DANcmGWlmerormmmva
ANDOTHER STORIES “I
By 3,

Noel Anne Seif

A THESIS
Submitted To
Michigan State University ,,; :1
in partial fulfillment of the requimments I
for the degree of 1 f

MASTER OF CREATIVE WRITING .-..

  

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ABSTRACT

DANCING WITH ST. JOHN THE DIVINE
AND OTHER STORIES

By

Noel Anne Seif

 

This collection explores the complex web of family relationships, those
between father and daughter, husband and wife, mother and daughter, and 3 {I }
father and son. Some are narrative pieces in which the important action of the '3
story has taken place long ago and is being remembered through the long lens '-
of memory by a narrator much older than when the events first took place.
Others take place in the immediate past when the events are still fresh and full > 3‘ "
in the narrator's mind. There is Peach, a gracious middle—aged southern belle
Who has gone mad and Malina, a Russian piano teacher who believes her
Sister’sspirit livesin thebodyofherfavoritepetcanarytonameafewofme
conection's unusual and interesting characters. In each story, the narrator
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- articles th campus or canteen or deer

ANTHEM

BECAUSE IT WASN‘T LOVE
BIRD ON A LEASH
DANCING WITH ST. JOHN THE DIVINE
DREAMS

DROUGHT

FATHER'S DAY

FINDING UNCLE HILLARY
HALF ORPHANS

THE ONLY ONE
PICTURING DUGAN'S FACE
STONEHENGE

  

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ANTHEM

 

She lay in the dark, listening to the soft thuds from downstairs, closet
doors being opened and closed, drawers being searched and slammed shut and VVV V
the footfalls of heavy boots across the kitchen linoleum. Her husband was taking
her son hunting for the first time on opening day and downstairs while they E
thought she slept, they were making ready. She did not want this. It was bad V. ;
enough that her husband wanted to go, sat in his chair in front of the television

 
 
 
 

days before, cleaning his rifle, counting his cartridges, cleaning underneath his
fingernails with his hunting knife, humming a little. She refused on principle to
join in any ofthe preparations. She would not cook for their expeditions, she

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Jamie, had said he wanted to go. He told her this months before, at the end of
August, when the leaves were still green on the trees, and the heat unbearably
humid. Deer season then seemed so far away and she thought she still had time
to talk him out of it. But she was not successful. Let me see for myself, he had
said, when she spoke of the absence of true sport, when she spoke of the danger,
when she spoke of the gore. Are you ready for this, she asked him. I mean you
have to gut the thing out, use your hands to take out things like the intestines, the

heart. Can you handle that? Let me just see for myself, be repeated sourly, not

 

looking at her. Her husband had said, Let the boy go for Christ's sake, he's old
enough.

She and her husband, Joe, had had many arguments about Jamie. She
resented how Joe always seemed to take the opposite view from hers, always
seemed to be sticking up for the boy and interfering when he had no right to.
Jamie wasn't his son but hers from a previous marriage, and in the beginning he
had told her he didn't want to get involved on the discipline end of things, that he
was the newcomer and thought it best if he stayed in the background. The
problem was he wasn't staying in the background anymore and he seemed
possessive of the boy in a way that made her feel jealous, like she always had to ‘
insa'therselfbetweenthemifshewantedtofeelpanofthings. V

But it was more than that. Even Joe had noticed it. It had started with
Mandfitfulsleep. Onenightsheawohetofindloeshakinghfl. i4-
may," 1. are, looking atherfunny, “whedidyoum , »- f I ‘

  
 

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were you trying to push out of the way?"

"What?" she said, startled to see Joe's face so close to hers. He had
switched on the light, but the room still had a pooling darkness to it, in the
corners and at the edges, like her dream had had.

"You were yelling in your sleep. You must've been having a nightmare,"
he said, sitting up on his elbow, staring at her.

"I must've been," she agreed, "but I don't remember any of it. Except it
was dark. Very dark." As a child her nightmares were always dark; that's how
she always knew if she had had one because the dark feeling stayed with her long
after the particulars of the dream had faded. Her mother called them night
terrors and told her, when she came to stand outside her parents' door pleading
for permission to climb into bed with them, to say prayers and to think happy
droughts.

"Why don't you lay on me until you fall back asleep," Joe suggested,
leaning over to switch off the light.

Another time she woke up suddenly and saw a sliver of yellow light under
the door. She saw nothing else in the inky blackness, just this sliver of light and
sounds like someone was moving something heavy and she was gripped with such
an inexplicable and sudden fear that she gasped. It was only Joe, staying up late.
She knew, though, where that came from. Not then but the next day she

remembered that that came from her childhood when her father came home late,

   

tuned on all the lights, kicked at things, woke theirmother up and denuded

 

 

 

that she cook for him. And when she was sick or was working nights, he came
after her and her sister.

Two days before opening day, Joe, in that musing way he had of bringing
up unpleasant things, said to her, "What's it about opening day that's got you so
riled up?"

"What do you mean, 11M?" she demanded.

"We've been doing fine, and then when Jamie and I start making plans to
go hunting together. you turn cold and distant like you feel threatened about
something. And if I know you, you're boiling inside so talk to me."

"There's nothing to talk about. You know how I feel about hunting and
that's never been anything I've wanted for Jamie. I've never kept that from
you." Talking about it suddenly made her feel sad. resigned to the futility of it
all.

"So it‘s about Jamie, is it," Joe said. "The boy becoming a man and
wanting to do manly things and the mother still wanting him to be a boy. That's
it, isn't it?" He had that satisfied look on his face like he had realized something
important.

She wanted to hit him, to wipe that look off his face. He enjoyed doing
that, probing, analyzing, making tidy clinical conclusions about everything. As

if life was really like that, neat and tidy, and nothing was obscm‘e or
unknowable. "Go to hell," she said angrily, and she imagined as she left the

roomthathewas already givinghimselfacongratulatorypatonthebackfor V.

  

 

 

 

having scored a bull's eye.

But he was wrong, partly at least, although she couldn't say why.

When she heard the car start up, she got out of bed and went to the
window. Jamie was helping Joe load some supplies into the trunk of the car.
She watched them bend over together, their heads almost touching as if in some
sort of ritualistic prayer. Next to Joe, Jamie looked smaller, more boyish than
she could remember him securing in a long time. She wondered if he would
ever seem manly to her, ever completely grown up. She watched them until they

got in the car and left, their taillights disappearing beyond the bend in the
driveway. Then she went back to bed.
All morning long the hills around her rang out with the sound of gunshot.

She was working in the laundry room when she heard a volley of shots at
midmorning. Joe had said that they would be hunting over in the state game
area across the river from their house. The shots seemed to be coming from
that direction. and she rushed to the window. There was nothing to see except
the naked November trees and an occasional wash of weak sunshine between
heavy pewter clouds. Below, the river snaked around the bottom of the hill, the
dull steel color of dirty dishwater. She wondered what she would do if a hunter
came up over the back hill, pursuing a deer. Scream at him from the safety of
her house, she thought. and order him off their land. After a while she gave up

trying to work and drove into town to do some errands. When she returned,

Jamie and her husband were sitting at the kitchen table, eating lunch. They were

  

 

 

 

their orange hunting outfits and their heavy boots; their rifles lay side by side on
the family room floor. Perhaps it was the rifles laying there or the foreign
orange color of their outfits, but she felt immediately like an intruder.
"See anything?" she asked, taking off her coat.
"Joe saw a buck with an eight point rack, but he couldn't get a shot off.
He was too far away." There was eagerness in Jamie's voice and pride, just
short of boasting. V ‘
"Sounds like you're enjoying it so far," she said.
"He's quite the scout. He found tracks that I didn't see and he helped make
a blind," Joe offered.
She ignored him. "Just be careful," she said to Jamie.
Her husband got up and followed her into the living room. She would not
look at him. Even from where he stood, she could smell the outdoors on him,
the sky, the cold air, the trees. She remembered that smell from her father. The
only time he smelled good like that was when he was hunting. The rest of the
time he smelled of cigarettes and bars.
"Don‘t ruin it for Jamie," Joe said.
"I'm trying not to.“
"Try harder."
"Screw you."

After lunch the two of them decided to hunt down by the river on their

   

side just beyond their property line. There were too many hunters on the state

 

 

 

 

land and they were hoping for better luck in a more secluded area. After they
had gone, she sat down with a magazine, but couldn't read. Her father had been

a hunter, fancied himself a good one, too. but the real attraction for him had not
been the act of hunting so much as the drinking. She remembered how her
mother brought home grocery bags full of pints of Kentucky whiskey, the good
stuff, real smooth her father crooned and how he distributed them so widely
among all his gear. So that he would never be far from a snort, never run out, Vi
never become desperate. Even as a child she had known this. He prided himself
in his Remington thirty aught six, sat and polished it at the kitchen table with a
clean Chamois and her mother's furniture polish, made her and her sister for
some perverse reason she never understood, touch the cold metal barrel. Days
before he was to leave on his hunting trips. he would have the house in an uproar
while he scrambled to get ready. He couldn't find socks. long underwear, his
whale bone hunting knife, his hat with the earmuffs. It was everyone's fault. He
yelled and threw things and then. he was gone. Peace and quiet returned, her
mother's clenched jaw expression softened, her sister quit biting her nails.

Her father, she remembered, never did get a deer that way. Instead he
drunkenly mowed one down with his car and the state police allowed him to take
the carcass home. (Of course he said that his wife was driving. No sense in
adding a ticket to the cost of having the car repaired.) She and her sister

watched him from the kitchen windows as he gutted it out. The yard light was

   

on and they could see him back behind the swingset on his knees beside it while

 

 

 

he worked. Steam rose in the air in front of him and she had thought, Ema-m,
W mid; and then her father's hands came up bloody and full of
something dark and dripping and she had turned away. When he was finished,
he hung the deer from a tree and she had rushed at him when he came inside and
said, ' i no hth th 's ad? Whydoyghavetohanghirnm? Her
father, astonished at her outburst, looked at her blankly. W ' h w ou
W. he said. He didn't hunt much after that. The venison sat in
their freezer for several years, mostly uneaten. Her mother tried to cook the
roasts but the taste, wild and sinewy which left a coating like tallow on the roof
of the mouth, was foreign, repulsive. She helped her mother load the frozen
blocks of meat into the garbage can on trash day. They clunked together like
stones at the bottom. MW , her mother said, to comfort her.
That was her mother's personal anthem, her solution to all the troubles in the
world, hers and everyone else's. She did what her mother said, then and other
times. Sometimes it worked.

She was dozing later in the afternoon when she woke up to the sound of
pounding feet along the side of the house. She was just sitting up when Jamie
came in panting, his face flushed and sweating, his eyes sharp with purpose.

"I've got one, but it's wounded bad. She's out on the back hill, but I've
got to get me some rope."

"Where's Joe?" she asked, feeling the prickly sensation of fear start at the
back of her neck.

 

 

 

 

"He's tracking a buck. He said he'll be back up as soon as he could."
She heard him downstairs flinging open cupboards doors, rummaging
inside. He seemed to be gone a long time. "Jamie," she called to him from the
top of the steps. "Jamie, you can't leave it there. It's suffering, you've got to
take care of it. "
"I know, I know," Jamie called back, but he did not come up right away.
She found him sitting on a folding chair. the ones they stored for
company. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together with V
his mouth to his knuckles.
"I'm resting," he said when she approached, but he did not look up.
She struggled to choose her words carefully. Finally she said, "Why don't
you show me where it is? Then you can decide what you want to do."
The doc was down on all fours when they came up, quietly, behind it. It
was bleeding from a wound in the shoulder and snorting, its breath steaming
from flared nostrils. Its closed eyes were running a little at the comers. Tears,
she thought. She saw black pools of blood in the dried leaves, a steady stream
from the angry tear in its side. It opened its eyes and looked at them, beautiful
black eyes, she thought, large, soft, beautiful eyes. Beside her Jamie moved
from one foot to the other, cradling his rifle in the crook of his arm.
"Shoot it, Jamie," she said softly and then louder, more sternly, "shoot it."

Jamie brought the rifle barrel to the doe's head and rested it right behind

   

itseyeandatthemoment hedidthahshesuddenlysawhermotherlayingthre.

 

‘h’mother prostrate before her father where he had knocked her down, the
riflebarrelheheldjerkingfromhertempleintomeblackcndsofherhairand

 

H M » back again while he labored drunkenly to say something. The rifle blast sent her
.1: V, (pl reeling. She saw her father falling backwards, the rifle flash upward toward the
.r'm ceiling. her mother cover her head with her arms while all around them the

room rocked with the sound of thunder.
"Mother?" Jamie was saying. "Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said, "yes."

She looked up into the tops of the trees, blinked several times and took a

 

deep breath. The sun shown weakly through the clouds. She could smell snow
in the air and hear the geese honking as they flew over on their way to the river.
Winter seemed to be gathering in around her like a woman gathering her long

skirts. Jamie didn't need her any more. She thought she'd head home.

 

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BECAUSE IT WASN'T LOVE

When Althea was dying, she was on a respirator and couldn't talk. Still

 

with pad and pen she scribbled to Mandy, NOW YOU CAN LAY THE 7 ;'
SECRET TO REST. FINALLY.

Mandy looked at her quizzically, stepped back to let the nurse pass and i V w
asked. "Secret? What secret?" V 31'

  

.1 VV

Althea wrote, REMEMBER? ME & BERTRAM? SUMMER, 1958? V V '
Mandy asked, "Who is Bertram?" She had no idea what her stepmother V. i" V

was referring to. She thought that maybe she wasn't thinking clearly wmcr. - V: VV'VV
WW giventhecircmnstances. ‘ - V 43' W .:.;1..~3‘ . "

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12

vigorously.

Satisfied, Althea lay back and closed her eyes, leaving Mandy to her
memories.

She had been thirteen or fourteen then, that summer of her stepmother's
lover, and she and Althea were quietly at war. That was the summer she came
fully to the realization that her mother was truly gone, not off on some trip and
coming back soon as she pretended, that her father had buried a part of his life
and was wanting something new. The new part was Althea who was a good
deal younger than her mother had been, flashy in the way she dressed where
her mother had been dull, outgoing and warm in a way her mother had been
reserved and she had other things her mother didn't, a mole and dimples that
gave her the feeling of ripe fruit ready for plucking. Later she came to see
that her father's attraction for her was physical while Althea's attraction for
her father was not as easily discernible. Perhaps it had been money as town
gossip suggested although her father did not have a lot of money. What he did
have was part ownership in a hardware store and a forty-acre apple orchard,
but perhaps that was the same thing.

That summer she had seen a gray truck parked in the orchard driveway
several times when she had been returning home, but it was always gone when
she went outside to look for it. She had never heard it drive away and she Ind
oometothinkofitasaghosttruckwhichgaveherbothastrangethrillmd

motelarm.

  

 

13

So the man's name was Bertram, the man she saw with her stepmother
the day she surprised them in the living room. She had heard them before she
found them, murmurs and little gasps of pleasure from behind the partially
closed door, but the sounds didn't register with her as being anything more
than slightly unusual. She first noticed the bare chested man, the sheen of his
skin in the low light (the shades had been pulled against the glare of the
afternoon sun) and then Althea's white slip clinging to her thighs and the two VI
of them wrapped in a ferocious embrace with their lips locked together and she ‘
remembered drinking, That is not my father. Althea saw her first and jerked
away and then the man turned to her and asked Althea who she was. Althea
had spat out her name and ordered her into the kitchen.

There dressed in her bathrobe, Althea lit a cigarette at the stove and
paced. "You've been spying on me," she hissed. "You little minx."

”Spying?" she said. "Mrs. Southwick came home early. What was I
supposed to do? Knock before I entered my own house?"

"Don't get sassy with me, young lady." she said. "Well, it's not what

you think. Nothing happened. Nothing at all." She turned and walked over to

the windows.
"It doesn't matter what I think, " Mandy said. "What will father think?"

Althea whirled around and came at her, her face distorted and flushed
withrage, berfistpoised forstriking. Mandyran out the kitchen doorand
downtbesteps,scrabblingnpdrenearby€hineseehnandsheoonfinmdm

  
   

 

 

“furtherandfurtherupuntil sheknew shewas safe. Altheastepped

ontsidelongenonghtoseewhereshe wentandthenslammedthedooronher
way back in, swearing vehemently.
ltwasawarmdayinluneandfromherperch shecouldseethegarden
andthetopsoftheappletreesalittlefartheroffandagraytruckparkedinthe
orchard driveway. She waiwd for the man to appear which he did a few
minutes later. He walked to his truck, leisurely, she thought. and she watched
him climb in and drive away. The waxy green leaves stirred in the breeze and
she rubbed the dried blood off her shins where she had scraped them climbing
up. After a time, Althea came back again. This time she was dressed in a long
skirt and blouse. She walked over to the tree and peered up.
"Come down now. Mandy," Althea said.
"No, I won't," she said. "Not until father comes home."
"Don’t be silly, " she said. "It'll be dark then."
"You'll hit me," she said.
”I wasn't really going to hit you. I was just angry, that's all."

