CHAPTER 2 #6
“You’re going to the Century Club not to praise them but to bury them?” Henry asked.
“Ah, yes, wrong toast,” Eddie said. “The real one’s in my pocket. I thought I could reuse the one I wrote fifty years ago for their rehearsal dinner, but when I found it—” He shook his head. “The sentiments were breathtakingly stupid. I don’t suppose I knew much about marriage at the time.”
“Were you the best man?” I asked.
“The very best.”
Eddie had a car waiting, so we didn’t stay long.
We were saying our goodbyes when Eddie stopped to look at a painting in the living room and asked if it was really a David Hockney.
He’d been glancing in that direction the whole time we’d been in the apartment.
Steve and Leda had gone out on a limb to buy that painting.
“We went out to the last leaf on the limb,” Leda liked to say, but all these years later they were happy to sit and stare at it.
As it turned out, what they had bought was eternal life.
The apple tree would always be glowing, the field around it would always be lush, the colors would always be more than anyone thought possible.
Eddie and Leda and Steve were standing in front of the painting when Henry came up behind me and tapped my wrist. When I looked at him, he said nothing, but turned around and walked down the hall to his bedroom.
Maybe Henry was the spy. I followed him.
His running clothes were in a soggy pile on the floor.
He closed the door behind us. Was there anything in nature like the bedroom of a teenage boy?
The twin bed, the poster of Einstein sticking out his tongue, a trophy that said “Best in Show” on the bookshelf.
“Dude’s gay,” he said to me in a quiet voice.
“What?”
“Gay,” he said again. “I’m guessing that’s why Grandma divorced him.”
I looked at the door as if I could see Eddie in the living room. “Because he likes Hockney?”
Henry closed his eyes.
“I don’t know! Not Hockney. What makes you think he’s gay?”
Henry sighed, as if to say the elderly were blind. “I’m betting it’s not a secret. You should ask him.”
“I’m not going to ask him.”
“No, sure, listen, I’m not trying to out the guy. He seems totally sweet. I’m just saying if you’re wondering what went wrong, that’s probably what went wrong.”
This information was followed by a light knock, then Leda stuck in her head. “Showtime,” she said. She looked at Henry and then at me. “Are you two having a conference?”
I nodded and gave my nephew a hug. “Fill your mother in.”
“You bet,” Henry said. “You’ll have a great time. You look pretty.”
We all said our good nights, and after one more meaningful stare at the Hockney, Eddie and I were in the car on the way to the Century Club.
“Oh, your sister,” he said, shaking his head. “What a marvel she is.”
“It’s true.”
“I have guilt where Leda’s concerned. She was a wonderful child but quiet, harder to know.”
“Leda was always taking things in. Even at seven, she was training to be a therapist.”
Eddie nodded. “You and I had such a natural affinity. We were easy. I never spent as much time with Leda and I should have. I always thought I’d get to know her better later on, but I should have tried harder when we had the time.”
It was almost seven o’clock and the light came slanting between the buildings. Everything it touched turned to gold. “Trust me, Leda remembers you as the highlight of her childhood, the same way I do.”
Eddie turned away from me and looked out the window. “Don’t make me cry,” he said. “If I start now, I’ll cry all night. I may cry all night anyway.”
Dude’s gay. No problem with that, unless he was your husband, unless you didn’t know. Eddie was not my husband. In the backseat of the black SUV I took his hand.
“Both of you married nice men,” he said. “Both of you seem happy.”
“We’re happy.”
“You were happy children. You didn’t have the best possible circumstances growing up, but you were little light bulbs, both of you. Life beats that out of so many people, but not the two of you.”
“Leda and I had each other. That was a huge help.” And we had you, I wanted to say, but was that me being sentimental?
Could Eddie have made a difference in the short time we were together?
I looked at him. “I don’t know if you had siblings,” I said.
“I can’t remember where you grew up. I don’t think I knew you went to Yale. ”
“An older brother, Martin. Younger sister, Amy. Altoona, Pennsylvania. And you knew I went to Yale,” he said. “I taught you both the Whiffenpoofs song.”
And then, of course, I did know. We sang it everywhere. We sang it on the way to the Century Club. “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way ...” Eddie shining on the lambs’ chorus: “Baa, baa, baa.”
He smiled. “It drove your mother to distraction, you and me and Leda, bleating.”
“Leda sang it in the first grade talent show,” I said. There was a memory that unpacked itself out of thin air.
Eddie nodded. “A cappella. She was terribly brave.”
