Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  “Amen” cried two women in the choir. Another in the front pew called out, “Jesus is happy today. Jesus gets a good man today.”

  A woman in a red hat told the story of how Max saved the furniture of poor people during the Depression. When she finished, someone murmured, “That man was a good man,” and someone else answered, “Don’t you know the Lord be happy today. Saved them folks, he did.”

  Uta glanced at me and smiled.

  I couldn’t keep up with the eulogies for listening to the music. After each person spoke, the choir sang song after song that I’d not heard for years, since I was growing up and black women walking to the poor end of Brantley would stroll by the house singing in the twilight. I felt filled with those spirituals that always admitted to despair without losing hope.

  Hush, Somebody’s callin’ my name,

  Hush, Hush, Somebody’s callin’ my name.

  I’m so glad that trouble don’t last always.

  I’m so glad that trouble don’t last all day.

  Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, what shall I do?

  This was the music I needed now. I wasn’t sure why, at least not consciously, not yet anyway. Maybe the soul does tell us what the mind has yet to grasp. All I know is that, as though they belonged to a time now gone, the old hymns I loved, “A Mighty Fortress” and “Faith of Our Fathers,” slipped through the open windows and floated out toward the railroad tracks.

  A large Bible was placed on Max’s coffin, the best coffin money could buy, I hoped. The Bible rested on a gold stand and people began going forward and placing money under the stand. Uta whispered that the collection was to pay for the funeral. I was mortified that I didn’t have much in my purse, but I gave Uta what I had and she rose and walked forward and added two twenty-dollar bills. A burgundy-robed woman in the choir stepped forward and as people filed by the casket, some crying “Oh have mercy on our brother,” her solo, a contralto “Amazing Grace,” floated in and out among the mourners. In the middle of a bar she paused to murmur, “Thank you, Jesus,” and then she sang the second verse with the choir coming in softly behind her. People stopped moving, just stood still to listen. When the final “Thank God I’m free” faded into the corners of the room, for five minutes not even a whisper was heard.

  A half hour later Uta and I are walking through Elmwood Cemetery. Max’s funeral procession has wound down Park Street, turned onto Elmwood Avenue, and passed into the cemetery, a long line of cars heading slowly toward the back section. Max is being carried to his final rest in a gold Lincoln Continental. Uta suggests we wait until the private burial is over before we go pay our respects at his grave.

  “I think I must show you something,” she says quietly, almost to herself. “Yes, I think I must tell someone. You are the right one.” In her purple silk dress and matching hat, her ringlets piled high on her head, she looked like something from another century. I found myself thinking that maybe you children were right, maybe she was part sorcerer.

  She walks purposefully, points to a mimosa tree, a wide circle of low thick branches, each branch shooting off at waist level into two or three smaller branches. “Looks like a family tree. It’s a sculpture, isn’t it, mothers with their children all gathered in a circle.”

  We pass plots outlined with iron fences amid magnolia and cedar trees. In the distance the choir at Max’s graveside is singing “He Will Carry You Through.”

  Uta smiles. “He got mileage out of that story.”

  “I still don’t understand why he lied about himself. He didn’t have to.”

  “I wish lying was the worse thing anyone did, Louise. Since that story was what Max wished he’d been, and he had such a good heart, to me, that story is the truth. Sometimes the truth is all that matters, sometimes it isn’t what matters at all.”

  Uta points to a tomb adorned with broken tree branches. “I want that on my tombstone, the cut branch for the end of the life cycle. Maybe a cedar branch—it’s bad luck for anyone to harm a cedar, maybe that’ll keep the crows away.”

  We pass a small tombstone on which a carved gate opens backward to reveal a star. I wonder why we’re walking so far away from Max’s grave. On my right looms an eight-foot statue of a woman with a penitent face standing on a rock to embrace a huge cross. Uta stares at it. “You know that hymn ‘Rock of Ages’?” She doesn’t wait for a reply. “The Anglican priest who wrote the poem the hymn’s based on—he calculated how many sins a person who lived to be eighty could commit in a lifetime. Two and a half billion sins. I do not sing that hymn.”

