Fever (22 page)

When we were finished packing, James took the suitcases and
I the smaller bags and we started out of the room. I hesitated a moment, looking at the gun, but James didn’t turn or look back.

Connie wasn’t in any of the rooms we passed and she wasn’t downstairs. We went out to the car and James began to put the cases in the trunk of his father’s car which it had been decided we would drive home. When we got it there James would sell it and divide the proceeds with Connie. When he was done, I said, “James, what about the gun?” He slammed down the trunk lid, then stood still, looking down at the pavement.

“Dad always said it would be my gun one day.” He turned away from me and leaned, chest first against the car, his arms extended over its roof, and looked down the street of his childhood, squinting as if to see better—a small boy leaving in the early morning with his father, putting guns in the trunk, the neighbourhood still asleep, the birds just beginning to stir, the sun appearing over the horizon.

He turned back to me and took my hand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I always knew something like this would happen.” Together we went back into the house. As we entered Connie was coming down the stairs. Behind us, as James shut the door, there was the roar of a big truck pulling up in front of the house. After a second we could hear a truck door slam.

“Good-bye, Connie,” James said. He waited for her to reach the bottom of the stairs. Someone began walking up the sidewalk briskly.

“Good-bye James,” Connie said evenly. I thought they might embrace again, but although Connie was right in front of him, they merely looked at each other. There was a knock on the door behind us. I opened it to find a husky young man in coveralls standing there.

“Movers, Ma’am,” he said. “Could you move those vehicles out of the driveway?”

“Yes, right away,” I said, and shut the door. James and Connie were still facing each other.

“Good-bye, Connie,” I said. “I hope to see you at Christmas.” She put her hand out to me, I took it, we brushed cheeks, and I turned back to open the door. James murmured, “Bye,” again, not looking at Connie. The driver of the truck beeped the horn twice, reminders to us. I looked back at Connie as James stepped out onto the sidewalk and saw that her face was still a careful mask. Her eyes flickered to mine, but I could tell she’d barely noticed me. Other things were on her mind. I followed James outside, pulling the door shut behind me.

We got in the car and drove away, leaving Connie, as we had arranged, to supervise the movers. We had gone a hundred miles when James said to me, lifting one hand from the steering wheel in a gesture of relinquishment, “I wonder what she’ll do with the gun.” Neither of us could imagine it in her smart Montreal apartment.

“Yes, I wonder,” I said. But thinking about it, I imagined that she would not take it with her, that she would leave it behind in one of the empty rooms of the house. I imagined, too, that it would cost her much to do that, but that she would not regret it.

The last time I saw my father alive it was early winter, and though there was no snow on the ground yet, the mornings were cold, the ground frozen hard with a covering of frost on it before the sun rose high enough to melt it. I was walking to my secretarial job on the university campus. To get to my office I had to pass the university hospital and all its satellite buildings and the parking lot for out-patients at the cancer clinic. The chilliness and the layer of morning frost had dulled and softened the outlines of the city that could be seen across the wide river. That is how I remember that morning: softened and faded, still as in a prophetic dream.

As I approached the entrance to the parking lot I saw a man walking slowly toward me. A few more steps and I saw that he was my father. When we met, we both stopped. He was out of breath and I thought, had to stop to rest before he went on to his car. He had been a labourer all his life, but when he was not wearing his workclothes, he always dressed formally, and now he was wearing his good black overcoat, a neat, small black felt hat, and a fringed, white silk scarf tucked around his neck. His colour wasn’t good, there were red spots on each cheekbone that had never been there before, but what struck me most was a gentleness that appeared in his face when he saw it was me.

We spoke, but we had so little to say to each other that I have no memory of our words. It was too chilly to stand for long, and he was worn out by whatever they had done to him at the cancer clinic and needed to get to his car so he could sit down and then drive himself home. I watched him walk away slowly in the still, frosty morning, then went on to work.

