Thereafter

by Anthony Schmitz

  She cannot help but look again.

  She is forced to admit that the girl has captured something of my essence on the cracked plaster. To my mother this is less art than witchcraft. She clutches at Hennessey’s arm.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she manages at last.

  The silence stretches on so long that they all are left to wonder how it ever can be filled.

  “Mrs. Brimsley,” Hennessey says finally. “ Allow me to introduce Magdelaine Marault.”

  ≈

  “I can explain,” Mag says, wondering if that is true. Better try to explain a dream. She watches as my mother touches a finger to the baby’s face.

  “Perhaps we should sit down,” Hennessey suggests. “A cup of tea — is that possible, Mag? — and a moment to catch our breath.” He takes Audrey’s elbow and steers her from the paintings. She allows herself to be led away.

  Wald waits in the parlor. My mother takes the hand that he extends. She is surprised by its size, its toughness. Such a change from her day-to-day world of doctors, nurses, idle visitors: a man who works with his hands. She cannot help but compare him to her James. James was fine-boned, lithe. This one could have picked James up and tossed him to the street. But James kept his hair to his death. In fact, his hair had been an odd note at the funeral. She couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong with the way James looked. She told herself what was wrong was that he was dead, which was about as wrong as things could get. Then, finally, it came to her. The mortician had parted his hair on the right.

  Wald can hardly believe this is the woman from Mag’s albums. Stooped, limping, hair barely thicker than his own; that she represents both the past and the future is more than he cares to consider.

  He leads her into the parlor. Her eyes ache with the brightness. She had rarely bothered to open the drapes. She had always kept the sheers drawn. “It’s like a funeral parlor in here,” one of her church friends observed.

  Now the room gleams. This boy has painted the woodwork and walls, torn up the dingy, moss-colored carpet, waxed and buffed the floor. He stands in the middle of the room, grinning as though waiting for a teacher to pin a gold star on his chest.

  James had been afflicted by the same childish desire to show off his work. He’d fix a pipe, then insist that she get down on her hands and knees to see what he had done. As if she cared for anything except that water came out when she turned the tap. But she did what he asked because he wanted so badly for her to see what he had accomplished. She did it because she loved him.

  A log burns in the hearth. Audrey had not bothered with a fire since… she could not remember. The work and the mess, it hardly justified the small pleasure. Anyway, she could not manage the cutting and splitting and hauling. There had been so much she could not manage, alone.

  Despite the many changes, still she is struck by all that was left behind. The chairs and sofa, the dining room table, the lamp on the sideboard, the sideboard itself. What had the boys bothered to remove? Certainly the furniture must have been worth something. Obviously not enough to overcome their indolence. But what did she care, really? She needed none of it herself. The money from the sale — not she would have seen it in any case — could do her no good.

  She has trouble concentrating. Hennessey is saying something to the girl. She sits on the sofa beside her husband. She reaches for his hand. “Did Mr. Hennessey explain that I’m pregnant?” she asks.

  “He mentioned as much, dear,” my mother replies.

  “I know that you, from the pictures, I hope you don’t mind, but…” Mag stops. She has seen my mother in those photographs, has talked to her as she painted. Now here, like nothing Mag imagined, is the fact of her.

  “Do you want them back?” Mag asks. “Your albums, I mean. I never thought I should have them. The agent said we should throw what we didn’t want but I couldn’t do that. I started to look and… I’ll get them for you.”

  “No, that’s fine. It’s fine, really.” My mother is already overwhelmed. Those old photos will surely push her over the edge. An instant later the girl kneels beside her chair. She sets one of the albums in Audrey’s lap.

  My mother rests her hand on the green leather cover. She should insist that the girl take it away. She knows that. To open the cover is to roll back the stone and step into the tomb. To be in the house is more than enough. It is impossible to make peace with the past, she told herself so often. The only hope is to put out of mind the unbearable portions, to hope that time will smooth the jagged edges. After all the years, my mother still doubts that she has managed.

