Oscar said, “Caro—”
“I’m sorry,” she said angrily. She shook her useless hands as if they were full of something she wanted to get rid of. She brought them to her face, let them grab her shoulders, hit her thighs.
James looked terrified. Boys never see grown women cry. Or perhaps he had—what did I know of his life when I wasn’t around? Perhaps his mother cried every day she lived. Perhaps the secret of her perfect skin was gentle tears, applied first thing in the morning and just before bed.
But what Caroline was doing was not an everyday occurrence. It was something hoarded, a fortune stuffed under a mattress that has inexplicably managed to gather interest as fast as any bank account. She flung herself into the big armchair, then slid to the floor. Her pretty face was bright red.
Oscar tried to help her up, but she wouldn’t let him—she elbowed him away and continued to weep. I didn’t know why she was crying, and I wanted to know, I wanted it explained. I wanted her to say: this is guilt, this is delayed grief, this is postpartum depression mixed with a lot of other things. I hadn’t ever seen anyone cry like this in all my life. It was like she was poisoned and crying was the only way to get the poison out.
“I’m sorry,” said James.
“No!” Caroline stood up and stumbled to the bed. She sat next to James. She leaned into him. He put his arms around her.
I rocked the baby a little in my arms. “Hush,” I said to her, though she wasn’t crying. I didn’t say it loud enough for anyone else to hear. I whispered, “Everything will be fine.”
“We should have …” Caroline said to James. She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.
“Yes,” he said. “You should have.”
There was nothing else to say. No. There were dozens of things to say, but I didn’t know what they were, or how to say them. Oscar sat on the ground at his wife and nephew’s feet. James was crying a little too, tears without effort, as if his aunt, who still wept beneath his arm—silently now—had done the hard part.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was something we all felt obligated to say.
“You didn’t know,” said James.
I looked at him, then at Caroline. All along I’d thought he’d known that I was every bit as guilty as Caroline and Oscar—more, perhaps. I was James’s friend.
When I didn’t say anything, Caroline said, “No, it’s true. She didn’t know.”
Sometimes we need people to lie for us. That lie was a gift I shouldn’t have accepted: inappropriate and unethical and much too generous. But I did; I took it silently; I nodded.
That night was James’s welcome-home assembly at the high school. Caroline and Oscar had been consistent in their lie—everyone in Brewsterville believed that Mrs. Sweatt was alive though ailing in a New Hampshire hospital.
The town, one person at a time, came up to James to greet him, touch some enchanted faulty part of him. And James thanked them, then broke the news, and consequently their hearts: My mother has died. And the town, one person at a time, left him to his grief, griefstruck themselves.
There was a program at the end of the evening; James walked across the stage to shake the principal’s hand. I sat in the audience with Oscar and the baby; Caroline sat on the stage with James. She’d asked me to join them.
“No,” I said. “I hate the idea of an audience staring up at me.”
James seemed old every day of his life, but never as old as that night. There was the cane, and the braces, and the careful, shuffling walk of an old man whose legs have outworn their usefulness. Caroline walked alongside him, her hand up at his elbow. She looked old, too.
“There’s Mama,” Oscar said to the baby. He squinted. “She should be wearing a slip.” He was right. The outline of Caroline’s skinny legs was clear behind the fabric.
The principal shook hands with James for a long time; you could tell he wanted something to give to James, a proclamation or a key to the city or a diploma. Something about James made you want to offer things up. But all the red-faced principal had to offer was his comparatively small hand, so, when that wasn’t enough, he offered the other one, sandwiched James’s own hand between them. They stood there awhile, James holding on to his cane, the principal holding on to James.
The Bachelor’s Cottage
It hadn’t occurred to me that now I would have to announce myself at the cottage until my hand was on the high doorknob; I had walked from work, as I had for several months, to see the inside and wonder what was left to do. Nothing now, I supposed. It was the Sunday afternoon after the high school assembly. We hadn’t installed a bell, so I knocked.
“Come in,” James called.
I opened the door. He’d already rearranged a few things—the bed was in the opposite corner, beneath a window. Doilies had been plucked off the armchair and lay like a stack of flapjacks on the desk.
“Settling in?” I asked.
“Have a seat,” he said. I took the chair nearest the wall; James was sitting in his big armchair. “It’s weird,” he said, rubbing the chair’s arms. Without antimacassars, I thought, the upholstery would be black in a week.
“What is?”
James looked around the room. “I have a house. I feel like I’ve been gone for five years.”
“Well, a lot has happened.”
And then we just looked at each other. We were strangers, after all; at least, we’d never been alone in a small space like this. We had talked at the hospital, where there was plenty to talk about—James told me about his physical therapy, the terrible psychologist, his visitors—any of which might interrupt our conversation. In turn, I had caught him up on the news of this world: the weather, the renovations on town hall, Oscar’s newest schemes. Now he’d returned and I had no news.
I reached into my pocket. “I got you a new pack of cards,” I said, tossing them.
