by Anne Tyler
NoNo was talking to Zeb about . . . ballpoint pens, it appeared. “Once a week, almost,” she said, “he tells me he needs ballpoint pens for school. Or maybe once every other week. In any case, way too often. I say, ‘What did you do with those pens I just bought you?’ He says he must have lost them.”
Rebecca leaned forward a few inches to check on Will. He seemed to be dissecting a strip of roasted red pepper. Each tiny dot of char was set carefully to one side.
Min Foo was nursing Abdul, which flabbergasted Patch. “Min Foo! Do that in the other room! You can’t breast-feed at the table!”
“Why not? I’m decently covered. I’m not sitting here undressed.”
“We’ve got company! What must he think?”
Min Foo turned a placid gaze on Will. “I’m sure you’ve seen a woman nursing a baby before,” she told him.
“Well,” he said, “yes. But not at the table.”
Patch said, “See there?”
Min Foo stood up, with the baby a squirming bulge beneath the hem of her tunic. She spun on her heel and strode out of the room.
Will said, “Oh, dear.”
“Go after her,” Biddy told Patch.
“I will not go after her! She’s finally off in the parlor where she should have been all along!”
“I shall go,” Hakim announced, and he rose with dignity and laid aside his napkin. A pause followed his departure. Then voices came from the parlor, and the cranking-up sound of the baby fussing. Hakim started singing in a low, cracked, rumbling voice. Some Arab lullaby, no doubt; something wandery and plaintive that Rebecca couldn’t quite catch.
She looked brightly around the table. “Will has a teenaged daughter; did I mention that?” she asked.
Nine faces turned in her direction.
“The most intriguing person! Seventeen years old.”
“She’s very difficult,” Will said.
“Difficult in what way?” Biddy asked him.
“Well, for one thing, she detests me.”
“Yes, that would be a drawback,” Barry said with a snicker.
But NoNo, dead serious, looked across at Will and said, “You know what, Will? I get that she’s going to be fine.”
“Excuse me?”
“I get that within the next eight months, she’s going to develop a liking for you.”
Will looked helplessly at Rebecca.
“NoNo sometimes . . . sees into the future,” Rebecca told him. “That’s what she means when she says she ‘gets’ something.”
“It’s genetic,” NoNo explained.
“Genetic!” Will and Rebecca echoed together. Rebecca had never heard this before. “Who supplied the genes?” she asked NoNo.
“Dad’s second cousin, Sophie. You knew that.”
“I didn’t even know he had a second cousin!”
“Sophie was the family oracle,” NoNo told Will. She was spearing a slice of ham as she spoke. “Nobody made a move without consulting her. Marriages, job changes, major purchases . . . They would come to her and ask, ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ She always knew the answer.”
Poppy said, “That’s who you take after?”
“Why, yes.”
“Cousin Sophie Davitch?”
“Yes.”
He started laughing. NoNo said, “What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“Okay: first, Cousin Sophie was three times divorced. And this was back in the 1920s, when nobody got divorced.”
“So?” She reached for the mustard.
“So if she was so good at predicting, how come she couldn’t predict that her three husbands would be mistakes?”
“Well, that I couldn’t say,” NoNo said. “All I know is, Grandmother Davitch told me I inherited my abilities from Dad’s second cousin.”
“And furthermore,” Poppy said, “consider the woman’s method. Do you happen to know how Sophie made her predictions?”
“Well, no.”
“You’d come to her and ask, oh, should you take an ocean voyage. Then she’d turn it around and ask you questions. Had you ever traveled before, where had you gone, how had you enjoyed yourself. Let’s say you told her you had so far only been on a train trip, and that was only to Philly, and you hadn’t thought all that much of the place. Cousin Sophie would ponder a while, pull on her lower lip, stare into space; and then she’d say, ‘My advice is, don’t go. The ocean voyage won’t be a success.’”
NoNo waited, fork poised in midair, but Poppy seemed to have finished. “When is dessert?” he asked Biddy.
