Lorna Mott Comes Home Read online

  Tant pis—too bad, so much for that—she was doing it. And now it was time to think of the future. She would prove, to herself if to no one else, that you can make a new life at any age.

  As she was climbing into the train, Armand-Loup telephoned her cell and said in a cold voice, “Chérie, tu as oublié ton argenterie.” She’d left the sterling silverware she’d taken with her from California when she married him and moved to France. He must have realized she might not be coming back for a while.

  Tant pis.

  2

  We must be prepared for things turning out differently than we expect.

  In the plane to New York, she had a plump, permanent-waved, chatty seatmate who pried things out of her, for instance that she had grandchildren. Lorna loved her grandchildren but didn’t think of herself as a “granny,” which was how the woman next to her put it. “I’m a granny,” she said. “How about you? How old are yours?” Lorna had to think: it changed all the time. Julie must be about twenty, twenty-one, and Curt’s twins, what, four? She didn’t inquire about the ages of this other woman’s grandchildren and, though she wasn’t in denial, did wonder if her own age and grandmotherhood would detract or add to her authority as an art critic. For a man, it would add, or be irrelevant; for a woman, she didn’t know.

  “Where are you from?” persisted the irritating seatmate. “Were you on vacation?”

  “Originally San Francisco,” Lorna said, “but I’ve been living overseas.” She had learned over the years to say “overseas,” like a military wife, instead of “I live abroad” or “I live in Europe,” which could seem elitist or excite the suspicion you were CIA.

  “Are you happy there?”

  Lorna thought it an odd, unanswerable question, and rather nosy, too. What would most people say? Yes, when they really weren’t, or no, though they were? Did people even know? Happiness was like one of those floaters in your eye that you can never focus on, intangible and fleeting. But she knew she was happy at the idea of wonderful America, its big mountains and expansive generosity—happy to be going there, to be home again permanently after all these years away.

  * * *

  —

  In the twenty years she’d lived in France, Lorna had often been to America, to San Francisco to visit her children or, in the first years, to New York or Massachusetts or even South Dakota to give lectures, keeping her professional life going. Then her lecture engagements had begun to taper off, almost without her noticing. So, today, it wasn’t exactly culture shock, arriving in New York, it was the new finality of her plan to stay that made her appreciate pleasant American things—the cheery man in customs who said “Welcome home” to people in the U.S.-citizen passport line; drinking fountains; the smiling face of the handsome new president, Obama, on posters in the reception hall.

  She felt a surge of sentimental patriotism, of oneness with her native land. America was more suited to her temperament than the exigent rectitude of formal, hidebound France. She was home; maybe she’d been homesick these twenty years. Missing the open faces, enchiladas, Japanese cars.

  She would postpone the unwelcome task of giving the news of her whereabouts to the children and facing their questions. But she did call Margaret, Peggy, her oldest child, who lived in Ukiah, California, and was recently divorced from her husband, Dick Willover, a man whom both Lorna and Ran (Randall Mott, Peggy’s father) had been crazy about at first. Tant pis. Lorna predicted Peggy would be the most understanding. She telephoned her from the hotel.

  “Peg, it’s Mother. Are you there?”

  “Mom! Where are you?”

  “I’m in New York, honey.” How to explain? “I’m on my way to San Francisco, then Bakersfield, where I give a lecture. I should be there by Wednesday. I’ll explain it all in the fullness of time.”

  “Are you coming here? Is Armand-Loup with you?”

  “No. Peg—I’ll be staying in San Francisco awhile. Armand and I are taking some time off. Don’t mention it to Hams or…”

  Predictably, Peggy remonstrated. “Time off? Are you leaving him? That’s terrible, Mother. Are you sure? Have you seen a counselor? What’s the matter?”

  “Please, Peg. I’ve analyzed my situation. With all its dismaying ramifications…” She spoke in a light tone. She herself would have to understand better before she could explain.