"I think I'll wait just the same," Mandy said.
"Suit yourself. You'll get hungry," she reminded her and she began

walking away. She stopped and came back.
"Ifyou'llcomedown,"shesaidinatone sosoftMandyalmostcouldn‘t

M."wecanralkandlmmkwecancometoanmderstamling.”
n 1‘ thd ofan meme-MW '

 

     

 

 

ilecouhl her better.
'Conreintothehousemdwe’lltalkaboutit,"shesaid.
"I'll be down in a little while," Mandy said, and it gave her great V
satisfaction to watch her walk slowly back to the house, imagining her
uncertainty, perhaps even her fear. V
”Don‘t wait too long," she warned, ttn'ning back once again, but it was a V
limp, heartless display of authority.
On towards dark, Althea brought out her supper on a plate and left it on V1

 

the stairs. "Please come down before your father gets home," she pleaded.

"He can't know about this."
In the kitchen they squared off again, but this time she felt more secure.
"What do you want for this?" Althea asked, [ms being, Mandy was sure,
her silence, her complicity.
”I don't know," she said. She hadn't given it much thought
"Everything."
Althea took a deep breath. "Anything that's within my power, it's

yours. "

"Just don't expect me to love you," she said, surprising herself at what

had come unbidden and unrehearsed off her tongue.
Over the years while their relationship had grown into an uneasy . ~i 1

 

 

 

"Hl.

 

havebeentheonetotellhim? Shehadaskedhimonedayifhewashappy.
They were closing the store together one Saturday and had just come in from
cranking the awnings down from over the big display windows out front. Her
father was cleaning out the register and shoving the cash into a cloth bag from
the bank. He straightened up at her question.

"Happy? Well, I guess I am at that Why do you ask?"

"I was just wondering." she said.

"Oh, I get it," he said. "You're thinking about your mother and
wondering if I'm as happy with Althea as l was with her. Is that it?"

"Not exactly," she said.

"Or if I've gotten over your mother," he continued.

She shrugged.

He turned and looked her kindly in the face. "Anyone who has lost
someone like I have has to find his own way again. My way now is with
Althea. She's good for me. She makes me laugh."

She had been prepared to tell him. Instead she said, "That’s great, Dad."

When she was older, her father began talking to her about Althea's lack
of money sense, but that was mostly when he wasn't feeling well, when his

spirits were down. Then, before he died, he had discussed his will with her,

starting right ofl'complaining about Althea.
"She's ueverhad a headfor money," he fumed. "She's never hadto. .13 _. 7.1,:

 

 

  

 

 

I've given her."

"Sowhatareyousaying,Dad? Thatyoudon'twauttoleaveher
uything, dint she doesn't deserve it?" She considered then that he was
soficitinghcrsupportaudapprovalforjustsuchaplanoratleastavalidation
of his feelings, but she wouldn't give it

"No, I'm not saying that. She does deserve something."

"She's been a good wife, a good mother, you've had a good life together,
haven't you?" She looked at him intently, but he turned away. "Am I missing
something here," she continued, "something you're not telling me?"

"You're right. She's been everything you've said," but the note in his
voice was still sour. "I'm afraid, though, I haven't been the good husband, I
haven't always been faithful." His voice trailed off.

"What?" Her voice was more shrill than she intended. "To Althea?"

Her father nodded, still looking off.

"Have you told her, does she know?"

He shook his head.

"Why?"

"I don't know. They just happened. I didn't plan them. It's not like I
thought about them. I didn't go looking for them if that's what you think.

Thesewereladieswhocametome."

AeiftlratnndehW‘meaocepflh. www.mfi ~

 

  
  
  
  
   

a 3 "

 

   

He didn't, wouldn't answer her.
Afterhehaddied, shefoundanote. W, sheread. mm

 

W. She still had the note, still carried it around in her billfold
behind the school pictures of her son, because it comforted her to take it out
sometimes and read it She thought about showing it to Althea but always

thought better of it. She didn't know how to broach the subject after all this

 

time and she wasn't sure she wanted to see Althea's reaction.

She had the note in her hand, though, when Althea woke up.

"Here," she said. "Read this," and she smiled at Althea to reassure her.
"I found it after Dad died."

Althea read it and then scratched fmiously on her pad. I DIDN'T
WANT TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU.

"You knew?" Mandy asked in disbelief.

SUSPECT ED, Althea wrote back. ON & OFF THRU THE YEARS.

"How sad," Mandy said.

IT'S OKAY. IT'S OVER & DONE WITH, Althea wrote back.

Mandy sat staring out the window for along time. Althea, to get her V ‘f

attention, had to tap on her hospital tray with her pen. They played tick-tack-

tue and hangman until Althea grew tired and had to stop. For the next several . .;. a

 

  

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BIRD ON A LEASH

He and Carla had gone into the bedroom that afternoon, but he could

 

tell by the way she picked at the buttons of her blouse, avoiding his eyes that V 3V:
she wasn't eager to make love. It's like an obligation, Michael, she said to him
one day, not like before. serene it had been sacramental, she said when he *f 3
pressed her to explain, spiritual, meaningful and then she shrugged her

  
  
  
  
 

shoulders and turmd away. He had not known that anything was wrong; her
wordssumnedhimlikeaslapintheface. Whenhethoughtaboutititwasau
easychargeforhimtodisnnssbecauseshewasalwaysdoingtllaan'yingto
nnkesomedring—pmfoundouafdiemdimryasifthecmeverydny .
Wm‘tgmdenonghfm‘hermhdtobemm '1;
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~ , of the priest's vestammts worn dming Mass, the chasuble and the alb, and the
smell of incense at Benediction, dim memories of his days as an altar boy at St.
Adalbert's. He took a last look out into the courtyard before he drew the
blinds closed completely and that was when he saw the woman.

She was stooped and she moved about slowly as if in pain. She was
wearing a black shawl pulled so far out over her head that her eyes were
hidden in shadow, only her mouth pinched closed like a fist and a chin white
and pointed were visible. He saw movement at her feet, an orange flutter, and

noticed for the first time the canary walking on the ground beside her. The

 

bird were what looked to be a little collar and was attached by a long piece of
string to the woman's wrist.

Incredulous, he turned to Carla. "Take a look at this."

Carla came up behind him and peered over his shoulder. "What?"

"Look at the bird," he said.

"Where?" She moved beside him for a better look.

"It's just like a dog. I've never seen anything like it"

"Oh, that's disgusting," Carla said, turning away. "Walking a bird like a
dog. How cruel."

"Cruel?" he countered. "How is that cruel? She's not hurting him."

 
 

"Itcouldchoketodeathlikethat. Abirdismeanttofly."
"Whosaysitcan’tfly?”heasked, bewildered. Hehadnotexpectedthis

  

92' F1:

 

 

 

Inafewmomentsheheardshriekingandthenayoungboyandgirl
came out into the open. They danced a wide circle around the woman, every
nowandagain stompingtheirfeetatthebird. Thebirdflewalittle awayfrom
them, but its leash prevented it from going far. The woman said something,
raisedherarmasiftostrikethem, andthegirlboundedaway. Theboy
flinched but stood his grormd.

"Witch!" the girl began chanting. "Witch!" She began picking up
pebbles off the ground and throwing them.

He wrapped at the window. "Leave her alone," he shouted. "She's not

 

harming anyone. Those little shits," he said, turning to Carla. "Do you believe
that?"

"You should go after them," she said.

Once outside he found that the old woman and her bird had disappeared.
The children saw him coming and scampered over to the side of the building,
eyeing him warily. The boy stared up at him with smooth brown eyes the
color of chocolates. The little girl played with her blond braids and looked
away. They wore pressed white shirts and socks with sandals, the boy in

trousers and the girl in a pinafore.

  

"What has that woman ever done to you?" he demanded.
"She's a witch!" the girl said in a sing-song voice.
”She's so mean," the boy added.
mam she-do unit's sum?" be «new mew... ' j ’

 

    
 

 

    

childrenamoyedhim. Hisniecesandnephewshetolemtedforholidaysand ‘
e.‘ thenwashappytogohomeandberidofthem. Carlacouldn'tunderstandthat,
‘. .-. considered it a character flaw on the same level as not being able to laugh at
yourself. He was riddled with character flaws, he decided.
"0h, lots of things," the boy replied in a tone which suggested that the
woman's meanness was public knowledge.
"Like what?"
"The bird on a leash is sorcery, my mother says so," the boy offered.
"She keeps them, a whole lot of them, in her apartment." ."3 . ’
"They do their business on her curtains. I saw once when my mother
took us there," the girl confided.
"Oh, come now!"
"It's true," the boy eagerly asserted, moving closer. "I saw it, too."
"And she's got six toes," the girl added, joining her brother.
"She does, too," the boy confirmed. "She wears an old pair of shoes and
the toes are all poking through and down here--" he gestured at his raised foot,
"there's one more toe! "
"And no teeth," the girl said. , ' ‘

"Well," the boy began in a tone of discreet disagreement, "sometimes

  
 

she has meth and sometimes she doesn't."

 
 

'8hekilledabatonce,"dlegirlsaid,changingtheelbject. “‘6
1’1. wk'i'fihehat inn deerhwith a Moan," width-hey, lie .

 
 

 

again at the recollection. "And all the time it was squirming and crying like a
little baby."

They stopped talking as if conscious of the fact that they had presented
all the evidence to substantiate their indictment. Their solemn angelic faces

waited patiently for a reply.
He fought amusement at the comers of his mouth. "Even so," he said,

his anger fading, "you should leave her alone."

"She doesn't like children," the boy said.
"Yes. well, that is her right," he said, at a loss for the right thing to say.

"It is our right, too," the boy said, and he took his sister by the hand.

"We should be getting back now," he said to her.
They left him, looking back over their shoulders at him, first the girl

and then the boy. He watched them until they went inside. For a moment he
stood there, wondering what to do. Perhaps he should try and locate the old
woman and explain that the children meant no harm, that they were just afraid.
He knew that fear made people cruel, obliterated all other emotions in its choke
hold. Even sensitive people, in the face of great fear were capable of terrible
cruelty, himself among them. He had hit a dog once with a baseball bat when it
lunged at him on the way home from practice, and then he had continued to
beat it even when it lay writhing on the ground. A passerby had stopped him
andkepthimfi'mn beating thedog todeath. Hehadneverforgotten that. He

wonderedwherethissuddennwdtoexplain,tojustify camefmm. l-Iiseye

 

  
  

 

25

caught a glint of silver in the dirt at his feet. Reaching for it, he was surprised
to find that the article of his interest was a metal clasp on a piece on twine. As
he studied it, turning it over carefully in his palm, he knew somehow that it
was the collar in which the little bird made its amazing jaunts around the
courtyard. Looking up, be scanned the surrounding balconies, hoping the
woman would show herself, but the balconies were empty. He pocketed it,

intending to find the woman and return it to her later.
Inside, Carla was fixing a sandwich for lunch. "That was sweet of you,"

she said, locking up.
The collar remained in his pocket for more than a week before he
decided what to do with it. Every day he looked for the old woman outside but
she never reappeared. The children eluded him as well. Carla wasn't
interested in helping to track her down because, like the children, the woman's
appearance and habits frightened her a little, and he had to admit that he wasn't
terribly keen on the task either. Still, there was something about her and the
bird that intrigued him so he asked around. To the other tenants, she was well

known. Oh, you mean the Bird Lady, they said. Ah, yes, the Bird Lady. 80

one day after work he went to her apartment.
"What you want?" she asked him at the door. She was wearing ragged

slippers and a housecoat. "No money, " she said. "I have no money."
"1111 not here formoney," he said. "I've come to return this." He held

out the collar.

 

 

 

26

"You come in," she said. grabbing him roughly by the arm and pulling
him inside. "My birds escape," she added, slamming the door behind him.
Looking around, he found that the children were right. Birds perched
on the curtain rods and the fabrics were spotted with droppings. There was a
concert grand in the room covered with plastic, a few tables filled with
photographs of birds in gilt frames, a floor lamp with a fringed shade, a couple
of faded sagging armchairs, and a Persian carpet threadbare and dark with
stains. All around him were the sounds of fluttering and chirping. An olive ’

green canary flew over and perched on the woman's head. When it alighted,

the woman smiled.
"He shows off for you," she said. She reached an index finger up and

brought the bird down to him. "Here, you try" she said. "Hold out your
finger. " The bird hopped from her finger to his. It jerked its head from side
to side, looking up at him with black beady eyes.

"What's its name?" he asked.

"No name," she said, shaking her head. "There are too many. He is my

green one. "
"I saw you outside with an orange bird, last week, in the courtyard.

There were children-—"
She cut him off. "The children think I am like Baba Yaga. In Ukraine,

Baba Yaga was a good witch. They are wicked little ones. They try to hurt

  

my birds. "

d! I

"They were frightened. They meant no harm. I spoke to them."

"Oh, I know, people think I am mad woman," she said, her eyes
narrowing sharply as if to include him. "Rudolph is gone now three years.
Birds are my family. They keep me young." She gave a little laugh.

"Was Rudolph your husband?" he asked.
She nodded, looking away. "I did not want to come here. He brought

me. He said he would never leave me." For a moment her lip quivered and he J
thought she would cry. Then she turned back to him and smiled brightly. i.
"Tea? I make some tea for you."
He watched her pad away to the kitchen. She were her white hair
twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck and even though her shoulders were
now stooped and rounded, there was something in her bearing which suggested
she had once been slender, even a little proud. A person of means, he decided,
from a good family, with good connections, who married well. And now this.
She returned carrying a little tray. "Without samovar, it is difficult to

make a good cup. I am sorry."

"This is fine, thank you," he said.
"A shame I had to sell it for money for food." Seeing the startled look

on his face, she continued, "For my birds, food for my birds."

  
  

"Do you breed them to sell ?" he asked.
"No, I do not sell my friends," she said, smiling again. "It is my little

secret. Idonotshareanymare. People laugh. Rudolph, helanghedtoo!

 

 

 

 

28

"I would not laugh," he found himself insisting.
"Maybe," she said. "But I do not know you."
Her name was Malina and she had come with her husband to the US.
during the war because he convinced her that they would starve if they
remained in Russia She taught piano and her husband managed a bookstore.
Her interest in birds began when a neighbor gave her a bird as a present,
shortly after Rudolph became sick. He was bedridden for along time. Her ‘
canary, Ivan, sang to them each morning and kept their spirits up. Hearing 2"
them sing made her think of Vinnitsa where she grew up, of waking on spring ‘
mornings to the sound of birds singing through the open windows. Now her
health was poor, she had shooting pains in her side that left her breathless, and
no money for doctors. She managed, she said. by selling off her jewelry a
piece at a time, and some antiques which she had brought with her from Russia.
She had only her piano left She would soon need to sell that too, she said.
"We must help her," he said to Carla that night. He was laying on his
back staring at the ceiling with Carla on his shoulder. "How can we help her?"
"Be her friend," Carla said, but he wasn't sure he knew how.
"Why does she keep all those birds anyway?" Carla asked after a while.
"She has a reason, but she won't share it."
"Ah, a secret. Why won't she?"

"She’s afraid people'll laugh."

   

ForatimeitseemedlikeCarlahadfallenasleep. Thenshesairk‘l- a __ L. "j.

 

 

29 i

know that feeling."
He took to visiting her every week, bringing her things like eggs and
cheese, fruits. She accepted his gifts graciously and always invited him in for
tea. While they sat sipping in her cramped little kitchen, she told him stories
about her childhood, about the cobbler who made her shoes, about the chimney
sweep who came every year before Christmas, about the kitten she smuggled
into school in her ermine muff. ;‘ ‘
"Why don't you go home?" he asked her one day. "To Vinnitsa where f I
you were happy once." ‘5
"There is no one left. My family all dead, my friends moved away.
Vinnitsa like people too, changed. I keep my Vinnitsa here," she said and she
tapped the side of her head.
"Surely it would be better than this," he said.
She looked at him blankly. "Rudolph is here and my birds. What would
they do without me?"
Not long after, Carla moved out, saying she was putting him at liberty to
do what he wanted. She was retreating to help put everything in perspective,
what she wanted from life, from him, from herself. This is not a break-up, she
kept insisting. It is just a distancing. She needed to see the whole thing, she
said, not just bits and pieces. Nothing was clear anymore.

Hestoodinthebedroomdoorwayandwatchedherpack. "lfthisis

 

 

 

 

 

30 4‘

I'm not a little kid who needs to be shielded from the truth." Already he could
feel the anger beneath his words, the searing.

"I am telling you the truth, Michael," she said, turning to look at him.

"So then I don't have as much liberty as you say."

"No, I suppose not."

The next time he went to Malina's apartment, there was no answer.
When his pounding produced no response, he grew fearful that something had
happened to her and he went to her neighbors. Eventually someone from 5
building maintenance was called and he was let inside. Her apartment was i
dark, the birds quiet and he was certain then that something was wrong. He
felt his way through the living room toward the kitchen, calling for her.

He found her in a back bedroom still in bed. Switching on the light, he
saw instantly that she was seriously ill. Her brow was moist with sweat and her
face was pale. She clutched at the covers with white fists.

"Malina," he said. "What's the matter?" He felt her forehead and was
surprised at its coolness.

She moaned a little but did not answer.

When they were wheeling her outside in the hall on a stretcher, several
children gathered around the doorway. Michael recognized one of them as the
boy in the courtyard. The boy pulled on his sleeve.

    
 

"What's thematterwith theBird Lady?" he asked,hiseyesromd.
"She's very sick," Michael answered.

T”

 

3]

"Are you taking her to the hospital?" the boy asked again.

Michael nodded. They were already half way down the hall to the
elevators when the boy's next question came floating after them.

"Who will look after her birds?"

