Family Matters

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Yes.” It was a shyness that kept her from being chattier with the Brodskys.

  “You’ve come to a parting of the ways,” Mrs. Brodsky helped out. Her husband nudged her again, harder. This was too much, and not in the script. He had a horror of seeming to pry.

  Betsy didn’t mind. It was a relief to tell people, and the Brodskys were always nice to her. (Mr. Brodsky, who ought to know, praised the strawberries she grew out back.) Also, she had drunk two gin and tonics and two glasses of wine at her grandfather’s.

  “It just didn’t work out,” she elaborated.

  “Well, we’re sorry,” Mrs. Brodsky said. “You two seemed to have such fun.” She was referring to the bed squeaking all the time.

  “It was a mutual decision,” Betsy said, adding, inspired, “Our careers conflicted.” The Brodsky were relieved. Of course. Conflicting careers. They nodded through the screen. “I may as well tell you,” Betsy went on, “I’ll be having a baby in January or February.”

  They were at a loss, but not for long. Mrs. Brodsky unlatched the screen door and came out to her. She had raised three children, but she had plenty of motherliness left over and no grandchildren yet. She put her arm around Betsy. “You’re a brave girl,” she said.

  “We’ll stick by you,” her husband said awkwardly, taking his turn.

  “Do all we can,” said his wife.

  “Anything you need.”

  “Just come and ask.”

  Betsy nodded, grateful.

  “How do you feel, then?” Mrs. Brodsky lilted. She stepped back to look at her. “You don’t show yet, not a bit.”

  “I feel fine. I get sick in the mornings.”

  “Didn’t I, too, Nick? Do you remember my morning sickness? It was something ferocious.”

  He shook his head from side to side, in the way that signified assent.

  “It’ll pass,” she said soothingly. “You’ve got the build for babies, like me.” She patted her thick middle approvingly. “Hippy!”

  Mr. Brodsky was frowning. He had to ask. “And the little baby, Betsy? You’re planning to—to—” He made a gesture that encompassed all possibilities, but Betsy understood it.

  “To bring it up myself? Yes. I am.” She smiled in the porch light. “I’m looking forward to it.” She moved toward her own entrance. “I hope you won’t mind there being a child here. I’d like to stay on, if I could.”

  “Mind? Oh, my God, no!” They followed her to her doorway, protesting.

  She thanked them, suddenly overcome with weariness; it was the relief, she thought—a hurdle crossed. “Forgive me, I’ve got to go to bed.”

  Mrs. Brodsky nodded with understanding and got in one last pat, on the arm. “You get tired.”

  “Yes,” said Betsy feelingly.

  “Go on up to bed, then. Anything you need, now.”

  “Don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Please start picking the berries as soon as they’re ripe,” she urged.

  “Looks like a fine crop this year, Betsy.” They were both behind the screen; she heard the lock click into place. “Get a good sleep for yourself.”

  In the huge, barren, forsaken, cavernous bed, Betsy went immediately to sleep, and dreamed of Emily. She was very old, sinking fast. Betsy stood at her bedside and said, “I’m your granddaughter.” Emily took one look at her and died.

  She wrote to the Middlesex County Courthouse in Connecticut, asking for a copy of a birth certificate for a child (possibly called Violet) born December 20, 1922, to Emily Loftus, in Haddam. It was a month before she got a reply. During that time she haunted the local courthouse, looking for death certificates for Harold and Cora and Emily Loftus, for property or mortgage deeds, for wills, for tax records. Nothing. The family must have moved out of the area. The 1923 city directory didn’t list them. Betsy asked Violet, “Where would your parents have kept the records of your adoption?”

  “You don’t think they’d be around, do you?” Violet asked, with a touch of asperity that Betsy recognized was directed not at her but at the secretive Helen and Frank.

  “They’d be in Grandpa’s safe deposit box, I suppose.”

  Violet shrugged. The effect of the new medication had worn off, and she had begun to call Betsy regularly in the night, whispering piteously, but in the daytime the question of Emily didn’t interest her much. She was simply confident, waiting. She left it to Betsy, she had her own concerns.

