The love letter, p.16
The Love Letter, page 16
In the program there were ads for antique clothing calling on cats and chicks to be groovy, ads for records and concerts by Procol Harem, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Butterfield Blues Band, Jeff Beck, Jefferson Airplane, the Incredible String Band, Vanilla Fudge. Helen read the names out loud.
“I saw Dylan,” she said. “I saw Janis Joplin. I saw Cream.”
“Did you get stoned, trip on LSD, all that?”
“Well...”
“Afraid of corrupting me? Setting a bad example? I already took LSD, Helen. It sucked. I thought my tongue was really long. What a mom you are. But luckily you’re not my mom!” He grabbed her and kissed her. “Did you go to Woodstock? I saw the movie.”
“No. I was in the hospital. Car crash.”
She remembered waking up in a small room. Her grandmother sat beside her, holding her hand. A vase of yellow tulips sat on the windowsill, which she could see out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t move her head. She felt her face, felt the line of stitches running along her jaw, a smaller one on her forehead. She wondered if her favorite belt had been ruined, if her jeans, the tightest and most worn pair she had, were lost. If she would miss Woodstock.
“Who were you writing to?” she said to Johnny, looking at the sheet of paper still on his stomach.
“My mom and dad.”
She picked up the letter. He didn’t protest.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I hope you’re still having a good time. Everything here is under control. So don’t feel rushed. If you’re having fun, feel free to stay on longer. I can man the fort, so to speak. Do you remember where you left the keys to the Volvo, by the way? Just wondering. Did you get the mail I forwarded? The weather has finally calmed down. It’s not raining. It’s not jungle hot. The wild raspberries are out. I’m getting some work on my paper done. The librarian is quite a character. My job is okay still. Miss you. But don’t feel you have to come home right away. Or anything.
Love,
Johnny
She thought of her friends, Mark and Vivian Howell, Johnny’s parents, Johnny Howell’s parents far away in Texas reading this letter, and it was as if she had written a letter to them herself: My good friends, I am happy and thriving, and all thanks to you! What a surprise! What an adventure. I am “educating” your little boy! He’s not so little, either! He’s in good hands, too, my hands, and I’m doing my very best. You don’t mind, do you? Everyone who’s been with me I’ve made happy. That’s what the seventy-year-old countess said, and I’m only forty-two. He’s a lovely boy. Delicious. I know how much you love him. I have a child, after all. I’ll treat him as if he were my own son. The dear old Oedipus theory.
“Oh God,” she said.
“What? Bad letter?”
“Your parents. Your poor parents. I’ve betrayed them. I’ve betrayed myself as a parent.”
“Helen, I’m not a child. And you’re not my mother.”
“They’ll never forgive me. Except that they’ll never know. Unless they guess. My mother always guessed everything. They’ll read that letter and think, English translation: Don’t come home! I’m doing something you wouldn’t approve of! I’ve been seduced by that awful Helen who stomps around in blue jeans and can’t bear to grow old.” Helen laughed. “They’ll be home like a flash.”
“You’re not old,” he said without much conviction,
“I’m old and wise in the ways of the world. That’s why you like me, darling.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” He kissed her. “Do you really think they’ll rush home? Will they know?’’
Soon she’d be getting letters like that from Emily. Would she know? If she knew, what would she do? She put her arms around Johnny. Freud’s letter to Fliess. George had gone to his bookcase to find it. He read it to his guests: “I can now understand the riveting power of Oedipus Rex,” Freud wrote. Oh, so can I, Helen thought. Or is it the riveting power of Johnny himself? Or of youth; or my own age, a force majeure, driving me to this boy beside me, his head on my breast? So improbable, so inevitable. She kissed his hand, the one that held the peach.
“In that Trilling book,” he said comfortably from her breast. “Why is everyone always so mad at everyone else? Are they all crazy?”
Am I going to have to explain anti-Communism and anti-anti-Communism to my little lover? Helen thought.
“This peach is awesome,” he added, and held it out for her to bite.
