Where We Are Now (11 page)

Shortly after everyone left and I was saying my goodbyes, George said, “Hand me that phone book, honey. I don't know why Lucy has to act such a fool, putting it
clear across the room.”

I did as he asked. We were blood kin and had lived in the same house. Standing there beside him, I was in that strange small country where, for a flickering instant, childhood and the present were spliced together. Probably because I had come from afar and would leave again, George didn't turn against me as he did everyone else. Fergus said he didn't rage at me because I was his niece, and old men naturally favored younger women just as our grandmother had favored her only son. Whatever the reason, I knew that George and I had no time now to pile up resentments.

“I have to find somebody besides Dave to help me out. He's the most aggravating s.o.b. I've ever had around. There's this friend of Jean's…. Her husband's gone, and she might…. ” Reverie seemed to overtake him. When I left, he had one hand on the phone book and his face turned toward the window. Dave waited in the kitchen. Lucias would drop by that afternoon.

In late May I returned for George's funeral. The woman who looked after him in his last days at her nursing home told me, “He used to ask me, ‘When are you going to get in bed with me?' And I'd say to him, ‘In a minute,' then he'd groan and say, ‘Your minutes are so long.' He died holding onto my hand.”

A kind country woman, she spoke of George with strong affection. Plump, energetic, sentimental, George's last woman. He never had her but he had expectations.

A few days after the funeral Lucias Atkinson arranged for us to meet in his conference room. Uncle Phillip, Fergus, Marshall and I sat around an empty gleaming table. Aunt Lucy was still too shattered to come. Once again there
was the blue paper wrapped around the white. We all had copies. Why, I wondered, had Lucias summoned us? He could have mailed us those copies. Actually, I thought, he preferred the ceremonial aspects of life. He was, after all, the one who had insisted on baptism by the rules. Now we were to have a proper sort of will reading within this dimly lit stage-set looking room where portraits of Lucias's father and grandfather peered at each other from opposite walls. Lucias had never married; no one was left to hang his picture with theirs. He stood up at one end of the table and cleared his throat.

“As you will see, George has left the bulk of his estate to Fergus and Marianne. Fergus is to be the executor since he lives in Tennessee.”

There was also a large cash bequest to Aunt Lucy, a small one to Dave, and another small one—two thousand—to a woman none of us had ever heard of.

“Who is this … this Gladys?” Fergus asked.

Marshall smiled. “I bet she was one of his women.”

Lucias cleared his throat. “I think she … she, um, used to work here … at a cafe on the square. She … well, she lived above the cafe. You know George…. ”

We all nodded.

“When was he carrying on with her?” Fergus's curiosity could be as bad as mine sometimes.

“Oh, I don't know exactly.” Lucias said, “I guess it was sometime after he and Lula parted.”

There was nothing more to be gotten out of him.

“What I don't understand,” said Fergus once we were outside “was why, when he wouldn't loan me a cent, he left me nearly half of what he had.” He stopped and looked over at Uncle Phillip standing in the sunshine talking to Marshall, making sure he had company, looking after him as he'd helped look after everybody.

“It was Daddy he held a grudge against, wasn't it?”

“The funerals? Because he was drunk at Miss Kate's? What about Jean's?”

Fergus nodded. “Hers too. I tried to get him not to go, but he loved her. Finally I decided, all right. Why not? If my daddy wants to drink his way through funerals, it's all right with me.” He looked at me and grinned.

I smiled. We were both thinking about how sober Uncle Phillip had been at George's funeral.

Fergus, Aunt Lucy, and I divided Uncle George's belongings. Fergus wanted his bed. Aunt Lucy chose a music box she and Uncle Phillip had always admired. I left the owl for Fergus but asked for the rest of his office furniture, those ornate Victorian pieces he'd acquired at auctions; the mahogany table made from a piano, its legs bulging with oak leaves and acorns, a settee and its matching rocking chair with women's heads holding its arms, the one I'd sat in the first time I went to see George downtown.

He never remembered where he bought any of those things. By the time I thought to ask him, he couldn't name a single location.

“Why did you choose these?” I pointed to the curly women's heads on the rocking chair's arms.

“Oh, the ladies,” he said, “You know how I love them!”

I had forgotten about the picture of the woman in the mirror in Uncle George's room until several summers after he died when Marshall and I were staying in a hotel on the Isle of Mull, one of the Western Isles off the coast of Scotland.
Rising above a cliff overlooking the bay, outlined in cupolas and carved stone, it was a marvelous Victorian pile, which had endured many owners and much history. There above the hotel's small bar was the same picture.

First one saw the woman with her hair heaped on top of her head, some of it falling round her neck, young and beautiful, as she gazed into the mirror. As I stared, the metamorphosis took place; a skull loomed above the bar. Now it was no longer magic; it provoked only a realization of an optical illusion, a remembrance of the old trick time played on all of us. Perhaps Uncle George viewed it daily as an ironic reflection on mortality, but more than that: for him, I believe, his picture was also a reminder to hurry.

M
arshall and I both knew
we wanted our son too much. We already had two daughters, Kate, five, and Sally, three, good ages to welcome a new brother. For a while we didn't tell them he was on the way; we told no one. Perhaps we both feared something might go wrong if we admitted our secret. I don't know. We didn't talk about it. He was the gift we kept closely hugged to ourselves, the invisible life hiding behind Marshall's back every night, circled by our bodies while we slept. I didn't even tell my Grandmother Moore who was always hungry for news of the next generation, nor did Marshall tell Carter and Sarah, the uncle and aunt who'd raised him. They lived out in the country south of Austin.

