by Anita Shreve
Yes, he now sees, his father had already taken off his shirt and was wearing only the sleeveless undervest and trousers. His mother fanned herself with a magazine and got up during a commercial to make them all lemonade. (Oddly, near dawn, they all sat around the kitchen table and drank the remaining lemonade together after the police and the ambulances had gone. How like his parents not to think of whiskey or brandy first in a crisis, as he would now—does now.) They all went up to bed after the show, shortly past ten o'clock (he remembers having said so to the police), his father winding his watch as he walked up the stairs, as he had nearly every night Andrew could remember; his mother hoisting her weight up the stairs by her grip on the banister, her tread heavy on each riser, short of breath at the top; and himself, as light as air, flying, bounding, sprinting up the stairs, not an obstacle for him as they were for his parents.
Later, after he left home, he liked to imagine that he had looked out of his screen window, while he was waiting for his mother or his father to vacate the single bathroom at the top of the stairs, and had had a thought of Eden that night—had posed a query or had seen a silhouette of her moving across the window. But it was, in retrospect, impossible to know if he'd thought of her that night or that morning, or when he'd gotten off the bus from the Texaco station. Eden had been too much a part of his life—as much a piece of his geography as the hydrangea tree outside his window, whose white puffy blossoms are turning now to salmon as they do at the end of every summer; or as the way his mother looked each morning at breakfast in her bathrobe, nursing her coffee as she stared out the kitchen window, making, he always thought, some kind of peace with the weather and with how the day seemed about to unfold. He had known Eden all her life and most of his, and though he was too young then to be able to say with any confidence precisely how it was he was connected to Eden, he knew that he was troubled, as the days of August moved toward September, about having to leave her behind.
HE SEES that he has pulled the sheet from the foot of the bed during his dream—during the boyhood fear in the dream?—and it now lies in a damp rough swath across his chest. He brings it to his face and inhales a musty scent; it must be years since anyone has slept in this narrow single bed, he thinks. When he used to visit with his wife and his son, the three of them always slept together in the double bed in the guest room at the opposite end of the hallway—and it was, for him, one of the highlights of those visits, their holding each other in that soft, lumpy bed. As a general rule, Martha didn't believe in letting Billy sleep with them (the child-care books, she said, insisted it would make the boy too dependent), and so they hadn't, except on these rare and wonderful occasions.
Since he left home—and went to college, got married, fathered a child and separated from that wife and child—his room has evolved in the way the rooms of children do when the children aren't ever coming back. At first his mother kept it unviolated, the pennants and the posters on the walls, his desk neat, with his boyhood books and blotter, the few clothes he didn't take with him to school hanging in the closet. They were still there, he saw last night, as he hung up the charcoal gray suit he'd worn to the funeral; but she had used the closet herself, beginning when he didn't know, for her off-season clothes, if such a formal term could be applied to the oversized gaudy synthetics with orange diamonds, green stripes and pink flowers on the sleeves. She never lost the weight she vowed to lose and favored, right up until her death, large loose blouses that camouflaged her ever-swelling hips and thighs.
On the desk now is her sewing machine, and instead of the old pens and half-used notebooks he used to keep in the right-hand drawer, he found there last night an array of bobbins, fabric scraps and needles. There were other rooms she could have chosen to sew in—the sun room downstairs, where the light was good, or the guest bedroom. Perhaps, though, she wanted an excuse to be in this room, to savor some vestige of her son's presence. Or possibly she simply liked the east light in the early morning, or wished to see the other farmhouse, to reassure herself that she was not entirely alone. He tries to imagine what it must have been like for her to have a family and have it fall away: his own leaving and never really coming back except as a visitor; his father abandoning her five years ago with a heart attack. It has happened to him too—Martha and Billy have left him—though faster and without the dignity of these natural milestones. And he had not had time to be defined by the family he'd made, as she was, nor to become rooted to a place.
