To See the Moon Again (5 page)

And that wasn't the end of it. After Pamela finally packed up and left, Julia had found several dozen handwritten IOUs in an old cigar box, all neatly printed, dated, and signed by Matthew—debts to his card-playing friends, totaling over six thousand dollars, all of which she had insisted on settling out of pride.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
waved to Gil now, but he made no sign of having seen her, though she knew he had. She stopped her car and pulled forward onto the circular drive, then eased out onto Ivy Dale and turned in the direction of the library. She and Gil didn't converse often, as there was little to talk about. They had a routine, and he stuck to his part. She stuck to hers, too, which was to mail him a check at the beginning of every month.

As she pulled away from the stone house, Julia glanced at Gil in her rearview mirror and thought again about what a colorful character he would make for a story. Tweak him a little, of course, add a limp perhaps, make him more talkative with some quirky speech patterns, maybe give him a more distinctive name, something more obviously foreign, and perhaps a characteristic odor—garlic or cabbage or curry.

She thought, too, of other people in her life who could also be cast as story characters: Marcy Kingsley, Dr. Boyer the French teacher, old Dr. Kohler, even her sister Pamela, and Pamela's big sloth of a husband, Butch. And Ida from Wyoming. But it would take a better writer than herself, not just someone with a good eye for detecting idiosyncrasies. A real writer had to be able to create, not just imitate and exaggerate.

More than once when mentioning her upcoming sabbatical, Dean Moorehead had said to her in his soft, earnest voice, “We know you'll enjoy some extra time for writing,” which she had taken to mean,
We expect to see you published again
.

But publication was another one of those things Julia didn't want to think about. She tried to push the thought away, but it pushed back this time, then began to settle in. She knew her few scholarly essays and two stories didn't count for much in academia, especially considering the origin of the stories. No one knew about all that, however, and there was certainly nothing to be gained by allowing herself to dwell on it again.

To her credit, she was a good teacher, a proven teacher, an
excellent
teacher in fact, perfectly capable and fair in her critique of student writing. No one could deny that she had much to offer in the classroom, whether she ever published again or not. Unfortunately, however, publication carried a great deal of weight with deans and department chairs. She knew they were waiting for her to deliver again. She had told her dean a couple of years ago that she was “working on” a novel. What she didn't tell him was that the only work she had done on it had taken place in her head. She hadn't actually written down the first word.

Sitting at a stoplight or eating breakfast or walking across campus, she might think of a perfect opening, but as soon as she picked up a pen or sat down at her computer, doubt set in. She might make several tries but by the end rejected them all as too stilted, too bland, too pretentious, too something. And then an old worry: Maybe she had read those exact words somewhere else and was only recalling them. She had the kind of memory that could do that. And even if she could write her own decent opening, where would she go from there? The thought of advancing beyond the first page was terrifying, like walking to the edge of a chasm and leaping.

Shame and fear—they made a debilitating pair. The closing words of one of her two published stories came to her now:
He saw her on the loading dock, waiting for him in the rain, the steam rising about her like an unholy incense.
She knew she could recite most of the sentences before that, too, all the way back to the first one. That was how well she knew the story. Backward and forward, as they said.

It was a good story, perfectly balanced between suggestion and revelation, with complex characters and a strong ending. But it wasn't her own, except for the title.

P
RAGMATIC
J
USTIFICATIONS

Sitting in her Buick at the public library, Julia studied the towering oak tree near the entrance, the roots of which had heaved the sidewalk upward until it cracked. It had been that way for years. Evidently no one was concerned enough to do anything about it. Library patrons simply skirted that section of the sidewalk. All it would take would be an accident and a lawsuit, and then something would be done.

When Julia had first received the box of Jeremiah's papers eleven years ago, theft was the furthest thing from her mind. She had never stolen from anyone, but the fact that it was from her own brother made it worse. And it didn't matter that he was dead and would never know. Somehow that made it worse, too.

She remembered well the shock of Lulu's long-ago phone call with the news that Jeremiah had been shot and had died instantly. And before Julia could even get her breath to ask about the funeral, Lulu had gone on to tell her that it had happened four days earlier, that he had already been cremated and his ashes scattered somewhere in the Grand Teton National Forest.

Pamela had been furious. “First of all, she waits
four
days to tell us? And then she just
throws
him to the wind?”

By this time, their father had been merely existing for almost two decades, his body refusing to follow where his mind had gone, and their mother was worn out from caring for him night and day. When Julia told her about Jeremiah, she received the news mutely, as if she had lost so much already there were no words left to say, as if this were just the epilogue of the long tragedy called life.

