Real Life (35 page)

He shrugged, and she settled herself at the foot of his bed and handed him a photograph. “Look at this,” she said. “Guess who that is.”

He knew immediately that it was Dorrie and his father. Two skinny little kids hand in hand, their black hair hanging wet in their faces. “It's you and my dad,” he said.

She seemed pleased. “You could really tell? Lord, but we looked alike. Except that Phinny was always better looking.” That was true, though he supposed he should have argued. But she was holding out another photo. “Here. Did you ever see this? Phinny in his cowboy suit.”

Hugo studied it. His father must have been no more than five, and he was sitting on a horse, pretending to fire a revolver in the air. Hugo could imagine him shouting, “Yippee!” or “Hi-yo Silver!”

“Whose horse?”

“A man used to come around with a horse and camera, sort of an itinerant photographer, and he'd take your picture up on his horse—preferably in a cowboy suit. Can you believe that everyone had a cowboy suit? Girls too, with little white skirts. And cap guns.”

Hugo set the picture aside; that one he might keep framed by his bed, if she'd let him. His father looking happy.

There were browning snapshots of his grandparents, old-fashioned prints with rippled edges, the two of them looking so young he hardly recognized them. His grandfather like a gangster in a hat pulled down low. His grandmother in a suit with big shoulders. Another one of her in a bathing suit looking—God! sexy! And a bunch of Dorrie: in a sunsuit, in the snow, in front of a Christmas tree. Not many of his father—a few blurred photographs he looked like he'd been forced into. And down at the bottom of the pile, a couple of his mother: the one with the pearls that had been in the newspaper, a picture of her holding a puppy, and a variation on the Camaro shot—same car, same big belly, no cat washing this time, and his father's arm around her. His father was frowning.

Dorrie chattered at him, turning up photo after photo, telling him old stories. The time Phinny had fallen out of the apple tree. That old swing in their backyard. Here she was with Rachel—can you believe that's Rachel? And that puppy must have belonged to—

Hugo sat staring at the picture of his parents. His mother looking so beautiful and joyful. Was she high on something? Himself in her stomach, waiting to be born. Was that why he was always so weird and out of it, because his mother had been on drugs?

He pushed the pictures away from him, and they slithered to the floor. Dorrie stopped talking. No one spoke. The smell of the untouched hot dogs filled the room. “Just tell me,” he said finally.

She told him about Iris, about her beauty and sweetness, as well as her tragic end. About that Thanksgiving dinner, the teddy bear named Pooh, the Christmas when she had sent Iris a hand-knit sweater and a wooden duck on wheels—though she left out the fact that Phinny had been in jail at the time, and that her mother had ordered her to send gifts to Iris and her baby, who were living in New London on welfare. She told him about a note she'd had from Iris, reporting that baby Hugo was cutting a tooth.… Here she improvised madly, remembering that Iris had once sent her a note about something, she had no recollection of what—though the large, childish handwriting had stuck in her memory. She was reduced to telling him where Iris had gone to high school and that she had once planned to be a secretary but had Hugo instead.

Hugo interrupted. “I assume they weren't married.”

“You assume right.”

“Did they ever catch the guy?”

“The one who killed your mother? Yes. He went to prison. I suppose he's still there.”

Hugo sat in silence for so long that she thought the conversation was over, and she was about to slip away to the kitchen, when he said, “You're leaving a lot out, aren't you?”

She sighed. “I can't remember all that much, Hugo. Listen—I'll tell you one thing. Your mother loved you, I know she did.” Well, it was true. She remembered Iris holding Hugo, her rapturous face. Should she tell him he was breast-fed? Only loving mothers breast-fed their babies. It would probably embarrass him. “She was a good mother. But she was very young, and misguided.”

Hugo gave her a belligerent look and said, “Spare me.”

All of a sudden she had had it. It wasn't enough, the mug in the garage, the flashes of goodness, the differences from Phinny. Damn it, she was doing her best. And she had her own tragedies, her own sad past. She said, “Don't talk to me like that, Hugo. I know this isn't a very nice story, I'm sure you're upset about all this, but—”

“My father,” Hugo said abruptly. “What about him?”

