by Carole Maso
“I think Mom’s sick again,” Fletcher said as we pulled up to the house in Father’s boatlike Oldsmobile. She was gardening in her fanciest clothes.
“Oh, no,” I said, “you know how she likes to dress up!”
“Children,” she cried, “what have you learned today?”
We always knew that the truth was useless if it did not make Mother happy. We did not want to see flames in her eyes. “How lovely,” she said when she heard about the Osbournes, “how wonderful.” And over and over in my mother’s head for months after, the Osbournes made things—beautiful pitchers of glass, glass bowls, and tiny glass animals; smooth dark night tables and handsome chests of drawers; elegant cabinets and wing chairs—until they finally replaced all they had destroyed. It reassured my mother to know that not everyone who had lived in our house had met tragedy. She loved the Osbournes. They decorated her house. And who is to say that stepping out of the fiery plane wreckage they did not decide on this path for their next life? “We must try to forgive the dead,” my mother used to say. And we did. We forgave the Osbournes, riding home that day in Father’s enormous car.
Our search was like a treasure hunt; one clue led to the next. A young boy who had lost a finger in a boating accident revealed the doctor who moved in after the boy’s family decided to leave for safety reasons. A dedicated birdwatcher was followed by cat lovers who had nearly twenty cats roaming the halls. A family who bred show dogs followed them. We watched everyone materialize in front of us. Even the highest-bred, best-trained dogs chased the cats. The bird-watcher, horrified that the cats might take away his identity, kept shoving them in the closets.
In another corner young Betsy Wiggins played a spinet. Her sister Martha carded wool and wove cloth in the living room. The Osbournes nipped at the sherry and carefully cradled glass baskets. Every corner of our huge house was full. I suppose we should have known that once we discovered the names of these people and invited them back again that they would be reluctant to leave. When we asked them about their lives, we should not have been surprised that after so long they could not stop talking. Still I was surprised to learn that the dead, w ith only slight coaxing, could fall so easily back into their old emotions. I am deeplv disturbed by the longings of ghosts. I want better lives for them, less pettv, more whole.
Usually I left the hard fact-finding to Fletcher, who found it rewarding. “Historical research,” I think he told his friends, soberly. But whatever name he gave it, he found after a short while that it was impossible to leave it at the day’s end. “Jacob Potter,” he would say in his sleep, recalling that afternoon’s work in the dusty Connecticut libraries, the county registers, the microfilm room. “Allison Anne Worthington,” he murmured. I think Fletcher fell in love with Allison a little. “Allison,” he’d say most nights, very late, “don’t cry.”
“I saw Allison’s sweetheart last night,” he said one morning, looking exhausted. “He was dressed in women’s clothing, the fine women’s clothing of the period, so as to trick her father. Isn’t that great?” he smiled. “How sad,” I said. “How sad,” my mother said.
“What is that chill breath we feel brushing against our necks even in summer?” I asked. “Out in the back, behind the lake?”
“That is where Cecily Pickens and Samuel Hall secretly courted in the woods in winter and froze to death,” Fletcher said.
My father finished his orange juice and stood up. “Someone keeps trying to convince me,” he said, slightly irritated, “to vote for Lincoln.”
My mother laughed gaily. She seemed to love them all. She savored each person, every detail, turning the stories around and around until she could see each face clearly, hear each voice.
“I’ve got a feeling you’ll like this one,” Fletcher said excitedly to my mother. But that was just the problem, she liked them too well, and the project which we intended to participate in so as to get more attention from our mother turned on us, giving us less and less. For, long after the rest of us had let these people go, free to roam the lost landscapes of their human lives, my mother held onto them and kept them with her. Weeks after we’d forgotten Jacob Potter, leaving him somewhere outside to pick wild strawberries, my mother would say, “I think Jay Potter should take a trip abroad next fall.
“And Emily Tilset,” my mother continued. “Poor Emily Tilset,” she sighed. “What to do for Emily?” Fiery Emily Tilset, suffragette, was even more lost than most in this century. “Why did you bring me back?” she demanded. “Women vote. Women work. Women run banks. Women smoke.”
“But there is still so much to be done, Emily,” I told her.
“We must go over the same ground a thousand times before it is ours,” my mother said to her.
“And the ERA,” Fletcher added.
But Emily just wept. “There is so much left to do,” I told her again. But it must have been hard for Emily to believe. In a few years Ella Grasso would be governor of our state.
I looked at Emily’s sad gray shape. It was dangerous to dedicate one’s whole life to a single thing, I thought, whether it was writing poetry or raising children or working for the rights of women. It did not matter. Things had a way of ending or turning on you and leaving you empty.
I cannot say anymore how much of these lives were facts my brother lugged back from the library and how much we ourselves invented. The documents Fletcher copied, the notes he took, have all been lost. It is possible my father, fed up with so many houseguests, threw them all out in a symbolic gesture, hoping that if the words disappeared so would Jacob Potter and Emily and all those dogs and cats. Even Fletcher, after listening to my mother, seemed unclear as to what he himself had learned and w hat we had all added. None of us knew where it was that the facts had ended and we had taken over.
