Mag glances at Wald. He shrugs.
“I wouldn’t wait too long to make an offer,” Gloria says to Mag.
The woman always buys the house. With rare exceptions, Gloria knows that to be true. She wonders briefly what it is about this ruin that attracts Mag.
Gloria Taberna, however, does not earn a living by lingering over pretty questions. She draws from her briefcase a purchase agreement. Before doubt can slip in under the poorly-fitted door, she hurries to get the papers signed.
≈
“What a lot of … potential!”
Mag hears the phrase a dozen times on the day their friends help them move in. She knows this is another way to call the place a dump. She quotes Wald. Fix, sell, repeat. Make something of themselves.
Make something of himself, Mag thinks. She has her painting. Wald has his urge to build a kingdom. On a good day she is touched by his desire to provide. When she feels less generous she sees only the fear behind his impulse. As if there is enough wood, plaster and money to protect them from all that the future might hold. She is not fearful so much as unconvinced that the material of this world can provide a shield.
Once everyone leaves, Mag finds the boxes that hold her art supplies. “I’m taking these up to my studio,” she says. She has claimed one of the abandoned rooms upstairs for herself.
“You want help?” Wald asks.
“I’ll be fine.”
She carries her canvases upstairs to one of the bedrooms. The last of the day’s sun filters through the trees and the dirty windows. She pulls one of Mrs. Brimsley’s chairs away from the desk and sits. With the exception of her paintings, everything in the room has been left behind. The bed, the chair, the rag rug on the floor, the small wooden desk and the nightstand, the lamp with its soiled shade; all of it an unintended inheritance.
She opens the window. The breeze shakes loose a curtain of dust from the screen.
In places the wallpaper, loosened by time and neglect, sags to the floor. The mirror is clouded. The room suits her paintings. This, she thinks, is how they should be shown.
Looking at her work, most people believe that her concern is for the flowers. Mag, however, takes her subject to be the fog.
Chapter Five
After six months in the nursing home to which my brothers sentenced her, my mother has learned all the habits of her roommate, Mrs. Beatrice Hennessey. The hiccups after breakfast, the nap after lunch, the even sound of her breathing. Thank God she is not a gasper or a cougher, like so many others in the Sheltering Arms. Smothering Arms is more like it, my mother believes. The place is squeezing the life from all of them. She was strong, she was a beauty, she had golden hair that reached halfway down her back and the sort of smile that said she knew something about mischief. Looking at her in her youth I imagine I might have become a version of her. And now, except for the light that still shines in her eyes, she is a husk, waiting to be blown away. She barely tolerates the endless days, and this with a saint like Mrs. Hennessey crammed in the room beside her.
At the moment Mrs. Hennessey’s breathing does not sound as regular as usual. Something is not quite right. “Mrs. Hennessey?” My mother calls from her bed. “Bea? Are you okay, dear?” In return she hears a gargling sound. Then, nothing. After a long pause, Mrs. Hennessey begins to breathe in her newly labored manner.
“Oh, Lord,” my mother says to herself. “I should call the nurse.”
Again that sound from Mrs. Hennessey.
“What?” my mother whispers. “Bea, what do you want?”
Light spills from the hallway through the partially opened door. She can’t tell what time it is without her glasses. The aide who puts her to bed sets them on the dresser, halfway across the room. Another of the many annoyances. They seem too numerous to be accidental. In any case, it is late. The usual sounds of bedlam have diminished, the groaning and sobbing, the shouted obscenities and all the rest of it. Instead she hears laughter from the nurses’ station. The night janitor’s mop clanks against his bucket. My mother grabs the cold steel rail beside her bed and slowly pulls herself upright.
She is still surprised by her decrepitude. When she awakes she expects to inhabit her former self, the Audrey Brimsley of thirty or forty years past. Instead, this. The steadily decreasing mobility, the steadily increasing pain. “I’m coming, Beatrice,” she whispers to Mrs. Hennessey. “I’m coming.” You would think she were swimming the Mississippi, not attempting merely to span the gap between their two closely-spaced beds.
