An egg timer dinged and I heard a tiny continental-sounding exclamation from Madame Langlois.
Dad went on. “She never liked a turkey at Thanksgiving. You remember? Too cliché. We’d do beef tender instead. She wasn’t much of a cook but it always turned out nice.”
He was talking like Mom had been gone for decades, like he was worried I’d forgotten her. His voice was way too loud.
There was some banging and rustling in the kitchen. A minute later Madame Langlois swung into the room bearing the turkey platter, which she placed on a trivet beside my father. She lifted the lid with a flourish. It was a beautiful bird.
“You will carve for us, Jeff, no?”
My father grunted his assent and Madame Langlois shuttled in a few more platters, then took her seat across from me. She looked a little wilted. We watched Dad hack at the turkey.
“So,” she said. “Tell me, Frank. You have been to France?”
I bobbed my head. “After college. I did the backpack thing.”
“How long were you in my country?”
“Let’s see—Paris for about a week,” I said, “then the south, Nice and Antibes. Maybe two weeks altogether.”
Madame Langlois served herself some casserole, started the dish on its round. “You did not visit the Loire Valley?”
“Afraid not.”
I took some, passed the casserole to my father and waited for Madame Langlois to finish with the salad. She made a little sucking sound with her tongue. “Then you did not see France. The Loire Valley is the very— how you say?—the very soul of the country. My father and his father before him and on and on like so, they had a vineyard near Lyon.”
Right then, my father slapped the serving spoon into the casserole dish, hard enough to splatter his tie and the lenses of his glasses.
“That’s it,” he said. “I can’t listen to this.” He glared at us, didn’t seem to notice the dollop of cream sauce obscuring his left eye. “This woman,” he said, bolting to his feet and aiming a finger like a TV lawyer. “She’s from North goddamn Carolina. Her father may have run a vineyard but what he made was third-rate domestic cabernet.” Madame Langlois’s lips were pressed into a thin white line. My father addressed her directly. “You’ve been in this country almost fifty years.” His voice leapt up in volume at the end of the sentence. “It’s absurd. You’re more American than Frank.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. He turned, too quickly, tipping his chair back on its hind legs, and stormed off from the table. The chair wobbled a moment, righted itself. Because it was too awkward and confusing to meet each other’s eyes, Madame Langlois and I stared at the space my father vacated like he’d vanished in a puff of smoke.
While I helped Madame Langlois pack all that food into Dad’s refrigerator—she insisted, said she’d made it for us, said it was too much for her—she told me two stories.
The first confirmed a fair amount of my father’s accusation while casting the details in a different light. It turned out that the Langlois family vineyard went belly-up when she was in her teens and her father was forced to take a job overseeing production at a fledgling winery in the States, the pet project of a poet who’d married an heiress and had the advantage of her money. Her father wouldn’t let his children (Madame Langlois was the youngest of three) speak English in the house, which explained, she said, the fact that she still had an accent after all this time. She’d come to Mobile to take a job teaching languages at the Jesuit college here in town.
I was beginning to wonder how my father had arrived at his knowledge of her past, when she launched, unbidden, into the second story. After months of cajoling, he’d accepted an invitation to dinner at her house. This was just before Halloween. Madame Langlois spared me no detail. The wine, the music, the candlelight. The food: smoked salmon soufflé, followed by fruit terrine. They talked, she about her father, he, after a while, about my brother. Madame Langlois was just setting a cup of coffee at his place when he took her face in both his hands and kissed her on the mouth.
“It was a perfect little kiss,” she said.
Except that it caused her to forget herself so completely that she spilled the coffee in my father’s lap. Except that once he recovered from the coffee he was embarrassed by the kiss and neither of them knew how to find their way back to intimacy. Dad had been vague and distant with her since.
When the food was put away, I walked her to her car and she rolled the window down.
“This is my fault,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“But how could you have known?”
I couldn’t help listening for traces of North Carolina in her voice. I put on an apologetic face.
