by Lynne Hugo
27
IT SOUNDS CRUEL WHEN I TELL IT, but I wouldn’t let Evan come to me. It seemed disrespectful to Mother; that’s how I justified it, but the truth is I didn’t know how I felt about my husband, and couldn’t bear to have him ask me. My wedding rings stayed wrapped in Kleenex, zipped in a compartment of my purse. I didn’t know how I felt about Mother, either, how to understand what she’d done, the note she’d written, but my mother was dead, and the fact alone threw such a stifling black blanket of guilt over my mind that sorting individual strands of anger, manipulation and madness was impossible then. Once again, one of my feet was in a boat and the other on the dock as the engine of the boat shifted into gear.
I confessed to Roger how I’d been late because I’d let Evan stop me at the station. I had to. I couldn’t accept his assuring me over and over “it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.”
“Of course it’s my fault,” I shouted at him, the night he arrived, twenty-three hours after Mother died. I’d been up all night, of course, between the police and the coroner, and I suppose it might have been excusable if that’s all I’d shouted. But then when he took me in his arms the way I longed for him to, I was suddenly furious. I shoved him back, hitting his chest and screaming, “And it’s your fault, too, every bit as much as mine. You broke every promise you ever made to her, and to me. I told you I couldn’t do it alone and you didn’t care. You didn’t care. You have no idea all that’s happened because you didn’t care.” I’d struck pay dirt; his bloodshot eyes, ringed with the mark of a smudgy thumb, filled involuntarily. We were in the living room, then, in semidarkness because neither of us had noticed enough to turn on the lights.
He sank into the blue sofa, bent double as though I’d punched him in the stomach. “I know. Oh, God, Ruthie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I had no judgment or restraint left. “Yes, you are. A sorry son, and sorry brother. You and Evan, you’re both so…goddamn sorry.” It was a moment’s relief to rage at him, to blame him. All I really wanted was that there be some identifiable fault line—or intersecting lines—where my earth had erupted into so much destruction. I, Roger, Evan, it didn’t matter: I just wanted someone or something I could point to and say, See, there, that’s the cause of all this incurable grief, that’s why love was never ever enough to save any of us. “It’s like a sick joke, the pointlessness of it. Mother’s dying could no more save me than anything I’ve ever done saved her. But the Bride of Christ took it all on, didn’t she? I just don’t get why she couldn’t have done it for Judas. Guess she just didn’t love you enough, it was better to be a boy when we were kids, but lookie here, when we grew up, I got lucky, she kept all the really good stuff for me,” I railed on. Here we were, deposited beyond the edge of the endurable world, lost. I was beyond making sense.
Roger’s face was buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking. As quickly as I’d ignited, the flame died and I was overcome with shame. “Oh, Rog, Rog, I don’t mean any of that. Look, look at me, please, Rog, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s not your fault. I understand. I do…I got married for God’s sake. How could I not understand?” I put my arms around him and buried my face into the space between the back of his neck and his shoulder, my tears running down into his chin and doubtless mixing with his own, a little stream like the running water into which Mother had mixed her blood.
We went on like that, back and forth, recriminating and forgiving, scourging and soothing each other with words and tears. Mother’s body was released the next morning, and together, Roger and I decided upon cremation.
“RUTHIE, YOU’VE GOT TO let Evan come for the service.”
“How did you get so high on Evan? It’s not like you met him at my wedding or anything.” I was at Roger again, aggravated that based on two telephone conversations with Evan, he was suddenly my husband’s new best friend. We’d flitted around like disoriented birds all day, trying to put together a small memorial service for Mother, trying to decide what to do with her ashes, sorting through the contents of the house. Her clothing and shoes had been boxed for Goodwill, and we’d arranged for them to pick up most of the motley furniture, too.
“I’d like Mother’s flute,” Roger said. We were cleaning out the refrigerator at the time, throwing out ketchup and mustard that was older than either of us. “Unless you think you would. I think you should keep the car. Why was it we didn’t get music lessons?”
“What’ll I do with a car in New York City?”
“So you plan to go back?”
“Of course. It’s where I live. I go to school there, remember?”
“I meant, what about where you’ll live? With Evan?” He said it casually, timing the question for when his back was turned, pitching old jelly jars into the trash.
“Leave me alone about it. I just can’t see him right now. You don’t know the scene that went on between him and mother. She killed herself proving him wrong.”
“But if I got your drift, which I admit I may not, she ended up proving him right.”
The conversation went in circular spurts like that, with me angry, sarcastic, then remorseful again. Roger was holding up under my onslaughts, but I thought he wanted Evan around to take some of the heat off himself, and that made me angry all over again. We were packing the old mismatched plates and silverware in the kitchen by then, the signs of our chaotic but shared life vanishing as we moved through the house. I’d ducked past the window seats, with the six boxes of Roger’s and my heritage. I didn’t think I could bear to just pull them out of their hiding place and give them away, not after all that Mother had made of them, but how could I ever look at that chocolate-brown dress with the white fur neckline?
“She sure didn’t have much, did she?” I remarked. Really, it was amazing how little it all added up to when it was tightly packed, condensed into airless boxes.
