Saying Grace (25 page)

“Did you, dearie?”

“Yes. I’ve noticed something since I’ve been away. I’ve noticed that people who feel blessed and lucky are the ones who aren’t always watching their backs or saying ‘I’ve got mine, Jack.’ The ones who have always been lucky and safe and had enough of everything Saying Grace / 179

are the ones who dare to keep giving things away. And who dare take risks. It’s the ones who feel pinched and unsafe and mean who hunch over their bowls and snarl when people come near.”

Oh my god, thought Rue, she’s not getting married, she’s going to join a cult. She’s going to join Mother Teresa. We’re never going to see her again.

The others listened expectantly. They could tell she was going somewhere, they just couldn’t guess where.

“It’s the people who haven’t felt lucky, and blessed, who have to say Me First, and I Win, who are always looking for systems to keep them safe, who think they aren’t all right unless they’re beating somebody else.” Her eyes were bright. She was full of passionate conviction.

Rue was tearing apart inside. On one hand, she was fiercely proud of Georgia. On the other hand, she was terrified that her beloved only child was about to take a vow of silence and become a nun.

“That’s very well put, Georgia,” said Henry.

“Yes, it is,” murmured Emily. She was unable to take her eyes from Georgia’s face. It was as if she were seeing Cricket again for the first time.

Georgia took a deep breath. She was smiling as if she would bubble over. “So…” she said, “I have something to say.”

That much had long since been evident to all.

“You always taught me…” she looked to her mother, and then to her father “…you always taught me that we have an obligation to use our gifts. To find the thing that we can do that nobody else can do.”

From opposite ends of the table, Henry and Rue nodded at Georgia. Then they looked at each other. Henry had finally gotten out from behind the eight ball. What the hell is going on? his eyes asked Rue.

“So,” said Georgia, “I have to say truly that the world is full of sopranos with well-trained voices who want to sing Santuzza. And in the long run it won’t matter if it’s me or somebody else. But no one can write the songs I’m writing. No one can sing the new music we’re going to make.”

“We?” said Henry.

“So Jonah and I are leaving school. We’re starting a band called Brain in a Jar,” said Georgia.

Y
ou are carrying this too far,” said Henry, coldly furious.

They were sitting in their bedroom, talking in low tones to keep from waking Georgia. It was hours past their usual time for sleep, and the room was cold. Rue was wearing a nightgown and bathrobe and a pair of Georgia’s aerobics socks. Henry was naked under his bathrobe. It was the first, and worst, fight they had had in many years.

“I think she has a right to make her own mistakes. It’s her life,”

said Rue softly. Her voice was almost pleading. She was horrified to feel so far from him, and part of her wished he
would
behave like a Victorian patriarch, and simply forbid Georgia to leave school.

“If she was four, and she wanted to light her hair on fire or bring a toaster into the bathtub with her, would that be her right?”

“She’s not four.”

“But she’s not right! She’s infatuated with this Whale fellow, she’s thinking with her…”

Rue interrupted him. “I don’t think you’re qualified to say that.”

“Qualified! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m her father, what kind of qualifications do I need?

“You would have to be her. She. You would have to be nineteen.”

“Rue, I know this is a long-standing principle of yours, everyone gets to decide for himself who to be and what path to follow, but sometimes children need to be protected from themselves. When she was little, there were times when we shut her in her room and told her to stay there until she could control herself. This is one of those moments! She’s talking about changing the course of her life in a way she can never undo, and she hasn’t even
thought
about the consequences!”

“She has now, since we spent the whole evening yelling at her.”

“We didn’t yell at her, and she didn’t think at all. All she did Saying Grace / 181

was tell us the decision was made. Do you think, if she drops out now, and two years from now she gets sick of greasy spoons and sleeping bags and she wants to go back to Juilliard and have a grown-up professional life, do you think they are going to take her back?

Of course not, they’re going to give her place to someone who’s shown some commitment, some vocation!”

“We don’t know that. They might grant her a leave of absence.”

