A Corner of the Universe

  I notice that Angel Valentine is nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m sure your parents want you at home in case Adam turns up here,” Miss Hagerty replies.

  I’m not so sure. I think Nana has decided that I can’t be trusted with Adam after all. I think she wants me out of the way.

  “Miss Hagerty, what is wrong with Adam?”

  Miss Hagerty puts down her teacup and looks at me for a long time. “You know, I’m not sure, Dearie. I don’t think anyone has ever told me. He’s just … funny.” Miss Hagerty taps the side of her head. “I believe you would say he is mentally ill.”

  I sigh. Funny. Mentally ill. These words are not helpful. I decide not to ask Miss Hagerty if mental illness can run in a family.

  When we have finished our tea, it is time for Miss Hagerty to begin her beauty regime. I take our cups downstairs to the kitchen. Later I sit on the front porch and look at the moon. I’m pretty sure Angel Valentine is not home. When she does come back, I hope Mom and Dad give her a good talking-to.

  I am still looking at the moon when the front door opens and someone settles beside me on the porch swing.

  Catherine.

  “I’m sorry about your uncle,” she says.

  I glance at her. “Thanks.” I don’t know how much she knows about Adam. “He has some problems.”

  “I bet they’ll find him soon.”

  “Probably.”

  Catherine looks at the moon with me.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I say at last.

  “He had a heart attack. He went to work like usual one day, and then his boss found him slumped over his desk. He was dead.”

  I nod. Catherine and I have both found out how quickly our world can swing between what is comfortable and familiar and what is unexpected and horrifying.

  At nine-thirty Mrs. Strowsky calls Catherine inside. I continue to sit on the swing. I look at my watch about every five minutes. Almost ten-fifteen and Mom and Dad still have not come home. Finally I go upstairs to bed. I have just fallen asleep when I hear my door open, and light from the hallway falls across my face.

  “Hattie?” says Mom.

  I sit up, immediately wide awake. “Did you find him?”

  Dad appears behind her in the doorway. They step into my room, and before they have even sat on my bed I know that they have news for me and it is very bad.

  I put my hands over my ears. “Don’t tell me,” I say. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Very gently, Mom pulls my hands down. Then she gathers me against her. I can feel Dad stroking my hair.

  “The police found Adam,” says Mom.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Mom doesn’t answer, and I feel her tears on my cheek.

  “He is, Hattie,” says Dad.

  “What happened?”

  “He hung himself. In the shed behind Nana and Papa’s.”

  I am sad. But I am not very surprised.

  My uncle Hayden is sitting in our parlor with his pipe clenched between his teeth. He smells like the back of Cline’s, where they sell the tobacco and cigarettes.

  It was shortly after dinner the next night when Mom answered a knock on our front door. “Oh, my God,” I heard her say. “Hayden.”

  I poked my head out of the dining room to see a tall man standing in shadow beyond our screen door, and I watched my mother cross the front hall. She started off in slow motion but was running by the time she reached the door. She put her arms around her brother, and they hugged for a long time.

  We did not expect Uncle Hayden to arrive so soon. Mom had called him the night before, shortly after eleven, and he had said he would take the next flight east. Even so, Mom hadn’t expected him until Monday.

  But here he is on Sunday, at the end of the longest day of my life.

  Time has been passing the way it did when I was six and got the measles and had to stay in bed forever. Each day felt like three days, six days, weeks. The night Adam’s body is found, we are up until nearly two o’clock. Half the house is up with us. Miss Hagerty hears us talking and emerges from her room, with what she calls Oil of Delay smeared on her face, and her hair tied up in a threadbare kerchief. We walk downstairs together, and Miss Hagerty sits with Mom on the sofa in the parlor. Later Mrs. Strowsky wakes up and joins us. Nobody says much. Mom is nearly silent, not even crying, but looking bewildered and bruised.

  And then Angel Valentine comes home. I think maybe she had hoped to be able to slip inside without being noticed, but I catch sight of her tiptoeing up the stairs, carrying her shoes in one hand. She runs into Mr. Penny, who has heard the news too and is on his way downstairs. He meets Angel halfway and tells her what has happened.

