Janie
Janice Billingsley
When my parents occasionally spent the night in New York City from our Westchester suburb, my brother and I were sent to my great-uncle’s house across town, a large brick pile in the English Tudor style. The small, many-paned windows let in little enough light, but large shrubs surrounding the house further kept the sun at bay, and the décor did nothing to lighten the mood. Everywhere were heavy walnut tables, deep red and blue oriental carpets and big chairs covered in dark-colored scratchy upholstery. When we stepped into the front hall, and my godmother Janie closed the door behind us, the stale air signaled that nothing new happened here.
I liked our rare overnight stays, though. In the morning, a wall of eastern-facing windows on the stair landing allowed sunlight to shoot down the stairs, shooing away the gloom in the entry hall.
“Like light from heaven,” said Janie, who was a very religious Catholic.
On the second floor were four bedrooms. Aunt Meg and Uncle Gilbert had the big bedroom at the top of the stairs with a balcony off of it, where Uncle Gilbert jumped off to his death, but that was a lot later. Janie had a small bedroom at the other end of the hall, and then there was another staircase that led up to two more bedrooms where my brother and I slept when we visited. I loved being tucked into the eaves on the top floor, in a secret, private space.
At breakfast we sat at the long, gleaming mahogany dining room table, set with linen tablemats and napkins. Unlike at our house, there was no eating in the kitchen. In fact, though it was then the 1950’s, it might as well have been 1920 at the Donahue’s, so formal was the household. At the head of the table was my great-uncle Gilbert, an imposing, white-haired man with clear-framed spectacles and a beak nose. His face broke into a smile at seeing us, and then he returned to his newspaper, which was folded into a brass rack shaped like a lute, and tilted at an angle so that he could read it while he drank his coffee. Uncle Gilbert’s wife, the dour-faced Aunt Meg, did not come down for breakfast, which was fine with me as I was afraid of her.
When we had pulled in our chairs and placed our napkins carefully across our laps, Janie would swoop in with bowls of oatmeal served with real cream. The thick, luscious concoction of swirling brown and white, sprinkled with sugar, was an extravagance unlike any we had at home. Janie fluttered in and out of the kitchen, tending to us and to her father, finally settling down herself for her own cup of coffee and a roll.
#
Like most children, I paid little attention to Janie outside of her attentions to me, but she frustrated my mother. Janie was my father’s first cousin and their birthdays were only a month apart but unlike him, who had married and had a job and a family, she still lived with her parents, and her manner was too girlish by half.
“If I hear her rave about Mummy one more time, I’ll scream,” my mother moaned from the front seat of the car one Christmas when we were driving home from the Donahues after our holiday meal there. There had been a lot of us—our own family, Aunt Meg, Uncle Gilbert, Janie, and her married sister and her husband. All of the grownups had a lot to drink, and Janie’s brother’s-in-law had even fallen asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace.
“She’s wrecked Janie’s life,” my mother went on. “That woman is a dragon.”
I took this in. Aunt Meg was a big, bulky woman who wore tailored wool suits and who never smiled or took the slightest interest in my brother or me. When I grew up and first heard the phrase from the Christopher Marlowe’s poem about “the face that launched a thousand ships,” I took it literally to mean one battered and crumpled like Aunt Meg’s.
“How did she wreck Janie’s life?” I asked.
“By criticizing every man who has had the slightest interest in Janie. She’s driven away all her suitors,” my mother said, the wine having loosened her tongue.
I suddenly thought of the seventh grade Christmas dance I’d been to the week earlier when my mother, flushed and in high spirits, came to pick me up wearing a very short red dress that all the boys noticed and which made me cringe with embarrassment. I stared out the window at the houses we drove by, Christmas lights blinking through living room windows.
When Janie came to our house a few months later to help with my twelfth birthday party, I paid new attention to her. She was tall, slim and had shiny, dark hair, cropped short in a way that framed her face in a pleasing way. Her eyes were such a light blue that they almost seemed transparent, and they suited her pale skin. She was pretty, I saw, but didn’t act pretty, apologizing too much for forgetting to bring the napkins in from the kitchen and saying she was too fat for a piece of cake. For the first time, she made me uncomfortable.
“You have legs like Janie,” my mother observed as I stood at the kitchen stacking dinner dishes that night while she sat watching me from the kitchen table where she smoked a cigarette. Her tone told me that this was not a good thing.
“So what,” I said with a sinking feeling, trying to remember what Janie’s legs looked like. I was having a hard enough time living with my too-round face and flat chest, unlike my best friend Barbara who got attention from boys. I’d never thought about my legs.
