Family Reunion Read online

  Her daughter was a mystery to Eleanor. Alicia never seemed content. Alicia, fortunate (spoiled?), always wanted more. Eleanor talked it over with her husband and her friends, finally deciding that it was Cliff’s birth, seven years after Alicia was born, that tangled the family’s relationships. Also, twined into Alicia’s life—and gene pool—Eleanor’s own mother had been fluffy and feminine until the moment she passed away. Audrey had worn lace and pastels, sparkling earrings, and several “signature” scents. Alicia had gone to stay with her grandparents during the two difficult times when Eleanor suffered miscarriages. Alicia had been in heaven with her frilly grandmother and had returned home reeking of French perfume and carrying velvet boxes full of costume jewelry.

  When Cliff was born, hale and hearty, Eleanor had wept with joy. Mortimer had made a fuss over having a son and for a while Alicia might have felt slighted. Alicia had never been charmed by her baby brother. She nicknamed him Stinky for the first two years of his life, shocked at what his diaper could contain. Cliff grew into a boisterous, mess-making, rowdy little boy, so it was probably true that Alicia had felt ignored or slighted while Eleanor was occupied with saving Cliff from danger or the house from Cliff. There was, Eleanor remembered, the summer when Eleanor had arranged a Cinderella-themed birthday party for Alicia, only to have to rush off to save Cliff from rappelling down the ’Sconset bluff using the ties of Eleanor’s robes and scarves.

  Alicia had been an indifferent student (but so had Eleanor). Alicia had been terrible at sports in high school (but so had Eleanor). On the other hand, Cliff had excelled academically and on the basketball court, winning full scholarships to several Ivy League colleges. Alicia had begged to go to boarding school when she was fourteen. It was, she told Eleanor and Mortimer, the only thing she wanted in all the world. So they had coughed up the tuition fees and sent her to an all-girls school in Massachusetts, and Alicia had come home on holidays desiring even more. A trip to the Caribbean for Christmas, diamond ear studs, a canopy bed, a Tiffany signature gold bracelet—whatever the poshest girl in her school had.

  Alicia was exasperating, but there were times when she sought Eleanor out and wept in her mother’s arms. Alicia was beautiful, but she didn’t believe that, and the boys she met at the yacht club in the summer flirted with her, but never the boy Alicia had a crush on. Alicia was thrilled when she got to invite a boarding school friend to stay for a week on Nantucket, but she was furious, in private, after the friend left, that Eleanor didn’t have a housekeeper and had expected the girls to help carry bowls and plates to and from the kitchen.

  Where had she come from, this pretty, demanding, commanding girl? In her heart, Eleanor knew she favored Cliff, even when he broke a chair or was caught smoking at ten or broke a window or showed up with Alicia’s lipstick scribbled all over his face. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked Alicia to bring her a diaper or washcloth, or to sit alone watching Sesame Street while Eleanor cuddled and rocked Cliff when he was teething. Eleanor could understand how her glee and pride when Cliff started walking might have made Alicia jealous. After all, she could walk, talk, sing, and do cartwheels. Eleanor tried to give Alicia special attention and praise but Alicia often gave her mother a dead-eye stare, as if she knew Eleanor’s praise was forced. Cliff was big and strong, knockout handsome like his father, and naturally sweet. If he wanted something, he worked for it, experiencing no wounded pride when he mowed the lawn or raked the leaves or even stacked dishes in the dishwasher, a chore Eleanor seldom asked him to do because he was so clumsy and clashed the glasses together. Alicia always balked at doing chores, sulking if she had to put a load of her brother’s laundry in the dryer or carry in the groceries.

  Alicia attended Northeastern University, and for a while Eleanor thought her daughter might develop an interest in teaching or business. Alicia did work for the first time in her life, as a salesgirl at Shreve, Crump and Low, which sold silver ice buckets and other necessities of life. Alicia worked there, she told her mother, because she hoped to meet the right man, and, miraculously, she did. Phillip Paget was a resident at Harvard Medical School. He wasn’t handsome, but he was kind. He wasn’t wealthy, but he was brilliant. Phillip thought Alicia was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Their wedding was a stupendously complicated and expensive event that caused Mortimer to retire to his bedroom with a cold cloth on his forehead.

