Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  Sinking back into the rocking chair, I shrug off my topcoat. But while Mom returns to the sofa, Candy and Maury remain on their feet.

  “We’ll let you two talk,” Candy tells Mom in the pastoral manner she’s adopted. “Maury’s dead set on driving around to some of our old haunts.”

  “Your old what?” Mom asks.

  “Places he remembers.”

  “There’s nothing left,” she says. “It’s all gone. Everywhere looks like everywhere else.”

  But Maury is already at the door. Candy, I see, has planned to leave me alone with Mom. I have no say in the matter. They bolt into the Sunday gloom.

  “Why don’t you hang up your coat?” Mom says.

  “It’s okay where it is.”

  “It’ll get wrinkled on that chair.”

  “It’s cashmere. It doesn’t wrinkle.”

  “Oh, cashmere,” she mocks me. When she crosses her legs, I notice how stick thin they are. Her blue-veined wrists are worse—just twigs.

  “How are you, Mom?”

  “Exactly like I look. I’m not going to get better. But you, you look terrific. Except for your hair. What happened? You cut it for a role?”

  “I cut it because I’m going thin on top, and this is better than a comb-over.”

  “I remember when you had thick blond curls.”

  “Now Maury’s the one with movie star hair,” I say. “He looks younger than me.”

  “Yeah, no matter how old he gets, he’ll always be a little boy.” She cants her head, as if weighed down by the thicker eyeglass on that side. “Sorry I don’t have anything to offer you. Not unless you’re in the market for a cigarette.”

  She fumbles a pack of Kents from the end table and lights up. With smoke pluming from her nostrils she looks more like her old self. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot,” I say.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Why? You worried I’m gay?”

  “No, I’m worried you’ll never get married and give me grandchildren.”

  “You’ve got bigger stuff, better stuff to worry about.”

  “No, I don’t. Even after I’m dead, I don’t want to think things have petered out here. I’m afraid Candy and Maury got scared off marrying and having kids.”

  “Yeah, I have a girlfriend,” I tell her. “It’s too soon to know where it’s going.”

  She sucks down a drag, then shapes the ash at the end of her cigarette. “Mind if I ask another question? When you strolled in with Candy and Maury, that definitely raised eyebrows in my mind. Did you go to Mass with them?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you take Communion?”

  Is there any point in lying? Who am I protecting? And from what? “No, I didn’t.”

  She sighs and recrosses her bony legs. “Have you lost your faith?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why not receive the sacraments?”

  “Technically, I’m not in a state of grace.”

  “Technically?”

  “Okay, actually I’m not. Now if I confess my mortal sins, will you grant me absolution?”

  “Save that for a priest. Your sins, I mean. Not your sarcasm. I’m worried about the state of your soul.”

  “From what I gather from Candy, you’re worried about your own soul.”

  “Naturally I am.” She taps the Kent in the vague direction of an ashtray. A live cinder goes dead as it falls to the carpet. “At my age who wouldn’t be?”

  “I’m confident you’ll do beautifully on Judgment Day.”

  “I don’t count on it. That’s why I pray so hard. What the hell, these days I pray for the church. I never thought it’d come to this—me praying for its soul instead of depending on it to save mine. You must have heard about the scandals here.”

  “They’ve had trouble in Ireland too,” I say.

  “Priests! Ireland!” She spits out the words the way she would a nasty shred of tobacco. “I had a bellyful of them hanging around my parents’ house on St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Thought your family didn’t go in for Irish holidays.”

  “We weren’t professional Irish, if that’s what you mean. We didn’t wear green derbies and drink green beer and sing ‘Danny Boy.’ None of that malarkey. Like my mother said, ‘If Ireland was so great, why’d we leave it?’”

  “To keep from starving to death,” I suggest.

  “It wasn’t hunger that brought us here. It was to escape the English. Now you’re living with them, like a traitor.”

  “I thought we were talking about your soul.”

