The windows were thrown open and the heat poured in, smelling of grass and earth and occasional summer rains. The record player stood between two windows and I played Respighi and Aaron Copland. When I listen to those records now I understand what that music was to me—distant and sweet; in one, the sound of scented waves on a tropical shore, in the other, the sound of the prairies, something wide and windy, full of sunshine and bending grasses; unpopulated music where no people walked at all. I lived in the music and it lived in me and tonight as I listen, I can remember exactly how it felt to be in that room. I can sense its dimensions, length and breadth, the pale floors, sanded down to a honeyed hue and varnished to a soft gloss, the new ceiling fixture like a hanging funnel enameled black so that the light by contrast was hot and white. The new rug was an oval of black plush, and the room seemed wonderfully empty, straight and simple, as though a hundred seasons could come and go and never set a mark upon those walls.
I don’t know how I could have cared so much for a house. When Mildred came, of course, she had to tear it down. She was Daddy’s new life and nothing could remain of the old. I understood and it was right, I suppose. For a long time I wouldn’t go back, wouldn’t look at the land where the house had been, where apartment buildings now stand. I couldn’t give the sight away, the one in my mind’s eye of that house, hung in shade where the maples threw pale green shadows on the walk and the weeping willow in the corner of the lot hid all my childhood games. I couldn’t give away what that was to me, all the pleasure and pain, the visions and the fantasies; all the doors we slammed on one another in anger and the sound of piano music in the front hall, Del and me playing scales. The basement flooded in winter, water creeping up the basement stairs like a thief; bats came down the chimneys, and the walls in certain sections of the house were solid brick a foot thick so that the plumbing could never be improved. There would be occasions when my father would go up with a flashlight into the eaves of the house and the air up there must have been eighty-five years old. The house was made up of oddities and improvisations. The laundry chute between the two bathrooms was boarded up but stale wind still blew from the cabinet below. I would drop things into that darkness now and then, knowing there could never be a bottom to a pit like that, though there was, of course. One could run down to the basement and open the laundry bin to retrieve lost combs and doll shoes, old rags. When I was young, if I wet my pants I would toss them down that chute thinking that I would never be discovered in my sins. I hate to think, when the house was torn down, what the workmen uncovered in a day’s destruction: messages I hid under loosened fireplace tiles in my bedroom hearth; old dreams boarded up in the walls. God, I’m glad I never saw the house torn down, rooms exposed when the walls were ripped away. I’ve seen houses like that, opened up like ripe fruit, and I always think I shouldn’t look, that the rooms are meant only for the eyes of those who lived there. And what does it all mean, wallpaper and window shades, bare bulbs hanging down where the fixtures have all been auctioned off? What does it mean when there’s nothing left but a hole where the basement was and a winding stairway that rises up out of nowhere and ends abruptly nowhere, too? And what does it mean to see those disconnected pipes like metal shoots, growing up out of plaster beds, powdered as fine as snow? I think it means that life is done and someone should let go. I think it means that no one can hang on to dreams like that, no matter how precious, no matter how full of pain. I think it means we should all escape while we can with our suitcases bumping our legs and our airplane tickets to the West Coast. Out there, they tell me, the houses are made of stucco instead of frame and the roofs are made out of rock instead of tin. There are no basements to flood, no icy winters to remind us of the other winters in our lives. And the music, when it comes again, might sound the same but the prairies are closer to home and the wide hills and the wind. In the West there is even an ocean like the one Respighi heard. You have to give the house away to have it, have to give away the trees, sign away the mortgage on your father who belongs to someone else now, sign away your mother’s grave. When it’s done and the papers are filed away in your heart, you can make a new life for yourself, take your infant son and your unborn daughter out of bondage. And it’s all right, the trade you make, that transaction among trust deeds. You’ll know that the music you heard in the summer of 1961 was only the song of the next decade drifting back at you, out of time, and that’s all right, too. When you get there, when you make it safely, you can look back on the old rooms and you’ll understand then why they had to go, why they had to be torn down. And you’ll know she never can destroy the structure in your head, the dream house you’ve resurrected in your mind. That’s yours and you can furnish it as you like, out of truth, out of memories, out of recollection and grief. You can make of it a mausoleum too where all your lives are laid out like the dead. On the West Coast there are graves with no headstones and the funeral homes look like Howard Johnson restaurants in the East. And for all you know, you’ll end up there in the pastures of Forest Lawn with no more to commemorate your life than a statue of Aphrodite in the nude. I think you’d best make your peace with the past since you’ve come this far. I think you know by now that you won’t go back again.
the quarrel
THERE WAS A KNOCK at the bedroom door and Kit glanced up from her packing. “Come in,” she said, hesitantly, and then she went on with what she was doing, folding a sweater, placing it neatly beside the folded skirt in the half-filled suitcase.
“Kit? Can I come in a minute?” It was her father, standing in the doorway, still in his robe and slippers.
“Yes, that’s all right, Daddy,” she said.
He was looking uncomfortable, his lean face lined with regret, his mouth creasing into a smile which hovered, hopefully, looking for one in return.
