All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 11
“So it doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Of course it matters. But it’s not your decision. I’m a grown man. I don’t leave my life decisions up to a thirteen-year-old. I decide who I live with, who I spend my life with. That’s how the world works.”
“Who you spend your life with? Are you going to marry her?”
“I don’t know. Someday, maybe.”
“You do know, don’t you? That’s what you really want, that’s what this court thing is all about, isn’t it? You don’t care about your will or the insurance or whatever. You just can’t marry your girlfriend while you’re still married to Mom.”
“That’s part of it, yes.”
The boy looked around the room at an invisible crowd with a shocked expression that said Can you believe this? He was equally scornful of his father and proud of himself for uncovering the secret.
“Is that so wrong, Jeff? Do I have to spend the rest of my life alone, like a monk? Is that what you want? Just tell me, what’s the right thing to do? And I’ll do it.”
“Nothing. The right thing is for you to do nothing.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Longer than this.”
Dan sighed.
Miranda: “What if the judge says Mom is dead but he’s wrong and she’s really alive?”
“I don’t know, Mimi. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s been a long time now. I don’t think your mother would just leave us like this. If she’s alive, great. But…”
Miranda slumped. “Are you going to give her Mom’s ring?”
“What ring, Mimi?”
“The one with the hearts.”
This was my engagement ring. It had a beautiful pattern of interlocking gold hearts, each containing a tiny diamond. Before it was mine, the ring had belonged to Dan’s grandmother, a woman who was once so poor—according to family lore—that she had worked in the window of the Jordan Marsh department store sewing ladies’ gloves.
Once, not long before I disappeared, Mimi asked me to take this ring off so she could see it.
I can’t take it off, sweetie. It doesn’t come off. My finger’s too fat.
You mean you never take it off?
That’s right, I never take it off.
Even when you go swimming?
Even when I go swimming.
Even when you take a shower?
Even when I take a shower.
Even when you go in the garden?
Even then.
Even when you poop?
Yes, you little stinker, even when I poop. I never, ever take it off. It’s pretty, isn’t it? Isn’t it beautiful, Mimi?
Dan said, “You mean Mom’s engagement ring? I don’t even have it.”
“Where is it, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s on her finger, wherever she is.”
“No one can have it.”
“Okay.” Dan looked at his daughter with a mystified expression. Why couldn’t he have had simpler children?
Miranda left the table and ran upstairs to her room. She did not come out again that night.
Nor could Dan get her out of bed for school the next morning. He tried coaxing and threatening, but she lay under her covers insisting she could not do it, she did not feel well, could she please, please, please stay home today, just this once? Dan finally relented, not out of kindness but exasperation; he had to get out of the house and go to work. My sister spent the day at the house with her. Kate took Mimi at her word that she was sick even though there were no symptoms. Later, Miranda’s bouts of depression would become more obvious—longer-lasting, vertiginous, paralyzing—but that day Kate saw no cause for alarm. Mimi lay around the house most of the day looking exhausted, lethargic, dazed, until her mood started to lift in the afternoon and gradually she came back to herself, and Aunt Katie taught her how to play gin rummy.
As for Dan’s announcement, Sarah did move in a few weeks later, into my house, into my bed. She bought new white sheets. She boxed up my clothes and put them in the attic. All this though I was not dead yet, officially. I was only missing, until a probate judge declared otherwise.
There was another surprise: Sarah did not come alone.
* * *
—
Sometimes I feel a sadness so heavy it won’t let me up. If I think about certain things—my kids, my sister—it is like filling my coat pockets with heavy stones. It happens when I think about my marriage too.
For a long time, Dan and I were happy. We made a good couple. Everyone said so. Not alike, but compatible. All around us—in our town, among our friends—we saw marriages worse than ours, marriages like cyclones. We knew couples who cheated and gambled and drank (though we all drank too much back then). We knew couples who argued endlessly; for naturally argumentative people, contradiction is just a reflex, and a marriage between two of them is like watching rams crash headlong into each other over and over. We had none of these problems. Dan and I were the steady ones. It was not a perfect marriage, but there are no perfect marriages.
I can’t imagine what I did wrong, how I displeased him. For seventeen years, I cooked and cleaned for him. I dieted and dressed for him. I bathed the kids, fed the kids, drove the kids—he did not even know their schedules or their friends’ names. I watched him get drunk at parties. I listened to his stories over and over, about defendants and lawyers who meant nothing to me, and I reacted on cue—nodded, laughed, agreed, always agreed. I smiled and smiled for him. I fucked his way, when he wanted to. I never, ever made fun of him, even as a joke, because he could not stand to be teased. I did everything I could—everything—and it wasn’t enough.
And here’s the thing: I never knew how unhappy he was. He hid things from me. My husband had secrets.
When I think about it, honestly, I am a loaded gun.
Well. Not anymore. I can’t be upset. I can’t be—I don’t exist. I am not.
Back to the story. My marriage.
