by Sue Miller
“Oh, yes, I do know that. I know it well. Now, what are you eating?” We were standing in front of the dining room table, which was laden with platters of food. “Those little caviar things? Fish eggs, I call them. You’ve got one stuck, just right there,” she said, and tapped her front tooth.
I swiveled my tongue in my mouth and smiled at her. “Better?”
She nodded. “What pretty teeth you have, dear. Be grateful. I’ve a mouth full of porcelain, entirely artificial. Everything in here but the kitchen sink, I always say.” She bent over the table, frowning, then gave up and turned back to me. “Now, tell me what you do. I know you do something. All you clever young girls do.”
“I’m a photographer.”
“I knew it. How smart of you. That must be fascinating work, poking your camera where the rest of us daren’t go. Or do you do portraits, that sort of thing?”
“No, I’m more the nosy kind, as you say. News, and photographic essays.” I shrugged.
“Nosy!” she objected. “I never said it.” She laughed. “But it must be quite interesting. I can definitely see the appeal of that kind of thing. Eberhardt,” she said abruptly. “Isn’t your husband the young man in all the trouble?”
“No. Not that I know of. Actually his name isn’t Eberhardt. And he doesn’t live here. I grew up on Harper Avenue, but. I—we—live in New York now.”
“Oh, Harper. Then you know the Masurs.”
“Very well.”
“So your father is … now tell me his name.”
“David Eberhardt. He’s here somewhere, actually.” I looked around and glimpsed Tony’s aureole of white-gold hair, saw that she was near the door, holding her coat.
“David Eberhardt. Jiggle my memory. What does he do?”
“He’s a psychiatrist. And he used to teach at the medical school.” I started to move back, to murmur something about having to go.
And then the light dawned behind her eyes. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Now I remember the story. You were the family with that tragic young retarded boy.”
She was so forthright that all I could say was, “Yes, that’s right.”
“My dear. I’m so sorry. How hard that must all have been.”
I made some fuzzy remarks about how young I’d been, about how happy we’d all been then, and began to back away, excusing myself, bumping against the people around me as I made my way toward the door.
When I told my mother about it, she didn’t respond at first. I couldn’t see her face. She was bent over the table, setting it. My sister Mary and her husband were coming for dinner. “Doesn’t that seem preposterous to you?” I pushed. “It’s been twenty or twenty-five years. And we’ve all had our own completely separate lives. And accomplishments. And scandals, even. And what we’re still famous for is Randall.”
She didn’t turn her head or look at me. Her voice was matter-of-fact. “No,” she said. “No, to me that doesn’t seem preposterous at all.”
Chapter 2
June 1954
Lainey had cried out in her sleep just seconds before the telephone rang. She had been dreaming, and in her dream one of her sons—it was hard to tell whether it was Randall or Macklin—was drowning. Her arms and legs were like those we own so often in dreams, heavy stumps disconnected from her will. They wouldn’t lift to save him. She had to watch, frozen, as he gently sank—she could somehow see him floating down to the glowing pebbles at the bottom of the stream. His eyes, his mouth and nostrils, were wide with terror. They leaked iridescent bubbles, which rose to the silvered undersurface of the clear brown water. For a moment, in her sleep, the diminished bell of the distant telephone became that sound, the sound of the shiny bubbles slowly rising; and then she woke, she was out of bed, sprinting down the dark hallway to stop the noise before it roused the children or David.
It was her father at the end of the line, clearing his throat, apologizing for waking her. Even before she caught her breath she began to reassure him, falling into the familial habit of politeness. Then she checked herself: here she was, standing in her pajamas in the dark in David’s study, her bare feet sticky on the nighttime cool of the wooden floor, the breathing sounds of the silent house around her. Why had he called now? “What’s wrong?” she asked abruptly.
“It’s Mother,” he said, and coughed gently, repeatedly, a nervous tic. Then: “She’s had a heart attack.”
“And?” Her voice rose in wild impatience. “How is she now?”
