“Thank you,” she said pointedly. “It means more than I can say.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Wence, betrayed. Mary Gunn was not welcoming her to Broadlawns. She turned from Lila, too.
The four or five others who had followed were confused only for a moment, then they followed the impulse in the organ prelude and sat solemnly down. When, after a few minutes, a spring of gay chatter erupted, Mary lifted her handkerchief to stifle it.
“Was the sign too high for wheelchairs?” she asked Lila, not meeting her eye. “I don’t see Edith.”
“I’ll check her room,” Lila said. It was empty. Then Lila heard a faint tra-la. Edith Fickett was abroad, though heading the wrong way.
“You shouldn’t be humming, Mrs. Fickett,” Lila said, seizing the wheelchair handles from behind, “you’re on your way to a funeral.”
“I … what?” Edith said, but regained herself. “Not humming, dear,” she said. “Humming is an aimless and vulgar pursuit…” But they were turning, they were on their way in.
“Edith,” Mary said, “how kind.”
For one long, terrible moment, Edith groped and found nothing, not her name or her home or any of the beliefs that had drawn her through life. Then she closed her hand on the firmest thing she knew: she must always, always be polite.
“I’m honored to be asked,” she said. Though she could not remember Mary’s name, she knew, seeing her face, what to say: “I’m so terribly sorry.” And saying it, she felt it; sorry for Mary’s loss which none of them could measure, for the leaves drifting away from the trees, for herself and her old dreams.
Mary nodded, clasping her hands, waiting for Edith to go on. “Lila,” Edith asked, “did you know … him?”
“Mr. Gunn?” Lila asked, giving Edith a clue. “We only spoke a few times.” She hated to mention speech, reminding Mary of Frank’s tight-lipped death.
“What a shame,” Edith said, ad-libbing, talking on faith. All sorrows were similar, weren’t they? No love satisfied, none was complete enough to crush and comfort its object. “He was so reserved, you know,” she said, “but how he loved our Mary here.” The name had leapt to mind as a gift; Edith was profoundly grateful. “And how he admired you, my dear, it showed in his every word and deed.”
“Thank you,” Mary said, as if acknowledging the most perfunctory condolence, but then she looked down and said again, “Thank you,” humbly, to herself alone. The organ music fell away, and after a muffled thump and crackle the Reverend Sleight took up his funerary drone.
Mary came to the back of the room and said to Lila, very softly, “Perhaps we can keep the tape on file for anyone who’d like to run through it again.”
“A wonderful idea,” said Lila, pouring a glass of sherry. Mary accepted it, while the others bowed their heads, listening to the Reverend Sleight go on.
Lila raised her own glass. If she had not provided the funeral of Mary’s dreams, if her event had not the mighty solemnity of the imagined ideal, still it had a luster: the plastic cups of sherry glistened, the lilies lifted their fragile heads, Lila’s dress took the light like a prism. This event was at least her own.
“To Frank,” she whispered, touching Mary’s glass with hers. Then another toast, in thanks, to the God she could never quite believe in. Surely, deep at the center of the moral universe there turned a beautiful star. Lila leaned back against the refreshment table but stood again, lest the dress split a seam.
The moon was rising, just a day on the wane, and the puny trees grew sharp against a fathomless sky. Edith, who had heard the Episcopal funeral service often enough to have memorized it, saw she had missed the full moon. Why had she not gone to the window last night? She would have to wait another month now, into November, and she considered, with the iron calm she had practiced against the inevitable, that no one could promise her another month. How could she have forgotten the harvest moon? Her hands closed on the armrests with a strength that surprised her. How could anyone ask her to sit here while the moon rose up beyond the view from the window, perhaps for the last time?
“Lila,” she said, in her fullest, haughtiest Yankee tone, so loudly she drowned out the ashes-to-ashes-and-dust-to-dust, “it’s time to go now. It’s getting dark as a pocket in here.”
