by Pam Lewis
In the lobby she asked to use the phone. She dialed the apartment, and a woman answered. “Mason residence.”
“Is Mr. Mason there?” Carole asked.
The woman said he was out and asked who was calling. Carole hesitated and then gave her name. “It’s Carole,” she said. “Their daughter.”
“Oh.” The woman paused. “Is there a number where he can reach you?”
She gave the woman, a maid perhaps, the funeral home number and waited while she wrote it down and read it back. Half an hour later her father called. The old business veneer was back. “I don’t know whether you know or not,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“On Wednesday your mother had a coronary and died. I’m sorry to have to break this to you, Carole. The service is tomorrow at the University Club. I’ve already arranged for cremation.” That was it.
“What happened?” She wanted to hear it from him, not Miss Palmer.
“She was running for a bus.” He waited. “When can you be here?”
“There?” she said. “The apartment?”
“Of course the apartment.”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“What about now? My God, Carole. Enough of this. Your mother is dead.”
She was a lot closer to his apartment than to hers, but she couldn’t go. It was too soon. “What time tomorrow?”
“In the morning. The service is at one.”
That night the old brownstone creaked in the wind and kept her awake. Cremated. The word hovered in the quiet hours of the morning. She had to get up and turn on lights to keep herself from thinking about the long chute, her mother, wrapped in white, sliding down it, arms crossed on her breast, and the roar of flame. She’d read somewhere that the body spits and crackles.
She spent the time until daybreak pacing. Running for the bus, her father had said. She imagined it over and over. She’d never been athletic. Her mother in a black suit, running erratically in her high heels, waving an arm. Yoohoo! Like that time with Eddie. And then falling, scraping her knees, bruising herself. She thought of her mother on the sidewalk, alone, strangers opening her purse to find out who she was, fumbling through her clothing, perhaps stealing from her. She was glad when daylight broke and outside the city began to move again. Glad for the noise, the distraction.
She dressed and undressed in everything she had, which wasn’t much. Her old wool skirts from Vassar. Blouses ironed shiny over time. She finally put on one of her waitress dresses, the only black she had. It was too short, she knew, but she had no choice. She took the subway to Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington and came up the stairs to the street in broad daylight. Since coming back to New York, she’d come here a few times at night when she hadn’t been able to sleep, when she’d needed to see her old home again, if only from the street. If only to know it was still there, that her parents were somewhere up there moving about those lit rooms, and that there was a chance that one day she could come home.
Now she saw that the Home for Unwed Mothers was a fenced-in construction site. A picture on the fence showed the high white apartment complex that would be there next.
The doorman was someone she didn’t know. He made her wait while he called upstairs to announce her. “Go on, miss,” he said. The man on the elevator was also new. He stood erect, with his uniformed back to her, watching the floors go by, then jockeyed the elevator several times to make sure the elevator floor met the vestibule floor exactly. She thought of asking about Heney but couldn’t. What if he was dead too?
Her father was waiting at the elevator. Thinner and grayer. He raised his shoulders and dropped them as if to say, I give up. His eyes were red. Cautiously, because this was something she had never done before, she reached out to hug him. The feel and smell of him, the way he so stiffly kept his distance, made her pull away again.
“You came,” he said, fighting back tears.
“I don’t—” She wanted to say that she hadn’t meant for this to happen. It was all her fault somehow. Her father looked anxious, his head swiveling from her to the apartment. The guests. He was as nervous as she was. “Do people—?” She wanted to ask if they knew she’d dropped out of sight.
“People from the firm,” he said, meaning who was there, inside. “Your aunt Emily, of course.” He was pulling her into the vestibule as he spoke.
She got passed from one person to the next. They all told her how sorry they were. The women kissed her. The men embraced her lightly. She felt carried along by the waves of their concern. At any moment, she thought, her mother would walk into the room. It seemed impossible that all this was because she was dead.