  “I suppose you have,” Peggy conceded. There were a number of negative ramifications Lorna was only now seeing. For instance, how much detail about all this was she really going to go into with the children? She had not been feeling that she needed to explain to them about her return, but now she was obliged to recognize that she was uncomfortable telling them her main reason for leaving Armand-Loup.

  It was his wild infidelity. Infidelity at their age was embarrassing, maybe even comic, because at their age—the children probably thought—you were supposed to be not only beyond caring but beyond doing anything much, and way beyond enduring the rituals and incurring the expense of illicit sexual capers, in Armand-Loup’s case the escalating expense of wooing demanding, ever-younger young women.

  She had been surprised by his infidelity. She knew the reputation of French husbands, but she had believed it was overstated, Frenchmen being more or less like other men, with normal physical capacities and the normal wish to avoid trouble. Besides, she had thought that she and Armand-Loup got along very well in that department of life. She also knew that French wives would, or would have in the past, turned a blind eye, or exacted some domestic price in private, to compensate for the dinners, the flowers, the concerts, and the weekends spent with poules de luxe. Lorna begrudged both the time and the expense of Armand-Loup’s adventures. And in his case, the costs had risen with his weight, and he was now rather plump—he who had been such a beauty, and a fantastic skier. Now the girlfriends were younger, plainer, and more expensive, especially a couple of expensive medical events involving these young women. With their cost, eventually, had come the need to sell the house, though this exigency was disguised even in their private conversations as sensible downsizing.

  And though she understood that he was trying to fend off age, bon, as a result of his betrayals she had become less and less motivated to throw herself into her assigned duties as helpmeet—why would you want to slave for a man who was weekending with some chick in Marseilles? And there were larger cultural issues: whatever she did, in their village, she’d always be the awkward American woman, never quite right, said to once have had some career in America, but never, ever getting the cheeses straight. All was failure.

  And yet—and yet wasn’t there more to it? A more positive force had also prompted her to leave. Her own sense of adventure? Of not wanting to feel that life was just reaction to fate, or to the infidelity of someone else? Was it wanting to have a new life while there was still time? Was she having a midlife crisis in an interesting way? Okay, too late to become an opera singer or a congresswoman, she still looked forward to the new chapter.

  Twenty years ago she had gone off with such glee with her hot French husband, leaving the children to their adult lives: the newly married Peggy with her baby, Curt and Hams in college. Over the twenty years, all of her kids—Peggy, Curt, Hammond—and in time their spouses and kids had loved their holidays and summers in France, in her postcard-perfect stone farmhouse, mas, in Pont-les-Puits. They loved to loll in the sun of its courtyard, hike the pretty mountain paths, and feast on the special foie gras and fragrant chèvres of the region. She had had little reason ever to come back to America.

  How much did a grown-up like herself need to reveal to her adult children anyhow? Did she owe them explanations? Had the balance already tipped on the dependence scale toward her being more dependent on them than they on her? She didn’t think so, but maybe they thought so.

  She was unwilling to struggle with the matter of her official story for too long and thrust it from her mind
, giving Peggy the cheerful version: grown apart, missing America, never really at home in France, lonesome for you children, also the grandchildren, wanting back into her intellectual life while she still had her wits about her…Armand-Loup, she explained, was selling the charming village house. There had been no question of her staying in the house at the time of the separation discussions, as it had been his to begin with, and his to sell, as he was now trying to do, very reluctantly.

  At moments when her positive spin collapsed, she knew that coming back to the U.S. was a question of supporting herself, and she painfully foresaw that her career, however well she could manage to reestablish it, would with age inevitably wind down, along with the enthusiasm she felt now for writing new material, doing research, and keeping up with art historiography.

