My Name Is Lucy Barton, Page 3

  My family did not attend my wedding or acknowledge it, but when my first daughter was born I called my parents from New York, and my mother said she had dreamed it, so she already knew I had a baby girl, but she didn’t know the name, and she seemed pleased with the name, Christina. After that I called them on their birthdays, and on holidays, and when my other daughter, Becka, was born. We spoke politely but always, I felt, with discomfort, and I did not see any of my family until the day my mother showed up at the foot of my bed in the hospital where the Chrysler Building shone outside the window.

  In the dark, I asked my mother quietly if she was awake.

  Oh yes, she answered. Quietly. Even though it was only the two of us in this hospital room with the Chrysler Building shining at the window, we still whispered as though someone could be disturbed.

  “Why do you think the guy Kathie fell in love with said he couldn’t go ahead with it once she left her husband? Did he get scared?”

  After a moment my mother said, “I don’t know. But Kathie told me he’d confessed to her he was a homo.”

  “Gay?” I sat up and saw her at the foot of my bed. “He told her he was gay?”

  “I suppose that’s what you call it now. Back then we said ‘homo.’ He said ‘homo.’ Or Kathie said it. I don’t know who said ‘homo.’ But he was one.”

  “Mom, oh, Mom, you’re making me laugh,” and I could hear she’d started laughing herself, though she said, “Wizzle, I don’t really know what’s so funny.”

  “You are.” Tears of laughter seeped from my eyes. “The story is. That’s a terrible story!”

  Still laughing—in the same suppressed yet urgent way her talking had been during the day—she said, “I’m not sure what’s funny about leaving your husband for a homo gay person and then finding it out, when you think you’re going to have a whole man.”

  “Killing me, Mom.” I lay back down.

  My mother said, musingly, “I sometimes thought maybe he wasn’t gay. That Kathie scared him. Leaving her life behind for him. That maybe he made it up.”

  I considered this. “Back then I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing a man would make up about himself.”

  “Oh,” said my mother. “Oh, I guess that’s true. I honestly don’t know about Kathie’s fellow. I don’t know if he’s still around or anything about him at all.”

  “But did they do it?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother answered. “How would I know? Do what? Have intercourse? How in the world would I know?”

  “They must’ve had intercourse,” I said, because I thought it was funny saying that, and also because I believed it. “You don’t run out on three girls and a husband for a crush.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  “Okay. Maybe you do.” I asked, then, “And Kathie’s husband—Mr. Nicely—he really hasn’t had anyone since?”

  “Ex-husband. Divorced her quick as a bunny. Anyway, I don’t believe so. There seems no indication of such a thing. But I suppose you never know.”

  Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door, the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had.

  “People,” I said.

  “People,” my mother said.

  I was so happy. Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!

  In those days—and it was the mid-1980s, as I have said—William and I lived in the West Village, in a small apartment near the river. A walk-up, and it was something, with the two small children and having no laundry facilities in the building, and we also had a dog. I would put the younger child in a carry pack on my back—until she got too big—and walk the dog, bending precariously to pick up his mess in a plastic bag, as the signs told one to do: CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG. Always calling out to my older girl to wait for me, not to step off the sidewalk. Wait, wait!

  I had two friends, and I was half in love with one of them, Jeremy. He lived on the top floor of our building and he was almost, but not quite, the age of my father. He had come originally from France, from the aristocracy, and he gave that all up to be in America, starting as a young man. “Everyone different wanted to be in New York back then,” he told me. “It was the place to come to. I guess it still is.” Jeremy had decided in the middle of his life to become a psychoanalyst, and when I met him he still had a few patients, but he would not talk to me about what that was like. He had an office across from the New School, and three times a week he went there. I would pass him on the street, and the sight of him—tall, thin, dark-haired, wearing a dark suit, and his soulful face—always made my heart rise. “Jeremy!” I would say, and he would smile and lift his hat in a way that was courtly and old-fashioned and European—this is how I saw it.

  His apartment I had seen only once, and this was when I got locked out and had to wait for the super to show up. Jeremy found me on the front stoop with the dog and both children, and I was frantic, and he had me come in. The children were immediately quiet and very well behaved once we got inside his place, as though they knew no children were ever there, and in fact I had never seen children going into Jeremy’s apartment. Only a man or two, or sometimes a woman. The apartment was clean and spare: A stalk of purple iris was in a glass vase against a white wall, and there was art on the walls that made me understand then how far apart he and I were. I say this because I didn’t understand the art; they were dark and oblong pieces, almost-abstract-but-not-quite constructions, and I understood only that they were symptoms of a sophisticated world I could never understand. Jeremy was uncomfortable having my family in his place, I could sense that, but he was an exquisite gentleman, and this was why I loved him so.

  —

  Three things about Jeremy:

  I was standing one day on the front stoop, and as he came out of the building I said, “Jeremy, sometimes when I stand here, I can’t believe I’m really in New York City. I stand here and think, Whoever would have guessed? Me! I’m living in the City of New York!”

