I followed Helen into the sitting room, which doubled as a dining room. We arranged ourselves on either side of a foldout table that was usually a resting place for papers but now held our meal: spaghetti with red sauce on mismatched plates.
As if it mattered what she served. There were some authors — Mitchell among them — who could build a scene around food. They found significance in under-buttered rolls and improperly folded napkins; they found lyricism in crisp baguettes, soft white cheese, dry red wine, and the dry witticisms exchanged over that dry red wine. I guessed they were slow eaters — how else could they have observed so much? — whereas I consumed so quickly that I didn’t really notice anything except, in this particular case, that the cook had used too much salt and that my dining companion was a partisan of the spoon-support technique for pasta. When I was learning how to feed myself, no one had suggested that method and it still seemed exotic, more foreign than chopsticks.
I so looked forward to eating; not just at Helen’s, in general. But eating itself was routinely disappointing because it never lasted long enough and the end was always in sight, always quantifiable: ten more bites, five more bites, two more bites, maybe three if I was careful. The period of satiation was painfully brief. Then began the countdown to the next feeding. Hours spent waiting for lunch, and then minutes to consume it. Hours spent waiting for dinner, and then a few more minutes to consume it.
Cooking anything in the least bit complicated came to seem futile, as silly as and perhaps sillier than spending money — which everyone said was the same as time — on an outfit I would wear only once. The outfit, once worn, would find its way to a closet and later a trash heap. The meal, once eaten, would find its way to a toilet and later a sewer. For these reasons I subsisted mostly on Pop-Tarts.
All that said, it was pleasant to have a hot meal for a change, and someone to talk to across the table, someone who listened patiently as I described, in greater detail than was strictly necessary, my usual dining habits, which I compared to my family’s more formal habits when I was young. Back home, we’d eaten well and we’d eaten carefully, with two or three forks and two or three knives and the water glass and the wineglass placed just so, the multiple courses brought out just when. I felt a little guilty, a little ashamed of my casual degeneracy, but Helen laughed away my concerns. She had a full laugh. A warm, soothing, affirming, seductive laugh, nothing like Evelyn’s high-pitched giggle, Evan’s conceited guffaw, or Professor Davidoff’s silent shoulder-shake.
Degeneracy, to Helen, was just another word for liberation. I should do exactly as I pleased. It was absurd to do anything else. Although she wished I were more capable of enjoying something so simple as food.
“Don’t worry that it’s futile, dear,” she said, helping me to seconds. “Most things are.”
We let the dishes fester and retired to a lumpy couch in the same room. Helen fetched a family photo album, one of those old-fashioned, leather-bound books filled with self-adhesive pages that had lost much of their stick. The spine read Milford, the Connecticut town where Helen had grown up. Side by side we waded in. On the first page were pictures of baby Helen crying, smiling, eating, crawling, sleeping, pointing at wooden toys — the gamut of infant actions — held aloft, held in arms, held on laps, thrown high into the air. She’d been an ugly baby: scrawny, bald, and splotchy.
“That’s my father, Thomas,” Helen said of a fair-skinned man looking out of the frame as little Helen tugged on his sleeve. “He was a psychiatrist. And my mother, Edith, who stayed at home.” She was the standard white middle-class housewife, from the updo to the pumps. “My nanny, Valeria” — a Latin lady in a cornflower-blue apron. “She made me hot chocolate with marshmallows every day after school, using milk, whole milk, never water. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, Robert” — scowling, wild hair, thin face. “He lived not too far away, in Concord, where my father and Freddy were raised. My father got along with Robert well, he took after him, but he was a difficult man, extremely demanding. Anyway, I guess I’m boring you. You said you wanted to learn more about Freddy, so let’s skip to the Freddy years. My uncle wasn’t around when I was small.”
“He must have been in Europe then,” I said, drawing on my library research.
She nodded, neither surprised nor impressed by my knowledge.
“I met him when I was about fourteen. Well, I’d met him as a newborn but I don’t remember that.” Helen chuckled. “He came to visit, thinking he’d stay just a short while to get his bearings. He’d run out of money. But he never left.”
“I didn’t realize he lived with you.”
“Right up until he died, about four years. Though I was at boarding school for part of that time.”
Langley — I couldn’t bring myself to call him Freddy, not even in my thoughts — did not seem eager to smile for the camera. His longish hair had gone gray. Not a nice gray either, more like wet-squirrel color. Broken capillaries crept across his nose.
“Well?” Helen asked.
“What?”
“Well, don’t we look alike?”
They did not.
“Yes, the similarity is striking.”
Helen beamed, flashing her sharp little teeth.
“Here’s one where you can really see the family resemblance. Our nose and ears are just the same.”
Judging from Langley’s dazed expression, he’d been surprised by the photographer. He sat on his unmade bed, legs extended, back against a pillow, a beer resting precariously on his lap, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. Slovenly. There was something strange about the proportions of the space around Langley, at least as captured on film.
“The ceiling looks slanted,” I said.
“He slept in the attic. My parents offered him a perfectly nice spare room. But he chose up there. He was a cliché.”
She stated this matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary way to describe a human being. He was a baseball fan. He was a journalist. He was a father of three. He was a cliché.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“How much do you know about my uncle, Anna?” she asked.
“Whatever’s in Freddy Remembered.”
“In that case, you know next to nothing. No one in my family had any interest in working with an official biographer — so nosy! — much less participating in a trivial oral history. The people rustled up for that collection — their impressions were stuck in the 1960s,” she said bitterly. “They thought of him as a gifted college boy. By the time he moved in with my parents, he was washed up. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him. He was nice to me. He doted on me, gave me pocket money. Even as a girl, though, I could tell something was off. He’d stay cooped up in the attic for days at a time. Do you understand? That’s what I mean when I say he was a cliché.”
Helen kept flipping pages. Langley in front of a birthday cake, grinning and bearing it; Langley and Thomas playing cards, grinning and bearing it; Thomas mowing the lawn with Langley looking on from the front steps, grinning and bearing it. Langley’s lackluster attitude prompted me to ask the question that had been nagging at me since the library.
“Why did your uncle stop writing after Omega?”
“He didn’t.”
“But —”
“He didn’t. Well, for a long while he did. He’d just had enough, as far as I could tell. Then he started again.