“They’re from your father’s side of the family, that’s all,” she said in the same scornful voice, damning all the legs in my father’s family tree.
#
About a year after this, Aunt Meg got cancer. She lost weight, her skin turned yellow, and she had to stay in bed. One fall day my mother picked me up from school to visit her, and I stood at the foot of her large bed as the late afternoon sun washed over the room that was filled with the signs of illness. A hospital tray table was pushed to one side of the bed, half a dozen pill bottles were arranged on the dresser and the bathroom door was open to show a contraption over the toilet with arms so that Aunt Meg could lower herself onto the seat and pull herself up again. Aunt Meg stared at us from her pillow, her eyes bright, and her face sagging in folds, like an old dog. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
“Mummy, isn’t it nice to see Marilyn and Lucy?” Janie said, coming into the room with a tray of tea and cookies for us. Her mother didn’t answer. Sick, she was even more of a sourpuss. We sat down on two chairs that Janie pulled up to the bed, and Janie herself sat on the low hassock beside us so that we three faced the large bed staring at silent Aunt Meg. I devoured the chocolate chip cookies, which were my favorite. Janie watched me eat four and smiled. I could tell my mother disapproved of my greed, but I ignored her.
“Is there anything we can do for you, Meg?” my mother asked.
“Bring me a stiff scotch,” she growled.
Janie blushed. “You know you can’t have any alcohol, Mummy. The doctor said.”
“Damn the doctor.”
Mother glanced over at Janie, and then back at Aunt Meg.
“You’re lucky Janie’s here to take such good care of you,” she said.
Aunt Meg turned her head away from us on her pillow. Janie asked after my brother--he’d just started playing little league baseball. I’d told him he was much too short to play ball and who would want him, but it turned out he was a fast runner and was made shortstop, so Mother talked about that. Then Janie asked me about my clarinet playing, and I said it was fine. I loved my thin, shiny clarinet, and slipping the reed carefully in the mouthpiece, tightening it and blowing through it just so.
Then it was quiet again as we all looked over at Aunt Meg, who had closed her eyes. All the tea was drunk and, thanks to me, all the cookies were gone. Finally, after what seemed eternity, Mother said we had to go.
“She looks awful,” Mother said to Janie when we were downstairs in the front hall.
Janie nodded. She had let her hair grow and wore it pulled it back in a ponytail, and her ears stuck out. She had gotten too thin herself, as if she had joined her mother in not eating, and there were circles under her eyes.
“Why don’t you get a nurse in?” Mother asked. “You look exhausted.”
“Mummy says she doesn’t want strangers in the house.”
My mother didn’t answer, but I could feel her impatience, and so could Janie.
“I’m fine, Marilyn,” she said, her voice suddenly hard. “I’m glad to be able to do this.”
So that was that.
“What a household,” my mother fumed as we drove home. I was hoping she’d say more the way she did when she forgot herself when we were driving and revealed secrets about the grownups I knew. For instance, the reason the Rileys hadn’t come for Thanksgiving with our family the year before was not just that they were visiting relatives, but that Mr. Riley had gotten drunk and shot a gun in their house and Mrs. Riley was trying to decide whether to stay married to him or not. But today my mother turned on the radio instead of talking so I just looked out the window as the afternoon sky turned from blue to grey.
“You’re going to have to speak to Gilbert,” Mother told my father that night at dinner. “Meg has Janie running around like a slave, and they can certainly afford a nurse. Janie’s going to get sick herself.”
My father adored Uncle Gilbert, who had become his guardian after his father died, but Janie drove him crazy.
“Everything I say, she says the opposite,” he complained. He was right. They acted the same way my brother and I did, disagreeing about everything just on principle.
“The last thing I want to do is get involved over there,” he said. “If she can’t speak up for herself, why should I?”
“Just mention it to Gilbert,” my mother insisted. “He goes off to the city every day. He probably has no idea what goes on.”
He must have done so because Uncle Gilbert did hire a nurse, but it didn’t help and Aunt Meg died about six months later, just before Easter. The funeral took place on a Tuesday morning, and my parents decided we shouldn’t miss school, but Janie asked me to pray for Aunt Meg’s soul. It was very hard to imagine Aunt Meg in heaven because she was so mean, or even how she got up there as she was so big and heavy, but I did my best, pressing my hands together, fingertip to finger tip, palm-to-palm, like the holy pictures the nun showed us at religious instruction class.
My parents thought, or at least my Mother thought as my father never thought about Janie unless he had to, that after Aunt Meg died, Janie would be free to blossom.
“She’s still an attractive woman and could find someone to marry,” she said not long after Aunt Meg died. “She should get out of that house.”