“I’m afraid it’s not good.” He paused. “She’s gone, Lainey.”
“Gone? Dead? You mean?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
Lainey’s voice was harsh, her answer pure reflex, like a quick retaliatory slap. “No she isn’t,” she said.
He was silent a moment, then answered gently, “Yes, she is.”
Lainey couldn’t answer. Her heart believed, she could feel it like a knuckle pressed into her throat; but she had no response. Finally she said, “I just can’t understand.” She stopped. “This doesn’t seem true.” She felt dizzy, and she touched David’s desk for the sense of something solid in the whirling dark.
“I know, dear. I’m the same way.” Her father’s voice was kind and professional. It made her remember abruptly how much grief, how much pain and misery, he’d had to help people through in his life. He was a minister, an expert at condolence. “I keep waiting for her to walk in the kitchen here and ask me what I’m doing up at this hour.”
She shut her eyes then in the dark and saw his tired face, the empty shiny kitchen, with even the last few snack dishes of the day rinsed and set by the sink on the old linoleum counter, the steady groan of the ancient refrigerator the only sound in the quiet house. “Are you alone?” she whispered. Somehow this was more horrible, easier to focus on, than her mother’s having died.
“Yes, for now. I called Sam, and he’s coming, and Paul. I couldn’t reach Pete. But I’m sure I’ll get him tomorrow, and then he’ll be on his way too.” These were Lainey’s older brothers, scattered with their families around the Northeast. Lainey, in Chicago, lived the farthest from her parents.
“And I’ll come too, don’t you think?” Nothing was clear to her.
“It’d be wonderful if you could, Elaine.”
“Of course I will,” she said with sudden conviction. And then everything wheeled back into place for her in the dark; she was all right. There were steps to be taken, plans to be made. This was what her mother’s death would mean for a while. She knew she could manage this. She found the chair, reached for the lamp chain. The light fell in a bright yellow pool on David’s desk—on the choked ashtray, the stack of notes in his finicky, even script, the wire tray full of pencils, odd coins, a letter opener, a favorite Little Lulu comic the kids made him read aloud every few weeks, so old and worn the pages curled.
“I’ll be a few days getting there,” she said. Facing her on the desk was a framed photograph of the two older children, taken when Mack was a baby. She squinted her eyes nearly shut against it. “I’ll have to arrange for the children.” Randall swam into her mind, then the little ones, Nina and Mary.
“I understand, darling. Just come when you can.”
“How did it happen?” He didn’t answer right away. “Do you mind talking about it?”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s perfectly all right.” And slowly he told his sad story—her mother’s collapse, the ambulance, the way she looked afterward. Her skin was gray, he said. Grayish. As he was talking, his voice changed, and Lainey could tell he’d been through it several times before. Perhaps he’d even called her mother’s sisters before he called her, maybe a few of her close friends. Some of the phrases seemed practiced and automatic. She could hear the distance he’d already achieved from them.
Lainey couldn’t imagine her mother the way he spoke of her. Her mother was small, plump, pink. She smelled of rose water and was incapable of inactivity, except for a ritual nap after lunch, after which she often said, as though
she’d had a cool drink of water, “My, that was refreshing.”
“I think she didn’t suffer,” he said. “Except maybe the fear of those first few minutes. I thank God for that.”
“Yes,” said Lainey. “Yes, that’s good.” There was a silence on the line. Then she asked, “Will there be a service? When will that be?” She was reaching for a pencil. She felt a slow surge of energy: the will to organize, to be efficient.
“A memorial service, I think. She wanted to be cremated.” He cleared his throat several times. “So we can wait a little. Just whenever you can get here.” He paused. “I haven’t really thought all these things through yet.” His voice sounded suddenly exhausted, desolate, and there rose in her the impulse to give, to enfold, to offer herself, her instinctive response to need or weakness.
“Oh, Father, don’t worry about any of it. We’ll all help, when we’re there. These arrangements should be the last of your concerns right now. There’s plenty of time for that once we get there.”
“Yes.”