“In a minute, Poppy.”
“Oh, good.” He dabbed his mustache with his napkin.
“But what was her method?” NoNo asked him.
“Hmm?”
“Cousin Sophie’s method. What was it?”
“Why, everything that you told her had happened in the past, she just turned it around on you. Claimed it would happen again. If you could really call that a method.”
“It would do,” Will said. He was smiling; he seemed genuinely amused.
But NoNo said, “I’m sure there must be more to it than that,” and she popped a bite of ham into her mouth.
Out in the parlor, Hakim was still singing. Rebecca suddenly recognized the tune. It was “O Danny Boy,” of all things. “O Abdul boy,” he rumbled, “the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”
“At any rate,” NoNo told Will, “I get that your daughter’s about to start liking you. Take my word for it. And I didn’t ask a thing about your past, now, did I.”
“No,” he said, still smiling, “you didn’t. Well, thank you very much. I’m encouraged.”
The others were smiling too, all around the table. Rebecca had one of those moments when her family seemed extraordinarily attractive—the girls with their animated expressions and black silk hair, the men so handsome and intelligent-looking, Poppy lending an air of distinction with his stately mustache. She let her eyes rest on each face in turn, feeling privileged and nourished, while Hakim sang softly in the parlor. “’Tis I’ll be here! in sunshine or in shadow,” he sang. “O Abdul boy, my Abdul boy, I love you so.”
* * *
It was a sign of how well the evening had gone that everybody stayed on after dinner. Min Foo got over her snit and agreed to accompany people on the piano; Troy and Biddy did their Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald routine; and Barry turned out to be a wonderful tenor, although perhaps “The Lord’s Prayer” was not the piece Rebecca would have chosen. It was nearly midnight before they all left.
Then she led Will to the kitchen—“Just to keep me company while I see to what can’t wait till morning,” she said—because she figured that would jog Poppy into going to bed. She was hoping she and Will could have a little privacy.
But no, Poppy came along with them, claiming he needed warm milk in order to sleep, and while he was waiting for it to heat he took it into his head that Will should be shown the family album. This came about because of a chance remark that Will made to Rebecca. “I had a little trouble,” Will said, “sorting out who was who. Why is that one stepdaughter Chinese? And that person Troy: is he Biddy’s husband? He seemed, er, not the husband type.”
“Boy, have you got it wrong!” Poppy crowed, pivoting from the stove on his cane. “Min Foo is not a stepdaughter; she’s Beck’s daughter. And she isn’t Chinese, either. I guess you were fooled by her name. And Troy for sure is not Biddy’s husband; he’s queer as a two-dollar bill.”
“Three,” Rebecca said.
“Huh?”
“Queer as a—”
Oh, Lord, she was turning into her mother. “Poppy,” she said, “aren’t you exhausted?”
“No, not in the least,” he told her. “I believe I’ll go get your friend the family album.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she said. “Basically, he’s seen the album.”
She meant the refrigerator door, with its multiple layers of photo
s. But Will couldn’t have known that; so when Poppy asked him, “You have?” Will said, “Why, no, I don’t think so.”
“I’ll be right back,” Poppy said, and he left the room.
“Now you’re in for it,” Rebecca told Will. She switched off the gas beneath the milk. “Did you enjoy the evening? Did you like my family?”
“Yes, they were very interesting,” Will said.
“You didn’t see Min Foo at her best, I’m sorry to say. She’s not usually so short-tempered. I’m worried she’s beginning her same old pattern: have a baby, ditch the husband.”
“Of course, they’re all of them quite . . . outspoken,” Will said.
“It’s kind of like those nature programs on TV, where the female does away with the male after he donates his sperm.”
“Pardon?”
Poppy said, “Here we are!”
He wasn’t even in sight yet, but they could hear his cane pegging rapidly down the passageway. “Every light in both parlors was turned high as it could go,” he told Rebecca as he entered. “You seem to think you have to siphon off excess electricity in case it might explode or something.”
