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Alice laughed. “We did not take turns,” she said.
“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Tibby said, knowing it wasn’t.
She remembered the four Septembers as little girls, playing for hours every Wednesday afternoon at the crummy playground on Broadbranch Road next to the public court while their mothers whacked the ball around. It had about two pieces of climbing equipment, as Tibby recalled. The Good Humor man had always stopped his truck there, and their mothers had almost always let them get ice cream bars.
“I wonder if she still plays?” Alice said more to the air than to Tibby. “Anyway.” She took the envelope out of her purse. “Here’s what I wanted to show you.” She passed Tibby a three-by-five color photograph.
“Ohhhh.” Tibby held it and studied it, letting the pleasure warm her all the way down to her dark red toenails. “I love this,” she said. “Can I please, please have it?”
There was a serious, actually fatal, infection called endocarditis, which was an inflammation of the heart. Lena’s great-grandmother had died of it as a young woman, and Lena was pretty sure she had it.
Lena lay in bed deep into the morning, monitoring the ache and the swell.
Sometime around lunch, her mother tiptoed into the room, took off her heels, and crawled into bed with Lena. She was still wearing her navy silk suit. Lena’s resistance evaporated. She felt herself slip back to being a three-year-old as her mother put her arms around her and pulled her protectively to her chest. Lena smelled her unique, powerful, mother smell, and she melted away. She cried and she shook and her nose ran disgustingly as her mother stroked her hair and wiped her face. Lena might have even fallen asleep for a while, strangely enough. She left off being a conscious creature altogether.
Her mother was as patient as the earth. She didn’t say one thing until the light had changed in the room and the pink of late day crept in the window. When her mother sat up a little more in the bed, Lena noticed she’d gotten snot on her mother’s best outfit.
“Would it be okay with you if I told you a little bit about Eugene?” her mother asked very softly.
Lena sat up a little too, and nodded. She’d cared so much about Eugene early in the summer, and now she could hardly remember why.
Ari fiddled with her rings for a while before she started talking—her wedding ring, her diamond engagement ring, her fifteen-year-anniversary emerald. “I met him in church in Athens when I was seventeen, and I fell madly in love.”
Lena nodded again.
“He went to America to go to college—to American University. Right near home.”
Lena nodded.
“I stayed in Athens. For four years I ached every day and every night we were apart. I felt like I only lived those few weeks of the year when we were together.”
Lena nodded again. She understood this.
“When I was twenty-one, after university in Athens, I moved to America to be with him. My mother forbade me, and she was furious when I went. I waited tables and I waited for Eugene. He was busy with his life and finishing up school. I was willing to take any part of him that he would give me.”
Her mother looked upward and thought about that for a-while.
“He asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes. He gave me a ring with a tiny pearl, and I cherished it like it was a religious icon. We lived together like we were already married. If my mother had known that, she would have died. Three months later, Eugene left suddenly and went back to Greece.”
“Mmmm,” Lena hummed in sympathy.
“His father had cut off the money and told Eugene he’d better come home and put his expensive education to some kind of use. I didn’t actually know that at the time.”
Lena nodded.
“For a year I longed for him miserably. He kept saying he would come back next month and next month and next. I lived in an ugly one-room apartment over a pet store on Wisconsin Avenue. I was as poor and lonely as could be. And, God, the place really stank. So many times I wanted to go home. But I thought Eugene would come back to me, that we would be married like he’d promised. And of course I didn’t want to prove my mother right.”
Lena nodded yet again. She could understand how that might be.
“I enrolled in graduate school at Catholic University that autumn. The first day of classes, I got a call from my sister. She told me the thing that everybody else knew and had known for weeks. Eugene had met another girl. He had no plans to come back to me.”
Lena’s chin quivered in overwhelming empathy. “Poor you,” she murmured.
“I dropped out of school the very first day. I took to my bed.”
Lena nodded solemnly. That sounded very practical to her. “Then what?”
“I had a truly good-hearted advisor at graduate school. She called me at home. She made me come back.”
“And then?” Lena had a feeling they were about to get to the part of the story she knew.
“On Thanksgiving I met your father. We were the two confused, countryless Greeks eating alone at Howard Johnson’s.”
Lena smiled. She knew this part. The often-told story of her parents’ first meeting, as it arose in this context, felt as dear to her as an old sweater. “And you got married four months later.”
“We did.”
And yet, Lena’s parents’ famous whirlwind meeting and marriage had a different, darker shading now that Lena knew all the facts.
“But unfortunately it wasn’t the end of Eugene.”
“Oh.” Lena sensed that this was where it got tricky.
Her mother seemed to consider her strategy for a minute or two. Finally she said, “Lena, I will explain this to you as a nearly seventeen-year-old young woman and not as a daughter. That is, if you want me to.”
Lena wanted that infinitely, but she also didn’t. The wanting prevailed. She nodded.
Ari let out a breath. “I thought about Eugene often in the early years of my marriage. I loved your father, but I distrusted that love.” She rubbed her finger over the top of her lip, gazing into hazy middle distance. “I felt ashamed of the hasty rebound, I guess. I believed our union was connected to Eugene and tainted by him. I was afraid I had transferred my feelings from Eugene to your father out of emotional necessity.”
Lena’s head felt heavy as she nodded. Her mother was trained in psychology, and sometimes it showed.
“When you were almost one, Eugene called me from New York. It was the first time I had heard his voice in four years. It sent me into a tailspin.”
Lena was starting to get nervous about where this was going.
“He wanted me to go up and see him.”
Lena ground her back teeth. She felt sorry for her one-year-old self.
“I agonized for three days. And then I went. I made an excuse to your father, left you with Tina and Carmen, and got on the train.”
“Oh, no,” Lena muttered.
“Your father still doesn’t know about it, and I’d strongly prefer that you not tell him.”
Lena nodded, feeling both the intoxication of knowing something about your mother that your father didn’t even know and also the deep revulsion of it.
“I remember walking toward him in Central Park, touching that awful pearl ring I’d brought in my coat pocket. Honestly, in that moment, I did not know how the rest of my life was going to go.”
Lena closed her eyes.
“The three hours we spent walking in the park were possibly the most valuable three hours I have ever spent.”
Lena didn’t want to hear this.
“Because I left there and I came home to you and Daddy, and I knew from then on that I loved your father for being your father and I no longer loved Eugene.”
Lena felt her heart begin to lift. “So nothing … happened.”
“I did kiss him. That was it.”
“Oh,” said Lena, almost disbelieving she was having this conversation with her mother.
“I was so happy to be home that evening. I’l
l never forget the feeling.” Her mother’s voice took on an amused and almost conspiratorial tone. “I believe Daddy and I made Effie that very night.”
Lena was starting to need to go back to being the daughter again.
“And you more or less know the rest.”
This struck Lena all of a sudden. It made a kind of cosmic sense that her conception and babyhood had been spent in an atmosphere of worry and distrust, and Effie had cruised in on a wave of perfect happiness. It made a sick kind of sense.
“So that was the end of Eugene,” Lena said.
“It wasn’t quite as easy as that. He called me a half-dozen times over the next few years. He was usually drunk. Your father really loathes that man.” Ari rolled her eyes at the memory. “That’s why Tina and Alice and—” Lena knew her mother had been about to say Marly, but she’d stopped herself. “That’s why my close friends knew about Eugene. I would dread those calls and the fights they provoked with your father. I still don’t mention his name around Daddy. That’s partly why I reacted the way I did when you brought him up.”