We Face Death
When Ma had nowhere to go, after her divorce, Abe Withan let her move into his chauffeur’s quarters—the Withans only keep a gardener and one hired hand. It was a low, vine-covered cottage attached to the garage, across the driveway from the big house. The rooms were dark and narrow and always smelled of the damp, but from the backyard Ma could look out over the Withans’ vegetable garden, their orchard on its long march toward the valley, then the roofs and spires of Brimfield amid the southern hills. When she pulled a beet in that garden, it was as if she could hold it up for the whole world to see. She was only supposed to stay at the Withans’ a few months, until she found a job and got back on her feet, but she could never bring herself to leave. It’s been seven years now, and my sisters—Grace and Audie—and I have come to think of that house as our home. The day I finally gave up on Lawrence I drove straight there.
I’d spent all night packing, all day in the car, my head spinning with accusations and entreaties. I set my hand on Ma’s latch with a pilgrim’s weary joy, imagining a cup of tea, but I opened the door to a blast of heat and laughter.
Ma was standing like a diva before her whole salon.
“How can you laugh at me?” she asked them, laughing herself, wiping her eyes. “I’m telling you, it was terribly sad!”
Abe’s men, just down from the woodlot, laughed mightily, straddling their chairs. Abe, though he’s at least sixty and owns the highest hill in town, looked as if he’d worked hardest of all: his thick hands were creased with dirt and when he laughed sawdust shook out of his beard. Audie lives just in the valley, so she’s always at Ma’s. Her children were drawing backward alphabets over sheet after sheet of stationery on the floor. Ma had a roaring fire, for the first of September, though there was barely a chill. Everyone had a tumbler of scotch and a story, and the voices rose, overlapping, fragments flying from one conversation to the next, laughter careening. Stepping over the threshold, I nearly put my foot in a casserole.
“My strombolis!” Audie said. “Kate!”
I hadn’t said I was coming. I wanted to slip in quietly.
“Kate? Oh, Katie!” Ma swooped across the room to embrace me as if her life depended on mine. She amplifies everything, to dazzle Abe, so I was welcomed now like a soldier home from the front. Everyone had to hug me, even Rolf, the new hired hand I’d never met before. Grace had been knitting in the firelight, and jumped up to clasp me so tight we bumped heads. Audie’s children tumbled over themselves to reach me, each clinging to one leg.
I shrank away, afraid Ma would ask about Lawrence and I’d have to produce some stumbling explanation for the whole room, but of course she never thought of him. She doesn’t care how I throw my life away as long as I’ll spend some of it laughing with her.
“Well, Katie won’t be so callous,” she said to her audience. “After all, I was hanging by my thumbs.” Retrieving Abe’s eye, she returned to her story.
Audie read my pallor and moved over to give me the farthest corner of the couch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been crazy the last few days.” She always treats me with reverence and condescension mixed, as if I were at once too delicate and too exalted to be bothered with her mundane life. I left Brimfield, went to college, and lived by accidents of love, while she got married and had Tim and Lizzie right away. They bent luminous heads over their drawings at our feet.
“Lizzie,” Audie said. “Go get your Aunt Kate a glass of scotch. You don’t mind it straight, do you?” she asked me. “She can’t do ice yet.”
“I can so,” Lizzie said, rolling her eyes in mock exasperation, stamping toward the kitchen, her fine blond hair swinging.
Ma’s voice rose again. “Well, it seemed like
I was hanging by my thumbs.”
Audie shook her head, smiling; she thrives in a maelstrom. Besides the children and the housepet menagerie, and her regular and extra jobs, she’s always peddling lobsters for the library fund or baking for the bereaved. She’s a little spark plug, all duty and indignation, happiest when she’s on her way down to give the PTA or the Zoning Board a piece of her mind. In a calm moment she’ll get nervous, as if something must be secretly wrong.
“It’s been crazy all week,” she said. “You know about Grandma’s flu?”
She knew I didn’t; she was waiting to tell all. Though Ma and Grandma, as usual, weren’t speaking, Ma had felt bound to nurse her and had taken Audie to mediate.
“God, she was sick,” Audie said. “And of course she said if Ma called the doctor, she’d call the police.”
“Is she better?” I asked. I didn’t want to take a turn spending a night in that house, with its years of accumulated cooking odor and Grandma’s little dried bouquets disintegrating everywhere.
