Earthly Possessions (21 page)

“Aunt Aster sent you a card, though.”

She tossed, as if throwing off some annoyance.

“If you like, I’ll read it to you,” I said.

She said, “How long am I going to be ruled by physical things? When do I get to be rid of this body?”

“I don’t know, Mama.”

“Bring me my cigarettes,” she said.

(She didn’t smoke.)

I laid aside my sewing and slipped out of the room. Sometimes I just had to. I went swiftly down the stairs, keeping my mind very blank and cold. But in the living room I found rumpled magazines, cast-off shoes, Linus’s doll chairs needling the floor, Amos sprawled on the couch with a newspaper. I stopped and pressed a hand to my forehead. Amos looked up. He said, “Shall I go sit with her a while?”

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No.”

He studied me. “I never really knew you before,” he said finally.

I had a feeling that he didn’t know me now, either.

For I was numb, and observed my life as calmly as a woman made of ice, but Amos thought I was strong and brave. He told me so. A thousand times—peering into Mama’s darkened room, bringing me coffee, sending me out for a walk in a world that was, surprisingly, going through summer—he would pause and say, “I don’t know how you manage this.”

“There isn’t any managing to be done,” I told him.

“I used to think you were only beautiful,” he said now.

“Only what?”

“I didn’t understand you. Now I see everyone grabbing for pieces of you, and still you’re never diminished. Clutching on your skirts and they don’t even slow you down. And you’re the one who told her the truth; I heard you. Said the word out loud. Cancer. You sail through this house like a moon, you’re strong enough for all of them.”

I should have argued. (I should have laughed.) But all I said was, “No …” and paused. Then Amos laid aside his paper, and unfolded himself from the couch and took hold of my shoulders and kissed me. He was so slow and deliberate, I could have stopped him any time; but I didn’t. His mouth was softer than Saul’s. His hands were warmer. He lacked Saul’s gaunt, driven intenseness, and made me see that everything was simpler than I’d realized.

My life grew to be all dreams; there was no reality whatsoever. Mama fell into stupors and could not be roused. The children looked like faded little sketches of themselves. My customers drifted in and out again, oddly attired in feather boas, top hats, military medals. Saul didn’t talk any more and often when I woke in the night I’d find him sitting on the edge of the bed, unnaturally still, watching me.

Amos met me in vacant rooms, in the steamy attic, in the bend of an unused stairway. We could be discovered at any time and so we held back, for now; but without even moving he could reel me in to him. It was the end of summer and his skin had a polished, brassy glow. His face had grown sleek and well-fed looking. When he lifted me up in his arms I felt I had left all my troubles on the floor beneath me like gigantic concrete shoes.

I loved him for not being Saul, I suppose. Or for being a younger, happier Saul. He carried no freight of past wrongs and debts; that was why I loved him.

“When this is over with your mother, I’ll take you away,” he said. “I understand that you can’t leave now.”

Actually, he didn’t understand. I would have left. I wanted to get out, throw all the old complexities off, make a clean start. But I was trying to stay faithful to his picture of me and so I only nodded.

“We’ll go walking down the street together in a town we’ve never been to,” he said. “People will ask me, ‘Where’d you
get
her? How’d you find her?’ ‘She’s been sleeping,’ I’ll tell them. ‘She’s been waiting. My brother was keeping her for me.’ ”

We looked at each other. We were not cruel people, either one of us. We weren’t unkind. So why did we take such joy in this? My wickedness made me feel buoyant, winged. Gliding past a mirror, I was accompanied by someone beautiful: her hair filled with lights, eyes deep with plots, gypsyish dress a splash of color in the dusk. When Amos and I met in public, our hands touched, clung, slid off each other and parted, while we ourselves went our separate ways blank-faced and gloating like thieves.

I photographed Miss Feather swathed in a black velvet opera cape, holding a silver pistol that was actually a table lighter. “This will be for my great-niece LaRue, who never comes to visit,” she said. “Make up several prints, if you will.”

