The Peacock Feast, page 8
Prudence points toward her dining room. “When I’m alone, I eat at the library table in the living room, but Maricel insisted we dine here.”
A long, narrow table is set with two gold place mats and pressed white cloth napkins. Angela, too, had ironed the table linens, as well as the bed linens and all of their clothing including Garcia’s undershirts. Grace waits until they’re seated to inquire about the paintings, a series of abstracts hung along one wall.
“I bought them at an Art Students League show, not long after I moved here.” Prudence smiles sadly. “Carlton would have hated them. For him, anything not clearly representational was suspect. Even Whistler was suspect.”
“My grandfather was the same. Except when it came to gardening and flower arranging. There, he was sort of a maverick. One of the early advocates of more artful and natural designs.”
Grace senses Prudence’s attention, feels her holding back from pressing now, still early in the evening, for more details. Usually, Grace is the one counseling timing: alertness to when an invitation to tell more will open or close a door. So unfamiliar to be on the other side, with the caution directed at herself.
Prudence tells Grace about her single trip to California when her employer, as a way of keeping her firm afloat during the Depression years, had marketed a line of dishware similar to the Franciscan ceramics manufactured there. Prudence points at the platter with the okra, a piece from the Desert Rose pattern that she’d brought back from the factory.
Seeing Grace’s gaze pass over the platter, Prudence suspects that it looks prim and old-ladyish to Grace. Or, and somehow this seems even worse, Prudence never having abided by decoration’s taking an arch tone, having always believed in sincerity and simplicity, perhaps it strikes Grace as kitsch.
How different Los Angeles had seemed to her, she tells Grace. Everything so far apart. They’d had to hire a driver to get from place to place. What she doesn’t say is how strange it was that it had never occurred to her to try to see her brother on that trip.
“San Francisco is much smaller. You don’t need a car. I have one, though, because I sometimes need to get somewhere quickly…” Grace sighs. No matter how hard she tries to steer clear of her work, she finds herself in one of these death cul-de-sacs: alluding to panicked caregivers she races to at midnight to help administer painkillers they are afraid to inject even though she’s taught them with oranges, to adult children who want her to officially proclaim a death, but, it so often seems to her, really just want her with them in those numinous hours when the room is filled with the airs of a person passing.
And here she is, unable to stop herself from noting that Prudence has eaten no more than two hundred calories: a few bites of the okra, a few forkfuls of the rice and beans, two cucumber slices. How many times has she instructed families not to get into food struggles with their dying loved one? People eat what feels best at this stage, she teaches. Not that there is any evidence that Prudence is in her final weeks.
After Prudence puts her fork down for what is certainly the last time, Grace clears the table. She loads the dishwasher while Prudence busies herself organizing a tray for them with a pot of tea and again a plate of the shortbread cookies.
“I think we’ve satisfied Maricel’s wish that we use the dining room,” Prudence says with a little smile. “Let’s have this in the living room.”
Grace carries the tray to the library table under the window, then gets her tote from the foyer. She sits in the wingback chair, across from Prudence, letting the tea steep as Prudence instructed on her first visit.
“When did you last talk with my grandfather?”
“Talk with Randall? That would have been the night he left. Good God, ninety years ago.”
Prudence rests her eyes on the river. “As you get old, really old, your age, how many years have passed, seems surreal to even you. If someone were to tell me there’d been an accounting error and, in fact, I am sixty-one, I would think, yes, of course.”
She looks back at Grace. “But perhaps you didn’t mean that literally? Perhaps you are wondering when we were last in touch?”
Grace nods. She’s not sure exactly what she meant.
“There were letters the first year Randall was out West, but they dwindled. My aunt sent him a telegram after my father died, which we later learned he never received because he’d moved. I can’t recall when his letters entirely stopped, only that by the time my mother died, I had no idea how to reach him.”
Grace serves the tea. She remembers that Prudence likes cream but no sugar. It takes only one hand to count the people for whom Grace has known how they like their coffee or tea. Her grandfather. Angela. Kate, her best friend since fifth grade. Garcia.
Garcia: No milk and three lumps of sugar.
She can feel the edges of the wooden box inside the tote at her feet. When she packed it in her suitcase, she’d not asked herself if it would be a good thing to show it to Prudence were they to meet. Now, though, it seems like a boulder in a rushing river. You stop here. You go back. Or you pick your way around it, you edge your canoe or your kayak or your raft through the narrow channel between the boulder and the bank. You trust there are not rapids on the other side, a foaming hundred-foot drop.
A dozen times a year, she sits across from spouses or grown children or, most heartbreakingly, parents who ask her, Should we tell Grandma or Dad or Junior that she or he has an inoperable tumor or stage-four cancer or Lou Gehrig’s that will leave her or him without the ability to walk or talk or swallow? A dozen times a year, she hears family members wonder if it would be kinder to spare mother, husband, brother, or daughter this information during their numbered days. Six months, six weeks, six days. And a dozen times a year, she presses her hands together and says that she understands their concerns, but knowing we are facing death—This is only my philosophy, you should consult your spiritual adviser, if you have such a person—is an inalienable right. No one, she says—And again this is only my view—should deprive another person of bringing his or her life to completion.
