My mother was in a depression for a week after that. I couldn’t stand being around her. She spent too much time talking to Jeffey. I thought she was crazy. Everything she did wore on my nerves. She turned on the gas burner before filling the tea kettle with water, as if you needed to let gas burners heat up, and I wanted to pick up the tea kettle and hurl it against the wall. She spread Marmite on her toast, which is a thick, almost black yeast spread the English are wild about. It looks like crankcase oil and it smells like the devil’s toothpaste. A couple of times I brought Pru home after school and there she was, eating it, on toast, and I think I was more ashamed of her at those moments than Pru was about having a padlocked refrigerator.
But as with all of my mother’s depressions, a day would come when I would walk into the kitchen and find her sitting somewhat dazed at the table, touching herself gingerly here and there, as if she had had a bad fall and was feeling around for broken bones.
“Hi,” I said on the Sunday morning when she was pulling out of this latest slump.
“Hullo, lambie. Did you sleep?”
“Can I have some coffee today?”
“When did you start drinking coffee? All right, half a cup.”
I got myself two-thirds of a mug of coffee, and doctored it with milk and sugar until it tasted like coffee ice cream.
“Where’s the paper?” I asked.
“It didn’t come today.”
“God!”
“Darling, will you come to church with me?”
I protested at first, and then realized I had nothing to do, no paper to read, no homework, and Pru was grounded all weekend for getting a D in science. My mother got up and went into the Lion’s Den, and after a minute I followed her there. She was sitting on the toilet, smoking dreamily, looking older. She had aged.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go.”
We ended up walking there together. I wore fringe moccasins; she wore sky-blue heels. It was about a mile away, across the railroad yard, along the shore of the bay, through town. She was reasonably cheerful again, humming hymns.
“You think Natalie’ll really come?”
“Yeah, I sort of think she will this time. I don’t think she’ll bring Lucy though.”
“What about her and Uncle Ed?”
“What about them?”
I shrugged. “Never mind.”
“Darling, it’s okay to bring it up. It’s just that I don’t know the answers. I think they’ll feel really strange around each other, but there’ll be a lot of other people around.”
“Yeah, like Peg.”
“That’s right. So it doesn’t really make sense for the little girl to be in the middle of all that stuff, does it? I don’t know how this will all shake down. God only knows.”
“God is a cheese-dick,” I said. I walked along staring at the ground. “I don’t even believe in him anymore.”
“Then how can He be a cheese-dick?”
“I don’t know. What about Peg if Natalie comes?”
“Peg has been over and over and over all this in her head. She left Ed, and Ed and Natalie were lonely as a couple of clubfoots at the time, and one thing led to another. Now Natalie has a kid who looks like Lynnie. And everyone has paid through the nose. And amends have been made. Everyone’s made sacrifices. So now this little kid is being raised by this nice new husband. She has two brothers who adore her. So, I don’t know. Peg’s okay with it now, I think. I mean, she’s the lucky one, right? She ended up with Uncle Ed.”
We had reached town. There were a lot more cars here now on a Sunday morning than there were two years ago. Plus several cute little breakfast cafes, several cute little stores that opened at ten on Sunday mornings. We didn’t see anyone we knew.
“What about Lynnie?” I asked.
“Lynnie’s so wrapped up in ballet.”
“We never even have mentioned it for one second.”
“Well, it was a pretty big deal. She took really nice care of Peg all along, even when things were at their worst; Peg lugging around that body bag of bad memories. But that was a long time ago. And Uncle Ed really loves her. So, we’ll see.”
It was great to be in church again. Everyone made a fuss over me. There were only three Anglos today, two at first, me and my mother, and then halfway through the first hymn, Wino John. I smelled his unmistakable smell and I felt my mother freeze up. Then he was pushing past me as though we were at a movie theater, and he pushed past my mother and sat down beside her.
