Evergreen

  “I was telling Mrs. Friedman about him. I don’t know how the subject came up; we just drifted into it.”

  “My wife never got over him. Her closest brush with royalty.”

  “Oh, Donald, you’re the worst tease! You know you were just as impressed as I was! One felt so alive with Paul, and he did have a touch of the regal, in a very nice way.”

  She turned to Anna. “But you said you knew him?”

  “I was a maid in his parents’ house,” Anna said. Now, that’s a shocker, isn’t it?

  They did look, for an instant, shocked; but they pulled their faces together and said pleasantly, almost simultaneously, “Well, it’s a real American success story, isn’t it, your life?”

  “I guess you might call it that,” Anna replied.

  Her reaction was a slight one, not piercing-sharp as she might once have expected it to be, but a small painful twinge, and quite controlled.

  Yet, without being noticed, she went upstairs to her room. The heavy earrings had begun to hurt. Iris had made her get all her jewelry out of the vault for the wedding. It was proper to be adorned for the wedding of one’s granddaughter, and yet in a way it was silly to dress up such old hands and such a wrinkled neck. Sighing, she removed the earrings, easing the pressure, and leaned forward to look at herself in the mirror.

  Funny, when you get old your nose droops. My nose was never this large. Theo says it has something to do with cartilage. But I don’t look too awful. I’ve held up well enough. I look calm. I always did. Faces deceive. Even after that conversation just now, I still manage to look calm. Only my head aches. She put her hands to her temples; there was a stronger beat there than usual.

  The great diamond, Joseph’s marvelous ring, lay like an oval teardrop on her finger. It had the pink fire of sunlight and rainbows. Strange to think that it had been torn out of the deepest, darkest earth with all that light in it. When I’m put into the earth it will go on living in the light, its pink fire blazing on some other, living hand: whose? Not Iris’, nor Laura’s … neither of them would wear a thing like this or want it any more than I did. Joseph’s marvelous ring.

  She got up slowly and went back downstairs. People were moving through the lovely rooms in their bright dresses and white summer suits. It was the last time the house would glow like this. Philip was sixteen. She could give a wedding party for him too, but it would be amazing if she were still here when he was old enough to be married. And as for Steve, who knew?

  From where Anna stood at the foot of the stairs she could see directly into the living room where her portrait hung. So young in the pink dress, with that faint look of surprise which she was certain she saw and which no one else had ever admitted to seeing! Wouldn’t she really have been surprised if she could have foreseen the things that would happen! Yet how could she have foreseen what it was like to be seventy-eight years old? One never imagines oneself that old.

  “Nana!” Jimmy cried. “Janet and I have been looking for you. Everyone’s going in to eat.”

  “I’ve been admiring the house,” Janet said. “Every time I come here I see more gorgeous things, your china, and all the silver—Well, someday.”

  “Someday what?” Jimmy asked.

  “Someday we’ll have it, too. With both of us working we’ll be able to have a nice home,” she said confidently, and quickly added, “I don’t mean like this, of course, but nice.”

  Joseph would have approved of this girl. The work ethic, he always said. You worked and you were rewarded. A bright, practical girl, not lazy, not ashamed to say what she wanted. Two more years and she’d be a doctor. All that and a brand-new baby asleep upstairs. She would love the diamond! She would wear it with joy. So she’s the one who shall have it. Time to divest yourself, the lawyers said tactfully, which was a way of saying that you can’t last much longer and you ought to be thinking about inheritance taxes.

  “I’m going to leave you all the silver,” Anna said suddenly.

  Janet flushed. “Nana! I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t be silly, I know you didn’t mean anything. But things like these should be enjoyed. Iris calls them dust collectors and Laura’s going to be digging on a Navajo reservation, so she won’t want them. That’s why I want you to have them.”

  “You’d better keep some for Laura just in case,” Janet said, adding mischievously, “they may get tired of archeology in a trailer and decide they really do want some of the things they’ve been scoffing at.”

  Anna smiled. “You may be right. Anyway, I’ll start making my list tomorrow.”

  “What morbid talk at a wedding!” Jimmy protested.

