The Angry Woman Suite (9 page)

“How good to see you, Aidan.” She nodded, as if she too could scarcely believe it had been five long years—or probably closer to the truth, as if she could hardly believe I’d forgiven her.

And had I?

I heard humming and looked down. Magdalene withdrew her hands and placed them on the boy’s thin shoulders. “This is Mr. Madsen,” Magdalene introduced me. “A very old friend of our family. And, Aidan, this is my son, Francis Grayson. Francis, manners please.” The boy ceased his humming and put his hand out, and right away I saw his long, sensitive fingers.
I saw Jamie’s fingers.
I took his hand and held it. I held it for the longest time.

“How do you do, Mr. Madsen.” The boy’s eyes crinkled up at the corners just as I knew they would, just as I also knew it would be a moment before the crinkling turned his lips upward into a tentative, winning smile, revealing the defensiveness at the center of his personality, the hidden hurt, breaking my heart all over again. He offered shyly, “I know who you are.”

“Do you now?” I recalculated his age. He was not yet five, small for his age, loosely-jointed, all elbows, arms, and knees. He bit his lower lip.

“Go on, Francis,” Magdalene encouraged.

“Everybody knows who you are,” the boy said carefully. His guarded manner intrigued me. “You’re the schoolmaster … and,” his next words tumbled out in a rush, “you have a radio show.”

“That I do. Do you listen to it?”

The boy’s face fell. “No sir. My grandmother doesn’t like the RCA on much.”

He was honest, anyway.

Magdalene and I chatted a few moments more—about what, I couldn’t say—and before I was near ready, she said they really had to go. Although I searched for something to say, something to keep her and the boy with me longer, I came up empty. There was so much I
wanted
to say, but couldn’t—not then, not with Francis there.

I’d too many gins after seeing Magdalene and Francis that day. But they did the trick because I eventually came to the conclusion it was better we had
not
lingered. I acknowledged my recollection of us “new men” sharing laughter and dreams in the shade of an old oak as nothing but a nostalgia-sweetened sliver of the big picture—and the big picture was
not
friendship or the festival that had become such an integral part of our legend. The big picture was huge slices of passion and deceit and those self-created walls that had kept us separated from ourselves and one another. I had to keep telling myself that. I had to keep remembering that I couldn’t let Magdalene Grayson get under my skin. Not again. I had to remember what she’d done to me. I had to remember that if it hadn’t been for her showing up at my door that horrendous night, the colony that had fed my life, my soul, would still be thriving—so it was perfectly understandable why I’d wanted to wash my hands of the whole affair, of the whole lot of them. It had been the only way I’d known to honor Jamie. My dear boy, Jamie. It had been the sane thing to do.

I had another gin then, for I had to face more facts. Soon Francis Grayson would be ready for school. I was the only teacher in East Chester. My school was the only school. I would be Francis’ teacher.

Facts.

So I had to prepare, to figure things out.

Facts.

The boy was not like his brother Earl; I’d seen that. Earl was a scrapper, a little loose in the head, but Francis was soft and curious and judging by his hands and that tender smile, he was also artistic and intense. He was like Jamie. But hopefully not
too
much like Jamie. No way under heaven could I go through that again. In time, Francis would come to me with questions about his family. I was the historian, after all.

Which meant it was time to give in
all the way
. It was time to look at the truth
all the
way
, not variations of it. It was time to go back to the very beginning and stay there for longer than two minutes, no matter how uncomfortable. It was time for me to get my stories straight. No, better yet, it was time for me to hone
one
story and stick with it. It was time to put pen to paper. A full accounting was also what Matthew Waterston deserved. And I owed Matthew. I owed Matthew Waterston everything. No getting away from it.

Facts.

ELYSE
Sacramento 1955

“Shush now, notice how the mourning bird stands so absolutely still? He is a plain little bird,” Papa observed. “But he is very, very serious about his music … watch. See how he holds every muscle so perfect in his striving for an extremely difficult performance?”

Back in our happy Sacramento days, before Daddy took me and Bean and Mother to Biloxi, Papa and I always got up at dawn. He liked things organized by the time Grandma arrived home from her graveyard shift at the hospital, and so he’d straighten the house, lay out Grandma’s nightgown for the day, get the percolator going, and the frying pan out for the one egg she liked, over easy. Then we’d sit out front on the porch swing, waiting. I’d still be in pajamas because Mother and Bean wouldn’t be up for another hour, which was when Aunt Rose got up too, for just long enough to smoke and talk while Grandma ate her egg, and then they’d play a hand of pinochle before heading off to bed for the day.

