Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  What?

  They have taken over Audrey’s house. Now Mag admits to herself that she is colonizing the woman’s memories. It is like a form of cannibalism, Mag acknowledges, knowing that she is unable to stop.

  Oh, but those photographs! Those pictures of a woman so confident, so full of life. So obviously, unquestioningly in love, and so loved in return. Had the photos been taken yesterday in full color they could not be any more soaked with emotion. The clothing so simple, the rooms so uncluttered with the junk of modernity — the prattling television, the cassette deck, the appliances that worked God-knows-how and then stopped working for reasons equally inscrutable. A life, in short, that is comprehensible. Feelings that you can hope to understand. Not the complicated mess that exists everywhere Mag looks.

  She wants just a few simple things on which she can depend. Wald. The house. The baby, when it arrives. Nothing like the confusion of her childhood.

  The wonder was that her father had disappeared so completely. Never a phone call, never a postcard. For months she waited anxiously for the mail, believing that he would send her a letter to explain where she should meet him. Nothing, nothing, day after day. She pictured him on a boat’s deck, the sun and salt in his face, a few days beard sprouting on his chin, sailing farther and farther away. She pictured herself — stupidly, pathetically, she later concluded — with him.

  Her own escape, when it came, was more prosaic. Her art, her marriage, her house. Now, finally, her baby. She considers Audrey to be a beacon, drawing her toward an unfamiliar coast. Happiness instead of lunacy and abandonment. Constancy instead of turmoil. In those pictures she sees the joy Audrey felt when she was young and pregnant, when her swelling body pushed against her summer dress. Soon Mag will feel the same.

  Just one, Mag tells herself. Just one box for tonight, and then I’ll go to sleep. She feels like she is an alcoholic promising herself just one drink, knowing she’d end up with an empty bottle. Except this time she really means it. She needs her sleep. Her baby needs her to sleep.

  Mag spreads her comforter on the floor. She unties the knot that binds the box she has chosen. Folded beneath the cover is a yellowed newspaper. The news is of a bank hold-up, a city hall scandal, the usual trivia of public life. Mag sets it aside. She doesn’t care about any of that. The only news that interests her concerns Audrey Brimsley.

  Beneath the newspaper she finds scraps of fabric. Material for a quilt that never got made, she guesses. Well, everyone has their plans, she thinks. Be grateful if it’s only the inconsequential ones that get dashed. Mag pulls the cloth from the box. White cotton diapers, she realizes. Beneath them a set of tiny, knitted booties. Then t-shirts, so small they might have been for a doll. A bonnet, some dresses, pink sweaters. Girl’s clothes.

  Under the sweaters she finds more pictures, fixed to pages torn from a photo album. Audrey holds a newborn in her arms, only its face exposed in its swaddle. She looks down on the child with such tenderness that Mag feels on the verge of tears herself. She can all but feel the baby’s warmth in the clothes that rest in her lap.

  There is more. Mother and baby together, asleep on a bed, the baby cradled on her mother’s arm while a curtain flutters in the open window. The baby, on its feet at last, holding onto the sofa pillows and grinning wildly. Baby clutching the wheel of a car, baby laughing on a swing, baby covered with food on her high chair. And Audrey hovering in the background, beaming, as if this were all a human being could hope to achieve: to stand by while your child grows and prospers. How much more could you desire? The love of your husband, the health and happiness of your baby — isn’t the rest of it just falseness and grasping? When everything that matters is free for the taking.

  My mother’s big, rotting house, so soon to be filled with life again, seems to hold its breath.

  At the bottom of the stack is a picture of the baby, clutching a rattle in its pudgy hand. Audrey stands at the foot of the stairs, just a few steps from where Mag now sits. The light falls on mother and child as if they are saints. On the child’s face is that deception that babies manage so well, that look of comprehension, of understanding beyond time and reason.

  Mag unfolds another brittle sheet cut from the newspaper, and reads on the yellowed page an obituary for Clarissa Brimsley, age two, daughter of Audrey and James, dead in the year 1918, cause of death, as the newspaper put it, “an accident in the home.” Which by the conventions of journalism is an accurate enough summary of my death.

