Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (15 page)

“You invited Mama? To Mexico?”

Norman laughed. “Sure, to Mexico. Where am I going, Hoboken? Mama’s never seen it and I figured what the hell, it’s either that or eat the tickets and why not.”

“You’ll have a
great
time,” said Sonya.

“I’m sure we will,” said Mama, smiling. “I haven’t been anywhere with one of my boys in twenty years. Of course we will!”

Castanza doesn’t know her
, thought Howard. Not even a description. Castanza said the woman was
nada
. Just somebody traveling with Norman. Window-dressing.

My God,
Mama!

Mama who had supported him, raised him, encouraged him. Who had, by marrying Nate forty-two years ago in the first place, then bearing two children in the second place, handed him his goddamn life!

He considered his options.

They were very much the same options he had considered when it was only Norman and Sonya he was worrying about. So it didn’t take him long, just a moment or so while he pushed aside the half-empty champagne glass and signaled to Billy for another Dewar’s rocks, one that he supposed would be the first of many—though it was still four hours to flight time, and he knew he’d have to be careful on the drinking.

He knew he shouldn’t be too drunk when they boarded.

Norman wouldn’t care.

But Mama would worry.

When my father left, my mother covered all the mirrors.

My father was a jazz pianist and a good one. Maybe too good.

“He hears too much,” my mother said to us once. “It’s driving him crazy.”

She would have been the one to know.

But it was true. My father heard
everything
. Taking in a conversation halfway across a crowded restaurant was nothing for him. Riding down the highway he could hear the wind in the trees over the grumbling of his car and my mother’s backseat driving. Most people sleep through a night’s gentle rain. My father couldn’t. He had perfect pitch and could reproduce a seagull’s call or a blackbird’s on the piano, a
percussive
instrument no less, so well that my sister and I knew exactly which was which. He could play the theme from
Picnic
on one hand and the theme from
Gone with the Wind
on the other simultaneously.

His gift was his curse.

There was no way he could stand the City. Not just New York
City but
any
city—which played hell with his career as a musician and limited him mostly to the small clubs nearby around the Jersey shore. In tourist season even lazy old Cape May would make him surly. His cure for surliness was a scotch bottle. My father was functionally drunk from June to September and throughout every major holiday season. We took it for granted that he would be.

What we didn’t expect was for him to leave us.

One cold clear night in February while all of us were sleeping he got up and drove away.

My mother covered the mirrors.

I was only eleven at the time but my sister Louise was sixteen. What for me was just a dumb, weird adult inconvenience to her was a disaster.

“Are you
crazy?
” she said to my mother.

She was—beginning to go there at least. I know that now. But our household had never been
Leave it to Beaver
anyway. The mirrors were just more of the same as far as I could see
.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

She wasn’t. She was doing it for herself. My mother was as vain about her looks as my father had been proud of them and in covering the mirrors she was saving those eyes, that skin, that wild shock of hair toward the day he returned. So she wouldn’t see the time passing, reflected in her face
.

She knew he’d return. Against all hope we heard it from her again and again. While it was probably her bickering and constant chattering that finally drove him away
.

“How am I supposed to have any friends over?”

She couldn’t. It was too embarassing
.

“
Everybody
has friends over. You know what this is doing to my life?”

She meant her social life. What it was doing was ruining it. But that was partly her own fault
.

My sister felt ashamed
.

It also nearly destroyed the family business. We’d been running a modest little bed and breakfast out of the six-bedroom
Victorian gingerbread my mother had inherited from her sister and it was pretty near impossible to explain mirrors shrouded in Laura Ashley prints to paying guests. My mother didn’t even try. Instead she adapted—replaced the large oval dining-room mirror with a Neal McPheeters seascape and opened the room up for a limited-menu breakfast and dinner. My mother was a good cook if slightly prone to thick floury sauces and people seemed to like the intimacy of a restaurant which could seat no more than sixteen at a time.

We survived. I survived handily. My sister Louise a lot less so.

She was ashamed. She was guilty
because
she was ashamed
.

It lasted the rest of her life
.

For my mother it took a few years before the bitter truth set in. Despite the hopeful litany—
when your father gets this out of his system
—she eventually must have realized he wasn’t coming back. Their wedding photo stayed on the mantle above the fireplace in our living room but gradually lost its power to draw her glance. I got to wondering why she didn’t cover that too. We got Christmas cards and birthday cards from Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and Maine signed in my father’s small neat hand. There was never a return address. My mother got the occasional crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. There was never a note.

Then he missed my sister’s twenty-first birthday and a few months later, my sixteenth. The hundred-dollar bills stopped coming.

Louise and I assumed he was dead.

My mother never talked about it.

Louise and I did, plenty of times. There was a place we used to like to go down by the Point off St. Mary’s By the Sea, a nun’s retreat. We hardly ever saw any nuns, just fishermen. We’d take the old boardwalk path over the dunes down to a long breakwater jetty built of huge flat slabs of granite set with pilings and cemented together by
pebbled concrete. Over years of tidal pull and pounding surf the concrete had disintegrated into white glinting chunks which deposited themselves into the fissures between the rocks after about thirty yards out or so. The jetty continued on for another sixty, black and jagged and slippery green with lichen.