The album was clamped under his free arm—an ancient cardboard scrapbook bound with a tasseled string. He set it on the table and lowered himself, stiff-legged, into the nearest chair. “Sit down, sit down,” he told Will, patting the chair beside him. “We should start with my late wife, Joyce. She passed away in 1969. I miss her to this day. Now, where are we. Let’s see. Trouble is, there’s no order here. Everything’s jumbled up.”
Rebecca poured Poppy’s milk into a mug and placed it next to the album, using the excuse to set a hand on Will’s shoulder as she leaned past him. He looked up at her and smiled.
“What I’m hoping to find is the picture of Joyce when we met,” Poppy said, turning a page. “She wore the most fetching hat. It resembled two bird wings.”
“I bet this is the one you call Patch,” Will said. He was looking at a snapshot of a child with a bunch of balloons. “I recognize her freckles.”
“Oh, then we’re way too recent,” Poppy told him. “I met Joycie long before Patch came along.”
“And this is the one you call NoNo, I think.”
Rebecca wished Will wouldn’t refer to the girls as “ones,” as if they were specimens of something. She settled in the chair across from him. “Yes,” she said, peering at the upside-down picture, “that’s NoNo at a birthday party. And here is Biddy. Doesn’t she look cross? She used to hate to dress up, is why. She said dress-up dresses itched.”
“So many parties,” Will said.
“Isn’t that the truth,” Poppy agreed. He reached for his mug and took a loud sip.
“Everywhere I look,” Will said, “—the refrigerator, the album—everybody’s celebrating. We just get through drinking a toast and then you sit me down and show me pictures of other toasts, years of toasts. Even the children are drinking toasts! Do you really think that’s wise?”
“We give them only a sip,” Rebecca told him.
Poppy said, “Why am I not finding Joycie? That picture of her when we met. I hope it isn’t lost.”
“And after all,” Rebecca told Will, “these are photographs. You don’t usually photograph people reading books or playing chess, although we do those things too.”
Poppy looked up from the album. “Chess?” he asked. “We don’t play chess.”
“Well, Dixon does, sometimes.”
“I see your point,” Will said. “It’s just . . . maybe you have an unusual number of parties, don’t you think? Why, any time you and I try to get together, we have to work around all your social events.”
“Social? Those are professional!”
“Yes, but . . . it seems you’re the social type, you know? Hobnobbing with your mechanic, for instance; sharing a stranger’s marital secrets.”
“Aldo’s not a stranger!”
“Ah. Well. Truthfully, I must say I’m not sure I find the man as laudable as you do. To me, his attitude toward his wife shows a lack of responsibility.”
“Responsibility for what?” Rebecca asked.
“He had a duty, in my opinion, to set some standards. Both for his children’s sake and his own. And he neglected that duty.”
“Oh, piffle,” Rebecca said.
She may have been more forceful than she intended, because Will drew back slightly. Rebecca drew back too, and pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Here we go!” Poppy said. “Joycie when we met.” He slid the album closer to Will.
“Ah, yes. Very attractive,” Will said, hunching over it.
“She was a cutie, all right.”
Will’s right hand rested on the top of the page, his thumb rubbing the corner with a repetitive, whiskery sound. Rebecca remembered him, all at once, seated at the library table: his papers laid out just so, his books in stacks, his colored pencils in rows.
With a little stretch of the imagination, she could have glanced toward the dark kitchen window and seen Joe Davitch’s laughing face.
Poppy tugged at the album till Will released it, and then he studied Joyce’s picture. “She had the brownest eyes,” he said. “You think the Davitches’ eyes are brown; you should have seen Joyce’s. Hers were more like black.”
He picked up his mug and drank off the last of his milk. “Well,” he said. “I’m beat. I’d better haul myself off to bed.”
Rebecca slid her chair back and stood up. She said, “I should say good night too, I guess.”
“Oh,” Will said. “All right.”
