by Devon, Gary;
At the age of thirty-four, Leona believed that everything always turned out for the best, and that the least significant everyday events were guided by some unknowable, mystical force. Even in the worst of circumstances, her belief seemed to hold true, from this moment back to that time sixteen years ago, when, soon after her eighteenth birthday, she had had to leave home.
Rather than submit to her mother’s arrangements and hide herself away at her Aunt Suid’s until the baby came, she had taken the bus as far from home as she could go for two dollars. The day’s journey took her to Livingstone, Kentucky, a river town of four or five hundred inhabitants. There, heartsick and alone and losing blood, she stumbled into the office of an elderly doctor named Merchassen. About to pass out, she told the doctor that she couldn’t pay him with money; she had taken nothing with her from home except the clothes she wore and a five-dollar gold piece, half of which she’d already spent. She had planned to work and save until her time came.
With unreserved kindness, the doctor and his wife took her in and cared for her when she lost the child. She had stayed with them afterward, in gratitude, but more because of an affection they came to enjoy and, later, because she had promised Dr. Merchassen she would stay with his wife until the end. She often thought how remarkable it was that she had been saved from her destructive self. It was almost as if she had been guided to their door so that she could emerge years later, changed and with a new and better life.
And yet, as much as she believed in the unseen trigonometry of things, she also believed in coincidence, the two almost whimsical forces meshing together like ever-changing, parallel gears. Hardly a week passed that some coincidence was not played out in her life. An advertisement for tires would arrive in the mail and the next day she would have a flat, or she would mention an old friend and that evening the friend would call. Over the years, many of these haphazard events had manifested themselves. There was no way to predict them, no way to use them to her advantage. They happened and she noticed and remembered.
Coincidence had brought her to Graylie, Pennsylvania, to live with her married sister, Emma. A call from Cornelia Dunham, her oldest and best friend, whose tone of voice seemed to imply more than it said, conspired with Leona’s imagination to suggest that Emma’s health was failing (even if she wouldn’t admit it), and Leona thought she should make one last visit while she still could.
The day after she arrived in Graylie, after all the hubbub and excitement of seeing each other for the first time in nearly four years, and while Emma was still hovering about, Leona said, “I don’t want you to feel that you have to entertain me.” Emma replied offhandedly, “I couldn’t entertain you here in Graylie if my life depended on it. I’m afraid you may have to entertain me,” and they laughed.
But for all the good it did, Leona might have been talking to a box. Emma was determined to include her in her daily routines, and as long as Leona lived there, she never got used to Emma’s fluttery invitations to go to church, to play canasta, to visit the neighbors. She understood Emma’s hospitality, but she resisted being drawn into a frivolous social life with people she didn’t know. She had come to Graylie to spend time with her ailing sister; she could only rejoice that the illness she imagined did not exist, but her purpose had never been to make Emma’s friends her friends, or to be jealous of the time Emma spent with them. It was a delicate, difficult balance: to go along with Emma on her excursions often enough to keep from hurting her feelings, and to not go often enough to remain uninvolved.
By the end of summer, she had turned Emma down so many times she was beginning to feel self-conscious and guilty. To make amends, she reluctantly agreed to accompany her sister to the hospital to visit a neighbor Leona hardly knew, Rosie Caldwell, who was recovering from surgery.
They asked for Mrs. Caldwell’s room number at the nurses’ station and had started down the hall past the intensive-care unit when Mamie Abbott wandered out of a room, her bandages coming loose, getting dirty, and Leona veered from Emma’s side to go to her. She took the child’s unbandaged hand and said, “I believe you’re going the wrong way,” and guided her back into the room as nurses darted toward them. Listening to the nurses’ chatter, she realized this was the little girl who had survived that awful fire. A few minutes later, with Mamie safely tucked in bed and the intravenous tube re-attached to her bandaged arm, Leona leaned down to say good night and the little girl grasped her thumb. Leona motioned for Emma to go on without her.