  She points to another tombstone bearing a woman’s name and the inscription: She was a good woman and full of the Holy Ghost. “I imagine they’ll say I was full of something else.”

  I almost laugh out loud. Uta stops and says, “We’re here.”

  She leads the way inside a rusted wrought-iron enclosure. A family plot, ten tombstones, five very old table tombs with nearly illegible script, the others modern and upright, block letters, and a smaller gravestone adorned with leaves surrounding an iris.

  “Meet the Moazens and the McClarys,” she says. She walks over to a modern tombstone and intones quietly, “Henry, I’m sorry. Two wrongs do not make a right, it didn’t fix anything, and I’m here to say I’m sorry for trying to interfere and I hope it didn’t cause you any discomfort.”

  She turns around, whispers over her shoulder, “You did deserve it.”

  “My husband, Henry,” she explains. She looks at the smallest tombstone, says very softly—“Now this.” She reads the name out loud: “Elizabeth McClary Moazen. My daughter.”

  I stare at the dates. Oh no. A six-year-old. The same age as Lyra. “Oh Mrs. Moazen, I don’t know what to say—I’m so sorry for your loss. I didn’t know.”

  Max’s choir is singing “Jesu” in the distance—Oh receive my soul at last, this is my prayer.

  Uta leans down and brushes dirt off the tombstone decorated with carved flowers. “It took me a long time to decide to use the iris—Greek Iris was the messenger of the rainbow, a woman’s soul couldn’t be released from the body unless Iris cut a lock of her hair. Max Wells prepared this grave. I held the lantern that night, and he put the stone in the ground.”

  “The funeral was at night?”

  Uta is slow to answer. “There was only a burial of a sort. There are so many rules for this cemetery. Max could have got himself in a heap of trouble. Not supposed to put anything in Elmwood without permission.”

  She turns to me. “There’s no body in that grave. Despite what it looks like, it’s only a memorial stone.”

  “I—I don’t—”

  “There’s nothing to say, dear. There’s no body because I don’t know what happened to my baby. She may be alive—by now she’d be about your age. Maybe I even have grandchildren.” Uta brushes dirt off of the gravestone. “After I lost my arm, Henry said I couldn’t properly take care of our child—Mackie—he hated that I called her after my mother, God rest her soul—and he said we should let his sister in Baltimore keep her for a while. I cried and screamed but I was still recovering, was still doped up from the operation, in terrible pain. I tried to call the police but they thought I was just an hysterical woman, and who listens to a woman who contradicts her husband? Especially one with only one arm.”

  “How long did she stay there?”

  “It isn’t unusual in Ireland, you know, that a child goes to relatives when times are hard. Then the parents go get their little one. Mackie never came home.”

  The gray mist hovering over the cemetery turns into a soft sprinkling of rain as Uta traces the stone garland of leaves around the iris. “I used the acanthus leaves because of Greek legend too—about a little girl who died and her nurse gathered up all her toys and put them in a basket beside the grave. The basket was set on the roots of an acanthus plant and when the leaves came o
ut, it curled around and over the basket to protect the toys and the child.”

  Her voice grows faint. “Henry didn’t send Mackie to relatives. He gave our child away. He didn’t like children—I ask you, what kind of man doesn’t like, much less love, his own child? While I was sick he signed the surrender papers to an agency, and she was privately adopted. I think money changed hands. He said he never knew who took her.”

  Uta’s words—worse than anything I can imagine—seem to knock the breath from me.

  “I begged Henry to tell me the name of the agency, but he said it was done and couldn’t be undone. I hired someone to look for her, to look for a trail to follow, but there was nothing. She just vanished. I almost went off my mind, I tell you, I almost ran away from Henry. I didn’t go for hoping he might someday tell me something—even accidentally—that would help me find her. He never did.

