Custody (11 page)

The thought of her dad with a pink beaded bracelet on his wide hairy wrist brought a helpless smile to her face. “Let me measure your wrist.”

She found the measuring tape from the miscellanea drawer—one good thing about her mother being such a neat freak, you could always find whatever you needed, unlike her grandfather’s house where everything was cluttered together. Her father’s wrist was eight inches
around. Hers was barely five.

“If it rains,” she told him, “I might get it done in one day. If it’s sunny, we’ll probably be out all day.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“Okay.”

He stared down at her. “I love you, Tessa.”

“I know, Dad. I love you, too.”

“Eat a banana, for goodness’ sake. For
my
sake. So I won’t feel too guilty about McDonald’s.”

She smiled. He left.

Tessa waited until the front door shut. She took a banana from the fruit bowl and went out to stand in the hall. Her mother’s office door was closed.

She didn’t really want a banana. But her mother would interrogate her about what she ate, so Tessa carried it up to her bathroom, stripped off the skin, broke it in little pieces, and dropped it into the toilet. She was afraid the skin would plug up the toilet if she put it in all in one piece, so she found her scissors in her desk and cut the skin into segments, then put those in the toilet, too, then flushed the toilet. Everything went down.

She was a horrible person. People just a few miles away were malnourished, people would be glad to have had that banana that she’d just wasted. There was nothing her mother could say to chastise her that Tessa wasn’t already saying to herself. And her mother didn’t even have a clue about the horrible feelings that swarmed inside her belly and heart like a pack of Stephen King monsters.

Tessa was pretty sure her birth mother was a criminal in prison.

Tessa often thought about her birth mother. She’d be fat, with cold dead eyes and a frightening hideous temper. Probably she’d killed someone, or more than one person.

Or maybe her birth mother was crazy. Maybe she was in one of those special security prisons for the criminally insane. Maybe she paced back and forth, back and forth, in her cell, muttering swears to herself, laughing maniacally, tearing at her flesh with dirty fingernails.

Maybe sometimes she screamed, kicked the walls and screamed until her throat was raw.
Tessa felt like doing that, a lot. She felt like doing that right now.

Instead, she curled up on top of her bed, still wearing her clothes. Closing her eyes, she held on to her stomach and sank into one of her favorite memories: the animated movie
Anastasia
. Anastasia had lost her parents, her brothers and sisters, her whole world. When she was Tessa’s age, she’d lived in a terrible orphanage run by a cruel hag. But that was only the
beginning
of her story.

Tessa assured herself that she was only at the beginning of her own.

She was, wasn’t she?

Which is worse, Kelly wondered, as she and Jason sat unlacing their Rollerblades on the steps of her apartment building: refusing to make love with your fiancé, or making love with him, while imagining, the entire time, another man?

The heavens smiled down on her, delivering her from the choice—the Red Sox had an afternoon game. When they walked into the living room, the first thing Jason did was to turn on the television set.

She took her time showering and then dressed in a severe beige sheath with, once again, her grandmother’s pearls. She put her hair up in a French twist. Jason trotted down to his car for the clothes he’d stashed in the trunk, and after his shower, pulled on summer-weight flannels, white shirt, blue blazer, red tie. Sunday evening dinners at his mother’s were not casual.

It was a brief ride from Cambridge across the river to Boston, but in many ways it was a voyage to a different country. They parked in the garage beneath the Public Gardens, walked up Beacon Street to the redbrick buildings sternly lining the streets, buzzed themselves in, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

“Jason, dear. And Kelly. How lovely.”

Eloise Gray stood before them, poised and cool, in a Lilly Pulitzer silk shirtwaist she’d probably worn thirty years ago. Certainly she hadn’t gained or lost a pound in all those years. And pearls. And heels. With, on this hot summer day, hose. Of course, the apartment was air-conditioned and humidity-controlled for the art and books.

Briefly, Eloise held her cheek out to be kissed.

They went into her living room, which glowed with ancient Oriental rugs, heirloom vases
and furniture, and oil portraits of her ancestors. Above the fireplace hung a painting of Eloise at eighteen, when she was a debutante. She’d possessed the exquisite dramatic beauty her son had inherited, black hair straight and heavy as wood, piercing dark blue eyes beneath straight black brows, and skin as pale as snow. It was no wonder she’d had her choice of suitors.

“Kelly, my dear,” Eloise said now, “I am so proud of you. The ceremony was most impressive. I thought we should have some champagne.”