You want to understand my marriage? You need to know one thing: Danny’s family was rich. I don’t mean a little rich. I don’t mean country-club rich or fancy-car rich. I mean name-on-a-hospital rich. I did not marry him because he was rich, of course. I married him because he was sweet and good, and I loved him. But I can’t say I was unaware of it, either. And I liked it. Who wouldn’t? My girlfriends gave me dreamy, envious looks when they thought of me swanning around in some mansion like Princess Grace. My parents teased me by calling him “Roosevelt.” I liked all that too. Only Katie was unimpressed. She never thought he was worth it. Anyway, when Danny proposed, I wasn’t going to turn him down because he was rich, now was I?
Maybe that was the problem. I could never be rich, no matter how much money I got. I could never be like Dan. Even at the end, right before I vanished, when one of the kids would do some low-rent, uncouth thing—when Jeff would clean the drips off the ketchup bottle by licking it, or take a drink of water by lowering his head into the kitchen sink and slurping from the faucet—I always thought, That’s my side of the family.
For his part, Danny could be vain about his family’s money, as if the fortune was somehow his accomplishment, but he could also be touchingly insecure about it. When I asked him on one of our first dates, “Is it true you’re rich?” he said, “No, my parents are.” I thought he was being cute. I didn’t understand the distinction. I should have listened harder.
* * *
—
Dan and I got engaged right before our senior year in college, but he did not want to tell anyone. He said it would be our little secret—for how long, he did not know. I worried he was keeping his options open in case he got cold feet; really, he just wanted to put off telling his parents. I forced his hand, not accidentally, by spilling the secret to Katie and a few close friends, and word began to filter out until finally I had to insist he tell his parents before they heard it from someone else. By then it was December.
He arranged for us to have dinner at his parents’ house, with hints that some momentous news was to be revealed. I got dressed up in my best clothes. Danny wore a coat and tie.
The Larkins’ house was not especially grand. Inside, it was lovely and stuffed with beautiful art and antiques, but from the outside you would not have known it was a rich family’s house at all. The dining room was sumptuous, though. White tablecloth, silver candlesticks, cut-crystal stemware, gold-rimmed china. Above the table was a crystal chandelier. At dinner, Mrs. Larkin kept a little sterling-silver bell by her plate; when she rang it, out through a swinging door came the family’s maid, a stout, cheerful black woman, in uniform, to serve and clear the dishes. As a twenty-one-year-old girl, I was awed.
When Danny sprung the news of our engagement, Mrs. Larkin smiled as if she already knew. She was thin, with prematurely white hair, a hawk nose, and dark skin. Not a beauty, but she had an attractive, candid self-confidence. A presence. I had already begun to study her behavior, to mimic her—the way she moved, her tart opinions—so that she would not be disappointed in me.
“Well,” she said, “that’s wonderful news. And when will I become a grandmother?”
“Millie!” her husband said.
Me: “Not anytime soon, I hope.”
“Well, it was just a question.”
We all laughed, and my future mother-in-law went right on eating and chatting as if oblivious to my embarrassment. She was not oblivious, of course. I don’t think she ever had an oblivious moment in her life. She just did not care what we thought of her.
Mildred Larkin was a one-third heir in the Coachman Shoe Company, which her father had started. At its peak in the 1940s and ’50s, Coachman was a massive enterprise, the second-largest employer in Boston, after Gillette. As a girl, Mildred went to private school then to Simmons College, which was a luxury for women at the time. But of course there was no place for a woman in the business. Those jobs went to her two brothers and later to Mildred’s husband. So all of her smarts and her wit were confined to the dinner table and her overmatched family, and occasionally the ladies at her do-gooder luncheons. What a waste of a terrific mind.
After dinner but before dessert, as the maid was bustling in and out, fussing and clearing the dishes, Mrs. Larkin said to me, “Come, we have a minute. There’s something I want to show you.”
She led me up the stairs. I remember looking up at her nubbly wool skirt and her spindly, bowed legs and thinking she was very old. She had arthritis, which swelled her knuckles and her knees and made her move stiffly. In fact, she was only fifty-three.
In her bedroom, she went to a large jewelry box and began to rummage through it. “I want you to have something, something of mine.”
“Oh, Mrs. Larkin, you don’t have to.”
“I want to. It’s not just a present, though; it’s mine. A present would be from me but it wouldn’t be mine. You understand the difference?”
“Yes.”
She and her husband slept in separate beds, and I sat down primly on the bed that seemed to be hers. She returned with a chunky gold necklace, not at all my style (or my budget, I’m sure), but she seemed so pleased when she clasped it around my neck that I said nothing.
“Come look.”
She stood behind me at the bedroom mirror. “There. That’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But it’s too much. Really, you don’t have to.”
She put her hands on my shoulders. “I can certainly see why he chose you.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you like it?”
“Of course I do. It’s lovely.”
