When all she really wanted to do was stay home with her two little boys, me and Roger.
My father vanished when I was thirteen, a fugitive from justice with thirty-seven charges of financial misconduct trailing him like a pack of hounds. He traveled around Europe, eventually landing in Switzerland. All of his assets were frozen, and our family went from high-living to hardscrabble. The loss of security, combined with the humiliation, was traumatic for her, as it was for the rest of us. But I always wondered whether, on some level, she wasn’t relieved.
Relieved to be out of the golden bubble. Relieved to be free of command-performance hostess duties. Relieved to be away from his soul-destroying, oxygen-depleting narcissism.
When she’d found work as a personal assistant to Marshall Marcus, it was a lifesaver for her and for all of us. I guess it could have been demeaning-one day the guy’s a guest at your dinner table, the next you’re keeping his call list-but Marshall somehow made sure the situation didn’t feel that way. He didn’t make it feel like charity, either, though I suppose that’s what it was. Instead, she once explained to me, he made it seem like he was running a family business, and she was family.
Eventually she moved on, got a job teaching in a local elementary school. Now she was ostensibly retired, but she kept busy as a volunteer school librarian. She also took care of the old ladies in her condo complex. Need a ride to your eye doctor’s appointment? Call Frankie. Confused by the fine print of your prescription-drug benefit? Ask Frankie. She knew everything or knew how to find it out. I don’t know why she pretended to be retired, when she was busier than any medical resident.
And ever since she’d been liberated from the gilded cage, she spoke her mind. She took no crap from anybody. My sweet, soft-spoken mom had evolved into a plainspoken, peppery older woman.
It was delightful.
She lived on the bottom half of a “townhome” in a retirement community in Newton overlooking the reservoir. All the townhomes, set among winding paths and landscaped gardens, were identical. I could never tell them apart; I always got lost. It was like the Village in that old TV show The Prisoner, only with bingo.
The door flew open almost as soon as I pushed the buzzer. My mother was wearing turquoise pants and a white top under a flowing knitted caftan of rainbow hues and a necklace of big jade-colored glass beads. A few minimum touches of makeup, but she’d never needed much. In her sixties she was a gorgeous woman, with sapphire blue eyes and dark eyelashes and a milky complexion, which she really shouldn’t have had, given how much she smoked. When my father first met her she must have been a knockout.
She was holding a cigarette, as always. A nimbus of smoke swirled around her. Even before she had a chance to say hello, a large dark projectile launched itself at me from behind her like a cruise missile.
I tried to sidestep, but her dog was on me, baring its glistening fangs, snarling and barking in a rabid frenzy, its sharp toenails raking my chest and arms through my pullover. I tried to knee it down, but the hound from hell was far too wiry and nimble and that only made it come at me more furiously.
“Down, Lilly,” my mother said in a matter-of-fact tone. Her voice had gotten lower and huskier from decades of smoking. The beast promptly dropped to the tiled entry hall, head resting on its paws. But it continued staring at me menacingly, growling softly.
“I’m glad she obeys you,” I said. “I think I was about to lose an eye.”
“Nah, she’s a love pooch, aren’t you, Lilly-willie? Come here.” She reached out one arm to hug me. The other one she kept splayed backward, daintily holding her cigarette away from me in two long curved fingers as if she were channeling Bette Davis.
As I entered, the beast got up to follow us, nails clacking on the wooden floor. It stayed so close it kept bumping against my legs. This seemed deliberate, a warning: It could rip out my throat at any time. It was just waiting for its Master to leave the room for a few seconds.
“Gabe here?” I said.
“In his room playing some computer game where you’re a soldier and you kill a lot of people. There’s a lot of bombs and explosions. I told him to put on his headphones. The noise was starting to bug me.”
That was just as well. I didn’t want him overhearing what I had to say. “Do you really want Gabe breathing all this secondhand smoke?” I said.
She squinted at me through slitted eyes as a plume of smoke snaked around between us. “Have you ever seen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? I think cigarette smoke is the least of his problems.”
“Fair enough.” I tried never to argue with my mother.
“Listen, honey, I know you’re awfully busy, but do you think you could make some time to teach him to drive?”
“He wants to drive?”
“He just got his learner’s permit.”
“What about driving school?”
She scowled at me. “Oh, for God’s sake, Nick, you’re the only father figure in the kid’s life. You’re his godfather. Don’t you remember how disappointed you were when you had to learn from me because your father was gone?”
“I wasn’t disappointed.”
“Lord knows he doesn’t want me to teach him.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’ll do it. Though the thought of Gabe on the Beltway…”
“And what kind of foolishness are you putting in his head about how he shouldn’t look in Lilly’s eyes or he’ll drop dead?”
I shrugged. “Busted. You can also blame me for that vegetarian kick he’s on now. He picked that up from my new office manager.” I smiled, shook my head. “I think he’s trying to impress her.”
“Honey, as long as he’s eating, what do I care. You want me to remind you of some of the things you did to impress girls? How about when you tried to grow a goatee when you were fourteen so Jennie Watson would think you were manly?”
I groaned.
“Are you getting any sleep?”
“I had to work late last night.”
Her condo was very IKEA: comfortable but unstylish. Plexiglas stools around the apartment’s “kitchen nook.” An armchair in some sort of maroon chintz floral pattern next to a matching couch. On the counter was a Boston Globe folded to the crossword puzzle, and a copy of Modern Maturity that looked like she’d actually read it.
I sat in the chintz armchair and she sat at the end of the couch, put out her cigarette in an immaculate stone ashtray.
“Nicky, my book group is meeting in a few minutes, so can we make this quick?”
“Just a couple of questions. When was the last time you talked to Alexa?”
She lighted another cigarette with a cheap Bic lighter and inhaled deeply. “Couple, three days ago. Yesterday Marshall called me to ask if she was here. She’s acting up again, isn’t she?”
I shook my head.
“Gabe tells me she spent the night at her friend Taylor’s house on Beacon Hill-you know her father’s Dick Armstrong, the senator?-but I think we know what that really means. She’s a beautiful girl, and-”
“It’s nothing like that.”
She looked up. “Did she run away?”
“No.”
She studied my face. “Something happened to her,” she said.
I hesitated.
“Tell me what happened to her, Nick.”
I did.
54.
I expected her to be upset.
But I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of her reaction.
She seemed to crumple, to collapse in on herself in a way I’d never seen before. She gave a terrible anguished cry, and tears spilled from her eyes. I hugged her, and it was several minutes before she was able to talk.