This was the part to the story nobody mentioned at the funeral. Nobody spoke about Martin’s drinking, or how Vivian had matched him, drink for drink. Cocktails after work every night. Bloody Marys on Sunday mornings, and other mornings, too, often. Wednesdays. Mondays. You name it.
None of the people who’d come that day—men who knew her father from Rotary, or golf, or the law firm where he practiced, women who’d done volunteer work with her mother—would have recognized this other side of the two of them that Eleanor had known. The angry dad who tore through the house one time, cursing, because he couldn’t find theTV Guide. The one who, when the liquor store was closed one night, drove to five different convenience stores to find a particular brand of whiskey. The one who, when she asked him if he could not have so many drinks when her friend Marcy came over, sent her to her room. After, she could hear him tearing around the kitchen, ranting to her mother.Can you believe? Our daughter thinks I’m some kind of alcoholic bum.At some point in the evening he had torn into her room and grabbed her colored pencil set, which she was always careful to keep organized by color family. He threw the open box against the wall, pencils flying in all directions.
Eleanor had a word for times like those, when one of her parents—sometimes Martin, sometimes Vivian—spun out over the edge. She called it Crazyland. They didn’t live in that place all the time, but you never knew when they might go there. It was always just around the corner.
Eleanor never told anyone about Crazyland, but the fact that she had been there—witnessed it, anyway—was why she didn’t invite Marcy or Charlene for a sleepover, ever. Knowing Crazyland was always nearby made her try to be very good all the time, to keep her parents from going there.
Looking back on the house where she grew up, it came to Eleanor—later—that she had seldom seen her parents completely sober. Her father’s drink of choice, Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Her mother’s, a Manhattan.
The accident that killed them had been a head-on collision, and all anyone said at the time was that there must have been ice on the road. Maybe the tread on their snow tires was not the best.
But Eleanor could guess why it was that their car had crossed over into the other lane that night. They would have stopped at their favorite bar on their way home. One of their many favorite bars.
They must have loved her. That’s what parents did. But it had been their idea, not Eleanor’s, that she go to boarding school, and although they seemed sad when they dropped her off that first time, Eleanor couldn’t help but notice a sense of relief underlying their farewells. “We’ll see you at Parents’ Weekend,” they said, but they didn’t make it.
After he picked her up and brought her home, the law partner, Don, told her she could leave everything till the summer, when school got out. But when school got out, and Eleanor returned to Newton, it was no easier to figure out what she was supposed to do with a houseful of the possessions of two dead people who in many ways she barely knew. In the end, somebody called in a company that ran estate sales, who promised to empty the house by July, so it could go on the market.
Eleanor spent an afternoon alone there. “Pick out what you want, honey,” Don told her. She started making a pile, but at the end of an hour the things she’d set out filled most of what had been their dining room. Where was she supposed to put all of this stuff, anyway?
In the end, Eleanor walked away with her father’s clarinet, her old cereal bowl decorated with Beatrix Potter animals, a dress of her mother’s from the fifties, and a pair of velvet pants that weren’t even her size. She took the photograph albums, of course, though it would be a few years before she opened any of them, and when she did, she was struck by how many photographs there were of Martin and Vivian, how few of herself. Judging by the slightly off-kilter way in which the images had been captured, she guessed she had served as her parents’ photographer. Anyone else, leafing through the album, would have no way of knowing that Eleanor had been along on those trips at all.
She was eleven years old when they’d traveled to New York City to take in the World’s Fair—riding an escalator past thePietà,flown in from Italy; taking in water-skiers and a parrot at the Florida pavilion and the World’s Biggest Cheese at the Wisconsin pavilion. Later that afternoon, her parents drank so many mai tais at the Hawaii pavilion (seven, based on Eleanor’s count of the paper umbrellas) that they had trouble making their way back to the parking lot.
The next day, after a breakfast involving a large pitcher of Bloody Marys, as they were walking along Fifth Avenue—Eleanor a few steps behind the two of them, as usual—she had decided to simply stop walking. Just stand still on the sidewalk and see how long it took before they noticed.
Her parents had gone more than a block before they looked back, and even when they did, they did so with an unnerving measure of calm.
Oh, there you are,her mother said. Her speech was only very slightly slurred. Nobody would have noticed but Eleanor.
The last time she’d seen her parents, Eleanor had told her mother she didn’t plan on going skiing with the two of them over break.
Did it ever occur to you to ask my opinion about what I’d like to do instead of making all these plans and then letting me know? Did it ever occur to you that I might have my own ideas about what I’d want to do, besides tagging along after the two of you, watching you order cocktails and stare into each other’s eyes? Cleaning up the broken glass in the morning?
That Christmas they’d given her a pair of warm gloves and a parka, a watch, an art kit of the sort best suited for a child around eight years old who may or may not have expressed an interest in painting, and a gift certificate for Filene’s. Eleanor was in her room, packing her suitcase, her face still hot from the argument with her parents. Her mother appeared in the doorway, without a drink.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come skiing with us?” her mother asked, again. She put her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder. She seemed relieved when Eleanor said no thanks, she was going to visit her school roommate, Patty, over winter vacation.
At the funeral, someone who’d seen Martin and Vivian at the mountain the day of the accident had told her how great the conditions had been. How happy the two of them had looked, sitting in the lodge after their last run, sipping their Irish coffees.
“In a way, it’s sort of perfect that they died together,” a friend of her father’s had suggested. Imagine either one of those two without the other.
They’d ended their lives side by side in the front seat of their Oldsmobile, with their only child at school a few hundred miles away.Once again, Eleanor had been left out, and though this time it was a good thing, it seemed to her that really, she’d been on her own forever anyway.
Who else did Eleanor know who—as she discovered, cleaning out their kitchen, after—had one whole cupboard devoted to swizzle sticks? And another containing two dozen jars of maraschino cherries?
7.
One Small Step for Man
Patty’s parents, the Hallinans, invited Eleanor to spend her summer vacation with their family in Rhode Island. Patty was going to be away working as a camp counselor for most of the summer, but Alice Hallinan said that only made them all even more eager to have another teenage girl around, so they wouldn’t miss Patty so much.
Jim Hallinan found Eleanor a job doing daytime kitchen prep at a restaurant owned by a golfing buddy of his. And the best part was, their son, Matt, would be home from college, retaking a class he’d flunked the year before and studying for the law boards, so he could drive her to work and look out for her.
An older brother. Eleanor had envied Patty for having one. It was her Anthony dream in real life.
She moved into Patty’s room, with its twin canopy beds and the poster of Donovan on the wall, along with Patty’s swim team medals and a collage of pictures from family trips to the Cape. Alice—who’d told Eleanor to call her Mom, not that she did—had cleared out half of the drawers for her clothes, though she didn’t have that many. Their dog, Buddy, licked her shin. She’d always wanted a dog, but that wasn’t her parents’ style.
“We all want you to consider yourself one of the family,” Alice said.