“What does it matter?” I asked finally. And Fletcher shrugged. For what did it matter? Noises in the night no longer frightened us. We could easily imagine Murphy, that eighteenth-century explorer, storming through the house looking for the lost deed to the land or hear Bernard reciting parts of Hamlet and Richard III, a brightly colored scarf around his neck, his hair plastered back as he stares into the long mirrors and weeps, so moved is he by his own performance. Fact or fiction, we could not help but feel bad for John Cook, who wandered in every now and then looking for his head, which was sold after his death to pay doctor bills and used for a time in local productions of Hamlet. Occasionally he’d come to check that it was not his head Bernard was using.
We were not frightened by any of them. We knew the tickling on our necks was really Patrick Derrick whispering, “Whales, whales,” under his breath, his blue eyes fixed in the distance, an enormous harpoon in his hand. “I’ve got to go now, children,” he whispers. “Whales, whales.”
The only one we dreaded hearing was Allison. When Allison cried I put the pillow over my head. When Allison cried the room turned red. Lovely Allison, the daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate, was forbidden to see the dock-worker she loved. She was the saddest sort of suicide. All night sometimes she sobbed. Nothing could make her stop. She cried into infinity. She came back again and again looking for her father. She wanted to let him know, I guess, that the life of grief is long—it lives even beyond the grave.
Twists of fate, lost love, broken trust, sudden death—all these things haunted our house. I think my mother, whose wisdom was wide, knew from the start the sorrow that was there, but she wanted to be sure that we knew, too, and that we were willing to accept it, accept it all, accept it in advance.’ She knew all along. She did it for us.
Last night we were all back in the house again: Fletcher and Dad and you and me. Dad built a fire, Hetcher read aloud from the Canterbury Tales, you wandered in and out, looking for the right word, warming your feet. Does it never end, Mother? Must it all go on forever?
I can barely see her now in this little apartment, but I know she’s here. She does not need to speak and she knows it. She does not need to lift one finger or even assu
me her human form. She has taught me well what ghosts are about. The wind sighs for her. The trees rustle her poetry.
The rain beats hard on the windows. No snow this year—only the grayness of rain. It is Friday again. He lights a cigarette.
She is soaking wet. She has been out for a long walk without a hat or boots again. I reach for a towel but I cannot get her dry
“The rain makes me want to make love,” I say to him. When I close my eves she is still there; she is soaking wet and begins to shiver.
“Such sadness,” he says.
“I need you,” I say, unbuttoning his shirt. “I need you now.”
He knows that with his hands alone he can stop all this for a moment—at least, for a moment.
The rain beats harder and harder. The rain seems to beat from within. I know about the rain forests of Brazil, the cold rain of London, the rainy seasons of Central and South America where, after a while, people begin to mimic the rain with their voices, unconsciously, its strange, compelling monotony I know about the men and women of rain who grow to incredible proportions, their heads like umbrellas, their moist skin like the flesh of fish, their movements the movements of fish.
I know about the monsoon belt of Southeast Asia, the dry winds that blow off the Gobi Desert for six months and the torrents of rain that follow from the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. I know about the great glaciers of Alaska, the century upon century of winter that has accumulated there. I know about the Alpine fohn and the vent du Midi. I know the paths of the tropical hurricane.
In the Amazon rain falls on a fixed daily schedule. Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington, is nearly always draped in fog. In the winter cold winds blow down from Siberia, pick up moisture over the Sea of Japan, and drop it as snow w hen they strike the mountains of Japan. In North Africa the dusty sirocco blows off the Sahara.
I have learned to watch the way trees bend, the direction smoke drifts. I listen to the pitch of wind chimes. I clock the velocitv of clouds. My brother has taught me what a halo around the moon means, a rash of stars. I know the place where the boreal forest meets the tundra. I hae drawn the horse latitudes around the globe. I have seen those ghost horses, dropped overboard in the windless night to lighten the load, rise up and trot on a watery field.
I hope she lives in some temperate zone, a place w here the weather is easily predictable. I have let my eye wander across the rolling hills like a gentle wind, looking for her. I have looked to the sky many times, wondering what kind of weather she faces now. I know the altocumulus, the cirrostratus—the nimbus.
“You’ll miss your train,” she whispers.
I look up now and it is twenty-five years ago and m mother and Sabine are laughing as they get off the train from Poughkeepsie. Her head is tilted back and I can see her beautiful throat. Sabine takes her arm.
Once, Marta and I got off that same train. Our bags seemed weightless and our books, too, as we stepped onto the platform and into the city that promised everything.
Part Two
I live supported by the royalties from lo Vanessa, which has just gone into its sixth printing. In the last few years there has been a great increase of interest in my mother’s work. Even I have been asked for interviews, mostly by young journalists who hope through some obscure means to make names for themselves. But this is not a cause I believe in and I always tell them that I am not that Vanessa Turin.
