“Oh, yes, twins,” Rebecca said. “I’d forgotten that.” Briefly, she laid a hand on his arm. “It must make you sad, celebrating your birthday without your brother here to share it.”
“No, not really,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve had a lot of years to get used to it.”
He took a much too large mouthful of waffles, dotting his mustache with beads of syrup. He was wearing his red plaid bathrobe over striped pajamas. Bristly whiskers silvered his face, and his white hair stood on end, unbrushed, raying out like sunbeams.
“Eighteen ninety-nine,” Rebecca said. “I don’t even know who was President then!”
“Beats me.”
“Your family wouldn’t have had a car, I suppose, or a telephone…”
But he was pursuing another train of thought. He said, “I’ve wondered, from time to time, if I’ve had added onto my life all those years my brother didn’t get to use.”
He spoke as if his brother had had no choice — as if it hadn’t been his own decision not to use those years. Rebecca said, “Well, I imagine he would have been glad to see you enjoying them.”
“Not necessarily,” Poppy told her. “He always did believe I got the best of the deal.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, you know… he wasn’t a naturally happy person. Some people, they just have a harder time being happy.”
“Would you say Joe was naturally happy?”
Poppy took another bite of waffles, either considering her question or stalling.
“When I met him, he was laughing,” she prompted him. Then she recalled that in fact, she was the one who’d been laughing. But she continued. “He said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ His very first words to me. Because Zeb was clowning around; you know how he does, and so I started… And when I decided to marry him, then he was laughing, for sure! I saw him laughing in the library window and I decided at that moment.”
Poppy said, “Hmm,” and blotted his mustache on his napkin.
“And don’t forget,” Rebecca said, “by profession, he was a party-giver.”
“But he never felt party-giving was really his true life,” Poppy reminded her.
“Well, no.”
“And that’s where he and I differed,” Poppy said. “Because I was always telling him, ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Face it,’ I said. ‘There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I said.”
“But he had a fine life!” Rebecca said.
“He certainly did.”
Poppy folded his napkin and laid it beside his plate. “So what I tell myself,” he said, “is I’m observing our birthday for both of us. That’s how I like to view it.”
Evidently, he had swerved back onto the subject of his twin brother. Rebecca took a second to realize it, though. That was what happened when you lived with someone confused: you became confused yourself, and one thing developed the oddest way of blurring into other things.
* * *
Her mother and her aunt arrived shortly before noon. Her mother wore her dressiest pants set and a fluffy mohair jacket that made her look smaller than ever. Her hair had been crimped into ridges as evenly spaced as the rows of tufts on a bedspread. Aunt Ida was all ruffles and froth — a pink rosebud print, despite the season — and she must have gone to the same hairdresser, although her curls were already beginning to wander out of formation. Between them they carried a large, flat package, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. “It’s a portrait of William McKinley,” Aunt Ida confided in a whisper.
“McKinley,” Rebecca said.
“He was who was President in 1899.”
“Oh, we were just discussing that at breakfast,” Rebecca said. “McKinley! Is that who it was!”
“We thought it would remind Mr. Davitch of his youth.”
“I’m sure he’ll love it,” Rebecca said. “Have you two had lunch yet?”
“Oh, we don’t want to be any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. I’ve got some cold cuts set out.”
She placed their gift on the chest of drawers in the front parlor, and then she led them back to the kitchen. “Poppy’s upstairs napping,” she said. “He had a sandwich ahead of time and now he’s trying to rest before the party.”
“Law, he must be so excited,” Aunt Ida said, but Rebecca’s mother said, “I never did understand the notion of adults having birthday parties.”
“Well, it’s kind of our tradition,” Rebecca told her. “And besides, this is his hundredth! He could have had his name read out on TV, if we had asked.”
“My last birthday party was in 1927,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I was five years old.”
Aunt Ida said, “Oh, that can’t be right! What about when you turned eighteen and Mother gave you her pearls?”
“That wasn’t a party, though, Ida.”
“Well, you had a cake! With candles on it! If you don’t call that a party, I’d like to know what it was!”
“Have a seat,” Rebecca told them. “Who would like iced tea?”
“Oh, I would, darlin’, if it’s made,” Aunt Ida said.
It was. (Rebecca knew that they always drank iced tea with lunch, even in the dead of winter, although at suppertime they would turn it down for fear of not sleeping well.) She brought the pitcher from the refrigerator and set it on the table. Aunt Ida was forking a mountain of cold cuts onto her plate, selecting each slice daintily with her little finger quirked as if that would make her portion seem smaller. Rebecca’s mother was delivering a blow-by-blow account of their trip. “We took the old County Highway,” she said, “because you couldn’t pay me to drive on that I-95, all those truckers whizzing past blaring their horns at a person. I don’t think I told you about Abbie Field’s daughter having that awful accident on I-95 down near Richmond. She had gone to I think Heathsville, or Heathsburg, one of those places; was it Heathsville? Heathsburg? Went to visit her parents-in-law and was coming back on a Sunday after mass; her mother-in-law is Catholic, you know, one of those very devout Catholic widows, and she had invited Abbie to her ladies’ bridge club luncheon on Saturday and then—”
“Wait; that’s not possible,” Aunt Ida said.
“Beg pardon? Of course it’s possible. You can be a Catholic and still play bridge.”
“You said Abbie went to visit her parents-in-law. Plural. But that her mother-in-law was a widow.”
“All right; I misspoke. It’s not a capital crime.”
Rebecca said, “How’s the move coming, Mother?”
“What move?”
“Your move to the retirement home.”
“Oh, that. Well, I’m working on it, but first I have to sort my belongings.”
Aunt Ida sent Rebecca a look. “Have a deviled egg,” Rebecca told her.
“Why, thank you, hon. I really shouldn’t, on account of my cholesterol, but you know I can’t resist.”
“Folks tell me I should hire help,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I’m too old to do all that sorting on my own, they tell me. But you know how that works. When Ida here tried to clean out my desk, would you believe what she did? Threw away a perfectly good sheet of three-cent postage stamps.”
“Have a deviled egg, Mother,” Rebecca said.
Then the phone rang, and she cried, “Whoops!” and raced off to answer it, even though the kitchen extension was no more than a foot away from her.
* * *
Rebecca’s Bedouin costume was a long black woolen robe with broad vertical bands of purple, red, and turquoise running from shoulder to hem. It made her feel like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, she had told the clerk at Discount Dashikis when she was trying it on. In order to keep the bright colors from blanching her features, she applied a good deal more makeup than usual. Then she wound a splashy purple-and-black silk sash around her head. When she descended the stairs, the sash wafted out behind her like a bridal train. “Goodness,” her mother said, meeting up with her in the foyer. Rebecca gave her a sphinxlike smile. (Nothing she would wear could make her mother happy.) But Aunt Ida, already seated in the front parlor, cried out, “Oh, my, don’t you look cheery!”