The Good Daughters (18 page)

Dana arrived in the company of a very attractive woman. She herself dressed more like a man than a woman now. It was clear, seeing the two of them, that they were a couple.

I took this news in with a certain mean-spirited pleasure. Now that it was revealed that Dana Dickerson was a lesbian she had finally done something even my mother, for whom Dana represented everything that was desirable in a daughter, would surely find unacceptable. My birthday sister would no longer be the daughter my mother would have wanted. I wondered if my mother would be aware enough to understand.

They didn’t sit down—Dana and this woman she had come with. They made no particular effort to conceal the fact that they were a pair. They were holding hands, as I recall. Dana was studying my mother’s face. Her skin was stretched tight and her eyes were closed.

“You always raised the best strawberries here, Connie,” she said. “I had to make sure Clarice got to taste them. My partner.”

My mother opened her eyes and looked at the two of them—Dana first, then the other woman.

“You turned out homosexual?” she said. “Knock me over with a feather.”

Here it comes, I thought: the moment I’d waited for all my life, when my mother would finally see Dana Dickerson as a flawed woman and appreciate, at last, the daughter she’d been given, me.

“I can’t say I understand what you girls do, or how you go about it,” she said. “But if you ask me, it makes a lot of sense. Who needs a man and all that complicated apparatus they’re always showing off? I’m guessing you two have yourselves a nice, sweet time together. Softer skin.”

Dana, though we had not prepared her for my mother’s behavior, seemed to take her words with a matter-of-fact interest. Her partner, Clarice, stroked my mother’s hand.

“We’re very happy together,” Clarice said.

“Well, isn’t that nice,” my mother said. “I’ll take that to my grave.”

One other group of people with whom we had only the briefest dealings over those last months were my mother’s Wisconsin relatives. Her parents were long dead, but there were two sisters still living near their old cheese operation.

“We thought you’d want to know,” my sister Naomi began, when she finally placed the call.

I did not hear the voice on the other end of the line, but the conversation was brief. When my sister put down the phone, she had looked shaken.

“Her sister said that was a shame,” Naomi told me. “She said it was too bad but they were never close, and to send the obituary when it came out, for their scrapbook.”

THE LAST TIME I SPOKE
with my mother was the day she died. She spent almost all day sleeping by that point, but as I was sitting there—I was drawing her—she had opened her eyes. My sisters were making arrangements at the funeral home and my father was resting, so I was alone in the room when it happened.

“You were a good daughter, in the end,” she said. “Not the one I was expecting. But things didn’t turn out so bad.”

She was buried in the family plot, which was set in a grove of birches behind the house next to one of our irrigation ponds. She had rows of Planks to keep her company—Plank men, and their wives, the children who hadn’t made it through infancy or childhood, and the ones, like my father, who had grown up to tend the farm after their father’s passing, and then passed it on to the next generation. Standing around the hole in the earth—it was a rainy day, early fall, hurricane season but thankfully there were no big storms this year—I watched my father sink his shovel in the earth and raise a spadeful of dirt to scatter over her coffin. One more planting, out of season. My sisters wept and I wished I could, but no tears came.

AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, I
told Jim I wanted to move back to the farm and build a house there, on that piece of land my father had been saving for me all this time. As usual, my husband went along with my wishes.

The place we built was nothing fancy—a couple of bedrooms and a little art studio for me, with a sunny kitchen that looked out over the irrigation pond where my father and I used to swim. I wanted to help look after him now, I told Jim, but there was more to it. My roots in that place had reached deeper than I’d known.

I got a part-time job running a kids’ art class, and a second job as an art therapist in Concord, the capital, working with emotionally disturbed adults and men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Vietnam veterans, mostly. Jim would keep his insurance business outside of Boston. Though this would mean an hour-long commute for him, he didn’t argue.

We had a comfortable life, then. Our daughter loved being on the farm, and though my father had once commented how odd it was that first Americans went to Korea to fight, and the next thing you knew they were adopting babies there, he adored Elizabeth. She spent many hours doing chores with her grand
father, riding next to him on his tractor when he plowed, tending the hills of pumpkins and snipping the heads off zinnias. As he had done with me, so many years before, he taught my daughter how to renovate the strawberry beds after the season was over, selecting the five strongest daughter plants, spacing them evenly around the mother plant, like the rays of the sun, and letting them take root for the next season.

“Daughters,” he told her as they dug. “Nothing better than a good daughter.”

