Finally Lou turned to his wife and asked, “Is this true?”
Anne-Marie nodded.
“And do you want to go with him?”
Anne-Marie paused and then nodded again.
“Well …” said Lou and he stood up from the table, went into the living room and shut the door.
Cal stared at where he had gone and then said quickly, “Get your things.”
She was finished in twenty minutes. She had made a mental inventory weeks ago and made sure everything that was needed would be ready. She came down the stairs carrying her overcoat and a single suitcase.
“Do you want to speak to him?” asked Cal.
Anne-Marie gave him her suitcase. “I’ll see you in the car,” she said firmly.
Cal hesitated, but she had already opened the door to the living room.
In the car he waited for ten minutes drumming his fingers against the wheel. Eventually the front door of the house opened and in a moment she climbed in beside him.
Without saying a word they drove home and that was when my grandmother finally stopped being Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife, and came to be known as Lavinia Hathaway: adulterer, whore, monster … victor.
That is where my grandfather used to finish this story. That was where everyone finished the story, but that was not the end.
As they stopped at some traffic lights, my grandmother said very quietly but clearly, “If you ever hit me again, I’ll stab you while you sleep.”
My grandfather nodded in answer and when the lights went green, drove on.
5
TODAY I PULLED OUT THE SUITCASE FROM THE top of my wardrobe and lay it open on the bed. Then I made myself a drink.
I packed some clothes, my diary and a list of phone numbers, and went about the business of trying to organize my life for the next few weeks. I made a checklist of things to do: people to call to let them know I was going away; to change my voice mail; to go through the fridge and throw out all perishables that would otherwise greet me with a noxious aroma on my return. I got to the end of the page and tapped my pen against the pad for a few minutes and waited.
I don’t know what I was waiting for, but after a while I realized that my refusal to stand up and start getting on with things was less a willful act than an inability. Try as I might, I couldn’t move. I sat there feeling the weight of my legs anchor me to the floor. Time passed and I knew I had things to do. I saw the list on the notepad staring at me with reproach, but my body refused to cooperate. For the first time in my life my head was saying yes, but the rest of me was saying no, and there was nothing that I could do about it.
And suddenly I was reminded of my mother. She went through an exacerbated version of this when my father died. She didn’t emerge from her room for a month. After the funeral, she washed and cleaned the house, set out the breakfast things for the following morning, then went upstairs to her room and undressed before she climbed into her bed and then didn’t get out of it again.
Piper came to attend to her with my uncle’s wife, Georgia-May, but it was my grandmother who saw to me and my sisters. She moved us into the main house. There was no discussion, no preamble, she simply showed up at our home the day after the funeral and waited in the kitchen as we each packed a bag and then followed her up the long drive. She cooked breakfast, got us ready for school, watched over us as we did our chores and homework: she was faultless. During that month she took sole responsibility for our welfare. My grandfather helped, of course, but my father’s death hit him hard. I think it if weren’t for the fact that my mother had gotten there first, he would have taken to his bed just as she did.
The only thing that we really hated during that time was that we were not permitted to see Mom. That was Lavinia’s wish. She batted aside our questions with such ferocity that in the end we stopped asking. Once Claudia snuck away, when Lavinia was busy with our grandfather, who had drunk all the whiskey in the house and then tried to drive into town for some more. Claudia walked down to our home in the middle of the afternoon, but whatever it was that she saw or heard there, it caused her to lock herself up in her room when she came back and no matter how much Ava and I pushed and pressed her, she refused to tell us anything about it. In the end, because I wouldn’t leave her alone, she slapped me across the mouth and pushed me out the door. After that, at Ava’s request, I stopped asking her. We’ve never spoken to her about it since.
That was such a strange time, living with my grandparents. That was the first time I really began to see what being a Hathaway meant. Instead of sitting down for meals in our scrubbed kitchen, dinner was a stiff-backed affair every evening at the long polished oak table with triangles of white cloth and china plates with patterns of blue swallows around the rim. Instead of the eight rooms I was accustomed to in my house, I now had twenty-two. The finest linens were on our beds, fresh flowers were in every vase (of which there were plenty) and various newspaper clippings, framed and placed on the walls, were interspersed with the customary family portraits.
Piper caught me staring at them once. She smiled and smoothed her hand down my braid. “Hard to believe sometimes,” she said. “Things used to be so different when I was your age.”
I was not the only one awakened to my social status by our time there. Claudia came to learn of our position in quite a different manner. Our grandmother’s way of trying to help us in our grief was to talk about my father, not how my mother would come to talk of him, as a man, but as part of a legacy: a legacy cut short that we must now take up.
“Make him proud,” she’d say. And Claudia would look up at her so eagerly, her brow became knotted with confusion.
“How, Grandma?”
“Remember who you are. Remember what your last name is.” She leaned back and smiled. As if that were the key to everything. As if we had been born to a world of unlocked doors where everything that lay behind them was there for the taking. Claudia would come to think so and look what happened to her. But if we had been smart enough, we would have remembered our mother in her bed, utterly devastated by the loss of her husband, and known that our name was just a name: it gave us no magical protection; it had no divine right.
As I sit here in my chair, I wonder if this was how my mother must have felt immediately after my father’s death. I can understand now, how during that time her body was acknowledging a fact her mind hadn’t been able to process, which I believe was this: that she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been in her life, of what was before her, of what she had to do and even more so that she had to do it alone. I know this because that is exactly what I am feeling now.
“We are all alone,” my grandmother had told me once. “No one feels our aches with us, or our pains or our joys. We are like islands floating in a sea together but that’s all, we are still just islands, so close we can touch each other, smell each other, but always from a distance.”
It is strange that it is her voice I remember now, not my mother’s comforting arms when we finally came home, or how she held us and buried her face in our hair and told us she would never leave us again. No, it is not this I think about; it is my grandmother’s words instead. I hear them strung out through the notes of her voice as I sit at my desk. They go around and around my mind in a continuous loop while the light outside seeps from pearl to gray.
A few weeks after her Decree Absolute came through, my grandparents stood in the courthouse and were married. There is only one remaining photograph of that day. It would come to sit in a frame of dark wood on a small chest of drawers in the entrance hallway. My grandfather stands there stiffly, his arm wound about my grandmother’s waist. He is squinting at the camera, though it is difficult to tell because the picture is so grainy. My grandmother is not looking at the camera: she is turned away, her face buried into her new husband’s chest. To the casual observer she looks adoring, overwhelmed with love. In truth she was fighting a bout of nausea that had been plaguing