She thought of Renée and Eric, both born at first light, and felt a surge of hope.
“There will be other visits, Herb. New days dawning for both of us.” Her words were a promise, to herself and to the gentle silver-haired man whose blue eyes were flecked with gray.
“I understand,” he said softly.
Hand in hand then, they left the restaurant and walked slowly down the Santa Monica boardwalk and watched the gentle waves break against the shore. The evening sun was slowly setting, its waning light now threaded with amber. They paused, watched its steady, inexorable descent, and she lifted her face to his and felt the softness of his lips upon her cheek.
sixteen
The night before her mother’s arrival, Dr. Lisa Gordon, exhausted from a long day during which she had traveled from her main office in Rittenhouse Square to two of her subsidiary laboratories along the Philadelphia Main Line, ate a hasty microwaved dinner, careful as always to check the caloric and carb contents, took a long hot shower and slipped into the soft flannel nightgown she favored on the nights when David Green was in a distant city. He called as she wandered through her living room, arranging and rearranging the various gifts her mother had crafted for her over the years.
“I’m fine,” she assured him as she centered the turquoise-glazed oblong fruit bowl in which she always kept lemons and limes on the rosewood dining room table. “It was just an incredibly long day. And I guess I’m sort of bracing myself for my mother’s visit.”
David understood her ambivalence about her mother although he himself was at ease with Elaine, whose work he admired, just as he admired the calm undemanding way in which she had dealt with her husband’s death. His own mother had suffered a brief nervous breakdown when his father died and immediately moved to an assisted living facility in Arizona, which caused him both guilt and relief.
“I’m glad you’ll be in Philadelphia tomorrow night,” Lisa continued, rearranging the gold and scarlet enameled trivets in the vivid autumn colors which had been her mother’s gift when she first moved into her spacious apartment. “I think she feels more comfortable with you than she does with me. I know I sound like an ingrate. I’m really relieved that she’s traveling to Russia with me.”
“I’m glad she’ll be with you,” David said. “Damn it. It’s Russwell. I’ve been trying to reach him all day. Can you hold on for a second?”
“Sure, I’ll hold.”
David was still at his office, she knew, juggling phones and e-mails, mauling his way through piles of memos. Congressman Russwell was an important client for whom David was coordinating a conference. Holding the phone she went into her bedroom and stood before the mirror and studied her reflection. Her hair was black like her mother’s; but while Elaine’s was a mass of dark curls, now tinged with gray, Lisa’s was satin-smooth and helmeted her head. She had her father’s bright blue eyes and thinness of face and, like him, she was tall and slender, swift of movement and calm of tone. She had memorized the reassuring, comforting cadence of his voice and made it her own. On impulse, she dabbed a drop of perfume behind each ear just as David returned to the phone.
“I’ve just wasted two drops of Chanel on you,” she said softly.
“Will it hold until tomorrow night?” he asked. “Lisa, I’m going to miss you. I wish I was going to Russia with you. Will you be all right?”
The odd wistfulness of his tone surprised her and she hesitated before replying.
“Don’t worry. I’ll manage,” she said at last. “And remember, I guilted my mother into the trip so I won’t be alone.”
“I’m sure she wants to be with you. It’s a chance for the two of you to be together and for her to meet her new granddaughter.”
“Genia. Her new granddaughter’s name is Genia,” she said with deceptive softness.
It was important to her that David speak the name of the dark-eyed little girl she would bring home from Russia, Genia, her daughter, whose shy smile in the photo she had seen in the adoption agency’s album, had pierced her heart.
“Right. Genia. Okay, we’re set for tomorrow,” he said too brusquely and she knew that he was probably studying a file even as he spoke to her.
David seldom did one thing at a time. He was, he had told her when they first met, a master of multitasking and she had archly countered that she could easily match his pace. They had, early on, drawn the battle lines of independence.
“Unless you suddenly get called to conference in Paris or Mexico City,” she retorted playfully.
“There’s no restaurant in Paris or Mexico City that can compete with Bookbinders,” he said, light-heartedness restored. “Hey, see you in my dreams.” His signature signoff, murmured each night they were apart.
“And I’ll see you in mine.” Her words matched his own and she repeated them even after she heard him click off and knew he was no longer on the line.
Moodily then, she placed the bookends of a mosaic design which her mother had made for her on her end table, setting two unread bestsellers between them. Elaine would be gratified to see her work so prominently displayed and Lisa realized, with some surprise, that it was newly important to her that she please her mother. She had, after all, lost her father whose pleasure and approval had always been dominant in her life.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said as she unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk, removed the cloth-covered journal and opened it to a blank page.
She had always kept a diary. As a girl, she had written in it late at night when her twin sister, Sandy, was already asleep, transcribing her deepest thoughts and feelings as she crouched in bed, holding a flashlight over a page that more often than not was worn thin with erasures and moistened by tears. Later, in high school and college and then in medical school, she would waken at first light, reach for her notebook, always hidden beneath her nightgowns, and record her thoughts, her experiences of the previous day and her plans for the day to come.
