The Uses of Enchantment (2 page)

Mary remained determined to forge an emotional connection with her sisters.

“How about that sermon?” Mary said, referring to Reverend Whittemore’s selection from the New Testament—
For one believes he can eat all things, but he who is weak eats only vegetables
—offered, she suspected, as biblical proof that their mother’s subsistence diet of white wine and pickles had been a more decisive element in her demise than the melanoma.

“He reads that sermon at every funeral,” Regina said. “Once he called the dead person, who was a man, ‘Beloved Phyllis.’ ”

Gaby yawned.

“Do you remember in junior choir how Reverend Whittemore smelled like embalming fluid?” Regina said. “The old perv was always hugging me after we sang ‘Praise Him! Praise Him!’ saying, ‘How the heavens applaud you my dear!’ ”

“Blick,” Gaby said through shards of Triscuit.

“At least Aunt Helen almost made it through her poem without crying,” Mary said. She didn’t mention Regina’s poem, written specifically for Mum’s funeral. The most truthful response she could muster, as she and Regina and Gaby waited for Dad to bring the car around after the service, had been: “It was so brave of you to read that.”

“Or plugging her herbal grief tea,” Regina said.

“I thought Healthy Acceptance filed for bankruptcy,” Mary said.

“Dad bailed her out, which is why we have seventeen cases of grief tea in the attic,” Regina said. “Where have you been? Oh right. You were
out West
.”

“When Aunt Helen cries,” Mary said, ignoring the dig, “I wonder how anyone could ever appear convincingly sad.”

“Which I guess explains why you didn’t even bother to try,” Regina said. “Gaby, where did you get that awful suit?”

“Mum’s closet,” Gaby said. “Is grief tea supposed to make you feel grief or make you not feel it?”

“Not feel grief,” Mary said dully. “I think.”

“That’s not Mum’s suit,” Regina said. “Mum hated navy.”

Gaby turned her suit coat inside out to reveal a green ribbon tied to the
DRY CLEAN ONLY
tag. Their father had donated the house’s contents to the historical society for auctioning and an overly apologetic volunteer had come around the previous day to tag the desirable items with ribbons. To be safe, the volunteer had overdone the job, or maybe, given she knew the wake was to be held at 34 Rumney Marsh, she saw herself doubling as decorator for the occasion. All four legs of the couch were adorned with ribbon, both andirons, both candlesticks, the lamp bases and the lamp shades and even the spare box of light bulbs, every individual kitchen item (eggbeater, potato masher, potato peeler, wine key), the collection of circa 1979–1983
Association of Descendants of the American Witch
newsletters stacked beneath the rattan coffee table.

“So,” Regina said, “speaking of not feeling grief, has anyone checked on Dad recently?”

“I’ll go,” Mary offered, relieved to escape the hostile tedium of her sisters’ company; it depressed her too intensely and made her feel abrased by an all-body loneliness. In the three years since Mary and Regina and Gaby had been together in the same room, nothing had changed. She tried to rekindle the heart-wrenching warmth she’d imagined feeling toward her sisters as she walked down the airplane exit ramp to their teary reunion, but instead found herself irked by Regina’s self-centered prickliness and Gaby’s wrathful apathy. Despite how she’d envisioned this homecoming—horribly sad, yes, stilted, yes, but glinting with the potential for everyone to recast themselves as expansively generous and affectionate people—the remaining Veal family members, herself included, hadn’t really shown themselves capable of improvement.

Mary passed through the living room, her mobile presence registered only by the way the guests she neared strived to more actively ignore her. She split the curtains behind the punch table expecting to see her father, Clyde Veal, still stationed on the front lawn directing parking, but he’d abandoned his post; since his departure, guests had parked along the north side of the street, ignoring the fliers he’d taped to the streetlamps in order to avoid the territorial wrath of the neighbor Mum had christened Ye Olde Bastard. Eventually she found him, fingers pittering against his key-filled pockets, waiting in the foyer to receive coats, even though people had long since stopped arriving.

