“Oh George,” I said, “excuse me. I was thrown by the uniform.”
“I’m afraid there’s bad news, Liz. Your mother died last night.”
I laughed. He stared at me. “No, it’s not a joke,” he said. He had a kind freckled face and at once I remembered him—a big kid who everybody liked and nobody picked on. “I’m afraid she died in her sleep. The nurse found her this morning. We’ve been trying to reach your father. His office says he’s away, an extended vacation, no forwarding address. We’re waiting for the doctor.”
“The doctor?” I asked. There, I thought. That proves it. She’s not dead. Why would she be dead? Dr. Gilbert had told me six months, a year, maybe even longer.
George took off his policeman’s cap and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. A red line marked his forehead where the band had rubbed. He replaced the hat and said, “We need a death certificate before they can move the body.”
I went inside the house, George respectfully walking behind me. Everybody had liked George when he was little. He was good on the playground and never hurt anyone’s feelings. His partner, Officer Gargiulo, was sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, reading The Star-Ledger. His hat was on the table, next to a can of Diet Pepsi. He stood up when I came in. “I’m sorry, Miss,” he said. “Maybe you’re glad to have this over with?”
“What over?” I asked.
“The illness,” he said. He was stocky too, with a dark tan and black hair crisply cut. He raised a hand and caught in it a fly that was circling the room so slowly it looked drugged.
I went in to see my mother while George stood in the doorway with his back turned. She was lying flat on her back under the bed sheet, with the scalloped hem of the sheet turned down under her arms. She was wearing a white nightgown with a square neck edged in blue satin ribbon. Her face looked sunken. I touched her cheek with my fingers. The skin was dense, waxy, cold. Yes, she was certainly dead. Or would she, in just a minute, open her eyes? I looked down at her again. No change. I looked around the room. Her bedside table with its white vase-shaped lamp and a pile of paperback books and a small tole tray with various bottles of medication and a glass of beaded water. But how had it happened? Dr. Gilbert had said six months or more. A fly swooped across the bed and settled on her chin. I waved it away.
“What do I do now?” I asked George.
“You could call a funeral home. Did you have one in mind?”
“No.”
“You’re a Protestant, so maybe Hawkins. They do most of the Protestants. O’Neill or Capelli get the Catholics.”
“Isn’t death nondenominational?”
“The departed don’t care. It’s for the family.”
The house was dim, neat, cool. There were certain household routines my mother had always observed and that belonged only to her. First thing every morning she went through the rooms opening draperies and pulling up shades. And at night, unless it was very hot, she would close the curtains again. She was the one who locked the doors, too. I asked her once why she carefully locked all the doors at night and she said, seriously, ‘To keep you safe.’ I think it must have been true. She wasn’t worried about losing things, and she wasn’t worried about herself. She was worried about losing us. Now we had lost her.
Skip drove down that night and stayed with me in my mother’s house. We went out to a local pub for supper—dark oak beams, posters of Great Britain, the smell of beer. He ordered turkey clubs but I couldn’t eat; cubes of toast stuck in my throat. I drank instead. I had several glasses of white wine. After the third glass I began to cry. Skip signalled the waitress and we left. I cried in the car all the way back to the house. Once there, I went into the room that had been my bedroom in that house and I locked the door. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore, until my eyes burned and my chest was dry and my ribs ached. In the middle of the night I got up and went out to the living room. The TV was on, the screen merely whitely buzzing and flickering. Skip was asleep on the sofa with his shoes and tie off.
I knelt down on the floor next to the sofa and pressed my forehead against his cheek. He licked his lips and mumbled something. I unbuttoned my wrinkled cotton dress and dropped it onto the floor and then lay down next to him on the sofa, pressing my body against his. I wanted to be close to somebody. I was terrified. His face was scratchy with beard and his breath smelled of beer. With his eyes closed, he started stroking my back and then unfastened my bra. We made love on the sofa, which wasn’t what I had intended, but my emotions were confused so that one kind of need became another. At the end I started to cry again, and we were both slippery with sweat, so we went into my bedroom—I was still crying, a silent crying, and I lay down on the bed in there.
