They were walking to the river. There had been much debate before they left regarding whether the younger girl was up to so much walking and for a moment there loomed the terrible possibility that they would go without her. But then May promised that if she got too tired they’d come back by bus, or even a cab, and she offered the child’s good shoes and the cool sunny day as a kind of collateral.
At the candy store she said, when their three pairs eyes fell instantly on the orange sugar-coated marshmallows wrapped in cellophane, “Well, the sugar will give you energy.”
And orange mouths and fingers that stuck together like webs. At the park along the river she gathered them around the first drinking fountain they came upon and made them wash their hands and rub their wet fingers across their lips. From her pocketbook she produced a man’s handkerchief for drying. “This belonged to my father,” she said. It was dull white and thin as paper.
While she sat on a bench and wondered if she was still up to so much walking, the three children made a stiff-legged, sidestepping procession along the black bars of the fence that divided them from the water below, grabbing each rung and moving their feet step by step into the shoe-sized width between them. She watched carefully. The bars, buried in a raised foot of concrete, were, of course, secure, and far too narrow for anything more than an arm to fit through. There were only a few passersby—none looked worth worrying about—and she told herself that if the three children did not start moving back toward her when they reached the lamppost she would softly call to them.
She had a memory (for certainly she, too, had walked like this as a child, walked along a fence in just this way) of encountering the thick black base of a lamppost, and because her leg could not reach around it or her fingers find anything to take hold of, she had started back again—although toward whom she could not say. Her father perhaps, if the memory was old enough.
The two girls wore the glen-plaid kilts she herself had bought for them and she smiled watching the way the skirts swung back and forth in perfect synchronization as they moved. The boy wore brown pants and a beige Eisenhower jacket that so set off his dark hair. Of the three, he was perhaps the best-looking, the one with the finest features, although the older girl still had a good chance at beauty. The youngest resembled her, and while she was sorry for that, she’d always felt a kind of pride, too, and so had despaired when Lucy said this morning that the child could not walk as far as the river. Because although she had proposed the trip for the children’s sake she had also seen immediately how the long walk would increase the chance that he would run into them while making his rounds; that he would notice again as he had noticed once before the resemblance between her and the child and so have some sense of what she had been like when she was young. And perhaps find something charming in the thought, all children being beautiful and that childish beauty the only kind she herself had ever known.
And now there was a new thought: perhaps for the girl to resemble her was not so bad after all. A new thought that had at its origin a dozen red roses in a cream-colored vase.
The three children stopped at the lamppost, each of them still splayed against the black fence. A brief bit of conversation seemed to pass through their shoulders where they touched and then they began to make their way back again, the youngest now in the lead. They were coming toward her.
Beyond them in the October sun there was the familiar backdrop of the city and then the gray moving waters of the river, a barge on it now that the children stopped to watch.
She had said, Your mother’s treasures, and the recollection of her own childhood might have made her wonder whose treasure she had been (surely she could not really recall walking to the river with her father), but today her thoughts preferred to linger on the lucky way the morning had run, the way Lucy’s hesitation about the walk had delayed them long enough and the orange pumpkins on the counter in the candy store had made their time there short enough, so that they were on the right street when he turned the corner. It might not have seemed as wonderful to a woman who had lived through it before: this sudden transformation of coincidence and happenstance into the signs and symbols that made a fate of new love or even gentle attraction, but she was living it for the first time and she found herself going over and over again each turn the morning had taken; she found herself saying a short, silly prayer of thanks and then wondering if in order to bestow such a blessing—this blessing of romance, middle-aged romance at that—God was not sometimes as foolish, as childish, in his love for us as we are when we first discover our love for one another.
The children returned, falling noisily into her lap with a new request, for peanuts from the man selling them from a cart behind her, and although their forwardness made her inclined to say no (It’s better, she did say, to wait to be asked if you’d like some), she followed them to the man and bought them each a warm bag in gratitude for the part they had played in this perfect morning; in some expectation, too, that the time they spent shelling the peanuts and tossing most of them to the flock of pigeons that suddenly descended would somehow lead to yet another chance meeting with her mailman.
It didn’t happen, although she silently promised them, on their slower and more subdued walk back when they refused each of her offers to hail a cab or to wait for a bus, a place forever in the home she might make, might yet make, for herself.
She said, walking with them, “My parents, your grandparents, were married in the fall. It would have been, let’s see, 1913, ’14? They’d met on the boat, both of them coming over from different parts of Ireland. A shipboard romance.” She would have liked to linger on the topic but the children had politely slowed their pace to listen to her and she wanted to get them home, in case they were getting tired, in case he had paused somewhere in the neighborhood. There was little else she could tell them anyway, except, perhaps, that the chance, mid-ocean meeting that had brought her and her sisters to life suddenly struck her as astonishing.