  For the first few years, Eleanor was relieved. Both Alicia and Phillip were happy. Phillip became a surgeon who focused fiercely when he worked but couldn’t find his car keys when he was at home. Alicia blossomed as a wife, decorating their house, holding cocktail and dinner parties (with temporary help), and after two years of marriage gave birth to their daughter, Ari. Ari’s difficult birth had ended in a C-section and a hysterectomy. Alicia was glad she was relieved of the burden of pregnancy. It had not been a state she’d enjoyed. But she was a good wife and mother, happy in her life, even blissful when the family came to the island most summer weekends to relax. Alicia met old friends, played tennis, sailed, and was thrilled to have Eleanor in charge of Ari.

  Ari.

  Eleanor adored Ari. Ari adored Eleanor. For years, everyone was happy. Now Ari was graduating from college, and Alicia was forty-six, worrying about her age. Alicia was obsessed with money and the status she thought it could buy.

  This Christmas, here at the Nantucket house, Eleanor had given Alicia a check for a thousand dollars. Alicia had spotted the amount and her face fell with disappointment.

  “Sweetie,” Eleanor had asked, “don’t you like your gift?”

  Alicia was almost at the point of tears. “It’s nice, Mom. Thank you. It’s just…I was hoping for more so I could buy a Birkin.”

  Ari spoke up, rolling her eyes. “Mom. You can get an Hermès Kelly online for a thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, used. Or a knockoff,” Alicia shot back.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Eleanor had said. Her daughter made her feel weary.

  Eleanor also worried about Cliff, amazingly handsome, brilliant, hardworking, and wealthy, just like Mortimer had been. Cliff was thirty-nine, and still not married. With his good looks, women had flocked to him in college, but no one stuck. He came to the island most weekends in the summer, but he never brought a woman with him.

  “Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him one summer, “don’t you have a special someone in your life?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Cliff had answered. “You.” He hugged her as they both laughed.

  “Cliff,” Eleanor had asked him this Christmas, “are you dating anyone special?”

  Cliff grinned and shook his head. “So many women, so little time.”

  When Cliff was younger, she’d taken him and his sister to all the best plays, musicals, and ballets in Boston and often in New York. After Mortimer died, Cliff invited Eleanor up to Boston, put her up at the Chilton Club, and took her to plays and operas and out to dinner at posh restaurants where he ordered expensive wines. When he began selling real estate, Cliff often emailed Eleanor photos and information about the gorgeous houses he was selling, and Eleanor responded, glad to have this connection with her son. It was fun to see the interiors of houses, even though she wouldn’t change a board in her own. Because of the weekends and emails, Eleanor felt much more attached to her son than she did to her daughter, who was, even in her forties, worried about her figure and whether or not to have her forehead Botoxed. It took Eleanor months to realize that the closeness she felt with Cliff was about his professional life, not his personal life. But she had tried to stay close. Weren’t men supposed to adore their mothers?

  In her most bitter moods, Eleanor blamed her husband for their son’s and daughter’s obsession with money. But even then, she admitted to herself that she’d influenced them, too. In the early days, she’d left them with a nanny while she tried to be the perfect wife for Mortimer. She’d furnished their Ipswich house
luxuriously and elegantly. She went to a gym to keep herself trim, had her nails and hair done weekly, held the requisite cocktail parties for his colleagues, attended other requisite parties. Because Mortimer expected it, she’d forced her children to attend the appropriate after-school activities: tennis, swimming, archery for Cliff. Tennis, swimming, and ballet for Alicia. She’d taught them manners, yes, and sent them off to boarding schools when they were fourteen, because they’d asked to go.