It was her father, perhaps sensing a need she herself could not define, who had given her that first blank journal and suggested, in his quiet professional tone, that she write in it daily. It would, he had assured her, give her focus.
It had also been her father who had given his twin daughters copies of The Diary of Anne Frank. Sandy had read it in silent sadness, her eyes brimming with tears, but Lisa had read it with a shock of recognition.
It had startled her to learn that the young girl, hidden in an Amsterdam attic, had feelings about her parents that closely matched her own. She had found it comforting that Anne, like herself, had adored her father and resented her mother and that she, too, had envied her sister Margot’s serenity just as Lisa herself envied Sandy’s gentleness. Like Anne, Lisa had written about her feelings and like Anne, her words suffused her with guilt. She read Anne’s entries again and again, shamed to compare her own situation with that of the sad-eyed Jewish girl who would die in a Nazi death camp and yet aware of the emotions she shared with her.
Lisa’s own earliest memory was of herself as small child trailing after her father as he walked through their garden and then rushing up to him, to grasp his hand, to match her small steps to his own, pausing when he paused, listening earnestly as he spoke. In dream she felt again the light touch of his fingers, heard again the softness of his voice. He plucked a flower and showed it to her, inviting her to share its mystery. “See,” he said. “The petals, the pistil, the stamen, all the secrets of the flower’s life.” She watched him place a golden caterpillar in tall grass, as he motioned her to silence so that they would not disturb a fat honey bee nestled in the heart of a primrose. She listened as he explained how pollen was gathered and new plant life perpetuated. Her heart swelled with pride at all that her father knew. He was a doctor. The secrets of the universe were his to comprehend and decipher. As early as grade school, she had known that she wanted to share his knowledge, to be part of his world. She, too, would study medicine and become a doctor. She had even imagined herself wearing a long white coat
and walking beside him down a hospital corridor, father and daughter locked into a professional closeness that excluded the rest of the family, her sister, Sandy, her brothers, Peter and Denis but especially her mother, who so often seemed to exclude her.
It was an exclusion that Lisa accepted, that she tried to understand. Her mother was a creative artist and her work was important to her. Her studio adjoined their house and her children called to her when they arrived home but it was tacitly understood that, except for Sandy, who often worked beside her, they would not invade her workplace. Their meals were effortlessly prepared as Elaine drifted from studio to kitchen, often igniting first her kiln and then her oven. She was an organized and orderly woman who listened with appropriate attention to her children’s tales of the school day, refereed their bickering, arranged for creative birthday parties and carefully scheduled medical and dental appointments.
But she hummed and smiled only when she prepared the meals she and Lisa’s father would share when he returned home, well past the dinner hour, after his last appointment. There were always patients who could not come during the day and he was an analyst who tried wherever possible to accommodate those who relied on him. Lisa recognized that his late arrival, the privacy of their dinner alone, was an arrangement that suited both her parents.
Her mother’s face brightened and her eyes softened when she heard his car pull up to the house. She hurried then to brush her hair, to place flowers on the small table in the alcove where they shared their meals. They sipped their wine, her head inclined toward him as they spoke, their faces radiant with candlelight, wedded lovers, impervious to the interruptions of their children who dashed through the house, shouted from room to room, quarreled briefly, giggled wildly. Now and again, after their dinner, one or the other would enter a child’s bedroom to help with a homework assignment, to arbitrate a disagreement, to listen to a joke, a complaint. Caring parents. Involved parents.
But later in the evening they sat in the living room, their eyes closed, their hands touching, as they listened to music. Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler. They did not need words then. They were happily locked into a gated intimacy. Lisa, who often watched them from the head of the stairs, knew herself to be unhappily locked out of their impenetrable closeness.
It was Sandy who spent long hours with their mother in the studio, working on her own drawings, her own designs. She stood before her easel as her mother stood at her potter’s wheel and they worked together, clay taking shape, colors taking form. There was no place for Lisa in that work space that smelled of paint and chemicals, of damp clay and Elaine’s Madame Rochas toilet water.
But Lisa was pledged to her father and she lay in wait for him at the door of his study on weekend afternoons, clutching her own book which she read, lying across his cushioned window seat as he sat at his desk reading journals, writing up reports, opening and closing his huge reference books. The world of nature was within his intellectual domain and he took delight in sharing it with her on walks through their garden and down their country road.
“What’s that, Daddy?” she had asked one day, pointing to a small sculpture that stood on his desk.
“It’s a model of the human brain,” he replied and moved it closer to her, his long finger traveling across its knobby surface. “A fascinating organism, the human brain. Here is the cerebrum. The cerebellum. The medulla oblongata.”
“The cerebrum. The cerebellum. The medulla oblongata,” she repeated.
The words were musical and fascinating. They offered her entry into the world of his work, a world that did not interest her sister and brothers, that even her mother did not understand. He was a psychiatrist. He had studied the secrets of what he called “that fascinating organism” and she, too, would study and understand them. She took biology, excelled and excelled again in an advanced placement course in physiology.
