The Solace of Leaving Early (6 page)

*

Just before the streetlights blinked on, Amos saw AnnaLee Braverman walking down the alley toward his porch. She was carrying a basket over her right forearm, as if she’d brought Toto with her. AnnaLee was one of the few people from whom Amos didn’t need to hide his wine glass, which made him especially fond of her. There were, in fact, countless things he appreciated about AnnaLee. He liked her wildness, the way she carried herself like a great ship through the world; her grief, and her great mind; the way she listened in church, her strange vulnerability to her mother. She had a resilient, perfectly normal marriage, she was afraid to drive, and she dreamed primarily in smells. She interested him.

Rising, Amos opened the screen door. “Don’t think I can’t see you haunting my alley, AnnaLee Braverman.”

She raised a hand in surrender. “You caught me.”

“Come on in,” Amos said, gesturing to the wicker furniture on the porch. “Is that a present for me in that basket?”

“As a matter of fact.” AnnaLee sat down in the rocker and opened the basket. “Dill bread. Fresh butter from the dairy. You’re too thin.”

“Hmmmm. I only
look
too thin so people like you will bake for me.” He went into the kitchen and brought out two plates, napkins, and a knife. “In fact, I only became a minister because of the alleged Sunday dinners I would be invited to. I thought I had a whole lifetime of baked ham and fried chicken ahead of me. Glass of wine?”

“No, thanks. Did it work, your food plan?”

“Alas. Now almost every time I’m invited to Sunday dinner by a church member, I’m taken to the café attached to the motel at the edge of Hopwood. It’s no sort of life. Oh Lord, this is good. It’s still
warm
.”

“Thanks. I thought you became a minister because of Kierkegaard.”

“That’s just a vicious rumor. I saw your daughter out walking her dog the other night.”

“Langston.”

“Langston. Yes. How’s it going?”

AnnaLee made a noncommittal sound and looked out at the garden a moment, chewing a piece of bread and considering her answer.

In the two years Amos had known AnnaLee, her children had been nothing more than shadows on her face. There were things he knew; some he heard from AnnaLee herself and some he picked up from people in the church. He knew there was a son, and legal troubles? what was it? and that he’d been gone a long time, ten years or longer. Amos hadn’t paid close enough attention to the gossip. He knew Langston had suffered a breakdown of sorts her senior year in high school. There were no pictures of the children in the house; Taos was virtually never mentioned. While Langston was still away, in school, her relationship with her parents seemed undefined. Amos suspected that AnnaLee’s public distance from her daughter actually belied something unmanageable, and so he never pushed her.

“I don’t know how it’s going,” AnnaLee said. “We still don’t know why she left school, and I don’t dare ask. I’m amazed she made it as long as she did, honestly. When she first left for college I told Walt, could you hand me a napkin, Amos? she’d be back within the year, and there were some touch-and-go moments, but mostly she just breezed right through. Then when she started graduate school I knew the pressure would be too much. I was really afraid for her those first two years. And it seems like I’d just gotten good and worked up about getting her some help and keeping her together and the next thing I knew she’d finished her M.A. and was going straight on for her Ph.D. She had a setback a couple of years ago, but we thought she’d bounced back just fine, and now this. And she was so close. She walked out of her
orals,
Amos.”

“I heard. What do you suppose happened?”

AnnaLee blew a strand of hair off her forehead. “God only knows. She’s bright enough, but unbelievably fragile. She looks, I don’t know. She appears to be sort of tensile, but in fact she’s made of eggshells. And
maddening
. She’s the most maddening child, and yet I can’t possibly confront her or go head-to-head with her, because I’m afraid every moment, Amos, that she might break. Which makes me furious with her, because I feel like she has this tremendous hold over me. I’ve already lost one child, and so she’s allowed to misbehave or withdraw or refuse to get a job, whatever, and I have no options. She’s standing there in front of me, defiant, a know-it-all, quoting depth psychiatry and change philosophers, and I can’t say a word about the contradictions in her own life. Because I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt her. I couldn’t live if anyone hurt her. Listen to me.”

Amos sat up straighter. “I am listening to you.”

