A return to the church of his childhood is unsurprising, thinks Nell, given her father’s love of stage and pomp, art and history. That enjoyment was a source of connection between her parents, Nell knew. No one could fail to notice that her father unabashedly loved beautiful things and pleasure, a stance in the world that was more fraught for her mother. The puritanical streak was inherited both through genes and example. But her dad enjoyed the finer things. He was often her mother’s guide and sometimes her proxy.
“Soothing and incredibly bigoted. Gay marriage, pedophile priests, women denied priesthood . . .”
He picks tobacco off his lip and then says, “Don’t lecture me, Cornelia. I am still your father.” As if he has to remind her of their roles, since somehow he has become the brooding smoker and mystic, and she the uptight defender of Quincys and equality.
“Wouldn’t smoking be like a slow suicide sort of thing? Aren’t there rules against that?” Nell asks.
“I miss her all the time,” he says, ashing out the window into a viburnum, and Nell feels a pang. She misses her mother, too. Though it’s been over a decade now, she no longer feels a breathtaking pain, but a constant aching companion. And it’s sad to think of her father alone, though she suspects he has female company. He has referenced “a friend” once or twice in the past, which has her picturing some well-preserved, older, Anna Magnani type. Nell can admit there might be women who would find him attractive. He’s still lean from all that tennis, and he has a good amount of his salt-and-pepper hair left. Though to her he is just her father, an old man who has recently taken up smoking and religion.
“Don’t judge me,” he says. “It makes me feel like you’re one of them.”
“I didn’t say a thing,” Nell defends.
“But I can feel you censoring yourself.” She wonders just how Italian he has become. “And you’re not one of them. You never were. Neither was she, thank God.”
Seeing that he’s feeling wistful and defiant, a promising combination, Nell thinks this might be a good time to move her cause forward.
“You know, I’ve been wondering . . .” But she’s having a hard time finding a place to start. “I’ve been curious . . .” But this has so often felt like a punishing guessing game. If she poses the correct query, locks will click open, doors will swing wide, truths will be revealed. If she can’t find the right question combination, all remains sealed. “Well, you never asked” is the common response when she’s managed to finally unearth a secret.
“I know you have,” he says, and this feels like an invitation. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“I think it’s time you told me,” Nell says with the mounting energy of someone about to be let in on a long-guarded secret.
He sighs as he walks into the little bathroom and throws the butt of his smoke into the toilet with a sizzle.
“I mean, don’t you think I should have some answers?” she asks above the flush. “About why Mom hated them all so much?”
He turns on the taps and washes his hands. “Or why you do, now that we’re talking about it.”
He comes back in and throws himself down on a low loveseat, slumped like a teenager so his head hangs on the back.
“Well?”
“Well nothing. She didn’t hate them. I don’t either, for that matter,” he says.
“No?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I did.” Nell decides the only way to do this is to wait him out. “She was so untethered, your mother. And they’re so . . .” He waves a hand.
“Hearty and rah-rah,” she says, reciting the phrase she heard her mother use many times to describe her family of origin.
“She was out of step,” he says, looking at the ceiling. “And they really don’t make space for that, let alone for someone as delicate as your mother. It wasn’t a nurturing sort of place. Loulou was never one to really see other people for who they actually are.”
“That doesn’t seem like enough reason to barely talk to your family.”
“If we’re going to do this, you’re really going to have to listen,” he says.
Nell controls her rising ire at being scolded and wills herself to be still, to listen, even if her father is being sharp.
“Loulou had her problems with your mother—this foundling waif who was put on her. Her niece, yes, but the product of so much loss.”
“Israel had died.” Nell nods, hoping to move him along by filling in the gaps of the story she’s already familiar with.
“Heart attack, yes.” She can hear the music coming from the front hall—Motown now. “And I think she was deeply shocked by it. I mean, I can only assume, but Israel Quincy was very religious, very strict, so I’m not saying he brought it on himself.”
“But you’re going to.”
“He was just marinating in shame after that mine fire. It was practically Japanese.”
“Then Grandmother May dying while Mom was born, I mean that happened back then, right?”
“Uncontrollable hemorrhaging, yes. In the face of all this it was just too much for Ethan. A father he worshipped, and his wife . . . There was no way he could care for a baby. Loulou was basically raising your mother anyway, when . . .” He falters for a moment here. “It made perfect sense at the time that it became formal. But even though it was all in the family, she felt like an orphan, a charity case, because Ethan left all the money in Loulou’s care.”
A stone drops in the well of Nell’s mind, making ripples through her thoughts and assumptions.
“How did Ethan die?” And as she asks the question, Nell realizes this is a piece of the puzzle she’s never had, or even wondered about, until now. Again, the maddening need to ask the right question.
“Ethan? Why, he drowned in the pond,” her father says calmly, watching her face. “Right here.”
Nell had assumed he’d been sick, but no.
“Incredibly sad. It was almost never spoken of because you kids would never want to swim in it again, now would you? Remember how much Old Lou used to like to swim? It was almost an act of defiance for her.”
Nell does remember Loulou in a light blue rubber bathing cap and a matching modest one-piece, swimming until well into her eighties. Quincys have a history of being strong swimmers.
“From what I understand he drank quite a bit, so maybe he was drunk at the time. I’ve also heard that he was in pain after his injury. So maybe he took something for it and it was an overdose, for all we know. There was no autopsy or anything. Everyone was too sad. Or maybe he panicked or he had a little stroke. He couldn’t use one of his arms, but people said he swam like that all the time with no problems. It happened at night, which makes me think it must have been somewhat intentional.” For the first time since he’s arrived her father’s face looks less guarded, looks genuinely sad. “They say the next morning when they fished his body out of the pond, every one of the staff cried.” He looks at Nell then. “Of course we couldn’t tell you children any of this.”
“Well sure, but you never told us even after we grew up.”
“That is the danger,” her father says, nodding to himself. “First things are known, but not talked about. Then they’re not talked about so for long that they become unknown.”
“So tell me,” she says. “Tell me what I need to know.”