by Anne Tyler
Sometimes he said, “Don’t you think we should see to their last names?”
“They have last names,” said Mary. “Yours. It’s on their birth certificates.”
“Yes, but if anyone were to check or anything. If they asked for proof.”
“Why should they do that?”
“Yes, well.”
He had the feeling that the children were some new type of boarder, just louder and more troublesome. They were not entirely of this house, they were visitors from the outside world. When he was most deeply absorbed in his work, children came seeping up the stairs like the rising waters of a flood, and their noise—strange clangs and hoots and the unbearable pitch of their quarrels—would soak into him slowly, at first unnoticed, then so exasperating that he would fling down his scissors and throw open the door and stand there trembling. “Why are you doing this to me?” he would ask. “Why must you make this noise? Why do you keep, why do you—” Their faces would all be turned up to him. There was something pathetic and yet irritating about their fallen socks, their patched jeans, the damp gray underpants drooping beneath some little one’s dress. They were utterly silent. Silence brought Mary more quickly than any shriek could. She was there in an instant, running up the stairs already asking, “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Mary, I was just trying to do some work here—”
“Yes, all right. Come on, children, Jeremy’s working.”
“It’s just that they keep making so much noise, you see.”
“You can play in the kitchen,” Mary told them. “I know what. Shall we make cookies?”
There was no way to win. He felt depressed at the way she herded them down the stairs, shielding them from him with her back; he felt lonely and guilty now that the third floor was silent again. How could he have scolded them like that? He knew them so little, couldn’t he have let them stay a while? He looked around the hall and saw the traces they had left behind—one roller skate, a homemade doll, a chalky handprint on the newel post. At his feet was a paper covered with purple writing: HANNAH 4 YR OLD I AM HANNAH. A fire engine with a key in its back wound itself down, its little red light blinking more and more slowly and the sound of its engine growing weaker.
Now a child tossed him an orange and he caught it by accident, astonishing himself so much that he dropped it again. He fell in with a parade that followed the old refrigerator down to the basement, which was dark and dank and smelled of mildew. The basement walls were lined with case lots of Mary’s household goods. There was an entire cabinet of sneakers, waiting to be grown into. Another of toilet paper. A barrel of detergent big enough to hold two children. Was this necessary? He felt that she was pointing something out to him: her role as supplier, feeder, caretaker. “See how I give? And how I keep on giving—these are my reserves. I will always have more, you don’t even have to ask. I will be waiting with a new shirt for you the minute the elbows wear through in the old one.” A delivery man knocked over a stack of flowerpots, bought on sale in preparation for spring. Somebody stepped on a cat. “Damn it all,” said the other man, “will you please get those kids of yours out of here? Will you get them out? They ain’t giving us room to step.”
The children vanished, but their giggles lurked in all the corners. The men went upstairs to bring in the new refrigerator and Mary followed, giving instructions. Jeremy came last. He felt old and tired. By the time he reached the kitchen, puffing and wiping his forehead, the refrigerator was already moving into place. It stuck out too far into the middle of the room and it blocked four inches of doorway. “Isn’t it too big?” said Jeremy. “Mary, I feel so—it seems so crowded here.”
But Mary said, “You’ll get used to it.”
Then she turned and smiled, and in front of everyone she threw her arms around him and said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t be a grump. Isn’t it nice that you keep winning us things? Aren’t you glad you’re so lucky?”
With people watching he couldn’t hug her back, but he smiled so widely that it seemed his face was melting.
He and Mary went to the gallery to see his one-man show—just the two of them, in Miss Vinton’s car. Mary drove. She wore a hat, also Miss Vinton’s, the first Jeremy had ever seen her in. Jeremy wore his golf cap. He was feeling a little sick. He held tight to the edge of the seat every time they turned a corner, and he kept swallowing. “How are you, Jeremy?” Mary said.
“Oh, fine, fine.”
“It isn’t far now.”
