While I Was Gone (28 page)

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“Yes.” A slow heat was rising to my face. I hoped it didn’t show.

“But of course, here come the holidays, and my life will be crazy for a while.”

“I understand. Maybe you should just call me when everything has quieted down. There’s certainly no hurry about it.”

I looked up at him.

“No.”

“So you’ll call.” He grinned.

“Eventually.”

“I promise.”

“Good. Good.”

He leanefl toward me. and we touched our warm cheeks together.

WHEN THE GIRLS WERE LITTLE, IF THEY WERE DISTRESSED IN

the night I was the one who went to them, who stayed until they were calm. Daniel had more trouble even waking up, and he needed much more sleep than I, so we both accepted this. For a few years when she was around six or seven, Cassie in particular used to have nightmares.

She cried out, and I would rush to her in the dark and slide in next to her. Her body would be tensed with whatever she’d imagined. (“A lady was turning around and she had big skirts on and it was too slow, Mom.

It was so slow.”) I would be cold from the sprint upstairs. She was always feverishly hot, as though she’d been exercising fiercely, even in sleep. She gave me her heated wired body, and I gave her my large, cool one. She’d nestle against me, poking me with her sharp shoulders, her bony hips, and I’d tell her stories.

Over the nights, I slowly focused on a character I invented to give her courage, a character Cassie always wanted to hear more of, Miraculotta. At first I saw this creation as a sturdy, unflappable older girl with a Buster Brown haircut, wearing, of course, culottes. In one story she traveled and lived with apes in the jungles of Africa. In another she became a fierce warrior, despite the men who said a woman couldn’t do that. She was friends with animals and could understand their speech—always a great selling point with my children. The kindly chickens and ducks gave her eggs to eat. Admiring foxes donated their tails—which they could grow back—to make a beautiful, soft robe she wore in winter. Friendly elephants bathe her, sending their spray arcing high in the air. She was never afraid of them, because she knew they loved her, she was so gay, so charming. (She’d begun to change already, though I hadn’t planned it.) She built her house herself, out of snow, and lived in the white glowing space, sleeping at night under quilt she made from the down the geese had given her.

At some point in these dark nights, I realized that Miraculotta had changed so much that now I was thinking of Dana as the model for her, bringing Dana to life again in these reassuring fantasies—taking the person who’d met the most horrible end I knew of and making her the most fearless and inwlnerable creature possible. After I understood this, I began consciously to tell Cassie some things that were true about Dana, giving details from her life to Miraculotta, how she sometimes slept on the roof at night to be closer to the stars, how she made her living for a while singing in the subways. Or I would embellish a germ of truth, she was so beautiful that men painted her, drew her, and these paintings had the power to cast a spell over anyone who saw them. She gave away everything she owned, and as a reward for that—though she hadn’t expected any reward—the wood spirits replenished her supplies. She built little creatures out of clay she found on the banks of the river, and they were so beautifully made, so real, that they sometimes came to life. These, too, she gave away, setting them free.

One night Cassie said to me, “I know who Miraculotta really is, Mom.” She was whispering, as I had been, so we wouldn’t wake Nora or Sadie, asleep in their dark rooms across the hall.

“Do you?” I asked.

She nodded gravely, her eyes wide and black in the faint light.

“I

really do.”

“Who, then? Who is she?”

Shyly she said, “She’s you.”

I was pleased and even a little embarrassed to be so admired, and whenever I told her these stories afterward, I felt a special tenderness toward Cass. But then, of course, she got older and stopped needing me in the night.

Several years later, though, when Cass’s disaffection began, and then her rage at us—at me—it helped to remember that once she’d thought Miraculotta and I were one, to know in what regard she’d held me. It helped me to understand how repulsive she found me when all of that had fallen away.

“You’re so limited,” she said to me once when she was about fourteen and I was telling her she could not do one thing or another. And I thought, Well, yes, of course I am.

