Hello Beautiful

“I wonder if it didn’t do you girls good,” Rose said, “for me to take my foot off the pedal for a few years. I went off to Florida, and you grew up well. You built your own lives. Josie’s a nice lady. I don’t see the sense in that baby they borrowed, but it’s a harmless hobby, I suppose. And Izzy reminds me of myself — she’s terrific.” Rose hardly paused for breath, as if relieved to speak after years of quiet. “Did you notice Emeline and Cecelia’s garden? It’s not half bad, though they clearly don’t know a thing about winter vegetables. They’re wasting space, and those potatoes looked a little iffy, but I’ll have to get another look tomorrow morning to be sure.”

Alice couldn’t see her mother’s reaction, but she imagined Julia rolling her eyes. Still, her mother didn’t say anything critical or unkind. Cecelia had set the tone, and on this day, everyone who had been lost — including Julia and Alice, of course — would be accepted as they were.

“Rose is amazing,” Izzy whispered, and grinned. “All of this is amazing.”

“Is it?” Alice said, with doubt in her voice, and her cousin laughed.

“You made a joke,” Izzy said with delight. “You’re warming up! You’ve looked petrified ever since you got here.” The young women stepped all the way inside and closed the door behind them. Julia was headed toward them, and she did something Alice had seen her do a few times since she’d arrived. Julia pulled Izzy in for a hug and pressed a kiss into her niece’s cheek. Julia had missed this baby, while everyone else had missed baby Alice. It seemed to Alice that her mother was able to hold herself back from her daughter in part because she had another girl to shower love upon.

All three sisters were near them — Emeline cradling the baby; Cecelia with circles under her eyes and a stack of paper napkins in her hand; Julia looking uncomfortable, her now-empty hands at her sides.

“Is it true,” Rose said, “that there won’t be a funeral at St. Procopius?”

Emeline spoke in a soft voice. “It wasn’t what Sylvie wanted, Mama.”

Rose watched her daughter sway gently on her feet to soothe the infant. They could all see the old woman working to hide her disapproval, working to keep her mouth shut. Alice felt like an astronaut again, with all these women so close by. Aunts, grandmother, mother, cousin. She was filled with static, finding it hard to breathe.

Rose said, “At least Sylvie’s with Charlie now.”

Her three remaining daughters looked toward her, toward this possible truth. For a moment they looked like young girls, and Alice could see the hope on their faces. They were picturing their sister with their father. It occurred to Alice that she had left home to see her father, and Sylvie had left her home — her life — which opened the possibility of a reunion with her own. This parallel was too much for Alice to consider further, but she felt, like a physical sensation, William’s presence in the backyard.

“You know what Daddy would say when he saw Sylvie,” Julia said in a quiet voice.

Emeline and Izzy nodded, and Cecelia said, “Hello beautiful.”

—

After a dinner of the sliced-up sub sandwich, potato chips, and wine, Julia put her hand on Alice’s arm. Alice was no longer angry at her mother. She no longer had space inside her for anger. Besides, if she’d felt like an astronaut in her aunts’ houses, she’d recognized that her mother did too. Each of them had been laboring through the rooms of these two homes, because whatever Julia had taken away from Alice for all these years, she’d taken away from herself as well. The mother and daughter had arrived here from the same place, and they were bound by a tight cord of love. For Alice, part of the strangeness of this new Chicago family was that they conducted a kind of love that seemed voluminous; it required talking over one another and living on top of one another, and it was a force that appeared to include people both present and absent, alive and dead. It was remarkable to Alice that the walls of her aunts’ houses were covered with portraits of the same women who walked its halls.

“The last time I saw Sylvie,” Julia said, “she asked me to give you something after she was gone. I thought she had time left, so I tried not to take it, but…” She shook her head slightly. “Let’s go over here, out of the way.”