“No, I mean listen to me. I brought this bread over because I wanted to check on
you
. I didn’t mean to deliver the Langston treatise. Not yet, anyway.”

“No, no, it’s interesting, really. Has she ever seen a—anyone?”

“Just that first year, after. But I’ve always thought that what was . . . I don’t know. Fixed in her? Her temperament was decided at the very beginning. Delicate. When you have a child like that you just pray they’re never deeply hurt.”

Amos said nothing, but thought: good luck.

“And how are you, actually?”

“I’m fine, AnnaLee.” Amos took a drink of wine, looked away.

“You don’t seem fine. There’s no reason for you to be fine.”

“I,” he began, “well, the children are coming on Friday, right? That’s a reason to pull oneself together. This is also my job.”

AnnaLee’s eyes filled with tears, but she blinked against them.

“It appears,” Amos continued, “that the aunt—Gail? correct?—has had some sort of breakdown, and feels unfit to keep them. A breakdown of the religious variety. Or at least the symptoms involve sacramental symbols. Father Leo called me; I probably shouldn’t say more than that.”

“No. It’s okay—I already know.”

Amos laughed. These
towns
. They simply smoked with gossip.

“I don’t understand,” AnnaLee said, “how Beulah will care for them, as frail as she is.”

“Beulah’s all they have. There’s no other family—well, there’s Jack’s mother, but she has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home—and the only option is to make them wards of the state. Gail was the godmother of both girls. Beulah won’t allow them to be taken away from her, and rightly so.” Amos lifted his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’ll just have to take care of them—I—the church will have to step in. I don’t know anything about children, AnnaLee. I mean to say I know more about small engine repair than I know about children. I’m scared out of my wits. Their damage? Their hearts? How to educate them? I know
a lot
about old people, but . . .” Amos swallowed hard, and didn’t dare go on. He watched AnnaLee lean forward as if she wanted to take his hand—he could almost hear what she wanted to say, that she knew something about children, and would help him—but she seemed to think better of it, and sat back.

“I’ve been thinking about something tonight, Anna. Do you ever feel like you’re home? Because I never have that feeling, which led me to wonder about place, the pull of a particular geography or lifestyle, do you know what I mean? Like Haddington, for instance. There must be a million people, maybe a few million people right this minute, living in cities, or in those wretched, isolated suburbs, who dream of a place like this, these streets and alleys, the way we wander around so freely and know each other and can get from place to place without a car. And the county fair—the parade—all that, the fresh produce and honey all summer. They think they would love to live in this town.”

“And? But?”

“But. But you can’t ever live in the place you dream about, the town you long for. You can’t go there, and I don’t mean like Thomas Wolfe or whatever, I mean the moment you become conscious of your desire, and then fulfill it, it evaporates. Like think of that bluegrass band that plays at the fair every year.”

“The Kitchen Band.”

“Now someone from outside would look at that, at those rustic people, some of them playing washboards or brooms, I don’t understand what they’re doing, plunked down in the middle of a county fair, and they’d see something wonderful, something to be devoutly wished for. But if they moved here and were part of this community, they’d begin to see that band ironically, because really there’s no other way to see it, right?”

“Irony is our best hope, yes.”

“And the moment you see something ironically, you’re neither in it nor is it in you. You don’t belong to the town and nothing in the town belongs to you. One is either perfectly present and entirely innocent of one’s own contentment (which is remarkably like not being content) or one is aware, and thus distanced, and no longer at home or happy. Am I wrong?”

AnnaLee stood and picked up her basket. “I’ll have to think about it. But you’ll stay, right? You’re not going to flee because your vision is ironic? Because I can see you moving from place to place, each one more isolated or bizarre than the last, in some desperate attempt to meet what is ultimately more real than your ability to perceive it.”

Amos opened the door for her, smiling his closed-mouth smile. “We’re all doing the best we can, aren’t we?” he asked AnnaLee, as she stepped down onto the slate flagstones.

“Yes, we are,” she said, and walked into the darkness of the alley.

