Early Warning (55 page)

—

ELOISE WOULD HAVE LIKED
to go to the wedding, but she hadn't been able to get out—planes canceled because of the weather. She had finally given up, telling herself that maybe she would go in the late spring. She had a strange desire to see Iowa one last time—she hadn't been there since Rosanna's funeral. She always jokingly called everything east of the Sierras “the humid lands.” Nothing about Denby or Usherton ever tickled her imagination the way California did. But this year's floods had killed the West Coast romance. San Mateo was a disaster area. Marin was a disaster area. Oakland, always in some sense a disaster area, was cloudy, dark, wet, and threatening, and for the first time in her life, Eloise had had the drapes closed all day—she felt the sense of something encroaching, something like a mudslide, slow and inexorable, not something like a tornado, quick and random.

Maybe her mood came from going through closets and tossing old clothes and shoes. Pink high heels! Could she have bought those? It boggled the mind. Good heavens, as Rosanna would have said, she was seventy-seven! Revolutionaries did not live to be seventy-seven. Buddhists lived to be seventy-seven, and she still knew a few of those, with whom she got along well enough. With three boxes of old clothes to take to the Goodwill, Eloise was wise enough to admit that her life had been a failure, but she didn't exactly mind it. She liked to think of herself as a sport—a branch of a peach tree that had happened to produce nectarines. She had violated her Lysenkoist principles enough to wonder about some of the Vogels and the Augsbergers, both in Iowa and back in Germany—either there were some malcontents hiding back there, or some woman somewhere had imported another genome into the family. However, she knew by her sense of humor, so offensive to every comrade over the years, that she was indeed related to Opa.

Her first mistake today had been to look at the paper even though she hated Reagan. She had been suspicious of Reagan from the beginning. In California, he had extended the right of public workers to strike, but he had fired the air-traffic controllers when they
struck, showing his true colors—born-again union buster. But more than Reagan, she hated his advisers: James Watt, made secretary of the interior specifically to destroy that very interior. She hated Anne Gorsuch, and she hated Rita Lavelle (now, thank goodness, fired). In her opinion, Rita Lavelle was not the bad apple, she was the open sore that indicates the underlying infection, and the underlying infection, in the Reagan administration, was the drive to suck as much out of the ground as possible and make a few people as rich as they could be. She'd heard that Watt said something about Jesus returning soon, so what did the earth matter—it was there to be put to the use of man, anyway. This was a sentiment people from places like Wyoming often expressed. It was a sentiment the Perronis adhered to, and it was a sentiment profoundly allied to another sentiment—that no one was going to tell a Perroni what to do. If someone tried, that person might get shot. It was not an Iowa sentiment; people in Oakland and Berkeley, who worked, like Eloise did, in co-ops and on local weeklies, laughed at this sentiment, but Eloise did not, having talked to Mrs. Perroni, who was if anything harder around the eyes and more uncompromising than Mr. Perroni. A hundred thousand acres! The hundred thousand acres owed them something, and Mrs. Perroni was going to make it pay. After Eloise looked at the paper, these feelings had rolled around in her head all day, and because the weather was so bad, she couldn't get out and take a walk away from them.

She had sold her car. Even Rosa didn't know she had sold the car. But what happened was, she had fallen into the habit of not turning around to back up—her neck and her shoulders hurt too much when she turned around. She had carefully looked in all three mirrors, left, right, center, and she had done so three times each. She knew that there was nothing behind her. Except that there was something. She hit it, felt it drag, heard the sound of it scraping the pavement. In her panic, she touched the accelerator rather than the brake, and bumped out into the street. Only then had she stopped, turned off the car, leapt out, and rushed around to see one of those plastic tricycles toddlers rode these days—a Big Wheel or something, red and yellow, and fortunately without its toddler. Maybe it had rolled down the street from a neighbor's house, since the toddler was nowhere. But Eloise had been so upset that she'd gone back in the house and lain on the couch for an hour, then called the Ford dealer to find out what
she could get for her car, only four years old and with thirty-four thousand miles on it. She would not drive it again; the representative from the dealership came and got it the next day, and she was relieved to see it go.

It was no big deal to be without the car—she could rent her driveway for fifty dollars a month to her neighbor, who had three cars. She was a good walker, good enough to get to the co-op if she took her time and pushed a little trolley. And the co-op was next to the drugstore, and the drugstore was next to the clinic, and so on and so forth. It was manageable. But if she asked someone to drive her one more time to Drakes Bay, a couple of hours, the purest place in California, then could she walk the beach in her own time, and in total solitude make up her mind?

