by Luanne Rice
“You mean we’re in your way?” Clare asked.
Loretta nodded. “Don’t get me wrong, but I have a job to do. My job is to make sure your grandmother gets her nourishment, and she eats better with you out of the room.”
“We’re going,” I said as soon as I caught Clare’s huffy expression.
“This is a real intrusion,” Clare said, when we were out of earshot.
“No kidding, but it’s working. I’m glad to let Loretta take the heat for a while.” Slowly I had begun to reorganize my Swift Observatory files; Loretta’s presence enabled me to work.
Clare’s eyes filled with tears. “It galls me, it really does, to see her treat Pem with such indignity.”
“I know. Me too,” I said. But I was so relieved to have help, I was willing to overlook it.
“I’d better get home,” Clare said. “Casey’s having a tough time at nursery school, and I want to make him some peanut butter cookies.”
“Remember how Honora always made us cookies?” I asked.
That stopped Clare in her tracks; she turned to catch my grin. Honora had never been famous for her cookie making. Clare smiled back, then walked out the door.
My new report was called “Death in the Family.” I wanted to explore all aspects of how death affected the loved ones left behind. Honora’s writing table had become my desk; I traced my fingers across its smooth, lacquered surface, then turned to the articles I had clipped from newspapers. I had pieces on war widows, orphans, parents whose children die young, adults who lose siblings. My only criterion was that the family connection be close and loving. Reading the articles, I had to feel the loss.
I sat there for a long time, my hand gripping the receiver, but I could not dial. How quickly I had phoned Mona Tuchman, Caroline Orne; how cavalier I had been about loss and suffering! It had been something to be studied, dissected like a dead frog. Of course I had felt sympathy for the victims, but it had been sympathy of a mild, analytical sort. Now I read and reread the articles about people who loved people who had died, and I felt too sad to call them.
Impulsively I dialed Mona Tuchman’s number.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi, it’s Georgie Swift,” I said.
“I read about your mother. I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” I said. “I’ve been feeling guilty about not calling you back after your last call.”
“Why should you feel guilty?” she asked sharply.
“I—I don’t know,” I said, taken aback by her tone.
“You certainly have no responsibility to me,” she said, more softly. “I did see those excerpts from our interview in the Times. You know, the article about the Swift Observatory?”
“Yes, I know.”
“I liked the way I came off. You made me sound real, like myself. Not like some of the other interviews. I’d read them and wonder who the bimbo was.”
“We liked each other,” I said. “I don’t have the same connection with other people I talk to.”
“Still hooked on infidelity?” she asked, giving a harsh laugh.
“No,” I said truthfully. “How are you? What’s been happening?”
“Dick and Celeste are going to give it a try,” she said. “That’s the big news. Me, I’m free as long as I stay in counseling. Counseling helps.”
“I’m glad.”
“The kids live with Dick. I’ve lost my kids, but right now I don’t feel that I deserve them.” Her voice sounded bitter; I wondered whether the counseling would force her to feel bitter before allowing her freedom. No wonder the court had spared her from prison—prison would have been redundant.
“I hope you get them back.”
“Yes, well—listen, I’d better go. Thank you for calling.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Neither of us mentioned calling or meeting again, and I hung up thinking of Honora, of how, during our last time alone, she had asked about Mona Tuchman.
For the next hour I paged through news stories, looking for possible topics. I found many possible subjects for “Death in the Family,” but no one I could bring myself to call. Then I looked around the room: at Pem sitting on the sofa and Honora’s empty spot, at Loretta crocheting an afghan, at the teak table where the Mackens and the Swifts and Pem Bennison convened without Honora to dine every night, and I knew that the Swift Observatory was about to turn its gaze homeward.
18
THAT NIGHT I HEARD THE SEAPLANE COMING home, and I stepped outside. The rising moon rode low in the sky; it seemed to light the plane from beneath. Loretta stood at the kitchen window.
“I don’t care what you say,” she said. “It’s not good for the old ones to eat late.”
“She wants to eat with the family,” I said, keeping my eyes on the plane.
“Feed her at five o’clock, then let her have dessert or a bowl of cereal with the family. Ten o’clock at night! This is no time for a eighty-six-year-old woman to be having her dinner.”
I suspected Loretta’s real problem was that she had been eyeing the leg of lamb, resented having to wait so long to be offered a slice. She had been grumbling for days about our eating habits. Nick stepped onto the stone jetty, and I went to meet him.
“What a moon!” he said, giving me a kiss. I recalled the last full moon, the night our problems had surfaced. Honora had still been alive then. The tides wash in and the tides wash out. Were we any happier? We took our time walking back to the house.
“The Mackens aren’t joining us tonight?” Nick asked.
“Casey has a little cold, and Clare thought they should stay home.”
“I’m just as glad. I’m getting a little tired of the togetherness scene.”
“It does get trying,” I said, not wholeheartedly.
“How’s the den mother tonight?” Nick asked. He meant Loretta, and I smiled.
“Put out by our dinner hour.”
“Will anyone suffer unduly if it’s a little later?” Nick asked, leading me onto the porch. We sat on the glider. I started it rocking, then tucked my feet beneath me.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I want to go home,” he said.
