by Susan Conant
“Then psychosocial context has to go,” Zara decreed. “The Jane Eyre is better, anyway.”
“So long as there’s no first Mrs. Youngman stashed in the attic,” I said.
“Holly, stop!” Rita protested.
“If there were,” Quinn pointed out, “we’d hardly have kept that part of the—”
Although Quinn’s mother’s voice came from the front hall, her enraged holler drowned Quinn out. “Monty, I am disgusted with you! Polluting your lungs like that! Your body is a temple, and you swore before God that you would quit desecrating it, so besides lying to me, you lied to God. What kind of Christian are you?”
Tiny MaryJo all but dragged her fleshy husband into the kitchen. Pointing her index finger at him, she addressed Quinn. “Look at your father! His doctor ordered him to quit smoking, and he promised God to quit, and he swore that he had, and now this! Sneaking around like some teenager. That’s what you were doing when you left that nice restaurant, isn’t it? That’s why you were gone so long. You weren’t in the little boys’ room, were you! No, you were sneaking out to smoke cigarettes.”
Ah hah! Minty Monty. His mysterious absence from Vertex. Now I understood.
Attracted by the shouting, Vicky appeared from upstairs, but for once, she remained silent. Or maybe even she couldn’t get a word in.
Monty made an effort to defend himself: “At least I didn’t shoot anyone, MaryJo.”
Mistake.
Angrier than ever, MaryJo said, “You did worse than that! You exposed your unborn grandchild to toxins!”
Rita exhaled audibly.
Quinn was at his most doctorly and authoritative. “This has gone far enough.”
“I didn’t mean to say it!” MaryJo switched from yelling to wailing. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. Rita, I’m sorry. It just slipped out. But we couldn’t miss it, could we? When you were so sick every morning—”
My attention had been focused exclusively on the little drama. Zara, however, had slipped away to admit Rita’s parents, Erica and Al, who’d arrived at the kitchen door. I’d met both of them before when they’d visited Rita. In appearance and manner, Erica had none of her sister Vicky’s brittle artificiality. She wore her silvery hair in a medium-length blunt cut with baby bangs, and her makeup was minimal. Rita always complained that her mother was dumpy and dowdy. Erica was, I admit, short and plump, especially around the middle, and her style was simple and conservative—today, she wore a navy-blue cotton twin set and pearls—but she was pretty.
In fact, Rita and Zara both looked like her, and she had the warmth that they shared with Uncle Oscar. Rita complained that her mother was censorious and had a Victorian outlook. The Victorian part was accurate in the sense that Erica loved Dickens, but I love Dickens, too, and I’m hardly repressive or prudish. Al, Rita’s father, was a tall, good-looking man who, I suddenly realized, bore a disconcerting resemblance to—you guessed it—Quinn Youngman. I’d never before noticed the similarity, mainly, I thought, because I’d never before seen them together. Furthermore, Al happened to be wearing a dark-blue polo shirt trimmed in red and pale blue, a shirt that had come from Orvis, as I knew because Quinn Youngman owned exactly the same shirt and had dropped the Orvis name when I’d admired it. Worse—much worse—Quinn was wearing that polo shirt right now.
Rita’s glance moved from Al to Quinn and back again. A look of horror crossed her face.
Pointing at Al and Quinn, Vicky screeched in that metallic voice of hers, “Isn’t that the cutest thing! Twins!”
Ignoring Vicky, Erica stared at Rita and said softly and flatly, as if addressing either herself or no one, “Morning sickness.” Then she spoke directly to Rita. “Morning sickness. And you chose not to tell your own mother.”
Al spoke up. “Erica, you seem to have forgotten that Rita has a father, too. Rita, this is wonderful news. Wonderful. Quinn, we’re delighted.”
“You may be delighted.” Erica’s eyes flashed. “Rita, at your age!”
“Erica, shut up!” Vicky said.
“That’s a very vulgar expression,” Erica told her sister. “Just what I expect from you.” Turning again to Rita, she said, “So, you told your aunt and not me?”
“She didn’t tell anyone,” MaryJo said. “I guessed, and I let it slip. I’m so sorry. But Monty and I are just thrilled, aren’t we, Monty?”