  Betsy searched the rolltop desk in the attic again. Nothing. In a pile of papers, she came across a yellow newspaper clipping, her father’s obituary. “William Ruscoe, of 737 Garden Street, died suddenly yesterday …” She was startled to see her name: “He is survived by his wife, Violetta M. Robinson Ruscoe, and a daughter, Elizabeth Jane Ruscoe.” She was surprised, too, to discover her mother’s name listed as Violetta. She’d thought that was just a pet name.

  She asked her grandfather about it, out of her mother’s hearing; such a question would have made Violet nervous.

  “Why did you name Mom Violetta?”

  They were in the kitchen, and he was opening a bottle of wine for one of the Saturday dinners. He believed in the old-fashioned corkscrew method. It made him red in the face.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s not a name I would have expected Grandma to pick.”

  “The opera. La Traviata. She loved it.”

  “Grandma?”

  He turned away from her to get wineglasses out of the cupboard. “Why not?”

  Betsy made a snorting noise, deliberately offensive. The only music she had ever known her grandmother to love was “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” which she sang every Sunday at the end of Mass in a loud, creaky soprano that made Betsy want to crawl under the pew.

  “I wouldn’t think La Traviata was exactly Grandma’s thing.”

  He looked straight at her, loyalty to Helen’s memory written all over his face. “Your grandmother was charming and sweet as a young woman. She had a hard life and it soured her. You never knew her at her best.”

  “What hard life?” Betsy asked. She had been hearing for years about Helen’s hard life without ever believing in it. “It seemed to me she had a pretty easy time of it, and if it was hard she made it that way.”

  Her grandfather snapped at her, “Don’t talk about things you have no knowledge of.”

  She snapped back, “Well, she sure made it hard for me. And for Mom, too.”

  All the fight went out of him. “And for me, too, Betsy. But I deserved it all. There were times I made her life a hell. I’m sorry she took it out on you and Violet. You can blame me for that, not her.”

  She was already beside him, with an arm across his shoulders, apologizing. He stood with his head bowed. “We loved her, anyway, Grandpa,” she said. “In spite of everything. I know she meant well. It’s just that we always loved you more.”

  It amazed her sometimes that she could say such tender things, with such ease, to her grandfather; she always had. I will love my baby, she thought suddenly; it was a thing she’d been wondering about, the continuity of the circle of love. “You were right, by the way,” she decided it was time to say. “I am pregnant.”

  “Oh, Betsy.” He groaned it out, and groaned again when he saw her shining face. He aged before her eyes, he sank and weakened until he looked like Judd’s photographs of him. “Where do you get that?” he asked her, with a bitterness in his voice that went with his new wasted, defeated face. “That bed-of-roses look? I sometimes wonder, Betsy, when you’re going to grow up.”

  Judd had said the same thing. Betsy caught her grandfather’s arm. “This is it, Grandpa,” she said urgently. “This is where I grow up. I think having this baby may be my first adult act.”

  She thought he would smile, but he straightened up and shook her hand off. “You’re going to have it?”

  “The baby? Of course! I never even considered an abortion.” His question stunned her. She knew he supported federal abortion funding, and would h
ave fought to the death for some poor woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy. But this would be Frank Robinson’s great-grandchild; there were conditions under which he would consider abortion unthinkable. “I wouldn’t have expected you to suggest it,” she said. She saw the problem reflected in his face and decided to rub it in. “This may be your only great-grandchild, you know. I’m almost thirty-five, Grandpa.”

  It seemed suitable to get back at him, mildly. The indignation—worse, the shocked recoil—she felt when anyone mentioned abortion astonished her. Playing mother to a doll was all very well, and so were vague longings for a baby. Becoming a solitary parent was something else again, and her calm acceptance of that state as a natural and inevitable one was the strangest thing of all. She had not expected, at her advanced age, to learn anything new about herself.

  Her grandfather regarded her sternly, masking his pain and bewilderment with a look of plain disapproval. But she had seen it, and would respect it. He was generations away from her, after all; he would have to adjust. It would take a while.

