The house was at the top of the road after an interminable climb, a grey shingle house that looked as though it had been blown by sea-salt winds rather than the north wind from the hills. In the winter, more than summer, it went with the stark landscape: I had forgotten that half the year the land was not gentle. I had come expecting to see orchards in bloom, the lilac bursting, the new green trees embracing the house. From the upstairs bedrooms in the summer I always had a sense of being in the trees.
But the maples and oaks were still skeletons, and another of the elms was down, only the sawed-off trunk a reminder of where it had stood. The elms had somehow been part of the house itself, so that now there was a dying look to the unprotected front door. Nothing to keep out the cold, and the wind that was always alive on the crest of the hill, cool and comforting in summer, but bitter now, taxing the heater in the rented car.
I went past the front of the house, turned down a small dirt road, and drove to the old barn that served, among other things, as garage. The red paint was wintered off, grey wood showing through. Beyond the barn was another, also paint-peeling, which was my father’s studio. When we were little, we all had easels in the studio, and were allowed to paint with Father for an hour every day. For the other three, it was only a comfortable memory of childhood. I still drew upon the things I had learned painting beside Father. I wondered if he was already at work; he liked the early morning light, and even in his latest work, the absolute newness of the first light was what struck one most forcibly.
As I got out of the car and left the barn, planning to walk back to the studio and look in on Father, Matilda came running to me, followed by Scar, the old hound. She was pushing her arms into an old coat, a man’s coat, not my father’s. I did not recognize it. She flung herself into my arms and simultaneously managed to hold me. Scar jumped up and barked in greeting. Matilda said, “Down.” I have never been very fond of Scar.
I pushed Matilda away to look at her; she smelled of fatigue, an odd odor for Matilda the Immaculate, always recognizable by her personal scent, the Madame Rochas with which I provided her and which I took in through contact with her flesh. “What is it, Tilly? Why did you send for me? Is it Father?”
She shook her head in negation at the same time that she said, “Yes.” Then, “It’s everybody. Father. Mother. Me. Bless you for coming, Marty, though you’re earlier than I expected and the house—oh, Martin, it’s just all got”—she held out her arms in a strange gesture of helplessness—“too much.” Helplessness was not a characteristic of my elder sister, who always stood tall and austere over every situation.
I said, “The barn needs painting.”
“Yes. And the house. Oh, Marty, I’m sorry about the house. Lily couldn’t come yesterday and I haven’t had time to get things tidied…”
“We better have the house and barns painted this summer.”
“We can’t afford it, Marty.”
“Why? What’s happened to their money?”
We were walking towards the house, arms around each other. I could not now see the gauntness of her face where the skin stretched thinly over the bones so that she had reminded me of Father. It was Helen and Billy who had inherited Mother’s tubbiness—Helen was always on a new diet. Matilda and I were long and lean. She said, “Money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I sell one of Father’s paintings occasionally and that helps, but we have more expenses now.”
“What?”
“I can take care of Mother, except for lifting her, I need help with that. But Father—”
“Is he ill?”
“Not—physically.”
“What, then?”
“His mind. You saw yourself last summer that it was going.”
“It’s worse, then?”
She did not answer.
“Is he painting?” I gestured towards the barn.
Again she did not answer.
I said, “As long as he paints, he’ll—”
Leaving Scar to whine outside, we went into the house by the low east door, which led us through a stone pantry to the kitchen. The front door was used only in summer when all doors and windows were flung open so that the house could drink in the blue and gold and green.
Today all doors were closed, and windows, and, as Matilda opened the door to the kitchen, I could feel the atmosphere of the house take me unaware and slap me across the face. Always when I crossed the threshold I thought of Mother’s bread baking in the oven; I smelled comfort and Queen Anne’s lace and the north-west breeze.
