After Life (4 page)

I didn’t die, of course. Instead, my grandmother did. It was a shock to all of us; she seemed immortal, not old at all, though she must have been seventy then. One spring afternoon she did not come home from work at Saint Ann’s. That night my mother called the police, who found her bicycle the next day, propped up against a fire hydrant in a not-very-nice part of town. Foul play was suspected. And though they found her a few hours later, alive but incoherent, wandering along the riverfront, she died in the hospital before we could get there. She’d had several strokes.

My mother screamed in the hospital waiting room.
How could this happen?
she wanted to know. How could a sick old lady walk around town for an entire day, without anyone helping her?

Unfortunately, they said, there’s no shortage of sick old ladies in this town. And anyway, somebody did help her. When the police found her, she was clutching a sack lunch some kind person had given her: an egg salad sandwich, a nectarine, and three sugar cookies.

They handed the sack lunch over to my mother, who pressed it to her face and wept.

But that was all the grief she allowed herself. By the time we got home that afternoon, she was, to all appearances, over it: she threw herself into housecleaning and funeral preparations with the energy of someone organizing a carnival ball. My grandfather, shrunken and pale, climbed the stairs slowly and shut himself in his bedroom. I wandered from room to room, crying and hiccuping. In the parlor my mother swept past me, smelling of lavender furniture polish. She turned and put her large hand on my head.

“Poor Naomi. Silly Naomi. You’re crying for yourself, you know. Your grandmother hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s right here watching you.” She pointed to the corner, where there was a large vase of peacock feathers. “You’re making her sad.”

I wiped my tears with my fingers. There was nothing in the corner, as far as I could tell, except for the feathers, which drooped and were clumpy with dust. I tried hard to see something else, a shimmer or a quiver or a glow, but there was nothing.

“It’s your grandfather you should be crying over. Stubborn fool has no faith. I don’t know how he gets through the day, I really don’t.”

She squatted on the floor with her cleaning rags, her cotton dress pulling across her muscular back. A bead of sweat slid down her neck.

“Come, help,” she said, and tossed me a rag. “In a couple of days this place will be full of weeping librarians. And don’t think for a minute they won’t notice the housekeeping—that’s all they’ll notice. That and the finger sandwiches. Right, Mother?”

It was a bit eerie. A few hours before, I had seen my grandmother lying dead on a hospital bed, looking not at all like herself—gray-faced, her hair tied on the top of her head with a rubber band—and now my mother was chatting with her as if nothing had happened, as if my grandmother had simply misplaced her body but might find it again at any time, under a sofa cushion or in the back of the fridge. Until that moment, spiritualism had been a fun sort of game to me, but suddenly the momentousness of it unfolded darkly in front of me: it could allow you to raise the dead.

I rubbed hard at a table leg, watching my mother. A dark lock of her hair slipped down over her forehead; she left it there. She was beautiful, in spite of her big nose and broad, mannish shoulders. I wanted to put my arms around her and bury my face in her bosom, but I knew if I tried anything like that she’d give me a shove and tell me to act my age, so I didn’t. Instead, I knelt alongside her and worked hard at polishing the table leg.

She glanced over at me and nodded approvingly. “Good girl.”

I rubbed harder. I loved her so much.

Over the next few months, my mother’s mediumship acquired a new intensity. All sorts of exceptionally peculiar people—and not just old ones, either—began hanging around the house: a young man with hoop earrings, a woman who scolded me for my “prickly aura.” And others: hippies and transvestites and young women in torn vintage dresses. They would start in the kitchen, eating crackers and cheese and drinking tea with my mother, then move into the living room and begin rummaging through the liquor cabinet. They’d lie on the sofa with their feet hanging over the armrest, drinking and shedding crumbs and giggling at nothing. By dark they’d be in the séance room, alternately silent and roaring with laughter. This is when my mother took on her new name: no longer Patsy Ash, she was now Madame Galina Ash, or sometimes just Mother Galina. She began to wear tight sweaters and slacks and eye makeup, and she was voluptuous and dark: sexy. She painted her nails fire-engine red, toes as well as fingers.

I found myself feeling nervous and vaguely jealous. My mother needed less and less help that summer, so I was left to moon around the house alone, or play board games with my grandfather. He wasn’t taking the constant parade of visitors well. “Lowlifes,” he called them, ungenerously. “Parasite weirdo circus freaks.” We hid out in his room.

It was the spirit of my grandmother, I discovered one day, that was causing all this uproar. I found this out by climbing into the dumbwaiter and squeaking up behind the wall of the séance room. I was getting too big for it, for sure: I had to press my face into my knees, which made it hard to breathe. But I was certain about what I heard.

“Dora?” said someone, possibly the young man with the earrings. “How are you feeling today? Are you ready to help us?” This was said in the too-loud, condescending tone people use when speaking to the very old, the very young, or spirits.

There was a groan. It sounded like my mother, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

“That’s all right, Dora, take your time.”

Dora Ash was my grandmother’s name. The woman had no use for spiritualism; she, like my grandfather, was a lapsed Catholic, an ardent materialist until the day she died. To think of her on the other side of the wall, talking to these people, shocked me.

