The telephone rang four times. (Was Mrs. Emerson in some new frenzy, twirling through the house wringing her hands and far too upset to answer?) The fifth ring was cut off in the middle. “Hello!” Mrs. Emerson said.
“It’s Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth, where are you? There’s a man here delivering big sacks of something.”
“Oh, that’ll be the lime.”
“What will I do with it? Where will I tell him to put it? I thought you were around the house somewhere.”
“The lime goes in the toolshed,” Elizabeth said. “I’m at lunch. I may be late getting back, I’m spending the afternoon downtown.”
“Downtown? What—and I can’t find Timothy. One minute he was here and the—now, don’t take all afternoon, Elizabeth.”
“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Bye.”
She hung up. Timothy was leaning against the doorframe, watching her. “Now call Matthew,” he said.
“I’m through with that subject.”
“That’s what you think.”
He took a step back and slammed the door between them, with a noise that shook the room. She heard the key in the lock. “Call him!” he shouted from the other side.
“Oh, for—”
She stood up and went to try the door. It was firmly locked. Timothy was standing so close behind it that she heard his breath, which came in short puffs. “Timothy,” she said. He didn’t answer. She gave the door a kick and then turned an oval knob at eye level that locked it from inside—a useless move, but the final-sounding click was a satisfaction. Then she flung herself on the bed again and lay back to stare at the ceiling.
When she had been there a few minutes she began to see some humor in the situation. She got off the bed and circled the room, stopping to look out the window. “I’m stripping your bed, Timothy,” she called. “Now I’m tying the sheets together. Now I’m tying the blankets. I’m knotting them to the headboard, I’m hanging them out the window. Whee! Down I go.”
Timothy said nothing. She imagined him waiting aimlessly, feeling sillier by the minute but unable to back down.
She went over to the bureau, found two military brushes, and brushed her hair with both at once. She picked up a textbook and went back to the bed with it and looked at a diagram of the circulatory system. There seemed no point in memorizing it. She went through her pockets, hoping to find something time-consuming—a scrap of sandpaper, maybe. Timothy’s windowsill was scarred and peeling. But all she came up with was a rubber band, an unwrapped stick of chewing gum, six wooden matches and an envelope flap with a number on it. The rubber band she flipped into a light fixture on the ceiling, and the gum she dusted off and popped into her mouth. The matches she struck one by one on the windowsill and then held in her fingers, testing to see if telepathy could make a flame go out before it burned her. It couldn’t. She was relieved to see the flickering knot of blue proceed steadily downward, unaffected by anything so insubstantial as her thought waves, which flickered also, veering from the match in her hand to the silent figure behind the door. When she had blown the last match out, and wiped the sting from her fingers, she dialed the number on the envelope flap. “Hardware,” a man said. She dialed again, choosing the numbers at random. “I’m sorry, we are unable to complete your call as dialed,” someone told her disapprovingly. “Please hang up and dial again, or ask your operator for assistance. This is a—” Elizabeth slammed the receiver down. “Timothee,” she said, in the tone she might use for the cat, “I’m ready to come out now.”
“Did you call Matthew?”
She blew a strand of hair out of her face and tried another number. This time she hit on one that existed. A woman said, “Hello? Barker residence.”
“Oh, Mrs. Barker,” Elizabeth said, shifting her chewing gum to the back of one cheek. “This is Miss Pleasance calling, from Baltimore Gas and Electric? Your name has been referred to us for an in-depth study. Would you care to answer a question?”
“Why, surely,” Mrs. Barker said.
“Could you tell me if—”
“But first, I want to say that I just love the little leaflets you send out. The ones with the bills? Your recipe-of-the-month is especially helpful and of course I’m always interested to see what new appliances are out. Why, every time the bill comes I just sit right down and read every word.”
“You do?”
