Her feet had swollen on the plane. She took a deep breath. They had circled for an hour, and then come down a lead-colored sky in thunder and skidding sways.
“Susannah,” said a Southern voice. Garland. Of course, a Southern name, she thought as she turned. A portly man in a suit, not very tall, with jowls. He grasped her hand when she put her suitcase down. “Garland Smith.”
“Garland!” she said. Immediately she felt helpful. His hand was trembling. Jo had done this to the man. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“They stacked you up out there. That’s my nightmare,” he said. “You don’t mind flying?” He picked up her suitcase. She was not used to men who said anything was their nightmare, and cast about for a reply. He walked soundlessly and she felt she was stumping along in her tight shoes.
“You’ll be staying at the same place where the memorial is being held, the Dominicks’.” Susannah knew she was not to stay in Jo’s apartment. Tomorrow she was going there with Garland to go through things. She felt a physical resistance, a twisting in her body away from this idea.
“It’s so nice of you to come get me.”
“Not at all,” he said with a little sideways scoop of his head. “I wanted to meet you.” She didn’t know whether he meant meet her plane or finally meet her. Maybe he had been thinking, before, that if he got to know her he would have another avenue to Jo. He had graying brown hair resembling her own, but thin. She wanted to say soothingly, I don’t know what got her going, with you, but it wouldn’t have lasted. It might have been almost, almost as bad as this anyway. Though she knew of course that nothing could match up to this.
Out in the vast parking lot of the airport it was cold, getting ready to rain. At a distance across the flat land you could see rain: a section of sky had let down a brown ramp of water that was rolling toward them. The spring wind whipped their coats. Garland didn’t just open the door, he handed her into the car, the way dressed-up boys would have, years ago. Though not her. Not her: she was not to have dates, but to stand by her locker and talk to a boy who leaned against the wall because he was tired, and she was to be weak in every limb over this tiredness—the rubbed neck, the deep yawn—in one so persistent, so dogged and strong. But certainly Jo had been lowered into cars this way by her boyfriends, who were the dressers, the dancers. Jo had sunk back into a gush of skirts chosen by some Mrs. Grayson, and smiled her planning smile.
Susannah put her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. The upholstery was cracked and stiff. Garland occupied himself with the gears of the little growling car.
Jo’s interest in school dances did not last. The time came when she told Susannah, “We say we’re going but we don’t.” It was after Susannah was married and Jo was running around, racing boys in the pickup, with rolls of barbed wire gashing the salt blocks in the truck bed, doing whatever she could think up to make Susannah sorry she had left. It made Jo sick to drink, herself, but she ran with the boys who did. Every year in the spring Jo knew the boy who wound his car around a telephone pole or flipped it into the river and died. In their bedroom in Larry’s mother’s house Susannah would tremble to hear a siren out across the fields at night.
“It was so warm I took my dress off. In a field way up near Bluemont, know whose land? Ray said that old woman lived out there and she does. The place is a mess. He wanted me to see. He thought I’d like it.”
“Why? Why would you like it?” But Susannah could see from Jo’s face that she did like it.
“It was dark, and she came out with a shotgun.”
“Jo! The woman with the dogs? She shoots that thing!”
“Not at us. She had it cracked over her arm just like nothing. We weren’t right on her land. She came over to the fence. There I was with my dress off. I held it over me. I mean I had everything off. I don’t know if she even noticed. She talked to us.”
“What did she say?”
“I told her who I was. She recognized the name. She thought I was you, the search party one. She said, ‘Well, you grew up, didn’t you.’ She said her land is posted but people hunt on it all the time. She sort of wanted us to know she was a good enough shot not to kill ’em when she shot at ’em. Ray said, ‘You don’t approve of hunting?’ God is he stupid. She said they shot one of her dogs. She has eight left. She’s not crazy,” Jo said suddenly. They looked at each other. That left their mother the craziest one around.
