by Mary Carmen
“I agree this may be a fiasco,” I told Muzz. “I appreciate your cutting through all the nonsense and giving me a good, practical opinion. I think I am just feeling guilty for leaving Mother in that dormitory for so many years.”
A couple of hours later we were back at the door, ringing the bell. Mr. Eyres showed us right in.
“I’ve been working on another planet for over thirty years,” I started to explain. “My mother moved to a retirement home in my absence, and she seems to have made friends there. The place is horrible, and I want to have you help me redecorate three rooms so at least she will be more comfortable.”
“They’re all horrible. Most of the operators ought to be indicted for grand larceny,” Mr. Eyres insisted.
I explained the situation with the three rooms and the two old ladies. Then I took out my computer and showed Mr. Eyres my photographs of the wonderful Federalist suite from the spacecraft and the photographs Muzz had taken at Mother’s home.
“Well, we can’t do much with the bathrooms. Retirement homes usually will not allow bathtubs because people are more likely to slip getting in and out,” Mr. Eyres told us. “However, we can make them more attractive. I would also suggest adding more handrails.”
We agreed we would go to New Kensington together on the next day to see the rooms and to take measurements.
Two days later, after the measurements had been taken and the appropriate comments on the quality of this housing had been heard, we met again to go over the options.
“Well, we can go with antiques or we can go with reproductions,” Mr. Eyres began. “With the antiques, the schedule may well be five years. With the reproductions, I can usually get everything in six months.”
“Yes, I’m not sure we have five years,” I said. Muzz nodded vigorously, as if the six months might even be a stretch.
Mr. Eyres said he would like to use the next month to complete the painting and the papering. I was not sure what we would do with the old ladies while he was working, but he further suggested he would work on one room at a time, giving me two rooms free to use as bedrooms for my mother and Mrs. Holly.
He also suggested visiting used furniture stores to find temporary pieces that would be in place until the reproductions were delivered. He assured me the wallpapers, carpets, lighting fixtures, and fabrics for draperies would be able to be delivered within a few weeks, especially if he went to Albany to find them.
Finally Mr. Eyres gave me an estimate, based on his being able to get commitments from his usual suppliers at his usual prices. The number was about what I had expected, but it still was not easy to agree to spend that huge amount to upgrade property I would never own. I signed the contract and gave him my credit card number. While he communicated with the credit card company about my credit worthiness, Muzz and I looked around the showroom.
“Here are some nice drawings,” I said to Muzz, pointing out some architectural renderings.
“Not Federalist. Regency. No need to mix things up,” Muzz replied.
Finding Father
While Mr. Eyres was busy supervising the painting and the wallpapering, Muzz and I found a housekeeper who could go to Mother’s suite every two weeks and a hairdresser who could go weekly. Ms. Lowe found a part-time caretaker who could help with the two old ladies, and we agreed to give this woman a trial. I worried Ms. Lowe might find other work for the caretaker while she was on duty, but she assured me my work would be the woman’s top priority.
I went over my expenses and my income. Except for the charges from Mr. Eyres, my monthly interest income at Ms. Turner’s bank exceeded the amount I had spent for the upgraded suite, the extra help, and the onetime charge from the janitorial service. I was holding onto most of my capital, anyway.
On Monday, April 7, 2110, Muzz and I went back to the Mann Detective Agency to find out more about my father. The agent, after three hours of work, was able to find my father’s obituary from the Pittsburgh Press. He had had two sons, and I was named as one of them.
The obituary gave the home of the other son as Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and it gave the name of the funeral home that had handled the arrangements. Father had been unmarried at his death.
The next day Muzz and I went to the funeral home to find out about Father’s burial arrangements.
Again, the establishment took the opportunity to present an unpaid bill, this time one for about thirty times the amount Muzz and I had spent the prior night on our hotel rooms. I saw that small payments had been applied about once a quarter, but at that rate the service charges were scarcely being met. I paid the total charges, and I received, in return, the address of my half-brother and the location of my father’s grave.
That afternoon Muzz and I went to the cemetery. Father was in one of the older plots in a very old graveyard. Unlike the situation in Iowa, this place was overgrown with weeds and thick sweet peas. We found the plot, and I saw the simple marker.
“Looks quite durable,” Muzz said. “Not fancy, though. Not like all these other stones.”
It was true Father’s marker was very modest. It was one of the newest graves in the area. To the east were the graves of his parents, both dead before I was born. There was no room for anybody else in the plot, and I wondered about my brother’s mother.
We found the address of the manager of the cemetery, and we called on this company the next day. The office assistant assured me no grounds keeping for that plot had been ordered. The prices for monthly maintenance for the three graves were very cheap, and I ordered the service, paying for a year in advance.
