Motherish

by Laura Rock

  “I’ve got excellent suggestions for where to stick those funds! But here’s what you do for starters: open two accounts and name one of them New Place to Live—”

  “Are you going to let me explain?”

  “The other, call it Hire A Lawyer. You need one.”

  She hangs up, satisfied to hear the disconnecting buzz. There’s one more thing to do. She goes into the account and places an ironclad, fraud-alert hold on the funds. Brava. Afterwards, she drops head to desk, but she’s dry-eyed, merely resting.

  A knock on the door jolts her upright. Maureen appears, hair dishevelled and collar askew, pushing a young woman forward.

  “Jamie, meet Susan. Remember, I told you she was starting today.” Of all days, Maureen’s widened eyes say. Help.

  As she secretly counted down the days left in August, she burned her parents’ images into memory against the time when she would never see them again. Mom standing at the kitchen table, humming tunelessly through white-pressed lips as she sliced tomatoes for canning, dividing the skinned flesh from the seeds with her knife blade while juice pooled around her hands. Dad looking across the dinner table at her before standing abruptly, almost tipping his chair over. His look was pure appraisal. He knew about her condition, she felt it, yet he wouldn’t or couldn’t say the dreaded words.

  She wished for better remembrances. Pictures that bespoke happier times, when she was content to take stock of the boys overflowing their desks in the back row of the schoolroom, thinking maybe him. Or him. But wishes weren’t going to save her.

  As each day brought the rendezvous with Jackson closer, she became less sure. She felt herself drooping like the parched cabbage plants in the garden, weighed down with heat.

  And as the life hidden within her ripened, she began to tell herself bedtime stories with ruinous endings. The prodigal daughter spurned at the farm gate, no hearts softening on her return. The woman at the well, never meeting Jesus. The adulteress standing before circling men, each perfectly willing to cast the first stone.

  Worry wormed around her gut. What if Jackson wasn’t there to meet her? Where would she go? His family might stop him from coming, or he might have changed his mind. The city was full of suitable young ladies; never mind a poor country girl, a Catholic no less, and with wrathful parents. She’d be destroyed over a fairy tale, taken for a fool. She felt she could trust Jackson, yet there was an edge of doubt. She had trouble imagining him meeting her train; she couldn’t picture the grand setting that the Weehawken train station must be with the two of them in it, or the ferry they’d take across the river to the terminal at the foot of 42nd Street.

  When John came calling, she was still flapping back and forth like sheets on the clothesline, even though it was the night before her city train. She heard him whistling and saw the sun glinting off his blond hair as he strode toward the house. They sat on the rough bench in the yard beneath the cedars, not saying much and yet comfortable together. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known John. He grew up on a farm farther down the same county road. They had played together as toddlers, studied at the same schoolhouse until he left to go to work, laboured side by side in haying season when the families put their horses and children together in the fields, and at the last ceilidh of winter, they’d danced together.

  She remembered that dance, the awkward way they bumped knees but laughed anyway as the fiddle music kept them bouncing. The bench creaked under his weight, and she thought he was as solid as they come. It was a shame that she’d never have his friendship anymore, once she got on that train heading toward Jackson.

  He turned toward her and cleared his throat. “I seen how things was this summer,” he said in a low tone. “And I see how things sit now.”

  She stiffened. She had caught him frowning at her at Busfield’s pond, where the gang went to swim after sundown. Felt him watching even after she turned away. Everyone said John had no time for Jackson, the fancy-pants newcomer who didn’t know anything. And since she had no time for anyone but Jackson, she’d ignored him.

  “You and me, we’re a pair,” he said, looking at his dust-covered boots.

  She softened then. He was waiting for her to say something, but what? And she thought: well, we could be a pair. She put her hand over his and squeezed it.

  “Let’s get married,” he said, and then, as if feeling braver now that she hadn’t stomped off and left him sitting alone, he smiled directly at her. “Marry me.”