At the hospital Michael learned that Malina had had a gall bladder attack,
that she badly needed surgery but that she was so malnourished and her heart
so weak that the doctors weren't sure she could survive the operation. He sat at
her bedside all afternoon and watched night fall from her hospital window. He
watched cars traveling on the street below, stop at traffic lights, pass over the
bridge with the lighted railings. Over the river the sky was stained blue and
pink like a bruise so wide and vivid that it made one gasp to look on it.
Buildings, awnings, parking meters, fire hydrants all lost their definition to the
lengthening shadows. To pass the time he began composing a letter to Carla in
his head. Dear Carla, he thought, I am here with Malina at the hospital. She
is very sick.

The next day Malina called him from the hospital. At first he did not
know who it was through the strangled sobbing.

"Michael?" the voice said. "They said they will take them away. All of
them. "

"Malina?" he asked. Somehow he knew it wasn't Carla She would
never do that, ask for help. But he knew they were both like that, determined
intheirbeliefthatto show softnesswastoshow weakness. Whentheyfought,

 
 

 

 

there was always the clanging of armor.

"You must help me," Malina said. ”Please."

"Who will take what away?" he asked.

"My birds," she said. "The county people will take them. They say so
may make health problems. They will come and take them if I cannot find
place for them. Help me, Michael."

The depth of her desperation startled him. "Let me see what I can
arrange," he said. "I'm not sure I have room for them all, but I can take some
of them at least. Perhaps your neighbors could help."

"I have hens nesting. There will soon be babies. You take my hens.
Please," she said.

"Yes," he said. Hanging up the phone, he did not know what he was
going to do. He did not know who would take them, how they would move
them, how even to care for them. But looking out the window onto the
courtyard he saw the little boy and he had an idea.

"I don't suppose," he said, calling through the lifted window, "that you
have a wagon, do you?"

The boy stopped playing to listen. "A wagon? Yes, we have a wagon,
my sister and me."

"Could I borrow it, for a little while, to move some things?”
"What are you moving?" the boy asked, skipping over.
”Samibirds," he said. "Tb Birdhady’eh‘nh." .

 

  
  
  
   

 

 

33

"Can I help?" He flung his toys, a dump truck and a shovel, aside and
began jumping a little up and down.

Michael smiled. "Of course, you can."

The apartment was still dark when they arrived. Michael pulled the
curtains open to let in the light. The birds began to chirp and fly around. The
boy chased them all about the rooms until he exhausted himself and collapsed
on the floor, panting. In one closet they found old unused cages gathering dust.
In another they found a wire mesh aviary, discarded perches, feed cups opaque
with grime, sacks full of gravel and bird seed. They spent a long time washing
cups, cleaning perches, cutting paper for the trays, outfitting the cages. The
hardest part was catching the birds. They struggled to free themselves, their
hearts racing like little motors nearly out of control, and Michael holding them,
feeling their softness, their delicate bones, the wild beating thought they would
die of sheer terror and was afraid. When the birds had all been caught and
caged, he and the boy began moving them to his apartment. The nesting bird
cages were smaller and Michael thought a wagon ride might jostle the eggs and
crack them and so he carried them one by one to his apartment. They found a
few neighbors who were willing to take some birds temporarily, but most of
them went to Michael's. The cages made his apartment look cramped and
untidy and he was grateful that Carla was no longer there to see them. He did
not think she would have approved.

"So tell me," he said to Malina at the hospital later that evening, ”why do

   

you keep your birds if it's not for the money?"
She smiled at him. "You have not forgotten. I do not tell this story
very often but I tell it to you. You are my friend." She settled back against the
pillow, her hands at her sides.
"When Rudolph was sick, after we have one canary, I go to pet store to
buy another. So Ivan is not so lonely. I see many birds, many colors. They
jump, they hop, they chirp at me. They are beautiful. I cannot make up my
mind which to buy. But there is one who doesn't hop or chirp so much. He is I. I
shy perhaps, afraid. I watch him, he watches me. I buy and take him home but
he does nothing. No singing, not too much jumping. Like he is sad. Like he
misses something, I don't know what. I tell Rudolph he is sad. Rudolph says it
is nonsense, that the bird doesn't know how to sing. Simple like that. I do not
believe him I think the bird is sad.
"Many months go by. Peter, we name him Peter after the czar, does not
sing, does not hop too much. Then my sister in Vinnitsa is very sick. She
writes to me for as long as she can. I feel so bad I can not go to her. She tells
me she will come to me if she dies, somehow she will come so we can be
together. On the day she dies, Peter sings. Not a little but much song. He fills
the room all day with song. He hops and hops like he cannot be still. At firstl
think something is wrong. Then I think, no, this is Tonya. She is come back to
me. She keeps her word." Malina began weeping softly, wiping her tears
away with gnarled trembling fingers.

   

   

‘ihya‘m'ahesaidafierawhile, "mybirdsarelikeangels. Theyare
unwarranted"
Athornedratrnghthesatforalongontheedgeofhisbed,watchhrg

 
   
   
 

thnestinghens. 'l‘herewerefourofthemstackedincagesontopofhis

    

dresser. Allbutonewasasleep. Itwasapalepeachcoloranditjnmpedfrom

  
  
  
  
  
  
 
      

pi thetopperchtothebottomperchand back again, peering athimwith intense
in beadyeyescockingitsheadfromsidetosideasifpuzzledaszomeflring.

Like it already knew something about him and was trying to find out more, he
thought. He suddenly found himself tafldng to it, talking to all of them, to
welcome them, to reassure them. Later he thought of Carla, how he would

write to her and what she would say when he invited her to come see his babies.

WU.) Rut . 4: . .‘ . . . ‘ I. ‘ 4; '"'- 211.3: 53”-

       
 

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DANCING WITH ST. JOHN THE DIVINE

 

Through the peephole in the door, she could see two men standing there.
The fisheye lens made them seem enormously rotund around the middle with :3
small heads and fat fleshy hands. They wore navy jackets and pants and stood
rocking back on their heels as if they were important people, people not to be
toyed with. She could see that they were in a hurry the way their nostrils flared,
the way one drummed his fingers on his folded arms. Behind her the stereo

played Strauss and her mother waltzed, flowed from one room to the next,

  
  
  
  
    
 

humming, circling, swaying, the brwelets on her arms jingling. The candlelight
cast flickering shadows on the walls and incense smouldered on the mantle. It

wasnotquiteeightinthemorning. Shedidnotwanttoopenthedoor. 7
z a 3:. C ,‘Ae mag

"WhorsrtDeha?"hermotheraskedasshesweptby ; ‘
’"cphlpyou Lc'.‘ \gpupetnmanuraé vourzady ~

-"-"“w-— '

  
    

 

 

 

 

"Men," she answered. "Two men."

"Well, what are you standing there for? Open the door and let them come
in. " Mrs. Meyerson stopped dancing and sauntered over. She was wearing a
long sheer robe and white satin slippers. Delia could tell that she had nothing on
underneath.

"You're not dressed for company, mother," she said.

Her mother pushed past her and flung the door open. "Welcome to my
party," she said in her best breathless and bright voice. She had two kinds of
voices, an ordinary one that she used when she talked to regular people and a
special one she used on men. Most men loved it when she talked that way; these
men, Delia observed, did not seem impressed.

".Mrs Meyerson?" one of them asked, stepping forward. "We have an
order here from the Probate Court directing us to take you into our custody and
deliver you to Willowbrook Hospital where you are to be held for a seventy-two
hour observation period."

"Willowbrook? What's that?" Her mother seemed bewildered, confused,
her smile fading. She pushed her hair off her forehead with a long ivory hand
and turned back to her daughter.

"It's a hospital, ma'am. Over on Fulton Street."

"You're going to need to pack some things," the other man replied.

Delia's Aunt Caroline came out of the kitchen. "Constance. Here. Let

   

me help you. Let's go upstairs and get you ready."

 

38

Constance, not Peach, Delia noticed. Everybody, even her Daddy, had

called her Peach for as long as Delia could remember. Now she wasn't Peach

but someone different, frightening. Delia realized that she didn't know this

person, hadn't known her for quite some time. This woman, this Constance lit

candles, played Strauss, chain-smoked Camels, stayed out all night with phantom

lovers. This was not Peach. Peach was her Daddy's invention for the blond-
haired, red-lipped girl-woman he had met at the N.C.O. Club at Fort Bragg after I
the war, but her Daddy had left and Peach had vanished.

Upstairs in the bathroom, she took bottles and tubes and jars and threw
them all into her Daddy‘s shaving bag. It was one the things that he had not
taken with him when he left. He had taken all the important things like the car,
the check book, the Zampigi off the living room wall, the television, his tuxedo
and all of his books. What he didn't take were framed family photographs, his
wedding band, his old Army uniforms, his Purple Heart, his brush and comb set
off his dresser, all things he no longer had any use for. Like trash, Delia had

thought when she had found his ring on the floor under his bed. Use it and then

throw it away.

Her aunt stuck her head in the door. "Does your mother have any shoes
besides her high heels? Walking shoes maybe?"

Delia followed her aunt into her mother‘s room. Her mother was sitting

on the bed with cotton balls between her toes, painting her nails.

"Mother, you‘re not going out on a date for God sakes! People are

  

‘ .4:
__ . _

39

waiting!"

"Maybe I'll meet someone—you never know," she answered dreamily
without looking up.

Delia found some mocassins in the closet and gave them to her aunt.
"We've got only a few minutes, mother, otherwise you'll have to go in like you
are."

Aunt Caroline grabbed her mother by the shoulders. " It's time now,

Constance dear. Time to go."

In the end her mother were sweat pants, an old blouse with a fake flower
pinned at the throat, a scarf on her head, and her winter coat. She blew kisses
and waved from the back of the car.

"Just like she‘s going on vacation," her Aunt Caroline said with a note of
amazement in her voice.

Her mother called a few days later. "I need cigarettes, hon," she said right
off. "Can you bring me some?" No how-are-yous, what-are-you-doing-for-
food, how-are—you-sitting-for—money type questions. Perhaps her mother

figured that Caroline was doing it all or that she was old enough to look after
herself which she was. But still.

"I don't have a car, remember?"

”Oh, that's right. I keep forgetting. Dick the dick took it. Has your

Daddy called by the way?"

"No."

40

"Well, if he does, you tell him I'm gone, okay? Tell him I'm on vacation
and that I'm having the time of my life."
"Okay, but are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Having the time of your life?"
"Yeah, I even met someone. He thinks he's St. John the Divine."
"Who's St. John the Divine?"
"How the hell should I know? But he's sweet. He wears a rope for a belt
and goes barefoot and has visions of the apocalypse. He's really something."
"Don‘t you encourage her," her Aunt Caroline warned, wagging a finger
over dinner. "She's going to get worse before she gets better. She's going to
fall, hard. If she gets mixed up with someone like that, who knows what will
happen. Your grandmother Lilly lost her mind a couple of times, got it back,
thank God, but some people don't."
All this was new to Delia. Her mother had always been a little on the
flamboyant side, but she thought it was the southern influence of her girlhood in
Charleston, the land of magnolias and honeysuckle, the home, as her daddy said,
of the lazy tongue. (Her mother thought Yankees talked like they had their
mouths wired shut or worse.) Aunt Caroline thought that her sister-in-law's
illness was brought on by living for other people, especially for men which
southern women were so good at And when the men left by death or design, the

women fell apart because their strength was gone, because they had given it

41

away. Delia figured it didn't help to have the genes for it either, she knew that
much from biology, and that was the scary thing. Perhaps that was what was in
store for her, too, when she was middle-aged and married. Perhaps she'd get
thrown over for someone newer, younger, someone with a more practical
Yankee name like Barbara or Margaret and end up in a nut house like her
mother.

That evening after her aunt dropped her off, she was admitted to the
visiting area before her mother had arrived. It was a quiet place and people
were inclined to whisper because the tall cathedral windows made them feel like
they were in church, and because there were shadows in the corners and pools of
lamplight which shone like grace in the long dark room. People huddled near
the lamps and murmured. To Delia it seemed a matter of courtesy that no one
looked at anyone else, as if it were a point of dishonor to be there and so people
pretended you weren't. Delia looked around by looking at the mirrored
windows. The patients were easy to spot because they had no coats on like all the
visitors had and some wore robes over pajamas. They didn't look much
different from ordinary people, but there was no mistaking her mother's friend.

She knew who he was the moment she saw him. His feet were bare and he
wore a braided rope around his pants, but what was even more striking was his
beard which flowed past his waist down to a little point. Delia immediately
thought of the prophets of the Bible and Moses. He strolled past her and made

his way to the far side of the room where an old woman and a young girl were

 

 

42

waiting for him. The girl was not much older than herself and looked like she

had been crying. Her head was bowed and every now and again she wiped her

nose with the back of her hand. The old woman took his hand and pleaded with
him in a loud voice. It broke the quiet of the room and heads turned for a brief
furtive moment to look at her.

"Take your medicine, Johnny," she was imploring. "Take your medicine.
Don't be such a stubborn ox."

After a while Delia's mother came in. She paused in the doorway, her
eyes flitting around the room. She looked like a woman waiting to be noticed,
smiling expectantly. Delia waved at her and saw as she came closer that she had
lipstick on her front teeth.

"Did you bring my cigarettes?" she asked, her voice breathless, her eyes
like butterflies still flitting about.

Delia nodded. "I had to leave them at the front desk. You aren't allowed
to have them all at once."

"Communists," her mother muttered, pulling out the last one from her
pack. A nurse emerged from the shadows and lit it for her before disappearing
again.

"Your friend is here," Delia said by way of conversation and then
regretted it.

Her mother stood up, looking around. "Where?" she asked with a strange

agitation. "Where?"

43

"Way in the back. He's with his family. You should leave him alone."
Delia pulled on her arm and her mother sat down. "So tell me how you like it
here."

Her mother stared down at her hands. "The food's not bad. The beds are
a little hard, no sheets, just blankets. They think we'll strangle ourselves if given
the chance." She gave a little laugh. "We can't even have pantyhose."

"What do you do all day?"

"We go to therapy and exercise class. Sometimes we get to read or play
games. I've forgotten how to play checkers. They have checker tournaments
here on Fridays."

"Have you made any friends? Other than--"

Her mother stood up and looked around again. She sat down blushing a
little. "He saw me. He looked right at me." She was trembling with excitement
and for a moment Delia saw herself in her mother's schoolgirl emotions.

"What's with you and this guy, mother?" she asked after a while.

But her mother wasn't listening. She was staring up, her face shining and
radiant into the face of her new friend and he was extending his hand, pulling
her up, away from the circle of light, into the shadows, and moving her into the
gentle swells of a waltz the melody to which they heard, the two of them, only in
their heads. And Delia watching them suddenly remembered a time not long ago
when they had all danced like that together, her mother, her daddy and her, all

holding each other's waists and shoulders, jumping around in a spontaneous

44

celebration because her father had just received news of an important promotion
and they were all so happy. She felt a tearing inside her, a wrenching, but she
caught herself before she gave into it, reminding herself that it was okay because
she could still hold it back, still keep it down and away from her while she

watched her mother, a stranger, dance with St. John the Divine.

DREAMS

Yolanda Galloway had barely turned thirty-two when she discovered she
was pregnant. At first she thought she was sick with the flu, wracked as she
was most mornings by the dry heaves before she left for work. She had to
force herself to eat dry toast and then, like a slap, sharp and unexpected, it
occurred to her that she was pregnant A visit to the doctor confirmed this. He
had wanted to know when she had had her last period, and she had not been
able to tell him. When her mother died, she had stopped menstruating for
several months, and her aunt told her that grief did that to you, provoked
strange ailments and symptoms. When her own mother died, her aunt told

her, she developed a strange rash near her amrpits and crotch and her gums

45

46

bled. Her aunt was a nurse, and Yolanda, feeling she should know what she
was talking about, did not worry too much about it. She felt foolish telling her
former boyfriend, Frank, about it because it was something you expected of
girls high school age, not grown women, and also because she had broken up
with him a month or so before she suspected anything was wrong

Frank took the news very well and straight off wanted to marry her.
She refused for the same reason she broke off with him. He was becoming
serious, a prospect that frightened her because the future, now that her mother
was gone, stretched out in front of her like the gaping, glistening jaws of some
wild animal. She expected it to snap shut on her at any moment trapping her
inside. She tried to explain this to Frank, and how unsettled everything felt,
how even the ground she walked on felt funny, spongy, but he responded the
way he always did. You worry too much, he said. They stopped going out,
but that didn't keep him from stopping over when he was in town on weekends,
bringing a little something for the baby. Last week he brought a musical panda
bear that played a lullaby when wound. The week before he brought a blue
and white rattle. She left them in their boxes on top of the television because
she didn't know what else to do with them. Frank was already talking about a
nursery, about getting things ready, and she had thought, I am not ready, I am
not ready at all.

She worked at the grocery store in town as the assistant store manager,

doing the ordering, preparing the monthly reports for the home office,

47

stocking shelves, supervising the part-time baggers and cashiers, even working
at the checkouts when they were short on help. Her boss, a portly man with
graying hair and bifocals, had made it seem that it was an important promotion
and that she had measured up. She didn't know how to tell him the truth or
whether she risked getting fired when he found out. She sensed though that he
will be like her mother, reticent but clearly disappointed, silently reproachful
but gradually accepting.