  “People do this sort of thing all the time now,” she said more gently. “It’s no big deal, really.”

  “No big deal—and you claim to be an adult!” He turned away from her in scorn and embarrassment. “Movie stars do it—not English professors. How could such a thing happen? At your age?”

  “I thought he’d marry me,” she said simply.

  “God damn the man!”

  Betsy caught his arm again; having visions of shotguns and vendettas, her grandfather dragging Judd to some altar and flinging them together. “No—it’s all right. Honestly it is. It’s not his fault. I deceived him.”

  “He didn’t deserve you.”

  She looked at him gratefully. She was still his Betsy, then. But she must put him right. “It’s not that simple, Grandpa. He just wasn’t ready. It didn’t work out the way I thought it would.”

  “He’s a scoundrel!”

  “He’s not!”

  He held up his hand like a traffic cop: enough of Judd. There was a pause before he spoke again, and Betsy steeled herself. This would be his official, patriarchal last word on the subject. He would not refer to it, willingly, again. But he would expect her to abide by what he said. The act of stiffening herself against him made her miserable. She was used to bending, to melting, to merging with her grandfather’s superior mind and its superior wisdom. Even Judd, a potential discord, had not challenged its hold on her. Her grandfather, she realized, had sensed Judd’s impermanence—as she should have sensed it herself. But a baby—an illegitimate baby, she amended, thinking of Emily—that could not be harmonized, not yet, anyway. (Oh, wait until he held the little thing, wait until it called him Grandpa!) She waited, ready to defend the baby in her womb with her last breath.

  “Betsy,” her grandfather said finally. “I think you are foolhardy and headstrong.” There was another pause, during which she contemplated, half-amused, the old-fashioned words: Judd was a scoundrel, she was foolhardy and headstrong. He went on more angrily, sensing her detachment. “I dispprove of this whole thing. I think you’re crazy to go through with it. It could ruin your career. It could ruin you. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not easy to bring up a child, even with two parents. You’re not considering the reality of it, the day-to-day reality—and the humiliation.”

  “I don’t feel any humiliation. I’ve told the Brodskys, and they rallied round beautifully, Grandpa.”

  He brushed it aside. “And then the baby, growing up without a father—under that cloud.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! What cloud?” She was furious with him—she could not recall ever having been so furious. “It’s all in your mind—your mind, your generation. None of my own friends will think twice about it. There are plenty of kids growing up with only one parent—and who’s to say I won’t get married someday?”

  “Who would have you, after this?”

  They stood glaring at each other, and then she started for the kitchen door. He called out, “I’m sorry, Betsy. Come back here. Let me finish.”

  She came back and sat down at the table, fiddling with the saltshaker. Eternally, a saltshaker would remind her of Judd; she put it down. Outside, in the yard, she could hear Marion’s loud voice, talking grocery prices, and the softer, vague tones of Violet.

  “All right,” Frank said, keeping his voice low. He sat down across from her. “All right. Certainly you may marry someday, and certainly the child may not suffer from its situation if you don’t. I know things are different. But don’t take those chances, Betsy. You’re right—it’s my great-grandchild and I want what’s best for it. But I want what’s best for you most of all. Have the baby. I can see you’re determined, and I think you’re right to be. I admire you for it. But then give it up, Betsy.” He covered her hand with his; it felt old and dry and cold. “Let it be adopted. The world is full of nice people who want babies. I know—I’ve worked with plenty of them over the years. Give the baby up for adoption, Betsy.”

  She waited for more, but he was through. He’s not going to tell me, Betsy thought. Even in a moment like this, he’s not going to tell me my mother is adopted. She looked sadly at him, overcome for an instant with pity and affection, and turned her hand up to grip his.

  “No, Grandpa,” she said. “I want the baby. I’ll be a good mother. I’ll be just as good alone as any two nice people would be together. You wait and see.”

  “You’ll smother it!”

  She suppressed her anger. “I know that’s a danger,” she said. “I have thought about it. But I’ll try hard.”

  Her hand left his and stole to her belly, resting there below her belt. His gaze followed it. “I’ll love it,” she said.