  Henry just died. Part of me had died when my little girl disappeared. I couldn’t look at other people’s children for years—that’s why I quit teaching before retirement. After Henry died, I made a grave for Mackie; she died to me when she was six. I went to see Max—a friend sent me to him—and asked would he dig a grave secretly. I wanted to bury some of Mackie’s things, a bird’s egg she loved, her favorite dolls. I’d gone as batty as the Sweetes burying those old clothes, and no way was the cemetery going to agree to this, so I offered Max money and he said he’d do it but he wasn’t taking money for helping a woman who’d lost her child.”

  I go over and lay a hand on Uta’s good arm. “I’ve needed to tell someone,” she says. “I won’t live forever and I need Mackie’s memory not to die with me. If I’d married a different man—who can predict what fate puts on us—we’d not be here right now. I’m asking you to share this story—you and that dear child have helped free something bottled up in me for a long time.”

  “I’m honored,” I whisper.

  “Louise, you need to know that you too can survive anything.”

  I stare at Uta’s unbending profile, outlined against a grave for a missing child, and think, I could never survive that. I could never survive losing my family.

  Part V: Lyra

  2004

  Chapter Eight

  One evening I walk into the dining room of my parents’ rancher and sit down at Uta Moazen’s oak table, which is always covered with a tablecloth to hide its gouged surface. This is good furniture haunted by history. You come home from school one day and the dining-room table has flown the coop. It was November when my mother closed the door to the dining room on Lincoln Street and didn’t speak for hours. Days passed and she barely looked at anyone. She never sang to me anymore, never danced me around in a circle.

  Yet outside our house it’s beautiful. The last of the leaves are falling, falling, falling, all over the lawns and sidewalks and in the street. The world is raining color.

  I’m dawdling on the way home from Logan, shuffling through the leaves. Leaves are like palm-prints, I think as I pick up two maple specimens for the scrapbook I’m making for school, sticking one leaf behind my ear in case I grow up to be Hawaiian. The runway of color is a mystery, how leaves can turn yellow and red and orange but fall onto the ground later and get crackly brown and soon they’re nothing but dust and brittle stems. Something so beautiful just goes away. I wish the leaves would stay. My mother says to remember that leaves are like old skin, that the trees stay alive and will make new leaves next year, so there’s really no reason for me to be sad. Things always come back around, she adds. I still feel sad—I’ve noticed that the dining-room table hasn’t turned up yet.

  I sit down in a pile of the leaves in the driveway. It’s like a cemetery. I begin picking up my favorite colors; I’m partial to the coral of the maples. When I’ve gathered my favorite twenty-five, having neatly piled them away from the others, I run into the house and come back with a kitchen fork and my mother’s hymnal. With the fork I dig a grave and place the leaves in it, arrange them one by one like my mother does flowers, the prettiest in the most favorable position. I’ll put them in this safe place to await that rebirth my Sunday school teacher is always talking about. I turn to “The Burial of the Dead” in my mother’s book; I understand only a few words—something about “ashes,” which I remember from when the stoves blew out. I skip the service, say a silent prayer, and sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” a song my mother likes so I know all the words. I’m about to cover the grave with dirt when she comes walking down the sidewalk.

  She stops and stares at the half-buried leaves, asks what I’m doing.

  “It’s a funeral. For the colored leaves.”

  She gazes at the hymnal open to the burial service and looks startled. She kneels down beside me, staring at the grave I’ve dug.

  “It’s the paintbrushes,” she whispers. Then her voice rises. “Didn’t I swear my child would never feel this way? Didn’t I?”

  She grabs me into her arms, murmurs against my hair, “Oh, sweetheart, don’t—let’s don’t bury the beautiful colors.”

  Although no one talked about history, and I spent years running away from it, it has stalked me everywhere. In childhood I never got over reading—and rereading and rereading—Jane Eyre, especially about Bertha the “hyena” madwoman locked in the attic. When I was in junior high and just beginning to paint, I happened upon Goya’s “black paintings.” When I looked into the vaulted chambers of The Madhouse, at those dark and wounded creatures in their subterranean dungeon, I couldn’t put the book down. Dark grays and lifeless browns and charcoal shadings, the shadows and shapes of misery and defeat. I lay on my bed and studied the library book for hours. One day the book disappeared. My mother had returned it.