“Oh, my yes. And try the recipes. Living on a budget, you know, I especially appreciate those meals-in-a-skillet. Rice and what-not. Of course my husband prefers straight meat. ‘I’m a meat-and-potatoes man,’ he says, but I say, ‘Joe, you supply the money and then I’ll supply the meat. Until then,’ I say, ‘it’s meals-in-a-skillet for you, my friend.’ Well, he’s very good-natured about it.”
“Mrs. Barker,” Elizabeth said, “is your—”
“One thing I might mention, though—”
“Is your refrigerator running, Mrs. Barker?”
“Oh, you’re preparing for summer, aren’t you. I read what the leaflet said about summer: don’t leave your icebox door open and then come crying to us if the bill is high. Well, you don’t have to worry, Miss Pleasance. I know how you people are working to save us money and I do try to co-operate in every way I can. One thing I might mention, though, is the amount you depend on tomato sauce in your recipes. I wouldn’t bring it up except you did ask, and I feel it might be helpful for you to know. My husband doesn’t like tomato sauce. He says it’s too acid. I don’t know about other families, maybe they love tomato sauce, but it’s something for you people to think over. Have you considered chicken broth? Look, I’m so glad you called. Any time, any questions at all, you just feel free to give me a ring. I’m home all day. I don’t go out much. We just moved here and we don’t find Baltimore very friendly, although I hope I’m not stepping on your toes when I say that. But I just know we’ll settle in. And I take a great deal of pride in my home and feel sure I could tell you just anything you want to know about the typical housewife’s opinions. Are you concerned about your meter-reading service?”
“Well, not just now,” Elizabeth said.
“Any time you are, then—”
“Fine,” said Elizabeth. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Barker.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Elizabeth hung up. “Oh, my,” she said, and pressed her index fingers to her eyelids. Then she rose and went over to the door. She knocked. “Timothy, I want to come out,” she said.
“Did you call Matthew?”
“This is getting silly.”
“Call Matthew.”
She went back to the telephone. With the receiver to her ear she stared vacantly out the window a minute, popping her chewing gum, and then she smiled. She dialed the operator. “I’d like to make a long-distance call,” she said, “to Ellington, North Carolina. Person-to-person. First class. Any other special charges you can think of.” Then she settled back, still smiling, unraveling a thread from the ribbing of one sock.
It was her mother who answered. “Oh, Elizabeth, what now,” she said.
“What?”
“Aren’t you calling to put off your visit again?”
“Not that I know of,” Elizabeth said.
“What is it, then?”
“I’m just saying hello.”
“Oh. Hello,” her mother said. “It’s nice to hear your voice.”
“Nice to hear yours.”
“Do you have enough money to be spending it like this?”
“That’s no problem,” Elizabeth said. “How is everything? Everybody fine? Spring there yet? Trees in bloom?”
“Well, of course,” said her mother. “Bloomed and finished. You’re using up your three minutes, Elizabeth.”
“How’s that dog getting along? Pop used to her yet?”
“You know he doesn’t like you calling him Pop.”
“Sorry. Well. Is Dommie still hanging around?”
“Elizabeth, that’s the saddest thing. I told you ho
w often he’s asked after you, well, then Sunday he came to church with a red-headed girl. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, she could have been his cousin or something. But now what I hear: they’re engaged. Planning a fall wedding. Well, I suppose you could care less, I know you’re bringing home some Baltimore boy, but I always hoped, don’t you know, just way in the back of my—”
Oh, Dommie was good for a full fifteen minutes. Elizabeth stretched out on the bedspread and listened, every nowc and then sliding in a question to keep the flow going. When that was exhausted they talked about her father. (“I feel I ought to warn you,” her mother said, “that he looks upon this visit as a sign of some turning point in your faith. What are you laughing at? I won’t have you hurt his feelings for the world. He expects you to have changed some, and if you haven’t I don’t want to hear about it.”) Then Polly’s new baby. (“Her hair is brown, and I believe it’s going to curl. I’m so glad she has some, I never could warm to a bald-headed baby. Her eyes are a puzzle to me. They’re blue but may be turning, there’s that sort of opaque look beginning around the—”) Once, in mid-sentence, the bedroom doorknob rattled. What would happen if she said, “Excuse me, Mother, but I just wanted to say that I’ve been taken prisoner”? The connecting of her two worlds by a single wire made her feel disoriented, but when her mother ran out of conversation Elizabeth said, “Wait, don’t hang up. Isn’t anyone else there who would like to talk?”
