by Terry Gamble
When Dana finds me, I have curled into the bed, pulled the covers up. The feather duster lies beside me like the carcass of a bird. “What are you doing?” she asks.
I run my finger across the final paragraph in my great-grandmother’s hand in which she describes how they went into the woods and dug up trillium to plant along the edges of the house. She herself had planted the garden that overlooks the lake, plotting out sunflowers and hollyhocks, bushes of lilacs, summer roses, lilies, and yarrow. She signed her letters As always, Sadie.
Sadie. The name of my child.
“The telephone,” I say, “is truly a mixed blessing.”
“What do you mean?”
I hold up the sheet of stationery. “This is from Grannie Addie to her friend Sarah. You and I would have had this conversation on the phone, and then…pffft…no one would know or care.”
Dana’s sideways glance. I can tell she is thinking, Why would anyone care what we said in the first place? So I read to her the piece about the schooner and the curtains and the trillium, and soon she is lying on the bed next to me on the swaybacked mattress while I read aloud the words of our ancestor. It was a forest then. No manicured lawns. The beach was a rocky, wild place from which they would launch canoes, the women in their long dresses with their parasols, the men mustached and grim, their shirtsleeves pulled up for their two-month hiatus from industry.
“Her baby died,” Dana says after I stop reading. “Banta’s little sister. She got scarlet fever and died.”
I know this—our grandfather’s sister who died as an infant, the insidious infections that haunted the country in the late nineteenth century, how my great-uncle, too, had almost died, yet lived, never to have children, but to ride through Turkey on a camel. Our grandfather was sent away to someplace less septic, and when he returned, his sister was dead, his brother living, his mother dressed in the black rags of grief. I have known this, but forgotten, or at least not thought about it for years. Perhaps I’ve blocked out the dead infants in our family, the legendary bereavement of my great-grandmother.
The Aerie, my great-grandmother wrote in 1887, shall be a place of respite. When you come, dearest, she penned her friend Sarah, we will sit in the trees and paint whatever vista suits us. At night, we shall read poetry.
Poetry, painting, and prayer. My great-grandparents came to Sand Isle with the best of intentions. Their fortune had been made—first by a cough remedy, later by sops and cures for headaches and lice, bad breath and sore throats, constipation, arthritic fingers, and aching teeth. My great-great-grandfather Josiah—Civil War soldier, repairer of roofs—was the embodiment of the philosophy that it’s better to be lucky than smart. The pine tar of his trade had a number of attributes, not the least of which was its medicinal value when combined with peppermint. Later, his son—my great-grandfather—imported eucalyptus from California, where it had been imported from Australia, apocryphally for railroad ties, but more than likely to prevent erosion on denuded hills. Structural lack of integrity aside, eucalyptus proved effective when its vapors were inhaled.
In 1875, Addison’s Curatives, as it was then called, employed Dr. Reginald Sedgwick, an English physician who had traveled to India and Turkey, returning with an antidote for constipation involving almonds, fenugreek, and caffeine, along with a cure for postbellum malaise using mustard and, as with many Addison products, alcohol.
My great-grandfather Edward succeeded in his courtship of Sadie Boothe (later to become Grannie Addie), a missionary’s daughter from Dayton who was prone to musings about the occult—particularly after the death of her daughter, Elizabeth. I can imagine my great-grandfather in 1880: Edward Moore Addison, son of a particularly prosperous maker of remedies, dressed in a waistcoat at a Sunday picnic along the banks of the Ohio—a river that curved through the limestone bluffs of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, freezing chastely in winter and turning turgid in the spring as the runoff from rain and snow leached into the Ohio River Valley. By summer, the river was a slow brown snake, steamy and sultry, laden with catfish and water moccasins, not to mention garbage from the factories that were growing up along its shores. The condensed air of the valley, the clammy evaporation of the river—all conspired to render the humidity nearly one hundred percent, and the air so cloying, it bound clothes to skin, curled your hair, and made it hard to breathe.
Especially with a corset and three layers of petticoats.
Hand me your handkerchief, Father. I am feeling faint.
