The Violet Hour: A Novel (13 page)

When the bullying heat of late summer finally capitulated and gave itself up to the fall, Cassandra returned with her siblings to school. A new attitude began to take hold of her. A more grown-up, fourth-grade attitude. Her mother wanted what was best, so maybe it was best if she didn’t always know what was going on. Cassandra didn’t confirm this reasoning with her father, not directly, but something in the way he tilted his head when she appeared at his office door after school suggested he felt the same.

“Your mother hopes you’ll take over the business one day,” Howard told Cassandra one afternoon, as she sat in the embalming room, copying out her weekly spelling list. Which was the most he ever said about what it was, exactly, that Cassandra was doing down there.

That fall she was simply in awe of her father’s workrooms, finding them almost sacred in their capacity to transform. When he let her join him, she brought her dolls, which she sometimes stashed among the tools and vials, making the preparation space just a little bit her own. She brushed her hair and removed the strands that remained in the bristles, tossing most of them in the trash, but sometimes saving one or two to hide in her father’s jars when he wasn’t paying attention. She made more dolls and put on her lipstick in the corner, and when she got restless, she practiced dancing on the cold cement floor. She posed for her father, kicking her heel up like a girl onstage. “See, Daddy,” she said, swiveling around the room as though underwater. “I’m Esther Williams. I’m the Million Dollar Mermaid!” He applauded and she pretended to have turquoise flippers, and flecks of glitter all over her cheeks. It was their secret place, where people could be reborn, if only for a few hours, and not quite as they were before.

One afternoon, she looked up from her worksheet map of the counties of Maryland to see her father straightening his back as the
body before him approached completion. It was an old man’s body, long and gaunt with knuckles twice as wide as his fingers. Her father looked from the man to the photo on his corkboard, a finger to his lips in contemplation. She inhaled, smelling something slightly foul she hadn’t noticed before. Hardly realizing that she was holding her breath, she watched her father, captivated, as he reached some important conclusion.

“Looks like I’m going to need one of your colors this time,” he said at last, reaching for the cupboard where he stored her private collection. “Good old Bardot Beige.” Before she could respond, he had uncapped the stick and was applying it to the man’s sunken mouth.

“You can try this one if you want,” Howard said, handing her a shiny silver tube. “Never used.”

The new stick was a ripe pink no different from the color of her tongue. Using the mirror, she poised it over her lower lip and would have rolled it on as she’d always done had it not been for a thought that suddenly flicked across her mind like a flea, gone before she even knew where exactly she’d been bitten. Spooked, she realized she was about to do to her lips what her father was at that very moment doing to dead lips, and though she’d done it thoughtlessly before and had just as often seen her father hard at work, this precise new way of looking at things overwhelmed her and made her wonder what she’d been thinking all this time. He’d bought this color for the lips of a dead man.
Dead
lips! It was horrifying.

She made an involuntary squawk, which caught and gargled in her throat, a sound that spooked her further and broke her into tears. When he rushed over and shook her shoulders, told her to quiet down and just stay calm, she only cried louder, helplessly, tears coursing down her face with abandon, though she knew it meant getting her kind father, her greatest ally, into trouble. She couldn’t bear the thought of her mother discovering their secret, but even more than that, she couldn’t bear the thought of spending any more time in that unnaturally chilly, horrid-smelling room or doing anything to her face that her father did to the faces of people who’d died.

“No!” she shouted, tearing herself from his grip. She stumbled into the hallway. Back in the room he stood dumbfounded. It was awful; it was worse than if she’d seen him naked. “I can’t!” she cried, willfully now. “I can’t I’m sorry I
can’t
!”

After that it wasn’t long before Eunice was screeching at him like a jay, demanding to know how he could have thought to give their daughter makeup—she was only nine years old! Not to be outdone, Howard bellowed back—loud, clear words about being a man and knowing harm from fun and really it was all her fault for scaring everyone so much. The house was flooded with noise as it always was when they fought. Her mother panted and screamed as she would at a murderer. Her father practically choked on his words. “Why don’t you have a drink and lighten up?” he said, bitterly, pouring a sloshing one for himself.

