The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Say hello, Pearl,” the mother would tell her child, and Pearl, dutifully, would say hello, and Leonora would wave. She knew that the mother was thinking, Thank God she doesn’t know what I’m thinking.

  Those children neither pained nor interested her. They weren’t her lost ones. But every now and then a Pearl or a Sammy would smile at her, and even giggle, and she would, she would want a nibble, a kiss, in the old way. A raspberry blown on a neck, a kiss with a bite at its heart: nibble, nibble, yum. They weren’t hers, but they were sweet. But if you were the mother of dead children, that was over. You weren’t allowed.

  On those days she ordered a second loaf of bread, which she dragged home and tore apart.

  Five years passed like nothing. She was recognized in the neighborhood as the monument she was, constructed to memorialize a tragedy but with the plaque long since dropped off. She was Leonora. Her name had survived, because the bakery workers remembered it, but that was all. Nobody imagined that she was a mother. She was (anyone who saw her presumed) a person who had always been exactly thus, poisoned, padded, eyes sunk into her face. She existed only at the table, eating bread in her finicking way. She spoke to the people behind the counter. That was all. Some of them were patient, and some of them weren’t.

  Then one day a man came into the bakery, caught her eye, and smiled.

  Poor Alan, she thought reflexively, but then she remembered Poor Alan was dead, though he’d remembered her in his will and set up a trust to take care of her. This man wore a green wool hat like a bucket. The hat looked expensive, imported. He pulled it from his head and revealed a mop of white hair. No, he never was Poor Alan, who’d lost his hair long before it faded. But she did know the man. He sat down across from her. The tabletop was Formica, the green of trolleys.

  “Mike Wooster,” he said.

  “Hello, Mike Wooster,” said Leonora. She could smell her own vile breath. She slept in a bed and washed herself, but she did not always remember to brush her teeth. Why would she? She scarcely used them.

  He bounced the hat around on his fists. Then he set it in front of him. She had a sense he wanted to drop it over the remains of the day’s bread: Dolly this time. He said, “I’m Madeline’s father.”

  She heard the present tense of the sentence.

  Everything about him was rich and lulled. “I heard you came here,” he said. “That bread good?”

  She tore off a brown curve. A cheek, a clenched hand. She sniffed at it before she pushed it in her mouth.

  He cleared his throat. “We’re having a memorial service. And my wife and I and our kids—well, we thought of you.” He picked the hat back up, brushed some flakes of challah from the brim. “I’ve thought of you.” He said that to the hat, then got hold of himself. “Every single day I’ve thought of you. You know,” he said, “they turned my daughter into a monster, too.”

  The alcohol, the coat, the ice. Everyone said that if one of those things hadn’t been true, they never would have crashed. “Too?” she said.

  The animals of her body were roaring back to life. They—whoever they were—had not turned Leonora into a monster. They had erased her. Newspapers, television, the terrible gabbling radio, which spoke only of the children’s father, the left-behind man, the single parent. That poor man, looking after his children. To lose all of them at once.

  Poor Alan had held a funeral, had invited her. Though he’d asked her to come to the front, she’d sat alone at the back of the church—a church! Since when!—drunk and unmoored. Nobody spoke to her. She was a mother who’d let her children go, a creature so awful nobody believed in her. She’d had to turn herself into a monster in order to be seen.

  “Madeline never got a chance,” said Mike Wooster. “To redeem herself. But you could. You could be redeemed.”

  She laughed, or part of her did, a living thing sheltered in a cave inside of her. “Redeemed,” she said. “Like a Skee-Ball ticket.”

  “Like a soul. Your soul can be redeemed.”

  “Too late,” she said. “Soul’s gone.”

  “Where?” he said.

  “Where do you think?” she said.

  At that he took her hand. “This only feels like hell,” he said. “I know. I do know.”

  She shook her head to refuse his sympathy: she could smell the distant desiccation of it. No. Why had he come here? She could not be redeemed, a coupon, a ticket. He had a dead child, too. She could feel it twitching through his fingers, the sorrow, the guilt, like schools of tiny flicking fish who swim through bone instead of ocean. He was not entirely human anymore, either. Indeed, she could hear the barking dog of his heart, wanting an answer. Her heart snarled back, but tentatively.

