Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  At home Mama went around answering the doorbell and the interminably ringing telephone with a weird vivacious smile on her face; Matthew, home from law school, had the moony, famished look of a child in a UNICEF brochure. The three of us sat eating lunch without the vaguest idea of what to talk about: the web of assumptions, memories, and old associations that makes conversations within families as automatic as breathing had abruptly been ruptured for us, and we had to find new ways to behave toward one another.

  After lunch we went to the hospital, which was a very modern suburban one, set like a country club on top of rolling turf hills that intersected the golf course of an actual country club next door. There in a small white room lay my father, absurdest of anyone in the family, breathing into a respirator in loud, sharp gasps that seemed affected to me, his eyebrows drawn down above his closed eyes and his cheeks puffed in a petulant, willful expression like a child having a tantrum. Mama sat and held his hand and talked into his ear, but I looked at him and wanted to shake him the way you shake a naughty child. I felt incensed at him, as if he’d played me a particularly nasty trick.

  Outside the hospital windows a flock of sparrows wheeled on a whitish sky from which a few big flakes of snow were falling; to the west a development of ranch houses spread over the brown hills. I walked over to the window, stuck my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, and pressed my nose hard against the glass, thinking about times when Daddy had played jokes on me. Once when I was very little he had told me that a perfectly ordinary rosebush that he had bought at J. C. Penney was a magic flowering tree whose blossoms would form letters that would spell out my name. It had been a brief, idle tale, invented to relieve the tedium of a trip home from the shopping center, but I had dwelt on the idea all winter and spring, and in summer when the bush brought forth a perfectly ordinary constellation of roses, I had been filled with disappointment and rage.

  Matthew came and stood beside me at the window, looking ridiculously young in a faded Atlantic City sweatshirt under a sports jacket. “What are we going to do?” he said, rubbing his chin with his knuckles.

  “What are we going to do about what?” I said, with my nose still pressed against the window, so that a circle of water vapor grew and shrank on the glass with my breath. “Matty, have you ever heard of a kind of flowering bush that spells out letters?”

  Matthew looked at me. “You know, you’re being really obnoxious,” he said. “You’re not helping anything at all.”

  A nurse came up to us and told us that visiting hours for Reverend Phillips were over. I went up to the bed and laid three fingers on my father’s cheek, as one does to awaken a sleeper, but the petulant expression, the childish heaving breaths did not change. Through my fingers, up my arm like an electric shock, ran the intimation of an anguish more complete than any I had ever experienced. I jerked my hand away and walked quickly out of the hospital room, pausing only to mutter to Matthew, “It’s not me who’s behaving badly!”

  3

  That night it snowed harder, a wet spring snow that threatened to break down the branches of the old azaleas around our house. At six the next morning, Mama, Matthew, and I were summoned to the hospital because Daddy had stopped breathing. The willful, childish expression had vanished from his face; within the chrome bars of the bed he looked tranquil, yet somehow more sophisticated than he had ever looked in life, with an aloof, delicately amused expression, as if his last thought had been a witticism of such subtlety that none of us could have appreciated it. And the joke was, I thought, that he wasn’t there—he had slipped out of our lives as swiftly and fantastically as characters in children’s stories stepped out of everyday life into Oz, or the country back of the North Wind. I leaned over the bed and rubbed my cheek against his big freckled wrist and hand that had assisted at so many christenings, weddings, baptisms, and deathbeds, and felt for the first time the limited contours of a body that had often seemed to me to be larger than life.

  Mama was crying, and a nurse with a turned-up nose gave her a cup of pink liquid to drink. Two doctors had been assigned to the case: Dr. Casey, who was tall, thin, and balding, with a good-humored, rather playful look on his face, and Dr. Henry, a friend of my father’s, who was short, fat, and grave. Dr. Casey came into the room and said to Mama, “We’re all so sorry about your husband, Mrs. Phillips. There are many of us here who followed his civil-rights work with great interest.”

  “His work?” said my mother in a strange, slow voice. “His work killed him.” She had a faintly puzzled look in her eyes, as if she had no idea what she was saying.

  “And one thing you can be glad of is that he certainly felt no pain,” continued Dr. Casey smoothly. He stroked his wispy sideburns and darted at me a puzzling little wink, a wink that seemed less flirtatious than hortatory, the kind of wink a scoutmaster might dart at a charge who seemed in danger of slacking off. “There was no suffering at all.”

  “He left that for us,” said Matthew flatly, and I stared at him. It occurred to me for the first time in my life that my mother, my brother, and I had each had a separate bond to my father, unfathomable to the others: now each of us had his own mysterious store of anger and grief.

  4

  The first person who arrived when we got home from the hospital was Mrs. Eakins, head of the Youth Choir and the Women’s Missionary Guild at New African. Mrs. Eakins was a small, energetic old woman with a squashed little dark-skinned face like a raisin—one of the avid churchwomen whom my mother sometimes described as being willing to shed any amount of Christian blood for my father. She rang the bell and then walked into the house before anyone came to the door. “I know it’s not even nine o’clock in the morning,” she said breathlessly, “but I had to find out how he is!”

