Tara Sullivan You don’t get to pick and choose your family. Heather believed that, no matter how hard her Uncle Tom kept trying. And he had been trying for 25 years, since Heather was ten. She had been old enough to know that his daughters were still her cousins, even though she saw them only by chance at their grandparents’ home; too young to know why she was no longer invited to sleepovers or to spend the afternoon at their pool.
As Heather turned the key to her apartment, a letter tucked under her chin, grocery bags heavy in both hands, her thoughts weighed her down. You pick favorites—she was her Aunt Angela’s favorite—you choose who will be your child’s godparents—Tom was her godfather—and everyone else you are related to is family and there’s no choice in that.
But choices were made in Heather’s family. Heather wanted to believe that for most family members the choices had been made for them, but she was no longer the naive child she had been when her Uncle Tom stopped speaking to her Aunt Angela. Heather’s mother Marie, her Aunt Angela, her other two uncles, Mark and Paul, even her grandmother chose sides that day. Their wives and husbands filed in after them, each taking a position, and finally their children did too, one at a time, until all 14 cousins had found their place.
Standing in the doorway to her apartment, her children clamoring for her attention, Heather felt the weight of her family’s choices and understood at that moment that those choices at one point had no longer been made for her but by her.
“You’re late,” Heather’s husband said. “Dinner’s already served.” The letter stuffed into her purse would have to wait until after dinner, until after her children’s evening bath, book and bed ritual had been done. Heather saw the light blinking on the answering machine and knew it would be her mother, wanting to talk about the letter. It could wait, she thought. They all could wait; what was another day after 25 years?
Not family, not friend. She pushed the words down as she finished the last of her wine. “No more fighting,” she yelled down the hall, “out of the tub. Time for bed.” Do not try to contact me or anyone else in my family.
Her husband came out of the bathroom, their oldest son wrapped in a towel, swung over his shoulder, “You get Sam?” he suggested and then asked, “You okay?”
“I keep seeing ghosts,” she answered with a weak smile. Heather felt a twinge of guilt. He would think she was making some reference to her sister’s ongoing chemotherapy to fight a disease that had proven itself undefeatable. She knew he wouldn’t ask any questions, not in front of their kids.
“I can take care of this,” he told her, letting her shrug off her role as mother for roles, which rarely took priority anymore: sister, daughter. He didn’t know that the titles weighing heaviest on her then were those that had seemed devoid of any meaning for so long: niece, cousin.
She took the letter out of her purse to read again. As the words left the page and attached themselves to her heart, she swore her family would no longer be one that only came together because someone had died.
Tom had not spoken to his sister Angela since their father’s death, which had followed the thing Angela had done for which her brother had banished her. “You’re a bitch and a whore,” he said as he walked out the door 25 years ago. That was the last time they spoke.
No one could remember exactly when Tom had berated her, “I can’t stand the sight of you. You make me sick.” But it was somewhere between their father’s last breath and their mother’s first prayers as a widow sitting at the kitchen table, clutching her rosary and clinging to her faith that God would take her soon too. It was from those words, “You’re a bitch, nothing but a cheap whore,” that Heather’s mother, her aunt, her uncles, their wives and her grandmother, assumed new roles. They walked away from the family relationships that had defined their childhoods, their teenage years and the first steps into adulthood that each was taking when their father died. They married, embracing their new spouses’ families as their own. They had children. They created new families to replace the one that was shrouded in uncomfortable silences and unspoken accusations.
Still they were bound by that primal sense of family that no choice could dilute. And so every holiday season Tom called on them to march like silent foot soldiers on his crusade to punish Angela. Each holiday became occasion for Angela to remind everyone she was being punished. For some, Christmas with Angela meant Thanksgiving or Easter with Tom. For Heather’s mother, any holiday spent with Angela meant no holiday with Tom and his family. Family gatherings were rare and Sunday dinners at the family home rarely warranted setting the large dining room table that in the past had never seemed long enough.
The last time they had come together was for Heather’s grandfather’s 25th memorial mass. Heather’s grandmother prayed nightly, pleading with her dead husband—with the help of Jesus and the Holy Mary—to make them a family again; it was not all she asked for, but it was what could be done.
