The house of cavanaugh, p.15
The House of Cavanaugh, page 15
“I know, and I really am sorry,” says Julia. “I wasn’t even sure you’d let me in if I came over it’s been so long, and I’ve been an asshole. So can I explain?”
“Go ahead,” Carolyn says.
“You know after Mark died, for the rest of high school I would fantasize about belonging to a different family. Remember on The Brady Bunch how Oliver moved in with their family?” says Julia. “I would have loved an arrangement like that. Just a whole household of new people. It was better when I went to college because the playing field was level. People didn’t know what happened unless I told them.”
“You never told me that,” Carolyn says.
“It didn’t seem relevant,” says Julia. “But the other thing that I did later without realizing it at first, is I gravitated toward people who had some kind of trauma or loss. I wouldn’t even know it at first, just people I hit it off with and made friends with easily would end up having a sad story or struggle of their own. I hit the jackpot with you.”
Carolyn smiles and nods. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“That’s not the basis of our friendship but we share, I guess, a sensibility, that people who haven’t experienced that just don’t possess,” Julia says. “That word framily we always throw around so easily. And now, we’re not related to each other, but we are both equally related to the same person. It’s kind of a mindfuck. Especially since I always imagined having that other family. Now I do literally have Anne to explore a relationship with, in addition to what I have with you. Anne and I are the same as you and Anne. I just needed time to process it. And I saw someone to get some help with all of it. She doesn’t know you.”
Carolyn laughs. “That’s what I told Anne. It’s not a club.”
“Anyway, I really am sorry,” Julia says. “I hope we can find a way to be okay again.”
“We will,” Carolyn says. “Don’t worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.”
“There’s just one more thing,” says Julia. “And this is harder for me to say. People are always a little bit canonized after they die, I think, you know? Revered and considered infallible in a way that we don’t when people are still alive. And I did that with Joan, vicariously through you, I think. She was so young when she died and was the foundation of your family and it was such an indelible loss for you. So knowing what she did, I’m disappointed in her. I feel robbed of the idea of her that I thought was true. I’m disappointed all of you were robbed of that, too. But I know that’s not really my battle to fight.”
“Have you asked your dad about any of it?” says Carolyn. “I’m not sure I want to hear any of it but I’m curious if you have.”
“Not yet,” Julia says. “I haven’t had a chance to be alone with him and I don’t know if he’ll even want to talk about it, but I am going to ask.”
“He’s the only one now who knows what happened,” Carolyn says. “I think I’d like to know too. Maybe.”
“I’ll figure out how lightly I’ll have to tread,” says Julia. “And who knows, maybe he’s waited a long time to unburden himself and tell his side of the story. What a strange thing to contemplate talking about to your parent.”
27
For Hutch to find out about Anne after all this time with something as simple as a test that you drop in the mail, but no revelation from Joan directly all those years, remains shocking even weeks later. He can’t imagine when it will no longer be. The genetic disclosure reminds Hutch of an uneventful high school biology experiment overseen by the same teacher for years, except for the one time when it goes terribly wrong and results in explosions that blow up in students’ faces, causing disfiguring burns and leading to lawsuits.
Joan hardly left a clean slate at the end of her life, and Hutch has to wonder why only tell Peter Herring half the story? Did she not know Hutch was Anne’s father or did she not want to disrupt Hutch’s life from beyond the grave? Or was it about not disrupting her own family? He wonders if she knew about Mark. Graham told Hutch the cancer had spread to her brain, so was her decision to tell Peter Herring about Hutch, and how to find him, influenced by her compromised cognitive function? Or was she completely clear-headed?
In the months after Mark died, as he tried to recover his footing, when he was least expecting it, Hutch would experience a moment, literally the merest fraction of a second, when he would forget Mark was gone. When he was watching a riveting Saturday afternoon baseball game that summer and would grab a beer from the fridge, unconsciously—temporarily—he would think, I’ll grab one for Mark, even though he’d been sitting in front of the television alone for five innings.
Or, one of the cruelest, strangest reminders, when the gas gauge was practically on empty he’d think, Goddamn it, Mark, how many times do I have to tell you to put in a couple buck’s worth when you use the car? The fact the car needed gas at all was evidence of how much Hutch was still out of his head; neither he nor Alice were driving very much so when the car ran out of gas just as he was pulling into the station to fill it on the day he realized how dangerously low it was and needed the attendant’s help to push it to the pump, he felt duped by a trick being played on him by an adversary he couldn’t see.
Hutch experiences the truth about Anne the same way. He’ll be distracted, invested in something mundane, getting salmon from the seafood counter at New Seasons, and while he waits for it to be wrapped after he orders it, be freshly struck that she is his and Joan’s child.
He is grateful for how Alice is handling it. She’s never said a single word, but he believes she has to be disappointed in him that he wasn’t careful during his relationship with Joan; that he didn’t take the very precautions men in his situation need to in order to avoid being in some version of the situation he’s in now, that they’re all in. He’s ashamed to admit that he had never thought about it, and he never brought it up with Joan. He assumed she was so far ahead of him in that department—she had a child already and was married—so it never occurred to him that she wasn’t taking preventive measures of some kind on her end.
