The Solace of Leaving Early (8 page)

“Yes, this is a new rinse. I’m pleased with it.”

“And your jewelry is very becoming today.”

“This is my mother’s strand of pearls and matching earrings. Cultured pearls, of course, none of those freshwater counterfeits everyone is so mad about. Some women won’t wear pearls after Memorial Day but I think that’s ridiculous. If you have them, wear them, I say. There’s never an occasion that can’t be improved with lovely jewelry. I see you still don’t wear jewelry.”

“No, no. I’m not much interested in adornments. Would you like to know why?”

“Where is your mother?” Grandma Wilkey reached up and smoothed her brow with her hands. She still had a manicure once a week in Jonah, and now her fingernails were painted the same color as her pearls. Her hands were lovely, the fingers long and tapered, and Langston could tell that she was accustomed to gesturing in ways that flattered them. A delicate chain hung from her platinum watch. After she had completed her gesture of impatience, she looked Langston in the eye and gave her a pursed-lip smile. Her eyes were even bluer than her hair.

Langston felt like laughing. “Grandma, you are a
beautiful
woman.”

Her grandmother sat up even straighter and smoothed her skirt again. “Well, I try. I’ve done the most with what God gave me and I always say—”

AnnaLee turned the corner of the staircase and made herself available to her mother. She was wearing her favorite housedress, a light brown with yellow flowers that gathered under her ample breasts and hung in folds almost to the floor. It was sleeveless, and her large, tan, muscular arms seemed to go on forever. She was barefoot, and she had gathered her hair up into a twist that was already collapsing. Langston sighed. Her mother held her hand out toward Grandma Wilkey and Langston noticed again her mother’s flat, blunt nails. Her hands were so strong they could have belonged to a man.

“Mother, it’s so nice—”

“Now AnnaLee, I would advise you to become more punctual. I’ve been sitting here for almost twenty minutes.”

“But you said you’d be here—”

“I know what I said, and I thought I taught you better than to keep your guests waiting.”

“Grandma, I think Mother is trying to say that if
you
had been on time—”

AnnaLee said, “Langston!”

Her grandmother said, “Langston!”

Langston rose. “Shall I start the tea?”

Her grandmother sniffed and looked at the floor. “Your mother hasn’t even offered me any tea.”

“Would you like some tea, Mother?”

“I don’t know. What kind do you have?”

“We have Constant Comment. Would that be all right?”

Grandma Wilkey took a deep breath. “That’s what we drank during the Depression, if memory serves. Well, you make do with what you have.”

AnnaLee turned and began to take cups and saucers out of the china cupboard.

“Is that my mother’s teapot in there, AnnaLee?” her mother asked. As she stood to her full height, Langston realized her grandmother was at least an inch and maybe two taller than she, which made her tall indeed for a woman in her seventies.

AnnaLee turned and looked at Langston, who gave a small shrug.

“Grandma, isn’t it a shame that Mama has to keep it in such a humble cabinet?”

Her grandmother tugged at the corners of her linen jacket, straightening the lines. “That dog isn’t coming near the table, is it? I have never in my life allowed an animal in my house.”

*

With their tea AnnaLee served small ham salad sandwiches and cantaloupe, which Langston thought was lovely, but her grandmother didn’t eat much of anything. She claimed to be feeling peckish at odd hours of the day and night, but never at mealtimes.

Their visit was winding down; Grandma Wilkey had exhausted her inventory of criticism and was about to start asking very pointed questions about Walt and his potential for better employment, so Langston leapt in.

“Grandma, Mama thinks this new minister, Amos Townsend, is all the rage.”

“Has anyone seen my keys?”

“I think they’re on the coffee table, Mother.”

“What do you think, Grandma? Have you met him?”

“I don’t see them on the coffee table.”

“Well, I do. That’s your Daughters of Job key chain, isn’t it?”

“I can see perfectly well! And I do not see them on the coffee table!”

“And isn’t it a shame about Alice Baker? Did you attend the funeral, Grandma?”

Her grandmother folded her napkin and slid it under her plate. “It’s a
horrible
thing. Never would have happened in my day. Oh, I imagine if your granddad were alive, what he’d think.”

“It never would have happened in your day? I’ve always assumed death was general over Indiana.”

AnnaLee walked over and picked up her mother’s keys off the coffee table. “Here they are.”

Grandma Wilkey pushed her chair out and stood up impatiently. “Where were they?”

“They were on the coffee table, Gran—”

“They were on the floor, Mother, where you couldn’t see them.”

“That dog probably got ahold of them,” Grandma Wilkey said, snapping her purse shut. “I’m going to have to have this suit cleaned.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Grandma, Germane is the most intelligent, noble—”

“Langston,” AnnaLee said, raising her hands to heaven, “does this have to happen
every single time
my mother visits?”