A YOUNGISH man read a poem. Susannah realized it was a poem when it was too late to go back and recall the beginning. When he sat down a man with a long head and tinted glasses rose and spoke about Jo’s work, her beauty, her openness to life, her refusal to shut out the terrible—even her welcoming of it.
What exactly was the terrible and how did he know Jo welcomed it? Had anybody said how Jo could screech in her sleep, how she could shiver in a booth in a department store? The crowd was small, Susannah thought. Well, Jo had shut out more than he thought, or tried to, and not only the terrible. But the man spoke with authority. Look at her pictures, he repeated, as if the people in the room might not have seen them. Susannah thought he might be a critic. Maybe they were all critics, not friends. She had never been sure the people around Jo in Chicago were friends. Certainly Jo did not like them. There is nothing morbid, the man said reassuringly. There is no irony, nothing we would say is ugly. Susannah let herself be soothed as he went on in this vein.
Another man stood up to speak. She knew Garland was not going to. And she had declined when he asked in the car if she wanted to. Never. Not about Jo, who was not even a grown woman, to her, let alone an artist about whom other people, who did not know her, might have opinions. An artist was what she had been when she drew pictures, when they were girls. She had been a girl.
What was Jo? She was like Larry, part of the world as it had to be, as it could not be if she were not part of it. Under her skin Susannah felt the spread of a slow, confused wrath. She had almost forgotten something: how people wanted you to lay grief aside in a year—or two or three years, the generous ones. Lay all of it aside, all the previous world. They wanted it over with. They wanted . . . And if she had forgotten that, then she must have done it, laid it aside. She must have. But it was new again as she sat there; it was always there, she thought almost with relief, ready to begin again. A woman with an alto voice was singing a song in German. The sound of the song had brought tears to Susannah’s eyes, but the tears just pooled there, she did not have to fend off the quakes of crying that had overtaken her on the plane. Beside her the plump, hospitable hostess, Mrs. Dominick, whispered, “When will you come?”
“Excuse me?” Susannah said.
“It means more or less ‘when will you come,’ this song,” Mrs. Dominick said with short puffing breaths. Asthma, Susannah decided. The woman had small old blue eyes under a layer of bright tears. Then they stood up in the big room and rock music was put on that was said to be Jo’s favorite. It was turned down and then turned up again. Susannah knew from having had teenagers that it should be loud. She recognized it. No comfort in it, loud or soft, though Jo would argue that comfort was not what music was for.
Openness to life. Susannah knew what the words were meant to convey, approximately: an innocent questing, a girlish trust, along with a certain inoffensive greediness. “Openness to life!” She could hear Jo’s scornful voice. You asked for it, she answered Jo. They can say whatever they want. You fixed it so people could talk any old way about you. She went on coldly in her mind in this voice. She knew that if you spoke to the dead in this way, you made a sort of puppet. A little condensed person of self-pity and shame whom you could berate and console.
Garland Smith went through the small crowd one by one, on a steady course. Almost everybody hugged him. While this was going on Susannah saw that the memorial was less for Jo than for Garland himself, that it was he, whoever he was, who had importance to the people here, and was surrounded by them in his grief because of this importance.
At home Susan
nah would have thought he was gay. Something about his phrases, his smooth walk. Winning the heart of a gay man would have given Jo one of her angry pleasures. It would have been worthy of some exertion, to her. But as she watched the man Susannah no longer thought so. His attention was focused on the women in the room, and theirs on him. It was the women he was talking to. If you watched for a while you saw the rueful, sweet smile, the smile of a man used to women, to having them make much of him, and make exceptions for him, a man who came to them, who accepted their help. “He’s not much to look at,” women she knew at work would say of a man like this. “I don’t know what it is . . .” When Garland Smith bowed his head, the loose skin of his face drooped forward. He lifted his graying eyebrows helplessly so that deep wrinkles formed on the sides of his forehead.