“And we’ll be there soon.” He didn’t answer. “Can you sleep, do you think?”
“I suspect. Eventually. I’m very tired.”
They talked hesitantly for a while more, politely sharing their disbelief, estranged already by her mother’s absence, by the lack of the third voice, quick and warm on the line.
For Lainey was like her father: thoughtful, earnest. They shared too a kind of spiritual ambition: to be good, to be kind, to be giving. This had made their relations difficult—in a strange sense, competitive. They had often argued passionately during Lainey’s adolescence, when her nose for hypocrisy was keenest, when her father suddenly seemed to her riddled with petty flaws.
Her father had found an outlet for his ambition in his work, but Lainey still drove herself in every aspect of her life and was defeated over and over, too easily exhausted. When she was young her father had tried to curb her ambition, had tried to influence her not to take herself so seriously: partly for her sake, because he understood how like him she was, how costly and difficult her ambition would be; and partly because she was a girl and he thought such an ambition inappropriate in her, even presumptuous. He wanted her to be like her mother, quick and lively, but pliant, a good wife to some ambitious man.
Now they spoke with some awkwardness of train schedules, of the details of Lainey’s coming east. Each was glad for this business between them, and having separated themselves with it, they were able at last to say good night.
“And I hope you can get a little sleep,” Lainey said.
“Thank you, Elaine. I think I will now.” The line went dead. She held the receiver until it buzzed in her ear. Then she hung up.
She looked at the pad she’d been writing on, making what she thought of as orderly notes as her father spoke. Scrawled on it were the words dead, DEAD, gray, service Saturday?? train schedule. It shocked her. She had a moment of revulsion at this vision of the way her unbidden mind worked. She tore the sheet off, ripped it into small pieces, and threw it away.
Now she made another list, a list of her children’s names: Lydia, Macklin, Randall, Nina, Mary. She sat and stared at it. Then she began to note the chores she would have to do on their behalf before she left. Retta was coming to iron in two days, and that took care of school clothes, David’s work clothes. But they’d all need socks and underwear. She’d have to do a few loads of wash. And she’d need to get a daytime sitter for the little girls, someone who’d be willing to be in charge of Randall too, once he got dropped off. They could just have cereal for breakfast, and David could manage that; but she’d have to pick up sandwich things for easy lunches, and perhaps a week’s worth of dinners. She needed to check the freezer, then, and she’d have to do a big shopping. She blocked out five days’ meals and began to make a grocery list from that.
She tried not to think of her mother; she had too much to do right now. Perhaps on the train she could relax into grief and memory. She had a quick image of herself, rocking gently to the train’s sideways rhythm, alone—smoking, perhaps weeping. It felt nearly erotic in the sudden pleasure it brought her, and she suppressed it instantly. She opened David’s drawer—he kept a carton of Camels there—and extracted a pack. She tore off the cellophane, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. Sitting in the swirl of smoke that slowly twisted and plumed above the desk lamp, she finished her list. Then she leaned back and swung the chair around to the window. Day was beginning off in the east, over the lake. She knew it in the dimming light of the stars, in the beginning of what might be green in the leaves of the mulberry tree that filled the space over their small city yard. The window was open and the air smelled fresh and she could hear from somewhere in the square the cheerful repeated cry of a bird. The night riser of his world, she thought. Around her in the house was the deep silence of her children’s sleep, a silence full of their stirrings, their dreaming, their soft breathing, as the stillness of a forest is full of a kind of noise.
Abruptly Lainey thought of her mother; she saw her waking terrified in her bed, reaching for Father. Her throat ached with a sudden pity for her in that moment, the same pity she felt for her own children when they woke in terror in the night. “Mother,” she whispered, but what she was seeing was a child. She closed her eyes tight and remembered the Scripture: Except ye become as a little child, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. For a moment, then, Lainey was so aware of the words, of the wish for her mother to be safe, that it was not so much as though she were praying as that she had become the prayer.
