After a while the babies wake, and you have to take care of that: the feeding, the bathing, the changing of diapers, feeling with your daughter just what you felt with Peter Blue, that hint of annoyance that she’s intruded on your grief, a hint of dismay at finding yourself a mother to her when you haven’t recovered yet from being a daughter to the one who died. It’s very complex, this life of yours, full of strangers who make demands; a husband and baby who want you to be someone you’re not ready for. And a nagging voice says, You did it—you chose this life and now you’ll just have to bear it—you’ll just have to bear what has to be borne. But you won’t, of course. The fact of Vanessa’s death will change all that in a way you never dream of, hugging your daughter tightly as you do.
In the meantime, your father comes home looking tired and he talks in a weary way about her death, about how he sat by her bed while the nurse left the room, about how she died in the space of a breath before the nurse returned. You had sat there too, by that bed, and you know what it was for him, to sit there with her, holding her pale white hand, the fingers as cold and as unresisting as the empty leather fingers of a glove. You know what it was to listen to her breathing, counting once and twice and then pause and counting once and twice again. Now and then her breath would come quite softly, like a sigh from someplace far away, a sleep too far down for her to come up again. She would die. You knew that then, when you sat with her, and in some ways you knew it better then than you do now. Now, in this house, with the babies to be fed, with dinner to be managed and the long-distance calls to be made, with Peter Blue smoking cigarettes, saying all the wrong things—now Vanessa’s death seems less than real.
And later when you get in bed and the day is done, later when you think you’ll have a moment to yourself, later Peter Blue is asking in that absolutely silent way of his if he can make love to you. And you think, Oh Peter Blue, you are so damn dumb, you are so insensitive. But you married the man because he was normal and now that burden is yours, too. And you say to yourself, He means well—he means to comfort me, and the same voice says, He’s dumb anyway.
“Just leave me alone,” you whisper harshly to him in the dark and he creeps away and you cry then to yourself without a sound, as much for his being dumb as for her death.
the closet
THIS IS A STORY about the contents of a closet. It’s the only story of its kind and it will only be told once, so listen carefully.
There was a woman who died when she was fifty-one and after the funeral, it was necessary to clean out her closet, to dispose of her belongings. In her bedroom, there was a picture of her, taken when she was thirty-one or thirty-two. She had a round face, rather a pretty face, with light brown hair in two gleaming braids coiled around her head, a pleasant smile showing nice teeth, and eyes that must have been hazel or blue though the picture is in black and white. She’s wearing a summer cotton, dotted swiss, and a necklace of white plastic beads—not beads, but buttons strung together in a double row, the sort of necklace children noticed when she held them.
The furniture in her bedroom hadn’t changed since 1940, twenty years ago: a bed, a dressing table with a stool, a chest of drawers, all done in a wood veneer. It’s the sort of furniture you see now at the Salvation Army stores. You could cut off the legs and antique the dresser but it would still be unattractive, spindly and cheap. The wallpaper was patterned with gloomy bouquets, gray and dusky rose, and the ceiling fixture was shaped like a shell in a shallow pool of light. She had rearranged the room only twice in all those years.
The closet door usually stood open and on it hung a shoe bag filled with her shoes. Most were size five, the last pair probably purchased in 1948; wedgies, white canvas wedgies with a strap that buckled behind the heel, toeless, not terribly worn; several pairs of slippers. There were two pairs of black leather shoes, toeless, with low square heels and black laces.
The clothes hung on a wooden rod to the left of the walk-in closet (the only closet in that massive house and hers, the only bedroom without a gas fireplace). Above the rod, on a shelf that never got much light, was a gray-and-white-striped hat box and an old water heater, looking ominous and out of place, dusty and ineffectual. On the right, six drawers and about as many shelves, containing very little—a few old hats, musty black straw hats with crumpled veils, a red felt hat with a big rhinestone buckle. In the drawers, she kept her stockings, some cotton slips, two empty fifths of Old Crow and half a fifth of King, a red patent leather purse made to look like a bound leather volume, another purse, black cloth with an old handkerchief wadded up in it, a diaphragm looking as ancient as a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. She didn’t have many clothes. Some of the dresses, like the black knit, were as dated as the shoes, and strangely cut, with plump shoulder pads, the fabric faintly powdered with dust. There was a gold satin blouse—somewhere there’s a photograph taken of her in that blouse, at a party, maybe 1946—beside the blouse a black gabardine suit with black braid buttons and next to that, a gathered cotton skirt in a pastel blue, a red-and-white-checked blouse with long sleeves, and a white blouse with a lacy trim. She was buried in a blue wool suit, which was bought for her, as were the newer outfits, by her daughter Kit.
