Mumma took to George and he also took to her. They had lively conversations first about Freud and then about Hegel, whom Mumma had never heard of before but whose world views she approved of. At the dinner table on the second night of his two-night visit during the Christmas break, Mumma told him, “Beth’s only nineteen,” by way of letting him know I was not mature enough for a serious relationship.
“I’m thinking of law school,” George answered, letting her know he was in no hurry.
“I’m thinking of a doctorate in mathematics,” I said, forcing my way into their cozy conversation. Because if George, or Mumma, thought I was trying to get him to marry me, they could both think again. And they could think again together at the same time, since they seemed to like each other so much.
“I’m thinking of Cambridge,” I added. “England.”
“You’ll like Cambridge,” Pops said. “You’re used to that kind of bad weather, and you could cross over to visit Brundy, which he would enjoy mightily. He’d show you Paris.”
“Brundy?” George asked. “Who are they talking about, Elfrieda?”
George stayed only two nights, and on the morning he was leaving we wanted to walk on the beach (translation: neck in the dunes) before we parted for the rest of the holiday. When Mumma suggested that she might come with us to see the ocean, she would take us in her car, I don’t think I shrieked “Mother!” but I might have.
George was readying himself for the law. “Elfrieda,” he reminded her, “I want to say a proper goodbye to Beth.”
“That means No Mothers,” I said.
In the car beside him, I said, “I will never, never, never understand my mother. For a smart woman, she is so dumb.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” George said. “Amazing is the only word.”
“Everybody always says that about her,” I responded glumly.
“No, not her, you. I mean, I already knew you’re strong-minded, but I think you must also have an unusual strength of character. I’m impressed, Beth. Elfrieda’s not a mother, she’s an experience.”
I found myself defending her. “She’s a good mother.”
“I didn’t say she was bad,” George corrected me. “Is this where I turn? I said exactly what I mean. I’m not sure an experience is what a child wants from its mother. It must have been hard to be her daughter,” George said, thinking about it. Then, being fair-minded by nature, he added, “Some of the time.”
“More than some,” I assured him.
After George had driven off to celebrate the holidays at his home in Delaware, Mumma found me in my room. She lay down on my spare bed and arranged the pillow behind her. Her hair was bright all around her face. I practiced thinking of her as an experience.
“You dye your hair,” I realized.
“You don’t love that boy,” she told me.
I snorted at my desk, where I was reading Saint Thomas Aquinas in preparation for the seminar that would meet the night I returned to school.
“But if you aren’t careful you will,” she warned me.
“You’re always telling me what you think and never asking me what I think,” I pointed out.
Mumma lay silent for a minute, her legs crossed at the ankles and those high heels pointed straight at me, like miniature rifle barrels. “Don’t ever think you don’t love me,” she told me.
At that, I burst into tears. Mumma rose from the bed and left the room, satisfied.
She was often right about me, about all of us, Mumma. You could trust her acumen. Because it turned out that I cared less about whether or not she loved me than whether or not I loved her. So perhaps Mumma was right not to have marital expectations for me, since it was only when George and I eventually decided that after all we did want children that we took that step. She could also have been right to be always wanting more, for me, for herself, for all of us. All except Pops, that is. “Your father is just fine, he always was,” she told us. “I have no complaints about your father. Of course, he’s not perfect. Don’t any of you ever think any man is perfect.”
And maybe she was even right never to offer me Olympia’s counseling services. I bearded her once on that subject, when I was in high school and counted it a major proof of her disaffection. “Why did you send Amy? Or Meg, too, when it was only Jo who had a real problem, with her lying, and then all the boyfriends, the promiscuity problem. But what was so seriously wrong with Amy and Meg?”
Mumma always had her answers ready. “The kinds of things that happened, that Mr. Smithers and those boys at the dance…Girls can turn insecure and it makes them shy, when things like that happen to them when they’re young. I don’t want any of my daughters being like that. Life is hard enough without having a shy daughter.”
6.
Mumma’s Marriage
For years, I kept the secret. It wasn’t until we had settled our Alzheimer-undermined mother into a nursing home that I told my sisters. We had made our farewells to Mumma, one at a time, one after the other so as not to distress her, and now we were having lunch together at The Captain’s Wheel. We made our usual choices—chef’s salad, the fried clam plate, a turkey club, and a medium-rare cheeseburger with fries. We had two pitchers on the table, one of iced tea and one of lemonade, to combine in whatever proportions each of us preferred. We had a table with an umbrella, out on the deck overlooking the harbor, where Jo could smoke and where, on a mild spring midday, pleasure boats far outnumbered the working boats that had filled the harbor when we were girls.
The round table meant nobody sat at its head and we would split the bill into four equal sections, no matter who did or did not order dessert, or coffee, or even, as Meg or Amy sometimes did, glasses of wine. Spring had come early and settled down gently over the Cape that May. Tulips bloomed in the planters that edged the deck. We had worn stockings and heels, even Jo, dresses and hats, to settle Mumma into her new home. In case she noticed, in case she cared, in case she needed the reassurance of things being as she understood they ought to be, we had dressed up for the occasion, purses and pearls. Despite the disparate nature of the paths our lives had taken, there were no real differences between us that day. We were four sisters, we were equals, we were Mumma’s daughters, and I thought it was time they knew. So I told them.
