After she had blown out the candles their father began to mumble with his mouth full of cake, something he would never have done previously. “I remember when each of you entered this world!” He pitched forward, dropped his head into his big clean hands and cried like the worst boys spanked in school.
May locked herself in the study and pried open the pewter humidor. It was her birthday. She took a cigarette in finger and thumb and lit it, dragged deeply, rested it in the groove of her mother’s ashtray. She didn’t even cough.
In the days that followed she smoked the cigarettes in her mother’s desk and she drank the sherry her mother kept on the sideboard. A decanter had stood there all during Prohibition for the people her mother brought back with her from picket lines, soaked to the skin. If her father smelled sherry or smoke, or if he noticed Carrie in the house in her dressing gown on schooldays, he said nothing. It took him weeks to remember his daughters at all, though when they called him he appeared, stroking his mustache and jaw in a new way that set May’s nerves on edge.
His patients were calling on the telephone.
“No, of course, dear, no, we didn’t really think he would be, not quite yet.”
“Thank you, yes, of course we could come to Dr. Thorp. But I expect we’ll wait for your father.”
Carrie kept a list of the calls, crossing off the ones who knew them well enough to visit and see how things were in the house. How the house with them in it lay in the yard as if on its side.
In the rooms was an almost invisible revolving, like dust in the air or the slow heaving of their neighbor’s bees, massed outside the hive on a branch of the spruce tree. Cold, Mr. MacLeod had said the bees were, cold and waiting for some order they would hear from within, to show the way. But May and Carrie heard no order. Slow fall of the nightgown, and not many hours later, slow climb back to the bedroom: why were clothes changed in this way? One piece of clothing in the morning and another at night, why were they doing it? Christmas came but they had made no preparation. The rhythm had gone out of what they did and at the same time it had gone out of what anybody did, all over the country.
Something was happening in the country to match their slowness. Things were running down. People milled around. No shouts in the lumberyards, no saws whining. Wherever a sign went up about a job, men stood in lines that doubled on themselves like material turned off the bolt into heaps on the floor.
A woman came to pay May’s father with an azalea she had dug out of her yard. It was spring again. Another paid by sewing a costume for Carrie to wear in the school play. A man their father treated for arthritis worked all day on the car engine. Through the window in the gloved silence of the dining room May could see his hand with its big oily knuckles holding up the hood.
There were two things May could not forgive her father, even when in later life she became, as Carrie said, a more tolerant person. One was that as he began to lose his memory in his old age, he did not, as many did, retain the far past. He forgot her mother.
He forgot the whole segment of time from 1917 when he wed Anna, his pacifist sweetheart, as he was fond of calling her while he still remembered, through nearly two decades of the century. From 1917, the year the labor organizer Frank Little was lynched, as he himself had taught Carrie and May, the year the president went with bowed head to ask Congress for a declaration of war, to the depths of the Depression: the time that had held her.
It was not only that he had been married to their mother for nearly seventeen years and to his second wife for forty. And this was the second thing. In the company of his new wife he changed utterly. In less than a year he doted on her every bit as much as he had doted on their fierce, singing mother, though the second Anna—Anna! a woman of the same name! a widow who had taught in their own grade school, whose husband had been his patient—had nothing remarkable of face or body or mind about her at all.
He lost his interest in politics, in justice, in society altogether; he barely read the newspaper. He lost interest in music, as Anna Olafsson did not play or care to listen. When Carrie got married to the minister at nineteen, they sent the piano to the newlyweds, strapped onto a patient’s truck.
He drove Anna Olafsson to school because she didn’t drive and she didn’t like the streetcar, and after dinner their talk was not of the New Deal or the evil millionaires of the Liberty League, but cozy intermittent murmurings about her pupils and his patients, like the talk of old people, though she was in her early forties and he, with his gray mustache, was thirty-nine!
