Autumn Street (12 page)

And she was right. Mama didn't remember her, though when I told her the name of Louise's mother,
her name before she was married—Peggy O'Reilly—Mama wrinkled her forehead and said finally, "There was a woman named O'Reilly who used to come to our house to do the laundry, and sometimes she brought a little girl. I always wanted to play with that little girl, but she was so shy, as if she were embarrassed to be there. She would never talk to me. I never even knew her name. But maybe it was Peggy."

But I thought that it couldn't have been. It may have been true that the little girl had been embarrassed; but if the little girl had been Peggy O'Reilly, she would have marched right up to my mother, despite the embarrassment, would have admired the yellow dress, and would have bellowed, "HEY. HOW ABOUT
THAT!
"

I thought often about Louise, her family, and her house, and why I felt so happy with them there. I thought about Charles, his mother, and Tatie, and wondered about their house, to which I had never been permitted to go. I decided that we were all like Jessica's paper dolls: placed neatly in our separate sections in a pleated file. Labeled. I pretended—wished, dreamed—that someday a giant hand would tip the file box upside down, scatter us all from our slots, onto the floor, mixing us together so completely that none of us would know, in the end, who we were, where we belonged, or whether, after all, it even mattered.

W
E WENT TO
the great-aunts' house for Thanksgiving dinner, Jessica and I dressed alike in pink hand-smocked dresses under our navy blue brass-buttoned coats. We argued about who would push Gordon's enormous English carriage and compromised, each of us walking with one hand on the high handle. Gordon, bundled in a pale blue snowsuit and propped on pillows, grinned toothlessly at us as we bumped and jiggled him along the brick sidewalk of Autumn Street. Mama walked behind us, with Grandmother.

I counted to myself. Three great-aunts, Grandmother, Mama, Jessica, and I.

"There will be seven girls at Thanksgiving dinner," I told Jess, "and only one boy, and he doesn't even count, because he can't eat real food yet."

"I wish Daddy could come," said Jess.

"I wish Grandfather could come," I said.

"Daddy used to give me the wishbone."

"You?" I didn't remember. "Didn't he ever give it to me?"

"No," said Jessica firmly, but I thought she was lying. "He always gave it to me, because you were too little."

There was no way to argue with her, because my memories were gone. "He would give it to me now, though. I'm not too little now."

Jess shrugged.

"Anyway, today maybe the aunts will give it to both of us. What would you wish?"

"I'm not going to
tell.
If you tell wishes they won't come true."

I thought,' glumly, that none of my wishes would come true anyway, whether I told them or not. I would wish to be older. To be braver. To be prettier. I would wish that...

The baby carriage bumped on a piece of sidewalk distorted by elm roots, and the baby giggled.

We eased the carriage up over the bump, and I finished my thought, almost frightened by it. I would wish that Charles would marry me.

When we were grown up, of course.

***

Great-aunt Caroline, Great-aunt Florence, and Great-aunt Philippa swooped upon us at the doorway with soft cries of greeting, hugs for me and Jess, and expressions of amazement at how Gordon had grown. They passed him back and forth, holding him delicately like a piece of china, until his chin puckered with fear, and Mama smiled and took him back. I could tell that the great-aunts had never held many babies.

They weren't wearing their fluttery summer dresses now, in November. Now the great-aunts were dressed in velvet, deep shades of gray and blue and green, like a trio of expensive dolls, and they each had pearls around their necks. The house was warm and smelled of turkey, of pumpkin and cranberry, piecrusts and breads. We sat in the living room; the grownups talked, Jessica leafed through a magazine, and I watched them all as if I were looking at a painting in a book.

Two little girls in pink dresses. Three elderly ladies in velvet, their hands moving as they talked, their pearls gleaming at their throats. Another elderly lady,
sitting stiffly, her neck unadorned, her hands motionless, her ankles neatly crossed. One woman sitting quietly, holding a baby now asleep against her arm, her head turned toward the little girls, smiling at them.

My mother is beautiful, I thought, for the first time.

The two little girls are sisters. The three ladies in velvet dresses are sisters. Mama is no one's sister. And Grandmother? Did Grandmother have a sister somewhere?