It was as though I had entered a strange place. The kitchen floor needed washing. There was a pile of soiled sheets sending up the stink of urine on the floor by the washing machine. This mixed with an equally strong stink from the cat’s box, which needed changing. There were dirty dishes in the sink, something unprecedented. Then I saw the chair by the hearth, but turned away from the fire so that the occupant could look out the window, across the cold fields and scars of stone walls, out across the bare valley to the hills. Our old cat crouched on the high back of the chair, staring unblinking, unwelcoming.
“Father.”
“When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen. Who’s that? Is that you, Billy?”
Billy was dead, dead in a war as stupid as every other war. Sharper, more self-protective than Billy, I’d managed to duck out of the war, sent cables after Matilda’s brief, dry phone call, cried hot tears with Mother and Father the following summer, and asked if I could have Billy’s magnificent captain’s desk shipped to England. It was perfect in my study, but I always felt a shock when I went into his room, as though seeing someone with their front teeth pulled out. It was right that I should have Billy’s desk—everybody said so. But I also want it to be in his room, too: simultaneously.
“Go away, man,” Father said, “we don’t know you.”
It was like looking into Billy’s room and expecting to see the desk: something was gone, something was not there that should have been there. It was not simply the appalling changes that less than a year had made in him physically: the silver hair was limp and lifeless; the contours of his face seemed to have fallen in; all his bones, indeed, seemed to have crumbled, so that the once erect old man was a huddle of bones held loosely by the wrinkled skin. The hands on the arms of his chair trembled.
“Father, it’s Martin. It’s Martin, Father. I’ve come home.”
“I’ll put green paint on your nose,” the old man said. “That may possibly improve it.” Tremulously, he started to rise.
From the shadows of the hearth behind his chair a girl emerged, a stocky creature, probably in her late teens, with lank brown hair straggling about her coarse features. Calmly and firmly she pushed the old man back into the chair. “It’s all right, Gramps,” she said in a loud, cheerful voice, as though she were speaking to a not very bright child. Then, to Matilda, “Lily called just now. She’ll be over this afternoon to clean things up. I’ll get the washing machine going in the meantime. Don’t you fret, Miss Tilly, I’ll get the dishes out of the way in a few minutes now that I’ve got Gramps settled.”
Matilda put her hand over Father’s to pet it. “Marty, you remember Daphne. She takes care of Father in the mornings.”
I murmured something that I hoped sounded affirmative.
“Daphne is Harriet Cooley’s youngest. The Cooleys have the big garage down in the valley. You remember.”
“Oh, yes, yes of course.”
“I don’t know how I’d manage without Daphne. Do you want to see Mother now, Marty?”
Want. Yes, but not now, not today. Then. Yore. Ten years ago, when Mother waddled happily between her rows of flowers and vegetables wearing one of those loose shifts of subtle blues or rusts or greens, exotic patterns she had created and dyed herself and which strangely suited her comfortable bulk. Her white hair was braided and coroneted, and her face, devoid of makeup, was alert, questioning, welcoming. She would sit down on the rich soft ground between a row of
zinnias and a row of brussels sprouts and talk: about my latest portrait—she was inordinately proud of my success; about Billy’s brilliant PhD thesis—Macmillan was publishing it; about Helen and her husband and the children living in California, and how Helen never wrote but always came once a year with the children; about how spartanly Matilda was bearing the death of her husband and children in an automobile accident—we never said that Malcolm had probably been drunk, only how terrible for Matilda, the waste of four lives and the death of her world. Then we would turn from the subject, the wanton reasonlessness of life and death, and talk about Father’s painting, about mine, and finally Mother would say, when reason returned, “You’ll have to help pull me up, Marty. There are disadvantages to being shaped like a cannon ball and I don’t want to roll into the vegetables.”
In the house now, in April, a log crumbled. The smell of burning applewood covered the smells of the unclean house. I was grateful that it was only because Lily, whoever she was, hadn’t come. In his chair, my father leaned forward, and I saw spittle dribble down the corner of his mouth and hang off the point of his chin. He had been shaved, and I wondered whether Matilda or Daphne had shaved him. “Why don’t you change the cat’s papers?” I said sharply.
