Still, I could not imagine Missy having anything like the thought I’d just had. However it was that she’d ended up this way, she was as unremitting in her criticism of me as Mama. She just used irony and indirection instead of full-frontal nagging and cajoling, which was why I could still keep my lunch dates with her and why I was starting to get very restless sitting here within earshot of even the mere tone of my mother’s voice.
But then it stopped abruptly, the phone conversation. And soon after, Mama was standing in the doorway to the parlor surprisingly dry-eyed and with a faint look of astonishment on her face. I knew why. I was in his chair. He was looking down on both of us. I didn’t move.
“How is she?” I asked.
Mama rolled her shoulders and came in. She sat on the far end of the settee. “She’s confused.”
“You told her to stay in the marriage,” I said, keeping my voice flat, without judgment.
Mama shot me a hard look. Of course she had. And of course she knew I’d advised the opposite.
Mama eased off the look and glanced briefly beyond me—to Daddy, I knew—and then she looked away altogether, out the trapezium of bared window where the drapes had been wedged back as far as they would go. “I said some things.” Her voice was low.
“I’m sure you did.” I tried not to sound sarcastic, but I’m afraid I did.
“Not what you think,” she said.
I waited. If she intended to repeat the things to me, she would. After a long moment, though, I got the feeling she was waiting, too. She wanted me to ask. I was curious, of course. But I wasn’t going to ask. If she and Missy had a thing between them that she and I did not, she was going to have to offer it of her own free will.
Finally, Mama said, “Are you tired?”
“Of what?”
“From the trip.”
“A little.”
“What do you want to do?”
So that was that. She was content to keep me on the outside. At least I was motivated now to get the work done and get out of here.
“Lie down?” she prompted.
“No. You say you want everything of his to go?”
“Everything,” she said, shaking off the little funk her voice had been in.
“I notice you haven’t offered for me to take what I want.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Does Missy want anything?”
“I didn’t offer to her, either.”
“Are you now?”
Mama thought for a moment. “Is it up to me?”
“I’d say so.”
“Then no. Sell it all.”
“Okay.”
She seemed suddenly to hear how she sounded. She said, “If there is anything …”
“I doubt if there will be. But thanks.”
Mama nodded once and looked at the little bit of daylight she could let into the room.
“How about the drapes?” I asked.
She looked at me and smiled. “They’re worthless.”
“But they’re his, aren’t they?”
She shot them the same hard look I’d gotten a few moments ago. “You’re right,” she said. “They’ll follow the moose.”
And so it began. All that day and night and through the next day and night, as well, Mama and I hardly saw each other. When we did, there was only small talk, which we’d never done all that well together. But she seemed preoccupied. Whatever it was, I was grateful for it, because she did not speak of Missy’s problem and she did not speak of what she saw as my problems and we put up an almost placid front for each other.
And there were, of course, Daddy’s things. I made mostly lots of like items—with as much in them as I could get away with. But there were some special things, too. A Colt 1851 Navy-model revolver with figured walnut grips, an eighteen-karat-gold open-faced quarter-repeater pocket watch, a late-classic pre-Columbian Veracruz ceramic figurine of a woman with large, naked breasts. I found this woman in the deep shadows of a book shelf and I held her for a time, wondering how often Daddy looked at her. I sat her in the center of the desk and made my notes and it was late on my second day and I leaned back in the chair and dug my knuckles into my eyes to clear them.
I was weary. It was night. I thought of Alain, his arms around me in my drowsiness, but then that thought gave way to his hands. I held before me a vivid image of his right hand. It lay on his knee, his leg crossed—I didn’t remember where the image was from; perhaps the knee was simply a velvet display case I myself was supplying—I watched the hand, and the fingers were slightly curved, enough that the puckering at the knuckles had begun to smooth. I was happy for having his hands. I would kiss his knuckles someday. I thought to call him, but it was too soon for us to be doing that. We’d had a sweet good-bye on the phone and the next call should be to make the plan to bring us together.
I swiveled the chair once more to the bookshelves behind me. I’d found a fine leather set of A History of the Pacific States of North America, and the two volumes that included Texas were clearly more worn than the others. I knew it had been Daddy who’d done that. He kept care of his books, but he would read them. Driving the value down, of course, though I did not feel the slightest twinge of regret, as I can with other auction objects that need not be handled to be fully appreciated. I was good at bullying buyers into taking a book with the patina of use it deserved. He also had a nice Morocco-bound mid-seventeenth-century Calvinist King James printed in Amsterdam with annotations from the Geneva Bible, and a Civil War history of the Texas Volunteer Division, privately printed in 1869, written by an enlisted man, and a first edition of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, this one clearly read many times and not just by my father, but the cloth covers were still whole and the pages were tight.
