misty was calling to exult.

  “Three million!” Wonderful Amy! Could salvation for each of them be far behind?

  “It’s true, you know, that money doesn’t bring happiness,” Lorna said to Peggy later. “That truism.”

  “How do you know, Mother?”

  “I had enough when I was married to Armand. Not money money, but you know. Is your father happy with his rich wife?”

  “I think so. They live simply.”

  “If simplicity is a prerequisite, we should all be happy.”

  “We are, aren’t we?” Peggy said.

  “Are you, Peg?”

  “Except for my mortgage worries, and it’s a little lonesome without Julie anymore, but I’m active…Activity is the secret to happiness, don’t you think? Creativity.”

  “I do think that,” Lorna agreed. “Though I never thought about it so directly. I think you can only spot happiness obliquely if you think about it at all.”

  Over coffee, Peggy and Lorna discussed another problem, that Lorna would need somewhere to live. They devised a house-hunting program. Lorna hoped that by looking with just Peggy, without the upscale Ursula Aymes, they’d have better luck. They would look online and in the paper, owner-to-renter directly, a better strategy. The soul-killing compromises required of a person house hunting had begun to chill her before they had even planned their itinerary or made their phone calls.

  The want-ad pages were smoothed out on the table, sparkling with promise. “I’d like to stay in this neighborhood,” she said.

  “Your budget, Mom—we should look out on the Avenues.”

  “So foggy, it’s so cold out there,” cried Lorna. “I’d rather do with less space.” Each site she’d regarded on Zillow was worse than the last: shrunken, pathetic rooms, grudging small windows looking onto seedy decks, neglected plants, exigence, improvidence, the futile optimism with which, in each for-rent photo of a repellent sofa, a misjudged decorative pillow in a cheerful color blocked the sight of a stain. Just from the photos she could smell the smell of other people’s stuff in the old floorboards, and the closets. She couldn’t help but think of the beautiful French farmhouse that was hers no longer, with its delicious odors of wax and flowers.

  That house, in Pont-les-Puits, built in the late seventeenth century and added to auspiciously in the nineteenth, had belonged to Armand-Loup when they married and was thus, by being something he brought to the marriage, something he was entitled to keep, even if he was callously selling it. The pain of this one thing had made Lorna hesitate about a divorce, such was her love for the house, so entirely had she felt it to be her own, the house of her soul, an emotion she had never felt for the San Francisco family house on Lake Street where she and Ran and the children had lived all those years. Looking into the vast Pont-les-Puits fireplaces, where a whole sheep could roast, she had imagined Capetian noblemen, musketeers, English soldiers hunting down poor Jeanne d’Arc…

  In California there was no one to imagine except the wicked mission friars who had enslaved the Nat
ive Americans, or the Zodiac killer more recently, or a madman with an assault weapon in the supermarket. She was sure her imaginative engagement with French history had immeasurably enriched her lectures, and here no one cared to hear them.

  “Mother, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” Peggy asked yet again. Peggy had often fleetingly regretted divorcing Dick Willover and would like to warn her mother to think carefully, though when she really considered it, she knew in her own case she had done the right thing. Dick had snarled abusively at Julie and was in the process of coming out, something none of them had ever suspected but which had put him under a strain that fueled his constant anger. Peggy often asked herself whether, if he hadn’t been so ill natured, maybe she could have lived with him being bi. It would be better than her present penury.

  “Right thing?”

  “What went wrong, if you don’t mind telling me? In France, with the Frog Prince?” The children had never taken to Armand-Loup. Lorna had supposed they wouldn’t have taken to any second husband. The circumstances of your own conception—happening so far before your birth—can be borne, but remarriage too pointedly reaffirms that your mother is still in the thrall of Eros, and they had found it slightly disgusting. Every book about how to tell the children about divorce had explained that they would.

  Lorna couldn’t bring herself to go into details. “Oh, village life came to seem so far from art, so far from real life,” she said vaguely. “So far from America, though I never thought I would feel such a thing.” She was certainly not going to tell them about finding someone’s underpants in the glove compartment of their Peugeot. And what she had said was partly true, she loved being back in the art world, or thought she was going to love it, with no anxieties about culinary faux pas or the need to struggle with cooking the wild boar and pheasant brought in by Armand-Loup’s hunter friends.

  “That doesn’t seem like much of a reason, if you don’t mind me saying so. That charming village, the wonderful house. At your age. Can’t you just work it out to spend more time over here? Without breaking everything up? It’s not so great here, either, remember. My house isn’t worth what we paid for it. You’ve seen the homeless all around.” Letting people sleep outside was not the way she remembered San Francisco.

  “Oh, honey, I’ve got my life in hand, it’s yours I worry about,” Lorna said, not quite truthfully but with some reason. Her heart did wrench to see Peggy looking so frumpy and distracted. Some money could help her so much. Should she suggest Peggy lighten her hair or at least get some streaks to blend with the onset of gray? Of course Peggy had earlier driven a hundred miles on 101, stop-and-go through Petaluma and Santa Rosa, a very tiring drive, no one would look her best. Peggy had not let herself go, exactly, and Lorna knew her life didn’t require the latest haircut, stylish clothes, or uncomfortable high heels such as she, the more petite Lorna, had sworn to wear as part of her renaissance.

  She restrained an impulse to suggest that Peggy could lose a pound and have better-fitting jeans. Lorna was not, not, an interfering mom, but Peggy, basically a good-looking woman of forty-four years, when she should be at beauty’s prime, could use some sympathetic counsel. Nonetheless, Lorna held her tongue. She herself had suffered the exacting standards of Frenchwomen, and understood that Peggy was a struggling Ukiah single mother with no need to go out wearing lipstick and scarves. She tried to think of what she could do for Peggy—but what could she do for any of them until she got some lecture engagements?

