by Gayle Roper
I got up from my sofa and let Rainbow out into the backyard. She immediately ducked behind Mom’s rose bushes and relieved herself. She was back at the door in less than a minute.
“Life would be easier for all of us if you’d use your litter box,” I told her as she sat to clean her paws after her excursion into the dirt. As always, she ignored me. My consolation was that on the litter box issue at least, she’d also ignored Pop. The only time she deigned to use it was if we were gone longer than her kidneys could handle.
Pop was John Seward Bentley, Jr., my grandfather. He and Mom, my grandmother, had raised Ward (John Seward Bentley IV) and me from the time we were quite little. Our parents were killed on an icy road in one of those massive pileups you sometimes hear about in the news. That we called our grandparents Mom and Pop was Pop’s little joke. After World War II, he had opened a small store that sold electrical appliances. Though the store had grown into Bentley Marts, a large, privately held chain of 45 stores in the Mid-Atlantic states, he always liked to joke that he and Mom owned a Mom-and-Pop store.
Ward was a lot like Pop. Driven. Type A. Both moved quickly, thought at lightning speed, and had five projects going at any given time. Both would have given the Apostle Peter a run for his choleric money.
“Cara,” Pop and Ward would tell me, “you’ve got to get out of that novel and into real life!” Or away from that computer. Or that movie. Or that how-to-write book.
Sometimes I thought Mom, no slouch in the personality pool herself, almost understood that to me that novel, that movie, that manuscript I was working on—they were life. Characters fascinated me. Plotlines struck my imagination. The juxtaposition of purposes, ambitions, and loves filled my mind as I wondered how that character would react if he trusted God instead of himself or how that villain would change if eternal issues ever filled his thinking. Story was all.
So here I was, a thirty-year-old woman who wrote inspirational romances, had a comfortable income from them, shared a home with her grandparents, and lived mostly in her mind. I was happy with myself like that, but no one else seemed to be.
“Cara, baby,” Pop would chide me in his booming voice, “you’ve got to live life large! You’re a Bentley!”
I tried for years to follow his advice, but I finally accepted that I’m not the “live life large” type, Bentley or not. I’m more like gentle rain to my family’s cyclones. But I enjoyed their whirlwind style because it kept life at 356 Harris Avenue vibrant and interesting, even if it occasionally made me cranky with surprises.
During Mom’s illness as her strength ebbed and she neared death, it hurt me to see her once brilliant inner light dim, then flicker, then burn out.
“Cara,” she would say as she lay wasting away on her pillows, “come sit by me.” And she’d pat the side of her bed with her frail hand. I’d climb onto the great bed and hold her hand.
“Cara, you are beautiful.” Her eyes held love and something that seemed like pity.
“Mom, please.” It always embarrassed me when she said that because I looked in the mirror every day. I knew what I looked like.
“You are! You have glorious hair.”
I had brown hair with a golden sheen to it, but it was just hair that I combed straight back from my forehead. I had little wisps that worked their way free around my face in spite of my best efforts to restrain them with extra heavy-duty hair spray. I dealt with the heavy mass by clasping it out of my way with a barrette at the nape of my neck or twining it into a quick braid.
“And your eyes!”
“Mom, they’re just brown eyes like millions of other eyes.”
“And your smile! If you’d just smile more, Cara, love. You’ve always been such a solemn little thing.”
“I’m hardly little, Mom,” I said, ignoring the smiling bit. I knew I’d never convince her that I was a closet optimist, but I was. I knew the sun was going to come up tomorrow, and I reveled in it. I just didn’t want to go out and smile at it. I wanted to write about it. “I’m tall—five eight.”
“And all glorious legs,” she said.
“I can tell you haven’t tried to buy jeans with legs this long,”
“Cara, don’t do that!”
“What?”
“Mock yourself like that. Just because your heroines all have auburn hair and emerald eyes or raven hair and violet eyes, you think you’re plain. Well, you’re not!”
