“Did one of them take it?” Mag asks.
“Take what?”
She struggles to sound patient. “There was a rattle. Right here. A baby rattle.”
“Mag,” he answers. He sets her hand against the lump on her skull. “Feel that?”
Her head feels like it is filled with putty.
“You gave yourself a good knock.”
“I know that,” she says. “I know.”
Wald leads her to the sofa. He draws the comforter over her and throws some wood at the fire. He puts an arm around her shoulder and draws her near. As they sit silently together he wonders what has become of his once-bold wife.
≈
Wald leaves to make them a cup of tea. Mag slips out from under the comforter and hurries to the trunk in the hall. Away from the fire the house is freezing.
She opens the trunk. She stuffed the picture of me and my mother in a green album. She knows exactly where it is.
Mag returns to the sofa. The fire needs stirring. Coals pulse beneath the grate.
She knows what she has seen. There is no doubt in her mind. It is all there in the photo. My mother holds me, our cheeks touching. We pose on the staircase landing. The sun filters through a sheer curtain, lighting our faces. We smile as if we had just invented happiness. My skin seems so delicate that Mag’s fingers twitch with the desire to touch it. Even in this simple black and white photo, my eyes are alive. In my hand is the rattle that Mag is so certain she has just held.
She leaves the album open on her lap and waits for Wald to return. She doesn’t know how the toy appeared. She doesn’t need to know. The feel of it in her hand took her back to the feelings she had as a child, in the quiet of her dark room with the lace-edged quilt pulled over her head, certain that from somewhere — from the sea or the forest, wherever it was he had landed — her father spoke to her, spoke in a way that was better than the tongue-tied fumblings of daily life. Looking at this photo now, recalling the feel of the toy in her hand, she is certain that all of it is a message. She has no doubt. Except why would she be thrown to the floor so roughly? What was the idea of that? Why risk the harm to her baby? There must be a reason, no matter how inscrutable.
Wald returns with two cups on a tray. “You all right?” he asks.
“My shoulder’s sore, that’s all.”
“Let me check your eyes.” He takes her chin and turns her head toward him. They stare at each other for a moment. He kisses her lightly on the forehead. “You had me worried,” he says. “You were so still.”
“We’re even then.”
“What?”
“Your dive from the roof.” She leans her head against his shoulder. “I’m fine.”
Mag senses Wald’s eyes settling on the photo album, still open on her lap. He laughs. “Those boys didn’t age so well, did they?” he says.
“That isn’t either of the boys.”
He’s silent.
“The Brimsley’s first child was this girl. Clarissa.”
She doesn’t wait for him to ask. “An accident is what the obituary said.”
“How did…”
“It was all packed away, in those boxes in the attic.”
He barely hears her. He stares at the photo.
“That rattle, Wald. I saw it on the floor. That’s what I was looking for.”
“Honey, you hit your head. You’ve got to take it easy.”
“Did you put it somewhere?”
“What?”
“The rattle,” she says, exasperated.
“We should get you to bed.”
“Not until …”
“Come on, okay?”
≈
Wald follows the medic’s orders that night, waking Mag every two hours. She barely opens her eyes. “Why don’t you just let me sleep?” she mumbles.
He is jolted awake repeatedly by the false sense that two more hours has passed. Finally he gives up. He pours a glass of bourbon and takes it to the living room. The remains of the fire flicker in the hearth. He drops kindling on the embers and watches it flare. In the firelight he sees Mag’s album with that photo.
He’s had his share of voodoo in his life. His mother is a devout churchgoer, just like Mag’s. He was an altar boy. He marched up and down the church aisles, ringing bells, choking on incense. He was petrified by nonsense. Satan lurking behind the trees. The actual body and blood of Christ, delivered by the wormy fingers of the parish priest. A childhood of spiritualism was enough for a lifetime.
