“I do, actually,” Phoebe says.
“God, as a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel. When she lost her teeth, I heard every gruesome detail. When she got her period, I was the first one she told. Besides her guidance counselor, but that couldn’t be helped. The whole thing happened on his chair, which is a little odd, I’m now realizing.”
Patricia takes a sip.
“Wait, Lila wasn’t molested by her high school guidance counselor, was she?” Patricia asks. “Is that why he’s here?”
“Oh no. She wasn’t. If she was, I doubt he’d be here, you know?”
“What a relief,” Patricia says. “It’s not easy having a daughter who’s always been attracted to much older men. That girl fell in love with her sixty-year-old piano teacher when she was nine. I’m the only mother I know who had to force her own child to quit piano. And you don’t have to tell me, I know it was all my fault. I, as Lila said so recently, set the tone.”
“Was Henry a lot older than you?” Phoebe asks.
“Fifteen years,” Patricia says. “I was twenty-six when I met him. God, such a little baby. I had no idea what I was doing, except driving my mother slowly insane. That was clear. After we got engaged, she said to me, No daughter of Paul Winthrop is marrying a Catholic who calls himself the Trash King of Rhode Island.”
“That’s what Henry called himself?”
“It was the name of his business. It’s what everyone in Newport called Henry back then, after he started making his fortune. But my mother didn’t understand. She kept asking me if he was in the Mob, and I kept telling her he was only pretending to be in the Mob. That was his entire advertising strategy, and it worked, and did my mother care that he basically built a million-dollar business in under three years?” Patricia says. “No. My mother is a true snob, and trust me, she’d take that as a compliment. She prides herself on being a snob, on telling everyone how embarrassing it was that JFK’s family wore tails to the reception while Jackie’s family knew to arrive in linen. But I was a kid in the sixties, you know. I didn’t want to be snob. I didn’t want to sit around with my mother and gossip about who didn’t wear linen. I wanted to wear bell-bottoms. I wanted to be American. One of the people. I wanted to go to Woodstock and marry a handsome entrepreneur who seemed to have come out of the dust fields of Ohio in a cowboy hat just to save me from my horrible snobbish family. But my mother, she was not wrong about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“She kept telling me, Patricia, do not marry this man thinking he can save you from who you really are,” Patricia says. “You’re a Winthrop. A terrible snob, just like me. And one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll see the Trash King of Rhode Island for what he really is. And she was right. I did.”
“What was he?”
“A mortal!” she says. “A mere human being! When the first doctor gave him three months to live, I was so shocked, I started to laugh hysterically right there in the office. I couldn’t understand. My big strong Henry? I actually said, But this is the Trash King of Rhode Island! And so Lila barred me from going to the next doctor’s appointment.
“God, I worshipped Henry in the beginning,” she says, and smiles. “He was so exciting. A man of business, building an empire. He bought me my first painting, you know? And we’d go on these long boozy dates, and I’d listen to him talk about his landfills at dinner like he was talking about Leonardo’s Gran Cavallo. I had no chance, really. The younger woman never has a chance. She’s always doomed to worship, right from the start.”
“I don’t think Lila worships Gary like that, though,” Phoebe says. “I really don’t get that vibe.”
“You should have seen when she came home from that doctor’s appointment with Gary. Her eyes were glowing, Pamela.”
“Phoebe.”
“I’m sorry, once I decide on a name in my head, it might as well be your name,” Patricia says. “It was like the girl was on drugs. She went on, telling me all about this wonderful doctor who was going to save Henry, all we needed was a little optimism like Gary. But I was under no such illusion. I knew the first doctor had been right. I knew Henry was dying. I would try to tell her that, get her ready, but she wouldn’t listen. She had Gary and his second opinion.”
Patricia sighs.
“She’s always been like that, though,” Patricia says.
“Like what?”
“Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be. But she never got engaged to any of them. She never took it this far. This is just ridiculous, and it’s all Henry’s fault.”
“Why?”
“He told her that his only dying wish was to see his little girl get married before he died. And what do you know, but a week later, they’re engaged!”
“You don’t think they love each other?”
“My daughter doesn’t fully love people yet,” Patricia says. “Not the way she will.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I mean she loves Gary the way that I love this cocktail. The way that I have come to love a foam body pillow. The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”
She wonders if this is what it’s like to have a mother, to sit together, drinking in the afternoon, listening to her meandering stories about what it means to truly love. Phoebe feels like she’s watching a woman write her posthumous autobiography aloud, like Patricia is the dead version of herself whose saving grace is somehow knowing everything.
“How did losing Henry make you better?” Phoebe asks.
“Henry quickly deteriorated after the first diagnosis, and I couldn’t stop having this horrible feeling like I was dying, too.”
At night, she stared at her sagging breasts and her blue veins and the thin skin over her hands and wondered what happened to her. How did her skin become so thin? How had she come to own so many paintings by dead artists? How had she wound up on the board of the Preservation Society? How had she come to be a woman who put on lip liner just like her mother? She had once been so young, so beautiful that an artist from her gallery asked to paint her, and why didn’t she say yes?
“I had been too embarrassed then,” she says. “Simply put, I thought I was fat. And I didn’t think it was tasteful for a married woman to do something like that. My mother was right. I was a terrible snob. But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.”
When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist.
“It had been decades,” Patricia says. “But I just called William like no time had passed and said, I’m ready to pose for you. God, that’s what impresses me now the most. How I just did that. It felt like the boldest thing I had ever done, somehow scarier than even getting married.
“William and I didn’t have an affair,” she adds. “Even though I know that’s what Lila must think. I just wanted him to paint me. I needed him to document my body as it was at that precise moment. Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit. To feel proud, actually. That saved me. But let me be clear. Not from myself.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I didn’t want to be saved from myself. Nobody does! All we want is permission to stand there naked and be our damned selves.”
This sounds true to Phoebe. This sounds like exactly what she wants, what she has secretly always wanted. To read books when she wanted to read books. To be sad when she was sad. To be scared when she was scared. To be angry when she was angry. To be boring when she felt boring.