“I love you, Mom.” And I kissed her and she sighed.
“You need a man, Cara.”
“Mom, how politically incorrect! I can manage alone. I’m a big girl now.”
“I have never doubted your ability to cope, my dear. I just hate to see you so solitary.”
“I’m not alone. I have you and Pop.”
As she became desperately ill, she would grasp my hand and murmur, “Cara, love. Please.” She whispered those words to me when I bent to straighten her pillow or brush back her hair and when I gave her medicine or helped her to the commode. In fact, they were the last words she said to me before she died. I knew what she really meant: “Cara, for Pete’s sake, get a life! You’re a Bentley!”
I loved that she cared. I loved that she and Pop worried, that they despaired of me. It made me feel warm and toasty that though they didn’t understand me one bit, they wanted me to be happy. But it didn’t make me change my contented bystander life.
After Pop died, Ward took up Pop and Mom’s mantle in more ways than the management of Bentley Marts. He was constantly after me.
“I don’t care what you do or where you go, Cara. Just do! Go! You’re a—”
“I know. I’m a Bentley.” I put my hand on his shoulder and said as firmly as I could, “But I don’t want to go anywhere, Ward, and I’m doing what I love.”
“Sitting in one room all day writing?”
I nodded. “I meet the most interesting people that way.”
He frowned at me, his choleric nature totally unable to comprehend a phlegmatic, introverted woman like me. But that didn’t stop him from trying to make me see the light.
“God doesn’t like us to be so introspective,” he told me one day as he paced in my office. “That’s why the Bible is full of ‘one another’ verses.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You know—love one another, encourage one another, do good to one another.”
I had to admit I had no answer for that comment, but I gave it my best try. “I regularly attend writers’ conferences as well as Romance Writers of America and Christian Booksellers conventions,” I said. “I deal with others all the time.”
“Right,” he said, unimpressed. “And when you go to these places, you hang around all day with other recluses just like you.”
I thought of the wild and wonderful personalities of many of the writers and editors I knew. Recluses hardly fit the bill. I thought of the panels I sat on and the classes I taught and the fascinating conversations I had at these convocations. In reality I did quite well with people. After all, I’d lived all my life with Pop and Mom and Ward. I knew all about people skills, and I loved my times on the dais or in the spotlight. But I was always happy to come home and be alone again. In fact, I needed to come home and be alone.
But Ward never saw me do anything but write, never saw me as anything but alone. He naturally assumed I had serious limitations that were preventing me from enjoying his version of a happy life.
Ward and his wife, Marnie, a delightful, sparkly blonde, lived fifteen minutes away from me in Columbia, in a large and wonderful new house with windows and gables and a stone front and a huge yard for John Seward Bentley V to run around in—as soon as he was old enough to run.
“Cara,” Marnie said when they dropped in one day to check on me, “don’t stay alone in this huge old house!”
“But I like it here,” I said for the hundredth time as I watched my brother begin his now routine tour of the place.
“Just checking,” he mumbled as he slid through the doorway t
o the kitchen.
“It’s not going to fall down,” I said.
He made a soft grunt, obviously expecting just that now that there wasn’t a man living here. As Marnie and I continued to talk, I listened to him go down to the basement to check the furnace. I heard him checking the locks on the back door. I heard him climb to the second and third stories, moving from room to room, methodically going over some mental checklist he’d created.
I felt a bit like Rainbow must when I hugged her too tightly.
Marnie laid her hand on my arm. “This place is too big for you, Cara. There’s too much upkeep. We worry about you all alone here.”
I smiled and said nothing.
“You need to buy a nice condo near us. Johnny will want Aunt Cara nearby.”
I thought that Johnny couldn’t care less, but I knew that Marnie, who had all the heart, vitality, and charm of a people person, was as concerned about me as my big brother. I just couldn’t imagine why they’d even think I would want to leave the house that had been my home almost all my life. I loved its high-ceilinged rooms, its tall, nearly impossible-to-decorate windows that let the late-spring light stream in, its backyard with Mom’s roses and two huge oaks that shaded the patio.