She sighed and kept singing, O Freedom. After a moment, I could hardly smell the starchy smell of all that processed hair and all those burning candles—I could only smell John, grease, dirt, urine, port. He looked even worse than usual. His eyes were more bloodshot, and slightly yellow, ringed in red, half-open, full of pain; and the dirt was thicker and the hair more matted. I studied him while James read the opening prayer, “Do Thou meet us while we walk in the way, and long to reach the better country; so that following Thy light . . .” John wiped his snotty nose and mustache on the sleeve of his jacket. His beard and eyebrows were flecked with burrs and bits of grass. He began to scribble angrily on a scrap of paper, all the while hawking and sniffling away. I turned back toward the pulpit.
James said something that day that has stayed with me ever since. He said that on Christmas the year before, he and his wife had been driving across the bridge, to visit their children and grandchildren in San Francisco, and suddenly he had understood that the birds and the trees, the animals, the land, the flowers, the grasses, the fish and the whales, the sky and the water all knew that Christ was born; the Incarnation had happened, and everything knew, and the air shimmered with the knowledge of Christ’s love and grace and reign.
And all the while the old man muttered, “Uh huh, oh yeah, aymen.”
When we stood to sing another hymn, John remained seated, writing, hawking, but when we stayed on our feet after singing for the passing of the peace, he got up unsteadily.
At this church, beginning at one end of the rainbow-shaped rows of chairs, James hugged the first person and said, “May the peace of the Lord be with you.” The person being hugged would reply “and with you,” and then turn to the person on his or her left, hug that person and say, “May the peace of the Lord be with you.” It was passed this way in the three semicircular rows until it got all the way over to the last person on the other end of the rainbow; much like “the wave” would later be done in ballparks, but slower. All of which meant that in several moments, my mother was to be hugged and passed the peace by John. I had seen him receive and pass the peace before, awkward, and of course no one wanted to linger in his arms for long, but people gave and received his hugs, whacking away for a second or two, turning then to hug the person to the left. But my mother had never been the one on his left. So I looked up at her and she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Pray for me.”
I nodded, smiling.
The peace was getting closer.
“It won’t be as bad as I’m imagining, will it?” my mother whispered to me. I shook my head, smiling.
Three people away, a mother hugged her tall chubby son, who turned to hug John, as my mother bent down to whisper, “I keep remembering Uncle Ed saying, ‘Panic is your worst enemy,’” and I gave her the thumbs up sign, and she turned to be hugged by John.
She squared her shoulders and then raised her arms to encircle John’s shoulders, but John squatted down, threw his arms around my mother’s knees, and lifted her into the air.
I covered my mouth to stifle a scream. Her face was three feet above me, blank with fear and red with shame. He held her aloft, two feet off the ground, his horrible snotty face pressed against her stomach, and I thought that the eyes of the church were upon us, but no one, no one was watching. They were waiting for their hugs, or they had averted their eyes, and the disgrace in me was total. It was suddenly as if we, the three white people, were behaving in a scandalous way, here in the house of the Lord, while everyone pas
sed the Peace of the Saviour, and it felt like an electrical storm was about to start. I reached up and grabbed a hunk of John’s hair, and pulled, and saw that my mother was pinching him hard about the shoulders, trying to get her nails into his neck; he grimaced then, and put her down, rubbed his face on his sleeve, and yawned.
He stood there looking bored. My mother was trembling, rigid and shaking, and turned to me, full of fear and shame. I looked into her face, trying to seem kind, and she sat down and rubbed at her eyes. No one at all seemed to notice that anything strange had just happened. I turned to my left, and stood on my toes to give old Stephen a hug.
“Peace of the Lord be with you,” I said.
“And with you.”
Then I sat down and leaned against my mother, hard, and after a minute she put her arm around me, and her head against mine. She sighed again, and we stared at the stained-glass windows that hung suspended from the ceiling, wheat and grapes, bread and wine.
