She had now been a widow for a dozen years. Up north, she had been as comfortably fat as an Eskimo, and at first Florida, where eating is the main physical recreation, had fattened her even further; she had grown paradoxically pale in the clammy, murmurous shelter of air-conditioned apartments. But now the anorexia of old age had whittled away some of the soft excess of those early retirement years, and her tint had become the glassy yellow-gray of the hardened tropical white; her Northern skin had acquired in Florida a lizardlike texture, deeply wrinkled nowhere but finely granulated all over.
If this was indeed her eightieth-birthday party, there must have been candles, and crêpe-paper hats and poppers, and shy little presents purchased on adolescent budgets and loosely wrapped by fumbling fingers. My mother’s mountain dryness and her schoolteacherish airs had repelled the children when they were younger—they had preferred my father’s false-front spirit of fun, the beady-eyed back-at-you boosterism of a small-town merchant. But with him gone over a decade, and me gone over a year, my three children had warmed to her, as a relic of a lost Norman Rockwell type of family. Her living so long seemed to acquire the selfless motive of sustaining their rôles as grandchildren, while an absent father and absent-minded mother had undermined their status as children.
“No, I have no idea why I’ve lived so long,” let us suppose she said, in response to the obvious question from one of the children, probably the wide-eyed Daphne. She would have been pushing thirteen by now, and Buzzy still fourteen, and Andrew a year into his driver’s license. He had driven to the airport in Boston to pick her up, and I was to drive her back the day after tomorrow, the length of her stay having been forced upon us by the terms of her economy plane ticket. Three days of family make-believe without so much as a glimpse of my real and perfect mate. My mother’s presence lay heavy across my chest. She knew only that Norma and I were having “difficulties” and that I, like a fourth-grader running off to a corner of the schoolyard to get away from the other children, had moved across the river. “ ‘Too mean to die,’ they used to say when I was a girl,” she said.
“Oh no!” came the pro forma protest, as with shaky but practiced and determined hands she served up pieces of cake, using the slender palette knife that, in the disorder of my legal wife’s kitchen, was the closest thing to a cake server.
“Oh yes,” my mother insisted to us, “and I even know why I’m so mean. When I was a little girl, I had this hair down to my waist, what they call chestnut, with a touch of red in it but nothing like as red as your mother’s, and my mother used to do it all up every morning in these long, long braids that she would then wind around my head and fix with pins so tight I would go around all day feeling as if my scalp was going to lift right off my head. It hurt.”
The children abruptly laughed, at the prod of that last word.
“Didn’t you ever tell your mother it hurt?” Buzzy asked. He was the most open of the children, the most—it hurt me to see—trustingly inquisitive. Andrew had his gathering armature of male equipment—his license and rock tapes, and girlie magazines and cigarettes tucked not quite out of sight in his room—and Daphne still had some cocoon of hopeful childish ignorance, but Buzzy had nothing to protect him from the facts of the world. Or do I mean to say that there was nothing to deflect my pained identification with him?
“Oh, I wouldn’t have dared,” my mother asserted, “because that was the way people did things. When I was a little girl, people did things one way only, or they were driven out—they would leave and go to Ohio, or Michigan, or Montana, where it didn’t matter what they did. They never came back.” Behind her eyeglasses, whose frames, in Florida style, were shaped, of several glittering ersatz substances, to suggest butterfly wings, her reptilian old eyes went round in mock alarm, and her audience of children laughed half in fright.
An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!
went the refrain of a poem she used to read her fourth-graders, with just this expression on her face. “In my day,” she concluded, “suffering was thought to be good for people.”
