The Excellent Lombards(52)
“What?” she said.
“Are you trying to say that our birth was the result of the immaculate conception? Teeth plus egg, the clinking becomes William? Is that it? The big reveal? You were not adopted, kids, but there’s something we need to tell you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said breezily. “I just remember feeling like I was having a baby by all the Lombards and for all the Lombards.”
“Hearts,” William called out, staring at me—this isn’t happening! “Hearts is trump.”
“I…don’t know…what! You are doing,” I said elocutionarily to my mother. I was going to remain at home all summer long to be the good, kind, strong daughter to my father, to be indispensable to him. I was going to do so even if I had been conceived to be a worker bee, a Lombard slave. I said, “I’m not going to Camp Four Rivers, in case you did not understand my earlier comment. I have no interest in the rustic cabins, the bonding, the stupid girls, the stupider boys, the competition for parts, and whatever else. I don’t care if Coral is signed up. Get it through your head that I am not going to Hayward.”
“It’s not like Frankie needs drama camp,” my brother pointed out.
My mother’s jaw was wonderfully clenched, the muscles twitching near her ears. I had perhaps never been so satisfied by anyone else’s suppressed rage, but then we Lombards, we freaks, were a tribe renowned for our decorum.
For the rest of the spring I did my best to maintain silence when in my mother’s company. Furthermore, when she signed me up for camp without my approval or knowledge, when I found out, I also said nothing. I went through the house and slammed all the doors, making the tour four times. The violence to the structure was, I hoped, permanent. Coral was very excited about going, and maybe secretly I was a little bit interested, but I did nothing to pack, that chore left for Madame Librarian. On the seven-hour drive north I said absolutely nothing to my mother. I did not say good-bye to her or even look at her when the time came to part. During the course of the one-month session, I did not write as much as a line on a postcard, even though we were supposed to correspond with our parents. I lied about my output to the beautiful, amazing counselor Nona Nelson, whom I loved even more than I’d loved Mrs. Kraselnik, something I had not known was possible. When my mother came to pick us up I didn’t say hello to her. I got in the car with Coral, and both of us cried all the way home, writing letters to our new friends and gazing at our jars of water that we’d collected from the lake.
When I got back I was further enraged to find that in my absence Philip had returned to the orchard, and that he was once again living upstairs with May Hill.
18.
Mail-Order Bride
Oh, by the way, Philip is spending the summer with us,” my mother said as we were pulling in our driveway. That’s how she told me. Before I could recover from the shock she said in a haughty way, “And in case you’re interested, Gloria is moving on.”
“Moving on?” I was able to say.
“Our Gloria, Francie, has found love.” Her tone was softer and sad. “We need to be happy for her.”
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
My mother smiled without showing her teeth. “We were checking the obituaries daily from up north,” she said. “Finally we called the camp to see if you were alive.” What could I say to that? “When we found out you were doing very well it hardly seemed right to bother you with Gloria’s news.” She added, “It was a surprise to us, too.”
In her spare time Gloria had taken the plunge, using the library computers, and signed herself up for a dating service. She didn’t tell anyone about it until she’d snagged a mate. After sixteen years in the stone cottage she was moving to Cortez Island in Canada, to live with a man named Corey, a man she’d gone down to Chicago to meet, also unbeknownst to us. Gloria, who had been our fake mother and my father’s stand-in wife, now was going to be like a mail-order bride before she became an old maid. Through the years, aside from her wipeout with Stephen Lombard, we were sure she’d loved my father better than anyone else and that she’d stay indefinitely to help him live and work. It turned out, however, that her loyalty wasn’t as permanent as we’d imagined. She packed up the relics of our childhood, the miniature bread pans, the heart-shaped muffin tins, the spindle, her knitting mushrooms, the boxes of fabric scraps—our craft supplies—for her unborn children, as well as the bedding and toys for the two cats she’d kept from the time of Stephen.
It made me furious that not a single person had written about Gloria’s departure, and that Gloria herself had not mentioned it in any of her postcards to me.
Two weeks after I’d returned from camp the cottage was empty and she was going, she was leaving. We stood by the car before she pulled away. “Thank you,” my father said, holding her with both hands at her slender waist. “Gloria—oh, Gloria.” His voice was gloggy because—were there? Yes, tears were running down his cheeks. Suddenly we wanted to cry, too. “Be well,” he said to her. “Be well, dear, dear Gloria. Take care. Please take care.” No one, we realized right then, would ever again send him a fifth-cloth note, never again the fifth-cloth surprise. “We love you,” Nellie said, “so much,” the two of them clasped tight. “How can we ever thank you? How can you know what you mean to us?”