The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  My mother’s newest acquisition told her that he just turned thirty, but he looks older to me. In fact, he told her a lot of things.

  Lydia’s new man has the same big, square head and blunt, handsome features as her comic book idol—what’s his name? Captain Marvel—and how long has it been since he flew? Right, Mother, these details date you without leaving a trace, and you don’t even know.

  This Gerard looks kind of like him, with the same blunt features and empty eyes, same dark hair like a backslash over the brow. He flashes the same bland, sweet smile. Instead of the cape with the lightning bolt, he arrives cloaked in a boyish, vulnerable air, unless that’s tragic inevitability.

  Practiced, engaging and needy in equal measure, he spins out his story, smiles, and waits. He is quite the storyteller. And what a story! Your heart goes out: poor guy.

  “My father was a black Irishman, that’s all Mam would say about him, even though I begged to know. He ran out on her as soon as she got pregnant and it made her angry and sad. She tried hard but was bitter every day of her mortal life. She tore up all his pictures but I guess I look like him, why else would she whip me the way she did? Poor little Jennie LaPierre, nobody to love her, no place to go and ugly to boot. Out of a clear sky she’d turn around and smack me for no reason, and I suppose that’s why. She was a hard woman, but she tried. God knows she tried.

  “In our part of Minnesota, Catholic girls didn’t get pregnant and if they did, God forbid, then they had the baby and either she married the guy or she went back to school and her parents brought it up, the town we lived in was that old-fashioned and remote. We lived so far out in the sticks that the only other option was St. Mary’s home for unwed mothers, and that’s where I lived until I came here.

  “See, my mother was a ward of the state. Even I would have to say she was never good looking, I guess she was pretty hard to place, so she landed with foster parents who didn’t care a fig about children and acted like she was a great burden. They didn’t want her, they did it for the sake of the monthly check from the state. She lived on table scraps and they worked her like a dog and she never heard a kind word or saw a penny from them. Then she got pregnant. She hid it for as long as she could, but they kicked her out as soon she began to show.

  “So she ended up with the nuns, and unlike every other girl who went to St. Mary’s, my mother stayed. See, the deal is, they take bad girls in when they get in trouble, and take care of them until their babies come, the idea being that after they give the baby up for adoption, they can go back to their lives unencumbered, and most of them do. My poor Mam had nobody and nothing to go back to. She was fifteen!

  “The sisters took pity and gave her a kitchen job, at least to start. I was the only child on the place. It was lonely but they made a big fuss over me, which is just as well. Mam wouldn’t give me up because she just wouldn’t. She probably loved me, but she didn’t like me much. The nuns said I’d be better off with a nice family in want of a child but Mam said stop, or she’d throw me in the river and jump in after me. She said I was hers to take care of and she swore she would, by God, take care of me until the day she died.

  “I love my mother and she did try, but Lord, she was mean. Thank God for the nuns.”

  His recital slips out too easily, and the tone? Archaic, like a book you find in your grandmother’s house and start reading out of sheer boredom. He probably says “Lord” every time he tells the story, and the story never varies. Where did you get it, man? Masterpiece Theater? Some things are too good to be true, but Mother bought it. Excuse me. Lydia did.

  She bought him.

  This is how my mother keeps new men in her life. She may flirt to get their attention, but she pays for what follows, and believe me, she can afford it. She co-opts her quarry with intimate dinners by candlelight in adorable country inns, where she seems almost as pretty as she thinks she is. She buys ambience: a wide, deep sofa by the fireplace where she and the chosen can sit after dinner, lulled by the flames before they go upstairs, and they will go upstairs where there are always feather mattresses in big brass beds. These places are not cheap, but for the time being, for as long as she likes, he is hers.

  She consolidates her position with gifts: the barn coat Gerard is wearing the day I get my first look at him. The new Leica hanging around his neck, because she’s cast this new man as the next Helmut Newton or Annie Leibovitz—typical Lydia, she’s bought him everything but a car, although she’s only known him since September.