And what was she making up her mind about? And who cared? And why did she still care? Rosa had asked her this question this morning, when she called to report on conditions in Big Sur (Highway 1 was out again, but they were fine). Rosa was Eloise's principal Buddhist, though she didn't call herself that. If you asked in a mild tone of voice that didn't imply a single thing (a tone of voice Eloise could rarely manage) how Rosa viewed her adult life, she would talk about phases, old mistaken desires that had been outgrown or shucked off. She “made no judgments” (except, of course, of Eloise), “had no desires” (except that Eloise stop harassing her), and “took things as they came” (except remarks by Eloise that sometimes caused them to be not on speaking terms for a month or two). But Eloise did make judgments, did have desires, and seemingly could not take things as they came, and she had this feeling that if she could just organize her self-contradictory thoughts she would come up with a program of why care and how to care, and, somehow, she would leave a record of this, and then her life wouldn't be wasted. But she did not want to be someplace like Esalen, and have positive feelings and forgiveness cloud her mind. She wanted to figure out a way to get Rita Lavelle, Anne Gorsuch, and James Watt to denounce themselves, feel shame, feel regret, engage in sincere criticism and self-criticism, and then do penance.

And yet she knew at seventy-seven that it could not be done. And she also knew that James Watt, Anne Gorsuch, and Rita Lavelle would ask her, just as she asked them, was she ready to do penance for the
slaughter of the Russian peasantry? For the Gulag? For the Great Leap Forward? For the takeover of Poland? For the Berlin Wall? For the Stasi? For the Khmer Rouge? For, indeed, Reverend Jones? And when they asked her this, she would squirm in her chair and say just what comrades had said year after year, decade after decade—“Mistakes were made.”

What if, Eloise thought, they were all nice people, as she herself was a nice person? What if, between gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and allowing PCBs to flood into the rivers, Anne Gorsuch worked in soup kitchens and nursed the poor? What if, between authorizations of the sale of every piece of public land in America, James Watt played with his grandchildren? Hadn't Eloise been shocked at the murder of Lord Mountbatten, imperialist pig, whom she had detested ever since he sent Julius to his death at Dieppe? A few summers ago, when the IRA blew him up with his wife and his grandson and that poor local child, hadn't Eloise thought first of how awful it was? Only later had she wondered whether at the final moment he'd had time for regret.

Was human nature inherently good? Eloise and Julius had disagreed on this one. Eloise had said yes, look at herself, look at her parents—if you showed people the way to do good, they would want to. Julius had said no, look at himself, look at his family—coercion was essential, eggs had to be broken. That was human nature. He thought she was naïve; she thought he was bad-tempered; neither of them saw the other one as the other one saw himself, herself.

Eloise went to the kitchen. Assam? Constant Comment? Mint? She made a cup of each and set them in a row on her coffee table. Finally, finally, finally, when she turned on the show, her show,
Hill Street Blues
, and saw that familiar attractive Sergeant Esterhaus starting the day's shift at the mysterious precinct station (Eloise always imagined Chicago), she forgot, more or less, about Hobbes and Locke and her aches and pains and the rain that had been going on for days. Her brain remained a pleasant blank for the rest of the night—while she put her cups in the sink, while she made sure the doors were locked and checked the windows in the sunporch, while she brushed her teeth and put on her nightgown and straightened her bedclothes, which hadn't been made by anyone that morning after she got up. By her, that was. Her book was by her bed
—Memoirs of Hecate County.
Hard to believe it had been censored, but it had. She was having a little trouble getting through it, though. She decided not to disturb her blankness by trying again tonight. She got into bed.

Oh, it was comfortable on a rainy day to do nothing. To think of that long beach, so flat, so remote from everything. Eloise sighed and yawned, then yawned again. If it stopped raining and she got to the co-op tomorrow, she had to remember Brie. She had a craving for Brie lately, and every night, she thought, Brie, and every day she forgot it. She had left the light on in the bathroom. No, she hadn't. Brie, she thought, Brie.

—

EMILY HAD TO
eat a bowl of Cheerios and some fruit, and she had to drink milk. Emily didn't mind Cheerios. One of the main things that she held against Mom was that she had to drink four glasses of milk every single day while Mom stood nearby. Mom said, “You are very thin, Emily.” Then she shook her head. In order to make herself happy while she was choking down her milk, Emily watched her dog, Eliza. Emily knew everything about Eliza. Eliza was almost two, a black-Lab/golden-retriever mix; she slept in Emily's room, right beside the bed (sometimes she worked her way under the bed, and then, when she wiggled, the bed jiggled, which made Emily laugh). She knew how to sit, stay, come, down, and catch a dog biscuit. When Mom told her to do these things, she did them right away. When Emily told her to do them, she lolled her tongue out of her mouth as if she were smiling, and did them, but a little more slowly. Eliza went to the back door and whined. Mom let her out.