  Still, when they were small, she had curled up with them at bedtime, reading to them from the classics. She had cuddled them, praised them, tended to their occasional cuts or bruises. And every summer she’d brought them here, to her family’s summer home on the east coast of Nantucket Island.

  Here, on the island, Eleanor had let the kids run free. Mortimer disapproved of skateboards and especially of any sign of sexual awareness. So Eleanor hadn’t told him when she’d sat her embarrassed teenagers down and talked to them about sex. She allowed them to go to beach parties in trucks driven by older teenagers. She didn’t mention it when they came home smelling of weed, and she held Alicia’s hair the night she came home so drunk she was sick. She put Alka-Seltzer in the medicine cabinet. She didn’t mind when they blasted Guns N’ Roses or Aerosmith.

  Her children had turned out just fine.

  Regardless of her parenting, Alicia and Cliff were who they were; they were done, like baked gingerbread cookies. The only family member Eleanor had any chance of being close to was her granddaughter, Arianna. Arianna, who asked people to call her Ari, was graduating from Bucknell University in a week, and she planned to continue her education, starting a master’s in early childhood education at Boston University.

  Where would Ari be for the summer? Eleanor wondered. She knew Alicia complained constantly about the sky-high tuition for boarding school and college, plus all the extras, clothing, textbooks, trips with friends. In fact, now that Eleanor thought about it, she remembered the atmosphere of tension and anger lying just below the surface of her family when they were on the island for Christmas.

  Alicia had wakened Eleanor the morning after Christmas Day. She’d tapped on Eleanor’s door, which made Shadow swiftly disappear under the bed, and slid into the room carrying a tray with two cups of coffee. Alicia had bumped the door shut with her hip.

  “Good morning, Mommy,” Alicia had said sweetly.

  Dear God in Heaven, Eleanor had thought, was her daughter not aware that calling her “Mommy” was a dead giveaway that Alicia was going to ask her for money?

  Eleanor had been awake, reading, trying to put off the moment of rising and facing her family. She slipped her book beneath her covers and sat up, shoving pillows behind her back. “Good morning, darling.” She did love her daughter, and wished she knew what in the world would ever make her happy.

  “It’s a cold day,” Alicia said. She set the tray on Eleanor’s bedside table. “Phillip is building a fire in the living room. I brought you coffee to warm you up before you come down.”

  “Thanks.” Eleanor took a sip. “Mmm. Nice and hot.”

  Alicia settled on the bed near Eleanor. “This has been such a wonderful Christmas, Mommy. Phillip loves his Fitbit. And your check was so generous.”

  “Well, I know it wasn’t as generous as you’d hoped for,” Eleanor said bluntly.

  A stab of guilt pierced her heart as she spoke. Why could she never be tender with her grown daughter?

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Alicia said, pouting, shrugging into herself. “It’s just that these past four years, Phillip and I have been stretched financially. Ari’s tuition is around sixty thousand dollars a year. Imagine! And now—I don’t know if she spoke with you about it—now she wants to get a master’s in early childhood education.”

  “Phillip’s a surgeon,” Eleanor reminded her daughter. “He must make a substantial salary.”

  “Oh, you would think so, wouldn’t you, but recently the insurance companies have absolutely strangled all the doctors and hospitals. I can’t even talk about it, I get so upset.” Tears welled up in Alicia’s gemlike blue-green eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Alicia, but I can’t help with the tuition. I’ve given you all I can afford to give.”

  Alicia wiped the tears from her eyes, rose from the bed, and stalked to the window overlooking the Atlantic. Today the ocean was a surly gray.

  Without looking at Eleanor, Alicia said, “You could if you would sell this house.”

  It wasn’t the first time Alicia had raised this possibility, and Eleanor kept her anger in check. She said what she’d always said before: “I am not selling this house. It was my mother’s house, and now my house, and I intend to live in it until I die, which I hope will not be soon.”

  Alicia was not defeated. “Maybe you could get a reverse mortgage? Have you heard of that?” She beamed at her mother as she walked back to the bed.

