Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

Lorin Jones also had a half brother she didn’t particularly get on with as a child, Polly recalled, feeling a faint echo of her old shiver of identification. Only it was worse for me, she thought: I had two of them.

When Polly was fourteen Bob Milner won a prize for a textbook on physics, and a reporter from the Times-Union came to interview him. Polly was at a friend’s house that afternoon, only two blocks away, but nobody called her to come home and be in the photo of Professor Milner and his family, or even mentioned her in the article. Bob said he was sorry about it afterward, when it was too late. “That’s okay,” Polly told him. “I’m not related to you anyhow.”

Her mother was different: Polly felt related to her, though she couldn’t understand why she liked Bob and the boys so much — didn’t she see how boring they all were? Bea at least wasn’t boring; she sometimes made surprisingly shrewd, even witty comments on people and events. But she was hopelessly unliberated and unambitious. She was still grateful to Bob Milner for marrying her and taking her to a dreary city like Rochester; she still couldn’t get over how nice he was compared to most men.

And the infuriating thing was that Bob was nice. He had always tried to do the right thing by Polly, she had to admit that. He paid to send her through college and graduate school; he never favored her half brothers over her when it came to presents or music lessons or trips. Of course, one reason he was so nice was that he’d always had everything his own way at home; Bea saw to that.

For instance, Bob Milner had been allowed to name his sons Albert and Hans after the two physicists he most admired; Bea had no input in the selection, any more than she’d had in the selection of Polly’s name — her father’s grandmother had also been called Paula. Once, when she was in college, Polly had asked her mother if she’d minded having her husbands choose the names of all her children. At first Bea had seemed not to know what Polly was talking about; then she smiled and rested her hands on the old treadle sewing machine at which she was piecing an ill-designed patchwork quilt. “No, it never occurred to me,” she said, shifting the folds of material. “But I don’t think names are all that important, do you?”

“I think they’re very, very important,” Polly had replied; at the time she had been thinking of changing her name to Stephanie, for no good reason that she could remember now.

Except maybe that was why I wanted to call my kid Stephen, she thought. I wanted him to be the kind of person I thought a Stephen or a Stephanie was then, probably because of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: independent and artistic and brave.

And what kind of person was Stevie now? Polly sighed. At the moment, she had no idea.

It had been a real dismal scene, as he would have put it, ever since he got to Rochester. She was stunned when she saw him loping along the airport corridor toward her, looking inches taller in his new cowboy boots, and transformed outwardly into a Western preppie. His unruly brown hair (so like her own, and before always about the same length) had been cropped and tamed, and he wore an unfamiliar red ski parka covered with zippers and flaps and strips of Velcro.

“Oh, Stevie, baby!”

“Hi, Mom.”

Not only was his greeting constrained, for the first time in his life Stevie seemed to suffer rather than return Polly’s hug and kiss. On the way to her mother’s house he suffered rather than answered her questions. He hardly looked at her, but kept staring at the backs of Polly’s half brother Alby and Alby’s new wife, Carolee, in the front seat. Maybe her son was abashed by Carolee’s presence, though strangers had never made him shy before: on the way to La Guardia in August he’d had an animated conversation with the cabbie about tornadoes.

At home it was no better. Polly had been looking forward to this moment for months, but she was unable to break through Stevie’s reserve. At her suggestion he sat in the kitchen while she made the walnut cake he had always liked; he cracked nuts for it and licked the bowl, but his conversation was a series of monosyllables and platitudes. “Yeah ... No ... Sure, I’m all right... Dad’s all right... School’s all right... No problem,” he kept saying. Her beloved child, whose lively volubility had always been her joy, had become a polite, inarticulate stranger.

At dinner, though, he fell into the familiar noisy, banal style of conversation at the Milners’, dominated as usual by the men. He and Bob and Bob’s sons compared computer games and sci-fi films; they traded stories of mountain climbing and white-water canoeing, while Bea and Carolee provided a cheering section. Afterward Stevie helped the men wash up and then followed Alby and Hans into the study to play poker. It was always that way in this house: you practically never had a private conversation. She might as well resign herself to it; after all, tomorrow she and Stevie would be leaving for New York, and she’d have him to herself for two days.

She certainly hadn’t had him to herself yet, Polly thought the following evening, clearing the table while her mother scraped and rinsed the plates, as they had done in this same kitchen every Thanksgiving since Polly was nine. Bea Milner had a new dishwasher now, and leaves had been added to the dining table as the family grew, but otherwise everything was almost eerily the same as it had been thirty years ago. Presumably, some of Bea’s dreary forget-me-not china must have broken and her flowered linen dishtowels worn out from time to time, but they had been replaced with similar china and towels.

Meanwhile, Bob and his sons and Stevie were watching football on TV, just as they did every year, and Polly and her mother were cleaning up, even though they had also cooked dinner. The men usually pitched in after meals, but on Thanksgiving they were always exempt. Polly had resigned herself to this; it was something else that riled her now: the fact that Alby’s wife, Carolee, was in there watching football with the men.

“I don’t see why Carolee doesn’t have to help us,” she complained, covering a Pyrex dish of cranberry sauce with plastic wrap. “After all, she’s not a guest anymore, she’s part of the family now, isn’t she?”

“Mm, yes,” Bea agreed placidly. She was a small, sturdy, rather pretty woman with tinted and waved light-brown hair and a more lined, less defined version of Polly’s features. Her large round eyes were pale rather than dark, and there was something neat and birdlike about her movements. “But you know, dear, she’s a tremendous football fan. I think she gets just as excited by a game as Alby or Hans, don’t you?”

“I guess so,” Polly agreed; she could hardly do otherwise, when her sister-in-law’s cheerleader shouts could be heard all the way to the kitchen. They were even louder in the dining room when she went back for a load of dessert plates. As she stacked them she thought how apt her roles and Bea’s were. She brought her mother complaints and irritations, like soiled dishes, and Bea, with her mild wash of resignation and explanation, patiently sluiced the mess away. Even though she saw through the process, it still made Polly feel calmer.

“I do really feel Carolee is one of the family now, you know,” her mother said as Polly returned.

“Oh, yeah,” Polly replied; in her opinion Carolee, who was a scientist and a jock, was all too much like a Milner.

“I think she’s going to be good for Alby. Of course, she’s not as brilliant as he is; but she’s an awfully nice girl, don’t you think?” Bea helped herself to a couple of grapes from one of the plates Polly had just brought in; her eating habits were also birdlike.