The Legacy of Eden (5 page)

At first Eleanor decided to keep up the pretense of parenthood and send them money every month. The amount always varied. Then after two years she sent forty dollars and a wedding photograph of her and her new husband. Her sister-in-law had humphed at this.

“At least she’s not wearing white,” she had said.

That was the last they had ever heard of her.

It was after this that they changed my grandmother’s name. Her aunt had never liked it. She had thought it pretentious, flighty: in short, far too reminiscent of the traits inherent in her wayward mother. So they had taken it away and instead settled her with her middle name Anne, though they thought Anne Brown was far too dour so they had given her Marie as well. They had thought in doing so they were being kind.

So she had lived and grown up with them as Anne-Marie Brown, one of them, but always aware this was by their admission rather than her right, so that at any moment this could be taken away and no one would intervene. How much of this was of her own thinking and how much was gauged by their implication, no one will ever really know. What is known is that one day at the age of nineteen, Anne-Marie had placed the silver tray of honey roast chicken on the protective place mat in front of her uncle and when he stood up and scraped the carving knives against each other, over the clang of metal she announced there and then that she didn’t want to be served any dark meat and that she was planning on marrying Dr. Lou Parks.

Her aunt had dropped her fork, her uncle had put down his carving knife and her cousin had shrieked with laughter.

“You can’t marry Lou Parks,” Louise squealed. “He’s a hundred years old.”

“Forty-nine,” Anne-Marie had replied quietly.

Over the dimming candles and intermittent incredulous gasps and other noises, they had questioned her for over an hour, while the chicken shriveled up and the steamed vegetables began to wilt, until all they were left with was a cold meal and more questions than answers.

How had this happened? they wanted to know. Had she done anything improper? Louise at one point demanded to know if she had slept with him, at which point out of disgust or fright her mother had slapped her across the mouth and Louise had burst out crying, which had only made her mother start bawling herself. Her uncle sat there trying to compose himself, but he was hungry and he stared plaintively at the chicken and mourned the fact that on any other evening, he would by now be sitting in his study, fed and sated, not stiff-backed at the dinner table with his women crying.

“Don’t you want to marry someone your own age?” her aunt asked her. “If you ever had any children, by the time they are grown up, why—” she turned to her husband, her hands splayed in a posture of both pleading and exasperation “—he’ll be old enough to be their grandfather.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there aren’t any young men left anymore,” Anne-Marie answered coolly. “And the last thing I want is to raise some brat on my own while my husband gets his head blown off overseas.”

Her aunt had opened and closed her mouth like a fish choking on air.

Finally, in an effort to impart some good on the proceedings, her uncle had asked Anne-Marie if she truly loved this man; if she was ready to spend the rest of her life with him, until death do they part, and, more importantly, if she really knew what this meant. She had leaned back in her chair and sighed, then looked at him with such tired contempt that when she dropped her head and turned away he had not dared to press her for an answer. For the very first time he had seen her naked in expression and suddenly he had an overwhelming desire to get the girl out of his house once and for all.

In that fact, he could not have known how alike in sentiment they were, probably the only thing, apart from blood, that they ever had in common.

Her family could not understand why Lou Parks wanted to marry her. A bachelor, with a taste for whiskey and a strong Presbyterian streak, he seemed the least likely person to fall for Anne-Marie. Her uncle couldn’t help but question him over the validity of the relationship, when Lou, like a lovesick teenager, had come to his house the next day to properly ask for Anne-Marie’s hand. Anne-Marie had bent over the upstairs banister, watching her cousin and aunt in the corridor below, trying to listen in on what he was saying, and she had smiled to herself at what she had accomplished, and even more that they would never know how she did it.

No one believed it would actually happen. They all thought it was a brief bit of madness that would be slowly weaned out before it could ever come to full destructive fruition. But even though the night before the wedding they had lain in their beds and wondered aloud if he would go through with it, the next day Lou had stood up in the church and never once faltered in his vows. Even their kiss had seemed sincere, as he cupped Anne-Marie’s waist to draw her closer. Louise had made a gagging noise until she was hit on the arm to make her stop.

