Part 20 (2/2)
Then I mentally put myself on the subway, stop after stop after stop. I didn't even have a newspaper to distract me.
I went for the car.
I left with the promise that I would call her the next day to give her a full report on Mom's news, whatever it turned out to be.
On the way out I ran into Justin.
”What's happening, Smash-up?”
”Same old, same old, Justin. You know.”
”Have a quick one with me, girlfriend.”
”I can't.
”Got a date?”
”Yep. Dinner. With my mother.”
”Ooooh. Bring me back some cornbread.”
I guffawed. He didn't know how funny that was.
The kitchen was spotless, as always. But then, why shouldn't it be? Mom never cooked. Everything was take-out or premixed or delivered in stay-warm aluminum foil.
”Mom, I'm here! Where are you?”
My mother's cotton dress was as surreal as the kitchen counters in its neatness. Decorous pageboy wig bobby-pinned in place. Makeup specially blended by one of the black salesladies at the Macy's in the mall.
It must be eight, nine years now since Daddy left her. But if I no longer remembered the exact date that had happened, Mom sure did. I bet she could tell you what she'd eaten for breakfast that day, what shoes Daddy was wearing when he broke the news to her. On those rare occasions when Mom talks about him, she never uses his name, referring to my father only as ”him.”
My father soon remarried: a young white teacher on his staff at the private school where he was now the princ.i.p.al. Outside of the occasional birthday lunch, Christmastime, and so on, I saw very little of him. He was happy enough, I suppose, in his new life. And he never missed an alimony payment.
”Nanette, what have you got on your feet?”
”They're called boots, Mother.”
”Those things are something you wear down in the bas.e.m.e.nt when you're looking to kill a rat. Don't tell me you dress like that for-”
”Holy mackerel, Mother, what is it you have to tell me!”
”It's about Vivian,” she said grimly.
I fell into a chair, suddenly exhausted. No melanoma. Thank G.o.d. No wedding.
Vivian, my father's sister, had been my idol when I was a kid. Breezing into town and swooping me up, Aunt Vivian meant trips into Manhattan and eating exotic food and hanging with her hip friends and my first sip of beer and every other cool thing you can imagine when you're ten years old and your father's baby sister is a sophisticated sometime-fas.h.i.+on-model who drinks at piano bars and parties with people who actually make the rock 'n' roll records you hear on the radio.
My father felt about his little sister Vivian the way Justin feels about d.y.k.es. He disapproved of her friends and her nomadic ways and her prodigious consumption of vodka and her way-out hairdos and everything else about her lifestyle, which he didn't understand at all.
My mother didn't understand it any better than he did, but she loved Vivian just the same. Maybe that was due to the same kind of sympathy with strays that had moved her to take Aubrey to her heart. Mom looked on with pity while Auntie Viv blew all her money and drank too much and got her heart broken by trifling pretty men and then recovered to start the cycle all over again.
In time Vivian married and divorced-two or three times, if I remember right-and moved out of New York and then back again, half a dozen times-to L.A. and Mexico and France and Portugal-wherever the job or the party or the boyfriend might take her. Daddy and she finally had one final royal blowup during the cocaine-laced eighties and stopped speaking to each other altogether. We didn't even know where she had been living for the past eight or ten years.
And now, apparently, some disaster had befallen her.
”Is she dead?” I asked. ”How did it happen?”
”No, no. She isn't dead.”
”She isn't? Then what happened to her? What about Vivian?”
”She's in trouble. Wait here a minute.”
Mom vanished into the dining room.
I sat looking around the kitchen in puzzlement, at last fixing on the covered Styrofoam plates that held our dinner, waiting to be popped into the microwave. And I thought the day had been long and weird before I crossed the bridge into Queens. What the h.e.l.l was going on here? Well, at least my mother hadn't tried to reach me at NYU. That sure would have resulted in an interesting phone message. But I had always discouraged her from calling me at work, telling her that as a part-timer I didn't really have an office of my own.
”Look at these.”
She handed me two pieces, one a standard tourist postcard with a corny photo of the Eiffel Tower, the other a telegram.
I turned the postcard over and read: ”Long time No see. Hate to ask you but I'm strapped. Can you spare anything? Just send what you can-if you can. Love, Viv.”
The postmark on the card was about three weeks old.
There was an address beneath her signature. A place on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine-my Lord, Viv was in Paris.
I looked up at Mom and began to ask a question, but she ordered me to read the telegram first, which was dated a week or so after the postcard.
JEAN.
DID YOU GET MY CARD?.
WORSE. I CAN'T GET OUT.
VIV.
”What's this about?” I asked, the fear rising in my voice.
”I don't know, honey. I don't know.” Her spine stiffened then and her eyes took on a gla.s.sy look. ”I finally called...him. I mean, he is her brother.”
”You're kidding! You called Daddy?”
She nodded.
I tried to imagine White Mrs. Daddy picking up the phone in their apartment near Lincoln Center. Handing the receiver over. Jesus, the look on his face when she told him who it was.
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