I have a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. I have a cat named China, a lover I’ll call Jack. To most it will seem that I do very little. I go to Grand Central Station looking for my mother who has quite simply disappeared off the face of the earth. It is December now, though a poor, warm excuse for one, and in January it will be one year since I last saw her. About once a week I see Jack.
I have very little contact with anyone else. Throughout the past year Fletcher has sent me postcards from various parts of the country he found bearable enough to stay in for more than a day. I write him letters but they have all been returned. “When do you think Mom is coming home?” I ask, following him across the country with the same question, but he cannot say yet. I have spoken several times by phone with Sabine, my mother’s best friend, but she has become increasingly hard to reach, having become with her fifth record album something of an “overnight” sensation in France. I have little actual contact with Aunt Lucy, my mother’s sister, who lives with her husband in Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world. “Where did Mom go?” I ask them, whenever I get a chance, but I have grow n accustomed to the silence that collects around the receiver in response to this question.
Once in a while I will take the train to our old house in Connecticut. I’ll sit by the lake my brother loved and slowly lower my legs into the chilly water until they become blue and blurry, detached and impossible to touch.
I am alone. I have not seen or heard anything about Marta since I left her and college so abruptly last winter in Poughkeepsie. Occasionally I will smoke a cigarette or play a Billie Holiday record. Occasionally I w ill pick up the phone in an attempt to find out w hat happened to her, but I guess I am afraid to know, for I have never once dialed the numbers that could answer my question.
I spend a good deal of time reading: classics, detective novels, romance novels, science journals—anything. I like biographies; it brings me some comfort to know that no life is simple. I am now reading the biographies of Colette, Grace Kelly, and Nabokov. My grandfather gave us many books about the Indians, which I have recently begun reading again; they keep me near to him. I read American history, too, as if all the clues to these terrible disappearances are to be found in that complex, heartbreaking story. I love poetry, of course: Rilke, whom my mother loved so much; Neruda, Dickinson, Whitman, Lowell, Bishop. I can bear to read almost any book except lo Vanessa.
The lake, despite a deteriorating pH level and a few dead fish along the shore, is still crystal blue. The fish out of water are purple and blue, armored in death, protected somehow.
The last time I saw Fletcher he was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and following a fat man down a street in Connecticut.
I go to the movies a lot. New York is the city of movies: Bunuel, Godard, Fassbinder. Father always loved the movies. His Oldsmobile was located a few weeks ago in a parking lot outside New York harbor. I went down to identify it like a body. A brochure picturing icy fjords was found on the front seat. I imagine he sails toward some neutral country, Sweden or Norway, where they are just about to enter their season of darkness. Anyone vv ho knows him would hope that a Mozart quintet or a Vivaldi concerto still runs through his head.
Fletcher is in South Dakota where I hope he has found some peace.
“All my letters to Fletcher have been returned, Jack.” I can’t help thinking that he sees them all, even touches them, without speaking—I always think of him as not speaking anymore. He points a straight arm away from his body and the letters are sent back to me. But maybe he’s forgotten how to read altogether. Maybe he’s left the English language behind completely. “I’m so worried about him.”
“Shh,” Jack says, “not here.” He takes my hand. “Look,” he says. “Here there are only you and I. We can do it,” he whispers. “We can make the world over. Just the two of us. Right here. Right now.”
It looks huge to him. He might not call it an iceberg, but simply ice. The whole world is shifting beneath him. He can’t explain why anymore. He just notices.
In the world we try to make together there is a classroom, and in our classroom games Jack is always strict.
“You’re late,” he says, looking at me disapprovingly. “I will not stand for tardiness in my class. Do you understand that, Miss Turin?” He is wearing a suit and tie. He puts on his wire-rimmed glasses.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize I was so late.”
He checks his watch. “It’s 3:12.” He grimaces.
I walk into the room. He has two bright
lights set up. The desk is covered with books. I sit in the straight-backed chair he has positioned for me.
“My homework,” I say, handing him papers. He frowns, takes them from me, and places them on the desk.
He removes his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves. I try to picture the strange geometry of our lives, the unlikely way we have intersected with each other, the theorems that have made this possible. But I am not that good a student.
“Page fifty-six,” he says.
He draws three triangles on the blackboard. “Do the proof for problem one.”
He knows I will need help, that I cannot retain even the most simple formula in my head. How do you find right angles again? He will begin to scold me soon. He will tell me over and over what the hypotenuse is and why it is so important.
“Why is it so important, anyway?” I beat him to it. He frowns. These are only the basics, he makes that clear; we cannot continue until we know these. There will be no way to move on without them, no way to proceed.
“You’ll be stuck here forever,” he says. “Is that what you want?”
I shake my head no.
“Then concentrate,” he says. “Concentrate. Work.”
He understands the importance of working hard—the importance of discipline. It is his message, his gift, the thing that he knows; he wants to give it to me.