She looks off at the night sky. “I think I’ll stay here all night.”
“Happy now?” Butterfield says to her. “You have our full attention.
You’ve got a crowd gathering. Happy? We’ll all be in the funny papers.”
“Go home,” Holly mutters. “Leave me in peace.” She gestures to the people on the lawn across the street. “All of you. There’s nothing to see here. An old lady in pajamas looking at the sky. Fuck off.”
“Holly,” says Elizabeth. “This is a neighborhood. Please.”
“Tell us what Fiona did,” Butterfield says.
“We’ve already been through that,” Elizabeth tells him.
But Holly speaks: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wanted to look at the moon.”
Fiona calls to them in a slurred stage whisper from the front door.
“I’ve got th’ cops com’n. They’ll be here moment-ari-ly.”
“You think I’m deaf ?” Holly yells from the roof. “You unrecon-structed, cruel-hearted . . .” She doesn’t finish, but scowls and makes a sputtering sound of dismissal.
“The p’lice,” Fiona says, holding on to the door frame.
“They’ll arrest you for public drunk,” Holly says. “I’m going to watch them do it.”
“I’m inside my house.”
“It’s my house.”
“I’m inside this house.”
“Both of you,” Butterfield interjects. “Cut this out, now. You know you love each other.”
“I don’t hate anyone,” Holly says. Then: “I hate Kenneth Starr, I 56
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guess. I’m not too fond of Henry Hyde or Newt Gingrich. And the television news people. I hated Nixon. Everyone down there, listen to me, I don’t think Nixon redeemed himself at all. I think he was a bastard to the end.”
“Holly,” says Elizabeth, “please. Please come down.”
The next-door neighbor now walks over, carrying a stick. He looks like a vigilante, eyes wild with conclusions, mind made up; he’s had suspicions about these women, and his suspicions have been borne out. It’s in the way he looks at Holly, approaching, holding the stick like a club.
“Someone stop her using that language,” he says. “I’ve got little kids.”
“Yes,” Holly says from the roof, “and you cuss at them, I’ve heard you.”
Someone else, another man, comes from the other side. He’s in a bathrobe. Elderly-looking, back slightly bent. “This has gone too far,”
he says. “This is pathology.”
“Top-flight detective work,” Holly says from the roof. She looks bad.
The wind has picked up, and her hair is a tangled, wiry fright wig now.
Her bony knees are too white in the moonlight, as if the skin has been peeled away from them. “Go away,” she says, putting her head down on her knees. “Stop cluttering the yard. Stop killing my crabgrass.”
“Mom,” says Butterfield. “I swear I’ll lose it. Right here.”
“Should I call the police?” the second neighbor asks.
“Mind your own business,” says Holly. “You never voted anything but Republican in your life. You’re a dupe of the corporations.”
“Excuse me?” he says. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I see you watching everything and everybody out your window. How many alarms you got on that dump anyway? I bet you spend all night listening to a police scanner.”
The man stalks off, muttering about language and vowing to call the authorities.
“Will,” Butterfield’s wife says. “She’s going to get arrested.”
He addresses his mother: “Holly, you know if the police come—you know what a mess that’ll be. Those sirens are for you. Now come on down from there.”
She mutters back, staring off: “They are not for me. There was an accident over on the highway. Fiona and I heard it on the scanner. I’ve got t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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a right to sit on my own roof if I want to and no one can stop me.” Now she looks at him. “I’m not threatening to jump, you know. I’m looking at the sky. I’ve developed a sudden interest in Orion, and all the other constellations—okay?”
“She’ll jump. Jus’ t’spite me. You jus’ watch.”
“What did she say?”
“She’s crazy, too,” Butterfield says, his exasperation turning to anger.
Elizabeth takes him by the arm. “Don’t, Will. Jesus.” Then she addresses Holly again. “Fiona did call the police, you know. This is not going to end well if you keep it up.”
In the next instant, a police car does pull up, no siren, lights flashing. A man and a woman get out. The woman walks over to them first.
The man leans back into the car and mutters something into the radio.
The woman’s solid and evenly built, neither slender nor fat, with square shoulders and a beautiful Italianate face. She introduces herself as Ser-geant Alison Ward Lawrence. Gazing up at Holly, she says, “You can call me Alison.” Butterfield sees her dark eyes. She steps closer and says
“Hello, there” to Holly, as if there is nothing uncommon about finding a woman sitting on a roof. “Would you like to come down and talk for a spell?”
Holly says, “Hi. I’m Holly. Pleasure to meet you. Would you like to come up? I mean, I’m not breaking any law, you know. And it’s pretty up here. A lot more peaceful than down there, no kidding.”
Alison murmurs to Butterfield: “What’re we dealing with here?”
For a second, he’s unable to speak. There’s something so inconsistent about the way her face makes him feel. Its very softness seems to call up an urge to protect; yet she’s staring at him, demanding an answer by her matter-of-fact silence. He’s abruptly heartsick along with his anger, and the anger goes toward all the authorities, the furor over this dispute between two old women. He can’t express this feeling to such a friendly, attractive face.