Skip took off his clothes and dropped them on the carpet and then lay down under the sheet and closed his eyes. I lay on my side of the bed, facing him. I whispered, “Skip? I think she killed herself.”
He mumbled, “Why do you think that?”
“I just think she did.”
“You don’t know that. She could have died in her sleep.”
“The doctor said six months or longer. I should have been down here. I shouldn’t have left her all alone. She didn’t seem that sick to me, not sick enough to die.”
“Why couldn’t they find your father?”
“He’s out of town. It’s their honeymoon.”
He turned over, away from me. I lay there staring out of the window. There were sheer Swiss curtains at the windows, with embroidered hems. Perhaps because it was hot my mother had left the shade up but pulled the curtains closed, so that whenever a small breeze entered the room it lifted the curtains and dropped them again. Outside the night was beginning to lighten, the black becoming various shades of gray. “I think I’ll stay down here this week,” I whispered. “I’ll get things packed up and cleaned out.”
He didn’t answer. I head his breathing, as regular and guileless as a child’s.
In the morning when I woke up I smelled coffee and I thought for a moment that my mother was in the kitchen and everything was as it used to be. Then I remembered that my mother was dead. They’d taken her body away and I would never see her again.
The memorial service was held at eleven a.m. the next Wednesday morning at the First Presbyterian Church on Maple Street. The church was packed. It seemed the entire town had turned out. Dr. McGorty, the minister, had served with my mother on the Substandard Housing Committee, and I knew he would be thrilling and vain and affecting all at once. My mother used to say humorously about him that he was in love with his own voice. He was a short man with beautifully arranged silver hair and dark brown eyes and you never expected the deep melliflousness of the voice that came at you, resounding from all sides of the stone church. Walking down the main aisle with Skip, I saw a man I thought was Leonard, and then realized that it was. I was shocked and uncomfortable.
The mayor, Elbert Prouty, gave the eulogy. He had once famously called my mother a “left-footed liberal,” but now he praised her character, her persistence, and the fact that she had taken on so many clients who were not well-to-do. He told two funny stories about her that I’d never heard before—how once after a meeting she’d gotten into his Buick instead of her own and never noticed that the upholstery was a totally different color. She jammed her key into the ignition and when he appeared—dourly—at the car window she’d said, “Oh Bert, thank goodness you’re here. I can’t seem to get my car started.”
Another time, she’d appeared at his house for dinner. He thought his wife had invited her, his wife thought he had invited her. She sat through cocktails and got into an argument with three members of the County Republican Committee. Bert and his wife kept glaring at each other. Just before fisticuffs broke out, my father pulled up in his car and cheerfully came to collect her. It seemed that they’d been invited next door to a cocktail party preceding a hospital benefit dinner. He’d seen her car in the driveway and figured things out.
The audience alternat
ely chuckled and dabbed at their eyes but already, it seemed to me, my mother had vanished, had vaporized, was no longer the complex and ungraspable many-sided person we all knew, but a “character” with a certain definitive outline about whom you could tell stories, a “feisty” “good-hearted” “believer in justice.” The pews creaked, people coughed or fanned themselves (it was another hot June day) and nobody said the truth, that, in fact, often she’d been the worst kind of pain in the ass. At least to the town’s Republican establishment. Now she was safely dead and out of their hair, and with some skillful editing she’d become for the first time not just an acceptable person but a courageous one, et cetera, et cetera.
As I came down the aisle, I’d seen Paul Wilkes of the AME Zion church and Maurice and Mungo Snyder, two black brothers in behalf of whom my mother had sued the local fire department. I remembered my brother saying, “You better be careful about how you put out those cigarettes, Ma. They might be real slow getting here if we need them.”
After the mayor’s eulogy, Mungo Snyder sang. He sang, “Swing Low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home,” and then from the back of the church (still the back! my mother would have made them move up), among the black citizens seated there, the clapping started. The two back pews were occupied by Wilkeses and Snyders, Smiths and Taylors, Chisholms and O’Neills, all black families. They clapped out the rhythm of the song, “Swing low! sweet chariot!” and the rhythmic singing and the clapping was taken up by everyone, the song became jubilant, a hosanna in praise of—not death—but of life, her life, a life that in its own way, in this small town, had amounted to something, and then we stood up and sang, rich and poor, young and old, black and white.
