By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  “They won’t even figure out until tonight that I’m gone. They’ll give it until morning before they do anything.”

  “I’m glad I’m not your wife,” Mumma said, then gave him fair warning. “If they don’t call here, I’m calling Lally.”

  Brundy shrugged. It was no longer his problem.

  • • •

  As things turned out, Mumma didn’t have to telephone the Cape house. Instead, the mountain came to Mohammad, as she used to say, after Grandmother telephoned Louisburg Square and Mumma couldn’t give her the name of the hotel where Brundy was staying. The day after Brundy’s boat had left New York, which was two days after his meeting with Mr. Talziewicz, Mumma and Meg returned from a walk around the Public Gardens to find Grandmother in residence and the whole house in an uproar, rooms being aired, furniture uncovered and dusted, suitcases unpacked, and Lally settled in the library, behind a closed door, weeping.

  Grandmother emerged from her bedroom to corral Mumma, who was on her way upstairs. “Brundy was here. He was here and you didn’t telephone. We would have stopped him. We could have, if you had telephoned.”

  This being entirely true, Mumma could see no reason to comment on it. “Moreover, my husband tells me that Spencer is purchasing some tenement building, in a slum.”

  “I’m buying it,” Mumma said. “Not a slum, it’s in North Cambridge. Off Massachusetts Avenue.”

  “You aren’t going to live there, are you?” Grandmother asked.

  “I haven’t decided,” Mumma said.

  “Well,” Grandmother said. “Give me the baby. You need to explain your actions—by which I mean your inaction, of course—to Lally. The child is upset. Very upset. You should have telephoned.”

  “Brundy should have telephoned,” Mumma maintained.

  “Everybody knows that Poor Brundy hasn’t been himself since his dreadful experiences,” Grandmother announced. “We can’t blame him. I’m sure you can explain it to her better than I can. You’re both young, you understand her better because of that. What could I say to her? He’s my son,” Grandmother reminded Mumma. “It’s up to you, Rida.”

  (“So what did you tell Lally?” we asked. “I explained about her financial settlement, I explained about divorces, about what desertion is, I tried to get her to move to Texas.”

  “Texas! Why Texas?”

  “Or New Mexico, or Montana. Lally would have remarried in a minute out West, she’d have been irresistible. But she wouldn’t leave Boston. But you girls already know that sad story, I don’t plan to go into it again. And she never wanted for anything. Your uncle Brundy saw to that. And yes, I told her about him. She didn’t believe me.”)

  It took only three days for Lally to pack up her married life and move back to her parents’ big house on Brattle Street, the house she lived in for the rest of her life, waiting for them to die, then waiting to die herself. None of them ever forgave the Howlands, and by association the Spencers, for her husband’s desertion. (“Oh, they could all go to the same parties and symphonies, but they never spoke to anyone in your father’s family, not even me. It wasn’t a feud. Bostonians don’t have feuds, but they are good haters.”) During the days of Lally’s departure, however, Mumma was most often out of the Louisburg Square house, and Meg with her, so she missed the excitement, if there was any. Mumma had plumbers to talk to, electricians, roofers, housepainters. She was lighting fires under her contractors, to keep the work moving along.

  Grandmother returned alone to the Cape and then Anne returned to Louisburg Square. “They don’t like my friends,” Anne told Mumma and Pops, having joined them at the dinner table. “I told Mother she should send me to Paris to take care of Poor Brundy, since after all I am a nurse, but you know them. They worry about foreigners. They don’t trust me.”

  Mumma held her tongue.

  “I’m going to really try to get a job in the city,” Anne told them, “but there are so many nurses around, because of the war work, and the ones who served in combat areas get preference. I never got to a combat area,” she told Mumma. “I was like you. Not the entertainment part, but I was always kept back in the safe zones. Personally, I suspect that my parents used connections. No wonder Phyllis married so young, just to get out from under. Juliet will do the same, just watch. Whatever she says now about marriage. You can’t believe what girls say. When I was her age all I wanted was to get married. Imagine!” She laughed. “I’m going out later,” she told them with her brightest smile.

  “Not with that married man, I hope,” Mumma said.