On the one side of the jetty was the wild Atlantic, on the other the calm beginnings of the Delaware Bay.

It was a place of contrasts, a good place to sit and think.

I remember lying on the sand on the Atlantic side one warm September afternoon and asking my sister why she didn’t just leave. Why she wasn’t going off to college like the other kids. Hell, she had the grades.

“She needs me here,” she said. “How’s she going to run the restaurant?”

“She yells at you.”

“Everybody yells sometimes.”

“Dad didn’t.”

“No. Dad just ran away. I’d rather get yelled at, wouldn’t you?”

“You figure he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

I remember I had on the bright orange bathing trunks I used to favor and that Louise, in her flowered modest two-piece, had a little bit more belly than she might have liked.

“I figure he’s dead,” I said. “It used to be sometimes, every once in a while, it’d be like I could feel him, y’know? Just sort of like know he was around somewhere. Not nearby or anything but around. I haven’t felt that for a long time now. You think that’s wierd?”

“No.”

“You think we’ll ever know what happened?”

“No. Not if we don’t by now.”

“I think you should leave. I think you should go away to school. She can get somebody else to work the restaurant.”

And another time much later, in full summer. Louise
and I standing on the rocks watching the sand-fleas swarm through the bright wet lichen at low tide.

“I should have gone,” she said. “She hardly speaks to me. Either that or she’s going on and on about something and half the time I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. I should have gone, dammit. Now I never will.”

“Sure you will. You can do it anytime.”

I was leaving in the fall—flying off to college. I wasn’t planning on returning anytime soon thereafter, either
.

“It’d be like running away,” she said. “It would be just like Dad.”

“No it wouldn’t.”

“How can I leave her here all by herself, Steven? You know she forgot to turn off one of the back burners last night? If I hadn’t caught it, the whole damn house could have gone up.”

“Jesus.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “You’re leaving.”

I flew to Boston. My sister drove me to Newark Airport and waited for me to board. Waving to me from the gate I saw a plain but not unattractive young woman dressed in jeans and workshirt who, in all her twenty-three years, had had only three boyfriends, each of them very briefly. I couldn’t even be sure she wasn’t still a virgin.

On the plane I thought about my mother.

By then the lines around her mouth were already deeply set beneath the hollows of her cheeks. She’d begun to stoop slightly. Her hair had begun to dull and thin. Her eyes appeared to have somehow settled more deeply into their sockets like sinking stones. It was as though her entire body were slowly turning in on itself—as though my father were still alive inside her however he might or might not be in the physical world and consuming her from within.

She was growing old before my sister’s eyes and mine if not her own.

The mirrors were still covered.

The men in our family leave, I thought. The women stay.

My mother’s osteoporosis set in my senior year.

I was twenty-two. Louise was twenty-seven and called me a few weeks before Thanksgiving to say that my mother had bumped her hip against the kitchen table. She’d fractured the hip and fallen. In falling she’d managed to fracture her wrist in two places. The hip was the main problem. It would keep her in the hospital for a week or so at the very least. I asked Louise if she wanted me to come home and help her out for a while.

“I can handle it,” she said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I took her at her word. There was a girl in Cambridge with soft red hair and a washboard belly who was screwing the daylights out of me. I called my mother twice in the hospital. She sounded depressed but otherwise surprisingly okay. Her talk was all doctors and bowel movements and bad food. Typical hospital-patient-talk, not mindless chatter. Then Louise phoned me to tell me she was home. She said she was sleeping and I said not to wake her.

I went to Cambridge for my own type of thanksgiving and home only for Christmas. Louise met me at the airport. I was shocked at how thin she’d gotten since just that summer. Her hipbones showed through her jeans. Her breasts had practically disappeared. When I told her she could stand to gain a few pounds she laughed.

“I know, I know,” she said. “
Mom’s taking me with her
, right?”

When we got home I saw what she meant. The house was as neat and clean as always but it was none of my mother’s doing. My mother was confined to her bed. Only a week before she’d stepped
out
of bed and her left foot hit
the floor the wrong way and now she’d broken a toe. They hadn’t told me.

There was a throw-rug by the bed now. Too little too late.

My mother’s flesh sagged off her brittle bones. When I hugged her it was like hugging a human-sized sparrow.

She was turning sixty-five in January. She looked to me more like eighty.

I figured with her in bed that except for in her own room we could at least unshroud the mirrors.

Louise shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m not all that big on looking at myself these days either. Leave them.”

My mother was in and out of sleep a lot. That was the medication for the pain. Awake she was usually lucid and kept wanting to set her affairs in order, to tell us for the umpteenth time where her will was or her insurance papers or the deed for the house. As though she was planning on dying the next day. She seemed to think she was still back at the hospital now and then. Bitching about the doctors or the nurses or the food. Or else she’d be half-asleep, and that was when she’d really start talking ragtime.

“
You got your dollar? Good boy. Go on down to Murphy’s and get us a bucket of beer, okay? And make sure get change. Can’t trust that Murphy. You got your dollar bill? Okay . . . good boy
. . .”

On
that
one Louise and I finally determined that what she was doing was talking to her dead brother Lloyd—but
in the voice of her own mother
. It had to be. She was back in Newark, somewhere in the late 1930s.