It was what you might call a moment of community. It was what you would want a community to feel like, at least occasionally, at least so you know the feeling’s possible. It struck me that the only other time I’d had this feeling in Comstock was Thanksgiving Day of 1963, when the Comstock High football team beat Cloverdale High 26 to nothing.
Skip drove me back to my mother’s house after the service. “You okay?” he asked, pulling up at the curb. He looked pale and troubled, the boyish scattering of freckles under his eyes were a dull liverish color.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Maybe you should come back with me.”
“Why? I’m all right. Besides, I want to get the packing over with. I’ll have the house listed by Saturday.”
“Listen. Dad and Amelia are coming up for the Fourth.”
“You mean to the Farm?”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. They just decided to come up and see us.”
“They sent flowers.”
“For the service?”
“They sent lilies. Those white lilies in the tall basket.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“It was nice of Leonard to come.”
“Where’d he disappear to? I didn’t see him later.”
“He must have gone out the side door. Are your parents okay?”
“They sounded okay.”
“I wonder what they want?”
“Maybe nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s just for the day. I’ll see you Friday night.”
We kissed, delicately, on the lips. I went into the house. It was very hot, I closed the drapes and turned on the living room air conditioner. I took off my dress and sat on the sofa in my underwear. I didn’t know what to do, so I watched TV, one program after another. After a while I fell asleep, and when I woke up I felt lost. I thought, What am I going to do? I put on the TV again and watched a British movie of World War II, a comedy that took place in Scotland. I was filled with such sadness. My parents were young then, not much older than me. I watched another movie and thought about Skip. I should have gone back with him. I hadn’t wanted to, I don’t know why. I fell asleep at last after three a.m.
4.
“Why Liz,” my mother-in-law said with some determination, “You do look gran’, chile. Lemme give you a big kiss.”
I bent my head. She kissed my cheek. Smack. There. I realized then that one of the disharmonies in our relationship was my slightly above-average height. I imagine it irritated her that she had to look up to me, and it irritated me to so slavishly bend my brow to this familial yoke. Gran’, chile. Sure.
Skip’s relationship with his mother confused me. He would spend hours closeted with her, listening, consoling, perhaps himself being consoled. But no, I didn’t think so. It wasn’t Amelia’s style. She wasn’t a mothering person, given to fluttering and clucking and cooing. Her method was to flatter Skip by asking his advice on practical matters. The fact that he’d gone to law school made him especially useful to her.
Skip’s stepfather, a large grinning presence on my left, enveloped me in a brawny hug, a big, bone-crunching masculine scrunch that smelled ever so faintly, attractively, of sweat. You couldn’t help liking him, he was tall, handsome, unabashedly vigorous, and despite the age difference between us, he set all kinds of hormonal strings a-singing. He was a nice man, although perhaps somewhat spoiled by his own naive sexuality. Yet I’d never heard any gossip about him, maybe because Amelia circled round him constantly, like the alert keeper of a large, good-natured but essentially unpredictable beast.
“How are ya?” he boomed out in his ringing baritone. The crisp black crinkles of his well-cut hair and the astonishing whiteness of his teeth! Today he was dressed in white—white shorts, white polo shirt, white sneakers, no socks. A tuft of black chest hair reared up at the neck of his shirt. His arms and legs were furred as well. His face was tanned, blue-jawed, the cleft in his chin formidable. He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey as well as sweat. She smelled of “Joy.” She wore a Lily shift in blazing corals and pinks.
“Why it’s lovely here,” she said. “I certainly do unnerstan’ why you chillen like it so very much. I do hope, though, you’ll think about gettin’ a little place all your own. A real family kind of place.” She winked at me, the green-dusted lid of one green eye snapped shut like a doll’s, with an almost audible click.
He said, “Certainly is nice up here. We brought some stuff for the party. Beer, wine, Jack Daniels.”
