by Mary Gordon
“Mommy wants us to go to the Greenspans until she takes care of things,” said Peter to his sister.
“When will you come and get us?” asked Sarah, beginning to cry again.
“I don’t know, darling. You may have to spend the night. But I’ll come and tuck you in.”
“I’ll go with them, Anne, and explain what happened. Then I’ll be back and help you. We must get started on all this before it does any more damage,” said Jane.
Damage. How much damage had been done already? They would never lose it from their lives. But physical life had the first place now. Upstairs a body lay. Oddly, this body, dead, had needs. And they were not dissimilar to what the living body had required. It was wet, it was cold, it was naked. It could not stay in a tub of water.
She must prepare the body of the dead. She must touch the flesh that she had shrunk from while it lived. The police were coming. Jane had called them. They would be there soon. And Laura’s body must be clothed before they saw it. What Laura had done was private, and the face she wore was the private face of death. Anne felt the body was painful in its exposure; she must protect it from the gaze of strange men, of men who came from the outside. She felt that Laura’s body, having met death in her house, became her child. So she must protect it from the violations of the outside world as she protected her own children.
She put her hand into the tub. Pulling the plug, she allowed the water to run out, slowly first, then quickly, with a heavy final gush. She waited until all the water was gone and only a thin greasy coating of blood remained before she tried to lift the body out.
The weight was terrible, for it offered no resistance. Torpid, languid, the limbs flopped passively. The body could do nothing to compose itself, to dignify itself, to save itself from the fate of the grotesque. Anne had to drag it from the tub in slow stages, putting it down on the floor from time to time. The flesh was icy cold against her flesh, her clothes were wet from its wetness, and she couldn’t lift it from the floor. Horrified at the spectacle of the only course physically possible to her, she dragged Laura through the quarter-inch of water in the upstairs hall. The trailing feet made a playful swishing noise, a seaside noise, a holiday noise, a noise children might make for the simple pleasure of the act. She got the body to the door of Laura’s room and stopped, exhausted, letting it lie flat on the floor for a moment. Her arms ached; her legs thrummed with fatigue. But she must prepare Laura for the police.
She placed the body in the center of the bed in a posture that might be like sleeping. Then she looked among Laura’s clothes. There were so few: a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, underwear, socks, a sweater. Alone in the closet was the dress that Anne had given her. None of Laura’s clothes seemed right. She went into her own room and got her bathrobe. Coming back into Laura’s, she thought, as if it were a problem in physics, how she would begin to dress the body. She sat down on the bed and spread the bathrobe out. She lifted Laura’s head and upper back and held them against the front of her own body. As a posture, this was not unfamiliar to her; it was not unlike dressing a sleeping child. She pulled the arms through the sleeves and let the body down to rest once more against the pillows. Straightening the robe underneath Laura, about to put the sides together and tie them, she looked at the girl’s body. There were the breasts, the sex. There was the waist, the white thighs, the surprisingly delicate ankles. She remembered that Adrian had been Laura’s lover. The thought shocked her: the juxtaposition of death and sex seemed wrong, as if the sexual activity one knew the dead to have been involved in had failed in its promise to bestow eternal life.
She closed Laura’s eyes, arranged her hands at her sides. The police were downstairs; she heard Jane talking to them. Now she must go and tell them what she knew. Which was nothing. That a girl who had been alive was dead by her own hand. That she didn’t know why she had done it. Except that she might have been disturbed by an incident earlier in the day in which she had been told that her services were no longer needed. She would not say to them, although she knew it was the truth, “She was driven to death by the hatred I bore her. She died because I could have killed her.”
She heard herself saying these things in her own mind, calmly, at a remove, as if she were being sentenced in a dream court. Calmly, she walked down the stairs, through water that splashed with every step she took, toward the police who were sitting on her couch.
They asked questions; she answered them as simply as she could, determined to talk about what had happened as little as possible. When she brought them upstairs and took them into the room where Laura was, they told her she shouldn’t have moved the body.
“We would have liked the coroner to see her as she was, ma’am,” the policeman said. “The cause of death has yet to be established.”
“But she cut her wrists in the bathtub,” said Jane impatiently. She’d followed Anne and the policemen up the stairs; she was trying to protect Anne from them.
“We’re not in any position to determine the cause of death. We’re just here to investigate the circumstances of the crime.”
“The crime?” said Jane.
“Legally speaking, it’s a crime, ma’am.”
“I don’t understand what you need to investigate. It seems quite straightforward to me,” said Jane.
“Well, there could have been foul play. Someone could have drugged the victim, for example, and then cut her wrists and put her in the tub like that to make it look like suicide.”
“How absurd,” said Jane.
“We’re not inferring anything, ma’am. It’s our job to investigate all areas of the incident.”
Jane spoke to the policemen as if they’d wandered impertinently onto her estate. She expected them to listen to her; she expected them to leave. But Anne thought they were right: there had been a crime. They would never know the name of it, and they would never name her as the criminal. But she had done it. She had closed her heart to Laura. She had driven her to death.