He beamed. “Couldn’t be happier.”
Erica said, “All the more reason you shouldn’t have—”
Al cut her off. “Erica, that’s no way to talk to Vicky. You owe her an apology.”
“Mother,” Rita said, “you owe me an apology.”
Erica sank into an empty seat at the table. Although her jaw was almost locked, she somehow managed to grind her teeth. “Rita, I never expected you of all people to have to get married. I am mortified. And at your age!”
“As you have pointed out, Mother, I am of childbearing age. Otherwise, my age has no bearing on anything, and I do not have to get married. I am more than capable of supporting and raising a child on my own. Many people do.”
“Dear God,” said Erica.
MaryJo took a seat next to Erica, bowed her head, and placed a hand over Erica’s. “We know where to turn, don’t we?” she said.
Erica looked dumbfounded.
“God forgives Rita,” MaryJo continued. “And the rest of us need to, too. You know, Jesus said, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ No one needs to blame her, and I’m certainly in no position to cast the first stone.” She lowered her voice and shot a meaningful glance at Quinn. “I was in the family way with Ishmael when Monty and I got married.”
She’d have done better to shoot someone again.
chapter thirty
The responses were almost simultaneous but far from unanimous, except in the sense that MaryJo had managed to offend or anger almost everyone, including me.
“That quotation is about the woman taken in adultery,” I said. “That’s—”
“Who said anything about adultery?” Vicky snapped.
“You were pregnant?” Quinn demanded. “And you never told me? You didn’t think I had a right to know?”
Al was red in the face. “What’s this fundamentalist horseshit!”
“Ishmael?” Rita asked. “Who is Ishmael? Quinn, I didn’t know you had a—”
“No, he doesn’t have a brother,” Zara said.
“MaryJo,” said her husband, “we’ve agreed never to mention that. I’ve never held it against you.”
Zara said, “Who cares? No one cares anymore.”
“I do!” Erica said.
“Why would you hold it against me?” MaryJo asked. “I could hold it against you, couldn’t I?”
“Good for you,” said Vicky.
“I care about having my daughter compared to the woman taken in adultery,” said Al. “In fact, I’m not listening to this.” With that, he stalked out.
“Ishmael,” Rita repeated.
Zara looked up from her phone, in which she’d taken refuge. “It’s Quinn’s real name.”
“And how do you know?” Rita asked.
“MaryJo let it slip the other night at Holly and Steve’s. When Uncle Oscar had us all singing. You’d left.”
Erica stared at Rita. “This is no time for a woman in your situation to make a fuss about his name. Who cares?”
Rita turned green. “Who cares? Who cares who the hell he is as long as he’s going to make an honest woman of me? Is that your implication, Mother?”
I’ve seen more peaceful dogfights.
“Erica, you disgust me,” her sister said. “I’ve listened to more than enough of this. I’m going for a walk.”
In the hope of getting rid of yet more relatives—the fewer, the better, Zara and Uncle Oscar excepted—I offered to show Rita’s mother, Erica, to the room in our house where she and Al would be staying and to help her with the luggage. As it turned out, Erica and Al had stopped at our house f
irst, and Steve had shown them to their room. Happily, Uncle Oscar succeeded where I’d failed, not in the sense of thinning out the concentration of relations, but in the sense of distracting people from the multiplicity of animosities. He and Willie had been outside on the patio, and when Uncle Oscar entered the kitchen, Willie trailed after him. Erica rose and gave Uncle Oscar a big hug, and Rita sank to the floor to commune with Willie.
If asked, Rita would have maintained that psychotherapists were the best defense against quarrelsome relatives. But where did she turn now? Did she call her psychiatrist? No, she did not. She turned to her dog, who, I might point out, didn’t give a damn that she was pregnant, that Quinn hadn’t told her his real name, that Vicky had told Erica to shut up, that Erica had implied that Vicky was vulgar, that MaryJo had revealed her knowledge of what was supposed to be a secret, or any of the rest of the human overcomplexity for which there was and always will be one cure: the perfect simplicity of dog love. Willie cared that Rita was right there with him. He cared that he and Rita loved each other. He didn’t give a damn about anything else.
