Return Trips (5 page)

Two years after Paul’s death, most unexpectedly my mother died, in a senseless automobile accident; she was driving to see friends in Connecticut and swerved on a wet highway to avoid an oncoming truck. I was more horrified, more devastated, really, than I could have believed possible. I went to an analyst. “I haven’t even written her for a month!” I cried out, during one dark fifty-minute hour. “How many letters does it take to keep a mother alive?” was the gentle and at least mildly helpful answer. Still, I wrestled with my guilt and with the sheer irresolution of our connection for many, many years.

In my late twenties I married one of my former professors: Lewis—a large, blond, emphatically healthy, outgoing man, as much unlike Paul as anyone I could have found; this occurred to me at the time as an ironic twist that only Paul himself could have appreciated. We lived in New York, where we both now taught.

To sum up very complicated events in a short and simple way: my work prospered, while my marriage did not—and I present these as simultaneous conditions, not causally linked. A happier first marriage could have made for even better work on my part, I sometimes think.

During those years, I thought of my mother with increasing sympathy. This is another simplification, but that is what it came to. She did her best under very difficult, sometimes painful circumstances is one way of putting it.

And I thought of Paul. It was his good-friend aspect that I most missed, I found, in the loneliness of my marriage. I felt, too, always, the most vast regret for what seemed the waste of a life.

And Hilton was very much in my mind.

Sometimes I tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I had never left: I could have studied at the university there, and married one of those lean and sexy
sweet-talking boys. And often that seemed a preferable way to have taken.

I divorced Lewis, and I had various “relationships.” I wrote and published articles, several books—and I began getting letters from Popsie Hooker. Long, quite enthralling letters. They were often about her childhood, which had been spent on a farm in Illinois—southern Illinois, to be sure, but, still, I thought how my mother would have laughed to hear that Popsie, the near-professional Southerner, was really from Illinois. Popsie wrote to me often, and I answered, being compulsive in that way, and also because I so much enjoyed hearing from her.

Some of her letters were very funny, as when she wrote about the new “rest home” in Hilton, in which certain former enemies were housed in adjacent rooms: “Mary Lou and Henrietta haven’t spoken for years and
years
, and there they are. Going over there to visit is like reading a novel, a real long one,” Popsie wrote, and she added, “They couldn’t get me into one of those places if they carried me there on a stretcher.” I gathered that Popsie was fairly rich; several husbands had come and gone, all leaving her well endowed.

We wrote back and forth, Popsie and I, she writing more often than I did, often telling me how much my letters meant to her. Her letters meant a great deal to me, too. I was especially moved when she talked about the seasons down there in Hilton—the weather and what was in bloom; I could remember all of it, so vividly. And I was grateful that she never mentioned my parents, and her own somewhat ambiguous connection with them.

During some of those years, I began an affair with Andreas, the doctor whom I eventually married: a turbulent, difficult, and sometimes rewarding marriage. Andreas is an exceptionally skilled doctor; he is also arrogant, quick-tempered, and
inconsiderate, especially of other people’s time—like all doctors, I have sometimes thought.

Our conflicts often have to do with schedules: his conference in Boston versus mine in Chicago; his need for a vacation in February versus mine for time to finish a book, just then. And more ordinary arguments: my dislike of being kept waiting, his wish that I do more cooking. Sometimes even now his hot, heavy body next to mine in bed seems alien, unknown, and I wonder what he is doing there, really. At other times, as I have said, I am deeply stirred by an accidental touching of our hands.

At some of our worst moments I think of leaving Andreas; this would be after an especially ugly quarrel, probably fuelled by too much wine, or simply after several weeks of non-communication.

In one such fantasy I do go back to Hilton, and I take up the rest of my life there as a single woman. I no longer teach, I only do research in the library, which is excellent. And I write more books. I imagine that I see a lot of Popsie Hooker; I might even become the sort of “good daughter” to her that I was so far from being to my own mother. And sometimes in this fantasy I buy the house that we used to live in, the rambling house down the highway, in the valley. I have imagined it as neglected, needing paint, new gutters, perhaps even falling apart, everything around it overgrown and gone to seed.

