Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  Richard remembered when his grandmother died, because of his father’s silence. Richard had been six or seven years old. He thought his own mother was there, but what he remembered most was darkness on the street in front of the Horton Herald. His father’s silence that was like darkness. Someone, maybe the Linotype operator, had received the call, and came out to tell his father on the sidewalk before they went into the building. His father and mother owned and edited the Herald, a weekly newspaper in what was then a small town just south of the Twin Cities, on the Mississippi River.

  There were facts of history, as well as a son’s feelings, in his father’s great emotion. Her maiden name was Addie Rosetta Doolittle, and she had raised her six children after her husband, Richard’s grandfather, Richard Abner Adgate, disappeared in 1914.

  Addie, Richard’s father said in his obituary notice in the Herald, was a small woman, weighing about a hundred pounds. She died at seventy-four on that Mother’s Day in 1943 from “heart failure aggravated by whooping cough.” A week later, in the next edition of the paper, he wrote a longer piece about her, how she had raised the six children alone. He made no mention of his father’s disappearance, saying only that they had “lost” their father in 1914. In his concluding paragraph he wrote, “Humbly I say that her going leaves me with a deeper duty than ever to be worthy of her, to live as she would have me live. May I, despite all mortal weakness, approach somewhat to her fine faith, her quiet gentility, her sincere affection and her unfailing goodness. To be privileged to remember such a mother is in itself a holy treasure.—Dick A. Adgate.”

  Richard’s name was also Richard Abner Adgate, so there were three of them. There was the deserter (or possibly the murdered), the gentle one who was his father, and himself.

  Richard’s father married Charlotte Clara Clifford in Duluth op February 2, 1936. Richard was born in Duluth that November. His mother’s father, John Walter Clifford, was a lawyer, a bitter, difficult man in some ways because he had lost a fortune in real estate by selling too soon. Of course, these things happened before his own memory began to flicker on, noting the blue skies and the white clouds that never appeared in the old photographs, and he couldn’t be certain of them because he was told of them by his mother, whose strange way with even the simplest sort of information had always been part of his life.

  “Are you going out there?” Nora asked. Of course he had to go to Arizona, and he tried to define the meaning of Nora’s question. What was her mood, and why did she ask? Was she being kind or unkind? On the phone with Joyce, the manager, he’d learned that a local retired minister sometimes acted as a “conservator,” taking on power of attorney in such cases and writing checks. That might have been possible; his own schedule was frantic and would be for a month or so. But when he called his mother and suggested this arrangement to her she went into a rage. “Keep that person away from me!” Richard had witnessed this sort of rage before—the scorched-earth rage that destroyed its host or the world, whichever was possible.

  “I don’t see how I can not go out there,” he said to Nora.

  “You know I have to go out there.”

  “I’ll make your reservations,” Nora said. She didn’t like his mother at all, perhaps for good reasons, but she believed in duty. That he didn’t want to go, to get on an airplane he couldn’t trust or control, she knew, but she would approve of his having to do it. It was his mother, the subject of her, that could not be brought up without tension between them. This was the sympathy, he supposed, of those married for over a quarter of a century, where everything was known, and known again.

  The airport limousine was driven too fast—seventy and eighty on the interstate—by a woman driver in a blue uniform. No doubt this speed was planned, part of its scheduling, though illegal. Everyone in the long limousine seemed dazed, as tight with apprehension as he was. On the airplane the narrow seats in narrow rows enclosed them all, and the familiar unnerving engine-surges and the thumps of the landing gear projected his devalued center of consciousness into the anxious stratosphere. He hadn’t smoked for two years, but he’d bought pack of cigarettes in the airport and he smoked, so even that one bit of pride had been frightened out of him.

  In Phoenix, after hours of demeaning attention to height and small variations in the plane’s engine noises, too many cigarettes and the booze dispensed as anesthesia, he rented Ford Escort in grayish heat unnatural to September.