“That’s his mother,” Elizabeth says to Alison, almost crying.
“Did you make the call?”
“I made th’call,” says Fiona joyfully from the door. “I called you.
Woman’s crazy. She’ll do something terr’ble, you’ll see. And s’not high enough. She’ll break her legs and I’ll have t’take care of her. Fetch’n and 58
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carryin, listenin to her complain . . .” Fiona continues talking, but her voice trails off, so the words are lost.
The policewoman peers at her. “I think I get the picture here.” She gazes up at Holly. “You need help coming down? You have to come down, you know.”
“Not till I want to. You need help coming up? The stars are perfect from here.”
She turns to Butterfield. “How did she get up there?”
“You can ask me that, Alison,” Holly says. “I’m not deaf, you know.
And I’m sober, too.”
“All right.” Alison waits.
“I was levitated by a desire for higher things. And my housemate is batshit.”
Butterfield almost laughs at the use of the one word he’s used most often in thinking about both women. Batshit. He can smell the beer on his own breath, holding one hand over his mouth and turning away from his wife, who again starts pleading with her mother-in-law. But Holly continues talking to Alison.
“Now and then,” she says with a grandiose gesture of taking in the surrounding beauty, “I seek the ethereal company of the air. And if that’s against the law, arrest me. But you’ll have to climb up here to do it. I’ve been arrested before. It’s nothing new.”
“Look,” Alison says. “It may not be against the law to sit on your own roof, but you’ve created a disturbance. And that is against the law.”
Holly says, “You’re the ones raising all the disturbance. I’m sitting here peaceably watching the fucking universe.”
Alison turns to her partner, who has walked around the house and come back. He’s very big and lumbering, with
a round face and eyes that seem too close together. He says, “There’s a ladder pulled up onto the roof in back. That’s how she accessed the roof.”
“Hey,” Holly calls to him. “Accessed? Jesus. Accessed? Am I the individual that accessed the roof ? Where’s your thesaurus?”
The partner says, “Ma’am, my name is Roy.”
“Hello, Roy,” says Holly. “Come on up.”
“I’d need your help.”
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“Aw, a big strong man like you?”
Alison takes Butterfield and his wife aside. “How old is she?”
“Seventy-five,” Butterfield says. “She’s never done anything like this.” Elizabeth gives him a look. “Well, she hasn’t. Not like this.”
“Tell us about her.”
“I’m a retired union organizer,” Holly says from the roof. “Do you know Brother Fire, the monsignor at Saint Augustine’s?”
“Yes,” Alison says. “As a matter of fact I do.”
“I got arrested with him in nineteen-seventy. On the Key Bridge in Washington, DC. You can look it up. We were protesting the war in Vietnam.”
“I won’t need to look it up,” Alison says. “Thank you anyway.”
She pulls Butterfield and Elizabeth farther away, toward the street, while her partner moves closer to the house, talking softly at Holly, who evidently isn’t listening. She stares at the sky and loudly hums something that sounds like a hymn. Below her, still clinging to the frame of the open front door, Fiona simply watches.
“Okay,” says Alison. “Talk to me.”
“She’s not senile, if that’s what you mean,” Butterfield tells her.
“Does she have some other form of mental trouble?”
He looks at his wife, who shrugs. Alison waits for one of them to answer.
“She’s always been—well, a little eccentric,” Elizabeth gets out. “I mean, as long as I’ve known her.”
“And how long is that?”
She shakes her head. “Since we were married.” She indicates Butterfield. “Ten years—ten and a half years.”
“Since forever,” Butterfield says. “She’s my mother for God’s sake.”
“Is she armed? Are there any firearms or other weapons on the prem-ises?”
“Of course she’s not armed.”
“I have to ask the question, you know. And you’d ask it too if you were me.”
“Well, she’s not armed.”
“Then the question is, do we compel her to get down? Do we go 60
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up there and get her, or leave her there?” Alison surveys the street. The people who have come out of their homes are standing along the curb on the other side, an audience. Evidently, Holly understands this in the same instant that Alison notes it. She comes to her feet, slowly, creakingly, and raises her arms to the sky.
“Now, Holly,” the policewoman calls, running toward the house.
Butterfield and his wife follow.
“As I have already indicated, I wish for everyone to leave me alone in my heavenly pursuit of a little peace,” Holly says calmly. “Fuck off, please, all of you.” She brings her arms down and folds them, looking right at Butterfield. “What is it, Will, fifteen feet? How bad could a person hurt herself. I just want a little quiet under the stars, Son.”
They’re all silent for a moment. The only sound is the sputter of voices on the police radio. Another police car pulls up, and two more policemen get out. Butterfield watches his mother settle herself again, putting her knees up and clasping them, gazing at everything with a stubborn, chin-high haughtiness. He can’t help admiring her, even in this blaze of exasperation and helpless rage. Lights are going on everywhere now, more people gathering.
“If I sent someone to get Brother Fire, will you come down for him?”
“I’d stay here for certain. He’s an old man. Don’t you dare disturb his peace.”