But, reflecting on that meeting now, long after it took place, I knew he had looked at me in the way he had when I was a child, when we had loved each other without conditions or reflection. The paleness of the morning, the chill, the tender way he held his mouth.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately, and I know it is time finally to go to the basement, to search in the closet in the storage room, and to bring out the box that Eric found after she died, thrust far back in a drawer of her dresser, buried under her best nightgowns. When Eric lifted the lid and saw the box contained only photos, he didn’t even look at them, but he and his wife, Lise, seemed to feel that I, as the only daughter, had an automatic right to them which they wouldn’t even question. I didn’t want the box to tell the truth, but I knew that I should, so I took it, though I was rendered mute by the tumult I could feel rising in my chest, and ever since Eric handed it to me, it has been sitting, unopened, in a storage closet in my basement.

What is it I am afraid I might find? Or is it that I have already found it, whatever it is, and don’t want to be reminded of it, or to have to look at the evidence? I pour myself another cup of coffee and stare at the small box marked ‘Broadway Shoes,’ a company long out of business, once situated in the city where my mother was raised, which she left when she married, and where her parents lived, died, and are buried. Or is it only that I don’t want the old pain of her irreparable loss to envelope me again, as it is sure to do when I at last open her private treasure?

I lift the lid carefully and set it aside, expecting perhaps that her ghost will waft upwards from it, hovering above my kitchen table, smiling, wearing the pink dress with the pale blue flowers on it that was her favourite when I was about ten, and that had a way, at least in my memory, of transforming her into a younger, prettier woman.

Maybe in here I will at last find a photo of her wedding. The thought jars me, I sit down. It is not that I had forgotten what my uncle told me, but only that I had pushed it away, refused to examine it, held it in abeyance for the time when I might be ready to confront it.

Though a shiver runs down my spine, she isn’t here; no ghostly voice whispers her name, her image doesn’t appear shimmering in the doorway, I don’t smell her perfume.

The secret, told to me a long time ago by my uncle, is only this: that when she married our father, she defied both her parents, especially her beloved father, since they had forbidden her to marry him—he was Italian and Catholic and they were Norwegian gentry and Protestant—and that neither set of parents would come to the wedding; that not only did she break with her family, but she defied those unwritten, unbreakable rules of her class and her society. The mystery is, why?

The photos have been shaken up by my almost dropping the box when I brought it down from the shelf, and some of them are standing on edge. They seem to be nearly all black-and-white snapshots, the kind people take in abundance with cheap cameras at the slightest pretext. I lift about half of them from the box and fan them out on the table in front of me. Not one of the photos is familiar—so we were right: in this box are the ones that, for reasons only she knew, she prized and would not put in the growing collection of family albums which I have placed neatly on the shelf in the rumpus room for anyone to look at.

In front of me is a photo of my mother and some women standing around a piano singing. You can’t see who is playing, and my mother, standing at the end, turned toward the piano player, is the only full-length figure. Struck by her expression, I study the picture.

She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she always had an appealing liveliness about her. I had seen her use it more than once when I was growing up, though I probably didn’t know what it was, only knew I was confident in her ability to make things right with people. Yet that smiling intensity that could sway and then captivate people, served to hide a will as determined as any queen’s or general’s.

The other three women crowded together behind the upright piano are looking at each other over mouths puckered into ‘ohs’ as if they are singing the final note of the song and will break into laughter the moment they run out of breath. Mother’s left hand rests on the piano top, her right hand hangs by her side, but it is not relaxed, it is clenched into a tight little fist. Her expression is sad, as if the song has made her think of something that opens a hidden well of melancholy deep inside her.

How she wanted that piano. I remember when I was eight how mother insisted to my father that I was old enough to begin piano lessons, that I must have a piano. I remember our father replying it was impossible, a piano was too expensive for a family like ours, so that I forgot about piano lessons, which I hadn’t much wanted in the first place. But the next thing I knew, when I came home from school one day that very piano was sitting in our living room. I began lessons the next day, and I guess I took it for granted that our father had relented and bought it.