“No, it certainly does not,” Langston said, more archly than she intended. “Grandma could simply learn to behave herself and then none of—”

“I’m going.” Her grandmother strode toward the door. She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Well. Come kiss me, you two.”

AnnaLee walked over and kissed her mother on the cheek and then Langston did the same. She didn’t kiss them back, but she slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Langston’s hand. “Buy yourself some nice clothes, dear. You’re a very pretty girl. Don’t slouch.”

Langston stood straighter.

“And AnnaLee, I assume the minute there’s word, any word, you’ll—”

“Mother, of course—”

Langston stood frozen, watching her mother and grandmother in the complicated dance of opening the door. So much was being said so quickly, and so late in the afternoon. Her grandmother seemed to be grimacing, and her hand slipped from the doorknob. Langston involuntarily thought of Cubism—and it was a comfort to her, to be reminded of such a construction—the way we perceive in an instant the table from every possible angle, even what lies beneath. Because the whole story was right there in front of her and had been so the whole worried day: all her grandmother’s loved ones
(all my pretty ones? Did you say all?),
the truly loved—her husband dead of a stroke at sixty; her son, the beautiful Jesse, choked in his high chair; and Taos, the one she maybe held most dear of all—were taken from her and she was left with just this
rind
. And she would never forgive them. AnnaLee, the pale replacement, and Langston, the invisible. And Walt? His was a life sentence.

Langston and her mother watched Grandma Wilkey walk down the front steps, taking them slowly, and climb into her 1978 Lincoln Town Car, which had been and remained snow white. Langston had once heard her father comment to her mother that Grandma’s car was bigger than the trailer they and Taos lived in before they bought the house in Haddington. The Lincoln started with a heavy purr, and they watched as Grandma Wilkey very carefully negotiated her way out. It took a long time, even though there were absolutely no obstacles in her path. She could have just driven away.

Chapter 7

FLIGHT

After his first meeting with Jack alone, Amos wrote: “Hyperabundant attachment formation; boundary disorder; abandonment,” all of which had been just shorthand, a way for Amos to remember his first impres-sions without transcribing the taped recordings he made of counseling sessions. Jack was neither simple nor stupid, and Amos could see why Alice would have chosen him, especially at so young an age. Who better to marry than someone who believed in marriage more than he believed in anything else?

Jack could remember, or thought he could remember, the genesis of his desire for a family: he was nineteen, working on a dairy farm, still living at home with his parents, Max and Edna Maloney. Like Alice, Jack had been an only child born late in his parents’ life, and he’d grown up in the particular silence of preestablished routines. The ghost of Max and Edna’s childless years seemed to follow Jack everywhere: vacations they’d taken before he was born; aunts and uncles who died before he’d met them; the dogs his parents, thinking they’d never have a baby, raised and loved and buried. Max worked in a tool-and-die for thirty-five years (when he retired they gave him a windbreaker), and Edna was a homemaker, very devoted to inspirational verse. She took up counted cross stitch as a way to incorporate verses into wall hangings, and later she learned needlepoint.

Jack often felt there simply wasn’t room for him in his parents’ history, and they must have felt that way, too, because they compensated with too intense a devotion. Edna saved every piece of paper Jack doodled on as a child, every ribbon he won in track, all of his outgrown clothes and shoes. Each room in their small house contained a shrine to Jack: a cluster of school pictures around his bronzed baby shoes, his trophies in a frozen row on top of the piano. Rather than making him feel secure, as they had hoped, his parents’ efforts only made Jack feel more alone, as if his life were not his own but a testimony to Max and Edna’s remarkable good luck, their ability to succeed at having a family.

Then, at nineteen, he volunteered to help his young neighbors, Chris and Becky Duncan, move from the small house they rented next to his parents to a larger house on the other side of town. Becky was pregnant and they needed more room, they told him, when he arrived at eight in the morning on a Saturday. Chris said, “We’ve been up since six, packing the rest of the stuff we didn’t get finished last night.” Becky told Jack, “We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your help.” Jack said he didn’t mind, and started carrying boxes out to his truck. The first was labeled: Kitchen, Silverware, Dish Towels, and Junk Drawer. Something stirred in Jack, an unrecognizable feeling. After a few trips to the truck he walked back into the living room and simply stopped moving. What was wrong with him? Was he too hot, too thirsty, had he slept poorly? And then he heard Becky say, “Sweetheart? Are we taking this little nightstand the previous people left here?” And he knew, just like that (or so he told Amos), that he had fallen in love. What he’d fallen in love with was the idea of an adult life, the strange notion that the articles in a box marked “Kitchen, Silverware,” contained not someone else’s life (like his parents’) and not Jack’s life alone, but Jack’s whole heart in combination with the heart of another, no dividing line between what he owned and what she owned. Their house. Their baby. Their Junk Drawer.

