Part 4 - Thelma’s Legacy

"What do you do, Mrs. Ryan?" Mrs. Huntley asked.

These people looked as if they spent most of their time inspecting the leather bindings on their books. What could she say, that if she had a big winner in the ninth she was going to buy a microwave?

"I manage my investments." Joanna looked over at her mother as she said this and smiled.

Dinner proceeded with bursts of conversation, then silence. Thelma lost track of exactly how many glasses of wine she had drunk, but still felt that she could focus adequately.

She was staring into a large black and white photograph of a bald man with a mustache. He smiled benignly.

"Who is that man, and the man in the large poster near the door?" Thelma asked Clive.

"Lenin is by the door, and that's Freud, across from you," Clive said, as if any dinner guest of his should not have asked the question.

Thelma stared at Freud. "Are you a communist, Clive?" Thelma asked stiffly.

Joanna started and then said, "Mother, really, people can like Lenin without being communists."

"Mother Ryan, that is an interesting question." Thelma knew right then that there would be nothing interesting about it.

"One's political persuasions are so rarely truly probed." I bet we're going to probe this one, Thelma thought.

"Political inclinations do relate to one's sexuality, one's economic status--," he went on.

Mrs. Huntley, who seemed, at least to Thelma's wine soaked eyes, a tad juiced herself, suddenly said, loudly, "People rarely entertain like this anymore. Do you entertain, Mrs. Ryan?"

A silence fell.

"No Mother Huntley, I don't much these days, not since my husband died." There was a pause. "I'm afraid that people might pour wine down my organ."

Mr. Huntley giggled, and Joanna, who had learned to expect anything out of her mother's lips, said softly, "Mother has a small organ that my grandfather gave to us. He was a missionary in Ethiopia."

"How lovely for you. But why would anyone pour wine down it?"

"Wine leads to that sort of thing, I think," Thelma muttered, conscious that she was now not sure where the wine was leading her. She had reached a state where she was a little shaky, where every word called for concentration and energy, so that lips would form them without slurring.

After dinner, drinks were served, and Clive bustled about, talking all the while of ideology, politics, poets, poetics, hermeneutics, a word that made Thelma want to grind her teeth. In fact, maybe she had made some funny noises with her teeth. Thelma was at the stage in her drinking in which she thought of doing things and then wondered if she had actually done them.

"Estate planning is crucial, really, and something mother and I have worked on together, as a team," Mr. Huntley went on. "We are quite a team," and he patted the fat bump on top of her stomach.

"I'm leaving my entire estate to Joanna," Thelma said proudly, and then realized that her estate would probably be the organ and the Oster blender she had had for twenty-five years.

Clive laughed and said, "Oh don't do that, Mother Ryan, we will just have to take them to the dump."

No one laughed but Clive, who experienced his wit as immediate and incisive. In the silence, though, he felt shock, not applause. Joanna went around to Thelma's chair. "It was just a joke, Mother," she turned slightly toward him, "He didn't mean anything by it."

Thelma laughed self-consciously, but then felt the kind of rage rising that she knew was very dangerous. She looked back at Joanna, in her black stockings and sensible beige skirt. So sweet, so serious, a young woman of purpose, of intellect, and very kind. In her drunken state Thelma was inordinately proud of the wonderful beauty of this fine girl, this person of substance.

How in the world had she sprung from the besotted loins of Frank and Thelma Ryan? Another wave of rage swept over her, and she knew she was descending into the madness that exists only over the edge, down into the bitter dark gall that ran inside, burning her, heavy, like molten lead. I can't lose her, not to them, she thought. She knew she was going to do it, she felt herself thinking of doing it, and then she did it.

She picked up the crystal wine glass and hurled it against the wall, where the brownish liquid splattered like dark blood.

Thelma heard someone yelling, it must have been herself; "You are not good enough to fuck my daughter in the ass."

Join us tomorrow to find out how Anne's story ends.