Her discourse was aimed, I felt, at me. The Claytons didn’t do things like run away from their families, even only a mile away. There had never been a divorce among the Claytons, or in her family, the Heebes: I had heard her say this often. And yet there was, too, in her discourse an undercurrent of forgiveness, a certain playful softness. Florida had made her more sociable than when my father had done enough socializing for two, and more tolerant. She watched television, its shameless talk shows and raunchy serials; she heard the horror stories of her fellow senior citizens, the tales of modern life. Rampant divorce, cohabitation without benefit of marriage rites, unapologetic homosexuality, promiscuous communes. Loyalty to spouse a joke, loyalty to nation a scandal. And now her son gone under to the tide of endless wanting. It was not in me to explain the paradox: I was leaving this marriage as a tribute to marriage, to create a perfect marriage. Not the most uxorious Methodist deacon in Hayes would be a stricter adherent of the old vows, once I got the right wife. I was a fervent supporter of marriage, just not of my marriage, my present marriage. In the meantime, there I sat, my own family’s black sheep, being gently teased.
“Was that the way Daddy was as a little boy?” asked Daphne, her cheeks made rosy by surfeit of cake and candlelight. “Bad?”
“Why, no,” my mother emphatically proclaimed, directing her rounded stare down through the candlelight, where I sat in the place of a fourth child, she and Norma having taken the heads of the table. “He was a good boy, all the neighbors agreed. They seemed surprised, because I had not been thought to be a good girl—I couldn’t explain how my braids had been pulling at my scalp and making me wild. I called your daddy my miracle child,” my mother went on, “because, as you know, he came into being long after such a thing was thought seemly.” Here her age had betrayed her language into an awkward quaintness; she swiftly read puzzlement on the faces of her audience of children and like a good schoolteacher clarified: “I was forty-one when he was born. His father and I were so afraid”—here she laughed, exposing the touching perfection of her dentures—“oh dear, the things people didn’t know in those years, we were just bundles of superstition; we were afraid that because we weren’t so young little Alfred would turn out weak and frail in his body. But look at him—a year short of forty and except for a gray hair here and there he could be your older brother!” They all admired me; I could even feel, in the corner of my vision, the Queen of Disorder turning her abstracted face toward me, where she sat at my elbow, at the head of the table I had deserted. “He used to suffer so with his asthma,” my mother went on, rather piteously now, as if all at the table must share her maternal concern. “There were whole nights when his father and I took turns not sleeping, this poor child gasping like every breath might be his last; but the doctor said he’d outgrow it, and he has!” The children stared at me with amazement—a prize they had somehow lost. Andrew, I felt, felt sorry for me, being held up to view this way; a confluence of little painfulnesses led him to frown and avert his gaze downward, his brow dark under its straggle of uncombed, Seventies-length hair. I imagined him trying, through the interference of these other psyches, to strike with mine the solidarity of mature males, and yet being inwardly defeated by the undeniable insult of my defection. Or perhaps he was simply longing for a cigarette and a cruise in the Volvo, to check out what his pals were doing tonight.
My mother might have stopped talking if a child had spoken up, but none of us did, overwhelmed by the sore points her monologue touched, singing my praises. “Except he was always so mannerly, and responsible, and even kind to animals. In that way, it may be, your daddy was a fragile child. He used to come home in tears from watching the other boys and even some of the girls do the things children do—pull the legs off grasshoppers, and torture frogs with matches and such.”
I wondered if that wa
s my bond with Buchanan—a helpless standing by, while vitality performed its wanton deeds.
“And he never made the least bit of trouble for his father and me—got such good marks, and helped out in the store since when he was no higher than the counter top. We used to say sometimes it was as if we were the children, and this boy the grown-up. Honestly.”
It was true, one of my first impressions had been that my parents, being so much older than the parents of my friends, shouldn’t be tested with the usual childish unruliness, lest they sicken and cease to shelter me. My instinctive attitude to the whole world, struck in infancy, might be described as oversolicitous. Or conceited—imagining that everyone depended on me for happiness.