For Anna Olafsson he spread a load of manure with a rake, so that she could lay out her garden, and he got down on his hands and knees with her to put in tulip bulbs. She had baskets of bulbs, brought from her own closed-up house and stored in the cellar with her potatoes. May hated the tulip bulbs, piles of shut fists covered with dried dirt. They yielded creamy flowers that mobbed the yard in Anna’s favorite colors, white and lavender, and had to be taken next door to the MacLeods by the armful. In April, vases and jars overflowed with them; there were always a dozen in a bowl on the dining room table, flopped open like bluish mouths.
That was part of it, for May, the colors. When her mother was alive, fiery things had lived in the house—chili peppers strung in the cellar, bought because they were beautiful hanging in the farmers’ market and then forgotten, and little misshapen pumpkins with candle stumps in them, and the marigolds and rank yellow-red zinnias she brought home from meetings. And certain haunting pale orange things were hers: the fall moon in the living room window, the heavily blooming azaleas on either side of the porch steps, the yards of unmade-up satin from her trousseau, leached of their coral at the folds, in which May and Carrie had swathed themselves when they were little girls. Now suddenly there was a blue, even a lilac presence in the house, the kind of off-blue in a flowered print that had made her mother cry, “I can’t sew that, that cadaver blue! That would make me sick at the machine!” A blue, double-chinned, pondering, talcum-scented presence, in the house where the first Anna had typed and sung and whirled in the living room.
May promised: Never, never, never will I get married. They would just as soon have anybody. They don’t care. They just want . . . what?
Off her father went with the second Anna to church every Sunday. Carrie went with them. Once or twice they got May to go. It was with the sweet-faced young Methodist minister, who laid the Bible to his heart in the pulpit, and sat down frequently to the second Anna’s bubbling pies, that her father and Carrie had replaced Kropotkin.
The minister’s first name was Laban. Before May had ever called him by it, a tiny ruby from his mother’s jewelry box was winking up and down the piano keys on Carrie’s finger.
Once she was out of her teens May found she could make room for her stepmother’s sturdy opinions. And later, when she and Cole had been married a dozen years or so, she began to seek them out, with their plodding, canceling assurance, their insistence that a marriage, no matter how hard-ridden, if given its head would plod to the warm stall, eat its fill, and live to run another day. Without the least sentiment about the time in her life when their droppings had been raked off the street by the ton, Anna liked the example of horses, of working or herded animals in general, and of plants, the bulbs and tubers in particular, for the hardiness missing in the newer breed of people. She offered the comfort of fish as she filleted them for flouring or poaching—fish and their cold labors. She talked of the labor of the wintered-over bulb of the tall white amaryllis she grew out at Christmas.
When the worst had happened, when a bulb of the foulest color had planted itself in May and was crowding, tearing, and working its way deeper instead of out, she found herself in Anna’s kitchen reliving a much earlier time. Anna iced her heavy raisin bars while they were warm and set the pan on the trivet, and May broke them off on the fork lines and ate until she could eat no more, and scraped up the icing with her finger. “Save one for your husband,” Anna said peaceably. Cole would come from the hos
pital. More and more May tried to be at Anna’s when it was time for dinner. She knew Anna would call him; she liked Anna to be the one to let him in the door, his face ugly with grief.
For Cole there was no respite. But after school May parked in front of the house where she had grown up, now Anna’s house, on the street of big Victorians. All but hers had been converted into student rooms; the MacLeods’ place was a Young Life center. She climbed the steps to Anna’s broad figure in the doorway, and complained like the child she had been when there was a chicken house in the back yard.
She complained about the past. About her father, his overnight transfer to her, Anna, of his loyalty, his interests, himself. And then in old age his forgetting, his misplacing May’s mother altogether. It relieved her to list these accusations.
Far from resenting her outbursts, Anna fell in with them. “Well, I don’t know. Your mother had her own interests,” she said, not at all averse to the subject, always ready to set foot firmly on old, delicate paths of memory. “And she was fond of so many. The young fellows. I do believe it hurt his pride.”