  In Sun City, or a suburb of it—or perhaps this retirement city was all suburbs with curving, neatly landscaped residential streets—he found the Garden Residential Hotel, a modern building of two stories with no architectural frills. After a short, hot, but not oppressive walk from his air-conditioned car to the Garden’s double entrance—an air lock—was the air-conditioned lobby, a breezeless chill where rows of old people, sitting in arranged chairs, watched a giant television screen. Joyce, at her desk, knew who he must be. She was middle-aged, like him, so they were different from the others, and conscious of it—members of a race, or clan, that had a sharper edge of participation in this world. She was crinkly about her bright eyes, with tinted hair.

  “She’s been overexcited. She thought you’d be here earlier,” Joyce said. The hotel had two floors, and he took the elevator up. In the hall, a Mexican-looking janitor said to maid, laughing, “Now, there’s a strong one we could use!” They all smiled, being younger than the citizens of this old, old country.

  A heavy, bent woman in the hall leaned on a cane, the kind that had a wrist cuff, resting, looking beyond him.

  His mother’s door was open, and he went in to find a plump young woman in white sitting in a chair beside her bed. His mother was not just thin, she had changed into a bird, her nose a beak, her face all beak and black eyes. Brown bruises were on her arms, the empty, discolored skin hanging below the bones. She could not sit up, but her face in its intensity followed him. It was a long time before this new face of hers became at all familiar to him. While she stared, her mouth opening and closing, the plump younger woman said, “I’m Maria. She’s been hyperventilating. She thought you’d be here earlier. We told her and told her when your flight was, but we couldn’t change her mind.” He understood; Maria seemed a little amused by it.

  “Dick!” his mother finally said. He kissed a bone on her face and moved back. The room was dark except for a bedside table lamp, the opaque curtains drawn against the day outside.

  “She won’t look out the window anymore,” Maria said.

  The world had become this room.

  “I’ve lived long enough,” his mother said. She began to try to cough up something, but didn’t have the strength. Maria, with a strong brown arm, lifted her up a little and took what she could get in a Kleenex.

  Her leg hadn’t mended, and the plastic splint didn’t fit properly because she’d lost so much weight. A raw sore covered the back of her leg above the ankle.

  A thin man in his seventies, chipper but not well shaved beneath the chin, came in and introduced himself as Frank Weeks. “I was a freshie when Charlotte was a senior, at Macalester. But we all knew who Charlotte was!” he said, sitting on the couch and smiling. “I was a philosophy major, so what good did that do me in the world?”

  He was going to go on, but the dark dry voice from the bed said, “Frank!” Meaning that he should go, that there was no room here for his prattle about himself. He got up quickly and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Charlotte. Sorry!” and left.

  Joyce came in then, and his mother said, “What do you think of my son?” While Joyce smiled at this unanswerable question, he was reminded of his childhood. It seemed familiar that poor Frank would not be allowed to say his piece, and that she would show off her only son. Oh, puh! to Frank, he could hear her say. He always says the same thing to anybody new.

  Joyce smiled some more, and said, “It’s good to see you so happy, Charlotte.” She gave him a quick, serious look that meant, Come and talk to me, and left.

  “Joyce adores me,” his
mother said.

  With a spoon Maria fed her some of the liquid food supplement that was all she would eat, and gave her a pill about as big as a BB, washed down with a sip of Pepsi-Cola. She couldn’t take larger pills because she said they were too big for her to swallow.

  While his mother went into an uneasy sleep, and Maria went down to the dining room to eat lunch, he sat in the dim room looking at a worn copy of the Chippewa, the 1933 yearbook of Macalester College. All the young faces seemed set in youth forever, though certain other photographs gave him a chill much like remembrance and loss. One was a winter scene of Macalester Avenue, with bare elms and the dead-white sky of all the old photographs. About four inches of snow had fallen, and the street and lawns were white, a single car’s wheel tracks faintly seen in the unplowed snow of the broad avenue. To the left, through the trees, was a brick institutional building with tall windows; to the right were white houses with curtained windows through which he seemed to detect warmth and life. A single woman, in a long coat, could be seen walking down the snowy sidewalk half a block away. Beneath the picture were the words “Where we tread, ’tis hallowed ground.”