When he remembers how he idolized her and fantasized about the value of what they had, how heartbroken and gutted he’d felt after it was over even though it was his decision, he also faces the truth that they didn’t know each other very well at all. The fact that they never even discussed birth control was a perfect example that their intimacy was reckless and immature. They had never even spent the night together sleeping in the same bed.
Given that he’s prone to, he has to stop himself from going down a bottomless rabbit hole about Anne’s conception. At the time was Joan’s marriage so troubling that she purposely got pregnant in order to have some terrible, hurtful secret in reserve but one that she never used? Despite how deeply in love Hutch was with her, it didn’t grant him the ability to know her well or understand her motivations and choices.
Because Anne’s looks so closely favor Joan’s, and Julia looks more like Alice than she does Hutch, nothing about their appearances screams that they’re related, but when they’re together, as they recently have been with Hutch and Alice, it’s easy to guess that they are, from, more than anything, how they carry themselves. They are roughly the same build and height, but Anne’s complexion and eye color are Hutch’s—more olive and dark brown—like Mark’s had been, while Julia is fairer. But the one undeniable thing the girls do share, though you have to look for it, is their hands. Like Hutch, they both have long, slender square fingers; they’re Hutch’s mother’s hands, and on a woman they’re attractive in a different way than they are on a man.
He remembers minutes after Julia was born and they were marveling at her, Alice had said, “Hutch, look, she’s got your fingers!”
He’s sentimental, cynical, critical and angry at Joan, but he has difficulty feeling any emotion about Anne beyond gratitude for how well their meeting went, although this is another thing he imagines sharing with Mark, even after all these years. I sure made a mess of things, so be glad you always wore a condom, son.
But what if a woman who had had Mark’s baby came out of the woodwork and dropped into their lives one day? Jesus Christ, he can’t go there. The goddamn rabbit hole.
Anne already has a family, and a father. And Hutch already has a family. It’s not like when divorce forces a formerly married couple and their kids to decide where and with whom they’re going to spend the holidays. This is a different thing entirely. If Anne and Julia want to become close in their own right, creating a unique triangle out of Julia’s friendship with Carolyn, that’s up to them. Although for reasons Hutch doesn’t understand, things between Julia and Carolyn have recently been rocky. And if Alice and Anne want to form some kind of alliance, he knows there’s nothing he can or should do to either promote it or discourage it.
At best he’s unnecessary, and at worst he’s unwelcome for them to find their way toward something either or both of them want. And if Anne wants anything from him, he’ll do whatever he can to give her what she asks for or needs, but he’s a follower with her, something he genuinely believes, and which was important for him to tell her. He is not at the helm as far as Anne goes. At the end of their lunch, she said she would be in touch. He’s trying to avoid the rabbit hole of counting the days.
Hutch is a grown man; he’s an old man who’s getting older, but he hasn’t forgotten what it felt like when he was twenty-three years old, to overlook Graham, to ignore Graham, to compete with Graham. Only recently has he had to deal with Graham. Their meeting was a necessity. And Hutch was grateful for Graham’s graciousness, his aplomb. Hutch imagines himself in Graham’s place and doubts he would have had the same generosity and composure that Graham possessed, and granted him what Hutch interpreted rightly or not, as unspoken forgiveness.
He and Alice had pared down so much from the house in New Canaan before the move to Portland and Alice had overseen all the aspects of downsizing: the moving sale, the countless carloads of Goodwill donations, and shipping the furniture they weren’t ready to part with to Julia for her to store. She wasn’t sure she wanted it either, but Alice and Hutch wouldn’t have room for it in the apartment, so she agreed to keep it until they could deal with it later when they had more time.
Days after Graham’s visit, Alice is at Julia’s to finally go through their furniture and make a decision about what to do with it, as well as determine anything else Julia wants to get rid of, and that’s only part of it. Alice is on a new kick she wants to share with Julia: the KonMari Method. It’s all Alice has been able to talk about since Marie Kondo’s book came out a few months ago, even though at this point there is very little in their Indigo apartment that isn’t essential.
“Oh, my God, Hutch,” Alice said one night when she was reading the book in bed. “Can I tell you how much I wish I’d had this years ago? It would have made selling the house so much less painful. I could have been living this way for years even before we moved. This woman is a genius, truly.”
And without Alice knowing, Hutch picked it up to see what all the fuss was about.
With Alice at Julia’s for the afternoon tidying, organizing and deciding what to keep and throw away—going full Kondo on Jack and Julia’s house—Hutch goes to the closet and takes out his drawings of Joan and when he looks at the images now, he hears Alice reading out loud from the book.
“I just love this, Hutch. Listen to what she says, Look at each object and ask yourself, does this spark joy?” These were the same words he read when he skimmed the thing himself.
Looking at the images of Joan, she looks exactly as he remembers her, and he can recall the afternoons he sketched them, but another part of him feels like he’s come across soft, buttery sheets of paper bearing the likeness of a beautiful woman while browsing the tables at a stranger’s yard sale. He has as much use for them now as he would the stranger’s.
