Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  I tell her I want her to come visit, knowing that she will not. She’s calling from a pay phone. I’m to send the money to a PO box in Minot as usual. She’s careful that I can’t find her. North Dakota is all I know.

  WE JUST got back from Publix. Mr. Inconspicuous and his dog Casual, just out for a stroll past the Dumpster in back of the supermarket. First we have a plastic bag of garbage, and then we don’t. Annick’s asleep thanks to my Ambien, and I’m at the desk, writing what you’ve just read because if I don’t write, I’ll be up all night fantasizing about catching and punishing the bin thief. Is a bin thief even capable of feeling shame and humiliation? I’ve written myself back to where we were, it seems. Ready to move back and move on. We’re in Requiem. It’s freezing. Dad has forgotten his keys. Audrey has a spare in her boot.

  Red and Violet come upstairs in their pajamas and robes when they hear the footfalls on their ceiling. Dad jacks up the heat. The radiators clang and hiss. Stevie leaves her jacket on. Red hands me a shopping bag full of mail and says how happy he is to see us, but I can tell he’s a little flustered by Stevie’s presence. Violet hugs Audrey and shakes hands with Drake. She has tears in her eyes and a miner’s lamp on her head. It’s a Christmas gift from Red. So she can read in bed without disturbing him. Red pulls Dad aside and tells him he doesn’t know if this domestic arrangement with Stevie is kosher. The gal’s name’s not on the rental agreement or anything.

  Dad says, “There is no rental agreement, Red. And this is our family now.”

  “And what about Frances?”

  “We’ll wait and see.”

  “What are you, Mormon now?”

  “Stevie and I aren’t married.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Violet takes Red’s arm and says they’ll let us settle in. They head downstairs. Deluxe sniffs around the parlor and finds an old friend, a blue cloth mousie missing its cotton eyes, behind the sofa. He bites onto the mousie and hops up on the TV, where he settles into his Easter basket. I stand in the bathroom and stare at the bathtub. I guess I expect to understand something, but I don’t. Smells like bleach. Stevie checks the fridge and decides we need groceries right away. She and Dad head off to Iandoli’s. I want to call Veronica, but the phone is dead. I go through the mail and put the utility bills in one pile, the medical bills in another. I toss out the catalogues and the Reader’s Digest after I read the article on Joe Valachi and the Cosa Nostra, which Nunzie once told me did not even exist. We had been talking about drug trafficking. Nunzie was helping me with a paper I was writing for civics class. He said if the Mafia existed, it would not dirty its hands with drugs. Trust me. It’s your Puerto Ricans behind it.

  I said, “How do you know?”

  “I’m a lawyer, aren’t I?”

  “But Joe Valachi says—”

  “Joe Valachi is a blatta. Capisce? A cockroach.” And then he put the sole of his shoe down on an imaginary bug and crushed it into the floor.

  I give Audrey and Drake all the holiday cards, and they cut out the pictures and arrange what we’d now call a graphic novel on the kitchen floor. Then they cut out speech balloons and write the dialogue. The story’s called “What Will Santa Do?” and it’s about how it’s Christmas Eve, and Santa’s favorite elf, Danny, is very sick, and Santa has to decide between delivering gifts to all the girls and boys of the world or getting Danny to a hospital in Hartford, Coconut, which is the only place they treat Danny’s condition, which is called crimson fever, and which is almost always fatal in elves. Already his tiny heart is pumping so fiercely that he’s bleeding from the eyes. It turns out that Audrey and Drake’s Santa is a compassionate boss, a loyal friend, and many children are left in tears on Christmas morning, and many parents are left to wonder just what their evidently devious and undeserving children have been up to behind their backs.

  I open the annual holiday letter from Uncle Gunner and Aunt Tree and read it. There’s a photo of their dog Blaster wearing fabric antlers, sitting by a fireplace. Tree and I are halfway through our marriage counseling sessions, and Dr. Burl is amazed at our progress. And so are we, quite frankly. I’ll admit it took me several weeks to recover from the disturbing revelation of Tree’s affair with Herb Gallant—I mean who could figure she’d cat around with a fat and balding fish and game officer—but my subsequent dalliance with Lucille Potvin helped both to ease my pain and to level the therapeutic playing field. And so on. I find out that their older boy, my cousin Errol, is now an import-exporter in Tucson, and his teeth have started to fall out. The other son, Blaine, is in a band with an obscene name that came in second in the Hampton Beach Battle of the Bands on Labor Day weekend. And he’s in AA now, and he’s at step nine, and this letter will serve as his amends to all parties offended and/or harmed.