  There was a long silence before Anne said, “No, Rida. That’s over. That was just—He was just lonely, it wasn’t serious. I can warn you, don’t ever leave Spencer alone for summers like that, that’s my advice. I’d never be serious about a married man myself, but not all girls have my standards. Whatever Mother may think of me. Our parents are hard to have for parents, aren’t they, Spencer?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to them,” Pops advised his sister.

  “They won’t let me not pay attention to them,” Anne said. “I’m not the family intellectual absent-minded professor, I can’t get away with things. But I’m not letting them pick my friends. They can’t tell me who to like.”

  Less than an hour after that declaration of independence, Pops answered the front door of the tall brick house to set eyes for the first time on Giancarlo Ruscelli. Giancarlo was obviously foreign, and just as obviously of Mediterranean extraction, with his olive skin and wavy dark hair, more hair than any true Bostonian would even think of possessing, and his velvety brown eyes. Also, he had an accent, vaguely Italian but also oddly British, and the cautious speech habits of a foreigner—a foreigner, moreover, who has learned his English not in America. Also, it was clear that Giancarlo worked in the open air, and with his hands, but Anne whisked him away after the briefest of introductions, deaf to Pops’ tentative inquiries. She deflected Mumma, too. “I would have thought you’d believe in taking people for who they are. Not who their parents are. Not what work they do or where they live. I would have thought you of all people wouldn’t be like my parents. Giancarlo’s fun, which is more than I can say about a lot of other people.”

  (“I don’t know what bee she was having in her bonnet. I was talking business with Giancarlo and he liked me.”)

  Giancarlo was an attractive man, with a muscular body and a fine head, strong cheekbones and a Roman nose, full lips made for kissing. Giancarlo had Mumma for an ally, at least to the extent (“I would never lie. You girls know that about me”) of not telling Grandmother about this foreigner who drove from Bourne to Boston three or four nights a week to see their daughter.

  Grandmother didn’t ask, so Mumma didn’t have to tell. Grandmother couldn’t imagine that an Italian, working as a gardener, might have met her daughter in England while he was a POW assigned to the grounds of a British hospital, might have then come to Cape Cod because she had made that a familiar part of America for him, might have followed up the flirtation begun during the war. Although born into an entirely bourgeois family of Paduan landowners and merchants, Giancarlo didn’t want to return to his native country, where Mussolini had been so admired and the Fascists had permitted so many injustices. He thought he had a good chance to win Anne’s hand. He had been an officer, after all, and he was a university graduate. Granted, he’d been the enemy, but he wasn’t a German. Women liked him, he liked women, life would be good to him, and he would enjoy all the good things life offered.

  The next Howlands to arrive at Louisburg Square were Grandfather and Uncle Ethan. A week after Brundy sailed, they came for a couple of days to meet with Mr. Talziewicz and put whatever spikes they could in Brundy’s fiscal wheels. Anne retreated to the Cape. “Mother’s a pain, but Father’s a ferret,” she said, climbing into her car. “I feel like I’m deserting you,” she told Mumma.

  “You are,” Mumma answered. “But I’m not worried. I know how to handle lounge lizards.”

  “My fath
er is not a lounge lizard,” Anne protested. “He’s just a drunk, and Ethan’s a womanizer, that’s all.”

  “Lounge lizards,” Mumma repeated. “I know.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Rida. Sometimes I wonder about you. I mean,” said Anne, who enjoyed a battle, “what do you think people are saying about you?”

  “I don’t,” Mumma said. “Think about it. I know what people are like. But I can tell you this, nobody would ever call me a lounge lizard. And if I had a father like yours, I wouldn’t run away from him. I’d stand and fight.”

  “I’m glad I’m not you,” Anne said.

  Mumma got the last word. “Me too.”

  Mumma almost always got the last word in any argument. You knew that no argument with Mumma was finished until that last word was uttered. You could always recognize it when it came to say The End, with absolute finality. The only exceptions to this pattern were Mumma’s arguments with Grandmother, who sometimes won her point. It was nothing Grandmother could count on, persuading Mumma to alter an opinion. Grandfather, on the other hand, never did, not even when he had Ethan beside him to back him up, not even when he was apoplectic with confidence that his version of things was the correct one.