What did "aunt" mean? It had something, I knew, to do with sisters. Could it be that
Grandmother
was the sister of the great-aunts?

Relationships were so complicated. But suddenly I had figured one out for myself. I sat up straighter, looked at Grandmother carefully, saw that her eyes were blue, as the great-aunts' were, and that her hair was the same gray as theirs.

"I just figured it out!" I cried in delight. "Grandmother is your sister!" I looked at the three great-aunts as if they were pieces of a puzzle that I had finally fitted into place.

But there was an awkward silence. Great-aunt Caroline rose to pass the little crystal dish of nuts again.

"No, Elizabeth," said Great-aunt Florence softly, with a smile. "Certainly we do
think
of your grandmother as a sister..."

The other two great-aunts nodded, their heads like birds, smiling, murmuring that it was true, they certainly thought of Grandmother as a sister. Even Grandmother was nodding and murmuring yes, that was true, yes, yes indeed.

Mama laid the baby gently on the couch and told me that she would take me to wash my hands.

"My hands aren't dirty," I whispered to Mama in the hall. "I took a bath just before I came here."

But she took me to the bathroom and closed the door.

"Liz," she said, "it wasn't your fault, because you didn't know. But the aunts were my
real
mother's sisters. So we shouldn't talk about that in front of Grandmother. It might make her feel bad."

"Oh," I said, though I didn't really understand. Dutifully I began to wash my hands.

"Mama, when your mother died, then your father didn't have a wife."

Mama nodded.

"But there were her three sisters. He could have married one of them!" It seemed a lovely thought.

Mama looked uncomfortable. She handed me a thick blue towel and didn't say anything.

"Why didn't he?"

"Goodness, Liz," said Mama. "He fell in love with Grandmother. And that's why people get married."

"Yes, I know," I said sadly. "Except poor Great
aunt Philippa. She fell in love with someone, Tatie told me, but they never got married, and now she just wears that diamond ring to remind herself about it. Probably it makes her very sad."

Mama suddenly looked
very
uncomfortable. "Tatie shouldn't have told you that," she said.

Then I knew. I knew it the same way I had finally known about the sky: that it was all over, not just at the top. I knew it from
seeing
it there, all around me, although no one had ever spoken of it.

"Mama," I said, awed at what I had realized. "Great-aunt Philippa was going to marry
Grandfather,
wasn't she?"

Mama rubbed my dry hands again and again with the blue towel.

"Elizabeth," she said, "you're old enough to know how important it is to keep secrets. I don't want you to say anything about this to
anyone.
Do you understand?"

"But it's true, isn't it, what I said?"

"Yes. It's true. But if you talk about it, it will hurt people. It will hurt Grandmother, and Grandfather, and the aunts."

"I won't even tell Jess."

"All right then."

"Mama, I'll tell you a secret, too."

"What's that, Liz?"

"I know all about falling in love with someone. Because guess what: I'm in love with Charles!" There was a kind of rapture, standing in the small, immaculate bathroom beside my mother, smelling her perfume, feeling the slippery, perfect oval of pale blue soap, and then the rough texture of the thick towel, talking about secret things.

She hugged me. "Just remember, Liz, that sometimes those things don't work out the way you want them to. But it's nice to feel that way, to love someone."

"Yes," I said. "Probably Great-aunt Philippa still feels that way about Grandfather."

"Maybe."

There was a knock at the bathroom door. Jessica called, "It's time! It's time for the turkey!"

At the table I felt supremely happy. I watched Jess, chattering, tossing her curls, and was glad that I knew something that she might never know. I watched my mother, bending toward me to cut my meat, and felt that she had powers of strength and of understanding that I had not before known. I watched my velvet-dressed great-aunt with the sparkling diamond on her hand, laughing softly as she served the vegetables, and was glad that she had loved someone once; and I hoped that for a while—for a little while, at least—he had loved her back.