  Stevie and Dad come in laughing and hauling the groceries. Stevie can’t believe they didn’t have grits at Iandoli’s. This is barbaric!

  Dad says, “They don’t sell grits anywhere in Requiem.”

  Audrey puts on the country music station and dances with Drake to “It’s Only Make Believe.” Stevie thinks we’ll have raviolis. How does that sound? It sounds great. With a nice pesto sauce. Dad unpacks the groceries, and I put them away, since I’m the only one there who understands Mom’s storage system. She keeps her olive oil in the creamer, her cream in the sugar bowl, sugar in the coffee can, coffee in a fruit bowl, fruit in the bread box, and bread in the oven. Canned goods go under the pantry counter; boxed goods over the counter in the cabinet by the window; herbs, spices, bottled and jarred food in the cabinet next to that. Tomatoes go on the windowsill.

  After supper I perk a pot of coffee and set out the Fig Newtons on the kitchen table while Dad and Stevie do the dishes. Audrey and Drake started a club at supper they were calling the Junior Thunder Riders. You have to be a cowpoke and devotee of Dr. Valentine Bondurant to join. They’re out in the back hall now building some kind of clubhouse. The first thing they made was a sign that said NO ADULTS ALLOWED PLEASE. The storm windows rattle in the wind. The three of us sit at the table, quiet and smiling. What have we wrought? I wonder. I’m going back to school in the morning after more than a week’s absence and will probably get yelled at, maybe slapped or exiled to the cloakroom until I learn my lesson, but I don’t care. I kind of miss Sister Casilda. I only hope no one has messed with my desk.

  I say, “Dad, you’ll have to write me a note.”

  “What should I tell them?”

  “That I’ve had a wicked case of crimson fever.”

  Audrey, of course, is finished with the nuns, so Dad has agreed to enroll her and Drake down the street at Robert Benchley Elementary, the rhyming school, as Audrey calls it. I ask Dad when we’ll get to see Mom.

  “When they let us.”

  “And then what?”

  Dad looks at Stevie and then at his coffee. Why did I just stir up the future when I’m so comfortable sitting here and talking without Mom around? When I think how sweet this is and that Mom can’t be part of it, I feel guilty. Traitorous. That’s why.

  After our baths, we crawl into bed. Dad set up a cot for Drake in Audrey’s room, not in the Junior Thunder Riders’ bunkhouse. Stevie tucks them in and reads them Pecos Bill start to finish. She comes to my room to say goodnight. I ask her how she likes it here so far.

  “Like it fine.”

  “It’s cold, though.”

  “You miss your mom, don’t you?”

  “Thanks for getting us home.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “How did you get him to go for that?”

  “Was his idea. I think he wants to do the right thing by everyone. Come clean. Where do we go from here?”

  “It’s not just for him to decide.”

  “And we’ll remind him of that.”

  When I mention school in the morning, Stevie tells me about her very first day of school, how she got lost walking home. First she was in a line of students, and then she wa
s alone and didn’t recognize the neighborhood. She stood by a wisteria and waited for her mom. Then she tried to retrace her steps to school but came to a shabby yellow house. She pretended her doll Cindy was with her and they assured each other that rescue was on the way. Let’s not cry. A lady came out of the yellow house and yelled, You don’t belong here, girl; this ain’t your house. And now she did cry. A grizzled old yardman, a stranger, rode up on his bicycle, a lawn mower balanced in the basket and a machete slung across his back. He asked little Stevie where she lived, but she had forgotten her address. There it is, on your lunch box, he said. See, right there. Eleven-oh-one Filhiol Street. Does that sound right? It did. She climbed up on his crossbar and he rode her home.

  I say, “Did you ever see him again?”

