Vera Kelly Lost and Found

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The island was a patch of earth held together by the roots of little trees a hundred yards from the shore. Sylvia pulled the boat up to it and Peach threw her arms around a leaning willow, and we stepped unsteadily ashore, almost losing the bag of breakfast things.

We spread a blanket, unpacked our food, and opened our thermoses. A trio of ducks fought and chased each other on the water.

‘Is it romantic?’ I said, nodding at them.

‘What?’ Max said.

‘Whatever they’re fighting over. Is it romantic?’

She was biting the rim of her coffee cup, her arms wrapped around her knees. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, and I was already beginning to feel the suffocating warmth that I always felt when I was angry or dismayed but knew it was too trivial to say anything about. But she said, ‘Isn’t it always?’

I took that as encouragement. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. Peach and Sylvia were picking their way back toward the boat for insect repellent, and we were more or less alone.

She pushed her hair out of her face and inspected the sky. I waited.

‘I got a letter from my sister,’ she said.

What did I know about the Comstocks in April 1971? I had known a few things before I ever met Max. I knew of the Comstock Institute, the premier educator of petroleum engineers in the United States, and by happenstance the alma mater of my mother’s father, who had inspected rigs in Louisiana and Texas. I knew of the Comstock Collection, one of the largest privately held art collections in the world. I knew that Comstocks appeared often in the politics of the West – state senators, commissioners, chairmen of infinite boards.

And I knew a little about how Max had been raised. She talked about a house in Los Angeles and a ranch in San Luis Obispo. I could sense that words like ‘house’ and ‘ranch’ were euphemisms, in a family like that, for immense ecosystems of people and property. I had tried once or twice to get at this point – a misguided desire, I guess, to emphasize that I was the unlanded one of the pair of us, even though I had grown up in a plush and well-connected neighborhood outside Washington, DC, myself, and even though Max had been completely dispossessed at twenty-two.

‘How big is the place in Los Angeles?’ I had said. ‘How many rooms?’

And Max had said, ‘How many rooms?’ in a way that made me understand not only that there were very many rooms but also that I hadn’t chosen the right measure. Another time she said, ‘I used to walk down to our post office ‒’

‘Your post office?’

‘At the ranch, yeah. It was my job to walk down to our post office twice a week and get the mail. If Dad had letters, he would drive down, but he always made us kids walk. It was a big thing to him, to make us tough. My brothers loved it.’

‘You had your own post office?’

She had laughed. ‘Things are bigger out west,’ she said. ‘We were our own town.’

She told me that when she was a little girl in Los Angeles, she could see the Comstock oil derricks from her nursery window, their great heads bobbing in the blue haze. I knew all that. I knew that Aimee Semple McPherson once came to the house, in Max’s grandfather’s day, to ask for money to build the Angelus Temple. ‘He talked about it for the rest of his life,’ Max said. ‘Because she didn’t ask, she sort of commanded him, which people didn’t often do. And he said she wore sequins in the daytime.’

But that was all. She had told me very little, in three years together. The subject of her family was painful, and her silence sometimes made her seem to me like an émigré from a small and distant country that no longer existed.

‘They’re getting divorced,’ Max said.

‘Your parents?’

‘That’s what Inez said.’

I could hear Peach and Sylvia splashing in the water on the other side of the island.

‘Is this the first time anybody’s written?’ I said. ‘Since you left?’

‘No, not the first. Benny wrote me once right after it happened and called me a lot of nasty names and said I was killing our mother.’ Her older brother, the firstborn. ‘And Inez writes sometimes at Christmas. She’s the only one I sent my new address to when I moved in with you.’ Inez was the youngest of the three Comstock children. ‘Inez is sweet, but she’s not tough. I think she would have liked to be nicer to me, but it would have made them mad.’

‘So what did Inez say?’

‘That Dad and Amma are getting divorced.’ She looked at me, embarrassed. ‘That’s what us kids called them.’

‘Amma?’

‘Benny called our mother that when he was wee. So now Amma is living in the Park Royal Hotel in La Jolla and Papa is holed up at the Los Angeles house with – I can’t really follow what Inez is saying. She’s too sweet to say unkind things, but then she doesn’t end up saying much at all. It sounds like there’s a woman living there with him. And some friends of the woman.’

‘Oh, no.’

She drew in a shaky breath. ‘Why should I care at all, Vera? Why should I care at all?’ Her eyes reddened, but she didn’t cry.

‘Well, but you do,’ I said, putting my arm around her.

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I just remember everything.’ She stared at the water. ‘Inez wants me to go out there.’

‘She does? What for?’

‘The walls are falling in, you know? She thinks if we were all there…’ She shrugged.

‘They certainly left you out when they felt like it.’ I was agitated in her defense.

