by Lisa Alther
As she swooped down from the clouds to take the pulse of her ailing mother, Ginny felt a distinct kinship with the angel of death. “I couldn’t ask the boys to come,” Mrs. Yancy’s note had said. “They’ve got their own lives. Sons aren’t like daughters.”
“Indeed,” Ginny said to herself in imitation of Miss Head, her mentor at Worthley College, who used to warble the word with a pained grimace on similar occasions.
As they taxied up to the wind-socked cow shed that masqueraded as a terminal, Ginny was reminded of the many times she’d landed there in the past. Her mother had always been addicted to home movie-making and had choreographed the upbringing of Ginny and her brothers through the eyepiece of a camera, eternally poised to capture on Celluloid those golden moments — the first smile, the first step, the first tooth in, the first tooth out, the first day of school, the first dance, year after tedious year. Mother’s Kinflicks, Ginny and her brothers had called them. A preview of the Kinflicks of Ginny’s arrivals at and departures from this airport would have shown her descending or ascending the steps of neglected DC-7s in a dizzying succession of disguises — a black cardigan buttoned up the back and a too-tight straight skirt and Clem Cloyd’s red silk Korean windbreaker when she left home for college in Boston; a smart tweed suit and horn-rim Ben Franklin glasses and a severe bun after a year at Worthley; wheat jeans and a black turtleneck and Goliath sandals after she became Eddie Holzer’s lover and dropped out of Worthley; a red Stark’s Bog Volunteer Fire Department Women’s Auxiliary blazer after her marriage to Ira Bliss. In a restaurant after ordering, she always ended up hoping that the kitchen would be out of her original selection so that she could switch to what her neighbor had. That was the kind of person she was. Panhandlers asking for bus fare to visit dying mothers, bald saffron-robed Hare Krishna devotees with finger cymbals, Jesus freaks carrying signs reading “Come to the Rock and You Won’t Have to Get Stoned Anymore” — all these people had invariably sought her out on the crowded Common when she had lived in Boston with Eddie. She had to admit that she was an easy lay, spiritually speaking. Apparently she looked lost and in need, anxious and dazed and vulnerable, a ready convert. And in this case, appearances weren’t deceiving. It was quite true. Normally she was prepared to believe in anything. At least for a while.
Ginny remembered, upon each descent to this airport, spotting her mother and the Major from the plane window — each time unchanged, braced to see what form their protean daughter would have assumed for this trip home. When Ginny thought of them, it was as a unit, invincible and invulnerable, halves of a whole, silhouettes, shape and bulk only, with features blurred. She decided it was a holdover from early infancy, when they probably hung over her crib and doted, as parents tended to do before they really got to know their offspring. But this trip home there was no one standing by the fence to film her arrival — in a patchwork peasant dress and combat boots and a frizzy Anglo-Afro hairdo, with a knapsack on her back and a Peruvian llama wool poncho over the pack so that she looked like a hunched crone, the thirteenth witch at Sleeping Beauty’s christening. Her mother was lying in a hospital bed; and the Major had “gone beyond,” as the undertaker with the waxen yellow hands had optimistically put it a year ago.
Apparently she was on her own now.
Her homecoming was less than festive. There were no drill teams in the driveway, no family retainers doing Virginia reels on the front lawn as she got out of the airport limousine. She struggled up the quartz gravel driveway, almost losing her balance because her knapsack straps were forcing her to stand up straighter than usual. She noticed that the lawn was overgrown and the tufts of coarse crabgrass were beginning to poke up among the gravel. She looked with pleasure at the graceful leaded-glass fanlight above the front door. Her home may have been a fraud, but at least it was a tasteful fraud. With a seizure of anxiety, she inspected the Southland Realty FOR SALE sign planted in front of the magnolia thicket.
“You’re not really selling the house?” she’d demanded of the Major when she’d been in Hullsport shortly before his death a year ago.
“Sure,” he replied blandly, holding his pipe to his lips and lighting it with a match held in his left hand, with its alarming missing finger. “Why not?”
“Why not? Well, because it’s our home, that’s why not.”
“Not mine, it isn’t. Do you and Ira want to move down and live in it?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Well?”
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was to move back to Hullsport. But it was reassuring to have something stable to reject.
Ginny jiggled the front door handle. It was locked. Setting down her pack, she knocked loudly several times with the huge brass knocker, which was badly tarnished. She had no idea whom she expected to respond, with her mother in the hospital — her childhood self maybe. She decided to look under the doormat for the key, since that was the traditional hiding place in movies and novels. Sure enough, there it was. Which raised the interesting question of why someone had bothered to lock the door in the first place, since the entire American criminal population would instantly look under a doormat for a key.
