CHAPTER 7 #2
Eddie had no idea if she’d been a wonderful mother, or he based his assessment on the years he had seen her in the role, or it was one of those meaningless things one says to fill a conversational space.
Or maybe he was right. Again, I remembered what Leda had told me about bravery and resilience.
Leda and I were happy, after all. We’d made good lives with men who loved us.
We liked our work. We were, for the most part, remarkably untroubled by the past.
Eddie took my mother around the apartment.
In the kitchen, he introduced her to Marta, his housekeeper, who had come to serve lunch and then clean up.
Marta sat on a stool scrolling through her phone, and when he said her name, she looked up and waved.
He showed my mother the bedroom. We didn’t follow them there, but we could hear them laughing.
Jonathan looked at me in alarm. When they came back to the living room, Eddie took her to the case of books he had edited.
She pulled one from the shelf. “This was you?” she asked, opening it up.
A huge bestseller, prizewinner, a book that everyone had read.
“I didn’t write it.”
“But you brought it into the world.” She hugged the book to her chest. “I loved this book so much.” She put it back and took out another, marveling. “This one, too?”
“That one I may as well have written,” Eddie said. “That one I take full credit for.”
She shook her head. “You were a brilliant editor. Even when you were in that little closet at Houghton. You were better than any of them.”
“I wasn’t, but thank you.”
“I’m serious. I envy you your career. After Lucas and I got married, I dropped out.
They promised to bring me back to work on his books, but then there were no more books.
The next thing I knew, I was home with two new babies.
I didn’t know anybody anymore. There was no way I could keep up.
” She couldn’t stop staring at the book’s cover.
“I loved publishing. I wish I’d stayed.”
He shook his head. “Publishing was ruined. , Germans, the end of antitrust laws, printing in China, take your pick. You left in the golden age. Keep those happy memories.”
“But what did I ever do with my life? I didn’t do anything,” she said.
“You’ve had a full and beautiful life,” Eddie told her.
She ran her fingers across the spines like keys on a piano. “Nothing like this,” she said.
Eddie, I knew, still carried the burden of the novel he had meant someday to write, while my mother regretted that she hadn’t come up with more publicity campaigns.
Still, from the perspective of a daughter standing in the living room of a Chelsea apartment, it didn’t seem that either of them had done a bad job.
Marta brought the plates to the table. Four of us opted for orange juice and two of us went for mimosas, which were followed up with glasses of champagne. “I never understood the need to put orange juice in champagne because it’s Saturday afternoon,” my mother said. Eddie agreed.
“Did you know,” Leda said to the table, “that when Daphne was nine years old, she climbed out of a wrecked car in a snowstorm by herself to go find help?”
“Leda,” our mother said sternly.
“She saved Eddie’s life,” Leda said.
“That’s a little hyperbolic,” my mother said, holding her glass.
We all looked to Eddie, who smiled at me. “No, she did. Daphne saved my life.”
I had never thought of it that way, but if it were true, I would never need to do anything else.
“I didn’t know about it,” Leda said. “I thought I did, but all I knew was a story I’d made up when I was seven. Daphne’s been telling me what happened, how you were in the hospital with me”—she nodded at our mother—“and Eddie picked her up from school and they went to the raspberry farm.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t do this,” our mother said.
“Why not? I’m telling you, Daphne did the most amazing thing. She should have had her picture on the front page of the paper.”
“It was a terrible time,” our mother said, “and I don’t see why we have to dredge it up on an otherwise happy occasion.”
“I want to hear what happened,” Eddie said to me.
I was across from him at the table. Leda was on his right side and our mother was on his left.
“I never knew. We weren’t ever alone again, or we were alone for a minute when you would come to my room in the hospital, but we didn’t get to talk.
I never told you how petrified I was after you left, or how much I missed you.
That time in the car, before you came back, I think that was the loneliest I’ve ever been.