  “Not morbid at all. Just practical.”

  Jimmy took her arm. “Well, practical or not, we’re going in where the food is.”

  At once her obligation as a hostess came to Anna’s mind: the special menu for the Mexican twins, who were as strict in observance of the dietary laws as any of their ancestors had been. She summoned Celeste to check. The young men had been seated with Anna, all other guests being free to sit where they chose, which was yet another of Robby’s and Laura’s innovations.

  It pleased her to see that so many of the young, including the bride and groom, had already settled themselves at her table. All these beautiful young people in their astonishing variety! Robby, pink-cheeked, frank and not too unlike Jimmy. Raimundo and Rainaldo, looking positively Spanish, and just three generations out of the Polish village; how to explain that? The reserve, that was it; that Latin formality which made them seem so much older than these American boys, although they were the same age.

  What irony! Vain, good-hearted, ambitious, clever Eli; all his line had been eradicated, while Dan the schlemiel, the humble, lived on in these handsome boys and many more. Landed in Mexico with nothing, in an unknown country which these his descendants take for granted, no doubt, as though it had always been theirs. And those who come from me take this America for granted, too, instead of seeing the miracle it is. My mind wanders. Strange, timeless people, I think, so contradictory, so tenacious.

  Fragments of conversation float like balloons above the table. Young people are so earnest these days. In my time you danced at a wedding. How they love to talk! Well, fashions change, round and round. That much I can see from my vantage point; it’s one of the rewards, the very few rewards, of being old. Everything passes. The revolution of only a few years ago, the dirt, the fury, even the beards all gone or going. So something else will take its place to worry and confuse us!

  Jimmy was saying, explaining to one of Robby’s friends, “Janet and I don’t observe all that.” (They are talking about Rainaldo and Raimundo.) “But we do think the religious tradition should be selectively maintained. One doesn’t step out and away from such a long, gallant history. Besides, it’s important for children to have a sense of identity.”

  High talk, fine talk. They have to analyze everything, give reasons for everything. It’s the disease of the times. But never mind their reasons, as long as some of them stay with the tradition.

  Robby said, “I’ve been learning a lot from Laura about the immigrant generation. It’s fascinating to think that when they came here at the start of this century they were really skipping two or three hundred years in one stop. Out of the late middle ages, actually. Some hadn’t even seen a railroad!”

  Quite true. I was ten years old before I saw one, nice boy. Nice boy with bright green eyes, so serious and interested in everything! Only I do hope you decide to buy a suit sometime. You can’t apply for a job wearing slacks and a shirt. Or maybe you can these days?

  A very pretty girl spoke from the far end of the table. “There’ll have to be changes. We can’t just go on exploiting people and destroying the environment. It’s simply too late for ‘every man for himself.’ Otherwise there’ll never be any peace on earth.”

  As if there ever could be, anyway! But no, I shouldn’t say that. What do I know of the future? One has to try. Maybe the vision and energ
y of these young will do what we didn’t do, didn’t even try to do or concern ourselves with. For us it was enough to take care of ourselves!

  So I don’t know. It’s all for them to solve if they can.

  Rainaldo—it must be he, because he spoke a little English—caught Anna’s eye. How rude of her. She’d been neglecting them. She smiled. He smiled back and, by way of making conversation, pointed to the candlesticks.

  “Very beautiful silver, Aunt. Very old. Two hundred years, I think.”

  “You’re right. They belonged to my great-grandmother. That’s your—let’s see, great, great, how many greats, four, no, five?”

  Rainaldo threw up his hands. “Fantastic! It does something—” he pointed to his heart—”to think about it.”

  “Yes,” Anna said, “it does.”

  “In Mexico we also have very fine silver. I am used to see it. That picture—portrait, painting? That is Uncle Joseph, I think? My grandfather told me about him.”

  The portrait hung behind her. From his end of the table Joseph had always faced himself. She turned.

  “Yes, it’s a good likeness. I mean, he really did look like that.”

  Not when he was young. In youth he had had an anxious look. But here in this portrait he was confident, a little stern perhaps. A patriarch presiding at the family table.