Last June, when I had agreed to give a series of lectures at Georgetown, Andreas and I made reservations in a small hotel where we had stayed before, not far from the university. We both like Washington; we looked forward to re-visiting favorite galleries and restaurants. It was one of the many times when we needed a vacation together, and so, as I might have known would happen, this became impossible:
two sick patients got sicker, and although I argued, citing the brilliance and the exceptional competence of his partners (an argument that did not go over very well), Andreas said no, he had to stay in New York, with the kidneys of Mrs. Howell and old Mr. Rosenthal.

I went to Georgetown and to our hotel alone. I called several times, and Andreas and I “made up” what had been a too familiar argument.

In Georgetown, the second day, as I walked alone past those elegantly maintained houses, as I glanced into seductively cloistered, luxuriantly ferned and flowered gardens, some stray scent of privet or a glimpse of a yellow rosebush in full bloom—something reminded me strongly, compellingly of Hilton, and I thought, Well, why not? I could take the train and just stay for a couple of days. That much more time away from Andreas might be to the good, just now. I could stay at the Hilton Inn. I could visit Popsie. I could walk down the highway to our house.

And that is what I did, in more or less that order, except that I saved the visit to Popsie for the last, which turned out to be just as well. But right away I stopped at a travel agency on Wisconsin Avenue, and I bought a ticket to Raleigh, treating myself to a roomette for the five-hour trip; I felt that both ceremony and privacy were required.

I had thought that on the train I would be struck by the deep familiarity of the landscape; at last, that particular soil, that special growth. But actually it was novelty that held me to my window: the wide flat brown shining rivers that we crossed, with their tacky little marinas, small boats, small boys on the banks. Flooded swamps, overgrown with kudzu vines and honeysuckle. I had the curious illusion that one sometimes gets on trains, of traversing an exotic, hitherto untravelled land. I felt myself to be an explorer.

That night I had an unmemorable dinner alone at the inn—which, having been redone, was all unfamiliar to me. I went to bed early, slept well.

Sometime in the night, though, I did wake up with the strange and slightly scary thought that in a few years I would be as old as my mother was when she died, and I wondered what, if anything, that fact had to do with my coming back to Hilton, after all these years.

The next morning’s early air was light and delicate. Dew still shone on the heavy, dark-green shrubbery around the inn, on silver cobwebs, as I set out for my walk—at last! The sky was soft and pale, an eggshell blue. Walking along the still gravelled sidewalk, beside the tarred road that led from the inn out to the highway, I recognized houses; I knew who used to live in almost all of them, and I said those names to myself as I walked along: Hudson, Phipps, Zimmerman, Rogerson, Pittman. I noticed that the old Pittman place was now a fraternity house, with an added sun porch and bright new paint, bright gold Greek letters over the door. In fact, the look of all those houses was one of improvement, up-grading, with their trim lawns, abundant boxwood, their lavish flower beds.

I reached the highway, still on the gravelled walk, and I began the long descent toward my house. The air was still light, and barely warm, although the day to come would be hot. I thought of my dream in Yugoslavia, of this walk, and I smiled, inexplicably happy at just that moment—with no heat, no pain in my heart.

I recognized more houses, and said more names, and I observed that these houses, too, were in splendid shape, all bright and visibly cared for. There was much more green growth than I remembered, the trees were immense, and I thought, Well, of course; they’ve had time to grow.

No one seeing me as I walked there could know or guess that that was where I used to live, I thought. They would see—a tall thin woman, graying, in early middle age, in a striped gray cotton skirt, gray shirt. A woman looking intently at everything, and smiling to herself.

And then, there before me was our house. But not our house. It, too, had been repainted—all smartened up with bright white paint and long black louvred shutters, now closed against the coming heat and light. Four recent-model sports cars, all imported, were parked in the driveway, giving the place a recreational, non-familiar air. A group of students, I thought; perhaps some club? The surrounding trees were huge; what had been a small and murmurous pine grove at one side of the house now towered over it, thickly green and rustling slightly in a just-arisen morning breeze. No one came out while I stood there, for not very long, but I was sure that there was not a family inside but some cluster of transients—young people, probably, who liked each other and liked the house, but without any deep or permanent attachment.

