“Finally! Someone to do all my thinking for me!” Ivy mimed plucking her head off her shoulders and handing it to Bucky.
“Bucky,” Eleanor said, straining to enunciate, “I want to thank you for making my sister so happy.”
“My life will have been a failure if spent making your sister happy,” Bucky boomed. “I won’t rest until the sun and the moon redden with shame knowing Ivy outshines them both.”
“We’re flying to Italy to have me fitted for white gloves,” Ivy said. “If you’re sitting in the front row, the gloves have to be over the elbow. Don’t you love it?”
“It’s on the front row, darling,” Bucky said. “One sits on the front row.”
Joe had a nickname for Ivy: “the Monstrance.” On certain Catholic holy days, the Eucharist was displayed in a golden-sunburst monstrance where worshipful eyes gazed at it around the clock. Joe, an altar boy, had often been tasked with the graveyard shift. In Bucky, this living monstrance, Ivy, had found her perpetual adoration.
Eleanor’s shoulders melted. Something deep in her jaw loosened. Ivy was going to be okay.
Their mother had died at St. Vincent’s. Those final visits, once so vivid in Eleanor’s mind, had faded with time. The old woman in the next bed being wheeled out for hip surgery, then wheeled back in thirty minutes later when they didn’t have the right instruments. The bag of dark urine hanging from the bed rail. Their mother, the Broadway star, dry-mouthed and distant. On one of her last visits, Eleanor had brought a picture she’d drawn: Tess with a grown-up Ivy and Eleanor, all three improbably wearing wedding dresses. “This is lovely, Eleanor,” her mother whispered. “But it won’t work.”
Eleanor cherished the memories of her mother: being picked up at school by Tess in her dance clothes and blue fedora, fringe purse swinging at her hip; listening to Tess, Gigi, and Alan gossip outrageously about the other dancers in the company, Eleanor not quite following but oh, the thrill of joining in the laughter; the parties that ended with everyone standing around the piano singing show tunes; the Cornish game hens for dinner; the exotic scent of Erno Laszlo facial products; the dazzling contents of her jewelry drawer; the lazy afternoons at the Bowlmor.
But these recollected moments also carried extreme guilt. Eleanor was old enough to remember how much Tess enjoyed her company, how unhurried their moments were together. Ivy remembered only the abandonment.
“Please don’t hold it against me,” Bucky told Eleanor, “but the future Mrs. Fanning and I must beg our exit. The Times-Picayune has arrived.”
With Bucky gone, ruddy-cheeked Joe joined Eleanor.
“Wow,” he said, the pillow hitting his back in the sweet spot.
“I know.”
“Make room, make room.” Lorraine, Bucky’s second cousin, nestled between them. “Get that rat off you.” She pushed a snoozing Mary Marge onto the floor and waved over some champagne.
“Can you believe how seriously everyone takes this?” Lorraine said of the scrapbooks. She opened up to her year. There she was, the Queen of Khaos. “Look how thin I was! I know what y’all are thinking, it’s moneyed tomfoolery, and you’re not wrong, but I tell you, it’s a gas!”
Across the room, Bucky arranged Ivy’s train for a photographer. Behind them hung a portrait of Bucky’s ancestor P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who ordered the first shot fired in the War Between the States.
“Oh, Barnaby!” Lorraine said with a mixture of fondness and spite. “Anytime he vexes you, and he will vex you, just remember, he’s a Troubled Troubadour. It’s a nickname we gave him. We were in the car when Kurt Cobain shot himself. The announcer came on the radio and said, ‘Troubled troubadour Kurt Cobain has been found dead’… The name just stuck, Troubled Troubadour. He’s not so bad once you realize it gives him great comfort to know where he stands.”
It was Irish coffee now, and who wasn’t comforted by knowing where they stood? The birds with the cascading tail feathers on the wallpaper, the butter-colored ceiling, the gold mirrors and jute rugs: the effect wasn’t pretentious, it was comforting, just like the blue-and-white striped love seat. Who would have thought blue-and-white stripes went with butter and birds and gold and jute, but it worked. So did being looked in the eye when people spoke to you, and teens in tuxes conversing with adults. Why not waiters in tails and white gloves? Why not Bucky’s mother and her friends in decades-old dresses, sun-damaged skin, frosted lipstick, and low chunky heels? Why not flowers from the garden and dinged julep tumblers and food that was good but not great? When Dixieland music started playing, the splash of the trumpet and belch of the tuba confused Eleanor at first because it was clearly live but not coming from inside. Then, faintly through the garden windows, Eleanor made them out: joyous black kids in short sleeves and neckties playing for the party, outside so it wouldn’t be too noisy. They could see in but Eleanor couldn’t see out. Why not that too?