In the vestibule of their building she found her smallest key and opened the mailbox: the glad proof that he had been there but a sorrow, too, to think that he would not be back for the rest of the day. And how long it was until Saturday.
The youngest one took her hand as they climbed the stairs, the other two, growing quickly, going up before them. On the floor of the landing there was a lozenge of sun on the worn runner and the blue sky was a dulled jewel through the dirty skylight. Veronica let them in and then the three children threw themselves one after the other on the wide green couch. Their mother felt their foreheads. The smell of the roses had taken over the place.
“We had fun,” the children said, turning away. Aunt May said she could not remember such a spectacular day and saw later that evening, after the cocktails and in the midst of the dinner she could barely swallow because of certain things that had been said, that happiness put some people at risk: today, for the first time she could remember, she had climbed the final flight of stairs and crossed the worn carpet of the landing and not thought for a moment of how on a fall afternoon over forty years ago her father had died here.
“I often wonder,” Momma said from her chair, “if he heard me. ‘All’s forgiven, Jack,’ I said. But there’s no telling if he heard me.”
In autumn, the cool air carried a taste of steel, as if it collected scent from the subway grates and the schoolyard fence and the black ribbons of wrought iron that guarded the lower halves of the two broad windows in Momma’s bedroom. Without turning on a light, the children watched from their window seats, and as Aunt Veronica passed by, the sound of the ice in her tumbler seemed to them to be a musical accompaniment to her journey through the growing darkness: a few faint, high notes that on a stage might indicate magic, a sprinkling of fairy dust.
“Hello, children,” she whispered and then surprised them by not continuing past them as usual and into her room but instead placing herself carefully (the ice cubes tinkling) on the edge of Momma’s bed. She sipped from her glass and be
cause she seemed to stare out past them the children turned back to watching the street as well. The sidewalk at this hour was silver blue and the growing darkness seemed to have repaved the road: they could make out, but only barely now, the worn patches here and there where the cobblestones showed through. Once, their mother often told them, toeing just such a worn spot in the asphalt, all the streets were like this. They heard Aunt Veronica raise her drink again and saw the circle of yellow light against the schoolyard pavement grow gradually brighter and more distinct. Cars passed by slowly and their father’s, they imagined, would somehow distinguish itself from the other humped and brittle roofs shining back the light by being faster, more luminous, more welcomed. They heard the kettle whistle in the kitchen, the clink of saucer against cup.
This room, Aunt Veronica told them, had once been part of the living room, with only a curtain where the door and wall were now. They glanced at her over their shoulders; it was all a part of the things they had heard before. When Momma came her first request was that a proper wall be built, and their father himself had done it, hammering and plastering and bringing all the neighbors up to mark his progress, much to the humiliation of his new bride.
They heard the ice cubes slip together in her glass, heard her stir it and sip from it in response, like a mother soothing a small child before she could continue her talk. (No need to tell them when the time came what it meant to nurse a drink; they had seen drinks nursed and patted, soothed and spoken to.)
There had been a book, she said, one her mother had kept since the first day of her marriage. It was long and thin and brown, meant for keeping accounts, but in it she had recorded a thought or two for each day. She had recorded, in fact, Veronica’s own name, writing that if the child she carried was another girl she’d call her Veronica. After she died their father hid the book—it was too painful for him to read—and after he remarried, Momma, his wife, found it in odd places whenever she cleaned, under the rug or behind the stove, wherever.
The ice moved again and might have sparkled in the darkness.
She kept giving it back to him and he kept saying he would destroy it eventually and she supposed after a while that he did because after a while she no longer came across it when she moved the furniture or cleaned out a drawer and after he died she didn’t find it among his things.
But wouldn’t it be interesting for them to read it? Aunt Veronica said. Wouldn’t that be something, to read what their grandmother had written down some half century ago. It would be like meeting her, wouldn’t it? Like she walked in here and sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to them for a while. Wouldn’t it be something if someday one of them just happened to come across it in the apartment here, maybe in some corner, some hidden place no one had ever thought to look. Some place low and out of the way, the kind of place only a child would discover. It would be a ledger book, tall and thin, maybe with a gray cover or a brown one. Her handwriting was thin and the ink by now would probably be somewhat faded, but if they found it, they would know what it was and they would know to bring it to her. And wouldn’t it be something if they could sit together and read what it was she had to say?
The children, turning their foreheads away from the cool glass, said, “Yeah,” softly, as if they were uncertain themselves if their enthusiasm was sincere.
“That would be interesting,” the boy added, because, although she was not his favorite, she looked nearly pretty sitting there in the dark, her eyes and her tumbler of gin shining, and so he wanted her to know that he was himself, separate from his sisters, and that he understood her clearly.
