Finally, at nine o’clock Janice called and she demanded to speak to Bobby. When no one picked up the phone she hollered, “I know you’re there, Celia! I want to talk to my husband.”
Sunny finally picked up the phone. “Bobby can’t talk, Janice.” She listened a long time, holding the squawking phone at arm’s length.
“No one has died, but you should come on tomorrow’s ferry, Janice, and you should bring Todd with you. He’ll have to 187
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drive Bobby’s car back.” Refusing to say anything more, Sunny remained calm, while Janice protested, raged, threatened, demanded to know what was wrong with Bobby. “No one has died. I can’t talk any longer, Janice, and I can’t listen.” Sunny put the phone down and turned to me, observing, “Fortunate that Janice has had lots of experience with chronic pain.”
I called Russell’s apartment, left messages, but he never called back. I might have made up the cot for myself in the kitchen, but I was too broken and exhausted, so I just went to bed that night beside Bobby, lay down beside him. Heavily sedated, Bobby slept noisily, his breath straggling up from his lungs, fluttered across his lips. No one had died, but bits and pieces, phrases, accusations from Bethie’s letter exploded in my head like shrapnel, ricocheting painfully. Beside Bobby’s familiar bulk, I wept against his back, great racking sobs. And it came to pass that, though I had put the New Disciples behind me, I wept and winced, writhed under the onslaught of all the old sinners’ questions: What did I do, Lord? What did I do that Thou should so smite me? What sin? What error? What omission? Could Bobby Jerome, this man beside me, a man I had loved for years, could he have committed these crimes against a child? Did I ignore, neglect and fail to protect my children? Was I too stoned, dippy and way-ward to notice that my children were hurting? Did I abandon them to the mercies of the men I slept with? Did I countenance or merely ignore the pain Bethie had felt as a child and exhumed as an adult?
Childhood is a gift, after all, like a basket of memory and that basket a gift of the parent. I prided myself on the childhood I’d given all my kids. I’d always thought my kids so fortunate to live here, to revel in the beauty of the place, the freedoms I could give them, the time to dream, to daydream, foggy mornings waiting for the school bus, rainy afternoons curled up with books or dolls, art projects spread all across the kitchen floor, girls practicing violin for the middle school orchestra, those free and wild summer days at Sophia’s beach where the girls found dragons and slew 188
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them bravely. Oh yes, an island childhood. An island idyll. Was it an imagined past? Some remembered Eden?
Bethie had blighted that past. There was now no summer day without tarnish. No winter evening without rot at its core. Bethie had destroyed the past, the collective past anyway, the thing that families have to assent to, more or less, agree upon in some general way. If they can’t remember the same things, they’re not a family.
With these pages, we had been cast out, expelled from our past. We had been driven from that warm collective place that we could all agree was the past. Bethie destroyed all that with what she claimed was the truth. The monstrous truth. Or monstrous lie. All Edens are remembered. Bethie’s charges barred my return like angry angels wielding flaming swords.
Drifting in and out of sleep, unable to distinguish one from the other, I moved from sleep to waking, from dream to thought, all echoing the voices of my children, piping, thin and plaintive. And when I did finally wake, I saw that dawn etched alongside the shade, framing the window, the light unconvincing and fluorescent. At least it was overcast, and not another glorious June day.
Beside me, Bobby groaned, woke, rolled on his back and turned to look at me, though he said nothing. He did not seem surprised to be here, in this bed, this room, or beside me. I took his arm in mine and he took my hand, but there were no words possible. We gazed wide-eyed at the ceiling where years before he had painted flowers, all of which had faded now. We lay there, side by side, like a dead knight and his dead lady on marble slabs in a medieval church, discredited relics of our own past.
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Eau de Soleil
With Todd in tow, Janice Jerome arrived on the morning’s first ferry, the one that docks at Dog Bay about seven. Her Honda rumbled along island roads toward Useless Point, scaring the bejesus out of early morning cyclists and rousing the very cows from their bovine stupor. She tore into Useless Point. The Honda spun gravel getting up the hill. Seeing Bobby’s car parked there beside Celia’s truck, Janice scrambled out of her car, slammed the door and stalked toward the house.
