By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  “He just walked away. She was waiting for him outside. He’d been holding the door, the way he did.”

  “But why are you so sure it was a date?” asked Amy.

  “They walked like people who were together.” I clarified it: “People physically aware of each other, maybe lovers? People in love, sometimes—you must have noticed this—sometimes it shows? When they’re walking together?” They nodded and I promised them, “It showed.”

  They digested this without speaking. I gave them time to do so. After a few minutes, Meg asked, “Who was she?”

  “It took me a while to find that out,” I admitted. “I had to sort of trail Pops, when he came to town on Wednesdays. I had to sort of follow him from his class—”

  “How did you know where he’d be?”

  “That was easy. I called BU about continuing education courses, and they sent me a catalog.”

  “A real little Nancy Drew,” Amy commented. None of them added, “Just like Mumma,” but we were all thinking it. The reason nobody said it was not to spare my feelings but because we had just left our mother, who at that point neither reliably recognized nor reliably remembered any of us, not even Meg, and who, in fact, had picked up the silver-framed commissioning photograph of our father and handed it to one of the attendants, saying, “Somebody left this.” Then, with a secretive little smile that could have meant she was teasing us, or could have meant she was getting away with something, she took it back. “Maybe I’ll keep it. He’s a good-looking young fellow, isn’t he?” Our mother, who all of our lives had been disquietingly sharp-witted and opinionated, even domineering, was now losing her brain, and with it her character. Our own loss of her remained too sharp for invidious comparisons. Our only consolations were: first, to know that we were suffering more than she was, that she wasn’t suffering at all now, really; and second, to remark wryly to one another, swallowing back tears, that this was just like Mumma, wasn’t it, arranging things to suit her own convenience.

  Not that we forgot the first years of the disease, especially before Pops died, her denials about symptoms and her disguised compensatory tactics. We noticed. And of course we asked her. We were worried. “Your father has always needed me to keep his life in order. To pay attention too, because nobody appreciates him the way I do,” she told us in response to hesitant, exploratory inquiries, asking, What would Freud say about this frequent losing of car keys?, or, Had she forgotten Emily’s birthday, or, Was the check made out to Amy’s oldest child, Jason, but sent to Jo, supposed to be for Emily so we should just give Emily the hundred dollars? “Wait until you get old,” Mumma responded. “You’ll know what it’s like then. For now, bug off why don’t you?”

  Mumma was frightened, we knew that, and we were frightened too. Never one to be fiscally self-indulgent, however, she gradually handed over the management of her real estate business to Amy, with George continuing as the company lawyer. But while Pops was alive, that transfer was her only acknowledgment of encroaching limitations. “Your father couldn’t stand to lose me,” she had told us, all of our lives. “I hope he dies first, because without me his days would be terribly empty.”

  We knew she was right about that, and this made the question of the mistress all the more puzzling.

  “How long did it take you?” Jo wondered. “Finding out who Pops’ woman was, I mean.”

  “It only took a day to find his class, but then I had to figure out how to discover who she was, and it wasn’t as if I could go sit in on his classes.”

  “Unless you wore some kind of disguise,” Amy said, and my three sisters smirked at one another. Then Amy realized, “You did, didn’t you. You wore a disguise.”

  “Not really. Just a hat, dark glasses. And a wig. You could get fatigues at the Army Navy store on the Square. Don’t look at me that way. It was just so I could follow him.”

  “You followed him?”

  “It’s not easy, it wasn’t easy, and Pops was a creature of habit so he must have been easier than most. Although,” I remembered, “she wasn’t so hard, either. Maybe I missed my calling? Maybe I should have been a detective?”

  This time they laughed out loud, which I always prefer to sisterly smirking.

  “So how did you do it?”

  “Well, he stayed at the Alumni House the nights he was in town, and I followed him there, after the class.”

  “You got in a cab and said ‘Follow that car’?” Meg asked.

