The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  I wondered what Mrs. Browning would say about the afterlife. Whenever I thought of her ditching her religion for love, it reminded me of Mom and Dad keeping up a few traditions for us kids and tossing out everything that required more commitment. “A lot of the time, I just . . . feel so lost,” I’d admitted to Grandma when we were in Miami.

  “Oh, honey. You may be lost, but God knows exactly where you are,” she’d said, patting my knee. “He knows where I am, too.”

  “But then why—” I’d said, and then stopped, because the question I was going to ask, But then why are you suffering? had made my throat constrict.

  “You are one of God’s chosen people, too. It’s in your birthright.”

  I blinked. “It is?”

  “You already are one of us.”

  “I am?” I’d wiped my eyes.

  Grandma had smiled. “You are.”

  I’d remember that moment forever, and it was all thanks to Mrs. Browning.

  “Elyse,” Aunt Andie said, and I jerked my head up to see her beckon me to come back inside. I hurried back up the patio steps, startling a green gecko.

  Inside Ray led the way across the hall to Grandma’s bedroom, which had a queen-size bed, a dresser, and a little TV. Palm leaves were slapping against the window as the ceiling fan twirled overhead, but it took me a moment to get what he wanted the three of us to see: a box of ashes sitting on the dresser. Grandma.

  “This is what she wanted,” Ray said, opening the box.

  I stared into the wooden container, trying to comprehend that this gray dirt was the person who’d made jokes in the hallway of the hospital and said, “You remind me of me!” This dirt had given birth to my mother, who’d given birth to me.

  “I’ll let you three sort out the jewelry and the clothes later,” Ray said, nodding toward Grandma’s open closet. It was strange to see her scarves and dresses hanging there; her shoes neatly paired on the floor. I felt like she should walk in and ask us why we were sipping smoothies in her bedroom. “Don’t you dare sit down on my bed, kiddo,” she’d say, pointing at my butt, which was still sopping from the patio furniture.

  Aunt Andie crossed the room to Grandma’s night table, which was littered with medicine bottles. “What about the pain medication? Can we divvy this up, too?” she asked, which made Ray smile, but Mom only scowled.

  “Here, kiddo—from Grandma,” Ray said, handing me an old weathered book, whose fabric binding was embossed with the words The Secrets of Flight. “Your grandmother’s novel.”

  “I haven’t seen that in ages,” Mom said, as I ran my fingers over the green letters.

  “Mom wrote it about her aunt who died in the war. I think I lost my copy in one of the moves,” Aunt Andie said. “Can I reread it after you?”

  I nodded slowly and opened up the front cover, where the name Margarita Schiff was on the title page. Schiff was my mother’s maiden name, but “Margarita”? “Is that a pseudonym?”

  “Yes and no,” Ray said. “Her parents named her after the actress Rita Hayworth, but later on, after they died, her grandmother changed her name to Margot—she thought Margarita sounded like a Mexican floozy.”

  From between the pages, a black-and-white picture fluttered to the floor. Gingerly, I picked up the photo of a little girl, dark hair in braids, sitting on the front stoop of a house. Ray squinted at it and then flipped it over so we could decipher the handwritten smear on the back.

  “‘Margarita, 1945,’” I sounded out.

  “She must’ve been about four.” He passed the picture to Mom and Aunt Andie. “Margot was looking at a bunch of pictures just the other day,” Ray said. “She must’ve stuck this one in here for Elyse.”

  “It’s kind of blurry,” Aunt Andie said.

  “It’s disintegrating,” Mom said, curling her lip.

  “Look closer,” Ray said, handing it back to me. “You might even recognize her smile.”

  IT RAINED THE WHOLE NEXT MORNING, SOME SORT OF REMNANT of Claudette, and it wasn’t until later afternoon that we packed a cooler of sandwiches and motored out toward the pinkish horizon for the burial at sea.

  “Is there gonna be a storm?” I asked Ray, who followed my finger where the thunderheads were gathering in the distance.

  “Nah. I checked the weather maps before we left. Might get a little wet, though.”