Awesome. Instead of cringing, as she once would have, she let the echo resound in her head, music, a song that only Johnny could sing. Johnny. So young. Sometimes he said, “I’m like really psyched.” Sometimes he said, “So she goes, ‘Johnny!’ and I’m like, ‘Jennifer!’” He said things were excellent. He misused the word hopefully and overused the word totally. She, who interrupted complete strangers to correct their usage, wanted to correct nothing. How many men had she tried to change, to mold, to dress, to educate? But when she looked at Johnny, when she held him in her arms, she wanted to whisper, Don’t change! I have no stake in you, no need to change you, no desire to mold you, to educate you. Dress you? I’d rather undress you. We don’t belong together. But you belong to me. I want you not as you might be. I want you as you are.
“Yes,” she said. “Awesome.”
***
Johnny lay beside her stroking her hair. Would his parents rush back? He remembered sitting on the stairs at home, Helen marching past him in nothing but his shirt, her legs brushing his face. Would he now see her, a demure friend of the family, sipping a glass of white wine in the living room, chatting about roses with his mother?
“When they come back,” he said to Helen, “don’t change.”
***
In the store, Johnny often found himself lingering in the poetry room reading love poems. At least, they were love poems to him. All poems are love poems, he thought. He read Wordsworth and Marvell and Keats and William Carlos Williams and Lowell and Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Edwin Denby, and Marianne Moore. He read whatever he happened to pull off the shelf. Linda Pastan and A. R. Ammons one day, Delmore Schwartz, Lloyd Schwartz, Harvey Shapiro, and Karl Shapiro the next. It was disorienting, and so struck him, disoriented as he was, as welcoming. He had no bearings, and caressed by the many breezes of language, he drifted and was comforted.
Helen, who usually spent any free moments in the narrow little room herself, now opened huge collections of letters instead whenever she had the chance. She scrutinized the mail, as well, examining typefaces, watermarks. He asked her about it, but she said only, “That letter, the one you ought not to have read, is something of a mystery. Mysteries annoy me.” Johnny often thought about the love letter himself. He could still see it lying in the shadows with the bottles of wine in her old black canvas bag. She had moved it to a drawer in the store and locked it up, and they had never really spoken of it. Once, he tried to ask her about it, and she said, “It was from no one to no one, and that makes it mine.” That’s all she would say. Even when he told her, “I wish it was from me, or from you to me,” she simply answered, “So do I.”
“Johnny,” Miss Skattergoods said one day, hollering from her Porsche, as he stood in the store’s open door. “Johnny,” she said when he went out to see what she wanted. She handed him a book. “Give this to your mistress. Don’t look so alarmed, dear. Your boss. She said she needed it for some horrible houseguest she’s having.”
“Oh. Yeah. Her mother’s coming.”
“Is she.”
“And grandmother.”
“Ah. And when do they arrive?”
“I guess tomorrow. Do you know them?”
“Do you ever really know anyone, Johnny? Stick to the lovely old past, don’t you think?” And she roared off.
Johnny carried the book inside and thought of the past. He himself hardly had a past. Was that why he loved the past? Other people’s pasts? But history wasn’t really the past at all—it was what could never age.
He handed the book over the counter to Helen.
“What next?” she asked him softly.
“Next?” he said. “Next is more.”
12
LILIAN AND ELEANOR arrived in a bottle green Jaguar. It was an old Jaguar, but like a new Jaguar it broke down regularly. Eleanor refused to sell it. She also refused to drive it, and Lilian was at the wheel.
Grandma Eleanor stepped from the car. “I’m here!” she said, holding her arms out, a cormorant on a post, a chorus girl taking a bow, a butterfly, a crucifix, Helen thought. A cross to bear.
“Grandma!” she said. “Mom!” she added, as her mother, a cigarette dangling from her lips, her dark glasses pushed up on her head, climbed from behind the wheel.
“Your grandmother is here,” Lilian said. “As she has noted. She’s here and she’s all yours. What you choose to do with her is your business. But may I suggest strangulation as a most satisfying option.” She slammed the car door and stormed, on her little feet in their little high-heeled mules (it was a diminutive but fierce storm), into the house.
“She dislikes having an aged parent,” Eleanor said in a bland, even voice. “Imagine how I feel. With an aged daughter.”
