Life Drawing (16 page)

As I wandered, I thought of what Alison had said about becoming generic. It didn’t just remind me of my father, I realized. It was also close to what I had felt about my affair. One day we were two fantastically, uniquely interesting individuals who had been lucky enough to find each other—even if under terrible circumstances. And then, five months later, I was that pathetic woman hoping a married man who would never leave his wife for me would leave his wife for me. A cliché. A soap opera trope. The humiliation of that had pushed me to end it, as much as anything else had.

W
hen I glimpsed Alison a few stalls away, she was at one of the crafty ones, filled with jams and quilted potholders, handmade soaps. I watched her for a couple of minutes before approaching her. It was still difficult to process all she had endured. The image of her being hit sickened me.

When I joined her, she was asking questions in her curious way about varieties of vinegars. I admired how easily her mind could slip with genuine interest from one topic to the next. I had lived in the area nearly three years with only a minimal, outsider’s need to know about the town or the life of the county, certainly no interest in chatting up the locals about their produce and home-canned goods; while she reveled in the human contact, seemed unable to imagine living in a place and not weaving herself into it.

I noticed the name on the stall.
Mayhew Farm
. I looked at the woman behind the counter. She was in her seventies, I thought, her cheeks a bit puffy, her skin lined, but still I could detect a resemblance there, in the square of her jaw, time-softened as its angles were, in the slope from her forehead through her short, slightly squat nose.

“Are you a Mayhew?” I asked. “Of Mayhew Farm,” I added as though she needed me to explain.

“I used to be,” she said. “Though I’ve been a Thompson for thirty-nine-odd years.”

Alison picked up a bottle. “It must be wonderful,” she said. “To feel so connected to a place … to be somewhere for so long …” She put it back on the vinyl gingham table cover. “I’m going to try the strawberry.” She turned to me. “Strawberry vinegar with vanilla ice cream. How does that sound?”

“It sounds good. It sounds incredible.” I looked at the woman again. “Has the family been here a long time?” I asked. “The Mayhews?”

She took a twenty from Alison and opened her cash box. “We’ve had the farm over a hundred years.”

“I was just wondering … I heard about a Mayhew. From a while back. John. Jack. Or Jackie … He was in World War I.”

She looked up at me, startled. “Jackie Mayhew? Jackie Mayhew was my father’s brother.” Her eyes narrowed. “How could you be hearing about Jackie Mayhew?”

“It’s a long story,” I said; and she looked around meaningfully at the emptiness around us, the absence of anyone pressing me to hurry through. “I’m an artist,” I began. “I live with my husband in what used to be the Garrick place.”

“I went to school with Emily Garrick. And her brother Freddy.”

“We bought the house as part of an estate sale. I never met either of them. But we were doing some work on a bathroom earlier this summer …” I started to tell her about the newspapers and a little about the paintings. At some point, Alison touched my shoulder and pointed to a poultry stall. “I won’t be long,” she said, and walked away.

“Jackie Mayhew was one of the boys. One of the obituaries.”

“You have his obituary?”

I repeated that I did. I told her my name and she told me hers, Kathleen. Kathleen Thompson, but Kathleen Mayhew before that.

“My poor father,” she said. “He never got over it. His baby brother. He was there too, you know. But he took ill and never had to fight. He used to say that dysentery had saved his life.”

The young couple had joined us at the stall. “I should let you work,” I said, moving aside.

“We were wondering if you have any of that mixed berry jam today,” the young man said.

“We give it as gifts all the time now,” the young woman said. “Everyone loves it.”

“Oh, sure. We always bring lots of that.” And then to me, “So strange, you mentioning poor Jackie Mayhew. I haven’t thought of him in years.”

But then she moved back to her customers. She had been curious—but unconcerned, it seemed. He was a family myth, a sadness of the past for people themselves long dead.

I took a business card off her table as I left.

A
lison greeted me by the car with the news she’d had a text from Nora. “She hadn’t told Paul where we were. I knew she wouldn’t have. He called her friend Heather and got the information that way. Said he was surprising Nora as a treat.”

“You look much happier,” I said. “I knew it would be something like that.”

“I am. Much happier. Though poor Heather. She got duped and feels responsible. But that’s Paul. He doesn’t think twice about using people. Anyway, Nora’s off with another friend now.”

I looked down at the Mayhew Farm business card in my hand—white with a basket of apples in one corner. A phone number in green. An address in red. “It’s so odd,” I said, sliding into the car. “Jackie Mayhew’s niece.”

“Why odd? It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose. I just never thought. I don’t know how to explain it. I haven’t focused on their families at all,” I said. “Parents. Siblings. Much less a living, breathing niece.”

Alison laughed. “You know, where I’m from, we’re used to families being in a village for a thousand years. A century is nothing. Newcomers.”

“Right. I guess that’s right.” I wondered if I should be troubled by Kathleen Mayhew’s seeming lack of interest in me and my project. Would it help to have more information? Photographs beyond the ones that had been “living” in my walls all these years? Family anecdotes? Or would it muddy things for me?

“When you paint a flower,” I asked, pulling my seatbelt on, “do you care about the garden where it grew?”

“No.” Alison backed out from the space with her usual vigor and both zucchini rolled off my lap. “Sorry about that. No, I don’t care. Except insofar as that garden has determined everything about the flower. But then I paint flora, not sentient beings. Not people. It might be different if I were doing that.”

“Right,” I said, then shook the whole subject from my thoughts. “I’m really glad Nora’s okay. And that you know she didn’t give you away,” I said. “I’m glad you can relax about that now.”

O
ver dinner in the kitchen, Owen and I marveled at the ugliness of the morning’s scene. I watched him as we spoke, looking for signs of his being in any way deflated by the departure of his beautiful admirer, but I found nothing there.