He stumbled to his feet. He stood waiting while she went around to Poppy’s chair and helped him up, handed him his cane, placed an arm round his waist; and then he followed them down the kitchen passageway.
“Feet ache, ankles ache, knees ache . . .” Poppy intoned. In the foyer, he turned to Will. “Good seeing you,” he said. “Don’t forget my birthday party.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Will told him.
Poppy started up the stairs. Rebecca crossed to the front door and opened it. “When is his party?” Will asked her.
“Well,” she said, “it’s December.”
“What date in December?”
She faced forward, gazing out. In the light from the streetlamps, everything had a soft, gray, blurry look, like a memory. She felt she had been through all this before; she knew she had been through it: that dampening of her spirit; that tamped-down, boxed-in feeling; that sense she had in Will’s presence that she was a little too loud and too brightly colored. And now she recollected that he was the one who had brought things to a halt that long-ago night on the sofa. She had been rushing ahead, ready to fling herself recklessly over the edge, and then he had pulled away and suggested they show more restraint.
She said, “I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other in December.”
Even the distant traffic sounds seemed to come to a stop.
“Or before then, either,” she said.
He took a ragged breath.
“Why?” he asked her.
And when she didn’t answer, he said, “Was it something I did?”
“No, Will, you didn’t do anything.”
“Was it your family? Did they not like me?”
She felt a stab of pity. She said, “Oh, I’m sure they liked you!”
“Or Zeb, then?”
“Zeb?”
“He’s obviously my competition.”
The pity faded. “The fact of the matter is,” she said, “this just won’t work, Will. I’m sorry.”
Then she stepped forward and pressed her cheek against his. He stood woodenly, not responding. “Goodbye,” she told him.
He said, “Well. Yes. All right. Goodbye, Rebecca.”
She watched his ungainly, angular figure set off down the front walk, and she waited until he’d climbed into his car before she shut the door.
The house had a muffled sound that seemed lonelier than silence. Coffee cups sat a
bandoned in the parlors, and the dining room looked half stripped and disheveled, and Aunt Joyce smiled wistfully from the album on the kitchen table.
It turned out that Rebecca was the one who was still in mourning.
Ten
A woman named Mrs. Mink called to organize a baby shower. “My friend Paulina Garrett recommended you,” she said. “I told her I wanted someplace elegant. Someplace like a mansion.”
Rebecca said, “Well, the Open Arms is just a row house.”
“It doesn’t have to be really a mansion, but it should have that atmosphere. That upper-class, elegant atmosphere. And then I’ll want it decorated in baby blue and white, with a cloudlike effect in the dining room.”
“Cloudlike?”
“Yes, ethereal; know what I mean?”
“We can decorate however you like,” Rebecca said, “but our dining room is papered in a maroon-and-gold stripe and the furniture is some dark kind of wood; walnut, I believe. So I’m not sure—”
“Oh, you can do it! I know you can! Paulina Garrett told me their party last spring was wonderful. Everything so joyous, she said; you made it such an occasion that nobody wanted to leave.”
Rebecca remembered the Garrett party all too well. A torrential thunderstorm had sprung up and somehow, by some process that she still didn’t quite understand, caused the front-parlor chandelier to start raining on the guests. Nice to hear that the Garretts didn’t hold it against her.
“The reason I want blue and white,” Mrs. Mink was saying, “is we know this will be a boy. They’ve had that special test. And we know he’s not going to live very long.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s got some kind of disease they can diagnose in the womb.”
“Oh, that’s terrible!” Rebecca said.
“So I want this party to be perfect, don’t you see? Every last detail. I want his life to be perfect. Because he gets to experience it for such a little while.”
“Well, of course,” Rebecca said.
But while she was discussing the fine points—the folding paper parasol, the white-clouded blue cotton tablecloth she’d seen advertised at Lust for Linens—she was reflecting that really, this baby’s story was just a shortened version of everybody’s story. Get born; die. Nothing more to it than that.