My mother slowly squirms past the rail and gets a leg to the floor. She takes her other leg with both hands and pushes it off the bed. Then, with a prayer that she will not crumple under her own weight, she launches herself upright as she grabs desperately for her walker. If she misses she’ll land in a heap on the cold tile. That would be the end of her, right there. All those young daredevils she sees on the television — the skiers and motorcyclists, the fire-jumpers and tightrope walkers — should live her life for a day, she thinks. She defies death every time she gets to her feet unassisted. Those young muscle-bound clods don’t know death-defying from shinola.
Mrs. Hennessey makes a new and more alarming noise, as if she were being hung.
My mother grabs her walker with both hands and gives it a push. The flimsy gray plastic wheels rattle, then the legs bang against the steel frame of Mrs. Hennessey’s bed. My mother is pulled along by the walker’s momentum. The walker jolts to a stop with her leaning heavily against it, panting with the effort. She reaches up slowly and gropes for the light over Mrs. Hennessey’s bed. As the fluorescent bulb blinks to life, she sees Mrs. Hennessey’s panicked eyes staring back at her. The sparse white hair stands out straight from her scalp. Her blue eyes are immense, unblinking. The woman is little more than a skeleton, covered with the thinnest, parchment-like skin. Of course they all look like this, all of them boiled down to the little they can support with their frail lungs and weak hearts.
“Shall I call the nurse, Beatrice?” she asks.
Mrs. Hennessey makes a motion with her head. At least Audrey believes that she has. The poor woman seems paralyzed, incapable of speaking, barely able to breathe. Has she moved her head at all, really? If so, what did she mean? My mother isn’t sure of anything.
“What do you want, dear?” she asks. “You better tell me soon or it won’t make any difference.”
They had talked about what each wanted the other to do in such a situation. It was an odd conversation, my mother thought at the time. She hardly knew Mrs. Hennessey. She had barely moved into her room, in fact. She had not yet set up her pictures on her dresser, nor put her books on the shelf. She was still looking out the window, onto the parking lot, wondering how her life had come to this.
The answer was obvious. She had only those two boys of hers to look after her. What could she expect? She knew, despite their lies, that they had sold her house. She could see it in their eyes whenever the subject came up. She sensed it in their haste to change the subject. Nursing is a job for a daughter. If you have to rely on boys, sad to say, then you are out of luck. She would have traded one of the boys for me. It sounded heartless, she knew it did, but old age was no time for false sentiment. Either one of the boys, it made no difference to her. Yes, she loved them well enough. They were no worse than most. But I was the first. She had poured so much of herself into me. She had felt a connection that she never allowed herself with those other two. She did not dare invest the same feeling in them, for children, she had learned, were so quickly and easily snatched away. At least they were in those days. Now even the old lived just about forever. That was the subject that Mrs. Hennessey had raised with her so soon upon her arrival.
“When it’s my time to go I want to go,” she said out of the blue.
“Go where?” my mother asked innocently. She thought Mrs. Hennessey might be talking about going to their meals or, conceivably, to the toilet, though that seemed to her an intimate subject for a first conversation.<
br />
“I don’t want them making me into a vegetable. I don’t want to be cut into pieces and dumped into my grave a bit at a time.” Mrs. Hennessey’s eyes bored in on her as she spoke.
“That’s fine, I suppose. We should all be able to choose,” my mother replied evenly.
“Oh, they say you can choose, but that’s a lie. They have those forms. You tell them to let you die, but they don’t roll a paying customer out the door if they can help it.”
“Hmmm,” my mother had replied. She could think of many conversations she would prefer. She looked out at the parking lot again, an expanse of potholed asphalt. Trash blew among the cars. My God. It was enough in itself to make you want to die, never mind her roommate’s awful demands. She could not help compare it to the view from her kitchen window. She had spent hours with a cup of tea at the table, looking out at the untrammeled snow and the oak trees as she hummed along with the radio. She paid one of the boys from the neighborhood to fill her bird feeders regularly, so there were always chickadees and jays and cardinals, flitting from the feeders to the lilac bushes near the window. Then a crow would swoop down, setting off a battle. Or a squirrel would try to invade a feeder. It was a peaceful life, with its own small pleasures. And she had company enough. Richard, the Meals on Wheels man. The ladies from church, only slightly less ancient and infirm than she was. They drove slowly up in their big Buicks and made their doddering way to her door.