She had been to the gallery before. She had been visiting it for years, checking on how his pieces were arranged every time Brian took in a new batch. But Jeremy had never set foot in it, and only the importance of this occasion—an entire show devoted only to him, already bringing in more money and comment than he had ever imagined—made it impossible for him to refuse to go. Not that he hadn’t tried. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s my own work. What’s the use of looking again?” But they left him no escape. Mary and Brian and the others had set things up among them. Miss Vinton lent her car; the boarder Olivia babysat. Mary said, “We’ll go on a weekday when the place is not packed,” and Brian said, “No one will know you, Jeremy. And you might even learn something! It’s been years since you last saw some of your pieces.” That was the argument that won Jeremy over. He thought of all the work he had produced—objects he had looked at for so long that he couldn’t see them anymore, things that had worn him out and sickened him until he handed them to Brian merely to get rid of them, to free himself to go on to something new. What would they look like now?
So here he was, in Miss Vinton’s dusty-smelling car on this clear cold afternoon in April, gazing around him at what appeared to be some sort of bomb damage in the middle of Baltimore. Whole blocks were leveled; nothing but rubble remained. Beyond were caved-in tenements showing yellowed wallpaper, tangles of pipe, crumbled understructures of something like chicken wire. “Mary? What seems to be the trouble here?” Jeremy asked. Mary only gave the scene a glance. “Oh, they’re rebuilding,” she said, and drove on. Jeremy shrank back further in his corner of the car.
He and she looked at different things. They might have been taking two separate rides. “There’s an interesting place,” she said. “It’s a shop for hippies; they sell tie-dyed denim that would make wonderful curtains for the children’s rooms.” And later, “That’s a new office building without any windows, but they say you don’t notice that once you’re inside.” Sometimes she explained things to him that he had known for years. Did she imagine he was deaf and blind? “Look, there’s a girl with a bush. Isn’t it amazing? They call it ‘natural.’ ” He had been seeing girls with bushes for years, in magazines and TV commercials and on the sidewalk before the bay window. He had probably seen more from that window than Mary saw on all her trips to stores and schools and obstetricians. He had observed the world steadily swelling and involuting, developing new twists and whorls and clusters like some complicated cell mass—first inch by inch, then faster, so that now it seemed that after the briefest holing-up in his studio he could come back to find everything changed: people stranger, cars more vicious-looking, even the quality of light altered in some indefinable way. But he had kept up with things. He knew what was going on in the world. Mary underestimated him.
The gallery was a narrow white building with an awning that extended across the sidewalk. It sat on a quiet street among other buildings very much like it, out of sight of the bomb damage. “Well, at least it’s not too big,” Jeremy said, but as he stood on the sidewalk waiting for Mary to put a coin in the parking meter he had the feeling that this gallery outclassed him somehow. Certainly, if he had been a mere passerby, he would have been intimidated by that great glassy door with its gold grillwork. He would never have gone in on his own. “Mary,” he said, “are you sure that this is a proper time for us to come?”
“I told you, Jeremy. People are never here on weekdays.”
“Why do they keep it open, then?”
S
he didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
In the foyer, lit by a yellow light, was a piece that Jeremy remembered from three or four years ago: an old man going through a wire trashbasket. The man himself was made of dull brown wrapping paper, crushed and reflattened. The basket was a network of all the glittery things he had been able to lay his hands on—small skewers for trussing poultry, a knitting needle, a child’s gilt barrette, a pair of Abbie’s school scissors with “Lefty” on the blade. Within the basket was a cluster of bright colors formed from postage stamps and cigarette packs and an old bandanna handkerchief that Mr. Somerset had left lying on the couch one day. “Haven’t they done it nicely?” Mary asked him. “I told Brian, it’s the perfect keynote for the show. I’m glad they set it up at the beginning this way.”