“She isn’t asking for one. She’s dropping out.” He picked up a small book that sat on the table between them, held it in midair between finger and thumb, then opened the fingers. The book dropped. What had been where it belonged, ready for use, now lay on the floor, face-down, with pages crumpled, and Rue had to fight to resist picking it up.

“You talk about gifts, Rue. You talk about people’s obligation to use their god-given gifts. That girl has an incredible set of pipes, and she has a brain and she has an ear. She could be Jessye Norman, with proper training…”

“She doesn’t want to be Jessye Norman.”

“She did last week, and she may next month.”

“I wish you wouldn’t yell at me, Henry, this isn’t my idea.”

“I can’t help it. It
is
your idea, as much as any one else’s. You’ve been telling her since she was in Pampers that it’s her life to do what she wants with.”

“That’s not fair. I never told her that without also making it clear how responsible she is to all the people who are affected by what she does.”

“Is she showing that she heard that part?”

“Some things have to be learned, not just received.”

“Oh, bull. You just can’t back down because this is a page from your sermon. And because you pander to her, because you can’t bear to be at odds with her.”

This was true, and Rue knew it, though she didn’t care for the choice of words. She felt so profoundly cold at the moment that she couldn’t tell if it was from the chill in the room or some ague of misery that had come to live in her bones forever. She couldn’t bear being at odds with Georgia, but it was no worse to her than being at odds with her husband.

“If we acted together,” said Henry, “if we showed a united 182 / Beth Gutcheon

front, and we both told her we didn’t want her to do this, we might be able to get her to finish the year. And by then everything might have changed. She might change her mind, she might convince us…but if you won’t stand by me, then she’s gone.”

“It’s not a matter of standing by you! I’m listening and I’m trying to agree with you, but I can’t! I don’t! I think she has a right to do this, whether I think it’s a mistake or not!”

“Does she have a right to be supported while she does it?”

“Not a right, no. I wouldn’t want to think of her in want….”

Henry stood up and began to pace. The bare floor was cold on his feet; Rue noticed he confined himself to the area of the rug.

“That’s it, I see it. You are going to let her commit professional suicide, and then you’re going to send her money behind my back.”

“Are you willing to starve her into submission?”

“I would hardly choose those words for it. I would give her the opportunity to feel the consequence of her actions.”

Rue stared at him. She suspected, with an awful misgiving, that he was absolutely right. That that’s what they should do…and that she wasn’t strong enough to do it. That if Georgia asked her for money, Rue would be unable to deny her.

As if he could read her mind, Henry said, “You think this is principle, Rue, but it isn’t. It’s just sick. And I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I’m too angry to get into bed with you, and I have to sleep, I’m on call tomorrow.”

And he walked out. In a moment, Rue ran after him. She gathered an armful of blankets from the linen closet and went into the guest room, where Henry had just discovered that the bedside lamp was unplugged. In rising from plugging it in, he banged his head painfully on the corner of the bedside table. Then he pushed the switch and found it still didn’t go on. Rue put the blankets on the foot of the bed and went back to the closet for a bulb. She returned and handed it to him. He took it and screwed it in, handing her the dead one. Then he got into bed, still wearing his bathrobe, either too cold or too angry to appear naked before her, and turned off the light again. Rue stood by the door, hoping he would at least say good night. But he didn’t want to talk to her anymore, and standing there, shivering with shock and exhaustion, she wasn’t sure it was such a good idea anyway.

Saying Grace / 183

She flipped the wall switch that turned out the overhead light, went out, and shut the door behind her.

Sometime after dawn, which was late at that season, Henry, with feet like ice trays, slipped into bed with Rue and put his arms around her. She had been too miserable to sleep soundly, and instead was floating in a slightly lurid half-sleep, missing him, and apologizing to him, and feeling that he was unreasonable and completely wrong, or else that she was, but wishing he would just come back.

“I had a terrible dream,” Henry whispered.

