Free Attachment by Isabel Fonseca Page B

and age could unmake any agreement—if not her own marriage, then her parents’ divorce.
    When Phyllis spoke again she was looking at the tree, not at her daughter.
    “For nearly thirty years, I thought we’d never part. And then, for what was perhaps a mere…peccadillo—Bill was extremely handsome in those days—well, part we did. I was right. But I was also wrong. I don’t know how to explain it to you. Not so easy to disentangle, you know. However much you have right on your side.”
    Okay, this was not a death notice. But the word “peccadillo”—it was almost jaunty, the Great Peccadillo on his flying trapeze. Where was the virtue in downgrading emotion? Behind this question was her impatience with Mark’s mustn’t-grumble British upbringing—the prime cause, she felt, of his missing candor now. She wished everyone would quit trying to shield her, if that’s what they imagined they were doing. Jean remembered how she’d had to insist on being allowed to go to the hospital and see Billy one last time, to say good-bye before they unplugged his breathing machine. “Are you saying you and Dad split up because he was having an affair?”
    “Yes. In a word. I am.”
    “Mom, I was twenty-six years old then. Why wait to tell me now?”
    “It wasn’t the moment. And your father, he isn’t well, Jean. This is what I wanted to tell you. He’s had—I don’t know how much you know—several what they call ministrokes, no one even knows how many. Some of them symptomatically the same as a stroke stroke but not supposed to do any lasting damage. So they say this week. You know Dad. He’s not going to make an announcement. And he’s going to ignore it as long as possible. Practically deaf and he won’t consider a hearing aid. But to answer your question, I didn’t tell you at the time because, well, you had your own difficulties. Your pregnancy—with the prewhatchamacallit.”
    “Preeclampsia.”
    “Right. I just didn’t think you needed that information. I know how close you are to your father.”
    There was a long pause during which Phyllis combed through her bag, looking for her eyedrops. Jean continued to let the silence between them weigh as she watched her mother finger each eye in turn and deposit her tears.
    “You mean you felt humiliated,” Jean said at last.
    “Well, it wasn’t a barrel of laughs, you’re not wrong there.”
    Another longish silence. Phyllis wiped her eyes with the back of a spotted hand. Peccadillo, ministroke, all quite harmless and unlikely to lead to minideath, Jean thought—and then she remembered that this was, according to Mark, the Frenchterm for orgasm: le petit mort. But she’d turn away from his mental universe—how was Dad really? How was Phyllis? Jean wondered if she had, maybe unconsciously, used eyedrops to cover any natural tears she didn’t want her to see.
    “I guess I should thank you. I know you were trying to be protective.”
    “Well, yes. But truth be told, we were just getting through. And frankly it was before the age—or before my age—when talking about something seemed like any kind of help. I hardly knew what hit me, and then, suddenly, it was all decided and there was no…recourse. Almost like I wasn’t even there.”
    Jean thought this might be an invitation to speak out about her own marriage, though she wasn’t ready for that either. “I don’t mean this as a complaint, Mom, but you know, for Marianne and me, it might actually have been better to think there was a reason. ”
    “There’s always a reason, Jeannie.”
    They crossed wooden bridges and cobbled walkways, and before long they met a large tortoise, uncaged and untethered, its wrinkly neck the only indication of its vast age. The rounded shell was like a toy car big enough to sit in, not so much standing still as parked.
    “They live to be something like a hundred and twenty years old,” Jean said, unconsciously putting her hand to her own throat, touching the fold