We head toward the elevators. “Your mama’s got a big soul,” Darleen adds. “Maybe she didn’t give herself credit for how special she is, that’s part why she is. I’d go to see her about Annette’s work and Miz Copeland would smile at me like I was the exact person she’d been hoping to see.”
I watch as Darlene waves and gets in the elevator. I feel like I should thank someone for her soul.
When I go back into the ICU room, my father is standing beside the bed, studying the computer monitors. He tells me if a number goes up or down. Eventually he leaves and I watch the spring sky out the window.
Dr. Dumaine comes to the waiting room every morning at seven. He says Louise is a little stronger today. He returns later and says she is still improving.
The next day he says Louise has fallen back a bit.
The day after that—raining today, is it still spring or has summer come?—he says she’s even weaker.
He comes early the next day. Head bowed, he says that Louise is failing. Too much fluid in her lungs, her heart is so weak. We may be nearing the end.
The unimaginable happens. My father’s lips begin to tremble, his shoulders shake, tears flood his eyes. The extraordinary sight of his emotion overrides my own. I’ve never seen him show affection toward anyone. Does he really love his wife?
I go sit in the first-floor atrium and stare at the cloudy skies in the ceiling. Did he really cry?
Mother grows weaker and weaker. I bring her a pot of African violets in bloom—her favorite indoor plant. A crisis comes, her heart almost stops but then corrects itself, as though she wants a little more time. Or maybe—just maybe—she’ll live another year or two. If it means being helpless, I know her well enough to hope she does not.
My father stands in her room all afternoon, dozes in the chair by the bed as her breath rasps in and out. Friends and relatives come and go. I stare out the window at the Columbia skyline; maybe what I’ve never liked about my hometown is its claim to fame as the defeated victim. Elmwood Park was built after the famous fire, but defeat drifted like poison gas through our rooms anyway. I turn around and gaze at my mother. Isn’t death the defeat to end all defeats?
Maybe not.
One day I say to my father, “I’m surprised Betty Tyler hasn’t come by.”
“She died. She was in the hospital for a while and Louise wanted to visit her but couldn’t drive of course. I knew the Tylers wouldn’t want anyone bothering them.”
“You wouldn’t take her to see an old friend who was dying?”
He gets up and stomps out, calling, “You don’t understand these things.”
When my father isn’t in the room, I whisper to my mother or sing her favorite hymns. My early training comes back and I’m standing beside her in the Earlewood church, I’m twelve or thirteen, and five hundred singing voices rise around me like swelling seas, a leviathan of sound, extraordinary and grand in this town that prizes the reasonable, the practical. The wild thoughts that flood me like a berserk river have their counterpart in such sound, and suddenly I’m aware that my mother’s voice is exceptional, is beautiful, that she is magnificently strong when she sings. She stands out, can be heard above the rest, her alto resonant, powerful. She’s suddenly new to me: someone special, more than just my mother. She knows abandon, what I feel when I paint. Here her breathing, timing, the balance of light and dark, are perfect. Here she is utterly herself.
I think about that day as I drive through the misty early evening. That day she was remarkable, strong in the artistic way I valued. Yet for years I implied that I saw her as anything but strong, patient endurance not being my idea of courage. Was it hers? Many women turn sour when they stay in an unfulfilling marriage. My mother never complained; a sweet spirit was never totally crushed.
As I pull into my parents’ driveway, I gaze at a twelve-foot dogwood tree—something’s odd. I didn’t notice before but—Jesus—the dogwood’s lower branches have been removed and the top foliage shaped into a giant sphere. It looks like a water tower. A tree ten feet away is the same. Two globes hanging in the sky. I stare at the other shrubbery. Most boxwoods have been pruned into perfect round balls, except for the two that are rectangles. My father has made the front yard into Versailles. Round fat balls and cones everywhere, palatial gardening for a carport rancher in a declining neighborhood. The azalea bushes look like a tall row of children’s wooden blocks. It’s a wonder we’re not on a tourist map.
