by Robert Price
Chapter Ten
Two days earlier, the morning after Elizabeth and Jon’s arrival to the East Coast, Elizabeth, Jon and Elizabeth’s cousin Tony, plus two of Tony’s laborers, Juan and Marcos, took on the monumental task of clearing out the first floor rooms of the Hubbard farmhouse in preparation for Tom’s memorial reception. The rooms were so full of the scavenging of a pack rat that the furniture and floor were barely visible; they were buried deep beneath an astonishing amount of clutter. The only clearing was a narrow pathway providing access to the center of each room.
There were boxes upon boxes of new and used clothing. There were at least fifteen sets of dishes, coffee cups and glasses, along with plastic bags full of polished and unpolished silverware. Brown paper shopping bags and big green garbage bags brimmed full of sheets, blankets and bedspreads, many with the store tags still attached. There were ten vacuum cleaners, both canisters and uprights. And there were piles upon piles of old newspapers, unopened junk mail, out of date phonebooks and yellowed bank statements. Floor lamps poked out of the mess, their dusty, ornate Victorian lampshades hovered above the mounds like canopies on ornamental trees.
Elizabeth put herself in charge of the cleaning crew. Mrs. Hubbard complained of fatigue and remained upstairs in her bedroom, but Jon and Tony followed Elizabeth from room to room along the narrow pathways. She would open a box, sift through the contents or just point to a pile and Jon and Tony would move it a little bit, into the path or closer to the front door, enough to indicate to Juan or Marcos that it was going out. Then each time the truck that was backed up to the front door became full, much to Tony’s displeasure, the junk did not go to the dump. To calm his aunt’s ragged nerves, he reluctantly agreed to store her multitude of belongings in several units in the U-Store It complex he had built on the land he inherited from his own mother along Route 1.
For the most part, the operation went quickly and smoothly. Except for the few times that Elizabeth lost her patience waiting for Juan and Marcos to return with the truck after taking a load to the storage unit.
“They dodder,” Elizabeth would complain to her cousin, who in turn defended the integrity of his two laborers. Yet despite her accusations, by four o’clock in the afternoon, when most of the debris and unnecessary furnishings had been removed, Elizabeth almost thanked the workers. The thought of tipping them had even crossed her mind, but she dismissed it. She told herself that their slow pace was partially to blame for the amount of cleaning that still needed to be done.
Elizabeth felt overwhelmed. The wide-board pine floors needed washing. The flowery wallpaper in the corners of the parlor needed reattaching. The yellowed windowpanes needed cleaning and the curtains washing and pressing. The fireplaces still contained ashes from fires of ten or twenty years earlier. The furniture needed polishing. The cushions and upholstery required vacuuming. The pictures on the walls begged to be straightened. She and Jon had yet to meet with the caterer, the church administrator and the funeral home. Her mother, still hidden upstairs, was useless.
“This is just too much work!” Flabbergasted, Elizabeth turned to her husband, Jon, and asked him to remind her why they had decided against renting a hall.
Juan and Marcos had sensed Elizabeth’s dismay and suggested to Tony, who spoke a smattering of Spanish, that Elizabeth hire their entire families to return in the morning and take care of the cleaning. They promised Elizabeth would be satisfied. “Señora Elizabeth será satisfecha,” they told Tony. Tony relayed the message to Elizabeth, who, encouraged by her husband, unenthusiastically agreed to allow Juan and Marcos’s families to clean the first floor rooms of the farmhouse. “Including the kitchen,” Elizabeth stressed.
At 7:30 the following morning, one day before the reception, two vehicles pulled into the circular driveway. Thirteen members of Juan and Marcos’s families piled out. Juan’s mother, aunt, son, daughter and wife were all there. Marcos’s two sisters and their daughters and sons, as well as his mother and grandmother were also prepared to work. Shortly after the families’ arrival, Marcos and Juan showed up with one of Tony’s work trucks and plenty of cleaning supplies. The two men then led the cleaning crew through the first floor rooms of the house. By the time Elizabeth and Jon had dressed and come down the stairs from their bedroom on the second floor, the first floor was a flurry of activity.