Just then Sunny emerged, a protesting Brio in hand. Sunny was pale, eyes ringed with sleeplessness and her color drained. Brio, by contrast, was in a fine fury, amounting to a tantrum, refusing to go over to Henry’s House. “I’m sorry,” Sunny said firmly, “but you have to go again today. Dorothy will look after you.” Brio stomped and pouted as Sunny said a weak hello to Janice.
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“What’s happened to my husband?” Janice wore a sort of track suit and running shoes. The ferry ride had disarrayed her short and highly lacquered hair.
“No one has died, Janice.”
“Where is Bobby?”
Sunny nodded toward the house. “You might want to go more gently, you might—”
But Janice walked in without knocking and when Sunny returned from having installed Brio with Dorothy, she found that Janice had not heeded her advice. In fact, she could hear Janice well before she got to Celia’s and she surmised, correctly, that Janice had read, or was in the throes of reading Bethie’s letter.
“You bitch! You slut! You whore!” Janice flew at Celia, the twenty pages clutched in her clenched fist. Todd sat helplessly by, his great mustache trembling. “You’ve done it, haven’t you? You always wanted to destroy Bobby and now you and your slut whore daughter have done it! You destroy everyone, Celia. Love unfettered?
The unfettered life?” She virtually spat out the last phrases and Celia sank under the weight of their implied silliness. “You broke Bobby’s heart. He loved you and he was a father to your fatherless brat of a girl who has turned on him now, betrayed him, betrayed every affection he ever showed to your brats. Bobby is innocent. You are the guilty one, Celia. Bobby loved and trusted you, but you jumped into bed with everyone, you screwed anyone who took your fancy. You threw Bobby out when he wasn’t of any more use to you. You needed a builder for your stinking great hulk on that hill, so you went to bed with Andrew Hayes. Did he take it out in trade? Or did you pay him? Did he pay you? You’re a whore. An unfettered whore living the unfettered life.”
“Did you receive a letter like this, Janice?” Sunny held up her own envelope, but Janice ignored her, returned to her reading.
“Yes,” Todd replied, rocking his whole body. “No one opened it though. It was addressed to Bobby.” Todd’s long gaunt face mirrored the confusion all around him and his bony hands writhed round one another as Janice read and wept, cursed and 191
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sobbed her way through Bethie’s twenty pages. There was no marine radio with its comforting litany of weather, no washer and dryer, no dishwasher, and in this unaccustomed silence only Janice’s periodic shrieks sounded.
When she’d finished, Janice flung the whole twenty pages on the floor and wiped her feet on the document. “That’s what I think of you and of your daughter, Celia. She’s right about you, of course.
You were a rotten mother, stoned and promiscuous. She’s lying through her teeth about Bobby.”
Retrieving the letter, Todd read it with difficulty.
“How will he survive this?” Janice wailed.
Perspiration beaded along Todd’s forehead. Nothing in his well-ordered life prepared him for the terrible pages in his hand.
Moreover Todd was shocked, unnerved to see his mother so undone, screeching and violent. Never in his life had he see
n this virago.
Even when his father had left them, Janice had maintained control of her chronic pain. Now, delinquent clumps of her hair had unstuck themselves and they trembled, as Janice trembled, took deep hyperventilating breaths. She quit crying. She snatched Bobby’s prescriptions from Sunny’s hand, and ordered Sunny not to tell her how to take care of Bobby Jerome, that she was doing the job that Celia wasn’t woman enough to do. She rained more abuse on Celia, going back as far as the death of Henry Westervelt, and when Todd tried to calm Janice—not to protect Celia, but because he feared for his mother’s heart—she shook him off. Sass and Squatch cowered and finally scratched at the door to be let out of the line of fire, but Celia was not so fortunate and absorbed the full barrage, as Janice accused her of wreaking destruction on everyone she’d come near, including her own daughters.
