The Cousins

by Rona Jaffe

  He grinned and moved away, and helped her prepare the rest of the lunch. They sat in the dining room and ate, and drank the first bottle of champagne while soft jazz played on the stereo. His playful mood faded.

  “My father committed suicide,” he said quietly. “No one in my family would ever admit it. They called it an accident. Big Earl said he lost his nerve and went out to test himself. Taylor made up some fanciful scenario that he got a phone call in the middle of the night and had to go save somebody. She had to make him a tragic hero. I agree with the cops.”

  It was the first time he had ever mentioned Stan’s suicide to her. She was touched and saddened. “Do you have any idea why he did it?” she asked.

  “No. We were so young. He was away a lot on location. But he was a wonderful father when he was with us. Whatever was bothering him had to be the most important thing in the world to him to make him leave us.”

  She remembered them again as children, and her throat closed with the threat of tears. “It always is,” she said.

  Grady’s eyes filled for an instant and he looked away, and then he sniffed. “My sinuses are still bothering me,” he said. Now he didn’t look sad anymore but only angry. “I had my nose fixed after you saw me last, because I got hurt and my sinus collapsed, but I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “Your hip, your nose . . . These jobs . . .”

  “It didn’t happen on a job. Big Earl got drunk and knocked me down one night when I was seventeen, and she kicked me in the face and broke my nose. It never healed properly.”

  “Your mother?” she said in horror.

  “Yep.”

  “Knocked you down? Kicked you in the face? Oh, my God, I never knew it was that bad.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Oh God, poor Grady. Poor Taylor. She remembered Earlene, big and drunk and frightening, but at seventeen Grady had been as large and strong as she was. He was an athlete. He could do a back flip over a bar. But that was then, and the back flips were now and the fights were faked. Still, he could have protected himself, he could even have hit her in return and made her think twice about abusing him.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?”

  He looked at her and didn’t answer.

  Because she was too fast for him? Maybe. “How could you have let her do that?”

  He just shrugged.

  Because she was his mother, Olivia thought.

  “Do you ever see your mother anymore?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He looked disgusted. “From time to time she insists on visiting. She pretends to be the devoted mother and acts like she can’t remember anything from the past. I won’t let her stay with me. She has to stay with Taylor. I won’t let her in my house.”

  “How does Taylor get along with her?”

  “She can’t stand her either, but she does the best she can.”

  “What’s Earlene doing anyway?”

  “Still living in Santa Fe. She’s got her widow’s pension. Is there any more champagne?”

  “A whole bottle,” Olivia said. “And how about coffee?”

  “Sure. I’ll help you.”

  He cleared the table and started drinking the second bottle of champagne while Olivia made the coffee. She wasn’t even high because he had done most of the consumption. She wondered whether he was drinking so much because stuntmen did, which she had heard; or because he had inherited the tendency from his mother, which was likely; or because he was obviously so unhappy. His depression was palpable, a presence in the room.

  She brought grapes and a plate of biscotti back to the table for dessert, and Grady pulled some photographs out of his wallet. “You still haven’t seen my new house,” he said. “It’s near the one I used to have, which you also didn’t see, but bigger.” He laid the pictures out on the table.

  The house looked like it belonged in an architectural magazine, with high beamed ceilings, fireplaces, a rustic motif and a look of tasteful if slightly fussy luxury, set in a thickly treed area. “It’s beautiful,” Olivia said.

  “There are a few things from Grandma,” he said. “See?”

  “I never understood why you and Taylor wanted to go back to live in Topanga after your horrible childhood,” Olivia said.

  “It’s our home. We like it there.” He dipped his biscotto into his champagne. “You know, it hurt me a lot when Earlene gave my room away.”

  “I guess it was because she needed the money, and you were at boarding school. That’s how she’d think.”

  “Mm. But this house is giving me a lot of trouble. I’m suing the people who sold it to me because they lied and said I could get a variance to build my deck out over the side of the mountain and it turned out I can’t. The deck was half finished and then I found out. I’m not allowed to complete it and I refuse to tear it down so it sits there like an eyesore and every time I look at it I feel sick. I’ve spent a fortune in legal fees already.” To her surprise he was shaking with emotion. Olivia remembered how Aunt Julia used to say that Grady was a perfectionist where his living quarters were concerned.

  “These things take time.”

  “I won’t give up.” He put the photos back into his wallet carefully, as if they were of his loved ones. The sun was going down and the room was getting dark. She wondered where Roger was. “I took a camping trip to Yosemite last month,” Grady said. “It’s very beautiful there.”

  “By yourself?”

  His eyes glittered. “I always find someone to amuse me.” He smiled. “I met this young guy and we were hanging out, and we went to the bar to drink. We ordered drinks and all of a sudden it turns out he’s under twenty-one, which is drinking age in California, and they wouldn’t serve him. It had never occurred to me. So I had to keep ordering the drinks and sneaking them to him. It was pretty funny.”

  What’s so funny about it? Olivia thought. Why are you telling me this story?

