In any event, Estelle came from Larchmont, New York, and she came from money, and between the two of them Estelle and William had made a home for themselves that left me quietly baffled because it did not feel like a home, it felt more like what it was—room after room of wooden floors—with nice rugs—and wooden sidings on the doorways, just a lot of dark, dark wood, it seemed to me, and then the chandeliers here and there, and a kitchen that was as big as our bedroom—I mean for a New York kitchen it was enormous, with lots of chrome in it and yet that dark wood as well, wooden cupboards and things. A round wooden table in the kitchen and, in the dining room, a long, much bigger wooden table. And mirrors placed around. I knew that it was expensively appointed, the maroon chair by the window was a big upholstered thing, and the couch was a dark brown with velvet cushions on it.
I just never understood the place, is what I am saying.
* * *
—
The night of William’s birthday party I stopped at a corner market and bought three sleeves of white tulips to take there, and remembering this I think how true it is that we choose gifts that we ourselves love. The apartment was filled with people, although not as many as I might have thought, but it makes me nervous, that kind of thing. You start a conversation with someone and another person comes along and you have to interrupt yourself, and then you see their eyes looking around the room as you talk—you know how it is. It was stressful, but the girls—our girls—were really very darling and they were nice to Bridget, I noticed that, and I was glad to see it, because when they speak of her to me they are not always generous, and of course I take their side, that she is a bubblehead and shallow, that sort of thing, but she is just a girl, and a pretty one, and she knows it. And she is also rich. None of these things are her fault, I tell myself that each time I see her. She is no relative of mine. But she is related to our girls, and so that is that.
There were a number of older men who had worked at NYU with William, and their wives, some of them I had been acquainted with from years back, and it was all okay. But tiresome. There was a woman named Pam Carlson who knew William many years ago—they had worked in some lab together—and she was drunk, but I sort of remembered her from way back and she was very talkative to me at the party; she kept talking about her first husband, Bob Burgess. Did I remember him? And I said I was sorry but I didn’t. And Pam, who was very stylish that night with a dress I would never have thought to wear—I mean it fit her snugly though she pulled it off, a sleeveless black dress that I thought remarkably low-cut, but her arms were skinny and looked as though she worked out at the gym even though she must have been my age, sixty-three, and she was kind of touching in her drunken way; she nodded toward her husband, who was standing at a distance, and said she loved him, but she found herself thinking of Bob a lot, did I find that to be true with William as well? And I said, “Sometimes,” and then I excused myself and moved away from her. I had the feeling that I was almost drunk enough myself that I could have really talked to Pam about William, and when it was that I especially missed him, but I did not want to do that, so I went over to where Becka was standing, and she rubbed my arm and said, “Hi Mommy.” And then Estelle gave a toast; she was wearing a dress with sequins implanted in the material and it also draped very nicely around her shoulders; she is an attractive woman with kind of wild brownish red hair which I’ve always liked, and she gave this toast and I thought: She did that so well. But she is an actress by trade.
Becka whispered, “Oh Mom, I have to give a toast!” And I said, “No, you don’t. Why do you think that?”
But then Chrissy gave a toast, and it was really well done, I cannot remember it all, but it was as good as—if not better than—Estelle’s. I remember only that she spoke—at one point—of her father’s work, and all that he had done to help so many students. Chrissy is tall like her father, and she has a composure to her; she always has. Becka looked at me with fear in her brown eyes, and then she murmured, “Oh Mommy, okay.” And she said, raising her glass, “Dad, my toast is that I love you. That is my toast for you. I love you.” And people clapped and I hugged her, and Chrissy came over and the girls were nice to each other, as they—I think—almost always are; they have always been—to my mind—almost unnaturally close, they live two blocks from each other in Brooklyn, and I talked with their husbands for a few more minutes; Chrissy’s husband is in finance, which is a little strange for William and me to think about, only because William is a scientist and I am a writer and so we don’t know people who work in that world, and he is a shrewd man, you can see it in his eyes, and Becka’s husband is a poet, oh dear God the poor fellow, and I think he is self-centered. And then William came over and we all chatted easily for a while until someone called him away, and he bent down and said, “Thank you for coming, Lucy. It was good of you to come.”