I loved him for not being Saul, I suppose. Or for being a younger, happier Saul. He carried no freight of past wrongs and debts; that was why I loved him.
“When this is over with your mother, I’ll take you away,” he said. “I understand that you can’t leave now.”
Actually, he didn’t understand. I would have left. I wanted to get out, throw all the old complexities off, make a clean start. But I was trying to stay faithful to his picture of me and so I only nodded.
“We’ll go walking down the street together in a town we’ve never been to,” he said. “People will ask me, ‘Where’d you get her? How’d you find her?’ ‘She’s been sleeping,’ I’ll tell them. ‘She’s been waiting. My brother was keeping her for me.’ ”
We looked at each other. We were not cruel people, either one of us. We weren’t unkind. So why did we take such joy in this? My wickedness made me feel buoyant, winged. Gliding past a mirror, I was accompanied by someone beautiful: her hair filled with lights, eyes deep with plots, gypsyish dress a splash of color in the dusk. When Amos and I met in public, our hands touched, clung, slid off each other and parted, while we ourselves went our separate ways blank-faced and gloating like thieves.
I photographed Miss Feather swathed in a black velvet opera cape, holding a silver pistol that was actually a table lighter. “This will be for my great-niece LaRue, who never comes to visit,” she said. “Make up several prints, if you will.”
“All right,” I said.
“For my other great-nieces, too. Who also never come to visit.”
“I’ll have them by tomorrow,” I said.
It was night. I was tired. Mama had dropped off and I was trying to catch up on my work. But I could hardly see to focus the camera; everything was haloed. “I believe I’ll go to bed,” I told Miss Feather.
“No, wait, please.”
“I need some sleep.”
“But what about Saul? I mean to say,” said Miss Feather, “Saul is not himself these days.”
“Who is?”
She fumbled at her throat, cast off her cape, and rushed at me. A tiny, excitable woman waving a silver pistol. “Now listen, please,” she told me. “I had this in mind to say for some time: he’s your husband. Would you like to take a little vacation together? I could stay with the children.”
“Vacation, Miss Feather. I consider it a vacation if I can make it out of Mama’s bedroom.”
“But … dear heart—”
“Thank you anyway,” I told her.
I went upstairs, took off my shoes, and sagged on the edge of the bed. Saul wasn’t there. He had taken to going on long walks in the dark. I was on my own, and felt free to slip a hand in my skirt pocket and pull out my true self’s photograph. She smiled back at me, carefree and reckless, but my eyes were too tired to make any sense of her. It seemed she had arrived unassembled. I couldn’t put her together.
How did you turn out, finally? What kind of grownup are you now?
Late in December they took Mama away and put her in the hospital. I had hoped to avoid that but Dr. Porter said I was getting strange-looking. Besides, he said, she might not even notice. She was hardly ever conscious any more. They hooked her up to a number of cords and dials. She lay silent, with her eyes tight shut. I imagined she was doing it deliberately—not sleeping or comatose but closing me out, hugging her secret clawed monster. I felt jealous. The nurses told me to go on home but I stayed, stubbornly gripping the arms of my chair.
Amos brought me a Big Mac—the smell of beautiful, everyday life. When I wouldn’t come away with him he laid it on the table beside me and loped off down the corridor. His moccasins made a gentle scolding sound. Then Julian danced in all edgy and skittish, dressed up as if for a night at the races. He gave me a note from Linus: I can’t visit hospitals. Can’t manage. Taking the Children to pizza palace, is my sympathy gift to You. I thanked Julian and he danced out again.
Saul stooped in the doorway, took stock of the room and then entered. He settled in the armchair next to mine, tugging at his bony black cloth knees. His head lunged forward awkwardly. “Have you eaten?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said.
The Big Mac sat untouched on the table; the smell of it had made me full.
“How is she?”
“The same. You don’t have to whisper.”
He cleared his throat. He set his Bible on his lap, took out his reading glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. Then he put them on and opened the Bible. I went back to studying Mama. She reminded me of a withered balloon. All those cords were just to hold her down; without them she’d lift up, level and sedate, and go wafting out the window. I snickered. I glanced over at Saul, hoping he hadn’t noticed. He was looking not at the Bible but straight ahead of him. His face was grim.
“Saul?” I said.
His eyes came to rest on me.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m eternally visiting deathbeds,” he said. “Even more than other preachers.”
“You do seem to go to a lot,” I said.
“Maybe it’s because I’m so poor at them.”
“You are?”