But Uncle Oscar’s presence had an effect, too. I had the feeling that the family felt ashamed to behave badly in his presence. Rita rose from the floor and set about organizing lunch. Probably to avoid having the various antagonists placed in close proximity at a table, Rita announced that we’d eat buffet style. She had Zara clear the pages of wedding vows from the table, and before long, we’d set out plates, silverware, napkins, and ready-to-serve platters of food from the refrigerator. Quinn took charge of drinks. He and Rita said nothing to each other, and when we’d filled our plates with salads, cold seafood, cheeses, and bread, Quinn headed for the dining room, and Rita went out to the patio.
I resolved to stay near her. She looked small and vulnerable. Until she and Quinn moved in together, that is, until no time ago, she’d spent her whole adult life living alone, always with a dog for company, but without another person. She’d longed not just for a partner but for a husband. Now, she was surrounded by people in various states of anger and distress, and I knew her well enough to know that she was rethinking her decision to marry Quinn. Ishmael. Whoever he was. Whereas someone else might’ve made light of the resemblance between her husband-to-be and her father, Rita was doomed to make heavy of it, so to speak. As she put out food and asked for help with little kitchen tasks, thoughts of Oedipus and Freud were, I felt certain, dancing through her head like visions of toxic sugarplums.
Like Caesar’s Gaul, our group was divided into three parts. Quinn, Monty, and Erica settled at the dining room table; MaryJo and Uncle Oscar stayed in the kitchen; and Zara, Rita, Willie, and I went outdoors to the patio. I’m not counting Vicky, who was presumably still taking a walk, or Al, either. I had no idea where he was. I can’t imagine what Quinn, his father, and Rita’s mother talked about. Maybe they kept asking one another to pass the salt.
MaryJo did busywork in the kitchen. I heard her unloading the dishwasher. Out of the corner of my ear, I heard her tell Oscar that she was happy to find that Rita’s mother was a good Christian woman. I wondered whether MaryJo knew that Uncle Oscar was Catholic and, if not, whether she’d be shocked if he told her so. To avoid finding out, I closed the door to the kitchen before I joined Rita and Zara at the wrought-iron table.
Rita, who is usually civilized, speared a shrimp with her fork as aggressively as if she were committing crustacean murder. The shrimp was already dead, of course. It had come from a beautiful seafood platter from which I’d helped myself to poached salmon, mussels in dill-mustard sauce, and giant sea scallops. Eyeing me, Rita broke the shrimp in half and fed a big piece to a grateful Willie. “Never feed the dog at the table,” she said defiantly.
I smiled. “He’s your dog. If you want him to beg for food, that’s your choice.”
“I do have choices.”
Falling back on banality, I said, “Those are yours, too.”
Rita patted her still-flat abdomen. “But I’m choosing for two.”
“Rita, what do you want me to say? How about a platitude? Most of the important choices that all of us make have consequences for other people, but the choices are still ours.”
“The marriage license probably isn’t even legal. I’ll bet that he lied about his name on it.”
Zara looked up from her tablet. “He’s Quinn in the Mass. Medical Society database.”
Unmollified, Rita said, “Then maybe his medical license is invalid, too.”
Glancing at the tablet, I saw that Zara had moved from the Massachusetts Medical Society website to a page about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
I spoke more sharply than I intended. “Zara, stop! You’re scaring yourself. This is not a comparable situation. Rita, tell her to stop reading about the Lindbergh kidnapping.”
Rita snapped at us. “Both of you, stop! The death of a baby is the last thing I want to think about. How could you?”
I apologized. “And I shouldn’t have looked at the screen, Zara. The sites you visit are none of my business. I’m sorry.”
“You sound like MaryJo.” Zara glanced toward the kitchen and spoke softly. “‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’“
“I am so tired of that woman’s hostility,” Rita whispered.
“Mine?” I asked.
“MaryJo’s,” Rita murmured. “Those mistakes of hers? That woman leaks hostility. Those slips? Those are motivated. Including that gun in her purse. I almost prefer Aunt Vicky. At least she doesn’t pretend that her barbs are accidental, and she never says she’s sorry.”