He throws a few more sticks at the flames and pulls Mag’s comforter close around his neck. The house feels colder than usual. The medics left the door standing wide open while they marched in and out. The furnace hasn’t caught up.
He opens a page of the album at random. Audrey Brimsley, he guesses. Mrs. Brimsley on a winter’s day, standing on the front stoop of this house, as ignorant of time’s course as everybody else. She laughs. The winter sun sparkles in her dark fur collar. She doesn’t seem to imagine that a speck of misery will ever land on her.
He turns the page. Another picture of my mother, this time holding my hand as I crawl up the stairs. Looming disaster in black and white. Wald has not stopped to think beyond the obvious fact that he and Mag must prepare for their baby. Fix the house, save some money, buy a crib and a thousand other things. He has not imagined that their baby might do anything but thrive. At times he is both surprised by his lack of imagination and grateful for it. What will they do if their child…
He doesn’t dare to complete the sentence.
Wald closes the album. It is time to check on Mag again. He turns on the bedside light and nudges Mag’s shoulder. “Open your eyes for me,” he says.
She turns her face into the pillow. “Leave me alone. I’m fine,” she grumbles.
“Come on, I’ve got to check.” He takes her chin and gently turns her head. She shields her eyes against the light.
Lips ruby red, eyes blue as ice: one cliché after another, he thinks, and all of them true. Too bad that so often she seems as remote as a girl in a tower. “Okay,” he sighs. “Back to dreamland.”
To put himself to sleep he works up a list of all the work that he must do. The carpet to rip up. The floors to be refinished. He will remake the place. No matter how many blunders and false starts. No matter how often the pipes rain on him or how many faucets drip. The house might resist but it will not win. He will banish whatever remains of the past.
If I could, I would tuck him in and kiss his forehead and whisper in his ear until he falls asleep. I cannot see the future, but I can guess as well as anyone else. Wald wants a simple, predictable life, and he wants within it a touch of the exotic. Which is to say that like almost everyone he wants a bit of everything, no matter how poor the fit.
≈
I am about to leave when I am struck by the sense that I am not alone. You’d think death would free us from that much at least. A ghost should not feel haunted.
My peers usually announce themselves. Could it be that there are separate classes of spirits: those like me and others who move like ghosts even in the world of ghosts?
I tell myself that I am leaving anyway. Watching two people dream is worse than pointless. Then, having opened the door with these lies, I flee.
≈
Mag’s shoulder hurts. Her neck aches when she turns too quickly. She pulls off her nightgown slowly and puts on the clothes she wore last night. She takes care not to wake Wald. She needs time to think.
Morning light floods the kitchen. It is as my mother left it, a collection of antiques. The range and refrigerator from the Fifties. The chipped porcelain sink. My mother wore a path through the brown-flecked linoleum from the stove to her chair. She rubbed bare another patch under the table, where she sat alone for so many years. Mag makes herself a cup of coffee and takes it to Audrey’s place beside the window. The view is already deeply familiar. The gnarled oak branches, so stark against the snow-filled yard. The thicket of lilac at t
he property line.
A cardinal swoops into the yard and comes to rest, like a blotch of blood against the snow.
She can still feel the rattle in her hand. It was so satisfying to hold, like an old, well-made tool. She takes the toy to be a message from the past, just as the trunk of photographs had been. She will have to find it.
The cardinal pecks at seeds scattered on the snow. It stops to look at her.
Mag wonders why my mother kept that rattle.
She supposes Audrey set it somewhere. On an upper shelf, maybe, or on top of a cabinet. Too painful to look at, impossible to discard. Forgotten, most likely, for decades. She must have shaken it loose when she fell.
The cardinal tips its head, still looking at her.
She pushes back her chair and returns to the dining room.
Wald leaned the ladder against the wall. The hall is empty, except for a plastic tarp bunched up in the corner. The unfinished portrait of me and my mother stares back at Mag.
She tells herself she will certainly find the rattle if only she spends a few minutes searching. She picks up an edge of the tarp and shakes it. Nothing.