On the dressing table, there were boxes of loose powder in a ruddy hue, nail files and hairpins, bobby pins, astringent lotion, tortoiseshell combs which she fixed together with rubber bands to form the waves in her hair, some dark red lipsticks worn down at a slant, a brush with a wooden handle and a tangle of fine brown hair in the bristles. In the drawers, a jumble of junky costume jewelry: pins, earrings, and a necklace of white plastic buttons.
From this, you might draw a few conclusions about her. She was not a woman who cared much for her surroundings. She did not care for clothes. She cared for bourbon, Old Crow and King, and she wore wedgies once upon a time. She didn’t go out much and her needs were few. She cared so little about most things she didn’t even bother to throw them away, or maybe she simply preferred old things to emptiness. Someone bought a few things for her. Someone sorted through them when she died and piled them all up on the bed: shoes and stockings, hats, junky jewelry, and the clothes still on the hangers, dusty-smelling, out of style. Somehow, at some point, and for reasons unknown, the woman in the photograph, looking fresh and pleased with herself at thirty-two, became no more than a pile of rags on a dark green spread.
Now that her daughter is getting older, nearing thirty-two herself, she does not see in it sadness as she once did, or tragedy or waste or ruin. She sees a kind of dignity, a kind of pride, something fierce and stubborn, something free. And even though the face is gone, and even though the house has been destroyed, some things remain the same. Life is as veiled, as elusive as death and there is no way to separate one from the other.
maple hill
KIT WALKED THROUGH the empty house, listening to her footsteps resounding against the pale dead floors. The strips of blue carpeting had been taken up from the hallway, ripped away from the stairs so that the sound of her walking was unfamiliar to her—she who had walked in that house for twenty years. Now the windows stood open to the summer heat and a wind that smelled of lilacs touched at the screens. From her bedroom, she could look out into the side yard, where the cherry tree had blossomed every April since time began, and beyond to the part of the yard they had always called the jungle, to the walnut tree, the lilac arbor, the maples which had shaded the front of the lot and drawn away the moisture so that no grass ever grew there by the front walk. She could remember climbing out onto the red tin roof outside her bedroom windows, watching her mother rake the maple leaves into two enormous piles. She and her sister, Del, had tumbled in that rustling ocean of dry brown year after year, had watched later while the leaves were burned, leaving two black circles like burial mounds on which the passing seasons were laid.
Between her room and Del’s was a narrow room where the maid had slept early in their lives, a withered old colored woman named Pee Wee who later took care
of Teddy Roosevelt the Fourth, she was told. All she could remember of Pee Wee was that she had no teeth. When Pee Wee left, she and Del had begun to use the little room for a playroom, an office, a grocery store where empty tins were bought and sold for a cardboard coin or two.