Emily jumped off her chair, showed Mom her bowl, and set it next to the sink. Mom said, “Oh, okay.”

Emily walked toward the swings, but really she was watching Eliza, who looked sneaky, the way she looked when she was planning to steal something. Mom always laughed at the stealing—a glove, a shoe, always found in her dogbed.

Emily sat on the swing with her toe on the ground, pushing herself back and forth, her arm hooked around the chain. Eliza went over and lay down under the mulberry tree; Emily bent down and stared at her. In the next yard, Mrs. Gilkisson came out, carrying a bowl; she walked briskly across the yard, and opened the door of the
chicken house. A few moments later, she came out, pulled the door, and walked back into her own house.

Now Emily went over to the sandbox and sat down in the middle. She picked up a trowel and began to smooth the sand idly. Eliza got up, walked along the fence, and, when she got to a certain spot in the honeysuckle, slipped through. Emily hadn't realized a hole was there, but when she went over and pushed aside the honeysuckle, she could see it. Emily stood very still and watched Eliza, who crept along the fence line until she came to the chicken house. She pushed on the door with her nose. The first time it didn't move, but the second time it did. Eliza went in.

Emily thought that maybe she should shout for Mom, because someone was about to get in trouble. There was noise in the chicken house—the chickens were squawking. Emily got a little afraid. Just then, here came Eliza, out the door. She did not have a chicken in her mouth, and so Emily felt a little less afraid. Even so, she ran back to the swing set and started to swing, pumping. She held tight to the chains, leaned way back, and stuck her legs out as far as they could go, then whipped them back and fell forward. In four strokes, she was pretty high, but she saw Eliza as she came through the fence and headed toward the back of the yard, where the garage was. Emily stopped pumping, let go, and flew out of the swing. She liked doing that.

Eliza had disappeared. Emily looked at the house. No sign of Mom. Emily went very slowly toward the garage, almost tiptoeing. She went around the corner, and there was Eliza, digging with her claws in the dirt. She was digging carefully, using both front feet. Emily watched. The hole she dug was pretty deep, but the ground was soft, so she didn't have to try very hard. She paused and looked in the hole. Then she went over to something she had set to one side and, very gently, picked it up. She put it in the hole. All this time, Emily had been edging closer and closer, and finally, just before Eliza started filling the hole, Emily was close enough to see what it was. It was an egg, white and perfect. The dirt landed lightly on it and then covered it. When she was finished covering the egg, Eliza turned in a circle and lay down. She stared at Emily with her ears pricked. Emily went over and petted her, and Eliza licked her chin. Emily said, “Okay, Lizie. I won't tell.”

O
N TUESDAY
, Lillian had called Debbie and told her about driving herself to the doctor—she sneaked out when Arthur was down at the bottom of the property, digging up bulbs, and went by herself, and felt fine. Didn't Debbie think that was a good joke? Debbie did, in a way, but then, on Wednesday, her father called her and said that she had better come, and bring Carlie and Kevvie, and Debbie kept saying, almost yelling, that she couldn't believe this, she couldn't believe this, and her father was horribly patient, and said that Dean would pick her up at the airport, and Tina was coming Saturday. But she got herself together by dinnertime—she told Hugh quietly enough so that he wouldn't think she was going crazy, and then she sat with the kids on the couch in the living room, and said that she had something to tell them. Carlie understood—she nodded, and she tightened her grip on Debbie's hand, but Kevvie just stared at her, his arm looped around his Funshine Bear and his thumb in his mouth. Hugh, standing in the doorway, said, “That's why they have to go, Deb; they have to see it.”

And so they did, and because it was Lillian Langdon Manning who was counting out her last hours, it wasn't that bad, and Debbie did not have to take over, which was always her instinct. She could sit in the kitchen and chat with anyone who passed through, give and accept hugs, offer everyone the food that people brought over because
they couldn't think of anything else to do. The weather was beautiful for January. The kids relaxed and played with the other kids; Carlie was solicitous and maternal with Eric, Dean's two-year-old. She read him an old Raggedy Ann book she found in Tina's room, and she was willing to read it over and over, which made Debbie proud in a melancholy sort of way.