  No problem. My mother is a living showcase for subtle excess. Nothing but the best for our Lydia: the newest sports car, with another coming as soon as new models hit the floor; A-list wraparound shades, designer jackets, and top-of-the-line jeans, boots by Gucci or Prada, depending, a gaudy contrast to the nun’s medieval-looking habit, although I’ve tried to warn her off that encounter. A sheepskin coat and a mink vest to wear over her thousand-dollar cashmere sweaters because her newly renovated weekend place is, after all, in the country. As though she would risk breaking a heel hiking in these woods.

  Walking into her costly little shack in the woods, I know I’m not here for quality time with Lydia, who always has reasons.

  I’ve been summoned to admire the nice new life she has decorated and furnished in this nice new town. Since then I’ve learned to hate the country. The monstrous pines and thick greenery give me psychological nosebleeds. The rustic farmhouse and Lydia’s antiques are locked in combat: highly polished, fragile tables teeter on weathered floorboards so heavily varnished that they slide on the slant, while her fussy chairs and elaborate side tables cling to the new bearskin rug with their little claw feet. I am alarmed by the profusion of silk cushions in her lavishly enhanced farmhouse boudoir—only Lydia would think of her bedroom as a boudoir.

  I want to believe she invites me because somewhere deep, she actually likes me, but for Lydia, I am an accessory with one simple function: I’m pre-set to arrive, exclaim over all her choices, and admire.

  And is Gerard an accessory?

  It’s hard to know. That first day, I mistake him for the last of a series of personal appearances as neatly scheduled as performers waiting to do their turn onstage: Lydia’s nice new friends, walking into the perfect setting for the next scene in her nice new life.

  Now I’m not so sure. Had she planned this or does Gerard come and go whenever he wants?

  Our lunch guests for Lydia’s grand opening are her suave Realtor and his wife, the kind of friends she makes every time she sets up another new life. Her next-door neighbors come over from their refurbished farmhouse in time for tea and leave on the stroke of twilight. The couple she’d invited for drinks thank her and go on to the next party and Lydia sighs the way you do when the curtain comes down on Act One. I sit there in her silent, perfect little living room, exhausted and honored. Finally. It’s just us.

  It’s scary. She’s my mother, but we’ve never been, well, what you would call close. Oh, it’s not her fault that she sent me to live with Grandmother after she and Hal divorced; after all, was she supposed to look after me when job-hunting was first on her to-do list?

  I remember the cab; I was three. Lydia leaned forward on the seat, intent on delivering me to Bronxville. I remember her rhinestone compact that she handed off to me to shut me up. There were three compartments clasped in the mouth of a fake gold frog. I made the frog’s mouth pop open and shut until the hinges snapped. Lydia smacked me and we both burst into tears. I even remember what she said, “It isn’t you, I loved that thing and now it’s ruined.”

  I was too little to tell her that I was crying for the little girl.

  It’s not Lydia’s fault that she handed me off but it is her fault that she took her damn sweet time about taking me back. Grandmother forced the issue so she had no choice, but she did decorate a room for me. Pink. By the time I and my two suitcases arrived, Lydia owned a co-op on the West Side and I was twelve. We moved my things into the converted maid’s room and had a stiff
little dinner at Café des Artistes to celebrate. By then her lovelorn column was syndicated, showing up in all the best papers, and Larry had left her well fixed. She could afford the best boarding school, the best prep school, and the best summer camps, and I went to them all. During the holidays, Grandmother took up the slack.

  I think I was something of a shock.

  Wait. You have opinions?

  Pretty much.

  Well, keep them to yourself. I have to work.

  Enough with the imaginary dialogs, lady. We’ve spent too much time together in my imagination, and not nearly enough in real life.

  I came up here to west nowhere with no idea what my mother and I would say to each other in adult life, alone in a room, but here we are.

  So, will we end up ordering takeout or has she actually laid in groceries? Or did she schedule one of her usual diversions at her favorite country inn, with cameos by the manager and neighbors who eat there every night, so we won’t have to face each other? It’s the first time in a long time that Lydia and I have been alone, with no entrances and exits, no scene breaks—our first crack at being together as adults.