But at that earlier time, I realized that Cassie was right, that she’d parsed it well, Miraculotta was me, me and Dana combined. That when I was dreaming her up in the dark with Cassie, I was talking about all the feelings I had about that time, the sense of magical possibility embodied for me in Dana’s energy and passion, in the openendedness of my own life, in the curious and momentary hallucination we all shared then—more important to me, I think, than to anyone else in the house—that we could make of our lives anything we wanted, that all the rules we’d learned growing up did not apply.

We didn t know what would happen next, that was our great gift. The gift of youth. The thing we miss, it seems to me, no matter what we’ve made of our lives, as we get older. When we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last.

And that is what I felt again after my coffee with Eli—that sense of a surprise, that heady sense of not knowing, that gift of a possible turn in the path.

THE NEXT DAY I DROVE INTO BOSTON TO MEET MY MOTHER.

This had become an annual ritual, since by choice she stayed home for Christmas, and my brother’s family came over from New Hampshire to be with her. She and I had gradually evolved what she called our “early Christmas” together, a meeting, an exchange of gifts, lunch, day of shopping, and then always, before I put her back on the bus, double martini for her and a glass of wine or coffee for me at the Copley Plaza Hotel. In the old days I’d brought the girls along, and the day had exhausted all of us. For the last four years, though, it had been just the two of us, my mother and I, and our pace was more civilized, our pauses were longer. She had told me when we talked the week before that the only thing she had to get done was presents for her great grandchildren my brother Fred’s first grandchildren, now six and three. We planned to go to the Museum of Science for these. They had educational toys in their gift shop, toys my mother believed in, toys such as all toys had once been, it seemed to me—things you cut or carved or assembled and glued. Things you mixed and stirred.

Kites. Gyroscopes, yo-yos.

“Nothing”—and here Mother’s voice on the telephone had changed, and I could imagine her drawing herself up slightly in a ladylike repulsion—“electronic. ” I had laughed. For beyond even her age, my mother was oldfashioned. She’d been a farm girl, from the center of Maine, and she’d come to the university to work at nineteen after taking secretarial courses, an ambitious reaching out for a girl of her background. By chance she’d been assigned to my father’s off fice He was twenty years older than she was, a professor of botany, and he was married, though his wife was dying. My parents’ love, their courtship, was never spoken of in our house—there was always a deep reticence about anything that smacked of emotion—but I imagined it later as her listening to him, admiring him, learning from him, botanizing with him, as her slowly becoming a necessity to him, this quiet country girl with the wide, surprising smile.

And this seemed to be the nature of their love, even long after his wife had died and they had married and my brother and then I had been born. Each of them solitary, busy, mostly silent, turning to the other from time to time to say things like, “Isn’t that remarkable!” Or, “Most interesting.”

I think she didn’t feel comfortable as a faculty wife—perhaps she thought of it as a kind of posthumous usurpation of his first wife’s role—so my father’s life did not change much as a result of this new marriage, or even when he became a father two times over. My mother continued part time as his secretary, she still accompanied him to the office each morning and went out on long walks with him. She continued to behave, generally, as though, like him, she were a middleaged botanist.

When he died, her grief was invisible to me, except as a kind of stiffening, a further aging. She was only forty-four then. She might have thought of her life as having other beginnings. Other chapters anyway. She might have thought of remarriage. But within a few months she was back at work full time, and her life’s shape seemed unaltered. As it had for all the years since.

I waited for her on the bus platform at South Station. A raw wind was blowing off the ocean, and the day was heavy and gray. A motley group got off the bus when it pulled up, some young people, few guys in military uniforms, a fat mother with three little kids.

When the driver stepped forward and held his hand out to help someone, I knew it would be Mother descending. He had made an odd motion first, as though—almost as though—he was going to take his hat off, in respect.

She emerged slowly, said something to him after she’d gotten down, they bent together briefly and then leaned back, smiling in polite collusion with each other. Then she looked around quickly, ascertained which direction she should head in, and came toward me, utterly erect, white-haired, a kind of jaunty wide beret pinned on the back of her head. She had on her ancient all-purpose coat, heavy no color duck cloth she zipped the plaid lining out of in spring. I was startled to see that on her feet she was wearing—for the first time to my knowledge—old-lady shoes, black oxfords you laced up over the instep, with a thick heel. Her gait was slightly more widespread than usual, as though she was conscious of the issue of balance.