I watched, head on Papa’s shoulder, my muscles turning liquid at the distinctively plaintive
cooOO-woo-woo-woo
of the mourning bird’s song.

“It
is
nice,” I offered.

“He sings
friedlich
—peaceful, not really mournful at all,” Papa agreed.

“The boys down the street shoot the mourning birds with their BB guns.”

“Shooting a bird of peace—now that’s irony for you,
Liebling.”

“Irony,” I said half to myself, liking this new word. I looked up at Papa. “Not all of them get shot down,” I reassured him. “They
can
fly really, really fast. They
can
get away.”

Papa’s smile was almost sad. “It makes me think—” and then he stopped.

“Yes, Papa?”

Papa chose his English words carefully. “That, like this little bird, it’s in this process of stepping up, of striving, even when there’s a good chance of getting shot up, that life gets meaning—especially where our hearts are concerned.” Papa brushed his lips against the top of my head. “I still grow through my problems,
Liebling
, like that little bird—and so, someday, will you.”

I could scarcely believe Papa had problems, let alone big ones. Papa was cheerful and busy as ever; why, just the night before he’d finished his covering of the entire Frigidaire with flowered contact paper, and while Mother clearly hadn’t appreciated the final product when she got home from work, harrumphing her way back out of the kitchen, Papa hadn’t seemed to mind her lack of appreciation. In fact, he’d seemed pleased with her reaction.

“Needs some loosening up,” he said. “Wound very tight.”

“Has Mother always been … tight?” I’d asked, not because I seriously cared so much about the answer as I wanted to stay talking with Papa. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I knew what being wound tight meant. We picked contact paper remnants up off the floor, stashing them in the flowered wallpaper-covered trash can.

Papa looked at me intently, much like when he checked something in the fry pan to see if it was ready for turning. Whatever he saw in me seemed to satisfy him.

“Ja,”
he answered. “Tighter than a jack rabbit’s butt.”

I giggled, instinctively checking over my shoulder for Mother coming in and making a comment about Papa’s nasty talk. Instead Aunt Rose stood in the doorway, dressed in sparkly black, fastening an earring, a cigarette dangling from over-rouged lips.

“Well, that’s a new one,” Aunt Rose said to Papa—and then, “Little pitchers have big ears.”

“You look beautiful, Aunt Rose,” I breathed.

Aunt Rose’s nightclub job meant she got fixed up every work night, but her fix-up was a lot different from Mother’s fix-up. Everything about Aunt Rose was glittery, and she wore thick, bright red lipstick, and had piled-high blond hair, whereas Mother carefully blotted her lipstick every morning and pretty much stuck to blue or gray suits, and crisp blouses with turned-up collars. The only fun things Mother wore were spectator pumps, which I loved, even if they were “tasteful.” And I didn’t feel the least disloyal telling Mother I liked Aunt Rose’s glitter best, or even sometimes catching the drift of Papa or Aunt Rose’s comments about Mother (and even Grandma’s, who could throw out a snide remark along with the best of them, usually having to do with the word
pretentious)
because I knew everybody really loved Mother, too. Especially Aunt Rose.

It was my whining that loosened the Nellie story up out of Aunt Rose. Mother had been long gone at work that day, but Aunt Rose had just gotten up from her daytime sleeping to weed our lone flower bed, and I’d begun my daily fussing about it being time for me to go inside, to get ready for Mother coming home, when I was nowhere near ready for going in.

In between weeds Aunt Rose said, “Honey, your mother’s seen a lot of heartache. I think you should stuff a sock in it and give your mother your best smile when she gets out of the car tonight, think you can do that?”

“Well, I don’t see why,” I whined some more. “It doesn’t seem … truthful. And Papa says truth keeps life clean.”

“Well, Papa says a lot of things, that’s for sure, honey, but none of them tout whining. Now, come here.” Aunt Rose sat back on her haunches. “I think it‘s time to tell you something about your mother.” Aunt Rose said this so seriously, I was sure she was talking an imminent disaster.