“I don’t know what to say at them. And I don’t like dying people.”
“Never mind,” I told him.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I believe we’re given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us.”
I thought of a merry-go-round, little dappled horses. To me, it seemed soothing. But Saul clamped his Bible shut and leaned toward me, looking into my eyes. “Till we get it straight,” he said. “Forgive, or settle up, or make the proper choice. Whatever we failed to do the first time.”
“Well, maybe so,” I said.
“I keep telling myself that.”
“I see.”
He made me uneasy, a little. Maybe he sensed it, because he relaxed suddenly and sat back in his chair. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I wanted to say to you.”
“I see,” I said again.
“Will you come home with me, Charlotte?”
“I can’t.”
“You know she won’t wake up. You heard what Dr. Porter said.”
“Saul, I just can’t,” I said. “You go.”
And he did, after a minute. The rustle he made while getting himself together was an irritation. I waited, keeping my face turned aside, wondering why he paused so long at the door. But finally he was gone.
Then I had my mother to myself. For I couldn’t let loose of her yet. She was like some unsolvable math problem you keep straining at, worrying the edges of, chafing and cursing. She had used me up, worn me out, and now was dying without answering any really important questions or telling me a single truth that mattered. A mound on the bed, opaque, intact. I was furious.
Around midnight, she said, “There is too great a weight on my feet.”
I bent forward to look at her. In the bluish glow of the nightlight I could make out her small, dazed eyes. I said, “Mama?”
“What is this on my feet?” she asked. Her voice was parched and broken. “And my arms, they’re all strung up to something. What’s happened?”
“You’re in the hospital,” I told her.
“Take that blanket or whatever off my feet, please, Charlotte.”
“Mama, are you all the way awake?”
“My feet.”
I stood up and searched my skirt pockets, my blouse pocket, and nearly panicked, till I remembered my cardigan. “Mama,” I said, “look.” I turned on the reading lamp at the head of her bed. She flinched and closed her eyes. I held the photograph in front of her face. “Look, Mama.”
“But the light.”
“It’s important,” I told her. “Who is this a picture of?” She rolled her head back and forth, protesting, but opened her eyes a slit. Then closed them. “Oh, me,” she said. “Who is it, Mama?”
“Me, I said. Me as a child.”
/>
I took the picture away and stared at it. “Are you sure?” I asked.
She nodded, uninterested.
“But … I thought it would be your true daughter. The one they mixed up in the hospital.”
“Hospital?” she said. She opened her eyes again and let them travel in a slow, frowning arc across the shadowy ceiling. “I never gave my permission to be brought to any hospital.”
“The one you had a baby in, Mama. Remember you had a baby?”
“A surprise,” my mother said.
“That’s right.”
“Like a present. A doll in a box.”
“Well …”
“I can’t imagine how it happened, we hardly ever did much.”
“Never mind that, Mama; the baby. You didn’t think it was yours.”
“It?” she said. She seemed to pull herself together. “It wasn’t an it, it was you, Charlotte. The baby was you.”
“But you said they mixed me up in the hospital.”
“Why would I say that? Oh, this is all so … it’s much too bright in here.”
I turned the light off. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You never thought that I was someone else’s. The notion never occurred to you.”
“No, no. Maybe you misunderstood,” she said. “Maybe … I don’t know …” She closed her eyes. “Please lighten my feet.”
I couldn’t think what to ask next. I had lost my bearings. Oh, it wasn’t that I doubted my memory; I was still sure of that. (Or almost sure.) But the picture! For now I saw that of course it was Mama. Obviously it was. And here I’d found so much in that little girl’s eyes, imagined such a connection between us!
“My feet, Charlotte.”
I slipped the picture back in my pocket, then, and went to the foot of her bed and lifted off the folded spread. I hung it over a chair. I returned to her, avoiding tubes and cords, careful not to jar her, and more gently than I’d ever done anything in my life, I laid my cheek against my mother’s.
She died a few days later, and was buried from Holy Basis Church with Saul officiating. Her coffin seemed oddly narrow. Maybe I’d made up her fatness, too.
The funeral was well attended because she was the preacher’s mother-in-law. None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn’t come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I’d lost someone more important than I’d expected to lose.
After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather’s tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk’s little winter bouquets; even Saul’s prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn’t take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. “Are you all right?” he’d ask.
“I’m fine.”
“I thought something might be wrong.”
“Oh, no.”
“I woke and you weren’t there.”
“Are you all right?” I said.
“Yes, certainly.”