“Yes, yes,” said Jeremy. But he was uncomfortable. He had never seen his work in such a setting before, among thick red carpets and hushed sounds and golden light. From some hiding place in the back of his mind a picture leapt forth of the model for this piece—an old man he had seen from the bay window, rummaging in the trashbasket one cold November day. He remembered the dry grayness of the man’s skin, nothing like this warm brown wrapping paper, and the claw-like fingers and silently moving lips. None of it was caught in his piece. He sighed. “Jeremy?” Mary said. “Aren’t you happy with it?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and moved on.
Past the hallway, behind the wall where the old man was displayed, stretched a larger room flooded with light and carpeted also in soft deep red. Five or six people were moving around it, stopping before each piece. He noticed the people before anything else. All but one were women, and they were whispering together about his work. His. He felt like rushing up and flinging his arms out, shielding what he had made. Two fat ladies stood in front of one of his old collages, one that was still two-dimensional; a girl made her way too quickly down a row of his statues. His smallest statue, the first he had ever made, sat on a wooden column: a woman hanging out washing. A curve of tin among stiff white billows that he had formed by spraying canvas with clear plastic. He remembered conceiving the idea and then wondering how he could set it in a frame. It had taken him weeks to think of making it a statue. He had worked fearfully; he had felt presumptuous, using up so much vertical space. But now a tag beside it read “From the Collection of Mrs. Herbert Lee Cooke”—one of the richest women in Baltimore. She had bought the statue the first day it was shown. And there were tags or “Sold” stickers beside most of the other pieces as well—each statue taller and more solid than the one before it. He wandered among them, dazed, holding his golf cap and chewing the tip of his index finger. He had never realized that he had produced quite this many things. Why, some people might consider him an actual artist, by profession. Was that possible? He pictured all those hours spent alone in his room, patiently fitting together tiny scraps, feverishly hunting up the proper textures, pounding in a row of thumbtacks until the back of his neck ached—all that drudgery. It wasn’t the way he pictured the life of an artist.
Brian appeared beside him and set a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Hi,” he said. He wore a double-breasted suit that made him appear untrustworthy. Jeremy was used to seeing him in sweaters and corduroy trousers. His beard was trimmed too neatly. “Well, Jeremy,” he said. “What do you think of your show?”
All the visitors looked up, their faces startled and avid. Brian’s voice had carried everywhere. “We’ve got them set up well, wouldn’t you say?” he asked. He smelled of some bitter spicy aftershave. He smiled not at Jeremy but at one of the statues, ignoring the visitors as if it were accidental that they had overheard.
Jeremy freed himself from Brian’s arm. “You said, but you said—you told me there wouldn’t be people here.”
“Well, Jeremy, it is relatively—”
“You broke your word.”
“Oh, now—”
“I want to go home, Mary,” Jeremy said. He turned to find her and saw, behind her worried face, all the spectators looking pleased. Of course, they seemed to be saying, this is what we expected all along. Brian told us. Had he, in fact, told them something? Did Jeremy have some kind of reputation? He pulled his golf cap on with shaky fingers; he turned on his heel, making Mary run to catch up with him. Yet immediately he sensed that he had done something else they expected. There was nothing he could do they would not expect. He stumbled across miles of deep treacherous carpet, trapped still in their image of him. His breath came rustily. He flailed one hand behind him and encountered Mary’s strong fingers. Then she had caught up with him and was hugging his arm close to her side and helping him through the glass door. “Never you mind,” she whispered. “It’s all right, Jeremy.” Out on the sidewalk she raised her other hand to cup his face and she kissed him on the cheek. “There now,” she said. But she only troubled him more. Was it expected of him also that he would stand here being kissed like a child? He wiped away the damp equal-sign left by her lips, and he pulled his coat more tightly around him and trudged off toward the car.
