by Monica Wood
“I don’t recall that,” Larry said. “It must have slipped my mind. Things do, lately, I regret to admit.” He patted the top of his head. “This fine old brain.”
“I didn’t feed birds back then,” Ona said. “Back then I was busy. I WAS BUSY.”
“Weren’t we all, dear.” He smiled, revealing the same large, square teeth as his mother. His curiosity about her seemed mild, considering. He was a man enviably at ease, accepting the pace and vagaries of age. Dr. Stokes must have been a bygone type who traveled from house to house, whistling “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” Quinn liked him; he chanced another peek at Belle, who had relaxed utterly. This mother-son reunion had to be far from her expectation—the son decades older than her fantasy, for starters—and yet she seemed transfixed. Satisfied.
“What happened to your things?” Ona asked.
Larry tapped his ear as if to jump-start a hearing aid, though he wore none.
“YOUR THINGS,” Ona repeated. “Your furniture. Books. Important papers. WHERE ARE YOUR THINGS?”
“Oh, my gracious, my things,” he said. “What an undertaking. The girls took the silver. The boys have the tools, I believe. The rest went in a house auction.” He adjusted a switch on the arm of his chair and the back reclined. Nothing was happening at the bird feeders. Quinn began to wonder if a yellow-breasted chat might be something on the order of a dodo, some extinct species with no chance of showing up.
“It’s awfully nice to meet you,” Belle said.
Larry tipped an imaginary hat. “What have we here?”
“I’m Belle.” Was she beaming? She was beaming.
Larry consulted Ona again. “Would you have wanted something, dear? I’d have saved something for you, had I known.”
“Did you come across my birth certificate, by chance?”
Larry tapped his ear again.
“MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE.”
“What in the world would I be doing with your birth certificate?”
“My parents gave my papers to Maud-Lucy for safekeeping. YOUR MOTHER TOOK IT.”
Belle nudged Quinn, harder than she probably meant to; she was standing very close. “What is she talking about?” she whispered. But he didn’t know. Ona hadn’t given him the full story.
Ona put a gaunt hand on her son’s gaunt arm and leaned into his ear. “She kept such things in a red enamel box.” When he turned to face her, she straightened up. “My parents were GREATLY PARANOID OF CONFISCATION,” she continued, “with good reason. And your mother was the ONE CREATURE IN THIS ENTIRE COUNTRY WHOM THEY TRUSTED WITHOUT RESERVATION.”
One of the captives called out like a baby bird—“Dawktor, dawktor, dawktor.”
“Excuse me a moment,” Larry said. He motored to the west corner of the day room, where he indulged a hairless woman in a minute of conversation, listened to her heart, then returned.
“I do very little,” he explained, “except relieve fear.”
“I NEED MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE, LAURENTAS.”
“I don’t have your birth certificate.” He resembled her eerily when he spoke, something in the shape of his lips, those square teeth. “Wouldn’t it be more likely that you have mine?”
Ona said nothing for a beat or two, then charged ahead: “We’re talking about people who kept their money in a FLOUR BIN,” she said to her son. “They owned an apartment building and later a grocery store, but they were afraid of everything. They couldn’t settle. That was their problem. They couldn’t settle into their own skin.” Her voice took on a different sheen, briefly. “Your mother was the opposite.”
“I’m sorry. Come again?”
“YOUR MOTHER. WAS THE OPPOSITE. That woman could settle anywhere. Not like these people nowadays. THESE PEOPLE,” she repeated, gesturing toward Quinn. “These people nowadays have no idea where they are. Wherever they are, it’s the WRONG PLACE.”
Belle laughed softly; Quinn felt her cross over to somewhere he couldn’t grasp and the day went irreversibly awry. He was a team of one, facing three inscrutable people who appeared to have sudden, passionate, possibly conflicting blueprints for how the next few moments—or hours—would go.
“If my mother took something of yours,” Larry said, “it would have gone up in the fire, along with everything else.”