“We didn’t have much,” he corrected. “Except, of course, the immensely helpful knowledge that we were each the result of immaculate conception. Our heritage, my ass.” He shook his head as he said the last, his voice bitter.
“For a while we had each other,” I said, but not with the cutting edge that had been unsheathed since he’d arrived. Rather, it was wistful and nostalgic, which must have been what gave him the courage to answer.
“We could have each other again…and you could have Evan.”
“You just don’t get it, Rog. I don’t even have myself,” I said. I didn’t say it to wound him, but, of course, I did.
I GUESS I FINALLY TIRED OF inflicting wounds. “The memorial service is tomorrow at noon,” I said to Evan on the phone. “If you want to come.”
“Of course I want to come. You know I want to come.”
“Okay. I checked the timetable and you could come in at 10:33. I can pick you up at the station. We’re having it at the funeral home…it just got too crazy trying to think about a church, she went to so many, and you know, the, uh, circumstances make it awkward. This is simpler, because we can greet people there. Rog and I have this place almost emptied out. Just big stuff left. Anyway, it’ll be mainly her students and parents, the Jensens and us.”
“Mark and Sandy want to be there. Okay? Can they just come with me?”
“Okay. Have Sandy come pick something for me to wear out of the closet, and bring it, will you?”
“I can do that. How are you? I’ve been so worried.”
“I know. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say lately, I’m sorry.” I was on Mother’s pastel blue princess phone, the one with the light-up dial she’d raved about. Using it to talk to Evan made me feel nervous and guilty.
“No need to be. Just let me love you.” His voice came through static on the wire, a bit of pleading in it. He must be feeling guilty, too, I thought. Well, that was all right with me.
“Not much left to love, Ev. I’ve gotta go.” I wasn’t about to make him feel better. Although I was tired of inflicting wounds, apparently I wasn’t tired enough to stop.
&
nbsp; THE HEAT BORE DOWN from a sky that glared like the white of a fevered eye, but the air-conditioning inside, like a refrigerated morgue, was the victor. Mother’s ashes were in a brass urn on a table at one end, chairs approximating the pews in a chapel arranged facing the table. I’d given the funeral director the only portrait of Mother I had: one from her performing days, before Roger and I were born. She was heavily made up, dramatically looking up as though at a remote secret heaven. Next to the framed picture was a single red rose for Mother, flanked by two white roses, one each for Roger and me. It had been Roger’s idea. In front of the arrangement of portrait and roses, her silver flute gleamed in silence.
I got through the service in the pastel-upholstered funeral home by paying no attention. Roger had done most of the work on the service without me, and finally engaged a Universal Life minister whose church she’d intermittently attended, to officiate. I had been largely useless, unable to think of a single thing I believed anymore. Evan, next to me in a navy-blue suit and white shirt, wore a muted tie he must have bought for the occasion, his others presumably being too festive. His hair looked darker, and I noticed he kept his glasses on. Doubtless, he didn’t want to look at anything too closely today. Who could blame him for that? He wiped sweat from his forehead with a white monogrammed handkerchief his mother had given him last Christmas. I spent my time noticing he’d polished his shoes and that his socks were black instead of the blue he usually wore with that suit. Roger was underdressed in a sports coat and khaki pants, the best clothes he owned, he’d apologized to me, embarrassed, and Evan had said, “I could have brought you a suit if I’d known.” He’d given Sandy his credit card and sent her to Bloomingdale’s to get the black dress with white lace collar I wore.
“Rog, it doesn’t matter. Wear a bathing suit for all I care,” I said.
“You’re not yourself, Ruthie. Take it easy,” Evan said, touching my elbow, but I pulled away—discreetly, I thought.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. Roger had asked Anna DeLue, mother’s favorite student, the gifted one, to play the flute. When the first silver notes of the hymn shimmered toward us like Taps, I shot a sharp look at him. He fixed his face into rigid lines and planes, but when he met my eyes, his shoulders began heaving. Of course he remembered. And finally, I began to cry.
“I told her she could play whatever she wanted that was appropriate,” he choked out before we had to greet people, after the final Amen. “I should have specified.”
As people left, they came to speak to us. “Your mother was a wonderful woman. I’ll never forget how far she took Anna. She helped her get into the conservatory, did you know that?” said Mrs. DeLue.
Anna herself was crying. “Thank you for asking me to play,” she said. “I could always talk to her. Sometimes she’d give me the last lesson of the day and we’d talk for a long time afterward. She always encouraged…”
“You’ll miss her terribly, I know,” said another parent. “She must have taught you so much.”
“She’ll always be with you,” another one whispered, “but God must have called her home. I’m sure she’s with the angels, playing the flute for them. She had such a good heart, a kind soul.”
“Wasn’t she funny, too. Such a sense of humor.” Then, in a conspiratorial tone, someone I’d never met said, “I guess sometimes we don’t know who is suffering. Such a shame no one could help her, when she’d helped so many young people.”