  “So we finally had to go back to my tent to drink.”

  Oh sure, back to your tent to drink. Is this a drinking story or a gay story, she wondered, but she was sure it was both. She didn’t want to ask him again if he was gay because he had already denied it, but she also felt he was trying to tell her something else in this afternoon of confessions, so she would know him better. Except for his brief prank with the burning sleeve, there was such a heavy sadness about him, such an air of isolation. She thought back over the things he’d said all afternoon and not one of them was optimistic. They were filled with anger and grief. A wave of tenderness washed over her for him.

  He held up his empty glass. “I remember these glasses,” he said. “Mandelay.”

  “Yes,” Olivia said.

  “The big family parties. Kenny used to hide in the kitchen he was so shy, and we had to drag him out.”

  “I remember,” Olivia said, and smiled.

  “We had fun then,” Grady said. “I loved Mandelay.”

  “You all did.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I was unhappy a great deal of the time, but there are things about it I realize I miss,” Olivia said.

  “Grandma took the dishes when they sold the place and divided everything up,” Grady said. “Now Taylor and I have them. They mean a lot to me. I actually use them.”

  “I’m glad.” Still filled with that tenderness, she wanted to reach out and connect him somehow with herself. “I’ll give you something of my mother’s,” she said. “Do you have any idea what you’d want?”

  “I’d like something from Mandelay.”

  Suddenly unexpectedly proprietary about her dead family, she thought about what she could bear to part with. Everything had a memory attached to it, and not all were bad. Some were unexpectedly poignant. She remembered the happy faces around the long table when there was a birthday to celebrate. She would share some of the glasses.

&
nbsp; “Would you like to have a pair of champagne glasses?” she asked.

  His face lit up. “Don’t you need them?”

  “I have the rest.”

  “Thank you. I’d like to have something of Aunt Lila’s,” Grady said. “She was good to me.”

  She went to the cabinet where she kept the cut crystal glasses and took out two. They sparkled in the kitchen light. A rush of memories poured through her of those beautiful dinners. She imagined Lila, still young, buying the glasses, looking forward to the summers with almost the whole family at Mandelay, maybe even looking forward to her life. There were so few things that had made Lila happy.

  “They’re your early Christmas present,” Olivia said, and wrapped them gently in a kitchen towel and put them into a shopping bag and gave them to him.

  Roger came home then, and dumped his gym bag and packages in the bedroom. It was six o’clock. “Hi, Grady,” he said cheerfully, coming into the dining room. “Are you two still having lunch?”

  “Yes,” Grady said. “It’s become the cocktail hour.”

  “We saved one glass of champagne for you, Roger,” Olivia said. When he leaned down to kiss her cheek she could smell that he’d already had a drink. He took an ordinary champagne flute from the kitchen and poured himself the rest of the champagne. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Good. And yours?”

  “Good.”

  “I didn’t know it was so late,” Grady said, glancing at his watch. “I have to meet a friend.”

  “Things going okay, Grady?” Roger asked.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  Olivia brought Grady his coat and hugged him goodbye. “You should call when you’re in New York,” she said. “I want to see more of you.”

  “I will.” She wondered if he would. “Thanks for lunch.”

  Grady left, carrying the shopping bag with Lila’s two glasses in it. Olivia was so glad she had given them to him. “What are you and I going to do about dinner?” Roger asked.

  “What? Oh. Let’s just go out. I’ve been in all day.”

  She cleared the table and put the place mats into the washing machine. “Give me your gym clothes,” she said. “I’ll have Peggy do this load in the morning.”

  “Oh,” he said. There was the barest pause. “I didn’t work out today. When I got to the gym it was too crowded, so I left.”

  “That’s too bad. So what did you do?”

  “A little shopping.”

  “Did you have lunch with anybody?”

  “With myself.”

  She thought of the wine on his breath. Well, Roger had always been self-sufficient, and it was the holiday season and a Sunday: why shouldn’t he have a decent lunch? She didn’t want to ask too many questions and be like her mother. He seemed in such a good mood that having been alone all afternoon to wander around obviously agreed with him. That was all that mattered.

  “When we have dinner I’ll tell you about my lunch with Grady,” Olivia said. “It was really very disturbing.”

  9

  FROM TIME TO TIME, and especially around the holidays, Olivia thought about Jenny and Melissa, and missed them. They were somehow mysterious to her, living their distant lives, and she wondered what they were doing. She thought how their children were growing older, and how she was not there to see it. Her little cousins were like her nieces and nephews, since she didn’t have any, but their mothers never called her because they were so busy, and out of consideration for this, and because she was so busy herself, she didn’t call them either. She thought of Jenny and Paul and their kids most often, because it was Jenny whose baby picture she had carried in her wallet when she was young, as if Jenny were her child or her baby sister, and it was she who Jenny had come to with her teenage complaints so long ago. So a week before Christmas Olivia made one of her infrequent calls to Jenny in Cambridge.

  “We’re all leaving tomorrow to go skiing,” Jenny said.

  “I’m glad I caught you. How is everything?”