Her family was afraid of her after that, and she was glad. She saw how they greeted her and how anytime they said the words
Mrs. Parks,
their tongues seemed to slide over the letters as if, should they linger too long, someone would laugh at them and they would realize that they were the punch line to a joke she had been playing on them all this time. That wasn’t too far from the truth and part of them suspected so. To them she was a stranger, capable of what…they did not know, nor did they care to find out. But Anne-Marie did, and she was waiting: waiting for the chance for her true self to emerge as an independent, not defined by who she was with or whose house she lived in. But the more she waited, the less likely it seemed that it might happen.

She saw her cousin look longingly over her shoulder and in that instant she took the chance to slip away. By the time Louise had noticed her absence, Anne-Marie had moved too far away for her to want to call her back. She wove her way through the garden. They called it a garden but in her mind it was no better than an untilled field, just long grass and bushes that sprawled down the back of the house in a wide arc and before she knew it, she had let it lead her away as it branched off to the left behind some trees. It was there, sitting on a bench, that she found Cal Hathaway. Later on in life he would say she was looking for him but she did not know it; that it was fate that had led her there. I am inclined to agree.

“I’m sorry, I did not mean to intrude,” she said. He looked up at her then. He was reclining back on the white bench, a tumbler beside him and a bottle of scotch.

“Who are you? I ain’t seen you before,” he said curiously.

“I’m Anne-Marie Parks,” she replied coolly and then held out her hand as an afterthought, but he’d already turned from her back to his scotch and her hand fell limply to her side.

“You from here?” he asked sharply.

“Most of my life.”

“How come I don’t know much of you then?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows much of me.”

He looked her up and down. “Probably the best way,” he said conclusively. “Soon as anyone knows anything about you in this place they all start wanting a piece. Well, they’ve had as much as they’re going to get of me.”

“Where you been? They— I heard that you had been away for some time now.”

“Oregon. I’m a salesman there.”

“Oh?” enquired Anne-Marie casually. “What do you sell?”

He shrugged. “Whatever needs selling.”

This was how my grandfather was—cold, casual, unattached to anything and anyone except his daughter. He’d had enough of attachments at this stage in his life. All they ever seemed to do was bring him harm.

“I heard your daddy is dying.”

“You heard right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t be if you knew him.”

“I think you knew him and you’re still sorry, or you wouldn’t be down here away from everyone knocking back scotch.”

In the dark she could see his gaze arrest in surprise. His hand hovered over the bottle before he poured a thimbleful.

“Want to taste?”

She drew herself up.

“Ah, now there’s no need to be like that. A bit won’t kill you and it’s the good kind anyhow. My pa has good taste in liquor.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m thirty-five.”

“Well, it’s a sorry state when a man of your age is hiding from a party thrown for him at the bottom of a garden, drinking stolen liquor.”

Cal laughed. “You ain’t very popular, are you?”

Anne-Marie put a hand to her neck and then dropped it in irritation.

“About the same as you from the sounds coming out of people. Who says I ain’t anyhow?”

In the dark he seemed to smile. “Nobody is who likes pointing out other people’s truths.”

He stood up then and she saw how tall he was, the broad shoulders, the thin nose and square jaw, his long hands that were now cradling his drink. She would come to know how much he would like to drink and for a long time it would not bother her.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Weren’t you paying attention? I told you it was Anne-Marie.”

He shrugged. “Anne-Marie just don’t seem to suit, is all. You don’t look like an Anne-Marie to me.” He licked his lips. “Anne-Maries are soft creatures. You ain’t soft, you’re hard and brittle and harder because you know you’re brittle. Your name is a lie, Anne-Marie, but then so is mine. People call me Cal, have done all my life, but my name is Abraham. You know your bible—Abraham is the father of the twelve nations of God’s chosen people, all-wise, all-knowing. But I ain’t no Abraham just like you ain’t no Anne-Marie, so what then is your name, girl?”

It was then, my grandmother said, that she knew it. She watched the swaying man try to steady himself on his drunken feet and even though he wasn’t handsome, even though he was just some salesman from Oregon, even though she felt a creeping vine of disdain tug at the corners of her mouth as she observed him, it could not change her revelation.

“One day you will know,”
she would say much later.
“You will just know and all you can do is pray for the serenity to accept it and the courage to follow through.”

“My mother called me Lavinia,” she said finally.

He smiled down at her, and as he leaned forward she could smell the rich yeast of his breath.

“See—” he cupped her neck in his palm “—didn’t I tell you?”