Marcos’s grandmother, Gabriella, a dark, round, compassionate yet strong Salvadorian woman, took an immediate interest in Elizabeth and offered with gestures and broken English to make her coffee. Like Elizabeth, she, too, had lost loved ones, she said: two brothers, her father and husband during the civil war in El Salvador. Elizabeth accepted the coffee and, unable to understand a word Gabriella had to say, decided to step out of the way and let them clean, the same way she stepped out of the way when the immigrants cleaned her house in California.
Stirred by all the commotion, Mrs. Hubbard eventually left her bedroom and descended the stairs. On the first floor landing she burst into tears, horrified at what she saw. All of her treasures were gone. Her bounty of boxes of clothing and piles of dishes were gone. Her stacks of newspapers and collections of phone books had been removed. Her brown paper bags and green plastic bags stuffed with bedding still wrapped in plastic were now in storage. All the things she had started to accumulate soon after her husband died, the things she began to amass more deliberately after Tom left town and the things she began to collect at a fevered pace when her daughter Elizabeth moved to the West Coast and married—all of it was simply gone. All that remained in her home were the bare furnishings.
The house was too empty for Mrs. Hubbard. She went into the kitchen and sat at the unusually clean kitchen table, folded her arms into a cradle in front of her, lowered her gray-haired head and wept yet again. Sympathetic, Marcos’s youthful mother, Marcia, his soulful grandmother, Gabriella, and Juan’s thickset Salvadorian mother, Patella, flocked around Mrs. Hubbard. Cooing and consoling in Spanish—“Pobresita,” and “Ahora su hijo esta con Dios”—they made her tea and eggs and toast.
By five o’clock that evening, the two families had transformed the first floor of the Hubbard farmhouse. They washed the floors, straightened the pictures on the walls, polished the knick-knacks and readied the dining room for the caterer. They organized the kitchen and arranged the furniture in the large living room and parlor to host small gatherings of mourners and to encourage intimate conversations at the memorial reception. Juan’s son, Eduardo, cleaned the fireplaces in each room, then drove over to Tony’s house and returned with a load of dried wood. In each fireplace he assembled the wood just so—all they needed was a match.
In the fading November light, the rooms glowed with newfound warmth. When Elizabeth and Jon returned from meetings with the priest, the caterer and the undertaker, they were struck by how much the rooms looked like a cozy country inn.
In the small sitting room, between the kitchen and the larger living room, Gabriella and Patella had positioned a stuffed armchair counter-corner to the fireplace. With the addition of a hand-knit afghan blanket, they made the chair as comfortable as possible for Mrs. Hubbard to sit in and receive her guests. On the mantel above the two hundred year old stone fireplace, at Mrs. Hubbard’s request, the women placed a small cross, a fat, round white candle and a picture of Tom in his military dress uniform. In the same room, on the small tables on either side of the couch, and on the coffee table, the women set out additional pictures of Tom that Mrs. Hubbard had brought down from her bedroom: Tom as a boy on a bicycle, his high school graduation photo with cap and gown, a college photo with thick sideburns and one of Tom on his 18th birthday, his face tellingly turned away from Mr. Hubbard, who stood beside him. The photo was taken just days before the old man had died.
When they had finished, Juan, Marcos and the younger members of the crew waited outside while the older women, Gabriella and Patella, slowly walked with Mrs. Hubbard through each room. Together they applied the final touches. In the front p
arlor, for instance, off the entrance hallway, they made a small adjustment to the position of a photo, in the living room they changed the tilt of a lampshade and in the smaller sitting room they moved a pillow that was ever so slightly out of place—last minute details that made all the difference to a welcoming home. As Gabriella and Patella prepared to leave, Mrs. Hubbard hugged each one and wept with appreciation for their help.
Outside in the driveway, with Marcos translating, Mrs. Hubbard thanked the families and, addressing the older women of the group, said, “Please, all of you, please, come to the reception tomorrow. You must come.”
Elizabeth stood in the doorway and rolled her eyes.