  II.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mrs. Hennessey is with us now.

  Upon her arrival she was confused and not entirely happy. Like so many of the devout, she came with expectations. Pearly gates, heavenly choirs, seraphim and cherubim, that sort of thing. Death is worse than life for those with a literal mind.

  Mrs. Hennessey, when I found her, was like a car with a shrieking alarm, broadcasting her outrage in all directions. I didn’t mean to…how could she…all she had to do was…I wasn’t ready…they could have…and then I would have…but now instead…and where are the… all those hours on a kneeler…and now not even…

  It didn’t seem like the time to introduce myself. And to be honest, poor, bellowing Mrs. Hennessey is not really my concern.

  My mother suffers just the opposite problem; the absence of Mrs. Hennessey. She is grateful when an aide finally appears to put the sheets and blankets back over the empty bed. After they removed Mrs. Hennessey — with what was to my mother an unnerving degree of practice and efficiency — the bed remained covered only in its plastic sheet. This was worse, oddly, than the night she had spent with Mrs. Hennessey’s corpse.

  She does not trust her ability to convey this to Mr. Hennessey.

  All the struggle had gone from Beatrice. All the straining and contention, the petty humiliations, the burdens of the world; all were at last rendered meaningless. My mother herself felt suddenly, briefly, at peace, as though whatever had descended upon Mrs. Hennessey could not be contained within her. That Mrs. Hennessey was soon to be bellowing in the afterlife is an unimportant irony. My concern is for my mother and her brief sense of tranquility.

  She was familiar with this sensation, having earned it with much greater difficulty once before in her life. She had learned then, however, that such feelings are not to be trusted. They come and go with equal ease.

  See my mother now in the summer following my death. She is free from her usual obligations. My father tiptoes around her, hardly daring to remark upon the dust that gathers on the window ledges, or the dishes that stack up in the sink. He comes home from work and does his best to impose some sense of order. Meanwhile he chats with her in a tone of false cheer, relating the minutiae of his day. Not because he dreams that it is interesting, but to fill the silence, which upsets him more than the note of desperation in his prattle.

  Does an hour pass during which she does not hear my last breath? That night we all huddled together in my parents’ bed. The doctor promised to return the next morning. He lulled my parents with his optimism, as if there would be a next morning for me.

  My mother rose from the bed that day and went to the window to watch the sun rise. She pushed back the curtain to the rich glow on the horizon. She was still standing there when the day fully revealed itself, the sky cloudless, the sun dazzling upon the fresh snow, her eyes aching with the overwhelming brilliance.

  How did the weeks pass? Once the burial was finished, once her mother left and her friends returned to the demands of their own lives, once the silence settled upon their home, once my things were carried to the attic and my mother heard the last ring of the hammer upon the thick steel spikes — my father simply did the job and did not bother to argue about the waste of space — after all that my mother began to fill her days by walking. She walked the four or five miles to the river and around the lake, stopping for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, nothing more, before setting off again. Her goal was to end the day so exhausted as to be incapable of thought. Sh
e wanted only to curl against James in their bed and pray that whatever remained in her head was flushed away by sleep.

  So she spent her days into the early summer, until the afternoon, when, passing along the lake shore, she stopped to sit on a bench tucked beneath a trio of apple trees. A breeze scuffed the lake’s surface. The sun played on the ripples. Her mind was emptied both by fatigue and by months of practice. There being no thought that brought her comfort, my mother aspired to think as little as possible.

  Later she supposed she had hypnotized herself. The glare of sunlight on the water, the dark of the shade where she sat, the hush of breeze and the damp rising from the thick grass — all this, she told herself, must have been like staring at a watch swung on a chain.

  Something happened. I wish I could say I was responsible. I would have given her that much, even then in the days so near to my passing. But all that I can say is that I was there, and that I have returned, more often than can be justified. The reflected light burned a path to her. Her heart, which she had labored so mightily to keep tethered, snapped loose and rose in the clear summer sky. If this was not to be a permanent peace between her heart and mind, it was at least a truce.