Dad
, she started to say. But the two of them had pointedly arranged never to be alone without a chaperone since her arrival so, in fairness to him, she chose to “check on Dad” from behind the broken grandfather clock. He opened the door and peered down the street as if expecting a calvacade of mourners to turn onto Rumney Marsh and invade the house in desperate need of a coat-check attendant. Her father hadn’t invited any of his work acquaintances from St. Hugh’s today, nor any of his golf cronies from the public golf range, a nonselective, dress-code-free club overlooking a swamp that boasted, among its members, a gay couple and an acquitted child abuser. Her father maintained his connection with the local working-class community while respecting Mum’s unspoken hope that these people never be invited to their house. So it was in deference to Mum, she assumed, that he’d failed to invite his friends. Or it was for some more complicated, self-defeating reason.

Mary knew without ever needing to be told: her father was a self-made lonely man.

She would tell her sisters, when they asked how he was:
Dad is Dad.
This diagnosis, transferably applicable to all of them, they would understand.

Mary returned to the living room, dodging the two hors d’oeuvres platters wielded at her neck height by the waspy widowed caterers. Did even
they
refuse to see her? How many years had it been? A stupid question. She knew how many years. Everyone in the room knew how many years. Fourteen years to the day. The waspy widowed caterers offered toothpicks and colored finger napkins to the guests, who seemed relieved to be interrupted from their non-conversations. People emptied their cups of gin punch so they could get a refill and have something to do. Not that funeral receptions were judged by the same standards as other social gatherings, but even given Mary’s exceptionally low expectations for this event, it was proving to be a dud.

Though not a regular smoker, Mary needed a cigarette.

“Excuse me,” Mary said to Fran Bigelow, Mum’s tennis partner and a relentless chimney, currently hurrying past her en route to the bathroom. Mrs. Bigelow—
Such hand-eye!
she remembered Mum marveling—sprung sideways as though Mary had attempted to stab her with an hors d’oeuvre fork; as Mrs. Bigelow continued to move in a diagonal vector at a near-tripping pace, her heel caught in the loop of green ribbon extending from the handle of the decorative coal hod. Her heel acted like a catapult; her next forward step hurled the coal hod into the fireplace, where the hod cleanly picked off both andirons and landed on its side with a deafening crash.

Conversations halted.

“Whoopsy!” Mrs. Bigelow said, staring damningly at Mary.

Mary froze. She, who had been previously so invisible, was suddenly aggressively seen. Mum’s Wellesley College Alumnae Association friends, Mum’s Semmering Academy PTA colleagues, Mum’s historical society co-workers, the spouses, the distant cousins, all of them eyed her with a familiar blank probity. Exuberantly, she returned their gazes. She’d forgotten how enjoyable it was to dislike these people and was invigorated by the reminder. Cocktail parties notwithstanding, their preferred pastime was making others feel eternally shitty about themselves. These emotionally mummified, blank-eyed, sorry people. How easy it was to blame them for her troubles with her mother. How much easier it was to blame them than to blame a more deserving party: herself, for example.

She rewarded the lot of them with a grotesquely buoyant smile.

“Strike!” she said.

In the hallway, her father stifled a hiccup.

Aunt Helen—three, maybe four drinks deep into the afternoon—rushed from the kitchen, silk skirt thudding on her apparent wind as she pincered Mary by the elbow and steered her to a vacant space near the punch bowl.

A gossipy buzz engulfed them.

“Not recommended today?” Aunt Helen said. “Irreverence.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Mary lied. “It’s what Mum would have said.”

Aunt Helen refilled her punch glass. Her wardrobe clashed as loudly as her interests in curative teas and gin drinks: a silk Ikat skirt blandified by a gum-colored twinset and a gold frog pin from the local purveyor of preppy, The House of Walsh.

“Also not recommended today?” she said. “Presuming to speak for your mother.”

You’re one to talk
, Mary wanted to say, but didn’t. Aunt Helen was a shadowy pro at expressing her own feelings by attributing them to others. Usually she employed her standard poodle, Weegee, for this purpose, to wit:
Weegee’s feeling neglected today, isn’t he?
But today Weegee was with her neighbors, and Aunt Helen needed a Weegee surrogate. Mary apparently fit the bill.

“Not that your extreme inappropriateness isn’t understandable. You must be
devastated
,” said Aunt Helen. “Refusing to see you before she died. But that’s just so
Paula
, isn’t it? She didn’t give two hoots about anyone’s feelings except her own.”