I worked long hours but I liked how I spent my days. Mornings I taught the elementary-school kids in town, making collages and clay animals and potato prints, which made it easier to locate patience for the men and women I worked with at the state hospital. It was a long way from my days as a young artist, working as I did now in a basement room in Concord, moving among the tables of people so profoundly depressed or damaged that in some cases I had never heard them speak.

But—maybe in part because they were unrestrained by the conventions of what was considered regular society—my clients at the mental hospital made beautiful things, painted with a kind of freedom and expressiveness you wouldn’t find in a class of so-called normal people. A portrait of a woman made by one of my students at the hospital would not simply fill the paper but spill over its edges—eyes boring into you, colors applied with bold, slashing strokes that practically vibrated with feeling. One man in my group liked to paint portraits of baseball players from the 1960s, with all their statistics forming a border around the edges of the canvas. One woman only made paintings of babies; another made a self-portrait using matchsticks.

Many times, surveying the artwork of my students in that little class of mine, I’d imagine how it would be if their pieces were hung in some downtown New York City gallery—how critics might rave about them, the big prices they’d summon. Occasionally I’d feel a stab of something like jealousy that here in this sad little room, with a bunch of people so heavily medicated they barely spoke, and shuffled when they walked, art was being made of a kind I myself no
longer seemed able to produce. Sometimes, truthfully, I almost envied my students their madness and their capacity to lose themselves in the art they made, as I once had. Perhaps the turmoil that afflicted them actually made them better artists.

Somewhere along the line—after I was brought back against my will from Canada—I had lost my passion for drawing and painting, or for anything else, with the exception of my child. But I was a good teacher, and there was a surprising amount of reward in that.

In my life at home there was less art than craft, I thought. Jim and I were good parents—kind to each other, devoted to our daughter. He worked hard taking care of his insurance customers and on weekends when we weren’t occupied with Elizabeth, he played a lot of golf. We had settled into a life with each other in which virtually the only shared endeavor was our daughter, though he would have welcomed the opportunity to shower on me the kind of love we both gave to Elizabeth. I just didn’t want it from him.

We lived less like husband and wife, it seemed, than affectionate brother and sister. I told myself there were worse things a person could say about her life than that.

How Things Happen

I
N
1977
PRESIDENT
Carter had declared an amnesty for all Americans who had left the United States for Canada and elsewhere during the Vietnam draft. For a while after I heard the news I kept hoping I’d hear from my brother, but no call came. I called Val to ask if she’d heard anything, but it was unlikely that my brother would have found her even if he’d wanted to because she’d moved so many times by then. She was in Virginia at that point, doing occasional portraits for rich people—of their children, mostly—and augmenting her income with greeting card designs. When I mentioned the amnesty, she seemed not to have heard me.

With the exception of that one odd period in which she’d protested the war, Val didn’t pay attention to the news of the world, or news of her own children for that matter. The rare times we’d talk, it was usually about her painting and pottery or her yoga or some new eating regimen she’d hit on—vegan, macrobiotic. I told her about Clarice, though she asked no questions about our life together. Once, though—out of character, for a person who seemed so unaware of any individual besides herself—she told me she’d heard Ruth Plank was living on
the farm again. Someone—probably Edwin—had evidently told her Ruth had gone to art school, and that interested her.

“Funny how these things turn out,” she said. “You ending up raising goats. And Ruth’s painting. Do you ever wonder how things happened that way?”

I hadn’t, but now, thinking of my brother, I said, “I wonder if she’s heard from Ray.” I never knew the particulars but I’d been aware something had happened between them once.

“Your brother’s off in his own world,” she said. “I don’t expect to see him again.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Everything’s changed now. He’s free to come home.”

“It’s not necessarily the government’s say-so that matters,” she said. “It’s what goes on in his own head. Your brother burned his bridges with us a long time ago.”

“He could be married, for all we know,” I said. “You could be a grandmother. I could be an aunt. Don’t you want to know if he’s got a family?”

“You know the funny thing?” she said. “He called me once from a pay phone somewhere in Canada. He said there was going to be a baby.”

All these years, and this was the first I’d heard of that. “Then what?” I asked her.

“Then one more call,” Val told me. “He said it didn’t work out. He was crying. That was the last time I ever heard from him.”

Road Trip

I
T WAS HAYING
season when my mother died, and maybe because of that, my father had little time to grieve for her, though he must have thought about her plenty, all those hours on the tractor moving in circles, mowing the fields.

We were experiencing a low-rain summer again, so he was occupied all that July moving the irrigation pipe. He still did a lot of that heavy work himself, though often now my sisters’ children helped out, along with his longtime worker, Victor Patucci—whose title was foreman now.