That’s as much as she would ever reveal about what happened that evening in the garden. My grandfather on the other hand was more forthcoming. He once told me how even though he had noticed the wedding band, even though she was just a slip of a girl with a bitter tongue and even though her face was twisted in contempt, he had still looped her up by the waist and pressed his mouth against hers. He was drunk, he was angry and he saw in her the same anger at everything. Perhaps it was an act of consolation or the comfort of two strangers who found in each other a sense of kinship. Perhaps I am being too sentimental. Perhaps it was only ever meant to be just a kiss.

Later, when her husband would decide to go home and start to look for her, she would appear next to the table with the punch bowl, and he would ask if she’d had enough and wanted to leave, and she would say, gladly.

On the ride home, my grandmother said, she wrestled with herself. She thought about Cal’s words while she twisted her wedding ring. She conjured the faces of her cousin and her family, of the last time she ever saw her mother and finally of the pink curtain she had slashed to ribbons. The weight of it all, of all she knew and hated and all she wanted and was too afraid of, made her sag in her seat. For once her husband seemed to notice. He leaned over as he steered the car down the thin tree-laden lanes and, holding her hand he said, “Are you okay, Anne-Marie?”

And just like that she broke.

When I think of a time when things could have been different and then when something happened to make it so that they could never be, I find myself back at that garden party. If it were possible to undo that one thing, then everything else in time would unravel with it and we’d be left clean and renewed with hope.

Before I went to bed that night I dialed Ava’s number. It was late but I didn’t care. In the end it was the answering machine that picked up. Usually I would not have left a message but this time was different. This time I said, “I’m going back. I thought…well someone has to look over things and I don’t want Mom’s stuff sold off to a pack of strangers or gossip-hungry neighbors. I was thinking…I don’t… I wondered if maybe you may want to come with me—just to see what stuff you’d want to keep to remember them by.... No, why would you, right? I know. But I am going. I just thought you should know.”

I put down the receiver and lay supine on my bed. I knew I would dream that night, but I did not care. In the silence behind my mouth I said to myself,
Let them come
.

As if they needed an invitation.

Chapter
3

AT THE AGE of
seventy-one, Walter Hathaway had cancer of the colon. That was the only
reason his eldest son had come back. He had been diagnosed in the office of
an oncologist upstate, a specialist recommended to him by Lou Parks, who had
gone to college with the man and had followed his career with a respect
tinged with envy.

After a series of tests and
weeks of waiting he had driven back up to the doctor’s office, where after a
few minutes of chitchat and polite conversation, the doctor had told him
that not only did he have cancer of the colon, but that there was also
nothing they could do to save him.

“Bullshit,” said
Walter.

He had picked up his hat and
thanked the man, who, after taking a moment to recover, was still hastily
trying to explain that with his symptoms Walter would be dead within a year.
Despite the doctor’s protestations, Walter left him with little more than a
curt nod of acknowledgment. He refused to believe that death would be coming
for him so soon, and so when he came home and sat before the dinner his
daughter had made for him, all he’d said when she asked him where he’d been
was that he had spent the day in a meeting with a supplier.

But then four months later he
had woken up in a pool of his own shit and blood and saw death beside him
sitting in a wicker chair. So he had lain back into his pillow, sighed and
said, “Okay, you win.”

It was then he began to talk
about his eldest son and how to bring him home.

It was also the first time he
had mentioned him in over sixteen years.

When he was laid up in his bed
and the doctor had given him his medication, he gritted his teeth against
the pain and curled his fingers into claws so that they dug tunnels in the
sheets. Twisting in agony he beckoned to his daughter and told her, “Go find
your brother.”

“Sure, Pa, I’ll go get him for
you,” said Piper. A few minutes later and she came back with Leo, who winced
when he saw the state his father had become.

Walter closed his eyes and
sighed irritably.

“No, not him. I mean your
brother Cal. Get Cal.”

Piper felt Leo stiffen beside
her but she dared not look at him. She stared at her father but the old man
had his gaze fixed to the ceiling, battling against the forces of his own
body, and she saw then what she would become despite everything she was now
and her back sank beneath the weight of her revelation.

“Pa?”

“Didn’t you hear me, girl? You
making me talk when I got no energy to talk. Do as I say!” he shouted and
then doubled over into himself. Piper went to help him but he smacked her
hand away. She looked desperately for Leo but he’d already left the
room.

