He pulled himself to his knees. Because he was rubbing at his eyes with his fists, he never saw the cop, nor the club that caught him above the ear. The last he was to remember of that afternoon was the yellow line on the middle of the street, where his face came to rest.
She wished she had pictures from those days. Back then she had been philosophically opposed to cameras. Photos were of the past, for the future. Not in the Now, which was where she aspired to be back then. She had not foreseen that her memories would grow hazy, that it would not remain entirely clear how she had ended up in this bed, in this house, in this life.
Anyway, she reminds herself, I have photographs. Just as she has my mother’s bed, and her chest of drawers, and even her lingering odor in her rooms — the faint, slightly cloying smell of lilac mixed with dust — so she has my mother’s pictures. The trunk in the parlor is stuffed with albums. They will have to do.
Mag slips out of bed and pads barefoot to the parlor.
The trunk looks like it sailed on the Mayflower. Its frame is of dented oak. The brass hasp cries for polish. Inside are two neatly ordered stacks of albums. She grabs one of the books and retreats to the sofa.
Mag turns back the leather cover. She feels as if she is breaking into someone’s crypt. Who are these people? Certainly no one knows anymore except poor Audrey Brimsley, Mag thinks. If even she remembers.
Mag stares at a photo of a farm house. The landscape is empty of anything except miles of prairie grass. The sun reflects from the brow of a willowy man in a city suit. His arm drapes over a girl’s shoulders. Her arm is wrapped around his waist. The wind catches her hair, carrying strands across her face. Her clear, bright eyes focus on the camera. Her easy smile says that she is at home with this man, with herself, with her notion of how the future will unfold.
Who are they? Mag asks herself.
She turns the page.
Those two again. The man tosses a ball in the air, a blur of motion frozen in time. She holds his arm, studies his eyes, the charge between them all but visible. Once so happy, and now so forgotten that no one will bother to claim their photographs.
Mag turns the page again.
The man is in a doughboy’s dress uniform this time, his hat tucked under his elbow. He looks like he has won the lottery. Beside him is the girl in a brilliant wedding gown. Her arms are bare. The white veil covers her shoulders. Written on her face, satisfaction. She has what she wants.
A newspaper clipping is pasted on the page opposite. The same photo is reproduced in a rough halftone on the yellowed sheet, accompanied by a few paragraphs. Audrey Vernalle joined in holy matrimony to James Brimsley. My mother, Mrs. Audrey Brimsley.
Mag sits quietly. She studies the Brimsleys, caught by the click of a shutter more than sixty years ago. Here, in their home, amidst their abandoned possessions in the dead of night, they seem less a representation than a presence.
They loved each other. Decades later and it is perfectly obvious, given no more evidence than these few black and white photographs.
What, she wonders, would a similar stack of photos of her and Wald reveal? His strength, surely, written across his neck and broad shoulders. Something of his eagerness to please. He is always taking a measure of her happiness. She would smile at the camera, and her arm would clutch his waist. She would seem a portrait of contentment. But her eyes would face the camera dead-on, and anyone who looked closely enough would see the sign of options being weighed. This being the lesson of her life; that nothing can be fully trusted, that no plans are final.
Mag locks the album back inside the trunk. She hurries back to her bed.
Chapter Nine
And so she drapes an arm around Wald, who shifts toward her without waking. Wald is a painter, too, though he buys his paint by the five-gallon bucket. He works primarily in residential interiors. He caters to a clientele that is willing to pay a premium to a college graduate who listens to classical music as he works. For the lady of the house he is, more often than he knows, the source of an idle fantasy. He is steady and, so long as he is putting paint on a wall, more than competent. Within his home the trouble starts as soon he strays from what he knows.
He thought, for instance, that he should be able to replace the mineral-clotted water pipes that sent a trickle of water to their faucets. He cut out the dull old steel that snaked along the basement ceiling, then soldered in new copper pipe. He felt like Midas as he admired the bright metal gleaming against the dark joists. His satisfaction lasted up to the moment that he turned the main valve. He might as well have stood in the shower, so thoroughly was he soaked. They couldn’t use the kitchen sink for two weeks.
