Side by side, we examined the contents of the freezer, its chilly white mist scorching our skin. Each loaf was labeled in Lucy’s Christina Rossetti cursive on first-aid tape: ZUCCHINI-BIRDSEED, BANANA-MAPLE RYE, ZUCCHINI-CHOCOLATE, PRUNE-PECAN-CASSIS. “Harvey’s Bristol sourdough wheat?” I read aloud.
Clem reached past me and took it out. “Awesome with cream cheese. We’ll have it for breakfast.” She closed the door, leaned against it, and folded her arms. Standing there, she looked for just a minute like our mother, sure of her place in a world where she’d landed almost by accident. I laughed.
“Oh good,” said Clem.
“What?”
“You didn’t leave it behind after all.”
“What?” I said again.
Clem walked toward me and pretended to pull something out of my breast pocket. She held it up, the invisible thing, and shook it in front of my face. “Your sense of humor.” She put it back, giving my pocket a tender pat.
I felt the air shift between us, as if we were finally together somehow. This wasn’t what I wanted. I walked across the room and looked out the window at the backyard. I counted four bird feeders, all filled. My sister, Saint Francis of Assisi.
“The cousins missed you,” said Clem. “Too bad about your deadline. Couldn’t you just have brought your typewriter out on the plane?”
I sat on the edge of the tub. I could tell her that I didn’t work well away from home, but it would have been a lie, and it might have started a real conversation, which I was doing my best to avoid. “How come the place isn’t looted?”
Clem pointed to the kitchen table and chairs. I noticed then that everything wore a claim: a tag or strip of tape marked RACINE, JACKIE J., GAIA, BEAU, and so on. The shippers would pack it all up the following week, after Clem left for school. My father would return, to hire painters and talk to real estate agents.
Clem hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She’d spotted my resistance, and I could tell she was contemplating the challenge. “So, you buying me dinner tonight?”
“If you’re buying tomorrow. I don’t remember owing you any favors,” I said.
Her smile opened wide. I’ve always envied her those perfect teeth: small and square, lined up straight as rails in a banister. “Deal,” she said.
FUN WAS THE LAST THING I expected when Dad roped me into this babysit-the-family-dowager job. But free rent all summer in Vermont: who’d say no to that? So I figured, okay, my hot date’s gone to Alaska to make big bucks on a rig, not an adventure I cared to join, even if I could’ve schemed the airfare from Dad (and I would have), and this way I could work with all these amazing creatures—owls, hawks, and falcons, something I couldn’t get paid for without a fancy degree—and maybe get in some serious cycling. Aunt Lucy knew this guy who ran a bike shop; his dad had been her gardener when she’d bothered with a garden. Fine, I figured; so I’d spend the summer fixing things—rusted derailleurs and bent spokes, cracked beaks and fractured wings, my great-great-aunt’s delusions. Bikes and birds I could deal with. Dementia? Well, I’d play that one by ear.
Lucy was ninety-eight and a half years old when she died. She was still sharp, if a little slow on her feet, even surprisingly strong. Walking, she reminded me of a cat on a skinny branch: agile but cautious. She ate her meals at normal hours, but she’d be wide awake for most of the night and then sleep, when she did, during the day. That was her only weird habit. I thought back then (back then!) she made an excellent argument for avoiding marriage and babies, and I told my Catholic boyfriend as much. (Luke still goes to church when he goes home. Which I try to ignore.) If she was ever lonely or bored, she didn’t say. The day I arrived at the house, a UPS truck was pulling away. Lucy was on the porch pushing a humongous box through the door, one careful inch at a time.
“Hey, let me do that!” I shouted. I dropped my backpack on the sidewalk.
She looked down at me and said, “Hello, dear one. I am in the process of newfangling my life.” Without waiting for me, she went back to her task. When I got inside the door, she had just pried the packing notice from its sleeve. She held it at arm’s length. Her face lit up like a flare. “Oh splendid!”
I stood beside her as she pulled an X-acto knife out of her apron pocket and removed its cap with her teeth (her actual teeth, believe it or not). Slowly, and with a concentration that totally canceled out my presence, she slit the tape. When she pulled the box open, Styrofoam peanuts exploded upward, reverse confetti. “I hate these dingbats, don’t you? They end up all hither and yon. Like water bugs in a tornado.” The cap in her teeth whistled as she spoke.