  Underneath his mother’s senior portrait was the motto “Oh, what is man that thou art mindful of him!” She looked to the left, and had dark short hair and a long neck, though she wasn’t tall. She was even-featured and good-looking as all the Cliffords were. In college she was sometimes called “Cliffie.” “Here’s to Cliffie,” wrote one of her classmates, “may she always be as happy as she has always appeared to be.—Pearl Murray.” “Charlotte, the girl who always keeps quiet (?).—Harold Hand.” “Where there is life there is hope, and you have the life all right.—Kenny Davis.” “You little man hater!! Oh, yes.—Velva B. Minty.” “A girl of surprises who surprised me into liking her, much against my will.—Meryl.” “Charlotte: with all your faults and freckles—I like you.—Hazel Joe.”

  A critical, or at least ambivalent, note seemed to be intruding into these comments. “I heard a lot about you before I saw you, Cliffie!—Helen.” “Dear Charlotte: I am sorry to say you are still on probation.—Ruth.”

  In the “Senior Alphabet “: “C for Clifford who’s fond of the boys;/But those who play football make all the big noise.” Even if one read between the lines, the jokes, the cartoons, there was an air of invincible innocence and seriousness about the Chippewa. One girl could sign her own photograph with this advice: “Remember old Ethics days in Prof. Andy’s room. May you always follow his ethical teaching.—Helen May.”

  When Maria came back, his mother still asleep, he left the dark room with a feeling of relief. From Joyce’s desk in the lobby he called the orthopedic doctor. “Her bones are oatmeal,” the doctor said. Of course the doctor wouldn’t come there to look at the ill-fitting splint; she’d have to go to the hospital, or to his office, in an ambulance, which Joyce told him his mother refused to do. His surge of anger kept him from saying anything more to the orthopedist. He called her other doctor, who said, “There’s nothing wrong with her, you know. She has no illness.” Because of this she could no longer stay in the hospital on Medicare.

  In her mail was a bill for a computed tomography of the upper body, from a corporation run by two doctors who evidently owned the CAT scan. “Sure,” Joyce said. “They go through the hospital, find an old woman with a broken tibia, and convince her to sign away a thousand dollars to see if she’s got anything wrong with her lungs. That’s how they make a living, I guess.” Then Joyce looked unhappy, or worried, about what she would have to say next. “It’s about funeral arrangements,” she said. “I know you’ll have to go back East pretty soon.…”

  He was glad to assure her that the idea didn’t throw him. The idea of death. She recommended two funeral homes nearby.

  He first went to the hospital to get her wedding rings, cameo locket, and diamond wristwatch, which had been left in the safe there, and saw the Home Care Services nurse who would visit her at the Garden. At the Thunderbird Bank, the officer who was familiar with her financial affairs estimated that she had about three weeks of available money left, at the rate she was spending it. But she would not leave the Garden and go to a nursing home. She liked Maria, and one other nurse’s aide who spelled Maria. There was another one she couldn’t stand, but who was the only other one available. No, she’d stay at the Garden, where she knew people, and where Joyce was. “Joyce adores me.” But actually Joyce was a kind person, kind enough to bend the rules; his mother would accept adoration, but not kindness.

  In front of the Tradition Funeral Home, three large young morticians in suits and ties, at 105 degrees Fahrenheit, tried to open the window of his rented Ford Escort, its keys locked inside. The window was open about an inch because he’d found that the air conditioning worked better that way, and a coat hanger, the modern equivalent of haywire, was the tool over which the three pranced and pushed, each with a perfect theory. Richard had his own theories, too, but hesitated to butt in because they liked what they were doing so much.