Audie mistook my concern and rushed to reassure me. “She had hot peppers for breakfast, I think she’s fine. But it was crazy! When I got home, the rabbits were loose…”
“They were in Daddy’s boots!” Lizzie was back with my drink, which did have an ice cube, though in her race to join the story she’d sloshed most of the scotch away. “And, and…” She was almost too excited to speak, but in fear of being interrupted she took a breath and let her story spill. Toasters exploded, pressure cookers rocketed overhead while Lizzie, enthroned on her mother’s lap, threw her quick hands up, gasping to show how she had gasped before, telling us all about it, as if the surging river of calamity would carry her through life on its crest.
“… and Mommy couldn’t go to her meeting, because the Town Hall burned down!”
This was the first thing I’d seen as I drove into town, and it gave me a cold thrill, like a nightmare. The Town Hall was built in 1751, and the sober ideals of that time had seemed to watch from its high windows over the length of Main Street. Now the great stone steps led to a roped-off pit, with an ancient, mossy graveyard beyond. The grocery, the pharmacy, and the church, abandoned, seemed scattered and small.
“Arson,” said Audie matter-of-fact. She expects buildings to go off like Roman candles every now and again. “The third this summer.”
“The fourth!” cried Ma. “Don’t forget the Plaistow house.”
“Now, we don’t know that was arson,” Abe said, but he hardly hoped to restrain her. Abe himself is so subdued that his every blink is subject to interpretation. Ma looked delighted to hear him speak.
“Please,” she said, giddy on his attention. “There’s a clear pattern. But they’re hitting the wrong places. I’ve got some suggestions that would singe your eyebrows.” She was speaking, as we all guessed, of the bank where she works as a part-time teller—though she’s fit to be Loan Officer at least—and of my father’s new house on the lake.
Grace knitted ominously. She’s the youngest, and she had divided that summer, her last in college, evenly between my parents as always, working in the bookstore and walking home up the hill or down the lake road, according to the week. Justice herself doesn’t clutch the scales tighter than Grace.
“It’s not really funny,” she said, sounding surprised to hear her own voice, shocked to hear it criticizing Ma. The fires were filling the town with fear. The arsonist seemed to crave a spectacle and was burning the largest buildings in town. After the Plaistows’, Abe’s is the biggest house.
“The caretaker died, you know,” Grace said.
“You’re right. I’m sorry, honey,” Ma said, and sincerely, but under Abe’s eye she can leave nothing plain. “I’m being silly. It’s not only arson, it’s murder, and it’s horrible. The bastards should be torn limb from limb.”
Why had I come here? At my house the worst noise is Lawrence turning another page. Yesterday I’d called him a pedant, clinging to his theories, afraid to put his feet down in the thick stream of life. I’d accused him of killing my youth with neglect. Now I remembered how spare and pure was the life in our clean-swept apartment, how free of false hopes, embarrassing ideas.
“… drawn and quartered! Ripped on the rack!” cried my mother, pausing to take a sip.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Grace miserably. She glanced up for my support but, finding it, judged me as she judged herself: disloyal. She looked away. “Never mind,” she said, pulling out a long row of stitches and starting again.
“I’m sorry, Sweetheart,” Ma said. “I never mean to upset you, really I don’t.” She seemed to be pleading, and everyone was quiet, waiting for Grace to absolve her.
“I know,” Grace said finally, wanting everything smooth. She strained for a true smile.
“I’m still a child, really, at heart,” said Ma, relieved and airy, watching Abe. “That’s why I annoy you all so. I’d be different if I could, really.”
Abe drew heavily on his pipe, fighting his smile. He’s not an immoderate man, but he’s guilty of enjoying Ma far too much. Here this pleasure threatened its boundaries—we’d just seen his wife drive in. He put a hand to the small of his back and rose with a valedictory “Well…”
“Well…” echoed my mother, meaning that if Abe was leaving, the others ought to go home too. In a minute the room would be quiet. I’d have a bath. I’d tell my story.
But the party was not to be snuffed.
