The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  She returned to Wisconsin and moved into the room off her mother's kitchen, enduring the stares of the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles who whispered, “We told you so,” just loud enough for her to hear. Then another man came for her. He was a farmer too, the son of her father's friend. He took her away from Wisconsin once again to the long porch house in Ohio where she spent all the rest of the days of her life until she came to be in her hospital bed.

  She remembered in her dreams that her new husband had loved her and the baby boy very much. She grew to love him too, with such a fierceness that she thought she might die if she were never to see him again. Their love brought them two more sons, and for years there was a perfect mixture of hard work and happiness as the family grew and the farm flourished.

  When the Depression came, they did not go hungry but worked harder and helped as many friends and neighbors and wandering souls as they could. The war that followed is what broke Margaret's heart the first time. Those inconceivable, distant battles snatched the two oldest boys before either of them had reached twenty years of age. What Margaret sent off to war were two strong, handsome men who adored her and promised to be careful, to come back to her and their life on the farm. What came back was a simple pine box for each of them, medals with purple ribbons, tattered clothes that had once touched the bodies of her baby boys.

  When the third boy fell from the top of the barn during haying season, Margaret wondered if she could go on living, if her broken heart would allow her to continue to feel anything. And there was always Raymond walking toward her at the end of the day, with that look in his eye that seemed to say over and over again, “I'm sorry, so sorry, my love,” as he peeled off his worn gloves.

  The years stored in Margaret's memory marched by while she slept, and when she finally opened her eyes, it took her a long time to remember where she was. She smiled as she stirred awake and for the first time, Margaret found she could move a little more easily to turn on the radio. She wanted to hear the latest reports about the walkers even though she already knew where they were going, why they were walking and what would happen to each and every one of them. Margaret knew all about the trials and tears of women and how sometimes you have to simply take a stand and say, “No more. That is the end of all of this.”

  Feeling grateful for all her new knowledge, Margaret also felt relieved that she could finally fit all the pieces together. She could never remember feeling quite so happy or light. Her mind was alive and crisp and anxious for what she was going to allow to happen to her next.

  When the morning attendant arrived, saying gruffly, “Hello, Mrs. Helgenson,” he reached to turn off the radio. She clasped her hand on top of his, feeling for the first time in many, many days what it was like to share the warmth of a human touch. “Please,” she said in a clear strong voice, “please leave the radio on. It comforts me and it's very difficult for me to turn it back on myself.”

  “Fine,” the man growled, his eyes widening slightly at her voice and the firm touch of her fragile hands. “I'll leave it on all day if that's what you want.”

  “That's what I want.” As he started to leave, she added, “What is the weather like outside today?”

  He cocked his head at her. “You haven't said two words in all these months. What's happening today?”

  “I'm just traveling through time.” She winked at him.

  “Wow,” he said nervously. “Well, here's your pills.”

  “The weather,” she asked again. “Tell me about the weather.”

  “Warm stretch throughout the Midwest,” he answered. “Not expected to rain for weeks. Just lots of sun out there.”

  Oh good, she thought to herself, then it won't rain the entire time the women are out walking. By the time they are finished with their journey, the rain can come and it won't matter. For now, Margaret thought to herself, we need this warm spring weather so we can get to where we need to go.

  “Here,” the attendant said, placing the blue pills in her palm. “Swallow these while I check the bathroom.”

  “Why, of course.” The minute the young man turned his back, she slipped the pills through her hands and watched as they dropped under her arm where she pushed them with what was left of her elbow, just a bone really, next to the other ones.

  “Should we change the bed?” he asked her next, hoping she would say no so that he could run outside and have a cigarette.

  “Oh, honey no, I think these sheets will be good for a while yet, don't you worry about that.”

  The fellow nearly ran out of the door then, and although Margaret desperately wanted to stay awake for the news, she was exhausted again and the room swirled. She saw her beloved husband, the one she loved, the man who had showed her how to open her heart, standing so close to her she knew it must be a dream. Raymond talked to her softly, standing close to the window.

  “Margaret,” he said lightly, as if saying her name was part of his breath, part of what he did every moment of his existence. “Margaret, I miss you.”

  Drifting awake and then asleep with her eyes rolling back and her head sideways on her pillow, Margaret had a clear picture of Raymond. She saw him as he looked in his late sixties, twenty years ago, how he looked just before he died. His eyes were set so deep inside of his head that she seemed to get lost gazing into them. Deep lines pushed wide by the prairie winds and the winters in the barn and the pain of all those lost boys ran from the edges of his eyes across his wide face. Raymond's neck was as thick and brown as the leather gloves that always stuck out of his back pocket, and little gray hairs popped up here and there from the chest Margaret had loved to lie across. “If I could just hear his heart beating, one more time,” Margaret told herself, hoping God would listen.