I see again a 1950s Checker cab, part yellow and part burgundy, colors clashing like two yard cats fighting over a food bowl. I laugh out loud. You can say this for him—he’s never been boring.
He once brought home a large velvet painting he’d bought at a yard sale, a bare-breasted chain-mailed woman astride a rearing white horse. My mother took one look, forbade it a room in the house, and headed for the aspirin. On the carport my father repaired the broken frame and touched up the paint; I can still picture my mother covering the perky bare breasts with a blanket afterward in hopes no neighbor would notice them. My father uncovered the painting every morning so “she could get some sun.” I wanted to kill him when the school bus stopped at my house and boys I knew leaned out the windows to whistle at her. One day a stranger offered my father a hundred dollars for the velvet beauty. Which he never let us forget. When I was a teenager, I prayed he would spot Jesus in the backyard—that would make sense, crazy-wise, be easier to explain. Eudora Welty said that if a man thinks he’s a streetcar and runs up and down the street at regular hours but isn’t hurting anyone, who cares? Miss Eudora was clearly not related to that charming fellow.
Abruptly I remember a gallery director who said my paintings were “iconoclastic, occasionally incomprehensible, never boring.” There’s a scary idea.
Inside the house I settle on a ham sandwich for dinner. Women have been bringing food at least once a day, it’s been ages since I’ve seen fried chicken and butter beans cooked with bacon. Not to mention the “sweet tea” that tastes like sugar water. I didn’t realize this world still existed. Each woman says how much she loves my mother; earlier today, a neighbor, eyes red and puffy, insisted on vacuuming and doing the laundry. Another woman told me how much my mother helped her when she got breast cancer. I gaze at the old brass lamps that have been rewired and rewired, at an old vase collaged with china shards sitting atop the oak bookcase. I pick up the vase and study the patterns—so many chaotic colors. Everything in the room is history. I always wanted my mother to have nicer things, but these objects seem right now, more her, more both of them really.
I lie down in my mother’s room, and the room gently rocks the child in me as I study another of my grandmother’s paintings—a lone young woman with bowed head floats in a wooden boat under a ghostly white moon. A melancholy picture, the only time my grandmother painted a human figure. Maybe it’s my new favorite. Most of her pictures are melancholic: did she intuit that her life would be brief? A life cut short by bad luck, an inheritance that fits us. In our case art is family. I get up and open the closet door and look inside. My mother’s shoes—lined up in a tidy row—break my heart. I run a hand up and down the sleeve of the blue suit she wore to my wedding, notice a cardboard box on the shelf bearing my name. After I pull it out, I plunge through tissue paper and unwrap a small wooden ladder: it comes with the memory of Uta as I watch the tiny boy and girl—it still works—plop plop plop to the bottom. Nice metaphor for aging. A small box underneath the toy contains three white satin Christmas balls. I pick one up but drop it suddenly—it’s made of human hair. Then I remember. Uta’s hair, that Christmas. A note in the box in a strange hand reads, “I finally found her and she didn’t care.”
In a flat clothes box lies a white linen baby dress encased in plastic; a tag pinned to it reads: “My mother was making this for her unborn fifth child when she died of the flu. I finished the dress and Lyra wore it on her Christening
Day.” I slip the eighty-year-old garment out of its bag—white eyelet embroidery around the tiny neck—and hold it against my cheek to feel the texture of my family’s women. I’ve never seen it before. Why is it separate from the other old linens? For the future—a christening gown for my mother’s second child? And for the grandchildren she dreamed of?