But the opposite happened. Instead of breaking out and doing something new, Janie hunkered down at Seventeen Wilton Street, taking care of her father and invoking Aunt Meg’s memory at every opportunity.
“Mummy hated strawberry jam,” she said one afternoon when I asked for some for a biscuit. My mother, brother Freddy and I had stopped by to see Janie after school.
“But she’s not here anymore,” my brother pointed out, and I looked at him in surprise. Freddy occasionally did say something worthwhile.
#
We no longer stayed overnight with Janie, as we were older and my parents didn’t go away by themselves anymore, so I saw her or Uncle Gilbert mostly at holidays or birthdays. At some point, Janie’s older sister Margaret moved back home with her husband, the one who had fallen asleep on the living room carpet, because he had lost his job. And I knew that Uncle Gilbert, who had retired from his law firm, had called my father to ask for help in getting the man employed again. And that my father succeeded in getting him a job in the city so he was out of the house during the day.
By that time I had my own worries. The icy silences between my parents had increased. One night I came home from a date—I finally had to started to have boys ask me out—to find my mother alone in the living room with our neighbor Mr. Carpentier, a French man thought exotic in our small city. He had once been asked to leave the beach at our country club because he wore bikini trunks.
“Oh, hello, Lucy,” she said, too brightly, hopping off the sofa, leaving Mr. Carpentier to lean back and take a sip of his drink. “How was your date?”
My date had actually kissed me, and I was over the moon, but I was not about to share that with her under any circumstances and certainly not these.
“Fine,” I mumbled and went directly upstairs to my room, where I undressed, got into bed to savor my momentous night.
My mother began to ask me lots of questions about my social life, which I did not answer. But when a boy came by the house and she was at home, she would join us in the living room, waving her cigarette in her cigarette holder (she said it was to limit the tar; my father said it was for dramatic effect) and ask him about the sports he played, or what books he was reading. She had a dazzling smile and lively blue eyes. Sometimes she sat down and played the piano and I would sit, awkward and lumpy, waiting for her to finish.
“You know,” my friend Ronald, whose parents were best friends with my parents, told me one day when we walked out of school together, “The reason boys come around is because they want to see your mother, not you.”
“You’re just jealous,” I said, because I knew he had a crush on me, but the next time a boy I liked came over and sat with my mother in the kitchen while I went upstairs to change clothes, my insides tightened at the sound of their laughter.
#
The next thing that happened at the Donahue’s was that Uncle Gilbert had a stroke and couldn’t talk or walk by himself anymore. We were very sad because, unlike how we felt about his wife, we all liked him. “He’s a kind, smart man,” my mother said, and I liked how his face always lit up when he saw me. Also, he always gave my brother and me a silver dollar at Christmas and on our birthdays, too. If we were troubled by his illness, my father was completely distraught.
“Those women”--meaning Janie and Margaret—“will be the death of him, with all their fussing,” he complained.
He took to stopping by his uncle’s house on the way home from work, often staying for supper with him.
“Uncle Gilbert was like a father to him after his father died,” my mother explained. “That’s why we moved here, to be near him. It’s good that he spend time with him now.”
But I knew she was also glad for my father’s absence at dinnertime because then they didn’t have to pretend for Freddy and me.
One morning in April, several months after Uncle Gilbert’s stroke, I woke up for school and there was no one home except my brother. The door to my parents’ bedroom was open. The bed was unmade and it was still dark, as no one had raised the shades. I went downstairs to the empty kitchen and saw a note scrawled in my mother’s slanted script that explained that she and Daddy had gone to Uncle Gilbert’s house in the middle of the night because he’d taken a “bad turn.”
“Get some cereal for you and Frederick,” she wrote. “I’ll see you both after school, so make sure you come home together.”
Freddy (no one called him Frederick except my mother) looked at me in alarm. He was only eleven, and he looked like he was eight in his pajamas and tousled hair.
“Don’t worry. Uncle Gilbert probably fell out of bed or something.”
And we walked together to school, which we usually did not.
When we got home that afternoon, my mother was waiting for us.
“Come into the kitchen and sit down,” she said and we did, taking chairs on opposite sides of the table and looking up at Mother whose face was pale. She wore no lipstick, which never happened.
“Uncle Gilbert has died. He fell out of his bed (I was right!) and choked,” she said. “Your father is very upset as are Janie and Margaret, of course. But he lived a long and full life, so although we’re sad, we have to remember that. It is better, in a way, that he died quickly instead of dragging on with his illness. He was very unhappy not being able to get around and talk anymore.”