She kept promising herself she wouldn’t go back to the hospital, but in the middle of the morning or late in the afternoon she would go out for bread or a bottle of milk, or with some other excuse, and drive up the hill to the hospital, looking at the windows, wondering which one was Mamie’s. Late in the night, lying awake, she listened for the spongy whir of the paperboy’s bicycle tires and the wallop of the newspaper on the front porch to mark the time she could leave her hot, disheveled bed without disturbing anyone. She felt reborn.
More than once in the preceding months when she thought her welcome might be wearing thin, Leona had attempted to leave, but since she really had nowhere specific to go, each time she allowed herself to be talked out of it. The last time—some weeks back—Emma’s appeal had been “Why don’t you stay and help me put up my garden? I always have more than I can do.” Now she waited for the town gossip to inform her of Mamie’s release from intensive care. When word finally came, five days later, she told Emma she wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help, and she went to the hospital.
In the narrow private room, Mamie lay huddled in bandages beside the covers she had kicked away, her shadowed eyes fixed on some point in the air. An odor rose from the bed—a mixture of disinfectant, scorched ironing, and urine. Leona, sitting in the wing-backed bedside chair, lost her cheerful composure.
She found a lipstick-smudged teacup on a cleanup tray in the hall. In the bathroom adjoining Mamie’s room, she washed the cup with hand soap and filled it with cold water. The only washcloth in the room had been used and left to dry in rigid folds on a wall hook. With a twinge of regret, she took her lace-edged handkerchief from her purse, dunked it into the cup of water, and wrung it out over the cup. Then she wiped the child’s forehead and cheeks and gently washed the dried milk from her upper lip. “You needn’t worry any more,” she said, her voice sounding as strange and swallowed as a ventriloquist’s. “I’ll stay with you.”
She dunked the handkerchief again, wrung it out, and folded it twice into a pad, which she held against the small forehead until the cloth felt as feverish as the skin beneath it. Then she did it again. And again. And the blank, staring eyes gradually fell shut. “That’s right,” Leona murmured. “That’s better, isn’t it? Go to sleep.”
When visiting hours ended, at eight o’clock, two different nurses told her she would have to leave, but she ignored them as long as she could. On their third or fourth try, she interrupted them by holding up her hand and standing. “Could we discuss this in the hall?” she asked softly. “The child is asleep.” With grim faces, they followed her out and she closed the door.
“I’ve been trying to decide what to do about this,” Leona said as she turned. “And I’ve decided to stay.”
“But that’s not possible,” said the nurse who had been doing most of the talking.
“Of course it’s possible. What do you mean it’s not possible? Mothers and fathers sit up—someone sits up with someone all across this country every night. I’ve seen it many times.”
“Yes, but Mamie’s parents are—Are you related?”
“No, but that’s all the more reason why she needs someone.”
The dispute went back and forth until Leona ended it. “You do what you have to do with your rules,” she said. “And I will do what I think is right. If you want to know the truth, I don’t think she’s getting very good care here. But I’d rather not make a case out of it,” and she turned and went back into the room. Ten minutes later, a thi
rd nurse brought in Mamie’s medication and woke her up to give it to her, but nothing else was said. Leona drew fresh water in the cup and rinsed the handkerchief and, bending down at intervals through the night, she dabbed what little comfort she could onto the beautiful, vacant face.
Mamie was fast asleep and dawn had filled the room before Leona really paid much attention to the stack of dolls on the floor behind the door—gifts sent by sympathetic neighbors and family friends. Many of the dolls were still in their original cartons, and the others, without packaging, were heaped on top, legs and arms protruding every which way. Leona found the mere fact that they were there immeasurably sad, and couldn’t bear to look at them for long. Shivering in the cool morning air, she stretched, wiped her face, and moved toward the window. On the windowsill stood seven red roses in seven thin glass vases, the red buds regressing from fresh to faded. They struck her as excessive and even unwholesome; it seemed inappropriate for someone to be sending roses frequently to a little girl. She thought of roses as a woman’s flower and the frequency implied a lover’s gesture, yet … It all seemed so ridiculous. She glanced about for a card and found nothing but the florist’s tag. Then she heard the hasty steps of nurses in the hall. She put the tag in her purse, collected her sweater, and whispered, “So long, see you later” to Mamie.