Julia thought she might have dropped the phone from shock. “Are you there, Mother?” she asked after moments of silence.

“Yes.” Barely a whisper.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell . . . him?”

“No.”

This was consistent with the mother Julia had known all her life, always serving, forbearing, shielding. Even now, though her husband's mind and heart were hollowed out, she wanted to spare him the grief she knew he would feel if he could. For above all else in life, Jeremiah had been his one shining prize, not that he ever put it into words, or showed it in any way.

Julia always wondered if somehow in the black cave of her father's mind he had sensed a tremor in the earth the day her mother learned of Jeremiah's death, something that told him all was lost, for within days he took a sudden downward turn and two weeks later Julia received a phone call from her mother. Her father had died in his sleep. Pamela was there to help.

And Pamela was there again two months after that when their mother died. It was one of the saddest things Julia could imagine—that her mother, finally and blessedly relieved after decades as her father's full-time caregiver, not to mention full-time receiver of his every foul mood and unkind word, was allowed no respite at the end of her life. No time to travel, to redecorate her house, to go shopping, to get up in the morning and plan a whole day of doing exactly what she wanted to do. Julia's only hope was that if her mother had by chance been assigned a parcel of real estate in the heaven she claimed to believe in, maybe the landlord there would give her nice accommodations with a scenic view and free rent.

She and Matthew had driven to both funerals in Alabama, but only for the day each time. Pamela did all the real work before and after—the arranging and paying and cleaning and selling and all the rest of it. Julia fell back on her teaching as an excuse, though she knew she could have asked for, and been granted, time off. But Pamela didn't play the martyr, just took it on willingly and, of course, efficiently. Julia knew it was something a lot of sisters would still be bringing up. But Pamela didn't. She understood the real reason Julia couldn't come, the thing they never talked about.

•   •   •

O
VER
the years Julia had tried to blame her misjudgment in the matter of Jeremiah's papers on the fact that it had been such a confusing time, losing her brother and both parents so close together. But she knew emotions didn't suddenly erase a person's understanding of right and wrong, that good people in stressful times rose above temptation every day.

It all started with the letter she received months after Jeremiah's death, mailed from somewhere in Wyoming, signed, simply, “Lulu.” She was surprised at the quality of the writing itself, though the stationery had been a sheet of notebook paper. The letter stated that Lulu had “stacks of Jerry's papers,” which she wanted to send to Julia since “Jerry always said you were the one who could appreciate them and would know what to do with them.”

Suggesting that the packaging and postage would be a hardship since “Jerry didn't have insurance and things are tight,” Lulu asked if Julia wanted her to “go to the trouble of mailing them, or just dispose of them.” She would wait a few weeks, she said, and if she didn't hear anything, she would “assume the latter.”

Julia wrote her back, of course—addressing the envelope the same way the letter was signed, to “Lulu,” and though Pamela advised her not to, she enclosed a check. Sometime later a box appeared at the front door of the stone house. It was a box that at one time had held a television, a fact from which Julia deduced that though money was supposedly tight, it appeared that Lulu was able to scrape together enough for one of life's real essentials.

So those were the facts. One, two, three deaths, all within a few months. Then a box of handwritten manuscripts—short stories, essays, a novella, and a lengthy memoir titled
Lost Boy
. It was the memoir that filled in the gap between the hot summer night Julia had last heard her seventeen-year-old brother slam the door of his bedroom in Alabama and the day over twenty years later when he finally called his mother on the telephone to tell her he was living in Wyoming with a woman named Lulu and their little girl, who was six.

The memoir made fascinating reading, like a novel, with a hero she would have loved even if he hadn't been her own brother. When she took it out of the box that first day, Julia read it straight through without stopping. Though she realized the potential for distorting the truth when penning one's own life story, she also recognized in Jeremiah's writing something remarkable. Even if certain details were overstated—though she had no way of knowing whether they were—her brother was a poet with words.

She had seen glimpses of it when he was growing up, of course, in his book reports and English papers, whenever he took the trouble to do them, but this was different. It was mature writing by someone who had somehow mastered the narrative art without apparently having been taught.

The knowledge affected her in two ways. First, she was proud, as anyone is proud of a family member who performs well, though she knew it was a selfish kind of pride, the kind whereby one sees a relative's achievement as a reminder that he shares the same superior gene pool. Second, she was angry that Jeremiah, who had slouched his way only through eleventh grade, could put words together as well as she could. Further evidence of the fundamental unfairness of life. She had always tried so desperately to meet their father's high standards, while Jeremiah, the apple of his eye, never appeared to care whether he measured up, in fact seemed to make a game of falling short.