“Marty.” Matilda’s voice was quiet, hurt. “Do you want to see Mother?”
No.
I followed her to the ground floor room that had been made into a bedroom for Mother when she broke her hip. It had once been a formal Victorian parlor. Now there was only a hospital bed, a chair for visitors, and shelves for Mother’s books. The back of the bed was slightly raised, and Mother lay there inertly, her soft bulk covered by a throw, another of those exotic, subtle pieces of material she had designed and executed. There was one book on her table, and an enormous magnifying glass.
“Marty’s here, Mother.”
She opened her eyes. “Marty, where are you?”
“I’m here, Mother, right here.”
Her rheumatic hands groped towards me. “Marty—where—”
Matilda gave a shove. “Go to her, Marty. She can’t see you unless you’re close.”
“But…”
“Her eyes are going, rapidly.”
“Can’t anybody—”
“No. Marty—”
I went to the bed, and I took Mother’s hands in mine. They were as always, dry and warm. Her grip was firm. She spoke, and suddenly it was her own voice, familiar, reassuring. “Matilda, I’d like some coffee, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martin would join me in a cup.” Then she gave her inimitable giggle. “Though we’d both look rather foolish, both trying to sit in the same cup.”
I laughed, too. “I’d love a cup of coffee, Tilly.”
As Matilda’s steps retreated, Mother said, “How does she look?”
“Tilly?”
“Who did you think I meant? The kitten?” And I noticed the inevitable kitten curled between Mother and the wall. There’s a new kitten every summer. When they grew up they stayed in the barn—behind the garage section we kept a milk cow—and in Father’s studio.
Mother spoke with an unwonted edge of impatience. “How does she look? Damn it, Martin, I can’t see for myself. I can only feel how she looks, and l don’t like the feeling.”
“She looks tired,” I said.
“And well she might be. What else?”
“There’s a good deal more grey in her hair.”
“And—?”
“She’s not standing as straight.”
“Go on.”
“Mother, I’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“You’re a portrait painter.”
“She doesn’t look like one of my portraits anymore. She used to. Now—maybe Grant Wood. She’s thinner. Everything about her is tight. That—oh, sort of grace and fluidity—is gone.”
“What about her eyes?”
“They’re veiled.”
“Tilly was never one for letting anyone in. Generous to a fault about everyone else, but too proud ever to let us be generous in return.” Then Mother’s nostrils twitched, very slightly. I was glad she could not see my face. She said, “Malcolm, please ask Tilly to come change me. I am soiled.”
Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, and perhaps I only imagined the humiliation behind this horrendous reversal of roles.
Tilly, the eldest, could probably remember me, and even Billy and Helen, being bathed and powdered and diapered by Mother. Although it seemed to me that I remembered lying on Mother’s and Father’s big bed, on a towel soft from age, while Mother’s firm hand rubbed cornstarch over my bottom, pinned on the clean nappie, and set me, fresh and powdery, in my crib.
I said, “Where’s Mrs. Matson?”
Mother said, “She died a month ago. We haven’t had anybody to take her place. Tilly’s looking. We have three girls to help take care of Father: Daphne, Lily, and Grace.” Again her irrepressible giggle. Then, “We’re very lucky, because they’re all kind and patient with him. Please, Martin, I am quite uncomfortable. Call Tilly, and then leave the room.”
Mrs. Matson wasn’t—had not been—much older than Tilly. It did not make sense for her to be dead and Mother alive. I went out to the kitchen and Tilly was at the stove, cooking something—for lunch, I suppose. It smelled like a kind of stew—Tilly was always a good cook—and this homey odor was a relief.
“Mother wants you, Matilda.”