  “He died very early this morning,” said my mother.

  At those words Mrs. Eakins simply flung herself on the living-room floor, an act that showed a resilience of muscle I never would have dreamed she had. “Oh, my Lord, he’s dead! My pastor is dead!” she shrieked in a hoarse, guttural voice that seemed sexless and grotesque, as if a demon were roaring from inside her. The skirt of her dark-blue suit rucked itself up to show a shameless piece of white nylon slip, and her feet, in black oxfords and thick elastic stockings, beat a brief tattoo on the carpet. The sight was both pathetic and monstrous. Matthew, Mama, and I, our own pain eclipsed, helped her over to the sofa and stood by numbly as the old woman continued to shriek and writhe like a possessed person. As I watched, I reflected that she was the first of many who would try to make my father’s death into something all their own.

  5

  In the next few days, the house seemed to fill up with old women. There were my father’s cousins from Washington, there was my great-aunt Madeline Chavis from Binghamton, there was the crowd of indestructible aged ladies who throughout my childhood and adolescence had formed a murmuring background frieze for events at New African. The house overflowed with a smell of old-fashioned cologne and pomade, and with a continuous light, sorrowful clucking, as if the big rooms had been invaded by a flock of elderly hens. It was impossible for me to turn around without being hugged and kissed by some member of that aged sisterhood. Whether she was brown- or yellow- or pink-skinned, whether she wore a wig or had thin gray hair drawn back into a bun, she always gave me the same shrewd, probing glance before embracing me. The old women filled the guest bedroom with little plastic suitcases full of hairclips and faded flannel nightgowns, and they spirited my mother away somewhere—possibly to her bedroom, which had become a darkened sanctuary from which someone was always emerging with a cup and saucer on a tray.

  Every one of the old women brought food—glorious, near-phantasmagorical food that piled up in the kitchen like a treasure from the Arabian Nights. It was the weighty southern food of my childhood holidays, but with a grandeur and ambitiousness to it that, on its own, established an occasion of high solemnity. Overflowing from the refrigerator onto the kitchen table and counters were a roast goo
se, a crown roast of pork, a couple of pheasants shot in Maryland by Deacon Leech, a corn pudding stuffed with oysters, glittering jars of homemade pickles and preserves, and desserts of all description, dominated by an oceanic rice pudding flavored with oranges, and a mountainous chocolate poundcake covered with rum icing and dotted with pecans. Often in the days before the funeral I found myself creeping into the kitchen at odd hours when it was unguarded by the aged fairy godmothers of our household; all alone, I would greedily, frantically taste everything, as if I were on the track of a subtle flavor that continued to elude me.

  Directed by my aunts Lily and May, the old women answered the phone and the doorbell and at the same time began an inconspicuous but thorough campaign of household tasks. The crystal was washed and set out ready for use on the sideboard, linen towels were starched and placed in the bathrooms for the guests who came and went, shades all over the house were dusted and then lowered to a uniform height, so that the rooms lay in a gleamig duskiness, and the house, with its low-voiced, somberly dressed visitors, had become an entirely public place.

  There was nothing at all for me to do. Mama had disappeared, and Matthew spent much of his time closeted with Uncle Freddy and a lawyer. To escape the old women, I sat upstairs in the unused maid’s bathroom at the back of the house, where a trickling stream of water made rust streaks in a claw-footed bathtub, and a blue spruce scratched gloomily at the pane. I sat on the floor among stacks of old magazines and the volumes of an outdated World Book Encyclopedia, reading Two Years before the Mast, one of the books I was analyzing for my thesis. When I got tired of that, I scanned the party jokes from Matthew’s old Playboys and looked at National Geographic diagrams of the sacrificial well at Chichén Itzá. One afternoon Matthew came in and found me leafing through the P volume of the World Book. “Look,” said Matthew, dropping down on his knees beside me and grabbing the book. He opened it to a picture we’d both loved when we were little: a panorama of the Pleistocene Epoch in which everything—the rolling savannahs, the gentle hills, the curiously gnarled trees, the pelts of the big early mammals who posed in heroic attitudes around the landscape—had the same tinge of autumnal gold. “I’ll be the saber-tooth,” he said, his narrow, dark-lashed gaze giving me the familiar vertiginous sense of looking into my own eyes.

  “I’m the woolly mammoth,” I said.

  It was a game we used to play with the animals in the picture: a sort of Rock, Scissors, Paper that was more interesting than it sounded because you pretended to be the animal you picked and tried to figure out ways to beat the others. We hadn’t played it seriously for years, but the words to it were part of the private coded language we had shared, and the picture seemed a portrait of an epoch in our lives. It was a time, I realized, that was now as remote from Matthew and me as if a glacier had covered it. After a few seconds, my brother and I couldn’t look at the World Book or at each other any more. I stared down at the knees of my jeans, which were white with dust, and Matthew, without saying anything else, got up and walked away.