Chapter 6

LANGSTON AT WORK

The streets of Haddington were so deeply imprinted on Langston’s consciousness she could have conducted her morning constitutional if suddenly stricken by blindness. Some days she spent her walk in a cloud of wonder about the people and the lives behind their doors. She tried to imagine penetrating any one of the houses—Clara Lodge’s house, for instance—and making her way first into the living room, and then into the deeper sanctuary of the house, and then into the secret places, like the hope chest where Clara kept, perhaps, old letters and moth-eaten baby blankets, and then into Clara’s head and heart, her knowledge of herself. Clara was patrician and widowed, her one daughter dead of cancer, and she stood quite elegantly and kept her hair dyed blue-black. Langston admitted to herself she knew nothing of Clara, and she nothing of Langston, and yet Langston was sometimes able to stand in front of this modest home and picture herself flying like an arrow through Clara’s life and into her very body, where Langston felt she might understand the manifold resonances of Clara’s life.

Mostly Langston didn’t wonder about her neighbors. Mostly she suspected there was little to know, and so she spent her walk engaged in more fruitful enterprises. On this particular day she was pondering the question of faith, religious faith, and where it was located and how one approached it. There were many theories, some erudite and some homespun, about how one arrived at a position of faith, but for Langston there was only one: Kierkegaard’s. The Leap. Kierkegaard’s
infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity
eliminated the possibility of a gradual approach. The leap of faith was an existential act that contained in its very execution, perhaps, an apprehension of eternity? Langston wondered. She tried to consider the other approach, the way it might happen in a life that one could spend years weaving toward a miracle, moving forward then dropping away with a little sideways feint, as if being watched by a man-eating beast, and how finally, with just a few steps to go, one would leap into the jaws and be changed forever.
Sola fide,
Luther said. The question of faith plagued her because literature was her religion, and she was curious about the reader’s relationship to a text. It struck her that we come to texts in the same way we come to God, either as leapers or tremblers, and that such a decision affected the way we . . .

Langston came to her senses just in time to realize she was about to trip on the broken sidewalk in front of her own house. In heaven she would ponder a thing as long as she pleased, and she would eliminate these sidewalks. As she stepped up on the front porch she could sense a sort of urgency in the air, not an atmosphere she ordinarily associated with her childhood home. The minute she walked in the door she knew her mama had taken some of Jolene Fletcher’s diet pills, because AnnaLee had set up the ironing board and was pressing Walt’s underwear, and all the lamp shades were off the lamps and piled next to the vacuum cleaner.

“Grandma Wilkey is coming, isn’t she?” Langston asked, adopting a tone both knowing and sympathetic, like one might use with a frightened child. One thing Langston wanted her mother to understand was that she understood the whole scenario, rich with human pathos, for what it was.

AnnaLee nodded but didn’t look up. She continued to iron the boxers with a strange ferocity. Walt would put them on the next day or the day after and never see or feel or recognize that she’d ironed them, and then he’d slide on his blue work pants and head off to work.

“And may I also assume Jolene gave you two of those blue pills and that you took them both?” Jolene lived in the house behind them, on Plum Street, and was a registered nurse at a small clinic in Hopwood. She was a generous soul, and stole samples of whatever was needed to keep her community running smoothly.

“May I ask what Grandma Wilkey wants of us today?” Langston was referring to AnnaLee’s own mother, her flesh and blood, although the way her mother panicked whenever Grandma Wilkey came to town would have caused anyone to think they were discussing a mother-in-law.

AnnaLee straightened up and blew a strand of hair out of her face, then returned to the boxers, ironing as if the Devil were on the case. “Well, Langston, she is coming to inspect. She’s coming to see if there is dust in the pineapples on the posts at the end of the bed she gave me when I left home because she doesn’t give anything away with a free heart and clearly that bed still belongs to her. She’s coming to say, ‘What on earth have you done with Mother’s teapot,’ and I’ll say, ‘There it is, where it always is, inside the china cupboard,’ and she’ll say, ‘Isn’t it a shame it can’t be in a more graceful spot and what a shame people no longer take tea.’ And then I’ll offer her a cup of tea and all I’ll have is Constant Comment and she’ll make a face but drink it and treat me like I’m a brave soul, having failed so completely after all.”