She still lived on the old highway in the same house she grew up in and
that her mother recently died in. The house was a two-bedroom bungalow
with yellow siding, white shutters and a sugar maple in the front yard that
every autumn carpeted the scruffy front lawn in crimson. There was a small
creek out back which gurgled over a bank of rocks she and her brother put
there when they were children. In the evenings after work, she often came
outside to sit in the heavy aluminum chairs by the back door. The house
always shook when a semi hit the pothole in front doing fifty-five. Motorists,
when they broke down, always came to her house first to use the phone, a
practice she didn't mind so much when her mother was still alive. Now it
worried and frightened her.

That was in fact how she first met Frank when he came to the house and
banged on the door, never bothering to use the bell. She was out back hanging
out the wash when she heard someone yelling. Coming through the house to

the front door, she saw him staring at her with his face pressed against the

48

screen and his hands cupped around his eyes. Like a kid, she thought and was
prepared not to like him. He told her he was in trouble, that his truck had
broken down, and that he could lose his job if his company found out that he
had been drinking. Just a couple of beers, he said, to celebrate a friend's
birthday. Then he stopped talking and looked at her. He was clean shaven and
neatly dressed and she had liked his hands. They were bronzed like the rest of
him, strong and purposeful but his eyes were soft. She let him in to use the
phone and he called for a friend, a mechanic, to meet him. She made him a pot
of coffee while they waited. They talked about the weather, a cool summer
with too much rain, and she casually mentioned that she had lost her mother
because that fact like the weather was also immutable. He had said he was
sorry and she had felt that he meant it. Later he called to thank her and to
apologize for the trouble. They started going out, not the first time he asked
but several invitations later. She discovered he was not like she imagined
truckers to be, loud and profane and unmannerly, at least not with her. There
was a quietness about him that she liked very much, but at times she felt so
overwhelmed with feelings of loss and sadness that it left her speechless. Frank
was good company though and he helped distract her.

It was so different with her mother gone, so different not to have anyone
to talk to or make coffee for in the mornings or to take to the beautician on
Saturdays. Often she found herself coming home after work, sitting and

staring at the living room walls with no energy left to make supper. She didn’t

49

eat like she used to. When her mother was alive, they would take turns
cooking and trying new recipes. She enjoyed baking more, cookies, pies,
breads, while her mother was more of a chef, sculpting flowers out of radishes
and trying tarragon with her capon and broccoli. For several months after her
mother's death, going into the kitchen was likely to trigger a fit of weeping.
She would find her mother's favorite china cup setting on the shelf in the
cupboard or spot the egg timer on the stove and that would be enough to set

her off. But the tears stopped after awhile as if they all fell together to form
one large stone in the pit of her stomach. She remembered how it felt at the
funeral home, greeting all those people. They were all at some distance from
her as if she were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope and
their voices sounded muffled like so many words with no meaning. She didn't
know what to say to any of them. All she could do was try and smile a little

but the smile always got caught at the corners of her mouth and broke.

Before Frank she didn't have anyone she could talk to about it and even
to him her talking was limited. He didn't know her mother and it was always
such an effort to try and explain anything. Her one friend from high school,
Stacy, started to stop by once a week and Yolanda felt her sense of duty and
obligation, her pity in their heavy silences and Stacy's nervous chatter. She
knew Stacy felt sorry for her now that her mother was gone and she was alone.
Stacy married young and had children right away and Yolanda felt sorry for

her. They never had enough money, the children always had runny noses and

50

Stacy was always recovering from an illness she caught from one of her kids.
It was not the kind of life that Yolanda wanted for herself. They used to be
quite close in high school although Stacy used to tease her about how prudish
she was and how she never had any fun. Yolanda's mother used to say that fun
had a way of seeming like work after awhile. Stacy had allowed, after she had
been married for a couple of years, that Yolanda's mother was right after all.
Yolanda hoped to find some way to tell Stacy about the baby but the moments
were always awkward. She imagined that she would wait until after the baby
was born and then give Stacy the shock of her life by greeting her at the door
with a pink squalling bundle in her arms.

On Saturday morning she lay in bed listening to the noise from the
highway and staring at the ceiling with her arms folded behind her head. It
was her day off, and the day seemed to spread out before her ominous and
purposeless. She didn't know what she would do with all that time. At least
with work, she would get busy and not have to think. She knew the wash
needed to be done and the house needed straightening, but she felt steeped in
inertia, almost like she was weighted with stones. She thought that if she stayed
in bed long enough, she might get some energy. She didn’t sleep well all night.
She kept waking up after dreaming of her mother. One time she woke up
feeling that her mother was in the room with her as if she hadn't died and
everything was just like it used to be. The effect of the dream while it lasted

was comforting. It amazed her that even after that even after eight months, she

51

could still feel that-~what it felt like when her mother was still around. She
slept better now than she used to, even fitful sleeping was better, she knew,
than no sleep at all. It had been like that for her until recently.

The other day she was stocking House and Beauty Aids when it occurred
to her that her mother would never see, never even know that she had a
grandchild. The memory of it now brought with it a sting of shame and she
wondered how she would have ever told her mother about Frank and the baby.
She could see her mother's face, her smile flattening into a long thin line of
disapproval, her eyes narrowing in reproach, and her hands fluttering over her
lap as she heard the news. Yolanda knew that there would have been several
long days of silence between them, maybe even months while her mother
struggled to absorb the shock that her daughter had been a bad girl. But there
are never bad girls, she could hear herself telling her mother, only lonely ones
and anyway she was not a girl anymore. The matter of her pregnancy would
have become something not discussed between them, like the matter of her
father's disappearance many years ago when she was still a child, and the on the
day her baby was born, she would find out how her mother had been knitting
and sewing for it all along. She closed her eyes and thought of finding a nice
photograph of her mother to frame and put in the nursery.

A few moments later she heard someone drive into the front yard and
she got up to go to the window. It was Frank in his truck, hauling a load of

what looked like steel pipe. She watched him climb down from his cab and

52

then she hurried into her robe. He came to the door with a box which he held

out to her when she opened it.

"It's for the baby," he explained.

In the noisy tissue, she found a gleaming silver cup with an ornately
scrolled handle and a silver spoon tied with a blue ribbon. She fingered the
smooth highly polished surfaces, stunned at the obvious expense. She knew

that Frank spent a lot in child support and extras for his daughter, Becky,
which didn't leave much left over for himself. "Oh, Frank," she said quietly.

"You shouldn't have."

"You can have it engraved for free, at the store where I got it. This

here," he said, pointing to the spoon, "is called an educator for when the baby

starts learning to feed himself." He grinned at her and she could tell that he

was feeling pleased with himself.
She put them back in the box and then sat the box next to the panda on

the television set. "If you keep giving me things, I'm going to run out of

room. "
"I brought something for you today, too," Frank said after awhile.

"Frank--"
He cut her off. "It's nothing special and I didn't spend any money on it

if that's what you're drinking. Sharon didn't take it when she left. I don't use

it any more either. It would make me feel better if you had it."

He went out to his truck and returned with what looked like a stereo

53

receiver. "It's a CB. base station," he explained. "I've got the mast and then
antenna out in the truck because I thought we could put it up today."

"What do I need a base station for?" she asked.

"Actually, it's more for later than for now." He paused and shifted
uneasily from on foot to the other, looking away. "The other day I got
thinking about the time when the baby is due and you being all alone. If you
go into labor, you might not have anyone to help you so I thought you could
have the base station and when the time comes, you could reach me on it and I
could come to take you to the hospital."

"What about your California runs?" she asked him. Frank went to
California about every six weeks and stopped over in Reno on his way back.
Once she took some time off from work and went with him. They stayed with
her brother in Anaheim, went swimming in the ocean and stopped off in
Denver so that she could see the mountains.

"I’m not going to take any California runs near your due date. I want to
be here, with you, when the baby comes. "

She shook her head, amazed that Frank could be thinking that far ahead,
to the labor and the delivery. That all seemed so distant to her now, so unreal,
as if they were talking about someone else. Her mother had once told her that
childbirth was not for the timid or faint-hearted but would not elaborate
further. Stacy had told her that it was as bad as everyone said it was. Yolanda

tried not to think about it. "I don't have room for it," she said.

54

"It doesn't take up much room," Frank said, undaunted. "The mast and
antenna go up outside and we could probably find some place in your basement
for the base."

He spent all morning and most of the afternoon putting up the antenna,
figuring out exactly where to put it and then running the wires into the house.
After dressing she went outside and helped him raise the antenna by walking it
up while Frank, on the roof, pulled it forward with a rope. After he secured
it, he climbed down and stood beside her on the lawn, looking up at it.

"You know, Frank," she said to him after a time, "you're taking that
thing down after the baby's born. I won't have that ugly thing on my roof for
longer than that."

"Yes, ma',"am he said.

He showed her how to turn it off and on, how to use the squelch control,
how to change the channels, how to change the antenna's direction, and how to
tune voices in on single side band.

"This is channel nineteen he said, turning the channel selector. They
were met with a blast of static and a rush of voices. "It's the channel most
truckers use to find about road conditions, where the cops are with their radar,
and local information. If you want to talk for a long time, you go to another
channel."

They stood and listened to the chatter for a time before he turned it off.

"How will I know if you're out there or not?" she asked.

55

"You'll have to call me by my handle and if I hear you, I'll answer." He
held the microphone to his mouth and said, "Break one-nine for the Red Man.
Do you copy, Red? That's a break for the Red Man."

She smiled a little. "You're the Red Man?"

"Yeah."

"Red Man," she repeated as they went upstairs. She had forgotten Frank
was part Indian. He had told her early on that his mother's people were the
Oglala Sioux, that his father owned a drugstore, and that they had met at a
carnival. His mother had died of the white man's disease, cancer, and his
father, now retired, lived in a trailer park in Florida. His brother was up to no
good the last he knew, dealing a little and playing in a band.

In the kitchen she made him a bologna sandwich and heated up some
tomato soup. She made a sandwich for herself and they sat the table, eating in
silence.

"I have a QB. in my truck," he said after awhile, "so if you're ever
feeling lonely and want someone to talk to, try giving me a call. If I'm around,
I'll come over. Or else we can just talk on the radio."

"Thank you."

Frank wanted to check the antenna installation before he left and
Yolanda followed him out into the yard. In the mild twilight air, they stood
looking at each other while behind them out on the highway, cars rushed by

with their taillights on, leaving a long red necklace in their wake. She could

 

56

sense that he wanted to stay but was waiting for an invitation.

"I know what you're thinking, Frank," she said. "But maybe another
time."

Without replying, he got into his truck and headed down the driveway to
the road. It was some time before the traffic eased and he could pull out.
Seeing him there waiting, a black silhouette in the cab of the truck, and then the
sky above him smeared with the day's last color, she thought how small and
insignificant they all seemed, Frank, his truck, the other cars, the barn across
the road, and she was suddenly filled with an inexplicable sadness and longing.

The next morning she had a severe bout of the dry heaves and did not go
into work. She told her boss that she had the flu and crawled back to bed.
Later she found a box of stale crackers in the cupboard and ate them which
helped a little. Stacy stopped by and then came back with soup in the
afternoon. She drifted in and out of dreamy sleep, dreams which upon waking
popped like large bubbles the color of carnival glass. But she remembered the
one in which she dreamt of her baby. In it he was already a grown two year
old child with soft brown hair ringing a round face in curls. He had huge blue
eyes like two still, unbroken ponds and a round smile displaying the white
perfection of his first teeth. When she awoke, the dream made her pregnancy
seem more real and its outcome more pleasant. All this for a little boy, she
thought. For the first time, she felt good about the baby, good to be having

one in spite of all the complications it brought.

57

It was almost dark when she climbed out of bed and got dressed. She
hauled a basket of laundry to the basement and put in a load of wash. She
turned the base on, too, listening for the tenor of Frank's voice or the mention
of the Red Man. Channel nineteen bummed, whistled and chartered, but she
heard nothing of Frank. She left it on all evening; from anywhere in the house
she could hear its clamor. At bedtime she sat on the basement stairs, watching
the base and its red glowing L.E.D. displays. She was listening for Frank
again. When she thought she heard him, it was his chuckle she recognized first
and then his voice, muffled, saying something she couldn't make out. She
grabbed the microphone and blurted out, "Is that you, Frank?"

The base buzzed with laughter. "Say little lady, what's your message,
c'mon back."

She blushed with the realization that there must have been at least
several Franks within range out there. She put the microphone down,
uncertain about what to do next. When it came to her, it made her smile. She
turned the base off and went upstairs. She would call Frank all right, she
decided, she would ask him to come over, she would tell him she was cold, that

she had a craving for peanut butter on toast. On the telephone.

DROUGHT

The girl in the chair studied the way the light came in through the slatted
blinds and fell in stripes over the woman's arm and across the right side of her
face. Zebra, the girl thought, and might have giggled about it at another time
and place. Not today. She did not want to be there and there was nothing
funny about the cramped airless room with the marginal air conditioning and
the fake golden pathos on the windowsill. The woman on the other side of the
desk was writing something down on her notepad or doodling, the girl couldn't
tell which. This was her third visit. During the first two visits they put
puzzles together and the woman had her draw a picture of her family with
chalk and crayons. She drew stick figures and a house with a tree and a sun

which seemed to exasperate the woman although she didn't say so. Then the

58

59

woman had her write the names over the people so that she knew who they
were. The girl declined her invitation to talk about them and so they played at
puzzles and endured long gaping silences.

Today the girl didn't think that they would play at puzzles because the
woman had not brought them out from the desk drawer where she kept them
and because the woman had about her this air of intractability which she had
not had before. She just kept writing on her notepad, looking down with
deeply hooded eyes.

"So, Veronica," the woman began, "why don't you tell me about tl_ra_t
day, like what time you woke up and what you had for breakfast. "

"What day is that?" the girl asked.

The woman looked up at her sharply. "The day your mother became so
sick and went to the hospital. That day."

"You mean the day my mother tried to kill herself. I had toast for
breakfast like I always do. I probably got up around nine." Her father had
taught her that, a dislike for euphemisms, the importance of saying things as
you saw them. No one as far as she knew had yet put real words to what had
happened, not even her father.

"I hear some real hostility there. Are you angry with your mother
about what happened?" The eyes had retreated under the hoods again.

"No, not really, no."

"Seriously now, you're not angry with your mother? She's tried to do

herself in and you have to step in and pick up the slack and that doesn't make
you angry?"

The girl shifted in her chair and sat up straighter. "I am angry that my
father sent me here. He doesn't have time for me so he sends me to a
counselor. That makes me angry."

"Let's get back to breakfast that day. Your sisters, did you eat with
them and how were they behaving?"

"Yes, I think we ate together. They were fine. They are always fine."

It was hot that day, she remembered, searing. The whole summer was
like that, still was. She could tell it was going to be a hot day because
everything felt sticky even at nine in the morning. Mallory had pulled Erica's
braids, Erica had spit on Mallory, a breakfast bowl was knocked to the floor
and broke. Her mother had called from the bedroom for them to quiet down.

"What did you do after breakfast?"

"Nothing much. My sisters went down to the beach like always."

She had ordered them out of the house, grabbed Mallory by the arm and
dragged her off the porch, throwing her sand toys after her. Erica went
willingly and then cried and threatened to tell their mother. Veronica had
scoffed at that. Like she cares, she had said. They stared at each other
defiantly and the younger two finally gave up and went off to play. She had to
go back inside and clean up their mess.

"What was your mother doing all this time? Didn't she eat with you?"

61

"She slept a lot. She was still recovering from that baby that died. She
wasn't feeling very good."

Actually her mother didn't sleep at all as near as she could tell.
Sometimes when she brought her mother coffee in the morning, she would find
her mother just laying there, her eyes wide open, staring at the wall. She
didn't notice you either unless you spoke to her. She was off somewhere else,

somewhere not very happy.
"Oh," the woman said quietly, demurely, "I didn't realize that your
mother lost a chil
"Oh, yes. A baby boy. A boy for my father. It was before school got
out, this past spring."

She remembered they all missed a day of school for the funeral and it
had rained. Their new Easter shoes all sank in the mud at the cemetery and
their mother had noticed the butterflies, mourning cloaks she called them and

told them all in a high, lilting, unnatural voice that the butterflies were
grieving with them. Veronica had not forgotten their black wings with the

pale yellow borders or the way people looked at them, quickly, like they were

afraid of what they might see.

"So your mother is sleeping all day; does your father know about this?
Did you tell him?"
Her father had asked her a similar question. She could still hear his
booming voice in her ear when he called from the hospital. W

62

W ? She could have held the receiver two feet away and still
have heard him plainly. She had wanted to say that it was because her mother
hated his secretary, Miss Burgess, with the red rosebud mouth, and that he
knew that but kept her anyway and that all summer long her mother had
wanted to go home from the cottage, but that he wouldn't let her waste the
money they had paid for rent. She had wanted to remind him that he promised
them two weeks in July but July was over with. She wanted to tell him all these
things but instead she said then as now, "He was always so busy. There wasn't
any time."

"But what did your mother do when he was home? Don’t you think he
could have seen for himself?"

"She always managed to get up half an hour before he came home. See,
he had to drive all the way from Grand Rapids to the lake and sometimes the
traffic was bad and sometimes he worked over, when he had a hearing or
something to prepare for. He was never home right away."

She thought of the maternity blouses her mother wore over her father's
bermuda shorts and her mother's face without her makeup or her ready smiles,
how blanched it seemed and unformed like putty, and how she sat on the porch
after supper, staring out over the lake, not saying much. Sometimes she'd say,
What direction is Chicago, do you think? How about Milwaukee? Or she'd
say, Look at that sunset. But they were just so many words; you could tell she

didn't feel them. They didn't mean anything.