Or giddy? Had she noticed my great-grandfather—a fine example of Presbyterian righteousness (prone to stuttering, but attractive nonetheless with those deep green eyes, that finely cut coat that he insisted on wearing even in that heat)? If she’d looked closer, she might have noticed that, fine fellow though he was, he’d had a sip or two—discreetly, of course—of Kentucky bourbon. Her father, the traveling missionary from Dayton, a hero in his own right having lost an eye at Gettysburg, saw the opportunity in the piety and tipsiness of young Edward. A pragmatist—my great-great-grandfather, the missionary, who crawled off the fields of Gettysburg with one eye intact and all of his limbs. Crossing with similar resolve the sea of checkered clothes and now-folded parasols and newly lit lanterns, he presented his handsome but introverted daughter who read too much and lived in a world of her imaginings to the minister of the Cincinnati First Presbyterian Church, who in turn presented her to my great-grandfather. The introduction thus made, the tantalizing blink of aroused fireflies began in the dusky Ohio sky.
Miss Boothe?
Mr. Addison?
Fade in to a shot of my great-grandfather with his mustaches, my great-grandmother with her center-parted hair, their expressions dour in the daguerreotypes that hang on our walls. The spring before my grandfather was born, construction began on the Aerie. My great-grandmother’s letters from those days wax hopeful about the prospect of shared poetry and piousness—a gentile reprieve from the manufacturing and marketing of medicines. Besides, no one could breathe in those industrial river valleys with their sweaty summers. Sand Isle was parceled off and sold to a covey of like-minded people whose social, moral, and spiritual values were aligned. At which point, my great-grandfather, if he harbored any notions of bourbon before bed, was sorely disappointed. The bylaws of the association read that no alcohol was to be served on the premises of Sand Isle, a rule that remained until 1945 (Addison’s Cough Medicine excluded). Thus alcohol went underground. It was hidden in log piles, in the Bible holders of wicker chairs, behind the curtains, beneath the mattresses; it was smuggled by train and ferry. In 1896, a renter was barred from future rentals by the board of directors after openly serving wine at supper.
So, too, were fishing and the playing of games on Sunday prohibited. As for swimming, “suitable attire” was required between the hours of 6 A.M. and 9 P.M.,leaving one to assume that after 9 P.M., these Presbyterian paragons could, with impunity, cast off their clothes and swim flagrantly in their birthday suits beneath the cover of darkness.
Even in my moviemaking imagination, I find it challenging to envision my great-grandmother cavorting nakedly. In every picture—even those on the beach—Grannie Addie is fully skirted, her collars starched, her hair done up, a little hat perched jauntily beneath a parasol. The remains of these outfits are now costumes in a box. The last time Sedgie opened a parasol, it exploded in a puff of dust and rotted silk.
But back to Sadie and Edward and the construction of the Aerie. Fast-forward the men reshaping the dune with shovels and plows, the carpenters laying a foundation on the stumps of felled trees. Up goes the house in a matter of seconds—studs, bead-board, shingles, shiplap, more shingles, and the obligatory garlands above the windows. The house is painted a sober green, and—behold!—my great-grandparents, along with their first son and my infant grandfather, waving from the porch.
According to Grannie Addie’s letters, the house originally had no kitchen. All meals were to be taken communally at the clubhouse—what was later
to become the yacht club. Neither was there any plumbing; thus, the Byzantine pipes that came later. And it wasn’t until 1900, after the kitchen was built, that Sadie Addison started writing down her recipes for tripe and tongue. By then, she had lost a daughter and, allegedly, her mind. Infections of the time killed more than a third of American children before their fifth birthdays. Statistically, Sadie and Edward’s family was right on the money. One child out of three succumbed.
Hospice has come to show us how to help our mother die. Two mild-faced women at the door. They remind me of Mormons. I resist the urge to open the door and say in a Lurch-like voice, You rang?
Dana and I invite them into the living room. They are winded from the stairs. So many stairs, they say. How do you sweep them all?
“We don’t,” I say, pouring tea.
Dana beams the two women an earnest smile. Perhaps they hold the possibility of a solution. “Our mother,” she begins. The two women lean forward. “She hardly eats. Ice cream, vodka. I try to get her to talk to me, but she won’t.”
