by Nelle Davy
“No,” she said casually, as Jane stepped into the hall, “they’re at the hotel.”
No, of course, I thought, no Greyhound and hope-against-hope for her. It was never her style anyway.
“Jane,” she said, arms outstretched, mannequin-like. Jane stepped in and out of them as seamlessly and as perfunctorily as possible.
We stared at each other for a moment, not really knowing what to say. I couldn’t really bear it.
“You can shut the door now, it’s kind of cold,” Claudia said officiously. I looked up. She still hadn’t taken off her hat.
“You look well,” she said finally as I moved inside.
“I’ve been feeding her up. You should have seen how she was when she first came,” said Jane, stepping forward to take Claudia’s coat. So that’s the effect of fur, I thought. It makes servants of those not wearing it themselves.
Claudia obliged Jane, shrugging the dead skin from her back, and I saw she was wearing a jet-black suit dress, neatly tucked at the waist with a gold-colored belt, and gathered at the shoulders. She always was about the detail. Whereas I—
“Is Ava here then?” she asked sharply.
“No, of course not, why would she be?” I asked, incredulous. She looked at me with disdain.
“Well, you are, and usually where you go she follows and vice versa.”
“That was a long time ago. We’re both grown up.”
“Or grown apart,” she added with a flourish.
“Speak for yourself,” I snapped and then because I couldn’t help it, I reached over and whipped off her hat. “And take this ridiculous thing off. You’re not at New York fashion week. This is Iowa, remember?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said in a low voice, eyes fixed on mine. “It’s been a while.”
“Well, try and remember.”
“Tea?” Jane offered quickly, already walking into the kitchen.
“Green?” asked Claudia, following.
“No, brown,” I answered scathingly. She turned around and swept her eyes over me. Usually as kids this would be when she knocked me over or pinched me, tempting me into a tussle she knew I would not win but my hot temper could not resist. I have a lot to thank her for, my sister. She taught me the art of battle from the moment I could walk. And I thought, wouldn’t it be easier if I could just push her as before? If she could just throw me in a headlock and we can fight and sweat until all that is between us is spent? It would not be like it would with Ava: ours is not a fight to the death.
“I had hoped we could be civilized about this,” she said.
“Well, yours wasn’t exactly a civilized phone call, was it?”
“What did you expect from me?” Her nostrils quivered though the rest of her was in complete control. “I might have thought the two of you would have had the good grace to—”
“The two of us? Oh, you mean me and Ava? Us two, conspiring against you? Well, Ava didn’t tell me about the farm. The lawyers told me about the farm. They contacted me after going through her and finding, surprise-surprise, a brick wall.”
She blinked, disconcerted.
“Why wouldn’t they try to contact me?”
“Probably because your last name isn’t Hathaway.”
“Neither is yours,” she added maliciously.
“Legally it is, though, isn’t it, Mrs. McCulley?”
I noticed from the corner of my eye that Jane was behind us poised next to the kettle.
“So how did you find out?” I asked suddenly.
“My husband discovered it at an annual fundraiser.”
“Pardon?”
“Yes,” she said, resuming her clipped tones as she stared down at a manicured hand, splaying her fingers. “John went to a law society ball as part of a fundraiser for victims of some kind of leukemia, I forget. What I can’t forget is that one of his old friends happens to be a partner at the firm of Dermott and Harrison and over canapés and scotch, he managed to find out about the dissolution of the estate of one of their former and best clients, a case that was proving particularly troublesome as the owner had died and the last living descendants either refused to have anything to do with it or couldn’t be traced. He managed to find out enough for me to start making some calls and lo and behold what do I find?”
“I’m surprised you told him enough in the first place to let him.”
She raised her chin in defiance.
“I’m not here to go through that again.”
“Neither am I,” I said. All of a sudden I was tired.
For the first time since she arrived, for a second, the ice thawed around her and she softened her mouth.
“Why are you here?”
I could have told her, about Ava, about all of them, all the things I have kept hidden for years. I could have drawn her into my confidence, maybe this could even be the tool that undoes all the threads of bitterness she has allowed to form around us ever since the day when she sat in a pickup truck and was driven away by our uncle. But even I am at least self-aware enough to know the difference between a courageous moment and wishful thinking.
“I felt like coming home.”
She twisted her burgundy mouth into a sneer.
“Yeah, right.”
It’s ironic that Claudia should be so contemptuous of the idea, when if it wasn’t for her, there is a very good chance I would not have known Aurelia as home at all.
Theodore James Hathaway had gone to war in Vietnam in 1968. He was seen off at the bus depot by his parents and brother, who all hugged him individually but, aside from his mother, could not meet his eye. Nor did he wish them to. Though he knew as he sat down and the bus moved from under him that this could be the last time he ever saw his family, he did not wish to prolong their goodbye. The specter of his sister haunted them as much as any vicious spirit, her name burning on their tongues and in their minds in their efforts not to mention her, or the terrible scenes that had preempted the last week of his stay. He had leaned against the window and sighed. His companion had shot him a look of pity.