Later we walked home, and she said her heart felt broken, but she couldn’t stand to talk about it yet. She said it had made her as afraid as she’d ever been before. She said she had felt abandoned by God, all alone in the world; until she had felt me leaning up against her. I didn’t say anything. We sat down on a bench by the water so she could smoke. I wanted a cigarette so badly I could hardly stand it. White quilted clouds were reflected on the drab green water of the bay. There was a long cloud above San Francisco, with two parallel lines running its length and then disappearing into the bright blue sky, as if a skier had skied through it. Out on a piling streaked with tar, a pelican preened. My mother stared up into the sky as if she saw a plane approaching. There were thick ribbons of seaweed wrapped around all the driftwood on the beach. I had caught thousands of crabs on these shores. Now there would be new ones, all new crabs, under the rocks, under the logs. After a while my mother said, “Shall we?” and stepped back into her sky-blue heels, got to her feet, and headed home.
The following Sunday, one week before my birthday, I went to church again with my mother. I went as her bodyguard. This time we were the only two Anglos there. Everyone made a big fuss over me again. Wino John wasn’t there. James pointed this out to the entire congregation, from the pulpit, as if my mother and I hadn’t noticed.
“John is in the hospital,” he said. “He is very sick. His liver is diseased. He is in trouble and really needs our prayers. I’m going up to see him after our service today, as he asked me to come and baptize him. Anyone here is invited to come along.
“I spoke to his sister in Minnesota last night. She said he has always had mental problems, since he was thirteen or so; he’s schizophrenic, they say. Some of you have heard him play this here piano. He was classically trained. His sister said he was a child prodigy. I taped him once playing, if anyone here ever wants to listen. Once I was here an hour before the service, still working on my sermon, needing silence—this was maybe five years ago or so—and all of a. sudden John showed up. He’d been to this church a few times before, but I hadn’t ever spoken to him, and he asked me, ‘Rev? Mind if I play around with your piano?’ And he looked like we know him to look, maybe not so sick, a few years younger. His sister says he turned forty last year. And when he asked I thought, ‘Heavenly Father, why do You do this to me?’ But I told John to go ahead, and went back to my work, expecting to hear a commotion, like he was a kid who was going to pound on the keys—but I tell you, I heard the Holy Spirit playing through him. I heard God helping him play. He played quietly, hauntingly, like an angel, half-Mozart, half-wind chimes. So anyone here wants to go with me today, see me after the service.”
My mother slowly bent her head back to stare at the ceiling of the quonset hut, and I knew then that we would be going.
We stood around his hospital bed, my mother and I, James, old Stephen, an aged black empress named Alice, and Alice’s two teen-aged granddaughters. We were inside the curtains which separated him from the next bed. He looked better than he had in years, not so bleary, clean and shaved. His face and eyes were not so red, both were a little yellow. He wore a light blue paisley hospital gown, and there was a pleasantly skunky odor about him, like puppy breath. We all touched him. He looked sheepish, tired.
He looked out of the corner of his eyes, slyly. “Hey, Nanny,” he said.
James filled a styrofoam cup with water, set it on the hospital table, and helped John get out of bed. His arms were as thin as a five-year-old child’s. He stood with his back to the bed, his hair long and tangled, looking at his clean bare feet, at James’ face, at mine, responding “I do” as James performed the sacrament. “Defend, oh Lord, this child with Thy Heavenly Grace,” he read, and dipped the fingertips of his huge cupped hand into the styrofoam cup. He let his hand partly fill up with water and daubed it all over John’s forehead. It trickled down John’s face, past his eyes, and James rubbed it into his cheeks, then caressed it into his neck.
John died three days later in his sleep, at the hospital. There was a service at our church and most of the congregation was there. My father and brother had come. The choir sang “Rock of Ages,” “Beulah Land,” the old man in the corner saying, “Uh huh, ay-men.” James played the tape he had made of John playing piano. It was unlike anything I had ever heard in my life. The last notes hung in the air, some high like chimes, some like smoke. Everyone was crying, even my mother. James said that the music was God using John as an instrument, God playing John. The choir sang, “When I go up to Heaven I’ll walk about, There’s nobody there to turn me out; Deep River, my home is over Jordan.” In a way I’ve never quite understood, the veil tore an inch for me that day, like it does every so often, when in the midst of all that is mundane and day-to-day, there’s suddenly a tiny tear in the veil, and you see the bigger brighter thing, and then the veil repairs itself, and the day goes on as before.