Usually, there are nods and then tears. Sometimes, though, the response is doubt and confusion, and then she has to explain how much can happen in the final span: forgivenesses, amends, love never expressed. And how this is a blessing not just for the dying person but for the entire family. But now, here she is, questioning if she should show the box to Prudence, if after ninety years of not seeing her brother, it would be a gift or the reopening of a wound to rifle through these items that for her brother were the remnants and reminders of what he’d had before he’d left her behind.
Grace leans over, the blood rushing into her head so she sees dark circles and flashes of light, feels the queasiness always there the first years after Garcia’s death. She takes the wooden box from the tote and places it on the table in front of Prudence.
Prudence stares at the box, the very box, she realizes with a start, Randall took from the shelf in the room they’d shared to put in his rucksack. It crosses her mind that if she opens this box of her brother’s, her heart might stop. She dares not look at Grace, dares not let the young woman see what she fears is passing over her face.
The box is heavier than Prudence expects. She lifts it to her nose, inhales the wood, then presses the narrow side with the brass clasp to her chest, to the place where those first weeks after Randall left, his absence had formed a hollow. Morning after morning, she would wake with a feeling of confusion, and then the awareness would wash over her again that he was gone and between her heart and her gut would be the terrible vacuum.
Were the girl, the young woman, this Grace, not watching her, Prudence would again bring the box to her face. She would investigate if her brother’s scent remained in the wood. Were Grace not here, she might even lick the wood so as to taste it, something she could not do in front of anyone: how exaggerated and bizarre that would seem. Instead, she places the box back on the table.
Grace looks away, as she has learned to do with families after she has told them her thoughts about the right to know we are dying. For most people, she is putting into words something they already understand, and averting her gaze grants them the privacy to gather up their wisest and most generous and strongest selves, but for others—and these are the ones she worries about later, after she has moved on to her next case—it spares them having her see their terror that the boulder is approaching and no one on this side knows what is beyond.
Through the window, she sees the red orb of the sun on the horizon, the river glistening with the end-of-day light. The eastern coast of what her grandfather had called “our great land.” She’s been here a handful of times before without ever trying to find her great-aunt. And her grandfather, hadn’t he been back here as well, for a night or two, bookending the ship crossing he’d made with Cecelia Brown? Had he thought to see his sister and mother? Was his mother even alive then?
On the rare occasions when Grace had stayed home sick from school, her grandfather would leave his florist shop at noon to check on her. Thinking it would entertain her, he would bring the wooden box from his study. He would drag the armchair in her room next to the queen-size canopy bed where she would lie like an invalid princess, a carafe filled by Angela with water she would boil and then cool to room temperature, refusing to add the ice Grace’s grandfather would urge.
Her grandfather would place the wooden box on Grace’s lap. Before she opened it, he would ask her to list the items inside.
“There are the stones you took from the beach in front of Laurelton Hall,” she would solemnly answer. “A blue tile your father gave you, copies of newspaper articles you found at the library. There’s one about a wedding and one about a big party.”
“The party was the Peacock Feast, and it happened before the wedding, but they were just a few months apart. The year?” her grandfather would ask, as though this were a Mensa test.
Grace would furl her brow and try to recall, and Angela, crocheting in a corner of the room, as she would do when either Grace or Garcia was sick, would make a tsk-tsk sound to discourage the quizzing. Annoyed, her grandfather would tell Angela to go, she could put a little bell by the bed and Grace could ring if she needed anything, but Angela would refuse to budge from her seat.
“Mr. Randall,” she would say, “in my country, a mother does not leave a sick child alone.” Grace’s grandfather would scowl, secretly pleased that Angela was so vigilant, but not wanting to encourage her belief that the death angel might creep into the room if she were not keeping watch. Her belief that had she ignored his instructions to leave him alone with Mrs. Carolyn in what turned out to be her last moments, had she stayed, she would have wrestled the dark messenger to the ground or brokered a bargain that he take her instead.
“Nineteen fourteen?” Grace would venture.
“Yes, May twenty-fourth, 1914, was when the article ran, but the affair itself was on May fifteenth.”
Grace would open the box and find the stapled papers with the caption her grandfather had written in his careful hand. While her grandfather watched, she would study the photographs: the five girls in long white dresses, three carrying what looked like live peacocks but had been, her grandfather told her, roasted with the feathers inserted afterward for their presentation; a girl wearing a hat constructed from the head of a peacock, her face so pale and still, she might have been carved out of marble; a group of children costumed in chef’s hats with pillows under their aprons that made them plumper than the stuffed pigs they each held.