  “Actually, I had my own car.” I continued my story. “I followed him and after that I just waited. What he did was, he went into the Alumni House alone, carrying his overnight case, he sat in the dining room, ate supper, and came out about an hour later with this woman. It was the same one I’d seen him with at the movie. So instead of watching his class, I started watching the Alumni House beginning at about the time class got out. But I didn’t see her go in, although she came out with him again.”

  “She worked there?” Amy guessed, just as I had.

  “In the dining room. A waitress. So what I did was, I wandered in, pretending…But not in fatigues, of course. That day I wore a skirt and sweater. My cover story was a father who had gone to Harvard but he’d been killed in Korea. You must remember how during Vietnam people felt bad for anyone who had lost someone in any war. Everybody felt so guilty, remember? I told them I was working at Radcliffe, which was true, and I just wanted to see for myself the places where my father had been a young man. Before he was killed. Because I’d never known him and now I was having his grandchild…That was my story so they let me walk around, and I saw her. In the dining room. In her waitress dress.”

  For a minute, I remembered vividly how it had been. I stood in the doorway looking at the long room with its many-paned windows and bright white tablecloths and little glass vases of flowers, the leather upholstered chairs set around the tables and the woman moving among them, putting down silver, napkins, plates, glasses. She was one of those narrow-shouldered, slim, small-breasted women, although oddly enough not at all boyish-looking. Such women are unquestionably feminine, dainty, fragile, their gestures always a little hesitant, their glances often looking around for approval, their smiles hopeful. She saw me standing, watching, and straightened up to smile, and blush a pretty pink before she turned back to her work.

  It never crossed her mind to come over and ask what I was doing there, or why I was staring at her. It crossed her mind only to hope that I would go away soon. Which I did.

  “She was a waitress? How young was she?”

  “Not so young. She looked to be in her thirties, mid-thirties, maybe. Actually, I learned she was thirty-four and divorced.”

  “You’re amazing! How did you find that out?” Jo asked. “Did you find out who she was, too?”

  “I tried to get George to get the information, because he went to Harvard Law School so he’s an alumnus so he could ask, but he refused, he wouldn’t even do it for Mumma. So I had to ask a friend who was married to an investment banker who had gone to the Business School, ask her to go there for dinner and find out. Because I couldn’t go myself. I mean, what if she recognized me? But once I had her name, which was Na—”

  Meg interrupted. “I don’t think I want a name.”

  I didn’t insist. “Once I had that, I looked her up in the phone book, and once I did that, I had her address, and once I had her address, I could go see where she lived. It was a house. In Somerville,” I reported.

  The house, in need of paint on its clapboards and its door and window frames, was a tall, three-story building with a bit more yard than its neighbors. The two metal mailboxes told me that two families lived there, hers and one other. My guess was that she either rented or rented out the apartment to which the exterior wooden staircase led; the bicycles leaning up against a rear door led me to think she had children at least eight years old and lived on the ground floor. I already knew that the phone was in her name.

  I ascended four broad steps up to the porch, where she’
d hung a porch swing, even in Somerville; Mumma would approve of a porch swing on a city street, I thought, and took the two steps across to peer through a window into the house. Inside, a golden retriever came toward me, bounding down a dim hallway and barking ferociously, leaping up to the window. So I fled. But I returned, two days later.

  That year we had snow in April, between April Fool’s Day and tax day, six inches of a wet, heavy snow that fell all night long. In the morning, instead of clearing the patch of sidewalk in front of our rented house, as required by law, I walked over to Somerville. There, a man was shoveling the steps. He was old enough to be her brother, I thought, maybe she lived with her brother? The same golden retriever jumped about in the yard, taking big bites of snow.

  “Hey,” I greeted them both. “That was a weird storm, wasn’t it?”

  The dog barked and the man turned to say, “Quiet, Vi, it’s all right,” and at that news the dog bounded up to me, wagging its tail in excitement.