  “For a long time I did, but I don’t think he remembered me. And then he was gone.”

  I fall asleep and dream about Mom with antlers. She’s munching on cucumber plants in Red’s garden. And then we realize that I’m holding a rifle. She backs away. I say it’s just an air rifle. She asks me if I’m going to shoot her.

  “Do you need shooting?”

  She’s a Mental Case

  I DIDN’T GET to see Mom again until April when she was released from Requiem State Hospital. When Dad was not on the road, he visited Mom on Sundays, visitors’ day. He’d take Mom a carton of Pall Malls and a case of Beemans gum. He wouldn’t take me along. He said, The nuthouse is not a place for kids. Some Sundays he’d come home so shaken that he could hardly breathe. He’d sit at the table, pour himself a belt of whiskey, and say, You wouldn’t believe what goes on in there. All the phones are off the hook. You know what I’m saying? People stumbling around in circles mumbling to themselves. They all think they’re invisible. And your mother’s afraid. She thinks everyone is watching her. And, you know, she’s right. The nurses, the aides, the doctors, the other patients—they’re all staring, waiting for the first unseemly gesture or unsuitable word. We need to get her the hell out of there, Johnny. She sends her love.

  Our timing was fortunate. Apparently around 1967 or ’8 or so there was a paradigm shift in the Massachusetts mental healthcare industry. Someone had figured out that warehousing fragile, skittish, and volatile people, locking them in rooms with barred windows, was not, in fact, caring for them, was not curing them, but was instead shattering their lives. Maybe that someone had looked up mental and health in a dictionary and learned that together they meant something like “to return the mind to soundness and wholeness.” Return is the operative word, of course. If you’ve never been whole, if you’ve always been cracked, well, just unpack your bags. Life in the asylum was harrowing and hopeless, the industry admitted, and so a move was begun to reintroduce those able patients, those not utterly helpless and profoundly disabled, to the community.

  Mom moved into a halfway house on Main Street across from the city’s methadone clinic and two blocks from Elizabeth Bishop Park, where the junkies liked to assemble and to sleep in the warmer months. And that’s where I visited her, in her new and temporary—her halfway—home. The house itself was a three-story Neocolonial that must have been grand in its day. There were two windowed dormers facing the street on the top floor like a pair of glassy eyes, and a long flight of flagstone stairs leading to a columned porch. The original clapboards had been not very artfully covered with white aluminum siding which was dented in places and fading to gray. A hand-painted sign was planted by the forsythia bushes. NO TRESSPASSING! OR LORTERING! KEEP OFF OF PROPERITY!! The building, I found out later, was owned by my dentist and his lawyer brother, notorious slumlords. Dr. Grenier liked to work without Novocain to save time. He filled eighteen of my teeth and pulled three. All eighteen cavities fell out within five years. But let’s not get started on my teeth.

  I pressed the buzzard, Audrey’s word for buzzer. Nothing. I knocked and waited. A man in a satiny blue and yellow Paramount Drum and Bugle Corps jacket answered the door. He was eating out of a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee Lasagna and Egg Noodles. He had a marinara mustache. He said, Welcome to the House of Redundants. He licked his spoon, turned it over, and licked it again. I told him I was here to see my mother and said her name. He said, My wife didn’t leave me, my friend. I left me. And then he turned, farted, and shuffled away down the hall.

  Mom’s room was in the back of the house on the first floor. I knocked. The hall smelled like cat piss and cigarettes. I yelled out my name. Mom said, It’s open. Come in if you’re beautiful. She was sitting at a table in front of a bright window, so I could only see her in silhouette. She held out her arms. She could have been looking at me or away from me. We hugged. She said, It’s really you, Johnny. She smiled and wiped her eyes. Out the window, a row of galvanized garbage cans and the backside of Atamian Auto Body. Mom was doing a crossword puzzle. She asked me what my poison was. She had ZaRex, instant coffee, and tap water. I said I wasn’t thirsty.

  She said, “Six-letter word for the future.”

  “Utopia.”

  “Starts with an o.”

  “Offing.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “It is.”

  “The opposite of awning?”

  “The foreseeable future.”