The still, heavy night mocks the dream, teasing it in and out of his consciousness. He wonders if the weather, so similar to that on the night of the shooting, has brought on the dream, or if it is the coincidence of lying alone in this bed. Or is it that he needs to feel his parents young and alive again, and his dream has willingly obliged? It is a mixed blessing, he thinks, to hold your past again for a few moments, as he sometimes feels when he dreams of Martha as she was (as they were together) when they first met. He wakes from these erotic dreams of his wife as if immersed in a warm bath, and then is chilled by those first few hints of reality—a tie flung over a mirror, a briefcase on a bureau, sheets he hasn't washed.
He swings his feet onto the floor and arches his shoulders. His back aches faintly; he isn't used to such a soft bed. And with Billy gone, he seldom exercises now—though his body remains, despite neglect, reasonably lean. He still has his hair too, for which he is grateful. His father, from whom Andrew inherited his thick dark hair—as well as his pale gray eyes—went bald at an early age. Andrew isn't certain, but he thinks his father may have lost his hair by the time he was forty-five.
Beside the bed, on a table, Andrew sees the sleeping pills. Dr. Ryder, his mother's doctor, pressed a vial into Andrew's palm after the funeral. He imagines the doctor with many similar vials, a drawerful perhaps, kept for similar occasions, the gesture like that of a priest with a rosary card, or of a car salesman handing you a calendar as you leave the showroom. But he doesn't want a sleeping pill just now. He feels restless.
FOUR DAYS earlier, he was in the screening room at the other end of the twenty-seventh floor, watching a videotape of an advertisement for a pain reliever his company manufactures, when Jayne, his secretary, got the call. The videotape had been especially poor, and despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating faintly when he returned to his office. As he walked in, Jayne came to his doorway with her hands clasped uncharacteristically in front of her. "There's bad news," she said quietly.
"Billy?" he said immediately, the adrenaline already shooting toward his fingertips.
Jayne shook her head quickly. Andrew slowly let out his breath. He thought he could bear anything except bad news about Billy, who was uncommonly prone to accidents—already a chipped tooth and a broken wrist, a scar over his right eyebrow. And since the child had left his keeping, Andrew's fears for him had increased exponentially. It was like the panic he sometimes had in airplanes.
"I'm so sorry," said Jayne. "It's your mother. She had a stroke just after breakfast and died almost immediately. A woman named Mrs. Close called to tell you, but I didn't want to break the news to you in the screening room. She says to call her. I have the number."
Andrew sat down. He remembers that his fingers could no longer hold a pen and that already a certain kind of numbness had set in, a disbelief in the truth of the event. He wouldn't need the number, he told Jayne. He had known it by heart since he was four, had been taught it in case of an emergency and later had used it to call Eden.
Although that conversation was days ago, Andrew is not sure even now that he has taken it in. The chaos of a funeral creates a blur inside which one can choose to remain. He has felt, alternately, grateful that his mother died so easily and so quickly; saddened that she might, even so, have known of her death, if only for a moment, and may have called out to him, her only son; relieved that he will no longer have to think of his mother as lonely; and horrified that the burden of being utterly alone has finally passed to him. He has no parents now or any family of his
own to go home to, to create rituals with.
He walks from room to room upstairs, switching on lights as he walks, naked but for his shorts. The contradictory feelings have come in gulps, unexpectedly assaulting him and then leaving him to move about in the curious kind of peace that tending to business has always offered him. Like a good secretary to himself, he has made lists: lists of people to call and tasks to be completed to get to this day, the day of the funeral, and a long list of chores to accomplish before he can leave the farmhouse and the town. The list contains notes such as call auctioneer, call real estate agents, do gutters, select mementos. He imagines the sorting out, the auctioning off of the furniture, the minor repairs to the house and the arrangements to sell it will take him a week, and he called Martha to say that he will be upstate another seven days. When Martha offered to come to the funeral, Andrew said no, Billy was too young. Their presence, he thought, would distract him. Billy's trusting face and sturdy body would enthrall him as they always did; with Martha, there would be a tension that would inhibit every movement, so that thinking about his mother at all would be nearly impossible.
