Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

She was a really nice woman. I didn’t pay any attention to her at first, she was so pale and dim and self-effacing. She looked a lot like Laurie, but she didn’t have her striking black-and-white coloring or her energy. When you walked into a room full of family, Laurie and Dan were the first people you noticed, and Celia was about the last.

Well, Lennie’d told me she was awfully intelligent, and when I finally started to talk to her, I found out he was right. Celia’d read just about everything, even in my field. All of Proust and Colette and Camus, for instance, and mostly in French. Balzac, though she didn’t appreciate him. Gross, he seemed to her — “earthbound” was her term — and greedy, and too interested in money. But that’s la condition humaine, like he said, right?

About all she ever did was read, and work in the garden a little. I never saw her cook or sew or clean or anything like that. Of course they had a live-in housekeeper, and Celia was already ill when I met her.

You couldn’t tell, except that she always seemed tired.

I think she knew she didn’t have much time left. She always used to ask me what’d been published in Paris lately that was interesting; and when I recommended something she’d call Scribner’s bookstore in New York and order it sent that day, first-class. I thought that was kind of silly and extravagant back then, but afterward I realized she’d been afraid she might miss something otherwise.

The infuriating thing is, the kind of cancer she had is curable now, it has only about a ten percent fatality rate. If she’d been born twenty years later she’d probably be alive today, and maybe she’d have accomplished something too, because she had such a remarkable mind.

I figure that Celia knew everything, really. Only she couldn’t do anything about it, at least it seemed like that to her.

For instance, she saw that Lennie and I were going to have a rough ride together, but that we’d both survive it one way or the other. And I’m sure she knew Lennie’s father was sleeping with some woman from his office, who turned out to be Marcia. And she knew Dan couldn’t stand her being ill.

He despised weakness, you see. Lennie inherited that from him. Except the kind of weakness Lennie despises isn’t so much physical or moral as intellectual. He can’t stand stupidity, even in kids, and you know all kids are stupid sometimes. I remember once his shouting at Roo, “Why must you be so childish?” But the thing was, she was a child, she was only about four then.

Yes. I never thought about it before, but I think Laurie despised weakness, too.

All kinds. But with her it was her own weakness as well as other people’s — probably more than other people’s.

No. She had a lot more drive and will than her mother, but she didn’t have her father’s stamina. Celia said to me once, “I wish Laurie were a little bit more like you, a little tougher.”

No, after Dan married Marcia we didn’t see them so much. We’d always go to New York for Thanksgiving, though, and Laurie and Garrett would usually be there.

It wasn’t very comfortable. Lennie didn’t get on with his dad, like I said, and Laurie couldn’t stand Marcia.

Well, she can be pretty hard to take, but she’s got a good heart. She still sends my kids presents on their birthdays, even though they’re grown up. Ridiculous presents, mostly. My youngest, who’s in the Peace Corps in Africa, got a five-pound box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates from her last February, because she used to like them as a little kid. Of course it was congealed into a kind of chocolate soup by the time it arrived, but you have to appreciate the impulse.

Yes, every year till Laurie left Garrett. And we went to stay with them a couple of times on the Cape.

It was all right. The main trouble was, pretty soon we had two small kids, and they didn’t have any. Roo was always knocking something valuable over; and our Celia was a baby, and you know how babies cry, just for exercise sometimes.

Yes, I met Hugh Cameron a couple of times, not on the Cape, but later, before he and Laurie settled in Florida.

He was a child, that’s what I thought. And was going to be one permanently, you could see that even then. One of those innocents who make trouble wherever they go. Men like that, they ought to glow in the dark, as a warning to women.

Yes. They were like children, both of them, playing hooky from real life.

No. She made me awfully impatient sometimes, but I knew that in a way it wasn’t her fault. She was brought up wrong. Her mother was wonderful in her way, and Dan was all right too, but he was the original macho man. He liked sports and parties and excitement and bossing women around. But he was generous, and he was really fond of our kids; they still miss him.

The thing was, they were your typical patriarchal couple: Dan ran everything, and Celia just drifted around him. So naturally Laurie grew up assuming that men would take care of her. When she finally tried to stand on her own feet and take care of herself, it was too late. That’s what I think.

Yes. Something did happen to her as a kid. When she was about ten, I think. It was at a Parents’ Day picnic at the country day school she went to. Laurie sort of wandered away and got lost, and when they finally found her she was hiding all crouched down in a corner of a little wooden playhouse in the nursery-school yard, without any panties.

She hadn’t been raped or anything, I know that. The family doctor said so. But she’d been just about scared out of her wits.

Nobody ever found out what happened exactly. Laurie wouldn’t say; she would hardly talk for weeks. There was a terrific uproar, and her parents took her out of that school and sent her somewhere else.

It was bad for all of them. One problem was, everybody in the family blamed themselves for not watching Laurie more carefully. The one who blamed himself worst was my ex-husband. His dad had told him to go and find his sister, but he didn’t want to be bothered, so instead he just climbed up the fire escape behind the school and read an Ellery Queen mystery.

No; I don’t believe that people are ruined by one bad childhood experience. I mean, everybody’s got something they can blame their whole life on if they want to. I got knocked down and stepped on, they can say, and I’m just going to lie here in the mud for sixty years so everybody can see how badly I was hurt. I think you choose your own life. Events happen to you, sure, but it’s up to you to decide what they mean.

Well, if you’re really haunted by something, I think you should go to a good shrink, get it out of your system.

No, Laurie never did, not that I know of. It wasn’t her kind of thing. But of course that was a choice too.

11

IN THE MAUVE AFTERGLOW of a warm December sunset, Polly Alter stood by the registration desk of a women-only guest house in Key West, dizzy with heat and travel fatigue. This morning in New York everything had been gray and gritty, like a bad mezzotint. She’d woken with such a sick, heavy cold that she called to cancel her flight, but all she could get on the phone was the busy signal. Giving up, she dragged herself and her duffel bag out to the terminal. There, aching and snuffling, she shuffled onto a plane and was blown through the stratosphere from black-and-white to technicolor. Five hours later she climbed out into a steamy, glowing tropical afternoon with coconut palms and blue-green ocean, exactly like a cheap travel poster.

It wasn’t only the scenery that was unreal. Most of the people she’d seen, beginning with the taxi driver, were weird. They moved and spoke in slow motion, as if something were a little wrong with the projector. Lee, the manageress of Artemis Lodge, was so slowed down she seemed drugged. It had taken her five minutes to find Polly’s reservation, and now she couldn’t find the key to Polly’s room.