Hearts (33 page)

Linda’s enchantment seemed to lift at the same moment. “Maybe we should all sit down,” she said. “I have news. I have something important to tell you.”

Robin looked at the impeccable white furniture.

“Are you sure you have the right place?” Miriam asked.

“Yes,” Linda said. “I think I would know you anywhere. I’m Linda Reismann. I was married to Wright after you were. And this … and this is Robin.”

Before she even said this last, though, Miriam had already turned to gawk at Robin, not as if she knew her, but as if she were someone famous, a movie star seen for the first time off the silver screen. “Robin,” Miriam said faintly, and Robin believed she was being named then, being christened in this cool desert house a million miles from home. “Robin,” Miriam said again, in absolute wonder.

“Maybe we should sit down,” Linda urged once more, and they moved in a cautious ballet to the white sofas. Robin and Linda sat together, and the single cushion they shared sighed gently under their combined weight and took them in. Miriam and Anthony faced them. The seats were too wide and deep for this tense encounter. There was no way to sit on edge and lean forward, and they all sank into false attitudes of relaxation.

“This is my … this is
Robin
,” Miriam said to Anthony, and she laughed excitedly.

He took her hand in his. “Maybe you should have
called,” he told Linda, and clutched the bathrobe over his knees with the other hand.

“I tried to,” Linda said, and looked to Robin as if to measure her own sin of betrayal.

But Robin didn’t feel betrayed, at least not by Linda.

“And Wright?” Miriam asked.

“Gone,” Linda told her. “I mean dead. He died.”

“Died? How?”

“Heart attack.”

“Oh,” Miriam said.

“Mim, Mini,” Anthony murmured, squeezing her hand, pumping it, the way Robin’s father used to squeeze the Test-Your-Grip handles at the penny arcade. She remembered how the machine registered his strength in ascending lights: Puny, 90-Pound Weakling, Getting There, Strong Man, Musclebound, Popeye! Her mother’s hand fell back lifelessly into her lap when Anthony let go, and it registered nothing.

“I’ll make some coffee,” he said, and still modestly holding his bathrobe shut, he stood.

Miriam was looking at Robin and didn’t reply.

“I’ll help you,” Linda said, and after one backward glance, she followed him across the shadowed tile floor and out of the room.

Linda imagined that leaving a child in school for the first time would be something like this. Knowing how good education was for the child would not diminish the pain of parting.

In the kitchen she watched as Anthony set the table with thoughtful care. He folded a yellow paper napkin neatly at each place. There was a large bakery box on the table, and when he cut the string the box fell open to
reveal four golden and sugared pastries. Linda guessed that this was the celebratory snack they’d planned to share after making love. It was probably a ritual. She imagined Anthony, still naked and flushed, bounding inside with the pastries on a tray, and how Miriam would smooth a place in the bed for him, and how their sticky fingers would sparkle later with crumbs. The nude photos of Miriam flickered through her head. That overexposed pallor and the dark lipstick. Wright’s triumphant and breathless smile, his arm circling her waist. It should be easier to separate people into heroes and villains. But Linda pitied everyone. And then, without warning, Wolfie entered her thoughts, and she grieved for all their forfeited greedy Sundays like this one.

Anthony plugged in the coffee maker and sacrificed the pastries to a communal platter. He seemed distressed that there was nothing else to do. “You really should have called,” he told Linda again.

“It’s hard to discuss certain things over the phone,” Linda said, thinking briefly of Supercreep, his impassioned and wordless messages.

“Yeah,” he said. “But this is quite a shock.”

“What happened to your family?” she asked, surprised that she really wanted to know. She remembered the postcard he had written to his son, the picture of the giant saguaro cactus. It was like catching up with the lives of the characters in a soap opera she had not seen in years.

Anthony didn’t question her curiosity or her right to know. “My wife got married again,” he said. “The boy joined the army right after high school. He’s married, too, to a Hawaiian girl. She’s very nice, religious. My daughter’s still at home. She does ceramics.” They both
pondered this synopsis, and then, as if he had just come to his senses, Anthony asked, “What does she want? To come live with us?”

“I guess,” Linda said. “It’s between them.”