But now I wonder, did her father buy it? We hardly ever saw our grandparents, and on the few occasions I can remember when either we went to visit them or they came to see us, I can’t recall
our father being there, only mother, Eric, and me. And it seemed to me even when I was a child that there was a stiffness there, a coldness. I remember once my grandmother bending as if she meant to pick me up in her arms and then drawing back, as if she had seen something on my face or clothes that should have been wiped away before she could hold me, and for years, I wondered what it might have been. Then we didn’t see them anymore.

I wonder now why it was that when my uncle told me, I didn’t rush to my mother at once and ask her why. Why did you do it? And though I loved my father, even I doubted she had been seized by any burning passion for him. I could see he wasn’t especially handsome, that he had only a high school education, that he wasn’t and never had been rich. As a teenager, those were the only things I could think of that might explain what my mother had done. But I never went to her and asked her to explain, and she never mentioned it that I can remember, and I am sure I would remember.

Once I asked her why there were no pictures of her wedding and she said, shrugging, not looking at me, “I guess nobody had a camera. It was just a little wedding.” And I didn’t ask again.

So it doesn’t seem likely that her parents paid for the piano. It is more likely that mother went downtown with her chin tilted in that determined way she had and, despite what our father had said, ordered it herself, presenting him with a
fait accompli,
to which he must have felt he could only acquiesce. It makes me wonder, did she blame him somehow for her alienation from her family and from the society in which she had grown up? Had he, falling under the sway of her powerful will, submitted to her point of view, and so gave in about the piano? Why does she look so sad, when everybody else is laughing? Is the song, perhaps, one that reminds her of her youth? Of her family? Of Norwegian traditions she left behind when she married?

And why did this photo belong in her private treasure of photos, the ones the rest of us never saw, discovered only after she was dead? Is it because of the gleaming, rich wood of the piano? The three laughing women? Or is it because she is so slim when in later years she grew stout and breathless? I despair of ever fathoming her secret, of ever finding anything to explain what her parents could only have seen as inexplicable treachery, which even she, at least once in a while in some secret place in her heart, must have regretted.

I reach for an ashtray and light a cigarette. My fingers tap through the snapshots and pull out a picture of two girls on a tennis court. They stand side by side at the net, holding tennis racquets and wearing white, knee-length tennis dresses. One is my mother, she must have been about eighteen, and the other I don’t recognize. A tall girl, with dark hair pulled back from her face, and long, thin arms and legs. Mother looks so eager, so daring, as if she is just a little out of breath, she must have just won the match, and doesn’t the other girl look a trifle sulky around the mouth, as if she never does win and knows she is expected to be cheerful about it?

I turn the photo over. ‘Klara and Mercedes,’ someone, not my mother, has written in blue ink in a scrawling, luxurious hand, ‘1933.’ Mercedes is a name I know; mother’s best friend from her school days, though none of us ever met her: “She married an engineer and went to South America to live. We lost touch.” But there were plenty of Klara and Mercedes stories, pranks mostly, and wonderful good times to be relived in the telling by mother, Eric, and me. They involved campfires and horses, swimming in cold northern lakes, dancing, and tormenting teachers, first in high school and then in business college.

Mother looks fearless in this photo, willing and able to take on any challenge. Perhaps that is why she treasured it, because it
reminded her of what she had once been, and of what she might some day dare to be again. Or it might be because it is her only photo of her girlhood friend.

Some of the pictures are so old that they are done in sepia and the people in them are posed formally and wear the clothing of the last century. No mystery as to why she might have kept these; I can even see the family resemblance in some of them. I reach into the box and pull out the last few pictures.

Here is an occasion I recognize—Eric’s wedding. Eric is three years older than I am, and despite his name and his lineage on our mother’s side, he is no Viking, no Norse god like his grandfather was, but a man of average height with brown eyes and light brown hair. Somebody snapped this picture at the reception and Lise is seated in her wedding finery while Eric bends over her. They might be saying: Are you all right? I’m managing, how are you? Chin up, it’ll soon be over.