As the huge door swung inward, a gust of musty air enveloped her. Hefting her pack, she walked in and cautiously looked around. Nothing had changed. The damn place was like a time capsule. Her mother had always refused to repair or redecorate, saying that she preferred to remember things as they were when her children were little. Consequently, the green wall-to-wall carpeting through the hall and up the spiral staircase was almost worn through in spots. The mahogany banister was still listing outward from when Karl, Ginny’s older brother, had slid down it carrying the dog. The green and white stenciled wallpaper had smudges all over it alongside the stairs where sticky hands had steadied small careening bodies. Her mother’s mahogany Chippendale desk, which had had nails hammered by Karl through its claw feet and which contained her mother’s epitaph and memorial service plan, still lacked the two handles that her younger brother Jim had wrenched off after being hogtied to them by Ginny. Over the desk hung the rubbing from Great-great-aunt Hattie’s tombstone: “Stop and look as you pass by./As you are now, so once was I./As I am now, so you will be./Prepare to die and follow me.”
And on the desk itself sat her mother’s most treasured possession — a small walnut clock about a foot and a half high with a peaked top to its casing like a house roof. A green etched-glass door covered the face and the clockworks. Fluted pilasters ran up the sides of the casing, and the hands were of filigreed wrought iron. The numbers on the face were faded Roman numerals. The clock had belonged to Ginny’s Grandmother Hull, and to her mother before her, and so on. God only knew where it had come from originally. It had sat for decades collecting coal dust on shelves and tables in small crumbling company houses in southwest Virginia mining towns, until Grandma Hull had brought it, like the household gods in ancient Rome, to Hullsport. As a child, Ginny had loved to wind it with its large metal key — eight turns each week and no more — as had her mother before her, and Grandma Hull before her.
A huge oaken Dutch kas stood against the wall opposite her mother’s desk. One of its paneled doors still hung askew, as it had ever since Ginny had hidden there among the tablecloths during an inspired game of hide-and-seek. The kas was another heirloom. The wooden pegs that held it together could be removed so that the giant cupboard could be transported in pieces — which had occurred any number of times prior to its being beached here in this pseudo-antebellum mansion.
The Palladian window flooded the hallway at the top of the stairs with sunlight in which legions of motes drifted languidly. Karl and Jim and Ginny used to lie there and watch the motes, blowing up at them to make them dance crazily. Karl was an army captain stationed in Germany now, with a wife and four children. Jim was making Vietcong sandals from cast-off tires in Palo Alto, California. Ginny had seen them for a brief several hours at the Major’s funeral. They had found surprisingly little
to say to each other.
The house was utterly silent. Ginny had the feeling she often had when alone and quiet there that a band of sound was present just beyond the range her ears could hear — a dog could probably have heard it. This band, the audio accompaniment to her mother’s Kinflicks, was a replay of all the shouts and laughter and arguments and brawls that had filled this house ever since it was first built. She turned her head this way and that way, teasing herself with the notion that if she could achieve the appropriate angle with her defective hearing apparatus, she could tune into this frequency. It was the same feeling she’d had ever since learning in Botany 104 that in a young forest, the some 124,000 saplings in one acre would eventually be reduced to about 120 mature trees: If she could only have heard the struggle, the din would have been deafening. It was creepy. She decided to stay at the cabin instead.
“Is there anything I should know about Mother?” Ginny asked as she drove Mrs. Yancy to the airport later that afternoon. Mrs. Yancy wore a flowered hat and white gloves and a linen coat-dress. She was meeting members of the National Baptist Women’s Union in New York for their charter flight to the Holy Land.
“Yes. She has idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura,” she answered carefully.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura.”
“The clotting disorder?”
“Yes.”
“You said she was taking steroids. Are they…like, working?”
“Have you seen the new fishburger franchise?” Mrs. Yancy asked, pointing out the window at a red and silver building with a sign out front featuring in neon a one-legged pirate tangoing with a laughing swordfish, and the name ‘Long John Silver’s Fishburger.
“No, I haven’t,” Ginny replied, relieved at not having her question answered definitively. “Have you tried it?”
“Yes, it’s very good. You must be sure to go while you’re here.”
“I will,” Ginny promised her. “But what about taking care of Mother? What do I do?” What she wanted to ask was how sick her mother really was, but she didn’t know how. It would be like asking about her mother’s sex life.
“The doctors and nurses have everything under control,” Mrs. Yancy assured her. “But she gets lonely. Just visit her some every day. But, Ginny honey, I should warn you so you won’t act startled when you see her: She looks just awful. She’s covered with big bruises, and her nose is stuffed with cotton to keep it from bleeding. But she’ll be all right. It’s happened before, a couple of times in the past year.”
“But why didn’t she tell me?”
“Well, because she felt there was no need to tell you, honey. It didn’t seem important enough to worry you with. She took a few pills and it cleared right up. You know, modern medicine is really remarkable.”
“Then why am I being told this time, if it wasn’t important enough to tell me about last time?”
“Well, honey, it just worked out this way,” Mrs. Yancy explained reasonably. “With me going over at the Holy Land and all. I thought it was a shame to leave her all alone. You know how your mama feels about strange places.”
“I was glad to come,” Ginny assured her hastily. “Is she in pain?”
“Not much. They can control that with all these wonderful new drugs nowadays. Isn’t it amazing what they can do?”
Waving as Mrs. Yancy boarded her plane, Ginny reflected that the last time she’d seen somebody off here had been about a year and three months ago, when she’d brought the Major out for a flight to Boston. It turned out to be the last time she saw him alive. It was just at the end of her conciliatory visit undertaken to display Ira and Wendy to her mother and the Major. She had picked the Major up at his office late one afternoon after working her way through gates and past guards by flashing his identification at them like an FBI agent in a raid.