“What can you expect from terminally ill conflict avoiders?” Mary said lightly. The truth was, she’d been blindsided by her mother’s refusal to see her, expecting, as inane as it sounded, to share some sort of pablum closure moment with her in the Lillian P. Rudy Memorial Cancer Wing, as the candy stripers wept and the oncologists did a mournful soft-shoe and her mother, the most pablum-free individual on the planet, clasped her hand and said…this is where the absurdity of her fantasy overrode the actual fantasy. Which didn’t mean the failure of the fantasy to be met, to ever be met, hadn’t left her feeling bludgeoned.

“You must be angry with her,” Aunt Helen said. “I imagine you’re very, very angry.”

Aunt Helen widened her smudgy eyes tellingly, then shudder-gulped twice in rapid succession before appearing to cease breathing altogether. She released Mary’s elbow and waved at her—Mary stared, bewildered, until she realized Aunt Helen wanted her cocktail napkin. Aunt Helen exhaled loudly, using the napkin to dab at her tearless face.

Across the room, Mary saw Regina and Gaby exchange a look that told her they were bonding over the hating of other people. Aunt Helen. Mary. Even their own father, who had excused himself from his nonexistent coat-check duties. Now he was playing with a second cousin’s baby beneath the portrait of Mum’s eighth great-grandmother, Abigail Lake, a suspected witch executed at Gallows Hill in 1692 and yet to be officially pardoned by the state of Massachusetts—and, notably, the only item in the living room without a green ribbon. Baby as grief shield, Mary thought, no funeral should be without a baby. Her father bounced the baby on his knee, he fake walked it across the carpet, he absentmindedly played with its left ear, squashing it in half and unsquashing it at seemingly intentional intervals as though he were sending Morse code to a guest across the room.

She watched as Regina approached their father and asked him if he’d like another punch. He smiled toward a longitude of unoccupied airspace; he’d been smiling at no one in particular since he woke up that morning, surrounded by an aggressively chipper force field that repelled all attempts at human connection.

Maxie and Susan, Mum’s former Wellesley roommates, ladies-who-lunch vipers and the only two people Mary had been pointedly avoiding herself that afternoon, stood proprietorially to the left of the portrait of Abigail Lake. The portrait, frequent target of family scorn and the only item, according to her will, that Paula Abigail Bowden Veal had left to her three daughters, was painted to look like an antique but was in fact less than ten years old, inspired by a passage Mum found in a diary describing her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s walk to the gallows. “Flatte and grey of eye,” the diarist wrote. “Expressionless mouth, in which the words of a pretty devile lurk.” The painting was a money-making scam, in Mary’s opinion, cooked up by Susan’s feminist artist daughter, a former classmate of Mary’s at Semmering Academy, who offered, for an absurd fee, to paint portraits of the gallows victims “to honor those who have been so long dishonored.” Susan’s daughter had interpreted the diary description of Abigail Lake to produce a woman who, according to Regina and Gaby, resembled nobody so much as she resembled Mary in a bonnet.

Maxie held a paper plate of grapes; Susan nursed a sweating glass of seltzer. Both women were rickety and unseasonably brown, their chests and arms so sun-spotted they appeared upholstered in a miniature leopard print. They flashed Mary grins so intense that it only confirmed her formerly paranoid suspicion that they’d been discussing her.

“How’s life in Montana?” asked Maxie.

“Oregon,” corrected Susan.

“You moved to Oregon?” said Maxie.

“She’s always lived in Oregon,” said Susan.

“You’re still a waitress?” asked Maxie.

“She’s a secretary,” said Susan.

“I work in the admissions office of a private girls school outside Portland,” Mary said.
Work
was either an understatement or an overstatement. She was more of a professional calmer of buttoned-up hysterics, the bulk of her actual job consisting of talking down the mothers whose daughters were rejected from Beaverton’s Grove School, mothers who charged into her office holding the “Due to the high quality of applicants” letter like a pair of damning panties pulled from a husband’s blazer pocket. Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably faraway expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades. The past and the present ghosted together in the hallways of the Grove School, and maybe that was why she worked there—when the halls were abandoned for the day and the sound of rain thrumming on the slate roof blurred with the far-off screech of coaches’ whistles, she could imagine she had herself been ghosted, that she’d been sucked back to a crucial crossroads in her own life and offered a second chance.