The policemen looked cursorily at Laura’s body, then seemed no longer interested. They turned their attention to the rest of the room.
“Here’s the note,” said the blond policeman, reading it quickly and passing it to his partner, who passed it to Anne.
“I thought you said you weren’t close to the deceased, that you hardly knew her,” said Officer Planck.
“That’s true,” said Anne, staring in horror at the words Laura had written.
“There’s no telling what some people keep bottled up inside, is there?” said Officer Duffy.
“No,” said Anne. “No telling.”
“Thanks, ma’am, we’ll just look around up here by ourselves. We’ll call you if we need you.”
Anne went downstairs and handed the note to Jane.
“My God,” said Jane when she had read it. “But, Anne, you mustn’t take it as meaning anything, not for a moment. It’s a work of absolute derangement.”
“We can’t talk about it now,” Anne said. “We can’t even think about it. What we must do now is clean things up.”
She knew that if she could just start, just make the first step, perform the first gesture, it would not be so impossible. She must make her mind a shape that could surround the things, a fence that could divide the labor from the rest of life. She must arrange things into parts, above all she must disturb the plane, break the surface, deconstruct the sheer impression that kept coming to her, so that she could see, beneath the smooth, complete appearance, divisions and parts. For that was what defeated her. Every movement made the problem worse; it literally stirred the waters. Every step was an incentive to damage. And the damage was so various and so particular in its effects. The rugs would merely stain, the floor would stain and warp, the books would stain and swell so they could never close again, not properly, so that they would never again be pleasant to the hand. Plaster would fall from the ceiling; the linoleum would come up. Unless she acted. Unless she did something right now. She went into the living room a
nd began moving the furniture, the rugs. She must take up the drenched rugs. They must be rolled up, taken outside, laid flat on the grass. But how would she do that alone? The rugs were heavy in themselves and much heavier wet. She needed the help of someone strong. Jane was seventy-five; she couldn’t ask her. She would have to try herself.
As she moved the couch back so that it rested against the north wall, Barbara walked in the front door. She was carrying several plastic buckets filled with towels and rags.
“I thought you might need a hand.”
“I was going to take up the rug.”
“I’ll help you.”
Silently, the two women rolled up the carpet. A few inches at a time they pushed and pulled it till they got it out the back door. Barbara turned the porch light on. They unrolled the rug on the black lawn.
“I wonder what this will do to the crocuses,” Anne said.
“I always hated crocuses,” said Barbara. “Too sprightly. Too goddamn much of a can-do attitude.”
Anne smiled. I do love you, Barbara. I do think you’re a splendid friend, a superb person, she wanted to say. But she felt a danger in allowing any discourse outside the world of objects.
“I gathered up all the old towels I could find. I thought we’d spread them around on the floors. Why don’t you go say good-night to the children while I do that.”
“All right,” said Anne.
“By the way, I’ve met Jane, and I’m in love. She’s going around the neighborhood cadging towels. I asked her to do it, because it seemed clear that people would simply give them to her without question. And she wouldn’t feel the need to explain. Whereas I’d be invited in for cozy chats that would end in serious quarrels.”
Anne put her hand over her eyes as if the light had suddenly become too bright. “I’m going to the children. You know I can’t thank you enough.”
“I’ve called Adrian. He’ll be here in a minute.”
The children were sharing beds with the Greenspan children. Anne had always liked the Greenspan children’s rooms. Barbara’s theory was that children need some free zone, a legal red-light district she called it, where they could be as messy as they liked. Their rooms were like the warm, cluttered nests of hibernating rodents. She understood why her children loved to be there.
“May I just talk to Peter and Sarah alone for a moment?” she said to the Greenspan children.
Quickly, they ran away.
“Are you two okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Sarah, who did not put down her book.
“Did the police come?” asked Peter.
“Yes.”
“Are they still there?”
“Yes.”
“Is Laura still there?”
“Yes, sweetheart, but not for long.”
Peter came closer to his mother and put his head on her breast.
“You can’t really say she’s still there, you know,” said Sarah. “She’s dead. It’s just her body.” Having said that, she went back to her book.
“Where do you think she is now?” asked Anne.
Sarah shrugged. “Who cares?”
The shock of her words hit Anne with the cruelty of a surprise blow. What did it mean, this callousness? It was, as people would say, a way of coping. Yet it was a very unappealing way. This was her child, six years old, to whom this monstrous thing had happened. Peter began to cry.
“I just don’t see what the big deal is. You didn’t even like her, Mommy. You were the one who wanted her to go away,” Sarah said.
“I know,” said Anne, “but I’m very sorry she’s dead.”
“Why? You didn’t even like her.”
“But it’s a terrible thing, darling, for anyone to die when they’re so young. Especially the way Laura did.”
Peter looked at his sister tearfully. “You didn’t see her. It was horrible.”