Freddy and I nodded. It was hard to believe that Uncle Gilbert would no longer be at Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, sitting on the sofa and sipping his scotch. And I was sad for Janie, who wrapped her life around his. And for my father after what Mother had told us. But I wasn’t that surprised. Uncle Gilbert was old and old people died and went to heaven. That’s what had happened to Aunt Meg.
“Can we go to the funeral this time?” I asked. I felt old enough to be a part of this sad occasion for our family and was eager to be a part of a funeral procession. I’d seen a number of funeral corteges passing through our city’s streets on the way to and from funerals, cars following behind the hearse with their headlights on.
“We’ll see,” my mother said, which usually meant no. I thought about protesting but decided I was too old to beg.
My father didn’t come home for dinner as he was with his cousins, so Mother ordered a pizza for us, and we ate in the kitchen under the thin yellow light from the overhead fixture. I hated the dim kitchen, making every thing look so tired and hopeless. Mother didn’t talk, just picked at her pizza and drank a beer, and so Freddy and I were quiet, too, not even fighting over the slices.
That night I put Uncle Gilbert in my prayers, but he was already fading in my mind. All I could see was his white hair and the glasses he wore. It was Janie who was the family there for me. I wondered what she would do.
Freddy and I walked to school together the next morning, still united by the drama of Uncle Gilbert’s sudden death. The morning was clean, and we were wearing light jackets as spring had finally decided to stay after a cold, wet winter.
“I guess no more silver dollars,” he said, which was exactly what I’d been thinking.
#
I didn’t completely forget about Uncle Gilbert, but he was pushed to the back of my mind when we got to school. That morning we were going to dissect frogs in biology class, which was a big event. Barbara was my partner and we’d studied hard so that we would do it right because we were terrified of making a mistake. It was scary enough having to touch a smelly, dead frog let alone do something wrong. Everything went fine until Mr. Binder picked Chuck Mellon’s frog to demonstrate how, even dead, the involuntary nerve in a frog makes his leg move. Chuck, by mistake, had decapitated his frog, and had pushed the head back on to look like it was still attached, but when Mr. Binder stuck a needle in the frog’s leg, not only did the leg twitch, but the head popped off and fell on the floor. I thought I was going to throw up.
Then everyone started to laugh and I did, too, while Chuck Mellon’s face turned red with embarrassment.
Barbara and I walked together down the hall to the cafeteria, buoyed by the dramatic finale to our dissection class. We went through the line for the spaghetti plate that was to be our lunch today and found our way through the energy and noise of the big lunchroom to one of the long, white tables by the window where we liked to sit. Today it was especially welcome to feel the bright sunlight and even a little breeze through the slightly opened window.
We were finished with the thick, tasteless spaghetti and I was half-heartedly eating a side dish of overcooked carrots when Nancy Larson, a short, pushy girl from the class behind me who lived down the street from my godmother, came over to me.
“I’m sorry Mr. Donahue killed himself,” she said, her voice sympathetic but also excited with the news she had to share. I looked blankly at her.
“He didn’t kill himself,” I corrected her. “He fell out of bed.”
She looked at me, confused by my certainty, and also respectful that I was a year older than she was.
“No, he didn’t,” she said, after a moment, a little less confidently, but still sticking to her story. “My father said he killed himself. He climbed over the balcony railing and let go and fell into the bushes and broke his neck. The police came with sirens and the ambulance took him away. It woke me up and my father went outside and saw everything. Miss Donahue was there, and your parents, too. He told us so at breakfast, said it was a miracle that Mr. Donahue had the strength to do it, what with the stroke and all.”
Barbara and I looked at each other.
Nancy Larson would not make this up. No one could make up such a story. But Iwas the person who should know this, not Nancy Larson. I was the person who knew how discouraged Uncle Gilbert had been by his stroke. I had been in his bedroom. I knew exactly where the door to the balcony was, how he would have to somehow maneuver himself out of his bed and get across the space to get there. I saw that when Janie said in her bright, fake happy voice that was just a matter of time before he was up and running again, Uncle Gilbert just closed his eyes, one of the few things he could still do. And I should know how he died, crumpled outside in the bushes in the middle of the night.
And how shaming to be related to someone who killed himself. No one did that.
“Why don’t you just tell the world, Nancy?” Barbara said when I sat mute.
“I was just saying,” Nancy said, but she was undone by my reaction and the glare of my friend. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”
She backed away, and I stared down at the soft, orange carrots swimming in the puddle of cloudy water they’d been steamed in.
I waded through the afternoon of math class with Mr. McFadden droning on, then gym class and finally English class, which I usually liked, but not today. I couldn’t understand one word the teacher said. It was as if Miss Parcell was speaking from across a lake and her voice melted away in the air, too thin to hear.