From his chair, Father said, “Matilda is brutal to your mother, Billy, brutal. How any child of mine can be so cruel—”
Daphne, pushing a strand of oily brown hair out of her eyes, stopped him cheerfully. “Oh, come now, Gramps, you know that’s not so.”
“She’s cruel, Marty, she won’t let me paint, she hides my brushes—”
Matilda, walking to Mother’s room, was suddenly more erect, so I knew his words had hit her.
Daphne’s warm smile belied the forced heartiness with which she called Father “Gramps.” “It’s a sickness in his arteries, you know. He doesn’t really mean it.”
Father raised his voice. “Don’t talk about me as though I’m not here. She bullies me. I’m not a child. Take her away.”
“Take who away, Father?”
Daphne said, “Gramps, do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“No. I can mess if I want to, like you-know-who.”
I said, “I’m going to my room.” I went upstairs. Past Billy’s open-doored room with the hole where his desk had been, the color of the wallpaper less faded. Past Mother’s and Father’s room, the great bed unused now, or did Father still sleep in it? Past my own room to the nursery, where Matilda’s children in summer had wakened the entire household at a proper seven or seven thirty in the morning (Mother would already be in the garden, Father in his studio), and where now Helen’s brats disturbed me during their visits by screaming for water at least three times a night and no one was allowed to sleep after five a.m. On to Matilda’s room, the smallest and always the coziest, reminding me of Emily Brontë’s room. Mother had made the curtains and the bedspread for the small bed that Matilda had moved into after Malcolm’s death. Mother had done the stencils on the walls, too, all in soft shades of brick rose, so that the room reminded me of my garden. I was relieved that the room was unchanged until I saw the picture—if one can call it a picture—over the bed. Matilda seldom bothered to show up at any church, casually calling herself a Unitarian. What in God’s name was my Unitarian sister doing with a cheap, gaudy, bleeding heart framed and hung over her bed? It destroyed the room. I backed out, did not go to Helen’s predictable room, but returned to my own, which was always a paradoxical blow to me, clean, impersonal, pleasant, but hardly mine anymore since I had virtually stripped it for my house.
I sat on my bed. How long does she want me to stay? Why did she send for me? Does she need more money? If I accept just a few more commissions, it won’t be a hardship for me to send more money.
I heard steps on the stairs. Heavy steps. Like Mother’s. Mother
would come clumping up the stairs at bedtime and squeeze into the big wooden rocker. She might be four feet in all directions, but she managed to have a mammoth lap, big enough for several babies simultaneously, and an unending repertory of seventeenth-century songs, some of them extremely bawdy.
Mother: singing to me: to my nephews and nieces: simultaneously.
Matilda came into my room. “Marty. There’s a tray of coffee in Mother’s room, and some hot muffins.”
“Tilly, what the hell is that bleeding heart doing over your bed? Have you gone to Rome?”
Tilly’s laugh was often reminiscent of Mother’s joyous chiming. Now she sounded like Father. “Hardly. It’s simply a reminder that life is a bloody farce.”
“You need to be reminded?”
“Sentences need periods at the end of them. It’s also a slim hope that somebody who once shared in the comedy may also be laughing at it.”
“You still believe in God?”
“On occasion. That’s why I use a bleeding heart for punctuation. Mother’s waiting for you.”
“Her eyes—”
“Part of the farce.”
“The magnifying glass—”
“She can still read for a few minutes at a time.”
“Why did you send for me? Is she dying?”
“Nature is not that kind.”
“Then—”
“Martin—I tried to tell you. Sometimes one needs—support.”
We went downstairs. Tilly buttered a muffin. “Mother, Grace made these muffins for you.”
Mother said, “Grace comes at night. You remember Grace. Grace Butler.”
I didn’t, but I let it go. “To help Tilly with you?”
“Father,” Tilly said. “The girls often bring their friends, too. I really have lots of help.”
“What about Mother, now that Mrs. Matson’s—gone?”
The Moment of Tenderness Page 22