“Yeah, and you know,” I said, “they’ll outlast our species by about a million years. The dingbats and the water bugs.” I picked a few off her dress.
She really looked at me then, as if I’d passed a silent test. “I liked the old newspaper stuffing,” she said. “I liked looking at the stories, especially when they came from towns that one is never likely to visit. ‘Mayor’s Nephew Charged with Poultry Theft.’ ‘Tree Surgeon and Dog Catcher to Wed in Fall.’ ‘Cattle Drive Causes Interstate Mayhem.’ Serendipity and fluff. Not always inconsequential, but never of tragic proportions.” She capped the knife, straightened up, and looked me over. “You have been sent here, young lady, to curtail my amusement. Your father was frank about that. He has also canceled my American Express. As if I were squandering an imperial nest egg. I tolerate Beau’s meddling because he does it from afar. But yours: we’ll have to see about yours. You are the slippery slope toward one of those, I believe they’re called ‘home health attendants’?” She sighed, leaned over, and pulled a tapered plastic tube from the box. She held it up like a flagstaff. “Noses down behind cushions!”
Jesus, I thought, I’m spending my summer with an old lady who goes into raptures at the sight of a new vacuum cleaner.
At least she wasn’t in diapers.
So my great-great-aunt, who still wore lace-up pointy-toed boots and long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses in June, had become the consummate consumer. It was like she’d lost her virginity and discovered the tyranny of lust. She loved paging through catalogs, but her new favorite thing was getting out her ’66 Ford Fairlane after dinner and driving to Burlington, where stores stayed open late because of the students. These shopping trips—for which she refused to call the guy who was supposed to drive her places—were what Dad called her “nocturnal missions” (innocent pun, I’m sure). They were the main reason he wanted her under surveillance. So Lucy and I made a deal. I drove, and I had veto power over purchases that were outrageously impractical or way overpriced. I’d come back from the bird station about six-thirty and put our frozen dinners in the new microwave. I’d talk about birds; she’d talk about books. She liked poetry and war memoirs, a weird combination, and lately she’d begun to subscribe to magazines like Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. “A curiosity,” she said, “the way my aesthetic urges have veered toward the palpable.” After dinner I’d make her peppermint tea and then, most nights, she would look at the grandfather clock before the just-emptied cup touched its saucer and say, “On your mark, Clement dear!” By the time I pulled the car out of the garage, she’d be standing out front with her purse—excuse me, handbag.
That was my life for two months. Except for the absence of Luke, I would gladly have lived like that for a year.
CLEM PUT ME in the room that was, a very long time ago, Aunt Vetty’s. Vetty was Lucy’s sister, who lived here, and died here, way before I was born. On the bed lay the green and yellow wedding-ring quilt Aunt Lucy said Vetty had made to honor her marriage (before it turned sour). Her quilting hoop still hung on a hook behind the door. Her brush and comb lay on the bureau, her Bible on the washstand, her dresses and shoes inside the wardrobe with the streaked milky mirror. Newly taped to the mirror was a hand-lettered decree: CONTENTS TO GAIA: HANDS OFF! Gaia, who’s my age, is a second cousin who dreams of becoming a Broadway costume designer. Sometimes I worry that artistic grandiosity r
uns in our blood. Which isn’t to say my cousin has no talent. It’s me I worry about. Do I feel I am somehow entitled to live with an immunity to rules? There’s a lot of that in our family. Sometimes when I’m at the wheel, mesmerized yet alert to its rapid spin, hands shiny with cocoa-colored mud, I wonder. Am I talented? Am I a fraud? Am I grandiose?
In Vetty’s room, the only other sign of change was a faintly darker oval in the wallpaper over the bed: the ghost of Vetty’s husband, according to Dad. Aunt Lucy, he says, took the cad down when her sister was dead, face turned up toward that picture, not even an hour. Dad says she actually scolded the picture. When he tells the story, he holds the imaginary portrait before him and whispers, with the utmost contempt, “Begone, poltroon.” We don’t laugh, because we know what Aunt Lucy sacrificed on account of that man.