“Do you want me to walk home with you?” Barbara asked after the final bell rang and I was back at my locker getting my books and jacket. I shook my head. Even though she was my friend, suicide wasn’t something I wanted to share.
I came through the back door to see my mother cooking the kitchen. She was stirring something in a saucer on the stove with her right hand while holding her other hand on the cookbook next to her and reading what to do next.
“I’m making a stew for Janie and Margaret,” she said, her voice cheery. She liked to cook.
I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at her back.
“Nancy Larson told me that Uncle Gilbert killed himself,” I said. “Her father saw you and Daddy there. She said that Uncle Gilbert jumped off the balcony.”
“Oh,” she said. She turned down the flame under the saucepan and turned around.
She came over and sat down across from me at the table. For once she looked at me straight in the eye as if we were in the same family, as if she was really my mother and not the person who acted as if I was never good enough.
“It’s true. We didn’t want you and Frederick to know. It’s a scary and terrible thing and Daddy and I didn’t want you to think badly of your uncle. But I should have told you, at least, if not your little brother. Of course the neighbors would talk. I’m very sorry, Lucy, that you had to hear it in school.”
She took a breath and said that Janie had called them in the middle of the night, crying and saying Daddy had to get over there, that there had been a terrible accident with Uncle Gilbert.
“She made it sound like it was a fluke, as if Uncle Gilbert always took midnight constitutionals on the balcony and had somehow tripped. She didn’t want the police or an ambulance or anyone to know.
“So we drove over right away and found him in the shrubbery. How he had managed to get out of bed and out onto the balcony I’ll never know. But he was still breathing and we got the ambulance there as quickly as we could.
“Your father went with him in the ambulance and I stayed with Janie—Margaret was spending the night with friends in the city, which may be one of the reasons he chose to do it when he did. You can imagine Janie, how upset she was.
“Uncle Gilbert died on the way to the hospital. His neck was broken.”
I must have been staring at her in horror or fear or something, because she took both of my hands and brought them to her lips and kissed them.
“It’s a terrible thing to kill yourself, Lucy, but you know what? I admire your Uncle Gilbert.” She spoke in a quiet, clear voice. “He knew he wasn’t going to get better and he made a choice. Janie and Margaret are very upset, Janie especially because your church forbids suicide, and she’s terrified that her father’s soul can’t go to heaven. Thank God, Daddy spoke to the priest, and somehow persuaded him to have a regular funeral for Uncle Gilbert, so Janie’s calmed down. At least there’s one Catholic priest with some sense.
“But I can’t condemn him no matter what anyone says. And I hope you won’t either.”
I looked across at her. Her candor and sympathy were so foreign to me that I was stunned. Not to mention the Catholic part. She rarely had a good word to say about my father’s religion as she was still mad that, as a Methodist, she had to sign a paper when she married my father to promise that my brother and I would be brought up in his church.
“Okay,” I said.
She let go of my hands. I sat still, confused. I couldn’t get my mind around the idea that Uncle Gilbert was a person who made important decisions about living or dying—he seemed far too old to have a real life. And then there was Mother telling me the truth right up front, not dropping news by mistake when she forgot I was there.
“What’s Janie going to do now? All’s she done is take care of her parents.”
“A very good question,” Mother said, leaning back in her chair. “I’d like to think she’ll make a new life for herself, but it might be too late.”
She looked over at me.
“You’re growing up, aren’t you Lucy?” she said. In her voice was a glimmer of respect, as if she was seeing me in a new way, separate from herself.
Her question annoyed me. Of course I was growing up. I was nearly sixteen. I shrugged.
“Wouldn’t you like to stay and help me cook?” she asked. There was in her tone a plea. She wanted me to stay.
“No,” I said. “I’m going upstairs.”
Her face fell. But I didn’t want to stay in the kitchen with her and suddenly be her friend. I wanted to be by myself. I pushed my chair back, stood up and headed upstairs to my room, where I could think whatever I wanted.
Janice Billingsley is a writer whose medical reporting, essays, and feature articles have appeared in numerous publications including healthday.com, Newsday, The Daily News, the New York Times News Service/Syndicate, and Family Circle Magazine. As a ghostwriter and writing partner, her books include Straighter, Stronger, Leaner, Longer(Avery, 2005), by Renée Daniels and most recently Family: The Good “F” Word: The life-Changing action Plan for Building Your Best Family(Bird Street Books, 2014) by Troy Dunn. She is a short story writer and is working on her first novel, which she workshopped in Jennifer Gilmore’s fiction course last fall at the 92nd Street Y.