“How do you know that?” May said rudely. Another thing about Anna as an old woman—she was in her eighties now—was that she would follow a thing to its root. Just as she would work her plump fingers down in the dirt and caress and fumble it without looking until it yielded the little potatoes tender as grapes that she used in her recipes, she would take a subject as far as anyone wanted to, with her blind, feeling, hardly curious mind. It might be she was as fearless, in that way, as May’s mother had been in hers.
She would let fall in passing the most appalling secrets of the families whose children she had taught. She liked talk about the young, about May’s daughters. They were her granddaughters, to her. She liked talk about sex. When May had told her, long ago, that Laura wanted to get married instead of going to college, Anna had said, “Well, if it’s sex you’ll never talk her out of it. And if you look at her, it is, you can see, she’s got that mated-sheep look.”
Sex, Anna always said decidedly, placidly, as if it were a fish she simply knew how to buy. May gazed at the voluminous cornflower-blue housecoat bent over the stove.
It’s only Anna Olafsson here in your kitchen, who got up this morning out of the bed you brought out from Boston. It’s 1978 now.
One of your grandchildren is dead. The boy. Carrie never had any boys. I had the boy. We named him Nicholas. Victory.
It’s only Anna Olafsson, who taught us in the second grade.
As if she could make her mother understand this.
Anna lumbered up, turned on three burners, and set a pan on each. Looking at the gas where it burned blue, May thought one of the nice things about Anna was that she did not want you to get up and help. She unwrapped fish, cut chunks of butter. “We’ll make all her favorites while she’s here,” Anna muttered as if to May’s father, who had been dead two years.
“How do you know that?” May pressed. Fond of so many.
Anna would never say, “Well, your father told me, of course.” She said instead, “Your mother had her crusades, dear.” Then she said something May would have quarreled with before she learned you could never talk Anna out of one of her opinions, which she did not form empirically, from any evidence, but out of some phase of herself the way potatoes form eyes. Anna said, “Thank heavens you girls got his nature and not hers.”
His nature. “What do you mean?” was all the force May could gather in opposition. Her son was dead, and all her force at that time was concentrated on pressing down the bulb inside her, the disbelieving horror—a bluish thing, a never-to-be-born thing that could not be prevented from growing—even when it was keeping still, half asleep, instead of tearing and rooting. It had starved out the layers that held her everyday obligations—which side of the yellow line to drive on, the groceries, her good manners—while exposing old, very old items that should have rotted into compost: her father’s black suits, the carbolic smell of his car, his faithlessness. Oh, worse than any adultery of hers or anyone’s: to simply forget the dead. “What do you mean, his nature?”
“Well, her obsessions!” snapped Anna, turning the big wedding ring set with pearls on her finger, startling May as she often did with her use of terms that sounded, in her Swedish accent, like crass slang. May had grown to like the pattern of Anna’s speech, the shape she gave words with the horsy lower lip with its double selvedge rim that had fascinated May in the second grade. “You girls—both go-getters. You don’t cry over spilt milk.”
We don’t what? What did you say?
“It was hard for your father,” Anna went on. “Hard to carry on his shoulders. Poor girl, Anna Harkness”—hardly conscious it had been her own name for decades—“oh, she was up in the air. Change-the-world. Whereas your father . . . the world is what it is, to him.” She still used the present tense, for May’s father. “She. She never would be happy.”
May waited a minute before speaking. Her mother singing “The Silkie,” dancing into the furniture while enacting the silkie’s emergence from the sea, her mother dancing to “Gentle Annie,” making faces as she sang, “‘Now I stand alone ’mid the flowers, while they mingle their perfumes o’er thy tomb.’”
“But,” she said at length, “we were happy. You can’t say otherwise.” That had a formal sound. “I mean we were as happy as anybody else, after the crash. How can you say that?”
“Not her. Not you,” said Anna firmly. “Not when I had you. Not in my class. Now you asked me, dear. I don’t think you had regular meals. And no sleep, and egged on at home to make it hard for yourself in the schoolyard. To run around like a calf with a heel fly. Now, of course, you’re—”
“Oh, but I had you before the crash.” May tried to keep her voice reasonable. “Really, what do you mean?”