When he was shot by a sniper in the knee and right shoulder and discharged a year later he did not go back to Iowa. Instead, on his release he sent his family a letter, which he wrote on a train to New York telling them he would forward an address when he had one. It exhausted him to try and balance the tone between cordiality and falsifying an emotion he was not yet ready to feel. They received the letter and a month later another telling them that he was working as a clerk at Syracuse University and the address of his new basement room in a block of apartments. His mother sent him a care package, his aunt a knitted sweater for the New York winters, and so began for two years, the dance between avoidance and denial between my father and his family.
Theirs was a careful balance between what was expected and what was uncomfortable, all behind a mask of cold cordiality. They did not berate him for not coming home at Christmas and he did not ask why they did not visit. They did not push him for further news of when he would come home, and he glossed over the painful parts of their letters when they alluded to the aftermath of Julia’s actions. They did not probe each other, they did not test their sores and, aside from when he remembered where he had come from, my father learned once again how to be happy. He began to build a life for himself in New York, even started taking night classes in history. That was how he would eventually come to meet my mother, running into her in a hallway where she had signed up for classes in Italian language and literature. They had crossed paths on the way to their lessons and engaged in that oh-so-awkward he-goes-to-the-left-she-goes-to-the-left, he-moves-to-the-right-she-moves-to the-right dance, until my mother let out a peel of laughter at their collective clumsiness, and for the first time in a long time my father felt real warmth. He did not ask out the brown-haired girl in the yellow smock dress that day, even though her laugh struck a match in his soul, but he made sure to be in that corridor at the exact same time on the exact same day for the next two weeks so he could
see her again. One day as she walked past him and smiled, he scratched the back of his neck and finally asked her out for a coffee. That was it: no great romance, no thunderbolt, just the tender embrace of a gentle thaw where his heart used to be. My mother did not realize the effect she had had on him until the same thing started happening with her.
The life of Antonia Magdala Pincetti had always been in a state of flux. Her father couldn’t or wouldn’t hold down a job. He went through a veritable succession of careers—salesman, barman, chef—but the longest stretch of employment was as a clerk at the Italian embassy in Washington. This lasted for fifteen months and both she and her mother, Angela, believed that at last they had found the security they so desperately craved. But then her father began to take time off from work, until he stopped showing up at the offices altogether and then one day Angela received a telephone call telling her that her husband need not come in on Monday, though it was doubtful by then whether he’d ever had the intention of doing so.
As a result, Antonia moved around constantly. From Baltimore to Washington to New Jersey, until she came to New York when she was fourteen. Two weeks after arriving, her father got a job interview with a travel agency. The interview was at 2:00 p.m. He left at one sharp. Wearing his job-hunting suit, he gave Angela a kiss and borrowed twenty dollars for gas. He took their car, a weathered yellow jalopy, and waved goodbye to her through the window. They never saw him again. And my mother never forgave him for it.
Individually my parents were blighted with memories they longed to forget, yet when they were together, they were suddenly able to paper over the cracks their past had made and, astonishingly, let it hold. My mother told him she loved him on their fourth date. Three months later they were married and she fell pregnant with Claudia on their honeymoon in Quebec, where they had bought a blue-and-white-speckled tea set that I used to play with as a child in make-believe doll parties. My maternal grandmother, who died before I was born, and twenty of their friends were in attendance at the wedding. None of Theo’s family made it to the ceremony, though they sent them a set of very expensive silverware as a wedding present. Lavinia had picked it out.
My mother could not understand it, but there was a small, nearly imperceptible but still noticeable change that crept into my father’s voice and face that stopped her from ever questioning the facade of his relationship with his relatives in Iowa. She herself knew what it was like to carry the burden of home and so she let the matter rest, never calling into question why the halcyon tales of his childhood past stumbled into an impassive wall whenever he spoke of his family in the present. But even she would eventually reach her limits.
You see it was at her request that they came home. They were living in a tiny flat in Queens and my father had spun her such gold-threaded tales of life on Aurelia that when she looked down at my sister and at the meager contents of their flat, she couldn’t see why they were pursuing a life of hardship, when there was one of ample prosperity just waiting for them to come back and claim it.
But my father dragged his heels. Though he indulged her in everything (which was not hard because my mother never asked for much), he stalled at this. It was hard for him to tell her that he was afraid to go back. She may have seen the peeling paint of their living room and the oversize closet they turned into a nursery and pained at these things, but when he thought of Aurelia, he did not see the house on the mound but the blood of a white Kansas Thoroughbred running in streams across the dust floor of the stable. Home was not home to him anymore. A lot had happened since he’d been away.