  “It’s your soul that’s in question. My father boasted he’d kill an Englishman before he died. Now it’s up to you.”

  “Yeah, murdering a limey, that’ll put me in a state of grace.”

  She uncrosses her legs. She can’t seem to get comfortable. “But priests, getting back to them,” she says, “they’d drink a couple of jars and get tight as ticks and start talking smut. Many’s the time one of them touched me where he shouldn’t have. They were always after me to sit on their laps. The nuns warned us girls never to sit on a man’s lap unless we put down a magazine first. But with the priests I knew, you’d need to put down a phone book. Now they’ve gone in for little boys,” she says, more animated by the moment. “Doesn’t shock me a bit. When it comes to men, nothing does.”

  “The way you talk I’m surprised you’re still a Catholic.”

  “It’d take more than a few bad priests, even a bad pope, to shake my faith.”

  “With that attitude, you shouldn’t have any trouble at the Pearly Gates. What worries me is your health and happiness here and now.”

  She screws up her face like a jeweler with a loupe discovering a fake diamond. “Is that why Candy ran off with Maury? So you can nag me about assisted living? Are you trying to make me sell my home and move into a roach nest?”

  “I’m here because you asked me to come.”

  “Assisted dying is what it amounts to.”

  “If you’d rather live at home, Mom, that’s your choice. But what’ll you do if Candy moves away with Lawrence?”

  She peers at the ash on her Kent. “I’ll be dead by then.”

  “Let’s hope not. Let’s hope you live a long, long time.”

  “Why? So I can be Candy’s matron of honor?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see your daughter married?”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Mom, Mom. You’ve been through a lot in your life. You spent so many years looking after us, why not let us take care of you?”

  “What a bunch of crap. You don’t intend to take care of me. You’ll pay a team of darkies to do it. A goddamn waste of money. There won’t be a cent left for you kids.”

  “Don’t worry about leaving me money.”

  “I’m not. It’s for Candy and Maury. I’ve been laying aside a little for them each month. Now you want me to piss away my nest egg.”

  “Wait a minute. You’ve been saving what I send you?”

  “Part of it.”

  I don’t know whether to laugh or howl. Whether to shit or go blind, as my foulmouthed mother often sums up her quandaries. During the most vigorous bull market in history, she’s been parking cash in a savings account that probably draws no interest.

  “That money was for you,” I say.

  “Once it’s in my name, I’ll do what I damn well please with it. If you don’t like it, quit writing the checks.”

  Her sheer ballsiness is breathtaking. “Look, I didn’t travel all the way from London to argue with you,” I say.

  “Good, because I’m not up to fighting either. I’d like you to look over the stuff Candy and I found in the cedar chest. There may be things you’d be interested in keeping.”

  “Shall we do it together?”

  “No, you go ahead. I’ll finish my prayers and my cigarette.”

  My overcoat, draped over the back of the chair, describes the outline of a
torso, like a chalk drawing at a crime scene. I feel as deflated as the coat. Still, I smile and plant a kiss on the crown of her head. Her hair smells not of the rankness that permeates the house, but almost refreshingly of cigarette smoke.

  Upstairs, I step into the room that used to be mine, then mine and Maury’s after his parole. The walls, formerly covered with movie posters and baseball pennants, are bare, and the floor space is crammed with beds. Two twins from Candy’s room have been squeezed in along with the ones Maury and I slept on. Leaning over them to a window, I look out at the backyard. The rusty stanchions of the clothesline jut up from bare earth like a pair of crucifixes. The emptiness between them begs for a third cross.

  In what Mom calls the library, the cedar chest is the size of a child’s coffin. The lid lifts not on a corpse, but on something almost as painful to me—fossils of family history. Photographs, Christmas and birthday cards, my grade school and high school reports, playbills from college, clippings from British reviews. Everything ready to be sorted, discarded, or salvaged. Whatever I wish.

