Sunday stirred and cleared her throat, but decided to say nothing yet about the buckle she had brought in her coat pocket.
Delta lifted the chain and let the locket swing back and forth before she put it down. “Well, it seems like I've seen this locket, but clearly, it was never there after he left. Maybe she showed it to me beforehand, but maybe not. Probably she created it for us in the telling, 'cause when it came, I knew immediately what it was. What I hadn't known was that he took it with him when he left.”
They had heard about the locket again and again, as Dolora made and remade her tale. Always it began in the same way, with her pointing to the empty velvet depression where it had been housed. She recounted her sitting for the photograph, and its presentation as a gift from her father, when she turned “sweet sixteen.” As she described its intricate monogram and delicate chain, she looked into the distance and they could tell she was seeing it, repeating chosen pieces of the chronicle with embellishments, until it was a myth with a life of its own. As explanation of its absence, she had said only that it was “lost.”
“Tell me . . . tell me the whole story,” Sunday said, reaching across the table to take Delta's wrist and to feel the pulse beneath her fingertips, helpless at how little she understood, wondering what it would mean to have the whole story about anything, anything at all.
“Tell me,” she said, “about the suicide that wasn't death.”
Daunted by the hunger in her sister's voice and the rough hand that encircled her wrist, Delta looked away.
As Sunday watched her, she relived her recent impasse with paint. She wanted to be able to tell how she had gone each morning to her kitchen studio to stare at the blank and half-done canvases that filled the room, reminded of tombstones, and then turned their faces to the wall. Riding the El to the end of the line and back, she had walked the city streets, searching for something, a face, a storefront, a window that would move her from silence. She had even found herself standing at church doorways, attracted, yet hesitant to enter for the first time since she had left home, except in requiem. She had walked the lakeshore, trying to think of the water that stretched before her as ocean, but unable to lose the feeling that she was landlocked.
She had tried charcoal and pencil drawing, collage and modeling clay, never getting past concept to give her beginnings life. She had collected paper scraps and photographs and fabrics, but had been unable to turn them into anything. Her relentless, vague anxiety seeded and took root as she stretched canvases and mixed colors, and then flourished into panic when she tried to begin. She couldn't even focus on the rote drafting projects that were her steady source of income.
And then, after retrieving Delta's note from the box, she had drawn and painted furiously for close to a week. What came to her were shadowy figures bent into fetal question marks and disembodied limbs and hands, floating, buried, rising, layered. Again and again she painted the world from above, patchworks of city and field joined by branching rivers that fractured into overlapping pieces, like shattered trees. But she would come to a stop while painting, as if full sight just closed up, and then her palette began to narrow down.
Reed had walked in one day to find her stuck, trying to make a mark, a stroke, in any kind of blue, but lost. She couldn't seem to choose it, just as she couldn't seem to fully choose him. She knew she was trying his patience, but how could she explain something she didn't even understand?
She wanted to tell Delta how it had been. Fingers still around her wrist, she could only say, “I need it. I need all of what I am.”
Except for the moth wings that homed in and trembled on the lightbulb's yellow curve, the room was still. And then Delta pulled away and tightened her pocketed hands into fists. “You see,” she answered, “there isn't much I know.” Tears filled her eyes and she felt as if she had failed her sister, once again. “We weren't a family that talked about what was gone.” She looked at Sunday, apologizing silently for every time she had come up short.
“You know a hell of a lot more than I do,” Sunday answered. “You had him for five years, so you've got your memory, for one thing. And by the time I came along, everyone had decided to just keep quiet about his leaving and everything else that had to do with him. I don't even know the smallest things about him, like whether he wore cologne . . . what he liked to eat . . . how he moved his hands. You and I scarcely even talked about him. Maybe everyone was protecting me, but in the end, I was left with my imagination, and a gaping hole.”
She leaned into the circle of light. “Delta, this didn't only happen to you; it's both of ours. I know you can't give me what you haven't got, but let's remember together. Tell me, anyway, what little bit you know.”
Delta paused. At least she was sure what the beginning was, for it came to her all the time, despite her resistance, as if occupying its own tier of the recessed past. She placed her palms flat on the table.
“Shoes,” she said. “What I remember most is that pair of shoes.”
Delta could see them. From the witnessing or the telling, or both, they were there, worn through brown to gray and dirty at the squared-off tips from work and daily travel. Laces tucked inside. Heels run-down and placed neatly side by side.
“Yes,” Sunday responded. “I heard about the shoes. It's practically the only concrete thing about his disappearance that I do remember hearing. Describe them for me, so that I can see them, too.”
She did describe their run-down heels, one eroded to a sharper slant than the other, and they both savored that clue to his walk, imagining him moving along, favoring one leg. She told about the places where the dark brown, dusty leather was strained and bunion-cracked on the sides. The twisted laces and elongated tongues. The mud-encrusted toes. And then they wondered what had happened to them, and Delta said, “Maybe Mama threw them out.”
As Delta stared out the back window, seeming to fade farther and farther away, it occurred to Sunday that they might not be able to begin with Mercury's disappearance, which had never, in all their years of growing up, been discussed. Would they have to start to remember him as a person, to make him real, first? “You know,” she said, “I wonder what Mama did with the rest of his stuff. There must be something, up in the attic, maybe. Something of him she kept.”