63

"It sounds like your father has an important job. What kind of work
does he do?"
"He's an attorney in patents and trademark law. He studies inventions."

At night he brought home a brief case full of blueprints, drawings, and
sometimes even mechanical devices. He would spread them out on the dining
room table and examine them. These were his clients' inventions for which
they wanted patents. He had told her once that most of what he saw was
uninspiring, that only occasionally did he see something that was truly
imaginative and useful. As the oldest and last to bed, she was sometimes
allowed to sit and watch him work. She watched the same long and agile
fingers that repaired their broken toys hover over gears and pulleys, massage
their way between covers, bulbs and screens. Later he said that what she had
thought was his reverence and respect for all working things was only his fear
of breaking something that did not belong to him He wrote notes to himself
on yellow legal pads in his own indecipherable shorthand, using pens with
chewed ends. When he puzzled over something, he paced back and forth and
fiddled with his glasses. For her entertainment he sometimes blew smoke
rings, small ones through the wavering loops of larger ones until a fit of
coughing would force him to stop. If she asked too many questions, he would
send her away so she learned to be quiet. She was happy then that her mother
sat out on the porch, away from them, so that she could have her father all to

herself. If only in this way, like someone outside the fence looking in.

"So what you're saying is that your father worked at home in the
evenings while your mother sat out on the porch?"

"Yes."

"And you don't think he noticed anything unusual about your mother's
condition?"

"I think my father had his own problems."

The woman looked up again. "Why don't you share a little what you
mean."

"He didn't like his boss. He was trying to find another job."

Hate was a better word for it. Around the house it was always that
W. She never knew what his first name was, but she did know
him to be the tall, gaunt, balding man she saw in her father's office the few
times she visited there. The man wore round spectacles and a bow tie and suits
that didn't seem to fit properly. She always thought of her father's office as a
dark and foreboding place except for Miss Burgess who gave them pieces of
gum out of her purse and let them talk over the intercoms and spin around in
the chairs until they were dizzy. There seemed to be too much wood paneling
for her liking, too many massive mahogany desks, too many little green lamps
that seemed to horde the light instead of dispersing it. Her father wanted the
partnership the man had promised him, but he was told there wasn't the money
for it or the client base. And then he became maLcheagbastard and her father

went behind his back, seeking positions with other firms. She remembered the

65

envelopes that came in the mail which her mother left for him on the kitchen
table. There had been no good news. Her father didn't find another job.

For a time the woman didn't speak. She turned toward the window and
the stripes caught her full across the face. She appeared not to notice or to
care. After a while she turned back to Veronica. "Let's go back to the day it
happened. Your father was at work. Your sisters went to the beach. Your
mother was sleeping. What were you doing?"

"Just cleaning up after breakfast, doing the dishes."

Actually she didn't start cleaning up right away. She went down to the
lake to check on her sisters. There was little wind that morning, no sound of
the breaking waves which she loved, only a gentle lapping as quiet as a clock.
That summer her father had spoken of the drought. She hadn't noticed it much
at the lake except the sky was a deeper blue than she ever remembered, cobalt
her mother would have said who always had fancy names for colors, and the
water level was down. She could tell by the stains on the dock pilings where
the water level used to be. There were a couple of sailboats out on the water
already. They made her think of kites. Her sisters were ignoring her, still
angry at her from breakfast. Behind her on a bluff hidden a little by pin oaks
rose the beach house they were renting, bleached white and shuttered against
the sun. She shoved her hands in her pockets, closed her eyes and tried not to
think about anything. After a while she went back inside.

"And after that, what then?"

She sat back in her chair trying to remember. What had she done after
she mopped up the cereal and milk off the floor? It was still sticky when she
walked on it so she did it over again. Then she put the mop and bucket away.

"I'm not sure. I think I read for a while."

"When did you find your mother?"

"That wasn't until later. After lunch."

She had gone in to check on her mother before then. Her mother was
laying on her side with her back to the door. She went around to the other side
of the bed. She saw her mother's face, her large unblinking eyes, her dark
curls crushed against the pillow. Mother, she said. Why don't you come down
to beach, mother. Please. No, her mother said, her voice quiet, muffled. Had
she already then? Please, mother. The sunshine will be good for you, the
fresh air. Her mother's words for her and her sisters. It was funny hearing
herself say them. No, just leave me alone. Leave me in peace. After that she
went to fix sandwiches for her sisters' lunch. They were bologna sandwiches
and they had chocolate milk from straws. They ate out on the porch. Erica
kept swinging her legs and bumping the railing. Mallory yelled at her to stop.
She noticed the lacy patterns of the leaves on the floor.

"Tell me about it," the woman said, gently, and put her pen down.

"I don't want to," she said after a long pause. "I've been trying so hard
not to think about it." She felt tears marshalling under her eyes, something

catching in her throat She looked up over the woman, at the wall behind her.

67

"Sometimes it's good just to get it off your chest."

"That's what my father says."

She could still see her mother's arm, the funny way she was laying on
the bed, the arm sticking out behind her back like it didn't belong to her. Her
mouth was open, her eyes closed, and at first glance she thought it was good
she was finally getting some sleep. Then she saw the bottle on the nightstand, .
coverless, empty. She shook her. Mother, she said. What have you done. Oh 3
mother. She remembered sitting down on the bed or maybe her legs collapsing
so she had to sit. Crazy thoughts went spinning through her head, all the
possibilities and implications of her mother's act played themselves out before
her like jewels she could pick and choose from. She sat for a long time. She
remembered that outside the chimes sounded and there in the room the shade
slapped against the windowsill.

"It's hard," the woman was saying, "to see someone like that and to
know they did it on purpose."

But that wasn't it, not really.

Outside after her session was over, she kept thinking about it. What was
it if it wasn't the shock of it like the woman had said? She was still thinking
about it when her father pulled up in the car. It startled her to see that her
mother was with him, that she was wearing lipstick, that he had his arm around
her shoulder. Her mother smiled and waved a little. Climbing into the back

seat, she suddenly remembered that on that day she had considered, briefly, not

going for help at all.

68

FATHER'S DAY

My father has always been a silent man, not given to much talk of any
kind. My sisters and I never knew what it was he was thinking when he came
home after working every day at Chrysler, but he would take a shot of whiskey
with him out onto the back porch and sit and smoke cigarettes and stare out
over the back fence past my mother's sunflowers and her rose trellis. We
would watch him quietly from the kitchen. He would rub his forehead and the
back of his neck with his free hand and sometimes mutter to himself and shake
his head violently from side to side. There were other times he just sat there
with his hands clasped together between his knees and his chin to his chest,

raising his head only long enough to drag from his cigarette. We knew he was

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7O

thinking something, we just didn't know what.

My mother called it brooding. She was cheerful and talkative in the
same way my father dour and silent. She told us that he had had a rough life
growing up during the Great Depression and serving in the Second World War
which included a brief stint as a Japanese P.O.W. in Burma. When we were
growing up, my father never talked about his childhood. It was considered a
subject that was off limits like sex and the occult. I remember one tinre when a
friend and I were playing with green plastic army men, staging a battle on my
bedroom carpeting and singing a kind of ditty that was popular among kids
then about army life, how the rolls that were so hard they bounced and gee,
Mom, I wanna go home. We had been singing for quite a while when my
father came in and ordered us to stop. We were forbidden to ever sing that
song again with my father‘s parting admonishment that we didn't know how
true it was.

As kids we were told that the grandfather-we-had-never-met, my
father's father, had died when my father was small, and so we were accustomed
to seeing only my mother's relatives at birthdays and holidays. I remember
asking my father a few times what his own father was like but my father
brushed my questions aside, saying he could hardly remember. All of this
changed, however, when my own son was born and my wife and I invited my
parents over for dinner one Sunday afternoon.

My father and I were sitting out on the patio with the binoculars,

7l

watching the birds. It was spring. We were enjoying one of those rare very
warm days before the first mosquito hatch, before the first feathery greenness
of the trees, before the full colorful explosion of spring blossoms. The
daffodils were out, some tulips and hyacinths, the crocuses were already spent.
My father had spotted a rose-breasted grosbeak and a Baltimore oriole. We
could hear cedar waxwings in the trees, but because they were backlit, we
couldn't see them well through the binoculars. Maybe it was the beer we were
drinking or the spell of the afternoon, but my father started to talk.

"I think my father would have enjoyed this," he said, peering through
the binoculars. "I bet he would have been very surprised at the number of
different birds there are."

"Oh?" I said, sitting up, instantly alert. "Why is that?"

"He was a city boy all his life. I bet he didn't know much about birds."

I didn't want to appear too eager. I wanted him to keep talking, but I
was afraid that if I asked a lot of questions, he would close up again. "A city
boy," I mused. "You're a city boy, too, aren't you, Dad?"

"Afraid so. Born in Chicago. Can't get much more city than that." He
laughed a little. "Y'know I've been thinking about my dad lately, maybe it's
because you're a new dad and all, but it's funny how certain memories stay
with you through the years." He was silent for a while and put the binoculars
down.

"What kind of memories?" I asked to prompt him.

72

"I remember playing with his pocket watch with the gold chain and
trying on the hat he wore. It had a red feather in the band. A couple of times
my mother and I met him at the trolley stop after work and we walked him
home. But he doesn't have a face for me anymore, just a big solid body."

"How old were you then?"

"Four, maybe five. I remember he bought me a tin of toy soldiers,
Prussians, he said they were Prussians, with sabers and pantaloons and I played
with them outside, listening to laundry flap overhead and I remember the smell
of starch in the air."

"What happened to your father? Did he die when you were little?"

"Y'know I'm not really sure. I remember they fought a lot, my mother
and dad. I could hear them outside through the open windows. He lost his job,
I remember that It was the depression then and jobs were scarce. I came
honre from school one day and my mother told me we were moving to my
grandmother's and I never saw him again."

"And your mother never told you why?"

He had put the binoculars on the table and was sitting with his elbows on
his knees. "She didn't really have to. I think my father had a drinking
problem. I remember I came home one day to find my father on his hands
and knees digging through the front hall closet. He was throwing out
umbrellas, boots, and hat boxes, looking for my mother's purse. I took him

into the kitchen and showed him where she was keeping it, down in the pots

73

and pans cupboard. I felt so happy that I could help him. I remember he
dumped it upside down on the floor and took all the money out of her billfold
and then he left. When my mother came home, she told me he had taken all
the money we had left to live on. Y'know I can still see him there on his
knees with all that stuff strewn behind him."
"What a thing to remember," I said.
"Good things are better, aren't they?" be said, turning to look at me.
"Later, after we had been living with my grandmother in Springfield for a

while, my mother told me he had died. And I believed her. But then there

was this funny incident at schoo

"What was that?"

"I must have been nine or ten when this man started hanging around the
schoolyard. At first I didn't pay him any attention but the other kids noticed
him and talked about him. He would just stand there on the other side of the
fence and look at us like he was studying us for some reason. Then I started
thinking he was staring at me but maybe I was just imagining it. He never said
anything, just stood there looking. I must have gone home and told my
mother about it because a few days later she and my grandmother called the

police and had the man taken away. He never came back again and I didn't

give it another thought."

"You don't think--" I began.
My father nodded vigorously. "I do. I do think that was my father and

74

y'know when I first thought that, I was a new dad like yourself. It wasn't
until I was a father that it finally occru'red to me. I mean, it makes sense
doesn't it? Why else would my mother and grandmother do that? Why else
would they care?"

"You're probably right," I admitted, exhaling slowly. I didn't know
what else to say. I could see him in my mind's eye, on the back porch,
rubbing the back of his neck, staring down at the floor.

"So now you know," he said.

"Yes," I said.

Behind us from the house my wife was calling us into dinner. My father
and I stood up and faced each other. There was the awkward moment when we
looked each other in the eye, when we were still thinking the same thoughts.
My father bent down to retrieve the binoculars and our glasses. I wanted to
say something like thank you, but the moment for that had already passed.

Instead I put my arm loosely around his shoulder and steered him indoors to

where people were waiting for us.

FINDING UNCLE HILLARY

Lying in bed in the dark, I could hear them arguing. I heard drawers
opening and closing as my mother put away clean clothes, her day's work, and
hangers jingle in the closet as my father took out his bathrobe. Their voices
were low but already sibilant and intense. Outside my open window crickets
chirped and a neighbor's fan hummed in the warm summer air. I wondered if I
should get up and go to the bathroom. Sometimes if they heard me, they would
stop talking, fearful of being overheard. But it was always too late. This way I
had learned things like my father hadn't asked for the partnership my mother
thought he deserved, that my father thought my mother was frigid (I wasn't sure

I knew what this meant), and that my parents, both agnostics, were considering

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76

joining some kind of church so that their children, me and my sister, Valerie,
could have some exposure to religious values. Tonight being more thirsty than
an ' g else, I climbed out of bed and padded down the hallway.

"But he's a drunk," I heard my father exclaim as I paused at their
bedroom door, "and he'll probably go to his grave a drunk, and I don't want to
have anything more to do with him"

"But he's your family," my mother answered, her voice full of
amazement. "And he's missing, and I can't believe you don't care."

"He's on a binge somewhere. He'll show up when he's run out of money
or when he's too sick to drink anymore. He's done it before. Trust me." My
father's voice was full of muted anger and exasperation.

"Your aunt's the one who's really worried, not me. She knows him better
than you do, and if she's worried, she probably has good reason to be." My
mother's voice softened a little.

"She's getting old and she worries about everything," my father replied
dismissively.
I heard the bedsprings creak as one of them climbed into bed.
"If something happens to him and he dies or is badly hurt, will you be
able to live with yourself, William? I know I couldn't."
I waited for my father's reply but there was none, just the sound of their
nightstand lamp being switched off and I continued on my way. On my way

back I stopped again outside their door and listened, but this time there was no

77

sound.

Back in bed I wondered which of my father's uncles was nrissing. He had
only two, Alfred and Hillary. Alfred was a judge and he and his wife,
Marguerite, lived in Grosse Pointe. Once a year, usually in the summer, we
visited them. They had Dalmations that jumped up and knocked you down and
old and blind Mrs. Thayer, Aunt Marguerite's mother, who sat motionless in
darkened rooms and scared us to death when we were playing hide and seek and
we happened upon her ghostly and still presence. Uncle Alfred had lost his
larynx to cancer and talked to us through a device he held to a hole in his throat.
His speech was mechanical, even, and when you talked with him, it was difficult
to make eye contact with him because you always wanted to talk to his throat.

I supposed it was Uncle Hillary who was missing. He was a bachelor and
no one had much contact with him because he moved around a lot, Chicago, St.
Louis, Denver. He said he went where the jobs were, that an architect made
more money in the boom towns than the more sedate places like Grand Rapids
and Detroit. Once in a great while Uncle Hillary would call for my father on the
telephone. One time when I answered he would not tell me who he was. Our
mother had taught us to say, May I ask who is calling? The gruff voice on the
other end said, WM . IeJLhLmit'sasurmise, It was a
Saturday morning and my parents were still asleep. My father would not get up
when I knocked at their door and told him about the call. Finally, my mother

did and told Uncle Hillary that my father was sick. That's how I remembered

78

Uncle Hillary, a gruff voice on the other end of the telephone.

The next morning my mother woke me and told me that I was going with
my father. Her pursed lips and the little frown between her stern unblinking
eyes told me her mood was poor. But I asked anyway, "Why me?"

I did not want to go. I did not know what to say to him or what to ask
him about I dreaded the long hours in the car, the unrenritting boredom, the
pretense that we were, because we were together, close. My father was a patent
attorney during the day and worked every night at the dining room table where
he spread out the blueprints he brought home from the office. He studied them
all very carefully, made notes on yellow legal pads, chewed the ends off of his
pens, paced and smoked his pipe. He had inventions of his own he worked on, a
toilet seat that automatically returned to the down position (it was too big and
clumsy to work in a confined space), and a hands-free telephone headset you
could wear without having to be close to your phone. He eventually did obtain a
patent for it and then sold it to a company for a small profit. My mother, being
kind, liked to say he was cerebral, but it was more than that. Children terrified
him. Fatherhood was some kind of affliction like lupus or polio, not to be
shaken off, something to be endured.

"Where are we going?" I asked my father. We were heading west on the
expressway through downtown, past the basilica of St. Adalbert's, its golden
dome glinting in the sun, past the fish ladder in the Grand River, past the twenty
foot tall red letters that spelled Jesus Saves on the hill in Belknapp Park.

79

"We're going to find Uncle Hillary who seems to be lost again," my father
said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Lost is a poor choice of words," my father rurninated. "A better bet is
that Uncle Hillary is probably off hiding somewhere while his sister worries
herself sick. "

"You mean Aunt Henriette," I said. Henriette was Hillary's twin. Twice a
year she called to bring my parents up-to-date on the Illinois Bensons, who had
married, who had been born, who was moving out of state. Even my mother
admitted that this courtesy was more than my father deserved since he didn't
seem to care about his family. My mother's family, her sister, and a handful of
close first cousins were all a very different kind of people. They all had married
and started their families at the proper time. The men worked in factories, at
good jobs with the auto companies in Detroit and the women held part-time jobs
at Hudson's and Kresge's or didn't work at all. My mother's family we knew
and visited at all the right occasions during the year. They were nice pe0ple,
somewhat bland in their tastes and habits, but they smiled for photographs and
sent us money for our birthdays. What you saw was all there was to see. My
mother called my father's family eccentrics. My father was not as charitable.
He called them lunatics.