“I think maybe I’ll paint the outside,” I said to Marnie as I rocked sweet-smelling Johnny softly in my arms. It was my way of saying that I wasn’t moving. “You think cream shutters would look good with the brick? Or should I stick with white? Or maybe go to red shutters?”
She didn’t say anything as she sank into Mom’s favorite chair, but her kind face was full of worry. About me.
“That painting is not a rash decision,” I said hastily, acting as if the painting were the main issue that concerned us. “Mom and I were talking about it just before she became ill for the last time, and I’ve continued to think about it ever since. Four years of thinking means it’s not an impulsive decision, doesn’t it?” I looked at her with feigned innocence.
“Cara, I don’t care if you paint this place purple,” she sputtered. She rose and paced, her arms shooting in all directions in her agitation. “It’s the place itself that concerns me, and you here in it alone. You’re letting life pass you by!”
“Oh, Marnie.” I gave her a warm hug. Johnny squeezed between us in a loving nest. She hugged me back, perhaps too ardently because Johnny squirmed. Without thinking, both of us bent and kissed him, me on the top of his bald little head, she on his chubby cheek. One thing in life was certain: Johnny would never lack for love. He was a Bentley.
I smiled at my sister-in-law. “I think you’re forgetting one basic thing. I don’t like change. No, I hate change. I’ve had too many recently, and I’m not facing another by moving. Let me get used to Pop being gone.” I smiled ruefully. “It’s going to take a while. I mean, I’m still struggling over Mom’s death three years ago.”
When Ward, Marnie, and Johnny left, they departed with warm hugs and kisses but no understanding. Bentleys are supposed to be doers in life, not observers!
To some extent Mom and Pop and Ward and Marnie were right about me. I was letting life pass me by. I was a recluse. But I was a happy recluse—until that late-May day.
I wandered from room to room, Rainbow trailing behind. As I walked through the dining room, I thought of the time way back near the end of the lean years when Pop had decided he and Mom could afford new wallpaper, though they decided to save money by hanging it themselves.
“Tess, straight! It’s got to be straight!”
“Don’t you give me straight, John Seward Bentley, until you match that pattern like you’re supposed to. And look! You cut that piece too short. We’re going to have to buy another roll.”
I remembered the fat little paperhanger who had finally been called, a man I had looked upon as a marriage saver. And I remembered Mom and Pop standing in the freshly hung room, arms about each other, smiling in shared pleasure that they could finally afford something as wonderful as new wallpaper and a paperhanger.
In the kitchen I saw the stove Pop had gotten Mom even as she lay too ill to cook on it.
“It’s the kind with no burners,” he told her as he kissed her pale cheek. “It’ll save you clean-up time.”
The pain on his face as he leaned over her told me he knew she’d never use it. He just needed to do something concrete for her, something to bring some sort of control to a situation beyond his control.
“John,” she whispered, knowing full well that the gift was a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. “I love you.”
I came to Pop’s office with its walls of plaques, commendations, and awards for his years of business achievement and community service. I looked at the neat, cleared desktop holding only his pictures of a young Mom and the last one taken of the whole family before her illness. I knew all the drawers were ordered or empty. Ward and Mr. Havens had taken away everything important and disposed of the rest. I missed Pop’s shaggy stacks of magazines, papers, bank statements, investment newsletters, and motivational quotes—the stacks that had driven Mom crazy.
“John,” she’d storm, hand on her hip, “you have the most unsightly, pack-rat habits of anyone I know. One of these days I’m going to clean up this mess, and then you’ll be sorry.”
“Tess,” Pop would answer, “did I ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re mad?”
“Don’t you beautiful me, John Seward Bentley!” she’d say. “Clean up your room!”
“Or you won’t give me my allowance?” he’d reply, walking up behind her and nuzzling her neck.
“John, stop that! The children are watching!” But her frown, never very serious to begin with, would show signs of severe strain.