“Have you lost all common sense? How much is this going to cost you?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.
But she found out, as soon as the call was finished. She dialed the operator, who said, “Eight-sixty,” and then “Ma’am?” when Elizabeth laughed. “Ho there, Timothy,” she said. “Can you hear me? I just made an eight-sixty phone call.”
Silence.
“Timothy? Now I’m going to call California station-to-station. I’m going to tell some store they delivered the wrong package, and get switched from department to department to—”
Something was thrown against the door. Then he kicked the door until it shook, and then he turned the key and rattled the knob. It was still locked from inside, but Elizabeth didn’t open it. “Damn it, let me in,” he said.
“You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” she told him.
“Do I have to break the door down? I want to talk to you.”
“Say please.”
“I’m warning you, Elizabeth.”
“Pretty please?”
There was a pause. Then he said, “I’m pointing a gun at you.”
“Ho ho, I’m scared stiff.”
“I’m pointing Andrew’s gun. I’ll shoot straight through the door.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Elizabeth said. The whole situation was getting out of hand. She slid off the bed and went over to open the door. “You’re lucky I’m not the hysterical type,” she said, brushing past him. “How do you know that’s not loaded? Put it down. Send it out with the garbage.”
She stopped off by the couch to slip into her moccasins, and then she headed out to the entrance hall. It was a pity she had no money; she would have to thumb her way home. Or take a taxi, and have Mrs. Emerson pay for it.
Behind her there was a click, a metallic, whanging sound. She wheeled around.
“Stop there,” Timothy said.
But it wasn’t at her the gun was pointing, it was at himself, at an upward angle near the center of his chest. His wrist was turned in a sharp, awkward twist. “Timothy Emerson,” she said. “Did you just pull that trigger? What if there’d been bullets in it? Of all the—”
“No,” Timothy said, “I think I took the safety catch off.”
She started walking toward him, slowly and steadily. Timothy kept his eyes fixed on her. His hand was shaking; she saw a glimmer trembling on the gun barrel. “Stop there,” he said. But an edge of something was moving into his face, and she could tell that in a moment there would be a shift in the way he saw all this: he would laugh. Didn’t he always laugh? So she kept chewing her gum all the way across the room, the eternal handyman, unafraid. “This family is going to drive me up a wall someday,” she told him. “What did you do before I came along? What will you do when I’m gone?” Then she lunged.
Her hand closed on his. She felt the short blond hairs prickling her palm. There was an explosion that seemed to come from somewhere else, from inside or behind him, and Timothy looked straight at her with a face full of surprise and then slid sideways to the floor.
5
It was all up to Matthew. It was Matthew who made the funeral arrangements, brought his mother endless cups of tea that he had brewed himself, met his brother and sisters at the airport and carted them home, answering their questions as he drove. “But why—?” “How could he—?” “I really don’t know,” Matthew said. “I’ll tell you what little I’ve pieced together, that’s all I can do.”
Peter came from college, looking young and scared with his hair slicked back too neatly. Mary flew out from Dayton with her little boy; Margaret came from Chicago and Melissa from New York. Andrew had not been told. He would arrive on Saturday, as he had planned before all this happened. Then they could sit him down and lay comforting hands on his shoulders and tell him gradually, face to face. The funeral would be over by then, but just barely, which made Matthew picture his family burying Timothy in haste. They didn’t really, of course. There was the usual waiting period, with the usual tears and boredom and the sense that time was just creeping until they could get this business finished. They wore out the subject of Timothy; they began to feel bruised and battered at the sound of his name. People kept paying formal calls, requiring them to make hushed and grateful conversation that did not sound real even though it was. No one ate regular meals. No one went to bed at regular hours. Any room Matthew went into, at any time of day, he might find several members of his family sitting in a silent knot with coffeecups on their knees. Sometimes a piece of laughter broke out, or an accidental burst of enthusiasm as they veered to other subjects. Then they caught themselves, checked the laughter, dwindled off in mid-sentence, returning to a silence that swelled with inappropriate thoughts.