He caught them in one hand.
“You’re still doing magic, aren’t you?”
“Well, I haven’t for a while.” He undid the lace of the cellophane and opened the box. “Maybe I should start again.” He began shuffling.
“Let’s see a trick.”
“Let me practice a little.” The cards clattered, then shushed into a bridge. “What do you want to see?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know card tricks. I like them, though.”
He shuffled. Then he looked through the cards. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t look at this part. Okay, now you can look. Come a little closer, I need some audience participation.” I dragged my chair up to the foot of the armchair.
He spread the cards into a fan. “Draw a card. Don’t show it to me, but remember what it is. Now stick it in the deck. Anywhere, that’s fine. Now.” He shuffled the cards a different way, letting them waterfall from one hand into the other. “Is this your card?”
The seven of clubs. Yes, it was.
“That’s great—”
“Wait,” he said. Then he ripped the card up and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. Then he tapped the pocket with the corner of the pack. “Okay,” he said. “Reach into my pocket.” He leaned over, so the pocket fell away from his body. Inside was an intact card. I reached for it carefully. The seven of clubs.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How did you do that?” I sat back on my chair.
“A magician never divulges secrets.”
“No,” I said. “Tell me!”
“Look it up,” he said, laughing. “I’ll give you a hint: you can find the answer in the Brewsterville Library.”
I handed the card back to him. “I was a big magic fan as a girl.”
“But not card tricks.”
“I didn’t have the patience. I didn’t do magic at all, I just read about it. I wanted to be an escape artist.”
James started shuffling again. “Yeah? You? Like Houdini?”
“Just like Houdini. I wanted to escape from milk jugs and glass booths.”
He laughed. “Can’t picture it. Why?”
/> “Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I never thought about it much. I guess: escaping was very dramatic, but with a happy ending. Like with the movies. I never liked comedies, because they were too silly, but I couldn’t bear tragedies because such terrible things happened at the end. And suddenly appearing after everybody has decided you were dead, that seemed like a tragedy with a happy ending.”
James started examining the face of each card, as though they were snapshots of loved ones. “Houdini had a thing about death. Didn’t he want to talk to dead people? At séances?”
“He wanted to believe he could, but he decided that he couldn’t, that nobody could. All that reading about magic, but you never wanted to be Houdini?”
James held the cards in one hand, tapped them against his chest, as if that were the start of another magic trick. “No,” he said. “Maybe I’m not that ambitious.”
“But you learned the card tricks,” I said. “I wanted to be Houdini, I just didn’t want to do the work. Or maybe I knew I couldn’t. It would have been too difficult to learn how to escape.”
“But that’s the thing of it,” said James. “It wasn’t escaping that was hard. I mean, he made it look harder than it was. He took just long enough to make the audience think he was dead. That was the real trick. Not that he was alive, because he was alive at the start and nobody was so impressed, right? The trick was he made people think he was dead.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
“Maybe that’s why he could never talk to dead people. Dead people didn’t want to talk to him, because he only pretended to be what they already were.” James had an amused, pensive look on his face.
“Do you think that anyone can?” I asked.
“What?”
“Talk to the dead.”
“Here’s what I think, and lately I’ve been going over this. I think there’s definitely life after death.”
“You do?”
“Definitely. But the reason that there’s no real proof is that dead people—or spirits, or whatever—are different from us. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, James,” I said.
“I mean, not only do they live somewhere else—which means I guess a different language—but they believe different things. I think—” He sighed. “I thought I figured this out. Give me a minute. I think Heaven, whatever you call it, is a different religion. A really strict, different religion. As time-consuming as a serious orthodox earth religion. And that people in Heaven are just naturally not going to talk to people who aren’t part of their religion. I mean, they don’t need to convert people, that’s for sure.”
“Does everybody who dies join the same religion?”
“Yes,” said James. “You have to. And there’s no point in being religious before you die, because whatever you learn, it’s all wrong. It’s like really religious people have had this hunch, but they’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. It’s not what you should do, it’s what you will do. You’ll convert sooner or later anyhow.”
“What about God?” I asked, though I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer. I was fairly sure he was an atheist, but it seemed a young man should have faith in the wonders of the world. On the other hand, I wanted us to have things in common.
“No such thing,” said James.
“But—”
“There’s no God. There’s just dead people.”
“So.” But I couldn’t figure out what the rest of the sentence should be. The windows were all open, and the long curtains were blown back, like the capes of magicians who had just left the room. Finally I tried, “Your mother—”
“Peggy,” he said. “Do you think my mother killed herself?”
I shrugged.
“She didn’t,” James insisted. “I would have known.” Then he said, “I was a lot of trouble for her.”
“No,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was disagreeing with.
“You don’t think I’m a lot of trouble?” He smiled.
“Look,” I said. He had his hand on the arm of the chair; I stood up, and I put my hand on his. This was that rarest thing in my life, an unpremeditated move toward another person. Once I’d done it, however, I felt awkward. “Your mother loved you more than anything.”