I also find a picture of my young parents in front of a huge bell tower. Photos of each of them under live oak trees dangling Spanish moss. He’s in a suit, she’s in a flowered dress. This must have been their honeymoon in Florida—they got married on Christmas Eve because that was the day my grandfather married my grandmother the painter. My God—did they have sex for the first time on Christmas Day? Romantic. I look up for a moment—those years they were barely speaking, when money was so short my handmade clothes embarrassed me, yet Christmas was always made into an occasion. To relive the good one, or to make up for the desperate weight that holiday carried later? In one old picture my father is holding out his arms as though to invite her to dance—flirty, boyish energy in his eyes. Did they really go dancing once upon a time? The back of the photo reads: “Christmas Day at the Singing Tower in Lake Wales.” He’s so lithe and handsome, she’s so dark-eyed beautiful—people, given the choice, I’d have requested as parents. A folder under the pictures is crammed with old sheet music. Hymns, gospel songs, African American spirituals—I stare at a tattered copy of “Somebody’s Callin’ My Name.” Also many sentimental 1940s ballads. The most yellowed, embellished with pink roses, is “I Love You Truly.” An ecstatic star decorates the right corner and written below the star, in my mother’s fluid, youthful hand: “For the Big Day! My dream come true!”
After I repack the box, I sit and stare at my name scrawled on its side in my mother’s elderly hand. She made sure I’d look at these things. I open the box again and take the photo of my parents beside the bell tower and prop it up on a dresser.
As my mother worsens, for reasons I cannot name, I begin riding over to Elmwood Park nearly every day. I park and sit and stare at the Lincoln Street house. Sometimes I walk up and down the street. The lawn-service guys now recognize me and wave.
One afternoon, long-buried fragments come back—
… the endless hours of screaming, my mother kneeling beside their bed crying, she sounds hurt bad. He yelled at her over and over again. Finally it’s quiet, night has gone out the window and sunlight creeps up the sides of the old house, dances on the windowsill where someone forgot to pull the shade, seeps under the front door that no one locked, crawls through a kitchen window where an unopened can of salmon sits on the counter and a terrified cat hides behind a refrigerator. Outside that kitchen window, a lone mockingbird sings a two-note song in a dogwood tree. Wooden houses creak, a stone house rumbles awake. A milkman, in a navy jacket with “Ray” stitched on the pocket, leaves long-necked bottles on every stoop.
A child, bathed in a pool of light, wakes up on a cold wooden floor. She’s me. I lay on the floor all night so I could see into their room. Grayish winter shadows stripe the scratchy wool blankets as I climb onto my bed. I hear a sound and get down again to look into my parents’ bedroom. My father is sprawled atop the covers, he’s wearing pajama bottoms streaked with red and his arms are flung out from his sides like a cross. My mother is still on her knees beside the bed, slumped over, holding on to the bedspread, and she’s crying like when my baby cousin died. I want to disobey her and run in there but I’m scared. After a while she slumps lower, I think she’s asleep.
I tiptoe into their room. Then I turn around and gallop back to my bed, I don’t want my daddy to grab me and make my arm hurt again.
But I want my mother to wake up, so in a minute I pad back into their room. I touch her but she doesn’t move. Red goo oozes from a bandage on my father’s arm. I reach out to touch it, jerk my hand back because he moved. He’s asleep though, I can tell because of how he’s breathing. I rub my finger in the goo, the color of red Kool-Aid. Then I lick my finger—the red stuff tastes sour. Like when I cut myself with that knife I wasn’t supposed to use.
My father stirs again, and I turn and run back to my bed and pull the covers up over my head, curl into a ball and slide way down where no one can find me. I think about my father’s photographs of dead Civil War soldiers lying in a field. The soldiers had blood on them too. I didn’t know that some soldiers are mothers. Maybe my mama and my daddy are dead.
Part VI: Louise
1957
Chapter Nine
I think I’ve been dreaming—I was back on Lincoln Street. Seems like Max was there.
I feel you across the room, Lyra. Did I ever tell you I buried the afterbirth when you were born? Supposed to bring a newborn good luck—it’s at the foot of a dogwood tree in Summerville, maybe I did tell you, I’ve forgotten. I loved it that you were born in the spring, that time of promise, but I often thought of you as a Christmas gift too. That 1957 December, it’s ironic that it began in such a lovely way. Despite the sadness of Max’s death, despite your father’s erratic behavior, I still believed—I guess naively—that life was a journey of amazing promise. Christmas was coming, midwinter unfurling its crimson streamers. Time of color, joy. Season of miracle. And before the world fell apart, we did have one.
