Patty had turned and run into her bedroom. After a few minutes, Mr. Delaney’s footsteps were heard going down the stairs, and her mother came into her room, a housecoat around her, and her mother said, “Patty, I swear to God you must never tell a soul, and when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
That her mother’s breasts were so big Patty would not have imagined, seeing them unharnessed and swinging over that man.
—
Within days, horrible scenes occurred in a home that had once been so placid and ordinary that Patty had not considered it so. Patty did not, in fact, tell anyone what she had seen—she wouldn’t have known what words to use—but she never returned to Mr. Delaney’s class, and then—oh, it was so sudden!—her mother, after exploding in a confession, moved into a tiny apartment in town. Patty went to see her there only once, and there was a blue beanbag chair in the corner. The entire town talked of her mother’s affair with Mr. Delaney, and to Patty it felt like her head had been cut off and was moving in a different direction from her body. It was the oddest thing, and it went on and on, that feeling. She and her sisters watched as their father wept. They watched as he swore, and became stony-faced. He had been none of these things before, not a weeper, or a swearer, or a stony-faced man. And he became all these things, and the family—they had all just been innocently sitting in a boat on a lake, it seemed like—was gone, turned into something never imagined. The town talked and talked. Patty, being the youngest, had to wait it through the longest. By Christmas, Mr. Delaney had left town, and Patty’s mother was alone.
When Patty began to go to the cornfields with the boys in her class, and even much later, when she had real boyfriends and she did it with them, there was always the image of her mother, shirtless, braless, her breasts swaying as that man grabbed one in his mouth— No, Patty could not stand any of it. Her own excitement caused her always terrible, and terrifying, shame.
Angelina was still slim and youthful-looking, although she was a few years older than Patty. Yet when Patty saw them both briefly in the mirror at Sam’s Place, she thought that she, Patty, looked much younger—and that Angelina looked drawn. Right away Patty was going to tell Angelina about the book by Lucy Barton. But as soon as they sat down, Angelina’s green eyes swam with tears, and Patty reached across the table and touched her friend’s hand. Angelina held up a finger, and in a minute she was able to speak. “I just hate both of them,” she said, and Patty said she understood. “He said to me, ‘You’re in love with your mother,’ and I was so surprised, Patty, I just stared at him—”
“Oh boy.” Patty sighed and sat back.
A few years ago Angelina’s mother, at the age of seventy-four, had left town—had left her husband—to marry someone in Italy almost twenty years younger than she was. Patty had tremendous sympathy for Angelina regarding this. But she wanted to say right now: Listen to this! Lucy Barton’s mother was awful to her, and her father—oh dear God, her father…But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.
Patty had been dying to tell her friend this, but she sensed now how paltry—almost nutty—her words would seem. And so Patty listened about Angelina’s children, in high school, almost ready to fly the coop, she listened about the mother in Italy, how she emailed all her girls—Angelina had four sisters—and how Angelina was the only one who had not gone to see her mother, but Angelina was thinking about it, she might go this summer.
“Oh, go,” said Patty. “Do go. I think you should. I mean, she’s old, Angelina.”
“I know.”
Patty was aware of how much Angelina wanted to talk about herself, and yet this didn’t disturb Patty, she merely noticed it. And she understood. Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves. Except Sibby had been interested in her, and she had been terribly interested in him. This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.
A while later, well into her second glass of white wine, Patty told Angelina about Lila Lane, but she said only the Fatty Patty stuff, and how they all thought she was a virgin. And then she said, “You know, Lucy Barton wrote—”
“Oh, for the love of God,” said Angelina. “You’re as pretty as ever, Patty. Honest to God, to have to listen to that. No one calls you that, Patty.”