“This isn’t home? It’s practically home.”
“Why can’t we move into our own house?”
“Because Pem is used to this place. She’s been through so many changes—Honora dying, Loretta coming to live with us. Just imagine how frightened she must be by the changes in her own head. She’s very confused, and I’m afraid to move her.”
“Then let her stay here with Loretta. You and I will be right next door—we’ll see her every day.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think—”
“It’s not fair to subject her to our routine. I agree with Loretta about that. When Honora was alive, Pem ate at seven o’clock every night. Tonight she’ll eat at ten, last night it was nine-fifteen, tomorrow it could be midnight.”
“She needs the family around.”
“Georgie, you’re being stubborn. You know I’m right.”
“I do not,” I said, but the idea of going home alone with Nick held me like a magnet.
“We’re having a baby,” Nick said, grinning. He put his hand on my stomach. I felt his thumb circle my belly button, newly protruding. “When I least expect to, it will hit me—you’re pregnant with my baby. Does it ever just knock you out when you’ve practically forgotten about it?”
“At this point it’s not something I forget about,” I said, resting my head on Nick’s shoulder. I couldn’t stop smiling.
We walked into the house. Pem brightened when she saw Nick.
“How about a martini?” he asked.
“Make it a good one!” she said.
“The old ones shouldn’t drink,” Loretta said.
“It’s not a real martini,” I assured her.
Nick, Pem, and I sat at the dining table; Loretta preferred to eat alone in the kitchen, a preference for which I was grateful. P
em had not mentioned Honora since the funeral. Gazing across the table at her that night, I wondered about the ease with which she had accepted the transition. Perhaps she was so grateful to be with the family, she feared that any show of strong emotions might jeopardize her position. Or perhaps she didn’t notice.
“Did Jean get all the credit for the tender offer?” I asked Nick.
Nick grinned. “It’s great you’ve taken my advice—instead of worrying she’s after me, you’re worried she’s after my job.”
“It’s a fair question,” I said.
“No, she didn’t get credit. I put the deal together; the client knows about Honora. Everything’s okay, Georgie.”
“I’m sorry anyway.”
“For what?”
“For—I don’t know, the timing of everything. You had to miss the closing.”
“The timing of Honora’s death?” he asked, and I felt my throat close and choke. He held my hand. “There was no good time for that. I still can’t believe it. It hits me once in a while during the day. I’ll be concentrating on work, and then I think of Honora.”
We all lay down our forks, and tears slid down Pem’s big nose.
“We miss her, don’t we, Pem?” I asked.
“I miss her very, very much,” Pem answered.
I thought of the natural course of events, of how, in Pem’s family, people lived to be very old, then died, then their children lived to be very old, then died. Honora had broken that chain. Pem had outlived her own daughter. Perhaps Granddamon’s genes had short-circuited. I sat there feeling sad I would not get to nurse my mother through her old age, feeling too young to nurse my grandmother through her old age. Then I thought of the Swift Observatory, of how I wanted to give everyone in my family the chance to speak.
I rushed from the dining table to Honora’s writing table and back again with my tape recorder.
“I want you to talk about Honora,” I explained to Nick and Pem. “I’m not going to ask any questions. Just talk into the machine and say what’s on your mind.”
“What’s the machine?” Pem asked, suspicious.
“A tape recorder.” Was it possible she had never used one? I told her to sing “Do Re Mi” into the microphone, and then I played it back for her. “That’s your voice,” I said.
“It is not,” Pem said; she refused to believe me. So Nick said a few words, then I sang “Jingle Bells,” and we played it back. She remained unconvinced.
“Will you do me a favor?” I asked. “Even if you don’t believe me, will you talk for a little while?”
“Not into that,” she said, her arms folded across her chest. Loretta came through the door just then. She examined Pem’s plate.
“That’s a naughty plate, Shortcake,” she said, casting a meaningful glance at me. “What did I tell you about their eating habits? No old person will eat a decent meal this late at night.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Tomorrow you can feed her at seven.”
“Five.”
“Five’s fine,” Nick said quickly, grabbing my wrist. “Come on—let’s go onto the porch and I’ll talk into the machine.”
I let him go alone while I stayed inside to help Loretta put Pem to bed. When I play back Nick’s tape today, I hear the waves splashing the rocks in front of Honora’s house. The tide had swelled under the full moon, so the waves were unusually full and soft. The wind rustled the porch screens, and a whip-poor-will sang in a far-off marsh.
Nicholas Gabriel Symonds
“When people get married, the woman usually takes the man’s name. But for a long time after I married Georgie, I felt as though I had become a Swift. This was a family of women, strong women, and they were used to each other and to having their own way. Once I had a dream they were witches, brewing spells in a cauldron to make men do what they wanted them to. In my dream, Honora was the head witch, and she was in life too. But the thing was, the spells worked; I loved Georgie, and I loved the other women in her family, and I wanted more than anything for them to love me.