Going home that morning, as she walked through the dew-laden air still silky and fresh from the night, she was reminded of playing, years ago, among wet clothes hung out to dry, and how refreshing the wet flapping had been against her face. But this morning she was bone tired and the air did little to invigorate her. A cup of hot coffee gave off its bittersweet aroma at her place at the table. “Look what the cat dragged in,” Emma said, and Leona told her only what she thought could bear repeating.
A few days later, in the afternoon, she drove across town to the Forget-Me-Not Florist and wandered among the claustrophobic profusion of flowers on display. When no one came to wait on her, Leona found a woman seated behind the cash register braiding a wreath from greenery. Leona explained who she was, giving the barest facts, and asked the woman if she could remember who sent the roses to Mamie Abbott. The woman knew immediately what she was talking about, smiled, and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “The order came in the mail. I’ve got the note here somewhere.” She flipped through a file and held up a small sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook. Written in a gawky, childish hand, the note said: PLEASE SEND 1 ROSE EVERY DAY TO MAMIE ABBOTT TIL MONEY GONE. IL NO IF YOU DONT. That was all. No signature or date or other markings. “Don’t that take the cake?” the woman said, her hands again shaping the wreath. “So we did what it said. Oh, I remember now—it didn’t come in the mail. Somebody stuck it under the door along with a ten-dollar bill.”
“Is that so?” Leona said, just to keep her talking.
“We think it must’ve been some kid, one of her friends at school, or maybe—you know, by the handwriting. The envelope was all beat up.” The woman went on and on, even to the point of recalling the multiple Abbott funeral. Leona was obliged to listen to her politely until another customer came in some fifteen minutes later. The woman’s notions seemed logical enough, and without an alternative theory of her own, Leona laid the small mystery to rest in the back of her mind.
Now suppers at Emma’s seemed even more subdued than usual, a soft tinkling of dinnerware and china, followed by the news on the Emerson television set Emma’s husband, Frank, had just acquired. When Emma had settled into her pink chair, busy with her crochet hook, Leona slipped quietly out the kitchen door and walked (or, if it was getting dark, drove) the twelve blocks and up the hill through the humidity of the evening to the hospital.
Tuesday was rain, and Wednesday was ten quarts of Rutgers tomatoes, and then it was Friday and Emma was hurrying to meet Frank after work to go to the V.F.W. for a blue-plate special and a few rounds of bingo. Knowing what the answer would be, Emma no longer asked Leona to join them. Leona spent the afternoon shopping and arrived at the hospital early.
Church-still, they sat side by side next to the bed, a man in a blue gabardine suit so new it still held the hanger creases, and a woman in a faded print dress, their weathered faces rotated toward her as she entered the room. She could have stumbled in her surprise. One look at their gaunt, sunburned faces and she knew who they were and why they were here. She went to stand across from them on the other side of the bed, and she said, “You must be Mamie’s relatives?”
They nodded that they were. She asked where they were from. “Redland, Texas,” the woman said. She asked how their trip had been. “Long and tedious,” the woman replied. The man’s gnarled hands rested like carvings on his knees and the woman’s thin bony fingers clutched the black purse in her lap. Mamie had not moved on the bed, her expression slack and remote. “Does she recognize you?” Leona asked, and they shook their heads. To make conversation, Leona said, “I was wondering—how old is she?” The woman frowned. “Seems like the first or second grade, wasn’t it, Charles?” Taking his time, the man nodded.
The withered roses had been thrown out, but ten tube vases still occupied the windowsill. “Mamie had such pretty roses,” Leona said. “Did you send them?”
“No,” the woman said. “We meant to, but with the funerals, we just couldn’t.”
After a while, Leona asked them if they were related to Mr. or Mrs. Abbott and the woman said, “Ray was my sister’s boy.” That would make them Mamie’s great-aunt and great-uncle on her father’s side. For what it was worth.
Unmistakably they were as slow as they appeared—slow, slow-speaking dirt farmers from Redland, Texas, come to take Mamie away. The evening light eroded into red and purple streaks and the long silences loomed between them. Finally, although Leona had made up her mind not to tell them who she was unless they asked, she blurted out that she lived nearby and came to see Mamie because she seemed so terribly alone after the fire. She felt better having said it. The woman said, “We appreciate it,” and stood, brushing the back of her dress, and the man stood with her and they turned for the door.