  She had a framed color print of the Virgin Mary over her dresser. Mary’s heart was exposed and a tongue of flame licked the air above it. A garland of white roses encircled the heart although you couldn’t really know that because you couldn’t see the back of the heart. You just assumed it. At first glance, Mary seemed to be about fifteen and completely befuddled by this extracorporeal event, but then you look again, and she seems to be thirty, jaded, and bored, like she might be thinking, And now for my next trick.

  Mom took my hand in hers and kissed my fingers. “So great to see you again, Johnny.”

  “Me and not my replacement?”

  “Yeah, what the hell was that all about, huh?” She shook her head. “Jeez, Louise!”

  “You scared us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She wiped her eyes with a balled-up tissue. “Look at me; I’m supposed to be getting better.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “It would be a little crowded, don’t you think?”

  “Dad told you about Stevie.”

  She nodded. “I’m just trying to be here now.” She tapped her fist on the table at each word. “Be here now.” She closed her eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Thinking too far ahead freaks me out.”

  “Do you have a radio on?”

  “I don’t own a radio.”

  “I hear music.”

  “It’s from upstairs. It travels through the hot water pipes. What are they singing?”

  “‘Volare.’”

  Mom explained that she was doing crossword puzzles these days as a way to stay sharp, alert, focused, and aware. She had read an article in the paper about it. Crossword puzzles and walking ward off dementia. If my grandmother had done puzzles, maybe she wouldn’t have wound up running naked down Fairmont Avenue at three in the afternoon. It was part of a bigger self-improvement kick she was on. “I’m going to get well,” she said.

  “I know you are.”

  “I’ve been to hell, and I’ve come back. That’s how I feel.” She spooned coffee crystals into her mug, walked to the sink, and filled the mug with hot water. “You know what hell is like, Johnny?”

  “Fires.”

  “Not the hell the priests made up to keep us in line. The real hell. The hell on earth.” She sat, sprinkled Cremora into her coffee, and stirred.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t know what it’s like.”

  She looked out the window. “Hell is being lonely, bored, poor, unnecessary, and inconsolable.” She shut her eyes and folded her hands. “And when you’re there, you feel all brittle, like you could snap apart at any second, like you could sit down wrong and just break your hip, fall to pieces. Or you could take a step,
and your leg would crack and splinter. So you don’t move. And you can’t hold a thought. A thought sparkles and fades. And then another lights up, and then a galaxy of them, and then they’re gone. If you can’t hold a thought, you can’t help yourself. The best you can do is be still and keep your balance because you know if you fall you won’t get up.” She held the table with both hands and looked at me. “You have no control of your life in hell. Everyone else wants to be the boss of you. Everyone knows what’s good for you. Even though not a one knows what you’re thinking or feeling. And if you tell them what you’re really thinking or feeling, they don’t like it or they don’t believe it. The voices aren’t real, they say. Well, if they weren’t real, I wouldn’t hear them, would I?”

  “But now you’re in control, right?”

  “I’m learning how to act appropriately in the milieu.”

  “What?”

  “I tell Dr. Reininger that he’s helping me even when he isn’t. I ignore the side effects of the Nirvanax and smile.”

  “Are you just pretending to be better?”

  “I’m healthy enough to know how to act. I may not be the sanest person in this house, but I’m the strongest. I’ll be the first one to leave. Me and Charlie.” She shook her head. “I worry about Audrey. She’s so much like me.”

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  We walked to the hospitality room so I could meet Charlie. A guy about four hundred pounds sat lounging on and occupying most of the couch. He was wrapped in a soiled bedsheet and nothing else. His hair was long, greasy, and gray. The skin on his feet was purple. His ankles were swollen. He asked me what I thought of his marvelous tits. Mom told him to zip it. She said, “You seen Charlie?”

  “Nope.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t have a watch.” And to prove it, he held up both of his enormous arms.

  She told me, “He’ll be here soon.” She looked at the man on the couch. “What was going on with Pat and Azad last night? All the screaming.”

  He picked up a can of Reddi-wip off the coffee table and squirted some in his mouth. “Azad was Satan again, and he wanted to have his way with St. Patricia.”