It used to be Elizabeth who managed this family. Matthew had never realized that till now. She was the one they had leaned on—he and his mother and Timothy, and the house itself, whose rooms had taken on her clear sunny calmness and her smell of fresh wood chips. Only now, when she was needed most, Elizabeth had changed. With the others present she looked bewildered and out of place, like any ordinary stranger who had stumbled into the midst of a family in mourning. Mrs. Emerson called on her continually, but she answered with her mind on something else. Her care-taking had descended to the most literal kind: errand-running, lawn-sprinkling, lugging down more toys for Mary’s Billy. At twelve o’clock one night Matthew found her on a stepladder in the pantry, changing lightbulbs. She wandered through crowded rooms winding clocks or carrying table-leaves, her face set and distant, and while Father Lewis was in the parlor offering his condolences she stayed on the sunporch, yanking weather-stripping from all the windows.
“Why are you working so hard?” Matthew asked her.
“This is my job,” she said, and dumped tangles of cracked stripping into a garbage can that she had brought in from outside.
“So that’s Mother’s famous handyman,” said Mary. “Is she always so grim?”
“No, not ever,” Matthew said.
Then he removed his glasses and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Mary looked at him a moment but said nothing more.
Late Friday afternoon, Elizabeth came into the kitchen while Matthew was making a sandwich. She was in her oldest jeans, carrying a curved pruning saw that she set on a counter. “I thought you would be the one to tell,” she said. “After the funeral I’m going home for good.”
Matthew spread jam over peanut butter and patted another slice of bread down on top of it. Then he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if
you left.”
“I think I’d better.”
“Is it because of the trouble with the police?” “No.”
“Mother’s going to rely on you to keep her going, these next few months.”
“I don’t want to be relied on,” Elizabeth said.
Matthew laid the sandwich carefully on a plate and offered it to her. She shook her head. He set the plate on the drainboard. “If you would just give it a little more thought,” he said.
“I have.”
“Or if you held off till things here were settled. Then I could come with you. I’m still planning on it.” “No,” she said.
“Well, all right. Not now. But as soon as you want me to.”
She said nothing. He laid a hand over hers, over cool rough knuckles, and she kept still until he removed it. Then she picked up her saw and left.
“Where is Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Why don’t I see her around any more?”
“She’s out cutting that hanging branch, Mother.”
“That’s not what I need her for.”
“Shall I call her?”
“No, no, never mind.”
He set a tray on her nightstand, tea and a perfectly sectioned orange, and then straightened to watch his mother pace between the bed and the window. There was nothing broken about her, even now. She continued to wear her matched skirts and sweaters and her string of pearls, her high-heeled shoes, her bracelet with the names of all her children dangling on gold discs. She spoke when spoken to, in her thin, bright voice, and she kept in touch with the arrivals and the sympathy cards and the funeral arrangements. It was true that she spent more time alone in her room, and there were sometimes traces of tears when she came downstairs, but she was one of those women who look younger after crying. The tears puffed her eyes slightly, erasing lines and shadows. Her skin was flushed and shining. She moved with the proud, deliberate dignity she had had when her husband died. Once, months ago, Matthew had asked Elizabeth if she found his mother hard to put up with. “No, I like her,” she said. “Think what a small life she has, but she still dresses up every day and holds her stomach in. Isn’t that something?” Now that Elizabeth seemed so removed, Matthew tried to take over for her. He shielded his mother from visitors, and answered her telephone, and brought her food that she never ate. When she paced the room he watched with his hands slightly flexed, as if he were preparing to leap forward any minute and catch her if she stumbled, or prevent her from ricocheting from wall to wall.