“Well, I never heard anyone talk about his belongings, and I can't even recollect what all he had.”
“But . . . but you must have kept something of him, then, if not a possession then a memory, some little thing he liked or used to do?”
Delta thought for a while, her hands in motion, turning and tipping the edge of her coffee cup and lighter. What came to her suddenly, despite attempts at forgetting, were his restless and uneven footsteps as he paced the upstairs hallway late at night, reaching one loose and groaning floorboard again and again. She willed away the sound and recounted other things.
“I know. He had a beautiful gray fedora that he always wore when he left the house. Sometimes he would take it off and let me feel the soft, pressed felt and the raised lines in its wide, grosgrain ribbon band, where a couple of feathers were tucked before the hat broke out in a cold-blooded brim. I think he felt really fly in that hat, even if he was just going to the plant. I'm sure Grandpa thought that was ridiculous, but he loved that hat, was proud of it, and when he came home he brushed it and placed it just so on the closet shelf . . . I can see him come through the door and do just that . . . but the clearest thing is me looking up at it, from my little-girl height, as it rested, tilted on his head, surrounding his frowning face with a dark oval that blocked out everything else.”
After a pause, she went on. “I remember him playing cards at the dining room table, by himself. He liked to listen to the news while he played, and I can see those cards being turned over, building and shrinking and building in overlapping columns, and then his sudden curse and a hand scooping the mass of them together and cracking the edge on the table, evening them up, before starting again. I was entranced by the ceremony o
f it, and the mirrored, noble pictures on the cards, the bright red and black and the faces turned, secretively, to the side, as if they knew things they would never tell. But I was afraid of the curse and the sound of them hitting the table, and even more afraid to ask if I could play.”
She spoke faster and faster. “And you know what else, Sunday? He used to bring a whole bagful of Mary Jane candies when he got home late. We both loved the thick, chewy molasses taste, and he would take one out and hide it in one hand, and ask me to guess which one. Whichever one I chose, he gave it to me, and we both laughed as we ate them together.
“I hadn't thought of that in a long time. It's small, but it's a good thing, isn't it?
“Mostly . . . he seemed ill at ease with me, like he didn't quite know how to relate to a child or a girl child, anyway. Those Mary Janes were something we shared.”
Sunday looked at her expectantly, pushing for more. “So what else?”
Delta continued, “He liked fine things. Champagne taste and beer money, Grandpa used to say. And Nana told me how he bought that belt buckle, which he had engraved, along with a pair of inlaid silver cuff links, and a shirt to go with it, and Grandpa chided him with the uselessness of that. ‘French cuffs,' he would say, and suck his teeth. It had turned into a big fight, because Nana had defended him, unable to bear the way he got on Mercury at the slightest provocation, telling Grandpa ‘a body's got to have a little something nice, just for himself.'
“Grandpa didn't budge, I guess, even though he had his own weaknesses. He sure loved getting all decked out for Mason meetings, and his ring was so important to him that he made Nana promise to bury him in it. Being a Thirty-second-Degree Mason, the secret rites, the ring, all of that was major, along with the gold pocket watch that he cherished so. But in Mercury, he just couldn't tolerate it. Nana said Grandpa thought a person had to work their way up, to pay their dues before they got nice possessions and respect, and that attitude seemed to make Mercury even more withdrawn. Nana said he had one pair of really good shoes that he changed into after he got home and showered, and they were impractical for the life he led. Thin soles and fine leather . . . and she thought he would change into them to try and mark off the separate parts of his life. It was as if he was saying: This isn't all I am. I am also a man who appreciates the distinctions between things.”
Sunday wondered at Delta keeping such details to herself for all those years, and at the slight smile in her eyes as she told them, as if they made her proud. She knew plenty of people like that, who found certain indulgences necessary, whatever their means. As she had studied the belt buckle over the past weeks, she had been struck by its extravagance, and she knew she had that taste for special things in her, too. Reed was forever reminding her of the time she had decided to have a pair of antique fountain pens repaired, when they'd scarcely been able to put together rent money.
Delta went on, “He would shower as soon as he got home and put on that shirt and those shoes and take a walk around town before dinner. The ones he left by the river weren't those; they were his other pair.”
“You mean that when he left, he went wherever it was he went barefoot?”
“Well . . . I guess he did.”
“I wonder what he did about that?” Sunday pressed. “I mean, how long could he have crossed fields and roads without shoes? I wonder if he stole some or what. Are you sure he didn't take those good shoes, too?”
“Nana said he left the good ones home, of that I'm sure. But the hat, the hat went with him. It was never found.”
“The fedora?”
“That's right.” She frowned in concentration and then went on, “You know, Nana would sometimes talk to me about him, as if she was trying to give me something of him to hold, and I often wondered if it was her own imagination talking, like she was forming an outlook that she could pass on to me. I remember those times by her gentle voice and her clove smell.