  In life, Margaret had memorized every line and turn in Raymond's body. She could pick out his footsteps from a crowd, smell him from one end of the manure-filled barn to the next.

  “It's getting close, Raymond, isn't it?”

  “We'll be together soon, Margaret, so soon now.”

  While his image faded away, Margaret remembered those last years of his life—the first signs of blood in the bathroom, and Raymond dropping his head to admit that he had been sick for a long while. The cancer quickly wrapped itself around them tighter and tighter each day, until he was unable to walk or move or to look her in the eye. She washed him and turned him on his creaking bed and at night, when his sleep was erratic and he cried out, she climbed in next to him and rocked him back and forth, just as she had rocked their three sons.

  After he died, Margaret thought of those months not with bitterness but with gratitude because she had learned a whole new level of love. She learned that after all the pain and suffering and loss of her life, she could go on and she could keep her heart open and unlocked, and that she could love Raymond, her wonderful Raymond, even more than she already loved him.

  For twenty more years, Margaret lived her life in the same house, walking the same paths through the long rooms, sitting each morning in the chair by the window, trying to fathom how she had managed to outlive everyone.

  Now Margaret didn't think of all those days alone as lonely. She had her church and her friends in town, and she had all those years of memories to keep her company from one season to the next. Yet Margaret grew old, and she could tell every day that her mind was shutting down. One morning she woke up on the kitchen floor and realized that she had slipped against the side of the refrigerator and hit her head on the counter.

  Not more than a week later, she tried to make a frozen pizza in the oven but she forgot to take the plastic and cardboard wrapping off of it. The house filled with smoke. She stopped driving soon after that, and waited out another year, hiding out mostly in the bedroom she used to share with Raymond. Everything frightened her, and often she would look out the window to see all her babies playing in the corn crib and then she could hear Raymond shouting from the barn to get down and be careful.

  In the second y
ear as newspapers and mail piled up on her porch and neighbors finally noticed, her pastor came with the sheriff. All the rest of those days that followed were lost to Margaret. All the days when someone sold the farm and people from Chicago took away all the pieces of furniture she had polished for years. The days when she was shifted from side to side in this very bed, and all the days when there was no one to pull the weeds from around the graves. No one to say the prayers and to pay for those Masses on the anniversaries of those deaths.

  By the time Margaret woke up from her last remembering, it was almost time for the last newscast of the afternoon. She grabbed at the thin sheets, pulling herself with one aching lunge just an inch so she could slide her head down the side of the pillow toward the radio. She heard the women were still walking, and she smiled and closed her eyes, listening to a woman announcer on the radio for the first time.

  “How many of us have thought about this, ladies? One day you are just fed up and you need a break and you say to yourself, ‘I'm just taking a walk and getting out of here.' That's apparently what this group of women from a rural section of southern Wisconsin are doing at this very moment.”

  She knew from her vision of them in her dreams that the women had a great deal of affection for each other. As they walked past that old pond and vanished beyond the next hill, Margaret drifted away again. As she focused on the women, and saw her old childhood house in the distance, her mind was filled with the sounds of barking dogs, and her mother's hand warm and soft, and smelling the soap against her face. When Margaret rolled over in her bed, she dreamed of her mother's arms, her wonderful kind arms, and as she slept, her arm rested gently on top of the mound of blue pills.

  United Press International, June 5, 1959

  —For National Release.

  Washington, D.C.

  DIVORCE—NEW FABRIC FOR SOCIETY

  Government statistics show that by the year 1980, one in every four households will be run by a single parent.

  “This might sound like an exaggerated figure and fairly shocking today, but by the year 1980, divorce and single-family households will be as common as two-parent families today,” said Clement Jenkins from the U.S. Census Bureau.

  According to Jenkins, government records show a dramatic increase in the nation's divorce rate, and he said that rate will only continue to climb.

  Dr. Martin Gibbons, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, said that the long-term effects of divorce on a family are often devastating. He said it's very difficult for a mother to raise a family by herself, and the mother usually ends up with the children while the father leaves the home.

  “Divorce is more widely accepted now than it ever has been, and although there is still a great deal of social stigma associated with divorce, that is going to change dramatically,” he said. He added that great changes in the legal and social welfare systems in the country will have to be made during the next twenty years to accommodate this huge lifestyle change.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but someday the divorce listings in this very newspaper will be as long as the marriage notices,” said Gibbons. “Times are changing.”

  Today traditional families, with the father working and the mother staying home to raise the children, still outnumber nontraditional families fifty to one. In some states, especially the central United States, those figures are even higher and divorce or separation remains fairly uncommon.

