Chapter 5 Kumquat
Kumquat
Admittedly, she practiced self-defense, avoiding her Radcliffe classmates’ notes in Harvard Magazine, and skipping over ads for family learning tours in Tuscany.
She was a punctual and generous great-aunt, quick with a birthday card and check, but she tended to miss the recitals, championship games, and graduations of her sisters’ grandchildren.
(Jeanne had three and Sylvia had two—not that anyone was counting!)
Who said comparison is the thief of joy?
Or was it only on a pillow? Helen did not keep score.
She took a longer, sadder view. After all, Jeanne had not lived to enjoy her descendants.
It seemed to Helen that every gain was offset by some loss.
She mentioned this in her Great Jewish Ideas class, and her rabbi suggested, “Or could it also be the other way around? B’erev yalin bechi, v’leboker rina.
Weeping endures for a night—but joy comes in the morning. ”
Helen smiled. She liked Rabbi Lieber, but she thought, You’ll learn. You’re only forty.
—
Her own life was rich and orderly but full of troubles, the worst of these her husband’s health, because Charles had Parkinson’s.
There was the question of the house, which he refused to sell, thus jeopardizing a place on the waiting list at Hebrew SeniorLife.
And then, of course, their daughter Pam, who suffered from depression that only worsened with words of encouragement and advice.
With her therapist as witness, Pam had declared, in no uncertain terms, that her mother’s visits exacerbated her condition—and so Helen was forced to worry from a distance.
All of this kept Helen up at night, even as she puzzled about renewing season tickets to the symphony.
On dark winter days, she found this problem every bit as difficult as all the rest.
“It’s a shame,” said Charles.
Helen threw up her hands. “What can I do?”
“You know what you could do.” His voice had an edge.
They had prime real estate, front row left mezzanine.
Soloists seemed almost close enough to touch—but their seats abutted those belonging to Sylvia and her husband.
A benefit for twenty years, proximity had become intolerable, because the sisters were not speaking.
This was not a little tiff. It was not simply, as some liked to suggest, a misunderstanding.
Sylvia had done something unconscionable.
Because of this, Helen went only to performances of new music, which she knew Sylvia would skip, along with programs of Mahler, who gave Sylvia headaches, and Shostakovich, who made her anxious to the point that she once said, in her dramatic way, “I can’t listen to this. I feel short of breath!”
Charles still spoke on occasion to Sylvia’s husband, Lew, and Helen bore no grudge against Sylvia’s son, Richard—but the rift remained. In this, as in many things, Helen suffered most. After all, Sylvia had two granddaughters to distract her. Helen had none.
Sometimes she thought she’d had it coming.
She had been too proud, too pleased with her own life.
Grimly, she remembered her superiority, dressing up her daughters, while Jeanne and Sylvia had sons.
Helen looked at her framed pictures—dark-eyed Pam, and Wendy with her auburn curls.
Now Pam lived alone, and Wendy had married a woman in a ceremony with much singing.
Why? Wendy said that she had always loved women but had been closeted—a word Helen found strangely offensive.
She had great closets. She’d organized them long before closet organizing became a sport and a profession.
The thought of her own daughter closeted seemed an insult not only to Helen’s intelligence, but to her housekeeping.
Of course, her feelings were immaterial.
These were the facts: Her daughters were no longer lovely girls, but stolid women in their fifties.
Pam had cut off all her hair, and Wendy’s curls were gray.
Pam had a dog and Wendy had Jill, who had sworn off babies.
“I’m the oldest of seven, so no kids,” Jill had declared, practically the first time she came to dinner.
“The technology is very good,” said Charles, who was a retired physician. “You don’t need to carry or even conceive your own child these days.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to raise one,” Jill explained.
Wendy added, “And we’re just too old.”
I am old, I am old, thought Helen, who had studied English literature sixty years before. Bits of poetry rattled inside her.
She kept busy, hosting her book group and serving on the board of the Brookline Public Library.
She drove Charles to the doctor and his poker game.
And in the end, she renewed her subscription to the BSO.
She did this because she wanted to support the orchestra, and because she could always donate unused tickets for resale, and because Charles wanted to go.
He could no longer play tennis or golf, and she would not deny him another pleasure.
But mostly she renewed because it was not in her nature to give in.
