Farthest House (2 page)

2

Three days after Jeannie’s death, with her body put to rest only that morning in the village cemetery, the whole of Farthest House lay under a pall. By evening, Julian’s sister, my dear Tory, already middle aged but still living there, had poured herself a glass of sherry to still her nerves and gone up to her room for the night. In the kitchen, Mable stood at the sink in a navy caftan and washed the last of the day’s dishes. She turned to glance with concern at the black gardener sitting at the table. She’d made him fresh coffee and set out a plate of homemade cookies, but he stared straight ahead, ignoring both. His name was Jonah, and the outside corners of his eyes, which fell when he was still a young man, now gave him the appearance of a small and forlorn basset hound. The radio was on low, and a commentator talked about the signing that day of the Civil Rights Act and how Negroes celebrated in the streets. At sixty-one, with all he’d seen in his life, Jonah scarcely cared whether or not a new law had been signed. Earlier laws hadn’t helped, and he couldn’t rid his mind of thinking about the number of lynchings there’d been in just his lifetime.
Lynchings.
Human beings at their most inhuman and the sight of busted up black bodies swinging. On top of that, not three days since there’d been another death in the house. Some homes went a hundred years and crumbled in on themselves and never felt death.

I couldn’t watch his misery. Sorrow and guilt sent me from the room and into the library where Julian stood at a window holding his daughter, her body snug against his. After the mortician came and removed Jeannie’s body, Julian reached for the infant and took her to his room—as though only the two of them could understand what they’d lost. Since then, he’d not let the housekeeper, his sister, or even his mother tend to the infant. He gave the newborn each feeding, watching the clock regimentally for two-hour intervals, and changing each diaper, though he asked constantly, “Like this?” and “This way?” but not giving her over to other hands. Even during the funeral and at the graveside, he hung on to the infant.

Luessy stepped through the library door, her reading spectacles in one hand. Her wide skirt reached to mid-calf, and her shoes were “sensible.” She came quietly down the short aisle, scarcely glancing at the rows of books on either side. Avoiding the wide desk where she liked to spend her evenings reading, she studied her tall son. His time in France during the Second World War and his training at the Police Academy were years behind him, but he’d remained lean and strong. Until now. Now he looked fragile. She approached him slowly, “Your baby needs a name.”

Out the window, a young willow tree blew in an approaching spring storm, branches swaying back and forth in the evening light and fronds floating in the air. Julian’s gaze lifted from the young trembling tree and settled on his daughter. “Willow.”

“Willow,” Luessy repeated, pleased with the sound.

He turned back to the window and the first drops of rain. “I shouldn’t have brought Jeannie here,” he said. “I should have made sure she was in a hospital. That quack of a doctor should be thrown in jail.”

“Nonsense. Jeannie wanted to be here. Dr. Mahoney has delivered hundreds of babies. Nearly all of them in their homes. How could any of us have known?”

The skin along Julian’s clenched jaw blanched. “She trusted him. I shouldn’t have let her talk me into it.”

“You were born in this house. So was your sister. We just didn’t know.”

“Doctors are paid to know.”

Luessy saw the eyes of a hurt boy. “They aren’t gods.”

Willow stirred in his arms but didn’t wake. He’d not argue with his mother. It wouldn’t change anything. Dr. Mahoney failed Jeannie, but so had he. In that, he also failed Willow. His mind tripped over the name, Willow. His daughter. He would not fail her again. “You think I’ve got it?” he asked. “You think I understand what she needs? How to do it all?”

Luessy’s eyes dampened, and she looked to the small, sleeping face and the tuft of dark hair on the crown of her head. Julian, with his determined purpose and strong hands, had swaddled the infant so tight in her yellow receiving blanket it was a wonder she could breathe. And the way Julian held her, not rocking or cooing, but tight and tucked, he might have been holding a football. Luessy hesitated. She wanted to say,
Heavens no, you’re not thinking of returning to Omaha so soon.
Instead, she heard herself say, “Willow will teach you what she needs.”