“You can’t know how to do everything,” Mag said to console him. But if he couldn’t manage a few pipes, she wondered, then what about the rest of it? There was no point in saying anything. It was too late for that.
He has a vague sense of Mag’s doubts. He does his best to overlook them. In the evenings he fills a yellow legal pad with a list of the work ahead. He revises it almost daily as he uncovers new bits of decay. His list grows, page by page, until he decides he must stop adding anything that does not immediately threaten their safety. Even so, his list gets longer. He must make a steadily increasing effort to avoid the obvious question: what kind of mess he has gotten them into?
≈
Meanwhile, unknown to Wald, Mag makes plans of her own.
Odd as Gloria Taberna had been with her prim red suits and her helmet of hair, she was right about the photographs stuffed in that trunk. Through them the house is speaking to her. When Wald is away or sleeping, Mag grabs an album. She does not care to explain. The photographs are her secret.
The subject of these pictures, almost always, is my mother, captured — relentlessly, besottedly — by my father. Audrey caught with her knitting. Audrey with a spoon poised before a toddler’s mouth. Audrey with a baby at her breast. The photos are like a map, Mag decides, pointing the way toward the few important facts of life. They are as important for what they are not as for what they are. There is not a single photograph of a new furnace, or a freshly-hung shutter, or a just-painted room. There is no picture of my father’s place of employment. No one bothers to save pictures of such things, because ultimately they count for nothing.
Mag studies the images. She imagines herself in my mother’s place.
≈
Mag possesses a single photo of her own father. The black and white print is yellowed where she has held it over the years. She sits on her father’s knee. He pokes a finger in her ribs. She squirms and giggles. In his free hand he holds a rake as if it were a scepter. They both wear sweaters and stocking caps. Mag, certain that her mother will rip the photo to confetti if she ever finds it, keeps it hidden throughout her remaining childhood.
Of all the possible reactions to her husband’s disappearance, Mary Marault settles on rage. She approaches the job of eliminating any trace of Jack Marault with relentless energy. His remaining clothes go in the garbage. With a Stalin-like commitment to erasing history, she gathers their photo albums, sets them in a galvanized washtub outside the back door, adds a gallon of gas and tosses a match from what she wrongly judges to be a safe distance. The resulting fireball burns away her eyebrows. Firemen, called by the neighbors, find Mary Marault in tears, her face smeared with ash. She will not explain anything to them. The blaze melts the maple leaves, which drop in smoldering bits at her feet. Mag watches from her bedroom window, a single thought stuck in her head: Why didn’t he take me, too?
She believed that she and her father had an understanding: the two of them versus her mother. In the face of her grandiose notions, they discreetly rolled their eyes. Gently, privately, they mocked her affectations. They never lacked for material. The white shag carpet. The Peugeot. The wine. All the bits of snobbery and two-bit madness that had permeated their household. Her mother was her mother, and they were the sensible ones, bound by shared awareness. Except now it was clear that her fathe
r was more sensible than she, because he is gone, she is stuck with her mother, and all she has to remind herself of better days is a single, miserable photo.
Her mother retails a fiction at first, that her father has been called away suddenly on business. When that becomes implausible, she explains that he had been under staggering pressure at his office. “I don’t think his work suits him,” Mag’s mother declares.
Of course it didn’t suit him. A thirteen-year old could see that. The moment he walked in the door he ripped off his tie and white shirt. As quickly as possible he changed into khakis and a sweatshirt. A can of beer in hand, he set into one of his self-imposed tasks that almost always took him out of the house. Tearing apart the Lawnboy. Building a fence. Re-roofing the garage.
Despite her mother’s objections — “You’ll kill yourself if you slip off that roof, young lady!” or, “You’ll never get that grease out from under your nails!” — Mag was constantly at his side. “You do it to spite me,” her mother declared, making a nervous joke. “You two, you’re as thick as thieves.”