“Let them,” he’d say. “And they’ll know what God meant marriage to be.” He’d turn her in his arms and kiss her thoroughly, and she’d cuddle against him, smiling happily.
Maybe they were why I write romances. I’d seen what real love was.
Once, about ten years ago, I’d gone to Mom and Pop’s bedroom. I needed to talk to Mom about something long forgotten. I knocked on the door and she called, “Come in.”
I opened the door to find her and Pop cuddled in the middle of their huge bed, her gray head resting on the grizzled gray hair of his bare chest.
“Oh,” I said, blushing. “I’m sorry!” I started to close the door.
“No, no, Cara,” Pop called. “Don’t go.”
I hesitated, feeling I was intruding, knowing I was intruding.
“I called for you to come in, Cara, love,” Mom said, “because I want you to know that love, true love, doesn’t die with the years. Gray doesn’t mean gone.” And she rested her hand on Pop’s chest. He grinned at me like a young man.
I shook my head in false disdain. “You two are such a bad example to an innocent young woman like me.”
“She needs more proof, Tess,” Pop said. And he bent over and kissed Mom a great smacker.
“I love you guys so much,” I whispered as I closed the door. All day I couldn’t stop smiling.
Now I started crying, and the tears spilled over and ran down my cheeks in a rain of loss.
God, how can I survive this aloneness?
The thought brought an intense, thrumming anxiety. My heart began to pound and my hands shook as I clasped them to my chest.
Always before I’d been alone by choice, alone yet surrounded by people I loved and who loved me. Now I was alone, period.
I was almost in a panic as I ran to the linen closet and pulled out a new box of tissues. I tore it open, grabbed a fistful, and began mopping my face, but the tears kept coming. I returned to the living room with the tissue box under my arm, Rainbow padding behind me. I sank to the floor and, knees pulled to my chest, laid my head on them. I sobbed and sobbed.
A tentative paw patted my thigh and Rainbow whimpered. I reached out and swept her into my lap. For once, she stayed. “Oh, Baby, what are we going to do?”
She had no answer, but she lay still, letting me str
oke her and bury my face in her fur. Finally though, she could bear it no longer, and she hopped down. She stalked under Mom’s dropleaf table and began rubbing her head against the box Mom always kept tucked under there.
“So I can enjoy these things anytime I want,” she’d say as she reached down and pulled out the generations of photos lying there.
I crawled to the box and tugged it from its hiding place. It suddenly became my life preserver. I could do better than go to dinner with Pop and Mom tonight. I could live our lives together all over again.
The first picture I pulled out was a very old sepia photo of Pop’s parents, the first John Seward Bentley and his wife, Charlotte, seated in a stiff, formal pose from the early twentieth century. In great contrast, the next photo I pulled out was an informal picture from Ward and Marnie’s wedding five years ago. The sun was shining, the warm June breeze was blowing Marnie’s veil out behind her, and everyone was smiling. Mom, three months short of beginning her final, fatal struggle, wore a midnight-blue that looked stunning with her white hair. Pop’s great chest strained his starched shirt and tux. Marnie was radiant and Ward handsome, though they looked impossibly young.
Even I looked good in the rose gown Marnie made me wear instead of the beige I’d wanted. Marnie had also insisted I “do something with that hair!” The result was an elegant chignon at the base of my neck softened by curls about my face instead of the usual ponytail. The baby’s breath and roses tucked in my hair made me look alive in a way my usual slicked-back style never did.
I smiled through the mists blurring my vision.
For two hours I cried as I looked at black-and-white photos of Pop in his World II Army uniform, of Mom, her hair dark, her smile brilliant, holding the young Trey (John Seward Bentley III, my father), of my great-grandparents standing in the front yard of this very house when it was brand-new, the trees and shrubs so small and unformed.
I found a picture of Ward and me standing with Mickey Mouse on that long-ago vacation. Ward was so happy he almost vibrated as he stood tall and proud. I looked furious.