“What fire?” Ona asked. For the first time she turned to Quinn—Can you get this fellow to talk sense?—but he couldn’t help her. He stood there, suddenly freezing in his newish T-shirt, trying to puzzle out her purpose. One thing was clear: she hadn’t come for a tearful reunion with the fruit of her womb. She’d come for her birth certificate and that was it. If only he’d listened more literally. But he’d have taken her to Vermont anyway; he knew this about himself, all of a sudden, and it surprised him.
Ona repeated, “WHAT FIRE?”
“The fire,” Larry said. “I was an infant, of course, but I think I remember it, she spoke of it so often. The family homestead, you see. Seven buildings and one of the orchards gone overnight.”
Quinn looked from one to the other, then to the window, as if Larry’s bird might appear like a carrier pigeon with a code wrapped around its ankle. “He, uh, doesn’t have it, Ona.”
“YOUR MOTHER WROTE TO ME FOR YEARS FROM THE SAME ADDRESS,” Ona said. She was squinting hard at her son, perhaps double-checking his identity.
“Her father built a new house over the burned one. Two, actually. One for himself and one for us.” Larry smiled dreamily. “Oh, my gracious me, I miss the place. We sold it, in the end, to an outfit that turned the whole works into a housing development. I’ll answer to the Man Upstairs for that, but it pays for my upkeep.”
“Well,” Ona said, “isn’t this a pickle.”
Larry looked up. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”
The moment clanged. Quinn tried to catch eyes with Belle, but she was studying Larry, oblivious, someplace else entirely.
Ona leaned very near the furl of her son’s ear. “Ona,” she said. “Vitkus.”
“What is that, Polish?”
“It’s Lithuanian.”
“No fooling?” he said. “My natural mother was a Lithuanian.” He shook his head, looking pained. “How do I know you, dear?”
The arctic air conditioning had electrified Ona’s ruined hair, which all but levitated from her skull. “Your mother and I were friends,” she said, too softly, really, for him to hear. She got up and extended her hand. “We’ll be going now. Goodbye, Laurentas.”
Alerted by the motions of departure, Belle came to. “We’re leaving?”
“Stay,” Larry offered. “The ladies here make spanking good coffee.”
Belle smiled. “That sounds wonderful.”
“We’ll do no such thing,” Ona said. “I have urgent business elsewhere.”
Quinn was only too happy to get the show back on the road, but Belle had other plans. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that bird,” she said to her new friend, meeting his eyes in a way that Quinn knew, from long experience, would melt the calcified cockles of the old geezer’s heart. “That yellow-breasted whatsit.”
“Chat,” he said, offering his binoculars. It came to Quinn then that the man had lost the use of one arm.
“My son likes birds,” Belle told him.
Larry, who appeared to have no trouble at all understanding her, said, “The more the merrier.”
“We were leaving,” Ona said.
Belle stared out the window. “I’ll stay here with Larry.”
“You look very fine, Laurentas. I’m glad to know you’re well. Goodbye.” At this, Ona made for the day room door.
“Uh . . .” Quinn said.
Belle was already far away, in Ona’s vacated chair, conversing with Ona’s son about birds and children. Larry had four daughters and two sons and nine grandchildren and a platoon of greats and great-greats—Ona hadn’t asked a single question on that score—but they were wanderers, it seemed, all his progeny had their eyes on the horizon. “
My natural father was a circus man, you see,” he told Belle with rueful pride, bathed in the light of her attentions.
She’s working you, brother, Quinn thought. In an earlier time he’d have said this aloud, which would have amused Belle, made her laugh right out loud and confess to being an incurable flirt around old men and little children. This was different, he saw now, her raw, fractured self shining out at a moth-eaten old gaffer who connected her in some unknowable way to her lost child. How at home she seemed here. It was like seeing her from the inside out. Is this what she’d been asking of him all these years, to see her this way? Was he fulfilling her frankest desire, at last? With her profile blurred by the harsh light crashing through the window, her fair hair whitened by that same light, she might have been ninety herself, sickly and shaking and stripped of her powers. He imagined himself husbanding an elderly wife into her twilight, and the tableau woke in him yet one more way he would have failed Belle in the end.