My mother once told me that Uncle Hillary had been like a father to my

father, but then the war came and my father was shipped out and Hillary moved

80

on. My father wrote to his uncle every week, but rarely received a reply.
Hillary wasn't there when my father came home to the family celebration on
Harper Avenue, the young G1. in his dress greens, wearing his purple heart,
feeling like thousands of other G.l.s around the world at that time as though he
had done something important, historic, and wanting everyone to share in the
moment. Hearts are often crushed, my mother told me, on lesser points.

"So where are we going?" I asked my father again.

"First to Aunt Henriette's, I suppose, and then we'll see what she tells us,"
my father said, pulling on his pipe and settling back against the seat. I pulled out
a book and began to read. The ride was going to be long and silent.

Upon our arrival, Aunt Henriette pinched my father's cheeks and called
him Billy. It was hard for me to imagine my father as an infant or a little boy,
but wandering through Aunt Henriette's house while they talked, I saw
photographs of him in bloomers, pulling a toy horse, with fat hands and wide
bright eyes. In another, he sat on the knee of a man whose round white face
seemed moon-like and strange, whose hands gripped my father at the waist as if
he should fall. In another, both of them were dressed in chaps and fringed shirts
with cowboy hats and lassos, wearing the forced, unnatural smiles demanded of
them by the studio photographer.

From Aunt Henriette's house, we went to the rooming house which had
been Uncle Hillary's last known address before his disappearance. My father
talked to a boarder there while I waited in the car. When he got back, my father

81

who had been cheerful enough at Aunt Henriette's seemed dispirited, sad.

"Is anything wrong?" I asked when he did not start the car right away.

"No," he said. "I was just thinking."

"About Uncle Hillary?" I asked again. I thought of the round moon-like
face of the man in the pictures.

"Yes," my father admitted.

The Herkimer Hotel where we stopped and parked the car was a dark and
brooding building, sitting among old warehouses and the repair depot for the
Grand Trunk Railroad. Most of the buildings were black with soot and some
still wore the faded white lettering of old advertisements. The tall windows had
become opaque with dust and there was something melancholy in the silence, in
the emptiness of the streets. The hotel was identified only by an orange neon
sign in the window. In spite of the beat, my father rolled up all the windows and
locked up the car after we got out.

The air conditioning in the lobby was the only luxury. Old men sat
around in yellowed undershirts and baggy pants. They watched television on a
small black and white set perched above them on a shelf out of reach. At a
rickety table, several men were playing cards. At the desk staffed by a small
tough looking man with wavy black hair and a tooth pick in his month, my
father inquired about Hillary Nelson. The clerk rummaged through a stack of
index cards and reported that a "Larry Nelson" occupied room 402. My father
explained that "Larry" hadn't been seen by his family for a time and might he be

82

kind enough to take us to his room so that we could see if he was all right. The
clerk looked at my father, then at me and then back at my father. Without a
word he took a key from a peg and came out from behind the counter.

We struggled up four flights of stairs in stifling heat. The building's only
elevator had quit working several days before and had not yet been repaired. At
the door to Uncle Hillary's room, the man rapped and called his name. Then he
put his ear to the door and listened. Shrugging, he put the key in the lock and
opened it.

The room was empty. The bed was unmade and strewn with clothes.
Magazines lay on the floor next to a couple of empty liquor bottles. My father
quickly moved to kick the magazines under the bed. But he wasn't fast enough--l
caught the toothy smiles and pointed breasts of the cover girls before they
disappeared. On the bureau top was an old photograph in a gilt frame of my
uncle's family. My father took it down and we looked at it together. They were
all there, Alfred, Hillary and Henriette, and Julia, my grandmother who died
before I was born, flanked on either by their mother and father. Julia had
beautiful long hair, braided and ribboned, brought over her shoulder, I was sure,
for the camera. Her mother had a rather plump face with a grim stitch for a
mouth. Her father was a gaunt man with chiselled features and piercing deep set
eyes like my father's. He were small glasses in round frames. Hillary and
Henriette wore sailor outfits and looked fragile, angelic. No one was smiling.

Before we left, the clerk told us that "Larry" like to frequent the Green Parrot

83

Tavern around the comer.

At that hour of the afternoon the Green Parrot was nearly empty. My
father and I sat awkwardly at the bar on high cushioned stools and sipped our
drinks. My father drank club soda with a twist of lime which is what he usually
drank at parties and special dinners when he didn't want anyone to know he
wasn't drinking. He was a teetotaler but for some reason preferred that no one
knew this. I had a ginger ale and tried to keep from staring. I had never been
inside a bar before. A mirror ran the length of the bar and in front of it in
several tiers sat rows and rows of liquor bottles. They all had pointed caps, to
make them easier to pour my father said, and there were wine glasses on racks
hanging upside down like bats. I liked how the chrome spigots dropped an
instant steady stream that foamed up the sides of the glasses and how the bar
tender could know when to stop even when he wasn't looking. Beer was served
in frosted mugs that they stored beneath the bar in a small refrigerator. In the
subdued light, tips of cigarettes glowed like red heads.

After a while I became aware that my father was looking at someone
behind him I turned and saw a knot of people standing and sitting around a
table near the door. We had not seen them when we came in. One of them was
an older man with a round face, wearing a fedora at a jaunty angle on his head.
He sat beside a woman wearing bright red lipstick and lots of jingly bracelets on
her slender arms. The man was telling jokes and gesturing wildly and the

woman beside him laughed along with the others. The waitress twice brought

84

drinks to their table and the man threw crumpled up dollar bills in her direction
and kept on talking. It did not immediately occur to me that this was Uncle
Hillary, at last, in the flesh, the gruff voice on the other end of the telephone, the
angelic boy in the family photograph I had just seen, Aunt Henriette's twin.

My father got up and headed for the door. I followed him, stopping near
the table where Uncle Hillary was sitting. I reached out and pulled at my
father's arm, thinking that we came all this way, thinking that we should say
something.

My father was already part way out the door. "No," he said to me. "Not
here, not now."

Uncle Hillary looked up at us. He glanced at my father for a long moment
and then at me. "Hey," he called after my father. "Hey, you look familiar.

Don't I know you from some place?"

I was nodding dumbly and staring when my father yanked me roughly out
into the intense white light of the afternoon.

"I am sorry," I said in the car.

"Yes," he said, not looking at me. "Me, too."

Back at Aunt Henriette's after dinner, the three of us sat out on the patio,
enjoying the cooler air. It was twilight and the fireflies were out, flickering in
the dark brush, down the s10pe of the yard, in between the trees. There in the
distance I saw something else too, hanging before me like a vision: the

roundness of Uncle Hillary's face touched just a little with recognition, and I

85

heard over and over again his voice in my mind, Hey, don't I know you ? I
thought suddenly that my father had been right all along, that he was a good

man, a decent man like my mother said, for having come for Uncle Hillary at all.

HALF ORPHANS

The summer her daddy married Georgina, Louise Fischer accompanied
the newlyweds on their honeymoon, at least as far as Keenan Gap, West Virginia,
in the Allegheny Mountains. That is where Georgina's mother lived and where
Louise would be staying while her father and stepmother traveled around the
South, taking in the sights. Louise did not like this arrangement because she
didn't like Mrs. Wilkering whom she had met at the reception. Her father didn't
seem to care. He had other things on his mind and besides, it was only going to
be for a week or so. Louise knew it wouldn't do to argue the point, and was
even a little intrigued at the prospect of traveling out of state. She had been to

Ohio once when her grandfather had died, but for the most part, Michigan was

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87

the only state she knew. If it hadn't been for Mrs. Wilkering, she would have
been eager to go. First impressions, her mother had told her, are usually as
right as rain.

Louise remembered that her first impression of Mrs. Wilkering at the
reception had been one of suspicion. It wasn't a tangible thing at all, nothing that
Louise could definitely point to or identify. Maybe it was the furtive way Mrs.
Wilkering had of looking at you, that sly sideways glance with the half smile that
seemed to take in even more than was there. Or maybe it was because she was so
gigantic, a huge woman who seemed determined to make herself appear even
larger than she was, who enjoyed the sensation that her enormous size produced.
Louise was sitting alone at the head table when this very fat woman in a flowered
kimono ambled over to her and sat down.

"I'm Georgina's mama," she said by way of introduction. "Georgina's my
baby." They sat watching Georgina and her father dancing. "Yes, sir, she was
the runt of the litter," the woman said after a while and she cackled a little to let
Louise know that that was supposed to be funny.

Georgina was plump with dimples and curls. To Louise she looked like a
smaller version of Mrs. Wilkering. She had once heard that if you wanted to
know what you would look like in your later years, you had only to look at your
mother. Louise's own mother had been pretty and petite, but Louise felt tall and
gawky. She fervently hoped that what she had heard was true. "You'd never

know it now," Louise offered, meaning it as a compliment.

88

"You wouldn't, would you now?" the woman mused. "She's as big as a
barn and she ain't even pregnant." She glanced sideways at Louise. "You a city
girl?"

Louise nodded.

"A city girl," the woman repeated. "Too bad. Are there any more of
you?" the woman asked. She crossed her huge legs and swung her foot to the
music. Louise observed that she wasn't wearing any stockings.

"No," Louise replied. "Just me."

"That's good, that's good," the woman said, looking off again.

"What's good about it?" Louise asked.

"You know where I'm from?" the woman asked again.

"No," said Louise.

"I'm from coal country, you know, West Virginia." The woman smiled
down at Louise with her peculiar half smile.

"Is that why you talk funny?" Louise asked. She had never met anyone
from the South before.

"Me? You think I talk funny? Yankees talk funny," she said and she
rearranged her arms across her bulging midriff.

"Is that the place where they have sin eaters?" Louise asked after a while.
"The people that eat the sins of the dead people so that they can go to heaven? I
read about that once in the National Geographic."

"Yeah, there are still some of them kind around. Not like when I was

89

young. There were more then. My daddy had one at his funer

"What about your mother? Did she have one, too?"

"My mama ran off when I was young and left my daddy with five kids to
raise by hisself."

"Oh," said Louise. Half an orphan, Louse thought, like me.

When Georgina and James came over to them at the end of the evening,
Louise had fallen asleep but not before Mrs. Wilkering had filled her head with
tales of sin eaters and divining rods and kudzu that grew so fast it covered cars.
Louise also knew that Mrs. Wilkering didn't like children. She said they thought
they were clever but they didn't know diddly squat. She said that a lot, diddly

squat

Louise was deposited rather unceremoniously on Mrs. Wilkering's porch
while her father went back to the car for her luggage. There had been a brief
heavy shower during the last half hour of their trip, but it had stopped, and now
everything was fresh and the colors deep, true. The leaves still dripping were an
emerald green, the branches of the trees an inky black, the stones along the road
pewter-colored and polished, the gravel driveway the warm tan of shoe leather.
Louise could not remember seeing anything so vivid back home in Mount
Pleasant where colors there were always muted and blurred like watercolors
bleeding. Here the sharpness, the definition of everything was like an assault and
made her blink.

90

Georgina had gone into the house after her mother. They were not
planning on staying, only long enough to drop off Louise since her father wanted
to make Richmond by nightfall. Louise knew that that was only an excuse. How
can you like a woman who weighs more than you do, her father had said after
meeting her for the first time. Her father brushed the top of her head with his
hand, told her to be good, and then hurried back to the car. When Georgina
didn't come out right away, he honked the horn. Louise and Mrs. Wilkering
watched the car drive away until it disappeared around the curve in the road.

"Come on in and meet the family," Mrs. Wilkering said finally.

Mrs. Wilkering's family consisted of three stray cats. She liked to pick
them up and wear them over her shoulders like furs, and they hung there relaxed
and content while she walked from room to room, showing Louise around. The
house smelled like cats lived there, and Louise who didn't like cats stiffened
when Mrs. Wilkering dropped an angora into her arms. "I don't trust anyone
who don't like cats," Mrs. Wilkering said as if it were a test of some kind, as if
she already knew. "They're my babies."

The cat dug its claws into Louise's arm before leaping down. Louise
resisted the impulse to cry out. Instead she covered the scratches with her hand
as if they marked her somehow as undesirable.

That afternoon one of Mrs. Wilkering's grandsons, Tyler Biggs, was
dropped off while his daddy ran some errands. He was tall with pale freckled
skin and long dark hair that needed combing. He had Mrs. Wilkering's sly smile,

91

but on him it was almost appealing. He took Louise out to sit on the porch.

"If you're gonna stay here awhile, you should know some things," he said
in a low confidential tone. "That woman's bad. Real bad. Watch out for her. "

"What do you mean, bad?" Louise asked.

"She likes the belt and will give it to you good. Once she beat me so bad I
couldn't sit down for days. She's Satan's sister, I swear it."

"You must've done something to deserve it," Louise observed. "Pe0ple
don't do things like that for no reason."

"Hell," Tyler said, ignoring her. "That's nothing. My own daddy uses a
board. A belt's got more give to it," he paused. "I haven't forgotten it neither.
She thinks I have, but she's wrong. I'll get even with that fat old hag. It's just a
matter of time."

"I'm sure you will," Louise said, not doubting him for a moment.

"It's easier now that she's slowing down, though. I can outrun her and she
knows it. I don't have to worry too much if I'm careful."

Louise also learned that Tyler was twelve although to her he seemed much
older, that he could already drive, a tractor that is, no different from a real car,
he assured her, and that he was the best French kisser in his whole school, it was
true, all the girls said so. He even offered to show her, but Louise declined,
saying he didn't have to prove anything to her.

Over dinner, a can of chicken soup and a couple of thick slices of buttered

bread, Mrs. Wilkering asked Louise, "So what did that peckerhead, Tyler, fill

92

your ears with today?"

"What's a peckerhead?" Louise asked. She had never heard that before.

"A babe," Mrs. Wilkering laughed. "Pure as snow. I thought girls like
you only lived in convents." She wiped her eyes. "You'll find out soon enough."

Louise went back to her soup, not sure she liked being laughed at "He
was telling me about his school and how the girls all like him and how he can
drive a tractor."

Mrs. Wilkering's face darkened. "That boy's headed for trouble. He's
gonna be rotting in jail by the time he's seventeen, I'll bet money on it. Or else
dead by some girl's daddy because he was messing around. I wouldn't get too
chummy with him if I were you."

"Don't worry," Louise said, wondering who to believe.

Two days later after Mrs. Wilkering complained of being cold, Tyler
came over to check on the furnace. Louise went with him to the cellar. Louise
could tell he was angry about something, and didn't say anything. The furnace
sat in the middle of the cellar and there was hardly enough room for anything
else. They crouched under the heating ducts to get to the door. Tyler pulled the
heavy iron door open and stared inside. He paused.

"What?" Louise asked. "What do you see?"

"I don't like the looks of this," he said darkly. "You better go get the old
lady."

"Is it bad?" Louise asked.

93

"Can't tell," he said. "She should look for herself. Go get her, will you?"

Louise, unsuspecting, brought Mrs. Wilkering downstairs.

"What's the matter with that boy," she puffed. "Such a simple job and he
can't get it right. Just like his daddy."

"I ain't a genius," Tyler said. He stepped aside to let Mrs. Wilkering

through.

"You can say that again."

Tyler reached over and pulled open the heavy door. Louise stood by the
steps, struggling to see in the near darkness. "It won't blow up or anything, will
it?" she asked.

Mrs. Wilkering hooted. "Half-wits," she said. "A bunch of half-wits."
"Check it out," Tyler urged.
"What am I supposed to be looking for, boy," she said, looking in. "I
don't see nothing. It ain't even running."
"You can't see nothing like that," the boy said contemptuously. "You
gotta look in, I mean, put your whole head in, to see the trouble."
"What trouble?" she asked, but she put her head in, like Tyler said.
At that moment Tyler slammed the heavy door closed with all his
strength. The door thudded against Mrs. Wilkering's head and shoulders and she
groaned before falling down on one knee. Louise stood speechless. Tyler shot
past her on his way up the steps. "Come on," he cried, grabbing her arm. "If

she catches you, you'll get the belt for sure."

94

"But I didn't do anything," she protested.

Still, she fled with up the stairs with him and out of the house, past some
leaning gray buildings with no doors, out into a field of tall grass and briars.
Louise stopped at an old apple tree to catch her breath. They could still see the
house from there.

"You have to go back, Tyler," she said. "You might have killed her. You
have to see if she's all right."
"The hell I do. She's tough as flint. I didn't do nothing that she can't
fix."

"You don't know that," Louise answered. "She might have a broken bone

or something or else be bleeding to death. You have to go back, Tyler."

"The hell I do. You go back if you're so worried about her."

At that moment Mrs. Wilkering came around the side of the house,
carrying a shotgun. She pointed it skyward and fired. The sound cracked all
around them. Louise flinched. Tyler took off running.

"See what I mean?" Tyler shouted with something like triumph in his
voice. He did not look back.
Louise saw the old woman moving slowly through the field, yelling at
them But Louise could see that she was hurt, hobbling a little, no doubt in pain.
"Tyler!" she called, but he was already gone. Mrs. Wilkering stopped her
advance, the rifle tilted forward, and she half sat, half fell down. Louise started,

wondering what to do. The next instant she was running, running with

95

everything within her, back to where Mrs. Wilkering now lay on the ground.
At the hospital in Beckley, Louise stood in the hallway outside Mrs.
Wilkering's room, waiting for her father and Georgina to come out. Mrs.
Wilkering had had a heart attack and her condition was precarious. All of
Georgina's family had been notified and were coming to see her. Louise would
not, could not, go in, as Georgina had urged, to pay her last respects.
"She's not going to die," Louise told them all, even the doctors. But

shame was stronger than her conviction, even though, in the end, she turned out

to be right.