  I can’t hear their conversation. All I know is that Angel goes on up to her room, and we don’t see her again until the next day.

  “I hope you tell her exactly what she has done,” I say to Dad. “I hope you tell her she killed Adam.”

  Dad places his hand on my shoulder and says gently, “You know that isn’t true, Hattie.”

  I do know that. But still.

  Nobody sleeps that night. The next morning I drag myself out of bed at five-thirty, because there is just no point in lying around and staring at the ceiling anymore. It is Sunday, and people start dropping by our house as soon as breakfast is over. Although it is Cookie’s day off, she shows up anyway, and that is a good thing, because everyone brings food. Our kitchen fills up with casseroles and cakes and pastries and even urns of coffee.

  Cookie takes charge. She sorts out the food, wrapping some of it and putting it in our refrigerator or freezer. She puts the rest of it on plates and keeps handing the plates to Mrs. Strowsky and Catherine to pass to the people who have paused in our parlor to talk to Dad, then washes the empty plates when they bring them back.

  Mom is upstairs in her bedroom. She stays there until almost noon. When I peek inside to see if she’s all right I find her standing in front of her mirror, fixing herself up like she does for the Girls’ Lunches. I can even smell perfume.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I ought to go over to Nana and Papa’s,” she says. “They’ll have a houseful too.”

  Mom is staring intently at the mirror. I start to tell her that she looks fine, and then I realize that she is looking not at herself but at the photos she has stuck all around the edges of the mirror. Photos of me when I was a baby, my tiny school pictures, pictures of her and Dad, a picture of Dad when he was a baby, Uncle Hayden’s college graduation picture, the yellowed photo of Nana and Papa that appeared in the newspaper when they announced their engagement.

  “Mom,” I say, “you don’t have any pictures of Adam there.”

  “Huh,” says Mom. “I guess not.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  A look of pain crosses her face but she only shrugs.

  I think of a question I have been wanting to ask. “Did you ever visit Adam when he was at school?” I don’t remember Mom taking any trips, but maybe she visited him when I was very little.

  Mom sighs. “No. Nana and Papa visited him from time to time. On their trip to Chicago, their trip to Milwaukee, a few other times. But Nana asked me not to visit. She said it would upset Adam.”

  I frown. “Didn’t you love him?” I ask.

  Mom turns around sharply, hand raised. “Hattie,” she says, “don’t you ever ask me that question again.”

  I stumble backward, and Mom catches my arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says. “Hattie, don’t pay any attention to me.” And then she adds, “Yes, I loved him. But he was very hard to love.… Do you want to come to Nana and Papa’s with me?”

  “Not really,” I say, and leave the room.

  The afternoon finally arrives and passes in the same endless fashion as the morning. More and more I find Adam creeping into my thoughts.

  I accept a tuna casserole from a neighbor, say, “Thank you,” and in my head hear Adam say, “Oh, ho, ho, ho! Tuna casserol
e, Hattie, a divine dish, fit for a king, fit for a king, Hattie Owen.”

  From the yard Sam Strowsky shouts something to Catherine, and for some reason I am back in Nana’s dining room and Adam is stomping on the hidden buzzer.

  I hold the front door open for another guest, glimpse the cloudless sky beyond the porch, and remember Adam whispering, “Because Mother says it’s a circus trick.”

  I close the screen door, feel tears gathering.

  “Ricky won’t let Lucy have a new hat, Hattie Owen. Lucy must save money and make her own dress, Hattie. Oh, Ethel’s birthday did not go well, not well at all. Lucy wrote a novel, Hattie Owen, Lucy wrote a play, Lucy wrote an operetta and Ricky sang, ‘I am the good Prince Lancelot, I love to sing and dance a lot.’ ”

  His voice is so loud in my head that I want to cover my ears like I did last night, cover them to keep out the sound of Adam. My new uncle, my family.