  And so it was that she settled for being saved by John, after Jackson had cleared out but before she’d anywhere near recovered. She leaned into him and allowed him to rescue her, a lifetime bargain they never spoke of.

  Mulling it over now, she marvelled that she and John had left so much unsaid. But it was well before the time when people started sloshing their feelings all over the place.

  “You didn’t have faith in me,” Jackson said.

  Yes, it was definitely better the old-fashioned way. What was the use of going over the past with a fine-tooth comb? There are bound to be some nits.

  She turned on her side and choked on the ice spreading up to her throat. “If it’s faith you’re after, maybe you could explain how … Ivy told me—she couldn’t wait to tell me.” She whispered to the wall. “How could you destroy yourself? Was it because I didn’t come?”

  He didn’t answer. The first birdsong of the day trilled outside the window, and still he was silent. She nodded, reinforcing herself. She could ask questions.

  “Why have you come back now?” she said, setting her mouth in a tight line. And then she thought she knew why. She turned back to face him, but he’d ducked out of sight, just like before.

  The marriage started slowly, though love gained ground over time. She promised herself that first year to put Jackson behind her, but it proved harder than she had thought. The doubts that had plagued her in August gradually hardened into a certainty that the life she’d missed was a life of ease, full of beauty and laughter. She had chosen badly, she came to see.

  The baby was born in early April, a sturdy boy with a head of black hair. They named him Thomas, after John’s father. No one mentioned Thomas’s dark eyes or premature arrival.

  Their families helped them set up house nearby in their first place, a rental with acreage, but crop prices had fallen so low it was hardly worth harvesting, so John found work at the silk mill in town. He came home with fine cuts all over his hands and a dry cough that would never leave him be.

  Shortly afterward, the stock market crashed, and then the mill closed. They scraped through the winter after that, John rattling around the sheds, never finishing jobs that he started.

  He doted on Thomas, though. That was a blessing.

  “Circus strong man,” John would say with a wry smile as Thomas grabbed his dirt-scratched thumb and held on, laughing from the gut. “Tough guy.”

  But nights could find him standing at the window, just looking. Once she woke to see his face in pure moonlight, pale with fear and resignation. She marked his sorrow and knew she was powerless to help in any way; she could even be the cause of it. The only certainty was that he wouldn’t tell if asked. Jackson, she was certain, would have talked with her as a pal, would have joked away the worst hardships. He had so liked to talk and laugh.

  Then she fell into a sleep marred by twisted dreams, lying in a green pasture, her head in Jackson’s lap. He smiled down on her, gently teasing her hair into a fan around her face, rubbing her temples, soothing her. He began to pour something from a cup held high above her. He poured with a flourish, back and forth to wet all the hair, and she thought that this is how it must feel to be an infant, washed and stroked and cared for. And then her scalp began to sting as though beset with swarming bees, and her eyes watered from the fumes, and she was engulfed by invisible kerosene clouds.

  The next spring, on a March afternoon of rain-spitting wind, Thomas
was napping in the big wooden drawer she’d lined with blankets. She was chopping onions and sniffling over them. She hurried to finish before Thomas woke.

  John came in and put the kettle on. It wasn’t his habit to make his own tea, and she looked up to see what the trouble was.

  “I’m going to the bend tonight,” he said. She put the knife down and folded her hands. “There’s more work in the city.”

  “It’s too dangerous to ride the rails.”

  “Supplies are running low,” he said. She nodded, thinking of the root cellar showing patches of dirt floor. “It’s for the baby.”

  “The baby needs his father. If you get caught … or fall—” She covered her eyes.

  “I know what I’m doing.” He warmed his hands around the kettle. “Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”

  Thomas began to shriek as the kettle whistled. She wiped her hands on her apron and reached for him, unbuttoning her blouse.

  “John,” she said, staring at the steam rising as he poured.

  “I’m going tonight. You’ll be happy enough to see some money.”