“I ruined your Thanksgiving.”
She shrugged.
“It is not my holiday,” she said.
Inside, the phone was ringing and I snatched it up in the kitchen half a beat after my father answered upstairs.
I heard him say, “Jeff Posey,” like he was at the office.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Son,” my father said, his voice thick with pleasure. Son, like Ted was an only child.
I was just about to hang up when Ted said, “Y’all eat yet?”
I hesitated. I wanted to know how Dad would answer, but he dodged the question like a pro.
“I bet Marcy really laid it on.”
“I’m still stuffed,” Ted said.
I knew I shouldn’t be eavesdropping but I worried that if I hung up, they’d hear it, they’d find me out. Plus, I was curious. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I’d been acting as a go-between, getting accounts from each of them about what the other said. I hadn’t seen or heard them together. To listen now, you would have thought nothing was wrong. My ear felt hot under the phone. I was interested, that’s true. The two of them were maybe the most interesting things in my life.
Dad said, “The girls OK?”
“You bet,” Ted said. “You’ll see.”
“Maybe you’ll come at Christmas.”
Ted was quiet.
Then he said, “Marcy’s calling, Dad. I gotta run.”
People always described my mother as a “no- nonsense” woman and it was true. She never babied me or Ted or treated her clients at Planned Parenthood with kid gloves. She never hid the truth to spare somebody’s feelings. She disliked public displays of affection. She disdained extravagance in almost any form. It wasn’t that she was cold. I always knew she loved me and so, I’m sure, did Ted, and the girls down at the center seemed to appreciate that she wasn’t full of shit. During Dad’s run for the House, Mom told a reporter for the Press Register that she was almost certain her husband would lose. The piece was supposed to be a profile of the candidates’ wives, something for the Living section, interior design photos and tender memories about the candidates. When the reporter asked why Mom didn’t like Dad’s chances, she said, “Look, my husband has actually been doing his job all these years instead of cultivating influence with the business big shots and religious phonies, and it’s been my experience that people like him hardly ever win elections anymore.” Dad loved it, worked it into his campaign, though Ted told me later that he’d called in a favor with the editor (he was not altogether without influence, no matter what Mom said) to have the paper strike the next line of her quote, which read something like, “This is not to mention that most people around here think of me as a kind of back alley abortionist.”
What I’m saying is I’m sure she would have wanted her husband to find comfort wherever he could when she was gone, even with someone as frivolous as Madame Langlois, but Dad didn’t see it like that.
I was in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich when he finally came downstairs. He sat at the breakfast table and without asking, I prepared the sandwich the way he liked—salt and pepper, a little mayo; nothing fancy—and fixed him a scotch. I knew I shouldn’t have but I did. He tucked in without a word and I set about making a second sandwich for myself.
“E
verything all right?”
“Your brother called,” he said.
“Yeah?”
He nodded, chewed.
“Tell me something,” he said after a while. “Be honest now. What did you think about that miniature Graceland? You thought it was silly.” He did a bashful grin. “Tell the truth.”
“OK, sure. It was silly. Sure.”
He shook his head. I carried my sandwich to the table, took my seat. Both of us had gotten more comfortable. I was in yesterday’s jeans and a fleece pullover and Dad had put a robe on over his trousers and his undershirt.
“I don’t want to stop loving your mother,” he said.
That made me flinch. Dad took a bite, dropped his eyes. I tried to imagine what sort of feeling must have swept him up when he reached for Madame Langlois’s face, touched his lips to hers, how his heart must have raced, how all the loneliness in the world must have been welling up inside him. I didn’t know how much he might have overheard between me and Madame Langlois and I had no idea how to respond, but he wasn’t after my opinion anyway.
“I’ll fix it with Louise,” he said.
“Who?”
“Madame Langlois.”
“Oh,” I said.
Somewhere, not too far off, a dog was barking. We listened for a second, then it stopped and a silence settled over us, neither awkward nor profound.
My father was the first to speak.