  “You big baby,” I say aloud. “You didn’t have to leave that way, you know.” He shouldn’t have left at all. There was no reason for it.

  Well, maybe there were some reasons, but they weren’t good enough.

  Five o’clock in the afternoon, Mom has left and come back, Cookie is still here, and I need a rest. I lie down on my bed. And that is when I remember the letter to Leila. I never wrote it, and clean forgot about going to Fred Carmel’s this morning. The carnival is gone now, I am sure, even though its departure will have been without any fanfare, no parade like when it arrived; just pull up the stakes and disappear.

  And so that is that. I have absolutely no idea how to get in touch with Leila.

  Three hours later dinner is over and Uncle Hayden makes his surprise arrival. He hugs Mom, hugs Dad, hugs me, tells me he hardly recognizes me. Then he says to Mom, “How’s Mother?”

  Mom shrugs. “How you’d expect. Dry-eyed.”

  “Pinched?” says Hayden. “All kind of pinched and held in?”

  I want to laugh, and I can’t tell whether my mother does too, but suddenly her hand flies to her mouth, and she says, “Oh, no, Hayden, I just realized. You can’t stay here. You’ll have to stay with Mother and Father.” She tells him about the Strowskys and our extra-full house.

  Uncle Hayden groans. That’s when he sits down in the armchair in the parlor and clenches his pipe between his teeth. After a moment he takes the pipe out, stares across the room at nothing, and his eyes fill with tears. I don’t know much about Uncle Hayden. Only that he never married and he works for one of the big movie companies. And he hasn’t been to Millerton since before I was born.

  Mom perches on the edge of Uncle Hayden’s chair and rubs his shoulders. He looks up at her. “Tell me again what happened,” he says.

  “The school closed,” Mom begins.

  Adam’s own brother didn’t know he was home.

  Do the people in my family never talk to each other?

  But Uncle Hayden is back. He has come back. He is here for Mom, and for Nana and Papa too, I suppose. And of course for Adam.

  Adam’s funeral is to be held on Tuesday. His obituary appears in the Millerton paper on Monday. It says hardly anything about who Adam was, just the younger son of Hayden and Harriet Mercer, twenty-one years old. It doesn’t even say the name of the school where he lived for so many years. Nobody who reads the paper will know about Shirley Temples, or Lucy eating snails, or flowers plucked up by their roots and offered hopefully to a pretty girl. And nobody will know the Adam on the Ferris wheel, or that he was called a freak, or about his temper tantrums.

  I want people to know.

  And so I call my grandmother on the phone and say, “Nana, at the funeral tomorrow I want to say something.”

  “What? Say something to whom?”

  “I want to speak.” I must speak.

  “But, Hattie —”

  “Adam was my uncle, and I want to say something about him.”

  “All right,” says Nana.

  That night, Mom comes into my room and starts sliding the hangers back and forth in my closet.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask her.

  “Something black. Where’s that dress you wore last Christmas?”

  “It’s too hot. It’s velvet. And it doesn’t fit.”

  I have decided what I am going to wear to the funeral. It’s the yellow dress I wore to my family birthday party. Adam told me he liked it. He told me he liked it, and five minutes later he ate the rose off the cake and was sent outside.

  Mom doesn’t argue with me. She stands before my closet looking blank and muttering that she can’t believe we are deciding what to wear to Adam’s funeral and that people are not supposed to die before their parents do. I put my arm across her shoulders and she gives me a tiny smile, cups my chin in her hand for a moment, then hurries out of the room.

  I lay the yellow dress on my armchair. I am looking around for my white flats when I see Angel Valentine hurry along the hall to her room.

  I have not spoken to Angel since Saturday. She has not eaten a single meal with us. And she flits in and out of our house like a moth, silently. She did pause on Sunday, though, to tell Mom and Dad how very sorry she was for their loss, and to say something else, which I did not hear.

  I do not believe she will be at the funeral.

