“What is it?” I asked.
She paused, holding the photos side by side. “It says, ‘You won’t get to me. Don’t try. I’m immune.’”
I snorted. “We’re difficult people. My mother was the worst. She was an impossible woman. Of course she was a good mother. I think now she treated it like a job. She wasn’t what you’d call friendly. Never warm.”
I was sorting quickly through the boxes, making piles of people of my mother’s side of the family, then my father’s and then one of faces I didn’t know, a growing stack of strangers.
“When I was a teenager,” I said, “I so wanted to be familiar and friendly with my parents like my white friends were with theirs. You know, they’d use curses with each other, make fun of each other at dinner, maybe even get drunk together on holidays.”
“It’s not so goddamn wonderful, you know,” Lelia said.
“I know. Of course it’s not. But I wanted just once for my mother and father to relax a little bit with me. Not treat me so much like a son, like a figure in a long line of figures. They treated each other like that, too. Like it was their duty and not their love.”
Lelia was quiet to this. “It’s incredible, isn’t it,” she then said, “that it’s so clear what we get from them?”
“Maybe incredible isn’t the word.”
Lelia handed me a picture.
“I do have her blood,” I said, looking now at a young girl standing before the gate of a Buddhist temple in a dark velvet suit. My mother’s face.
Lelia rolled over and rested her head on my leg. “You should watch yourself, those cancers run in families. You told me once how your mother bit down on her lip whenever she was angry, just like you do. It’s crazy.”
“What are you going to get from Alice and Stew?” I asked her.
Lelia laughed harshly, turning on her side. “Let’s see,” she said, propping her head up. “Frailness and oversensitivity from my mother. A fat liver from Stew. And all those old rugs.”
“How are the old people?”
“Okay,” she said. “Mother seems better. She’s been going out shopping lately with a friend. She’s feeling lonely. Actually, I think it’s a sign of improvement. She won’t admit to me that she’s horny as hell. I reminded her that it’s been four years since her last boyfriend. She said three and a half, and then she broke down crying. I told her to put an ad in the paper but she didn’t want to because she thought all of Boston would know who it was, particularly my father. She finally placed one a few weeks ago, and of course the day it appeared Stew called her out of the blue just to say hello. He can be such a shit.”
“He saw the ad?”
“Of course not,” she said. “That’s just my father. He’s lucky that way. He asked about you the last time I spoke to him. He wants you to call him sometime.”
“I don’t know why,” I answered. “With our troubles.”
Lelia shook her head. “Don’t worry, he blames me for everything.”
She tucked down her chin and made a stern face. “‘Henry’s a kind and respectful man,’” she gruffed, doing him from her throat. “‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ I think things haven’t been going well with Katie but he won’t say.”
“Katie’s the one with the legs?”
Lelia shook her head. “Katie is the younger woman, the curator. Maybe you haven’t met her. Did you? I don’t know. I like her, actually. She doesn’t go for his captain-of-industry routine. They were both in New York last month and we had dinner. Katie had this one long streak of gray in her hair. She didn’t have it the first time I met her, and I thought, oh shit, Stew’s ruining another good woman.”
“I never understood that kind of grayness.”
“It comes from grief,” Lelia said. “When I got her alone I asked if anything was wrong and she said nothing and laughed and said you mean with the hair? She told me she had it done, that she had a streak of color bleached out.”
“What for?”
“I guess Stew wanted her to look more distinguished or something at his functions. Less artsy-fartsy. So she decided to go gray.”
“Bride of Frankenstein.”
Lelia laughed and said, “Of course Stew hated it. He didn’t say anything, though. I think for the first time in his life he’s afraid of losing a woman.”
“Your old man isn’t afraid of anything.”
“It just seems that way,” she said. “He’s getting old. What am I saying? He is old. He’s been old for twenty years.”
“So what’s different now?” I asked. “Is it Katie?”
“Mostly,” Lelia said, looking through more photos. “I think he’s finally catching up to my mother. He’s just begun to feel the sadness of growing old, if that’s what it is. Decrepitude, obsolescence. There’s no good cure.”
“He’s the semi-immortal type,” I said. “A Titan.”
“Give him a break,” Lelia said. “When you’re sixty-four we’ll see if you’re not feeling a little desperate.”
I got up to take down more shoe boxes. “We Parks don’t let it get to that,” I told her. “No one in my family actually survives his fifty-fifth birthday anyway.”
“I don’t think you’ve got to worry about that,” she said. “You’ll make it.”
I sat back down on the littered floor. “A minute ago you were talking cancer.”
“I changed my mind. I’ll make sure to take you to the internist twice a year.”
“I would like that.”
She stretched her neck and vigorously massaged her head with both hands. “Anyway,” she said, messy-haired, “you don’t work like them. You don’t drive yourself to exhaustion like your father or mother. The problem for them was stress. That’s not the thing that’s going to kill you.”
“What will kill me?”
Lelia shifted toward me on her knees. When she touched my cheek with her open hand we got the shock of static she built up from the carpet.
“You obsess, Henry,” she said, her hand still trembling. “You live in one tiny part of your life at a time.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“How is work going?” she suddenly asked, words I hadn’t heard from her since before Mitt was born.
“Okay,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
She bit her lip, but then said, “Jack didn’t seem to think so.”
I slowly unlidded the next shoe box.
“I talked to him a couple days ago,” she said. “Actually, Molly wanted to meet him. She was intrigued by his picture. She loved his big features. I thought what the hell. Jack, as usual, wasn’t sure if he was ready to meet anyone. So we just talked. Then the more we talked the more it seemed that he was worrying about you.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He just kept mentioning you. Parky this, Parky that. You were steadily becoming the point of the conversation. Finally I called him on it and he said nothing was wrong but I better talk to you. He knew we were coming up here.”
“I told him.”
“I figured,” she said. “Come on, sweetie. What’s going on? You should say. You should tell your only wife. Isn’t that how your father always said it? She is your only wife. I promise not to get angry. Say anything. Promise. It’s most of the reason I came up, you know. Cleaning we can do any old weekend.”
“You were oddly insistent.”
She smiled again. “I’ve picked up a few things in ten years with you.”
I nodded, looking away from her. Then she reached for my cheek, her cool fingertips on my skin. I leaned into them. I took her hand and held it to my face, against my mouth. At that moment I almost wished for something like smothering myself with her.