  Once we’d cleared a succession of buoys and the island itself looked small and distant, Ray cut the motor, and we bobbed up and down on the whitecaps in the humid breeze. The sea was unexpectedly greenish rather than the usual aqua, and stingrays kept darting just below the surface like little black omens. It was hard to relax when the life preserver that Mom made me wear was chafing around my neck.

  “I’m assuming you got the permits for this, Ray?” Mom asked right away.

  “Permits?” he asked, wiping off an icy beer from the cooler with his hand.

  “It’s illegal to dump human waste, including dead bodies, in the ocean. The Coast Guard may have a problem with us disposing of the ashes this way, if not the Key West boating authority,” Mom said.

  Before I could ask if she was just making stuff up, Aunt Andie snapped, “Are you fucking—?”

  “I got the permits, Jane,” Ray interrupted, putting a staying palm on my aunt’s shoulder. “I got the permits.” Then he cracked open the Yuengling and handed it to Mom. “Now drink up.”

  We ate our sandwiches in silence, save for the crunch of Ray’s chips, as the warm wind scudded across the deck and the thunderclouds grew closer, like a gathering army. We sat on opposite sides: Mom and me facing Ray and Aunt Andie, the wooden box of Grandma perched between us. As waves slapped the side of the boat, I thought how Grandma always said she’d fallen in love with the ocean when she fell in love with Ray. “How is it possible that I grew up landlocked?” she’d asked me once, and I felt a little bit bad for Pittsburgh, as if its crisscrossing rivers and endless bridges didn’t even count.

  “Is this what Mom wanted?” my mother suddenly asked, jerking her head toward the ashes. “That we just sit here in silence?”

  “I brought a poem,” I said, holding up a book with the one by W. H. Auden about stopping all the clocks and putting away the sun—we’d read it in Mrs. Kindlings’s class earlier in the year. “And we could look for the green flash,” I added. One time Thea had told me about the crack of green on the horizon when the last of the sun melts away, and I wanted to see it now, wanted it to be a sign from Grandma that she’d crossed over to the other side.

  “I don’t think Margot would have a problem with you girls sharing some memories,” Ray said as he swigged some beer. “Hell, I’ll start. I remember the night your mom and I met down on Duval Street. She was drunk as a skunk, and she was singing karaoke, and she had an unbelievable set of pipes, even if she always picked the most melancholy songs by Carole King.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just—trying to understand something,” Mom suddenly said to Aunt Andie, who glanced up from her sandwich. “Do you have a legal background that I wasn’t aware of? Did Mom pay for a couple of ‘Intro to Law’ courses at your community college? Because I can’t figure out why she would’ve made you the executor of her will.”

  “Margot figured it would be easier for Andie to help me out, since you’re such a busy lady.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom asked, and Ray shrugged as he swigged his beer.

  “Did you ever call her back?”

  “Maybe we should do this another day,” Aunt Andie said, setting down her sandwich. “It’s not what I imagined . . .”

  “That’s funny, it’s not what I imagined, either,” Mom snapped. “If I had known we were—scattering Mom, I would’ve brought the boys.”

  Easy, people, Grandma would be saying right about now. It’s my funeral. Can’t you all just relax? I stopped flipping through my book of poems. Trying to read on a lurching boat was making me queasy.

  “Margot said she wanted to be scattered in Key West,
and she didn’t want to wait. She’s Jewish,” Ray added with a shrug. “They bury their dead right away.”

  “Yeah. We bury our dead. In the ground.”

  I wished they would stop arguing almost as much as I wished the boat would stop rocking but neither seemed like it would be happening anytime soon. The sea kept rising up, threatening to swallow us, and soon the debate about what to do with Grandma would be pretty much beside the point after we’d drowned.

  “Oh, Jane.” Aunt Andie rolled her eyes. “This isn’t about what you want; it’s about what Mom wanted. So don’t be such a martyr.”

  “Do you even know what it’s like to work hard?” Mom asked. “To not have Mommy and Daddy pay for everything?”

  “I’ve supported myself for years!”

  “You can’t even pay the rent on freezer space for your goddamn eggs!”

