Missing Mom (26 page)

“Ms. Eaton. ‘Nikki.’”

Fixing his nickel-colored eyes somberly on me. Arranging the lower part of his face in a small sympathetic smile.

“…terrible shock you’ve had. You and your family. Of course you are still in mourning. You are still in shock.”

A pause. I fumbled to drink ice water from a crystal goblet and the ice cubes tumbled prankishly causing water to splash onto my face in a way that necessitated a hurried mopping of my face as the nickel-eyes brooded upon me and a waiter hovered in the background.

“I can only imagine. I can only attempt to imagine. Your grief.”

Actually it was discomfort I was feeling: a dread of glancing down to see that the front of my shirt had been splattered.

“You could write about it, Nikki. For our readers.”

Oh! I was staring somewhere neutral: to my right, through a leaded-glass window, at the Chautauqua River below. Swift-flowing, breaking in a sequence of small frothy rapids.

The editor-in-chief of the
Chautauqua Valley Beacon
, Nathaniel Waldeman, Jr., rarely met with staff writers. More rarely did Mr. Waldeman take them to lunch at the historic Fayetteville Inn.

“You see, ‘Nikki,’ Dale Wilmer and I were discussing the possibility that you might write about your experience for our readers.”

“Nikki” sounded in Mr. Waldeman’s mouth like the cute, quirky name of a dog. A Pomeranian, a toy poodle. Dale Wilmer was the features editor of the
Beacon
. My editor.

“Catharsis of grief”—“sharing your grief”—“healing process.” As in cartoon word-balloons issued from a man’s mouth. The nickel eyes misted over. There was the understanding that, sure this was a cheesy request, or would have been a cheesy request from anyone other than Nathaniel Waldeman, Jr., owner and publisher, as well as editor-in-chief, of the revered
Beacon
. Instead of wincing, or drawing back in revulsion, or tossing the contents of my wineglass (a California chardonnay Wally Szalla would have scorned) into the gentleman’s face, I smiled gently, to allow my companion to know that of course I understood, his request was a gracious one, generously offered, in the service of doing me, the murder victim’s daughter, a favor.

“Well! I know, it is a bit early. Maybe you are not quite ready to formulate your thoughts. Dale has been telling me that since, um, the tragedy, you have been living in Mt. Ephraim, in the family home you inherited, you’ve been turning in fewer features for us but those you have turned in have been first-rate, I’ve personally been impressed. Work is the great solace in time of personal tragedy, oh I know!” An inward brooding moment. Sipping of chardonnay. I had to wonder what Mr. Waldeman meant. What my relations with Dale Wilmer were at the moment.

We wavered from week to week. We were like a fever chart except not so predictable. It appeared that Mr. Waldeman didn’t know, I failed to complete at least half the assignments Dale Wilmer gave me. “Failed to complete” a euphemism for “never got around to starting.” I had to wonder if my relations with my editor Dale Wilmer were in inverse ratio to my relations with my married-man-lover Wally Szalla. If we were on good terms at the present time or not-so-good. If one of us, or both, were delighted/disgusted with the other right now.

“…may discover kindred spirits. In the healing process. Those who have lost loved ones, too. Prematurely I mean. ‘Violently.’ We were thinking of a diary format. When the trial begins in December. With tastefully selected photographs. We feel that, given our readership, and a wish to extend circulation, the diary format is the most accessible to the most readers.” A sigh. A lifting of the wineglass. A fleeting vision of
most readers
hovering in the air before us. “You would provide day-by-day copy. Very easy to e-mail. Dale could edit. No need for you to rein in your observations. Your feelings. ‘Intimate.’ ‘Uncensored.’ Perhaps I will have a hand in editing, too. A daily account of the trial, with the outcome not known. You, as well as your readers, Nikki, would be kept in suspense.”

The nickel eyes glowed, for a moment almost lewdly.

Mr. Waldeman was admired/feared/disliked/avoided at the
Beacon
. Some staff persons claimed never to have seen him. Some, perhaps unseriously, doubted he existed except on the
Beacon
masthead. I knew that Waldeman existed because Wally Szalla knew him, in the way that Wally knew everyone worth knowing in the Chautauqua Valley.

Mr. Waldeman was assuring me that payment for the proposed feature would be “considerably higher” than usual. Whenever I wished, we could “negotiate.” Perhaps a “formal contract.” An “advance.”

My heart was beating slower and slower. Strange! I wondered if it might cease to beat.

Mr. Waldeman spoke of my piece on the Christian punk band, that had been featured on the front page of the
Beacon
and had stirred some interest. In fact, it had been reprinted in its entirety in newspapers in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany. I smiled to think that Mom would have been proud of me. At the house I’d discovered a scrapbook devoted to
NIKKI
’
S WRITINGS
. Each article, each clipping, dating back to columns in our high school newspaper and features in college publications. The most recent was an interview with a local private school headmaster, dated May 8, 2004.

One of your best pieces, Nikki! Really, it is.