“Know what struck me?” she said. “Up here there are no nigroes. We went through all these teensy villages and didn’t see one black face. Amazin’. D.C. is just unlivable. You need a personal bodyguard jes to go shoppin’.”
I replied (ever the stiff-backed liberal) that we did have a couple of black families living nearby. The Tillburys were people I knew who lived in Stanton. The McCords had a farm on Route 8. The McCords had been in the county for a long time, generations, but although even this far north certain county families had owned slaves, the McCords had known themselves to be free men and women as far back as the American Revolution. He was a social studies teacher, she was a nurse.
“Don’t say,” she muttered, with a sarcastic tuck to a corner of her mouth. “Wunnerful.”
They followed us into the house. It was just past noon and in the kitchen things were getting organized for the picnic. May was shredding cabbage for cole slaw, Alice was cutting up greens for a salad, Wayne was shaping hamburger patties. Amelia went around saying hello to everyone as if she were working the crowd at a cocktail party. “How are ya, how are ya.” My father-in-law stood and gave us his dazzling smile. Alice turned and looked at him appraisingly from under her mascaraed lashes.
Outside, under a true-blue All-American sky, Sal and Skip were setting up the volleyball net. We were going to have a lot of company. Sal’s ex-brother-in-law was coming from Plainfield, Shauna’s sister Millie, Millie’s husband and their two kids were on their way. Wayne’s brother and his fiancee would arrive around three, Alice’s brother the cop was coming, plus wife and kid, May’s parents were coming, a detour on their way to the Jersey shore.
I thought of how the year before my mother had come up for The Fourth and now she was dead. Every nig
ht now, I woke up at two-thirty or three a.m. and thought of my mother and felt a burning sensation in my chest, as if in the utmost blackness of the body’s workings, I’d erupted a crater full of boiling fluid. If only I’d stayed with her, just been there with her. She must have felt completely alone: my father off with the new bride, the daughter miles away, and her heart slowing, tottering, failing.
I’d convinced myself she’d been a suicide, but whenever I brought this up with Skip his face took on a grim look. “Hey, don’t obsess. What’s the point of talking about it? Besides, I think you’re imagining things. Just because that woman—what’s her name?—yeah, Sonny—just because she tried it, doesn’t mean it’s happening everywhere.”
Sal and Skip were playing badminton now, hamming it up with leaps into the air and deep knee bends. Sal held the racquet like a baseball bat and gave the shuttlecock a terrific whack. Skip, on his side of the net, simply stuck the racquet up in the air so that the birdie hit the strings and fell straight down at Sal’s feet, as if it’d been shot. Skip laughed.
“Well, shit, man,” Sal said. “What kind of stupid hit is that?”
“This is a brain-game, Sal,” Skip said. “You’ve got to have finesse. You want to play a nickel a point?”
“Ahh, go jump,” Sal said in disgust.
Before the picnic supper, some of us drove down to the village to see what the local celebration was like. The village festivities took place in the park, a charming glade of lawn and old shade trees that lay on both banks of a little glittering river. A Long Victorian footbridge of wrought iron hung over the shallow river, making one of those idyllic places for strolling that brought to mind an utterly different era, one devoted to parasols and flirtations and German bands.
Of course there was music—a stereo system had been set up in the picnic pavilion and ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday’ was coming out of the loudspeakers full blast. Why that song? Nobody knew. The mayor’s sixteen-year-old son was in charge of the music. Members of the VFW handed out little tin American flags which you could pinch onto your collar. The Dix Mills’ Women’s Club had set up a table to sell raffle tickets for a hand-stitched quilt (to benefit the Orphans Christmas Fund) and booths had been set up to sell hot dogs, hamburgers, watermelon, ice cream, frozen custard, popcorn, and funnel cake, a sugar-dusted import from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania eleven short miles to the west. For a quarter you could play the ducking stool—you had to hit the center of a target and if that happened, the person in the ducking stool—who happened to be The Mayor—got bobbed into a tank of water. A jumping frog race in two categories—large frogs, small frogs—was about to start, and a pet parade with prizes for Largest, Smallest, most Unusual was under way. Most Unusual would certainly be won by a boy who had brought his boa constrictor, which he wore—a real “boa”—around his neck.
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