“Don’t catch cold.”
Then he’d wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.
I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, criss-crossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Selinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments. And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people’s shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.
“I won’t hurry you,” Amos said.
I looked at him.
“I know what you’re going through,” he told me.
For we never met in vacant rooms any more—or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.
So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog. Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, comforting smell: chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father’s camera. I turned on the lights and took the CLOSED sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather’s: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?
“Certainly it’s real,” I told him. “You see it, you feel it: it’s real.”
“No, what I mean is …”
“Sit beside the lamp, please.”
As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, “Amos!”
“You’re back at work,” he said.
“Yes, well, only Bando.”
I hung the prints. Bando’s face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. “Isn’t it funny?” I said. “In ordinary life he’s not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these; they’re not really real, he would say.”
“What’s your father got to do with it?” Amos asked.
“Well …”
“This studio’s been yours for, what? Sixteen, seventeen years now. It’s been yours nearly as long as it was his.”
“Well,” I said. “Yes, but …” I turned and looked at him. “That’s true, it has,” I said.
“And still you act surprised when somebody wants you to take his picture. You have to decide if you’ll do it, every time. A seventeen-year temporary position! Lord God.”
It dawned on me finally that he was angry. But I didn’t know what for. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went over to him. “Amos?” I said.
He stepped back. He had suddenly grown very still.
“You’re not coming away with me, are you, Charlotte,” he said.
“Coming—?”
I realized that I wasn’t.
“You’re much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs.”
“No, it’s … what? No, it’s just that lately, Amos, it’s seemed to me I’m so tangled with other people here. More connected than I’d thought. Don’t you see that? How can I ever begin to get loose?”
“I’d assumed it was your mother,” he said. “I assumed it was duty, that you’d leave in an instant if not for her. Turns out I was wrong. Here you are, free to go, but then you always were, weren’t you? You could have left any day of your life, but hung around waiting to be sprung. Passive. You’re passive, Charlotte. You stay where you’re put. Did you ever really intend to leave?”
I didn’t think my voice would work, but it did. “Why, of course,” I said.
“Then I pity you,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t feel a bit of pity. He looked at me from a height, without bending his head. His hands in his pockets were fists. “It’s not only me you’ve fooled, it’s yourself,” he said. “I can get out, but you’ve let yourself get buried here and even helped fill in the grave. Every year you’ve settled for less, tolerated more. You’re the kind who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You’re proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it’s their business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own …”
He stopped, maybe because of the look on my face. Or maybe he had just run down. He took one fist from his pocket and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Well, thanks for the example,” he said finally. “I’m leavin
g, before the same thing happens to me.”
“Amos?”
But he was gone, not a pause or a backward glance. I heard the front door slam. I didn’t know what to do next. I stood looking all around me in a stunned, hopeless way—at my dusty equipment, stacks of props, Alberta’s furniture, which had never (I saw now) been sorted and discarded as Saul had promised but simply sifted in with our own. At the crumbling buildings across the street: the Thrift Shop, newsstand, liquor store, Pei Wing the tailor … not a single home in the lot, come to think of it. Everyone else had moved on, and left us stranded here between the Amoco and the Texaco.
I stood there so long I must have been in a kind of trance. I watched a soft snowstorm begin, proceeding so slowly and so vertically that it was hard to tell, at first, whether the snow was falling or the house was rising, floating imperceptibly into the starless blue night.
After Amos went away, I became very energetic. I had things to do; I was preparing to get out.
First I discarded clothing, books, knick-knacks, pictures. I lugged pieces of furniture across the street to the Thrift Shop. I gave my mother’s lawn chair to Pei Wing, the plants to Saul’s choir leader, the Sunday china to Holy Basis Church. I threw away rugs and curtains and doilies. I packed the doll things in cartons and put them in the attic. What I was aiming for was a house with the bare, polished look of a bleached skull. But I don’t know, it was harder than I’d thought. Linus kept making new doll things. I packed those away, too. The piano grew new layers of magazines and keys. I had the Salvation Army come and cart the piano off. Objects spilled out of the children’s bedrooms and down the stairs. I sent the objects back. Strangely enough, no one asked where all the furniture had gone.
The parlor became a light-filled, wallpapered cavern, containing a couch, two chairs, and a lamp, with blanched squares where the pictures used to hang. But still I wasn’t satisfied. I skulked around the echoing rooms, newly drab in a narrow gray skirt I had saved from the trashcan, discontentedly watching Jiggs skate the bare floors in his stocking feet.