Phinny
. It was as if Hugo had pulled a switchblade on her. She felt sick to her stomach. She could never wish Phinny on Hugo, no matter how angry he made her. Iris was one thing—angelic Iris, with her yellow hair and sweet smile. Phinny was something else. Let him remain a myth. Poor Phinny, who died young in a car crash.

“I know there's something funny about him,” Hugo said.

Something funny about Phinny: no, there was nothing funny about him, not one thing. Just for a moment, the present fell away, and she was a child—pig-tailed, gawky, resentful, and Phinny was kicking her, pinching her, calling her Horse-Face, performing the star turns from his vast fraternal repertoire of minor tortures.

“What makes you think there's something funny about him?”

“No one ever talks about him. Grandma and Grandpa never did. You don't. Why not?” he persisted. “What is it about him? Or are you going to keep lying to me?”

She looked at Hugo's angry face—his lips pursed tight, his eyes hard. Behind the anger, she could tell, was tremendous courage, to ask her these things. She thought to herself, Here's the truth: your father was a junkie and a dope dealer, he died in prison of an overdose, he was a creep who ruined your mother's life. Other lives. Who knows how many lives he ruined? Forget about him.

She said, “Hugo, I'm sorry you were lied to about your mother. I suppose they thought you were too young to handle something like that.”

“I'm not so young anymore,” he said.

“I'm aware of that.” Fifteen—a terrible age, as Monica had said. She imagined him up here with the witchy Nina, the two of them necking, and thought of her own aging face in the mirror.

“I'm old enough to have people tell me the truth.”

“All right. You've been told,” she said, speaking more sharply than she meant to. “What else do you want from me?”

“What about my father?”

She drew a deep breath and said, “No one lied to you about your father. There was nothing funny about him. He—I suppose you'd have to say he wasn't ever very successful, he kept losing jobs, he didn't help much to support you and your mother. But he wasn't a bad man.” God forgive me, she thought, and searched her brain for what to say. “He was sort of the family black sheep, I guess. A little weak, maybe. A little selfish and immature. He wasn't much like Grandma or Grandpa. He wasn't even much like me. I was always the good girl—you know? The older sister who did everything right. I must have made him suffer.”

Hugo nodded slowly; she could see him believing what she said. Lies worthy of Phinny, the champion liar. What irony.

They sat in silence. Daisy yawned and stretched, and jumped from the bed to the windowsill. It was pitch dark outside, but the kitten stared out as if there were something to see, and then began to wash herself. The two of them watched her. It was Halloween night—a good night for honoring the dead, whether they deserved it or not.

“Don't think badly of your parents, Hugo,” Dorrie said after a while. “They were—honestly, they were good people. I'm telling you the truth.” She almost held her breath, waiting to be struck dead.

Hugo looked up at her with tears in his eyes and said, “Thanks.” Lord, how easily the kid could cry. Well, good for him. Phinny, so far as she could recall, had never shed a tear.

She stood and picked up the tray—cold hot dogs, limp fries. “Want me to reheat this?”

He was studying the photograph of Phinny on the horse. “Oh—yeah—thanks,” he said, and smiled at her: the first genuine smile she'd had out of him in a long time. Well, that was something. Worth all the lies? Maybe. They were stuck with each other: might as well smile.

In the kitchen, she looked out the window at the night. Her own reflection looked back at her, hazy on the dirty pane: Phinny's face. The old photographs had brought back what she would rather have forgotten. Unfair, the way the remains of childhood persisted, whether you wanted them or not. Her mother in a paint-daubed smock made from an old shirt of her father's. Her father emerging from his study, rubbing his forehead with the heel of one hand. The Cézanne print in the upstairs hall. The bowl of papier-mâché fruit on the hall table, the Mexican rug on the floor there, her father's shabby leather briefcase, the parchment lampshade in the study, her mother's voice reading
A Girl of the Limberlost
, Phinny with his cap gun. “You're dead, Dorrie, fall down.” None of those memories, or the crowd of others waiting to rush in, made her happy. None of them made life any easier to endure. And yet there they were, as inescapable as the face of her brother looking back at her from the window.