So Mom had assured me. Beaming with pride.

Like Dad’s calendars, Mom’s scrapbooks were scrupulously maintained as holy relics. You would not think they might come to an end so abruptly.

We must have ordered lunch. Food was brought. Our hefty silverware flashed. I pushed food around on my plate until, at an appropriate moment, a waiter murmured
Ma’am may I?
and whisked it away.

“Nikki. I hope I haven’t offended you.”

Alpha-male code for: you are not responding as I wish.

Alpha-male code for: you are not responding in a way to assure your own best interests.

The nickel eyes were guarded. Perpendicular lines bracketed the small smile. By this time my heart was beating so slowly, I had to wonder if I was awake. There was little likelihood of my tossing wine at my companion, muttering
Go to hell! I hate you! I quit!
and stalking out of the elegant dining room.

The check was paid. We were parting company. One of my hands was shaken. I heard myself say, in my bright Nikki-voice, “When I’m ready to ‘share my grief,’ Mr. Waldeman, it will be with the
Beacon
. I promise!”

In the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive, time moved differently than it did elsewhere. Not in short frothy rapids that glittered in the sun but in large wide swaths you could not see the edges of and could not know where they began, how far they extended and where they might end.

If they might wash over you, and drown you.

Or bear you aloft, hopeful and unharmed.

It had become routine: Mt. Ephraim police now patrolled Deer Creek Acres.

At least twice a day, but not at predictable times, a metallic-blue Mt. Ephraim PD cruiser turned into the subdivision and passed with methodical slowness along the curving roads, drives, lanes. Gliding into and out of cul-de-sac “circles.”

The cruisers were manned by youngish uniformed cops. Usually there was just the driver. I knew that Ross Strabane would never have ridden in the patrol car and yet each time I saw the car I thought of him and felt a stab of alarm, resentment.
I don’t need you. I have a man who loves me
.

If I saw the cruiser I looked quickly away. My face beat with blood, I felt stricken, exposed. For of course the cruiser had to do with 43 Deer Creek Drive. With what had happened to my mother in that house.

Opinion in Deer Creek Acres was divided on the subject of the patrol. Most thought it was a good, safe thing, especially the parents of young children. Some older residents grumbled that it was annoying to see the patrol car, Deer Creek Acres wasn’t a “crime ghetto.”

If I’d been asked my opinion of the patrol I would have said yes certainly it was a good, safe thing.

In a time of emergency. When you need the police. Yes.

No one asked me. Except for a few of Mom’s close friends, residents of Deer Creek Acres waved hello to me but otherwise kept their distance.

Her? The Eaton girl. The daughter.

That house where Gwen Eaton was murdered.

Through the summer, the police cruiser became an ever more familiar sight in Deer Creek Acres. Children waved at the uniformed driver, who waved back. Young mothers dawdled in the street with babies in strollers, toddlers, eager dogs. Often I heard laughter. I felt a pang of envy.

I didn’t answer Strabane’s letters. I didn’t call him.

Yet it happened one afternoon, I was just parking my car in the driveway when the Mt. Ephraim cruiser appeared. And instead of looking away, somehow I was smiling at the cruiser, and waving.

“Hi! Hello!”

The youngish uniformed cop behind the wheel might have looked surprised but he smiled, too, and waved as he drove past.

And now I was suffused with a strange childlike happiness. For it had been so easy, what Mom would have been doing from the start: making the young police officer feel, not unwanted, but welcome in our neighborhood.

Every few weeks for as long as we could remember, Mom drove into the old, east side of Mt. Ephraim, to St. Joseph’s Cemetery.

For a long time I went with her. Longer than Clare went.

As soon as Clare was in eighth grade she was too busy for such excursions. Jumping into the car because Mom called out in her cheery-adventure voice, “Who wants to go with me?” no longer appealed.

The east side of Mt. Ephraim was a hilly tumbling-down neighborhood near the river of row houses, potholed streets, derelict buildings and vacated mills with such faded names as Beame Ladies Hosiery and Carlyle Footware & Leather Goods. Here, South Main Street intersected with Spalding where Mom had once lived. The names of the streets were plain and utilitarian: Bridge, Front, Railway, Commodore.

Mom told us how as a child she’d been told that Commodore Street had been named for “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad, a long time ago. It was said that Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in the world at the time, had “disembarked” from his luxury car to visit with a Mt. Ephraim resident. Or, Vanderbilt had at least stood on the railway platform overlooking the street.

“Did you see him, Mom?”

“Did I see the ‘Commodore’? That man died in 1877.”

As a little girl I’d been concerned with dates, ages. Numbers were tricky, figuring them in your head. You had only ten fingers and ten toes to calculate with. The only birth-date that seemed to be permanently imprinted in my brain was October 8, 1973, when I’d been born.

