The House (25 page)

“No, I’m not.” Anna felt ashamed of her honesty and of her emotional retreat against Edward baring his soul. She told Linda about Edward’s collapse.

“Do you need me and Brad to come back?”

“No. Hospice sent over a worker.”

“How often will she be coming?”

“Every day.”

“Is it that bad?” Brad had picked up the other phone. Anna was surprised to hear him. The porous web of relationships encasing and linking her family was growing ever more transparent. No hiding places and secrets remained.

“He’s dying.” Anna spoke the words as much to herself as to Brad and Linda. “But, I can manage. I’ll call if his condition worsens.” She clicked off, knowing that conditions would most definitely get worse.

Having arranged a meeting with Father Richard, Anna entered his study the next morning. Sitting upon the sofa across from him, she unloaded and shared the conversation she had with Edward before the collapse.

“So much envy,” she said. “He hated me. And yet he said he loved me.” How could I have made love to him? Anna berated herself. So stupid. So foolish. Just like Serine.

The priest explained, “A man can’t make love to his mother. But he can hate her—or at least fool himself into thinking he hates her. Still, we can only hate what we once loved. In many ways, Edward, as a child, was also the husband his mother never had, protective, loving, and non-judgmental. He married you, and in a sense became the man he had wished for his mother, the father he had hoped to have. That little boy, who was never allowed a childhood, has now come
home.
”

“Why did he leave me?” Anna was confused.

“One of the most respected psychiatrists in our department during my residency was a woman in her seventies,” said Father Richard. “She was a wife, mother, and grandmother. She told us that despite what history and definition tell us,
eroticism,
in its most rudimentary form expresses the profound. Humans need to be held and nurtured. Only when encased in a body does the soul come alive, and grow aware of its vigor or consciousness. Human touch. The feel of others. Their hands in ours, our fingers entwined with theirs, one body sleeping against the other. These actions let us know we are alive and that we matter. Intense sexual desire is but the wish to be loved, and cherished, most particularly by our parents.”

Anna shuddered at the priest’s words when considering her re cent foray of intimacies with both Inman
and
Edward. “He was a little boy making love to all those women?”

“Edward was searching for his mother.”

Anna considered how hard she had worked as a mother. So much giving and no receiving. And then how empty she had felt with Elena.
We all need a bit of affection. Someone to love. Someone
.

“Sex as an obsession, addiction, or a major focus in one’s life evidences that a hole has been rent by the lack of love and nurturing.

In an effort to heal, we seek the bodily nurturing we didn’t receive as a child, a mother holding us close to her breast and feeding us, either from a bottle or—”

“Her breast,” Anna said as she remembered, “Edward used to watch me breast-feed the children. He was always helpful, making sure I was comfortable and not interrupted. And then ..” her thoughts retreated. Father Richard leaned forward, his movement brought Anna back. “He would watch me breast-feed them,” Anna repeated. “It was as if he didn’t understand. Edward appeared mesmerized by what I was doing.”
I envied your ability to give.
“It was as if he was taken by what was going on between me and David, and then Theo.”

“You gave to the children what he never got from his mother,”

“And what the company could never provide, nor Stella or Esther,” Anna said. Again she recalled Edward’s confession.
They were nothing compared to you. Fleeting moments without pain.
Anna murmured a lament. Edward had cried out for her during and then in his sleep after their lovemaking.

Anna said, “Edward had grown distant by the time Linda arrived, absorbed in work and his
affairs
. Yet he was empty. Life drained from his eyes while I breast fed Linda. He looked at me, intently.” Anna screwed her face.

“Your children were full of your milk, your love and nurturing, what his mother had never possessed to give him.” Father Richard leaned back in the burgundy recliner. He clasped his hands, inter wove his fingers and set them on his stomach. “Edward wished for and yearned to receive what you gave David and Theo.”

“He coveted what I gave them.”

“And your ability to do so. But, he was not about to interrupt while you were giving it to them,” the priest said. “He knew too well the pain of not having it.”

“And so the women were his way of getting back at me?”

“Or perhaps his feeble attempt to get some of what you gave your children.”

“You’re saying Edward was torn between needing me to be there for his children, and yet envious of what I was giving them?”

“The more financially secure Edward became, allowing you to remain ensconced in the home as a wife and mother, the deeper he fell into realizing how much he’d never gotten during his childhood.

What his mother could never give him due to her circumstances, not because of who she was.” Father Richard then said, “This is why he never left or abandoned you.”

“And why the house means so much to him.” Anna then sighed. “It’s why he didn’t want me to sell it.”

Father Richard joined her in the reverential silence that follows awareness.

“In all his sickness and hurt,” Father Richard said, “Edward gave you what he most lacked, a
house
where you could love his children, most particularly, his sons, and where you could feel safe, and hopefully loved.”

“But I
needed
him. I still do.” The truth of Anna’s words sent a chill across her body. “That’s what would have made me feel loved and safe.” She had experienced that two weeks earlier when making love to Edward.

“Tell him,” Father Richard said.

Aching in the wake of her self-revelation, Anna grew more frustrated. She looked to the priest.

His words resounded once more. “Tell Edward that you love and need him
before
he dies.” ?

Chapter 36

The hospice worker, Bertrice, was with Edward when Anna re turned home at noon. After making a cup of tea, Anna sat at the kitchen table. She thought of Theo while sipping her tea. She missed him cooking and moving about the kitchen, sharing tea with her, steam rising from the cups between her and him. Anna wished to speak with him now. No one had answered when she called his home last evening. This time she dialed his cell phone.

He answered. She told of his father’s collapse.

