Flannery said as she watched Nick’s gentle, fathering hands. ‘And anyway, you’ll catch up.’
20
Flannery’s mother came frequently, of course, driving up from her modest home on the Peninsula. Charles’s mother had died of lung cancer several years before he and Flannery met, and he was in scarce contact with his father in Ohio, so Willa was a girl with a single present grandparent.
Now in her sixties, unmarried, a few years away from retiring from the high school, Laura Jansen’s face gently sagged but was still pretty, her weathered skin creased mostly by kindness, her undyed hair the shade of sandy driftwood, streaked off-white with the tracings of sea creatures, or years. Laura was perplexed by but tolerant of her daughter’s shifting choices, and had a formal respect for the man Flannery had married, without necessarily understanding either his work or his attraction. She had never been a baby person, Flannery recalled noticing at a family gathering after Rachel’s child was born, but Laura was interested in people and their stories, and as her granddaughter grew older, she happily read picture books to her, listened to the girl’s tales and opinions, and wandered hand in hand with her to story hour at the local library.
For the moment, Laura nestled Willa gingerly until she started crying, then handed her back with visible relief. Charles, trying perhaps to establish his paternal standing with his mother-in-law, took Willa and walked with her, rocking her. This did not happen altogether often, Flannery quietly knew, but she saw her mother registering Charles’s thick, loving arms holding the tiny girl. A complex cloud moved over her mother’s face that had in it memory and wistfulness, both.
‘I’ve told you about the trip I took with you to Italy, haven’t I?’ Laura said to Flannery, though the question was really aimed at Charles.
‘Tell it again,’ her daughter said.
‘Well. You were ten months old, and a girlfriend of mine was living for a term in Florence.’ That Don Lennart, as Flannery ironically named him, had deserted Laura shortly before Flannery was born was a fact the single mother skipped over. ‘Jennifer said I had to come visit, though I’m not sure her husband was completely thrilled to have a baby wailing in their tiny apartment. You were quite a loud little thing!’ Laura watched Charles holding Willa, whose cries had turned to hiccups and were subsiding. The part of this story Flannery had always least enjoyed was how piercing her own scream had been as an infant. It was a bit late to apologize for it now.
‘I’ll never forget,’ her mother laughed ruefully, ‘taking the train from Florence to Rome. I realized I needed to give Jennifer and David a break so I thought I could manage an overnight in Rome, alone. With you.’ Laura winced at her own naive determination. She had been brave then. In 1975. ‘But I had left the bag of diapers on the train, when I got off. So there I was in the Rome train station, your lovely yellow onesie was soiled and you were crying, and I sat on a bench trying to clean you up – to fashion a cloth diaper from one of your little sleepers, sweetie – and making a godawful mess of it.’ As she rolled her eyes up to the high living room ceiling, Laura’s face was the young mother’s again. ‘A Roman conductor came up to me, waving his hands, in more despair than I was, saying, “È un disastro! È un disastro!”’ Laura did the big Italian hand gestures, which fascinated little Willa. ‘Of course, seeing that I was without a man, he then tried to pick me up.’
Charles laughed obligingly, though Flannery could see from her husband’s face that his thoughts were elsewhere. She could read him well by now, see from the interior focus of his eyes that his mind was traveling over a problem from his work. He disguised it well enough that Flannery’s mother felt merely flattered by the loud barked laugh of his response. She glowed.
‘That must have been tough, doing all that alone.’ Flannery was wearied by midnight feedings, but made herself smile at the familiar story.
‘Oh, it was!’ Laura said, almost gaily. ‘Luckily I was still young, and didn’t know any better. You can be braver, really, when you don’t know what you’re doing.’
Flannery leaned across and hugged her mother from a mixture of impulses, among them sympathy and apology (she was sorry to have caused her such trouble, thirty plus years before); though also, given recent argumentative outbursts at the Ashbury Street house, another feeling was folded in there too.
How hard it must have been, to do all this alone; yet on the other hand, there might have been moments when it was simpler, and purely sweet.
21
Flannery’s daughter had a father.
This was a novelty.
Flannery saw, even drained as she was by her paradigm-shifting exhaustion – when a new mother believes she has sunk so far into sleep debt that it would require a government bailout, or intervention by the World Bank, to extract her – that her daughter had a father. Daily, that small miracle nourished Flannery. Charles held Willa and he cherished her, and Flannery had not in her own childhood known a man’s holding or his cherishing. How else could A Visit to Don Lennart have moved so many, and sold so well? The ache at the heart of that story, her fatherless melancholy, gave Flannery’s otherwise wry, jaunty tale of adventure and pilgrimage its salt and its truth.
A doer, an actor, Charles liked taking Willa places, even when she was tiny. He left the hands-on tasks – feeding, bathing, dressing – mostly to Flannery. This division was more unexpectedly lopsided than Flannery felt comfortable admitting to her friends, or sometimes even to herself, since when she did bring it up with Charles he responded to her perceptions with caustic disbelief. (‘Is that a line from the feminist playbook?’ he asked her once during a tart exchange about the unequal share of diaper changing. It proved an effective silencer.) But he did get their daughter out into the world, proudly pushing the sleek navy stroller that contained her, and enjoying the way strangers admired and smiled at a baby in a stroller, as well as the parent accompanying her. He liked taking her places not specifically separated out for children, so avoided playgrounds and toddler pools, but happily walked with Willa past the tattoo parlors and used-clothing stores of Haight Street, the exotic botanical gardens at Golden Gate Park, or art museums, galleries, art shops, hardware stores. By the time Willa was three, the hardware store was one of her favorite outings with Daddy, who indulgently let her pick up objects in the carpentry aisle, encouraging her to feel the texture of sandpaper, or even the heft of a hammer.
Daddy: hearing her daughter speak those two syllables re-arranged something within Flannery, fixed one of her inner workings, got some fundamental emotional mechanism to run more smoothly. She was forever grateful to Charles for that, and when her husband aggravated or disappointed her, demeaned her even, she reminded herself of this shift, and how permanent it was.
‘You won’t have the same material as me, sweetheart,’ Flannery whispered into her daughter’s perfect mollusk ear, as she splashed and cleaned her in the evenings in the large and elegant claw-foot tub. There, too, Charles’s previously tasteful arrangement of soapstone dishes on a weathered wooden cabinet had been brought downmarket by Willa’s brightly colored frog sponge, her waterproof Dr. Seuss books, and the bubble bath that smelled of fake strawberries. ‘You already have a very different story from mine.’
Willa might have nodded had she been older, but at that tender age she simply grew, as children do, into herself, as the particular braid of nurture and nature came together to form her.
From her father Willa inherited an infectious laugh, an urge to build, and a knack for playing with Legos that set her apart from her princessed peers. (She was focused, careful, and inventive as she wove imaginative tales in and out of her constructions.) Her dark eyes; her dimples; her square