“My mother was jealous of the Swifts. She was always used to us kids coming home for holidays, not even considering going anyplace else. No one ever went to Florida for spring break, or to a girlfriend’s for Christmas. But after I met Georgie, I never wanted to go home. Georgie thinks she was sneaky, arranging ways for us to spend holidays at Black Hall, but that was exactly what I wanted. There’s a rhythm here that seduces you. Everyone’s afraid of whether it can continue without Honora, and I am too. That’s why we’re all so skittish, not giving each other much peace or distance. I wonder whether there will be a power struggle between Georgie and Clare, because everyone is so used to having one dominant Swift.
“Georgie is the watcher. She’ll be a wonderful mother, but totally different from Honora. We all love Honora so much, no one wants to say she wasn’t the perfect mother. But she made those girls dependent. Don and I too, in a way, but that was our choice. Georgie tells me about when she was small, sitting at the head of the stairs, listening for her parents to start a quarrel. I asked her, ‘You mean, you heard them fighting and you listened?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I was waiting for them to start.’ That is what I mean by ‘dependent.’ In a way, Georgie’s watchfulness nearly came between us. When I left for London, I didn’t know what I’d come home to; for a while I thought I couldn’t continue to live here. I only knew Georgie had to change. I couldn’t take the suspicions and hints, and I have the feeling Honora was behind a lot of it. I could almost hear her whispering in Georgie’s ear, ‘Don’t trust men.’
“Sometimes in the plane Don and I joke, saying someday this place will be called ‘Macken Point’ or ‘Symonds Point,’ but of course it won’t. When I’m fifty-five I’ll walk into Poole’s Hardware, and the guy behind the counter will say, ‘Here comes Honora’s son-in-law.’ On the other hand, they said of Honora, ‘Here comes Damon Bennison’s daughter.’
“Damon must have been a willful character. In his pictures, his profile is even stronger than Pem’s. I’ll never know how he got Pem and Honora off this peninsula for a visit to Ireland every summer. Though I will say this: when one of the Bennison or Swift women falls in love, she means it. That’s why I wonder about Timothy. Everyone thinks Honora got tired of him, outgrew him, but I’ll never believe that. He hurt her so badly, having that affair, that she never forgave him and she never forgave men.
“I wish Honora could know our baby. Georgie was so funny, suggesting names. Bennison and Letitia. Didn’t it ever occur to her that I might want to use a Symonds family name? Of course it did. But she thought she’d present her names so surely that I’d accept them at once. I did. I love her family names. But I know Georgie, and she’ll suffer for it. She’ll feel guilty for conning me. I’m telling you now, Georgie, don’t. The names are fine. I’d suggest Honora, myself, only there can’t ever be another Honora. At least, not on this Point.”
PEM SET THE HOUSE on fire. One morning I left Loretta to fix breakfast and do a little laundry while I took a swim. When I returned, Pem stood alone in the kitchen, beside a flaming toaster, shaking the burning sleeve of her robe.
“I’m afire!” she called when she saw me. “Ooh, ooh, I’m afire!” Flames licked the length of her sleeve, and her wild thrashing spread some to the voile curtains.
I threw her to the floor, rolled her in the rug, then flung her over my shoulder and carried her outside like a sack of grain. “Help, fire!” I yelled. Honora’s smoke detectors clanged from all quarters. When I unrolled Pem, her sleeve no longer burned, but I smelled scorched skin and fabric. “Stay here,” I commanded, and she sat on the grass, still, facing the burning kitchen.
Clare came running with a garden hose. “I called the fire department,” she called. “They’re on their way.”
“Loretta’s inside,” I said. Smoke billowed out the front door.
“No, she’s at my house, doing laundry. She said Honora’s machine isn’t big enough for Pem’s sheets.”
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br /> We heard the sirens far off. Clare directed the drizzle at the kitchen window; with her thumb partly covering the nozzle, she forced a bit of pressure. I stared at Honora’s house, the silvery shingles already stained black with smoke, and tried not to weep. Then I turned to Pem. She was examining her extended arm. It appeared red, mildly blistered, but miraculously not burned.
“We should put some ice on this,” she said, ignoring the fire.
“That’s a good idea,” I said. The red hook-and-ladder truck stopped in the road, unable to fit through Honora’s gate. The men in black rubber coats and fire hats tore up the driveway, dragging monstrous hoses that they pointed at the fire.
“How’d it start?” asked one of the firemen, but years of marriage to lawyers had taught me and Clare to never blurt out information to officials.
“Electrical fire,” I said simply, in case that would affect their methods of controlling it.
“Can you save the house?” Clare pleaded.
“We’ll do our best.”
Neighbors, summoned by the smoke and sirens, ran into the yard with buckets and wet blankets. They spread the blankets across bushes. “Thank heavens there’s no wind,” Mrs. Tobin said. “But if it picks up, you girls will want to spray water on your own houses, to keep them from catching.”
Loretta stood near the edge of the crowd. Clare and I saw her at the same time. We left Mrs. Tobin in charge of Pem, then stalked over to Loretta.
“Where the hell were you?” I asked.
“I only left for five minutes, just to throw the laundry in Mrs. Macken’s machine.” She cowered, and I felt almost sorry for her. “Your grandmother already had her breakfast, and I left her in a nice sunny spot in the living room, watching you swim around that rock.”
