Oh William!, page 6
A tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt.
It has stayed snapped, it never grew back.
I began to write more truthfully after that.
“Mom,” said Becka into my phone—I was walking down the street to the drugstore the day after having seen William in his apartment—“Mom, what the fuck?” So I knew he had told her about Estelle.
“I know,” I said. I walked over to a bench on the sidewalk and sat down.
“What the fuck?” Becka said again. “Mom, that poor man! Mom!”
“I know, honey,” I said. I watched through my sunglasses people going past me, but I did not really see them. Then my phone buzzed and it was Chrissy calling. “Chrissy’s calling,” I said to Becka, “hold on a minute.” Then I pushed the green circle and Chrissy said to me, “Mom, I can’t believe this! I just can’t believe it!”
“I know,” I said.
It was like that, the girls went back and forth with me about the outrage against their father, and I was calm and spoke to them both, and when they both asked me “Is he going to be okay?” I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself—except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay? I said, “He’s still reasonably young, and he’s very healthy, and he’s going to be fine.”
Within a week Chrissy had ordered a bed and a bureau for Bridget and she also bought new rugs. “They’re much prettier,” she said. “They really lighten the place up.” She’s a wonderful person, Chrissy. She has always taken charge.
In three more weeks, Chrissy called and said, “Mom, we’re going to have dinner with Dad at his place. We’d like it if you came.”
I think I have to mention this, although I have said I would not talk about David, but I think you should know:
When I say I had no home except for William, this is true. David—I told you this before—had been a Hasidic Jew growing up poor right outside of Chicago. But he had left that community at the age of nineteen and he had been ostracized and he had no contact with his family until almost forty years later when his sister got in touch with him. What you need to know is that he and I had this in common: We had, neither one of us, been raised with the outside culture of the world. Neither of us had grown up with a television in the house. We had only a vague knowledge of the Vietnam War, until we taught it to ourselves later on; we had never learned—because we had never heard—the popular songs of the time we grew up in, we had not seen movies until we were older, we did not know the idioms that were used in common language. It is hard to describe what it is like when one is raised in such isolation from the outside world. So we became each other’s home. But we—both of us felt this way—we felt that we were perched like birds on a telephone wire in New York City.
But let me just say one more thing about this man—!
He was a short man, and a childhood accident had left him with one hip higher than the other and so he walked slowly and with a severe limp. And he was—being not tall—slightly overweight. What I mean is that he looked as different from William—almost—as a person could look. And I had none of the reaction I had when I had married William. I mean that David’s body was always a tremendous comfort to me. David was a tremendous comfort to me. God, was that man a comfort to me.
When I walked into William’s apartment that night to have dinner with the girls and him, I was surprised that the girls’ husbands were not there, and I said so, and Becka said, smiling, “We left them home.”
It was true that the place looked a great deal better, and I walked through it and exclaimed on everything Chrissy had done. (The vase on the mantel was gone.) And William looked better, though when he bent to kiss my cheek he gave a sigh and squeezed my arm, and I understood it to mean he was doing this for the girls, so they could see that he was all right. The girls both cooked, and the four of us sat in the kitchen—Estelle had left behind the round kitchen table—and William had two glasses of red wine, which he almost never had—I mean, William almost never drank is what I mean. And there was this:
It was unbelievably easy for me to be there. I think we all felt that. It was like a moment out of time, and the four of us were thrust back into the old rhythms that we had had when we were a family; I felt absolutely relaxed, is part of what I am saying. And the three of them seemed that way too. It was remarkable how easy it was for us. I looked at all three of them, and their faces seemed shiny with a kind of happiness.
We spoke of old friends that we had known as a family, we spoke of how Becka had dyed strips of the front of her hair purple for a year when she was a teenager. We told the story, as we had so many times, of how Chrissy, sitting in her car seat one day in the summer—she was three years old—listened to her father, who had pulled the car over because she would not stop fussing, and he had pointed a finger at her and said, “Now you listen to me, you are starting to piss me off,” and then Chrissy leaned forward and she said to her father, “No, you listen to me. You are starting to piss me off.” We all loved that story, and I added, as I always had when it was told, “Your father looked at me, and I looked at him, and then he just started to drive again. We knew who had the power after that.” Chrissy, so grown-up now, seemed to blush with the pleasure of this. We spoke of how when they were little we had taken them to Disney World in Florida and Chrissy choked with laughter as she remembered how scared Becka had been at Captain Hook when during the parade he’d stopped and thrust his sword at her. “I was not,” Becka said, and we all told her yes, she was. “You were nine years old,” Chrissy said, “and you acted like you were three!” And Becka laughed, tears coming into her eyes.