The memoir ended abruptly after fast-forwarding over a great deal of time, as if tired of itself. No more lush, detail-rich passages, only a small breath of white space followed by a flat summary:
And one September day I arrived in Wyoming, where a woman's heart opened to me and I found home at last. We had a child, a beautiful little girl, and it came to pass in the fullness of time that I returned to the faith of my mother.

That was all. Stymied, Julia read the closing sentence many times. She never would have guessed that “the faith of my mother” was a place to which Jeremiah would return, for she couldn't remember that he had ever been there in the first place. In his youth, he, like Julia, had had no use for their mother's faith. He saw it as a defect that enabled their father's tyranny, for submission was a key ingredient of her particular faith. But so was love. And prayer—their mother took to heart the admonition to “pray without ceasing.”

The faith of their mother was not embraced by their father, though the two of them had met at a tent revival in the early fifties, where her father was song leader and soloist for a traveling evangelist. Her mother, sitting on the front row between her parents, had caught his eye, as he had caught hers. Julia wondered if there were signs, had her mother's eye not been so dazzled by his handsome exterior, that his heart was not in his work, that the words he sang meant nothing to him, that he had simply secured a job where he might meet pretty, easy-to-manipulate young women.

After they married, he told her he wanted sons. That she bore him only one was a disappointment he never let her forget. As children, Julia and Pamela never had to wonder where they stood in their father's affection, for he never tried to pretend that he esteemed his daughters as much as his son.

Though, to be sure, he had a strange way of showing his esteem for Jeremiah. The two of them, father and son, were so much alike they could have been twins if time could erase an age difference of thirty years. Yet as far back as Julia could remember, there had been conflict.

Her mother had often wrung her hands over it, called it a Frederickson family trait. “Your father and his father never did see eye to eye either,” she told Julia once, “and the same with his father and grandfather—it's something in the Frederickson men that can't just let each other
be
. The fathers always have to be striving and picking at the sons.” Julia wondered if her mother really did believe the striving and picking were aimed only at Jeremiah. Didn't she hear the way their father talked to them
all
? Or maybe she just meant that Jeremiah was the only one who ever fought back.

Though their battles were many and fierce, there was a softness in Jeremiah that her father didn't have. Not softness in the sense of weakness, but gentleness, toward women, babies, animals, and anything beautiful, even everyday beauty—a wildflower, a leaf, a robin. Running deep beneath all the things they shared, which were many—good looks, intelligence, verbal wit, musical giftedness, physical strength—there was this one enormous difference. And it seemed to be the thing her father couldn't abide, the thing he kept trying to root out.

If judging only by her last memory of the two of them together, Julia might be tempted to say that her father had succeeded, for there was nothing gentle about her brother that sultry July night. Not when their argument first erupted, not when Jeremiah hurled a chair against the wall, not when he answered his father's tirade curse for curse, not when he slammed the door of his room so hard the wood splintered, not when he turned his music up as loud as it would go and threw things around inside his room.

By early morning he was gone and never came back. On the kitchen table he left his mother a pink rosebud from the bush by the back door and a note that said simply,
I love you, Mom, I always will, but I have to leave before I turn into him. I'll see you again one day. Promise.
Pamela had found both flower and note in a small jewelry case in her mother's dresser after her death, the brown papery bud detached from the stem, the note worn from handling.

Within her brother's papers, Julia saw sure evidence of the gentleness her father had so hated but had failed to eradicate. All these lovely words—she wondered if they had cost him effort, or had just wafted into his mind as a breeze through an open window.

And though Julia hated to admit it, the anger evoked by her brother's writing gave rise to another emotion: envy. She found herself wishing she had written these words. So what if her dissertation had been praised as a “masterpiece of writing, both scholarly and artistic”? Academic writing had only been a hoop in the dog and pony show of higher learning, and she had jumped through it, with one goal in mind: to qualify for a college teaching position. It certainly wasn't the kind of writing she really wanted to do.

In her first years as a new teacher, she submitted papers and essays to various literary periodicals to fulfill the standards expected of faculty members in the arts and sciences at Millard-Temple. Several were accepted for publication. But it was her love of fiction that continued to grow, especially the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. She fed her obsession by reading these stories over and over. This was the kind of fiction she wanted to write someday—startling and mysterious and comical all at once.

The day she received the box from Lulu and first read Jeremiah's stories, something else hit her hard: What was she waiting for? She had already been teaching for fifteen years. If her younger brother had written things like these, why hadn't she? She had gone through hard times, but what of it? So had he. Anyway, hard times were no excuse for not writing. If anything, they should be fodder.