Kit crossed the hall to Del’s room, marveling as she always did at how clearly the differences between them were spelled out. Both rooms had the same high ceilings, the same narrow windows, the same fireplaces which had been converted to gas and later stuffed with newspapers to keep bats and stray birds from flying down the chimneys. Both rooms had the same shallow shell fixture in the ceiling, throwing light down like some pale echo of the sea, far away, far away. The wallpaper in Kit’s room was dark green sprinkled with pink rosebuds on a curving stem and the curtains had been frothy white from ceiling to floor, the rug a dusty pink, the bedspreads white. In Del’s room the wallpaper had no pattern at all and the deep rose hue seemed stark and plain. Instead of curtains, Del had pasted Chinese rice paper on the glass, leaving the windows bare of ornament. The picture frames she had chosen were no more than two sheets of glass between which she had pressed magazine illustrations, all of it held in place by two metal clamps and a wire affixed to the strip of molding near the ceiling. The one picture Kit remembered was of a young man who sat squarely facing the camera. One hand rested on a table in front of him, fingers tucked out of sight, and near him was a single rose in a Coke bottle. Kit had never understood why her sister would select such a picture, all in black-and-white and tones of gray. Del had never kept a china figurine, had never collected dolls or stamps or shells or party invitations. Del was three years older than Kit and Del had collected books. It was one of the great frustrations in Kit’s life that no matter how many books she read or how fast she read them or in what order, Del was always three years ahead of her. Del was ahead of her in everything. She heard all of the beautiful music first, knew Botticelli, Titian, and Renoir before Kit had given away her dolls.
And now the house was being sold and the land, their mother was dead, their father remarried: all of life, everything was breaking apart, breaking down, being leveled, destroyed, razed, rendered obsolete, that childhood, that life, that family as odd and unhappy as it had been.
Kit wandered down the hallway to her mother’s room, bleak relic from the thirties with its grim bouquets of roses marching across the walls, its dark woodwork, the shades lowered, radiator peeling cream-colored paint. Gone was the dresser with its splintered veneer, gone was the dark plush dressing-table stool, the chest of drawers, the bed with its dark chenille spread. The closet drawers were empty now of the whiskey bottles which Kit had raided time after time, pouring five-dollar bourbon down the bathroom sink in some misguided attempt to save her mother from the doom of secret drinking. At some point in her life, Kit’s mother had come in from raking leaves and had taken instead to the quiet life of an alcoholic. Kit thought of her mother always, stretched out in the cool of the living room on the couch, a cigarette burning in her fingers, a paperback novel laid facedown across her chest. Kit’s mother had read Shell Scott, had smoked, had tottered out to the pantry for a jigger of Early Times, had tottered up to her bedroom for Old Crow and King. Kit’s mother had been hauled off to the hospital several times a year suffering malnutrition, pneumonia, and broken bones. Kit’s mother had been hauled off, toward the last, with cancer of the throat and finally suicide. After the funeral, Kit had slept in her mother’s bed, wondering how her mother had felt on the last night of her life with a hundred phenobarbital burning in her belly. Ruined woman, wreck of a life. Her mother had been razed and the rest of them now followed, one by one, an oddly self-destructive lot, having learned that from the cradle.
Off her mother’s room was the sleeping porch, screened-in, where she and Del had slept every summer, lulled by the tapping of green slatted shades which could be rolled down against the morning sun, rolled up at night to let in the sound of chill summer rain and the smell of drenched lilacs. Every spring there had been the ritual of the cleaning of that porch when the yard man, James or a black George Washington, would hose down the screens, scrub down the winter dirt, black soot and dust which collected with the snow. The rollaway beds were moved out onto the porch then and made up with fresh sheets, with cotton spreads which were pale brown and patterned with Navajo designs. There was a trap in the porch ceiling which led up to the attic. Kit had been told that the roof of the original farmhouse was still there, bent down, the new roof built over it after the first house had burned. Somehow she had always had a horror of that, of the old roof still intact and that part of the brick wall which remained. The farmland itself had been eaten away so that now there was only this one acre left like an island out of the past, floating among present houses and present neighborhoods. Even that last acre had been sold (thirty-five thousand dollars she’d heard) and once the house was torn down there’d be two or three apartment buildings instead.
Downstairs, she passed through the dining room to the tiny room where her father had slept for the last ten years on an old maroon daybed. The room had apparently been intended for the raising of house plants. The floor was of cold tile, smooth dark red stone with a drain in the middle and a faucet which no longer functioned. There were windows on two sides of the room and hooks in the ceiling for hanging pots. The room was scarcely large enough for the three pieces of old maple furniture which had been moved in: the daybed, a small coffee table, and a maple armchair. There was also a revolving drugstore rack that had been filled with the paperback books they bought and read. Kit’s mother had marked each in pencil when she finished it—“dull” or “dirty” or “good”—so that Kit had at her disposal an endless supply of Mickey Spillane in that monk’s cell where her father slept, without sheets, with his shoes on, covered by an ancient varicolored afghan which her mother had crocheted during pregnancy. How could she have known, that woman, that her needlework would only eventually warm his celibacy in the winter of their life? It was gone now, of course, maple furniture and dirty books, man and wife.
