Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“And that’s how she got pneumonia?”

“Mm-hm. See, she was impatient, and she went out to the reef in February before the sea had warmed up. And then she stayed in too long. Only I figure probably she didn’t realize it, because she was so strung out. She caught a bad chill. But she didn’t like doctors, so by the time she went to one it was too late.”

“And you weren’t here.”

“No. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have left her alone, the state she was in, but I thought I had to be a good little boy and meet my classes.” Mac almost groaned with sarcasm. “I didn’t even know Lorin was in the hospital till the day before she died. And by the time I got home it was all over.”

“I’m sorry,” Polly murmured, silently apologizing for everything she had thought and said over the last months about Hugh Cameron’s desertion of Lorin.

“That’s okay. It was a long time ago, and, like I said, we hadn’t been getting on all that well.”

Had he said that? Polly thought not, but she didn’t challenge him.

“Only somehow that made it worse, you know?” Mac looked at her. “Hey, Polly,” he said, putting one arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” she said, wondering if it were true. “Well, I guess I feel a little awful. I didn’t know —”

“Nobody told you, huh.”

Polly shook her head. In her mind, Lorin Jones floated facedown in the salty aquamarine water of the Gulf, her long thin legs and arms spread in the shape of a pale star; her dark seaweed hair sloshed in the waves. Below her a school of little pale fish swam through branching coral. Her huge wet star-lashed eyes were wide open behind a snorkeling mask edged with white rubber. They did not blink, though, because she was dead.

What the hell’s the matter with you? Polly scolded herself. Why should you feel like crying? Lorin Jones didn’t drown, she died in the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital. Anyhow, you don’t like her. “It’s stupid, I —” she said. Choking on the last word, she stood up and turned away.

“ ’S okay,” Mac said. He came over to Polly and put his arms around her.

“I didn’t —” She choked up again, recovered. “I mean, I didn’t even know her.” No, an internal voice said, but you’re planning to ruin her reputation, aren’t you? Pretty soon Lorin’s name will be mud, because of the dirt and muck you’re planning to spread on it, out of envy and spite and sexual jealousy. She’ll be dead and disgraced, isn’t that the idea? And you’ll be alive and successful. Isn’t that the idea? A spasm of self-revulsion shook her. Forgive me, she whispered silently to Lorin Jones. I won’t betray you, I won’t hurt you; it was a mistake.

“Sorry. I’m all right now,” she said, blinking.

Mac kissed her lightly, then looked around the raw, empty, darkening house. “Hey, this is sort of a dreary scene,” he said, checking his watch. “I tell you what, let’s get out of here and find ourselves some conch chowder, okay?”

“Okay. But I’d better get back to the guest house first and clean up,” Polly heard herself say; she was surprised how normal her voice sounded.

“Right. You do look kind of as if you’d been rolling around on the floor. But I don’t mind.” Mac hugged her again.

Polly held herself stiff for a moment; then she leaned wholly and passionately into the kiss. You might as well enjoy it, she told herself, almost weeping. You haven’t much time.

RUTH MARCH,

photographer

Yeah, I wanted to talk to you, like I told Dad. He says you’ve been getting all kinds of bad news about Aunt Laurie, really shitty low-grade stuff. So I wanted to even up the score.

Sure, it’s true she died when I was thirteen. And the last time I saw her I was only eleven and a half. But I remember her just fine. I ought to, because she like changed my life.

What she did was — But you have to understand how it all happened, the whole scene.

Okay, it was Christmas vacation, the last year before my parents split up, and we were all down visiting Granddad and Marcia in New York. It was always kind of uncomfortable there; we didn’t go too often, and we never stayed very long. Half the time they were away somewhere, traveling in Europe or whatever. Granddad was a restless type; well, I dig that, I’m kind of like him.

The way it always seemed to me back then, Dad didn’t have a real family; not like my mother’s folks in Brookline, who’ve lived in the same house for forty years, with all these uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors around. Kids like their families to stay put, you know; I can see it already in mine, and he’s only three.

Well, Dad’s mother and aunt were down in Florida, and all he had left in New York was his father and Marcia, and his sister, Laurie, who was my half aunt. That always seemed kind of weird to me, you know. There was a family joke that when I was real little I asked Ma, which half of Laurie was my aunt?

I don’t know. I guess I thought it could be the left side of her, or maybe the part above the waist. I mean that wouldn’t have surprised me. Even a little kid could see she wasn’t like other people.

For instance, she wasn’t like any of the other women in my family. She wasn’t really Jewish, only the part that doesn’t count according to Jewish law, and she didn’t know anything about Jewish things. Then she was real thin, not like the rest of us, and she had all this long shiny hair that always looked a little damp. She never said much, and she had a kind of drifty manner, as if she wasn’t even there in the room half the time. If she did notice Celia or me she didn’t talk to us the way most adults talk to kids. I don’t think she knew what a kid was exactly.

Anyhow, we were all there in the apartment that afternoon. It’d started raining hard, and we couldn’t go to the park, so Marcia got out some paper and colored pencils to keep me and Celia occupied while the men watched television and she and Mom made dinner.

You know how kids get typed, one is a jock and the other is a musician, whatever? Well, everybody in my family was good at words except me, so the idea was that because I liked drawing, I might grow up to be an artist like Aunt Laurie. The trouble was, I couldn’t really draw worth a damn, and at eleven I was just finding that out.

I was trying to make a picture of two horses I’d seen trotting in the park that morning, only I couldn’t get them right. I got more and more frustrated, and started jabbing the colored pencils into the paper. It was one of those soft cheap drawing pads they sell in the ten-cent store; it would have been okay for crayons, but Marcia’s pencils were too hard for it. I kept ripping holes in the sheets, then tearing them out, crushing them up, and throwing them around the room. Finally I got so mad I started a fight with my sister.

Aunt Laurie didn’t seem to notice anything much, but while Mom was calming us down she put on her duffel coat and went out without saying a word to anybody. About an hour later she came back, dripping wet, and handed me a plastic shopping bag, and in it, all wrapped up, was this expensive camera, a Leica.

Well, the honest truth is, nobody was much pleased. Mom thought the camera was much too expensive and complicated for an eleven-year-old, and she was right, too. “Oh, Laurie, you shouldn’t have!” That was what she said, and she meant it.

Aunt Laurie told her it was a Christmas present. That didn’t go over very well, because nobody there celebrated Christmas, only Hanukkah. And besides, they all thought, if Aunt Laurie was going to give me a present she should’ve bought something for Celia too. Celia thought so too, naturally, though she didn’t whine about it or anything. But then it wasn’t as if she’d wanted a camera.