Zara gave a sardonic smile. “You can count on my mother not to apologize.”
Rita yawned. “Maybe instead of marrying Quinn, I’ll divorce my whole family.” Looking down, she added, “And start fresh. But I’ll keep you, Zara. And Uncle Oscar. And maybe my father.” She yawned again and looked up at the sky, which was low and gray. “This humidity is affecting my thought processes. I need a nap. What time are we leaving?”
“I don’t think you should go with us,” I said, “after this—”
“—fiasco,” Rita finished. “Let me see how I feel after my nap. What time?”
“Five fifteen,” I said.
Simultaneously, Zara said, “Five.”
I echoed her. “Five.”
Since I’m incapable of accepting hospitality without saying thank you, I told Rita that the food had been delicious. Zara told her the same thing. Then she and I managed to say goodbye to everyone.
Once we were outside, we both, I think, felt tempted to sprint to my house and might have done so if the humidity had been less than unbearably tropical. My head was spinning, and I felt mildly unwell, as if the toxicity in Rita’s house had actually poisoned me. I could hardly wait to get home.
chapter thirty-one
I opened the kitchen door to find Steve standing at the counter contemplating a tub of OmniThrive. Rowdy and Sammy, who adore OmniThrive, were bouncing around with telltale smirks of recognition on their faces. Telltale smirks? Tattletale smirks.
Steve whacked the tub. “This is half empty.”
“I’m not giving it to India and Lady,” I said. “And everyone swears by it. Look at Rowdy’s coat! This is the best it’s ever been in August. Kimi’s is amazingly good, too, and so is Sammy’s.”
“Just which veterinary schools did everyone attend?”
“Everyone in malamutes. And look at the dogs’ pigment! It’s beautiful.”
“It always was. Holly, we’ve been through this before. You don’t know what’s in this stuff. Or where it came from.”
“It’s made in Ohio.”
“And where did the ingredients come from? You don’t know that. But this is all beside the point. The point is that you know I don’t want you giving this stuff to the dogs, and you said you wouldn’t.”
If you’re a wise dog-person wife, you don’t admit to your husband that you care more about your dogs’ coats than you do about your honesty with him.
“I’m sorry. But your objection to OmniThrive is totally irrational. The dogs really are thriving on it. It’s an excellent source of zinc, and a lot of Northern-breed dogs have low zinc levels.”
“If we were worried about their zinc levels, we’d test for it.” His eyes were sad. “Holly, you went back on your word.”
“I’m sorry. Look, Steve, we’ll talk about it later. I need a shower. Everything at Rita’s was horrible. MaryJo and Monty guessed that Rita is pregnant, and MaryJo let it slip when Rita’s parents were there. Erica’s response was just as mean and prudish and critical as you could imagine, and MaryJo said that when she and Monty got married, she was pregnant with Quinn, except that she called him Ishmael. So Rita found out that Quinn has been hiding his real name, and I think it’s possible that she’ll call off the wedding. There’s more, but that’s some of it. The whole atmosphere was so poisonous that I need to take a shower and wash my hair.”
Before he could respond, I hightailed it upstairs. My need to decontaminate myself was, by the way, genuine. Zara felt the same way, as she’d told me while we’d been walking home. She, however, hadn’t broken her word to anyone, at least so far as I knew, and she didn’t bear the guilt I did about failing to tell Steve about the ransom demand and about my intention of helping Zara to deliver the money. Then there was the business of sneaking out last night and seeing John leaving his ex-wife’s apartment.
I’d told no one about my little recce, and I certainly hadn’t admitted to Zara that I’d switched dogs on her. On that topic, I’d even gone so far as to drag my innocent, honest dogs into the deception by switching collars. What I needed wasn’t so much a shower as a ritual bath.
When I got downstairs, Steve had gone out and had taken India, Lady, and Sammy with him. Rowdy was alone in the kitchen. I’d offered him to Zara on our way home, but she’d said that she was going to take a shower and would be all right by herself.
“You had a narrow escape, my boy,” I told Rowdy. “If you’d gone with Zara, she might’ve tried to lure you into the bathroom, and you know what’s there, don’t you? Yes, water! God forbid.”