Sarah looked at her brother and made a clicking, exasperated noise with her tongue. “Oh, Peter, you always act like you’re the big cheese.”
“Let’s not talk about it now,” said Anne. “Just try to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Don’t stay up too late with Daniel and Josh.”
“Barbara said we don’t have to go to school in the morning. Daniel and Josh do, but we don’t,” said Sarah.
“Sarah,” Peter said with outrage. “That’s not true. You made it up.”
“I think you should go to school,” Anne said.
“Forget it,” Sarah said.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Anne.
“Just forget it. Who wanted to hang around here anyway? I might as well go to stupid school.”
“Just try to sleep, my darlings,” she said, turning Peter’s pillow. When she tried to smooth Sarah’s hair from her forehead, Sarah flicked her head away, not violently, a small resentful gesture of disgust.
In despair, she closed the door of the children’s room. What was this doing to them? What should she do to help them? Even this she couldn’t think about. Not now. She had to go back to the house.
There were towels spread over the living room floor, up the stairs and in the upstairs hallway. Adrian and Ianthe were there, squeezing sponge mops into buckets, emptying buckets into the toilets, into the tub.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, moving away from Adrian’s embrace.
“Just tell me what you want done.”
“What you’re doing. I’ll leave the upstairs hall to you. If you can give me those wet towels, I’ll put them in the washer.”
They worked all night. At one, the police had finished their work and taken Laura’s body with them, wrapped in a black plastic bag. The absence of the body, the first signs of dawn, made the house seem light. Anne felt as if it might float up, fly off and away any minute, like a toy house in a child’s dream of a hurricane. But there was something about them all in there, accomplishing an immense labor, that kept the house held down. She didn’t think of Laura. She thought of one job at a time. She bent and straightened her body. She wrung out wet cloths, emptied water into the kitchen sink. The sun rose silver gray at first and then the sky took color, its blues deepened, cleared. It became a beautiful day.
At eight o’clock the doorbell rang. Adrian, who was nearest, answered it.
“I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help,” she heard Ed Corcoran say. Adrian brought him into the kitchen.
“I heard what happened,” he said to Anne. “My wife has a police-band radio. She told me about it. I was wondering if I could help.” He spoke looking down at the floor.
He is embarrassed, Anne thought, welcoming embarrassment into the room, the old woman whose arrival one has dreaded, whose louche story saves the party from the hatred of the most important guests. It signaled, once again, the hold of the ordinary, the press of the trivial: a third-rate and quotidian emotion.
“Thank you,” she said to Ed, not looking at him. “But I think my friends and I are managing.”
He turned his attention from her and looked around the room, a competent professional about to give an estimate.
“You don’t have a pump in the cellar,” he said. “I’d better check down there.”
“The cellar,” she said ashamedly, “I hadn’t thought of it.”
He disappeared down the cellar stairs.
“I think the water’s gone from the floors. We’ve taken the rugs up, the books are off the shelves. Shall we put them outside to dry? It looks like it will be a nice day,” Barbara said.
“Thank God it was just the one bookcase,” Anne said. “We could put them on the lawn on blankets. How many of them are ruined?”
“Not many,” said Barbara. “But they’ll probably always smell queer.”
Memento mori, Anne thought. Not the clean, well-formed skull, but the smell of mold, the feel of pages crumbling.
For the first time, she felt able to stop long enough to place a call to Michael. The overseas operator put her through in seconds. She heard her hu
sband’s voice say “Allô.” The foreignness of the word, the familiarity of the tone, made her feel like a swimmer who sees, far off, the lifeboat coming toward him but cannot stop his movements for a moment to rejoice. So she couldn’t weep to him; she couldn’t say much. Barely, she told him the facts.
“Don’t talk. I understand. I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said. “Just hold on. I’ll be there. Hold on to the children.”
Then the voice was gone and she felt more alone than ever. “Just hold on,” he had said. Yes, she must do that. When he came home, everything would seem more possible, for her and for the children. They could see that all of life was not affected by what had happened. That life went on, somewhere, that planes took off and landed; that you could dial a telephone and, from five thousand miles away, someone you loved could come to you.
She heard a step behind her.
“There’s an awful lot of water in that basement,” said Ed. Anne had forgotten he was in the house.
“I have a friend down at the oil-burner place,” he said. “He’ll probably let me borrow one of those big suction vacuums they have, you know that takes care of oil spills and things like that.”
“That would be wonderful if you could get that,” Anne said, looking out the window.
“The only thing is, I’ll have to dig a hole in the backyard to empty all the water in. It’ll sure mess up your lawn for the summer.”
“That’s all right. Do what you have to do.”
“I’ll just give that guy a call.”
Anne nodded.
“You know, Brian talks about you all the time. He really misses you. He keeps asking if we’re going to come over here again, if we’re still friends.”
Anne smiled neutrally. She thought they were not.
“I told him of course we were still friends and we’d get together when your husband got back in the summer.”