I asked about a replacement stone, and the office assistant directed me to toward another company several miles away. This company, Muzz and I found, was the same place where the simple marker had been made. The manager there had nothing fancier, but, with a look of “there’s a fool born every minute,” she gave us the address of a place where custom granite work was done.
“It’s not that he was such a fine father,” I explained to Muzz. “It’s that I have enough money now to thank him as best I can for going through with the marriage to my mother.”
“The fifth commandment wasn’t included in the rules of Moses to make you feel better,” Muzz insisted, shaking his head. “It was included so old people would be taken care of. The social fabric of that civilization depended on it. Ours does, too.”
“I never did anything for him when he needed me,” I said. “This is the least I can do now, when I have the means.”
We went to the custom headstone company and selected a marker. It was the kind of thing I would have liked for my own grave if I hadn’t already seen my beautiful resting place in Iowa. The marker was much larger than the one for my grandparents, and I did not feel I owed anybody an apology about it.
Paying My Child Support
The next day we went to see Ms. Turner at the bank. I asked her to wire money to Anna’s account at the largest bank in New Philadelphia.
There was no question in my mind Anna was much wealthier than I. Nevertheless, I wanted to give her more than a token as my contribution toward Harrison’s high school and college costs.
I looked up the yearly costs for St. Paul’s School, with boarding, and I decided this amount would be about half of what Anna would need to pay for all of Harrison’s education costs for each of the next eight years. I multiplied that yearly amount by eight, and that was the figure, in Universal Gold, I had Ms. Turner wire to Octula.
That evening I sent Anna a long message to tell her about my deposit into her account. I enclosed the pictures I had taken of her sister and of the mausoleum. I told Anna I was anxious to prove to her that I could make a positive contribution to her life and that I was ready for her to ask me to return to our home on Octula. I asked her to write to me and to ask our children to write also.
I looked over my financial health once again, and I found I had spent only a fraction of the amount I had in the bank. I had not touched the retirement account.
Finding James Waltrop
That next Sunday I started a routine that lasted until my mother’s death in 2116. I went to the retirement home, sat with my mother and Mrs. Holly for tea, surveyed their supplies of toiletries and other consumables, discussed the weather and the news with anybody else who visited, kissed my mother on the cheek, and went home.
Then, on Thursdays I went to the drug store to pick up anything the two old ladies were running short of and returned to the retirement home for a brief visit.
Never during this time did my mother acknowledge me as her son, not to me or to anybody else. Her usual introduction of me was:
“This is…what’s your name again, honey?”
I would say my name and tell the person I was Mrs. Burton’s son. This routine went on until her death. She was always very pleasant, and I found her very easy to deal with. But she never was able to say she understood I was the son she had given up to her parents.
By June of 2110, the redecorating was going very well. Mr. Eyres and his crew had completed one bedroom and, after we moved Mrs. Holly to that bedroom and my mother to the sitting room, had started to paint and paper the other bedroom.
Mrs. Holly’s bedroom was the highlight of Ms. Lowe’s tour for prospective clients. She always used the line “this is what you are able to do, if you like” with exactly the same inflections in her voice when she opened the door to Mrs. Holly’s room. The fact that anybody with enough money to buy those furnishings would never put up a relative in her establishment did not come up during the tour.
By the end of June I was ready to try to find my brother. Muzz and I left our hotel one Tuesday afternoon to drive to Johnstown.
Muzz continued in his role of advisor. He said, “Now, you don’t have to endow this fellow with your usual largesse. Maybe he actually received an inheritance when your father died, or maybe he can take care of himself.”
I nodded but said, “He didn’t have much luck paying that bill at the mortician’s. He didn’t bother to find a suitable gravestone. He didn’t post the obituary in the usual announcement sites so our detective could easily find it. He’s either poor or mad or both.”
Johnstown was brighter and more prosperous than I had remembered from thirty years before. It still sat perilously close to the Little Conemaugh and Stonycreek Rivers, but it had lots of new buildings on the outskirts of town.
We drove up in Muzz’s old Cadillac to the address we received from the mortician, and we saw a rundown two-story frame house on a very small lot. It looked to me as if the neighbor on the adjoining lot could reach out his window and steal a pie cooling on my brother’s windowsill.
We drove around the town until late in the afternoon. Finally I asked Muzz to stop the car in front of my brother’s house.
“I’ll come along,” Muzz announced. “Don’t want you to get into more than you may have bargained for.”
Of course Muzz was fiftyish and I was seventy, but I believed I could take care of myself. Nevertheless, I agreed he should come into the house with me.