“She was eight,” William corrected Chrissy. “She was eight years old.”
We stayed in the kitchen, and we laughed and we were happy. Then Becka glanced at the time and she said, “Oh, I have to go—”—her face falling with sudden sadness—and then Chrissy said she had to go too; I glanced at William, and he looked at me and he said, “You go too, Lucy. Now.” He stood up. “All of you, out, I’ll clean up. Go.” And he smiled in a way that made me feel he knew he would be okay and I think the girls felt that as well, and so as we started out of the kitchen Becka suddenly turned and said, “Family hug?” And William and I glanced at each other briefly, a little bit I think like we had been stabbed, because when the girls were very little we would sometimes say “Family hug?” and the four of us would squeeze together in a hug. And we did that now, only the girls were grown, and Chrissy is taller than I am, but we all hugged and then I turned and said, “Okay, everyone, come on,” and we went then, the three of us down in the elevator, and when we got to the street Becka had tears seeping from her eyes, and I put my arm around her, and she began to really cry for a minute, and Chrissy looked serious, and then I said, “Take that cab right there, girls, go—”
And then when I got into my own cab a few minutes later I began to cry. The cabdriver said, “Are you okay?” And I told him no, I had lost my husband.
“So sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “So very sorry,” he said.
There is this about my own mother:
I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. When I took William to meet my parents she took me outside right away and said, “Get that man out of here, he is upsetting your father!” And so we left. It had to do, she said, with the fact that William was German, and apparently to my father’s eyes William looked German, and it brought back to him many memories of the war and how bad it had been for him. So William and I got into William’s car and we drove away.
That day, as we drove, I told William about a few of the things that had happened to me in that tiny house—and earlier in the garage, which William did not know about until that day—and he stayed silent and just kept looking at the road ahead of him. Over the next few years I told him more; he is the only person who has ever known about everything that went on in that tiny house, and the garage before that, that I was raised in.
My mother—because William paid for her to come—came to New York City a number of years later when I was in the hospital for an appendectomy that had made me sicker than it should have and she stayed with me for five nights and it was extraordinary that she did that. It was unbelievable. It made me understand that she loved me. But she never, before the visit or after the visit, would accept a collect telephone call from me, which I sometimes tried to do when I missed her. She would tell the operator, “That girl has money now and she can spend it.” But I did not have money then, we were young and just starting out and William only had a postdoctoral.
This does not matter.
What matters is that I went to see my mother a few years after she had come to see me, she was dying in a hospital in Chicago, and I went to see her and she asked me to leave. So I left.
For a long—very long—time, I have believed that she loved me. But when my husband was ill, and then after he died, I have wondered if she did. I think this was because my love with David was so very present. And so I have grown somewhat constricted in my heart about my mother—at times.
My brother lives alone in the house we grew up in. My sister lives in a town nearby, and she and my brother and I met once not so many years ago, and we all agreed that my mother had not been quite right.
I speak to my siblings once a week on the telephone. But for many years we never spoke at all.
I tell myself my mother loved me. I think she did in whatever way was possible for her. As that lovely woman psychiatrist said once, “The Wish never dies.”
Catherine had taken up golf at the country club she joined after William’s father died. She played with the same group of women each week. And she taught William how to play golf, although when I met him at college he did not play golf, I mean I never saw him or heard him talk about playing golf. But when we moved back East he played golf with his mother, and the first time they went to play I thought it was like tennis and they would be back in an hour or two. They arrived back more than five hours later and I was so angry—where had they been? And they kind of laughed and said, Lucy, that’s how long golf takes.
That year—right before we got married—Catherine arranged for me to have a golf lesson. She took me to a shop at the country club and bought me a golf skirt, it was short and reddish, and she bought me golf shoes, and I felt so strange, I really felt so strange. And then the “pro,” as he was called, gave me a lesson, and I wanted to cry, I couldn’t stand it that much. But I kept trying to swing and I did not do too well, and when Catherine showed up to get me I think she must have seen my distress. Because I overheard her whisper to William when we went into the club to have lunch, “I think this has all been too much for her.”
My birthday was soon after, and Catherine asked me what I would like. I said I would like a gift certificate to a bookstore. The idea of going into a bookstore and buying a few books was unbelievably exciting for me. On my birthday she took me out to the garage and showed me a thing with golf clubs in it. Her face shone with light. “Happy birthday,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Your own golf set.”
I never once played golf.
But Estelle played golf; she and William played golf together in Montauk and also out in Larchmont, where Estelle’s mother lived. And even Joanne played, I remembered this as I sat watching the river a few days after we had all had dinner at William’s.