“You’ve got to wait until you’re dead,” Mrs. Hennessey continued. “Not just halfway dead, or they’ll haul you back. They’ll pound you and jolt you and jerk you, so they can tie you in your wheelchair again and feed you more of their mush.”
“I see,” my mother had replied. Mrs. Hennessey was not looking for an argument.
“So we’ll make a deal?”
“A deal? What sort of deal?”
“If I start to go, you won’t call the nurse. You just pretend to be asleep. Let enough time pass so they can’t drag me back. When my time comes I want it to be my time. I want to go. Let the good Lord decide, not one of these smart-alecks.”
But what seemed reasonable then is confusing now. Things are moving much too quickly. My mother is alone except for poor, bug-eyed, gasping Bea Hennessey, whose brave talk then might seem, even to her, like prattle now. My mother hardly knows what she makes of her own life, let alone that of Mrs. Hennessey. Had she had been asked thirty years ago whether, living in this place and in this odd, creaking thing her body had become, she would care to wake up tomorrow morning, she would have instantly answered no. And now? She would wake up, see what the day would bring, and hope there was some pleasure there. “It’s easy to think you know what you want,” she had said to Mrs. Hennessey. “Then the moment comes and you’re not so sure.”
Mrs. Hennessey paused at that. “Oh, I’m sure enough,” she said at last. “I’m sure enough. Promise me you won’t buzz the nurses.”
Mrs. Hennessey took her by the arm, clenching her scrawny flesh. She was surprisingly strong. “Yes,” my mother said, so that Mrs. Hennessey would release her. “If you’re sure that’s what you want, then, yes.”
“Don’t worry that I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Hennessey. “I’ll do the same for you,” she offered.
“Let me think about that,” my mother replied.
That was the last they spoke of the matter.
≈
Now Mrs. Hennessey’s skin has gone from its usual yellowish pallor to a faint shade of blue. Blotches of purple bloom on her cheeks. Her eyes scan wildly until she seems to focus on my mother again. “Are you ready to go, Beatrice? Is that what you want?” she asks.
Mrs. Hennessey opens her mouth. Her tongue waggles but no words come out. She looks at the call button, but that might be nothing more than an accident. My mother is surprised to feel, above all, resentful. Certainly it is easy to crow about how you want to die, and that is all well and good if you expect to hobble out onto the lonely tundra and quietly freeze to death. But if others are present, then it is an imposition to ask them to sit on their hands and watch you die. Things can be done. All she has to do is press the button and people will come running from every direction. It is a normal, human reaction to want to keep another alive.
What would she not have given, my mother thinks, if just once in her life she had possessed the power to do that much? Press a button to bring the near-dead back to health: what price would have been too high?
Surely she cannot turn out the light and return to her bed. She feels obliged to stay with Mrs. Hennessey, to comfort her as well as she is able. No one should die in the dark, alone.
Later they will ask her why she didn’t buzz for a nurse. They will blame her. Not that they can punish her. What can they do? Send her to a nursing home? But she will have to listen to the whispering, endure the sidelong glances. In that she had experience.
“I’m going to let you go, dear,” she says to Mrs. Hennessey. “I gave you my word. I hope that’s what you want.” She takes Mrs. Hennessey’s hand and feels again that strong grip, as if death itself has grabbed her. Mrs. Hennessey makes an effort to speak. Her eyes grow larger, then freeze in place. She gasps for breath and chokes with the effort.
“Relax, darling, relax,” my mother says. “It will all be over soon.”