  At the Louisburg Square dinner table, after Anne had fled and Ethan and Grandfather had spent an afternoon with Mr. Talziewicz, an anxious Little Louisa served the meal while Grandfather finished his scotch and started on the merlot, which he took with the meat course. He drained his first glass and remarked to Pops, “What kind of tomfool idea is this that Tally’s been telling me? Do you think you can explain yourself?”

  Pops had the most elegant table manners of anyone I’ve ever known. He managed forks and knives, spoons, any utensil, however specialized, with skill; he ate slowly, savoring each individual bite. Pops also believed that the purpose of a dinner was conversation. He admired Mumma’s ability to keep conversations interesting, and he helped her as much as he could. When Grandfather made that conversation-killing demand, Pops continued chewing, and then he swallowed, set his fork down quietly on his plate, and brushed his mouth with his napkin before responding. “What is it you don’t understand?”

  “Nothing, there’s nothing I don’t understand, except for one simple thing, which is: What the hell you think you’re doing liquidating your New York, New Haven, and Hartford stock. Unless you’ve been gambling, in which case you’ll just have to bite the bullet, and I can only hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

  “Do you mean the principal I’ve withdrawn?” Pops asked, to clarify what his father might be talking about.

  “You know damned well what I mean. I don’t remember authorizing any such sum.”

  (“As if that man could remember anything that got talked about after ten in the morning. I don’t know who he thought he was fooling but he wasn’t fooling me.”)

  “After I turned twenty-five,” Pops reminded Grandfather, since his father seemed to have forgotten the terms of the Howland Trust, “I no longer required your authorization. Mr. Talziewicz notified me, when I turned twenty-five, that I was the sole signatory.”

  “Tally will do anything to undermine my authority with my own family, the stupider the better, like putting a shitload of cash into your woolly-headed hands. I always heard Jews were so smart with money, but he’s starting to smell like an exception,” at which witticism Ethan snickered and Grandfather raised his glass in acknowledgment.

  “It’s less than two percent of the total capital,” Pops pointed out and cut himself another bite of roast beef. (Grandfather would only eat roasts, and those had to be what he called real meat, beef or lamb; anything else, he maintained was not a dinner, except lobster, and the unavoidable holiday turkeys.) Pops lifted his fork to his mouth and gracefully set it back down empty on his plate, and chewed.

  “We’re wondering,” Ethan said, then turned to his father for corroboration and permission to speak. “What we wonder is: What do you want the money for?”

  Mumma ate away at her meal, ignoring the men insofar as she could, filling her mind with ideas for renovations, books to read, and good thoughts about Pops. Mumma believed that a baby’s surroundings during gestation affected his disposition and spirits. If she ignored Grandfather, she thought, he would have no effect on her son’s character. She concentrated on the mashed potatoes with their brown pool of gravy, on the sweet tiny onions nestled among bright green peas. She concentrated on happy thoughts about good food and bright white linen, heavy silver and pure crystal, her child asleep upstairs and her husband seated beside her.

  “For an apartment building,” Pops said.

  “You’ve bought an apartment building? What is wrong with you, Spencer? I thought you were going for your doctorate. In—I can’t be expected to remember, something nobody else is interested in. What do you want with an apartment building?”

  Mumma had no desire to say anything. His father was Pops’ problem, and she wasn’t about to take the man on as one of hers.

  “Actually, it’s Rida’s building. It’s in her name. She found it.”

  “You gave her that money? All that money? Get it back, boy. That’s no way to use your trust fund, buying run-down apartment buildings in North Cambridge where nobody with any sense wants to live. You don’t want to start giving large sums of money to your wife. Bad enough you married her.”

  Mumma rose from the table.

  “Can’t take a joke?” Grandfather glared at Mumma and grimaced at her in a show of merriment. “Make her sit down, Spencer, she’s your wife.” When Pops didn’t obey him, Grandfather demanded, “What are you, afraid of her? Are you a man or a mouse?”