I checked on William about a week later and he said, “I’m okay,” and he said that Bridget had come to stay a few nights, and we hung up. I thought: Okay, I will not call him again; he had been slightly dismissive of me, I felt.
But a few weeks after that—it was almost the end of August by then—he called at night and he said that he was thinking about this woman, Lois Bubar, his half-sister, and whether or not he should contact her. So we talked about that; he said he wanted to reach out to her because time was running out and they were related to each other, but he didn’t want to because what if she hated him? She would certainly hate his mother. “I don’t know what to do, Lucy,” he said. Then he said, “Do the girls know about this?”
And I said, “I never told them, did you?”
And he said, “No, I just figured you would.”
And I said, “Well, I thought it was your thing to tell.”
“Okay,” he said.
He hung up.
Five minutes later he called back, and he said, “Lucy, will you go to Maine with me?”
I was surprised; I didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” William said. “Let’s just go up to Maine for a few days—next week. Let’s just do that, Lucy. We’ll go up and see what it looks like where this happened. I have the address of where Lois Bubar lives now, let’s just go look.”
“Just look?” I asked. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t either,” William said.
There is this about trips:
Catherine is the one who took us on vacations. I mean where people sit in the sun around the pool on a Caribbean island. The first trip she took us on, we had just been married. Catherine organized everything; the three of us went to the Cayman Islands. I had only been on one airplane before, and that was when William flew me East my senior year in college. I could not believe that I was sitting in the sky, and I had to act nonchalant about it, and I tried to. But it was astonishing.
At least for the trip to the Cayman Islands I had that one plane ride already behind me so I could act natural, or feel sort of natural. But as soon as we got off the plane and stepped out into the blinding sunshine and then took a van to the hotel, I felt quietly horrible. I had no idea—no idea at all—what to do: how to use the hotel key, what to wear to the pool, how to sit by the pool (I had never learned to swim). And everyone there seemed so sophisticated to me, everyone else knew exactly what they were doing; dear God, I was petrified! Bodies were splayed about in the lounge chairs, slathered with greasy stuff that made their skin shine in the sun. Someone’s hand would go up and a ponytailed waitress would appear in shorts and take their drink order; how did they all know what to do? I feel invisible—as I have said—and yet in that situation I had the strangest sensation of both being invisible and yet having a spotlight on my head that said: This young woman knows nothing. Because I did know nothing. And William and his mother pulled up lounge chairs together and sat in them facing the wide ocean before William turned to see where I was, and he waved his arm for me to go over to them. “Lucy,” said Catherine, “what’s the matter?” She had a canvas hat on with a wide brim. Her sunglasses were directed at me. I said, “Nothing.” I said I would be back out soon, and I went to our room—though I got lost and was on the wrong part of the floor for a while—and when I got into our room I cried and cried. And I don’t think either of them ever knew this.
Except when I went back out to them as they were lying in their lounge chairs, Catherine was very kind to me, and she took my hand, and she said, “I think this is too much for you.”
Catherine’s room was next to ours, and each room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a little patio, and the furniture was a light beige and the walls were white. From our room I could hear Catherine going in or out to her patio; I could hear the sliding glass door. At night I begged William to be quiet when we made love; it alarmed me to think of his mother right there. In that tiny house I grew up in I had heard my parents’ sexual noises almost nightly, and they were horrifying, appalling high-pitched sounds my father made. I slept very badly that week in the Cayman Islands.
Once the girls were born, I would watch them by the pool, and Catherine would sit next to William and they talked. One time I said to Catherine, “When you were young, did you go on trips like these?” She was reading a magazine and she put it down on her chest and looked straight ahead at the ocean. “No, never,” she said. She picked her magazine back up.
I always hated those trips. I hated every one of them.
One time—we may have been married for five years or so—we took a trip at Thanksgiving to Puerto Rico and we stayed at a place much fancier than the hotel on Grand Cayman, with lots of green grass around it and a huge swimming pool, and then the ocean out in front. Maybe because it was Thanksgiving, I don’t know why, but I missed my parents awfully, I even missed my brother and sister. And I collected quarters—I went to the man at the front desk and got as many as I could without telling William or Catherine—and I made a phone call by the long bank of payphones; they were lined up in an area of the lobby that was sort of private, and there was mahogany wood behind all these payphones. And I called home, and my father answered. He sounded very surprised to hear me, and I did not blame him; I very seldom called my parents. He said, “Your mother’s not home,” and I said, “That’s okay, Daddy, don’t hang up.”
And he said, nicely, “Are you okay, Lucy?”
And I said, I blurted it out, I said, “Daddy, we’re in Puerto Rico with William’s mother and I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do in a place like this!”
And my father, after a moment, said, “Is it pretty there, Lucy?”
I said, “I guess so.”