  If she accepted his sympathy, then she would have to feel sorry for him. She would have to transcend. Some people could. They could forgive and rise above their agony.

  She could feel the turning of her organs in their burrows, and she felt an old emotion, one from before. Gratitude. She was thankful to remember that she was a monster. Many monsters. Not a chimera but a vivarium. Her heart snarled, and snarled, and snarled. She tried to listen to it.

  “The thing,” Leonora told Mike Wooster, and she pulled her hand from his, “is that you can’t unbraid a challah.”

  “No?” he said. “Well, I’d guess not.”

  “Would you like some?” she asked.

  He looked at the rubble of the day’s loaf. “Oh no. No, that’s yours.”

  “Let me get you one. Please.”

  “I don’t need—”

  Leonora said, rising, “It will be a pleasure to watch you eat.”

  The Get-Go

  Sadie’s mother was tall and narrow, with a long braid down her back, black when Sadie was very little, then silvery, then silver, an instrument to measure time, an atomic clock. Her father had been tall, too, both he and the mother the tallest members of short families. In photographs and at reunions, they loomed. Everyone was happy when they had a short child: they’d decided to fit in after all. Sadie was small and plump and blond, and when she was nine, her father died, and it was just the mismatched mother and daughter, a different kind of sight gag.

  Years later Sadie brought Jack home to meet her mother, Linda Brody, who still lived in the green house on a hill in Swampscott, with its view of the ocean and its cyclone fence. Windy on that hill. All his life Jack had felt like an interloper. He might as well, he decided, interlope on purpose. The doorbell was a little button with an orange light so you could see it in the dark. It was daylight. Sadie pushed it.

  “You can’t go in?” Jack asked.

  “It’s her house,” said Sadie. She opened the storm door and her mother opened the front door, a minuet, and mother and daughter met on the threshold. They hugged each other so long Jack wondered whether he should leave. Finally, they disentangled, Linda in her apple-red cowl-neck sweater, Sadie in her cherry-red winter coat. Linda offered Jack her hand and said, “Linda,” still gazing, lovestruck, at Sadie.

  She’s basically a hermit, Sadie had told him, and Jack had imagined a lady lighthouse keeper, a kind of nun—not a nun nun, since Linda was Jewish, but a woman of the book, devoted to reading. She was a high school librarian; she’d gone back to school for it once widowed. Here she was, with her cheekbones and her hair in its braid, her little house bound up in aluminum cladding the pale green of an after-dinner mint.

  “Come in,” she said, “before the wind takes you.”

  She strong-armed the storm door open so that Jack and Sadie could step inside, but she seemed unable to look at him. In his life he’d been ignored, but in ways that had made him feel invisible. The way Linda Brody turned from him, he felt blindingly bright, gargantuan. He took himself to the window and watched Sadie’s mother unzip Sadie’s down coat, take it off shoulder by shoulder, elbow by elbow, wrist by tender wrist. Down the hall was Sadie’s childhood bedroom, and Jack understood that he wouldn’t see it this visit, might never: it would be shut to him forever.
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  “Let me look at you,” Sadie’s mother said to Sadie, and set her hands on Sadie’s hips, and frowned.

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “It’s a lovely house,” Jack offered interlopingly, though it wasn’t. There was a general disorder to the room, books on every table, venetian blinds at odd angles to window frames. The furniture looked as though it had been bought all at once from a catalog. There was not a piece of art on the walls. Jack gestured at the window. “Look at that view!” Truthfully the view was only good in that you could see a pennant of ocean in the right upper corner. The rest was taken up with hedges, the across-the-street house, television aerials, telephone wires.

  “It’s nice,” Linda agreed. “You need a new coat, Sadie. Let’s go shopping: you can pick one out.”

  “I’ll buy you a coat,” said Jack.

  “We’ll go to Lord & Taylor’s,” said Linda.

