“Jack,” Franny said, putting her hand on her stepfather’s trembling forearm. “Kumar’s my husband.”
But Kumar was not about to miss his exit. He would take what was available. “Sir,” he said and nodded his head. Somehow, in an impossible feat of balance and strength, he managed to scoop all of it up. He looped the boys’ duffels across his chest.
“Go through the kitchen,” Jack said when Kumar had taken a single step in the direction of the sweeping staircase. The luggage was just about to overtake him, and still he turned and took the bags to the kitchen. There was a narrow back staircase that the servants had used when there were servants.
“They think they can go right through the middle of your party,” Jack said to Franny, his eyes tracking Kumar’s back. “You’ve got to watch all the time.”
“That was my husband,” Franny said. Was she choking? She had the strangest feeling in her throat.
Jack patted her hand. “Tell me what I can get the pretty lady to drink.”
“I’m fine, Jack.” Franny had thought that she had won the toss. When she heard the quarter come down on Caroline’s table, when Caroline told her to go and spend Christmas in Virginia, she thought she had gotten the better deal. Now Franny found that she was longing for her dying father, her father who was nearly dead.
“I’ll get you some eggnog,” Jack Dine said and then turned and walked back into the crowd.
“Worse.” Pete followed his father with his eyes. “In case you didn’t catch that. He’s a lot worse. Has he started any fires yet?”
“Why would you say that?” Beverly asked, her voice gone flat. She loved Jack Dine, or she had loved him when he was still someone she knew. His sons, on the other hand, often required more consideration than she cared to give.
“Because sooner or later he will,” Pete said. He was scanning the crowd, looking for someone better to talk to. “Matthew!” He raised a hand and waved to his brother. “Look! Franny’s home.”
Matthew Dine’s vest was black, but he wore a gold watch chain with a small red Christmas ornament hanging from it, a single glass ball that made him look more festive than all the rest of them. Franny had forgotten that Jack Dine’s Christmas parties required vests for men. Glancing across the room the theme emerged: women in red, men in vests. Matthew took both of Franny’s hands in his hands, kissed her on the cheek. “You haven’t made it three steps past the door,” he said in a solemn voice.
Franny liked Matthew the best. Everyone did. “Where’s Rick?” she said, thinking she might as well get all three of the brothers out of the way before she tried to fight a path to the staircase.
“Rick has his nose out of joint about something,” Beverly said. “He said he wasn’t coming.”
“He’ll come,” Matthew said. “Laura Lee and the girls are already here.”
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats. Franny couldn’t keep them straight. She knew the Dine boys, that’s what they were called late into their fifties, but their wives and second wives confused her, their children, in some cases two sets, some grown and married, others still small. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. There were members of the Dine family who considered her in some vague sense to be a sister, a cousin, a daughter, an aunt. Katie Dine in New York had a baby. She couldn’t follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related. Jack Dine’s first wife, Peggy, had died more than twenty years ago but Peggy Dine’s sisters, along with their husbands and children and children’s spouses and their children, were still invited to the party every year—cherished guests! Every year they came and stood in the house that had once been their sister’s and catalogued the changes while eating the canapés that Beverly had made herself—the new sofa and a different color of living room paint and the painting of birds above the fireplace—it was a desecration of Peggy’s memory. The rearrangement of objects was more than they could bear.
The guests were catching on to the fact that Beverly’s daughter had arrived, and the ones who knew her were anxious to see her, and the ones who didn’t know her had heard so much about her. Matthew leaned towards her, whispered in her ear, “Run.”
Franny gave her mother a kiss. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
She went through the kitchen, where two black men in black pants with white shirts and vests and ties piled ham biscuits onto silver trays, while a third man arranged boiled shrimp around a cut-glass bowl of cocktail sauce on a massive silver platter. They didn’t lift their heads from their work when she came through the room. If they saw her at all they said nothing about it. She went up the back stairs to the room where she and Kumar always slept. All of the Dine boys lived in town, all in beautiful houses of their own, so even at Christmas there was never a worry about space. In his retirement Jack Dine’s empire had been divided three ways, giving Matthew the Toyotas, Pete the Subarus, and Rick the Volkswagens. Rick, who was lazy, was also bitter, and often said it wasn’t fair that Matthew got Toyota. No one could compete with Toyota. He particularly envied his brother the Prius.
Franny opened the door quietly and found her husband lying on top of the bedspread in the dark. His jacket and tie were hanging in the closet, his shoes tucked beneath the bed. Kumar had always been neat, even when they were in law school. She dropped her coat and scarf on the floor, pushed out of her snow boots.
“I would feel very sorry for myself,” he said quietly, his hands folded over his stomach, his eyes closed, “except that I’m feeling sorry for you.”
“Thank you,” she said and crawled the length of the vast mattress to lie beside him.
He put his arm around her, kissed her hair. “A different couple would make love now.”
Franny laughed, pushing her face into his shoulder. “A couple whose children wouldn’t be walking in the room any minute.”
“A couple whose host wouldn’t shoot the son-in-law for miscegenation.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Franny said.
“Your poor mother. I have to feel sorry for your mother, too.”
Franny sighed. “I know.”
“You have to go to the party,” he said. “I’m not brave enough to go back down there with you, but you have to go.”
“I know,” she said.
“Ask the boys to bring me up a plate, will you?”
Franny closed her eyes and nodded against his chest.
If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.
“What about school?” Franny would ask.
“Aren’t we capable of home-schooling for six weeks out of the year? It wouldn’t even be a full six weeks. We would subtract the weekends and vacation days.”
“What about work?”
Kumar would look at her sharply then, his dark eyebrows pushing down. “Just participate in the fantasy,” he said.