“Will you be taking Mamie with you?” Leona asked in a rush.
“When she’s well enough,” the woman said. “The doctor said we could probably take her home after her check-up this coming Wednesday.” And the man said, “We bide by our own.” They stepped out into the white corridor, leaving Leona behind in the darkened room with the handles of her shopping bag cutting marks in the palm of her hand. The murmur of Mamie’s sleep drew her down like a seductive lure. “Good Lord, Mamie, what will become of you?”
The nurses came and went, the noises dwindled to silence, and when Leona thought to look at her watch, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. All night she sat in that bedside chair, deeply troubled, her mind a whirl of thoughts and memories. She remembered a time when she was four years old and Emma was—what? Eleven? And her mother had come down with diphtheria. As soon as the illness was diagnosed, the two girls had been sent to stay with their Aunt Cora, who lived on a farm several miles away. Leona still remembered that dark stifling house, the curtains that were never opened, the photograph portraits of Aunt Cora’s brothers and relatives who had died in World War I. She and Emma had stayed there for two and a half months and she had never been so frightened for such a long time before or since. She never felt loved, never understood her stern, neurotic aunt. Her mother had nearly died. But Leona had prayed to be sick like her mother so she could go back home. It was one of her earliest memories. If Mom had died, Leona thought, what would have become of us? Even today the idea of it still made her feel sick to her stomach. I can’t let this happen, she thought. If Mamie’s experience with relatives was as unhappy as hers had been, it would be unendurable. This coming Wednesday, the slow woman had said. I have four days, Leona thought. Only four days. There was so little time. And so much to do.
How could she ever have imagined that the next evening the hospital would use her chance meeting with M
amie’s relatives as an excuse to keep her out of Mamie’s room and, to all intents and purposes, put an end to her nightly visits? On the pretext that she was too emotionally involved, they called her into an office and explained that the relatives had complained, which she didn’t believe, and how necessary it was to maintain a certain detachment, a certain emotional equilibrium—and on and on, until her mind swam.
Overnight, Indian summer ended and the weather turned dreary; a cold snap laid waste to Emma’s garden; the vines and stems and hardy leaves were suddenly black and limp. Emma, of course, went to work clearing the patch first thing the next morning, bundled up in sweaters and pants, and before long, Leona joined her. “I’m glad you came out,” Emma said, leaning on the rake handle. Her windburned cheeks were red, her eyes watery. “I was about to come get you. Come here. I want you to look at this.”
Leona followed her sister across the tangle of cucumber vines to the iron birdbath in the center of the garden. On the back side of the ornament was a trampled place where the ground was packed hard. Around it, odd bits of stuff had been scattered: matchsticks and bits of cloth, a knot of crinkled thread and two Lucky Strike cigarette butts. It looked like the remnants of a destroyed nest. “What do you make of it?” Emma asked. “Frank smokes Lucky Strikes, but I know he doesn’t come out here. Somebody’s been standing on this very spot.” She stooped and poked among the debris with her gloved finger.
As worried and preoccupied as she was about Mamie, Leona had to grin. She had seen Frank checking the garden on his way into the house, but to egg Emma on, she said, “Looks to me like we have a peeping Tom.”
“Oh, come on, Leona. Be serious,” Emma said. “I swear to God, some of the things you come up with. Who’d want to watch us anyway?”
They looked at each other, trading glances and winks, and burst out laughing. How different they were. Emma, always the realist, prematurely gray now, stockier, the good German matron. And Leona, younger by seven years, impulsive, taller and darker, and considerably more attractive. Only in their eyes did they resemble each other; they both had been blessed with their mother’s warm brown eyes. When Emma stood, she went wading off across the frostbitten garden, bundled up in work clothes as heavy as a bear, switching her hips and waving her arms in a hula-dance mockery. Then Leona followed, swaying from side to side, and they laughed and laughed, finally draping their arms around each other to keep from falling.