She runs her hand through Mrs. Hennessey’s thin hair, attempting to smooth it down. Here is a woman who was something, my mother reminds herself. Here is a woman who gave birth to children, who ran a household, who did real work in the decades before dishwashers and clothes washers and drying machines. What did anyone know about work anymore? And now here she is dying with a virtual stranger in what might as well be a prison.
Mrs. Hennessey’s grip slowly loosens. My mother sets Mrs. Hennessey’s hand upon her chest. “That’s right, dear. I’m saying a prayer. They’ll have a spot waiting for you.”
Platitudes and pieties, which she neither believes nor disbelieves. Still, she says a prayer for Mrs. Hennessey and a prayer for herself. She hopes she has done the right thing. She waits a while longer as Mrs. Hennessey sighs one last time and then sinks slowly into her pillow.
My mother turns off the light. With great effort she slowly hauls herself back to bed. “Lord have mercy on us all,” she whispers in the dark as Mrs. Hennessey makes her way toward us.
I linger, and listen to my mother’s familiar thoughts, until the sun comes through the curtains and the inevitable commotion begins.
Chapter Six
Excuse me. It is confusing, I know, to slip back and forth in time as we do. Like a good Buddhist, I can be here now, but I am also able to be there now. It is only the future that must remain a mystery. In the end even we dead are the prisoners of time.
There are those among us who are bollixed by the past. They have no sense of where to stop. They think they are following a relevant string and end up spooking a peat fire in the Middle Ages, listening to relations twenty generations removed speak antique languages. Everyone, the dead included, can take things too far. Information and knowledge are not the same.
Take, for example, the case of Mrs. Hennessey. I am tempted to find out more about her. A strong woman with powerful opinions, eager to spit in the eye of all those who fancy that they might save her. I could learn as much as she knew about her life. I could learn things she herself had forgotten. But she is off my path. Unless I care to wander forever down one dusty corridor after another, I must discipline myself.
The trouble being that sometimes it is hard to tell a dead end from a poorly-marked shortcut. Thus my feeling about Mag Fuller. I am not sure I should resist her.
Not having accomplished much in life except to learn how to gurgle and crawl, I wonder, naturally, what I would have become. My presumption — my hope, I suppose — is that I am more or less what I would have been. But that allows nothing for the experience of living — the triumphs and heartbreaks that form one’s personality. Then again, perhaps the experience of dying, especially given the i
nsight that comes with open access to the minds of others, is superior in terms of character development. Further research is needed, not that I’ve noticed that the dead have much interest in science. We are forced by circumstance toward the artistic. Our realm is the emotional.
Often I feel like a teenage girl, guessing at what the future will be. Or, would have been. My mother in her day could enter a room and stop a conversation, and not only because of her looks. There a spark inside her that everyone seemed to see. I might have been like that. I would have wanted a husband and children, two or three. I try to give them faces, personalities, lives of their own, but they seem always to have their backs turned to me.
Mag might have been my daughter. I might have been something like her. She may tell me something about myself. She now occupies my mother’s house, which gives me the thin thread of an excuse. The dead enjoy certain prerogatives.
Anyway, where is the harm?
≈
I will take you to Mag’s thirteenth birthday, a day that opened the main stream of her life’s narrative. Her mother announces a trip to mark the occasion. She refuses to reveal the details, which is no particular surprise. Her mother loves intrigue. Despite the facts, she prefers to think of her life as glamorous, extraordinary.
The Maraults live in a tidy Cape Cod in a better part of town, a neighborhood where the grass is trimmed and the snow always shoveled with manic vigor. Mary Marault’s occupation is to maintain her own striking appearance and to beautify her home. She has an insinuating voice and a set of sharp eyes. She prides herself on the artfulness of her décor, the subtle touches that in her judgment elude her neighbors. The white shag carpet, the Danish furniture, the lime green ceramics; these are a few particulars of Mary Marault’s taste. Among Mag’s prominent memories is that of her mother standing barefoot on that snowfield of carpet — no one enters the room without first removing his or her shoes — and remarking, mostly to herself, “I think it works, dear, don’t you?”
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