I rang the doorbell, and I heard a woman say, “Who in hell wants me now?”
When she came to the door, I recognized that she was very young, perhaps thirty. She looked somewhat like my father, with his nose and his thin frame.
“Yes, what do you want?” she asked, certainly not politely.
“My name is Tony Waltrop, and I want to speak to James Waltrop,” I began.
“Uncle Tony! Dad told me you had paid for the undertaker, and I couldn’t believe it! After all this time!”
“Are you my niece? What is your name?”
“I’m Marty and here are Sally and Poopie,” she said, shoving forward two very young children. She opened the door a crack and motioned that we should enter.
Muzz and I went into a tiny vestibule and then into a small sitting room. Toys were everywhere, but the place looked fairly clean. The small of cabbage cooking was overwhelming.
“I’ll get Dad,” she said.
During the next few moments we heard a serious argument between Marty and someone I assumed to be James. Marty wanted James to get out of bed and put on a shirt to come into the sitting room. James did not have much of an interest in any of these suggestions.
Finally Marty returned to find Muzz on the floor with the two children, playing with a top. I was appalled she would leave the two children alone with total strangers, but it seemed to be of no concern to her.
“Dad will be right out,” she said. “He was working on balancing his checkbook.”
James finally appeared. He was the very likeness of my father, tall and thin and pale.
“Heard a lot about you over the years,” he said. “Dad sure was pissed off when you got all that money when the old folks died, but that wasn’t your fault, now was it? You was just a boy, after all.”
I explained I had just returned from over thirty years on Octula, and I wanted to catch up with the family. James was not certain what this meant, but he assumed I wanted to get back the money I had paid to the funeral director.
“Couldn’t pay it all at once, you know,” he began. “Finally, everything else came due, and it had to wait.”
“Was he ill at the end?” I wondered.
“In the county home for the last seven years,” James told me. “County put a lien on his house, so we had to sell. Nothing left after the county was paid off.”
“Did he leave a will?” I asked.
“Yes, left everything, such as it was, to me. Left you a dollar. Marty, get me a dollar from your handbag.”
A Message from Eliza
A few days after the trip to Johnstown, I received a letter from Octula. Eliza wrote to tell me she and Harrison would be coming to Vermont for Harrison’s high school years.
I was elated. I had missed Eliza almost as much as I had mourned for my relationship with my beloved Anna.
She told me they would arrive at the spaceport in Caribou, Maine, on November 17 of that year, 2110. She asked if I could meet them and go with them to Montpelier. She enclosed pictures of the last of the work on the organ and of a Van Gogh painting Mattie had recently bought.
I wept as I looked at the picture of pretty Mattie standing next to the new painting. I was overcome with a longing to be back with my family, in the comfort of my own home.
Of course I quickly wrote to Eliza to tell her I would be in Caribou with Muzz. I enclosed pictures I had taken of my mother in her newly redecorated suite and of my father’s new gravestone. I had taken several pictures of James and Marty and the little children, but I could not bring myself to let Eliza see how poorly they lived.
God does not distribute unsuitable relatives unfairly. Everybody, great and humble, receives his share of relatives with no discernable purpose other than to embarrass you in front of your in-laws and your friends. God likes to feel your embarrassment and enjoys a good laugh at your expense.
Looking at Wayne County
By the late summer of 2110, I was ready to look into real estate for my Pittsburgh children. I had decided to look first in northeast Pennsylvania, in Wayne County.
2110 was just past the turning point for American real estate sales. After the terrible flooding that had followed the melting of the polar icecaps in the 2020s, there was a frantic move inland, and real estate prices started to climb steeply.
During the decade of the 2020s, nobody died from drowning along the coast. Instead, the government supervised an effort, essentially a logistical nightmare, to move people to places where they could live and work. Many people spent their last dollars on buying land, and for decades they held onto that land.
Then, from 2040 through 2100, the American population declined significantly because people were too crowded at home to consider adding more of their own kind. By 2100 there were parcels of real estate available again as people released their holds on the land.
During those decades, too, the state boundaries of the United States were redrawn. Rivers had changed cour
ses, and some states were significantly smaller. Rhode Island had disappeared, and Hawaii and Cuba were just small fractions of their former sizes. The federal government decided to redraw the contiguous states into thirty-seven governmental units for the purposes of handling those services the states handled. The federal government attempted to group people of like characteristics and occupations together in the new states, reorganizing them so that only thirty-seven state legislatures and thirty-seven state governors were required.
I spent the late spring and early summer of 2110 looking at real estate advertisements. The prices were more reasonable than I had remembered in 2077 when I left for Octula, so I believed I could find what I wanted at prices I was willing to pay.