“Would you say,” Amos asked him, “that you’d been particularly intense or romantic as a younger man? In high school?”

He was intense, maybe, but Jack assured Amos he had not been ro-mantic. He’d been an athlete, had lettered in four varsity sports, and so had not had much time for girls. He’d dated, but very casually, and usually in a group.

“So you’d never been in love when you had this insight?”

Not only had Jack never been in love, girls had seemed completely foreign to him, impossibly far away. In the mid to late seventies girls still had secrets, he told Amos. They hadn’t learned to completely expose themselves, and no one had taught him how to see them, or else it just wasn’t in him to see.

“You fell in love with the concept of marriage before you’d ever loved a girl?”

Jack nodded. That was about the size of it.

*

It had taken him another eleven years to find Alice (all through the eighties, a ridiculous time for a man like Jack to look for a bride) and by then he was nearly out of his head with longing and worry. In that time he’d bought the Masons’ dairy farm, where he’d worked since high school, after the bank foreclosed. His father had been killed in a car accident; his mother was showing signs of dementia, and had moved in with her sister, Gail, and Jack had inherited their house in Haddington, which he sold to buy a farmhouse on the Crooked Tree Pike. By the age of thirty he owned a home on ten acres of land, a dairy farm, a brand-new truck, and had ten thousand dollars in a savings account.

“For what?” Amos asked. “What were you saving the money for?”

Jack looked puzzled. “For my children’s college fund. Oh, I forgot,” he’d said, laughing, “you don’t have kids.”

“Neither did you.”

*

A breeze blew in the open study window facing Plum Street; Amos had been able to sit without moving for long periods, many days now. Already today he had lost more than an hour of the afternoon, just dropped it, his body completely still, his heart beating without any consent from him.

Amos can reconstruct the day Jack met Alice as if he’d been there. He heard it from both of them, and their stories were consistent: how Jack was in church (Amos’s church, before Jack converted to Catholicism), bored, restless as if he had a grievance, how Alice, nineteen years old and home for the weekend from art school in In- dianapolis, had walked in with Beulah. Alice, Jack said, had been wearing a pink sweater with short sleeves, and a black skirt. She was wearing a black headband and pink lipstick and just the slightest trace of makeup on those beautiful brown eyes, and she and Beulah sat down in front of him. He fell half in love with her from behind, he said, just looking at the curve of her neck, and then, out of the blue, she’d turned around and smiled at him.

Amos pictured that heartbreaking overbite, those dimples, a flock of white birds taking flight. “And your world shifted? Is that it?”

“She was just the one,” Jack said, looking miserable.

*

Amos had his top desk drawer open and his hand on the small cassette tape before he realized what he was doing. Just to hear her voice. Just to check his memory. His hand shook as he slipped the tape into the microrecorder he used for pastoral counseling sessions. He hesitated before pushing play, a moment the length of a monkey’s paw, imagining Alice limping up his darkened staircase, returned to Amos from her civil war, not quite whole. Then he pushed play anyway.

“I went to church with Mom, I saw him when we first walked into church, the back of his head is sort of broad and flat and his hair is straight and honey-colored, that’s what I noticed first. He was tanned and wearing a white shirt and he took up a lot of the pew with his, I’m not sure what to call it, his maleness. He looked more like a man than anyone I’d ever met, I can’t remember my own father. We sat down in the pew in front of him and I could hear him breathing and then I could sense that he’d stopped breathing? stopped making some essential movement? and for a moment I thought, well, there goes that one, I’ve killed him. It was the pink sweater. All girls should have one. And I wasn’t looking for him at all, I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted to go to art school and then out into the world, and I wasn’t used to having any power, I’d been a plain girl. Inside I felt like a plain girl. And my mom suddenly seemed very nervous, sitting there, looking at me like I should do something, I don’t know what she thought was happening, but the look on her face was really dramatic, it struck me as funny. That’s what was going through my head when I turned around: that I’d killed him and ought to turn around and apologize, and then wondering if he could see Mom’s face, all anxious like she was standing at the edge of fate, and I was going to say something funny, I can’t remember what, but when I turned around he was looking at me in an amazing way, his beautiful face, the curve of his mouth, I felt like I was looking at my own sweet, sweet children. That’s what happened. I saw my children, and I smiled at them.”

Amos pushed stop, then sat back in his chair and waited for the afternoon to let go of him, these days he was living in.