Our house was in town just north of the university and the capitol, close to the places where we worked. Although we loved going to their farm and Marsh was the only child they had, we saw the McNeils infrequently. They weren't clingers, nor were Marsh's other aunts and uncles. My family was when given a chance, but they all lived a thousand miles away in Tennessee. For three months we told no one. Our friends didn't catch on though some of the women looked at me with a speculative eye and later swore they had guessed. We spent a lot of time guessing about each other then.

What did we fear? I was twenty-nine, young enough to carry a child well though I never carried any but the first easily. I had morning sickness followed by periods of immense fatigue and hunger so strong my doctor suggested I suck hard candy to contain it. And the ninth month I retained so much water and was so swollen Marsh had to tie my shoes. The last three weeks my blood pressure, usually low, shot up and
worried everyone. This happened every time I got pregnant. It would be all right, I knew, as soon as the baby was born.

Amniocentesis wasn't a routine test in the early sixties, certainly not for someone my age, and if it had been I probably wouldn't have taken it because I was so sure it was a boy. That was the one thing we spoke about. The rest of the time, when we were alone, we made only slight references to him as if some nameless but malignant fate might happen to overhear us. When around others, we sometimes glanced at each other and smiled. We'd already named him, Martin Moore McNeil—after my father, my mother's family and Marshall's family in that order. He had the burden of all those generations upon him within a month of his conception.

For my thirtieth birthday Marshall bought me a two person hammock, one of the sort I remembered from my childhood in Tennessee—a friend of my mother's had one at her farm—made of stout rope closely woven at either end. He hung it with strong bolts and chains between two catalpa trees in our backyard. Showy in the spring—hundreds of white blossoms resembling miniature orchids drifted down and scattered across the grass—their large leaves provided deep shade. I had insomnia during that long summer. When there was no comfort to be found, no position which gave me rest in bed, I got up and padded out of the house to the hammock to rock slowly to sleep in ropes' embrace beneath the catalpas' floppy leaves.

“Mama's in the hammock!” Kate woke every time I left the house and shouted from her bed. I wasn't sure why she had to announce it, maybe just to reassure herself of my whereabouts. Every time she made this discovery she would fall asleep again immediately. For some reason her shout never woke Sally who slept, foot to foot with her sister in the next bed, nor did she wake Marshall who was only a short hall's length away in our room. Both the girls still woke near
dawn and both had their share of bad dreams but they were generally good sleepers.

That was later after everyone knew, had to know. I could hide under loose dresses for three months and not a day longer, not for the third child. We actually announced it to no one. When people noticed and asked, either Marshall or I simply agreed happily.

It was an odd time in our lives. We had two children and were going to have a third, yet we were still in transition, still renting a small twenties-style Spanish colonial house with two bedrooms and one bath in an old part of town when many of our friends were making house and car payments in the suburbs. Both Marsh and I worked at jobs we thought we'd leave, but we wanted to have the baby first.

By the time Martin Moore McNeil came along we'd collected so much equipment we didn't actually need anything though I did buy some new maternity clothes. I was sick of the ones I'd used before and had already passed them on to friends. We had a cradle that had been my grandmother's and my mother's before it was mine, a beautiful old one my grandfather had made of hickory. He'd also carved himself a stout walking cane. These were the only two objects we still had that he'd made, one for his children, the other for himself. My mother hadn't used it for me; instead she kept magazines in the cradle, a functional use Grandmother detested.

When we moved to Texas, I made few plans for the future, so I'd I left it with Grandmother who stored it in a half-finished room on the second floor of her house, a room that frightened me when I was little. I was used to cluttered attic refuges on rainy days in other houses, but this was a forbidden room next door to my bedroom. Cold air crept out of it after someone opened it during the winter, and in the summer, since the windows were never opened, it was hot enough to melt the wax fruit my grandmother put
away there. The few times I peeked through the door I saw narrow strips of wood on walls, a single light bulb hanging over a small collection of dusty trunks and boxes and a raw section of red brick chimney—a brighter unweathered red than it was outside—on is way to the roof. Dim gray light fell though a small dormer window. The cold light and the room's empty unfinished look was inexplicably scary. It was, I thought later, a place of beginnings—it hadn't become anything—and endings, feared perhaps because I was in transit then myself, living just for a year during the war in my grandmother's house. I didn't have to be warned away from its door. Later, of course, the attic-room lost its mystery. Still even after I was grown, I never liked that room. I don't think Grandmother liked it either. When she retrieved the cradle from it, she wrote complaining of the cold and the dust in there. I could imagine her, white-headed, arthritic though sturdy still, trudging up the stairs on her errand. She must have shipped it to me believing I would, at last, put it to proper use again. Did she, I wondered, remember the days Grandpa gave to its making? Surely she thought of the three children she'd rocked in it. I liked thinking of my mother, my aunt and my uncle as babies while using it for my own. To remember the others was to return to the pristine stage of their lives—before Aunt Lucy's raddled nerves kept her at home, before Uncle George's drunken insistence on driving put him in a wheel chair, where my mother's short life began—before any of them had faults and fates.