“Oh, dear; you are speaking rapidly.”

“I don’t have much time.”

“Mama,” Langston said, approaching the ironing board, then thinking better of it. “Grandma Wilkey is yet another type of person overrepresented in literature, in my opinion . . . can you hear me in your current state? . . . which she would never of course know because one would be hard-pressed to name a single book she’d ever read. I don’t know that she’d read a novel even under threat of death.” Speaking of death, Langston nearly confessed that she was waiting for her grandmother to die, because rumors abounded that Grandma Wilkey had over the years tucked away hoards of cash in picturesque receptacles like coffee cans, mostly under the floorboards of her bedroom. Langston didn’t want the money—she had no use for it—but she did want to know if the story was true. Her grandmother lived in a Civil War–era brick farmhouse west of Hopwood, between Hopwood and Jonah, on three hundred acres she oversaw when Langston’s grandfather was alive and which she continued to cash-rent to farmers who used pesticides with abandon. When the farmers market opened every summer, Grandma Wilkey’s land produced the most robust and photogenic fruits and vegetables in three counties.

“I say overrepresented in literature because she’s shallow and has a misplaced sense of aristocracy. She is wealthy but miserly, and is a woman who takes pleasure in devastating other women. She heaves her metaphoric weight around with an imperiousness that causes my own mother to resort to drugs, of which I heartily disapprove.”

AnnaLee switched from the boxers to handkerchiefs, the use of which Langston found horrifying, but concluded that was a lecture best saved for a day when there weren’t more pressing disapprovals at hand.

“I heartily disapprove of you taking drugs, Mama.”

“They aren’t drugs, Langston,” AnnaLee said, quite speedily for a usually relaxed woman. “Jolene calls them ‘pep pills’ and I believe they are used entirely in the aid of dieting.”

“Are you ‘dieting’?” Langston asked. It was a sham, this weight loss excuse. The women of Haddington were universally chunky and none of them seemed to notice. But when the occasion demanded it, such as a graduation party or in order to rev up for a parade, they suddenly found themselves in need of weight loss pharmaceuticals.

“I am today.” AnnaLee put an end to Langston’s attempt at her reformation, and for a moment Langston was so disoriented she saw stars. She took shallow breaths and rubbed the palms of her hands against her blue jeans. Still? It was still okay, she thought, to find a way around (
the way through the world is harder than the way around it
, Wallace Stevens said) the most intractable elements of their life there in Haddington, around their history? The tranquilizers, the fertilizers, the diet pills . . .

“Well,” Langston said, swallowing hard. “How much time do I have before she arrives?” Of course she had plans for a sunny day in May, but she would have to sacrifice them for the sake of her mother’s mental health, such as it was.

“At four o’clock.”

“Okay. It’s eleven now. What are you going to do for five hours, what is your plan? Because if you choose to straighten the crawl spaces you’re on your own. I absolutely will not retrieve you from under the house again.” She tried to sound firm. “And where is my father?”

“He’s at work, but he came home and got that lamp, the one that belonged to Aunt Tilda, it shorted out again and he’s trying to fix it in the shop. If Mother finds out it’s not working, she’ll—”

Langston walked toward her mother, bravely risking AnnaLee’s frenzied use of an extremely hot, weapon-shaped implement. The whole situation moved Langston to a fit of compassion she could barely negotiate. “Grandma Wilkey will do nothing, she can do nothing.” AnnaLee no longer allowed Langston to read to her from Freud and Jung, and so Langston had, of late, begged her mother to delve into popular psychology. As much as it pained her, the pandering and imprecise language of Personal Growth, Langston believed her mother could do with some
empowering
where Grandma Wilkey was concerned. “Grandma is an old and bitter woman. Picture this with me, if you will. Picture the day she dies, and after the funeral procession has wound out of the cemetery like a black ribbon, stay with me, Mama, we shall all go back to her house and have a picnic on her big front yard. There will be lemonade and molasses cookies and little diamond-shaped ham salad sandwiches and everyone will be both happier and richer. And then when we all get to heaven we’ll be reunited with her and she’ll be greatly improved.”