When she went down the stairs
she found Leo standing on the front porch, his fingers splayed against the
fringe of the roof that hung over them. He was staring out onto the drive.
Without looking away he asked, “Is he dead yet?”

“What the hell is wrong with
you? Of course not,” said Piper.

He turned to face
her.

“Well, by God I wish he were. I
wish he’d hurry and up and go before he does something stupid.”

“I don’t want to hear you talk
like that.”

“That man up there is not my
father.”

“He may be more of your father
than you’d like.”

Leo lurched himself forward down
the porch steps.

“What do you want me to do?”
Piper called after him. He turned around, and when he did his face was half
in shadow.

“Get a gun and end it. If it
were a horse you wouldn’t think twice.”

Piper leaned back and clasped
her hands over her skirt.

“Well then, don’t ask me again,”
he said, his profile throwing up long shadows as he walked home.

After a while it seemed that the
medication began to take hold. Her father was weak but quiet, as if he had
resigned himself to his fate. Sometimes as she passed the hall that led to
his bedroom she would hear his voice and wonder to whom he was talking. She
mentioned it once to Lou Parks, who said not to worry, one of the side
effects of the treatment was hallucinations. He asked her if she wouldn’t
want to move their father to some palliative care place that would help
control his pain before he died, but Piper refused. She had nursed her
mother in that same bed before she died and she felt it was only right to do
the same for her father. Lou Parks shrugged and touched the rim of his hat
as he left her. She went to the kitchen to prepare dinner.

But then a few days later, Lou
came into the living room, where she was mending linen, and said gently,
“Your pa is asking for Cal.”

“What?” she asked,
startled.

He stepped gingerly into the
room, cautious to avoid any mines. “Walter won’t stop talking about the boy.
He wants to see him.”

“Could this be the effect of the
medication?” Piper asked hopefully.

“No, more like the effect of
dying and the regrets that come to you before you do.”

“Oh,” said Piper as she sat back
in disappointment. “I see.”

“Do you know where he
is?”

“Cal? Of course I
do.”

“It’s just what with Walter
feeling how he did about him I thought…”

“I never stopped talking to
Cal,” said Piper. “I just didn’t do it in my daddy’s earshot.”

“Well, it’s up to you, of
course.”

“Yes, I suppose it
is.”

Later that night, Piper went
down to Leo’s house, a small honey-colored place he’d built half a mile down
from the main house. She knocked on the door and walked in to find her
sister-in-law wiping flour from her hands.

“Hi there, Elisa,” she said. “Is
Leo home?”

“Sure is, he’s upstairs having a
bath. You wanna wait?”

Piper nodded. “I think I’ll have
to.”

The women sat in the kitchen and
chatted while Elisa put the finishing touches to her pie. Then quietly Elisa
said, “My sister is pregnant again.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” said Piper
before she had time to stop herself. Elisa smiled down at her fingers as she
licked cherry juice from them.

“Yes, it is. I’m very happy for
her. I do love playing with my niece and nephews. She was a little afraid of
telling me, I think, on account of the troubles Leo and I have been having,
but I’m glad she told me. She must feel so full of purpose.”

Piper kept silent but she
watched the back of the woman’s head keenly. Usually she would reach out and
touch her, but she could not afford to do so at a moment like this, not with
what she had to tell her brother; not with knowing that she had
approximately thirty seconds to say what she needed to before she was sent
packing out of the house.

When Leo came downstairs, he
nodded at his sister in greeting.

“I told Piper about my sister’s
baby,” said Elisa as she dusted the pie in sugar. Leo gazed at his wife and
then as if conscious of his sister watching, coughed into his hand and
turned away.

“So you stopping for supper?” he
asked.

“No, not exactly.” Piper placed
a hand on her stomach, willing the courage to come, but it would not. So
instead she leapt forward anyway, hoping that its inability to show itself
was merely a product of delay rather than a sign of total
absence.

“I think we should send for
Cal.”

From the corner of her eye she
saw Elisa’s hand hover in midair and then gently resume shaking the sugar
over the crust. Her hand beating against the sieve was the only sound in the
room.

Finally Leo said, “Now what in
hell gave you that idea?”

“Pa is dying. You should respect
a dying man’s wish.”

The chair scraped on the floor
as Leo seated himself level with his sister.