  She returned that afternoon in a daze, as if she had just awakened from a sleep so deep and confounding that she forgot which way her head was pointed. She did not attempt to explain to James. Before autumn came she was pregnant with Max.

  Now my mother pulls back the lace curtain and watches the birds circle high in the freezing sky. She remembers me and Mrs. Hennessey. My mother wonders if, in the wake of her own departure, there will be anyone near enough to her, anyone sufficiently attuned, to appreciate what was left in her wake. She is forced to assume that the answer is no.

  ≈

  After Mrs. Hennessey’s death, my mother finds it difficult to keep track of the days, the difference between one and the next being of such slight consequence. The sole exception is Sunday. When she hears the cheap little organ in the community room wailing a hymn, she wheels herself down to Mass.

  She sits at her window. The cars in the lot are covered with that grit of winter, the gray slurry of road salt that eats through metal in the blink of an eye. My father, who had a taste for a fine automobile, fought and lost a long series of battles against rust. He washed and polished, waxed and washed again, but in the end all his cars sprouted brown blotches. These he sanded and painted, always hopeful that he had discovered a successful technique. He despaired as the rust bubbled through again. My mother would not have cared except that he did. His sense of himself, his worth as a man, was tied up in such maintenance. Too bad he picked a battle that he could only lose. She remembers all of that in the instant it takes for a gleaming white Cadillac to turn into the parking lot. It hardly seems possible that a car could be kept so immaculate in this weather.

  The driver’s door opens and Mr. Hennessey steps out. He stands there in his long black coat, his goateed chin thrust forward, like a statue of Lenin. Mr. Hennessey pulls his coat tight and strides toward the door.

  Has he remembered his promise to visit her again? My mother tries to be realistic. He might have outstanding business regarding his mother, new bills concocted by the accountants. She cannot expect that a vital man such as Mr. Hennessey, a man in the prime of his life, will make good on an idle promise to see her again. Her own sons, her own flesh and blood, do not manage to visit once a week.

  She hears a brisk tap at her door. “Come in, come in,” she says, more eagerly than she intends. Oh, but she is eager. Why pretend? If he sees that, if he stays a bit longer as a result, she will not complain.

  “Mrs. Brimsley, where do you keep your coat?” Hennessey’s voice booms; he seems to fill her small room.

  “My coat?” she replies, confused. She is uncertain that Max or Ernest had thought to bring one for her. Having gotten her into the Sheltering Arms, they have no intention, apparently, ever to remove her.

  “No matter,” he says. “We’ll wrap you in this.” He takes off his coat and drapes it over her shoulders. It feels like butter, the softest cashmere that has ever touched her skin. The fabric carries his scent, a note of cologne, smoke, leather. The smell of a healthy man. She is surprised at how much is tucked away in the corners of her mind, waiting to be summoned.

  “We’ll take this,” he says. Mr. Hennessey whisks open her wheelchair. He pushes it beside her seat at the window. She gets in as quickly as she is able. Not terribly quickly, as it turns out, but not so slowly as to discourage him. They are at her doorway when she thinks to say, “I don’t have my purse.”

  “You don’t need it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “For a drive. Lunch along the way. My mother was always eager for fresh air.”

  “Will they let you wheel me out the door?”

  “We’ll see,” he replies with the confidence of a man used to getting his way. He rolls her toward the foyer, where the so-called welcome desk is positioned beside the door. The receptionists are actually guards, chosen on the basis of muscle and humorlessness. Audrey does not recall having seen one smile. But now, in response to whatever Mr. Hennessey is doing behind her, the Amazon at the desk actually winks. “Help you with the door, sir?” she asks.

  “No problem,” Mr. Hennessey replies, giving the wheelchair a jaunty twirl. My mother raises a pale hand from her black cashmere cocoon and waves as the door swings shut.

  The winter wind rakes through her thin hair. She laughs.