  “Laura talks about him so much,” Robby said. “I wish I could have known him.”

  “He was a simple man,” Anna explained, as if she had been asked to sum him up. “All he wanted, really, was to keep the family together. I think that everything else was just a means to that end.”

  There was a little flurry of voices and laughter. A group stood up and came over to Anna’s table. Theo called out. “I want to ask everyone to drink to my mother-in-law. May she live a hundred and twenty years!” The glasses touched and he added, “It isn’t every man who can wish his mother-in-law long life and mean it.” His eyes met Anna’s and stayed in a long look.

  “And I would like to drink to the memory of Papa,” Iris said softly. “On a day like this especially we remember him.”

  It was inevitable, at any and every gathering, that the resemblance game be played.

  “Do you look like him, Iris?” Doris Berg inquired. “Standing there beneath his picture it seems to me perhaps you do look a little like your father.”

  Iris asked, “Do you think I do, Mama?”

  She wants to be told she looks like him. “I’m never very good at seeing resemblances. I always think everyone looks like himself.”

  Doris Berg persisted. “Oh, I don’t think so! Some people are carbon copies of each other. Jimmy looks just like Theo, and Philip looks like Iris. Iris does have a high forehead, something like her father’s, but still,” doubtfully, head on one side, “still it’s hard to say … maybe you don’t look like him. You are a mystery, Iris.”

  And Mary Malone said, “But our bride is her grandmother all over again! The red hair and the eyes, you couldn’t mistake those! What curious, wide eyes you had, Anna! I remember when I first met you, you looked as if you couldn’t see or know enough, as if you were just in love with the world.”

  It was over. The bride and groom had driven away on a camping trip. Celeste had appeared at the front door with boxes of rice. That was another tradition which Laura and Robby had wanted to dispense with, but Celeste had had other ideas and they had run down the driveway to their car through a rain of rice. Theo and Iris stood next to Anna until the car was out of sight. Their hands were joined.

  Anna touched Theo’s arm. “She isn’t gone, Theo. You haven’t lost her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because. They go their separate ways, but there’s a chain that holds them to you all the same.” She almost, but not quite, believed it herself.

  When the guests and the caterers were gone and only the family was left, Anna went upstairs.

  “I’ve got to get this rig off,” she complained.

  “I’ll help you,” Iris offered. “It was a lovely wedding after all, wasn’t it? I thought it was going to be so hippie.… Oh, that darn dog again!” For Albert had pushed the door open and greeted Anna with wet nose and dripping whiskers.

  “Look at your dress!”

  “It can be cleaned, I don’t mind. I’m worried about Albert. He’s apt to outlive me, and you don’t like dogs.”

  “Mother, you’re so morbid!”

  It was the second time that day that she’d been told that, and she didn’t feel morbid at all. Didn’t people ever want to face facts?

  “Still, I do believe Laura and Robby would take him. They’ll have plenty of space.… I must write and ask them.”

  “Do please allow them to have their honeymoon first before you start talking to them about death. Let me put your corsage in water.”

  Hideous things, orchids. I always liked cheerful flowers, like dahlias and asters, almost anything but orchids. Joseph always bought them for occasions; he seemed so pleased when he gave them to me. I never told him they remind me of snakes.

  “Here, give me the necklace. I’ll just put it in this box overnight and take it to the vault for you in the morning. What’s this?”

  “That’s not my jewelry box.” Anna was embarrassed. It was a fancy tin box that once, long ago, had held candy. In it she had hidden the last cutting of her own long red hair.

  Iris lifted it out, a shining spiral that fell almost to her knees. “Mama, what hair! It’s beautiful! I’d forgotten how beautiful …”

  “A long time ago.”

  “It doesn’t seem so long. I remember at my wedding, you wore a pink dress. You used to wear a lot of pink, so clever with your hair. You were the most striking woman there. Nobody looked at me; they all looked at you.”

  “Iris, I hate to tell you, but you do say the most idiotic things. You were a lovely bride, as lovely as any,” Anna argued firmly.