  —30—

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Elegant Gathering: Gail

  EVERY DAY FOR YEARS and years now, I have started out thinking that I will not make the same mistakes over and over again. I won't yell at the kids. I won't have them leave the house with their heads hanging down. I won't secretly wish that school lasted for fourteen hours, and that a woman with her hair up in a bun will show up to clean the house, cook dinner and do every other thing that I am sick to death of doing. I won't blame Bruce for leaving me with the whole damned mess, bills up the ying-yang, and a heart that is as hollow as the black stump on the back road that runs behind the house.

  I used to call my mother on the worst mornings.

  “Gail Marie Harksman, if I could raise three children by myself and send them all to college, then by God, you can get through this too.”

  Well, Mother, here's some big news for you. You screwed up big time and that's another thing I keep promising to change—blaming you for my own two divorces and a life that seems to have me moving in no particular direction.

  My life is the one that everyone whispers about at the class reunions. “Oh my gawd!” they all say. “Two divorces, how many affairs, who fathered which kid and she works where?” I've become the National Enquirer poster mom for this entire state and every other one I have run from or to.

  I don't suppose my parents planned this for me. When I was a girl before my father took off with just a raincoat, a paper bag with three books, some underwear, and a bunch of junk from the garage, I did what all little girls do. I spent countless hours paging through the wedding album that my mother kept on the table next to the fireplace, imagining what it would be like to marry my own father.

  For me, that album was the most beautiful and wonderful thing I had ever seen. My father wore a dark blue tuxedo that was slightly too big that he had borrowed from his friend in the show band. My mother wore my grandmother's dress, which fanned out like peacock feathers. I never ever remember seeing her look happy like she did in those photos. Often, when I was older, I would spend hours and hours watching her eyes for any sign of happiness, for some glimmer of hope or joy, for anything that might confirm for me that happiness does not have to disappear from a life.

  My father did say good-bye to me, and even though I was only seven years old, I can remember everything he said, how he stood, the way he touched my face and let his hand rest there the entire time he talked to me.

  Outside the window the lilac bushes swayed against the yellow siding of the house where we lived in Detroit. My mother was sleeping off one of her headaches, and my brother and sister were in their rooms pretending to do homework but really hiding from my mother.

  I was in the living room, and I watched my father pull into the driveway from work but he never got out of the car. He just sat there, and I wondered if I should go out and get him. I don't know if he saw me watching him but finally he got out.

  When he came into the house, he was holding a paper bag and looked startled to see me. Quite to my surprise, he came forward and knelt down in front of me as if he were about to propose marriage.

  My father's eyes were so dark, they looked as if they had been set into the back of his head. His hair was longer than that of the other dads I knew; it hung down across one eye, especially late in the day when all the hair oil had been rubbed off by his soft, elegant hands. He had a way of tilting his head to the right when he was serious about something, which was practically all the time.

  “Gail, do you know I love you?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “My princess,” he said, smiling just a little. “Now give me a big kiss.”

  I never asked him about the paper bag or why he was whispering or why he turned on his heel and left the house.

  I ran to the window, saw him backing up without ever looking around to see if I was there, then I watched the Buick disappear. I sat there for an eternity until finally the phone rang. Then I could hear my mother upstairs, yelling like my father was still in the house.

  Nothing was ever the same after that, although my mother kept telling us how our life was better without him. I could never understand how she thought this because all we did was yell and cry and look out the windows, hoping he would come back. My brother got in all kinds of trouble, but finally settled down when a note came in the mail from our father. As he read it big tears rolled out of his fifteen-year-old eyes, before he ripped the note into pieces. After that he was like the perfect son.

  I know now from my own experience that my mother tried as b
est she could, though it was never quite enough. She went back to work right away, telling us we couldn't count on our father or anyone (any man is really what she meant to say) to ever take care of us again. Her working meant that she wasn't around so much, and that was good for us. When she was there, she yelled at us as if it were our fault that her husband and our father had left.

  I always got home before my brother and sister during those first years, and I loved being in the house alone. My mother made a big point of telling me that it was against the law for me to be seven years old and home alone, so I would literally run into the house, lock the door, crawl on my hands and knees into the kitchen so no one driving by could see me, grab something to eat and then crawl up the steps to my bedroom like an old, tired dog.

  This is what I loved the most: locking the door, turning on the light on my dresser even if it was sunny out, grabbing my books, pulling my dress over my head, then slipping under the cool cotton sheets to read before everything got loud and crazy again. For that precious hour, I was everywhere in the world but really just inside of my own strange life. Mostly I was with Nancy Drew chasing down bad guys, standing on the seashore with the wind in my face and my beautiful hand resting against my forehead. My God, how I loved those Nancy Drew books.

  For Christmas that year, I hoped and prayed for a set of my own Nancy Drew books instead of having to borrow them from the library. “Just even one, Mama,” I begged. We were by no means poor after he left, but there was never anything extra. Mother let us all know that Christmas was not going to be much because of him. My sister and brother didn't bother to ask for anything, but I was still young and hopeful, thinking the world was full of happy endings.