Was it a trick of vision, or was Norma’s pale blur of a face stuck in the corner of my eye, fixed in contemplation of me, seen afresh by my mother’s adoring light? The old lady had at last wound down, and lifted a forkful of birthday cake to her open mouth. With a self-conscious scrape in his throat Andrew pushed back to leave the table; his younger brother imitated the gesture. Daphne’s bright eyes dimmed and her rosy cheeks paled as she realized the storytelling was over, taking with it the warm illusion of a family intact through the generations. Norma’s face jumped alarmingly nearer the corner of my eye and in a whisper insisted, “Talk to Buzzy; he’s been getting terrible school reports.”
Then, how eerie it was, not to leave the house, with apologies spoken and unspoken, but to stay, as if I were my younger, monogamous self’s ghost. While my mother finished her cake and Norma lit a cigarette and poured herself another dab of white wine, I helped Daphne clear the dishes, and in the kitchen loudly admired a streaky watercolor of a horse she had painted, pinned to the refrigerator door with magnets that looked just like cookies—Oreos and, especially convincingly, chocolate chips. She had begun to take riding lessons at a stable in the next town, toward Seabrook. What would girls that age do without horses? Society’s engines of sublimation and education were still running in my absence, on reduced, one-parent fuel. Andrew called me outdoors to move my ’69 Corvair, my unsafe bachelor chariot, so he could extricate from the driveway what had become his and Norma’s ’72 Volvo. I went out without putting on a coat; I shivered and told him, “Don’t stay out late.”
“I won’t,” he said, as if I still had some authority over him. Our breaths made manly barks of vapor in the night air, there by the massed brittle-leaved rhododendrons and the slanting cellar bulkhead. The cellar was especially thick with guilt for me, as if all my derelict household duties had settled there, gathering dust and rust.
“How—” My breath hung suspended. “How is everybody doing, do you think?”
He knew what I meant. “O.K.,” he said. “We’re adjusting.”
His phrase put a chill into me, through the thickness of my cotton shirt. Was I adjusting, too? When big fingers came and pulled off the grasshopper’s legs, did I merely shrug and smile now? Was I taking my revenge, at last, for all that premature tender-heartedness?
“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” Andrew told me. “Everything’s cool. What a man’s gotta do, he’s gotta do. At least you’re still around. Some of my friends’ dads have cleared right out.”
“It’s a sad world,” said I, feebly.
Andy, too, was underdressed for the cold, in the high-school baseball team’s little green windbreaker (he played second base for the JVs), and he beat his arms across his chest, so his voice came out jiggling. “It’s lonelier for Buzzy and Daphne; they can’t get out yet, they’re pretty much stuck with Mom after school. But they’ll grow up, they’ll get over it.”
“They will?” It came out as a question, not an affirmation. “How about your mother? Lonely for her, too?”
I had worked myself up into wanting all the hard answers. What if the Gobble-uns did get me?
The boy looked away. “She gets out now and then. Dad, I got to run.”
“She does? Where does she go? Who with?”
“Beats me. Some jerk or other. They’re all odious.”
This was a parting shot; we hung there, wondering if we should kiss, and decided against it. The Volvo door slammed. We had bought that station wagon the year of Nixon’s landslide because it somehow showed you were a liberal, against Vietnam and for abortion and conservation, but it had always seemed to me to give a bumpy ride and mediocre mileage. I didn’t miss it.
Back inside the house, I visited my mother where she had settled with a black cup of coffee—no decaf or watery herbal brew for her—in the library. She seemed small, huddled in the wing chair bought secondhand in Central Square in Cambridge, with its silvery-blue velvet worn white where my head and wrists had rubbed off all the nap. She was shrinking; her hands were packages of bones wrapped in mottled paper. All around her stood my old books, left over from college and graduate school, packed and unpacked and repeatedly arranged by me in orderly rows, Trevelyan and the Beards and Gibbon and Churchill, Europe Since Napoleon by Thomson and History of Japan by Sansom, The Medieval Mind by Taylor in two volumes and also in two The Growth of the American Republic by Morison and Commager—stately volumes bound in stamped cloth of ivy green or navy blue, word-palaces of whose contents I had retained little but the confidence that, if needs be, I could again tread the maze and find the chamber where the necessary information would be waiting like the gilded treasures encased in a seldom-visited, sleepily guarded museum room. Paperbacks like Cash’s The Mind of the South and Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 varied with their livelier spines the chronological logic of the rows. Already, especially where my Buchanan project had plucked some volumes and left gaps, anomalous books had drifted in—the paperback mysteries the Queen of Disorder would read in bed, and slick-jacketed novels by Anne Tyler and Barbara Pym and Lois Gould, and alien tutelary tomes such as What to Listen for in Music, by Aaron Copland, and A History of Western Music, by one Donald Jay Grout, presumably left over from her involvement with the affable Ben Wadleigh. I itched to edit and rearrange these shelves, but I was not ready to replace what I had taken, nor were the books left mine to touch.