  “Crazy. You know sometimes when I come home from work I sneak upstairs and get into my bathtub and just stay there for half an hour before anybody knows I’m home, and then I can face them.”

  “I don’t wonder, with five kids,” Olivia said. “And that job of yours.” She thought how as a domestic relations lawyer Jenny dealt all day with battered women, deadbeat husbands and damaged children, but never seemed to bring her day home with her and never talked about it. Jenny had a helpful husband and a good baby-sitter, but Olivia had still always been amazed at how she could manage to juggle her job and her family so well. She was successful in her career, and her children were thriving.

  “Do you know how much money ski lift tickets cost for seven people?” Jenny said.

  Actually, Olivia had never thought about it, because she had never had any interest in skiing in her entire life. To her—and to her mother, of course, who was afraid of everything—it had seemed like a sport in which you were sure to be seriously hurt. Her token sports had been tennis and swimming (but she didn’t dive), and now she just went to the gym. “They all ski?”

  “Sure. Kara and Belinda are still beginners, but they’ve all been on the slopes since they could walk. It’s a good thing for the family to do together.”

  “I envy you.”

  “You and Roger could do it. Or you could ice-skate. They have that at those places, too.”

  “Maybe.” But what she meant she envied was the happy family, not the winter sports. She and Roger had always preferred to go to the movies on winter afternoons.

  “I love everything about skiing,” Jenny said. “The ritual of putting on the clothes, the air, coming back for lunch . . .”

  “Being able to eat as much as you want because you’ve burned up so many calories,” Olivia said.

  “That too.”

  “What else is new?”

  “Didi wants singing lessons. But I don’t know. She had piano and violin and guitar, and none of them worked out. I don’t want to throw good money after bad.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t found herself.”

  “She looked up singing teachers in the Yellow Pages,” Jenny said admiringly. “Can you imagine a nine-year-old doing that?”

  “I think you should let her have them.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I hope to see you all sometime,” Olivia said.

  “You will. Don’t forget Sam’s bar mitzah in the spring. Can you believe we’re going to be parents of a teenager?”

  “No,” Olivia said. She still thought of Sam as a little boy.

  “I have to go,” Jenny said. “There’s yelling and crashing around in the other room. I’d better see what they’re up to. Have a nice holiday.”

  “You too. Love to everybody.”

  “Same.”

  While she was still in the mood Olivia called Melissa in Houston.

  “Hiii!” Melissa said. Olivia had forgotten how sweet her voice was, and how glad Melissa always sounded to hear her.

  “Hi. I called to wish you Merry Christmas, or whatever.”

  “I hate Christmas,” Melissa said. “It’s not my holiday. I wish they’d stop playing Christmas carols all the time in public places.”

  “Freedom of speech,” Olivia said. She hadn’t been aware that Melissa had become so religious, or perhaps Melissa always had been but she hadn’t noticed.

  “Why do I have to listen to them?”

  “Are you going anywhere for the holidays?” she asked to change the subject before they got into an argument. She had always liked Christmas carols.

  “Yes, Hawaii. We’ve never been, and it’ll be nice for the kids.”

  “I’ve never been there either,” Olivia said.

  “Have Roger take you. Or you take him.”

  “It’s one of the places
on my list.”

  “Don’t make lists—do it. Life goes by too fast. You see that when you have children. One day they can’t bear to be away from mommy, and the next they want to go away on their own, and you cry and miss them so much, but you know you have to let them go.”

  “Yours are still young.”

  “Abe and Jake have been going to sleep-away camp.”

  “That’s hardly college.”

  “Don’t even say college,” Melissa said with a nervous little laugh.

  It reassured Olivia somehow to hear Jenny and Melissa talk about their busy, ordinary lives. But she wished they could all be together more. Nobody had mentioned the idea of a cousins club since Santa Barbara.

  She thought about Grady. He hadn’t called her again since she had seen him, nor had she called him. She imagined him showing up at Uncle Seymour’s office and asking questions about business and wondered how he had the nerve. Grady had probably been charming, and Uncle Seymour had doubtlessly enjoyed explaining things to him, but on the other hand, if Grady had done anything to upset Uncle Seymour’s sense of absolute control it would have gone badly for him.

  The memory rose up before her of the dinner Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris had given to celebrate her father’s engagement to Grace. Actually, it hadn’t been an engagement party but their polite way of acknowledging Grace’s arrival in their lives. Her father, after all, had been married to Uncle Seymour’s recently dead sister.

  It had been at a very expensive, very cholesterol-laden French restaurant, where none of the patrons looked to be under sixty-five. The only other guests were herself and Roger. Grace was wearing a beautiful designer dress Olivia’s father had bought her to look nice for the family, and she and Olivia’s father were glowing. Olivia was seated next to Uncle Seymour, who was not glowing. He morosely spooned the last of his vichyssoise into his mouth and then he turned to Olivia.

  “I have a bone to pick with you,” he said quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear him. “I’m not going to discuss it here, but I want to talk to you later.”