They had moved everything away from the dining room walls so Wald could work on the windows. The table, the six chairs, the sideboard, the cabinet, the rug, the curtains and their rods, all of it is jammed together in the center of the room. She checks the cabinet drawers, pulls open the sideboard cupboards. She pokes at the ends of the rolled up rug. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Mag rips the cushions from the sofa. Frustrated now, she kicks at the stack of firewood, spreading the neat pile into a jumble.
“What are you doing?”
She gasps.
“It’s okay.” Wald puts his arms around her.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“It sounded like somebody was ransacking the house.”
“Just me.”
“What are you looking for?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know.
≈
We have reached a fork in the road. Even within the confines of a ghost story, which I must admit this is, either the rattle that has shaken Mag exists, or it is a product of her imagination.
Then again, this is a creation in which I exist. Lacking the ability to move even a speck of dust, still I am here. That old toy is real enough to Mag, just as I am real enough to myself, though if we shared a room you would say you are alone.
I admire her certainty. Most of us bow before the ordinary; we accept the obvious interpretation. I hit my head. My thoughts are scrambled. My senses are unreliable. But the world that others insist upon — the logical, sane, predictable, work-a-day world — Mag feels no obligation to accept.
There you have her problem.
≈
I am as nagged as she is. I feel again that I am not alone. If my world were one where I could turn on a light and see, then I would be left to wonder if I should reach for the switch. Although in my absent heart I know.
Stay for a moment. Our interests overlap, don't you think?
In reply I hear the tumult of unspoken thoughts from Mag and Wald, and the endless creaking of their old house, and the soft buzz of their baby’s dreamy half-awareness.
Chapter Seventeen
She has to talk to someone.
Not Wald. He will only repeat what he has already said.
Not her friends. Knowing she is pregnant they’ll assume she is barely in her right mind.
Who does that leave? Her mother. There is always her mother.
After her rage burned itself out — after the photos of Jack Marault were gone, after her eyebrows grew back and the fire-damaged limbs were cut from the backyard trees — Mary Marault began to change her life. She stripped her house down to bare floors and a few necessary pieces of furniture. Gone were the white shag and avocado vases. She traded the Peugout for a sensible Ford. A spiritual core, somewhat loony in its expression, slowly emerged. Her mother complained that Sunday Mass was no longer said in Latin. She loved the incomprehensible spells, the incense and candles. She developed a taste for the ill-lit corners of life.
Mag and her mother had mirror-mirror-on-the-wall issues that complicated a relationship in need of no further complication. Mary Marault was a beauty in her day. Years ago the occasional flatterer might ask if she and Mag were sisters. But by the time Mag hit seventeen they both knew who was the fairest. Her mother’s disappointment expressed itself in subtle criticisms, unreasonable rules.
Now that Mag is developing the first few lines at the corners of her eyes and the odd strand of gray, her mother offers phony consolation. “I remember my first wrinkle, dear. I looked at it for hours in the mirror. I was absolutely horrified. And now… Well. Soon enough you’ll know.”
They meet in the dining room of the club at which Mary Mauralt has been a member for decades. The room overlooks a snow-choked gorge where the river makes a sweeping turn. Her mother waits at a table beside the floor-to-ceiling windows. She has let her hair go gray. She is still slender, still square-shouldered. She wears a navy knit dress. A woman half her age would be happy with her figure.
“Darling, you’re looking so…”
Mag wears a dowdy jumper over a turtleneck, one of her maternity costumes. She has decided, not entirely with cause, that her clothes are now too tight.
“…so pregnant!” Her mother laughs.
“Thanks,” Mag says. The waiter holds her chair. Men have not stopped fawning.
The waiter disappears. Mag’s mother leans forward. “So,” she says eagerly
“This is complicated.”