No wonder I’m such a bitch, Helen thought. Third-generation bitch. Nature and nurture, a conspiracy, a confederacy. Was little Emily also destined to this fate? Secretly Helen hoped so—she was proud of her grandmother, her mother, herself. But my poor Emily. Perhaps just this once, just this one generation could stay benign and sincere, perhaps she could stay at Camp Rolling Ridge, rolling over ridges until it was safe to come home, until she became an adult and home wasn’t home.
Helen hugged her grandmother. She could feel her white hair against her cheek, smell her cold cream, her make-up, the sweet waxy smell of lipstick, as Grandma Eleanor kissed her, leaving, as she had since Helen was a child, two garish pink streaks on her face. She experienced the familiar sensation of hugging her grandmother after a long absence, and yet the moment pulled away from her, shyly, like a dog from a stranger. Johnny, Helen thought. Where are you now? Staring out the window, your jaw slack, your eyes glazed? Rubbing Jennifer’s head for luck, your smile affectionate, contemptuous? Or are you selling one of my customers a book, looking up suddenly from the cash register with a flash of blue eyes?
Johnny, she thought, hugging her grandmother, then noticed over Grandma Eleanor’s shoulder a moving van pull into the driveway.
“A moving van is pulling into my driveway,” Helen said.
“I thought I might stay awhile,” Grandma Eleanor said.
“Here?”
“For a while.”
“A while?”
Lilian stuck her head out the door. “You’re insane,” she said to Grandma Eleanor.
“It’s genetic,” Grandma Eleanor said.
Helen took a deep breath. It’s not my house, she reminded herself. I like my mother. I like my grandmother. I haven’t seen them in a year. It’s not my house. She watched the screen door swing forcefully shut behind her mother. She smiled, happy at the familiarity of the sight.
Lilian was severe and short-tempered with a throaty voice. She smoked in the bath. When Helen was growing up, her mother treated her like an adult who, for reasons no one cared to go into, was too small to reach the light switches. Helen trailed around after her mother in a soft haze of half understanding. Adult conversations, thrilling and somehow important, surrounded her, as indecipherable and compelling as new art. Lilian, propped against the pillows, would gossip mercilessly and good-humoredly into the telephone. Lolling on the bed, at the foot like a lapdog, Helen listened contentedly to her mother’s side of the conversation.
Helen admired her mother, who either never stayed still or stayed absolutely still. As a youngish widow, she took up a desultory study of archaeology, which consisted mostly of visiting museums in European cities and going on digs in points farther east. She still traveled, having left a friend in every port. She had never thought in terms of a career. She didn’t need the money and didn’t seem to need the assurance of an academic post, or even an academic degree. She was a committed, energetic amateur. When she wasn’t globe-trotting, she lay in bed manning the phone, dispensing advice, which she could, and did, give out on nearly any subject—and if she turned out to be right, so much the better.
It impressed Helen that Lilian had maintained so many close friendships from her childhood, from college, from every stage of her life. Women who wouldn’t dream of speaking to each other all talked intimately to Lilian. The secret, Helen knew, was a combination of intelligence and interest. She, Helen, had inherited the intelligence.
My mother is interested in people. I am merely curious about them, Helen sometimes thought. Lilian regarded others as recipients of her energy, her counsel. She was imperious and generous. They were projects, her projects, and she worked hard at them. Helen saw this, saw the devotion it inspired in people, but she herself wanted only to let live and to live. She had escaped her mother’s attention, for which she was grateful. Lilian, busy with bossing her friends about, had simply accepted Helen as a kind of silent accomplice, a junior member of the board, nonvoting.
Lilian never stayed anywhere very long anyway, Helen reminded herself. Neither did Grandma Eleanor. But unlike Lilian, who traveled obsessively, visiting ape preserves in Kenya and digging up shards in Turkey, Eleanor did not travel—she moved. She had moved so many times that she was now quite expert at it. She knew her moving man. She called Atlas Van Lines every few years and asked for him by name, Joe Clancy. And Joe Clancy would drive up in his giant moving van and load the boxes. Eleanor kept empty boxes, labeled and waiting, in the attic or the basement, depending on the house she was in at that moment. Sometimes she moved because her present abode was getting too big for an old woman like her. Sometimes she moved because it was getting too small. Sometimes the north was too cold. Sometimes the south was too hot. The east too wet, the west too dry.