Isn’t that funny? I felt like we’d been in that car together for months and then you shot out the window and were gone.
” He looked at my mother. “She was afraid that someone was going to snatch her, that she’d knock on the wrong door or get in a car with the wrong person, and I said, ‘No, no, everyone’s nice.
You’re going to find good people who want to help you. ’”
“I remember that,” I said.
“Then I’m alone with my broken ankle and my foot pinned under the emergency brake, thinking, Someone is going to take her and lock her in a basement and I won’t be able to get her back.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that,” I said, thinking of how his case for human decency had informed my life. I believed him, and by believing him, I had found it to be true.
“I had a pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket, but I was too afraid of striking a match and blowing up the car.”
“What happened?” Jonathan asked. He was as scared as Eddie.
Leda looked at him. “You don’t know?”
“I knew Daphne was in a car accident when she was young, but I had it in my head that Abigail was driving.”
“That I was driving?” our mother asked.
Leda laughed.
“You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,” I said. “Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?”
“It’s all people think about,” Leda said.
Eddie put his hands flat on the table, like we were going to do this as a séance. “Tell us now.”
My mother shook her head. “Please don’t.”
“I’d like to know.” Steve, who had made it through the entire lunch speaking a maximum of two sentences, voted to hear what had happened at the raspberry farm in 1980.
“You don’t have to tell us everything,” Eddie said. “But I would like to hear the part I wasn’t there for.”
I looked at our mother. I didn’t blame her. We were having a nice time. “Mom?”
“Fine,” she said, but didn’t look at me.
And so I went ahead. “Okay, first off, I kept that coat until I left my apartment in Newton. I couldn’t make myself get rid of it.”
“What coat?” Jonathan asked.
“My teddy bear coat. Fake fur was all the rage among the fourth grade set in Winchester at the time. I had begged Mom to buy me one for my birthday, and it kept me from freezing to death.”
“An excellent investment,” my mother said.
“It was a magnificent coat,” Eddie said. He covered my mother’s hand with his hand. “I remember we walked over to Filene’s one day at lunch to pick it out.”
Our mother smiled.
When I went to stay with the Cathcarts, when Eddie and Leda were still in the hospital, Mr. Cathcart got all the blood out of the fur. I remember him standing at the kitchen sink, working on it with a bottle of dishwashing liquid, and by the time he was finished, it looked as good as new.
“The hardest part was jumping off the car,” I said. “The car was on its side, and I’d crawled out through the window on the top. I was afraid something awful would happen when I jumped, that I’d knock the car over. I was worried about your ankle,” I said to Eddie.
“With good reason,” he said.
“I was also worried about my own ankle. There was a lot of snow, so I had no idea what I’d be jumping into. I didn’t know how deep the snow was or what was beneath it. Anyway, that might have been the worst of it.”
Steve asked the make of the car.
“Chevrolet Impala station wagon, 1972,” my mother said.
He took out his phone and tapped it in. “The Chevrolet Impala wagon was 80.5 inches in width, so, six and a half feet wide.” He looked at me like I was still considering my options. “That’s a big jump.”
“I ended up going to the back of the car. I held on to the bumper and put my foot on top of the license plate. Anyway, that worked.”
“How do you remember this?” my mother asked.
“I had a lot of time to think,” I said.
I had never told this part of the story.
Back in the day, I would have told it a hundred times had anyone asked, but no one did.
Given all that went on in our house in January of 1980, it seemed worse than self-aggrandizing to list my own accomplishments.
But as it turned out, the lack of telling had kept the story fresh.
As I recounted my trip from car to civilization for the assembled luncheon, I began to shiver.
I remembered the confusion caused by so many snow-covered trees and the panic I felt climbing up the hill, away from the car, away from Eddie, like I was an astronaut leaving the capsule to drift off into space.
“The car hadn’t gone that far down the hill, but it was hard to climb out, you know?
It was steep and there was so much snow.
” And I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to leave him there.