I said to my mother, with false cheer, “How’re you holding up? Not every day a body turns eighty.”
“Thank the Lord. I hope He doesn’t afflict me with too many more birthdays.”
“Don’t say that, Mother. The children were enchanted tonight—we all were—by your liveliness, your wit, your gift of recall. Though you didn’t have to work so hard selling my virtues; they don’t need to be sold, they’d like to have me back.”
“Norma, too?”
“Sure. At least I assume so.” I had never doubted it—was there room to doubt?
“Well, then, what’s the problem?”
“I’m the problem. I like it out there, out of this house. I’m moving my Buchanan book along at last. I’m getting my”—in the Ford era, though much was permitted, one didn’t say “shit” to one’s octogenarian mother—“act together.”
Perhaps if I had said “shit” it would have brought us to a new level of frankness and intimacy. But Vermont proprieties still ruled our relationship, and she was feeling the weight of her eighty years. My mother sighed and said, “That Buchanan. I never knew anybody had a good word to say for him until you took him up. He tried to ship the whole country south, Republican gospel had it when I was a girl.”
“A totally unfair charge,” I said. “He tried to hold the country together was his only sin. But we New Englanders finally got our way, Mom. We got our war.” I saw she wasn’t following this, and told her, “Go to bed whenever you’re ready. I have to go say good night to Buzzy.”
As I climbed the familiar stairs, with its pair of creaking landings, I could hear Norma singing to Daphne, sweetly, if not as sweetly as Genevieve to her two daughters. A mezzo versus a coloratura. A History of Western Music: that rankled. Possibly the Wadleighs had reconstituted their marriage on the then-fashionable “open” basis. Wendy had come calling on me once or twice in the yea
r past, letting one thing lead to another, and I had flattered myself that she was cheating on Ben; if he knew of these visits, it became, repulsively, as if I were fucking him, too. Sex is always to some extent group sex. Odious, in Andrew’s sudden heartfelt word.
But Buzzy’s room still had the pre-sexual aura—the posters of foreign cars and fighter planes, the plastic dinosaurs arranged in a row, the telescope trained upward out the window at the lifeless moon and inviolate stars, the smell of glue, of collecting and making, the smell the universe has when it is new to us. “Hi.”
“Hi.” His room was dark and he was already in bed. His voice came out of the darkness deeper than I remembered it.
“How’s it going, fella?”
“O.K.”
“Really?” Taking care not to kick over the telescope on its tripod, I made my way through his hobby-crammed room to his bed and sat on the edge. “Your mother told me you’ve been getting some bad reports at school. That shouldn’t happen to you. You’re smart.”
Blue light from the winter night outside rested on his profile, with its short nose flattened at the bridge like a baby’s; his hair, which in my mind’s eye remained fixed at a crewcut he had had at age six and that made his head look round as a ball, in fact was quite long, like a Rolling Stone’s, and in its greasy length rather repulsive. He could have been an untidy girl, but for his deep voice. “I’m not so smart.”
“What makes you say that?”
He turned his face toward me; his babyish profile vanished. “At school, when we read, I can tell the other kids are getting more out of it than I am. And they’re quicker.”