“You ever think that maybe you
should respect the wishes of a man when he was sane and well, rather than
hallucinating and sick? That in his right mind Pa would never ask for such a
thing?”

“It’s not just for Pa. Cal has a
right to know.”

“For what?” Leo snorted. “He
didn’t want to know for how many years now? Did he want to know after Ma
died?”

“I think Daddy is ready to
forgive.”

“I think this is
horseshit.”

Piper stood up from the table
and spread her fingers in a fan against the edge. She made herself tower
over her brother.

“I believe we are better than
this. I believe we are better than some people who would just let their own
interests get in the way of doing what is right and I believe that even if
Cal came back it wouldn’t make no difference to anything other than Pa would
finally stop asking for him and could get some peace before he
dies.”

Leo’s jaw worked thoughtfully at
this last part. Piper saw it and pressed her advantage.

“You have to trust that Pa would
have recognized what you’ve done, Leo. You’ve been here, Cal hasn’t. Maybe
things were meant to work out differently to that, but they didn’t. We won’t
lose anything by having him back. Once upon a time this is what you would
have wanted.”

Elisa’s hands provided the
background noise to the pause that followed Piper’s words: the opening and
closing of the oven door, the scrape of dishes in the sink. Piper willed her
brother to show a glimpse of the boy she had known since childhood. She
willed it so hard it was almost a prayer, and for a moment as he lifted her
head she thought perhaps God had been listening.

“Whatever,” said Leo and he left
the room.

She knew better than to look at
her sister-in-law for comfort when it came to this subject so she left and
made her way back home. Three days later as Leo came in for lunch, she
slipped a piece of paper and some money next to the arm holding his corn
beef sandwich.

“What’s this?” he
asked.

“I need you to send a telegram
for me.”

“To who?”

“To Cal.”

Leo slapped his tongue against
his teeth.

“Will you?”

“I wasn’t planning on going into
town.”

“Neither was I.”

They stood there in their silent
contest of wills, and as Piper felt herself falter, a shadow passed over her
brother’s face and he dropped his sandwich onto the plate. He hunched over
as he stood up to leave and she made as if to touch him, but he gave her a
look that forced her hand back to her side.

And then her father called for
her. She was up the stairs in an instant and when she came back down, she
saw the plate was now in the sink and that the money with the piece of paper
was gone and she held on to the banister to steady herself as she leaned
against the wall.

Did Walter have an inkling of
what his simple request had done to the equilibrium of his household? Did he
even care? It was a question she longed to ask, but she held her counsel.
Instead she thought back to the last time they had all been under the one
roof. It was the day of her mother’s wake and she had been thirteen years
old. She remembered how she had stared up at the blueness of the sky and at
the good china laden with finger sandwiches and cakes from their neighbors
and the house full of people, and she remembered thinking that on any other
day, to any stranger passing by, how much it would have looked like a
party.

She remembered her father
sitting in his chair, when he was still strong and intimidating, surrounded
by their neighbors and Leo, only two years older than she was, hovering in
the doorway looking silently at the shadows Cal threw up on the walk as he
stalked up the drive away from them.

She remembered all these things
with color, and between the stairwell and the walls she gave up a
shudder.

Whenever my
grandparents talked about their courtship, they always gave the impression
of a passion and romance that could not help but transgress all boundaries.
In one sense they were being truthful, but in another how else could they
have presented it? Because the simple truth, as Piper loved to point out and
did so more frequently the older she became, was that while theirs was a
respectable marriage, their courtship had been far from it, with the
inconvenient fact that my grandmother was already married.

I have often been struck by the
differences in the ways in which Piper and Lavinia laid out the early years
of my grandparents’ relationship, and indeed both their versions fascinated
me because despite their differences they both illuminated an aspect of
their partnership that neither myself, nor my siblings, nor even their own
children, had ever witnessed: a time when it was my grandfather, not
Lavinia, who had the power.

When my grandmother was still
known as Anne-Marie Parks, she and Cal had begun their affair. At first,
certainly from my grandfather’s point of view, it was never meant to be
serious. He had no intention of staying in Iowa—this was simply a way of
passing the time until his father died and he could be free. And he liked
Anne-Marie: he liked how she always twisted her hair in her hands on one
side of her neck as she listened to him tell stories from his childhood; he
liked that she smelled of rose water; he liked how she spoke the truth
regardless of consequence or feeling; he liked that she was
unhappy.