  And a look went across his face—so fast, so involuntary—that was a look of real distaste. I had not yet learned the depth of disgust city people feel for the truly provincial.

  —

  The second thing about Jeremy: I had my first story published right after I moved to New York, and then it was a while, and my second story was published. On the steps one day, Chrissie told this to Jeremy. “Mommy got a story in a magazine!” He turned to look at me; he looked at me deeply; I had to look away. “No, no,” I said. “Just a silly little really small literary magazine.” He said, “So—you’re a writer. You’re an artist. I work with artists, I know. I guess I’ve always known that about you.”

  I shook my head. I thought of the artist from college, his knowledge of himself, his ability to forgo children.

  Jeremy sat down beside me on the stoop. “Artists are different from other people.”

  “No. They’re not.” My face flushed. I had always been different; I did not want to be any more different!

  “But they are.” He tapped my knee. “You must be ruthless, Lucy.”

  Chrissie jumped up and down. “It’s a sad story,” she said. “I can’t read yet—I can read some words—but it’s a sad story.”

  “May I read it?” Jeremy asked me this.

  I said no.

  I told him I could not bear it if he didn’t like it. He nodded and said, “Okay, I won’t ask again. But, Lucy,” he said, “you talk to me a lot, and I can’t imagine reading anything by you that I wouldn’t like.”

  I remember clearly that he said “ruthless.” He did not seem ruthless, and I did not think I was or could be ruthless. I loved him; he was gentle.

  He told me to be ruthless.

  —

  One more thing about Jeremy: The AIDS epidemic was new. Men walked the streets, bony and gaunt, and you could tell they were sick with this sudden, almost biblical-seeming plague. And one day, sitting on the stoop wit
h Jeremy, I said something that surprised me. I said, after two such men had just walked slowly by, “I know it’s terrible of me, but I’m almost jealous of them. Because they have each other, they’re tied together in a real community.” And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me. He saw this that day, I think. And he was kind. “Yes” is all he said. He could easily have said, “Are you crazy, they’re dying!” But he did not say that, because he understood that loneliness about me. This is what I want to think. This is what I think.

  In one of those clothing shops New York is famous for, one of those places privately owned and sort of like the art galleries of Chelsea, I found a woman who turned out to affect me a great deal, who may—in ways I don’t understand fully—be the reason I have written this. It was many years ago now, my girls would have been perhaps eleven and twelve. In any event, I saw this woman in this clothing store and I felt certain she hadn’t seen me. She had the sort of ditzy look you seldom see on women anymore, and she was attractive with it, wore it very well, and she was I would have said almost fifty years old. She was attractive in many ways, stylish, and her hair—ash is the color we used to call it—was well done, by which I mean I understood the color to have come not from a bottle but from the hands of a person trained to work in a salon. And yet it was her face I was drawn to. Her face, which I watched in the mirror while I tried on a black jacket, and finally I said, “Do you think this works?” Her look was surprised, as though she had no idea someone would ask her opinion on clothes. “Oh, I don’t work here, I’m sorry,” she said. I told her I understood that, I only wanted her opinion. I told her I liked the way she dressed.

  “Oh, okay. You do? Well, thanks, wow. Yeah, okay. Oh yeah”—she must have seen me tugging on the lapels of the jacket I had asked her about—“it’s nice, that is nice, are you going to wear it with that skirt?” We discussed the skirt, and whether or not I owned a longer skirt, just in case, as she put it, I “might want to wear heels, you know, a little pickup.”

  She was as beautiful as her face, I thought, and I loved New York for this gift of endless encounters. Perhaps I saw the sadness in her too. This is what I felt when I got home and her face went through my mind; it would be something you didn’t know you saw at the time, as she smiled a great deal and it made her face sparkle. She had the look of a woman who had men still falling in love with her.

  I said, “What do you do?”

  “For a job?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You just look like you do something interesting. Are you an actress?” I put the jacket back on the hanger; I did not have the money to buy such a thing.

  Oh no, no, she said, and then she said, and I swear I saw her color rise, “I’m just a writer. That’s all.” As though she might as well confess, because—I sensed—she had been caught before. Or perhaps being “just a writer” was all she thought it was. I asked her what she wrote, and then her color clearly did rise, and she waved her hand and said, “Oh, you know, books, fiction, things like that, it doesn’t matter, really.”

  I had to ask her name, and again I had the sense I’d caused her great embarrassment—she said in one breath: “Sarah Payne”—and I didn’t want to cause her embarrassment, so I thanked her for her advice, and she seemed to relax and we spoke of where to get the best shoes—she was wearing a pair of black patent leather high heels—and that made her happy, I thought, and then we parted, each of us saying how nice it had been to meet the other.

  —

  At home in our apartment—we had moved by then to Brooklyn Heights—and as the children ran about, shouting where was the hair dryer, or the blouse that had been in the laundry?, I looked through our bookshelves and I saw that Sarah Payne looked only a little bit like her jacket photo; I had read her books. And then I remembered being at a party with a man who knew her. He spoke of her work, saying that she was a good writer, but that she could not stop herself from a “softness of compassion” that revolted him, that, he felt, weakened her work. Still, I liked her books. I like writers who try to tell you something truthful. I also liked her work because she had grown up on a run-down apple orchard in a small town in New Hampshire, and she wrote about the rural parts of that state, she wrote about people who worked hard and suffered and also had good things happen to them. And then I realized that even in her books, she was not telling exactly the truth, she was always staying away from something. Why, she could barely say her name! And I felt I understood that too.