Sylvia would never cancel her subscription; she never gave up anything she liked—so why should Helen?
She loved music just as much. Of course, Jeanne had enjoyed the symphony the most. She had been a violinist, after all.
Helen renewed in memory of Jeanne, and because she saw Mahler on the schedule.
—
It was an icy December night, so they took a cab which rattled and squealed alarmingly. Looking out at freezing rain, Charles said, “I wonder who will come in this.”
Helen said, “We will, apparently.”
She imagined a small audience, but the portico was swarming with umbrellas. Inside, the house was nearly full, and Helen worried briefly that Sylvia would show up, even if Mahler made her ill. She loved anything popular. However, her seat was empty, as was Lew’s.
The orchestra was tuning up when a rustling began far down the row of chairs.
An usher’s penlight, and Helen’s heart jumped as someone said, “Excuse me. Sorry!” Not Sylvia, but a slender girl, followed by a tall ambling boy.
“Hi, Aunt Helen,” the girl whispered, and Helen recognized her great-niece, Phoebe, who was supposed to be away at college.
“Aren’t you in school?” Helen asked, somewhat inarticulately.
“Winter break! Aunt Sylvia gave me tickets. This is Wyatt.”
Wyatt waved from one seat over. “Hey.”
Applause again as the conductor took the stage. Phoebe said, “We went to string camp together.”
Charles half rose to shake Wyatt’s hand. Missing his patients as he did, he loved any sort of company. “What do you play?”
Before Wyatt could answer, a strange melee began—not Mahler—but a pair of new pieces. The first involved orchestral wailing and a sobbing disco beat. The second sounded like a Bach cantata floating lonely in the wind after threshing by a tractor-mower.
“Well!” Charles said when the piece ended after a half-dozen false alarms.
Phoebe leaned back in her seat. “I just want them to play it all again.”
Wyatt nodded. “Same.”
“Really!” said Charles. “I want a drink.” And he insisted on taking the kids down to the bar. Stubbornly, he refused the elevator, which worried Helen, who hovered, while Phoebe and Wyatt trailed behind, unaware of danger.
Wyatt was long-limbed and graceful, although his clothes were terrible. Phoebe, golden-haired and fair, pre-Raphaelite as her mother Melanie had once been.
“I play cello,” Wyatt told Charles.
“Good for you.” Charles had a glass of Scotch, ignoring Helen’s disapproving look.
But it wasn’t just disapproval, it was love for him!
Her husband, who insisted that alcohol didn’t make his symptoms worse—although Helen saw it did.
Her husband, who had been an athlete and a dancer, now sporting a moustache because it was difficult to shave with trembling hands.
Meanwhile, Phoebe and Wyatt looked shy when Charles asked them what they wanted and ordered Cokes like children.
Helen told Phoebe, “You should have mentioned you were coming. You could have stayed with us!”
Phoebe looked confused and then apologetic. “I didn’t even think of that.”
You told Sylvia, Helen thought. She gave you tickets! But you never thought of visiting me. Why? Was she so frightening? She was harsh, supposedly, although the opposite was true! Did she not bleed when family came to town without a word? Downcast, Helen sipped her cold white wine.
Some people found Helen overwhelming. She couldn’t help it, but her simplest statements sounded like commands. “Time to go back,” Helen announced as soon as the lights dimmed. Immediately, Phoebe and Wyatt set down their glasses.
“How is Jeanne’s violin?” she asked Phoebe as they took their seats.
“It’s good.” Phoebe hesitated. “There was a little wobble on the fingerboard, but I think I’ve fixed it.”
“A wobble! What do you mean fixed it?” Helen exclaimed as the conductor made his entrance for the Mahler. “You tried fixing it yourself?” The audience was applauding as she said, “You don’t fool around with an instrument like that.”
A trumpet, sad, sardonic, filled the hall. A wave of sound below. All hands on deck—every instrument, and harp, and whip, and glockenspiel. Phoebe leaned forward, visibly relieved that Helen could not continue scolding. Saved by Mahler’s Fifth, she clasped Wyatt’s hand.
Meanwhile, Helen fretted. Possibly Jeanne’s violin was fine. She shouldn’t have assumed the worst—but she had no time to mend the conversation, no chance to soften the impression she had made.