“I’m leaving right now,” Theo said.

“Don’t.” Remnants of her latest foray of berating Edward weighed heavily in Anna’s head. And then there was the sexual reconciliation wherein their souls had touched. “Your father and I need some time.” Theo was silent, then “You know I’m here. Call anytime.” She blew a kiss through the phone.

Theo said, “I love you, Mom.”

Anna had set the cordless back upon its charger when Bertrice entered the kitchen. Startled on hearing her footsteps, Anna jumped then turned around.

“I’m sorry,” the hospice worker said

“No bother,” Anna said then extended her hand toward the table, “Please, join me if you will.”

“Edward’s resting now,” Bertrice said. She sat at the table. “That’s good,” Anna said then added, “Thanks for coming so soon last evening.” She offered Bertrice some tea.

“I’m fine. Bertrice waved her palm. Anna drank more of her tea, now lukewarm.

“I’ve had no experience at this. What I mean is that,” Anna hesitated then rephrased her statement. “My mother died of a terminal condition. But my father took care of her.” Regret engulfed Anna, “I abandoned my father; refused to see my mother in her last days.”

Anna’s thoughts drifted back to Reverend Elijah speaking of Elena.
Your mother had her way. She was difficult to understand.
Parishioners of Reverend Elijah’s flock had struggled like Anna to make sense of Elena.
She wasn’t always affectionate.

“She was never affectionate,” Anna muttered, deep in thought
. You could have used more love from her—a show of emotion,
Reverend Elijah concluded
. She meant well, your mother. She did the best she could.

Anna said to Bertrice
,
“Papa hoped that one day I would see that Mama cared for me. He wanted me to forgive her.” Anna had not. She took in the middle-aged Bertrice. The color of her chest nut face was like her Reverend Elijah’s; Bertrice’s salt and pepper hair resembled Elena’s. “After Mama died,” Anna said, “I wanted Papa to live with us—me, Edward, and the children. He refused.”

“Death is difficult no matter how many times we’ve experienced it,” Bertrice said. “Each case I take leaves me with a sense of loss. Every death asks me to become more than I think I can. We are all born once. For those who know of their impending death and receive advanced warnings, or a heads-up as my mother called it, there’s a chance for a second birth, a re-birth.”

Anna didn’t want to hear any philosophical theories on how Ed ward’s death could open up blocked passages in her, him, or their marriage. Hope had dissolved with Edward’s confession and subsequent collapse. In her searching for a way out of the darkness of his encroaching death, she had given herself over to Edward. She had clawed her way through the depths of forgiveness. Amid Edward’s hands trembling across her back Anna had infused his weak and ailing body with her passion.

Edward had then murmured, his fingers squeezing her breasts, “I don’t deserve it, you taking me like this.”

“Shhhh.
You’re the father of my children.” Anna had received, and granted him her passion. “I wanted to be so much more.”

“
Shhhh
.” For remembrance’s sake, she had taken him unto her one last time. She now wondered, how in his condition could she have done such a thing
.
She had settled her body upon him, the door to her heart eking open. Her soul had given way. Edward had breathed more deeply, as if coming to life, the two of them liberated in their moment of coming together. Redemption intertwined with death. Anna had feared Edward might die while reaching climax.

Bertrice’s words pulled Anna from her memory. “Death is difficult. We all make mistakes. We will all surely die.”

Anna held her breath. Bertrice’s words felt pointless. “I always thought I’d go first,” Anna said. “That I was the weaker. I’d die of a broken heart.”

“Broken by whom?”

“Edward,” Anna whispered.

Bertrice appeared to ponder the idea. “He’s a young man, relatively speaking. At fifty-six, he’s is in what many might consider his prime.”

“He worked hard. And played hard.” Anna’s breathing shallow. Bertrice said, “If you could re-live your mother’s death, how might you arrange things? What would you change?”

Anna absorbed Bertrice’s question and then acquiescing to her mixture of bitterness, regret, and atonement, said, “I’d ask her why she was so closed, withdrawn, and unloving.”

Bertrice placed her palm upon Anna’s trembling hand. “Sounds like you might want to give
yourself
a chance at rebirth.”

Anna wondered how many people, now deceased, had Bertrice’s hands consoled. “How does it feel? Death—life slipping from a per son’s body?”

“Terrifying. And yet freeing. They’ve suffered so much, most of them, the terminally ill. They need rest,
relief.
”

Don’t we all, thought Anna.

Bertrice’s eyes sparkled, as if in the midst of Anna’s torment, she was undergoing an epiphany, grasping a new reality. “As we live, so we die,” the hospice worker said. “Many of the people I assist have held on to life so tightly, afraid it would slip away at any moment’s notice. The harder we hold on, the more life snatches itself from our grips. Like people and love, life longs for freedom, to come and go as it pleases, and with us grateful and gracious of its presence.”

“But what of all those who tell us to embrace life?” Anna said. Her thoughts shifted to Inman. He had filled her with such passion, enough for Anna to give Edward. Inman had fed her yearning to connect. Inman’s very being exuded vibrancy and the will to live despite all losses. Basking in the rays of his perceptive attention, she had felt, seen, and valued.

Bertrice said of life, “Like the child who lives in each of us, we need to hold it with gentleness and kindness, not with fear and rage. We’re the only person who can steal life from us. We do it by living in a way that robs our life of love and affection. Then again, sometimes our parents do that for us.” Her brown eyes twinkled.

Poverty and Violet’s struggle had stolen meaning and any semblance of love from Edward’s life as a child. He took what remained and put it into his drive toward ambition.