  “Yes,” Mumma echoed the question, looking down at Pops. “Which one are you?” (“I thought he would be standing right at my side already, like a knight. Like Lancelot and Guinevere, but he stayed sitting, as if he was thinking over what that old drunk was saying. It was a bad moment in my marriage, I can tell you girls that. A very bad moment.”)

  “I’m not afraid of Rida,” Pops said to his father. “I’m not afraid of you, either. And as to the man-or-mouse question, in the way that you are using the words, I’d say I’m a mouse.” Then he looked up at Mumma. “It would seem that I can be a mouse for you or a mouse for them.”

  “You’ll do better with me,” Mumma advised him.

  “I’m not going to ask you to sit down,” Pops said to her, “but if you would do that, I’d be grateful.”

  Mumma sat. “I’ll pay you back the money for the building,” she told Pops, ignoring Grandfather and Ethan, who snorted in a duet of disbelief. “With interest,” she said, ending the discussion.

  But she knew even then that they couldn’t live in an apartment in the midst of renovations, so that was the first of the few arguments with Mumma that Grandmother won. In the matter of a house, Grandmother insisted on a compromise that Mumma could go along with. The apartment building was obviously uninhabitable when Grandmother returned to Louisburg Square, the day after Labor Day, explaining, “Mr. Howland will follow in a day or so. He’s closing up the house.”

  “We’ll have moved out by then,” Mumma told her.

  “You’re not going to live in that tenement, are you? It’s not safe for Meg, or a baby, all that dirt and noise. You can’t live there.”

  “I thought we would live in the Capstan house. Spencer can drive in for classes and sleep here if he’s too late to drive home,” Mumma said. “I’ll have Polly Grangery there, to help with the house and children.”

  “But I’ve told Anne she can live there, because she’s going to stay with the job in Bourne after all.”

  “Then it will have to be the big house.”

  “Oh, no, Rida, I can’t let you do that. It’s not winterized. There’s no heat. What about the baby? You haven’t forgotten that you’re going to have a new baby, have you? What does Dr. Irving think of this?”

  “I can have the baby in Hyannis.”

  “And bring it home to that big drafty place? Yo
u’re asking for colds, and croup, and probably only bronchitis, if you’re lucky, not pneumonia.”

  “By then I’ll have found somewhere else. We’ll have our own home by then.”

  “You’ll come in from the Cape a few weeks before the baby is due,” Grandmother instructed. This was her compromise. “You can live out there until winter if you like, but my grandchild is going to be born at Boston Lying-In.”

  On this point, Mumma gave way. After all, she was as concerned about the health of her children as any normal mother; she wanted the best for her son, and she trusted Grandmother’s sense of what was the best. So Jo—not a boy after all—was born in Boston, and after two postnatal weeks in the house on Louisburg Square, Mumma moved her family into one of the renovated apartments in her building.

  In June she moved the family again, into the house she had finally found for them, not in Cambridge but out on Cape Cod. They were still in the town of Wampanoag but right on the border of West Falmouth, miles from the Spencer houses and without even a water view. From Wampanoag, the commute to Cambridge was long and hard, especially in the winter months, so at the end of his second year in graduate school, Pops transferred to Brown, on the basis of Mumma’s convincing arguments about wanting him not to be killed in a car wreck on some winter evening.

  Of course Pops did what she told him he’d prefer, and in fact he was much happier at Brown than he’d been at Harvard, finding like-minded, like-spirited friends among professors and fellow students. Mumma was entirely satisfied with her home and her husband. Pops, too, was satisfied, and Grandmother, who had won the battle, accepted her undeniable loss of the war.

  4.

  Mumma and the Social Orders

  THE ENGAGEMENT

  “Fast girls get pregnant, look what happened with your aunt Anne.”

  This constituted Mumma’s contraceptive counsel as we grew up, and it made a convincing argument until Amy pointed out to us that it was girls who got pregnant, pregnancy having to do with the girl part of the sentence, not the fast. Aunt Anne, she pointed out, could have gotten pregnant without being fast. For example, Aunt Anne could have gotten pregnant the first time she slept with anybody, whenever that was, and whoever, rather than getting pregnant eventually, which, as Amy pointed out, wasn’t the same as inevitably.