The Legacy of Eden (21 page)

The life of Antonia Magdala Pincetti had always been in a state of flux. Her father couldn’t or wouldn’t hold down a job. He went through a veritable succession of careers—salesman, barman, chef—but the longest stretch of employment was as a clerk at the Italian embassy in Washington. This lasted for fifteen months and both she and her mother, Angela, believed that at last they had found the security they so desperately craved. But then her father began to take time off from work, until he stopped showing up at the offices altogether and then one day Angela received a telephone call telling her that her husband need not come in on Monday, though it was doubtful by then whether he’d ever had the intention of doing so.

As a result, Antonia moved around constantly. From Baltimore to Washington to New Jersey, until she came to New York when she was fourteen. Two weeks after arriving, her father got a job interview with a travel agency. The interview was at 2:00 p.m. He left at one sharp. Wearing his job-hunting suit, he gave Angela a kiss and borrowed twenty dollars for gas. He took their car, a weathered yellow jalopy, and waved goodbye to her through the window. They never saw him again. And my mother never forgave him for it.

Individually my parents were blighted with memories they longed to forget, yet when they were together, they were suddenly able to paper over the cracks their past had made and, astonishingly, let it hold. My mother told him she loved him on their fourth date. Three months later they were married and she fell pregnant with Claudia on their honeymoon in Quebec, where they had bought a blue-and-white-speckled tea set that I used to play with as a child in make-believe doll parties. My maternal grandmother, who died before I was born, and twenty of their friends were in attendance at the wedding. None of Theo’s family made it to the ceremony, though they sent them a set of very expensive silverware as a wedding present. Lavinia had picked it out.

My mother could not understand it, but there was a small, nearly imperceptible but still noticeable change that crept into my father’s voice and face that stopped her from ever questioning the facade of his relationship with his relatives in Iowa. She herself knew what it was like to carry the burden of home and so she let the matter rest, never calling into question why the halcyon tales of his childhood past stumbled into an impassive wall whenever he spoke of his family in the present. But even she would eventually reach her limits.

You see it was at her request that they came home. They were living in a tiny flat in Queens and my father had spun her such gold-threaded tales of life on Aurelia that when she looked down at my sister and at the meager contents of their flat, she couldn’t see why they were pursuing a life of hardship, when there was one of ample prosperity just waiting for them to come back and claim it.

But my father dragged his heels. Though he indulged her in everything (which was not hard because my mother never asked for much), he stalled at this. It was hard for him to tell her that he was afraid to go back. She may have seen the peeling paint of their living room and the oversize closet they turned into a nursery and pained at these things, but when he thought of Aurelia, he did not see the house on the mound but the blood of a white Kansas Thoroughbred running in streams across the dust floor of the stable. Home was not home to him anymore. A lot had happened since he’d been away.

For the first time since they had known each other my parents argued. All she could see was what they did not have and all that they could with my father acting as a barrier in between. But how could he tell her of the scene that had occurred just before he left? That his sister was the town whore, who if she’d been a common streetwalker, would have commanded more respect? That he had watched as she had been taken away by his aunt to where he did not know, only he was sure that she would never come back. She was to be, as my grandmother later put it, “shunned.” Quickly tales of her wantonness had spread around the town. Cal, at Lavinia’s insistence, took out a restraining order against his daughter. There were threats she would come back for her son, but Jess—passive, unsure Jess—who had not come to the house since that night, came out of his self-imposed isolation and threatened to kill her if she ever stepped foot on Aurelia or near Cal Jr. again. For once Julia cowered before the seemingly docile musician she had once coveted, perhaps realizing for the first time that her poison had spread through more lives than just her own.

For Jess was wounded badly. Humiliated, deceived, disgusted. It was more than what his wife had done; it was what he had given up for her in the first place. He had made himself into the type of husband and father that in the end was acceptable for nothing more than a whore. Those were his words. So he began drinking heavily, until the house, as my grandmother noted whenever she came to visit, was littered with bottles. There was barely any food but there was more than enough liquor. He could hardly look at his son anymore. Piper took care of him. She was afraid, she said, to leave the boy with Jess, but his grandfather could barely look at Cal Jr. any more than his own father, so she could not have him to stay in the house as she would have liked.

A few months after Julia had gone, just before Christmas, there had been an “incident.” Cal Jr. had ended up in hospital. There had been a grave fear that he would not survive intact. He had had a broken arm, cracked ribs and a mass of contusions to his head that left him unconscious, and in intensive care for a week. He was only three years old. The police had been called as he was placed in intensive care and Jess, when they found him, was slumped at the wheel of his car two and a half miles away outside a titty-bar, his knuckles covered in his son’s blood, snoring loudly as he clutched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to his chest. He was charged with grievous assault but my grandmother persuaded the police to drop the charges. She gave Jess five thousand dollars and a legal document that forfeited all of his parental rights. He left town and they did not hear from him again, though his parents had gone to see Cal Jr. in the hospital. Afterward his father had had to excuse himself to be sick. Jess would never come back to our town. My grandfather had threatened to lynch him if he did. At the hospital he stabbed his finger in the air at Jess’s father over the bed of his comatose grandson, and then drew it in a line across his neck.

Nobody informed Julia of what had happened.

But Julia did not try to claim Cal Jr.

Though no one in the family was allowed to contact her or have anything to do with her (even Piper, who raged and howled at her brother, but was told she would be turned out if she so much as breathed his daughter’s name again), Julia did not try to assail the walls of silence her family had built against her. It led some to believe in time that this was the opportunity she was looking for. She got to leave, to finally escape her marriage and her son. Though she lost everything she had, in some quarters there was a deep-rooted bitterness that perhaps in the end, she had still won after all.