I continued on my walk, a circle of back roads on which I was pleased to find that I still knew my way, which led at last back to the highway, and up the hill, to the inn.

I had called Popsie Hooker from Washington, and again from the inn, when I got there. She arose from her nap about four in the afternoon, she said, and if I could come out to her house along about then she would be thrilled, just simply thrilled.

By midafternoon it was too hot for another walk, and so I took a taxi out to Popsie’s house, in the direction opposite to mine. I arrived about four-thirty, which I assumed to be along about four in Southernese.

Popsie’s house, the fruit of one of her later marriages, was
by far the most splendid I had yet seen in town: a Georgian house, of ancient soft red brick smartly trimmed in black, with frequent accents of highly polished brass. Magnificent lawns, magnolias, rhododendrons. By the time I got to the door I half expected to be greeted by an array of uniformed retainers—all black, of course.

But it was Popsie herself who opened the door to me—a Popsie barely recognizable, so shrunken and wizened had she become: a small woman withered down to dwarf size, in a black silk dress with grosgrain at her throat, a cameo brooch. She smelled violently of gardenia perfume and of something else that at first I could not place.

“Emma! Emma!” she breathed up into my face, the old blue eyes filming over, and she caught at both my arms and held them in her weak tight grasp. I recognized the second scent, which was sherry.

“You’re
late
,” she next accused me. “Here I’ve been expecting you this whole long after
noon
.”

I murmured apologies, and together we proceeded down the hallway and into a small parlor, Popsie still clutching my arm, her small fierce weight almost tugging me over sideways.

We sat down. The surfaces in that room were all so cluttered with silver and ivory pieces, inlay, old glass, that it could have been an antique shop, or the parlor of a medium. I told Popsie how happy I was to be there, how wonderful Hilton looked.

“Well, you know, it’s become a very fancy place to live. Very
expensive
. Lots of Yankees retiring down here, and fixing up the old houses.”

“Uh, where do the poor people live?”

She laughed, a tiny rasp. “Oh, there you go, talking
liberal
, and you just got here. Well, the poor folks, what’s left of them, have moved out to Robertsville.”

Robertsville was the adjacent town, once predominantly black, and so I next asked, “What about the Negroes?”

“Well, I guess they’ve just sort of drifted back into the countryside, where they came from. But did you notice all the fancy new stores on Main Street? All the restaurants, and the
clothes
?”

We talked for a while about the new splendors of Hilton, and the rudeness of the new Yankees, who did not even go to church—as I thought, This could not be the woman who has been writing to me. Although of course she was—the same Popsie, half tipsy in the afternoon; she probably spent her sober mornings writing letters. This woman was more like the Popsie of my early years in Hilton, that silly little person, my mother’s natural enemy.

Possibly to recall the Popsie of the wonderful letters, I asked about the local rest home. How were things out there?

“Well, I have to tell you. What gripes me the most about that place is that they don’t pay any taxes” was Popsie’s quick, unhelpful response. “Tax-
free
, and you would not believe the taxes I have to pay on this old place.”

“But this place is so beautiful.” I did not add, And you have so much money.

“Well, it is right pretty,” she acknowledged, dipping her head. “But why must I go on and on paying for it? It’s not fair.”

Our small chairs were close together in that crowded, stuffy room, so that when Popsie leaned closer yet to me, her bleary eyes peering up into mine, the sherry fumes that came my way were very strong indeed. And Popsie said, “You know, I’ve always thought you were so beautiful, even if no one else ever thought you were.” She peered again. “Where did you get that beauty, do you think? Your mother never was even one bit pretty.”

More stiffly than I had meant to, I spoke the truth. “Actually
I look quite a lot like my mother,” I told her. And I am not beautiful.