  Tuesday, August 2, 1960, the day Adam Mercer is buried, is glorious. “A funeral day,” says Cookie. “Haven’t you noticed? Funeral days either pour down rain or pour forth sunshine. Nothing in between.” I don’t know about that. But this morning is clear and warm and sweet, with a whisper of wind that shakes the leaves in the elm tree outside my window. It is a day that might have made Adam cry, “Happiness! Happiness!”

  At ten-thirty I go to my room and quietly close the door behind me. I look for a long time at the yellow dress and my shoes, laid out for the day. After a while I slip the dress on, then the shoes. Nana will want me to wear gloves, but I don’t plan to.

  Mom and Dad and I set off for the Episcopalian church just after eleven o’clock. Miss Hagerty and Mr. Penny and Cookie and even Mrs. Strowsky are going to go to Adam’s funeral, but they are going to leave a little later, so that my parents and I can walk there on our own.

  When we arrive at the church we see that the parking lot is already nearly full.

  “Wow,” I say softly.

  When Hayden and Harriet Mercer give a funeral, everybody comes.

  That is what I think until I see Nancy and Janet in the crowd. They are not here because of my grandparents. They are here purely out of curiosity. They want to see the freak’s family. They want to see what kind of funeral the freak will have. As if we are an attraction at Fred Carmel’s sideshow. I wonder if any of Nana and Papa’s friends feel the same way.

  Dad sees me eyeing Nancy and Janet, sees them eyeing me back, sees their contained giggles. He takes me by the elbow. “Come on, Hattie.”

  We make our way through the crowd and into the hushed church. Dad loops his arms through Mom’s and mine and we walk to the front, slide into the very first pew next to Nana and Papa and Uncle Hayden. We make a row, the six of us.

  The church is hot, the church is full of shushings and loud quiet, the church is rustling and whispering and waiting, and after a while I don’t hear anything but Adam. “Oh, ho, ho, ho, Hattie Owen.”

  I jump a little when the organ begins to play, jump again when, after the last note has wheezed out, the priest speaks. He talks and talks about Adam, and truthfully, he could be saying his words about practically any person in the room. Well, of course, I think. The priest has only been at this church for seven years. He probably never even met Adam.

  When he has finished speaking he suggests that we bow our heads in prayer, and I whisper to Mom, “Let me move down to the end.”

  Nana frowns at me. I ignore her.

  I do not know whether Nana has told the priest that I want to say something about Adam. I am prepared to stand up on the pew and just start talking, if necessary. But when the prayer is over, the p
riest looks at me and nods. Then he leaves the microphone at the front of the church and sits off to the side.

  My legs wobble, and my breath comes in shallow gasps as I slip out of the pew and climb the steps to the pulpit. I have not prepared what I am going to say, and now I think maybe that was a mistake.

  The microphone is much too high for me, so I lower it and it squeals and I hear giggles. I have told myself to find Miss Hagerty in the crowd and talk directly to her, but the giggles help me locate Nancy and Janet, and I decide that I will talk to them instead.

  “My name is Harriet Owen,” I begin. “I am Adam Mercer’s niece.”

  I glance at Nana, and she looks as though she is holding her breath. I look away, back to Nancy and Janet. “I am Adam Mercer’s niece,” I say again. “And I want you to know that Adam was not a freak.”

  I hear a sound, as if every person in the church has just sucked in his breath. I look only at Nancy and Janet, though, and I see them drop their eyes.

  “But he was called a freak,” I say. “He was called lots of names. And that was one of the things that made it hard to be Adam.”

  I talk about other things that upset Adam — confusion and too much noise and fears I don’t understand. I talk about Lucy Ricardo and dancing and receiving an invitation to my own birthday party. I think about mentioning Adam’s circus trick, but change my mind.

  “Adam,” I say, “had good times and he had bad times.” I pause here and glance at Nana, see that she is crying silently, the way I cried at the duck pond in the park. I was going to say something more about the bad times — how Adam’s bad times were different from most people’s, and that I’ll never really understand them. But now that I see Nana’s tears, see her start to reach for Papa’s hand, then pull back and fold her hands in her lap again — now that I see Nana, I change my mind.