The mass was held at Mount Carmel Church in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. It was there that Heather’s grandmother’s five children had received their first communion, where three had been married and later chose to baptize their own children. It was where she still sang in the choir, although it was harder and harder for her to climb the balcony stairs and make herself heard above the younger voices. Her family filed one by one into the first four pews marked with bunches of white chrysanthemums: her five children were there, with their husbands and wives, and her 14 grandchildren; ten of whom were born after her husband’s death into a family already divided and conquered by Tom’s hatred. They sat down together for the first time in 25 years.
But like so many prayers, the answer would bring unintended consequences. Later Angela would tell her sister that she didn’t know what came over her. She would blame her father’s spirit for making her walk over to Elizabeth, Tom’s youngest daughter, and saying to Liz’s husband Jim, “Hello, I am Elizabeth’s Aunt Angela, we haven’t met. I wasn’t invited to your wedding.” (Only Heather knew that her grandmother had not been alone in making promises of impossible sacrifice in exchange for her grandfather’s intervention.)
Liz said nothing. Jim said nothing. The silence they greeted her with washed out the sound of the tolling bells in the church tower. Angela would later tell her sister that she walked away because no one said anything. Marie was incredulous, “They must have reacted in some way? What about their faces? Did they seem surprised?” “No. Nothing.” The sisters joked that maybe they didn’t hear her. They guessed at poor Jim’s reaction to one of his new wife’s crazy relatives walking up to them like that. They didn’t laugh about how much it hurt to be ignored though they both knew Angela should have been used to it. They didn’t talk about what Elizabeth’s silence might have meant.
Three weeks later Angela received a letter. When she saw the return address on the envelope was from Tom’s law firm, she thought he wanted to make amends. Maybe her words had not fallen on deaf years, she told herself as she opened the letter. She took a deep breath then exhaling slowly, she felt hopeful. She pursed her lips, keeping them from a smile. Hopeful about recovering something she had long believed was lost forever she struggled with the envelope. Her heart raced. She let her eyes rest on the first line, “Angela, after all these years I did not believe it necessary to remind you that you have no right to speak to anyone in my family.”
She had been so wrong. He warned her to stay away from him and his family. To never make any attempt to contact him or any other member of his family. He wrote that she had not been invited to the wedding because only family and friends were invited. She was not family or friends.
Angela read the letter dozens of times; alone; over her husband’s shoulder; to her sister on the phone; and the numbness she had managed to feel whenever an invitation was not extended or responded to, came back to her. She was used to his reproach, like the touch of arthritis she had inherited from her father, bothersome but nothing she needed to treat. She read the letter again and again until a heart monitor wouldn’t have picked up any difference had she just read one of those true stories from Reader’s Digest, and she could finally shake her head as to say, how terrible, glad it’s not me.
That was when Angela decided to go to their mother’s house, numb to the hateful words on the page, “I have only one sister: Marie. You Angela are nothing to me.” Armed with this letter, this proof, she believed her mother would finally realize that it was not Angela herself who was responsible for the 25-year rift that had divided the family. Her mother would be forced to see it had been her own son Thomas. Because, while her brother’s unjust accusations were like a rope weighing heavy on her shoulders, they rarely tightened into a noose anymore; it was her mother’s allegiance to Tom that wrapped itself around her neck, choking her until she could barely breathe.
Her mother’s response, though not unexpected, stung, “Tom is very hurt by what you did.” Angela rebutted, “This isn’t about how he feels. This isn’t about him. This is hateful and meant to hurt me.” She would have yelled, “This has never been about Tom. I did not leave Tom. I did not divorce Tom. I divorced Andrew.” But that had been said before and her mother’s defense of Tom was too painful for Angela to endure again.
While Heather’s grandmother wanted to reunite her family, it was to be on her terms, which meant that Angela must repent. She had always defended her sons, “the boys” she called them, no matter what they did or said. The three of them held the title roles of oldest, middle child and baby. The girls, mother’s helpers, were in between each one, filling things out. And none of this may have mattered much; just stuff that happens in a big Catholic family, if Angela and Tom hadn’t fought. The line their mother had drawn years ago when they were all children, like a school teacher organizing her charges, boys to one side, girls to the other, suddenly mattered—very much.