You can't help whom you love, she thought, and realized it was Phinny she meant. Well, of course she had loved him. Against her will, and hating his guts, she had loved him because he was her brother. She looked into his eyes, and thought, I'll keep your son safe from you or die in the attempt.

Two days later, she had a postcard. The Grand Canyon at sunset, rose and orange and copper, the sun a hot mass outlining the North Rim in gold. The message read, “Took off after class—here with Henry and Woofy en route to California to see kids—forgive me for running—forgive me for everything—thinking hard—love you forever.”

She sat with it down in her studio, in Alex's wicker chair, reading it over and over, as if his handwriting—so precise it could have been typescript—were an obscure hieroglyphic that only close scrutiny could interpret. He had gone to see his kids: that was good. And to the Grand Canyon. He would climb down the trail, take his notes, have his epiphany, think hard. Good. “Forgive me for running”: that was the part that hurt, the words that, however often she read them, rang like bells of doom. Why run? And was he running from her and Hugo, or to his family out there in California? He hadn't waited for a vacation—just took off in the middle of the semester. The urgency of his act was unfathomable. She had the feeling she had never known him at all. She had known his sad-eyed face, his lean and vulnerable body, the Crosshatch of scars on his thigh from a bicycle accident, his dry knobby elbows. But the real, complete, interior Alex: was it possible he was still a stranger to her? and she to him? How had he not known that, if it came to this absurd choice, she would stick by Hugo? Or that this casual postcard, laid out nakedly to be read by the postman or Hugo and Lord knows who else, would cut her to the heart?

“Love you forever.” However many times she read it, it sounded like “Good-bye forever.”

She went upstairs and made herself a cup of tea in the
FAVORITE AUNT
mug with its garish flowered border. Ugly though it was, she treasured it; the ugly and unlovable things of this world should be loved and treasured nonetheless. She remembered how Rachel had said, “I can't be alone,” and how she had agreed without thinking twice: of course, of course, there's nothing worse than being alone, no love, the lonely bed, the sameness of the days, the dread of the years ahead. But she had been alone—plenty. She had become adept at solitude, and at finding company in inanimate objects, in nature, in work. Now she would have Hugo. Good old Aunt Dorrie. There were worse things.

She was finishing her tea when Hugo came in, breathless and coughing, with Nina—his first day back at school.

“How did it go?”

“School? Lousy as usual.”

“I suppose what I mean is, how do you feel?”

“Oh—fine, fine.”

“He coughed all the way home on the bus,” Nina said. Nina was still shy with her, apologetic under the brassiness. “I think he needs some cough medicine or something.”

“All I need is the
Grove
,” Hugo said. “It's one minute to three.”

They went into Hugo's alcove. The usual commercials, the theme music, the buzz of inane yakety-yak, Hugo flipping through his notebook, coughing, the two of them arguing: “They're not going to let her die.”

“Hugo, she's got a brain tumor, for heaven's sake. That happens to be serious.”

“She's survived worse.”

“Oh, give me a break. Even Dr. Wendell says she hasn't got a chance.”

“When has he ever been right about anything?”

Dorrie smiled. It was Paula, she knew, who had the tumor. Dr. Wendell was her former lover. Paula's brother, Michael, was married to Tiffany, who had also had an affair with Dr. Wendell. Did all that have anything to do with Dr. Wendell's pessimism about Paula's brain tumor? Or with Paula's daughter's illegitimate son, Jason, who had been adopted by Prescott and Tara but was now about to be kidnapped by something called the People's Syndicate? Lord! Was she becoming hooked on
Upton's Grovel
Never—she wouldn't give Hugo the satisfaction.

She would have to add on a room next summer, a place for Hugo to watch television, entertain his friends—lose his virginity, Alex would say. And she'd have to call the cable people; the TV reception, she knew, wasn't good. What else? Pottery classes again, maybe. Some work with the salt kiln. Italy in the spring. Or Greece. Somewhere. Something.

She drank the last of her tea and took her mug into the kitchen. A weepy voice from the television said, “All we can do now is hope.”