I listened for a while. Most of what “Dora” said was mumbled, and I couldn’t make it out. She said something about “Paradise,” something about “The River.” The voice came from different places in the room, and I heard what sounded like footsteps. It took a while for me to figure it out: my grandmother was controlling my mother’s body, speaking through her, and walking around the room. I imagined my mother’s eyes closed, her head lolling on her shoulder, her feet doing a slow shuffle, and for a moment I was sickened with embarrassment for her. But then I was struck with another thought: what if it
was
my grandmother in there? Could the soul of my grandmother—who was a small person, and fragile, like a shorebird—have put on her daughter’s body like a huge and heavy dress? And if so, where, then, was my mother?

The dumbwaiter was hot and had a sour, dusty smell. Claustrophobia wrapped me in its panicky arms. I wanted to push the walls away from me, explode out of there and drink up the fresh air like water, but for the moment I was trapped, like the house’s own soul.

Breathing slowly, I felt for the ropes, then inched the dumbwaiter upward. I stopped outside my grandfather’s room and risked opening the door a crack, then pressed my eye to the opening. He was absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle and didn’t hear me. The back of the old man’s neck was red and creased and prickled with short white hairs, and a plate with a cheese sandwich, half-eaten, sat on the card table by his elbow. He was hunched in a pool of yellow light. When he picked up the puzzle box to examine it, I saw what it was: the Taj Mahal in front of a greenish, faded sky. Over the months he had done dozens of puzzles, always buildings, always beautiful: monument after monument to his tireless, bottomless, glorious loneliness.

The heat that summer was an aberration—a torment. For months the city was delirious with fever, but no rains came. Giant purple clouds rolled in every afternoon, glared down at us, and moved on. The heat itself seemed to originate not from the sun, but from the things around us: the buildings and the cars and the trees, and in particular, the people. The furniture in our house seemed too hot to touch. Eating was difficult; wearing clothes oppressive. Small things began to go to pieces. Plaster walls softened; clothes soured in their drawers. A peculiar odor filled the house—it was like a wet animal at first, and then like a dead one—and finally my grandfather discovered a plastic sack of potatoes in the back of a cupboard, deliquesced.

In spite of this strange weather, or perhaps because of it, my grandmother continued her visits. She had things to say about it, and about politics and the stock market, and Indian ancestors, and impending illnesses. Once, she made a flashlight gallop across the room. A perfume pervaded the room when she appeared—a minty, lily-of-the-valley-type scent, according to the rumors. People you’d never expect to see at a séance showed up at the ones my mother held. The wrong types, my grandfather said: gangsters and buffoons. But it was as if the weather had persuaded people that anything was possible, that everything they thought they knew about the world had come unfixed.

One night I overheard an argument between my mother and grandfather. Before his wife died, my grandfather never expressed much of an opinion about spiritualism. He tolerated everything, and would nod and say, “Interesting,” or “What do you know!” when shown spirit photographs, spirit fingerprints in wax, flowers that appeared from nowhere. But things had gone too far.

“My wife is dead,” he told my mother.
“Dead!”

“Not to me, she isn’t,” she said. They were in the kitchen, leaning over the table at each other. “To me she’s still here. To me! And that’s what a spirit
is.
I feel sorry for you, if she really is dead to you.”

My grandfather’s face darkened. He began to shake. “You have the wrong woman!” he roared.

Though my mother enjoyed her sudden popularity, it had its problems. The least of them was the friction with my grandfather. He was, above all, a quiet man, and would usually rather ignore what was happening in his house than make a scene. More problematic were the police. There were rumors that my mother was running some kind of drug den. This they couldn’t prove, so then they told her that fortune-telling for money was illegal in New Orleans. My mother spent a lot of energy trying to convince them that what she was doing was religion. They wanted to know what church. She actually found one—the Church of Spiritualist Studies, headquartered in upstate New York. She joined a local branch. It met every Monday in a tiny storefront on Terpsichore Street. I went with her often. There were folding chairs and plates of snacks and a podium draped in white velvet. Most of the spiritualists were quite old, but I was used to that. They took turns giving lectures: “The Rainbow as Spirit Matter” was one, “Was Eisenhower a Spiritualist?” another. Dull as it was, I was relieved to be going to church at last. I had never gotten over feeling that I could die at any time, and, in that Catholic city, I couldn’t help but feel that not going to church was a very bad idea. And I liked this kind of spiritualism: predictable, bookish, reverent.

Most of all, I enjoyed the message service at the end of every lecture. Each week a different medium was scheduled to serve. She or he stood in front of the podium and gave out spirit messages to the audience—
I have an Emma here. Does anyone here know an Emma? It might be her middle name. A small woman, white hair…that’s right, she’s yours, Barnard…
—prosaic things, for the most part. The recipient of the message would smile and respond loudly and happily, though they must have all gotten ten thousand such messages during their spiritualist careers. I got very few, myself. Once a tiny fat woman told me, in no uncertain terms, that my father was there. She said that he wanted me to know that he loved me very, very much, and that he was happy in the afterlife, and that he didn’t miss me because he visited me every single night while I was asleep.