Chapter 14
Before Phoebe leaves for the bachelorette party, she returns Lila’s mother’s outfit. She knocks on the door of the Raven.
“Thank you for letting me borrow your clothes,” Phoebe says, and hands her the bag.
Patricia stands there with a cocktail in one hand, surprised, as if she truly said goodbye to the outfit in her mind and can’t comprehend how it is here, back from the dead.
“Just put them there,” Patricia says, pointing to the marble table where the raven sculptures sit, like that is where all the dead things must go. Phoebe puts the bag down next to the ravens, all of them turned around so they are facing the wall, like they’re in trouble.
It only takes one quick glance around the room to see that the ravens are everywhere, one painted just above the bed, one sitting under the lampshade on the nightstand. Next to it, Phoebe sees two books, How to Be Your Own Best Friend and We Die Alone .
Patricia turns back to where she had been sitting, which feels like a sign that Phoebe should go, but Phoebe feels compelled to stay. Maybe this woman will die alone, but she shouldn’t have to drink alone.
“May I join you for a drink?” Phoebe asks.
“You want to join me for a drink?” Patricia looks equally confused and delighted, like she just witnessed a sudden snowfall. “Usually Lila’s friends can’t get away from me fast enough. They think poor old widows are the plague.”
Patricia pulls out a glass for Phoebe and opens the beverage cooler.
“I went to your gallery today,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I looked in the window.”
“Thirty years we’ve been building that collection,” Patricia says.
“It must be impressive.”
“At first it was just living artists. And then, as we got older, and some of those living artists, well, died, we started to branch out into dead ones. That really opened things up for us.”
Now they host a huge collection of the Hudson River School paintings, not to mention one Warhol.
“You have a Warhol?”
“I should donate it to the hotel, honestly, give them something worthy to hang on the walls,” she says, then looks to the painting above her bed. “Tell me, Professor, this is a death painting, is it not?”
Phoebe looks at the image of a raven perched on a dried-up orange slice.
“That is undeniably a death painting,” Phoebe says.
“ Thank you,” Patricia says. “Finally, someone with a little sense. Lila refuses to acknowledge it, no surprise there. And I understand the hotel is trying to achieve some level of authenticity here, bringing in the Victorian macabre, but must they hang it right over an old woman’s bed? It’s hard enough getting to sleep without the bird of death watching me.”
Patricia holds up a yellow bottle.
“I wasn’t sure about this spicy margarita elderberry hibiscus concoction,” Patricia says. “I’m quite suspicious of any cocktail with such a long name. But it’s delicious.”
Patricia pours her a glass.
“I’m sure Lila has told you all kinds of things about my drinking in the afternoon, even though I keep explaining to her that my doctor was the one who suggested I start day-drinking. I simply can’t drink at night anymore. Just two glasses of wine at dinner, and I’ll never fall asleep.”
Phoebe takes the glass and sips.
“It’s good,” Phoebe says. “Spicy.”
But Patricia is not listening.
“And honestly, what else does the girl expect me to do up here all day? She tells me I can’t bring a date to my own daughter’s wedding. Tells me I can’t give a speech. I can’t drink in the afternoons. Can’t come to the bachelorette party. She expects me to just sit up here with nothing to do. I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me. And my hair hasn’t grown past my ears since Bush Senior was our president.”
Phoebe laughs.
“Tell me, friend of Lila’s I know almost nothing about. How did I not know you before this week?”
“I’m not local,” Phoebe says.
“But to never have even heard of you,” Patricia says. “Lila’s closest friend in the world, and I don’t hear a peep? This is what it’s been like, Pamela.”
“Phoebe, actually.”
“See? I don’t even know your goddamned name. Ever since her father died, Lila keeps herself so buttoned up, so closed off to me. She used to tell me things. We used to be what you might call friends before her father got sick. Not that I believe in the whole mothers-and-daughters-being-best-friends thing. That’s, frankly, unnatural. But I do miss her. The real Lila, the one who used to sit in my bed and talk my ear off. Do you know what a talker Lila really is?”
“I do, actually,” Phoebe says.
“God, as a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel. When she lost her teeth, I heard every gruesome detail. When she got her period, I was the first one she told. Besides her guidance counselor, but that couldn’t be helped. The whole thing happened on his chair, which is a little odd, I’m now realizing.”