Mag takes a deep breath as she pulls the album from her purse. The green leather binding feels warm in her hand. She opens it to the portrait of my mother and me that she has stuffed inside.
Mag’s mother sets down her fork. She takes the album and stares at the open page. “Oh, my,” she says at last.
“What?” Mag asks.
“Excuse me, but…”
Mag waits. “What is it?”
“This child.” She stops. “Darling, this looks… This looks so much like you.” Her mother touches the photo lightly, setting her fingers on my lips. “Well, how would you know what you looked like? But trust me, dear. Is that why you’re showing it to me?”
“No,” she says. “No.”
“Then why?”
“I want to ask you a question, about when you were pregnant.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I know it was, mother.”
“Well, not that long.”
Mag sighs. What did she expect?
“Just listen to me. Please?”
Mag tells her mother about the albums left behind, how the peculiar Gloria Taberna suggested that the house would speak to them through the pictures. Mag tries to describe her sense that the photos point to a path. A path by which she will focus on the few things in life that are important. Her child. Her husband. Her home. My mother and I are beacons in the dark, she says, pulling her toward…
She cannot complete the sentence. She has trouble finding the words.
“I’m not sure what you want,” Mag’s mother says finally. “I don’t really see what I can do.”
She points to the picture of the toy that I hold in my dimpled fist. “I found this. After I fell from the ladder. The rattle from this picture. Then it disappeared.”
“Oh, it’s somewhere. Those old houses, so many crannies. You can’t keep them clean. But then you already know that.”
“I looked everywhere.”
“Well, what difference does it make?”
Inside her old house it is easy for Mag to feel that the past has a life of its own, that it can find a way to send its messages. She believes there is no shortage of evidence. Those photographs. The rattle. Her fall from the ladder. Wald’s plunge from the roof. Her baby will have such a precarious hold on life. A moment’s distraction, a common disease, that is all it takes. She believes she is on a high wire. But now, with the bright winter light pouring t
hrough the plate glass, her fear suddenly seems ridiculous.
“You hit your head, dear.”
“That’s what Wald says.”
“He’s being sensible.” For once, her mother thinks. That big old house was a mistake all along. Nothing but work, and for what? A few thousand dollars if they got lucky. Plus, everything the oaf touches seems to spring a leak. The best she can say for him is that he has a strong back. In comparison, her Jack… Well, there is no point in getting into that. Anyway, a tidy rambler would have made so much more sense.
“Let me make sure I understand,” her mother says. “You imagined this toy.”
“I didn’t imagine it,” Mag insists. The tears that come now embarrass her. She can count the times she has cried in her mother’s company. She doesn’t need all the fingers on one hand. Mag never gave her the satisfaction, not after her father left.
“Let me see that picture again,” her mother says softly.
Mag hands it to her. Her mother sets her fingers delicately on the print, as if she is touching a living thing.
“Well, what’s normal?” her mother says at last. “I look at you and wonder, dear: where did you come from? To think that someday we’ll all come to nothing.”
She may be right, though my presence proves that Nothing is less imminent than many people think.
“Nothing together, anyway,” Mag says.
“I’m not sure that’s such a consolation.”
Her mother turns toward the window. The sun sparkles on the snow. A thin black channel in the river remains unfrozen. The winter glare highlights the lines around her mother's eyes and mouth. A few more years and she will be old. All that beauty folded in on itself, then gone, Mag thinks.
“Do you remember the Dimicis?” her mother asks.
Mag remembers. Of course she does. Little, hustling Tony. All those Dimici trucks careening around town. His wife, Judy, another of the world’s explosive redheads. During Mag’s youth they visited now and then. They played cards for nickels and dimes around the kitchen table with her parents. The next morning Mag was invited to sweep up the money that had fallen to the floor. She assumed that Tony Dimici dropped most of it. The friendship between the Dimicis and her parents was of the opposites-attract variety. The Dimicis went through more apparent emotion in an evening than her parents experienced in the whole of their marriage.
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