  And what I wish fervently at the moment is to vanish. I want to get out of here and back to Tamzin and my snug conservatory. Instead, like a forensic coroner at a mass grave, I suppress my personal revulsion and sit next to the cedar chest and concentrate on learning what the dead—and under this rubric, I include the boy I used to be—have to teach the living.

  Mom seems to have saved everything except my fingernail parings and navel lint. There’s the blue-beaded bracelet I wore home from the maternity ward, a hank of my blond baby hair, and an envelope of teeth, yellow as kernels of corn, that the tooth fairy exchanged for dimes. Whatever bizarre freight of emotion these mementos carry for her, I’m tempted to declare that they mean nothing to me. But that’s not true. Otherwise I wouldn’t fear that if I saved this midden heap and shipped it to London, the past would own me. Yet how can I discard it without insulting Mom and showing that I don’t value what she treasures?

  I browse through a few letters, full of false bravado, that I mailed soon after I settled in England. Then there are the curt notes that I’ve taken to enclosing along with Mom’s monthly check. Each one includes less and less of myself. It’s only the hand-drawn cards I did in grade school that suggest the true depth of feeling that used to connect us. Every Christmas and Easter I composed a spiritual bouquet, reckoning on sheets of loose-leaf paper the number of Masses, Communions, and Rosaries I dedicated to the salvation of her soul. How can she have any doubt that she’s well fixed for eternity?

  Deeper into the cedar chest, I dig down to another sheaf of newspaper clippings. They’re not about me. Yellow with age and as delicate as antique lace, they deal with Maury and the murder. I handle them with care. No, with caution. I’m not convinced I’m supposed to read them. This information—the headlines about the “Boy Killer,” “The Bad Seed”—has always been off-limits.

  But then another possibility presents itself. Maybe Mom decided the time has come, and that’s why she sent me up here—to find material for my memoir.

  I break out in a sweat, a cold one, yet remain clearheaded as I read on. Under the clippings, a buckram folder contains the paperwork from Maury’s original booking and a transcript of his confession, neatly typed at the County Service Building hours after the killing. Are these relics of his childhood the equivalent, in Mom’s mind, to my baby teeth and hair? What did she save for Candy—her leg brace? It hits me that at last I’m getting an answer to the question that years ago got my head slammed into a wall.

  My mother and father were arguing in the kitchen. I remembered all the things he did to me, and I got really mad. I waited outside the kitchen door, thinking what to do. I opened the door and went in where they were hollering. I told them to stop. My father saw me and I knew by his look that he’d punish me for sticking my nose into his business which I had been brought up never to do. There were knives in the kitchen drawer and I took out the biggest one, the butcher knife. He ran at me, and I held the knife in front of me to keep him away. But he didn’t stop and his belly bumped into the knife. I pushed it into him. I don’t remember how far. I was crying and my mother was screaming and my father fell on the floor and blood came out of his mouth. Mom grabbed the butcher knife and said we better call an ambulance.

  This sounds more or less like my brother—in the same way that stage dialogue sounds more or less like a fictional character. What’s missing are Maury’s verbal tics and some indication of the off-kilter cadence of his voice. The confession doesn’t suggest anything of the impression he made the same day on the psychiatric staff at Clifton T. Perkins Criminal Mental Health Clinic. They concluded that he displayed symptoms of “morbid ideation,” “thought disorganization,” “easy distractibility,” “sensory integration disorder,” “attention impulse disorder,” and “manic behavior.” The transcript of his admission interview almost makes me weep.

  Staff: Where are your parents?

  Patient: Mom’s at home. Dad’s probably in hell.

  Staff: Why did you kill your father?

  Patient: Do I have to say what I already said?

  Staff: Not if you don’t feel like it. Does it bother you to talk about it?

  Patient: I get dizzy.

  Staff: Why?

  Patient: I don’t know.

  Staff: Were you dizzy when you stabbed your father?

  Patient: Yeah. Everything was spinning.

  Staff: Could you describe yourself? What kind of boy you are?