When the car pulled up at the club, Eddie turned to me. “I want you to know that if you never do another kind thing in your life, this will have been enough.”
“Is the party going to be that bad?”
“No, it will be a beautiful party. I just didn’t want to go in there alone.”
“Well, good. You don’t have to go in there alone.
” And so we went through the doors of the Century Club, arms linked, into the sea of older men in tuxedos and women in silk pantsuits and good jewelry.
Always get married in May—it ensured anniversaries full of peonies and ranunculus and anemones.
The room might as well have been a cutting garden.
“The Hotallings like flowers,” Eddie said as my gaze went from one massive arrangement to the next.
We filed into the receiving line with everyone else, fifty couples to mark fifty years, everyone moving forward.
All of them knew Eddie. His name was a bass note called again and again.
I could see how truly rotten it would have been to show up to this thing alone.
“Ed!” the woman at the front of the line said, holding out her arms to him. He let go of me long enough to kiss her. Polly Hotalling wore a white silk duster over white silk pants, an outfit appropriate for a second marriage or a fiftieth anniversary. She was still the size of a teaspoon.
“Ed,” her husband said, and shook his hand. Skip Hotalling was trim and tall, a full head of silver hair and a cleft in his chin, for heaven’s sake. A leading man from bygone days. “Who do we have here?”
Eddie put his arm around my waist. “Here we have my daughter, Daphne Fuller. Daphne, these are the famous Hotallings, Polly and Skip.”
Skip, Polly, and I were each taken aback by the introduction but for different reasons. For me, it was a huge promotion. I held out my hand and said how glad I was to meet them.
Skip, lost, kept on smiling, but it only took Polly two beats to catch up. “Daphne Zabriskie?”
I smiled. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that, but yes, Daphne Zabriskie.”
Skip laughed. “No one ever put one over on Polly.”
“No one was trying to,” I said, still beaming. I knew how to beam.
“You look beautiful,” Eddie said, and pressed Polly’s hand to his heart. “Let everyone else see how beautiful you are.”
“You’re at our table,” Polly said to me, spider to fly.
I felt the doom ahead as Eddie steered me towards the bar. A young woman in a sequined dress leaned her hip into the curve of the piano, singing, “I wandered around and finally found the somebody who ...”
“Well, we’re here,” he said. “Let’s make a night of it.”
“Daphne Zabriskie,” I said, a glass of Sancerre in hand. What open bar featured a good Sancerre? None that I’d ever seen. “Have I met them before?”
Eddie nodded. “Probably, when your mother and I were first dating, or it may have even been when we were palling around. Your mother was once a great pal of mine.”
“Good to know.”
“Polly and Skip came to see me a couple of times in Boston before they had children. Polly was besotted with children so we brought you and Leda along.”
“She’d remember me from that?”
“Polly has what we used to call an acute memory. She would remember that Abigail’s daughters were Daphne and Leda. I’m a little surprised she was able to pull up Zabriskie.”
“Wait, were they at your wedding?” The one in which he married my mother, the one in which Leda and I got matching dresses made of yellow silk with a sewn-in slip. Eddie called us daffodils.
He shook his head. “They were not.”
“You were the best man at their wedding and they didn’t come to yours?”
“Your mother did not care for the Hotallings.”
“Ed!” a woman cried, short gray hair, large black glasses, making her way towards the bar. “Tell me what to read!”
“Daphne, this is Maxine.”
Maxine and I shook hands.
“Maxine likes to play Stump the Band but with books. Maxine has read everything. Don’t engage with her. She was the associate publisher at Farrar, Straus.”
“Retired,” Maxine said, hitting the word hard. “Out of the loop. Yesterday’s news. Tell me what to read.”
I longed for my husband, who was probably cleaning out a linen closet now, eighteen sets of sheets for double mattresses. He could have played the retirement game no matter where he turned.
Eddie took a sip of his drink. “Je refuse.”
“The Bee Sting,” I said.
Maxine smiled, a little smear of lipstick on her tooth. “Good,” she said to me. “Smart.”
“Don’t do it,” he said. “She’ll break you.”
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” I said, trying again.
“I finished it two weeks ago.” She turned to Eddie. “If the party had been three weeks ago, she would have had me.”
Eddie shook his head. “She says things like this to keep you playing. Chances are she finished it six months ago.”
I felt like I was at a slot machine. “Independent People.”
“Halldór Laxness, Iceland, published in two volumes in 1934 and ’35. That’s an excellent choice.”