  Now, sitting in a hotel in New York City, she was overtaken again by other negatives of what she was facing—the hurly-burly of the lecture tour, of mediocre library venues in Bakersfield or Fresno, even fears about her physical stamina; she’d been so tired last night, and she wasn’t a tired person. What if she was coming down with something, the onset of some condition appropriate to her age that she would henceforth have to think about? People her age got diabetes, they got arthritis; they had to allow for their health, had to carry an embarrassing doughnut cushion with them, or an oxygen bottle, or excuse themselves to take medicine, or sneak pills into their mouths at table with that furtive sidelong look.

  And yet, wasn’t America the better place, where opportunity beckoned at any age, and people were not so conscious as the French of what other people thought? Ça ne se fait pas, said the French. That isn’t done. In America, you could do it.

  3

  Thinking of others spares you thinking of yourself.

  Apart from her own personal life, Lorna had another reason for coming back to America: her children. Though they were adults, they seemed to need her in practical ways that their father apparently ignored. Lorna’s children with Randall Mott, in order, were Peggy, the oldest at forty-four; Curt, the older son, forty-one; the younger son, Hammond, called Hams, thirty-eight. All were in Northern California—well, Curt at this moment was in Southeast Asia somewhere.

  Lorna reviewed her worries for each of them. They had the normal problems of adult life—the oldest, the divorced Peggy, was poor and in debt; the younger son, Hams, also, to a lesser extent, because he lived on the fringe anyway, sort of an ex-hippie; and there was Curt, her most promising child, who had been on the cusp of launching a start-up, already crowdsource funded and ready to go, when he had a serious bicycle accident with unforeseen consequences. Lorna could not be free of fears for any of them—first of all for Curt, of course, and then for the others, and then for the grandchildren, new hostages to fortune who continued to arrive, like the baby Hams’s wife, Misty, was expecting. She was sure they all needed her. She was also aware that she must not interfere with their lives or give the slightest sign of being bossy.

  * * *

  —

  The recently divorced Peggy Willover lived in a little house in Ukiah, California, where she kept herself going with various craft enterprises, like personalized dog collars, thus contributing to her daughter Julie’s college expenses, and bought nothing for herself. She had a little venture in Internet commerce, buying bargain items, especially handbags, on eBay, fixing them up, and reselling them to RealSteal or private customers. She also made earrings to sell at craft fairs, sold cheese and jam made in her backyard shed, and worked in the local library. By nature optimistic like her mother, she nonetheless, when she really thought about her situation—early forties, alone, and stone poor—could get fits of despair. She was aware that her mother, Lorna (the well-known art historian Lorna Mott Dumas!), was probably hard up, too—men had been difficult for both of them. Peggy sometimes thought that Lorna hadn’t prepared her correctly for a world with men in it. Peggy had tried to tell her own daughter Julie (age twenty) certain realities while avoiding cynicism or bitterness, and so far Julie had been so free of man troubles, Peggy had started to worry the other way.

  “Don’t you know any boys, honey?”

  “Mother! The boys”—Ukiah High School, UC Berkeley—“are revolting here.”

  “I can’t believe there isn’t one nice one at least.”

  “Not even one, always pawing you, or else ignoring you.”

  If Peggy worried about Julie, Lorna in turn worried about divorced Peggy’s own nunlike and low-paid—rather dreary, in fact, to Lorna’s view—humdrum days beset with financial problems, Julie’s expensive schooling, for example, and Peggy’s increasingly old-maidish way of worrying about small things like the garage-door opener being broken. Peggy’s ex, Dick Willover, was no help with any of this.

  “If you moved to San Francisco, there’d be art and music at least,” Lorna prompted Peggy.

  “Mother, it isn’t that easy. Anyway, art and music are not what I need.”

  * * *

  —

  Curtis Mott, second child of Randall and Lorna Mott, had always been the star of the family, at school, in college, and in his professional life. Happily married, with a thriving software enterprise, young twins, and a beautiful house—all was going well until almost a year ago, when he had suffered a near-fatal bicycle accident and for a while seemed to be destined to die young, the fabled doom of such golden boys. But he hadn’t died.