THE ONLY ONE

"Isn't this peculiar, Candace?" my mother said to me one day. We were
sorting through boxes of my father's papers. My father had died the previous
autumn and with my mother's assistance, I was finally going through his
personal effects. At the time of my father's death, my mother and father had
been divorced for twenty years, and he and I were not close. But there the two
of us sat one afternoon, sifting through layers of accumulated years of living,
my father's cancelled checks, his weather diaries, blue air letters from
Blackwell's and the Bodleian detailing business transactions my father had with
them for books and research, lists of words to check in the 0. E. 0., old marking

records for my father's students, old pipes still pungent with the smell of his

96

97

cherry-flavored tobacco, a handful of letters from colleagues and students, and
picture postcards of Oxford and the British Museum left over from his summer
vacations in England. I wanted to burn it all, but my mother quietly insisted
that we at least brew what we were burning. You never know, she had said,
what you might find. I think she was curious to see how a man she once brew
so intimately had spent the last years of his life, even a little eager to find some
trace, some proof that he still loved her or at least still cared for her, as she did
him, despite their years of separation. She was hoping to find an old
photograph of the two of them or perhaps an old love letter. But there was
nothing like that. Those things had been disposed of long ago when my father
was at his most punitive, his most bitter, just after their divorce had become
final. He had told me after he did it, that he had burned them all in the barrel in
the backyard, watched how the white ashes rose and drifted away on the wind,
and his voice was smug with satisfaction. Later I understood that he had hoped I
would tell her-~he would use me to hurt her because, after their divorce, he no
longer had the power himself. I had never told her about that or any of the
other things I knew that my father had done and my mother didn't He had done
enough hurtful, malicious things that she brew about without my having to add
anymore. I hadn't considered, however, when I agreed to do this, that there
might be one or two artifacts to be found which, like undetonatcd bombs, might
explode in our faces. My mother had just found one.

"What did you find?" I asked. Already I felt a sense of dread as I moved

98

across the room to the chair where my mother was sitting.

"What do you make of that?" she said, holding the paper aloft

It was an old bill from the Pederson Mortuary in Chicago for funeral
services rendered in the amount of nine hundred dollars. It was yellowed and
brittle and the creases were splitting. There was no name given, and my father
had marked it paid, dated it and noted a check number.

"I don't know," I said blankly, staring at the paper in my hand.

"We were still married then," my mother observed from her chair.

"That's right," I said.

My mother's brow furrowed in thought. "Who could have died then? I
don't recall that we ever paid for anyone's funeral expenses. Your father's
parents were long dead by then, my father, too . . . my mother died long after
the divorce."

"Yes," I said, thinking.

My mind tipped backward, slowly at first, and then tumbled and rushed
and I was standing breathless, back home in my parents' house on Norwood
Avenue and my father was puffing heavily on his pipe and telling my mother
that he had to go home. We had just finished eating dinner and were still sitting
at the table, Mallory and me, and my mother and father. It was July. Erica was
away at camp. My father, a teacher, was enjoying his summer in "exquisite

leisure" as he liked to tell everyone which included a little research for the

99

Oxford English Dictionary and a breeding canaries, nearly thirty of them,
which he kept in a huge aviary in the attic. It was a task he couldn't manage
alone and so all of us, except my mother who refused, were conscripted to help
him. My parents hadn't been getting along for quite some time, and I think my
father enjoyed getting away from it all, loosing himself in a hobby. For her
part, my mother enjoyed having him gone, his brooding silences and unspoken
criticisms which hung heavily in the air like curtains whenever they were
together.

My mother looked at him, bewildered. "Home?" she said.

"Joliet," my father said. "Henriette's not well. Roberta called today and
she sounded anxious."

"What's the matter with Henriette?" my mother asked. Henriette was one
of my father's aunts, and she and her sister, Roberta, were the only ones left of
my father's family. My mother mistook the urgency in my father's voice for
concern and her face softened.

"A stroke, I think. Roberta isn't quite certain. She didn't get to talk with
the doctor. Henriette's still in the hospital. I thought I'd go down tomorrow
and pay her a visit." My father tapped his pipe on the edge of the ashtray.

"Of course," my mother said. "But I have to work tomorrow. I
wouldn't be able to come with you."

"It would probably be better if I went by myself," my father said with a

reassurance, it seemed to me, too easily given.

100

I sensed immediately that it was all a sham, Henriette's illness, my
father's concern for her, the need for a trip to Joliet. For some reason, it didn't
have the ring of truth. My father simply wasn't close to his family. We rarely
ever saw them and he hadn't much talked about his childhood there except to
make it clear that it had been unhappy and that he preferred not to be reminded
of it. Perhaps most importantly, my father was not a loving or caring man.
Once, after dinner when I began having sharp unbearable pains in my stomach,
my mother, fearing appendicitis, summoned the doctor. I lay in bed writhing a
little and moaning while my father paced back and forth in the hallway, rubbing
his hands together. Seeing his agitation, I was struck by his concern for me.
Then the doctor came and diagnosed my problem as severe indigestion and gas,
and my father confessed to my mother in front of me how relieved he was, not
that his daughter wasn't seriously ill, but that this wasn't going to cost as much
money as he feared it might. That's what we represented to him, money spent,
unceasing financial obligations, money which might be spent on more useful,
even more important, things. Another time he and my mother purchased a desk
for me. It was one a few substantial gifts I had ever received from them that
was brand new, that I wouldn't have to share with my sisters, and I was giddy
with happiness. It was made of a lustrous honey-colored maple, its surface so
polished I could see my reflection in it After it had been delivered, my father
came into my room and reached his arms out to me as if to hug me. Instead he

grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, telling rrre in a voice full of

 

101

controlled fury, that I had better take good care of it or face dire consequences.
Later my mother told me that my father was a child of the depression, that he
had grown up browing extreme want, even, sometimes, hunger but I was not
comforted. I kept seeing his pinched and contorted face, feeling his hot angry
breath on my cheeks. So I wondered about this trip. There was something he
wasn't telling us. I was a little surprised when my father asked me, before I

went to sleep that night, to come with him to Joliet.

We did not go to the hospital when we got into Joliet near noon the next
day. Instead we pulled into the parking lot of a funeral home on a busy
thoroughfare. I thought that Aunt Henriette had died and that my father had
forgotten to tell me. This wasn't unusual since my father was very often non
communicative, especially when he was involved in his research and had hit a
snag somewhere. There were sirens sounding and fire trucks thundered by as
we stepped out of the car. My father appeared not to notice. He walked a little
stooped around to the front door, and I thought for the first time, my father
looks old. I almost felt sorry for him, but it seemed a useless emotion because it
couldn't be acted upon, given my father's need for distance and reserve. Instead
I looked down at his shoes which were glossy from fresh polish, and we went
inside.

My father did not ask for Aunt Henriette. Instead, a somber man with

jowls and bifocals perched at the very end of his nose lead us into a viewing

102

room with an open casket.

"Will there be any other visitors?" the man asked.

My father shook his head. "I don't think so." His voice was barely
audible.

"When you are finished, please see me so that we can finalize the
arrangements." With that, the man left the room.

In the casket was an old wizened man, with wisps of long white hair
trailing over his shoulders, so thin that his skin was a mere drapery over sharp
angular bones. His frail wrists, his fingers were without jewelry, and he wore a
dark colored paper suit with the creases from the packaging still obvious. The
paper crinkled noisily under my father's touch. Then his shoulders began to
heave, but he swallowed and touched the casket to steady himself.

"Who is this?" I whispered.

"This, Candace," my father said loudly or so it seemed in the quiet room,
"is your grandfather."

"How can that be?" I demanded. As children we had been told that both
of our grandfathers had died before we were born. My father's father was a
particular mystery since we had no photographs of him. A photograph of my
mother's father as a young man graced our mantle for as long as I could
remember.

He ignored my question. "He used to throw feed bags over his shoulders

like they were pillows, and his hair was thick, and now look at him Gone," my

 

103

father said. "Stolen."

I went over to look out the window. Outside people were walking by
carrying grocery bags and brief cases, waiting at curbs for the traffic lights, and
I thought life never stops, not even for death, and the idea terrified and
comforted me at the same time. Behind me my father was now wheezing a little
between silent sobs; it sounded almost like constrained laughter of the sort you
hear in school when everyone is supposed to be working in silence. I wanted to
go over to him, to touch him, but then I remembered all the missed
opportunities that had passed between us, how a hug could turn violent, and I
was afraid. I waited until he was done and then we left the room. Before
leaving, my father paid extra for a new suit, a navy blue one and a bow tie, and
then we got in the car and drove home.

"Mother doesn't know about this, does she?" I said after we had been
driving for a while.

"No," he admitted, not looking at me.

I thought my mother does not really know this man; she thinks she does,
but she doesn't. What else don 't we know about, I wondered. I felt as if I were
standing over the edge of a high building and was about to fall off.

After a while, an enormous silence enveloped us. I sat there listening to
the low hum of the engine, the wind at the vent windows. I tried not to think
about anything. In that silence grew the tacit assumption that I would not say

anything to my mother.

 

104

Several weeks later, I was helping my father clean the bird cages. The
sun was shining, falling in sharply angled patterns on the floor through the low
dormer windows, and the attic smelled warm and musty. The canaries,
especially the males were lively and cheerful, hopping from perch to perch,
trilling a little and sometimes breaking into full glorious song. I was blowing
the chaff out of the seed cups as my father had taught me so as not to waste any
of the seed that hadn't yet been eaten. My father was filling the water dishes
with a pitcher of fresh water that he had brought up from the kitchen. The
atmosphere seemed charged with expectation. My father, I noticed, was
breathing sharply through his nostrils, a prelude, I had come to recognize, to
speech.

"My father," he began without preliminaries, "was an alcoholic. He used
to come home so drunk that he'd have to crawl up the stairs on his hands and
brees. I saw him like that many times and when it first happened, it frightened
me terribly. I thought he had hurt himself so badly that he couldn't stand up.
He used to beat my mother, slap her, throw her down on the floor-~the drinking
made him mean. Eventually my mother couldn't stand it anymore and she
threw him out He tried to dry out, several times, but he could never stay that
way for very long. And after awhile they got divorced. Divorce was almost
unheard of in those days, not like now. You had to really need or want it
because it carried a stigma. People thought less of you if your parents were

divorced. My mother told me to tell people my father had died. I did what she

 

105

told me."

"So you never told mother about your father?" I asked.

My father would not look at me. He was measuring and trimming clean
paper for the cages, using a large knife, and his movements were precise and
careful. "Your mother," he said, "has never known privations of any kind. She
would not have married me if she brew the truth about my family. Her parents
wouldn't have allowed it." He paused. "I was not good enough. . . It was not
a confession, however , but an accusation dripping with bitterness and
recrirninations.

"What about your father?" I asked. "Did you ever see him again?"

He nodded. "After their divorce, my mother wouldn't let him see me so
he used to come to the schoolyard or the park, bringing little presents. I would
tell my mother how I earned them at school. One day he told me he was
moving away to find work. After that I never saw or heard from him again."

"How did they find you?"

"Through Aunt Henriette. They called her."

"Did you miss him?"

"Oh, I missed him," my father said. "I always believed that when I grew
up, I'd find him again. I found him all right," and then he snorted a little and
choked on a sob rising in his throat.

Without thinking I put out my hand, but he squared his shoulders and

threw his head back.

 

 

106

"Let's hurry up," he said after a moment "I've got grading to do."
We finished orn' work, put our things away and went downstairs. That

was the last my father ever said to me on the subject of his childhood.

During my senior year in high school, my father told my mother he
wanted a divorce and moved out of the house. He pretended to be having an
affair in order to force a separation because my mother still clung tenaciously to
the idea of saving their marriage. He even had the letters to prove it, letters he
manufactured at his typewriter at school and then forged with his make- believe
lover's signatures. I brew this because I found one such letter still in his
typewriter one day after school when he had stepped away to use the restroom.
He did not brow that I knew because I was standing looking out the windows
when he returned. The letters though had the intended effect and my mother at
last decided that divorce was the only solution to their difficulties.

Both of them had begun confiding in me about their roles in the divorce,
especially my father who perhaps felt that in sharing these confidences, he was
also exonerating himself. He liked to say how my mother had fallen in love
with him largely because of his socks (he wore argyles; then as now, he liked to
wear fashionable clothes and have people notice and admire him) and how my
mother never wanted to have children. But she loved us in a clearly
demonstrative way and so I was not shocked or bothered by what he told me. I

am certain that my father felt close to me during this time although he had no

 

107

right to. I said little when he talked me, I just listened being the dutiful
daughter I was. I knew by experience that he did not really care what I felt so I
did not tell him.

I was home the day he left and helped him pack. He had his suitcase
open on the bed and we were stuffing shirts, socks, belts, even the cufflinks my
mother had given him for their twentieth wedding anniversary, into it He was
in a cheerful mood, and I thought it odd. Sadness, even wistfulness would have
been more appropriate. At one point, he paused and put his arm around my
shoulder.

"You know, Candace," he began. "You're the only one who brows all
sides in this mess, the only one, " and he said this pleasurably, as if this were an
honor, a distinction I could take pride in and that he had helped make possible.

"Lucky me," I said.

"What was that?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said.

Now looking at my mother's face twenty years later, on this golden

autumn afternoon, I considered for a brief moment whether or not to tell her

what I knew. Instead I took the paper and put it back.

"Well," I said brightly, "I guess we'll never know about that one, will

we?"

And my mother, smiling a little, was already reaching for another box.

 

 

PICTURING DUGAN'S FACE

Mother Mary Celeste was ill, so ill, in fact, that when Mother Elizabeth
went in to check on her before Matins and didn't hear her breathing, she rushed
to her bedside and put her ear to Mother Mary Celeste's dry feverish lips. For a
moment Mother Elizabeth wildly thought that Mother Mary Celeste had died
during the night, alone, with the benefit of extreme unction, without the solace
of her confessor. But Mother Mary Celeste was breathing quietly, regularly.
Relieved, she straightened up and adjusted her habit pulled on in haste in the cold
predawn dampness of an October morning. At the windows she drew the

curtains open. Dawn was still some time away. She could see nothing but her

108

 

 

109

own reflection in the glass, the long chocolate brown robe, the rope belt knotted
at the waist, the chocolate brown headdress with its black band across the
forehead all worn by the Brown Franciscans. She wondered about that person
in the glass. It did not look like her, being rather too round and soft She
always considered herself rather tall and flat like a piece of lumber, but perhaps
the shadows did that and the rippled panes of glass. Behind her Mother Mary
Celeste stirred and moaned a little.

"What is it, sister?" Mother Elizabeth asked, going to her side. She bent
to fluff her pillow and smooth the long hair trailing in gray ringlets off her
forehead which was hot and moist to the touch.

"I can't go home," Mother Mary Celeste wailed, rolling her head from
side to side. "Mother won't let me. I want to, but she won't let me."

At that moment, Mother Valencia stepped inside the door and asked,
"How is she?"

Mother Elizabeth shook her head. "Should we admit her? Was this the
right thing to do? She's delirious. I'd feel better if Monsignor were called, I
really would."

Mother Valencia gave Mother Elizabeth a look. "I‘ll call the doctor.
Perhaps Monsignor will come by later after Mass. Pray, Mother Elizabeth,
pray," she said as she retreated. "It is not up to us."

Later she returned with a bowl of cool water and a cloth. She wet the

cloth and laid it on Mother Mary Celeste's forehead. Mother Elizabeth offered

110

the sick woman water.

Mother Mary Celeste pushed the glass away. "Mother doesn't like me,"
she said, her voice petulant. "She never liked me, not from the first."

"Oh, I'm sure that isn't true," Mother Elizabeth soothed.

"It is, it is. I was never good enough. She always liked you much better."

Mother Elizabeth started forward in her chair. Mother Valencia patted
her arm and whispered, "She had a sister named Elizabeth. Don't worry. It's
not the Mother General she's referring to."

Soon Mother Mary Celeste settled back against the pillows and began to
snore. Although her body was resting, her mind raced, spinning in and out of
thoughts and ideas that had only the thinnest of gossamer connections. When
scrutinized the ideas receded and then vanished altogether until she couldn't
remember why she was thinking them In the back of everything, however, was
the gray farmhouse, always the gray farmhouse. Her mother's domicile, that's
what her father mockingly called it when he was angry with his wife, and
feeling bitter. It had come to be theirs from her people, not through hard work
as he had preferred and the sweat of one's brow, but through privilege and ease.
The barns were his though, the foundations built of stone he had dragged from
the fields, the timbers from trees he had felled, the hardware purchased from
the lumber store in town with money earned on the sale of his milk. You are
poisoning yoru' children's minds, her mother had often hissed at him. He had

often countered that the truth is never poison except to liars and thieves. Then

111

there followed after these outbursts, for there were many, her mother's imperial
silences, and the children becanre moutlrpieces for the parents. Tell your mother
that I am going to town this afternoon. Tell your father that the baby has a
doctor's appointment today and I will need the car. Tell your mother that I am
going to market. Mary Celeste hated to bring her father's messages to her
mother because they were snatched away from her with disdain and she was
dismissed as if she had done something wrong. Eventually her father would say,
gently and with a pat on the head, Tell your mother I will not abide it any
longer. If she has something to say to me, she can say it herself. All this in the
kitchen by the stove with the tea kettle singing and the baby wailing for there
was always a baby or else in the barns with the stink of manure and the
grunting of the cows. It is not your fault that your mother is not happy, her
father would say, but she did not believe that.