Patricia takes a sip.
“Wait, Lila wasn’t molested by her high school guidance counselor, was she?” Patricia asks. “Is that why he’s here ?”
“Oh no. She wasn’t. If she was, I doubt he’d be here , you know?”
“What a relief,” Patricia says. “It’s not easy having a daughter who’s always been attracted to much older men. That girl fell in love with her sixty-year-old piano teacher when she was nine. I’m the only mother I know who had to force her own child to quit piano. And you don’t have to tell me, I know it was all my fault. I, as Lila said so recently, set the tone.”
“Was Henry a lot older than you?” Phoebe asks.
“Fifteen years,” Patricia says. “I was twenty-six when I met him. God, such a little baby. I had no idea what I was doing, except driving my mother slowly insane. That was clear. After we got engaged, she said to me, No daughter of Paul Winthrop is marrying a Catholic who calls himself the Trash King of Rhode Island.”
“That’s what Henry called himself?”
“It was the name of his business. It’s what everyone in Newport called Henry back then, after he started making his fortune. But my mother didn’t understand. She kept asking me if he was in the Mob, and I kept telling her he was only pretending to be in the Mob. That was his entire advertising strategy, and it worked, and did my mother care that he basically built a million-dollar business in under three years?” Patricia says. “No. My mother is a true snob, and trust me, she’d take that as a compliment. She prides herself on being a snob, on telling everyone how embarrassing it was that JFK’s family wore tails to the reception while Jackie’s family knew to arrive in linen. But I was a kid in the sixties, you know. I didn’t want to be snob. I didn’t want to sit around with my mother and gossip about who didn’t wear linen. I wanted to wear bell-bottoms. I wanted to be American . One of the people. I wanted to go to Woodstock and marry a handsome entrepreneur who seemed to have come out of the dust fields of Ohio in a cowboy hat just to save me from my horrible snobbish family. But my mother, she was not wrong about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“She kept telling me, Patricia, do not marry this man thinking he can save you from who you really are,” Patricia says. “You’re a Winthrop. A terrible snob, just like me. And one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll see the Trash King of Rhode Island for what he really is. And she was right. I did.”
“What was he?”
“A mortal!” she says. “A mere human being! When the first doctor gave him three months to live, I was so shocked, I started to laugh hysterically right there in the office. I couldn’t understand. My big strong Henry? I actually said, But this is the Trash King of Rhode Island! And so Lila barred me from going to the next doctor’s appointment.
“God, I worshipped Henry in the beginning,” she says, and smiles. “He was so exciting. A man of business, building an empire. He bought me my first painting, you know? And we’d go on these long boozy dates, and I’d listen to him talk about his landfills at dinner like he was talking about Leonardo’s Gran Cavallo . I had no chance, really. The younger woman never has a chance. She’s always doomed to worship, right from the start.”
“I don’t think Lila worships Gary like that, though,” Phoebe says. “I really don’t get that vibe.”
“You should have seen when she came home from that doctor’s appointment with Gary. Her eyes were glowing, Pamela.”
“Phoebe.”
“I’m sorry, once I decide on a name in my head, it might as well be your name,” Patricia says. “It was like the girl was on drugs. She went on, telling me all about this wonderful doctor who was going to save Henry, all we needed was a little optimism like Gary. But I was under no such illusion. I knew the first doctor had been right. I knew Henry was dying. I would try to tell her that, get her ready, but she wouldn’t listen. She had Gary and his second opinion.”
Patricia sighs.
“She’s always been like that, though,” Patricia says.
“Like what?”
“Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be. But she never got engaged to any of them. She never took it this far. This is just ridiculous, and it’s all Henry’s fault.”
“Why?”
“He told her that his only dying wish was to see his little girl get married before he died. And what do you know, but a week later, they’re engaged!”
“You don’t think they love each other?”
“My daughter doesn’t fully love people yet,” Patricia says. “Not the way she will.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I mean she loves Gary the way that I love this cocktail. The way that I have come to love a foam body pillow. The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”
She wonders if this is what it’s like to have a mother, to sit together, drinking in the afternoon, listening to her meandering stories about what it means to truly love. Phoebe feels like she’s watching a woman write her posthumous autobiography aloud, like Patricia is the dead version of herself whose saving grace is somehow knowing everything.