“I can’t come back here.”

Swinging her hands behind her back was Luessy’s only way of keeping herself from grabbing her granddaughter. She thought of insisting that he leave the child there to be raised by the household of females, but this was Julian’s child, and he needed the infant. “I know how much you loved Jeannie, but someday this house will be Willow’s. I want this to be a second home for her while she’s growing up.”

Julian shifted his weight, ready to leave, but he stopped when Luessy dropped a hand on his forearm. “Take some time,” she said. And then, to keep him close a minute longer, “I know death can take years to heal. When you’re ready, bring Willow back here. I’ll be waiting.”

He lifted the baby to his shoulder, touching her soft cheek with his rougher one. He couldn’t explain his wanting to cut all ties to the house and everyone who lived there, but he did. “I need space. Don’t call, don’t hound me.”

“
Hound
you?” Luessy needed to sit, but she didn’t want to leave his side for a chair.

His brows pinched, apology grabbed his face. “I just mean you can’t fix this. You can’t mother me through and make it all right.” She looked tired—the last three days had aged her, too. She’d also lost Jeannie, and death had entered her house. “I know it sounds cold,” he said, “but let us go.”

He left her standing there. He couldn’t explain what he couldn’t understand. Loss for certain, shock, maybe even pity for himself and Willow, but that wasn’t all. Jeannie had needed him to understand something, to give her dying moment some assurance. He’d failed to understand, failed to give her what she needed. Now Willow needed away from where everything went bad, and she needed kept away until the world righted itself. If ever the world would be right again.

3

When they left, no one imagined six years would pass so quickly. Willow lived in Omaha with hardly any knowledge of family outside of
Papa.
And me, Amelie-Anais, the ghost of her great aunt. I was the one Papa called
imaginary
each time she spoke of me, until at last, she quit mentioning me, though she often sensed me standing over her bed at night, soothing away tummy aches and restlessness. She moved me into ever lower regions of consciousness, but I never left her.

On a May morning in 1966, she woke from a night of especially vivid dreams. Her right shoulder blade felt bruised from having spent another night on the hardwood floor, but she lay watching the sunlight stream in through her bedroom windows. Tiny dots of red, blue, green, yellow. Already she had an acute sense of color.

A faint sound grew and overtook her fascination with the bright motes. With a start, she realized the vibrations rivering through the floorboards came from boot heels striking the polished wood in the short hallway. Papa. She scrambled to her feet, and using both arms—even the weaker one she didn’t like—she grabbed up her blanket, pillow, and last of all Doll, shoveling them onto her bed. Falling onto the heap, she shut her eyes as tightly as she could and fought to keep them closed. Papa frowned when he caught her sleeping on the floor, and
his
frowns went into
her
mouth and down to
her
stomach and stayed there a long time.

When the sound said he’d entered the room, she peeked with one eye to be sure he saw her in bed. Now she could be awake, and she yawned and stretched and smiled at him. Her smile faded when he gave her only a distracted glance, only half his attention. He went instead to the wicker basket holding her clothes, moving the easy way she wanted to move, but not coming to her bed to ask her about bed bugs or to lean over and kiss her cheek with his whiskery face, maybe even to swing her into the air. He dropped a knee to the floor before the basket and began picking through her clothing. Watching him, Willow remembered what she’d seen the evening before, and her stomach began feeling saggy and heavy. Was he still so sad? She scooted off the heap of her blanket, kissed Doll, and hurried to stand beside him, aching to have him tell her everything was all right. “The bedbugs didn’t bite me.”

“That’s good.”