He has imagined that in lists there is control, but as he walks from room to room, the house seems about to slip from his grasp. His mother's room, now too bright under the overhead electric light, the room she left at dawn one morning five years ago to find her husband cold as tiles on the bathroom floor, the room she then slept in alone, is a labyrinth of snares and complications. There are only so many boxes of things Andrew can rescue from his and his parents' past to take back with him to his apartment in the city. And he sees at once that unless he hardens himself or designs a selection system, he might spend an entire day just in here.
Should he, for instance, take the quilt his mother made when he was ten—a year of her labor (he can recall it clearly) each night after supper, the basket of pieces beside her, her plump fingers nimble with a needle? What will he do with it? He has no wife to give it to, no closet big enough to store it, for it is a massive thing: It kept his parents warm even on the bleakest January nights.
And what of the oak chest of keepsakes at the foot of their bed, things his own mother saved from her mother, and doubtless things that his grandmother saved from her own mother's house? Such a process of distillation, like the corridors of endlessly repeated, though smaller, images in two mirrors; and such a burden, he thinks, these cartons filled with the leavings of lives gone before you. Will Billy one day open drawers in his father's apartment (depressing thought! Will Andrew now progress no farther in his domestic life than his expensive, cheerless condo?), taking objects that seem to contain some essence of his father, or of his own past, and bring them back to his own drawers and closets in Greenwich or Santa Fe?
Andrew picks up the watch his father wore and wound every night going up the stairs to bed. He knows he will take this, a watch his father inherited from his own father, but what of the Omega lying beside it on his father's bureau—the surface of the bureau undisturbed but for dusting? The Omega was a gift to his father when he left the dairy at his retirement. Andrew did not come to the retirement dinner—there'd been a critical business trip, a trip Andrew has always regretted making—and he doesn't know if his father ever even wore the Omega or if he would want it saved.
Andrew's father was plant foreman when he retired. But for most of the forty years he spent at the dairy, he drove a truck. (At his mother's insistence, the more accurate title "milkman" was seldom used in the house.) Andy was always asleep when his father left for work (at a punishing three forty-five in the morning), but when he returned from school, the truck would be there, and if he had a friend with him, they would clamber up into it with its bright green and red Miller Dairy sign, competing for the privilege of sitting on the high burnished leather seat and placing their small hands on the oversized steering wheel, the stem of which came all the way from the floor. Andrew remembers his father's gray overalls with the red embroidered script on the pocket, and the way, in winter, his father would wear so many layers underneath for warmth that he looked nearly stuffed. It wasn't until Andrew went to college and the boys around him spoke of their families that he first thought of himself as a WASP. But so humble were his father's circumstances (and, in truth, the circumstances of all his father's ancestors, most poor farmers) that Andrew wondered for a time if there might not be such a category as failed WASP. Andrew remembers vividly the afternoon his father came home with the news that he'd been promoted to foreman at the plant, releasing him from his position as a driver. He is not sure he ever saw his mother quite so jubilant—the way she kept kissing his father and throwing her arms around him and laughing, as if it were another era and she'd won the lottery.
He sits on the edge of the bed. He wonders who made the bed, for it was here that his mother was found. He assumes it must have been Mrs. Close, who came to his mother after the phone call. ("Your mother called Edith Close at about eight this morning and said she had a terrific pain in her head," Dr. Ryder revealed in his hoarse, authoritative voice on the phone the night Andrew arrived. "By the time Edith got dressed and went over, your mother had already passed away. She found her upstairs. It was a massive stroke, mercifully quick. Be glad for that. But you watch yourself, Andy, both your parents dying of cardiovascular diseases in their sixties; you watch your diet.")