There must be something she could do to please her mother, some special
errand, some special deed, a cultivation of a different personality. She would
smile more, she would trap retorts, mockery and arguments under her tongue,
silence was golden after all, she would ask her mother for nothing but give
everything. Not my will but your will be done, she prayed. Bless me, Father,
for I have sinned. Still her mother withheld her love. It was like a star, this
love, glittering, unattainable in the night sky when the air was frigid and
cheerless. Father in heaven, be thou not far from me.

Her siblings, Elizabeth, Megan, Bridget, Patrick, and Dugan, were all

112

showered, it seemed to her, with kisses on the tops of their golden heads and
caresses all over their chubby bodies. Each one grew like a protuberance from
her mother's hip and were removed only for bedtime. Her father gave her rides
in the wheelbarrow and carried her on his shoulders but he was bony and
muscular. It was not the same. What did I do, she asked her father one day,
that she hates me so? Her father was silent for a long time. Your mother
doesn't hate you. She--and then he paused and couldn't finish. You know, he
told her after awhile in that private voice of his that told her she was about to
hear something special, I had different names picked out for each of you. I
wanted to call you Hyacinth because you came first. Into the spring of our lives.
Because you were my little flower. That year for her birthday, he planted
hyacinths for her in the back of the house so that she could see them on her way
to and from the barns. He called them his mary celestes. After their first
flowering her mother tried to dig them up. They attracted the wasps and the
wasps threatened her babies. Her father would not help her defend them. The
next spring they bloomed stouter, more prolific than ever and her mother left
them alone.

On the day of her First Communion, when she wore white dotted swiss
and a veil with seed pearls and daisy appliques and white gloves and the priest
held before her the host that rose with well manicured fingers from the
glittering golden chalice, she gave herself over to the fragile beauty of the
moment and closed her eyes. Dust motes danced in the beams of sunlight which

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seemed driven through the high arched windows of St. Catherine's and she
imagined that angels, not people, sang for her from the choir loft in low
feathered voices. She felt it on that day, that she would always want, would
always search for, that same sense of purity, serenity, godliness she then felt.
She would become, as the Dominicans who taught her bad themselves beconre, a
bride of Christ She would wear a gold band on her finger and forsake forever
the secular world. She would become Sister Maristella, the star of Mary, wear
a habit to cover the allure of her hair and seek out the hard comfort of her
rosary beads when she was troubled or alone. God at least would find her
willing and eager to serve and would cause his blessings to shine upon her.

If she felt these things as an eight year old child, she knew them with
absolute certainty the summer of her eleventh birthday. That summer they
rented a cottage on a lake with a dock and a boat tethered to it and loons. Her
father did not come, could not get away. Farmers never have time for
vacations, he had said, but he did not seem disappointed. Little Mary Celeste
had become tall and angular. Her mother studied her with pursed lips and a
frown. That haircut, she would say, makes you look like a boy. Stand up
straight Don't slouch. What it is about your eyes? You look Oriental. Father,
she would ask, in the evenings during milking, do I look Oriental? He would
say, Oriental ladies are the most beautiful ladies in the world.

At the lake the sun burned the sand so hot it was painful to walk upon.

She sat posted on a blanket to watch the children while her mother guarded

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against heat stroke and stayed inside. The children clustered at the water's edge
and dug channels for their boats. The sun and the sound of water lapping at the
boat's hull made her sleepy. She laid down on the blanket. The children's
voices rose and fell, tinkling like chimes. From far away she heard the sound of
a motorboat and then a dog barking and then she fell asleep. She awoke to
someone calling her name, Megan, she thought, calling her name over and over.
She looked up, prepared to be angry. The children were in the water. We can 't
find Dugan. We can 't find Dugan. She heard terror in their voices and alarm.
She struggled to her feet, but before she could reach them, she saw Elizabeth,
arms flailing, bring something up out of the water. A doll, she thought absurdly
and then realized with horror that it was Dugan, dripping, lifeless, blue. Oh
God, she cried, and she took Dugan out of her sister's arms and ran with him to
the cottage, to her mother, feeling his coldness, his near perfect stillness, against
her own heaving body. But there was nothing her mother or the doctor, called
so hurriedly from town, could do. Little Dugan had slipped away without
saying good-bye, without telling anyone where he was going. Her mother
howled with grief. Her father stared unblinking off into the distance and did not
hear people talk to him. On the day of the funeral it rained, cold and steady, all
day. Tears from heaven, Father Brogger said and blew his nose and wiped his
eyes like the rest of them At the cemetery, she noticed the dump trucks filled
with dirt, waiting at the curb. This is the end, she thought, this is truly the end

of Dugan, of a whole lifetime. It will never be the same. Even without her

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mother's terrible silence, full as it was with reproach and accusation, she felt the
enormous burden of her guilt She did not shrink from it. Take up your cross
and follow me, she remembered and she took it up.

For a long time afterward, her one comfort was her ability to picture
Dugan's face. She would lay in bed, in the dark after a particularly trying day,
and in her mind's eye, she saw his golden curls, the velvet of his eye lashes, his
little mouth like a rosebud and his chubby checks that dimpled at the comers of
his smile. Sometimes she could even hear his giggles, more like a series of high
pitched squeaks, and hear his voice, the lazy almost complacent way he had of
talking as if he were practicing being charming. In thinking of him the crushing
weight she carried would be lifted off momentarily and she could breathe more
freely. But only for a moment. M_ayv_v_i. Mam, she would hear him say, and
her eyes would fill. She could not remember exactly when it was that this ability
was lost to her, but she discovered it shortly after her father died. (Yes, it was a
heart attack that took him, Father Brogger said to everyone at the funeral home,
but heart break, too.) In recalling her father's face, she discovered that
Dugan's was fading from her memory. The set of his eyes, his smile, the slant
of his nose, all vague and indistinct. It was painful to consider her disloyalty and
she was ashamed, but it could not be helped. Time is the guilty one, my dear,
the Mother General said to her. Not you. But she was not comforted.

Now her fever brought forth many things long since buried, like treasure,

in time and distance: the gray fedora her father wore to Mass on Sunday with

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the red feather in the band, Dugan's wagon made out of barn board, the clanking
of empty milk pails, the table in the kitchen with the chipped formica, her
mother standing on the porch in her navy blue Sunday dress, holding Dugan, and
Dugan, reaching out to her, smiling, holding something in his hand he wanted
her to see. He was laughing and his eyes shining and his hair blown back a little
in the breeze. And she was thinking as she reached for him that he wasn't little
anymore, and then suddenly he was waving and retreating into whiteness and
someone clasped her hand and she was back in her room at the convent. She

recognized Mother Elizabeth when she opened her eyes.

STONEHENGE

Mara had foreseen an affair for him, encouraged it even. By then her
illness was well advanced and she had no delusions about what was in store for
her. She lay each day propped up in the corner of the couch with a book to read
and her ice water nearby and sometimes she read but mostly she dozed or lay
back looking up at the ceiling, thinking about things. Company came on Sundays
when she felt up to visitors. They were mostly business associates of theirs, she
had been in interior design before her diagnosis of cancer, and he owned the
jewelry store in town, but she most enjoyed the wives and husbands of their
bridge group who could look at her without looking away. Cancer is not pretty.

she told people. It is not an illness for the faint of heart. Edward is fortunate

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that I am not a coward. She wore turbans or scarves, nothing when it was just
the two of them alone, kaftans in bright bold prints that billowed out around her
and disguised her thinness, rings that spun on her fingers. Edward was not as
brave as his wife. He always left the room when Mara started talking about her
illness.

"You need someone, Edward," she had said one day after their guests had
gone. "I can see it in your eyes."

Startled, he turned to look at her. "What's the matter with my eyes?"

"They're narrow, hungry looking like starving people's. A haunted
loo ." Her voice softened, faltered.

"Good God," he muttered, turning away again.

"We must find you a lady, Edward," she said and when he turned sharply
back to her in protest, she continued. "A real lady, Edward, not the husk of
one." After that she, mercifully, slept.

Later that evening she took it up again. "I was serious, Edward, about
finding you someone. We should start with our bridge group. Perhaps one of
the ladies there will do."

"Why do you want to give me away?" He did not know what else to say.
It was an odd notion that she should want to find him someone, that she should
think him needy like a child.

"A sick woman," she said, drawing herself up, "should have no guilt and I

feel guilt for you, Edward, much guilt."

 

 

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"What have you done to feel guilty about?" His heart began to race and he
sat down to calm himself, trying to prepare for her confession, a revelation
which might come crashing down on him like a boulder from a mountain.

She touched his hand. "It's more what I haven't done," she said. "I
haven't been wifely. I haven't looked out for you. It's been a terrible burden,
this illness, and you've had to care for me and there's been no one to care for
you." She had a way of telling the truth, peeling away the accumulation of the
passing years, revealing the essence of the thing. She had told him early on that
death did that, took you by the hand and showed you all the important things in
life which were not many; only love.

"You worry too much, my dear," he said. "I'm all right. I can take care
of myself."

"Yes, you can, but you deserve better, you need more than I can give
you.

Still, he didn't tell her.

Grace had been a neighbor of theirs who had moved away some years
before. She and her husband had moved to a nearby town where they had had a
house built on a river. Before her illness Mara had gone there for lunch and
pronounced the house and the view breathtaking but it was not a friendship that
survived much beyond that. Edward was smprised to see her when she came
into the store. She had a watch that needed repair and a stone, an emerald, that

had fallen from an old ring. She laid them both down on the counter and looked

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up at Edward expectantly.

She smelled faintly of perfume and the cold. She wore her blonde hair
shorter now in a wave off her forehead, very becomingly, Edward thought, and
she still had that studious air about her that had caught Edward's attention when
he first met her. Even Mara who had been brassy in her youth was never that.
She gave the impression that she watched and weighed everything she said before
she spoke it, that she was measured and controlled. There was something very
satisfying, even comforting about that although he didn't quite know why.

"Did you have any ideas for your emerald?" Edward asked, holding it up
to the light. It was a large flawless stone.

"Not really," she said. "I'm afraid it'll get lost if I don't have something
done with it. I've lost it once already and I'm afraid if I lose it one more time,
I'll not find it again."

Edward looked in her eyes. Ever since Mara had told him about his own,
he had become interested in other people's, in what they said, in what they didn't
say. Most people's eyes, he had discovered, were not the eyes of happy people.
Grace's eyes he wasn't sure about They seemed a little distant and cool, perhaps
a little sad. "We could fashion another ring for you," he said.

"No. Please," she said. "Not that. A pendant, a brooch maybe, but not a
ring." She looked away as she spoke.

"It's just that emeralds are shown to their best advantage in a ring setting

where the light shines directly down on them All of the facets then are brought

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into full play. A pendant or a brooch won't catch the light as well." He always
enjoyed working with the large stones, the way the light flickered across them
like fire caught in ice. There was something hypnotic about them, too, as if you
could drown in the deepness and purity of their color. When he was younger he
liked to imagine the crowns of the medieval kings and queens, the glittering
miters of the Renaissance popes, the bejeweled necks of marquessas, the fat
jeweled fingers of the cardinals. The long slow afternoons in the store induced
such reverie.

"I could never wear a ring like that again," Grace was saying.

Edward noticed that she now wore a plain gold wedding band where
before she had worn a unique pear-shaped diamond. Mara often accused him of
noticing jewelry first before he noticed the people wearing them. This was
probably true but not always.

Grace saw him looking at her hands. "I'm still married," she said, "but I
don't know for how much longer. My husband and I are separat

"I'm sorry to hear that," Edward said and then he added, "Mara's very
sick."

"Nothing very serious, I hope," Grace said quietly. She looked up at him
for affirmation.

"She has cancer," he said. "Very bad cancer."

"Oh no," she said like a wail. She stood for a while considering. "How

awful for you," she finished.

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When she came for her emerald, now a tortoise with gold feet, they went
to lunch together. Afterward Grace invited him to come home with her. They
had coffee in her bright airy kitchen and Edward could see swans down on the
river and the sun like shimmering lace on the water. Leafless brown November
trees scalloped the far hills. There was something very sad in all of it despite the
sun and the natural beauty, despite Grace's kindness. For the first time he felt
himself a solitary person as he would be without Mara. It was an odd feeling,
unsteady, like he should be gripping things for support. His coffee cup felt very
real, very substantial, in his hands.

"I don't have the courage," Grace confessed later when they were laying
in bed together. "I thought I did, but I don't."

"It's all right," Edward reassured her. "I know what you mean." Every
time he had closed his eyes, he saw Mara in her turban, Mara, ghostly and
cadaverous, floating in the air above him.

"How do other people do this?" Grace asked. "I thought it was supposed
to be so easy."

"I don't know," Edward answered. "I wonder how many people aren't
really comfortable about it, but do it anyway."

"Yes," Grace agreed. "Probably more people than you think."

Still, he enjoyed holding her, enjoyed feeling her warmth and the soft
curves of her body. It had been so long since he and Mara had slept together

much less made love. After the cancer had spread to her bones, it hurt her to be

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touched. That's when they moved her to the family room, to a hospital bed with
railings so she couldn't fall out, where he wouldn't hurt her by rolling over. "Is
this the beginning of the end?" Mara had starkly asked him looking up at him,
her eyes searching his face, her mouth working hard to hold back the tears. He
had taken her hands and kissed them Another time she told him as her hand
lingered on his chest and sought underneath his shirt at his collar, "The hardest
part, Edward, is saying good-bye to your body. That's the hardest part." In
Grace's company it wasn't easy to forget all the memories of Mara that hung on
him like comfortable old clothes. Even Mara could not have accounted for this.
It was easier when you were young and were just building your histories. When
you were older and your histories were already acquired, they got in the way,
were firm and implacable.

"Chaste," Grace pronounced one day, giggling a little. "That's what we
are. Chaste."

His visits with Grace were punctuated by visits to the doctor with Mara.
They took x-rays to monitor her loss of bone mass. They showed him pictures
of her honeycombed pelvis. They wanted more chemo for her, proposed
experimental new treatments. He did not dare to say no. Instead Mara said no.
Enough, she declared flatly, shrunken and child-like in her hospital gown.
There was nothing child-like in her eyes, however. They were direct and sharp
as flint Her doctors didn't argue. She did say yes to morphine.

Edward followed her doctors out into the hallway. "This is it, isn't it?" he

 

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asked quietly.

Both of them nodded.

"How long?" he asked.

"Two weeks, two months. For as long as she wants to fight," one of them
said. "It is out of our hands now."

"Look at me, Edward," Mara said when he returned to the examining
room She was looking at her arms and legs, turning them slowly from side to
side, inspecting them. "I have become my grandmother." And her voice was
full of wonder.

Edward began taking mornings off at the store to be with Mara. He was
haunted by the fear that she would die alone, that he would return one day to
find her still and cold. That was the sort of death he feared for himself, to die
alone, to have no one there when life frnally pulled away, to have been
abandoned by friends and family. That was the sort of death his father had had.
His father had been divorced and drinking alone for many years when
pneumonia had sent him to the hospital. He had died alone there, with tears in
his eyes, a nurse had told him. Only later did Edward realize that that
information would have been better left unsaid, but it was too late. He had
already been marked by it.

Mara did not talk much anymore, that is, she did not talk with him so
much as to him. She said, I'm cold, Edward. Read to me, Edward. Water,

Edward. He put her skeletal arms through the sleeves of her pajamas, massaged

 

 

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her skeletal feet. He brushed her thin white hair and carried her to the picture
window so that she could see the cardinals, bright red spots like blood on the
snowy landscape. He cradled her in his arms when he bathed her, sudsing the
loose, leathery skin with gentle strokes of his hands. Stonehenge, she said,
watching him.

Grace made a steaming pot of soup and brought it over. She smiled at
him, touching his cheek. He seized her hands.

"I am not ready," he said. "I thought I was, but I'm not."

Grace studied him carefully. "She is ready, Edward."

"Yes," he acknowledged.

"May I see her?" Grace asked after awhile.

"Grace——" Mara cooed weakly when Edward brought her in.

Mara died in the morning. It had snowed the night before with the wind
whipping and howling at the windows. Edward could not sleep. He felt
strangely alert in the darkness, holding Mara's hand, listening to her breathing.
"Stay with me, Edward," she had said before she drifted off to sleep. In the
middle of the night, she had awoken and asked for water, but when he brought it
to her, she was no longer thirsty. She lay back against the pillows and stared at
him with bright, feverish eyes.

"You know, Edward, you have a beautiful nose. Funny I never noticed
that before. I wonder why."

"You should be sleeping," he admonished her.

 

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"It's hard to sleep when you're busy," she said.

"Busy?" he said. "With what?"

"Making plans," she said, smiling a little.

"What kind of plans?"

"Just . . . plans," she said.

Sunlight was streaming in through the windows when he felt her hand slip
out from under his. He roused himself with a start. She wasn't breathing when
be bent over her to listen. He shook her a little, but she didn't respond. He felt
her hands-—they were still warm. He arranged them on her chest and then pulled
the blankets up. He sat for awhile next to her, staring at her face, her mouth
slack as if in sleep, her eyes closed. He stared at her for so long that he could no
longer see her as Mara, until the colors in the room all blended together and

swirled around him like a storm.

“ltttthh