“All right,” I said.

“For my other great-nieces, too. Who also never come to visit.”

“I’ll have them by tomorrow,” I said.

It was night. I was tired. Mama had dropped off and I was trying to catch up on my work. But I could hardly see to focus the camera; everything was haloed. “I believe I’ll go to bed,” I told Miss Feather.

“No, wait, please.”

“I need some sleep.”

“But what about Saul? I mean to say,” said Miss Feather, “Saul is not himself these days.”

“Who
is?”

She fumbled at her throat, cast off her cape, and rushed at me. A tiny, excitable woman waving a silver pistol. “Now listen, please,” she told me. “I had this in mind to say for some time: he’s your husband. Would you like to take a little vacation together? I could stay with the children.”

“Vacation
, Miss Feather. I consider it a vacation if I can make it out of Mama’s bedroom.”

“But … dear heart—”

“Thank you anyway,” I told her.

I went upstairs, took off my shoes, and sagged on the edge of the bed. Saul wasn’t there. He had taken to going on long walks in the dark. I was on my own, and felt free to slip a hand in my skirt pocket and pull out my true self’s photograph. She smiled back at me, carefree and reckless, but my eyes were too tired to make any sense of her. It seemed she had arrived unassembled. I couldn’t put her together.

How did you turn out, finally? What kind of grownup are you now?

Late in December they took Mama away and put her in the hospital. I had hoped to avoid that but Dr. Porter said I was getting strange-looking. Besides, he said, she might not even
notice. She was hardly ever conscious any more. They hooked her up to a number of cords and dials. She lay silent, with her eyes tight shut. I imagined she was doing it deliberately—not sleeping or comatose but closing me out, hugging her secret clawed monster. I felt jealous. The nurses told me to go on home but I stayed, stubbornly gripping the arms of my chair.

Amos brought me a Big Mac—the smell of beautiful, everyday life. When I wouldn’t come away with him he laid it on the table beside me and loped off down the corridor. His moccasins made a gentle scolding sound. Then Julian danced in all edgy and skittish, dressed up as if for a night at the races. He gave me a note from Linus:
I can’t visit hospitals. Can’t manage. Taking the Children to pizza palace, is my sympathy gift to You
. I thanked Julian and he danced out again.

Saul stooped in the doorway, took stock of the room and then entered. He settled in the armchair next to mine, tugging at his bony black cloth knees. His head lunged forward awkwardly. “Have you eaten?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said.

The Big Mac sat untouched on the table; the smell of it had made me full.

“How is she?”

“The same. You don’t have to whisper.”

He cleared his throat. He set his Bible on his lap, took out his reading glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. Then he put them on and opened the Bible. I went back to studying Mama. She reminded me of a withered balloon. All those cords were just to hold her down; without them she’d lift up, level and sedate, and go wafting out the window. I snickered. I glanced over at Saul, hoping he hadn’t noticed. He was looking not at the Bible but straight ahead of him. His face was grim.

“Saul?” I said.

His eyes came to rest on me.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m eternally visiting deathbeds,” he said. “Even more than other preachers.”

“You do seem to go to a lot,” I said.

“Maybe it’s because I’m so poor at them.”

“You are?”

“I don’t know what to say at them. And I don’t like dying people.”

“Never mind,” I told him.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I believe we’re given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us.”

I thought of a merry-go-round, little dappled horses. To me, it seemed soothing. But Saul clamped his Bible shut and leaned toward me, looking into my eyes. “Till we get it straight,” he said. “Forgive, or settle up, or make the proper choice. Whatever we failed to do the first time.”

“Well, maybe so,” I said.

“I keep telling myself that.”

“I see.”

He made me uneasy, a little. Maybe he sensed it, because he relaxed suddenly and sat back in his chair. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I wanted to say to you.”

“I see,” I said again.

“Will you come home with me, Charlotte?”

“I can’t.”