“You have a gift for science,” her teacher told her. “Have you thought about medical school?”
“Of course,” she said without hesitation. “My father’s a doctor and that’s what I want to be.”
Neil Gordon was proud of her aptitude, proud of her achievements, but too often he answered her questions impatiently. Too often he cautioned her to be quiet because he had work to do. Slowly, she came to understand that although he loved her, loved all his children, his all-consuming passion was vested in his work and in his marriage. He and Elaine were inextricably linked, each defining the other. Lisa had recognized that and when they were in college and flirting with an introductory psychology course, she had too flippantly defined their relationship to Sandy.
“Mom and Dad are a cult of two,” she had said. “We’re important, of course, but they’re a world unto themselves, by themselves, for themselves, of themselves.”
Sandy had forgotten those words, perhaps banished them from memory when she morphed into Sarah, but Lisa remembered them all too well. In a way, she confided to her diary, that recognition had freed her, thrust her into an early independence, an independence that had sustained her even during her junior year abroad in Rome, those golden months that had ended in such dark misery.
Even now, staring down at the blank page of her journal, in her beautifully appointed apartment, she could not bear to think of that time. She flinched from the memory of pain and betrayal, of a loss that had overwhelmed her then and overwhelmed her still.
She sighed and began to write, growing calmer as she sorted through her thoughts and feelings, acknowledging in careful script her uneasiness about spending such a long period of time with her mother. And yet, she admitted, she was relieved that she was not going to Russia alone. Her mother was a skilled traveler. Organized and savvy. She stared at the adjectives. Her mother was more than that, she knew, much more.
She turned a page and began a new entry, writing about her reasons for adopting Genia, the child of the heart-shaped face and soft eyes whom she had claimed as her own from the moment she saw her photo and watched her on video.
“I want her in my life,” she wrote. “I have waited so long for her. I want to love someone who will always and forever belong to me. Oh, I want to be Genia’s mother.”
She reread her entry then carefully replaced the journal in her desk drawer and locked it. Her father had been right about the diary, as he had been right about all of the advice he had given her. It did provide her with focus and emotional privacy.
Before going to bed she went into the nursery she had prepared for Genia. She wandered through the cheerful sun-colored room, straightened the flower-sprigged coverlet in the white crib, held a fragrant soft, hooded towel to her cheek. She paused, too, in the doorway of the pleasant room she had prepared for Ellen, the young nanny she had hired. If Ellen did not like the plaid bedspread she would, of course, replace it. She wanted Genia’s caregiver to be happy. She wanted all of them to be happy.
Newly calmed, she went to bed and slipped into a dreamless sleep.
Elaine arrived too early at Bookbinders but she was immediately escorted to the table reserved by Dr. Lisa Gordon.
“A lovely woman,” the maitre d’ said. “A valued client of this restaurant.”
“My daughter,” she told him proudly.
She hesitated and then ordered a martini.
“Vodka. With both an olive and an onion,” she told the waiter. Neil’s preferred drink and her own.
She sipped it slowly, glad of this interval of solitude before Lisa and David Green arrived. She had been caught up in a whirlwind of activity since her return from California. The Westchester house had been swarmed with handymen as she arranged for new windows, masonry repairs, the painting of the outside trim. Such arrangements had always been Neil’s responsibility. It was unfair, she thought bitterly, suffused with an irrational anger, that he had left her to cope with so much.
“Widow’s anger,” her friend Serena had said when she described the feeling. “We all go through it. Part of phase one of widowhood.”
That transitor
y anger had dissipated into a sober assessment of her situation. The house was too large for one person; it required too much care and its very size intensified her aloneness and vulnerability. She would have to make a decision about selling it and deciding where she wanted to live. For the rest of my life. She thought the words, thrust them aside. She would not think about that now. She had time. She would decide, but not yet.
Serena approved the delay.
“I waited for almost two years after Sam’s death before I put the house on the market. The therapist I saw said that I was in synch with what she called ‘the widow’s timetable.’ The shock, the anger, the reconciliation and finally, the acceptance and the reentry. It took me five years to arrive at the reentry,” Serena said, draining her second glass of white wine.
“I’m stalled at anger, I’m afraid,” Elaine had replied dryly.
She had spent an afternoon at Mimi Armstrong’s gallery, carrying with her the completed tiles for the mural. Mimi thought them beautiful, admired the smooth firing of the enamel glaze with professional dispassion.
“It’s a wonderful idea, Elaine,” she said. Ever the shrewd businesswoman, she added, “A memorial mural is something that other people would want. I could get you a slew of commissions.”
“This is for Neil.” Elaine’s reply had been sharper than she intended. “I’m not about to go into the memorial mural business. That’s not what I plan to do for the rest of my life.”
The rest of my life. That phrase again, springing up unbidden. She turned her attention to the work Mimi was showing her, collages by a young artist who was experimenting with mixed materials, intricate small sculptures crafted of blown glass and papier-mâché.
“Interesting,” Elaine said. “This would sell well in California.”
Open Doors Page 23
