My mother looked around. “You didn’t find it,” she said. She seemed disappointed.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Well, the miserable evening ended miserably and Eddie and I went for a walk. Did he tell you about the walk?”
“He mentioned it,” I said.
My mother took off her dark glasses and closed her eyes. “So many things I didn’t know. I blame the time, that was part of it, but part of it was me in that time. Eddie shouldn’t have taken that horseshit off of anyone, and especially not pompous Skip Hotalling. He deserved so much better than that.”
“So what did you do?”
My mother looked at me then and gave a tired smile. “I offered him something better. All of my love, and the love of my beautiful girls, and all he had to do was promise to never speak to Skip again. And not be gay.”
“Oh,” I said. Seventy-six, and still my mother was a beautiful woman. The other children used to stare at her when she came to pick us up at school.
She waved her hand, as if to wave away my thoughts. “It wasn’t purely mercenary on my part. I saw a good life for all of us, you and Leda and me and Eddie, all of us. I thought Eddie would change his stripes. He would change who he was so that I could have what I wanted.”
I had no idea what to say, and after a while she went on.
“I don’t much believe in God,” my mother said. “But someone sent me your brother so that I could redeem myself. Matthew told us he was gay the summer after his freshman year of college, told us what I’d pretty much known since he was born. And while Lucas crashed around the house rending his garments, I said to my son, ‘Let’s you and me go take a walk.’”
“So Matthew knows about Eddie?”
“Matthew is the only person I ever told.”
I might have reminded my mother that she had blamed me for her second divorce. Eddie had driven off this very hill and I had cut my face, so she could no longer be married to him. She couldn’t trust him. But my mother had suffered enough. And if my brother had in any way benefitted from her suffering, well, I was happy for them both.
“How did you find out about Eddie and Skip?”
“Did he tell you this part?”
I shook my head.
“That’s too bad. I would have liked to know how he remembered it. As far as I was concerned, we had a good thing going. We were tender with one another, thoughtful. I had loved your father, but that was madness, screaming, moving out, making up, making up in every room of the house.”
I held up my hand.
“I’m just saying, Eddie and I did a better job, especially where you and Leda were concerned. We did a good job with the two of you.” She stopped. She might have been resting.
“So?”
“So Leda was still in the hospital. She couldn’t get her bowels going, there was a lot of worry about infection. Then Eddie comes in and his foot and ankle are smashed to bits, his shoulder’s cracked. You were good, though. Just a cut. You were sucha solid, reliable child. The car was gone. I was running up and down the stairs between Eddie and Leda, back and forth, back and forth. Eddie had surgery, he was doped to the gills, his ankle was in a rig to keep it elevated and he was still working on some book he was editing. He had asked one of the firemen to fish it out of the backseat before they brought him in. All of it was crazy, but we were okay. No one died. We made it through.”
“Eddie told me that’s what you’d say.”
“When you saw him?”
I shook my head. “When we were in the car after the accident. I said you’d be upset about us wrecking the car, and he said no, you’d be too happy that we were alive.”
My mother’s chin dropped to her chest, but she smiled. “That’s Eddie,” she said. “Bright side.”
“I interrupted you.”
“They’d put a sign up on the door whenever the doctor was there to do an exam or the nurse came to give him a bath: ‘Privacy, Please.’ I’d been in the room ten minutes before and I came back. There was something I was bringing to him or something I’d forgotten to say, I don’t remember. I saw those two words on the door and didn’t give them a second’s thought. ‘Privacy, Please’ did not apply to me, but I should have been respectful. He gave me everything. I could have given him that much.”
“Skip?”
“He was sitting in the chair beside Eddie’s bed and he had his head on Eddie’s chest and Eddie had his hand on Skip’s head. That’s all it was. Skip was crying. He must have been waiting down the hall for me to go. Eddie must have called him and told him what happened. He would have told Skip not to come. Eddie was no dummy. But Skip came anyway, and he sat in the chair I’d been sitting in ten minutes before, and he put his headon my husband’s chest. And everything was over because Eddie was still gay and he was still in love with Skip. And so I wanted Eddie gone. I never wanted to see him again for the rest of my life, but that isn’t true. I wanted him to be in love with me. That’s what I wanted.”