“Victor’s always after me to retire and let him run this place,” he said one night, coming in from the field after a particularly long day in which he’d stayed out, watering, until the last hours of sun were gone. “But there’s something about that fellow that rubs me the wrong way.”

As rough as things had been for my father ever since the barn burned down, he wouldn’t have known what to do in the Florida retirement community whose brochure Victor showed him one time, or on the senior citizens’ cruise to Bermuda. My father needed Victor, but he had never cottoned to Victor’s ideas con
cerning how our place should run. Maybe it was true that we’d boost efficiency and increase profits if we cut back on all the little specialty items we grew and gave up on growing things like zinnias and peas—crops he loved, that weren’t particularly profitable—to focus on volume and what Victor called “the entertainment factor” of the farm that could turn it into a real moneymaker.

But tending the land had never been just about making money for my father. Not even mostly about making money.

“If all we had to do was cultivate plants and we never had to worry about selling anything,” he sometimes said, “life would be perfect.”

But for Victor, the bottom line was profit. “He’s a bean counter, not a farmer,” my father said. “The only thing that fellow likes to see growing is his bank account.”

If my mother had been alive, she would have sat with him all those nights after work, working on a quilt while she listened to his reports on how the corn was looking and what kind of a tomato crop they might expect. As it was, the evenings must have been lonely for him. Even with my sisters and me dropping by when we could, bringing dinners over, he came in from the fields so late that he ate most of his meals alone.

Come fall, after the frost, he was restless. Once pumpkin season was done, there was little work remaining, and he’d take walks along the road, throwing sticks for his dog, Sam, or spend hours playing solitaire. My daughter, Elizabeth, used to stop by and play hearts with him, but she was busy with homework most nights now, and on weekends she visited her friends. The other grandchildren were no different.

“I wish those darned seed catalogs would get here,” he said, but it was only November. He had another two months to wait before they arrived and he could get to work on next season’s orders.

Sometime in early December my father announced he was planning a trip. “I thought I’d pay a visit to Valerie Dickerson,” he said. “Her being an old friend and all.”

I hadn’t seen Val for years, and didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though it would have been easy enough to find out from Dana, and probably
that’s how my dad had learned she’d moved to Virginia. She was making pottery, he said.

“That’s a long drive,” I told him.

“I always liked a road trip,” he said, though apart from those spring vacation pilgrimages to check up on the progress of Dana Dickerson’s childhood, I doubted he’d ever taken one.

“When did you ever go on a road trip, Dad?” I asked him.

“There’s my point. About time,” he said. “I can take in some historical sights. See the country.”

The day before he set out, he visited the barbershop in town instead of asking my sister Sarah to trim what was left of his hair. When I stopped by that evening to check on him, I noticed a small package on the table, gift-wrapped, with a ribbon.

“A person doesn’t want to show up for a visit empty-handed,” he said. He’d bought Val a pin depicting the New Hampshire state flower, the purple lilac.

He set out before sunrise. For once in his life, he did not wear his overalls. He was wearing a new pair of jeans, with the creases pressed, and a collared shirt with a tie. He had his usual L.L. Bean jacket, naturally, on account of the cold. Standing on the front porch to see him off, I kissed him good-bye and smelled aftershave.

He had made arrangements for us to take care of Sam for a full week, and my mother’s African violets, figuring he might want to stay down in Virginia for a while, checking things out, particularly considering this trip constituted the first vacation he had ever taken in his life.

He was home seventy-two hours after he left. I heard his car pull up the road past midnight. He must have driven straight through back from Richmond, to save on a motel, but even so, given how long it would have taken him to get down there, he could not have spent any time at his destination.

The next morning I stopped by to ask how things had gone with Val. He was sitting with his coffee at the kitchen table, but he didn’t want to talk about it much.

“How did she like the pin?” I asked. If he heard the question, he ignored
it. He was stirring the cream in his coffee, looking out the window to the fields below our house.

“She got married,” he said. “One of those fellows that trades in stocks and what have you. Suit and tie, the whole bit. You know how she met him? He hired her to paint a picture of his dog after he died. Next thing you know, they were hitched.

“They asked me in for lemonade,” he said, “but I said I was on a tight deadline. Busy man, that’s me.”

My father was reaching into a drawer now for something, as he told me this. When in doubt, apply WD-40 oil to a hinge, one of his mottoes in life.

“She’s still a beautiful woman, though,” he said. “That part didn’t change.”