She smiled for him but not from any joy of her own. She smiled because she recognized the look on his face. He was being sent like an emissary from an enemy camp; the eternal diplomat, poor dear.
“Everything all ready to go?” he said.
“Just about. I have a few things more but it’s mostly done.”
He sat down on the twin bed and took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his robe. “Is there an ashtray in here?” he said, glancing around at the chest of drawers.
Kit took the blue one from the windowsill and handed it to him, watching while he lit his cigarette and offered one to her. She shook her head slightly.
“I just put one out,” she said.
“Will you sit down and talk a minute?” he asked, and she nodded, knowing exactly what he would say but unable somehow to refuse him. It would be painful, she knew, because they would skirt the truth. It would be a conversation like a hundred others she could remember except that this one would deal with Mildred where the others had dealt with Vanessa. Vanessa was her first mother, her real mother, and Mildred was her second. Kit really didn’t want to talk about either of them. In fact, she had assumed when Vanessa died that all the conversations between fathers and daughters about their mothers would end. But here was another mother to be discussed, circumstances to be justified, forgiveness rendered like a judgment in which Kit had already been condemned.
Mildred went to church. Mildred did good works. In the community at large, she was known for her tireless efforts in behalf of others. This charity did not extend to Kit or her sister.
Mildred was a partner in her father’s law firm so Kit had known her for years. When she’d heard the two were getting married, she’d felt happy about it, not realizing what shrill surprises were waiting for her down the line. Mildred specialized in estate planning and wills. She told Kit in passing about the bequest of an elderly client who was leaving twelve thousand dollars for the care of her beloved dog in the event of her death. Mildred had the dog put down the same week the woman died.
The quarrel the night before had been a bitter one. Mildred was a fighter where Vanessa’s tyranny had been the silent, sullen type. To Kit, in
the moment, thinking back across all those other moments, it might have been one long quarrel springing out of the same relentless rage. It might even have been the same mother for all the good it did her. Mildred had a sharp tongue and an icy accuracy, plunging deep and hard and sometimes even wildly so that the wounds were all-encompassing and not easily healed. Without any conscious intent, Kit had begun trying to appease and placate the woman to no particular effect. Once in a while Kit blew, which she’d done the night before. And here was her father again, bright and early to patch things up, to smooth over an unsightly anger, explain away any excess emotion. Blessed are the peacemakers, she thought, except that she didn’t consider her father blessed at all but damned because he was willing to pay any price. He was not a meek man but a beaten one. Vanessa, in twenty-eight years of marriage, had worn him down and now he had married Mildred and that would finish him off. He was a man strangely satisfied by grief.
“Mildred had to go over to her mother’s this morning. She and Clara have to take turns, you know. The uh . . . old woman doesn’t know them anymore of course . . . hardly knows anyone, but the nurses need relief one day a week so Mildred and the other sisters take turns. She said she was sorry she couldn’t be here to see you off.”
Kit didn’t make much reply to that. Mildred, she knew, must have been delighted to go sailing off first thing, her martyrdom clearly visible, leaving Kit and her father to finish up whatever ugly business remained from the night before.
“Mildred really does have a lot on her mind,” he said, and Kit felt a little pinch of pain. “She works awfully hard,” he went on, “and you know how she is. She has a quick temper sometimes but she has a heart of gold and she’s really a pretty good old gal.”
Kit lit a cigarette and emptied her mind. It might have been Vanessa he was talking about, some stranger, a character in a book. It all seemed the same and what was he really saying? He was saying, “Kit, dear, do me this one thing . . . let’s overlook the god-awful thing this woman has done and just be glad anyone would have us at all.” He was saying, “You and I are the strong ones, Kit, so we’ll have to be the ones who forgive, let bygones be bygones.” He was saying, “Try, Kit, to get along on just this fantasy between us, that your mother means well but falters now and then.”
And all the while whatever it was that they were overlooking, Kit and her father together in these little chats, whatever they were being so courtly about, was in truth some monstrous violation of the values he had taught her, some disastrous wrong which later, afterward, he carefully explained away. Sometimes Kit got so caught up in the make-believe forgiveness she couldn’t remember what it was that did her in, what hellish thing had taken place the night before. Even now the details of her quarrel with Mildred were indistinct. Quarrels were like that. Quick and brutal and disconnected so that later it was nearly impossible to reconstruct the logic of those cruel accusations and cutting rebuffs. Mildred was an expert at it, of that she was certain, and maybe that’s all the quarrel had been intended to be: a testing of weapons, of strength, of skills. Mildred was a paralyzing opponent because she stopped at nothing. Kit had been utterly vulnerable, caught off guard by some snide remark which then triggered that violent exchange. Kit had come off poorly and in retrospect could think of a thousand withering remarks when she had really only burst into tears and run upstairs. Mildred had cried then too, not to be outdone, and Kit’s father had stayed downstairs playing diplomat to Mildred’s hysterics so that Mildred had managed to win twice: once in the real arena and once offstage.