It didn’t stop until he gave up and retreated, stalking past her and out of the house after dark, a vapor of cigarette smoke filling the space behind him. He was going out, he shouted from the hall, to be alone, to be with reasonable people who said reasonable things, and though he appeared again at breakfast the next morning, showered, dressed, and smiling as though nothing had happened, the echo of those words stirred uncomfortably between father and daughter as they sat eating their Cheerios and milk. She had let him down. She had been unreasonable and she had betrayed him to the most unreasonable person of all.

U
NABLE TO MAKE
a decision of any kind, Cassandra remained on the ottoman with Elizabeth, which was where Mary found them a short while later. She looked tired, but no less efficient than usual. “The bakery delivered Daddy’s cake,” she said. “Plus a couple extra gratis. We can put one out for the wake, save the other two for Thursday.”

“Cake for a funeral?” Cassandra asked. “Isn’t that a bit inappropriate?”

Mary furrowed her brow in condescension. “Cassandra,” she said, “it happens all the time. You know that.”

In fact, Cassandra didn’t know. Or if she’d once known, her adult life, far away from funerals and their rituals, had allowed her to forget. What surprised her was Mary’s authority, as though she hadn’t been off living an adult life of her own, teaching seventh-grade history in Pittsburgh, attending intellectual dinner parties with her academic husband, and hurrying her twins through their gauntlet of college-preparatory activities. As though she’d stayed home to run the family business and planned funerals here every day.

Mary twitched her head slightly. Her fine blond mane, which had poured down her back as a child, now sat up neat and short around her face.

Seeing her opportunity to leave her mother in someone else’s care, Elizabeth stood and kissed Cassandra on the cheek. “I’m going to bed.”

“Make sure Kyle’s out by the time I come in,” Cassandra said.

“I
will
.” Elizabeth slouched out, like a teenager, the hem of her T-shirt barely skimming the waistband of her jeans. She closed the door behind her.

Alone with their mother, the sisters were silent. Mary stood aside, watching Cassandra, who watched Eunice, still slumbering. Cassandra could tell Mary had something to say, something she wouldn’t want to hear.

“I called Abe,” Mary said finally. “Last night.”

Cassandra snapped her head up, though in truth, she’d expected her sister to interfere. Mary stood with her arms folded across her chest, her hair accusing Cassandra of some negligence. When Cassandra didn’t answer, she sucked in her cheeks; for a moment, her features aligned in a familiar scowl. Mary was even more like their mother than she was, Cassandra realized with some relief. Which sparked no new sympathy for Eunice, but somehow made her love her sister more.

“I didn’t ask your permission because I knew you wouldn’t let me,” Mary said.

“Damn right I wouldn’t.”

“Well, it’s about time you talked to him. That’s all.”

“I talk to him enough.”

“Bullshit. When?”

“All the time! You can’t not talk to your ex-husband in this day and age, can you? We have to talk about Elizabeth, and her future, and how well we’re doing without each other.”

Mary gave this her full consideration. “I didn’t know,” she finally said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It
does
matter.” She sat down eagerly next to her sister. “All this time I thought you were being an idiot.”

“No.”

“What a relief.”

She waited for Cassandra to respond, getting nothing.

“Now that Vlad’s here,” Mary went on. “Estella has to sleep on a couch. I made Max go with her so she’s not alone.”

“Mm.”

“So if you’re talking, why didn’t
you
call him? Why did I have to do it?”

“Jesus, Mary, I don’t
enjoy
talking to him. I don’t like him. The last thing I needed today was the sound of his voice. I’m sure I would’ve called him tomorrow.”

The little sister held up her hands,
mea culpa
. “Fair enough. I jumped the gun.”

“So there you go.”

Mary patted Cassandra’s knee. Eunice gargled and seemed to sing.

“Can we be sad about Dad now, please?” Cassandra asked. “I’d just really like to cry about
this
right now.”

“Cry, then. No one’s stopping you.”

“No one’s stopping you either.”

Their childhood had forged in them a certain bluntness. Only
outsiders were allowed to be surprised by death—people who had not spent their formative years glimpsing body bags rolling into and out of the basement service entrance, who had not been called upon as teenagers to fill seats at embarrassingly underattended wakes.