“You know she won’t wake up. You heard what Dr. Porter said.”

“Saul, I just can’t,” I said. “You go.”

And he did, after a minute. The rustle he made while getting himself together was an irritation. I waited, keeping my face turned aside, wondering why he paused so long at the door. But finally he was gone.

Then I had my mother to myself. For I couldn’t let loose of her yet. She was like some unsolvable math problem you keep straining at, worrying the edges of, chafing and cursing.
She had used me up, worn me out, and now was dying without answering any really important questions or telling me a single truth that mattered. A mound on the bed, opaque, intact. I was furious.

Around midnight, she said, “There is too great a weight on my feet.”

I bent forward to look at her. In the bluish glow of the nightlight I could make out her small, dazed eyes. I said, “Mama?”

“What is this on my feet?” she asked. Her voice was parched and broken. “And my arms, they’re all strung up to something. What’s happened?”

“You’re in the hospital,” I told her.

“Take that blanket or whatever off my feet, please, Charlotte.”

“Mama, are you all the way awake?”

“My
feet.”

I stood up and searched my skirt pockets, my blouse pocket, and nearly panicked, till I remembered my cardigan. “Mama,” I said, “look.” I turned on the reading lamp at the head of her bed. She flinched and closed her eyes. I held the photograph in front of her face. “Look, Mama.”

“But the light.”

“It’s important,” I told her. “Who is this a picture of?” She rolled her head back and forth, protesting, but opened her eyes a slit. Then closed them. “Oh, me,” she said. “Who is it, Mama?”

“Me, I said. Me as a child.”

I took the picture away and stared at it. “Are you sure?” I asked.

She nodded, uninterested.

“But … I thought it would be your true daughter. The one they mixed up in the hospital.”

“Hospital?” she said. She opened her eyes again and let
them travel in a slow, frowning arc across the shadowy ceiling. “I never gave my permission to be brought to any hospital.”

“The one you had a baby in, Mama. Remember you had a baby?”

“A surprise,” my mother said.

“That’s right.”

“Like a present. A doll in a box.”

“Well …”

“I can’t imagine how it happened, we hardly ever did much.”

“Never mind
that
, Mama; the baby. You didn’t think it was yours.”

“It?” she said. She seemed to pull herself together. “It wasn’t an it, it was you, Charlotte. The baby was you.”

“But you said they mixed me up in the hospital.”

“Why would I say that? Oh, this is all so … it’s much too bright in here.”

I turned the light off. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You never thought that I was someone else’s. The notion never occurred to you.”

“No, no. Maybe you misunderstood,” she said. “Maybe … I don’t know …” She closed her eyes. “Please lighten my feet.”

I couldn’t think what to ask next. I had lost my bearings. Oh, it wasn’t that I doubted my memory; I was still sure of that. (Or almost sure.) But the picture! For now I saw that of course it was Mama. Obviously it was. And here I’d found so much in that little girl’s eyes, imagined such a connection between us!

“My feet, Charlotte.”

I slipped the picture back in my pocket, then, and went to the foot of her bed and lifted off the folded spread. I hung it over a chair. I returned to her, avoiding tubes and cords, careful
not to jar her, and more gently than I’d ever done anything in my life, I laid my cheek against my mother’s.

She died a few days later, and was buried from Holy Basis Church with Saul officiating. Her coffin seemed oddly narrow. Maybe I’d made up her fatness, too.

The funeral was well attended because she was the preacher’s mother-in-law. None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn’t come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I’d lost someone more important than I’d expected to lose.

After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather’s tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk’s little winter bouquets; even Saul’s prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn’t take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. “Are you all right?” he’d ask.

“I’m fine.”

“I thought something might be wrong.”

“Oh, no.”

“I woke and you weren’t there.”

“Are
you
all right?” I said.

“Yes, certainly.”

“Don’t catch cold.”

Then he’d wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.

I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, criss-crossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and
searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Selinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments. And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people’s shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.