Kit got up and folded a pair of plaid wool slacks and placed them in the suitcase, listening idly while her father droned on about Mildred’s goodness of heart which was only occasionally overlaid by venom, spite, and vituperation. Mildred was a big woman, angry and insecure, an abrasive woman who marched through life hoarding grudges like bad debts on which she could eventually collect. She was not all that bad, Kit thought to herself, even while she berated Mildred in her head, but the instinct to temper her judgment was something her father had taught her and even now she resented that peacemaker’s tool. Her father amended and qualified and overlooked and understood and soothed and pacified until reality was not even recognizable. What he did, in effect, was to take all the blame for whatever went on and then humbly ask someone to forgive him.
“It was really my fault,” he was saying gruffly. “I should have realized she was tired. She tried so hard to have everything just right for you. God, she cleaned house for weeks and cooked. I guess the holidays are pretty darned hard on her too with that bursitis acting up like it does. It’s a nasty business, bursitis. . . .”
Kit tuned him out again. Medical problems, now what the hell did she care about Mildred’s medical problems? She knew she was meant to understand from what he said that Mildred was suffering, staunchly, some terrible ill which was in fact responsible for whatever cruel things she had said. And Kit would buy it. She knew she would. It was like some incredible game they had played, these twenty years, being noble and long-suffering while first Vanessa and then Mildred went at them tooth and claw. What was she supposed to do with all that pain? What was she meant to do with the anger she felt? Eat it up, gulp it down? She had done that now for twenty years and she knew that it was anger that made her stomach cramp, burned the walls of her abdomen like cigarettes from inside. It was anger that perforated, eventually, and spilled out your guts, as his had spilled, leaving nothing of all that nobility but a scar a yard wide. It was anger too that cut away love so that angry people were numb to the core, uncaring and cut off from tenderness, cut off from tears.
He finished what he was saying and Kit chimed in with the usual clichés and comments, together manufacturing a plausible excuse for all that was inexcusable in the world. He patted her hand and kissed her cheek and when he had shuffled out again, she went right on packing, putting two blouses in with the sweater, her hosiery with the nightgown and slippers. She noticed she was crying into the suitcase as she worked and it seemed absurd somehow that whatever true tears she wept for him would only be packed away with her shoes and carried back with her to California. I could have cried on the West Coast, she thought. I could have wept without coming three thousand miles for more. But she couldn’t, she knew, have completed that strange transaction of mercy, the last bond between them. Father and daughter, heads bent together, acting out rites that neither of them could identify. If Mildred died, some other lady would come along to do them in, to cut at them and whip them, giving them grace to forgive again and peace to indemnify.
jessie
“YOUR MOTHER WAS a wonderful person,” Jessie says to me, her forehead furrowing as she speaks. Her face is a warm coffee brown and her cheeks are high, her teeth very white and her black hair streaked with gray. She came to work for us when I was sixteen and my father had just had his ulcer surgery. That was fifteen years ago and now everything is different except Jessie and me. When I see her, we talk about the house, about Daddy and Mildred, about my mother too. Somehow Jessie is the only person in the world now who remembers Vanessa as I do and we talk together about everything that was, as though we can between us reconstruct some portion of the past forever lost to us.
“I remember when Miss Mildred brung me out to the house for an interview and your mother set on the couch in the living room and ast me did I know how to make hot breads. And I don’t know . . . just something about her face and the way she spoke made me think to myself, Now, Jessie, I believe this is where you should stay. I didn’t have any idea in the world that I’d be with her that long but seems like it just worked out that way. Miss Mildred ast me some questions too but I never did care for her even then. I won’t call her Mrs. Conway, you know. To me, your mother was the only Mrs. Conway.”
“Oh, Jessie,” I laugh, “what do you call her then?”
Jessie laughs too and her white teeth flash into view. “I try not to call her anything. Oh, sometimes I call her Mrs. C. but mostly I call her Miss
Mildred. That bothers her some, I can tell, but she won’t let on,” she says, and then she goes on, talking almost to herself.
“I don’t see much of your daddy since he married her. Miss Mildred, you know, she didn’t like having me around once your mother was gone. It was too much reminder of everything that had gone before. I was just as glad when I started working for Del though she don’t say a whole lot to me. Your sister don’t say nothing to anyone. And I love Del, so don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that. But she and your daddy are kinda close-mouth, you know. Miss Mildred now, she’ll say anything. Like she says to me one day, ‘Jessie,’ she said, ‘Jessie, I want you to know how sorry Mr. Conway feels that he don’t see more of you.’ She didn’t say she was sorry. Just him. So I didn’t let on I noticed that and I said, ‘Why, Miss Mildred, what do you mean? He comes down to visit with me now and then.’
“‘I mean, up to the house,’ she says.
“And I said, ‘Why, Miss Mildred, I love to go anywhere I’m invited.’ She didn’t mention any more ‘up to the house’ after that. Up to the house, my foot. You know she don’t want me up there. If she want me to go ‘up to the house’ she knows where I am.