Housekeeping: A Novel (22 page)

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground—a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over
the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one’s hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up. Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem relatively harmless. Well, all that was purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.

I cannot taste a cup of water but I recall that the eye of the lake is my grandfather’s, and that the lake’s heavy, blind, encumbering waters composed my mother’s limbs
and weighed her garments and stopped her breath and stopped her sight. There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him—a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad—such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation
at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing. Imagine that my mother had come back that Sunday, say in the evening, and that she had kissed our hair and that all the necessary business of reconciliation had been transacted between her and my grandmother, and that we had sat down to supper, and Lucille and I had grown restless listening to stories about people we did not know, and had gone out to play on the chill grass in the strange, deep yard, hoping our mother would notice how late it was, and hoping she would not. Say we had driven home the whole night long, Lucille and I
asleep on the back seat, cramped and aware of the chilly air that whistled through the inch of open window, diluting my mother’s perfume and the smoke from her cigarettes. She might sing, “What’ll I do when you are far away,” or “Love letters straight from your heart,” or “Cottage for sale,” or “Irene.” Those were her favorite songs. I remember looking at her from the back seat as we drove toward Fingerbone, the waves in the crown of her hair, the square shoulders of her good gray dress, her long hands at the top of the steering wheel, the nails gleaming a deep red. I was struck by her calm, by the elegant competence of her slightest gesture. Lucille and I had never seen her drive before, and we were very much impressed. The interior of Bernice’s car smelled dusty, like an old sofa. We held on to the thick gray cord that hung across the back of the front seat and bounced up and down as if we were driving a stagecoach. The air filled with dust particles that looked like tiny bent threads, or hairs, which someone had once told us were atoms. We fought and counted horses and cemeteries, and she never spoke to us once. We asked to stop at an ice-cream stand by the road in the woods and she stopped and bought us hot fudge sundaes, and the lady there said we were nice and our mother smiled absently and said, Sometimes they are.

It seemed to me that in all this there was the hush and solemnity of incipient transfiguration. Perhaps memory is the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well. For it seems to me that we were recalled again and again to a sense of her calm. It seems that her quiet startled us, though she was always quiet. I remember her standing with her arms folded, pushing at the dust
with the toe of her pump while she waited for us to finish our sundaes. We sat at a hot green metal table, weather-dulled and sticky, and loud black flies with rainbows in their wings fed at the pools of drying ice cream and then scrubbed their maws meticulously with their forelegs, like house cats. She was so tall and quiet in her silvery gray dress, never looking toward us, and we were sweaty and sticky and cloyed and tired of each other. I remember her, grave with the peace of the destined, the summoned, and she seems almost an apparition.

But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone. We would take her to a restaurant and a movie on Thanksgiving and buy her best-sellers for Christmas. We would try to give her outings and make her find some interests, but she would soften and shrink in our hands, and become infirm. She would bear her infirmities with the same taut patience with which she bore our solicitude, and with which she had borne every other aspect of life, and her silence would make us more and more furious. Lucille
and I would see each other often, and almost never talk of other things. Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm. I know how it would have been, because I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger. We would have laughed and felt abandoned and aggrieved, never knowing that she had gone all the way to the edge of the lake to rest her head and close her eyes, and had come back again for our sakes. She would have remained untransfigured. We would never have known that her calm was as slight as the skin on water, and that her calm sustained her as a coin can float on still water. We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches. When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated.

Sylvie realized that her first scheme to keep us together had failed. She had little hope that the hearing—which, according to a letter we received in the mail,
would take place in a week’s time—would turn out well. Still, she persisted in her housekeeping. She polished the windows, or those that still had panes, and the others she covered neatly with tape and brown paper. I washed the china and put it back in the cupboard and burned the boxes in the orchard. Sylvie saw the fire and came out with an armful of old magazines that had gathered in the porch. It was difficult to make them burn. Sylvie brought newspapers from the shed and we balled them up and stuck them in among the magazines and lit them with matches, and after a little while the magazines began to swell and warp and to page themselves and finally to ascend the spiraling air. That was a pretty day. The fruit trees were all bare, and their leaves on the ground were as limp and noisome as wet leather. The sky was a strong, plain blue, but the light was cool and indirect and the shadows black and precise. There seemed to be no wind at all. We could watch the heat from the fire pull and tease the air out of shape, stretching the fabric of dimension and repose with its furious ascending. The magazine pages went black, and the print and the dark parts of pictures turned silvery black. Weightless and filigreed, they spiraled to a giddy height, till some current caught them in the upper air, some high wind we could not feel assumed them. Sylvie reached up and caught a flying page on the flat of her hand. She showed it to me—in dark silver, a woman’s face laughing, and below that in large letters,
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
! Sylvie tried to wave the page off her hand, and the corners and edges tattered away, leaving just the laughing face, from the brows downward. She clapped her hands in the pillar of heat, and the lady ascended
in cinders and motes. “There!” Sylvie said, watching them fly. She wiped her sooty hands on the flanks of her skirt. I saw the fiery transfiguration of a dog, and the bowl he ate from, and a baseball team, and a Chevrolet, and many hundreds of words. It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

We burned papers and magazines until well after dark. We forgot supper. Again and again Sylvie stepped out of the firelight and in a few minutes reappeared with an armful of things to be burned. We had both become conscious of Fingerbone all around us, if not watching, then certainly aware of everything we did. Left to myself I would have shrunk under all this attention. I would have stayed in the house and read with a flashlight under the covers and have ventured out only for Wonder bread and batteries. But Sylvie reacted to her audience with a stage voice and large gestures. She kept saying, “I don’t know why we didn’t do this months ago,” loudly, as if she thought there were listeners beyond the firelight, among the apple trees. Everything to which Sylvie imagined anyone might attach merit she did with enormous diligence and effort. We burned the entire newspaper and magazine collection that night, and soapboxes and shoeboxes, as well as almanacs and Sears catalogues and telephone books, including the current ones. Sylvie burned
Not as a Stranger
.”That isn’t the sort of thing you should be reading,” she said. “I don’t know how it got in the house!” This was intended to impress
the judicial gentlemen in the orchard, so I did not tell her it was a library book.