“Don’t tell you brother about all this.”
“Right,” I said. “No problem.”
When we finished eating, Dad freshened his drink and we adjourned to the den and watched three hours of a Star Trek marathon on TV. Halfway through the second episode, about a shape-shifting alien trying to commandeer the Enterprise by impersonating Captain Kirk, I looked over and saw that he’d been crying. Halfway through the third, I heard him snoring. Something was jabbing me in the leg and I rooted around in the pocket of my jeans and there was that pet ID tag from yesterday. It gave me an idea. I waited until the commercial, then crept out the front door and around the block to Madame Langlois’s, slipped the tag into her mailbox. By way of apology. She’d know who left it there.
Elsewhere, my brother was in bed beside his lovely wife, his girls dreaming sweet dreams down the hall. Elsewhere, my mother knew all the secrets of the universe or nothing. Elsewhere, even at that late hour, Elvis was crooning to a tiny simulacrum of his life.
I found Dad right where I left him, an afghan in his lap, his glasses reflecting blue light from the TV.
This time, he let me help him up to bed.
Part 2: Christmas
Regarding holidays …
When I was a kid, I lived for Halloween and even very young I was heavily involved and invested in my costumes, but from ages six to eight, prime trick-or-treating years, I was stricken with a succession of illnesses serious enough that my parents forbade me from going out. First, strep throat, then mono, then an infection that caused both of my eyes to swell shut and baffled my pediatrician. It sprang up just forty-eight hours before the big night and was so mystifying (all Dr. Baldacci knew to do was prescribe antibiotics and send me to the hospital for tests, which turned up nothing) that I began to wonder if I hadn’t done something to offend the cosmos. We never really went to church and my ideas about religion were a bit amorphous, but I’d picked up the basics. I lay in my bed, blind and scared, praying, if not for wellness then at least for an explanation. Why, God? Why me? Surely there was some other little boy who didn’t care so much about Halloween.
The infection cleared up after a day or two without event or repercussions and what I remember best about that time is that for each of those three Halloweens my brother carried a Polaroid camera on his trick-or-treating route to record particularly interesting costumes and a pad and pen to keep track of who was giving out what sort of treats. He’d come into our room when he got home and sit on the bed and split his candy with me and tell me everything. It’s possible that my parents put him up to it, though I have no evidence to prove it, and looking back, I’m sure a part of him took pleasure in rubbing my nose in what I’d missed, though if either of those things are true, he certainly never gave himself away. At the time, I thought he was very brave to sit with me like that, risking his health, and very generous to share his loot.
I mention this only because almost anything can seem meaningful in retrospect, deepened by the soft light and long shadows of the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean our lives are affected in the bare-bulb glare of the present. It seems to me sometimes that life is little more than a long string of missed opportunities and connections and we never know what a thing means until it’s too late. Or that the meaning we attach is false, colored by faulty memory and wishful thinking. Or that we attach meaning to empty moments and miss the big picture altogether. What I’m trying to work up to here is that nothing much changed in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Dad went on moping around and Ted went on taking the hard line and I went on with my life more or less exactly as before. I don’t know if it would have made a difference, but Ted and I didn’t even talk about Thanksgiving, not the details anyway, mostly, I think, because Dad had sworn me to secrecy about Madame Langlois, which made the rest of our time together feel confidential as well. Because of the school holidays, Shakespeare Express was on hiatus, so I put in a week at The Playhouse as Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. I shopped for presents. I went to parties. I slept alone. And I decided, without much fanfare, to spend Christmas with my brother. I still hadn’t made it over to see his house and I’d given him plenty of excuses but none of them held water with Ted, even if they were genuine. I told myself that he was right, as usual, about everything, that I really was doing more harm than good with Dad, but the truth is Thanksgiving had worn me out and it was tempting to imagine waking up on Christmas morning in a house brimming with good cheer.
