I had learned, as I grew older, that my father didn’t like to talk about the past. His past. He really didn’t like to talk about his brother. These were like the sometimes unseen bruises that were left when you had fallen from your skateboard on your knees and, even though there were no scrapes or scratches, if you pressed your fingers on the spot it still hurt afterwards for days. My father’s memories of the past were like those bruises, and we took care not to poke them.
In my eighth-grade history class we’d watched a vivid documentary about the Vietnam War, and I’d finally understood in a more grown-up and complete way what it was my father and his friends had faced, and why they’d protested, and why it had been difficult for everyone involved.
But sometimes, honestly, I thought the simpler answer I’d been given as a child was still the truest one.
Sometimes, you can’t make everybody happy.
“How,” demanded Rachel, “was it complicated?”
With a shrug, I drank my wine and told her, “It just was.”
Unconvinced, she said, “Well, it’s a good thing that it will be you and not me at that Sisters of Liberty lunch thing. I’d tell Great-Grandma Van Hoek what I thought of her, right to her face.”
There were no guarantees that I wouldn’t be tempted to do the same thing, I thought. Even if, as the museum’s curator, I’d have to be diplomatic.
My niece said, “I saw her once, you know. When Dad and I first moved here.”
“Did you?” I’d only seen her in photographs.
“Yeah. She looked like a—”
“Hold that thought,” I interrupted. My cell phone was playing a personal ringtone—the iconic whistling theme from a Clint Eastwood western—which meant it was Tyler. I answered and put him on video. “Hi.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, slid from her stool at the counter, and left me alone to my nightly call.
Just seeing Tyler’s face made me feel happier. When I’d first met him I thought he’d been way too good-looking to wish for. His smile had been perfect, his tawny hair cut just a little bit long so the curling ends gave it a sleep-rumpled look, and his blue eyes so clear and so blue in his suntanned face that for the first while I’d thought he wore contacts. But all of it, as I’d eventually learned, had been real. And that smile was for me.
I asked, “How was your day?”
“Not too bad. Yours?”
I told him, with help from a third glass of wine, just exactly how my day had been. And I threw in the highlights of last night’s board meeting.
“Wow. Fun.”
“Not really. But at least I’ll get a break from it next weekend. Oh, and the hotel said that we can have the bigger room, the one that has the view. If I can pack the car the night before, I can drop Rachel at her residence and get her all unloaded and have time to make it down to the hotel to meet you there for lunch, is that okay?”
“About that,” Tyler said.
The way he said it warned me.
“What?”
“Well, Bob from work . . . remember Bob? His wife walked out on him last month, and he’s been having a hard time, so some of us decided we should take him to Atlantic City. Cheer him up.”
“And?”
“And the guys decided that we’re doing that next weekend.” He could see my face. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he was. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. We can meet up in the city anytime, right?”
“But I made the reservation. Like you asked me to,” I said. “It’s non-refundable.”
“I’ll cover that, don’t worry. Hey, you can still go and stay yourself. Go see a show, or something. Have a break, like you were saying.”
“Ty.”
He promised me again, “I’ll make it up to you.” And smiled the smile he knew would end the argument.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to argue; that I didn’t want to push the point and ask him why his boys’ night in Atlantic City had to be next weekend, why it couldn’t be the weekend after that, and why he felt it was okay to let me down but not his co-workers.
But when he smiled like that—his salesman smile—I knew his mind was set, and nothing I could say was going to change things.
“Fine,” I said.
I said it once again when we were finishing the phone call, and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t mad at him.
“I’m fine,” I said.
And not long after that, when Rachel came downstairs to put the kettle on and found me standing at the sink, intent on scrubbing every bit of baked-on spatter from the glass lasagne dish, she asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Okay, then,” Rachel said. And very wisely left me on my own.
Lydia
“You keep scrubbing that bowl,” Violet warned, “you’ll be wearing a hole in it.” She’d just returned to the kitchen from gathering eggs and was looking at Lydia now with a mixture of mischief and sympathy. “All that poor bowl did was hold the man’s breakfast. That’s surely no reason to punish it.”
Lydia straightened away from the basin and grimaced. “He vexes me.”
Wiping the wooden bowl carefully dry, she set it with the others before glancing out the window at the place beside the shed where this past week, between the days of rain and wind, her father and Mr. de Sabran had been hard at work on the cider press. Today they were aiming to finish the caulking, her father had said, since the morning so far had been dry and what clouds they could see hung far off out to sea.
He’d seemed pleased to have help. It had left them astonished when Mr. de Sabran had set down his sword belt and shrugged off his waistcoat and, rolling the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows, had set about showing her father the way to position the crossbeam between the two sides of the cider press.
That had been all he had done that first day. With a nod he’d retreated and put on his waistcoat and picked up his sword, and exchanged a few clipped words with Mr. de Brassart, who’d seemed to be voicing a protest.
The next morning, though, when Mr. de Sabran had returned from his walk he had stopped to observe what her father was doing, and once again taken off both sword and waistcoat and lent his assistance.
“He knows what he’s doing,” her father had said, when he’d come in to wash before dinner that day. “He’s no carpenter, but I’ll not turn down a strong pair of hands when they’re offered.”
Her father had meant that short comment for Joseph, but Joseph had quietly let it slide by. Lydia, keenly aware of her father’s frustration, had found herself growing increasingly grateful to Mr. de Sabran for helping him; but anytime she’d tried to act on this gratitude it had appeared to do nothing but increase the Frenchman’s impatience.
This morning, when she’d tried to clear his empty bowl and teacup from the table, he had put her off with a short phrase in his own language and had picked them up himself and, rising, taken them across into the kitchen, to the basin, before heading out the door.
Which was why she had spent the past ten minutes scrubbing that same cup and bowl as though to clean off any clinging trace of him.
“He vexes me,” she said again, to Violet. “He is always so ungracious.”
“Well, Miss Lydia,” was Violet’s calm reply, “he’s lost his freedom. Did you think that he would thank you for it?”
Lydia heard the rebuke in those words and accepted it, ashamed she’d needed the reminder that for people like herself, who’d had the fortune to be born and raised in liberty, its loss remained a hardship that they could not hope to know.
For years she had been ignorant of Violet’s true condition, having grown up with the understanding Violet—like her mother, Phyllis—were free blacks. They’d been paid a servant’s wage and never made to work on Sundays, and she’d known no differently until the year she’d turned eight.
That year, the funeral of her father’s elder sister had drawn all the family back to Newtown. Well, not all, exactly—Phyllis had been left behind with Violet, and when Lydia had asked her father, “Why can’t they come with us?” she’d received the curt reply, “Because they can’t.”
She’d been reassured by Phyllis, who’d maintained there were few places on this earth she wanted less to go than Newtown, and that being left behind on this occasion was no hardship but a blessing.