A Reckoning (17 page)

“No one wants to talk about death. It frightens people, doesn’t it?”

“Well—” Mary hesitated, “yes.”

“You have seen it, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Mary, it would help me to know a little more about it, if you could tell me.”

“I’ll tell you a strange thing. It seems as though a person dies when he is ready, when he wants to go, and not before.”

“Really? Is that true?”

Mary’s eyes when she was moved became very dark blue, and now she looked at Laura with a strange little smile and said, “I’ve never told anybody this, they don’t ask. But I can tell you, Laura Spelman, that the ones I’ve seen looked—” she clasped her hands in the struggle for the words, “They looked—”

“Not afraid?”

“Oh, no, they looked as though they could see things we can’t see, and the kingdom of heaven was within them.”

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“Old Mrs. Cotter, she was really a difficult woman, if I say so myself. Once she said to me, ‘The trouble with me is I don’t wear well’—she fought with all her friends, and her children for that matter. God was not with her that I ever saw,” said Mary with a chuckle. “But when she died, that old woman looked beatified. I’ll never forget her look at the end. Never.”

Then they had changed the subject and talked about making a stew for the weekend so Daisy would have something easy to heat up for herself.

There was something ironic about Daisy’s coming now that Laura was critically ill, and ironic, too, Laura thought, that she had to accept such a visitation because she needed the help over the weekend. Everyone took it for granted—even Mary O’Brien, who was sometimes so perspicacious—that Laura wanted Daisy to come. In a way, perhaps she did, though she had no illusions that they would at the eleventh hour reach some kind of accord, after so many years when whatever contact there had been had ended in recriminations. What do I hope for then? Laura wondered. A moment outside time, outside the past, when we might begin to be friends? And could it be that that might be possible only now because only now was Laura herself in a position of weakness? Perhaps.

These thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of flowers from Amy, a delightful glass bowl filled with bright pink roses and forget-me-nots. “Be good and get well soon,” the card said in Amy’s bold hand. Laura let it fall.

“Thanks, Mary. Pretty, aren’t they?”

“Will it be all right if I take Grindle for a walk? It seems like a good time.”

At the word “walk” Grindle, who had been asleep on the rug by her bed, leaped up and began to bark.

“Oh, Grindle, be quiet!” Laura said crossly. The barks fell on her ears like a blow.

“Come on,” Mary said firmly. She turned at the door with a questioning look.

“By all means, Mary, take him out.”

Strange, the relief, even excitement she felt knowing she would be all alone in the house for a half-hour. Mary’s presence was discreet, and she managed to do the housekeeping with a minimum of noise or fuss, doing up Laura’s bedroom when Aunt Minna came in the afternoon—but being quite alone was something entirely different, as if when anyone was around, Laura did not feel entirely free inside herself to think her own often outrageous thoughts, to float on that deep current again, to let things happen in the psyche without even the mild censorship of another presence. Every relationship pulled, even with a very slight thread such as that joining her and Mary. When the phone rang and rang, Laura did not answer it. It is not a moment when I wish to respond, she said to herself.

Instead she went back into the current and floated. She was remembering Charles’s look of pure happiness when he came into her room at the hospital after Daisy was born. “Darling, it’s a girl.” He had so wanted a girl! And Daisy, from the beginning, had been an ultra feminine person, though in her own ineffable way. She, the youngest, with two brothers, had wanted to do everything they did a little better than they, from climbing trees to playing baseball. Her hair cut like a boy’s, wearing blue jeans and jerseys, she looked like an androgynous boy and crowed with delight when she succeeded in pinning Ben’s shoulders to the ground, which was not difficult; he was always so gentle with her. Laura had to admit that she sometimes resented Daisy who appeared to have the best of both worlds, applauded as a wonder when she did well at boys’ games, but demanding and getting the attention of Charles as his beloved daughter who flirted with him, Laura thought, outrageously, and with all the wiles of a woman. So she got a boy’s bicycle when whe was twelve and her first lipstick when she was fifteen, both from her father. In return she taught her father to smoke pot when she was in college. But that was before she took off on her own with a knapsack to “see the country” after she graduated.