The living room looked the same to her, somewhat smaller with the furniture removed, somewhat colder with the rug taken out. The mirror had been taken down from its place above the mantel, leaving a dead blank space where once the hallway had been reflected. There was still on the pale green paper, the ghostly imprint of the lath and plaster behind it, shadowy ribs of the house showing through. In the hall where the upright piano had been, there was now a clean square of wallpaper, rimmed with fingerprints. All those years of piano lessons, what had they been for? Her parents had once had friends who came to the house and played during parties, George Gershwin tunes and Irving Berlin, and the neighbors up and down the block would remark the next morning how lovely it had been. Kit could hardly imagine such a thing. Kit’s last recollection of the house was the wild summer after her father had remarried and moved out. She had lived there by herself with her infant son and the cook who came in days and the men who came in nights. There had been two men that summer and one of them she had now married. The neighbors had watched his sports car come and go and in the mornings, they made no remarks at all. Poor dears. The man across the street had shot himself one day; the two sisters down the block were dying. The big houses all around them were being converted into apartments. There was a pattern of death and decay and destruction, the old swallowed up by the new, bent down, built over, layers and layers of wallpaper in an empty room. Even the walls came down eventually when they could hold no more; even a life could tumble when its burden was past bearing.
She left the front door open, thinking surely there was nothing more to be locked in or out of that house. To the right of it, on the border of the yard above the alley, there was an old stone hitching post. She had watched it, through her life, being slowly engulfed by the trunk of a tree growing near it. That suffocation would be stopped at least when the bulldozers came; stone post and tree would go down together. In certain moments there were no distinctio
ns made between host and parasite, begetter, begotten. In time, both fell prey to the passing of years, some new order which wiped away love and hate as though they were the same. They had struggled as a family and now it was done and whatever it meant, whatever it had done to them or they to each other simply had no meaning anymore. She could walk away from that house and still be haunted by it. Whatever time and distance she set between herself and the house and all that it had been to her, she would never be free of it. Those twenty years would be imprinted on her heart like the shadows of that lath and plaster in the wall, and she would act them all out over and over again, bending down, building over, house upon house, heart upon heart. She was a walking blueprint of those years, mind and memory, a habit of that world, repeating in every relationship the wrongs she had learned in that house. There was nothing more to be locked in or out of her. There was only summer and the smell of lilacs and a house called Maple Hill, and as she drove away, she knew how thoroughly the lessons of her life had all been learned.
a portable life
DURING THAT LAST summer I lived alone there with my infant son. I had made a nursery of the narrow room between my room and Del’s and he slept there, tiny creature with his wobbly infant’s head and his unfocused eyes. During the previous winter I had redone my room, stripped off the dark green wallpaper with its pattern of rosebuds, patched the cracks in the plaster, and taken away the faint glass fixture in the ceiling. For a while the room remained that way, quite bare, naked of paint and paper. Even the plaster was the color of cold flesh and the wind rattled at the empty windows. The glass was as chill and clear as the ice along the sills, and the snow, when it came, made the room glow with gray light. The few pieces of furniture were draped with sheets, and a narrow bed was set in the center of the room. The whole of it was as raw and as clean as a crater, a place bombed-out and abandoned except for me. Everything else in the house remained the same—the runners of dark blue carpeting in the hall, the tall oval mirror that stood just outside my bedroom door, my sister’s room across the hall, my mother’s room to the right, the landing to the stairs, the rooms below, laid out like a vast museum—all the relics of the life which everyone had left but me. My son was born in April. My father married again in May and by the time summer came, there were shutters at my windows, painted chocolate brown, and the walls were the color of mushroom soup in a can.