“That’s why Victoria didn’t tell you she’d got married,” Janice jabbed, “she knew you destroy everything you come near and she didn’t want you anywhere near her marriage. Victoria told Bobby she got married. She told Sunny. She even told your precious Bethie, but not you. And it wasn’t because she knows you don’t approve of marriage. You’d like to think so. You’d
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like to think people look at you like a great iconoclast. You’d like to think you have the admiration of the world. Just because Joie de Vivre!
fawned all over you, you think you can do whatever you like without risk or consequence—” Janice spied the offending letter on the table, swooped it up, and shook it in Celia’s face. “These are the consequences, and by God, Bobby will not pay them! Bobby is never coming here again, and Sunny, if you want to see your father, you’ll have to come to him. Once I get him off this wretched island, he will never come back.”
“Can Sunny come with us?” asked Todd. “Sunny and Brio. Maybe they should come with us.”
Still bristling, Janice ordered Sunny to pack up her things, Brio’s things—they didn’t have much; everyone knew they’d come to Isadora with little beyond the clothes on their backs—and return with her. “Bobby is your father and your place is with him, and with us.
You can’t stay here with her, with this homewrecker. You can’t live here.”
In her slow, deliberate fashion, as though calculating the outlay of energy to the possibility of achievement, Sunny picked up a sock of Brio’s that had been left on the kitchen floor in the morning flurry.
She looked over at the stricken Celia, sunken and undone, made ugly by the accusations on the page and those in the air. Sunny said quietly, “My place is here with my daughter.”
“And Celia?” snapped Janice. “What has Celia Henry ever done for you that you would betray your own father to stay with her?”
Sunny’s great blue eyes widened. “I could never betray my father.
Isn’t there enough destruction here, Janice? Isn’t there enough anger out of Bethie? Shouldn’t the rest of us be trying to help each other?
Shouldn’t we try to protect Bobby?”
“How can we protect him from this?” Janice eyed Bethie’s letter.
“He’s always needed protecting,” Sunny appealed to her stepmothers. “I knew this when I was younger than Brio. From the time Linda left, I took care of him. I have always taken care of him. Someone has to. He needs a woman who’ll look after him.
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You both know that. He’s just one of those men. But he doesn’t need me right now. He needs you, Janice. He needs your love, not your anger. You love him, we all love him—”
“Celia doesn’t.”
“I do,” Celia protested, weeping. “I’d do anything to spare him this anguish.”
“We all have to help him survive this, Janice. But it wouldn’t serve Bobby for me to go with you and Todd. I need to be here with Celia, with Brio. I have to think of Brio too.” Sunny hurt all over, back, shoulders, arms, like she suffered from whiplash. “This is a grotesque lie Bethie’s written, and I intend to prove my father’s innocence.”
“Where do you think you are, Sunny?” Janice cackled. “Traipsing in front of some TV camera with your stupid lines? This is not a lovely little sitcom where it will all be resolved and tied up in twenty minutes, when saying something funny makes it OK. This is the world, girl! Get real! This is not something that can be disproved.
Don’t you understand? Accusations like these, rumor, nastiness like this will go all around, and it will ruin him. Bobby is a piano teacher!
He works with kids all the time. How do you intend to prove his innocence? Put an ad in the Seattle Times: Anyone accusing Bobby Jerome of molesting children, please come forward and prove your case, or he stands vindicated? You astonish me, Sunny! You wear this pseudo-LA sophistication like a costume! You come here, show up here out of the blue, no explanation, with your illegitimate child, you admit you had affairs with married men, but then, of course, you’re in Celia’s great tradition of illegitimate children, and sleeping around! What else can we expect? Look at your own mother. She deserted you and Bobby altogether.”
“I think we can leave the dead out of this.” Sunny went to the sink and stayed there, staring out the window, looking past the dusty jars with all their bits of seaglass and sand dollars, their remembered summers. “I don’t see how the dead have any bearing on this at all.”