“She told me he had worked delivering papers and groceries and whatever else he could manage, from the time he was nine or ten, and then he had landed that job at the paper mill his junior year, most likely with Grandpa's help. At first he worked part-time, and then, after graduating, he had a regular shift. They still had segregated bathrooms, by unstated policy, though, and the black men used to have to warm their lunches on the radiators outside the makeshift ‘colored' washroom, which wasn't much more than a closet with one toilet for the dozens of men, and that had filled Mercury with rage. She said he was a prideful man, who liked words. He read the dictionary sometimes and he liked to work crosswords during his breaks at the plant . . . and, what else . . . I know, he used to say all the time that his white supervisor didn't even know the word ‘quandary.' It used to burn him, Nana said, and he would repeat it over and over again, ‘Quandary,' and shake his head, as if it summed up everything about the unfairness of the world.
“Nana said he used to walk the river early in the morning, a big branch of oak like a staff in his hand. Looked like he was pretending to be someone in an adventure story, striking out for new ground.”
Sunday asked, “But what was he thinking about while he walked? And on his last day here, did he pass the corner store and the little triangular park? Did he nod hello, and good-bye, as it turned out, to those he knew, and stop to chat at the barbershop, with its rippled iron grate and Mr. Odell out front, closing up?”
“I wonder. Maybe he saw that lilac tree downtown as you round that corner near the river, and scent floated up over the curb to greet him.”
Sunday thought about that. “Somehow I don't think so. Even if he passed it, he likely didn't really see it. At least for me, that tree, with its tender perfume and cones of star-shaped blooms, might just make me able to deal with things. Really seeing that tree might just make me want to live.”
“Well, everyone's different, Sunday,” Delta said with irritation as she lit a cigarette. “Seeing . . . seeing a tree might not make some folks want to live. Some folks who might feel unlovely could have a harder time going on, with lovely things like lilacs around. People . . . individuals, I mean, see different things in things. Some people might even look up and see a tree as a potential place to hang.”
Sunday stared at Delta and then picked up her glasses and began to clean them again. She was taken aback by the despair and resistance in her sister's words, and at the fury with which they had rushed out. Damn, Sunday thought, focusing on getting one lens completely free of lint, you can count on family to be there for you, in the same awful way they always were. And all you have to do to inspire their antipathy is be yourself. I wonder how soon I can get a train.
“I'm sorry,” Delta said to the table.
“No,” Sunday responded, putting the glasses on, “I wouldn't want to deny you a chance to express a grievance. It's quite okay.”
Delta sighed. “Anyhow, I overheard someone say that he left for the paper bag plant that morning, showing no more than his usual dislike for his job. He had been talking in the weeks before, though, about his new assignment of pulling the bags out of the folding machines, where they had been turned from flat sheets into rectangular sleeves, one after another, on, on, and on.”
They were silent for a long time, both pondering the embalming force of mechanical routine, from which Sunday had always been escaping and about which Delta knew so much.
Sunday pointed at the locket and finally asked, “How did it get here? When did it come?”
Delta went to the hallway and returned with the shoe box Sunday recognized as the family photo archive. Placing it on the table, she explained how she had been at the post office on sorting detail when it arrived in a small padded envelope, made out to “The Owens Girls” at Nana and Grandpa's obsolete address. She had turned it over and shaken it as she tried to think of whom she knew in Clare County, all the way across the state, and after prying open the stapled end, she had reached in and pulled the contents out: the locket, a long piece of lined, yellow paper folded into a tiny squar
e, and a store-bought sympathy card. As she read the card she heard herself shout, “He was alive,” and then she looked around and realized, from the uninterrupted flow of events around her, that no sound had emerged from her mouth.
Delta lifted the gray cardboard top of the shoe box, its edges worn soft, its corners split, and removed the brown padded envelope that held the note and card.
“Well,” she said, and then cursed herself silently: There you go again, with that pathetic floundering. Unable to find the words to go on, she placed her fingertips on the envelope and slid it across the table.
Sunday began to sweat as she opened the card from the stranger. The words seemed to wave across the page until she placed it on the table and anchored it with both of her hands, recalling the sight of her thumbprints on Delta's note. She finished reading, put it back in the envelope, and got up for more coffee, her cup rattling against the saucer in her unsteady hold. She would have to do this in two stages, she realized, and she was not yet ready to confront her one and only message from a man who had been dead her entire life. Reaching out to touch the kettle without a pot holder, she felt nothing at first, and then a sharp white heat pierced her numbness and she jerked her hand away. Instead of running cold water on her fingers, she took solace in waking to the throbbing burn.
The card, whose printed message read “With the Deepest Sympathy” in embossed silver script, had a handwritten message inside. It said,
Your father he asked me to send this along. He was brother to me these last years. And he was sorry.
Sincerely, Clement Woods
She came back to the table and picked up the folded yellow paper, smelling the chemicals in it and detecting the minuscule fibers within its smooth surface. Aware, suddenly, of the fingers that held the paper, she noticed the dryness of their skin, the paint deep in the cuticles, and the scars the fingers bore. She could hear her heart beating, the air moving through her lungs, and the thunder of the paper unfolding as it grew from a two-inch square to full size.
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