  In the hospital that next morning—now so many years ago—I told my mother I was worried about her not sleeping, and she said that I shouldn’t worry about her not sleeping, that she had learned to take catnaps all of her life. And then, once more, there began that slight rush of words, the compression of feeling that seemed to push up through her as she started, that morning, to suddenly speak of her childhood, how she had taken catnaps throughout her childhood too. “You learn to, when you don’t feel safe,” she said. “You can always take a catnap sitting up.”

  I know very little about my mother’s childhood. In a way, I think this is not unusual—to know little of our parents’ childhoods. I mean, in a specific way. There is now a large interest in ancestry, and that means names and places and photos and court records, but how do we find out what the daily fabric of a life was? I mean, when the time comes that we care. The Puritanism of my ancestors has not made use of conversation as a source of pleasure, the way I have seen other cultures do. But that morning in the hospital my mother seemed pleased enough to speak of the summers she had gone to live on a farm—she had spoken of that in the past. For whatever reasons, my mother spent most of her childhood summers on the farm owned by her Aunt Celia, a woman I have remembered only as a thin, pale person, and whom I, as well as my brother and sister, called “Aunt Seal”—at least in my head I always thought that was who she was, “Aunt Seal,” and there was confusion about that, because children are literal thinkers and I had no idea why she would be named after an animal from the ocean I had never seen. She was married to Uncle Roy, who was, as far as I knew, a very nice man. My mother’s cousin Harriet was their only child, and her name was the one that came up periodically throughout my youth.

  “I was thinking,” my mother said, in her soft, rushed voice, “how one morning, oh, we must have been little, maybe I was five, and Harriet three, I was thinking how we decided to help Aunt Celia take the deadheads off the lemon lilies that grew by the barn. But of course Harriet was just a little thing, and she thought the big buds were the dead parts to take off, and there she was, snapping them right off, when Aunt Celia came out.”

  “Was Aunt Seal mad?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t remember that. But I was,” my mother said. “I’d tried to tell her what was a bud and what wasn’t. Stupid child.”

  “I never knew Harriet was stupid, you never said she was stupid.”

  “Well, maybe she wasn’t. She probably wasn’t. But she was afraid of everything, she was so afraid of lightning. She would go hide under the bed and whimper,” my mother said. “I never understood it. And so frightened of snakes. Such a silly girl, really.”

  “Mom. Please don’t say that word again. Please.” Already I was trying to sit up and raise my feet. Even now I always feel the need to get my feet up where I can see them, should I hear that word.

  “Say what word again? ‘Snakes’?”

  “Mom.”

  “For heaven’s sake, I don’t— All right. All right.” She waved a hand, and gave a little shrug as she turned to look out the window. “You’ve often reminded me of Harriet,” she said. “That silly fear of yours. And your ability to feel sorry for any Tom, Dick, or Harry that came along.”

  I still do not know, even now, what Tom, Dick, or Harry I’d felt sorry for, or when they’d com
e along. “But I want to hear,” I said. I wanted to hear her voice again, her different, rushed voice.

  Toothache, the nurse, walked into the room; she took my temperature, but she did not look into space the way Cookie did. Instead Toothache looked at me carefully, then looked at the thermometer, and then told me that the fever was the same as it had been the day before. She asked my mother if she wanted anything, and my mother shook her head quickly. For a moment Toothache stood, her woebegone face seeming at a loss. Then she measured my blood pressure, which was always fine, and it was fine that morning. “All right, then,” said Toothache, and both my mother and I thanked her. She wrote a few things on my chart, and at the door she turned to say that the doctor would be in soon.

  “The doctor seemed like a nice man,” my mother said, addressing the window. “When he came in last night.”

  Toothache glanced back at me as she left.

  After a moment I said, “Mom, tell me more about Harriet.”

  “Well, you know what happened to Harriet.” My mother returned to the room, to me.

  I said, “But you always liked her though, right?”

  “Oh, sure—what was there not to like about Harriet? She had that very poor luck with her marriage. She married a man from a couple towns away she met at a dance, a square dance in a barn, I think, and people were pleased for her, you know, she wasn’t a great deal to look at even back then in the prime of her youth.”

  “What was wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Nothing was wrong with her. She was just always fretful, even as a young girl, and she had those buck teeth. And she smoked, which gave her bad breath. But she was a sweet thing, she was that, never meant harm to anyone, and she had those two kids, Abel and Dottie—”

  “Oh, I loved Abel when I was a kid,” I said.

  “Yes, Abel was just a wonderful person always. Funny how that can happen, out of nowhere a tree rises up strong, and that’s what he was. Anyway, one day Harriet’s husband went out to get her cigarettes and—”