Not only was Angela a girl, a daughter, but she had also failed at the one thing that she had been raised to do easily. She had married Andrew, Tom’s wife’s brother, despite her mother’s disapproval and then, to make matters worse, left him, despite her mother’s objections, offending everyone: her mother, Thomas, Thomas’ wife and Thomas’ wife’s family, all of whom made up his family now.
Then Angela remarried—in a quiet civil ceremony—and soon thereafter divorced someone else (whose name Heather couldn’t remember) and in doing this had offended God and Heather’s grandmother for a second time. Her original sin had been enough for Thomas and his family.
Like Angela, Heather too read and reread the letter, trying to make sense of it but unlike her aunt, no numb feeling washed over her. Instead confusion surged into an indignant rage. Although written by her Uncle Tom, it was another voice Heather heard.
Why had Elizabeth decided to incite Tom? What had she said to her father? No matter what she did say, she said it knowing that her words would enrage him, hadn’t she? Questions whirled around in Heather’s head until they found answers and sank heavy into her gut. Elizabeth didn’t want a family reconciliation. She accepted her father’s resentment as her own. Elizabeth believed Angela had wronged her too.
Divorce was not a sin, certainly nothing Heather or any of her peers condemned, yet this was what destroyed her family. Heather had played her part for 25 years, a secondary role that included silently accepting invitations when extended, not questioning when they were not and never mentioning the name Angela on the rare occasions Heather was family Tom chose. It was written for her by the older generation who adhered to rules dictated by a Catholic church, whose threat of hell fire and eternal damnation paled next to the everyday headlines of escalating crime, global warming and terrorist acts, all around her.
“But what was it really that Aunt Angela did?” she asked her mother on the telephone after she tired of reading the letter.
Heather needed an answer. The answer to a question she had been asking for 25 years. She needed the answer when at Elizabeth’s seventh birthday party—although only ten years old herself—she knew something had happened to merit that she would be quietly punished. She needed that answer when she never was invited to another birthday and her time with her cousins was reduced to chance encounters at her grandparents’ house. She wanted the answer when she had no idea what to give her cousin Elizabeth for a wedding gift because she didn’t know anything more than that Elizabeth’s favorite color was purple when she was seven years old. And she wanted to give her cousin Sarah, Elizabeth’s sister, the answer to that question when Sarah told Heather how hard it had been growing up without family being family unless her father said so. Heather wanted to be able to tell Sarah why they had had to suffer the loss of each other—cousins, like a sister and more than a friend. That answer was what Heather needed to prove to Sarah that it was not their fault; to prove Uncle Tom had been wrong to try to pick and choose his family. But she didn’t have the answer. And it seemed no one in the family did.
Heather’s mother answered with a distracted voice, “Tom doesn’t even really know.” Uncle Mark was of the opinion that Tom’s wife was to blame. Uncle Paul said Tom’s wife’s mother was to blame. But these were answers filtered through Angela and Marie, who then as an afterthought said, “Angela once said it’s because she did what Tom couldn’t.” Words soaked in tears followed quickly as her mother wept for a family lost, a sister hurt, a brother stolen from her by his own pride. The new answers were washed away by the old ones as they flooded out again.
Heather knew as she listened to her mother that she could not count on any of them—not her mother, her aunt or her uncles—to lift the crushing weight of their years of feuding. Heather would inherit her grandmother’s diamond engagement ring, one of her cousins would inherit her grandfather’s oak desk; even the proceeds from the sale of the family home would be passed down to the cousins. Their inheritance would not include forgiveness.
Heather folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. She avowed herself against Elizabeth carrying on for her father. She would not allow Angela and Tom’s conflict to become theirs. She would uncover the answers she had been seeking for so long. She would do it for her children, in her sister’s name and in her grandfather’s memory.
Heather would begin her inquiry with Angela. At first, Angela would evade her questions. She preferred the numb feeling she had grown used to over the pain that could be caused if the past were looked at too closely; if too many questions were asked. Angela knew something the others didn’t. She knew how much more pain she could cause.
And although she would be evasive, Heather would persist. And eventually Angela’s resistance would weaken. She would allow herself to be tempted and cajoled into appointing Heather as her successor.
Angela would teach Heather how to swallow the pain that comes with keeping family secrets. Tom would teach her to hate because of those secrets.
Author’s note: This is chapter one from The Good Aunt, a novel in progress.
readings from writers for fair goers.