  Patient: I try to be polite and clean.

  Staff: Anything else? Anything you like or dislike?

  Patient: I don’t like people that cuss and yell at me. I stay away from them.

  Staff: Did your father do that?

  Patient: Yeah, a lot.

  Staff: And your mother?

  Patient: Less than my father.

  Staff: What do you think is going to happen to you?

  Patient: I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay here or go someplace else.

  Staff: Where?

  Patient: Maybe reform school.

  Staff: Why do you think that?

  Patient: I don’t know. Maybe when I’m twenty-one they’ll put me in prison.

  Summary: Maury believes that he is a normal child, that he is no different from any other boy, except it takes him a little longer to do his homework. He says that he will never marry because that brings too many problems.

  Predisposition: Passive-aggressive personality

  Impairment: Severe

  Prognosis: Guarded

  There’s a loud thump; Mom groans on the stairs. She sounds hurt. I pitch to my feet, spilling papers off my lap. But before I have a chance to rush to her, she crawls into the room on her hands and knees.

  “Sit down,” she wheezes. “There’s something I better tell you.”

  Maury

  When we’re out of Mom’s house, the stink stays inside and Candy and I stand next to her car catching our breath. There’s cloud everyplace, from the top of the sky down to the ground, and we add our clouds to it, like the puffs of cigarette smoke from Mom’s mouth. I don’t like looking up the street where the houses disappear and dark windows and black roofs float in the air with nothing underneath them.

  Candy unlocks the car with the clicker on her key ring. It chirps like a frog. I make the sound myself. Before they bulldozed the creek, I caught frogs behind the house. Turtles and lizards too. Never a snake. I saw them, but I knew Mom wouldn’t let me bring them in the house. She believes they’re all poison. Now in winter they’re sleeping, warm underground. Or else they’re dead.

  In the car a good smell comes off Candy and off the little green cardboard Christmas tree that swings from her rearview mirror. “Where would you like to go?” she asks. “What would you like to see?”

  “All this cloud, there’s nothing to see.”

  “The fog’ll burn off.”

  “Burn?”

  “It’ll lift. Go away. I’m glad to dri
ve you wherever you want.” She revs the engine and starts driving before I make up my mind. The cloud rolls over the hood and onto the roof. “There must be places you’d like to visit,” she says, “even if everything has changed.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s changed? Or yeah, there’s places you’d like to visit?”

  “Yeah, it’s changed.”

  “What changes have you noticed?” she asks.

  She’s staring at me instead of the road. It’s a thing Nicky does that scares me. Even in clear weather in the desert, you can’t tell what’s ahead. In this cloud, there could be a car, a wall. “Dead,” I say, afraid what we’ll bump into.

  “Dead?” From Candy’s voice I know I’ve made a mistake.

  “There’s more dead people than when we lived here.”

  “But we’re still alive. So’s Mom.”

  “Why does it smell that way in her house?”

  “What way?”

  “Like cats.” I worry how deep this cloud is.

  “Mom’s cats passed away a long time ago.”

  “I still smell them.”

  “Maybe it’s because she’s been sick.”

  “And she’ll die like the cats?”

  “We hope not. Mom’s different from a cat. She has a soul.” Candy talks like she did giving Communion to Mom. “She’ll be in heaven, and we’ll join her there when we die.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll be in the other place.”

  “Oh, Maury, that’s not true.”

  “Yeah, it is. Because of what I did.”

  “That was a long time ago. You were punished and forgiven.”

  “Still …”

  “Do you go to Mass and Communion in California?” She keeps tunneling into cloud where we could crash head-on into anything.

  “Whenever there’s a Mexican to drive me.”

  “A Mexican?”

  “They’re the only Catholics around.”

  Stopped at a red light, Candy doesn’t notice it turn green. She’s staring so hard at me, she doesn’t see it go yellow, then red again. A car behind us honks, and Candy zips across the intersection. More horns blow, and a truck just misses smashing us.