Cassandra threw her arms around her sister’s shoulders, a clumsy sideways embrace. “Fuck,” she said. “All day long I’ve been waiting for him to come back.”

Mary freed an arm and curled it around Cassandra’s back. “I think that’s normal.”

“It’s pathetic,” Cassandra said, settling in to rest her head on Mary’s shoulder.

“Well, yeah, of course it’s pathetic. But that’s just the way it goes.”

S
HE’D LIED TO
Mary about Abe. She hadn’t meant to. But the way the day was going, it seemed the easiest course to take.

The truth was simply too strange. The truth was that Cassandra had not actually spoken to Abe since they set their terms of divorce. Abe had left the lawyer’s office first; Cassandra waited for the second elevator. And then it had been eight years. It startled her every time she remembered. Had she been asked, in another life, if it were possible to quarrel with a man after twenty-some years and never speak to him again, much less a man she’d once loved ferociously, she would have answered that it was impossible, however doomed the relationship had become. But here it had happened, and to her.

To her surprise, it had been easy, like losing a baby tooth. Wrenching at first, when the roots twisted and snapped, a pad of blood rising in the gap that remained. But you lived, you went on. You put the severed tooth under your pillow, pearly and grooved like a stone from the beach, something inanimate and hardly yours, and you said good-bye to it—forever.

Yet when she’d stepped onto the boat that day, she hadn’t wanted to end her marriage, nor did she really believe she could. Even when she and Elizabeth arrived back at the house that evening, and she
put a yearning Linda Ronstadt album on the stereo before readying ingredients for a midsummer risotto—even then, Cassandra hadn’t believed it would end. The fight was already beginning to recede from her mind. She felt vaguely embarrassed and not herself, and her hand shook enough that she had to steady her knife for a good moment before cutting into the onion. But as the minutes pulsed by, she remembered less and less of what had happened, and rued it less still. Before long she felt safe in her assumption that Abe would walk in the door after a few hours, stirred to his senses by his swim in the bay. They’d acknowledge each other and tacitly make up. A few minutes later they’d be talking about dinner, or a patient of his. Later on that night, she’d find a way to apologize and make it clear that her affair was over, and he would nod and wave the explanation away.

But when Abe did arrive, beleaguered and dripping across the white kitchen tiles, it became apparent that none of this could be. Another reality had already taken hold. Down the hall he went, past her almost uttered apology, shaking his head, never looking back, a line of water droplets curving in his wake.

By then she knew it was too late. As she stared down the hallway after him, watching his wet trail glisten in the fading evening light, she realized how wrong she’d been to hope. She’d let him swim; she hadn’t chased him. She had, after all, gotten just what she’d deserved. Shaking, she covered the uneaten risotto, no longer daring to wish for forgiveness.

Since then, she’d made many more risottos. She still lived in the Berkeley house, excessive though it was; she hardly needed all that space. “Your client will keep the house,” his lawyer had proposed, and Abe had looked down murderously at his interlocked hands. Rather than sell it or kick her out into the street, which would’ve been the sensible thing to do, he seemed to want her to live with what she’d done, to see the ghost of him in every room. In her timid worthlessness, she acquiesced. She had, after all, destroyed something rare and precious; her life should bear the punishment, as inescapable as death.

T
IRED OF WATCHING
Eunice sleep, Cassandra said good night to Mary and went down the hall to her room. Pausing outside the closed door, she placed her hand on the wall, as if to detect the presence of Kyle inside. She heard movement in the room, and then a whisper that was Elizabeth’s voice, tinny and echoing, like a radio program picked up from several counties away.

“Don’t touch me.”

Cassandra held her breath. She put her ear to the door, hearing nothing but silence and then a rush of motion that made her jump back.

A moment later, Kyle was in the hall. Seeing Cassandra, he let out a sudden taut laugh. “Jesus, what a day.”

“Is she all right?” Cassandra asked.

The skin on Kyle’s face was gray and thin. She felt she could have reached up and peeled it right off, leaving him with nothing but a sadly smiling skull.