In the end, to everyone’s surprise, it was my grandmother who proposed that Cal Jr. come to live with them in the white house. My grandfather had been reluctant at first but Lavinia insisted. She hired decorators and remade a room for him especially. She nursed him when he came out of the hospital, and she attended to his every need. Her sister-in-law did not know what to make of it. Until that moment Lavinia had never shown any interest in her grandson, but it was as if none of that had occurred. She took him to her as if he had always been her own and my grandfather, out of his own deep-rooted guilt, did not question it; he let her have her way and an exhausted Piper did not try to intervene. I think losing Julia had hit her the hardest out of everyone, though no one would have cared to find out. I remember how even as a child whenever she dared to mention her niece’s name to me that lick of love would still slide into her voice and mouth. She had been the child Piper never had while she was there, but none of those rights existed once Julia had been sent away from the farm. If the two remained in contact no one knew it, but losing her broke my great-aunt in a way nothing had before or ever would. She grieved for her until the day she died. But even when she asked for her as she was dying, my grandfather would not allow his daughter to come and visit. As far as I know, no one ever told her that Piper was dead, though I’m sure somehow she would have discovered it and mourned the death of the one person who had truly loved her from a stranger’s distance.

As for Ethan, he had married none other than the daughter of his neighbor, Georgia-May Healy, a sweet but plain girl who was as unlike Ethan and, more importantly, as unlike Allie as it was possible to be. At first Theo would not believe it until he saw the wedding photo. But there his brother was, dressed in a suit so black it looked like he was attending a funeral. He was frowning at the camera. The sight of Georgia-May clutching onto his brother’s arm in nervous excitement made my father shiver when he saw it.

My mother could not understand his reaction. “Don’t you like her?” she’d asked, but he had shaken his head unable to explain. He could only say that during Ethan’s proposal, his brother had raised the point that at least in marrying him she wouldn’t have to change her initials. After that my mother did not need to press him further. My father recognized instantly that when Georgia-May’s father died the dairy farm would be joined onto Aurelia’s ever expanding estate. The Healys had more than survived the first year Lavinia had estimated and she had been delighted at the opportunity to align the two farms. My father had not liked the thought but it would not leave him, no matter how many times he had batted it away.

Yes, he had grown up in a tall white house on a mound and run his horse alongside the wheat fields there, but those days of careless happiness were gone. And not one bit of this did he reveal to his wife, not until it was too late. I cannot help but think that if he had she might have been able to provide him with the strength to withstand the difficulties of their lives together and the weariness that being poor can bring. And his resolve would not have waned and he would not have allowed that treacherous seed of hope to plant a vine that strangled his reason with the idea, the small dangerous fragment of an idea, that even though all these things had happened, perhaps Aurelia could still be a new kind of home for his daughter, who never knew what it had been like in the past and so could not know any better.

When he came back in 1971, he came as if he had only been away for the afternoon and not four years. He walked up the drive and into the house knowing, as always, that in the daytime the door would be unlocked. When he pushed back the door, the only person who sat there, as ever, as if she had been waiting for him, was Piper.

Older, more lined even in four years, but still Piper.

Except she did not look up when she heard his step. She must have thought he was Ethan.

“Hello?” he said. She looked up then, slowly, cradling a cup of coffee, her pen poised over a crossword. For a moment nothing, and then a slow dawn of recognition lighting up feature after feature from the eyes down.

“Theo,” she breathed midhug, drawing in a large sniff as she pressed her nose against his shoulder. Yes, it was him, the boy who had left after that awful time was here now as a man—his blond hair grown long and crowded against his ears and neck, his body lithe and still strong, but most of all alive. Here he was and he was not alone.

My mother was waiting in the hall, dressed in white and holding my sister, who was still a baby at the time. Long brown hair, big brown eyes, young, naive, hopeful. She cast her eyes about the place she had heard of so often from my father, who had unknowingly wooed her not with the dinners he took her to, or the flowers he bought her, but the tales of his childhood and the near reverence with which he spoke of his home—the one thing she had never really had and always longed for.

Piper stopped short when she saw them as Theo led her out into the hall. She took in my mother and her child clutched against her chest, and for the first time my father saw the fissures that had formed long cracks along his aunt’s composure because just then she crumpled. And out of joy or fear or sadness or all three, she held on to the top of his shirt and burst into tears.

“So this is what I think we should do,” said Claudia, who, after sipping at her coffee rather than brown tea (“Instant?” she asked in disappointment as Jane had set down the mug beside her), had decided to pull herself together and take command.

Out came the long list of thoughts she had been compiling ever since she had heard of the farm’s demise. I watched her coffee get cold.

“And I was thinking of hiring someone to—”

“Hiring someone? Why would we need that?”

“Well, that’s the beauty of letting someone finish their sentences, Meredith.”

“Look, I know what you’re going to say—”

“The gift of foresight?” She leaned forward and narrowed her mascara-heavy eyes into slits.

I let myself throw her a dirty look half-mixed with condescension, the ones I used to practice over a table very similar to this one.

“Listen, there won’t be enough for you to box up and take away. The farm is gone and anything that is left will be auctioned off to pay back the heap of debts Cal left on the place.”

“Aurelia,” she said.

I blinked. “What?”

“You never use its name. It’s ‘the farm,’ or ‘that place,’ but it’s actually Aurelia. That’s what it’s called. Anyone might think you’d have an aversion to it.”

I waved a hand in front of her to signal how pathetic I found her attempts at psychoanalysis.