He turned away, walking straight through the lobby and into the waning afternoon, where he found Ona standing at the entrance, all but melted into the pavement. Rattling with alarm, he eased her to the car with as much care as she’d accept, unrolled all the windows, then moved the car to the far end of the lot, under a large and sheltering tree that probably graced the cover of the Orchard Acres brochure. He rustled a bottle of water from his duffel. The car smelled a little off, the effluvia of the day room apparently having clung to their clothes. His friend (this is how he thought of her, holding the water while she adjusted her sticky clothes) had fallen into a black mood.
“Ona . . .” he began. “Do you want to go back in?”
“Why would I go back in that place?”
Quinn took this in. “It was kind of a short visit. That’s all I’m saying.”
“The purpose of this trip was my business entirely. You offered to take me and I accepted.”
“Because you said you were after a big reunion.”
“If you’ll review your own blinky memory, I told you I needed a ride to Vermont. You and your lady read the cards however you pleased. People usually do.”
He wondered if all good-deed-doers felt this insulted when they didn’t get to pick the exact specifications of their charity. “I canceled a gig for this,” he said. He wished himself back in Maine, shielded by his guitar, giving chatty, dancing people exactly what they expected.
Her eyes filled. “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, Quinn.”
“I just—Christ, Ona, it’s just a stupid record book full of people who will literally stand on their heads for immortality.”
“Eyeball poppers and chain-saw jugglers,” she said. “Yes, I am well aware. But I wanted this. I didn’t realize it at first, but now I do.” Before she stopped speaking to him, she added, “You have your music to outlive you. You wouldn’t understand.”
By the time he absorbed Ona’s spectacular misperception of Quinn Porter as the possessor of a musical legacy, she was beyond reach, peaked and mute and seemingly flattened by unmet expectation.
Belle, for her part, returned looking reborn. “I saw a chat,” she said. “You really missed something.” To Ona, she said, “You have a beautiful son.” Then she ordered Quinn into the back seat and put the car in gear.
FAMILY
Biggest family reunion. 2,369 members of the Busse family. Country of USA.
Most children born to one woman. 69. Mrs. Feodor Vassilya. Country of Russia.
Hairiest family. Victor and Gabriel Ramos Gomez. 98 percent of bodies covered in hair. Country of Mexico.
Most albino siblings. 3. Unoarumhi family. Country of UK.
Most statistically dominant father-son duo in Major League Baseball. Bobby and Barry Bonds. Country of USA.
Most populous country. China. 1 billion plus. Country of China.
Biggest blood donation. 3,403 donors in 12 hours. Country of Colombia.
Largest turkey farm. 10 million turkeys. The Matthews family. Country of Great Britain.
Largest gathering of clowns. 850. Country of UK.
Longest human chain. 370 miles and 2 million people. Country of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Chapter 15
Ona hoped they took her shameful emanations as the after-odors of the day room. Oh, that awful place, filled with old crocks who’d quit their lives with no more fight than a grasshopper gave a house cat. She’d stood in that day room for ten mortifying minutes, hollering like a fishwife into the tattered eardrums of her firstborn, all the while stewing in damp underpants and the dreadful knowledge that she wasn’t the only one. For all her trouble, she’d gotten exactly nowhere.
“There it is,” she said, spotting a sign: Apple Country Motor Court and Café.
“It’s only five o’clock,” Belle said. “We could do some sightseeing. Larry says there’s some beautiful country here and we just happened to land in the ruined part.”
“No,” Ona pleaded. “I’m—ill.”
Belle eased into the parking lot and Ona got out. “I need my bag right now,” she said. “This minute.”
Belle looked at her queerly and gave Quinn the keys. He opened the trunk, his free hand cupping her shoulder. She’d made it to the nursing-home restroom on time—a public-face restroom with gleaming tile and a dish of little pink soaps—but in her rush to lock the stall she’d snagged her blouse and her bladder leaked before she could fully sit down and here she was now, one hand fisted over the ripped-out button, her drawers pasted to her nether parts, staring into a dead-empty trunk. Her bag was gone: the beehive overnight case with which she’d left Howard in 1948.
“Oh,” Ona gasped. “Oh, no.”
Quinn said, “Damn. I must’ve left it in the house.”