Daughters, Laura thought as she floated down the stream. So much harder than boys to bring up because … here a branch impeded the passage of flowing waters … it is much harder to be a woman than a man.

So after all that freedom and all the paths open to become whatever she wanted to be, Daisy had ended up living with a boy five years younger than she who was an intern. Laura had not been allowed to meet Saul; “he hates Wasps,” she had been informed by Daisy in the aftermath of Charles’s funeral. “But Charles met him and liked him a lot,” Laura remembered answering, offering her neck to be guillotined. “I know, in New York,” Daisy had answered, “It’s just this whole rich atmosphere of the
goyim
he couldn’t possibly take. Suburbia,” she had said with her usual contempt.

And now this grown-up person called Daisy who had once had tantrums and had to be put in a tepid bath in her clothes, was due to arrive by her own wish at the bedside of her dying Wasp mother. At this point all Laura could think of was those slow-moving, hibernating wasps who made their appearance in March from somewhere in the attic and died hanging on to a wicker lampshade, as one had done the other day in her bedroom.

I do not have to pretend any longer, she told herself. I am permitted to die as I am, what I am. No one can try to change me. It’s too late.

It was a comfort when Mary O’Brien called, “We’re home!” and Grindle trundled up the stairs, his tail wagging, his pink tongue ready to lick her hand.

It had been Laura’s experience that things waited for with dread rarely turned out as expected. Everybody looks so old, Laura thought—Daphne, now Daisy, whose face had tautened, whose reddish hair had a touch of gray in it. Daisy, lean and elegant still in tight jeans and a lavender suede jacket, was no longer the sharp, self-assured, brusque person with whom Laura had argued about nearly everything. She had become gentler, and from the first moment when she flung her knapsack down and ran to her mother without a second’s hesitation and kissed her on the cheek, Laura realized that this encounter was not going to be what she had imagined; so that she herself, armed as she had been and prepared to be attacked, found herself newly attentive to this unknown daughter.

Now Laura was lying on the sofa listening to a Mozart piano concerto while Daisy was busy in the kitchen, heating up Mary O’Brien’s stew for their supper. Laura had made a salad and set out a bottle of burgundy. We managed to get separated, she was thinking, very long ago when Daisy became her father’s rather than her mother’s daughter. Was it that? Or was it simply that Daisy had set her mother and her mother’s life aside as irrelevant, as uninteresting, in her own hunger for life and determination to find out all about it on her very own. She had said as much, but thoughtfully this time, and without animosity. “Your life didn’t seem to have anything to do with my life. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” And she had gone on to talk about Sybille, who had nourished her need for the absolute and the heroic. “Granny seemed really to understand everything—and it was so marvelous that anyone as old as she could blaze away as she did about the war in Vietnam. That was the last time I saw her—she had gone to march in Washington!”

“I’d forgotten,” Laura murmured. But now she did remember and how angry she had been, for it seemed an absurd risk to take. She had even called Jo, hoping Jo would back her up and make it impossible in some way for their mother to embark on such a crazy expedition. “I was hard on Sybille.” For seeing it all freshly through Daisy’s eyes, Laura winced at how mean-spirited she had been. By then she herself had washed her hands of Sybille and Sybille’s extravagant passions for this or that, a person or a cause. “My sisters and I had learned to protect ourselves, I suppose.”

“Should I go and see her, Mother—while I’m here?” “She wouldn’t recognize you. Why should you make a gesture that has no meaning? Far better keep your memory of that intensity and passion intact.” “Besides I’m here to take care of you, aren’t I?” “I don’t need care,” Laura had said, “as you can see.” Daisy had frowned and rocked back and forth, her arms clasped round her knees. “You haven’t eaten anything except a mouthful of scrambled egg since I arrived. You’re starving.”

“Probably. Eating is the one thing that seems rather difficult—so I’m weak—I get tired. Otherwise …” Seeing the strain on Daisy’s face, Laura added quickly, “Jim Goodwin has promised me the spring.”

“You sound so calm, Mother.”

“The truth is that dying is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.”

“Wow!” Daisy sat up, her eyes very bright. “You’ve got guts, I must say.”

“No. It’s just that when there are limits, it’s easier to handle some things. The irrelevant can get pushed away. That pile of mail on my desk, for instance. I never think about such things now. I live in the present, Daisy. It’s quite a relief.”

