Prayers for the Living (47 page)

I said, “You got your wife on your mind?”

What did I know? I was thinking of her. I was thinking that in spite of everything else she was his wife, and she was alone and probably very lonely out there in that place. Owl Valley. With the green lawns, the shaped shrubs, the stately, stately trees—I been there to visit, I saw it. But he hadn't been there to visit in a while. And so I said it. Sarah had gone. She went there when she came down from school. But he hadn't. You marry a girl, you try to make a life, and then when she gets sick do you leave her there in the home? No matter how good it is—and he tells me, and I believe him, that it's the best place on the East Coast—no matter how good, do you leave a person there? Do you leave there a person you married?

He didn't say a word, just looked at me, deeply, deeply. In his eyes I saw—I was watching when I said,
With your mother you get a meal and for dessert you get a lecture
—I saw in his eyes there was this empty space, a darkness and a nothingness, a large field of black like on it I could have picked up a lipstick or a crayon my granddaughter wrote with when she was a child and I could have inscribed my name, made pictures, drawn this star-shaped shard around which that very moment he was curling his fingers in his trousers pocket. It frightened me to see this—
into
this—because he was my son, who I tried to raise practically by myself, and I knew what he had lived through, and I knew the things he felt and saw, because he told me so much, the mother, his friend, and to sit across from him and look into that place it was very scary, let me tell you, because I had no idea how much he had changed, right before my very own eyes. In another man, an average man without the kinds of talents possessed by my
Manny, in a man who would never climb so high, you could look and you could see, like vegetables and meat floating in a stew, bits and pieces of guilty thoughts and happy thoughts, hopes, prospects, fears. But I told you just now how it was with my Manny. Why I kept after him on the subject, I can only say, I must have been a little bit crazy at that time.

“After all she's still your wife,” I said.

And he nodded. What had I said that he could argue with?

“Florette tells me the same.” He said this. He said.

“So what do you do about it?” I asked him.

Him holding a bit of meat up on his fork.

“I'll see her more often.”

“Often? It doesn't have to be often,” I said. “It just has to be sometimes. Sometimes is better than nothing, Manny.”

“It hasn't been nothing,” he said. Still holding the meat on the fork. He had stopped eating, stopped chewing. He reached out for a glass of wine without looking and nearly knocked over the bottle. Wine, which I had brought out from his new collection in the study wall. Dry red wine—not the white sweet he used to like. It's all changed for him, see, even the wine.

Now maybe he would have gone to see her again sooner rather than later anyway. Maybe he would have. But when I remember it I worry that it was my remark that started him back there. The way he did. What he did. And this in turn. You don't know that part because he told me he couldn't bear to tell you. But I'll tell you even though it hurts me, like tearing the scab from a sore. Why shouldn't it? The son hurts, the mother hurts. That is a law of life. But as far as laws go, what happened in the next months, it showed me an answer to the questions he had on his mind about the devil or not the devil. If you could say anything on that question that made sense after what happened next, the answer was there to see. It always has been. It always will be.
Life
is the devil.

T
HEY WERE PULLING
up the long tree-lined driveway to Owl Valley when Sadie got cold feet.

“What if she doesn't believe me?” she asked.

“She'll believe you, sweetheart,” her painter friend and teacher said. “You're her daughter, her only child. She'll want to believe just about anything you tell her.”

“But if she doesn't want to come?”

“She will, sweetheart, she will. How could she refuse the offer we're going to make to her? I wouldn't, would you?”

“I didn't,” Sadie said. “I'm living up there with you, right?”

“You shouldn't put it that way, Sadie. You shouldn't make it sound as though you're my subordinate. Here, park here.”

“I wasn't trying to. It just came out that way.”

“Think about the way you frame those statements, sweetheart. Your whole sense of framing is subordinate. We're equals, remember? Under the sign of the
gyn
?”

“Under the sign. Here we go.” Sadie's voice trembled a little with anticipation, and a little fear.

Up the steps of the lovely wide veranda to the large oak door. Once inside, Sadie went directly to the receptionist at the desk.

She introduced herself and said, “We've come for my mother.”

Peale the painter meanwhile was studying the portraits on the wall—gray-faced, gray-haired men, doctors they appeared to be, the founding psychiatric fathers of this place.

“She'd probably like to take a walk,” the nurse said as she led them down the long hallway toward the rear of the large converted Victorian house.

“That's what we had in mind,” Peale said, suppressing laughter.

“My sister,” Sadie said.

“Older sister,” Peale said.