True enough, they were as thick as thieves, stealing away from the fussy order within Mary Marault’s house and into a world of their own. Her father wore his thick, dark hair swept straight back, and kept a lively, wry expression on his face. He was sinewy and strong, with an athlete’s natural grace. He belonged on a fishing vessel, in an oil field, on a baseball diamond — in a thousand places, not a one of them requiring triplicate forms, a Dictaphone, or white shag carpeting.
“We should go on vacation, you and me, daddy,” Mag told him a few months before he disappeared.
“We can’t leave mom at home.”
“She wouldn’t want to go anyway.”
“But she wouldn’t like it much if we left her here.”
“We wouldn’t have to come back.”
“Hmm,” he said, laughing. “That’s an approach.” Later she wondered if she planted the idea that he could simply vanish.
“Why do we have to stay?”
He thought about that for a while. Instead of answering her question, he tousled her hair and laughed.
Years later she chose Wald, first for his looks and then later for his steadfastness. Whatever his other flaws — his imagination was not expansive, for instance, nor was his wit tremendously quick — she never doubted he would be constant. She told him they ought to be married. He had simply asked when.
Of course he had reasons of his own.
A few weeks before he agreed to her proposal, he had taken her to an abandoned quarry in the countryside. The pit had long-since filled with spring water. They slipped through a slit in the chain-link fence, then hiked on a gravel road overgrown with saplings. Wald thought that after a picnic on the slabs of rock high above the pool they would scramble down to the water for a swim. He did not expect that Mag would stroll to the quarry’s edge, casually dropping her clothing. The halter-top that hung so loosely from her thin shoulders, the India print skirt, the practical white cotton panties, all discarded in a trail on the gray granite as he watched. Nor could he have predicted that, having arrived naked at the lip of rock, Mag would, without a moment’s pause, launch herself headfirst at the water thirty feet below. He raced to the edge, arriving in time to watch ripples spread over the black surface. He called her name. He listened to the lonely echo from the rock walls. When, finally, she returned to the surface, she swept back her black hair and did a lazy backstroke across the pool. “Hey,” she called, the thought finally occurring to her. “How do I get back up?”
He would marry her for her heedlessness, for her beauty, for her artfulness. For everything he was not. He was a flatlander, drawn to the sea.
≈
As Mag digs deeper in the trunk she comes across an old camera. The name James Brimsley is written in black ink on the brown leather case. Like so much else in their home, the camera is an antique, well used, glossy where James once held it. She opens the cover of the viewfinder and looks down through the glass. Her fingers naturally fall where my father’s had once been. She focuses on the stairs, on the front door, on the sofa before the fireplace. So little has changed. James Brimsley could walk through the door and — except that everyone he had once known and loved was now dead or gone — might feel that he had just stepped out for air.
While Wald is at work, Mag takes the camera to the drug store for film. The pharmacist, his ruddy face highlighted by his white smock, turns the camera in his thick fingers. “Haven’t seen one of these for quite a while,” he says.
He spots the Brimsley name on the case. “Related?” he asks.
“We bought his house. Did you know him?”
“Brought film here all the time. But he’s been dead, oh, I don’t know… A long time. A gentleman.” He looks as if he has more to say. Instead, he simply adds, “A real gentleman.”
The pharmacist finds film and shows Mag how to load it. When Wald comes home, Mag insists that he take her picture. She stands on the steps before their house and does her best to pose as my mother had so many years before. Eyes straight at the camera. Chin tipped up. A slight smile on her lips, as if she knows something than no one else around has figured out. Which is true enough, Mag tells herself. She, like the Audrey Brimsley of long ago, has a husband. Her husband has a house. She will have a child.