  She wished to argue but knew he meant to have the last word. And there was no disputing the hard times. She pictured the Depression—that’s what they were calling it—as an enormous pit in the earth. They were ants crawling at the bottom, working all day for their little crumbs. It surely must be different in the city. She thought of Jackson and his well-fed family out for a stroll in the park. They wouldn’t be struggling. Perhaps they’d had to let some hired help go, but that would be the extent of it.

  That evening they sat in the kitchen, pretending to read as the clock ticked on toward the 11:15 freight train that rattled their windows every night. She opened the Bible and flipped the pages a little too hard, so that one of them tore at the edge. He looked up.

  “What about the tramps?” she said. “I don’t mind giving them a bit of food when they come around, but you never know how they’ll take it.” She couldn’t bear the thought of him riding the countryside like a tramp, aimlessly searching. It hurt her to think of that train carrying him away. She wanted to give him a morsel of nourishment, some salve for his wounds. But she couldn’t say these things.

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Try not to worry.” He smiled weakly. “I’ll send the money back.”

  She flipped the pages back and forth.

  Photos fell out of the back cover. Their wedding day, though you’d never know it from the plainness. There hadn’t been time or money for finery. A picture of her parents, younger then, sternly posed. A group of youngsters on a hay wagon, baking in the sun. She traced her finger across the faces, first her own, then John in the second row at the end, Ivy next to him smiling coyly at the cameraman, and then circling back to stop at Jackson. She stroked the spot.

  John stood up and his chair fell over with a crash.

  “I’m going now,” he said to her straightened back. He waited for a minute, then muttered something she couldn’t make out and left.

  How long did she sit there, eyes pointed at the picture but not seeing? Afterward, she went to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come in that drafty house. She saw John heading out back to the trail, finding his way to the rail line, and then, crouched low at the bend, waiting for his chance. Over and over he missed the open car and fell under thundering wheels, screaming. What would become of them?

  And when he finally crept back into bed, before dawn, she didn’t turn to him, because she had won. Whether he changed his mind or lost his nerve or no longer trusted her to stay at home, didn’t matter. She exulted in his return, cold righteousness in her mouth. She was too young to know that he’d blame her for his lost opportunities. For believing in the picture instead of her man.

  “My father was fit to bust about his building.”

  Kathleen startled at the voice and opened her eyes. Jackson stood by the window, looking out over the flower gardens softly lit by the first golden streaks of daybreak. He ran the flat of his hand across the glass, stopping to press on it several times as if checking for flaws.

  “He always had to have the best of everything, the finest workmanship, richest materials. His building was a statement that the Newsoms had arrived, you see. As much a statement as a headline in a newspaper, only brickwork and glass. It took up a whole city block.”

  She pushed herself up by the elbows to nearly seated. He had never told her much about his family or their business matters. Ivy liked to mention the Newsom Merchant Bank and Newsom Assurance as if they were cousins alongside Jackson. Kathleen had no idea what assurance was, and she’d be damned if she would ask.

  “I started to do this trick, first for the employees, and then he’d make me do it for visitors.” Jackson moved back from the window and ran toward it, pushing off the wall with his foot at the last moment. He turned toward Kathleen. “I could charge the window and rebound without breaking the glass. I just bounced off.”

  Jackson reached into his pocket for rolling papers and pouch tobacco. He sat on her bed and began to roll a cigarette on his thigh, brown crumbs falling onto the coverlet.

  “Want one?” He held the cigarette toward her.

  Kathleen frowned. “You still smoke?” She wagged her finger at him playfully, clicking her tongue.

  Jackson lit a match on the bottom of his shoe and touched it to the end of the cigarette, cupping his hand like he was outside. He inhaled, held the smoke in, and watched her with narrowed eyes.

  “So you ran straight into the window?” she said. He blew perfect smoke rings in the air above her head.

  “All the time. It showed what stern stuff my father’s building was made of.” Jackson chuckled mirthlessly. “We lost a lot of money in the Crash, and after. People needed a laugh. I didn’t see any harm in it.” He shrugged his shoulders and settled back into the chair. “There you have it. The full account.”

