East Side Story Page 22

  “Entirely. No one turned around.”

  “And haven’t you yourself, as you have told me, spent a lot of time recently looking backward? All those family albums and charts?”

  “You think it might be a warning to me to start looking forward? But to what?”

  “No, it might be just the opposite. A hint that you should go on with what you’re doing. Write a memoir about the family. Tell the whole truth, at least as you see it.”

  “Oh, I could never do that!”

  “Why not? You don’t have to publish it. Not in your lifetime, anyway.”

  Janetta now joined them, and they had to tell her of their excursion, carefully modifying the account so as not to make her feel that she had missed an important sight.

  “We didn’t really see anything that you couldn’t see with your field glasses,” David assured her. “The columns and pediments are really all that’s left of the temples.”

  Loulou told herself that she wasn’t capable of writing a book, but she didn’t for a minute believe it. David’s idea had so deeply excited her that she hardly dared dwell on it for fear that it might evaporate. For the rest of the cruise the concept of a family history kept jumping up and down in her mind, and when the cruise was over, and she found herself once again in her small apartment, a return that she had once dreaded, she was elated at the prospect of really starting the project.

  But the calendar reminded her that the time had come around for her next chest X-ray, and when it was taken, it showed that her cancer was back—and fatally so.

  WELL, HOW MUCH did it matter, she asked herself over and over in the dreary months that followed. Were not the albums, with all their monotonous contrast between the stately poses in the studio and the high jinks that people used to feel obliged to affect before the candid snapshot, and all the dates of births and deaths, even the tedious lists of favorite sports and recreations, the fatuous self-appraisals in reply to her ceaseless interrogatories, a sufficient record of the Carnochans?

  Indeed, was there even such a thing as a family? With royalty the constant intermarriage of cousins preserved a certain physical resemblance, such as the Hapsburg lip, but was that such a good thing? Didn’t she have to recognize that such impact as the Carnochans had made on the social scene had been largely through the multiplication of the name due to the unusual preponderance of male births? Hadn’t she been planning a species of novel with what was at best a collection of short stories?

  Her brother came to see her every evening at six, in the bedroom to which she was now largely confined. He was an angel of sympathy.

  “You’ve done more than any of us,” he kept assuring her. “You’ve assuaged an iota of the world’s misery.”

  “And you’ve assuaged much of mine. Can one iota be greater than another?”

  “Anyway, I can promise that I’ll take good care of all your family records.”

  She didn’t tell him that she thought he’d do as well to burn them. She knew how much he wanted to feel that he had done something for her. Maybe it would be an iota for both of them.