Yes, Lillian had driven herself to the doctor on Tuesday, but then, Tuesday night, something broke, some little membrane or wire or bolt (depending on how you imagined the brain), and the hallucinations began. She woke up Wednesday morning, turned to Arthur, and said, “Have you seen Arthur?” Arthur had patiently reminded her over and over that he was right there, and now, as she lay in her bed, looking at the windows or at the sunlight on the ceiling, she would say, “Is that a lake?” or “Did you hear that Henry my brother died?”

Her father would pat her mother's hand and gently say, “No, darling, that's the ceiling; I'm right here; Henry is fine, you'll see him tomorrow.” And her mother would nod and say, “I suppose you're right.”

Allegedly, there was little if any pain, and if pain should begin, there were painkillers, but her mother had told her father weeks ago that she wanted to be conscious as long as she could be.

She had greeted Debbie with a kiss and asked if Carlie and Kevvie were hers and what their names were. Debbie had made a strenuous effort not to compare how her mother processed her presence with how she processed Dean's presence, or with the number of times she asked if anyone had seen Tim. Her mother had been precisely and exactly herself for Debbie's entire life, thirty-six years now, and Debbie had found her too disorganized, too yielding, too wrapped up in her husband, too focused on Tim, too affectionate with Janet for most of that time. But since Carlie's birth, she had liked her better (liked her—she had always loved her to pieces) and had talked to her almost daily, sometimes asking advice, but mostly just listening to the soothing sound of her voice. In fact, it was the sound of her own voice that Debbie heard most when she made those phone calls, but she could not help checking in, seeking the how-are-you's, the yes-honey's, the that's-a-good-idea's, the love-you's.

The calls were over, dead as of Tuesday. Now, every couple of
hours, Debbie slipped into the bedroom and listened to the strange conversation between her parents, knowing that she would never forget it and maybe she should not let this be her last indelible memory.

The rest of the time, she arranged the funeral, because someone had to. She called the funeral home, chose the dress and the shoes, wrote the notice for
The Washington Post
and the local McLean paper. She went through Lillian's address book, trying to judge who would need to know. She cooked, she washed dishes, washed more dishes.

Her father was perfect—endlessly kind, loving, and reassuring—and her mother seemed to take this for granted (and even as Debbie had this thought, she knew it was stupid). Dean and Linda did the driving-around errands. Linda was nice. Debbie could not object to her in any way, except when she went into Lillian's room, and Lillian said, “Linda. I would know you anywhere. You are very pretty, do you know that?”

She, Debbie, was the girl who had had the perfect mother—kind, indulgent, organized, and capable—and therefore, if you could still feel that spark of resentment toward the perfect mother, then there were no perfect mothers, and best not to try to be one.

Debbie was in the room when it happened. Her father, who was sitting on the bed, had kissed her mother's hand and gotten up to stretch and walk around. When he did, her mother cried out—just “Oh! Oh!”—and then she lay back, and her eyes were open and her jaw was slack. Debbie took a step toward the bed, and her father was just ahead of her. He said, “Lily Pons? Darling?”

Debbie put her head out the door and called in a low but intense voice, “Tina! Dean!” and went back into the room. Tina was there at once. Lillian said, “What is that noise?” And then Dean appeared, and all three of them approached the bed. Lillian lifted her head, then let it fall back, and her last word was “Darling.”

It didn't matter whom she was thinking of or talking to, but always afterward, Debbie said that her mother had looked at her father, said “Darling,” and passed away.

—

DEBBIE HAD CALLED
maybe seven people, Tina had called four or five, and their father hadn't called anyone, because after their mother died he seemed to collapse. So Debbie was amazed when she finished
dressing herself, and then Carlie and Kevvie, to come out to the living room and discover that it was packed to the doors, that there were people chatting in the hall who stopped talking when they saw her and gave her sympathetic looks, that the front door was wide open and there were cars parked all the way down the driveway and out onto the road, and more people, everyone dressed in somber, formal outfits, walking up to the house. They should have had it at the funeral home or at a church of some sort after all—with no one to consult, she had assumed that maybe thirty friends plus Uncle Henry, Uncle Frank, Aunt Andy, and Janet would show up. When she'd called Uncle Joe, he had started crying as soon as she said, “My mom…” but he didn't dare come—Lois had some sort of stomach virus, and he had been exposed. Aunt Claire couldn't come, either, because she had just started at Younkers; she and Debbie had agreed they would do a memorial at the farm, maybe at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and then Claire had burst out crying, too, and said, “Oh, sweetie, your mom was my idol. When I was little, I would get her mixed up in my mind with Maureen O'Hara, except that I thought your mom was more glamorous!” The first thing Debbie did when she saw all the people was to go out to the pool area and check that the gate was chained, and the next thing she did was go into her father's office and lock the liquor cabinet. The coffin, closed because her father couldn't stand for it to be open, was in the living room, right out of a nineteenth-century novel, but that hadn't been her intention—her intention had been to keep her mother for as long as she possibly could, not to let her leave home until the very last minute.