“Tell Ira that there are twenty-two bullets in the drawer by the fireplace,” he said casually as they drove toward the airport, just as though he were informing her there were eggs and milk in the refrigerator to be used up.
Startled, having forgotten that this was the same man who had given her a .38 special and a lifetime supply of bullets when she left home for college, Ginny asked, “What for?”
“If anyone bothers you, don’t hesitate to blast him one.” Ginny knew he meant it, too. Never mind if they claimed to be Bible salesmen or trick-or-treaters or heart-fund volunteers. When in doubt, blast them.
“You know something, Dad? You’re getting as paranoid as she is.”
“You call it paranoia, I call it reality.”
“I think if you spend all your time dwelling on potential disasters, you attract them to yourself,” Ginny snapped.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “sending you to college in Boston was the worst investment I ever made. You used to be such an agreeable, respectful child.”
Ginny shot him a look of outraged disbelief. She could recall nothing but conflict with him in the years preceding her departure.
“Well, you’re the one who wanted me to go.”
“Me? I assure you, Virginia, that I couldn’t have cared less where you went to college. Or whether you went at all, for that matter.”
Ginny looked at him with astonishment. Was he lying, or had she lived part of her life fulfilling parental wishes that had existed only in her imagination?
“I’ve never tried to influence the way you’ve lived your life.”
Ginny gasped at him in fury and concentrated on the road, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
They rode in hostile silence for a while. Then he said gruffly, “If I don’t see you again, Ginny, I want you to know that you’ve been a very satisfactory daughter, on the whole.”
“Father, for Christ’s sake!” Ginny shrieked, almost running head-on into a concrete abutment.
“Yes, but it’s a distinct possibility when you fly as much as I have to. You don’t seem to be aware of your own mortality.”
Ginny glanced at him helplessly as he sat looking debonair in his three-piece pin-striped suit. “How could I not be? What else have I ever heard from you two all my life?”
By now they had reached the airport. Ginny parked the Jeep. “Come in and have a cup of coffee with me,” the Major suggested as he hefted his bag out of the back. After checking in, he took Ginny’s elbow and directed her to the gray metal flight insurance box in the waiting room, where he filled out a twenty-five-cent policy naming her beneficiary to $7,500 in the event of a fatal crash.
“Thanks,” Ginny said absently, folding the policy and stuffing it in the pocket of her Women’s Auxiliary blazer.
His hand still on her elbow, he directed her to the luncheonette. They sat at a small Formica table and ordered coffee. When the waitress brought it, they began the undeclared waiting game to see which of them would take the first sip, confirming for the other, like a canary in a coal mine, that the coffee wasn’t poisoned, or the cream a host to ptomaine. It was a battle of nerves: Whose desire to drink still-warm coffee would first overcome his embarrassment at death in a public place?
Ginny lifted her cup and slurped, pretending to sip. The Major wasn’t fooled. He shifted his lanky frame in the chair and stirred some cream into his coffee. To buy time, Ginny dumped a spoonful of sugar into her heavy white cup and asked, “What does Mother think about the house’s being on the market?” Ginny knew what her mother thought, even though they hadn’t talked about it: Her mother thought that the Major knew best — in all things.
“She agrees with me that the cabin is big enough for the two of us. We just rattle around in that white elephant And it doesn’t look as though you or the boys are going to want it.”
In a diversionary maneuver, the Major removed a bottle from his suit jacket, unscrewed the lid, and took out two small white pills. These he popped into his mouth and downed with half a glass of water.
Watching him, Ginny unthinkingly took a si
p of her coffee. Realizing too late what she’d done, she held the liquid in her mouth, trying to decide whether or not to return it unswallowed to the cup. Overcome finally by curiosity, she swallowed. As they both waited for her collapse, she asked, “What were those?”
“Coumadin,” he answered blandly.
“Coumadin?”
“Coumadin.”
“What is Coumadin?”
“An anticoagulant,” he mumbled, averting his eyes.
“For your heart?” He nodded yes, glumly. “What’s wrong with your heart?”
“Nothing. Just a little heart attack.”
“Heart attack?” she shouted. “When?”
” Last month.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“It was nothing. I was just working too hard. I was in bed less than a week.” He took a big drink of his coffee. A look of annoyance crossed his face because it was cool by now.
Ginny felt a great upsurge of anxiety. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She had difficulty breathing. So — the coffee was poisoned after all, and she was to meet her long-expected end here on the linoleum floor of this airport luncheonette. Her mother had always warned her to wear her best underwear when leaving the house, since one never knew when one might end up in the emergency room. But had Ginny listened? Of course not. And now here she was facing Eternity with safety pins holding up her bra straps.
“What’s wrong?” the Major asked uneasily.
“Nothing,” she replied bravely. And soon her symptoms abated, and her seizure assumed the proportions of a normal bout of separation anxiety, a malady she was intimately acquainted with. The house up for sale and the Major on the brink of a heart attack. Yes, those were valid grounds for a seizure.