  16

  However daunted, we can almost all of us rise to an occasion.

  Next morning, when Peggy dropped her at Southwest Airlines for the flight to Bakersfield to give her lecture there, Lorna felt her professional persona assert itself. She was an art historian who had a certain reputation as an interesting lecturer, or had had in the early nineties, more than twenty years before. Back then she was known for bringing her subjects to life with an animated and perceptive way of talking about the visual arts, and with wonderful slides. Now the public lecture was a bit out of fashion, what with videos and the Internet, and she had found, when she began rather furtively to weigh getting back into circulation, that people’s taste had changed. Armand, when they discussed it, had cynically said it was owing to the lack of public transportation in America; people were reluctant to hunt for parking places after dinner. The lecture as a performance art was more suited to village life, where people could stroll to hear it, then gather in the pub.

  On the plane, she reread and mentally timed her lecture. Lorna had not learned her speaking style from tapes of Mrs. Thatcher in the eighties—not entirely—she had also spent a lot of time as a young woman in the early seventies hanging around the fascinating gurus of the mind-expansion movement, had seen Werner Erhard, had even once had a date with Timothy Leary, an attractive guy in those days, though married. Those were good public speakers. She had never understood what had saved her—vanity or timidity—from the dangers and silliness of their far-out subjects, given that she’d been kind of drawn to the ideas of expanding consciousness and visual representations of mental states—this in turn leading to her doctoral dissertation on the French Symbolist painters of the 1890s, especially focusing on Odilon Redon. What a busy time! She wondered, looking back on her virtuous stamina in those days, with young children and a husband, Ran—Randall Mott—whom she had been at the same time trying to leave. How had she done it all?

  She’d have to work up anew the lingo of art historiography: Art Talk had changed so much since she was in graduate school, and now involved understanding semiotics, and dropping a few words like “disruption” and “signifiers” into her lectures. Some of her audience, Lorna was sure, actually wanted instruction for their own self-improvement, to learn about how to see a painting, really to see; but she suspected such people were rare. Most people just wanted to hear stories, and get a few clues as to what to say the next time they were called upon to comment on a painting, say when visiting a museum with a friend. No, she wouldn’t mind giving it all up except for the need for the wherewithal to help poor Peggy and buy Hams a house and pay someone to find Curt—and now even for herself, the only one who truly had no money and had stupidly left the family silverware behind in France.

  Lorna wasn’t used to having financial problems. She hadn’t ever been rich, but she’d always been solvent—when growing up, and then during her marriages to solvent husbands—first, doctor Ran and now rentier Armand-Loup. She felt there was something soul degrading and personally culpable about having money problems, though she didn’t feel degraded in her own case, because she wasn’t giving in to caring one way or another. If she had to live in a hole, she would. She began to understand the proudly poor in nineteenth-century novels, in Dickens, for example, or Trollope, proud ladies furtively mending their stockings.

  But the things she saw around her on the San Francisco streets or read about in the paper suggested a new kind of poverty, unfamiliar even, among people who had been solvent and now had been undone by harsh structural events—their stores closing or losing their jobs. She had never followed economics closely, but now discussions could not be avoided of the falling house prices, iffy, perilous banks making unwise loans, people losing their homes. With her savings, she had bought some certificates of deposit—surely the government would not let them fail? But they paid a pitiful amount of interest.

  For herself, she knew that leaving Armand-Loup meant she would have to get serious about her lecture schedule and raise her fees. The prospect of a plunge into work was what had firmed up her resolve to leave him and the unhappiness and tension in their lives. But what if there was no work? Her savings wouldn’t last forever. And she had only now begun to understand how inadequate they were.

  * * *

  —

  Now she was on the plane to San Francisco again. New York, San Francisco, Bakersfield, the lecture, overnight in the Bakersfield Days Inn and another
airplane. It was hard to imagine that only six days ago she’d been in Pont-les-Puits, leaving Armand-Loup, alive with an inner sense of being on the brink of an important return to her essential self. Now she saw that getting back onto the circuit was going to take time, judging from the sparse attendance at her first lecture appearance, in Bakersfield.

  Something about it had not been a success, and she would have to think about what that was. She hadn’t been sure the topic would be right for Bakersfield: medieval tapestries. The medieval Apocalypse Tapestries of Angers, France. The Angers tapestries had been new to her until a year ago, when she saw them for the first time, and instantly had known they would become her new passionate subject, beside Symbolism and Dada. She attacked them with missionary zeal, had made them her own, and had worked up a fascinating lecture with beautiful slides. She needed to try it out, and Bakersfield had been the first audience to hear it.

  Unloved, nearly unknown in America, the Angers tapestries were mighty and transcendent works of art, yet it seemed they were almost ignored in the scholarly world: more than eighty huge tapestries based on the Book of Revelation, devised by a powerful medieval imagination, informed by faith, woven by the unknown fingers of probably Flemish believers, and with a romantic history of being lost, hidden, forgotten through the centuries. There was the apostle John, the author of the biblical Book of Revelation; there were Jesus, the devil, Mary, the Whore of Babylon, the Beast, and God himself—each more picturesque than the other, woven in sumptuous greens and pinks and blues, emblazoned with stars, towers, and raging waves. Her photographic slides, taken by experts with special lights and permission to briefly illuminate the panels, were in fact clearer and easier to see than the actual tapestries, which, too fragile to be exposed to daylight, were exhibited in almost total darkness, counting on the human eye to adjust in the vast, windowless space of a medieval dungeon adapted to contain them. The slides brought out the enchanting iconography imagined by that fourteenth-century genius in what must have been closer to its original transcendent beauty.