I arrived just before dark on Christmas Eve and everybody came out to meet me in the yard. Marcy put the twins through their paces: Remember Uncle Frank? Give your uncle Frank a hug. They were blue-eyed like their mother and fair-haired like their mother but somehow they looked like Ted. As if the weather had been special ordered by my brother, five inches of snow had sifted down the week before (still a record for that part of Alabama at that time of the year), then the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there (also a record), so the world was icicle-y and white. We talked about that, how real winter always caught Alabama unprepared, then Ted and Marcy gave me the tour.
The house itself was modern looking, lots of picture windows, multiple rooflines, porches up and down, in the neighborhood of 5,000 square feet. Like a lot of places on Mobile Bay, it had a grand hallway running down the middle so you could see straight through from the front door to the silvery water out the back. When I was a kid, Point Clear was still quaint cottages and ramshackle bungalows along the boardwalk, summer places, but in the last twenty years it had become a kind of posh suburb of Mobile. Ted’s neighbors were neurosurgeons and VPs and real estate investment guys, commuters all. Somewhere nearby lived a writer of modest fame. I knew Ted made plenty of money but he was only four years my senior and I was dazzled by the fact that he could pay for such a place.
My brother had started out doing defense work for a firm called Monk, Lewis and Fewer. He’d made his reputation on the strength of his performance in a lawsuit involving a train wreck in Bayou La Batre. Ted’s firm represented the insurance company responsible for Black Belt Rail’s liability policy. Fourteen people were killed, not so many for an accident like that, though more than enough to elicit a substantial punitive award, and the train was carrying a stew of toxic chemicals so that the bayou itself was thoroughly poisoned (scientists have pointed to that crash as the beginning of a significant decline in the local firefly population), and it looked to everyone but Ted like the best possible option was a quick settlement with minimal publicity. Because he is a good and thorough lawyer, however, because he doesn’t put much
stock in vagaries of popular opinion, Ted researched until he found a loophole in Black Belt’s policy, something to do with maintenance and safety features. The loophole was tiny and well-concealed but big and real enough for the insurance company to sneak through without a scratch. They defaulted on the policy and the ensuing verdict bankrupted Black Belt Rail, putting over seven hundred jobs at risk and tying up in a Chapter 11 mess any damages Black Belt might have been able to pay, thus preventing nine widows, two widowers and three sets of grieving parents from collecting a dime. The insurance company was so impressed, in fact, that they dismissed Ted’s firm and offered him a position as chief in-house counsel for the American Southeast. He bought the house around the first of November, three months after starting his new job, and here I was at last.
We were in the guest room now, Ted leaning in the doorway with my duffel in his hand, Marcy fluffing the pillows on what would be my bed. A row of windows looked out on the bay and I could see the wharf, Ted’s boat out there on the lift, sleek and white, broad of beam, dangling six feet above the water like a trick of levitation.
“You’re a lucky man,” I said.
Ted said, “Welcome, little brother,” and he slipped his free arm around Marcy’s waist. They held the pose a moment, as if waiting for me to take their picture, before moving apart.
For dinner Marcy served shrimp bisque, followed by honeyed ham with English peas, and afterward she took the girls upstairs to get ready for bed while Ted and I retired to the living room with glasses of spiked eggnog. The ceilings were high enough that I half-expected our voices to come echoing back to us and there was a fire in the fireplace and a Christmas tree in the corner, all decked out and glittering, an abundance of pretty packages underneath. Though it was plenty warm inside, you could sort of sense the cold pressing in against the windows, making everything feel cozy and battened down. Ted was going on about our plans for the morning, presents and church and dinner and so on, but I mostly tuned him out. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back. I was sitting in a wingback chair, close enough to the fire that the heat was making me drowsy. I was trying not to think about Dad at the moment or about a decision I’d made that morning or about the fact that before too long I’d have to fill my brother in—trying, in short, and if only for a little while, to relax. Then I realized that my brother had stopped talking, and I peeked my left eye open. He was looking at me like he expected a reply.
The Holiday Season Page 3