“I want to spend some time with my family,” she said now. “I’m getting older.” She lied about her age, shaving off five years. “Almost eighty-five, after all.”
“Mrs. Lasch!” It was the moving man, removing his baseball cap. He had a spiderweb tattoo on each elbow. “Welcome.”
“Did you have a good trip, Mr. Clancy? Next time I’ll travel with you. In the cab.”
“You’d be safe with me, Mrs. Lasch.”
“But would you be safe with me?” Grandma Eleanor shook her silver-handled cane at him.
“Maybe I should get a tattoo,” she said to Helen as they walked in the door of the house.
“Like my friend Lucy.”
“Like Cher.”
***
Lilian was short and boyish, as insouciant about clothes as her own mother, Grandma Eleanor, was—was what? Souciant, Helen decided. Lilian threw her clothes on, threw them off, tossed her sweater here, kicked her shoes there. There was always the suggestion of vigorous movement in her attire. Her clothes were good, expensive clothes, and they didn’t seem to mind her treatment of them. Like slumming debutantes, they were adventurous, reckless. Like Lilian herself. She and her Armani jackets appeared to have an understanding, not unlike an open marriage, a French arrangement.
“Coffee?” her mother said. She’d already found it, made it. She poured Helen a cup, and they stood at the sink, as if they were in a hurry, and Helen wondered again why her mother’s coffee, made with Helen’s beans and Helen’s machine, always tasted so much better than Helen’s coffee.
“You make the best coffee, Mom.”
Lilian smiled. Helen noticed a ring, a sapphire, round and unfaceted, a ring she’d never seen before on her mother’s left hand, on the finger with her wedding band.
“I never saw that. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful. When did you get that? I never saw that.”
Her mother shrugged. “It was made for me. Last year. You like it?”
“I want it.”
Lilian laughed. She put down her mug and embraced Helen. “My Helen,” she said softly. “My dearest.”
Helen felt her mother’s hug from a vast distance, from childhood. She closed her eyes, pressed her face against her mother’s hair, resisted the temptation to say Mommy.
Oh, Mommy, she thought.
“I love this house,” Lilian was saying. “You’ve really fixed it up beautifully. Where is your poor old dog? Jasper!”
Lilian released her, and Helen whistled for the dog, who painfully emerged from beneath the chair he favored. The sun poured in through the big windows and he stood in a yellow rectangular patch of light, his tongue hanging, his tail lurching awkwardly back and forth. He barked.
“Here,” Lilian said suddenly. She pulled off the ring and thrust it at Helen. “Take it.”
Helen took it and put it back on her mother’s finger.
“You’re crazy, mother,” she said.
“It’s genetic,” Lilian said, raising her arm dramatically and pointing a mighty finger at the figure silhouetted in the doorway, an elegant figure in a hat, flourishing her cane.
“I’m not conceited,” Helen’s grandmother often said. “I’m quoting.”
And it was true. She took her new towns, neighborhoods, cities, states, by storm. Helen thought that the local Pequot inhabitants, possessing a blend of sophistication and provincialism that occurs only in those both very comfortable and very geographically isolated, would be charmed by Eleanor. Whether Eleanor would be charmed by Pequot was something altogether different. Having fled a small town to live in New York at an early age, having thrived there, turning herself from a poor seamstress into a well-known hat designer and then, with evident relief and pride, an idle Upper East Side matron, Eleanor might find Pequot as dull and limited as it in some ways was. Or she might see it as fallow ground, just waiting for Eleanor Lasch.
Eleanor always wore a hat. Not a petite perched lady’s hat. Not a sensible canvas tennis hat, not a bright baseball cap. Not any of the kinds of hats people wore in Pequot. Eleanor wore her own hats, svelte, dashing fedoras. With her silver-tipped cane, she was the picture of elderly elegance. What Helen marveled at was not so much her perfect taste. It was her energy in exercising it. She tuned her look with gentle, meticulous expertise, a mechanic tinkering with his Daimler.