  The object was to reach the window crank and, if it could be cranked, figure out which way it should be cranked. One of the young morticians wanted to try to pluck the keys from the ignition, and was dampened in his spirits when it was pointed out to him that in Ford Escorts a knob on the steering column had to be pulled in order to release the keys. Why, in the name of automobile design, was this so? No one else, in the clamor of his own ideas, would discuss this with the key-theorist, but even he was not unhappy for long. It was a sort of dance they performed, each given a certain amount of time to do his solo with the wire before he had to relinquish it to the next. Meanwhile all three, surely for the first time on that hot, slow day upon a recognizable American street on the edge of the desert, felt useful and excited.

  The architectural style of the Tradition Funeral Home was, as near as Richard could define it, Spanish-modern-romantic, a sort of brown, textured adobe with arches, glass panels, and Palladian windows. Inside, it was somber and dignified, with oil paintings of, for instance, Venice, done in the learn-to-painton-television style—motel paintings, elaborately framed, quite similar to those in the lobby and halls of the Garden Residential Hotel. And yet the pictures were lively, and did make your eyes move into created worlds with their own depths. He could acknowledge this, although with a kind of aesthetic guilt. In the deep-carpeted, dark-paneled interiors of the building were no obvious religious symbols.

  He had spoken earlier with Les, one of the three young morticians, about his mother’s cremation. Her will, which he’d found among her papers, stated, “…no ceremony, no residue.” Just like that, in spite of the religiosity she had proclaimed throughout her life. She had once even published a book of “family devotions.” But toward the end, where she now was, she made no mention at all of Christ, or of God. So Richard had conducted his business with Les, learning that there would be a special box, costing five hundred dollars, a sort of one-time crucible, among other charges. Since her will stated “no residue,” her ashes would be scattered somewhere at their convenience, in the desert, somewhere.

  Now, however, at the ceremony of the window crank—it had been an hour, at least, of discredited theories—Les had an idea; a coat hanger was too frail for the job at hand, so he went into the Tradition and returned with one of those conical flower holders made of wire of a thicker stock, and a pliers, with which he fashioned an instrument which worked. There were cheers, triumphant feelings all around. Richard supposed he’d locked the keys in the car because he was nervous about having to arrange his mother’s disposal, since she was at that moment, he would find, ordering Joyce and Maria to call the Thunderbird Bank, the hospital, and the state and local police to find out where he’d been for so long. Of course, they didn’t make those calls.

  When he got back to the Garden, he tried to explain why he was late from the bank and the hospital, an explanation containing the necessary lie, but she was exhausted now. “Diamond,” she whispered, raising her hand an inch o
r so before it fell back. He put the rings on the thin, bluish finger.

  The nurse’s aide she didn’t like was now on duty, a dumb, kindly woman from Kentucky who worried about the raw sore on her leg.

  “Let’s us see it, now,” she said in baby talk. Her name was Anna. “You be a good girl, now, and do what I say, or we’ll have to spank ’ums, won’t we?”

  A voice from a dry place near death, with something of that terminal power: “What? What did you say?” It seemed to come right out of unconsciousness, fiercely aware and aimed at the fool, who in this case ignored it. His mother’s power had waned, now, and her anger dissolved in exhaustion. She let herself be turned on her side, while sympathy pains flickered over the skin of his legs. She sighed in pain. From the sore? From the cracked eggshell of bone? Oatmeal!

  She groaned, and groaning fell into a kind of sleep. He received a glimpse of the sore, which was red and alive, as if it were an organism stronger than its host.

  He leaned away, and looked elsewhere in the room. There was the high school graduation photograph of his daughter, smiling too broadly and thus unlike her, her blond hair to her shoulders. And a photograph of his son, whose hair was long then too—another discarded fashion. Now both of them were in their own lives, needing little from him or from Nora.

  He remembered hitchhiking with his mother to the Twin Cities—a first hint that she was acting without his father’s knowledge. After the Horton Herald went broke, she worked for another newspaper. A man where she worked kept saying to her, “Hey, beautiful.” “Hey, beautiful,” in a way Richard recognized at the age of seven or eight, and she seemed nothing but pleased and flirtatious.

  Much later Richard found that she was not the first wife to leave his father, that he had been married just after high school, for about a year, had sent his wife to art school somewhere, and that she never returned.