Mother is standing behind Eric as if she is waiting to speak to Lise, but she is looking at me, where I stand beside her in my sleeveless short dress and my veiled, pillbox hat. I am turned away from her, smiling at someone who isn’t in the picture. It is the look on mother’s face that makes me set down my cigarette and push the ashtray away, then take off my glasses to peer closer at the photo, trying to fix precisely what her expression is saying.

It is both questioning and faintly disapproving, although I don’t seem to be doing anything but smiling in a polite, social way at whoever I am looking at. I would have been twenty-one, the same age my mother was when she married our father. Is she afraid I am about to do the same thing she did? I peer even closer to see if disapproving is the right word, but the closer I get, the more the image of her face dissolves into shades of grey, patches which no longer have any meaning, and if I were to get the magnifying glass and peer even closer, her face would disappear
altogether into the texture of the paper on which the picture is printed.

I can’t see anything remarkable about this photo. It isn’t even a very good one, just an amateur snapshot of some people at a wedding reception, caught unaware, each looking in a different place, isolated, except for Eric and Lise, in her own drama. I don’t know why she would want to keep it in a secret cache.

I am nearly at the bottom of the box now and it occurs to me that I haven’t found one photo of our father. The thought is enough to stop me in the act of lifting out the envelope that lies at the bottom of the box. Why no pictures of our father? Not even one? In the box I have found, now that I think about it, images of every person in her life who meant something to her: Eric and me, Mercedes, the women who were her friends when she was a young housewife and mother, her parents, her ancestors, but there is not one picture of our father, not at any age, not doing anything, not even in the background. He simply isn’t there.

Tentatively now, with a peculiar, breathless sense I can’t quite put my finger on, as if the air in the kitchen has picked up electricity, or as if someone else is there, waiting with me, I take out the yellowing envelope, spread it open with my fingers, and peer into it. Inside there is only a lock of faded, pale blond hair, pressed flat. I touch it with the tips of my fingers; it is unbelievably soft. I know this: it is a lock taken from mother’s hair when she cut it just before she and Mercedes started off to business college. I know because she often mentioned how fair her hair had been until the end of her teens and how it had been so long she could sit on it, how she had kept a lock from that ceremonial bobbing. And when I would ask if I might see it, she would reply, “It must be around here somewhere,” but she never seemed to find it.

I lift it from the envelope, lay it on my palm and stroke it. It is
so soft, so pale, so lovely; it brings tears to my eyes. The girl my mother was before I knew her lies in the palm of my hand, the sweetness of her youth blossoms around me, and I am overcome with grief for her joyous, evanescent, lost girlhood, that a box of photos cannot ever bring back.

I put the small lock of hair tenderly away in its envelope and set the envelope next to the pile of snapshots I have looked at. Then I notice there is one photo left in the box, a photo in deplorable condition with edges worn away to raggedness, a blotch on the background, and one corner torn away.

It is a picture of a man in an overcoat leaning against a stone wall or fence in front of a large house that I don’t recognize. The top of the wall forms a ledge which he rests his elbow on. It is winter and his unbuttoned overcoat has snow on the elbow that rests on the fence, around the skirt and up its front as if he might have just been in a snowball fight. I can tell by the length between his ankle and knee and his long thigh that he was a tall man, and his shoulders seem broad, although that might be an effect of the overcoat.

I study this picture for a long time, longer than I have looked at any of the others, because something tells me that this is it. If I can read this picture accurately, I will find the answer to the question I have for so long refused to ask. Why? Why did she do it?

But I see only a man strikingly handsome in the way of movie stars, a self-confident man, which shows itself in the easy way he leans against the fence, an arrogant man, spoiled, I’ll bet, too. There isn’t any writing on the back and the only other clue is that the photo must have been handled a lot to be so damaged. But I don’t like this man. Dislike of this man makes me drop the picture carelessly onto the table.