My eyes fell now to a lower shelf with oversized books laid sideways. A large volume I’d noticed and wondered about there finally moved me to lean to it and pull it out. As I’d suspected, it wasn’t a published book at all but an especially fine leather album with heavy black photo pages. I moved the naked pre-Columbian lady well to the side and laid the album on the desktop, expecting family photos, I suppose, though having been in my professional groove for a couple of days, I may not have expected anything at all. I lifted open the cover, and there was Maidie, tipped in to the page in a monochromatic eight by ten. She was Daddy’s first breeding cow. She was standing in a stock pen, her face turned languidly to the camera, and though her image had blurred from having been blown up from a Brownie-box photo, her large, dark eyes were clear and deep and sweet. I’d heard about Maidie. And on the next page was Ned, Daddy’s first stud bull. And the facing page had smaller images of cows, four of them, and each was named and dated in Daddy’s back-slanted hand, and I turned another page and another and it went on and on and they were all Daddy’s special cattle, each one held here forever.
I closed the album. I heard him on the phone.
Where was I? Not at the office. I must have been at home. Yes, he woke me up. It was two or three, New York time. I answered the phone by my bed and my first thought was that he was gone. It was Mama calling to tell me he was dead. But it was Daddy’s voice. He probably was sitting at this very desk, in this very chair. I looked now at the phone. His hand had reached out to that phone and picked it up and perhaps Maidie was looking at him from his desktop, though she was already long dead. He was sleepless and he was weak from the chemo, but his voice was firm.
“Amy, it’s me.”
“Daddy, are you all right?”
“All right?”
“Okay. I guess I meant, Are you alive.”
“This is not a ghost calling you.”
“I withdraw the question. It’s late. I was sleeping.”
“I’m sorry to wake you up,” he said.
“You know I’m not complaining. If we’re going to talk Texas-blunt, then don’t pull the hurt feelings over nothing.”
“You’re right. And it is time to be blunt. I�
��m going to sell off the rest of the cattle, Amy. The whole ranch. I can’t keep it up.”
He fell silent and I waited. For a question. A plea for help. Something. But he wasn’t saying any more. “Okay,” I said.
“Is it okay?”
I finally figured out what he’d been waiting for. “You want me to stop you.”
“I’m dying, honey. I can’t keep doing this.”
“You want me to say, It’s time I quit all this meaningless stuff, I’m coming home and taking over the cattle business.”
There was a long silence between us. Then he said, “I know you can’t do that.”
“It’s what you always wanted,” I said. “I understand that. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t call to lay guilt on you,” he said. “I guess … It’s just that you were the only one who understood what I saw in them.”
My breath caught at this, my eyes filled. I worked hard to keep my voice steady and I said, “I did, Daddy. You know I understood.”
I laid my hand now on the cover of the album.
“Would you like to do the auction?” he’d said.
It was then that the tears spilled over, though his gesture was not a sentimental one, I knew, not even a gesture of genuine acceptance of the life I’d chosen for myself. The sudden brittle edge in his voice betrayed him. And I knew his ways. For the irony of it, yes, I wanted to auction off his cattle. But if I agreed, he’d figure to win either way. I’d get down there and in the midst of things, having to do the act myself, I’d see the light and I’d not go through with it. I’d stay and do what he’d always wanted. Either that, or he’d be able to hold my heartlessness against me. Not only was I making him sell off his dream for both of us, I was willing to hammer down the gavel with my own hand.
So I wiped the tears off my face hard and I said, “I can’t, Daddy. I’m way too busy here. I’m their star.” And that was true.
“You were always my star, too,” Daddy said, and that wasn’t true. I was surprised at his sudden plunge into bathos. But he was dying, after all. Maybe no declaration of attachment to things was sentimental if you were fucking dying.
Then he said, “I’m sorry we won’t be able to ride the fence line together again.”
He was pouring it on. I squeezed my eyes shut with my fingers.
And now, sitting at his desk, with him dead for more than a year, I consciously disconnected this memory. I pressed at my eyes, but from weariness. And I thought of a saddle. Just before he got sick, Daddy’d bought me a custom half-seat saddle from a maker out in New Mexico, built on an 1868 H.Y.A. Slick Fork tree. It was a beautiful thing and I bet it would have been as comfortable as Missy’s recliner, with a flat seat and a California twist in the stirrup leathers, which were bound with latigo lace. He probably spent close to three thousand dollars for the thing. I never even sat on it. What could I do with it? He gave it to me for Christmas when my auctioneer career was in full flight, and of course it wasn’t meant to go to New York with me. I hadn’t ridden in years. It was meant to sit in Houston and beckon me to return, to come back and ride the fence line with him like I’d done as a girl.
“You’re going to beat this thing,” I’d said to him that early dark morning when he’d called me.
“You know I’m not,” he replied.
He left me with nothing more to say.
The phone rang and I woke. I sat up and fumbled to the night table, which wasn’t there. I brushed metal with the back of my hand, grasped at it—the brass headboard. There was no phone. I listened. No sound. I lay back down. It was Daddy calling. I wondered: if I’d answered in my dream, instead of forcing reality upon the sound, what would he have said? I closed my eyes and invited the dream to return. But my head was full of thoughts now, no longer phones and voices and a saddle redolent of new leather. Where was that saddle? I’d not taken it with me, of course, though I’d slept with it in this very room for a night. Missy wasn’t there, that Christmas, so Daddy’d been free to give me something he wouldn’t know how to match for her. What did he do with the saddle after I left it behind? Was it around this house? Did it get sold off with the cattle and the horses and the ranch?