  For nearly five months, he had lain in a coma, occasionally appearing to wake or stir. Lorna, who had flown to his side, had regretfully gone back and forth from Pont-les-Puits, asking for constant updates in between. There had been despair, or moments of hope, once when he had sat up and said “Donna!” before lapsing back into his former unseeing state; and some then began to believe he would recover.

  Some did not. His pessimistic wife, Donna, had once said—no one could believe she could say such a thing—“Do we need to discuss, um, whether this goes on forever?” Was she talking about the plug? The others had gasped at her cold realism. Donna was not their favorite, but this was beyond imagination. No one else had even thought of pulling the plug—there was no question of anything besides waiting. What was in her heart, really? Arrangements were made to put him in a facility where people would manipulate his limbs to maintain his muscle mass and monitor his breathing. Luckily he hadn’t terminated his hedge-fund day job, so his workplace insurance had paid most of the stupefying costs.

  There had been enough good signs in the situation of Curt Mott, beginning with the fact that he was alive, to stanch the fears that Lorna had reserved for him since his childhood. Her sturdy daughter Peggy had never worried her, the younger boy, Hams, was Hams, no altering that; but Curt, the firstborn son, had had such a penchant for danger, and such bad luck, and, as she imagined, frail health, though outwardly the picture of wellness, and had so much promise that anxiety was almost her automatic response when she heard his name, even without his serious case of measles (had she forgotten to get him vaccinated?), his first bicycle accident (was he too young to have had that bicycle?), his fall off the rings in gym class, breaking his arm, his getting lost at camp, and much more. The long grim weeks of his coma had thus in a way been no surprise, his awakening a joyful exception to her expectations, his vanishing right in line with her fears. But he was alive.

  Then, something strange, breathlessly imparted to Lorna by Donna on the phone to France: Curt had woken miraculously from his coma and, after a few days of regaining strength, announced a spiritual quest that required him to go to a jungle somewhere in Southeast Asia, inaccessible by Skype or FaceTime. A few days out of his sickbed, frail and diminished though he was, he bought an airline ticket and began his packing to go to Thailand, giving the impression that he had spent his coma months gestating like a larva some elaborate plan that drew him away. If she didn’t come right now, Lorna would just miss him.

  The family believed that his bicycle
accident had damaged his brain some way, obliterated the site that controlled ethical behavior and probability and affections, making it possible for him to go off, without concern for his wife and small children. His twins were boys aged four. His wife Donna, fanatically attentive during his illness, had actually despaired and had begun building a new life, rather surreptitiously out of consideration for his parents and siblings. She did endless yoga classes and video-coached sessions on her stationary bike, in case she met someone. She studied the want ads from Silicon Valley start-ups, even those known to be hostile to women. His waking up surprised her more than anyone.

  At first, with globalization, Curt’s trip to Thailand could seem almost normal, business related. But he hadn’t returned. Donna claimed to get the odd postcard from time to time, but never Skype, FaceTime, or an email address. He had closed his email account, there were no credit card charges that might give a clue to where he was, he never called, but he did considerately reassure them by sending postcards with blurry, unreadable postmarks, and these usually said things were going well. Donna’s priest (Donna, his wife, from an Italian family, was Catholic) counseled patience, while Donna, in despair, tried to wrestle with the problems of a huge mortgage and the lively four-year-olds.

  * * *

  —

  That was Curt. After Curt, it was her second son, Hams, whom Lorna worried about most among her children; Peggy, after all, was balanced and resourceful. How glad she would be to see Hams. Despite his rumpled, bag-person aspect, she had an especially soft spot for him, saw into his inner sensitive self, his unexploited musical ability, remembered the tears that came to his eyes as a child whenever they read something sad aloud, “King of the Golden River,” wasn’t it? Or the Oscar Wilde story about the statue who gave up its jeweled eyes and ended in pigeon shit?