“Your mother’s mother—her name was Nellie—wasn’t quite right in the head. She drank a lot when Papa was at work, and talked to thin air and hit your mother. She scared her. And your poor mother didn’t have any sisters and brothers to bounce things off of, and Papa was gone all day and didn’t know about your mother being scared until a neighbor lady caught Papa on his way home one afternoon and told him your mother had run over to her house the day before, crying … this neighbor lady felt real bad she hadn’t said something to Papa before, because she’d heard your mother crying lots of times and she knew Nellie wasn’t quite right.” Aunt Rose chucked my chin, adding, “Nellie didn’t say anything about wanting to take your mother with her when Papa kicked her out—”

“But Papa would never have let someone like Nellie take Mother!” I cried indignantly. “Not if Nellie was hitting Mother!”

“I know … yet crazy as it seems, it hurt your mother’s feelings real bad, not being wanted by her own mother. And here’s the other thing: As much as Papa loves your grandma, I know he loved Nellie too, and it hurt
him
something fierce having to let Nellie go …”

All this seemed like an awful lot of hurt for one family and I was suspicious. “Did Papa tell you this story? Because it doesn’t sound like Papa.”

“No. But the pinochle crowd is tight and I’ve heard talk about Papa and Nellie.”

There was that word again
, tight
.

“But, Aunt Rose, it doesn’t square, Papa not knowing about Nellie being not quite right—Papa always knows everything before anybody else.”

Aunt Rose seemed perplexed by this, too. “Yes, you’d think … but my point is, you know how Papa always talks about doing the right thing, and the right thing hurting a lot, and that’s how you know when something’s right?”

I nodded, suddenly understanding. “It’s like the mourning bird putting everything he has into his song.”

Aunt Rose looked more puzzled, but she said, “Well, there you have it.”

“I do,” I said confidently. “That’s Papa. He’s the mourning bird. But he didn’t know it till after Nellie happened; that’s when he started putting everything he had into striving, when he got serious and started being able to see through people. And someday that’ll be me too. I’ll be a mourning bird, Papa told me so.”

“There’s more, Elyse. Nellie died right after Papa kicked her out; that was the same year I met your family. Your mother was twelve then, and I was seventeen and your daddy sixteen. Our own dad had taken a hike, and my mother—your grandma—supported us herself … then one night she got invited to go bowling.”

I tried imagining my big, fat grandmother bowling. Aunt Rose saw my expression.

“Okay, she went for dinner. That’s where she met your grandfather—and here’s why I think they hit it off. Because they’d been kicked in the teeth, and people who’ve been kicked in the teeth can see that same thing in other people; Papa because he’d had to give Nellie the boot in order to do the right thing by your mother; and my mother, not only because she’d been deserted, but because she was as big as a house—no, two houses.

“A month after they met, Stephen Eric and I and your grandma moved into the house where Nellie had lived with Papa and your mother … but here’s the other deal about your mother, Elyse; she was a sweet thing,
really sweet,
and I was in trouble at the time—”

“What kind of trouble?”

Aunt Rose grimaced. “Later, when you’re older.”

“Oh.”

“I know your mother didn’t understand the trouble—she was too young, too—other than she understood it
was
trouble, but believe you me, that girl took my hand one night when I was in a bad way and she didn’t ask questions and I’ve loved her like she was my own ever since—she didn’t have to try to make me feel swell, you know. I mean, all these strange people just moving in and taking over
her
house, she could’ve turned her nose up—God knows she’s damn good at that, too. But she and Papa, together, made us family; they stood behind me and my big mess.

“And then we—your mother—lost Stephen Eric, your daddy. And your mother had loved Stephen Eric something fearful, Elyse. So, you see, she’s had a whole lot of losing, your mother has, honey. Look there, here’s her car—run, give her a kiss. Do the right thing.

“And Elyse, please—don’t ever let your mother get to thinking that she’s losing out again.”

I look back from where I sit now, nearing forty and remembering Mother and Aunt Rose, and I think the story about Nellie explained a lot, because unlike Aunt Rose, I think my mother must’ve always been a sucker for underdogs like herself, like what Nellie had helped make her—and so Francis had been a natural progression for Mother. Aunt Rose, though, had been almost transparent, something Papa had loved as much as the rest of his newly expanded family, calling Aunt Rose’s transparency “honesty that hurts.” Aunt Rose just never gave a holy hoot what people thought. And while Papa had that in common with Aunt Rose, he was generally more genteel about the not caring thing than she was; he was kind.