“Perhaps the lighthearted girl was also scatterbrained. At any rate, when she was nineteen, she found she was with child. The child’s father had scampered. This had happened to one or two of her sisters. Such an event was accepted, was even applauded. The new child, like the others, would be everyone’s. Everyone would care for it. There would be only an increase of the family’s easy happiness …
“But the child was born—”
“Defective,” said Mrs. Duprey.
Val swallowed. “Yes, the infant, a girl, was born deformed and also defective, the kind of child who cries all the time and is un-rewarding to care for. Her red ringlets”—Val’s hand fluttered to her own hair—“seemed like a curse. The town witches would have done away with her. The priests offered to take her to their House of Compassion on the far side of the mountain and bring her up with others of her kind. A magician wanted to transform her into an amphibian. But the family wouldn’t listen to those ideas. ‘Hope,’ they said — Hope was the poor infant’s misbegotten name—‘Hope will be brought up in our midst.’ ‘She will have the best life that can be given to her,’ said the oldest and laziest sister.
“There was only one silent voice — one person whose vision of the family had been darkened by the event, who inwardly damned its members as feckless and forgetful.”
“A twin sister,” said Liam.
“Who knew she’d do all the caring,” said Win.
“She would have accepted the magician’s offer. A nice frog,” said Fay.
“Or the priests’,” said Mrs. Duprey.
“Or even the witches’. Euthanasia,” said the professor.
“But she would not have been listened to,” said his wife. “Even though she was—”
“So what should she do?” Val quickly interrupted.
“Run away,” came all five voices at once.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, on a rainy Sunday, Val was having a cup of tea near the movie theater, waiting to see a new Afghan film. A man dressed in clothes that had once been good sat down opposite her. His teeth, too, had deteriorated, but his smile remained charming nonetheless, and of course she recognized him.
They had recently returned to town. Val asked for news of the twins, and Deborah. Desmond asked for news of Val.
“I’m nanny in a professor’s family now,” she said. “I’m also dogs-body and housekeeper. I find I rather like it.”
“Do you live in?”
“… yes.”
“I’ve thought of you off and on through the years,” said Desmond. “I remember that first day, when you reminded me of Mary Poppins. But it wasn’t Mary Poppins, really — it was the actress who played her in that movie, who played in so many movies, remember, Julie Andrews. She was once an adorable English ingenue, and she was still adorable years later. You weren’t a governess type, and neither was she. You were a party girl in disguise.”
Val said nothing to this discourteous unmasking.
“You’ve cut your hair at last and let it curl the way it wants to. More youthful … you’re only fifty, yes?”
“Forty-nine.” Sallie was forty-nine, too, if she hadn’t already died of self-sacrifice. And Hope … Hope would be thirty. Val remembered the painful birth, the big head with its red fuzz finally emerging from between her thighs, the instant realization that this misshapen infant would not be like other children except maybe in her attachment to her mother.
Desmond said: “With that flighty coiffure I’ll bet you remind yourself of the girl you were.”
“The girl I left behind,” said Val in a low, flat voice.
AUNT TELEPHONE
I GOT MY FIRST TASTE OF RAW FLESH when I was nine years old. I had been taken to an adult party. My father was out of town at an investors’ conference and my brother was spending the night at a friend’s; and my babysitter got sick at the last minute, or said she did. What was my mother to do — stay home? So she brought me along. The affair was cocktails and a buffet featuring beef tartare on pumpernickel rounds and a bowl of icy seviche — this was thirty years ago, before such delicacies had been declared lethal. The party was given by the Plunkets, family therapists: two fatties who dressed in similar sloppy clothing as if to demonstrate that glamour was not a prerequisite for rambunctious sex.
My mother and I and Milo walked over to the party in the glowing September afternoon. Our house and Milo’s and the Plunkets’ all lay within a mile of each other in Godolphin, a leafy wedge of Boston, as did the homes of most of the other guests — the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and social workers who made up this crowd. They were all friends, they referred patients to one another, they distributed themselves into peer-supervision subsets — a collegial, talkative crew, their envy vigorously tamped down. Their kids were friends, too — some as close as cousins. I already hated groups, but I was willy-nilly part of the bunch.
Among the adults, Milo was first among peers. He produced paper after acclaimed paper: case histories of children with symptoms like elective mutism and terror of automobiles and willful constipation lasting ten days. I longed to become one of his fascinating patients, but I knew to my sadness that therapists rarely treated their friends’ children no matter how sick and I knew, also, that I wasn’t sick anyway, just ornery and self-centered. In his published work Milo gave the young sufferers false first names and surname initials. “What would you call me?” I asked him once, still hoping for immortality.
“Well, Susan, what would you like to be called?”
“Catamarina M.”
He warmed me with his brown gaze. (“The eyes,” Dr. Lenore once remarked to my mother, “thoroughly compensate for the absence of chin.”)
Milo said: “Catamarina is your name forever.”
So I had an appellation if not symptoms. All I had to do was stop talking or moving my bowels. Alas, nature proved too strong for me.
Milo’s colleagues respected his peaceable bachelordom: they recognized asexuality as an unpathological human preference, also as a boon to society. He had been born in cosmopolitan Budapest, which gave him further cachet. His liberal parents, who were in the bibelot business, had gotten out just before World War II. So Milo was brought up in New York by a pair of Hungarians, penniless at first, soon rich again. He inherited a notable collection of ancient Chinese figurines.
On the day of that party Milo was wearing his standard costume: flannel slacks, turtleneck sweater, tweed jacket. He was then almost fifty, a bit older than my parents and their friends. His hair, prematurely gray, rose high and thick from a narrow forehead. It swung at his nape like a soft broom. He was very tall and very thin.
Dr. Will Plunket gave me beef tartare in a hamburger bun. But the Plunket boys wouldn’t let me join their game of Dungeons and Dragons. So, munching my feral sandwich, I wandered in the fall garden still brightened by a glossy sun. On a chaise on the flagstone terrace sat a woman I didn’t know. She looked sulky and bored. Dr. Judah joined me for a while and wondered aloud if fairies nested under the chrysanthemums. I frowned at him, but when he went inside I knelt and peered under the mums. Nothing. After a while Milo found me. In his soft voice he talked about the greenery near the stone wall — basil was rumored to cure melancholy, marjoram headaches, ground ivy conjunctivitis. He bent, picked up a handful of the ivy, stood, and crushed a few leaves into my palm. “Not to be taken internally.” Then he, too, went in.