Yet she did not doubt the sincerity of whatever he was saying. He had a handkerchief in his fist, for sweat. You can’t fake sweat. He was sweating and shaking in his loose suit. Maybe he had been losing weight for his wedding. She noticed he talked for a long time to a gesturing woman with thick gray eyebrows rather like his own, and then to Mrs. Dominick, who actually reached out and with her plump thumb wiped his eyes for him.
Mrs. Dominick was an art collector. Her husband was a surgeon. Once the rows of chairs were out of the way their apartment was not much different from the houses of doctors or horse people at home, with worn Persian rugs and dusty jade plants in Chinese pots. A maid was passing out glasses of wine from a tray. If there was food Susannah couldn’t see it. Glassed-in boxes with objects and scenes in them were stuck into the bookshelves. Paintings covered every wall. Susannah stopped before a small print in a corner. Mrs. Dominick came to join her as she was putting on her reading glasses and leaning to read what was written on it.
They began to walk along together, past a row of portraits in heavy frames. Susannah imagined that the subjects of these paintings would have thought twice about hanging them in their own houses. Nude and holding cats, or standing in messy bedrooms, or sitting in cars with the windows rolled up, they stared out unkindly. Walking seemed to cost Mrs. Dominick most of her breath. She had taken Susannah’s arm. She looked at each painting at the same time Susannah was looking at it, and then at Susannah as if she had introduced them. “She’s a hero of mine,” she said.
“Which one?” said Susannah.
“The painter,” said Mrs. Dominick. Despite her breathless-ness she said everything easily, with no instruction in her voice. She offered the facts about her collection. It was the way you talk to children, Susannah thought, when their questions don’t bother you at all. When you are happy. Mrs. Dominick was one of those here, apparently, who really did mourn Jo. For some reason she was one of them. But she lost sight of her grief in giving the name of the lengths of pipe assembled on a dais in the entrance hall—machine parts Jo must have liked—and the stroller full of rope in the study: they were installations. They were as they should be. Everything had a rightness if one paused for a long enough look.
On the plane Susannah had imagined this gathering. The women would be wearing the kind of clothes that halfway frighten you and have hair dyed red-black like Jo’s. Savage gossip would be whispered. Susannah would be pointed out to men who had been Jo’s lovers. Grief might or might not excuse her grown-out permanent, her feet swollen over the sides of her pumps. No one would believe Jo had been only three years younger than Susannah.
It was not like that at all. It was ordinary. Mrs. Dominick’s breathing problem made little oases in the conversation, during which you did not have to do or say anything. For a while they stood together looking out at the balcony. Against the thick, brightly lighted leaves of trees in tubs, rain was coming down in big drops, separate and greenish, like something shredded, celery or fish. Susannah began to be hungry. Far down, headlights were being pulled along Lake Shore Drive, and beyond that was the dark rainy lake. On the other side of her the husband, the surgeon, was saying that he was at sea with art people.
It wasn’t clear who the art people were. There were a few young men with earrings and one or two bodies in very short dresses fitted like socks, but most of the guests were older people dressed just the way people would be in Virginia, and the talk seemed to be about their children’s problems.
Everyone was talking in a more emotional way than she imagined they normally did. The children were in drug programs or going through divorces. Susannah thought of her own children, anxious all of them that she no longer guard them. “No one told you what to do,” they would point out to her. “I guess not,” she would say. They would not be able to resist saying, “Look what you did when you were our age. You got married.” Then they would be sorry. In their minds she had gotten married because of their crazy grandmother. Simple. Escape.
Of course they could not know the thing so irresistible it parted her from everything leading up to it, from all worry, from her bedroom with Jo, from Jo. The tiny supply room at school, the sheet faintly stenciled CLINIC, the window. The high-up radiant window pumping heat across the cot at noon, when Larry Kephart woke up and she pulled him up to her by his hot arms and said to him, “Don’t cry.”
Standing by the window she drank more of the wine they handed her, and found she could speak comfortably with the husband, the surgeon, who did not seem to have known Jo. Or perhaps he had been one of them, too, Jo’s lovers, she thought suddenly, angrily, looking at the clean gray hair behind his big earlobes and the shirt collar digging into his shaven neck. He looked considerably younger than his little elderly wife. But it did not matter, did it? Nothing at all, certainly nothing that could be said or discovered in this room, mattered where Jo was concerned. “Sad, sad,” Dr. Dominick kept saying when there was a pause.