  “Stop it!” I shrieked, bringing my hands to my ears. The book of poems slid off my lap and hit the deck, literally. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  There was a moment of silence, most likely of the stunned variety, before my mother said, “Elyse, honey—”

  “If you don’t have anything nice to say just shut. The fuck. Up!” I screamed.

  The beer in Ray’s hand seemed frozen halfway to his lips, and for a second I wasn’t sure if there was a wave about to break over my head. I glanced behind me, at the rolling, dark water, and then back at Ray, still watching me with a silly grin on his face. Then he raised his beer bottle, as if in salute, and said, “Here, here.”

  Aunt Andie stood up and began pacing the deck—or more like stumbling the deck, as the boat kept up its nauseating roil. The breeze had escalated to a full-fledged, wet wind, and my stubby ponytail was whipping in the air.

  “Watch it!” Mom said, when another lurch sent Aunt Andie tripping into her lap.

  “I am watching it!” Aunt Andie said, untangling herself.

  “Ladies, I’m just gonna toss this out there, but seeing the two of you together right now, you’re actually a lot alike.” They turned and fixed their eyes on Ray, who was pointing back and forth between them with his beer bottle. “You both do this thing when you’re concentrating where you look like you could kill whatever it is you’re focusing on.” They continued to stare at him, until he slowly lost his smile. “Maybe I’ll . . . go check on those permits.”

  Mom waited until he’d ducked down below to say, “Elyse, I’m sorry. I know this is hard—”

  “Don’t apologize to me, apologize to each other!” I shouted, trying to make myself heard in the rising wind. With each pitch of the boat, my stomach bobbed up in the back of my throat.

  “She’s right.” Aunt Andie slumped onto the cushion across from Mom and exhaled. “Look, Jane, I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

  “This isn’t about the money!” my mother said. “This is about Mom loving you more than she loved me!”

  Aunt Andie craned her neck forward. “Are you—kidding?”

  “You think if you had a baby, and your husband was diagnosed with cancer, Mom would’ve moved over a thousand miles away to party in Key West? I don’t think so. She would’ve stuck around and helped you raise it. She would’ve been there for you. She was always there for you.”

  “I’m a mess. I’ve always been a mess. You’ve always had your shit together. She knew you’d be okay.”

  I was relieved they’d switched from fighting to talking; now if only I could push a button and make the boat stop its roller-coaster ride. The shore seemed so far away.

  “Have you ever heard that story about the Prodigal Son?” Mom said. “There’s the irresponsible son, who goes out and blows through his parents’ inheritance partying like a rock star? And then there’s the other son just working the farm, sweating in the hot sun and doing the right thing, and then his little brother gets home, and he’s broke, and they throw him a goddamn party? It always seems like the wrong brother gets the fatted calf.”

  “I think the point is that God always welcomes you back, no matter what you’ve done,” Ray said, coming up from down below.

  Mom blinked. “Is that the point?”

  “Jane, your whole life is the fatted calf,” Aunt Andie said. “You got the guy, the house, the kids, the career.”

  “I have a little bit of everything,” Mom agreed. “And I am in pieces.”

  When my mother began to weep, Aunt Andie put her arms around her shoulders and squeezed, murmuring apologies into my mother’s ear, only the wind was taking away Aunt Andie’s words, as the boat kept rising and falling. I wished Holden would’ve held me like that and told me he was sorry. I wished Daddy would come back home, and Grandma were still here. Sobs started to well up inside me, but when I opened my mouth to howl, the only sound that came out was vomit, spewing all over the deck.

  “Whoa! Man down! Man down!” Ray said, quickly setting down his beer.

  I hurled again, only this time the wind blew it back in my face. Aunt Andie and Mom—showered with stomach acid rain—shrieked from somewhere behind me.

  “Oh my God! Elyse! Are you all right?” Mom asked, all concerned. Brownish, yellow puke was splattered everywhere; Aunt Andie was wiping it off the box of Grandma. “Oh, sweetie . . .” Mom said, smiling in spite of herself.

  “I’m not feeling so good,” I said, woozily, stumbling back and forth with the boat. My front felt sticky with puke, but when Ray handed me a towel, I automatically started wiping off the deck cushions.