“How did losing Henry make you better?” Phoebe asks.
“Henry quickly deteriorated after the first diagnosis, and I couldn’t stop having this horrible feeling like I was dying, too.”
At night, she stared at her sagging breasts and her blue veins and the thin skin over her hands and wondered what happened to her. How did her skin become so thin? How had she come to own so many paintings by dead artists? How had she wound up on the board of the Preservation Society? How had she come to be a woman who put on lip liner just like her mother? She had once been so young, so beautiful that an artist from her gallery asked to paint her, and why didn’t she say yes?
“I had been too embarrassed then,” she says. “Simply put, I thought I was fat. And I didn’t think it was tasteful for a married woman to do something like that. My mother was right. I was a terrible snob. But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.”
When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist.
“It had been decades,” Patricia says. “But I just called William like no time had passed and said, I’m ready to pose for you. God, that’s what impresses me now the most. How I just did that. It felt like the boldest thing I had ever done, somehow scarier than even getting married.
“William and I didn’t have an affair,” she adds. “Even though I know that’s what Lila must think. I just wanted him to paint me. I needed him to document my body as it was at that precise moment. Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit. To feel proud, actually. That saved me. But let me be clear. Not from myself.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I didn’t want to be saved from myself. Nobody does! All we want is permission to stand there naked and be our damned selves.”
This sounds true to Phoebe. This sounds like exactly what she wants, what she has secretly always wanted. To read books when she wanted to read books. To be sad when she was sad. To be scared when she was scared. To be angry when she was angry. To be boring when she felt boring.
“Of course, Lila was horribly embarrassed by the painting,” Patricia says. “She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after I brought it to the gallery. She was hysterical, kept saying, Dad is sick and you strip naked for another man? So I said, Honey, your father loves Cubism.”
She laughs to herself.
“Of course now I know it took Henry his entire life to admit the truth about who he was, too,” Patricia says. “I hope it doesn’t take Lila that long.”
She turns to Phoebe.
“Is she horribly embarrassed of me?” Patricia asks. “What a humiliating question for a mother to ask.”
“She’s angry at you.”
Patricia nods again. “She’s been angry at me ever since Henry got sick.”
“And you’ve been angry at her.”
The comment takes Patricia by surprise, as if she hadn’t quite been able to admit this aloud yet.
“When Lila gave away the painting to Gary for free, what a slap in the face that was. Never mind that a William Withers painting goes for at least twenty thousand at auction these days. That painting was priceless to me. It wasn’t even for sale, and she knew it. She said, Yes, you kept saying it was literally priceless, so I gave it away for free.”
Patricia sighs.
“It’s not easy being angry at your own creation. It’s like being angry at yourself.”
She worries it’s her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.
“The girl spills a bottle of red wine on the brand-new couch, and we just get a new one. It is as simple as that. Everything is replaceable. The windows in the bedroom, the Barbies whose heads popped off sometimes for no reason I could understand, replaceable. Her world is a world of one million Barbies; a world of cartoons, where Daffy Duck can get baked into a cake or fall out of a tree and never bleed. Her father was the first thing she ever truly lost, and so what else does she do but try to immediately replace him with a man who works in corporeal waste management.”
She finishes off her cocktail.
“Anyway. Nothing can be done now. The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo , right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.”
“I suppose I didn’t realize that’s what it would feel like getting older,” Phoebe confesses. She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked. A concretization of your personality and all the things that made you who you were. “But it’s not, is it?”
Patricia shakes her head.
“Pamela, it is all about moving on. Saying goodbye to whoever you thought you were, whoever you thought you would be. Let me demonstrate.”
She gets up, opens the bag of clothes. Holds up her sweater to the light.
“Henry was always trying to make me a sequins gal, but now that he’s gone, I can finally admit, I am not a sequins gal. So, goodbye.”
She drops the shirt in Phoebe’s lap.
“In full disclosure, I’m not a sequins gal, either,” Phoebe says. “I mean, it was fun for a day.”
“It was fun for a life,” Patricia says. “But now I wear linen and drink in the afternoon, and so be it. Because when did afternoons get so long? I mean, Christ, let’s just get on with the evening, shall we?”