But the present had also unfortunately contained an exhausting fit of coughing later on in the evening. That could not be glossed over, and Daisy had been shocked. Ever since, she had been careful not to let her mother talk for very long. Now it was Saturday evening, their last evening, for Daisy would go the next day and was asked over to Sunday dinner with Brooks and Ann.

Laura was hoarding her energy. She had not even lit the fire. She was learning to let other people do things that might bring on sudden exhaustion. Stooping was one of them. She lay, floating on the music, reaching over to stroke Grindle’s soft ears now and then.

“Now can I open the champagne?” Daisy called from the kitchen. She had brought a bottle of champagne at Saul’s suggestion—apparently he had told her that champagne was good for Laura’s condition.

“Splendid,” Laura called back. “Oh, just light the fire would you? Then we’ll pop that bubbly, as your father used to say.”

“Daddy loved festive things, didn’t he?” said Daisy, bending to light the fire. When that was done, she stood up and began what became quite a struggle, to get the champagne open. “Oh, dear, I wish I could do this like Daddy—there—now … now!”

“That was very satisfactory,” Laura smiled, for the cork had hit the ceiling, making Grindle run away into the kitchen. “Even though Grindle thinks war has been declared.”

For some reason Grindle’s exit struck them both as very funny, and Daisy laughed so much she could hardly pour.

Laura lifted her glass, watching the bubbles rise to the surface.

“There’s so much I want to say, to ask—but I’m so afraid of tiring you.” Daisy, Laura noticed, was for once sitting in a chair rather than on the floor.

“You look prepared for some fatal interview,” Laura teased. “And what if I do get tired? Does it matter? I want all of life I can have.”

“All night I was thinking about you and me. Why is it that mothers and daughters appear to have a harder time than mothers and sons?”

“I’ve wondered, too.” Then Laura plunged deliberately into the turbulent sea. “Did we have a hard time?”

“Oh, Mother, you were always criticizing me. I felt I could never do anything right! Don’t you remember?”

But Laura did not remember. What she remembered was Daisy’s stubborn refusal to do anything that was asked of her, from wearing a dress to dinner to not climbing tall trees to the very top. “As I remember,” Laura finally answered, “you were always criticizing me,” and then they laughed.

“Well,” Daisy said thoughtfully, “when I was sixteen or seventeen, I must say you seemed to represent everything I despised, especially money.”

“Money?” Laura was startled. “Money?” she repeated. “Daisy, we aren’t rich and never have been. Mamma and Papa gave away huge amounts of money to all those causes—there wasn’t that much left.”

“But she wore dresses by French couturiers, Mother, for heaven’s sake.”

“Yes, she did, and they were often handed down from her really rich cousin in Philadelphia.”

“Maybe, but the whole atmosphere I grew up in was somehow privileged—I guess that is the word. There were servants, for instance.”

“Well, I paid for Sarah Page by working at Houghton Mifflin. I earned that, after all.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I guess I’ve never thought much about it. But I felt that you and Daddy really didn’t know very much about real life. You’ve been so safe.”

“If you’ve been brought up in the eye of the storm as I was (you can have no idea of the dramas we had to witness as children), maybe what you long for is something quite simple and normal, like family life in a comfortable suburb. But, if you must know, quite a lot of what you call ‘real life’ comes into a publisher’s office. I’m not entirely beyond the pale.”

Laura felt nettled and knew that this was not a good idea. Keep calm, she said to herself. “But that isn’t the point, really, is it? About mothers and daughters—I can understand that a mother, these days, is rarely the exemplar a daughter needs.”

“Because,” Daisy said, “we really don’t know what it is to be a woman, what we want of ourselves—I don’t even know whether I want to marry or not, for instance.”

“You’ll have to decide pretty soon, if you want children.”

“Don’t, Mother.”

“You talk about reality—you might as well face the fact.”

“I wonder whether I’m capable of that kind of commitment.” Daisy slid down to the floor. “Nothing seems permanent or that solid to me. Maybe marriage asks more than I can give. I’m not even sure Saul and I will ever get married. It would be hard on his family if he married a non-Jew.