In the living room, Robin and her mother had remained in a silent tableau for a few moments. Then, surprisingly, Miriam laughed, a short, anxious trill of laughter. She said, “You’re thirteen now, aren’t you?”

The laughter and the question both startled Robin, and she found herself recalling bitterly the missed birthdays. Her own birthdays and her father’s, the imposed solitude of all their celebrations. On New Year’s Eve, he always woke her at midnight and brought her, in her pajamas, to the living room, where they both donned silly hats and blew a short discordant duet through tin horns.

“Yes,” she said.

Miriam’s hands raised, opened. “Your hair … You look exactly like your father.
Exactly.
” Her tone was slightly accusing, as if Robin had chosen to look like Wright or he had used undue influence over her in Miriam’s absence.

“It’s hard to know … what to say,” Miriam said. “I suppose you hate me.” She paused expectantly.

But Robin didn’t answer. Hate. Love. They were such puny, useless words. She touched the fork, counted the tines.

Miriam moved from her sofa to Robin’s. “I was only twenty-one when you were born,” she said. “I guess that seems old to you, but it wasn’t. Girls were different then, more innocent. I didn’t know up from down.” She sighed. “Wright was older, like Tony. My fatal weakness.”
She laughed again. “Did he ever tell you I called?
Twice?
”

Robin shook her head, disbelieving.

“Well, I did. The first time right after we came here. I offered to take you, but he said no.”

Offered. Take. One by one the words were losing meaning, slipping away.

“The second time was about a year later. You answered the phone.”

Robin searched frantically for the event and couldn’t find it.

“I didn’t say who I was,” Miriam said. “You couldn’t possibly know.” She touched her brow, pushed her fingers through her hair. “He acted crazy that time. He said he’d
kill
me if I ever called again, if I ever tried to contact you. I wrote a couple of letters to him, to you, and then I tore them up. Time went by, like it does.” That laugh again. Then she leaned forward, clutching her own arms. “Listen, I
thought
about you. Every time I saw a little girl in the street … God, the
nights
 … Tony wanted to have you kidnapped and brought here. Can you imagine?”

Robin could barely pay attention. She was much too busy trying to remember that phone call, her father’s murderous impulse. She imagined him hanging up, beating his fists against the wall, and then going to look for her, Robin. What was she doing? Watching television? Getting ready for bed? She pictured one of those suffocating embraces, Wright’s passion, her own wriggling impatience to be free.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Miriam asked.

Robin attempted a shrug, but couldn’t bring it off. One shoulder kept twitching involuntarily.

“I know I’m not the best mother in the world, but I’m not the worst, either,” Miriam said. “When I was there, we were very close. You probably don’t remember it, but I used to brush your hair all the time.” She laughed.

Robin thought that if her mother had never left she would have grown up listening to that laugh, that it would have become as casual and familiar as language. But now she despised its sound, its inappropriate punctuation of Miriam’s narrative. Robin knew it was an evasive technique, that it replaced the truth that could only be told through language. Unreasonably, she was disturbed in the same way by the eyeglasses. They seemed to make it impossible for their eyes to be engaged for more than a glance. They were a disguise, another evasion, and Robin could kill her mother for that alone. Her hand crept into her pocket and held the fork.

“Talk about mothers.
My
mother was the worst,” Miriam continued. “She stayed home and made everybody miserable and guilty. She didn’t believe in normal feelings. Since she missed her chance in life, she wanted everybody else to miss theirs. I wasn’t even allowed to
talk
to men until I was eighteen. And do you know what she used to do, Robin? She used to
smell
me when I came home. She pretended it was to see if I’d been smoking or drinking, but it wasn’t, take my word for it. She wanted to see if … well … if I had
experienced
anything she didn’t want me to experience. Do you wonder I took off with your father when I was only nineteen? And you know what
he
was like.”

Robin’s whole body prickled, and her grip tightened on the fork’s handle. “His heart …” she began.