“Pops had an affair.”
“I don’t believe it,” they said. “Although I don’t blame him. Do you?” they asked one another. “That’s if he did. If it’s true.”
“It’s true,” I assured them. “He had a mistress, I don’t know for how long, a woman he was seeing and I think they had to be sleeping together. Although, that doesn’t sound like Pops.”
“I don’t know,” Jo said. “He was a really attractive man, and he got even better-looking as he grew older.”
“I was thinking of his moral integrity,” I told her. “Although,” I realized, “I guess it wouldn’t show much moral courage or integrity to not sleep with her. I mean, if you’re having an affair with someone, you owe it to them to sleep with them.”
“Who was it?” Amy demanded. “When was it? I don’t believe you.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Meg demanded. “And why now?”
“Although,” I realized, in the rush of thoughts that came to me, once I relaxed my hold on this secret, “I can see Mumma doing just that. Having an affair but no sex,” I added, when they looked confused.
“Mumma would never have…she just liked…She liked toying with the possibility,” Meg said. “She just…She liked flirting, she was a flirt. She would never have done anything. She just liked thinking men were in love with her.”
It was an article of faith with us that Mumma was crazy nuts about Pops, and we could see why. What we couldn’t always understand, even if we had no doubt the feeling was mutual, was what he saw in her. She wasn’t his mother, after all; he didn’t have to love her.
“Or maybe they weren’t just flirtations,” Jo suggested. “After all, she did have all those fianc?
?s. She was pretty sexy.”
Amy turned to me. “How do you know? About this woman, this mistress, if she was one.”
“Did he confide in you about her?” Meg wondered, but Amy assured her, “He never would. He never really talked to any of us about his personal life, you know, feelings, fears, hopes. I figured he talked to Mumma about all that. Except work, he talked to Beth about his work. Was she someone from work?”
“Let her tell,” Jo said. “Let’s stop interrupting. Interfering,” she pointed out.
I began. “Remember when George and I were living in Cambridge, and Emily was a baby?”
“The mid-’70s,” Amy located it. “I was pregnant with Kelly and Jason was two and a half.”
“The gas shortage of the ’70s,” Jo said. “Bennet and I weren’t the only people riding bikes those days.”
“I remember Bennet,” I said. I hadn’t thought about him for years, the first of the men Jo hadn’t married, although she lived with them for extended periods before breaking it off and sending them away. “Bennet was a lot of fun.”
“He had his moments,” Jo agreed. “Pops was teaching a course at BU, wasn’t he? Those years, what was it? Grad school Latin?”
“No, it was a community outreach course for adults. Continuing education, reading the Greeks, Homer, Aeschylus, you know, Sophocles, Sappho. All in translation,” I told them. My sisters had never studied in Pops’ field.
“A student?” Meg guessed.
“He wouldn’t do that, not even with adult students. You have to know that about him,” I scolded.
Meg fixed me with a level gaze. “Until today, until this lunch, I would have said that Pops wouldn’t do that with anyone. So my mind is open.”
She spoke precisely to the point, of course. I hesitated in my telling, taking stock. Here we were, the four of us, middle-aged now, hair fading and graying unless, like all of us except me, we highlighted or tinted it. I looked good standing beside him just as I was, George assured me, and I chose to believe him. We four, Mumma’s daughters, sat around a table as we so often had, talking. Meg looked fit and tailored in a white-and-black linen dress, dark glasses perched on her thick short curls. Jo had grown her hair long and had perhaps twenty-five surplus pounds disguised, as she thought, by the high-waisted and loose-fitting flowered rayon dress; her eyes were heavily made up, which emphasized how much their blue had faded. Amy wore a tan blazer over a navy skirt, and low heels; she had a small signet ring bearing Wilfred’s family crest on the little finger of her right hand, and Wilfred’s great-grandmother’s engagement diamond on her left, next to her wedding ring. I was the only one of us who had kept her hat on, one of my summer straw hats, because for college professors summer vacation begins early and I had already had enough sun. I wore a simple rust-brown cotton shift and dress sandals. We looked just like our childhood selves, only much older, and dressed up, and also a little mellowed by time and experiences, both good and bad times and experiences. Beyond us, cars had only begun their seasonal clogging of the street, searching for parking places. I met Meg’s eyes and said to her, and to my other sisters, “I hope you’ll agree that I was right to keep it to myself.”
Not surprisingly, it was Jo who said, “What good would it have done to tell us?”
“Or Mumma,” Amy guessed. “Although I’d have thought you’d have thought you should.”
“I didn’t want to ruin her life. I outgrew that years ago.”
Jo said, “Maybe it wouldn’t have. Maybe, once she reacted—blew up, threw him out, sold the house, whatever—maybe her life would have been better.”