  Iris’ eyes filled. My daughter looks at me and I can tell what she is thinking as clearly as though the bones of her forehead were transparent. She is remembering childhood and mothering and she’s guilty because she always loved Joseph more than she loved me. I put out my hand; she lays hers in it, but she doesn’t feel comfortable with my touch. She never has, though I don’t know why. But it’s something she can’t help, any more than she can help loving Theo.

  Janet knocked on the open door. “May I come in? I thought I’d bring the baby to visit.”

  She laid the baby in Anna’s lap. Anna put her finger out and the tiny hand wound around it. The baby’s eyelids were shut like two fragile shells. Oh, to be young again, to produce a thing like this!

  She felt a sudden panic. Something had gone absolutely blank in her head. She couldn’t remember: was it a boy or a girl, this child of Jimmy’s? I can’t remember, she thought in horror … I can’t shame myself by asking. They’ll think I’m senile and I’m not that at all, not yet, although God knows and I know that my arteries are hardening. A pity, because otherwise I can see things in a clearer light than ever.

  “The baby’s not too thin?” She drew the blanket slyly away. A pink sweater. Ah, a girl. Of course. My great-granddaughter.

  “The doctors don’t want them to be fat, Mama. You know that.”

  Rebecca, that was the name. Rebecca Ruth, after Janet’s two grandmothers. Too bad Ruth couldn’t have lived to see her. Isn’t it funny that we should be great-grandmothers to the same child? A good name. Thank heavens, they hadn’t given her one of those phony names that people used these days, like Judy with an “i” on the end or Gloria with a “y” stuck in it for no good reason. Rebecca Ruth, you’ve just arrived and I’m about to leave. Well overlap by a few years at most. I’d like to live till you’re old enough to keep some memory of me. What vanity!

  But I’m the link, the only one in this house tonight who ties them all together, Rainaldo and Raimundo, Philip and Steve.… I hold up my hand. Is it true that some of the cells in me are the same as in this baby? I w
ish I knew more about biology. I wish I knew more about everything. Think of the things Rebecca Ruth will see and know! Things I can’t even conceive of. And my mother stood at the door of our house, talking of a marvelous time when every woman might learn to read.

  But one thing was true then that’s still true now. I told Theo there’s a tie that holds us all together, and I said it to comfort him, but I meant it. It’s there, or nothing has any value at all. And I know that’s not true. It’s the lifeline of the family, and if we can hold to it then we can make good children and the world will be better. Maybe that’s putting it all too simply in these tangled times, but then, the truest things are always simple, aren’t they?

  Oh, I’d like to stay a little longer to see what Philip does with his talent, to watch over Iris (though I’m certain she doesn’t need it anymore). How can I die and leave them all? I worry so! You silly fool, you think they can’t manage without you? Anna, the indispensable!

  The baby stirred and puckered her peach face. “I’ll take her,” Janet said, “it’s feeding time again.”

  Anna thought of something. “I should like to have my picture taken with her. It will be a fine thing for her to have. Not many people can know what their great-grandmothers looked like. Why, I’ve been curious all my life about the people who came before me! And there was never any way to find out. Certainly no pictures.”

  “We’ll have a photographer come in the morning,” Iris declared. “We’ll take the boys from Mexico—I never remember those names! Well take the whole family. Here’s Philip. You played wonderfully, darling.”

  “Nana,” Philip said, “I’ve come with the tape recorder. I hope you haven’t forgotten. Nana and I,” he explained to Janet, “are doing the story of her life for posterity. It was my idea. Because of what Nana always says about families and people knowing their ancestors. All that stuff.”

  Anna clasped her hands. “I don’t know what to say! It’s not as if I’d had a heroic life or anything.”

  “Nana! You’re not backing out?”

  She was suddenly quite, quite tired. But he looked so disappointed! He has my father’s pale eyes, set far apart, and he moves like him, clumsily. How can he understand what life was like for his great-grandfather, maker of boots and harness? For him it’s a story, picturesque and touching. For him my father is truly dead, as we all are when the last person who knew our faces and heard our voices is gone. The most we do is to save a little part of the life that was.