  Her father’s death had bound her to her mother. How could Jack not have known this? Everything that Sadie had told Jack about Linda, her height, her seriousness, her occasional unkindness, the way she fussed over Sadie’s weight, couldn’t carry a tune but sang, couldn’t remember the name of any of Sadie’s friends—none of them had prepared him for this truth. Sadie’s mother loved her unnervingly. Not in a way that meant she’d love him, too. The opposite. Their love was a piece of furniture designed for two people only. Their love was an institution that barred men. Their love was love, provable and testable, solid, documented in any number of ways. What Jack and Sadie had was something different, built quickly, a lean-to, like all young love.

  He’d imagined he’d walk into Linda’s life through Sadie’s door. That was how it had worked in his family: Sadie belonged to him; she arrived with him as luggage, to be understood only as a part of his life. He saw that this wouldn’t work with Linda. He would have to come around the other side and talk his way in.

  He left the window and sat in a leatherette armchair seemingly made of the skins of Gideon bibles. It sighed under his weight. “Oh!” he said. “Jordan almonds!” He reached over and took a handful from the bowl on the glass coffee table, and Linda lunged and slapped his forearm, really slapped it, and said, in the voice of a shocked dog owner, “No.”

  Then she put her hands to her temples, contrite. “I just always get those for Sadie,” she said miserably. “She loves them. They’re harder to find than they used to be.”

  It had hurt. She’d meant it. He looked at Linda, then at Sadie, and understood that they were all going to pretend this hadn’t happened. He had the almonds in his fist, which he unfurled. The pastel coating had started to transfer to his palm. “Of course,” he said. “You have them.”

  That was the start of their lives together. It went on for years. A mistake, to go to the house. Linda wasn’t a hermit; hers was the sort of shyness that dissolved in a crowd. What she hated was to be seen in her own habitat, among her own things, the nest she’d built around her. Soon after that meeting she finally sold the house in Swampscott and rented a room from a colleague at the high school. Then she moved to Nahant. Then, once retired, to an apartment in Melrose, and finally to a studio in a converted elementary school in Waltham. Jack was invited to none of these places. Perhaps she was trying to throw him off her trail. He couldn’t even remember whose idea it had been, that disastrous first visit. Had he said, Why don’t you bring me home to meet your mother? Had Sadie said, Sure, no big deal, we’ll just go to the house, we’ll go to the place where my father died, and you’ll meet my mother, and we’ll all be happy?

  Ever after, Jack worked on winning Linda over. Mostly he succeeded. He needed a role for those times. He was not her child: What was more grotesque than that American trampling of boundaries, calling your in-laws Mom and Dad, I haven’t lost a daughter, I’ve gained a son, that whiff of incest and separation at birth? Nor was he a replacement husband, a tinkerer, an offered elbow at the opera, Aren’t I lucky to have two such beautiful dates: that was just as disgusting. He wasn’t a friend, though he grew to love Linda Brody decorously—a business relationship, a fond one, a banker or butler. A trusted member of staff.

  Of the three of them, only Sadie worked year-round, as an editor for a numismatic magazine (her father had been a coin collector, a biographical detail that had landed her the job). After grad school Jack had lucked into a visiting position at Boston University, then a permanent one. Summers he accompanied Linda to games at Fenway—for her sake, he’d affected an interest in baseball, which eventually became genuine, he would have thought lifelong but then the Red Sox broke his heart by becoming successful, not once but over and over. He learned the secret of Linda, perhaps of all in-laws, which was to fold his own personality in half, and quarters, and eighths, then tuck it into his pocket. He allowed himself to be lectured; he offered himself up as the brunt of jokes. The widow Brody. Baseball, museums, movies, but Sadie was what they had in common, though they did not speak of her. They both respected her privacy.

  Sadie’d been so little when her father died, an only child. A freak accident, she told Jack once. Did she want to talk about it? She did not. He thought he’d be the sort of person in a marriage—they weren’t married yet—to whom anything might be told. That was true of the small stuff, the nutshell jealousies, the unusual rashes on inner thighs, the basest functions of the body and the psyche. Not the big things. She had one picture of her father looking toweringly tall, a sort of diamond-shaped monolith, wider at the beltline than anywhere else. He smiled, showed off his bad teeth.