AnnaLee sighed and looked up. Langston gently covered her mother’s hand with her own and lifted the iron from the already singed handkerchief. AnnaLee had been known to set clothes aflame. “How is that supposed to make me feel better? Thinking of my mother’s funeral? What is wrong with you, Langston?”

“It’s supposed to comfort you for a variety of reasons. One. Grandma Wilkey is mortal, and in front of you at Death’s ticket window. Two. Her calculating and graceless use of her riches, which cause you so much pain now, will entirely profit you upon her death. Three. The nicest thing I could think to say about her is that she will eventually die.”

“But sweetheart, that’s your failing, not hers. Don’t you see? in this equation you’re drawing you’ve left out the principal variables; namely, that she loved only three people in her life—her husband, her son, and her grandson—and she lost them all. It’s her losses, Langston, that’s what we’re left with. That’s why she’s so, I don’t know. Hatchetlike.”

“But that is . . . I’m sorry, but is that not the human condition? Are we not all left with our losses?” Langston didn’t dare mention her mother’s own. “All I’m trying to say is that Grandma has no power over you. She has no power because she has no strength, and she has no strength because she has no gentleness, and therefore you must not fear her, but face her as the desperate and lonely old woman she really is.”

AnnaLee looked at Langston a long blank time. “I thought I might get through the day without a sermonette, but I see it was not to be.” She cast aside the ruined handkerchief, then walked over and dropped down onto the old brown sofa, causing clouds of dust to rise around her like smoke. “Your grandma is not old, not really. She’s only seventy-seven, and her own mother lived to be nearly a hundred. And she is anything but lonely. She has her Flower Club, her quilting circle, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary at the Presbyterian church in Jonah. She has no need for more friends or more activity.”

“Yes, Mom! But consider what Paul Tillich says. He tells us that—”

Instead of seeing in her mother’s eyes that long-dreamed-of glint of intellectual recognition, the one that would signal, finally, that AnnaLee had returned to herself after such a long absence, she just tilted her head back against the couch and blew air out of her cheeks, staring at the ceiling, which was peeling and cracked, and said, “For the love of God, how many times will I have to hear that Paul Tillich lecture? How many? Would you read someone else for a while and abuse me with him?”

Langston squinted at her coolly. She could, in fact, and her mother perfectly well knew it, abuse her with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer and Niebuhr and Buber and Meister Eckhart, Nietzsche and Hume and Hegel, to name a scant few. AnnaLee was getting off lightly because she was drugged.

“Besides,” AnnaLee continued, “and I’ve said this many times, Grandma Wilkey doesn’t seem to be affected by her hypothetical brokenness, Lan, and I can’t see as how anything else really matters.”

“No, you’re right. I acquiesce.” Langston knelt before her mother, resting her hands on AnnaLee’s knees. AnnaLee looked at her with interest. Her pupils were quite small.

“But!” Langston said, raising a finger. “The fact of her brokenness might matter in the way you look at and deal with her. The fact of it, your knowing of it, might lessen her power over you, and voilà! What is only imagined—her powerlessness—becomes manifest. Remember the words of the Gnostic Jesus, I forget which book: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ ”

“It was Thomas.”

“Yes, the Book of Thomas.”

“And anyway, the Gnostic Jesus? From a girl who refuses to go to church with her mother?”

“As if church has anything to do with Jesus.” Langston stood and held out her hand to her mother. “Off your haunches woman. Those drugs won’t last forever and there are rugs to beat.”

AnnaLee took Langston’s hand but didn’t rise. “Sweetheart, sometimes I feel, well,
often
I feel that you’re talking to me as honestly as you know how, and yet everything you say is in code. Or maybe it’s more like you’re trying to say something to me as you pass by in a speeding car.”

Langston frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ve begun to feel,” AnnaLee rubbed her forehead vigorously, as if she had a headache, “that we’ll never get it said, is all, that we’ll continue to just skim past each other, that everything is impossible and time is too short.”

Langston looked around the room as if she might be able to find the thing she seemed to be missing. “I still don’t know what you mean.”