I'd Give Anything(12)

Oh honey, I thought, you have no idea.



My mother sat in her delicate Duncan Phyfe lyre-back chair at her delicate little round Duncan Phyfe table in her beautiful stone-floor sunroom with sunlight misting through the long windows and opera swirling around her. A china plate of Rolf’s lemon snaps arranged on a plate before her. Two cookies on a second, smaller plate, one cookie broken exactly in half, both otherwise untouched. A plate smaller still bearing three slices of lemon, so thin as to be translucent. An even thinner china teacup, a wisp of a teacup, on a matching saucer. A flute-narrow crystal vase eliciting one white lily. My mother as she’d forever been, Adela Beale at her quintessence: ramrod straight and hard as nails and surrounded by deliberate and delicate beauty. But, although I had seen her two days before, her frailness stunned me like a blow to the solar plexus. I could never get used to it, that my mother—all fierce, force, incisiveness, mercilessness—should, in the end, fade. I’d expected fireworks. Clouds parting and a bodily ascent. I’d expected her to go on forever.

“Virginia. Come sit.”

Her voice was as sharp as always. Her eyes were lasers. I sat down in the chair opposite my mother. She leaned toward me an inch or two, her gaze flickering over my face.

“What’s happened?” she said.

As little as she had ever seemed to discern—or bother to notice—my other emotions or states of being, my mother had an eagle eye for trouble. For two full seconds, I considered saying, “Happened? I don’t know what you mean. Everything is fine.” But I knew it would be no use. And then there was also the fact that telling her was my whole reason for coming. The story came out in a single, long, sad, sordid stream of words.

“Harris was fired. He developed a relationship with an intern, a young one. I don’t know how far it went. Possibly, he was obsessed with her. I’d say it’s even likely. A lower level employee at his company saw them holding hands across a table at a restaurant. In an attempt to keep him quiet, Harris offered him inside information on a new drug that’s about to launch, something big. The employee went to Harris’s boss. The boss fired him.”

It never paid to try to give my mother anything but the unvarnished truth. I’d tried many times, mostly when I was between the ages of eight and eighteen, and it always somehow came back to bite me. In this instance, I wasn’t even tempted. I needed to tell her the true story, even if it would be the last time I ever told it to anyone.

Nothing. Not a hitch in her breathing or a narrowing of her eyes. Once, in high school, I’d asked my brainy friend CJ what the coldest liquid on Earth was so I could say that it ran in her veins.

“Liquid helium,” he’d said. “Which doesn’t exist in nature. It has to be made in a lab, but most scientists settle for cooling things off with liquid nitrogen instead because liquid helium is stupid expensive. It’s like the Rolls-Royce of lab-cooled gases.”

“Only the best and fridgidest for Adela,” I’d said.

“When she looks at you, her eyeballs alone could give you the kind of frostbite that makes your nose turn black and fall off,” my friend Kirsten had said, shuddering.

Now, my mother said, “How young?”

“Eighteen. A high school senior.”

Her face was immovable, a frozen lake.

“Lucretia Mott?”

“No. St. Michael’s.”

“Name?”

“Cressida Wall.”

“What do her parents do? St. Michael’s isn’t exactly cheap.”

“I don’t know. I guess I can ask Harris.”

“Don’t bother. I can find out myself. Does Avery know?”

“Not yet. But she will.” My chest felt tight just thinking about this.

“Of course she will. Everyone in town will make sure of that.”

I sat up straighter. “I’ll make sure of it. She needs to know the truth. The bare bones of it anyway. We don’t lie to our daughter.”

My mother just flicked her index finger. It was the smallest gesture. Her hand didn’t even rise from the table next to her plate, but somehow, with it, she managed to dismiss me, Harris, the entire concept of Truth, and the relationship Harris and I had built with our only child. She did not dismiss the child herself, because if there was one person in her world whom Adela Beale considered eternally undismissable, forever worthy of her attention, it was Avery.

“The truth. Well, I’m sure you have some semi-hysterical, psychobabble, morning-talk-show reason for that. What you tell her is your business. My concern is what others will think and what they’ll aim at her. That’s the story that matters most.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course that’s why. Have you told anyone else? That ridiculous Kristin, for instance?”

“Kirsten’s been my friend for over twenty years, which incidentally means that you know her name is not Kristin. She has an MBA from Wharton and runs her own highly successful business. When does she get to stop being ridiculous?”

“Have you told her?”

“Not yet. I haven’t had time. And maybe I wasn’t ready to hear her say what I know she’ll say.”

“Which is?”

“Finally.”

“Finally your husband shows a spark of life?”