  It’s almost thrilling. Terrifying. Both.

  But here we are.

  Then we aren’t.

  He taps on the window—lingering landscape gardener, I wonder, painter with a question, paper boy, I don’t know—but Lydia jumps up. It’s odd. Gerard’s arrival could be staged, as ordered and on schedule, like the other chic little visitations we’ve had today. Unless he’s embedded, a man who comes in any old time, any old way he wants.

  Whichever, he enters Lydia’s fussy little living room and whisks my mother’s mouth with an all-too-casual kiss. All Lydia’s lights go on as he kicks off the lizard Tony Lama boots, stingrays, like hers.

  “Sweetie, this is Gerard.” As if I need no introduction, she plays to him, but she is working me. Lydia the director in full cry: this is the superb portrait photographer I told you about, he took that amazing portrait of me, protégé, really, he comes to me for career advice. All he needs is the right dealer, the right art house to publish his photos and the world will recognize him as the first-class artist that he is, in fact I’ve been making some important contacts for him.

  And me? But she is distracted. That has to wait.

  He’s brought food. She thanks him with a hug and gets busy setting the drop-leaf table in the dining area with the vintage Willow ware she found at the sweetest little place in the next town. Oh, Marie, note the embossing on the ornamental hinges of the table, she had it specially made to fit, see how nice the teakwood looks against the brass.

  Grinning, he jerks his head in my direction. She goes back for a third plate—right, she forgot somebody—and this reminds her to say, “Oh dear, Gerard, you haven’t met Marie.” Pretending I’m her BFF and not the grown daughter she couldn’t possibly be old enough to have.

  He uncovers platters from the local caterer—if they hold all Lydia’s favorites because she phoned in the order and secured it with her credit card, she covers, gushing the way she does whenever presents come. Then with a look I recognize she opens a bottle of wine and I think, Oh God, don’t let him sleep over. It is that obvious.

  While Gerard assesses me I smile, more for Lydia than for her newest acquisition. So this is her new friend that I’ve heard so much about. Negotiating this visit, she actually giggled and fluttered on the phone. For her sake, I murmur and nod and make a fuss over the supper Gerard brought and wait to see how this evening with my mother will turn out.

  It isn’t about me.

  It was never about me. What else explains his cashmere V-neck, same this-year’s-color, same high-end designer as hers? After dinner she fusses in the kitchen while he sits in the center of my mother’s silly velvet sofa like a rajah granting me an audience. Unless I am the audience.

  “She was a harsh, angry person, but she’s all I have.” Gerard corrects himself. “Had. For warmth and kindness, I had the nuns. Mam was who she was, but the sisters were the only mothers I had. They taught me to read and write and do fractions, and when I was big enough to go on the bus alone, they sent me into town to the Christian Brothers’ school. I got my high school education in that town; I took art classes at the local university extension and worked full-time, although she didn’t need the money, Mam wanted me at home, and I wanted to give something back to the nuns. I worked for a studio photographer on Main Street, yearbook pictures, wedding photographs. I was twenty, twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-eight, but every night I came home to the housekeeper’s cottage where Mam and I lived. I was broke, but that wasn’t the real reason. My mother expected it. After all, she said, ‘I took care of you. Now it’s your turn to take care of me.’ She never liked me, but she was one woman alone, and I was all she had.” That sigh. “I stayed with her to the end. I couldn’t pack up and leave my old life behind until she died.”

  Note the past tense. Figment or fact, Gerard says his mother is dead, and although she is, frankly, old enough to be his mother, Lydia’s girlish heart rushes out to him. Does she not see the differences between them?