I threw back the sheet and swung my legs over the side of the bed. They dangled there, not reaching the floor, which freaked me out a little bit. I’d shrunk back into my seven-year-old self. But it was nothing new. Mama’d put this particular guest bed in here at least six or eight years ago and I’d always flinched at the first climbing down on the first night home of each trip. More so now, however. And it even led me to reflect on Mama as Mama, and Daddy as Daddy. I’d have a hard time telling any New York friend of mine why, as an adult, I still called them that. It was a Texas thing, certainly. Broader than that—a Southern thing. But I knew it was more. We’d all just stalled here, in the Dickerson family. We were all still acting out parts from an old script. And my goddam feet were dangling as I thought all this.
I dropped to the floor and padded across the needlepoint rug and out the door and I headed for the steps. I’d lost my connection to sleep and I was going to go downstairs for a midnight glass of wine.
When I reached the top of the staircase I saw a light below. I hesitated, weighing the wine versus a middle-of-the-night conversation with Mama, but maybe the light had been left on accidentally, and if not, maybe this conversation was inevitable anyway, so I started to descend, twisting to see the grandfather clock. It was after two. I landed in the hall and looked toward the light. It came from the parlor and I could see Mama’s bare legs and her feet in house slippers stretched out on her settee. I moved to the doorway. She was sitting there sideways, her back to me, her face lifted to Daddy’s portrait. I looked up at him. The clock ticked loudly behind me. Time had moved on, for Christ’s sake. Let’s give it a rest. I almost backed out, but before I could, she turned her face to me.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Can you sit down with me for a few minutes?”
She didn’t move her legs off the settee and I looked toward Daddy’s chair and then I chose a neutral corner, a nondescript overstuffed couch, my mother’s attachment to which had always puzzled me. I went to it and sat and it was more comfortable than the brass bed.
“I’m sorry I haven’t spent more time with you this trip,” she said.
“It’s me. I’ve been busy cataloging.”
“Missy’s going to try again with Jeff, I think.”
“Oh shit.”
“Don’t you talk like that,” Mama said, though without any real fight in her voice.
“Is that what you’ve been busy doing?” I asked.
“I knew you’d take this attitude.”
“There are no secrets between us,” I said, meaning we always knew what to expect from each other. But I hit some sort of nerve. Mama grimaced and looked away from me, toward the fireplace, though she kept her eyes down, in the smudgy dark of the inner hearth.
“There are some secrets it’s just better to keep,” she said.
My distaste for the family’s problems had kept me from trying to sort all this out before. Now I could see the pattern clearly. Mama’s silly hinting around about “things” said to Missy; the nature of Missy’s problem; the decades of silent rancor between Mama and Daddy; even Mama sitting in here in the middle of the night, confronting his image, and then not looking him in the face right now. I knew it all instantly.
“You’ve already told Missy,” I said. “It’s time to tell me.”
Mama looked at me in surprise. How stupid did she think I was? I could even guess the thing itself. Daddy’d fucked around on her.
“Your father …” she began solemnly. Now she looked up at him, setting her mouth hard but her eyes filling with tears. “He wasn’t perfect, of course. Far from it. He was a man. Like all men. And what are they like, men? They’re just like those bulls of his.”
This was Mama’s pain—it hurt me to see her tears—and she should be able to say it the way she wante
d, but I was impatient at her hemming and hawing. “Mama,” I said, making my voice as gentle as I could. “Do you want me to say it for you?”
She looked at me. “No. I can say it. He had women. He slept with women. It was something I knew. And he knew I knew. So did I take the two of you and just up and start over, the first time he let his dick out of the barn?”
Mama clapped a hand over her mouth.
I laughed. She didn’t.
“It’s not funny,” she said, and she was working herself up now. “He makes me mad. He makes me say things I don’t want to say. And do things I don’t want to do. He still does. But did I tear down the family over a thing like that? Or a dozen things like that? No I didn’t. I could never do that. We respect family above all else around here. I hung in. For you and for Missy, and for me, too. I’ve had all the things I want. So do you think I’m going to tell Missy it’s okay to kick that cow chip out the door for his first sleazy fling? You can bet your bonnet I’m not. Do you think I did all this with my own life for nothing?”
And that final question hung in the air, trying to offer its own, presumed self-evident answer, for a long while afterwards. Mama fell silent in its presence and let her gaze retreat to the shadows in the fireplace and I sat thinking how, once she’d made the decision to stay and take it, she’d had no choice but to be who she was—all of it, every last goddam phone call to her daughters, every whine and criticism.
Finally, she flipped her chin up at the painting. “All those trips to New York,” she said. “That was one of them. I don’t know who she was or where, exactly, except I can see her standing right behind the painter. Maybe she even was the painter. Then he put that thing over our fireplace and I’ve had to look at the twinkle in his eye for decades.”
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