  These were not our best days together. In my teens I watched her continually subordinate herself to my father: he made all decisions, and she went along with little objection no matter how strange or paranoid his ideas were. And no matter how much his decisions hurt or inconvenienced us both. The king was cracked, if you asked me. She didn’t talk to me about this anymore than she acknowledged our past, but occasionally I did remember my father’s defacement of the lovely women on a bathtub decal. So we could spend time together, my mother repeatedly took me to her favorite movie, Sunrise at Campobello. Finally I realized that the film’s claim on her wasn’t her admiration for FDR so much as Eleanor Roosevelt’s perfect self-sacrifice. Years later I wondered why my mother didn’t notice that Mrs. Roosevelt eventually became much more than anyone’s wife.

  It was in art school that my nightmares—in daylight and in darkness—began hinting at my family’s unspoken past. I was perpetually restless one spring, pacing endlessly. I couldn’t paint—brushstrokes kept changing at will, they were long and sensate and brimming with color, then suddenly choppy, sharp, abrupt. Fragmented and dull gray-yellow. I felt out of control and frightened, so I began going to art shows and museums once a week, hoping that would help. Soon I’m in a small gallery in a white mansion near campus, a show from New York, people doing their milling, IVs attached to glasses of cheap Chardonnay. A painting begins following me. I walk by it, stare, start walking away. It grabs me back, demands a second look. French, Hugues Merle, nineteenth-century pre-Impressionist. La Pauvre Folle. The lunatic is the central figure, a desperate woman with stringy black hair; sitting beside a well, she holds a piece of firewood swaddled as a baby. The women and children nearby stare at her—they’re light, airy, cherubic, and horrified. One young girl keeps a small boy from going too near the deranged woman whose wild unfocused eyes come straight from hell.

  I’ve seen such eyes before.

  I walk off. Get another glass of wine, intently swill alcohol into my bloodstream. I can’t stay away—I go back to the painting, almost against my will. The eyes of the crazy woman scratch marks on my arm and suddenly—for the first time—I know. The past really did happen.

  Another glass of wine an
d I go to a pay phone and call my parents. When no one answers, I buy a postcard, address it to them, and write drunkenly: “Plato was right about art—memory is the mother of the Muses. Pentimento everywhere. Now is always reciting the story of Then.”

  I mailed the card that afternoon. I was told it never arrived.

  I sit in the waiting room and wait. Hospital time has no end or beginning, no day or night, no mealtime or meaning. It’s standing in a still pond—movement occurs in the distance, nurses go up and down the hall, the muted intercom requests a doctor, the woman whose husband is dying cries softly. Life is happening but you’re only vaguely part of it. I’ve painted that many times—aren’t most of my pictures metaphors of estrangement? The whole point of my abstracts. What did those first reviews say? A “cool silvery tonality.” Except when I painted Lincoln Street.

  Later I part the drape into my mother’s ICU room and find the nurse Darlene. She has pulled the sheet up and is massaging my mother’s swollen, blue-veined feet, tender hands kneading the misshapen bulge on her right foot, a car-accident injury that never healed properly. I remember only vague details about the accident, something weird about our car in the Lincoln Street driveway, but I have the feeling—for no reason I can name—that it was important.

  “Do you think she might get better?” I ask Darlene as we walk out into the hall.

  “Honey, no. She’s tired, she’s gonna die.”

  My lip trembles. “How do you know?”

  “She told me she’s ready to go. You get yourself ready for her to pass.”

  “She spoke to you?”

  “Not with words, but I could feel it. Working with the sick you get so you can sense things. She can’t let you know she’s ready ’cause it’s terrible to you, her going, and she don’t want to disappoint you, make you feel bad. Kinfolk naturally want the loved one to keep fighting. That’s why most people die in the middle of the night. After the relatives go home, they feel free to do what they want.”