One of the junior partners took Carole aside. In a soft, wet voice he asked her, “Will your mother be there? At the University Club?” She couldn’t understand the question. She looked around, feeling almost panicky. Then she realized he was asking about the coffin, or about the ashes. Where were they? “I don’t know,” she said. She turned away from him, down the corridor and to her old room. She stopped in the door and leaned against the jamb for support. It was all happening so fast.
The chair from the den was in the middle of her room, and beside it was a table with a book of crossword puzzles and a tray of pens and pencils. Her mother’s eyeglasses. She opened and closed the stems, held them to her nose, and breathed in. The faint, familiar odor made her weak and slightly ill. She sat on the edge of her mother’s chair and opened the small drawer at the front of the table. There were photographs of her as an infant and the proofs of her Spence yearbook photo, taken the autumn before graduation. In them she had the calm, intelligent look of a girl you couldn’t surprise. A girl who knew exactly where she was going. One of the photographs and half of another had been ripped from the sheet as if in anger.
Under the photos were her report cards from Spence. Each was a single sheet on which her grades, all A’s, were recorded in blue ink with notes from the headmistress at the bottom. “Will do well whatever her field of endeavor,” the last one said. Even getting away with murder, she thought ruefully. She pushed them to the back of the drawer, where her fingers felt something else. She drew out a small stack of mail, bound with an elastic band. There were four letters, all addressed to her and all unopened. She knew the writing because her mother had forwarded a letter to her at Vassar. Rachel must have kept writing to her here, she thought, feeling a flutter of pleasure at the idea of somebody who liked her.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and she slipped the letters into her purse. “She practically lived in here,” her father said. He was standing in the doorway. “She thought if she was in here for long enough, she’d know why you left.”
“It wasn’t anything she did.”
“She didn’t know that.”
She felt vulnerable and ashamed in the chair, guilty for having the letters, which she was sure he hadn’t seen. If he’d known about them, he would have opened them all. He walked to the window. “Why did it have to take this to get you back?” He didn’t face her, but the question was real. He wanted to know.
“I thought I had more time.” It had never occurred to her that one of them might die.
He wheeled to face her, visibly angry. “Well, you learn the hard way, don’t you?”
She was about to speak, about to lash out, but he put a finger to his lips and squeezed his eyes shut. “I promised not to do this, not to be angry. I promised that if you came, I would say ‘no questions asked.’ I want it to be like that, and not like this. So I’ll say it now. Please come home, Carole. Or at least talk to me. Let me know what’s happening now. Not then but now.” He forced a weary smile. “No questions asked. Your mother said it was the only way. I wish she were here to see you.” He stopped himself from crying the same way he had done on the street, by sucking in his mouth.
The tenderness was far worse than anger could have been. She stepped to the window with her back to him and looked down on the hole where the Home for Unwed Mothers had been. �
��I’ll bet she hated to see that,” she said. “They’ll build something higher than us.”
“Think about it,” her father said and then left.
She stayed there alone for some time. It had always been her mother’s face she thought about when she thought about home, never her father’s. She’d been so sure that after enough time had passed she would hug her mother again, and now that would never happen. Please come home, her father had said. Could she? Looking around her room, she felt an ache of regret. If he really meant that, no questions asked, then for his sake, maybe yes. For her father’s sake and for her own. He had nobody now.
“Well, look who decided to show her face.”
Emily was there, tiny in a dark outfit. “Everyone else has gone ahead. I told Conrad I’d collect you, and we’ll meet him downstairs.”
Emily’s face had softened since Carole had last seen her, fleshed out a little so she resembled Carole’s mother more. “Oh.” Carole checked her watch. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Emily’s words were charged. She didn’t move from the door.
“Excuse me,” Carole said.
“Your mother suffered.” Emily blocked the door.