A
LTHOUGH HIS MOUTH
remained the damp, cavernous, misshapen puzzle-piece it had been since his stroke in August, I could tell from his eyes that Grandfather remembered Christmas. Tatie and Mama grasped each other's wrists to make a seat of their hands and carried him down the staircase to the library where we were decorating a tree. Grandmother hovered and fluttered like a distraught sparrow until he was arranged in a chair; she tucked a plaid blanket around his thin, pajamaed knees and patted him into a kind of fragile symmetry like a bouquet of dried grass. He made a moist, clicking sound with his mouth.

Click.

Click.

"Why does Grandfather make that sound?" I whispered to Mama, as she unwrapped the carved ornaments from the tissue paper in which they had been packed.

"It's his false teeth," she whispered back.

How terrible to have false teeth. My own two bottom front teeth had fallen out a few months earlier, but bigger new ones had grown in their place. Charles' front top teeth were missing, and he could whistle through the gap and spit great distances; I pushed at my own top ones from time to time with my tongue, but they were recalcitrant and firm. I envied Charles' interstitial grin, but the watery clicks from Grandfather's mouth were unnerving. I scuttled across the rug to his feet and leaned against his covered legs, stroking them as a comfort and apology for his infirmities; it was then, looking up past the clicking mouth into his eyes, that I could tell he remembered Christmas. He was watching the tree intently as Jessica and my mother hung the decorations, and the silvery reflections in the murky mirrors of his face spoke of recollection. I reminded myself to ask Mama later about Christmases when she was a little girl.

Tatie appeared in the doorway, acknowledged the
magnificence of the tree with an awed smile, but spoke to Grandmother dourly.

"Ferdie Gossett's at the back door, ma'am, for his Christmas."

Grandmother rose, said to Mama, "Watch your father, Celia," and followed Tatie to the kitchen. I scampered behind them.
Ferdie Gossett.
I had seen him only from an apprehensive distance before. Now he was right here, in the kitchen, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything, even though it meant leaving the ritual of the tree-trimming and the frail warmth of my grandfather's meager knees.

"Every town has a Ferdie Gossett," my mother had said to me casually when I described to her the man who stood and stared with vacant eyes at the edge of the asphalt playground, during recesses. "He's harmless. But stay away from him."

"What's wrong with him?"

She shook her head. "He was injured somehow."

"In the war?"

"I don't think so. The first war was too long ago. And this war—well, this war is too new, still. He's been around here for several years, since before this war."

"His eyes are funny. Was he injured in his eyes?"

"Oh, Liz. I don't know. It was in his head, I imagine."

"I didn't know there was another war. I thought this was the only one."

Mama had sighed. "There are always wars," she said.

There are always wars; and every town has a Ferdie Gossett. The generalizations were hard for me to comprehend. But the details of the silent presence at the edge of the playground fascinated me. "Where does he live?" I asked her. "Does he have a wife? Children? Why does he wear those terrible clothes?"

"I don't know, Liz. I don't know. Just ignore him."

Now he was in Grandmother's kitchen: for his Christmas, Tatie had said.

And it was true. He sat there, at the kitchen table, his encrusted overcoat pinned closed with a large safety pin, his rheumy eyes peering through the steam of Tatie's soup in a bowl before him. It rolled in narrow streams from the corners of his mouth as he ate. On the floor, leading from the back door, was a track of small dead leaves and mud. Snow was late coming to Pennsylvania; it was gray and cold outside, but the ground was still bare. It had been raining all afternoon. There was dampness in Ferdie Gossett's long fringe of matted hair.

Grandmother moved briskly to the table, unsnapping her purse. She laid a ten-dollar bill on the oilcloth near Ferdie Gossett's bowl.

"We wish you and yours a happy holiday season, Mr. Gossett," she said, matter-of-factly.

He belched. He rubbed his mouth with the sleeve of his filthy coat.

"Tatie," said Grandmother, "be sure to clean everything thoroughly after Mr. Gossett has gone."

I was embarrassed by that. No need, I thought, to point out to Ferdie Gossett that his hygiene was questionable.

Tatie was angry. Not at Grandmother, not at me, but at Ferdie Gossett. "I don't know why we got to put up with this every year," she muttered.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," pronounced Grandmother. "Especially at Christmas. Doesn't the Full Gospel Church teach charity, Tatie?"