“Maybe,” he said. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His skin was pale, scrubbed by the fluorescent lights of his hospital room, and he’d picked up a habit of his mother’s: he bit his lip, though he made it seem thoughtful, not nervous.
“No. It’s true. Everyone could see it.”
“Mothers love their kids. It’s a rule.”
“Not all of them. And not the way your mother loved you.” His hand was still under mine. I wanted to check my watch. This wasn’t the sort of thing I usually did, putting my hand on someone else’s, and I wasn’t sure how long was comforting without being unseemly. “I’ve known a lot of mothers. Most of them don’t hold a patch to yours.”
“What about your mother?” he asked.
“My mother? No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t hold a patch or didn’t love you?”
I took my hand from his and scratched my ear. “My mother,” I said. “My mother is a good woman.”
His hand, free from mine, bounced on the chair’s arm. He opened his mouth to say something, but then changed his mind.
“I don’t know what happened to your mother,” I said. “But I know it had nothing to do with you.”
“She didn’t kill herself,” he said.
“Good.”
“No, she didn’t,” he said, as if I’d disagreed. “She would have told me. That’s one thing about her, different from everybody else around here. She was lousy with secrets. She couldn’t keep them for a minute.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“From me,” he said. “She told me everything. I mean, about her life, about my father. I knew when she had heartburn. I knew every last thing about those old ladies at the nursing home. Nobody will ever tell me the kinds of things Mom told me.”
“Somebody will,” I said, because it sounded like something he wanted. I almost said, I will, but I didn’t think I had it in me to honor that promise, not then. Worse, I didn’t think I was the one he had in mind.
“Nobody will,” he said again. “I knew everything she did all day. I knew when she was menstruating.” He stumbled over this last word, and I could tell he’d probably never said it aloud before; we both blushed. “I knew that she took sleeping pills. She took diet pills, too. I didn’t want her to. If I knew all that, don’t you think she would have told me something so big?”
I nodded, for his sake. But I was a grown woman and knew any grown woman was crammed full of secrets—you couldn’t open her like a medicine cabinet and read the indications.
“She would have,” he said. “She wouldn’t have let me talk her out of it, but she would have told me. She believed in putting all her eggs in one basket. I was her basket.” He rested his chin in one hand. “That’s one thing I used to be.”
We heard somebody coming up the gravel path.
“Hello,” Caroline called. Then she knocked. Then she said, “Hello?”
“Yes?” said James.
She stuck her head in. “I’ve run away,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” said James. “You didn’t run away far.”
“Actually, Uncle Oscar’s giving Alice her bath. Then it’s dinnertime. Peggy, you’re more than welcome.”
“No thank you,” I said. I was fairly dizzy with the afternoon’s conversation, wanted to get home, lie down, think about it.
Caroline sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. Her skirt draped between her knees, a flowered V. “Don’t let me interrupt you. Go ahead with whatever you were talking about.”
“I was just practicing card tricks on Peggy,” said James.
“Oh,” said Caroline. “That’s all?”
“That’s
it,” said James.
“Were you fooled, Peggy?”
“Utterly.”
It was clear that Caroline wanted us to talk more. Clear, too, that Caroline was somebody that James would keep secrets from—that he would, in fact, withhold things that would not ordinarily be secrets, just for the pleasure of withholding them. This was because Caroline so desperately wanted to hear them. You never tell your secrets to people who want to know, I understood that much.
“Nice afternoon?” Caroline asked me.
“Yes,” I said. Impossible not to follow James’s terse lead.
Caroline let her head fall back to the stucco wall and stamped one foot. “You are the two most reserved people I ever met.”
“Reserved?” James said.
“Like a book,” I said. “A best seller waiting for the people who have asked for it.”
“Like a table in a restaurant,” said James.
“Like a sauce.”
“A sauce?”
“Yes,” I said. “When you cook, sometimes you have to reserve some of the sauce for the end of the recipe.”
“No,” said Caroline. “Not like any of that. Reserved. And I don’t think it’s such a great thing, if you want to know the truth.”
“Reserved,” I said. “Like the best table in the restaurant.”
Caroline didn’t think that was funny. “But the table is reserved by somebody, for somebody. The sauce is reserved by the cook, for the meat. The book is reserved by Peggy, for someone she knows wants to read it. The table doesn’t reserve itself, just in case the party of its dreams comes in, right? You guys, you’re holding on to yourselves, for—well, who for?”
“Who for what?” James said quietly.
“Who are you saving yourselves for?”
“Myself,” said James.
“Well, that’s about as ridiculous as the book holding on to itself for itself. What’s the point? Here’s what I think: you can’t save yourself. Somebody has to do it for you. I don’t mean rescue, I mean: hold on. I mean: reserve. What if you save yourself for marriage—”
James laughed and looked down.
“—yeah, save yourself in all the different ways, you don’t tell anybody your secrets and you don’t sleep with anybody, and then you don’t get married. What happens then?”