As he sits on the bed, he thinks that a marriage seen when you're a parent too, an adult, is a different thing than the one seen from boyhood. He wonders if his parents were happy together, if they slept touching or apart (he doesn't really know; they were always private and silent in this room, and he has no memory, as other children do, as Eden said she did, of mysterious and unexplained parental sounds) and whether they had ceased to make love. His parents were older than most when he was born; his mother was thirty-one. She had, she said, nearly given up on a baby before he came, and there was a time when this caused him to imagine that he was adopted, like Eden, despite the fact he looks so like his father that he can't, even today, go into town without a man or woman there saying it: the image of your father. Still, as children can be, he was obsessed for months (or perhaps it was only weeks) by this notion of adoption; so much so that he conceived the idea that the two families had gravitated to the two farmhouses set apart from the town because there was about them this unnatural link.
He looks at the marriage bed and sees, suddenly and unbidden, the image of a woman rolling over, turning her back on the man. But it is not his mother he is seeing; it is his wife. He doesn't want to think of Martha just now. He gets up and shuts off the light.
The brandy, kept for company, is in the cabinet with the meat grinder over the fridge. He pours himself a generous amount in a jelly glass. The kitchen, he reflects, sitting on a white-painted wooden chair, is nearly unchanged since he was a boy. And as it did then, it gives the appearance of having been scrubbed raw. It is a farmhouse kitchen, "modernized" during the thirties, with a green-speckled linoleum floor, a white porcelain sink and stove and kitchen table, all with rounded edges. There are painted surfaces everywhere—the white tongue-and-groove boards of the walls, the pale green of the old Hoosier cabinet, the four unmatched white chairs at the table. He thinks about the kitchen in the house in Saddle River he bought with Martha, where Martha and Billy now live, and about the shiny, stainless-steel refrigerator in that kitchen and the expensive quarry tile on the floor and how remarkably cold—literally cold—the floor is there.
When he arrived the evening of the day his mother died—by car, having driven the 270 miles north from the city—and walked in the back door (as did everyone who entered the house), the kitchen appeared as it does now; there were no leavings of a half-eaten breakfast, as he had feared to see. Edith Close again, he imagines, silently officious, cleaning up the clutter of death.
Thinking of Edith Close, he remembers again, and abruptly, the terrible sound in his dream of a woman crying. He swirls the golden brandy in the jelly glass and recalls the sequence o
f events, an exact sequence he has not thought of for years. His father again picked up the phone and dialed the police. Then he went alone through the kitchen, out the door and up the drive, his rifle tense along the side of his leg. Andy heard his father's unhurried footsteps on the gravel and the heavy patter of his mother running down the stairs. Andy pulled on his shorts and went downstairs to be with his mother, partially out of a desire to protect her, primarily out of a need to be in her presence. She was standing at the screen door, peering out at the darkness. Despite the heat, she had put on a robe (pink seersucker with lace at the edges, he sees now), knowing that there would be the police soon. The shrill wail had stopped; they both knew it had been the voice of Edith Close, but neither yet had the courage to imagine precisely what had caused it. Andy moved closer to his mother, and she shifted slightly so that he, too, could see out the screen door into nothing.
"I told him to wait for the police," his mother said, her voice tight with strain. It was a strain he is now familiar with, the strain of cautious women with good sense, a voice men often choose to ignore.
"He has a gun," Andy said, knowing instantly she would not for one minute think that a help.
"A gun!" his mother cried. Her voice rose like the other, as if it, too, might spiral up into the night. Was this freedom a special province of women? he wondered. "What good is a gun in the pitch dark? You can't see a hand in front of you out there."
"He'll be careful," Andy said. But he didn't know if this was true. Was his father, in a crisis—a life-threatening crisis—a cautious man? He had never witnessed his father in physical danger; he doubted that his father knew himself how he would react until each footstep was taken.