The nurse looked from Sadie to Peale and back again.

“Here we are,” she said, leaving them at the door to Maby's room. She took a last look at Peale, and walked away.

“Bitch,” Peale said.

“Why?” Sadie asked.

“Just bitch, that's all.”

Sadie pursed her lips, gave a shrug, and knocked on the door.

No reply.

Sadie knocked again.

Again silence.

“Just go on in,” Peale said. “It's
our
mother.”

Sadie looked up and down the hall, and then opened the door.

“Who?” Maby said in a feeble whisper, as if from beneath a heap of blankets.

“It's me, Mother.”

Sadie crossed to where her mother sat at the window. Her slacks were an ugly green—Sadie had never seen them before.

“Who?”

“And my friend.” Sadie gestured toward Peale who had come in and shut the door behind her. But Maby didn't turn.

“We've come to take you for a walk, Mother.”

“Who?”

“Mother, we've come to take you for a walk.”

Maby stirred in her chair.

“A walk? I've had a walk. I'm tired now. Later I shall arise.”

“You'll what?”

“I'm reading this poem,” Maby said. But there was no book nearby, only a few novels on the shelf near the bed. Sadie stared at them while wondering how to move her mother off the spot—there was a title by the man named Bair, the one who taught her. The man she turned back once to see before he left for Alaska. Once. Maybe twice.

“Come along, sweetheart,” Peale said, taking Maby's hand and urging her to stand.

“Who are
you
?” Maby blinked at the painter, as if coming out of a dream.

“She's my friend, Mother,” Sadie said. “A dear friend.”

“Come along now,” Peale said. “We've got a ride to take.”

“We do? Not a walk?”

“We do, and not a walk.”

“Not back to the city. I don't want to go back to the city. Not just yet.”

“Up to the country is where we're going, Mother. Up to Vermont.”

“I would like
that
,” Maby said. “Where we took our picnic. I remember that. I enjoyed myself.”

“We'll enjoy ourselves a lot, Mother. We're going to spend a lot of time together. The three of us. And maybe more. We'll invite more women to live with us if we can find the right ones.”

“All of them are okay,” Peale said. “Some are just a little closer to a sense of themselves than others.”

“That's right,” Sadie said. “We want you to come with us now, Mother.”

“I'll need to pack.”

“We have some of your things in the car, Mother.”

“You do?”

“We do.”

“And your father? Was he glad to hear the news?”

“The news?”

“About my trip.”

“Oh, yes, Mother. He was very glad. He
is
glad.”

“Very glad,” Peale said.

“We're going on a picnic,” Maby said as they passed the nurses' station.

“
Today's the day
. . .” Peale was singing.

“The sisters going on a picnic,” Sadie said.

“. . .
the teddy bears have
. . .”

Maby laughed as they went out the door.

“. . .
their pic-nic
.”

But when Sadie opened the car door and motioned for her mother to climb in? Maby pressed her face against the side of the vehicle and began to cry. “I have no things,” she said.

“We packed for you, Mother, I told you,” Sadie said. “Your bag is in the trunk.”

“I have nothing to read,” Maby said, her voice choked with tears, high-pitched, like a worried child's.

“We're going to stay near the college, Mother. You can use the library.”

“Well, we'll have to be careful for a while,” Peale said. “But we can get books for her from the library, sure. But Mrs. Bloch, Maby? Maby. Climb in. We're going to have a picnic on the way, really.”

“Really?” Maby peeked over at the painter from behind her hand. “It could be fun. I never had fun. I couldn't, do you see?”

“Mother?”

“I couldn't have much fun at all.”

“Mother, please get in.”

“I'll get in,” Maby said.

B
Y SIX O
'
CLOCK
that night Manny was beginning to think about returning home from where he was—in Boston, at a meeting—and he called the house to tell me that he was going to take the shuttle. I had to tell him that the Owl Valley people, a nurse, had called to ask if Maby had shown up there at the apartment.

“What?” I could hear the airport noise in the background, I could hear static on the telephone, noises both loud and soft. And in the middle, my Manny's silence. What's going on? his silence said.

“They said that she left for a picnic with Sarah and a friend and she hadn't come back.”

“A boyfriend?”

“A girl, they said. A woman.”

Jet noise, static. Silence between.

“Manny, you're hearing me?”

“I hear you. It's the teacher, the one she's been talking about.”

“You think so?”

“Who else? Look, if they show up, you keep them there, Mama. I'll be there in . . . an hour and a half, two hours. I'm going to call Mord and have him come over.”