  “Vi?” I asked, bending down to pet it with my mittened hands. “That’s an odd name for a dog,” I remarked, although I was unqualified to judge that question. Mumma hated pets, dogs or cats. (“What do I need with a pet? I’ve got four children,” she said, and waited, before adding the clincher, “Daughters.”)

  “Viola,” the man told me. His cheeks were red with cold and exercise, his eyes a trustworthy brown under straight eyebrows. He was a nice-looking man, not too tall, not too heavy, not too handsome—a nice, normal man. “After Twelfth Night. Because Vi pretends to be a fierce watchdog but she’s really a sweetheart.”

  “Is she yours?” I asked, busily stroking the dog on the shoulders, pushing down against her willingness to stand with her forefeet on my shoulder to make it easier for me to reach her ears.

  “She belongs to my landlady, but Vi and I are good friends. I walk her when the boys are at school and my landlady’s at work.”

  “You have boys? How many?” I asked.

  “They aren’t mine. Mine,” he said with careful expressionlessness, “are in Wisconsin. Living with their mother.”

  “Oh,” I said. He waited. “I’m sorry,” I said. He shrugged. “You must miss them,” I said.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “But you have the landlady’s boys to keep your parenting skills honed,” I observed.

  He looked at me more sharply. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, you didn’t say anything about a landlord, so I deduce that she’s—”

  “We’re friends. Good friends, but that’s all,” he said. “I’m really fond of her boys.”

  “Boys need a father,” I observed.

  “Boys need a responsible father,” he clarified. Then he seemed to think of something. “What can I do for you? Because I’ve got this shoveling to finish, and then…You ask a lot of questions. What do you want?”

  I didn’t have to fake embarrassment; that was real enough. I presented the story I had prepared. I was looking for a friend who was staying with another friend, I said; on this street, I thought, but I wasn’t sure of the exact number. “A college friend,” I specified, then realized I hadn’t chosen a name, so I grabbed at the nearest to hand, “Rida is her friend’s name. Not like Rita Hayworth,” I said. “Rida with a d, Rida Smith, do you know her? Does someone with that name live on this street?”

  He didn’t believe me but pretended he might. I was female, I was pregnant, he would give me the benefit of the doubt. “No,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” I had to answer. But it wasn’t what he thought, whatever he might be thinking. I only wanted to know what he meant by implying that her husband (ex-husband? late husband? criminal husband?) wasn’t meeting his responsibilities. And if she had many boyfriends, I wanted to know that too, and were any of them my father, until just recently one of the world’s most responsible husbands. At least, as far as any of us knew. But I was pretty confident that one of the boyfriends would be Pops, and probably he was the only one, especially if she was a working mother with two children in school and a very presentable tenant, who was moreover fond of her children, but whom she was keeping at friend’s length. Mostly, I knew that anything else I was going to find out, I was going to have to find out from Pops.

  I gave my sisters the synopsis: “She had a house, and rented out the third floor, and she had two sons in school, no visible husband. She was working at a low-level, no-future job. I guess there’s some éclat in that, but academics aren’t good tippers.”

  “I always thought he really liked Mumma, really enjoyed her,” Meg said. “An affair doesn’t make any sense.”

  “This woman was the fragile feminine type. The kind Jonquil Cartenbury Heolms pretends to be. You know the type. I expect that’s what attracted Pops,” I told them. “Not that he said that, he didn’t say exactly that. But she was one of those women, they just look helpless, and needy. She looked like that kind of woman and I think probably she really was.”

  “What did he say? When you asked him,” Amy wanted to know.

  “Did he deny it?” Jo asked. “I would have, but Pops had all that integrity.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “That’s what made it so weird. We met at Mrs. B’s—the hamburger place?—for lunch.”

  “With George?”

  “No. George kept out of it. He never even told me what he thought about it. I did all the talking with George, and I did most of the talking with Pops, now I think of it, especially when…He didn’t deny it. I was dreading one of those conversations, you know? You have them with boyfriends, but you never think you’ll have them with your father. You ask accusing questions: How could you? What about…? Then he presents his defenses, his rationales, the reasons why he couldn’t have done anything else.”