  “I’ve heard of it, and I would be insane to do it,” Eleanor said.

  “Then I don’t know what we’ll do,” Alicia said sadly, sinking back down on the quilt. “Even if we resign from our Boston club—which is so important for both Phillip and me—” Alicia paused, waiting for her mother to speak.

  “You could get a job,” Eleanor suggested.

  “A job?” Alicia looked horrified, as if her mother had told her to drink poison.

  “It’s not a stain on your character to work,” Eleanor said gently.

  “Really? Like you would know? Because you never worked in your life!” Alicia’s lovely face crumpled. Tears spilled from her eyes. She strode from the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She had forgotten to take the cups and tray.

  Ah, Eleanor had so many memories like that one, when Alicia lost all her charm when charm didn’t get her what she wanted.

  But Alicia had given Eleanor one miraculous gift: Ari, her granddaughter.

  Eleanor and Ari had been like human magnets from the moment Ari was born. As an infant, when Ari wailed inconsolably, Alicia would either wring her hands or rock the baby so quickly she only cried louder. Eleanor would pick her up, hold her to her shoulder, and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. Ari would relax, sagging against her grandmother, sobbing a little less, then a little less, and finally falling asleep. Eleanor had walked miles carrying the little girl. Alicia had been grateful to her mother for the help, and had been delighted for Eleanor to visit for weeks at a time during Ari’s toddler and “terrible two” years. But when Ari turned three, Alicia sent her to what she considered the preschool, and Eleanor was less useful. Next came school plays, ballet lessons, piano lessons, and playdates with the right girls.

  Fortunately, Nantucket was the place to be in July and August, so Eleanor and Ari continued to enjoy each other’s company, especially on rainy days when Alicia had lunch dates. Then the two played cards and board games and read aloud to one another from Harry Potter. For a couple of years, grandmother and granddaughter became obsessed with making clothes for a pair of adorable small toy mice.

  Those had been heavenly days. But when Ari turned ten, she took sailing and tennis lessons and met friends her own age who came over to hole up in Ari’s bedroom, listening to bubbly tween music while trying on clothes and playing with their increasingly sophisticated phones. Two years later, Ari was on the island for only a few days in the summer. Instead, she attended an all-girls New Hampshire camp where she learned to paddle a canoe and a kayak, play volleyball, softball, and soccer, shoot arrows into targets, and run relay races. It would help Ari learn about team spirit, Alicia said, and Eleanor knew she was right. Still, Eleanor was sad to be separated from her granddaughter, even if it was natural and to be expected.

  After that, when Ari came with her family to Nantucket, she was affectionate with Eleanor, but she was always racing out the door to go to the beach with a pack of friends.

  “Remember what you di
d when you were her age,” Eleanor said out loud as she sat in her bed. “Now stop being silly and make a plan for yourself in your fortunate old age.”

  After a moment, she took up her iPhone and texted a message to her son, her daughter, and her granddaughter.

  Please come to Nantucket and help me celebrate my 70th birthday on June 3! Party favors and cake for the guests!

  She tapped “Send” and found herself smiling. This would give her something fun to think about. She’d ask her cleaner, Penny, to help freshen the bedrooms—well, the entire house, actually. She’d take them all out to Le Languedoc for an extravagant champagne dinner. As for party favors, well, that would take some thought. She’d go exploring in town to find the perfect gift for each person.

  Eleanor snuggled down beneath her quilts—even now, at the end of May, it was cold in the house, but she was too much of a New Englander to turn the heat on. It was meteorological spring. She lay on her side and smiled as Shadow crept over and folded himself against the bend in Eleanor’s knees. Reaching out, she turned off her bedside lamp.

  She closed her eyes, let herself sink into sleep—and had a thought that made her eyes fly open. What if her family thought that by “party favors” she meant giving them the house?

  Two

  It was Ari’s last day at Bucknell University. Her roommates and most of her friends had already left. Her Subaru Forester was almost packed. Her room was empty, down to a few plastic hangers abandoned in the closet.