Wilde Lake(84)

MAY 26


“Nineteen eighty-five,” Lu says, not for the first time, waving the death certificate as if it were an exhibit in a trial. She is standing over her father, who sits at their dining room table, his eyes downcast, but his demeanor defiant. “She lived for fifteen years after I was born. How could you keep this from me?”

She has called work and said she will be late because of an “urgent family situation” and were truer words ever spoken? The situation goes to the heart of her family, and if the situation doesn’t seem urgent to anyone else—her mother has been dead for thirty years, her father has been lying to her for forty-five—she cannot imagine doing anything until she has this conversation. It took great resolve last night not to shake her father awake and demand to speak to him then and there. She has not slept at all, and she snapped at the twins throughout the morning routine, then snapped at their babysitter for being all of five minutes late.

And yet her father, the true object of her wrath, is unrepentant, even if he cannot meet her gaze.

“Lu, you were never going to have a mother. Adele was not capa ble of taking care of anyone, including herself. She wasn’t fit to live outside an institution.”

“But to lie to your children and say that she was dead—”

“She was, in a sense. She attempted suicide several times. In 1985, she managed to slit her wrists with a knife she conned a staff person to smuggle in. If you want to berate me for something, then focus on the eight years that I lived in denial of the fact that my wife was severely mentally ill, the terror that her disorder visited on your brother. The day after you were born, she had a full-blown psychotic episode and attempted to kill herself for the fourth or fifth time. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing at Johns Hopkins. And, as far as I knew, she was to spend the rest of her life there. I tried to visit her once or twice, but she was truly a hopeless case. It did no good. For either of us.”

“But—the death certificate says she died in Spring Grove? How did she end up there?” Spring Grove was the state psychiatric hospital in Catonsville. Her mother had been perhaps ten miles from her family through much of Lu’s childhood.

“I don’t know. I gave your grandparents power of attorney. They were responsible for her care.”

“They blackmailed you,” says Lu. True, she has blackmail on the brain, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Her father was and is a circumspect man. He would have agreed to any condition if it meant keeping this secret.

“It was never that—coarse. But we did reach an agreement. They would keep her in the hospital if they could have power of attorney. They were wealthy people, better able to care for her than I was. Our insurance was running out—And, as far as I knew, she was being cared for. I think she may have been switched to Spring Grove after their deaths. I don’t know.”

“Why did you tell AJ and not me?”

“I didn’t. He also thought she was dead. Then he became very depressed while at college. I thought I owed it to him to know about the family history. The children of suicides are so much more likely to commit suicide.”

“Only she didn’t succeed until AJ was a year out of college,” Lu points out. “And she was—what was her diagnosis?”

“When she was first diagnosed, in her teens, they said it was schizophrenia. I’ve come to believe it was probably what we’d call bipolar disorder now. She had stunning mood swings, but she also was delusional at times. We had no hope that she could ever live outside a hospital setting. She was beset by paranoia, incapable of recognizing those who loved her and cared for her. You have to remember, Lu. Your brother knew her, lived with her for eight years. Eight fraught, difficult years. I owed him the truth because it helped him make sense of his childhood.”

Isolated events are connecting in Lu’s memory. This is why AJ was worried about having a child. It’s why he didn’t want to use his own sperm. And it was why her father and brother didn’t seem overly concerned when she had to have a hysterectomy in her late twenties. To their way of thinking, she dodged a bullet.

“What about me? Why wasn’t I owed the truth?”

“I suppose you were.”

His ready agreement deflates her. Nothing defangs a good rage quite like the other person admitting that you’ve been wronged. “I rationalized, as people do. One, you never knew her. Why not let you have a mother you could mourn. Two—I didn’t sense any of that melancholy in you. You’re tough, grounded, my little pragmatist. But as AJ got older, he was prone to depression. He was in a very dark place for a while there, during college. I kept it from you at the time, but he almost dropped out of Yale freshman year. So I told him everything—that his mother was still alive, but quite ill. When she finally killed herself five years later, I wondered if I had made the right choice after all.”

“Did you ask AJ not to tell me?”

“No. I told him only that I preferred to share the story with you when the time seemed right, and he agreed. Then I kept putting it off.”

All the family legends are unraveling in her head. What was true? Fact: Her mother was beautiful; Lu has seen the pictures. Fact: Her mother died. Everything else is now up for review. She thinks about her mother in this very house, her alleged hatred of light, which now streams into their home from all angles. Who was Adele Closter Brant?