  “Aw, buddy, that towel’s for you. If you feel like you’re gonna throw up again, maybe don’t aim right into the wind.”

  “You feel better now?” Aunt Andie asked, as Mom scooted next to me and wrapped me up in a new, fresh towel, and I nodded, feebly. “Wow. I haven’t been puked on since Emmett Socoletti drank too much at prom,” Aunt Andie added, and I felt Mom’s shoulders shaking with laughter, even while she was hugging me.

  “He drank something red—grain alcohol and Kool-Aid, right? You should’ve seen the front of her dress. Grandma thought she’d been stabbed,” Mom said, and she and Aunt Andie cracked up, giddy tears rolling down their cheeks.

  It seemed hard to believe this was the miraculous reunion designed by Grandma when my eyes stung and my throat burned. But then again, it had been years since I’d seen Aunt Andie and Mom laugh at the same time.

  “What do you say we head back, kiddo?” Ray asked me.

  “What about Grandma?” I asked, just as swell of wave sent the bow of the boat crashing down and the box of Grandma toppled right off the side and into the ocean.

  Mom jumped up with a yelp, and Aunt Andie made some weird sort of utterance—almost like a moan—and even Ray stood there, his mouth sagging open as he scratched his head. I joined them at the rail and peered into the green water. It was amazing how quickly the wooden box had been swallowed. The ashes made tiny explosions under the surface of the sea. The four of us stared at the water for a long time as if the ocean were one of those Magic Eight Balls, and we were waiting for an answer.

  “Can we go home now?” I finally asked.

  Ray nodded slowly. Then he moved back to the steering wheel and fired up the engine.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Bronx

  1945

  Five months after leaving Beacon Street, I am in New York hanging clothes to dry on the fire escape outside my window and half-watching the children playing stickball in the street when I notice Mrs. Prospero, a perpetual fixture on the stoop of our building, chatting with a woman on the street below. I squint and then gasp, realizing belatedly that the woman in the checkered dress with the velvet hat who’s been talking to Mrs. Prospero for the last five minutes is none other than my own mother.

  “Mama!” I call, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. Mrs. Prospero nods her head and opens the door to our building, so I climb back in the window and slam it shut. I have eight flights. Eight flights until Mama crosses the threshold into my new, married life; eight flights to hide everything. Suddenly franti
c, I toss clothes into the closet and dishes into the sink. In the bedroom, I slip off my penny loafers and then bounce across the mattress to reach for the crucifix hanging over the bed. After shoving the wooden Jesus into a drawer of my night table, I rush back into the kitchen again, where Mrs. Prospero’s voice is trailing in from the hall. She’s saying something about what a fine couple we are, so nice to have as neighbors, how proud of us Mama must be—a son-in-law who’s going to be a doctor! I unlatch three locks and then stop, take a deep breath, and push my little gold cross under my ruffled blouse. Then I fling open the door and smile and thank Mrs. P before quickly pulling Mama—who’s still panting from the steps—into the apartment.

  “You’re here!” I say, hugging my mother before latching the door behind me. Her face looks older and wearier than when I left last spring, and her hair more gray. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I add, breathless.

  “I sent you a letter.” Her dark eyes dart around like dragonflies, looking for a lovely place to rest on, as she unbuttons her wool coat. I would tell her that the letter just arrived yesterday, that I’m still in the middle of writing her back, proposing I visit her in Pittsburgh rather than put her up in our tiny apartment right now, but Mama keeps peering about as if searching for something. I show her the tiny space like a real estate agent hoping to make a sale. It’s a one-bedroom apartment with a bathtub in the living room. The entire tour takes about a minute.

  “. . . And this is where Rita will sleep,” I say, cracking the door to our bedroom and then quickly closing it again, suddenly self-conscious about the unmade bed, the impropriety it represents rather than sloppiness. Since we eloped last spring, I still have the feeling that Mama doesn’t believe Sol and I are actually married.

  “But that’s your room,” Mama says. “She can’t stay in there.”

  “Sol and I will sleep in the living room,” I say.

  “Where? In the bathtub?” she asks, and I manage to laugh as if she’s joking.