“Alison was glad Nora had some time with you,” I said. “She told me Nora related to you as a positive father figure.” It wasn’t quite what Alison had said, but I decided it was close enough. “She described you as soothing. Alison did. Admirably unflappable.”

He frowned. “Is that a good thing?”

“Well, for a girl like Nora, with a father like that, I understand the appeal.”

“I suppose. Though it sounds pretty dull. There aren’t many boys who dream of growing up to be unflappable.”

“Well, dear, if the shoe fits. But I don’t think she meant dull. I think she meant reliable. Not a loose cannon. Not a maniac. A positive influence. You know how sometimes young people need a supplemental parent to help them move forward.” But then I realized that down this road lay Laine and my role in her life. “You know,” I said again, “while I was working today, I thought how strange it is that my father is locked in a cell, while that man … I mean, it’s too bad there isn’t some doctor out there willing to say he has Alzheimer’s just so he can be locked up. I’m sure he’s more dangerous than poor Dad will ever be. It ought to be the other way around.”

Owen laughed. “No one can say you don’t think outside the box, Gussie.”

“I’m only semi-joking. The whole system … how we humans
manage it. I’m having difficulty these days understanding the logic of it all. Maybe it’s …” But I stopped myself—again. I had been going to say something about how meeting the real, live niece of one of the killed boys had made me all the more aware of the slaughter I was documenting, made that horror, too, more real to me; but the subject tumbled down another one of our rabbit holes of taboo. No work talk. “Maybe it’s just the fallout from my father’s condition, his move, that’s got me so contemplative. And then hearing that lunatic shouting obscenities in the yard. Sometimes, it just seems like we’re doing it all backwards.”

“I don’t think many people could look at the world and think we’re doing it right.”

“No, I don’t suppose they could,” I said. “Though it would be nice to think there’s hope.”

“There’s always hope,” he said. “Even if unwarranted.”

“Well, on that cheery note,” I said, “I’m turning in early tonight. How ’bout you join me?”

I was certain he was going to say no, but he said yes.

Here we are, Jan and I, clearing our father’s belongings from the efficiency apartment he has occupied for nearly two years. Two women, sisters, similar coloring, black hair, dark eyes, tanned skin—mine from the country summer, hers from two weeks’ boating and swimming in Nova Scotia. I am informal, a bit messy in my comfortable clothes, jeans and a rose-colored T-shirt; she is elegant in gray linen pants, a white short-sleeve silk blouse—straight from a morning at work. In the first moments or possibly minutes—immeasurable—we are both, together, silently overwhelmed. Not by the extent of the task, modest and meager, but by its nature.

Eventually, I say, “I can’t imagine where to start,” meaning that I can’t imagine how this ends. I am counting on my sister’s orderly mind, on her ability to see systems and methodology where I cannot. She sighs, resigned, ready to engage that brain of hers. She has boxes in her car, she says. There are categories we can use. What she will take. What I will take. What neither of us wants. What he might be able to have in his new room. I nod. It all makes sense. It sounds so obvious—though I might have stood there an hour before detecting this structural simplicity to the job.

We move quietly, rarely speaking—each of us drawn first to the meaningless objects, the things he has mysteriously acquired since our childhoods. A Lucite paper towel holder. A beer stein from Atlantic City. An afghan that looks handmade, that neither of us can place but that we decide should go with him. A pair of galoshes he will never now need. (Of all the unfamiliar things, these alone stir me. An existence spending all rainy days indoors. A life sentence. A
never again
molded into this loosely human shape, green rubber, traces of old mud still wedged in the grooves of the soles.)

Once the unrecognized objects are gone, the familiar sparkle like shards of all the memories he has lost. I find the salt and pepper shakers that sat on our kitchen table for decades, aluminum cubes I used to knock together during long family meals, and I can see that Jan wants them, so I tell her to go ahead. Into her box they go. I take the single jade bookend, its partner long vanished, the back half of a dragon carved into it. We come close to alternating, one for her and one for me; and I wonder as we do if she too is feeling the absence of the third set of hands. Neither of us mentions Charlotte. Or our mother—but that is not so noticeable an omission. Neither of us reminisces at all. Sitting on the bed, I think that we might be somehow cheerier had he died. The weight of his double captivity, within the locked room, within his own body, is heavy on us.

We haven’t discussed whether or not we will visit him after the task is complete. But then I’m relieved to learn that Jan has made the decision. It’s enough for one day. Let the staff bring him his things. Let us each wrap our arms around the light, half-filled boxes we will take to our own homes. Let this be over.

In the parking lot, we put the boxes down and hug, hurriedly. She is no more comfortable than I with the kind of physical affection that flows, overflows, from Alison. Like our black hair and dark eyes, like our silence on the subject of our dead sister, of our
mother, our need not to see our father this afternoon, we share this reserve.

“Drive safely,” I tell her.

“You too,” she says to me.

“Jan,” I say, just as she’s leaning to pick up her box. “I was wondering. Do you ever go to the cemetery?”

She looks at me for a moment, clearly surprised. “We go on Charlotte’s birthday. Once I went on Mother’s Day, but we decided it was better to spend that with Letty’s mother, who was clearly hurt by our opting for a grave over her. Why?”

“No reason. I don’t know. Maybe it’s Dad. I don’t know. Nothing really.”

But I want to say:
I have never known what to do with them. The ones who aren’t here. I don’t understand it. I have never understood it. The love I felt and didn’t feel for our mother. The gash to my heart where Charlotte lived
. I want to ask her:
Do you believe they still exist?

But instead, I say, “This was tough, I suppose. I just have cemeteries on the brain today. The obvious reasons. Plus there’s some related work that I have going on.”