“They’ll be wondering—”
“They’ll wait for the sister and the daughter.” Emily’s voice was stone. “The blood relatives. The only blood relatives, and they’ll wait for us, by God. You’re not leaving here until I say my piece.”
“You don’t understand, Emily.”
Emily snorted. “Understand? How dare you speak of understanding! You broke your mother’s heart. You might just as well have shot her, taken a knife and plunged it into her. Day after day. It ate her up. She used to sit in this room. Your room. She was waiting for you to call, to come home. ‘What did I do?’ she would ask me. And I tried to tell her she’d done nothing. She’d been an exemplary mother. It was you. Ungrateful, spoiled child. You had every advantage. And you have the audacity to breeze in as though nothing has happened.” Emily glared at her.
“Everything has happened.”
“A week ago. If only you’d come a week ago.” Emily broke down, holding her white gloves to her face, smearing them with lipstick.
“Daddy’s waiting.”
“Don’t want to upset our daddy, do we?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re just like him.”
Carole edged past Emily and into the hallway to the main corridor. She wasn’t like him. She couldn’t be.
“Their marriage was falling apart.” Emily caught up to her, her little face fierce, the eyebrows like a pair of chevrons, her features bunched in fury. “Ever since you left, and don’t go acting surprised. Your father with his stiff upper lip, telling her to get a hold of herself.”
The door to the vestibule was open. Carole ran for it and pressed the buzzer.
“You could say you’re sorry.” Emily was right there, slamming the door to the apartment behind her.
“Of course I’m sorry,” Carole said and felt her heart fracture, felt the rush of tears again.
The elevator door rattled open. They rode in silence until Emily tapped the operator on the shoulder. “Broke her mother’s heart, right, Maurice?” He turned partway, nodded politely, and then faced front again. “You saw it. You had to see it. Everybody did.”
“Leave him alone,” Carole said.
Downstairs, her father was waiting in front of the building beside a shiny black limousine. He checked his watch in annoyance, then hopped into the front next to the chauffeur. Carole took her place in the backseat and sat staring at the back of her father’s head. At the hair over the collar of his shirt. Her mother was dead. The thought was stunning all over again. It couldn’t be true. But it was, and she was going to the funeral.
They were ushered into a red brocade room at the back of the University Club. A minister read from the Bible and then began to speak of her mother, calling her Patsy so often that Carole wondered if her mother had been going to church. He mentioned the loss of a devoted wife to Conrad. “And a loving mother to her daughter, to Carole. There is nothing so deep as the bond of mother and daughter,” he said. Her father apparently hadn’t told the minister anything about the family after all. The minister was talking about other people, some mythical family.
After the service, the room swarmed with men and women in dark wool suits and dresses, gold jewelry and perfume. They sought her out, one by one, introducing themselves, telling her how they admired her mother and, again, how sorry they were and asking if there was anything they could do. She’d seen the sympathy cards at home, all the people who couldn’t be here today. It was the great wide web that her parents inhabited. The vast network she’d once known, if only peripherally.
Waiters appeared with trays of food and glasses of wine. She watched her father glide through the crowd. The women kissed him, the men shook his hand. Carole came up beside him and touched his elbow. He turned and smiled at her, his eyes brimming at the sight of her. They moved together from cluster to cluster, accepting sympathy. Three people gave her their business cards and urged her to call them. They understood she was at Vassar. Perhaps she would be looking for work when she graduated. They could help.
So nobody knew except Emily. To everybody else, the family was intact, perfect except for the death of the mother.
At the far end of the room, someone caught her attention. She looked again, but the crowd had shifted. Her father passed her to a woman with tears in her faded old eyes, who kissed her and then wiped lipstick from her cheek. He introduced her to someone else. He had his arm around her waist, holding on to her for dear life. “Client of the firm,” he said about the man now shaking her hand. “Client and friend,” her father added, but he was already in another embrace. This time a woman had him by the ears and was saying something close to his face. Her father’s arm loosened at her waist. He let her go. He was moving away from her, being swallowed up by another group.