“Did you, sweetheart?” She turned and put her arms around him so that she could feel him all the way down to his cold feet. He hugged her as if he was amazed to discover he still had that option.

“I dreamed I was marrying somebody else. I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me, and you were right there, and I knew you were the love of my life, but you didn’t do anything to stop me, and I had to go on even though I knew it was a terrible mistake.”

Rue stroked his hair and pulled the covers up to his chin.

“Did you know her? The one you married?”

“I don’t think so. She was young and built like a fireplug. It was terrible. And I knew that for the rest of my life, instead of her understanding me, I would have to explain my life to her. And even if she listened, even if she understood, then she’d start explaining
her
life to
me
. I’d have to go spend Christmas with her, in places like Texas, and meet her family, and they wouldn’t care anything about
The
Pickwick Papers
. It was really terrible.”

“It sounds terrible,” she said. They held each other.

“I woke up and couldn’t figure out where you were.”

“I know,” she said.

That was enough to say for the moment. They held each other, and presently felt finally warm again for the first time in many hours, and then slept again.

A little later, Henry was up, showered, and dressed for work, before Rue realized he was gone. He sat on the edge of the bed with a present wrapped in Santa Claus paper in his hand. Rue sat up.

“I was so mad at you last night I forgot to give you your present.”

184 / Beth Gutcheon

“I thought the fancy Screwpull was my present.”

“No.” He handed her the package and watched her open it.

In it were the cassettes he had secretly been recording for her all fall. They were carefully labeled Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
read by Henry Shaw. They both looked at the title and started to laugh. Rue kissed him, and they clung to each other.

“Henry—I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

G
eorgia left them on December twenty-ninth, a week before they expected her to go. She wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with Jonah.

Henry and Rue had scarcely known a happy moment since Christmas Day. Rue had come to understand that a strong source of pain to Henry was that his little one, two years shy of her legal majority, was going to leave the dorm, pack her duffel bags, and move into some sort of slum flat with a hairy man. She was going to put her socks and underwear into his drawers. She was going to cook for him, or maybe he was going to cook for her. They were going to treat each other as if they were a couple, as he and Rue were a couple. It caused Henry a piercing sorrow, and he and Rue had somehow managed to keep that aspect of his distress completely out of the conversation. He knew it wasn’t rational or especially noble, but that didn’t mean the pain wasn’t real.

They had learned a good deal more about Jonah in the awkward days since Georgia’s announcement. He was twenty-three, which sounded old to be a college senior. He had a lot of hair, they gathered, and was more than ordinarily pierced, though when Henry wanted to know exactly what was meant by that, Georgia laughed.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Why do you want to know? You’ll just start in about ritual self-mutilation, and scarification.”

“Well, isn’t that what it is?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“Daddy, why do you even ask? You’re not going to understand.”

She was right. He wasn’t. And yet, he felt terribly hurt and balked, like a person standing at a door that has always opened at a 186 / Beth Gutcheon

touch, and hearing someone on the other side turn the latch to lock it. He couldn’t understand if she didn’t even
try
to explain, could he? Could he? So why wouldn’t she try?

The answer was painfully obvious.

“Doesn’t it hurt her too?” Henry asked Rue. “Why does she seem to take pleasure in telling us she’s going where we can’t follow her?”

“Think of all the times when she was little we closed doors to her, understood things she couldn’t, and went places without her, leaving her behind.”

“But we didn’t do it
in order
to hurt her.”

“We did it.”

Henry and Rue spent some time talking about their own rages at their parents when they were Georgia’s age. “That was different.

Our parents were horrors,” said Henry.

“I grant you. But maybe we are too.”

They learned that Jonah’s parents had been divorced when he was twelve, and that he had been an emancipated minor since he was fifteen. He had left Brooklyn and lived over a classmate’s garage in New Jersey. He went to high school in New Jersey and turned the friend’s garage into a recording studio. In an odd detail, Georgia informed them that he had made quite a good living performing as a magician. There were two expensive restaurants in New York that let him go from table to table performing sleight of hand for the customers. He collected tips.