That is what she believes the photographs have taught her. Her paintings are a flimsy bit of creation compared to the flesh and blood that Audrey held. You could call a painting challenging, or risky, but that was nonsense, really. A painting might be art, but art is not life. You can sell a painting. You can put it in a dark room and forget about it. There’s no chance that a painting will ever truly break your heart. It will never lower you into your grave. But a baby…
The only question is one of timing.
Wald holds the camera in both hands, head bowed to peer through the viewfinder.
“Cheese, baby,” he says. The shutter clicks.
Perfect, Mag says to herself. Absolutely perfect.
Chapter Ten
Needless to say, my brothers did not trouble themselves with the clothes that hung in the closets upstairs. My father’s old suits, my mother’s party dresses: moth-eaten now, shoulders thick with dust, they remained untouched for decades, until the afternoon that Mag discovers them. She takes a black satin dress from the closet and holds it up to herself. Without thinking she presses the fabric to her face and inhales, trying to catch some trace of her predecessor. She smells mold and dust. Underneath all that she imagines perfume. Perfume and a note of sweat, the ghost of my mother in her clothing. Mag quickly removes her own t-shirt and jeans, dropping them in a heap on the floor. She steps into my mother’s dress. The satin is cool against her skin. The skirt billows. The bodice is cut lower than anything Mag has ever owned, and hangs loosely on her scant frame. Mag imagines the Brimsleys out dancing, in the days when people still troubled themselves with elegance. Orchestras, cocktails, black cars with upholstered seats, men in hats, women in gloves; life as it was before glamour, however much an illusion that might have been, got beaten out of it.
She wants a picture of herself and Wald, got up in my parent’s clothing. She will pin the dress to make it fit. Someone can take the picture with the Brimsley’s old Brownie. She will have the photo blown up and hung in the foyer. A bit of a joke, a bit of a homage.
Wald will do it if she asks. In the end he always does.
She takes out one of James’s suits. The moths have made a fine living from the dark pin-striped wool. Dapper: that was the word for what this suit had once been. The broad lapels, the pinched waist, the cuffed and pleated pants, the long-dead and withered boutonniere; like the dress, it spoke of a time that strikes Mag as better than her own. Dressed in their finery, Mag believes, my parents lived as if their lives were sophisticated, magical — even if only for an evening, before the next load of laundry waiting to be scrubbed in the cellar’s cement sink.
Wald, she realizes, will n
ever be able to stuff himself into James’s suit. He’ll look like a Frankenstein, his wrists dangling from the sleeves. The pant legs won’t cover his ankles. Add to that his receding hair and high forehead, and there he would be: her very own monster.
Halloween is coming, she tells herself. His house is right for that.
She makes herself a witch’s hat and a cape to go with the dress. She turns some weeds and an oak branch into a broom. Among the Halloween trinkets at the drug store she finds a battery-operated amulet that hangs from a plastic chain. When she turns it on the red plastic jewel pulses, like a cartoon heart.
She sets the costumes out on the dining room table and waits for Wald to come home.
“So I’m a monster?” he asks, laughing. “That’s how you think of me?”
“Do I think of myself as a witch?” she replies.
≈
A few words concerning Halloween. There are those among us who take it for a mockery, others who enjoy the spectacle, some who feel we should be able to participate more fully. Provide some professionalism, rather than leaving the job to those amateurs, the living. In the end our opinions count for nothing, since we must play by what are, apparently, the rules. Look but don’t touch, to summarize. As frustrating as it is liberating. No sensible person expects anything from the dead and they are not disappointed.
So then, the day itself. The morning is brisk but clear, one of those fall days created for the calendar industry. By mid-afternoon, as if even the weather were donning a costume, the wind shifts, pushing in heavy, low clouds from the west. At dusk Wald lights the candles inside the pumpkins he and Mag have carved. The two of them put on their costumes and wait for the doorbell to ring.
Wald sits with a bowl of candy in his lap. He wears one of my father’s old suits. Mag has glued a pair of plastic bolts to his head. His face is covered with green makeup that Mag rubbed in with her fingertips.
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