“Kate! I haven’t talked to Katie!” protested Vinnie Duff, Abe’s gardener, so that Rolf turned to eye me and repeated my name in a heavy, suggestive voice, as if in this roomful of delights I were a morsel he had yet to taste. Timmy climbed the bench to bang the piano until Abe’s big black dog came out from beneath and stretched himself, baying along. Then the phone rang, from pure exuberance.
“Yes, Grandma,” Audie shouted, answering with a finger in one ear. “Now you have to call a doctor. Yes, now! All right.” She hung up and turned to us. “Pay attention, this is serious. Grandma has to go to the hospital.” She was flushed with purpose, in command, and everyone sprang to her will as if we were firemen just waiting for a call.
I refused to worry: my family loves a crisis, a chance to drop all the tedious ordinary chores and surrender ourselves to emotion. Ma will manufacture an emergency whenever she’s feeling dull.
Abe and Vinnie got clear of us, but Rolf was new on the hill. Everyone in Brimfield Valley can look up to see the neat fields at the Withans’, the big white house, the apple trees. Rolf had expected to find Abe in a smoking jacket, and, in the chauffeur’s quarters, a chauffeur. All evening he’d laughed in the wrong places, never sure how to take us. Carried away by Ma’s attention, he’d tried to goose Grace, urging her to “loosen up.” Now he threw back his shoulders and told us, from a pontifical height, that we had no need of doctors if Jesus was on our side.
Ma gave him a moment’s polite smile, but he was off the subject.
“What about me?” she asked, still vamping, looking for our sympathy, our interest, or at least a laugh. “What about when I was sick? Did you find Grandma at my bedside? But now of course she expects…” Recalling what was expected, she gave a daughterly sigh. “I’ll come with you, Audie,” she said. “Kate, you and Grace meet us at the hospital.”
“I’m sorry,” Audie said to me over her shoulder. “It’s been crazy all summer.”
I felt a firm hand on my arm, so familiar I half expected to find Lawrence behind me, but when I turned, there was Rolf.
“Don’t forget,” he said, more threatening than kind. “You’re in the palm of His hand.”
* * *
“No, Mother. You may not ‘die in peace,’” Ma said witheringly. She’d had to call the ambulance when Grandma refused to leave the house. Now Grandma lay before us on a gurney, in the corridor of the emergency room. They were pumping blood out of her stomach, dripping blood into her arm. Her face was thick and gray, her white hair stood on end, and all her softness, her
sweet vagueness, was gone. Whether in peace or not, she was clearly dying. I told myself to look closely, to see what I could learn.
She tried to lift herself on an elbow, but failed, and gave me a rueful, cracking smile.
“Not a very good day for me,” she said. She was neither frightened nor serene. This might have been another household predicament, a flooded washing machine or blown fuse. “But, Katie,” she said, and her voice filled with grandmotherly fondness, “your mother tells me you’re going to have a baby.”
Ma met my surprise with a whimsical shrug—no reason not to make promises now. I nodded to Grandma, smiling shyly, and reached for her hand, but there was a needle attached there.
“She’ll name it for you,” Ma said.
Grandma turned obstinately away from her.
“Even my last wish you disobey,” she said, and the green masks came to wheel her away.
“It took three men to get her into the ambulance,” Ma told the nurse, less vexed than proud.
“Was she unconscious?” The nurse was a preternaturally neat and smiling woman, and ready with compassion, but Ma gave a laughing shout.
“She was thrashing! She wants to ‘die in peace’! Nothing less than death for her, no wretched little diseases.”
Grandma has been suspicious of medicine since she was eight years old and the doctor was the only man in town with a car. He loomed up beside her in this gleaming contrivance as she walked home from school, helped her into the high seat like a lady, let her squeeze the horn and wave to her friends the whole length of Main Street to his office, where he chloroformed her and tried out another up-to-the-minute idea: a tonsillectomy.
“You’re not to take any extraordinary measures to save her life,” Audie said. “We promised.”
The nurse smiled inscrutably.
“‘Extraordinary measures’ indeed,” said Ma. “She watches too much TV. Sit down, Audie, and stop worrying. I’ll go hold her silly hand.” She thrust Grandma’s purse, a red straw clutch that must have had espadrilles to match, on me, sending me to fill out the forms.
The Rose Thieves Page 13