  “You mean denials,” said Meg. “In my experience, mostly with Jack, but he was a classic, denial at all levels is the knee-jerk response. Even Liam thinks that way under pressure.”

  “So do I,” I admitted. “But Pops didn’t. In fact, he was sort of wonderful. ‘Who is this woman?’ I asked and he said, ‘Someone who’s had a hard time of it and is making the best of things.’ That’s verbatim. His exact words.”

  Saying that, Pops had looked straight at me, across the platter of onion rings at the center of the table. We both had grease on our chins, which we mopped at with paper napkins. We both sipped tall sodas from straws. We both weren’t quite sure where this conversation was going to go, although neither of us wanted a battle. We both understood that, once I had seen him at the movies, and he had seen me, this conversation was inevitable.

  I have to admit, I admired my father. I continued my report to his other daughters. “I asked him, outright, if he was in love with her. He didn’t answer me.”

  “You mean he didn’t say anything? The silent nonresponse?” Meg asked.

  “It wasn’t that obvious, but he said Mumma was his wife.”

  “He called her Mumma?” Amy demanded.

  “No, of course not, he called her Rida. He wouldn’t ever call her Mumma, you know that,” I said. “Pops never called her Elfrieda, either.”

  Three of us ordered the hot fudge sundaes that had been established during childhood as the best of all possible desserts, and Jo returned us to the subject. “So do we deduce that Pops was in love with her?”

  “I did,” I told them.

  Amy greeted this statement with the irritated impatience that characterized so much of my childhood relationship with my siblings. “Do you really believe someone can love two people at the same time? Because you’re not going to convince me he didn’t love Mumma.”

  “Maybe he loved Mumma,” Jo fine-tuned, “but maybe he wasn’t still in love with her. Come on, you all know what I mean. Beth, for example, are you still in love with George?”

  I had to admit, “A lot of the time, yeah, I am. Most of the time, in fact, although I do know what you mean. So maybe that was it. He was in love with the other woman and he still loved Mumma. Al
though, I have a hard time with that. If it was George…”

  “Never mind George,” Meg said. “So you asked Pops if he loved this mistress person and he said Mumma was his wife…then what?”

  “I asked him, What if Mumma found out? And he asked me, How would she?”

  At the time, all I could do was stare at my father, his eyes serene behind round gold-rimmed glasses, his expression one of intelligence being applied to a problem. I had never realized before how compartmentalized my father’s life was, or, more to the point, how separated in his own perceptions those compartments were. I stared at him in amazement across a table that suddenly seemed to me to resemble the un-compartmentalized lives of everybody else I knew, especially my mother. The table was littered with remnants of our lunch, the half-eaten platter of onion rings, straw wrappers accordioned up on the speckled Formica, mounds of crumpled, greasy paper napkins. But you could see, in the puzzlement on Pops’ face, in the unselfdoubting, untroubled blue of his eyes, that as far as Pops was concerned, Boston, Cambridge, Wampanoag, and Brown were as distinct in his mind as they are on maps. They had nothing to do with one another. He had roles and duties, each appropriate to its own locale, none overlapping. You could see that he believed they were as separate in reality as they were in his perceptions. So he was entirely sincere when he asked me, “Why should your mother find out?”

  “Did he think you were going to tell her?” Meg asked.

  “He knew better than that,” I said at the same time that she answered her own question, “I guess he knew better than that.”

  “I would have told her,” Amy said.

  “Anybody but Beth would have thought seriously about it. But you didn’t, did you?”

  They were right. I had asked my father to have lunch with me not to make a scene, or to threaten him, but so that I could put a stop to his affair so that my mother’s…My mother’s what?

  They weren’t illusions, that her husband loved and admired her, and was grateful to her, and enjoyed her company. I didn’t know why he felt that way about her, but I knew that he did. So it wasn’t her illusions I was protecting.