One of the women purses her lips, reminding me of my current shrink, the eternally patient Dr. Anke. Dr. Anke nods in response to all my rants of victimization. She eggs me on. Your mother, she says. Why was your mother always napping?
Dr. Anke is my third therapist. The first two were abysmal failures—more my fault than theirs. I wasn’t even sober. I moved back to New York and, within a year, got into a program. When I got out of treatment, the hospital referred me to Dr. Anke. I liked her name. It was like the Egyptian sign for life.
Are you Egyptian? I asked her.
Swedish, actually. She had long, blond hair swept back in a ponytail. She wore glasses to make herself look older, but she was smarter than her age. Together, Dr. Anke and I have mapped out the terrain of maternal pathos—a long-forgotten garden choked in weeds. Why was your mother not supportive? With pruning shears, we’ve attacked my mother’s drinking, the way she took to her bed. Hack, hack. We pulled back wayward ivy and thorny stems. Do you think your mother was happy with the choices she made in her life? Hack, hack, hack. What do you think she would have done differently?
The first time she asked me this question, I considered it carefully. I even stroked my chin. But Dr. Anke’s eyes bore into mine until I finally said, My mother’s choices were limited to marriage and children, and after we were grown, what? Garden club and bridge? Martinis at lunch?
I then added what I already believed to be true: that my mother simply lacked interest.
That’s very sad, Dr. Anke had said.
“It’s very sad,” one of the women from hospice says in response to Dana. “But death is a natural part of life. Without death, life would have no meaning.”
I want to dispute her on this point. What about work? The meaning of friends? But her statement carries the finality of one of my mother’s needlepoint sayings.
“It’s all about contrasts,” the other woman says. “Letting go. It’s quite beautiful, really.”
Let go and let Betty.
Dana says, “So you think you can help her?”
“Normally, we work with people who are terminally ill with cancer. But in this case…because she is terminal, according to Dr. Mead…we can help you cope. At least, we can tell you what to expect.”
One of the women begins to hand out brochures. These, she tells us, will explain the process of dying. An infection may occur, taxing the lungs. Or, in the case of a stroke, brain capacity shuts down, compromising organs. “The body dies slowly,” she says.
I want to tell her she is wrong. The body can die in an instant, that it can be breathing one second in the nursery upstairs, the fontanel pulsing with life, and in the next moment, cease to breathe. Simply stop.
“Ultimately,” the hospice woman goes on, apparently having read my mind, “the breathing simply stops.”
I look at the woman sharply. She is older than I, maybe fifty. Her hair is gray, while her friend has dyed hers assertively red. The gray-haired one keeps putting on her reading glasses as she cites passages in the brochure, then taking off her glasses and staring at Dana and me. She earnestly wants us to get it. She is an interpreter of death. Like my father’s secretary, when I turned twenty-one, laying before me spreadsheets and columns, interpreting the numbers of what my grandmother had left me, making sure I understood. It meant nothing to me at the time. A number, fixed in ink, nothing plastic that could be reshaped or adapted. A sentence, not a choice.
“So,” I say. “How long?”
The two women exchange glances. I have the feeling my question is predictable, unenlightened. And like Dr. Mead, they look at me a little regretfully. If they pat my hand, I’ll scream. But they do not touch me. Instead, they say it will happen in time—in the body’s time, in Evelyn’s time. We will see the changes, though. The subtle blue in the extremities, the irregular breaths, the fixed stare. Things will become very focused. Our world will become small.
Don’t tell me about small, I think. Don’t tell me about death. I’ve been there, ladies, and I’m not thrilled to go again. I ignored the baby monitor, and Sadie stopped breathing—and now you’re asking me to sit and wait and gauge my mother’s breaths as she creeps out of life on her own damn time?
“Well, then,” says Dana. “We’ll just have to keep her comfortable.”
Leaving their brochures spread all over the coffee table, the two women ask to look in on Mrs. Addison.
“Certainly,” says Dana, rising.
“Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
After they leave, I pick up a pamphlet, but I can’t concentrate. I want to believe my unspoken declaration to Miriam that I’m not of this place, but the letters in my grandmother’s hand say otherwise. Her letters from the time the house was completed in 1887 up until 1890, the year of Elizabeth’s death, are demure examples of Victorian optimism. They never speak of money. They never mention my great-grandfather’s surreptitious drinking. They are sunny letters that begin with cozy and familiar wording such as Let me tell you about the house.
But in the summer of 1890, after Elizabeth’s death, the tone of her correspondence changes. Curling up in a wicker chair, I read the letter she wrote to her father, the one-eyed Presbyterian:
Weeks have passed, and though the weight is still heavy in my chest, I have taken your words of comfort to heart. Indeed, as you say, God sends children to cleave us to the world while teaching us not to love too much. In my weaker moments, I wonder why He would expect us to strike so precarious a balance. Perhaps the measure of our lives rests on such a fulcrum. That He loves her as we do, I have no doubt, and possibly she was spared a greater unhappiness by avoiding the burdens of adulthood. Yet I shall always wonder who she would have been. So, too, shall I miss those dear brown eyes that reflected the world in innocence.
You may tell me not to dwell on these things—that my duty now is to my sons. But please indulge me my despair, for her short life was the bitterest sweetness, longer in my womb than under this too bright sky. I take care not to expose my weakness to my husband, but hopelessness contaminates this house as surely as the fever that went before.
Please keep us in your prayers because, at this moment, I cannot offer mine.
One might think that, with a thirty percent mortality rate, parents of the time would be better braced for the loss of a child. Who would risk becoming fond? The photos I’ve seen of Elizabeth show a fat-cheeked infant with brown eyes drowning in cascades of ruffles and lace. The tintype in the oval frame on the dining-room wall displays her seated in the lap of my grandfather, my great-uncle looking on. Two weeks later, she started crying, exhibited a rash and a fever and, within three days, was gone. Scarlet fever wasn’t an epidemic in 1890, but there were outbreaks. In 1887, each and every one of the children in the village of Harrison, Ohio, perished. Perhaps one of the maids in Cincinnati brought it to Sand Isle. Perhaps another child.
I can imagine my forebear kneeling by nine-month-old
Elizabeth’s crib—the same crib, perhaps, in which my daughter, Sadie, died. The original Sadie Addison, in her cotton skirts and silk blouse, prayed in the confines of her summerhouse, where she and her husband have planned their Elysium far from the shores of the Ohio River. Surely, the vicissitudes of life—the dank pollution, the rotting, sulfurous air—can’t reach them here. The child’s cheeks are flushed—not with health, but fever. Elizabeth’s eyes glisten, the brown eyes of the child’s matching those of my great-grandmother.
There is no poetry left in my hand, she writes. I am bereaved beyond words.
Reeling, I return again and again to my great-grandmother’s letters until my mind is suddenly on gardens. I start thinking about gathering flowers to put in vases in the cousins’ rooms. Surely something can be resurrected from the weeds below the porch. Cornflowers for my niece Jessica. Sunflowers for Sedgie. Black-eyed Susans for Adele. Roses or cosmos for Derek. I will hack away and excavate them from the overgrowth, the grasses and brambles that have smothered them. From beneath the campanula gone to seed, the opportunistic tendrils of myrtle, I will ferret out the leafy remnants of my great-grandmother’s garden, breathe new life into them, finger them for a pulse.
FOUR
Ready about!” I say as I come around a corner.
My father bought the Malibu station wagon new in 1964, and at one time, its lines must have appeared sleek and modern. Even so, it has less than ten thousand miles on it because it only gets driven in summer—airport runs, the IGA, and, when we were teenagers, long, winding drives out the shore. After I turn the wheel, seconds seem to pass before the rest of the car decides to follow. Like a cartoon limousine, it snakes around curves.
Jessica’s plane was due in at 3 P.M., but planes seldom land on time this far north. Some flights are canceled for days. But the Baileys’ cocktail party! Dana groaned when she heard that Jessica would be delayed for hours. At which point I offered to pick up my niece, relieved for the excuse to dodge my parents’ friends whom I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Their questions, good-natured and wholehearted, inevitably gloss over their true opinions of my absence.