Janice sagged visibly. “I’m angry at anyone, at everyone who 194
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has ever hurt Bobby.” She began to weep into her hands and Todd took her in his arms and let her cry. But she was not a woman to weep her way through any thicket, be it bureaucratic or the tangled skeins of a broken heart. “I love him so much and I know what this will do to him.” Janice freed herself from Todd’s embrace and mopped her eyes. Resignedly she asked Celia if Bobby was upstairs.
“In your bed, I take it.”
By the time Janice, with Todd’s help, finally got Bobby Jerome downstairs and slowly to her car, Saturday morning had waned into Saturday afternoon. Todd drove Bobby’s car back to Dog Bay and Janice followed him, a fact which could not have passed unnoticed in Useless Point. Just as it would not have passed unnoticed that Dr.
Aagard came last night, or that Dorothy Robbins was directing the operations of Henry’s House. Too, every-one employed at Henry’s House noted that for several days little Brio was the staff’s responsibility. The fact that Bethie Henry had sent the same letter, postage due, to Celia, Sunny, Nona and Angie slowly rolled round Useless and beyond. The slow perk of island gossip began.
Afternoon shadows laced the kitchen floor, Janice long gone, but still Sunny and Celia stared at one another, distraught, debilitated, unable to pick up the phone, unable to stir. They heard Nona’s car and her dogs barking, Sass and Squatch in a frenzy. Nona entered without knocking, said a grim hello, and flung her envelope on the table, pulled out a chair and sat down with Sunny and Celia.
Nona fumbled for her cigarettes, then remembered she couldn’t smoke inside. “You come off very badly here, Celia,” she said at last.
“Abusive, irresponsible, manipulative and uncaring. Have I missed anything? But did you really read this letter? I have. Over and over.
And I tell you abusive is the quilting verb here. It covers everything.
If you spanked her and sent her to her room, it’s abuse, and it’s abuse if Bobby forced her to make him jack off.”
“Don’t say it—” Sunny implored, “please—”
“Of course it’s vulgar! Awful! And we know exactly what she 195
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means, but she doesn’t actually say it, does she? Does she ever call it vulgar? Horrible? Criminal? Wretched? Disgusting?
No—everything in here is inappropriate. This cotton candy vocabulary has allowed Bethie to say the truly unthinkable without the weight of its being unbearable. Do you understand?” They looked at her blankly. “The iniquitous is submerged here into the impolite. You and B
obby are accused here of the worst crimes any parents can commit against a child. The letter is completely incoherent. But look at this.” Nona held it up by the staples. “Neatly stapled. All the pages numbered. These are copies of an original! Someone had to take these to Kinko’s! Rouse yourselves,” Nona shouted. “What does that mean? What does that tell you?”
“That Wade has his hand in this does not make it hurt any less,”
Celia replied quietly.
“It means you will never get through to Bethie without knocking down Wade. Have you called her yet?”
“No. We hadn’t the heart to call. Or the stomach.”
“Has Victoria read this?”
“She and Eric are in Portland.”
“I’m a writer,” Nona began more gently, “and I know how words work and I think you ought to call Bethie. I think we need to hear the voices as well as the words. It’s not so important that you talk, Celia, as it is that you listen.”
Wade answered on the first ring. His voice utterly without rancor or resentment, he told Celia that Elizabeth had decided not to speak to her, to any of her family, until she was able to move beyond this terrible, painful point, the recovery and acknowledgment, the expression and inventory of abuse, repressed childhood traumas which are the first steps of healing and redefinition. Elizabeth was doing her work through the ReDiscovery Program, yes. In a tone so low, so smooth, so emollient, Wade described Elizabeth’s therapy, adding,
“If you could see her suffering, your hearts would break.”
“Our hearts are already broken, Wade, but we’re not calling to inflict more pain on Bethie. We’re calling because we love her. Her sister and I are here, and we love her and we want to 196
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talk to her.” Celia glanced at Sunny who held one extension, Nona on the other.
“Is Victoria with you?”
“Victoria is in Portland.”
“Oh. I thought you said her sister.”
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