“Oh, you came primed to speak up. Just the wrong thing every time. You made an outcast of yourself. You lost your little friends. Isabel Barr.”
“Isabel! But I don’t remember that.”
“Better not. Your sister would not associate with you, I’m ashamed to say. Mary Pitt couldn’t do a thing with you.”
I thought Isabel moved away, May thought. She did move away.
“You were a wild little thing, with your mama’s full approval, when I got you in the second grade.”
No more, she thought. What happened to me? “I was a silkie,” she said.
Her mother was going down to the waterfront, where the hobos lived, to make a speech. Not the hobos, the unemployed. She was going to Hooverville to talk about the Unemployed Citizens’ League.
Carrie said, “I don’t see why I have to go. It’s Saturday. I have to finish my application. I have to wash my hair. Couldn’t just May go?” Carrie had “Blue Moon” on the phonograph; everyone was singing “Blue Moon.”
“Neither one of you need go.” Their mother was pulling up her ribbed stockings while she read the typescript laid out on the bedspread. She hurried to the mirror to put Vaseline on her red, chapped lips, which would be pleated all winter with little cuts from smiling.
“It’s a stormy day to be going down to the tide flats,” their father said as they came down, setting his bag on the hat rack bench and shaking out his overcoat. “There’ll be mud.”
“It’s stopped raining.”
“You’re hoarse. You’re coughing. You shouldn’t go out. And I can’t pick you up, it’s a first delivery, I’ll be all afternoon and half the night.”
“We’ll take the streetcar back.”
“I’m not at all easy about this, Anna.”
“We will be perfectly safe.”
“I’ll take you down but I can’t pick you up,” he said again, scratching his head. “You must come out no later than four o’clock. And you’re sure there will be police.”
“You know they send someone when any of us speaks.”
“Do you really want to go, May?”
No, she didn’t want to go. “Yes,” she said.
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nbsp; When he let them off it wasn’t raining, the air was fresh and silvery. He rolled the wet window down to kiss her mother. “Be sensible, Anna.”
Her mother laughed and patted her bag. “This is a sensible speech, John.”
“I mean don’t inflame them. And don’t, whatever you do, smile. Don’t even—don’t look at them when you’re speaking. These are men who—” Her father was almost pleading. “It would be like showing them food.”
“Food,” said her mother lightly, turning her back.
A wind sailed against them with its invisible load of water as they crossed the railroad tracks and started down Charles Street. There were no buildings to channel the wind, nothing but pier and open water beyond the acres of tin roofs in a kind of basin her mother said had been a shipyard. The street was not paved; already their boots were muddy.
“What are you going to say to them?” Now that it was too late to turn back.
Her mother steadied herself on May’s shoulder and bent to pry mud from her boot heel with the tip of her umbrella. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to go on and on, or even try to convince them, honestly. I’m leaving information that may be of use to them, that’s all.”
Smoke pouring from stovepipes ran into their noses and stung their eyes.
Now their boots were caked to the lace-hooks with the oily mud. Winding paths of mud led in and out among the shacks. From above May had gasped at how many there were. It was as if they had gone behind a curtain painted with buildings and streets into a huge fort in the open countryside, where men might appear in helmets, like the legions in her Gallic Wars, or around the next corner under blowing standards, spreading out maps.
Nobody appeared. Birds and wind made the only sounds. The place was not the huddle of tent poles and tarpaulins May had imagined but hundreds of wooden boxes, many of them raised on legs. Propped against the boxes were small, two-wheeled carts that made her think of the wagon she had pulled the chickens around in as a child. Where her mother turned downhill there was a box hut with a porch the width of two planks, three flat stones laid in a curve for a walk, and a picket fence. Everything here, the shacks in their hundreds, her mother said, had sprung up in just the two years since the city had the original place burned to the ground.
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