A few days later, the last train left town for good. No one seemed to know that it was a historic day, that no train would run here again. This one train had been coming and going for nearly a month, and then one day it pulled out of town and didn’t come back. There was no ceremony, no crowd, no nothing—but I was there. It was the day before my birthday, and I was walking into town, and this same diesel locomotive pulling one empty freight train slowly started up. The tracks were overgrown with brown grass and green weeds. The train briefly flattened the grasses like a hand running through a brushcut, the conductor blew the whistle, and that was that. Uncle Ed told us the next day that it wouldn’t be coming back.
I was walking along the bay, by the railroad yard, and watched the train disappear around a bend. It was a foggy white day, and I was headed to Pru’s. In the distance coming toward me from the direction of town, I saw a figure approach—a funny gypsy figure in ragged jeans like Wino John, long brown hair, my father’s old Brooks Brothers vest. It was Casey. I waved to him. He walked toward me, but he didn’t wave back, and I worried that maybe he would pass me by without saying hello. I felt a wave of loss in my stomach, my breathing grew rapid.
“Hey,” I said when we got close.
“Hey,” he said and stopped. He fished around in the pocket of his jeans. “Close your eyes,” he said. He had something in his hand. I closed my eyes. “Stick out your hand.” I had another wave of fear. I had spent my early childhood doing this, over and over ending up holding horrible and sometimes living things. I felt him put his fist on top of my palm and hold it there a minute. Then something slithered from his hand to mine, like a stream of sand. I opened my eyes, expecting the worst, but there in my palm was a thin silver chain, which held a crescent moon made of turquoise set in silver.
I gaped. He pawed the earth softly with one foot, trying to look cool. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” he said.
“Oh my God,” I kept saying. I could have almost—out of joyful confusion—turned and flung it into the sea. I stood pouring the necklace slowly from one cupped palm to the other, the way we used to pass small heavy puddles of mercury from broken the
rmometers back and forth, from hand to hand when we were young. He was staring straight up, as overhead against the pure white, fog-white sky an egret glided past. “Look at that,” he said. Then we stood there a minute not knowing what to say to each other, Casey acting bored, my own heart racing with relief and temporarily requited love.
“I gotta split,” he said, and turned and walked away. There was a good-sized hole in the seat of his faded jeans. You could see a patch of pale skin. He didn’t turn around to wave, and after a while he crossed the street and cut across the deserted railroad yard.
Natalie came up for my birthday after all, by herself. She flew up in the late afternoon of the big day, and was scheduled to leave at noon the following day. My mother and I picked her up in the Volkswagen bus. They couldn’t take their eyes off one another, reaching out to touch each other’s face, like blind lovers. Then Natalie started kissing me, taking my hand as we walked out the building, petting my stiffly set hair.
“You’re almost as tall as me, Nanny girl. I love your hair that way. It was pretty the other way too,” she said, which no one in my life ever had, ever, ever. “But this way, it’s more you. Champagne blond. Lucky girl.” I smiled and let go of her hand and walked on ahead. There was a huge burning rock in my throat. The two women limped along behind me. I thought about the day Natalie had moved away; about Wino John, and Casey, and I cried, wiping at tears, scuttling along like India Schuyler.
I raced to the car and stood there staring in as if there were someone inside I needed to talk to, smiling idiotically as my mother and Natalie approached, both of them looking quizzically at me.
While we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Natalie said to my mother, “You look exactly the same.”
“Oh, but I don’t,” said my mother. “I look in the mirror and say to myself, ‘Where did you get that mask?’ Inside I’m Nanny’s age. Robbie has a friend named Gil, who turned seventy a month or so ago, and Robbie asked him what that feels like. And he said, ‘I don’t at all feel like a seventy-year-old. I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him.’”