  Mag opens the album.

  Time vanishes with a flick of the wrist. There she is outside her parents’ home, that wind-scoured farmhouse on the Dakota border. She took James there to present him to her mother and father. Her father judged James too insubstantial for honest farm work. Not that James intended ever to plow a row or harvest a field. Her father, however, had no other measure of a man’s worth. Audrey thought the supper-table interrogation would never end. Later, in the starlight, she and James strolled in the immense emptiness beyond the windbreak. There wasn’t so much as a swell or rise for miles in any direction. Her father had been at work cutting hay. The perfume of fresh-cut grass was everywhere. Eventually they settled together in one of the ricks that her father had assembled. Never, certainly, had he intended such a use. She could all but feel James’ hands on her as she thought of it. This depth of this feeling frightens her, for she knows what is to come.

  It is like waiting for the conductor to call out the stops on a train. Mag pauses, inevitably, at that picture that had once made James so proud. My mother holds me. I hold my rattle; that idiotic, unnecessary rattle. Had it never existed, had I not dropped it those dozens of times, had my mother’s patience been less frayed, then everything might have been different.

  My mother tries to put aside this thought. She will not surrender again to life’s irrational flow. She will not attempt to impose a false order. She will not. She spent too many years at that.

  In the photo the sun shines through the window and the sheer, lighting our faces as perfectly as if we had been in a photographer’s studio. I have just wet myself. My mother feels the dampness soaking through her blouse. James pleads with her, “Just another shot, Audrey, please! You can wash your things but the light will never be like this again.” I was all but cross-eyed with the pleasure of filling my diaper. Later, when Audrey reminds James of that he replies, “Sure, but it’s still a beautiful picture.”

  My mother registers dimly that Mag is talking to her about the photograph. She will have to try to concentrate.

  “…that’s when I fell,” she says. “And when I was lying there, I saw…” She points at the photo.

  “That rattle?” says my mother.

  “I had it in my hand.”

  “I very much doubt that, dear.” She cannot help but allow herself a tight, grim smile at the idea of it. Of course I would continue dropping the rattle until kingdom come. At least I would have, my mother believes, had she not finally put the thing where it could not conceivably be dropped.

  But no, that wasn’t right. Odd how her memory had worked. She had tried and failed. In the end she had been forced to find another way to be rid of the toy. How could she have forgotten that?

  ≈

  I have been ignoring the murmuring in the corners. Sad to say, the gang’s all here. Mrs. Hennessey, Jack Marault; lacking bodies but busy nonetheless.

  What does he think he’s going to do? Mrs. Hennessey asks me. Dial you up? I think Billy’s falling apart without me. The things he’s doing.

  I would help him if I could, I offer.

  What makes you think you can’t?

  The past sixty years.

  Didn’t you see what I did with my old fur? It’s a question of will.

  The fact that you have desires don’t mean they have effects.

  Look at the facts, that’s all I’m saying.

  The
noise within Jack Marault subsides briefly to allow a nearly coherent thought. A spray of blood against the plane’s instrument panel. Monkeys staring from the trees. A streak of yellow blossoms pressed against the glass. Then this: We can… I… I can let her know I’m here?

  Yes. No. Mrs. Hennessey and I issue our opinions simultaneously.

  Which is it? Which one? he asks desperately before his thoughts fracture again. He is looking down at his own body, half submerged in an Amazon backwater. Macaws squawk in the trees.

  Of course you could have worried about it before now, mutters Mrs. Hennessey.

  From Jack Marault comes the sound of a live wire, broken and sputtering.

  To this noise my mother adds her own still vivid memory.

  ≈

  She takes the rattle down from the top of the china cabinet. The bright spring day fills her with resolve. She takes one of James’ shovels from the shed and goes to a far corner of the yard. The grass has already gone from brown to green. The first dandelions bloom. She spreads out a tarp to collect the loose dirt. Unless she cares to explain herself to James, she knows she must not leave evidence. She cuts out a patch of sod with the shovel and sets it gently aside. When she judges the hole sufficiently deep, she kneels beside it, wraps the rattle in a napkin and places it in its small grave. She stops to wipe away the sweat raised by the sun.