‘Yeah, of course they did.’

‘So why should you go now?’

‘Who said I was going?’ she said.

I relaxed.

‘I wish I could explain it to you,’ she said. ‘I could talk for days and I couldn’t get it to make any sense.’

‘I might understand it,’ I said.

‘There’s too much,’ she said. ‘Forget my family. Who can even understand Los Angeles?’

I thought it was settled. Maybe my mistake was in trying to extrapolate from my own family, which was so small, just my mother and me, and my mother was a redoubtable woman who would never call on me for any kind of assistance, in any circumstances. I had no brothers or sisters, and my father died when I was twelve. I was a disappointment to my mother, and when I was a teenager she was harsh and obtuse with me. We didn’t speak much now, and I didn’t worry about her. Probably no one had ever worried much about Elizabeth Kelly. She once got in a wreck in our old Studebaker and arrived home in a taxi with three stitches in her forehead and all her dry cleaning, which she had made the driver stop to pick up on the way home from the hospital. She would not be dissuaded from an errand and she was not interested in the opinions of other people and she had never misspent a dollar in her life. It was a mystery to her why I couldn’t master my life the way she had mastered hers.

Max slept badly when we came back from the mountains, and over the course of a few days she became distracted and irritable again. One night I got up for a glass of water at three in the morning and found the kitchen door open a crack, and cigarette smoke wafting in from the tiny backyard. Max hardly ever smoked.

‘Sweetheart?’ I said into the dark.

‘Ah, hey,’ she said.

I came out onto the step. The sky was yellow overhead, but it was hard to make out her expression. She was sitting curled up in the Adirondack chair in her work clothes, her hair unpinned.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘You just got home?’

‘A little bit ago. I had a good night, took a cab.’

‘Spendy baby.’

‘Don’t scold.’

‘I’m teasing. You know I don’t like you on the train this late anyway.’ I sat. ‘It’s chilly out here. Come to bed?’

‘I’m not tired yet.’ She looked tired.

‘Who’d you bum that cigarette off of?’ I had quit the year before. The smell made me nostalgic for a lot of wasted time.

‘A new girl at the bar. She was getting in my way all night.’

‘Then it’s the least she could do.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

We listened to a siren coming down Flatbush Avenue. ‘Inez wrote again,’ Max said.

I took that in, examining my feet.

‘He’s going to marry the new woman,’ Max said.

‘God, that fast?’

‘Amma’s all alone in some hotel.’ She rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘What if I did go?’ she said.

Somehow I was relieved. All the tension of the past week had been an effort to avoid this, and here it was. She could do this and then we could get back to normal. ‘What if you did?’ I said.

‘Would you think it was stupid?’

‘I would think it was family.’

She smiled. An airplane droned low overhead, a red-eye bound for LaGuardia.

‘Will you come with me?’ she said.

I hadn’t expected that. ‘Won’t they ‒’

‘Yeah, yes. But I –’ I think she wanted to say, I can’t do it by myself. But that wasn’t the kind of thing she said. ‘They might be awful about it. You don’t have to. I would understand.’

‘Of course I will,’ I said. I glowed.

She reached across the gap between us and squeezed my arm. After a minute she said, ‘You’re in for a ride.’

I could take a week off, I thought, without doing too much damage to the couple of cases I had. One was a young woman looking for the father of her daughter, who owed her a great deal of money and had told her he was going to pick up shifts for a while unloading cargo on the docks in Bayonne, but could not be found. Another was an older gentleman of my acquaintance whose landlord had been trying to get his rent-controlled apartment out of his grip. Construction had been going on in the units above and beside his for months, and I was fairly sure, after a few weeks of observation, that it was unpermitted and out of code, and that there were times when the only worker there was a rangy kid banging at random on the walls and floor with a hammer. I gave all parties my answering service and assured them that I would be able to wrap up work when I returned. We would fly out on Monday, April 26.

‘Is that your opera?’ I said to Max. There was an old shirt box on the bed, the lid not quite on, and I could see a stack of papers in a binder clip inside. I had found her packing in our bedroom, very slowly. She would take a dress out of the closet, smooth it out on the bed, fold it, and then stand looking at it for a while.

She put the lid on. ‘It’s a copy of the draft,’ she said. ‘It’s not done.’

‘You’re taking it along?’

‘I thought I might get a chance to see my old piano teacher,’ she said. ‘While we’re out there.’

It stung, briefly, that she would show it to someone else when she hid it so carefully from me. But then, I couldn’t read music.

‘Who are we going to tell your family I am?’ I said. I had been thinking about this every day.

‘They’ll guess,’ Max said. Now she was digging absently in the box of costume jewelry she kept on her dresser. ‘They know all about me.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘That’ll be the least of their concerns, I think,’ she said.