After that things went flooey: she lost some time, though not her feet, apparently, for when she came to, she found herself safely upright, her companions accepting keys from a skeletal boy—raised on apples, apparently—behind the motel’s reception desk.
Belle steered her to a ground-floor room. Quinn had the room next door. It appeared the ladies were going to share. Had she agreed to this?
Belle sat on a bed as Ona made for the bathroom. She peeled off her slacks, damp in spots but not soaked, but her drawers were beyond redemption. Her shirttail (far too long; it had belonged to tall, long-waisted Louise) was dank and wrinkled where she’d shoved it down into her slacks. She stood there on the cold tile, entirely undone, feeling like a witless old bat in a ripped blouse and nothing else, surrounded by mirrors. Her wonderful trip had now been ruined twice over.
She sat on the toilet and bawled. It was Frankie she’d wanted to see: Frankie at eighty, looking old or looking young, stroke or no stroke. The second she’d laid eyes on Laurentas—Larry!—a picture of her darling, unreachable Frankie had exploded in her head, his countenance as merry and candid as ever.
“Are you okay in there?” The door creaked open and Belle peered through the crack. She looked almost healthy—the visit with Laurentas had restored her color—though Ona distrusted her boomeranging moods. She seemed harmless enough as she slipped into the bathroom, her face as open as a magnolia leaf. Out of options, Ona decided to submit.
“I’ve wet my drawers,” she whispered. “Not clean through, you understand. But I don’t fancy putting these clothes back on.” She wiped her eyes. “My bag is gone and I’ve nothing else to wear.”
Belle plucked a towel from the rack and offered it sympathetically. “The same thing happened to me once, when I was pregnant,” she said. “I was with Quinn at a gig and had to ask the bartender for a towel.” She filled the sink and drubbed Ona’s slacks and drawers with bar soap. “Is your shirt all right?” she asked, twisting the bathtub faucets with no more effort than it took to snap a finger.
Ona let go of the rip. “Don’t look at me, please.”
Belle helped Ona off with her blouse—“This is our little secret,” she assured her—and into the tub, which received Ona’s disgraced and flapping carcass
with a slosh of disapproval.
Time passed, some of it lost. When Ona got out of the tub—she insisted on doing this herself despite Belle’s offers from the other side of the door—she found her things dripping on a towel rack and on the closed lid of the toilet some dry, youthful clothes that she, apparently, was expected to put on.
“What are these?”
“It’s all I’ve got,” Belle called in. “Your stuff won’t be dry for a while.”
“I should have worn polyester,” Ona muttered, inspecting a folded pair of blue jeans, a sleeveless red blouse, an A-cup brassiere, and a pair of silk underpants with a pattern of butterflies freckling the seat. Everything freshly laundered and pressed—the overprotective work of the dark-haired sister.
She examined the underpants as if excavating her lost womanhood. It had been over fifty years since she last bled. She stepped into them and hiked them up, half expecting a genie to appear with an offer to restore her menses. The butterfly-patterned silk hung on her like another deflated muscle. How had this happened? She gazed down at the baggy casings that passed for breasts, the vertical pleats of her thighs, and yanked the panties off her body so hard she tore the band.
A butterfly had been Ona’s first gift from a boy. Fourteen years old, waltzing home from a dance at the Mechanics Institute, comparing dance cards with the girls from Wald Street. Just then Mervin Fickett, a bucktoothed boy from the School Street livery, caught up with her in front of the Thibodeau block to thrust the iridescent treasure into her palm. Pinned to a stiff square of velvet, the murdered thing shone with reflected moonlight. Where Mervin had acquired such a jewel he would not tell, but he wanted her to have it because, he informed her, slurping the words through his crisscrossed teeth, the wings matched her eyes exactly.
The lovely creature left her woozy with desire—for what, she did not know. On this first summer night of 1914—the summer of no Maud-Lucy—silly, sweet Mervin Fickett laid the first innocent stone in a path that would track the rest of Ona’s life. As Maud-Lucy nursed her auntie back in Vermont, Ona turned up at the midway, stunned once again by desire; in ten months’ time she’d be home again, sick with regret and unthinkable pain, giving birth to a boy destined for Maud-Lucy’s arms.