In our family lore, she is a saint, a crackpot, or a militant lesbian ahead of her time; take your pick. If she had stayed where she was meant to stay—if she had married as she was expected to marry, raised a family, and ushered her offspring into society—she would have reigned over a sun-filled French Quarter town house, complete with lacy gridwork, gilt chairs, a world veiled by white oleander. Tante Lucidité, we might have called her. Or maybe she wouldn’t have lived so long. Maybe we’d never have met her.
It starts like a fairy tale. There were, once upon a time, three sisters in the Jardine family: Vetty, Amy, Lucy. Vérité was the oldest, Amitié followed two years behind, and Lucidité, spark of sentiment, trailed them by twenty more. There was also a son, Vetty’s twin brother, Aristide (my father’s father’s father). Aristide had the anxious honor of being the first Southerner accepted at West Point after the Civil War. As the only member of his class to inherit the pain of cultural as well as military defeat, Aristide was an object, variously, of his fellow cadets’ pity, esteem, and scorn. His eventual popularity was hard won and, as a result, never taken for granted. After rising through the ranks faster than any of his classmates, he wore four stars by the time he was fifty and, on November 11, 1918, in Rethondes, France, played a critical role, with his plantation manners and flawless French, in closing the deal on the Armistice.
For Aristide’s graduation, the family commandeered a first-class train carriage north, the women flaunting every amber bead and tiny pearl that remained of their semiravished sugar fortune (that blue cameo, I imagine, riding the proud throat of my great-great-grandmother Théa, barely pregnant with Lucy). They’d stuck it out beyond the terrible losses of the war, refusing to turn tail and head back to France, as so many of their compatriots did. They would show these Northerners that they had done far better than merely survive.
During the festivities, the Jardines must have stood out like peonies in goldenrod, strolling the campus and praising the sights, exclaiming at everything in their patrician drawl, fussing with fans and parasols. Aristide’s best friend, Josiah Moore, squired the two sisters about with their brother whenever the parents’ energies flagged. Bantam-chested and big-chinned, blond but with a Venetian’s dark eyes, Josiah looked tremendously virile in his uniform. (Who can know what his smile was like, how devastating, when all that remains to us now is a shady quicksilver image on glass, a portrait taken the day of commencement?) A week after the Jardines returned to New Orleans, Vetty fled north again to elope with Josiah. She wrote to her family from Boston, requesting their love and forgiveness.
What she got was a thorough disowning. It was one thing, in 1881, to share education and martial fellowship with one’s vanquishers and quite another to marry them, let alone on the sly. Over the next two decades, Père Jardine rebuilt his fortune, cane by cane; Lieutenant Aristide Jardine helped bring in Geronimo; Amy married a grapefruit czar and had the first three of five children; young Lucy grew up and was groomed by mother and older sister for a glorious debut. She knew of her eldest sister’s existence only through whispered remarks outside her home. The way Dad tells it, Lucy was popular and pretty, poised for a momentous engagement, when a letter arrived from Vetty, opened only perhaps because its postmark was a riddle. Vermont? Who knew anyone there?
Vetty’s husband had left her. Childless, she could not bring herself to ask his family for help, and she was afraid she might not survive another winter by herself. She was too distraught, she said, to travel home on her own and did not know, besides, whether the family would take her back in.
Meanwhile, her sister Amy was pregnant for the fourth time—as it would turn out, with twins of her own—and her mother’s help was indispensable. Père Jardine had a business to run, and Aristide was about to set sail for a tour in the Philippines. So a bold nineteen-year-old Lucy volunteered to make the trip, with a trusted servant as companion, to bring home a sister she’d never even known. (Is this tale Victorian or what?)
How it happened that the servant returned to New Orleans several months later without either sister isn’t entirely clear. But in the end, what we do know is that Lucy stayed in Vermont to care for Vetty, a woman who made herself scarce, preferring to stay in her room and quilt, her stitching a method of mourning away the rest of her life.
About the forlorn, mysterious Vetty, rumors still thrive: that Josiah left her far earlier than she claimed, nearly as soon as she was disowned, because money was all he’d been after; that she had a child who died as an infant; that Josiah ran off with their maid after getting the girl pregnant. Whatever Lucy knew, she kept to herself. When I asked Dad why he didn’t get her to tell the whole story, he said, “Louisa, we live in an age when keeping secrets is out of fashion, and that’s a shame. If she wanted to tell us, well, she would.”