By the time Grace was thirteen, she could list most of the other items in the box: more newspaper articles, the top of a peacock feather, a photograph of her grandfather as a boy of four or five seated on a blanket with two identically dressed babies, a packet of letters tied together with a gold ribbon. By then, though, she’d felt too old to have her grandfather at her bedside when she was home sick from school, and in any case, her grandfather was preoccupied with Garcia, who, having failed seventh-grade math and barely scraped by in English and history and science too, had been tested by a neuropsychologist, who recommended an even smaller, more flexible school than the one Garcia had attended since leaving the Presidio Academy, where his father and great-grandfather had gone.
Now, again, a dart of worry. Has she made a mistake bringing the box? In nursing school, they’d been taught that a starving person should be treated with caution. You have to start with a spoonful or two of broth. A full meal could overwhelm bodily systems.
“Would you like me to just show you one or two items for today?”
Prudence nods. There’s a hint of fear in her eyes, a look that reminds Grace of her grandfather when he’d come into the diner where she worked on his trips to visit Garcia, wary of what news she might report. It washes over her that this woman across from her is her grandfather’s sister: the same heart-shaped face, the same violet-tinted eyes.
Grace reaches over and draws the box toward her. Using her thumbnail, she flips up the little brass hook and opens the top.
A faint smell wafts from inside the box. Prudence inhales a potpourri of something musty, something salty, something turning to dust. A scent cradling a century past. With it she sees her mother’s face. Her mother’s face from before they moved to the city: laughing so her teeth show and her eyes crinkle, unbraiding her red hair and brushing one hundred strokes. Her freckled calves on the beach where the servants were permitted with their families when Mr. T and his wife and children were away. Her mother sucking out the pits from the orchard plums and spitting them into the dirt before giving Prudence the fruit. Lifting her onto one of the ponies outside the barn. “Such a big girl, Prudence, you’re such a big girl.” Prudence with her socks and shoes off, her toes deliciously free to burrow into the cool, damp dirt while her father inspects the beds of lilacs, her mother leans over with her nose inside one of the blooms.
Grace is looking through the photocopies, searching for a particular one it seems. When she finds it, she folds back a page and hands it to Prudence.
There are photographs, children and young women in costumes, but Prudence locks on the handwritten words at the top. In a hand as familiar as her own, her brother had printed The Peacock Feast, May 15, 1914.
* * *
When Prudence opens her eyes, Grace is sitting quietly across the library table. The photocopied pages are still in Prudence’s lap. She is embarrassed that she drifted off.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Not long. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
“I hope I didn’t worry you. I wake so early these days and then spend the rest of my days in and out of little naps. Like a baby, I’m afraid.”
“I am worried about you. Not that you fell asleep. As you said, that’s normal at your age. About your living alone.”
“I have Maricel. She comes every day but Sunday. She watches over me like a mother bear.”
(“Thirty hours out of one hundred sixty-eight,” Maricel, who has been on a campaign this past year to have her sister work for Prudence on Sundays, chides. “Nothing…”)
“But what if you fall or something happens when she’s not here? Could I at least arrange a medical alert system for you? Then, if you were to fall or need help, someone would be notified.”
“If I fall, it will hardly be a tragedy. I’ve lived a long, long life. I’m like one of those cans that’s past its sell-by date.”
What Prudence doesn’t add is a long, long life that started so abundantly, then withered and drooped, leaving her now with only Maricel and her beautiful things.
“I’ll come back Thursday. Around five? If that is okay?”
“Please do. I would like that.” Not until after Prudence has said the words does she realize that they are true.
“I could leave the box here.”
Prudence nods. She remains in her chair by the library table while Grace clears the tea things. She hears the water running in the sink, thinks how at Grace’s age, she was already a widow.
When Grace returns, she leans down to kiss Prudence goodbye. How lucky her brother had been to have this lovely granddaughter.
“I’ll let myself out. The door locks automatically, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
After Prudence hears the door close, she looks again at the papers in her lap. She was so riveted by her brother’s caption, she didn’t recognize that this is the very article she came across sixty-some years ago in her wet galoshes in the Periodical Room at the New York Public Library—a bitter era of her work when the items she’d purchased for her wealthy clients had so essentially felt like coded declarations of wealth, she’d come to think that rather than waste their money on Sheraton sideboards and Chippendale chairs, they should simply pin to their backs a sign stating their net worth.
Looking more carefully, she sees that her brother stapled together what is actually two articles: The first, published just two days after the event, is a short description of the menu and a list of the young ladies and children in the pageant. The second, published a week later, has nearly a full page of pictures of the procession.
Prudence finds Dorothy’s name under one of the photographs. She’s carrying one of the peacocks. Her thick hair grazes her waist, and the band of the Grecian-styled gown is wrapped around the top of her thighs in a way that reveals the shape of her behind. There are no images of Tiffany from the evening, though Prudence dimly recalls a picture of him she’d come across that same March afternoon from the Egyptian Fete he’d given the year before the Peacock Feast: dressed like a pasha in silken pantaloons, his impervious wide forehead rising up from dark brows to a fez perched atop his head.
Her lids are growing heavy and she is drifting, drifting again. Drifting into fantasy or waking dream or memory, how would one ever know?