  6

  On the night of my father’s funeral, a policeman and four members of the Ushers’ Guild were directing the crowd outside the church. By the time our limousine pulled up, they had begun to tell people that all the pews were filled. I had rarely been to the church at night; lit from the inside, the big Gothic building looked grander and more mysterious than it did in the daytime. The stained-glass windows shone and the bells rang out over the blocks of row houses bounded by the Delaware River and the railroad yards—neighborhoods where my parents had grown up, and which they had abandoned to raise their children outside the city.

  I was dressed like an heiress: the old women who had shaken our household into the proper symbolic order had produced from somewhere a slim black wool dress, a matching black coat with a fur collar, sleek leather shoes, and a lace mantilla, all of these things of an uncompromising luxurious quality that dazzled me a bit. Sometimes at school I had played at dressing up, but I had never had clothes like these, nor had I ever ridden in a limousine. When I saw how expensive and beautiful I looked, I was filled with a surge of self-congratulatory excitement, and with the feeling of assuming a glamorous new character with the clothes. Once seated in the gray interior of the big black car, I leaned my head against the window glass in an affected manner, hoping that passers-by in the March night would see and admire me as a tragic heroine.

  As we entered the church, Mama supported by Uncle Freddy and old Deacon Cronin, the organ was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Through the music came the breathless feeling of pressure, the vast rustling murmur of a packed crowd. There were more people than I had ever seen at New African before, squeezed even into the upstairs balconies that I had seen filled only during Daddy’s great Easter and Christmas ceremonies. They stood up to see us come in, and the force of that mass concentration on our small group caused a blush of heat over my body, as if I were under the lens of a burning-glass. The light in the church was dim, almost amber, giving the gilt-and-blue ceiling, the massive oak altar, and the red-curtained baptismal pool the look of an old-fashioned hand-colored photograph. The rustling rows of somberly dressed people made me think of a stand of dark grain or bamboo. When I entered, I looked automatically for my father in the pulpit; he wasn’t there, but in an instant I saw his face down below, lying in what seemed to be a bassinet of flowers. For a minute I felt absurdly pleased that he should be, as usual, at the center of things at the church, but then the sight of his face among the flowers began to puzzle and disturb me. It was an image that I was to return to many times in the months and years that followed, but I could never decide what to think about it.

  There were three speakers at the funeral: Dr. Shelton Granger, a white minister who had worked with Daddy in civil-rights election campaigns in Alabama; Father Gerald Ramsay, an Episcopal minister and neighbor of ours, whose kind, lopsided brown face had been a familiar sight at our dinner table; and Stuart Penn, who had grown up with Daddy at New African and had flown in from Washington, where he headed a commission for poor people and had his name constantly in the papers. Penn had a sallow, angular face, a bit like my father’s, and a forceful, blunt, magnetic way of speaking. He called my father “Jimmy,” as no one else but my mother did, and at one point in his eulogy he turned suddenly in the pulpit and spoke directly to Matthew and me. “I would like to request, for Jimmy’s sake, that you two kids try to do something out of the ordinary with your lives,” he said, in a voice that sounded harsh and peremptory, as if he were giving an order.

  I knew Penn only as one of the men in suits who had filled the living room with cigarette smoke and argument throughout my childhood; but when his bulging, rather cold brown eyes brushed across mine as I sat in the pew, I had the sensation—for the first time in many days—of connecting with my father. At the same time, I was aware of the desire to say something: a word, even a syllable, of explanation or assent. The moment came and passed almost instantaneously, and I had no idea what I might have said. Again I was aware only of the amber light, the great bank of flowers that half hid my father’s face, and the massed, inquisitive gaze of the crowd on my black lace and fur. It was much the easiest to pretend to be a heroine.

  7

  The next day at about noon I went for a walk, grabbing out of an upstairs closet an old purple ski jacket that I had bought back in ninth grade. When the jacket was new, it had been puffy and stylish, with a crisp white lining printed with tiny purple pines; now it was dirty and deflated-looking, with a rip in the left arm where my mother, who wore it to hang out clothes, had caught it on a branch. In one pocket I found a wadded-up school lunch ticket with two meals still unpunched, and in the other I found an ancient stick of chewing gum, its wrapper faded to a yellowish gray. I put the gum in my mouth as I went out the door, and it immediately dissolved into a thousand tiny crumbs, each with a wisp of flavor that was like a memory of spearmint.

  Outside it was gray and chilly and windless, one of the absolu
tely nondescript March days that nevertheless have about them a sense of secret excitement, a silent, fulminating sense of preparation for the coming change of season. Patches of dirty snow still lay on lawns and in gutters up and down the street, but the branches of the maple trees were knobby with buds. I wasn’t thinking much about warm weather. To me, the stucco and fieldstone houses with their muddy lawns in the suburban noonday stillness looked inexpressibly sloppy and depressing. As I turned the corner of my street and walked toward Hopkins Place, where the houses were big and Victorian and beginning to be torn down for garden apartments, I started to have the strange idea that every house I passed was in poor repair; was, in fact, falling to pieces as I looked at it. For a very brief instant, the space of a blink, I seemed to be walking on a broad dirt road in the middle of a tremendous mutable landscape in which the main tendency seemed to be to break down, to decay. “People ought to try to keep up their property!” I thought irritably, and then realized that I had spoken aloud.