  Kathleen shook her head. The smoke was fogging her in.

  “An accident. Not what you wanted at all. But how did …?”

  “The newspapers liked to write up my family. Any whiff of scandal and those hounds were on it. Of course, it was all between the lines back then. Now—hell, now they’d have blood-spatter patterns and witness statements. Grief counsellors for the staff.”

  “You know what they’d do now?” she said. She felt a tight pain in her forehead and rubbed the spot.

  He grinned. Sticking the cigarette in his mouth, he reached over to plump her pillow and let a hand rest on her forearm. “The article said that I fell, and that’s all it took for everyone to think it was money troubles that drove me to it. Not a single person in the room that day told them it was just a silly boy’s game gone wrong. A mistake.”

  Kathleen patted his hand. It was cool and smooth, no calluses. He had been a silly boy; she should have seen that more clearly. John was dependable.

  “They were afraid of looking foolish. And my father—” Jackson stopped to clear his throat. “My father preferred to let on that I’d jumped. I guess it gave me an air of gravity. He always wished I would be more serious.”

  “Gravity,” Kathleen said, laughing as Jackson mimed a bird hitting the ground. She pushed at the outer corners of her eyes to staunch them.

  “He never talked to the press; that was a strict policy. But he kept sending them reports about our financial recovery, and in two weeks, they forgot about me. The company did well.”

  “And your mother?” Kathleen said.

  “She thought the worst, like you did.”

  Every part of Kathleen’s body ached in the morning. She made snow angels in the sheets; it helped some to move around. The early light through the blinds reminded her of butter under a pastry blender in her hand. And waking on the farm in summer as a girl, the day spread out and already known: chickens to feed and water, the weeding and the laundering, berries to pick. The rhythm of
chores and smells and sounds always the same. Until that summer when Jackson came to stay with his people who lived down the road, and the unknown washed over the known.

  Her feet and fingers trembled from the waiting she had endured. She’d been living alone for years, brooding over events that could have been. Not paying enough attention to the life she’d had. She couldn’t say exactly how long it had been going on, but enough was enough. Of that she was certain. She sniffed the air for smoke and brushed the covers in search of tobacco, but there was nothing to substantiate the conversation in the night, no lingering signs.

  No matter.

  Slowly, she reached for a bedpost to steady herself and threw off the covers, swinging her legs down, waiting for the buzzing in her head to stop. The floorboards under her bare feet were not as cold as she’d feared. It felt good to grip the smooth grain of the wood with her toes, like caressing her house. Any lingering lightheadedness would pass, she was certain, with fresh air. This was no day for her walker, or her clunky orthopedic shoes. She would get where she was going without the ugly aids that marked her as elderly. She’d be fine, shifting from one hand-fall to the next in the place where she knew them all. Moving this way reminded her of how Thomas had learned to walk, pulling himself to standing and then cruising between the sofa, radio console, and easy chair.

  Her dressing gown hung on the back of the door. She reached for it, feeling the puckered seersucker fabric, and eased one arm in, and then the other. Her slippers were tucked behind the door. They slid on easily.

  From the back porch, she side-stepped down the few stairs, holding the railing, and into the grass. Here the footing was trickier, but she kept the trail in sight, focussing on reaching it. Her breath was audible in her ears, yet she, who had been known for fretting over vexations large and small, did not stop to wonder if her pulse was racing too fast, or worry about looking ridiculous, should a neighbour happen to see her shuffling into the woods in her pajamas and robe. She spared no thought for anyone but Thomas, who planned to stop in this evening on his way home from work. Or was it tomorrow evening? Which day was this? She did love him so, her good boy. Still and all. The orderly passage of time might slip away from her, but the anchor of love remained. She should have told him more often how dear he was, how proud she was of him. And yet, she wasn’t raised to voice such feelings.