“I know,” Miriam said. “I know. It’s hard to believe. He was so healthy. He bowled and he worked out. But what I meant to say was, he was so
nice
. At first I really liked it. Everything I did pleased him. I could burn the roast and he’d say he liked it that way. He’d chew on it until he choked. No roast and he’d say he wasn’t hungry anyway.” Miriam laughed. “He used to say he wanted to make it up to me, that I had this unhappy childhood, that my mother was so strict. He said he wanted me to feel
free
. But he was always asking me if I was happy, he was always hugging me.” She hesitated. “And I didn’t feel certain things for him that I wanted to, that a wife is supposed to feel for her husband. In some ways I might as well have been back with my mother; you know, trapped, and being
good.
”

Robin began to draw the fork from her pocket. She was furious that Miriam had spoken against her dead father, and that what she had said was undeniably true. She was furious that she had understood all the other implications when she wasn’t ready to understand them. This woman who had eloped with Robin’s childhood was forcing her now into sudden adult knowledge she didn’t want.

Miriam slid nearer to Robin. “Then there was Tony,” she said softly, earnestly. “Sometimes you don’t meet the right people at the right time. It’s not always
convenient.
” She was close to Robin, leaning closer. Robin felt as rigid and tense as she had that day when the beautiful silver dogs had circled her feet, panted against her skin. She half closed her eyes and tried not to inhale her mother’s scent.

Miriam’s hand reached out in the milky light to
touch Robin’s hair. “You
loved
when I brushed it,” she said. “You used to close your eyes just like that. Your hair was like corn silk. It still is. I thought it would be so much darker by now.” She stroked Robin’s head and Robin grew sleepy. She had to force herself to stay awake, not to lose her fierce and precious guard. Her hand relaxed and almost released the fork, the way it let go of the pillow at night the moment before sleep.

Miriam whispered, “I would dream about the old apartment in Newark and wake up, hearing you. Once or twice it was really Nicky, Tony’s son. He came to stay with us for a while because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. But he got into trouble here. Fights at school, and he set little fires.”

Robin came awake abruptly, gripping the fork. “You could have taken me,” she said, meaning to sound condemning, rather than the way she did, pleading and sad.

Miriam withdrew her stroking hand. “But I
couldn’t
,” she said. “Not then. When you run away like that, you’re a little
crazy
. I hardly took anything, clothes, anything. I don’t know, I thought he’d let me have you later … I didn’t think …” Her hand rose up again.

Robin moved away, out of reach, and saw that Anthony had come back into the room. Miriam didn’t seem to notice him. “But you’re here now,” she told Robin. “It’s sort of like a miracle. You can stay and we can make up for it …?”

“Coffee, Mim,” Anthony announced in his firm baritone.

Linda looked closely at Robin’s face to see if she could figure out what had taken place in the other room. Robin looked back at her with that old warring expression,
as if nothing had changed, nothing was about to change.

They all took their places around the table. Miriam sat next to Anthony. She gave some signal in the shorthand of habit, and he proceeded to pour the coffee.

Linda put cream and sugar in hers, even as her throat closed against the possibility of food or drink or speech. She looked politely, brightly at Anthony, the other minor player in this drama, who might provide some necessary comic relief.

But he didn’t. With serious attention he served the coffee and passed the plate of pastries to Linda, who simply took it from him and held it. Then he got up and stood behind his wife and gripped her shoulders with his large beringed hands. In their plush matching robes, Miriam and Anthony reminded Linda of pictures she’d seen of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, exiled forever from the kingdom of real privilege.

Miriam tried to laugh, but achieved only a small, failed sound. “I’d like Robin to stay,” she said, “to live with us?” It was definitely a question.

Linda saw Anthony flinch at this threat to their obsessive privacy. “Well, sure,” he managed. “If that’s what you—”

“Why, that’s wonderful!” Linda interjected. “It’s exactly what we’d hoped.” She turned to smile or grimace at Miriam, who was holding her teaspoon up, seeking her own tiny inverted reflection in its bowl. Then Linda looked at Robin and saw that she had risen in her place, clutching a fork in her hand. It was an elaborate, heavy, old-fashioned fork, very different from the severe stainless steel flatware that Anthony had arranged in perfect symmetry. Linda had seen that fork somewhere before.
Robin held it as if it were a weapon, and she looked from one of them to the other, taking deep, desperate breaths like a silent-film vamp simulating ecstasy.