It’s dark, late, you’re snuggled under your wool blankets and the patchwork quilt your grandmother made, when I tiptoe into the room and lean across your bed and part the curtains. Fluffy issues a yawn and nestles closer to you. He’s mellowed since you stopped dressing him in doll clothes.
“Look outside, honey.”
You brush sleep out of your eyes and sit up. I gently push you toward a window. You gaze outside, turn to me with wide bedazzled eyes. “Snow! It’s snow!”
Together we behold magic. The world is white. It’s nighttime but it looks like a million lights outside, you say, like light is coming from under the ground so it looks like daytime except fuzzy like fog. I raise the window and we hear twinkling noises and you say it’s like two stars bumping together, and it’s so still outside, as though the world has stopped, quiet and tinselly at the same time. Snow is a miracle in a subtropical land, as mysterious as a virgin birth. White down falls and falls as I lift the screen latch so you can stick your hand out, and you catch a huge wet snowflake but it disappears and you try to catch another and we laugh out loud and I whisper, “Shush, we’ll wake your father.”
With my arm around you, we watch white crystals mount higher and higher on the garage roof, the snow gets deeper and deeper, like maybe it’ll keep falling forever, and you say that soon we’ll be Eskimo people and live in a house made of ice and cut holes in the ground where our food of fish will come from.
I think about the first time I saw snow. “Let’s go outside.”
Hand in hand, coats over my nightgown and over your bluebird pajamas with plastic-spotted feet, we scurry past your sleeping father in entirely inappropriate shoes—who in South Carolina has snow boots? You say that now we have Up North trees because they’re covered with lacy icicles, and you run to see one up close and fall smack-dab into a big white drift. I giggle like no mother ever does and pick you up and whirl you around and maybe we’ll both catch cold, but how often does a child see such winter beauty? I pull you toward the tall evergreen near your swing set; we walk underneath the low-hanging branches and as it snows around us, we’re dry and safe. We hold hands, looking up through the green limbs as white crystals float down from heaven.
I reach up and come back with a palm filled with snow. “Make a wish, sweetheart.”
You say you’d like more snow for Christmas Day and a sled like Up North kids have.
“Now kiss the snowflakes.”
You giggle because of course you’re kissing white sloppy goo in your mother’s hand.
“Now kiss the best mother in the history of motherland.”
You do, and I shake snow f
rom a tree branch down onto you, combing the white crystals through your hair. “I christen you a Southern child of snow. Here’s to Lyra the Queen of Winter.”
I sing—very softly—“In the lane the snow is glistening” and feel as happy as you’ll probably ever remember me. I’ll carry that snowy night in my pocket for a very long time, as you travel down road after road in another direction, until I can’t bear it anymore and one day I take it out and leave it on the sidewalk to melt.
That snowstorm came a few days before the demon arrived—the demon with prayers and screaming and blood and being thrown to the floor. It’s still that first night and William remains slumped by the bed mumbling. I’ve got to stop the bleeding. I run to the bathroom; you’re crouched on the floor hiding by the tub. I tell you to stay quiet as I rifle through the medicine cabinet. I run through your bedroom and rush over to William and grab his left forearm. The sight of the blood makes me queasy again, but I wrap the wounds with gauze and apply all the pressure I can—
He jumps up suddenly and the gauze falls away as he shouts, “That child has to confess. Where is she?”
I grab William’s wrist, hold onto it for dear life, he doesn’t seem to feel any pain. “God likes prayers to be quiet,” I whisper. “Come kneel with me and we’ll say our prayers together.”
I can’t think what else to do but this works, and William becomes docile and kneels down and lays his head on the blood-spattered sheets, crying. I wrap his wrist, this stems the bleeding, and I tell him that God is listening, and I’m going to get some water to wash the wound, everything will be all right—
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