He hadn’t turned to her, and her cheeks pinked in determination. She stood still, taking in his every movement. The basket he rummaged through sat beside an empty and never-used clothes dresser with yellow-duckling handles. That piece of furniture, like the white curtains, the yellow rocker, and the wallpaper—hundreds of baby ducks, all with one foot in the air—was the work of Jeannie. A woman she’d never seen. A stranger Papa said was her mother. He didn’t use the dresser, Willow knew, because like the photographs of Jeannie hanging in his room, it made him close his eyes and take deep breaths.

He lifted her favorite pair of pants, the ones the color of a ripe apple. At least they were that red the summer before when they hung over her shoe-tops. They only touched her anklebones now, and matched the red-but-not-red color of her lips.

One of his discarded T-shirts served as her nightgown, and she lifted the cotton over her head and twisted out. Standing beside him in her Friday panties on a Saturday, she ached for him to turn, face her, and smile in a way that told her she was pretty, maybe even as pretty as her best friend in kindergarten, Mary Wolfe.

He looked over the front of one shirt and then another.

Waiting to be noticed was too hard, and Willow grabbed her stomach, pinching her skin to try and make an outside hurt bigger than her inside hurt. The outside hurt she could stop when she wanted.

If I could have pulled Julian aside and scolded him, just as I’d done when he was a boy, I’d have done so. He never let his eyes really see her shoulder when he helped her dress or when she sat naked in the bathtub. Did he suppose she didn’t sense his aversion? She knew he loved her, though. She knew because she’d ridden his shoulders and listened to his thoughts since before she could walk. At first, her arms had been so short she needed to stretch to wrap them around his forehead, his sweat filling her palms on hot days while he held her with one big hand low on her back, and with the other hand he folded laundry, washed dishes, and picked groceries from store shelves. She’d often napped sitting on his shoulders, one cheek and one ear on top of his head, his thoughts mixing with hers. Even awake, watching him walk across the room, or smoke a cigarette, the words in his head mostly said he loved her. Sometimes, they said things like
she’ll suffer for her shoulder.
Leaving her own thoughts and sliding into his, she first heard directly from him what he never wanted her to hear at all: She needed to be “fixed.”

Standing beside him now, she wouldn’t let herself think about sad things; she’d think about things that matched. Her favorite game was “Memory,” where small playing cards, each with a different, brightly-colored object, were turned over two at a time until matches were found. Those cards she got to keep. Bits of winning and order. Things fitting together and making sense. Even if her mother was dead.

She swayed, leaning her weight onto one foot and then the other. Her and Papa’s bodies matched and didn’t match. They had the same dark brown hair, though he had a few white hairs by his ears, and they had the same green-blue-brown eyes. Mostly though, their bodies didn’t match. She didn’t have the thing she once peeked into the shower and saw hanging off him from out of a mitten-sized patch of fur. (Mary Wolfe was right—boys did have ding-dongs.) But the main reason her body didn’t match his was because his back went straight across. Both his shoulder blades stayed inside him and as flat as the floor she slept on. Her right scapula—a word she knew from her trips to the doctors—pushed out with a knot of bone the size of her fist and not even sleeping on the hard floor made it go away. The bone huddled beneath her clothes and made her right arm slightly shorter than her left. Her right hand was stupid, too, because it was still five when she was six. Girls could have yellow hair and straight backs and be pretty like Mary Wolfe, and girls could have brown hair and crooked backs and stupid hands and be ugly.

Watching Willow, I ached for her. I thought myself ugly throughout my childhood, even believing my scapula, gnarled in the same way, made me deserving of my uncle: The Beast.

Julian continued picking through her things, and because he didn’t say it this time, she did. “I’m growing like a weed.”

“Uh, huh.”

“We can go to a store.” Her left hand pulled the fingers on her right. “You can buy me a dress.”

“You wear a dress to school every day.”

She put both hands on her hips, letting all the ducks on her walls watch. “Papa. My school uniform is not a dress!”