“Good. Then keep it. I like it too. I like it better on you than on myself. It’s a sturdy piece; it needs a sturdy girl.” She squeezed my shoulders—in a friendly way but also with a kind of professionalism, as if she were sizing up a horse she might buy. “Maybe when you wear it, you’ll think of me.”
“Of course I will. Always.”
“Come, let’s sit down. I want to have a chat with you.”
“Shouldn’t we get back downstairs? They’re waiting.”
“Let ’em wait. We’ve never really talked. I want you all to myself.”
Here was the real reason for my new necklace: it was the price of a private audience with me. We sat down on opposite beds, facing each other.
“Jane, have you ever met my father?”
“No, but I’ve heard a lot about him. Danny worships him.”
“What has Danny told you?”
“That your father came to this country because he was poor. And he started the company.”
“Poor. Poor doesn’t begin to describe it. He came here when he was fourteen years old, with nothing but the clothes on his back, speaking not a word of English. When he first got here, he lived on the street. Twenty years later, he started the company.”
“He must have been very smart.”
“Oh, he was smart and he worked hard, but a lot of people are smart and work hard. You know what he was?” She whispered: “He was lucky. The shoe industry was still wide open. There weren’t big national brands like now. Most shoe companies were still regional. But everything was changing. New ways to make shoes, ship them, sell them. To do it faster, cheaper, better. There was opportunity, you see? That’s why he was lucky. Tell me, did you ever have Coachman shoes, sweetheart?”
“Yes.”
“They were very expensive, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And your parents did not have much money, did they?”
She was shameless! “No,” I admitted.
“So why did your mother buy them for you? Why did she spend all that money?”
“Because she said they were the best.”
“Yes, exactly. They were the best. Do you know why I’m telling you all this, Jane?”
“Not really, no.”
“Parents do for their children. Just like your mother did for you.”
“Oh. Yes. They do.”
Mrs. Larkin looked at me, took my measure. She frowned, as if I had not understood something, so she tried again, with a different approach. “Do you know how my father met my mother? Has Danny ever told you?”
“Yes. He saw her in the window at Jordan Marsh, in town.”
“That’s right. When she was your age, my mother was making gloves. They used to have sewing girls in the window, to show the customers the quality. Now, what kind of a girl takes a job sewing gloves in a department store window?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you: a poor one. A poor one, Jane. You see, that’s what my parents come from. It’s not what Danny comes from, but it’s where I come from. It’s what I was taught. I was not born rich. My family got rich in my lifetime. That makes a difference, and I’ll tell you why. Because we haven’t had money long enough to be careless with it. We can still remember being poor. Ask my father about it sometime. Ask him how it feels to be hungry. And cold.”
The subject made me uneasy. My family never talked about money, except to assure ourselves that it can’t buy happiness and you can’t take it with you and so on.
“My Howard grew up poor too. When I met him, he didn’t have a pot to piss in. He came up here from Washington, Pennsylvania. He was a dentist with no patients. It was the Depression; nobody went to the dentist, nobody could afford it. So he decided he’d open a practice in pediatric dentistry because he figured parents would spend money on their kids’ teeth even if they wouldn’t spend it on their own.”
“That was clever.”
“It didn’t matter. He wasn’t lucky. Turned out, nobody had money for dentists, period. So when we got married, my father gave him a job at Coachman and that was the end of Howard’s career as a dentist.”
“Did he like it at Coachman?”
“Hated every day of it. Retired as soon as he could.”
“That’s very sad.”
“Not at all. Howard is very happy now. He’s retired, he plays golf, we go to Palm Beach in the winter. He has a good life.”
“But all those years he was miserable.”
“Yes, well. Happiness is a privilege. First you need a roof over your head and food in your belly, then you worry about being happy. Does Danny make you happy, Jane?”
“Very.”
“Good. I’m glad. Howard’s made me happy too. I married a handsome boy, and he married a rich girl; we made a good deal, the both of us. We’ve had a good life.”
“There must have been more than that. Didn’t you love each other?”
“Of course! And we love each other even more now. The only problem was my father. He thought Howard was a gold digger.”
Mildred’s eyes sparkled with meaning.
I could not think of one thing to say.
“Oh, it’s all right, Jane. Don’t be shocked. It was natural for him to be suspicious. Howard was a gold digger. But it didn’t matter, you see? Because I wanted him.”
“Oh.”
“And by the time Howard gets any gold, he’ll be too old to enjoy it anyway. That’s the way my father arranged it. All the money is his, his and my mother’s, until they die. Until then, technically I’m not worth a nickel. I stand to inherit quite a bit, of course, but that may not come for many, many years. And when it does, there is no provision for the grandchildren—Danny will get nothing, not until Howard and I both die. That’s the way this family works. Each generation takes care of its own. Each generation works for what they get.”
“I see.”
“I want you to know that, sweetheart, right up front. There isn’t going to be any money for Danny. Or for you. Not for a long time, maybe not ever. I intend to live a very long time.”
“I don’t want any money. I never—”