  She throws a shovelful of dirt in the hole. As it hits the toy she hears that familiar sound again. She cannot continue. For some time — she has no idea how long — she stares dumbly at the dirt. Finally she fishes out the rattle, carefully replaces the dirt and tamps the sod back into place.

  She slips the toy into the pocket of her house dress and goes back inside. The screen door slams behind her. Above all, she is angry with herself. She is allowing herself to be taunted by a toy. It seems now to stand for all she does not possess. She sets it on the kitchen table. Then she makes herself a cup of tea, sits down and stares at the rattle. She should have tucked it in the coffin and been done with it.

  Eventually she comes up with a plan. An embarrassing, ridiculous plan that, thankfully, she will never be obliged to explain. She quickly gathers what she needs. A pair of candles. A few kitchen matches. A picture of me. Ribbon she had once used to tie back my hair. She picks up the rattle and climbs the steep attic steps.

  What had seemed so necessary at the time now strikes her as foolish, primitive. She might as well have waved a torch and howled at the moon. She should have pitched the rattle in the trash all those years ago. Then there would never have been a question. It would have been gone for good.

  ≈

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you expect of me,” my mother announces to them.

  They look to Hennessey. He says nothing, hoping still that a solution will present itself, if only he is allowed the space and time.

  “That old toy,” my mother says.

  “It was in my hand,” Mag adds.

  “There’s only so much you can allow yourself, dear.”

  Mag sees now that her other creations had been so insignificant. Botch a painting and you lose only time. A canvas fits neatly in the trash. But a child? A mother’s blunders chase her to the grave. The mistakes cannot truly be buried. My mother, she sees, is the evidence, as if Mag needs more than her own childhood had provided. Even if Mag does not know the details, there is no mistaking my mother’s sense of guilt. Her eyes cannot find a place to settle; her knobby fingers cannot rest.

  “You’ve got a roof over your head,” my mother says. “A husband. Medicines that hadn’t been dreamed of when I had children. You’ll excuse me, dear, if I say your worries seem like an indulgence.”

  A reply teeters on the tip of Mag’s tongue. What wasn’t yours? she wants to ask. A beautiful child and a doting husband. A new house, polished and painted. You tell me then, how did it come to this? A handful of boxes hidden behind a door shut with nails. A trunk of albums abandoned in a run-down house. What was it she and Wald could do to guard against a similar fate?

  “I know,” my mother says. “I know. Everyone worries about their baby.” The album remains open in her lap. There I am, sixty years on, still studying her with that solemn expression.

  “This isn’t her problem, Mag,” Wald says. “It’s not her fault.”

  That is what James told my mother so many times. It’s not your fault. Even after she confessed to him her momentary satisfaction as the child flew from her arms. “You’re flattering yourself with guilt,” he said. “We don’t control that much. What you thought had nothing to do with what happened.”

  He was right, of course he was. Her thoughts had not killed the child. It was bad timing, bad luck. If only the banister had been properly nailed to begin with. If only James had put away his tools. If only the doorbell had not rung. If only my stomach had not been upset. If only I had not dropped that damnable rattle for the hundredth time. A dark joke, that’s what it was, a tower of grief and guilt, all woven out of circumstance. She knew that all along, not that it ever brought her relief. Her thoughts had no effect except to reveal the vein of selfishness that ran through her, that ran through everyone except the saints. All the hocus pocus afterward had been folly. She had created a religion and lived as the world’s sole adherent.

  “I’m not saying it’s her problem, Wald. I’m asking if she can help.”

  “What do you expect her to do?”

  Hennessey clears his throat. “I wonder if this would be a good time for a moment’s silence,” he asks. “We could attempt to focus our thoughts.”

  “We needn’t bother with gibberish,” my mother says with sudden resolve.