“What if I tell you that we’ll go get him if you don’t come down,”
Alison says.
“I’d like to think that we’re above that sort of vulgar threatful negotiation,” says Holly.
Alison begins beseeching her to please make it easier on herself and come down. There isn’t going to be any peace tonight. That’s clear. If she’ll come down, they might reach an agreement whereby she can get back up there if all she wants to do is look at the sky. But the town’s involved now, and a lot of money’s being spent and employees occupied by this situation, and it’s the responsible thing to come down and put an end to all that.
During this, Elizabeth begs her in a low, half-crying murmur:
“Please, Holly. Can’t you see what you’re doing? Please. This isn’t you.”
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“Talk to my drunken aunt,” Holly says. “She’s the one that called you.”
Aunt Fiona is lying on the small hammock on the front porch, snoring softly, completely gone. For a brief moment, everyone seems to con-template this fact. It’s as if this turn of events is so bizarre that they are all struck dumb, like people staring at a sudden manifestation of phe-nomena from outer space. No one saw her lie down, and no one can say when in the course of this trouble she did so. It is a moment of complete, dumbfounded concentration.
“She’s asleep,” Elizabeth says in an astounded tone.
“In that case,” says Holly, “I’ll come down.”
This is also amazing to everyone. They watch silently as she stands, turns, again slowly, with effort, and makes her way up to the peak of the roof and down the other side. Everyone moves around there.
They reach the backyard in time to see the ladder come down. Holly manages it all quite well, stepping down into Roy’s arms and then turning to glare at him. “I don’t need your help, young man.”
She huffs away from them and onto the screened back porch. The whole crowd follows her: Butterfield, Elizabeth, all of the police. They go up into the dark of the back porch, and she turns a light on and faces them from the open door, holding the screen open. “Anybody want something to drink or eat?” she says.
With the police who remain behind—Alison and Roy—Holly’s very well-spoken and direct: The problem is Fiona. She tells them that she climbed up on the roof for a little tranquility, and that Fiona overreacted because she was drunk. It was Fiona who called them. Fiona threw a water glass at her first thing this morning. “And look,” she tells them, pointing an accusatory finger at the place on the dining-room floor,
“there it is. I was damned if I was going to clean it up and it’ll be there next week if I don’t. That’s what it’s been like. I tried to get her to clean it up, and she had too much to drink and ended up calling the police.”
“Then she called us,” Butterfield says. “She always calls us. No matter what we’re doing and no matter what time of the night it is or what plans we might have, you, both of you, always call us.”
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“There,” Holly says to the officers. “You see how it is? Hysterical overreactions all around. The fact is, I called Brother Fire first.”
“I think I still have to cite you for disturbing the peace,” says Alison.
“Go ahead,” Holly tells her. “Cite me. I’m quite used to it. I used to be a union organizer. I protested the war. I fought the battle of civil rights.”
Alison shakes her head with something like grudging admiration and begins writing out the citation. While she does so, Holly engages the other officer in conversation.
“You got a family, Roy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How many kids?”
“Two—boy and girl. Twins.”
“Identical?”
“Well, no. Identical are always the same sex.”
“That’s right. Sorry.”
Butterfield tries to get his wife’s attention. But Elizabeth’s concen -
“Do I go to jail?” Holly says evenly, not even quite curious. “As I told you, I’ve done that, too.”
Alison tears the ticket out of the book. “No. I don’t think that’s necessary, but there’s a court date. You can waive trial and pay the fine.”
She sets the ticket down and stands.
“Thank you,” Butterfield says. “I’m sorry for all this.” He holds the door for them. When they’ve gone, he closes the door and turns.
“Somebody help me with Fiona,” Holly says.
They all go out onto the front porch and stand over the shape of Fiona in the hammock. One thin arm is dangling over the side. Holly says, “Wait a minute,” and goes with alacrity back into the house, as though she has just realized that she left the coffee on. Butterfield and Elizabeth stand apart in the small snoring sound the sleeping woman makes.
“She’s regressing,” he murmurs to Elizabeth. “I swear.”
Holly comes back, moving now, incongruously, with stealth, carry -
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ing a saucepan full of water. She puts it under Fiona’s drooping hand and brings it up slowly, so that the other woman’s fingers go in.
“Holly, what the hell—?” Elizabeth says.
“I heard it’ll make you wet your pants,” says Holly. “Leave her here.”
“We can’t do that. It’s supposed to get down in the fifties tonight.”
“Good. She’ll be wet and cold.”
“Mom, stop this,” says Butterfield. “Christ. Stop this right now.”
He stoops and reaches under Fiona, lifting. She’s much heavier than she looks. He almost drops her, staggering with her in the doorway, hitting her ankle against the frame. She wakes, looks up at him, and gives forth a high-pitched, whispering cry of terror.
“Take it easy, Fiona. It’s just me.”
“Will. She wants me dead.”
“Nobody wants any such thing,” he tells her. He carries her into the house and eases her down on the sofa.
“Where is she?”
“Stop it, Fiona,” Elizabeth says. “You’re drunk.”
“Everyone’s against me.”
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