More than once, I’ve listened to my relatives squabble inconsequentially over the meaning of Lucy’s choice, as if she made it last week. Some say she was a foolish martyr who inherited the loneliness she deserved; others that she was a wise, willful woman who saw and took her best chance at freedom from a life of luxurious monotony. Others insist that she was simply a good girl who honored—as so few children do these days, they’ll say with a sharp mournful glance at members of my generation—the Most Important Thing: loyalty to blood, cost be damned. Some of the younger cousins are certain that Lucy was gay, perhaps dallying with her own sister. I don’t believe any of this; I believe she was swept along on a tide, like most of us. There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, that currents you can’t even feel have pulled you off course.
A WEEKEND, a whole weekend, with Louisa? What a sourpuss she had become. But I was stuck playing host, so I asked for the afternoon off from the bike shop. That morning, I was slicing the loaf I’d thawed and Louisa was sleeping off jet lag when who should call but Ralph. Ralph and Hector ran the raptor station. They’re zoology grad students, muscular outdoorsy guys you’d never guess are lovers unless you’ve been to their house and seen their water bed (king size, spread with a polar bear hide). Ralph wears a diamond the size of a peppercorn in his left ear, but he also has a tattoo—a blue cormorant—on the opposite biceps. Ralph’s run the Iditarod, and Hector, from Portuguese New Bedford, dresses like an off-duty fisherman—clean but hardly stylish. When Ralph asked if I wanted to go out and hear a new band, all I could think was that my prayers had been answered. I wrote Louisa a note and left to put in my grease-monkey time at the shop.
Lucy liked my mechanical know-how. She treated me like a free electrician, plumber, you name it: an all-around Ms. Fix-It. This was her subtle revenge for my treating her like I was her probation officer, no matter how nicely. If I came home for lunch, I’d find a sandwich, a bottle of beer in a bowl of ice, and a note that said, Clement dear, the drain in the sink seems a mite sluggish; could you give it a thorough snaking? or Do you rewire? The tasseled lamp by the pink chesterfield has a new habit of winking. Lucy would be asleep in her room, so she never asked me in person. I could have stayed in town all day, but the weird thing is, I began to look forward to going back at noon: I liked the green bre
ezy silence on the porch, liked finding that beer, liked peeking through Lucy’s bedroom door to make sure she was breathing. Maybe this was the closest I’d ever come to having a child.
But nothing surprised me more than how much I got into the afterdinner shopathons. By early July, I was an ace chauffeur and personal shopper. At first, we just hunted down gadgets: man, was she obsessed. Like the juicer, which I tried to talk her out of. She had to ask me what it was for, and when I explained how it was mostly for health fiends who live on carrot juice and have orange skin on the bottoms of their feet, she said, “My carrots will never be anything other than boiled.” But she put her hands around the barrel of that thing and said, “Don’t you adore its sheer presence? So exquisitely masculine! A stevedore. A gigolo!” In her mouth, that word was a delicacy, a chocolate-covered cherry, and she gave me a new smile—hardly the smile of a maiden aunt—so I overrode my own veto. (Things I did veto: a pasta maker, an electric corkscrew, an automated shoe-shine.)
Her obsession sent us back to the same three stores again and again; after two weeks, she’d seen everything there was to see. So one beautiful evening—dry spruce air off Lake Champlain, sunset scorching the water flamingo pink—she steers me down a street of hippie boutiques, those places where simply stepping inside to browse makes you smell like a swami for days. I figure she must sense this because at first she just peers through open doors, makes disapproving remarks (“Clutter, clutter” or “Whose attic exploded here?” or a tart “Remarkable”). But then she says, “Here we are!” like she’s a regular, and pulls me into a pack rat’s trove of gauzy dresses, earrings like chandeliers, and a million doodads for smoking pot. I’m nervous she’ll ask me what all the bongs and pipes and clips are for, but she’s staring at the ceiling—a fleet of Chinese kites. She points to a black one, a twisting dragon with scales painted in gold. It’s incredibly cheap for something so cool, so handmade, I guess because the paper’s fragile and it isn’t expected to fly. I warn Lucy, but she says she’s too old for flying kites; she wants to hang it over her bed. (We know who’ll get to do that.)