They had no medical student now. Buddy had married and moved to an apartment, and before a successor could be found Mary came home one day with a girl hitch-hiker she had picked up while driving Miss Vinton’s car. A hippie named Olivia. Her hair was like spun glass, colorless and straight, long enough to sit on. She was so thin she seemed translucent and she wore jeans studded with silvery stars and a shimmering white trenchcoat. When she held out a hand to Jeremy, her fingers felt like ice. “I found this child thumbing rides,” Mary told him. “Can you imagine? Why, you must be no older than Darcy!”
“I’m eighteen,” said Olivia.
Mary said, “I don’t care, any age is too young,” and she went off to find the girl some food. Olivia trailed her, the way one of Mary’s children might. She had a watery, boneless way of walking. From the dining room, where Jeremy sat with a cup of tea, he could hear her questions: “What is this for? What are you doing now? Is it all right if I have one of these crackers?” Later Mary told him that she had persuaded Olivia to stay in the south front bedroom. “What?” said Jeremy. He mentally placed the house on a map, set down a star for the compass points, found south. “But that’s the students’ room! We have always had students there!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it mattered,” Mary said.
“Well, no, of course it doesn’t matter. It’s just that—”
“I worry so, seeing a child out in the streets that way,” Mary said.
It seemed to him that every year she was becoming more motherly. She had six children now and she was six times more motherly than when she had had only one. Was it a quality that grew by such mathematical progressions?
Last month, going to Dowd’s grocery store for milk, they had been approached by a teenaged boy asking for money for a meal. “Why, you poor soul!” said Mary. “Haven’t you eaten?” It was six in the evening; all her own children had been fed an hour ago. “Wait here,” she said. “They sell sandwiches at Dowd’s.” “Well, money is what I rather—” the boy said. “Don’t go away,” said Mary. “Stay with him, Jeremy.” She went alone into the store. The point of her kerchief fluttered behind her, her family-sized handbag swung at her side, her unstockinged legs flashed white in the twilight and her scuffed oxfords beat out a businesslike rhythm. The eternal mother, scandalized, indignant, interfering, setting everyone straight. “Money is what I rather have,” the boy told Jeremy. Jeremy only nodded and swallowed. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Then Mary returned with a sandwich in waxed paper and a cellophane tray of oranges and a carton of milk. “You eat every bit of this, you hear?” she said. “Look,” the boy told her, “you didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Look, what I could really use is—”
But she had pressed the food into his hands and turned to go into the store again. “Don’t gulp it, now,” she said. “Not on an empty stomach.”
“Well. Thank you, ma’am.”
Then he and Jere
my had stood looking at each other, bemused, unsmiling, across the knobs and angles of Mary’s gifts.
At night, colors and shapes crowded his mind, elbowed each other aside, quarreled the way his children did: “Let me speak! No, let me speak!” He traced outlines in the dark with his index finger. He pressed his thumbs against his lids to erase images that disturbed him—cones rising in a tower, the base of one resting on the point of another in a particularly jarring way; yellow and blue appearing together, a combination he could not tolerate. Meanwhile Mary slept soundly beside him, and her breaths were so soft and even that they might have been no more than the sound of his own blood in his ears.
Were women always stronger than men? Mary was stronger, even when she slept. Her sleeping was proof that she was stronger. In Jeremy’s insomnia there was something fretful and nervous; he felt the presence of thoughts he would rather not look at, nameless fears and dreads. Yet Mary, who could name exactly what she feared and whose worries came complete to the last detail—Was Abbie’s tonsillectomy really necessary, when anesthesia could backfire and kill you? Should Edward have had a tetanus shot for that cat bite?—lay peacefully on her back with her palms up, her fingers only loosely curled, open to everything. She didn’t even believe in God. (Jeremy said he didn’t either—how could he, knowing how carelessly objects are tossed off and forgotten by their creators?—but he was haunted by a fear of hell and Mary was not.) Mary was more vulnerable than any man, the deepest pieces of herself were in those children and every day they scattered in sixty different directions and faced a thousand untold perils; yet she sailed through the night without so much as a prayer. There was no way he could ever hope to match her.