And then, as part of the same slow impulse that had led her to sit down and speak with them, she stood and, passing her hand over the younger girl’s smooth head, told them she was going to go change her dress and put her slippers on. They saw her many dim reflections pass through the dressing-table mirrors and then watched as she pulled open the door just beside Momma’s night table, showing for an instant the nearly faded light in her draped room, and then pulled it closed behind her.
They waited in what was now darkness for the bar of light to appear at the base of her door and when it failed to appear quickly enough they began to have the sense that an eternity would pass before it would come on. They had the sense as they sat in the darkness, no longer looking toward the street, that although the light would come on any minute now and once burning would seem to have been there forever, a sudden eternity stretched between the moment when the room was black and the one when the light under her door would be shining, and that into that slow time (slower even than the hours they had spent in this apartment today) all their past and all their long future would drain—as if this single moment of mild expectation was both the last and the only moment of their lives.
It was at this moment that the older girl saw with some certainty what it was their aunt had just told them: that her mother’s book, the account book turned into a literal, daily account, was hidden inside the handmade wall that faced them now in the darkness.
A cat’s squeal turned them back to the window where they saw it was not a cat at all but the squeal of slowly turning tires as a car backed into a tight space just below them, the streetlight slowly drawing itself over hood and windshield and roof. “That’s Dad’s car,” the boy said, uncertainly, but yes, as the door opened they saw the way he stretched out and stood. And then their legs would not come out from beneath them fast enough and one two three four their feet stomped through the bar of light that came from under Veronica’s bedroom door, kicked past Momma’s chenille bedspread and out into the living-room light and the sharp sound of the buzzer from the downstairs hall. “He’s here!”
And Agnes said, “Lord, they go crazy.”
From the last flight of stairs they could see him, moving to peer through the blurry, beveled glass door. Aunt May reached over their heads to unlock the bolt and when he entered the vestibule it would have seemed to anyone that he had brought the children with him, both girls so suddenly in his arms and the boy already behind him. His clothes, too, had been touched with the metal of the fall city air and with his hat knocked askew and his shoulder bent under the weight of the older girl he said, Hello, May, and without thought or awkwardness kissed her cheek. So there was the scent of the starch on his collar, too, and cigarette smoke and faint after-shave, masculine scents she had never known or had forgotten but that now must be considered if she would indeed allow this new thing, this mildest, sweetest of miracles, to come into her life. She climbed the stairs in front of them. The children were telling their father about the walk and with her courage failing her she prayed they would not mention Fred (Saturday night, then?) and yet crossing the landing from the stairs to the door was sorry they had not.
The coffee table was bare. Lucy appeared with fresh lipstick on and Momma was already going through the top drawer of the dining-room server, collecting the utility bills she wanted him to look over. Agnes, who might have retreated to her room after some of the things she’d said, emerged from the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands and smiled. (The smile was an indictment; it said: I have it all over you. It said, I could not warm my heart over the attentions of a mailman.) “Coffee, everyone?” she said.
Their father said yes, he would have some, and not even the children seemed to notice that the roses were no longer there.
She found them in the kitchen sink, still in their cream-colored vase but placed on the floor of the deep sink so that they seemed strangled by its white ceramic lip, so that they seemed, the washed dishes on the drainboard beside them, the low shelf with the boxes of detergent and bleach and mothballs above, suddenly awkward in their beauty, foolish and inappropriate.
“I changed the water,” Agnes said. “And put an aspirin in it so they’d last longer.” She was at the tiny stove, putting a flame under the coffeepot. She wore a straight navy-blue skirt and a silk blouse with pale gray pinstripes, her stockings and black embroidered slippers. Agnes knew about such thin
gs. She knew how to keep cut flowers fresh, how to clean brocade or velvet or silver. She knew which cocktails called for bitters or onions or round red cherries and what kind of glass each should be served in. She knew good china, fine cheese, the best seats at every Broadway theater. She knew the best stores, the best tailors, the proper way for a man’s suit to fit. She had chosen, May sometimes thought, the better part of what the world had to offer, making a study of the finer things as she herself had once made a study of Christ (believing herself, at the time, that she, too, had chosen the better part), not merely because these things appealed to her or were the very stock-in-trade of any executive secretary, but because she thought these things were the world’s, mankind’s, salvation. Because in what May saw now as her misanthropy Agnes found all else, all the soiled, dull, and tasteless things about humankind, somehow appalling.
“Thank you,” May said humbly, although it was pride that coursed through her veins at the moment. “But you could have waited.”
Agnes looked up from the silver coffee server. “I beg your pardon?”
“You could have waited until later,” May said again, her wrists in her hands. “To change the water.” She might have waited until Lucy’s husband had seen them.
Agnes studied her. Her eyes were a weak blue but her skin was pale and lovely and her black hair streaked dramatically with gray. “Does it matter?” she asked.
At Weddings and Wakes Page 7