I called out and crossed to her, watching her face shift as she recognized me.

“Why, Josie!” she said, and we held each other.

We had lunch right away, in a place we usually went to near the terminal. Despite my exclamations of interest in various dishes, she conscientiously ordered the least expensive item on the menu, as she always did, and black coffee. She asked about Daniel, about the girls, and I gave my report, offering mostly achievements and accomplishments, not so much to boast as because that was what I assumed would give her greatest pleasure. She offered in exchange information about her students, the students who boarded with her. A thin smile played over her lips as she went on about these strangers, and I was startled, as I always was, to hear how important they were to her, to feel how much more interested she was in their activities, their achievements, than in Cassie’s or Sadieb or Nora’s. But they, of course, were in her life every day, whereas the girls were, I suppose, a kind of lovely abstraction for her at this point, a nice idea.

And I was glad, in a sense, for her involvement with Edward and Rolf and Naomi and Susie—the names changed almost yearly. Still, it was boring, too, the tedious accumulation of detail about people I didn’t know and didn’t care about. As she spoke, I drifted off.

watched the passersby moving in the brisk wind outside. I looked up at the warehouse windows above us and wondered about the kinds of lives being lived there. I let myself think of Eli.

“I’d like to see you again,” he says, smiling at me. I smiled at my mother now, too warmly perhaps, for she gave me an odd, sharp look and then sniffed, loudly.

I asked for the check.

I had read in the paper of a program of Christmas music at two o’clock at Trinity Church, and Mother said that would be lovely, so we drove there next. I was parking at a meter only a block or so away—we had congratulated each other on finding it—when she cried out, “Oh!

I wanted to be sure to tell you, Albert Moran died.”

Dr. Moran. I turned the engine off. He came to me, bending over a wounded dog, covering it with his big hands, turning to say to me in his soft voice, “Our friend here has gone somewhere he should not have gone, I’m afraid.” I saw him tidily tucking his napkin into his collar before opening his oldfashioned lunchbox, as black and humped as a steam engine.

“When?” I asked.

“Oh, a couple of weeks ago, I think.” Mother was casual.

She was used to death. It was her familiar by now.

“Had he been ill?”

“Dearie, I don’t know. I just read it in the paper and thought you might like to have the information.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“Though come to think of it, they said he was in a nursing home, so he might have been. III. But he was ninety-six. A good old age.”

She sounded approving. This was how it should happen, the distinguished thing.

“Yes,” I said.

She was opening her door.

“He was certainly good to you.

I won’t soon forget that.”

“Nor will I,” I said.

The wind was driving and powerful off the glass of the Hancock Building as we approached the church. Mother held her hat on with one hand and I hooked my arm in hers as we pushed against the blast.

Her coat flapped back, showing the worn lining.

Inside the church, we turned away from each other, gasping in the peacefulness, the dim, reddish quiet. I blew my nose, and Mother savagely repinned her hat.

As we entered the nave, the lighted altar glowed, golden and radiant, in the vast space. The dark wooden pews were more than half full, and we slid into the first empty one we came to. We whispered an intermittent conversation, quieted by the hush around us, by the high, empty spaces arching above. Mother was admiring of the needlepoint on the kneelers, the names of the needle women or their families picked out across them. Hannah Maynard Shaw. Lilian Tappan. Edward and Rebecca Soames.

I was glad, when the music started, to sink into it and my own thoughts—a strange mixture of Dr. Moran and my work with him, of Dana, of Eli again, and now and then of Daniel. Of Mother-and her curious, proud, and lonely life. Did she regret it? Any of it? Did she sense the end of it closing in on her and wish she’d done things she hadn’t? Wish she’d gone places she should not have gone? Or was it enough for her to have done steadily and honorably and carefully and thoroughly all the things she’d undertaken to do? Perhaps it was.