Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [95]
The Christmas when Hudson was first born, before we went back to L.A., the whole family except for Julia was at Eleanor’s in Connecticut; Christmas is the only time all of us are ever together and I had wanted to take some pictures. Hudson, ten days old, was sleeping in his car seat carrier next to the tree. It was tempting to nurse a sentiment of “first Christmas with Mom gone” and “I have a brand-new baby that Mom will never know,” but I caught myself, because Mom wouldn’t have been here at Eleanor’s house for Christmas even if she was alive, and she might not have met Hudson until he was two and a half anyway. There was some truth to those sentiments but it wasn’t the full truth. Still I felt close to Eleanor and Katharine in a new way. They were happy that I hadn’t missed out on being a mom and we seemed connected now as mothers, though they still made jokes about my capabilities and saw me as a die-hard spaz. At one point that night, as I finished putting a diaper on Hudson and turned my back to throw out the old one, Katharine undid the tab and refastened it.
“It was too tight,” she said, looking at me as if to say, Sorry, but it was.
I wanted a memory I could keep of all this, but I couldn’t find my camera, and I wandered around the house looking for it. A blind woman had lived in the house before Eleanor and her husband, and apparently there were cords running up and down the stairs and through rooms when Eleanor bought it. Whenever I was there I tried to picture a blind woman navigating a three-story, five-bedroom house using only some cord. Seems like you might just want to throw in the towel and get a ranch at a certain point if you were blind, but maybe that’s just my laziness. I popped my head into the dining room, where my brother-in-law Jim and my father were still sitting at the table having a grappa, and I caught “. . . so her uterus was scraped.” I yanked my head out of the room and headed into the kitchen, where Katharine and Eleanor were doing dishes.
“He’s on the abortion thing again,” I said.
“Yuck!” Katharine said. “Can’t he give it a rest? It’s Christmas, for Christ sake.”
Eleanor rubbed a platter with a cloth. “Yeah, I mean, he could wait until Halloween next year, and he could tell all the kids in New Canaan his abortion stories. That’d be fun. Maybe he could work the fall fair with me this year. Actually, we need some new booths. He could work the Great American Abortions Booth.”
To Dad, he’s simply talking about books. He’s been after Jim to represent him in negotiations with Bill Gates. He wants to contact Gates because he’s heard that Gates is a big fan of Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, and that he has the last line from The Great Gatsby lining his library in Redmond, California. My father wants to see if he’ll back putting the real Gatsby mansion, on Sands Point, in preservation. He wants Jim, a partner in a firm in New York who sees my family as a bunch of loser English majors, to broker a deal with Gates’s people, who will surely want to own and preserve the real Gatsby mansion. He’s constantly calling Eleanor’s house asking, “Now, is Jim going to be in the office tomorrow?”
“Yes, Dad, he is.”
“All right, well, let him know I’ll be by tomorrow with my dossier on Fitzgerald, and let me tell you it is going to knock Gates’s socks off.”
“Fine. Go by anytime.”
“Say about two-thirty?”
“Anytime, Dad.”
My father hasn’t made it in yet to meet with his legal team, hungry young lawyers out for their first kill on a meaty literary preservation/landmark contract. He usually calls Eleanor a few days later to apologize for not stopping by the office.
“Will you give Jim my apologies? I’m coming by next Wednesday for sure. I just need to put the finishing touches on this