She thought of Mrs. Dominick calling her husband at work to tell him about Jo. It must seem unfair, perhaps even infuriating, after operating on people all day to be told that someone else has used this time to force the life out of herself. Has gulped all her lithium and dropped herself down, a week after the decision to get married and have children, and a day after the exuberant passing of this news to her sister and father—but the surgeon getting this call from his wife wouldn’t know that, or want, in all likelihood, to know it—into the brown commercial river right in the middle of the city, in the sight of people not so far above on the bridge, where, as one couple was to tell the police, although she had been walking slowly she had done nothing to draw attention to herself, so that no one thought to grab her before she got up and over and dropped herself into a river full, as Susannah pictured it, of barges and floating trash. She could not swim. She sank. No one jumped in to save her until it was too late. No one saved her.
Some of the Dominicks’ art was too large for a room with furnishings in it and occupied a wide hall. One wall held huge paintings of trees—“Prints, actually. They’re colored etchings,” said Mrs. Dominick—tall as trees themselves. Susannah was going to comment on their beauty but she thought better of it, after calling them paintings. On the other hand Mrs. Dominick seemed not to notice little things but to be governed, in her regard for each work, by a maternal care that it not be passed over and a confidence that the artist still inhabited it, out of sight like a shy tenant.
At the end of the hall were Jo’s photographs, on a wall to themselves, on either side of an old carved door. Susannah knew that some of them were recent because there were things other than machines in them. Two even had people.
In one there was a large-bodied young woman with her arms spread out, a hand on each of two big, bomb-like old-fashioned hairdryers. Stevia. But of course it was not Stevia. It was hard to know just what Stevia would look like now, but she would be much older than this. This mischievously straight-faced fat woman was under thirty.
Stevia’s son would be that age now, and more. “Ah,” Susannah said. She knew why she had put on her glasses and looked so long at the little print in the corner of the living room. The title had been written in pencil at the botto
m with the print number: “Man with Antlers.” The man’s face wore a look neither alarmed nor proud, the look of a calm beast. She thought of herself at nine, hoping all summer that Stevia’s baby would have something wrong with it, something unforgivably and incurably wrong, would be an animal. Everybody had the same ideas, really. The artists just didn’t feel ashamed of their ideas and disgusted by them.
That could be good or it could be bad.
The wine was making her mildly unsteady. She was tired from being on the plane and trying to talk to Garland in the car, and from the speeches and the loud music, and from being given no food and introduced to people who said they were glad to meet Jo’s sister. Glad. Susannah felt certain she was the only one here—except maybe Mrs. Dominick, with her wall of photographs—who had found happiness in knowing Jo. She shook off dizziness and stepped firmly away from the pictures. How strange it was to think now that things done so many years ago by Jo and herself had been happiness.
She leaned against the wall to fit her fingers down the side of her shoe, and almost fell. Mrs. Dominick said, “My dear, you need a minute or two to simply lie down. You can get right back up. Come with me.”
Garland met them in the living room, flushed and carrying a bottle of wine. He said her whole name, “Susannah Floyd,” the way people sometimes would back home when they first ran into you on the street. He seemed to forget she had a married name. “Here you are. I never have asked how your father is.”
She held up her glass. “I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve had. Thank you. My father couldn’t come. He’s old, he’s upset, he can’t leave his cows.” Words poured out of her. “He’s very tired, after my mother. Anyway we had Jo’s service at our church and we buried her in the cemetery.” “We buried her.” What strange words. Like a secret crime. We buried Jo. She would have taken a picture of the hole. Not near our mother, there wasn’t a space there, and that’s just as well. And for days everyone brought us food, for days—you know how they do. You’re from the South. And everyone talked about Jo’s birth and the search party.
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