  She turns to Mag. “There’s something,” she says. “Something I want to show you.”

  ≈

  My mother has not climbed the stairs in this home since — when? There hadn’t been a reason, not after she moved her bedroom to the first floor. She had the boys come by to turn off the water and drain the radiators. She instructed them to block off the second-floor hallway with a plastic sheet. Why pay to heat dead space? The boys argued that she should move to an apartment. They had been right, though not for the so-called practical reasons. She should have moved after James died. They should have moved long before that.

  Why had she been so stubborn for so many years? What had she been waiting for?

  She knows. She was waiting for what would never and could never come: a sign that I understood and forgave her. Not for her actions, but for the smallness, the meanness, of her thoughts. For the insufficiency of her love.

  She had spent years listening to the noises in this pile of lumber. She had studied the shadows that the sun cast upon its walls, as if they might have meaning. All of it, she now thinks, had been a waste, a deluded waste.

  All of it? I would not go so far. The dead do long to be remembered. Don’t memories always come with a price? The remembrance of the good times, no matter how many or how few, underlines that we are gone.

  Where is she going? Mrs. Hennessey wonders. Where does she think she’s going?

  Up the stairs, it would seem, I reply. My mother is in a state beyond words. The image of that rattle, that stupid toy, is all that seems to be in her head.

  She grips the banister with one hand and Mag with the other. The two men trail behind them. Mrs. Hennessey and Jack Marault drift along, too, part of our odd parade.

  “Is this a good idea, ma’am?” Wald asks.

  “I don’t suppose I have time to wait for the perfect idea.”

  “If you fall…”

  There would be some symmetry in that, though she has no such intention.

  “You two may wait for us here,” my mother says to the men.

  “I’m not sure…” Hennessey answers.

  “I am myself quite certain.”

  She pulls herself up the first step and is shocked by the effort. She wonders if she can hope to complete the pilgrimage she has in mind.

  ≈

  The
y make their way slowly, pausing on each step. “We could go to the kitchen instead,” Mag offers. “If it’s privacy you want.”

  “No, no. That’s not it at all. I want to show you something. You’ll have to see.”

  Mag fears my mother will be upset by the wreckage above. “We haven’t been able to fix anything upstairs,” she says. “We’ve been so busy.”

  “It’s been a mess for decades. I know that.”

  They stopped at the landing. “Let me catch my breath,” my mother gasps. The stairs might as well be Everest. Her chest heaves. She should have borrowed a tank of oxygen from the Sheltering Arms. The girl could have dragged it along.

  The sun shines down on Mag through the landing window, just as it had struck my mother and me so many years ago. My mother looks at the girl and recalls her younger self.

  Jack Marault takes in the sight of his daughter. There’s nothing I can say? he wonders.

  You can think whatever you want. But only the dead will hear.

  This is worse. Worse than I imagined.

  Then what did you imagine?

  Imagine…? I hear more sounds of the jungle. Chirping, animal screams, thousands of ants trodding a path. Someone whispers, No como esto.

  You’re sure? You’re sure there’s no way?

  Who says there isn’t? Mrs. Hennessey is moved at last by the desperation in his voice. Who knows what’s possible?

  I wonder if you might come along quietly, I plead.

  We glide along the stairs.

  ≈

  My mother holds tightly to the banister to keep from falling. Her heart still gallops, even while they rest. She notices that the varnish on the banister has clotted with age to a dull, dark brown. For all the difference it made in the end, James might never have bothered with his repairs.

  “I’m ready,” my mother says at last, tugging at Mag’s arm. They climb the remaining steps to the second floor.

  Once my mother considered this the heart of her home. On the left is the door to the bedroom she shared with James. Opposite is the sewing room where she worked on all those things she made for me; the quilts she sewed on her treadle-driven Singer, the sweaters she knit in the rocker beside the window, the booties and caps and tiny mittens. She remembers walking down the hall for what she thought would be the last time, pulling the doors shut one by one, then descending the stairs, not daring to look back.