He asks himself: Do they bring you joy?
No. They do not. Had they ever? But now they most certainly only bring sorrow and loss and resentment and serve as a reminder of a secret he should have known; one that Anne should have known.
There is a partially full paper bag of recyclables under the sink containing signs of their lives: yogurt containers, tuna cans, flattened cereal and pasta boxes, which Hutch grabs and shoves the drawings of Joan into. The bag isn’t big enough for all of them, so he gets a second one for the rest of the drawings and puts the letter from Peter Herring on top of the drawings and pushes the whole mess down into the second bag.
He grabs his keys, leaves the apartment and takes the bags to the garbage room at the end of the hall on their floor and opens the big blue recycling bin the tenants all use and which is emptied regularly. It’s mostly empty, maybe just another tenant’s stuff in there, and he drops the drawings of Joan and then his own recycling on top of the drawings. There’s no way to know how much longer it will all be in the bin until it’s emptied; the drawings could be sitting there for days while he fights the urge to change his mind as other tenants add their recycling, filling the bin.
He lays the bin on its side and pulls out his bag of recycling, all the drawings of Joan and Peter Herring’s letter. He rights the bin and drops his recycling back in it again. He takes the drawings and letter, returns to the apartment and puts everything in a plastic garbage bag he pulls out from under the sink and ties it closed. He returns to the garbage room and flings the bag into the chute that leads to the bowels of the building and goes back to the apartment.
There is no additional mystery to solve and nothing to debate or decide. With Alice’s help, Hutch will keep an open mind about Anne, figure out what to do or say when the need arises, but he is finished, again, with Joan. Although we’ll always have that baby between us, won’t we? Proof. And he is newly, but finally, finished with Graham.
28
Three months after Joan was diagnosed, on New Year’s Day 1986, Graham and Joan were invited to an evening open house in New Canaan hosted by a younger attorney in Graham’s firm who had recently been promoted and his wife. Joan had recovered from the mastectomy and had just started chemo, but hadn’t yet had reconstruction and was reluctant to go.
“Can’t we skip it?” she asked. Most days she was feeling and looking good, and her prognosis and the future seemed so optimistic that Graham couldn’t understand her hesitancy. Joan always effortlessly outshone him at a party and Graham didn’t mind.
“I want a night out with you,” he said. “You deserve it. We deserve it. People have been asking about you and we have both earned some fun.”
“Graham, I don’t want to play the cancer card,” Joan said. “And there’s no way around it. It would be, I would be, the elephant in the room. It will be an obstacle course of a bunch of people trying to not get overheard whispering to each other, ‘Look there’s Joan.’ I know I’m not the center of the universe Graham, but I do know people know what’s going on with me and I don’t want to fuel the gossip. Isn’t that enough reason for you to understand why I don’t want to go?”
“Yes,” he said. “It absolutely is, and darling, I get it, but I’m going to push back a little and say to hell with the cancer. We’ll talk about anything else but, I’ll make sure of it.” Graham took her hand in his. “You’ll know so many people there and you know they love you, don’t you? So you should expect that they will be delighted to spend some time with you. Please, Joan. We can leave whenever you want. Let’s celebrate the start of a new year.”
Joan had finally agreed to go, and Graham had felt right to convince her. She was buoyed by seeing so many of Graham’s colleagues and their spouses, friends they’d both known for years, and no one said a word about cancer.
But after they had been there for an hour, a woman neither of them knew, a neighbor of the host, said to the group they were standing with, “I saw Alice Hutchinson the other day in the market. I can’t imagine that woman’s agony. Has anyone else seen or spoken to her?”
Joan had asked him to please get her another glass of wine, she was going to go and sit down. He brought back a glass for each of them and sat with her on the stairs leading to the second floor of a house they’d never been to and would never be again and after fifteen minutes Joan told him she was suddenly so tired and asked could they please leave? She was so sorry, but could they please go?
He remembered young, beautiful Joan Hamilton, and their first meeting—in his mind it was last week, yesterday, only hours ago, they were playing hearts with Richie and Judy in a bar after winning a hockey game—before their lives together began.
But no, that January 1st it was three grown daughters later, and the shared decades between them during which they loved each other and bore witness and soldiered through everything that had gotten them to this night when Joan was sick and needed Graham to take care of her at a party in New Canaan that he forced her to attend.
When he was feeling optimistic and hopeful and Joan was having a good day, Graham was convinced that the end of her life was unlived decades away, something he could keep at bay with bargaining and prayer and the fact that because of medical advancements, millions of women survived breast cancer every year. When he was worried and panicked and terrified that the light of her life was flickering and dimming by the hour and her time was winding down too fast, he knew the best medical predictions often failed, and luck and fate could neither be measured nor relied upon.
He was in control of nothing.
What a mystery she was to him. Was he to her? No, not ever. Their whole lives he was as simple and two dimensional as a photograph. He was smart, and a good provider, and he loved her, deeply, but he was no mystery to her. But she truly had been, and he had been content to coexist with that mystery.