Mt. Ephraim had once been an important stop on the New York Central Railroad. Trains had pulled into the station often, sometimes two or three a day; the east side had flourished. Now, trains thundered past hauling what seemed like miles of freight cars and the old depot was boarded up and covered in graffiti. Anyone who wanted to travel by train had to drive thirty miles to the station at Chautauqua Falls.

As a child I’d asked Mom why was this so? Why the trains didn’t stop in Mt. Ephraim any longer?

Mom laughed. “Oh, ask
me
! As if I’d know.”

Then, for Mom always pondered our questions to her, even those she couldn’t answer: “I think it has to do with the economy, Nikki. ‘Supply and demand.’ You can ask Dad, he will know.”

I was reluctant to ask Dad such questions. He’d squint at me suspiciously as if, at school, I’d already learned the answer and was testing him. Or, worse, he’d provide such a long and complicated answer I couldn’t make sense of it. “Supply and demand” was what it all boiled down to.

“Will you look at these
weeds
! It’s enough to break your heart.”

Visiting her parents’ graves in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, in warm weather, Mom brought grass clippers, a hand hoe, potted flowers. If it was sunny she wore a crinkly straw hat to protect her face, which burned easily. If the grass was wet, she wore rubber boots. St. Joseph’s Cemetery had become shabby and overgrown and Mom was fearful of snakes.

At her parents’ graves Mom knelt in the grass. Always she was sad, subdued. This change in my mother disturbed me. I saw that my Kovach grandparents’ graves were smaller than the graves of most of their neighbors and wondered if that was why Mom wiped surreptitiously at her eyes. Such plain dull-gray markers!

As soon as I was old enough to subtract numbers, I calculated the dates on the grave markers: Grandma Kovach had been forty when she’d died and Grandpa Kovach had been forty-four. You could see why they’d died, such old people!

In my bright schoolgirl voice I asked Mom how old you had to be, to die, and Mom smiled nervously saying any age that was old, much older than I was, so there was no need for me to worry—“You’re just a little girl, darling.” Impatiently I said, “No, Mom. How old do you have to be?
You
.” For of course it was preposterous to think that Nikki would die, for “die” meant to go under the earth, and why’d I want to do such a silly thing?

Mom stared at me for a moment. Then laughed, and gave me a smacking wet kiss.

“Not for a long, long time, sweetie. Maybe never.”

While Mom tended to the graves, clipped weeds and trimmed the English ivy she’d planted, wiped bird droppings from the markers, I prowled about, restless. It was hard to care about my Kovach grandparents who’d vanished so long ago. Dad never spoke of them and if Clare or I asked Mom about them her replies were vague and distracted and her smiles forced as if she was trying to keep from crying.

In St. Joseph’s Cemetery there were some large, shiny grave markers. There were angels, and crosses. The small plain Kovach markers held no interest for me. I could not associate them with any actual people, not people who mattered. The cemetery was hilly and overgrown with shrubs, Mom couldn’t see where I was poking around and if I climbed up onto gravestones. At the top of a steep hill there was a dumping-ground for old, rotted flowers and broken clay pots.

Sometimes from the top of the hill I’d lose sight of Mom. Then I’d see her, kneeling in the grass. Mom looked so little! I almost wouldn’t have recognized her.

Distance makes people sad, I thought.

After a while Mom missed me and began to call anxiously: “Nikki? Nikki?”

It was the most delicious feeling to hide from Mom then to jump out from behind a gravestone, and run down the hill to her.

“Oh, Mom! I was here all along.”

On the way home Mom sometimes swung around to Spalding Street to drive past her old house. The number on the front doorframe was 91. The house was weatherworn wood faded gray like the Kovach grave markers, with a sagging veranda. Mom had lived upstairs which seemed strange to me: other people lived
downstairs
? It seemed wrong, too, that the houses on Spalding Street were so close together, you could hardly squeeze through the narrow space between them. The front yards were small, grassless and ugly, nothing like the lawns in Deer Creek Acres.

Clare once snorted in disgust: “Some people! You’d think they’d be ashamed not to fix up their houses better.”

Mom said reprovingly, “Clare. Not everyone has our advantages.”

“‘Advantages’—what’s that?”

“A father to work and take care of them and—love them. A mother who can stay home with her children. Enough money to—well, live.”

Clare objected, “Mom, anybody can rake up trash! Anybody can shut their front door, and pull their curtains back inside the windows, for heaven’s sake.” At thirteen, Clare had a schoolteacher’s indignation in the service of absolute fact.

Mom continued driving, biting her lower lip. Poor Mom! She never argued with us if she could avoid it. And more and more, Clare was seeing things that Mom seemed not to see, or didn’t acknowledge seeing. It was Mom’s
just-pretend
way, in Clare’s words.

It was a relief when Clare was too busy to come with us to St. Joseph’s. I suppose Mom missed her but I didn’t, not one bit.

The last time we drove past 91 Spalding, I asked Mom if she’d liked living in that house? If she missed it, sometimes? and Mom said with a vague smile, “We’re all happy where we came from.”

So softly Mom spoke these words, she might have been alone in the car.