The next morning, I took a cab over to Presbyterian to visit Edgar. After the strokes, the doctors had hooked him up to a ventilator and dropped him into a coma in an effort to reduce the swelling in his brain. Since I wasn’t immediate family, I wasn’t allowed to see him.
Never mind all he had was an estranged son who lived in London; never mind I was the only one who’d shown up for the dying man. I must’ve looked miserable, because when I dropped the flowers on the Formica desk, one of the duty nurses took pity on me.
“Ten minutes,” she whispered. “If anybody asks, you’re his granddaughter.”
It was dark in the room, and Edgar’s bed was cranked to the highest level, so that his pale face was almost even with mine. I brushed back a lock of his hair. Leaned close and kissed his forehead.
“Edgar, it’s Pip.” I felt tears push behind my eyes but sniffed them back. “You don’t look so hot, mister. I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while.” I straightened. Drew in a shaky breath. “So, Frances got married. Again. Yesterday, as a matter of fact. To Beno?t Jaffe. She didn’t tell me, she just went off and did it. She went to California with him, and I just . . . I don’t know. I don’t like him. I think he’s a parasite.”
I caught my breath, not sure I could go on.
“You have to be okay, Edgar, because Frances can’t function without you. And this guy, Beno?t? If he ditched his ex-wife for Mom, he’s got to be penniless. Completely dependent on Frances. You have to get better and help me figure out what to do. Also, there’s this guy, Asa. Frances’s assistant . . .”
I felt the tears again, hot and threatening.
“Did you hire him? He was in her office last night. On her computer. What is going on? Has she gone completely around the bend?”
The shush-shush-click of the ventilator filled the room. I smoothed his hair again.
“I threw him out. Told him not to come back as long as I was in the apartment. But he’s trouble, I can tell you that right now.”
The tears dripped down my cheeks and my nose. I sniffed mightily.
“I know. I should call her. But Edgar . . . it’s been too long, and there’s so much between us. I’m just so fucking out-of-my-mind angry . . .” My voice broke.
I might say something I regret forever.
I might cut all ties. For good.
“We need you to get well, Edgar,” I whispered, suddenly prickling with shame that I’d popped into the ICU and dumped my problems on a comatose man. Everybody knew you were supposed to be positive and upbeat in these situations. God, I was turning into Frances.
I kissed him, then brushed away the wetness left behind on his wrinkled face. “Don’t worry about Mom, okay, Edgar? I’ll take care of that. Right now, I need you to get well so I can hear you complain about how shitty the young bartenders are at Bemelmans. You hear me? I need . . . I need to hear you laugh, one more time . . .” I turned, fled the room, then stumbled down the fluorescent-lit corridors until I found a bank of elevators.
Back in the lobby, I sank onto one of the plastic benches near the automatic glass doors of the entrance. I dropped my head in my hands. My gut was still twisting, the pinpricks stabbing me all over, but I barely even noticed. All I could think of was Edgar.
He was the person who’d sat me down on my thirteenth birthday and told me he knew how hard it was to be Frances Ashley’s daughter. He told me I could come to him, no matter what, for anything. He was the one who convinced me that, even though I wasn’t a great student, I should go to college and major in global and urban education, a decision that ended up being the smartest thing I’d ever done. NYU was where I got my first subway card, ventured into my first laundromat, and met my best friend.
Edgar was the one who reminded me of Frances’s good points when I wanted to kill her. He was the one who kept me sane. My foundation. But now . . . now he was lying unresponsive in a hospital bed, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.
It was the fortieth anniversary of Kitten, I remembered, scrubbing at my swollen eyes. The pressure of planning such a monumental event had worn him down. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He wasn’t strong. He couldn’t handle things—stress or Frances—like he used to.
My eyes unfocused, and my mind rewound. I visualized life—my life, Edgar’s life, Frances’s—as it might’ve been, without Kitten. A carefree, rose-tinged existence where I was just a regular girl with a regular mom and a kindly uncle-figure like Edgar. No rabid fans. No strange trips featuring a revolving door of strangers. Just a family who loved each other.
And then the flecks in the blue tile at my feet swam into view, and the fantasy dissolved. Wishing was a child’s game. I couldn’t change the past. Frances had written her book and, for better or worse, changed all our lives.
It had taken her a mere two months in the summer of 1975, after her sophomore year in college. She was working as a housekeeper at a bed-and-breakfast on one of Georgia’s sea islands to earn some extra cash. She was from Macon, Georgia. Her parents weren’t rich, and Frances had held jobs since she was a kid. She was used to the hustle.
Kitten was just a little something she dashed off in her spare time between toilet cleanings. A little something that the eminent Drake, Richards and Weems published the following year to rave reviews. It wasn’t her only book—she was no Emily Bront? or Margaret Mitchell—but it was the most famous.
I’d never read it. I also managed to make it all the way through high school without seeing either movie, automatically clicking past them whenever they showed up on basic cable. Mom made it easy enough for me to pretend Kitten didn’t exist—not to mention her other work. She wrote nonstop, but she never talked about her books with me. That part of her life was work, and she was adamant that work stay separate from family. I wasn’t Frances’s fan, I was her daughter.
My freshman year at NYU, a rare wave of curiosity crashed over me, and I spent one Sunday afternoon researching my mother’s famous book online. I found a scathing write-up at Kirkus in their vintage reviews. More reviews, from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, popped up. They all read pretty much the same—250-word paragraphs blasting the book’s utilitarian writing with a sledgehammer plot.
Apparently, Kitten fans didn’t give a rip what reviews said. I found dozens of elaborate websites where readers wrote their own lengthy odes to the book. As well as speculated endlessly about all the sequels, prequels, and related materials.