Mary Frances shrugged her shoulders.
Edith’s face turned tight. “I keep hoping she will wake up from this mood she’s in. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? She was married for three years.”
“We could just pretend it never happened.”
“Of course it happened.” Edith moved to take the baby in his towel. “We have Sean here to show for it.”
“I was joking, Mother. I meant to be funny.”
“Your Dote,” Edith said to Sean, who had a firm grip on her earlobe, “is a ninny.”
In the garden, Al still sat beneath the lemon tree with his cheekbone balanced on his fingertips, his ankle across his knee. She could see the worn-out sole of his shoe. What happened, what didn’t happen, what you wished to happen, and what you pretended not to, what you worried was about to happen. It was hard for Mary Frances to decide where to place her care anymore.
Edith called her from upstairs. Where were the baby’s clothes?
* * *
Everyone gathered at the long walnut table in the dining room, and Rex opened a bottle of wine, beginning the patter of luncheon conversation, raised glasses, gentle compliments to the food and company. No one mentioned Anne’s husband or the strike in San Francisco, the drought, or the fact that Rex needed an editor at the paper. Her younger siblings Norah and David were home from school in a week, and they’d have the holidays together at the Ranch; more of these gatherings, less that could be talked about. Over her father’s shoulder, Mary Frances could see the broad globe of the fishbowl in his study, the shimmer of movement in the late light.
She would just say it; that would be the most natural thing to do.
“Al and I are moving to Laurel Canyon, after the holidays.” She looked at Al, and he stepped in to explain.
“A delicate situation, really,” Al said. “It seems—”
“Delicate?” Rex rested his glass beside his plate.
“Nothing at the college, sir. It seems, well, you remember the Parrishes, from Laguna?”
Mary Frances bit the inside of her lip to keep quiet. It was taking so long for Al to get around to it, she was stuck here, waiting for him to say the wrong thing. She was sorry she’d brought the matter up at the dinner table. She could have just told Edith, let her pass it on. Rex shook his head; he was a midwesterner at heart, and no one from Indiana got divorced.
“You people,” he said, picking up the delicate cage of the hen’s breast. He closed his eyes to take a bite.
“Us, Daddy?” Anne said. She could not abide to be judged wanting.
Then like a door slamming, Sean wailed from his cradle by the fireplace, and Anne sprang up so fast her chair tipped back onto the floor. Al reached down with one long arm and righted it, still nodding his head at Rex, whatever Rex had to say. Anne called for Liesl in the kitchen and Sean’s bottle, the afternoon turning back so easily toward the baby’s needs and satisfactions, their announcement seemed gone as quickly as it had come.
After lunch, Al was ready to go home.
“I need to get back to my study. I have notes.” He jabbed his book in the air like a prophet. “I thought we were just going to stay for the one thing.”
“Mother wants to take me into town. Can we stay just an hour?”
“For what?”
“It’s almost Christmas.” She turned to brush out her hair. It was silly to be so vague, she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. If she said they were going shopping, Al would draw up like a sponge. “You could sit in the garden and read again like this morning. That would be quiet.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Please, Al.” She dropped her hair around her shoulders and turned to face him, but he was already stepping back, determined to keep their distance as it was.
“What difference would it make if I refused?” he said. “Go ahead. Have a nice time.”
She laughed as if he were joking and turned back to the mirror. Rouge, a dab of Vaseline on her eyelids to make them shine. When she opened her eyes again, she was relived to see him gone.
Edith was waiting in the foyer in her sensible shoes.
“Shall I bring the car around?” Mary Frances said.
“We can walk. It will do us good after that meal.”
“We’re not going into the city?”
“Your father’s money is spent right here in Whittier these days. He supports this town in thick and thin. And I need the constitutional.”
Anne arrived on the stairs. “You sound like Grandmother.”
“And you sound disrespectful.”
Anne’s expression could blacken like a cloud. “Mother.”
“Here we are then,” Mary Frances said, holding one arm for Edith and the other for Anne.
Edith was having one of her days of resolution; they would walk because she wanted to, and perhaps it would improve her mood. Rex walked to town every morning. He said it was better than church for clean living, and god knew he never went to church.
Whittier was a Quaker settlement, and Christmas was no more or less holy than any other day. But when Mary Frances was a child and they lived downtown on Painter Street, Christmas morning she and Anne would run to the sleeping porch and crawl into bed with Rex, Edith already gone to sing with the Episcopalian choir. At dawn, a trumpet played “Joy to the World” from the steeple of the meetinghouse, chilly, trembling notes in each direction. Mary Frances thought of the pale, church-bound holidays in Dijon, she and Al shivering in their apartment, waiting for the peal of bells. It had not been much different: the promise of a child’s holiday to come.
Somehow today didn’t seem as much like Christmas as it might have when they were children. Part of it was Norah and Dave off at school, but too, as they passed into town itself, the shops were quiet, some of them with the windows papered over with the Whittier News.
Edith stopped to read the dates, full of tut and bustle, one hand twisting at the other. “Your poor father.”
“He didn’t close the hat shop.”
“But he sees it, Dote. And I know it kills him.”
And here her mother headed into the version of Rex-as-pillar-of-the-community. People of Whittier looked to him for solutions and responsibility, had always looked to him, but especially now that times were hard and jobs were few. Anne rolled her eyes and turned away, but Mary Frances liked this version. Rex was a great man; Rex was her father.
“I saw an old woman, a woman my age,” Edith said. “Down in the orange groves by the Ranch with a pack of hungry children. I don’t think they were even her children. I told her to pick all the oranges she wanted.”
Edith was intent, and clearly Mary Frances’s audience was not enough; Mary Frances could see it, and she didn’t know why Anne could not or would not. It would be Anne’s first Christmas on her own with the baby, and everyone was worried she was turning mawkish.
Mary Frances caught her sister by the elbow. “What will Santa Claus bring Sean?” she said. “I want to make him something. I could knit him a sweater. Herbert Fisher brought me some really lovely lamb’s wool last winter, and I never did anything with it.”
Anne squeezed Mary Frances’s hand where it fell across her arm. “Sweet of you,” she said. “You are so talented. I never have time for that sort of thing anymore. Or patience. By the time I get home from the office—”
Mary Frances let out her breath, and let her sister talk.
* * *
Edith bought Mary Frances a dress of deep russet silk, the skirt fluted and biased close, with a bracelet-length bishop sleeve and a keyhole tied at the neckline. The color set off her skin, her eyes. The dress cost as much as a week’s rent for the house in Eagle Rock, and Mary Frances could not remember the last time she’d worn something so pretty.
Anne laid the flat of her palm against Mary Frances’s hip, nudging her around to model. She was not trying on dresses herself.