Several years after their mother died, Roy’s sister, Sally, told him that she had recently had dinner with Kitty’s former sister-in-law, their aunt Isabelle, whose first husband had been Kitty’s brother, Buck. During their conversation, Sally said, Isabelle remarked that Buck had warned her when they were newly wed that his sister was only out for herself, that Isabelle should be cautious in her dealings with Kitty, who was twelve years younger than he.
Hearing this made Roy angry, given that Isabelle, now in her mid-eighties, was, in his experience, one of the most cold-hearted, ungenerous, selfish persons he had ever known. He’d not seen Isabelle in more than thirty years, but her behavior when he was a child had made an indelible impression on his memory. Not that Kitty hadn’t been vain, self-absorbed, even neurotic, but she had not been a snob, an arriviste, as was Isabelle.
“Isabelle has no right to disparage Kitty,” Roy told his sister. “Our mother had a very different history than Isabelle. Being raised in a convent insufficiently prepared her for the world, married off at nineteen to a man two decades older, having to suffer from a chronic, misdiagnosed illness since adolescence. Kitty had her faults, we know that, serious psychological as well as physical problems. She was a very beautiful woman who learned early on how to use her looks to get what she thought she needed or wanted. Isabelle must always have been envious of Kitty’s natural beauty, how most men were instantly attracted to her even well into her middle age.”
“Isabelle was pretty when she was young,” said Sally.
“Yes, but she couldn’t compare to Kitty. And despite her failings our mother had a good sense of humor, which Isabelle never did. It bugs me that Isabelle still can’t let it go, that she said this to you now.”
The night after Sally related to Roy her conversation with Isabelle, he had a dream in which he was a very young boy accompanying his mother, she was driving and Roy was seated next to her on the front seat of her midnight blue 1953 Oldsmobile Holiday convertible. The top was down and the car was zooming down the old seven mile bridge on Highway A1A in the Florida Keys. For a moment Roy was again in Kitty’s world, she was in her late twenties, telling a joke and then laughing, flashing her perfect white teeth and tossing her long auburn hair as the wind caught it. There were no other cars on the road.