I was taken aback. They were talking about the charismatic, magical woman, the one I’d seen often enough to love without reservation or criticism when I was a child. I’d thought that woman had disappeared, that Roger and I were to blame. It must have taken everything she had to pull herself together for students and their parents. I was proud that she’d been able to do it, at the same time it made me desperately lonely. No one really knew, no one except Roger.
Evan was certain he did, but of course, there was far too much I’d never told him. I wanted to spill it all out to him, to sort it out into columns and say, “Look, this is the tally of what really happened. It’s much more than what you witnessed that brought us here.” I almost couldn’t believe that he thought the little of it he’d seen was an adequate map to the terrible place at which we’d arrived. I’d not shown him what she’d written; it too suffused me with shame in both of us.
EVAN, ROGER AND I ALL got a little drunk that night. Rog had bought a half gallon of red wine when he’d gone out to get us pizza and salads after we’d come back from the service. We took Sandy and Mark to the railroad station but Evan and Roger joined forces on the issue of whether Evan would stay or go. “I could use help getting the rest of the stuff out of the basement, but I’m too shot to do it now,” Roger said.
“No problem,” Evan replied, both of them bypassing me. I hadn’t the inclination to argue anyway. I was in another place, my mind numbly observing the goings-on at the funeral parlor and here, in the home of so many sorrows, as if from a great distance.
We all changed into shorts and Tshirts—the house wasn’t air-conditioned—and sat on the floor with the stub of a candle stuck in an empty Coke bottle Roger fished out of the trash. The night sank around us, as we picked at pizza and drank the Chianti out of paper cups. None of us could handle anymore; we talked very little about Mother, but instead Roger and I rehashed our few poor stories about incidents in our lives that didn’t directly feature her.
“Remember Mr. VanFrank? He was one great guy,” Roger said. “I actually thought about calling him today.” He was lying on the floor, propped up on his elbows, while trying to stay in the track of the oscillating fan.
“He came in the diner a couple of times when I was waitressing. It was nice, you know, he’d always order the same thing and stay to talk to me if it wasn’t too busy. He told me I should try to be an exchange student.”
“You were a waitress?” said Evan.
“Oh, man, you ought to see her sling hash.”
“But not as well as you sling bull,” I laughed in Roger’s direction, lost in the brief mercy of wine.
“No, be serious. What else don’t I know about my wife?”
The laughter dried on my lips. “That’s what worries me,” I answered.
“Oh, come on! That’s not what I meant. There’s nothing to worry about, I’m just interested.”
But I was thinking about the blue sofa, how Mother had braced herself against it when she’d made me beat her, and how once I started, I had enough anger in me to keep going. Had I shouted aloud that day I’d thought it was only in my mind? Had I killed my mother with my hatred as surely as I’d helped her kill hers? Would Evan think his wife capable of murder—direct, indirect, either way, it didn’t matter: I could claim credit for one of each. No, he would never really know me. I didn’t want him to. I could kill him, too. I seemed to be acquiring a repertoire of techniques as varied as Mother’s music.
It was because I’d had too much to drink that I let Evan and Roger take over. Dimly (through a glass darkly, I remember how the phrase came back to me like an echo of the minister’s voice reading that passage at the service), I heard Roger say, “You and Ruth take the bed, I’ll grab one of the couches.” I heard a protest rumble from Evan, then Roger said, “Hell, it’s the last night. Ruth and I both slept on couches the whole time we lived here. Goodwill said the truck would be here by ten for the furniture. Is there anything in this place that you and Ruth could use? She said no, but I obviously can’t drag it to Colorado, so if you see anything, take it.” Then, finally, Roger’s voice a last time, “Well, none of it’s worth anything anyway. Can you look at this stuff about probate? I don’t want Ruth to have to mess with it, but I’m not sure how some of it gets filed…it’s a good thing Ruth’s signature is good on the checking account. She did a lot more than her share with Mother.” I heard Evan agree, but his tone had lost its hostility on the subject.
Then I was on Mother’s bed, Evan sliding my shorts off and
covering me with just the sheet. I wanted to protest, I don’t want to sleep in here, I don’t want to…I thought the words, but nothing came out. Outside the open window, in darkness too dense with heat and moisture for starlight to penetrate, crickets were chanting Amen, Amen, as though they had forever and nothing else to say. Amen. The urn containing Mother’s ashes—her smoldering last note folded into the indentation beneath its base—was on her empty bureau, six feet from my head, while my husband’s body weighed the bed down next to me. On that uncomfortable slant between the two of them, I tumbled dizzily toward sleep.
28
WHATEVER ELSE WAS IN THE dream that impelled my eyes suddenly open, I recognized my mother’s voice in the last instant. Dawn was raising the dark toward gray, enough that I could tell where I was and see the urn on the bureau. Evan was next to me, in what looked and sounded like a peaceful sleep, the sheet rumpled across his bare chest. What was it Mother had been saying to me? What had awakened me was horror, all my maneuverings shameful in retrospect.
How had I let this happen, that I’d slept with Evan in her bed? I sat up and swung my feet toward the floor, my head setting up a pounding protest. Had I had sex with him? Was it possible that I’d done that, too, like a willful gesture of rejection, with her ashes and letter set by my head? My mouth tasted rotten and stale; I was nauseous.