Her father was a mess. He kept running his hand back through his hair and standing it on end, and he could not tolerate the feeling of his tie, so he had pulled that off and draped it around his neck. He was wearing a black suit that looked like it had crumpled itself to conform to his state of mind. Debbie watched him. A man would come up to him, shake his hand, mutter something sympathetic, then put his arm around her father's shoulders and walk him a little away from the crowd. There would be earnest words, more head shaking, a pat on the back; then that man would walk him back into the group, and another man would do the same. Her father looked pale and distraught, as though he found all of this attention disconcerting, but Debbie didn't know how to put a stop to it or draw him away.

The weather continued calm and clear. As one o'clock approached, Debbie went through the crowd, handing out the programs that Linda had made at the copy center. Mr. Littlejohn, who was going to play the piano, had to walk half a mile to the house. Debbie thanked him effusively, and saw that he understood—he and she were the only two people in control of this mob. Dean, Linda, and Tina set out the rented chairs—not enough—and every bench, kitchen chair, and stool they could find. At one o'clock, Mr. Littlejohn commenced Pachelbel's “Canon in D.” Everyone stopped talking, came into the living room, and sat down where they could. Debbie took her father into custody—she got him to sit beside her, and she tightly held his hand. Aunt Andy was on his other side, and Uncle Frank was leaning against the wall nearby. Janet had come without Emily or Jared, and she was in the back of the room, keeping to herself. Debbie knew from their talk late last night that Janet was barely holding herself together, but she couldn't think about that. Aunt Andy quietly took her father's other hand. When they were all silent, Mr. Littlejohn played the Introit from Mozart's
Requiem
, arranged for piano, and much more somber than the Pachelbel. Faces assumed their proper expressions.

Once the music had stopped, a minister they knew socially—a very liberal and cheerful-looking man—got up and gave the sermon. He did not mention “God,” only “our dear Father,” and he said the blandest possible prayers that everyone knew. Then Uncle Frank stepped up and talked about the farm, and Lillian with her troops of devoted friends, and then, all of a sudden, she was spirited away by some stranger, and it turned out to be Arthur, and when he met Arthur and saw them together, he knew he had seen true love. Then Janet came forward and talked for a few moments about Tim, and then Tina came forward and talked about watching her mother her whole life and saying to herself, Oh, that's how you do it; and now she had seen her mother die, and she had said once again, Oh, that's how you do it; and she thought of her mother going ahead of her into that unknown kingdom, and somehow felt safer. Then it was Dean's turn, and he started to talk about being allowed to do whatever he wanted when he was a child, and how that was the best—but he couldn't go on, and after a few moments, Linda had to come up and take him back to his chair.

Debbie crumpled her paper in her hand and stared at her strangely moving feet in their black pumps as she stepped to the front of the room. As she passed the coffin, she allowed her fingers to run along the dark-reddish edge. Mahogany? It looked like it; her mother herself had picked it out. When she saw all the faces looking up at her, she crumpled the paper even tighter, then looked at the back wall of the living room and out the windows, at the shine of the pool in the warm air. When she opened her mouth, she said, “I am a know-it-all, and have always been a know-it-all, and all these years I spent telling my mother what to do, and either she did what I told her, or she very kindly went her own way and did it differently and better than I would have done. But even as much of a know-it-all as I have always been”—everyone was smiling—“I always knew that my mother, Lillian Manning, knew all there was to know about being a loving mother and a loving wife and a loving friend. I hate how much we miss her already, and how much we will miss her tomorrow and forever.” And then she, like Dean, started to cry, and so she went and sat down, and she could hardly see where she was going through the tears.

Her father got up. Debbie took out her Kleenex and wiped her eyes, of course smearing her mascara. Aunt Andy reached across his empty seat and stroked her arm. Debbie glanced at Uncle Frank, who had gone back to leaning against the wall, and was staring at her father with a kind of hungry curiosity. Yes, they all thought it: How will he survive this?