Then the heat of the cigarette burning in her fingers pulled her back. She swallowed and swung the chair around. She pushed the cigarette out in David’s full ashtray and got up. She stepped into the wide hallway at the top of the stairs and noiselessly padded around the circle of nicked, scarred doors opening onto it. Only Randall’s door was shut, hooked from the outside against his nighttime meanderings. The other children lay sleeping, humped or hurled out in abandon, visible in the dim light falling from the study into the hall. Mary, the baby, who had a summer cold, was snoring gently as a cat on her back in her crib, her tiny curled hand shot out between the slats. Lainey felt distant from them all, transformed by the event that had so far happened only to her. Though she wasn’t aware of her sorrow yet, a part of her had withdrawn from the children already. How amazing that they slept on! that they couldn’t somehow feel her absence, the coolness with which she looked at them. They were, for the moment, only lists of things to do, these willful, beautiful babies of hers.
At the door to her own bedroom Lainey paused too. David was turned to the wall, away from her rumpled side of the bed, away from her as she stood in the doorway. Her faint shadow fell jaggedly across the wrinkled sheet that covered him. He stirred slightly, as if he could somehow feel its touch; and at the same moment, Lainey was aware of the beginning of the nausea of morning sickness, so tentative it wouldn’t have wakened her, she wouldn’t have known she was having it if she were sleeping still. She was only three weeks late; the nausea had been with her for just a few days, and she hadn’t yet told David. He would never forgive her for her carelessness—he’d been angry enough about Nina and Mary—and she wanted to hold on to the few shreds of goodwill left between them for as long as she could.
She wanted to wake him now, to tell him what had happened to her, to her mother. To ask for his help. But her uncomfortable awareness of the secret she was keeping from him stopped her.
Pushing that under, she thought of herself as sparing him for a few hours more. Besides, she reasoned, later today his turn would come. She would go away; he would be in charge. And she would become, in some last, final sense, once more her mother’s daughter. In her confusion she thought of this, too, as a kind of betrayal of him. It made her recall, suddenly, the summers early in their marriage, when they took the children east and visited her parents at their shore house. They usually stayed for only a few weeks, but even in that short time David grew irritated at her
attachment to the family, particularly to her mother. In the evenings, she and Lainey usually sat together around the big table in the kitchen, sewing as they talked about her brothers’ marriages, about her aunts, about the series of family gatherings that Lainey, far away in Chicago, had been absent from. Lainey could feel how her love of this gossip, of these old familiar stories, pushed David out. He would withdraw to the guest cottage alone, and she would slowly feel the pull of his absence shaming her for staying on. Often by the time she left, though, he was already asleep in the bed, which smelled faintly of mildew. Then she in turn would be angry at him. Why couldn’t he join her? Why in every case did she have to give up what was dear to her to be with him? The dark trip out to the cottage over the bumpy path seemed emblematic of this. She could remember turning once at the screen door to look back through the stand of elms at the glow of the windows in her parents’ house—like a fire flickering through the shifting trees. She had felt a desolate sense of exile and loss then. She’d had to remind herself that it was precisely because of David’s exacting nature that she’d fallen in love with him. But there were several of those early summers when they hardly made love at all, and Lainey knew this was connected in David’s mind with the presence of her mother, though later he’d come to admire and perhaps even love her.
She turned away, went down the hall, and descended the back stairway, narrow and pitch black, to the kitchen. She shut the door slowly, carefully, and stepped across the linoleum floor. Effortlessly her hand found the light switch. With its sharp click, the tiny lamp over the table brought the room to life.
The old-fashioned kitchen was immense. In the low wattage of the lamp, its corners were still deep in shadow. For years David had wanted to have it done over, but Lainey resisted. The idea of putting up with workmen trooping in and out, even for only a month or two, was intolerable. They had compromised on new appliances, and so next to the white-painted Hoosier cabinet sat a nearly brand-new stove, enameled an odd mustard color—the label had called it Harvest Gold. And in the butler’s pantry, an immense refrigerator quietly hummed.