  “What is so funny, Mrs. Brimsley?”

  “You wouldn’t understand, Mr. Hennessey. Not unless you had been locked up in that place.”

  He opens the door and gently deposits her in the Cadillac. He could load her in the back of a pickup and she would be happy enough. But this: every surface clean and polished, the warm leather like cream against her thighs. The dashboard bristles with mysterious dials and buttons. Mr. Hennessey gets behind the wheel and pats her knee. They pull out of the lot.

  She knows she will have to tell him something about his mother. Certainly that is what he is after. She is a Sheherazade, a liver-spotted, white-haired, so aged and dried out that she might blow away, but a Sheherazade nonetheless. The truth might suffice; she supposes. But would he want to hear about that last bit of gurgling? Will he care to learn about the desperation in her eyes?

  No, no, surely he will not.

  She looks at him. He turns to her and touches her knee again. She is a bit alarmed to notice that his eyes are the same color as his mother’s. For a moment Audrey has the disorienting sense that Mrs. Hennessey is here with them, another party to their outing. In this she is mistaken. There are only the three of us.

  We drive along the river road that follows the bluff. The black, open water steams far below.

  How my father would have loved this automobile! Audrey imagines him at the wheel, humming to himself. If she turned to find him sitting beside her, she would not be entirely surprised. She can still call him up in an instant. She can hear the rumble in his chest as he hums a tune. She can see the texture of the skin on his neck, the pulsing of blood in the veins above his collar, the spot where his razor scrapes too close.

  “Would you mind stopping?” Hennessey asks as they pulled onto a snowy drive. The path circles toward the door of a cottage, hidden from its neighbors by a dip of the bluff and a veil of tall pines. A fairy-tale house, Audrey thinks.

  “My mother’s home,” he says.

  The walks are neatly cleared of snow. Light shines through the mullioned windows. “You’d think she still lived here.”

  “Only me now. She loved the place. But she couldn’t keep it up alone.”

  “A momma’s boy,” Audrey says without thinking.

  “Oh, I suppose I am. Or was.” He sets his warm hand on hers and laughs lightly. “But then I’ve never known women to object.”

  At least there is a limit to how much one can object, Audrey tells herself. James doted on his mother. He was the first b
orn, all but smothered by his mother’s love until the day she toppled into her grave. When he set out to visit her he said he was going home. “This is your home,” Audrey reminded him, more annoyed than she cared to admit. “You are going to your mother’s house.” He smiled and gave her a quick kiss, never bothering to argue, but never conceding the point either. He patted her bottom and went whistling out the door. The big mama’s boy. But better to marry a man who had previously loved at least one woman. It showed a propensity. Audrey had friends enough whose husbands loved no women at all.

  “I’ll get your wheelchair,” Hennessey says.

  “Oh, I can walk those few steps.” She does not want to make herself more trouble than necessary, for fear he will decide not to bother with her again. She grasps Hennessey’s arm tightly and makes her way up the flagstone walk. He opens the door, which is so thick that it could serve as a castle gate. My mother looks inside and cannot help but sigh.

  “What?” he asks. “Is something wrong?”

  “Such a change, Mr. Hennessey,” she says. “Such a very pleasant change.” No linoleum in sight, nor wood-grained plastic, nor fluorescent light. Hennessey’s home is from that era when skilled woodcarvers worked for a song. The ceilings are timbered, the floors hardwood, the walls quarter-sawn oak, all of it polished and gleaming. Mr. Hennessey lights the candles on the dining room table. Two places are already set. “I’ll be right back,” he says.

  Audrey is determined to let joy win out over despair. For one night, none of the paste that passes for food, served under those flat, cold lights. None of the ceaseless, unchanging complaints from her table mates, Mrs. Walters and Mrs. Schnidler. They knew how to season a beef roast. They knew how to set a table. They knew how to mash a potato. On and on, steady as a metronome, one hundred percent correct and absolutely intolerable. She is grateful to have briefly escaped, of course she is, but also she is appalled by what has become of her life.