PART 3 - Thelma's Drinking

"Clive, what the hell you mean, it's got to be Clyde, I'm tellin' you definitely. It's Clyde," Rafe pronounced,

"Rafe, I do think you might admit that my own daughter knows the name of her fiancé better than you do."

"Hell she do, you don't know, he could be shittin' her. It's Clyde."

Rafe, Ginny and Thelma were bound together by dreams, by the concentrations and obsessions of the gambler. Rarely did their conversation include anything external to those dreams.

"It is Clive Huntley, I'm telling you."

"It sounds like a name out of a play," Ginny muttered as she looked at the next day's racing form. "You know, 'bring me my whiskey and soda, Clive.'"

"It's Clyde," Rafe insisted.

"Rafe, I'm going to hit you in a minute," Thelma said angrily, as she took a big gulp of Jack Daniel's.

"Bring me my whiskey and soda, Clyde," Rafe said, looking down at several names he had circled in the paper.

"That does it, that really takes it. It's bad enough that she's marrying this guy, and now you keep saying he's Clyde. What if I said your name was Rade instead of Rafe?"

"It's not, it's Rave."

"Oh Christ," Thelma yelled. "First I'm listening to poetry about penises, then I'm talking to a deranged black man about names. Do I need this?"

Thelma walked a bit shakily up the steps to Clive's apartment, one of those Berkeley places she considered picturesque, with plants and trees twining around the top step. She had cut down on her alcohol consumption that day, knowing that she should be somewhat more in charge of herself. Thelma always looked a bit wispy and startled, but this evening her blonde-grey hair curled neatly around her face. She had on her best lilac dress. Lilac, the color of the soul, she thought as she had fastened the small buttons down the back.

It was a three-room apartment, and as Thelma entered, she glanced at a life-sized poster of a man with mustache, cap, and a generally gloomy visage. Mr. and Mrs. Huntley were already there. They rose graciously. Thelma lurched towards them out of nervousness and shook their hands rather harder than she should have, then backed down onto a chair.

"What would you like to drink, Mother Ryan," Clive asked with a too cheerful smile.
Thelma was so startled by the Mother bit that she giggled, imagining herself on a broomstick.

"What are you having?" Thelma asked as if she barely touched the stuff.

"White wine, that is, I think we are," and Clive looked around at everyone for confirmation. They all nodded.

"That'll be fine for me too, then." Goddamn, she thought. I should have known it, white wine drinkers.

The conversation had been interrupted by her arrival, and now Joanna started it up again, something about political systems and their relationship to ideology. Thelma now had a good chance to check out the Huntleys. The Mister was a bit portly, with grey hair and grey suit, altogether grey, period. Mrs. Huntley was something else again, short, not attractive, not colorful, unsmiling - she did have a small lump of a stomach that bulged just beneath the top band of her navy blue wool dress. Thelma hated stomachs like that and had often wondered what it would be like to carry around something bulgy like that up front. But then she couldn't hate her for her stomach, could she?

Another glass of wine was poured. Joanna was smiling at her, and once again Thelma vowed that she would not go over the edge - no going over the edge, no sir.

"The state of modern criticism, I'm talking now about hermeneutics, Marxist criticism, deconstruction - it's very healthy, active, a major contribution to the dialectic of modern thought," Clive intoned solemnly. Thelma stared at a white, hairy mole on the left side of his chin. What a pasty little man, with short, stubby fingers that looked like a baby's.

Mr. and Mrs. Huntley seemed to know what he was talking about and nodded. Joanna was in the kitchen, and wonderful warm, meaty smells were coming out through the door. Thelma looked around. The room was completely surrounded by bookshelves lined with books. Every book appeared to be arranged alphabetically. She glanced down at a shelf of records near her chair - all in order there too. For a moment, Thelma was stricken with a weird sort of awe.

Join us tomorrow for Part 4 of Anne's story.