  Does she not know that he sees it too, and takes it for what it is? Gerard’s voice drops, striking a note so sad that even I want to make him feel better. “It was last March. You might as well know, I drove thousands of miles from Minnesota and the Benedictine rule, but I didn’t come far. Remember, I grew up with the nuns. I don’t know many people, but I’ve always been at home with the sisters. Mother Ignatia sent Mother Therese a note and they took me in at the abbey here. I do a few things for the community, and in return …”

  That night, before she releases me to the Hide-a-bed in her guest cubicle, Lydia shows me her boudoir, as if to prove that tonight, at least, Gerard isn’t sleeping here. She takes my hands and pulls me down on her lush velvet quilt. “What do you think?”

  I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to say but it won’t matter because in every circumstance, no matter what mess she’s walking into, Lydia talks on.

  She says, “Gerard is very religious.”

  “I gathered.”

  She says, “I think he’s in love with me.” She means she is in love with him.

  What to say, what to say? “That’s sweet.”

  “Do you think he’s too young?”

  North of forty, at the very least. “Depends.”

  The next time she summons me to the country I table all my excuses and go. People go to NASCAR tracks for some of the same reasons: being at the rail in case there’s a crash, but my real reason is, I think, oddly, altruistic. I take the train to the bus that will drop me in that claustrophobic small town because it’s time to tell Lydia what I think.

  I won’t accuse her of robbing the cradle, which is more or less the case. I think the cradle is robbing her.

  Turns out Gerard is away, which is probably why she pulled my chain; the woman languishes without an audience and in spite of the growing cast in her farmhouse drama, she doesn’t make real friends. Gerard is back with the nuns in Minnesota, settling his mother’s affairs, and Lydia has taken this opportunity to open up to me.

  We reach her silky boudoir via a short trip from the local bus stop to an exquisite but long, long dinner at the night’s designated country inn, with plenty of staff circling, buzzing her table to chat her up, and enough regulars coming in to drop small talk into all the empty places. Note that she staged my arrival so our day together would be short and end mercifully soon.

  Oddly, instead of leaving me to put fresh sheets on the Hide-a-bed, she pours two glasses of port and summons me to her boudoir, which occupies the entire second floor. Only Lydia has a boudoir. One more set she can decorate with her exquisite vision of herself. Now she’s sitting cross-legged on the velvet quilt, holding her feet like a college drunk just back from the party of her life.

  “Oh, Marie. Oooohhh, Marie.” She’s rosy with self-importance, confiding as though we really are BFFs, “We’re so in love.” />
  “I’m glad.” I can’t be here, listening to this as she slides closer, words boiling over.

  “It’s just that …”

  “Do you mind if I?” The bed dips in the middle; if I don’t get up now, while I’m close to the edge, I’ll slide into the dip. “It’s been a long day.”

  “My heart is breaking.”

  I do not say, You’re shitting me. “I have to …”

  “Gerard wants me to marry him.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s gone to Minnesota to bring back his mother’s engagement ring.”

  “She was engaged?”

  “Yes. It’s a very sad story.”

  I can’t begin to guess what I’m grieving for, but it makes me bitter. “I know.”

  “How could you possibly know?” Oh, Lydia, the scorn. All this grief and her hair is sleek and her face impossibly smooth. I would like to meet her plastic surgeon. “This is real.”

  “So what’s the big problem?”

  “He’s in Minnesota, with those fucking nuns.”

  “I thought he was getting the ring.”

  The noise inside her breaks out, smashing her slick surface. Her age shows in her voice, every single year of it. “I don’t understand it, but I’m a divorced woman and in spite of everything he’s some kind of Catholic. He has to choose between me and God.”

  “Why can’t you just.”

  “Because we’re not married!” Oh, that face. Lydia’s face, just then. Her voice clots. “He says we’d be living in sin.”

  Oh, this is so odd. Odd and awful. Whatever is going on with Gerard, she gives lovely presents, he takes from her, he comes as he goes as he pleases, but oh, Lydia, whatever is going on with Gerard stops short of this great big bed.

  “Did you hear what I just said? It’s this Mother Therese. Monday I’m going to see this Mother Therese and straighten him out.” Lydia is, OMG, on her feet, teetering on the soft mattress in a drunken fighter’s stance. Lydia, preparing for a fight to the death. “By the time he gets back this will be settled, so wish me luck.”