  Sometimes Jack thought that if only he could solve the riddle of Timothy Brody he could go forward in life. They’d get married. Have a kid. They were waiting for a sign. As though they would follow a sign. As though they’d be able to read it.

  In July of his twelfth year with Sadie, Jack answered the phone to hear a man with a thick Boston accent say, “Is that Jack? I’m a friend of Linda.” Linder. “She could use your help. She took a tumble.”

  Jack could hear Linda in the background saying, “Tell him I’m fine!”

  “She’s fallen down?”

  “She’s just in a bit of a pickle. Could you come over to her place?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me just call—”

  “She says don’t bother Sadie,” said the voice. In a stage whisper he said, “She’s embarrassed.”

  “I’ll be right over. But—can you tell me the address?”

  He didn’t tell the voice that he couldn’t drive; he grabbed a cab. It was hot in Boston, the kind of heat he resented. Linda’s building was called the Schoolhouse, which sounded picturesque but was only accurate: twenty apartments, some with blackboards and some with tiny porcelain water fountains. His cell phone sat in his pocket, accusing him of treachery. He should call Sadie. It was Sadie to whom he was bound.

  He rang the bell by the front door and was buzzed in without having to explain himself. The hallways were air-conditioned. Sadie had been enchanted by the Schoolhouse when she visited her mother, but Jack knew that no place once devoted to the education of children is enchanted without also being haunted. He could smell, quite suddenly, gym class. Not kindergarten gym class—cinnamon toast, artificial fruit, the squeals of five-year-olds allowed to run at top speed—but sixth grade. Half the girls budding, three or four in full bloody bloom. Boys, too, with wobbly chubby tummies and weak arms. The smell of burning flesh: thighs on climbing ropes, knees on the floor, what Jack would have called Indian burns. Maybe they still called them that. Lunch: square pizza, pickly tuna salad. Smoke from the teachers’ lounge. Turning a school into a residence, thought Jack, was as bad as building your home on top of a cemetery.

  Linda’s door was marked PRINCIPAL in black paint on chicken-wired glass. A short, fat man of Linda’s age in a baby blue polo shirt opened it.

  “Hey! Come in, Professor. I’m Arturo. Vitale. You’re the son-in-law.”

  “Not officially.”

  “No kidding? You’re not married? I got the idea you we
re married.”

  They went down a little corridor into the apartment, four long windows letting in four tranches of sunlight, exposed brick, a kitchen in the corner, handsome green-shaded lights hanging from the ceiling, and, in the middle of the floor, Linda Brody, leaning on a wooden chair. She held a cloth to her head. She was surrounded by boxes, though she’d lived here awhile. Was she moving out? Were the boxes permanent? Jack felt as though he were the one who’d been in the accident, hit by a truck and pushed through miles and walls to end up here. In the years he’d known her, she’d aged very little, but now she looked ancient with worry. Her floral dress was hiked up. He could see too much of her legs.

  “Not married yet,” Linda said.

  “Not yet,” agreed Jack. He knelt down next to her and surreptitiously pulled down her skirt. “Linda,” he said, “what’s going on?”

  “Well, I feel stupid,” said Linda. She took the cloth away from her temple and regarded the pink streak left behind. There was a matching streak in her hair. “I’m not sure what’s happened.”

  “Took a tumble,” said Arturo, squatting down.

  Jack looked at him. “Why isn’t she at a hospital?”

  “She said, don’t want to go. Hey, maybe me and Lindy will beat you two to the altar.”

  “We’re not getting married,” Linda told Jack.

  “You don’t know,” said Arturo. “Who can predict the vicissitudes of life?”

  Linda frowned, put the cloth back, and Jack touched his own head. His brain felt injured; he wanted somebody else to take charge of the situation, load him onto a litter. The boxes around her were filled with items wrapped in newspaper.

  “Are you moving again?” he asked.

  “No. Just putting things in order.”

  “Selling some stuff off, hopefully,” said Arturo.

  “Who are you,” Jack asked, and Linda answered for him: “Antique dealer. Old friend. Do you think you can help me get to my feet?”