For the first time since they had known each other my parents argued. All she could see was what they did not have and all that they could with my father acting as a barrier in between. But how could he tell her of the scene that had occurred just before he left? That his sister was the town whore, who if she’d been a common streetwalker, would have commanded more respect? That he had watched as she had been taken away by his aunt to where he did not know, only he was sure that she would never come back. She was to be, as my grandmother later put it, “shunned.” Quickly tales of her wantonness had spread around the town. Cal, at Lavinia’s insistence, took out a restraining order against his daughter. There were threats she would come back for her son, but Jess—passive, unsure Jess—who had not come to the house since that night, came out of his self-imposed isolation and threatened to kill her if she ever stepped foot on Aurelia or near Cal Jr. again. For once Julia cowered before the seemingly docile musician she had once coveted, perhaps realizing for the first time that her poison had spread through more lives than just her own.
For Jess was wounded badly. Humiliated, deceived, disgusted. It was more than what his wife had done; it was what he had given up for her in the first place. He had made himself into the type of husband and father that in the end was acceptable for nothing more than a whore. Those were his words. So he began drinking heavily, until the house, as my grandmother noted whenever she came to visit, was littered with bottles. There was barely any food but there was more than enough liquor. He could hardly look at his son anymore. Piper took care of him. She was afraid, she said, to leave the boy with Jess, but his grandfather could barely look at Cal Jr. any more than his own father, so she could not have him to stay in the house as she would have liked.
A few months after Julia had gone, just before Christmas, there had been an “incident.” Cal Jr. had ended up in hospital. There had been a grave fear that he would not survive intact. He had had a broken arm, cracked ribs and a mass of contusions to his head that left him unconscious, and in intensive care for a week. He was only three years old. The police had been called as he was placed in intensive care and Jess, when they found him, was slumped at the wheel of his car two and a half miles away outside a titty-bar, his knuckles covered in his son’s blood, snoring loudly as he clutched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to his chest. He was charged with grievous assault but my grandmother persuaded the police to drop the charges. She gave Jess five thousand dollars and a legal document that forfeited all of his parental rights. He left town and they did not hear from him again, though his parents had gone to see Cal Jr. in the hospital. Afterward his father had had to excuse himself to be sick. Jess would never come back to our town. My grandfather had threatened to lynch him if he did. At the hospital he stabbed his finger in the air at Jess’s father over the bed of his comatose grandson, and then drew it in a line across his neck.
Nobody informed Julia of what had happened.
But Julia did not try to claim Cal Jr.
Though no one in the family was allowed to contact her or have anything to do with her (even Piper, who raged and howled at her brother, but was told she would be turned out if she so much as breathed his daughter’s name again), Julia did not try to assail the walls of silence her family had built against her. It led some to believe in time that this was the opportunity she was looking for. She got to leave, to finally escape her marriage and her son. Though she lost everything she had, in some quarters there was a deep-rooted bitterness that perhaps in the end, she had still won after all.
In the end, to everyone’s surprise, it was my grandmother who proposed that Cal Jr. come to live with them in the white house. My grandfather had been reluctant at first but Lavinia insisted. She hired decorators and remade a room for him especially. She nursed him when he came out of the hospital, and she attended to his every need. Her sister-in-law did not know what to make of it. Until that moment Lavinia had never shown any interest in her grandson, but it was as if none of that had occurred. She took him to her as if he had always been her own and my grandfather, out of his own deep-rooted guilt, did not question it; he let her have her way and an exhausted Piper did not try to intervene. I think losing Julia had hit her the hardest out of everyone, though no one would have cared to find out. I remember how even as a child whenever she dared to mention her niece’s name to me that lick of love would still slide into her voice and mouth. She had been the child Piper nev
er had while she was there, but none of those rights existed once Julia had been sent away from the farm. If the two remained in contact no one knew it, but losing her broke my great-aunt in a way nothing had before or ever would. She grieved for her until the day she died. But even when she asked for her as she was dying, my grandfather would not allow his daughter to come and visit. As far as I know, no one ever told her that Piper was dead, though I’m sure somehow she would have discovered it and mourned the death of the one person who had truly loved her from a stranger’s distance.
As for Ethan, he had married none other than the daughter of his neighbor, Georgia-May Healy, a sweet but plain girl who was as unlike Ethan and, more importantly, as unlike Allie as it was possible to be. At first Theo would not believe it until he saw the wedding photo. But there his brother was, dressed in a suit so black it looked like he was attending a funeral. He was frowning at the camera. The sight of Georgia-May clutching onto his brother’s arm in nervous excitement made my father shiver when he saw it.
My mother could not understand his reaction. “Don’t you like her?” she’d asked, but he had shaken his head unable to explain. He could only say that during Ethan’s proposal, his brother had raised the point that at least in marrying him she wouldn’t have to change her initials. After that my mother did not need to press him further. My father recognized instantly that when Georgia-May’s father died the dairy farm would be joined onto Aurelia’s ever expanding estate. The Healys had more than survived the first year Lavinia had estimated and she had been delighted at the opportunity to align the two farms. My father had not liked the thought but it would not leave him, no matter how many times he had batted it away.