Now he did look at her, an almost smile she didn’t like. She wasn’t making a joke. She wanted a dress. If he bought her one, she’d wear it every day. Mary had a hundred dresses. Willow let her hands drop. Mary had a mother—that was the reason she had dresses. Jeannie, the mother Willow didn’t have, looked at her new baby and the thing on her new baby’s back, and died.

Five afternoons a week, as one of Willow’s many sitters napped or polished her nails, Willow sat rapt, her attention on a television show,
I Dream of Jeannie.
Then she practiced crossing her arms over her chest and giving a quick nod. When she got her powers—she believed absolutely it was a matter of nodding and winking just right—she’d make two things: first, she’d make herself pretty so Papa didn’t think she needed to be fixed, and then, she’d make a dress. But she wouldn’t make her mother come alive. She didn’t want
that
Jeannie;
that
Jeannie had left her.

She moved behind Julian and stretched over his back, wrapping her arms around his neck, as though he’d put a knee to the floor just to give her a piggyback ride. “How come your bones don’t poke?”

He rose slowly, so that she slid off without falling. He handed her the soft pants and shirt he’d chosen. Trailing a thumb down her cheek, he said, “Get yourself dressed now.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and moved to the window where he could stare out and think.

The room faded around Willow as she watched him, found his thoughts, and slipped in behind a curtain of his mind.
Damn doctors,
his mind said,
can’t fix Willow. Couldn’t save Jeannie.

He had never raised his hand or even his voice to Willow, but hearing again how he thought she needed to be
fixed
made her eyes burn like skinned knees. She sank to the floor to put on her pants. If he only wanted a little girl who could sing and dance, she’d practice until she won a hundred prizes. He wanted her to be a pretty girl though, and she was trying, but no matter how hard she prayed, her fingers going around and around the rosary the kindergarten nun passed out, touching each bead and saying “Hail Mary,” then moving on to the next bead, “Hail Mary,” or how many nights she slept on the hard floor trying to push the bone away, she couldn’t make herself pretty.

Don’t cry,
her mind said. Tears blurred her vision, and she stuck both feet into the same pant leg, rolled to her knees, and tried to stand. The tangle pitched her forward, her weaker right arm folding and even the left arm lacking the strength to catch her. Her chin struck the floor. Hot pain rammed up through her jaw, and one cheek scraped over a thorn of the basket’s broken wicker. She grabbed the hurt and felt wetness and warmth. “Papa! Blood!”

Julian wheeled around at the sound of her fall, his hands jerking from his pockets, his eyes anxious as he took quick steps to her. He stopped, his will forcing hesitation into his bones. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re hardly bleeding. Go wash your face.”

She heard what he said, and what he managed not to say:
Today is the day. She’s gotta learn I can’t always be there.

She never lost a drop of blood without Papa making a fuss over her, and his rejection now, when bleeding proved she really was hurt, stung worse than her injuries. Running from the room and him, she wailed again, though not even her howling made him follow. In the bathroom, she grabbed the damp towel from the bar on the wall and pushed the cool wad against her chin. Still, Papa didn’t come. He wasn’t acting the way she wanted, and she’d cry until he felt sorry, came and held her. Or turned her upside down, ran her feet across the ceiling, and made her forget what she’d heard his mind say.

She climbed onto the footstool she used to brush her teeth, spied her reflection in the mirror, and sobbed along with it, slow tears running down her cheeks, meeting the smeared blood and turning a watery red. She noticed how her two cuts, her red eyes, and tears changed her face, making it a not-match to her usual face. Every new thing could be a sign telling her that the round bone grabbing ahold of her scapula had gone away.

For extra powers, she dropped the towel, folded her arms over her chest, and gave a quick nod. Satisfied, she let her gaze creep down her reflection, over her chin, her neck, and her chest with its two button-sized and cinnamon-colored circles. Her front looked the same, but she promised herself that her back could still be changed. Turning inch by inch on the stool, afraid of looking too fast, she pivoted to see her shoulder.

Her heart sank. The stupid bone that made her different and Papa sad, still clung to her.