  He turned away. “You know my feelings.”

  She sat bemused. The important thing was under her hand, under her skin, swimming through its dark world toward life. She cradled it. Was this what Emily had felt? And yet she had given it up, surrendered it to two nice people. Helen! Imagine giving this baby up to Helen! Betsy stood suddenly and got the wine bottle and two glasses.

  “Come on, Grandpa. Toast me.” She clanked her glass against his and he drank grimly, as if he needed it.

  Before they left the kitchen, she said, “I still don’t understand why Grandma would want ‘Violetta.’ It’s a fallen woman’s name, not a saint’s.”

  Tell me, she pleaded silently. Tell me about Emily. It’s wrong not to tell me.

  But he only looked exasperated. “Your grandmother insisted on Mary for a middle name. Violetta Mary. All right?”

  “It’s really a weird name,” she said, but what was really weird was the way he put it: “Helen insisted.” … I’ll bet Emily named her, Betsy thought triumphantly. We’ll find her in spite of you.

  “Drop it, Betsy. Okay?”

  “Okay, Gramps.” She grinned at him and put her arm through his. “Cheer up. You’ll get used to it. I want you to be happy, for my sake.”

  “You always were a doozie,” he said, shaking his head from side to side like an old man.

  Her intuitions, while interesting, weren’t useful. Emily might well have given Violet her outlandish name, but Betsy’s inquiry progressed no further. She waited impatiently for information from the Middlesex County Courthouse. When it came, it was a mimeographed letter that said: “Thank you for your inquiry. We regret we cannot process it without your remitting the sum of ($2.50).” There was a form enclosed for her to fill out; she had to give her relationship to Violet Loftus and her reasons for wanting the birth certificate. “Daughter,” she wrote. “Family records.”

  She mailed it with a check and continued to wait, cursing her own inefficiency. I should go to Connecticut, she thought. But she hated to leave Violet. Her mother’s condition seemed to have stabilized again, but she was decidedly weaker, and her placidity was simple loss of energy. There were certain things she refused to do, like be helped down the stairs for dinner. “No more,” she said irrit
ably, clinging to her bedcovers. A table was set up in her room, and Frank ate his meals up there with her while she had a tray in bed. The Saturday dinners were held there, too, with everyone crowded around the table and Violet on the bed as if on a throne.

  Betsy saw her almost every day. “I feel so weak and empty,” she confided once, but she got no worse, and the pain wasn’t bad yet, though sometimes she said her legs hurt so, she felt she’d just taken a long hike. Once a week, Frank still drove her to the hospital for treatment; her kind of cancer was supposed to respond well to therapy, but the doctors were discouraged: it didn’t. Violet opposed the hospital visits.

  “They tire me so,” she complained. “I’d feel better without them.”

  “They might help, Violet,” Frank said to her.

  “They won’t,” said Violet calmly. She seemed truly to know. “They just make me sicker. It’s not dying I mind, Dad. It’s being disturbed.”

  Nor would she go into the hospital. “I’ll die at home, thanks,” she said, and when for a while there was talk of radiation therapy, surgery, she wouldn’t even discuss it. But that was given up, finally, as futile by the doctors.

  Betsy agreed with her mother. If her disease was incurable, why did they persist in trying to cure it, or in trying to prolong what was to become an agony? To tame the wild beast inside her? But, for the moment, at least, the visits to the hospital continued. Sometimes Betsy took her, and once while Violet was with the doctor she took the elevator down to the maternity floor.

  “Can we help you?” asked a nurse at the desk.

  “I’m expecting a baby,” Betsy said. “I just wanted to look around.”

  The nurse was interested and helpful; they were both members of the Pregnancy Club, though in different capacities. “You can arrange to have a tour of the whole thing—labor and delivery rooms, and the nursery. Through your doctor.”

  Her doctor hadn’t suggested it. Betsy was still trying to persuade him that she wasn’t a special case, that she was looking forward to her baby as much as any respectably married woman. From down the hall came a baby’s cry, and she caught herself exchanging smiles with the nurse.