“How better?” Meg wondered. “I always thought…I mean, she thought Pops was fascinating.”
“I know,” we agreed, smiling indulgently, “she really did.” Pops was a lovely man, but fascinating wasn’t a word anyone but Mumma would have applied to him. “She loved talking over his theories with him, and what he was reading, or his course outlines.”
“If she’d thought he was unfaithful…” Amy didn’t finish that sentence.
I agreed. “Talk about loose cannons. I don’t know what she would have done.”
“It would have been extravagant,” Jo agreed, her voice not entirely free of longing. “It would have been uncompromising. I wonder what.”
“Pops unfaithful? That would have undermined her sense of the natural order of the universe,” Meg observed. “More than most women.”
“Anyway,” I said, “it turned out I didn’t want to tell her.”
“And maybe it wasn’t true, anyway,” Jo suggested.
I began again. “Remember when George and I were living in Cambridge, and I was getting my doctorate?”
“Not particularly,” Amy said, “but it was the ’70s, we’ve established that, and those years Pops came into Boston one night a week, to teach.”
“He stayed at the Alumni House,” Meg remembered. “I had dinner there with him once. It was sweet, he was worried about Liam and me. He was worried I’d get another divorce, I think. He was really concerned about me.” She smiled at the fond memory, Pops as paterfamilias, and then she remembered, “And you’re saying that at the same time he was having an affair?”
I’d had years to get used to the idea, and all that it implied, perhaps most significantly that our parents were just real people, ordinary people who could be unfaithful to their wives, like stories we read or heard or lived ourselves, like friends, not parents.
Jo said, “I don’t know, Beth. How can you be so sure?”
“For one thing, I saw them together. And for another, I asked him.”
“You didn’t.”
“How could you? No, I don’t mean how could you do such a thing,” Meg said. “I mean, how did you bring yourself to do it? I can’t imagine.”
“She was always closer to Pops than the rest of us,” Amy reminded them and there they were again, the three of them, and there I was, alone and at odds, all of us once again reduced to our childhood configuration. Then I laughed out loud, at myself, at them, at the four of us, being sisters. Here we were with our father three years dead and our mother no longer a fully functioning human being, and we were still measuring the attentions we had been shortchanged of. I laughed out loud, and they stared at me with tolerant impatience. Here we were, four aging women, with the cellulite to prove it and lines around our eyes, chins starting to double, stretch marks and varicose veins, and buried in each one of us was the child she had been, who looked at her sisters as if they too were still children, a child glaring around her with the same resentments and jealousies.
By now, however, those were mixed with geographic distances from one another, as well as admiration and sympathy, too. Sisters. I would always be the youngest of the four Howland girls, and I was proud of my sisters. I liked us, our achievements, our hopes, our persistent attempts to live honest lives in whatever direction we were moving or in what position we had settled. Mumma should be satisfied with the job she did, I thought, and then I thought, I wish she could remember us, so she could see the way we are now.
That thought saddened me. I told my story quickly:
“It was a Wednesday night and we were both ready for a break, me and George. I’d finished the draft of an article, George had gone stale on a brief, so we hired a sitter and went to see Coming Home. With Jane Fonda, remember? And Jon Voight, it was at the Church Street Theater. As we were leaving I saw a couple ahead of us, and I recognized Pops. The woman he was with wasn’t Mumma, but he was definitely with her.”
“Is that all?” Meg demanded. “You thought it was Pops and you decided it was an affair?”
I remembered what I had seen, the tall man with the military bearing he’d never lost, and his dark chesterfield coat, his pale hair, the outer rims of his glasses; and the slender woman beside him, tall enough herself to come up to his chin, wearing a dark blue woolen coat, gloves, low, practical heels, her short hair a nondescript brown, and when she turned to glance at him, her eyes on his
face and the little smile on her mouth, obviously a woman in love with her escort. I remembered the way he placed his hand on her back, to guide her through the crowd, as if she needed his help to successfully make her way, and the way she then took his arm, not his hand, as if she were accepting his support. He held the theater door for her and she moved through it. Once on the sidewalk, she turned to wait for him. She was an undisturbingly pretty woman, with regular features and a slim, delicate neck, curved eyebrows and large, deep-set brown eyes, which gave her face a doelike expression of helplessness, or weakness.
Before Pops let go of the door, he turned to whoever came after him to pass on the responsibility for holding it open. That was when he saw me watching. Without thinking, he smiled and raised a hand, waving, to greet me. I raised my hand back, but didn’t wave and I think my face must have given my thoughts away, because Pops seemed to realize then that he wished I hadn’t been there. Concern flashed across his face, then he turned to join the woman on the street, and she took his arm, and he leaned slightly toward her, protective, as they walked away together.
“It was Pops,” I assured my sisters. “I saw his face. He saw me. He waved at me before he remembered.”
“That is just exactly what he’d do, isn’t it?” Jo asked us. “For a smart man, he was pretty slow to catch on. Even when it was a matter of self-protection, he was slow. So he saw you, and then what?”