A waiter handed her a glass of sherry, and she set it down untouched. Without her father shepherding her around the room, people left her alone. She edged toward the door, away from the thickest part of the crowd, where she could watch her father’s progress through the swarm, catch a glimpse of his gray head bobbing, hidden and then emerging.
She felt a hand grip her elbow firmly and thought, for a moment, it was her father, but she caught a glimpse of him in the distance, so it couldn’t be. There was a flash of longish dishwater hair and dark mutton-chop sideburns. A waiter, she thought at first, but why was he gripping her so tightly?
She turned to take him in, face him full-on. It couldn’t be. She blinked and looked again. “Eddie,” she said. The horror of it, that he would be here, in this place with these people, the invader making what was already dark so much worse.
“How did you know?” She scanned the crowd, frantic to find her father, see if anyone had noticed, as if her drumming heart was so loud people would have fallen silent, watching her. But they weren’t. Nothing had changed out there. “How?” she asked him again, more forcefully.
“Announcement in the Times,” he said, smirking. He was so calm. “I just happened to notice—I don’t usually read obituaries, so depressing, don’t you think?” He took her wrist in his hand and held it tight. “I’m really sorry about your mother. Honest.”
“Don’t you dare even speak about her,” she said.
“She was a lovely woman.”
“I said, leave her out of this.”
“But I knew her.” Something in the way he said it made her turn to see his face. He smiled at her, cocked his head. “In the biblical sense, if you know what I mean.”
He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant. It wasn’t possible. That he and her mother had— No. She shut her mind to it. “I had to leave Vassar. I flunked out,” she said.
“No, no, you didn’t,” Eddie said. “I went up there. Your little friend Josie told me all sorts of things a
bout you. You left. No flunking out.”
She searched the crowd again for her father and found him at the center of a cluster across the room, safely at a distance. She had to get Eddie out of here before her father noticed.
“She flagged me down one day,” Eddie said. She thought he meant Josie. It was so hard to get her bearings. The room felt unbearably hot. She was sweating. “You remember. You were pissed. You thought I’d accosted her, remember? But it was the other way around. Honest, she was the aggressor that time, and then again last spring on Lex.” He meant her mother. “I was house-sitting nearby. Same neighborhood as before but a much better gig. Those people were civilized. They didn’t care if I drank the liquor, and there weren’t all those workmen. The noise. Remember?”
“Stop it,” she said.
Eddie winked. “‘My daughter? The one you met at the train? You wouldn’t happen to know?’” Her mother’s voice leaked sickeningly from him, the way it had from Josie. “Seems you’d vanished into thin air from college, and she never knew where you were. Ran away from Vassar. Did you get kicked out? Join the underground? Are you one of those college girls running around with drug addicts and ex-cons? Well, your mother was distraught. Your father wanted to hire detectives. Where, oh, where could she be?” He paused and looked around the room. “Well, I couldn’t let it go. I had to know too. Have to know. Present tense. If there were to be detectives, perhaps there would be police, even though the police wouldn’t touch it, since you’d obviously left of your own free will and you were of age. Well, by now you are. By the way, you lied about your age that night. But if there had been police—well, there was no alternative.”
“Alternative to what?”
“To comforting that poor woman.” He had a predator’s grin, all teeth. “So lovely. So mistreated and misunderstood. And so responsive. Much more than you. Is that him?” Eddie pointed to her father, who had moved closer and was speaking to a group of people.
She tried to focus on something in the room, her eyes darting from one spot to another, one face to another, but what she saw was her mother’s white plump body beneath Eddie in that room Carole had been in, the one strewn all over with his clothes. Her mother on that bed, her eyes shut, her head thrown back. He would have told her mother she was beautiful, she was special, and then he would have asked, So where do you think Carole might be? She could hardly breathe all of a sudden. It felt as though her throat had closed.