“Champagne would be wonderful, Eloise.”

“In that case, Jason, will you do the honors?” Eloise nodded toward the silver bucket where a bottle of Perrier-Jouët waited on ice.

At first Kelly had been uncomfortable with the stilted conversation, the formality, the stretches of silence in Eloise’s presence, and she knew from Jason that more than one woman had been so daunted by his mother’s disdain that they’d broken off with him.

If
she
broke off with Jason, she would be damned if it would be because she couldn’t rise to his mother’s provocations. Deep in her character ran a rod of pride that made her face down any dare. So she had kept any negative thoughts about Eloise to herself.

When Jason had asked, “Don’t you find my mother cold?” Kelly had replied, “Not at all, I like someone who doesn’t gush.”

When Jason had asked, “Do you feel like my mother ignores you during dinner?” Kelly had responded, “I enjoy watching the two of you talk.”

When Jason had asked, “Don’t you find my mother rather forbidding?” she had answered, “Jason, don’t be silly. I really like your mother.”

Then, one day, she realized that what she said was true, because Eloise reminded her of her grandparents, her father’s parents, whom she had fiercely loved.

When she was only eighteen, Kelly’s mother, Ingrid, had come from Sweden to work as an au pair. Within a year she’d met Otto, within two years she’d married him, and less than a year after that she was a widowed mother. Kelly’s father, Otto MacLeod, was killed in Vietnam in 1965, the same year she was born. He was an officer and a hero, but that was not much consolation to his parents, for he was their only child.

Ingrid MacLeod considered moving back to Sweden, but only her father was alive there,
a dour, pessimistic fisherman drinking himself to death in a wind-blasted village.

Besides, Otto’s parents begged her not to return to Sweden. Move in with them, they implored.

The older MacLeods had a large house on a tree-lined avenue in Arlington, and no one to share it with. If she lived with them, they would take care of her while she took care of Kelly, and she could have time to decide what else she wanted to do with her life, perhaps attend college. Ingrid agreed.

The MacLeods owned a handsome fabric store on Mass Ave where they carried the best of material, wools imported from Scotland, England, and Ireland, silks from Japan and China, accessories from Italy and France. Their home on Flora Street, within walking distance of the shop, furnished in sharp-cornered angular teak, reflected their stern sense of economy. They had only the necessary furnishings, and those were spartan and clean. Like Jason’s mother, their favorite adage seemed to be: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” They could make a chicken last a week, and even at their most prosperous chose to have soup made from old bones and leftover vegetables rather than throw anything out.

Hardworking Presbyterians, they frowned on drinking, dancing, and card playing. Because they did not easily touch, kiss, or compliment, Kelly was always shy around her grandparents, but as the years went on, she came to appreciate their sensible reliability and the tranquil orderliness of their days, the logic by which they lived their lives.

For Ingrid it was different. For the first few years her relationship with her daughter sufficed, but she was a young and beautiful woman who could not help yearning for more adult embraces.

When she finally did fall in love, she changed everything in Kelly’s life. She betrayed Kelly. She ruined Kelly’s life. She broke Kelly’s heart.

In a way, Kelly thought, her grandparents were returned to her, through Eloise. The same self-restraint, the same cool facade hiding a steady heart.

On Sundays Eloise’s housekeeper had the entire day off, so Eloise prepared the meal, set the table, and served the dinner: lamb chops, wild rice, asparagus.

“Will you pour the wine?” Eloise asked her son.

“May I help?” Kelly offered, as always—and as always, Eloise refused.

A bowl of roses sat between the candles in their twisted silver sticks. The silverware was luxuriously heavy. Eloise sat at the head of the table, her posture magnificently straight. Conversation passed among them with the measured solemnity of a pavane.

“I attended the Symphony Friday night,” Eloise told them. “They performed Ned Rorem’s new song cycle,
Evidence of Things Not Seen
.”

Jason cut into his chop, chewed a piece, swallowed. “Did you like it?”

“Very much.”

After enjoying chocolate eclairs from a bakery, they rose, leaving everything for the housekeeper to deal with the next day, to take coffee in the living room.

“I’ve agreed to chair the committee for the renovations at the Sadler Museum,” Eloise told them, stirring cream into her cup with a heavy silver spoon. “I wonder, Kelly, if you would be kind enough to serve on the committee.”

Kelly hesitated. “I won’t have much free time, with my new duties—”

“I wouldn’t expect you to do much,” Eloise countered.