“Well, yes.”
“Come upstairs, then. I got him sitting by the window. I told him company might be coming.”
They filed up narrow dark stairs, through a wallpapered hall and into what was plainly the best bedroom. Light poured in from a tall window, whitening everything—the tufted bedspread, the polished floor, the bony old man sitting in an armchair. A shock of silver hair slanted across his forehead. He was tilting his face upward, letting the sun shine on sunken, gleaming eyelids. For a moment Elizabeth thought he was blind. Then he turned and looked at her, and his hand fluttered up to make sure his pajama collar was buttoned.
“Daddy, honey,” Mrs. Stimson said.
“They got me in pajamas,” the old man told Elizabeth. “Used to be I never wore pajamas if there was company coming.”
“How you feeling, Daddy?”
“Why, I’m all right.” He squinted at his daughter—nothing failing about those eyes of his, which were chips of bright, sharp blue. “Later I might come down and see the people,” he said.
“Well, I got someone I want you to meet. This is Elizabeth Abbott, the preacher’s daughter. Remember? I know you must have seen her when she was just a youngster. This is my daddy, Mr. Cunningham.”
“How do you do,” Elizabeth said.
Mr. Cunningham nodded several times. A metallic flash moved back and forth across his shock of hair. “I was an usher when the old one was there,” he said.
“The old—?”
“The old pastor, the one before Reverend Abbott.”
“Oh, Mr. Blake,” Elizabeth said.
“That’s the one. What became of him?”
“He died.”
Mrs. Stimson made a sudden clutch in the air with both hands, as if she wanted to grab Elizabeth’s words and reel them back in, but Mr. Cunningham only went on nodding. “That’s right,” he said. “Died. Now I remember.”
“Daddy, the nicest thing—”
“Aren’t you the one got married?” Mr. Cunningham asked Elizabeth.
“That was her sister, Daddy. The other daughter.”
“Well, anyone could make that mistake.”
“Of course they could,” said Mrs. Stimson. “I’ll tell you why she’s here, Daddy—”
“I would advise you against the marriage, young lady,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Call it off. Get a divorce. I married.” He turned and looked out the window again. “She aged so,” he said finally.
“Daddy?”
But he went on staring at framed squares of blue, with his hands limp on the arms of the chair. His feet in their leather slippers hung side by side, not quite touching the floor, as neat and passive as a well-cared for child’s.
When they had tiptoed out to the hall again Mrs. Stimson said, “Oh, my, I wish you had seen him more at his best.” And then, on the stairs, “He can be so smart sometimes, you wouldn’t believe it. Please don’t judge him by this.”
“No, I won’t,” Elizabeth said.
“You mean you’ll take the job?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” She beamed and squeezed Elizabeth’s arm. Her skin seemed suddenly clearer, two shades lighter. “You don’t know what this means to me,” she said. “Could you start on Monday? Eight o’clock? I’m not due for work till nine, but I’ll want to show you what he eats and all.”
“Okay,” Elizabeth said.
They carried the Kool-Aid in to the men. Mr. Stimson was still talking. He broke off to say, “I was just remarking on the bum, the atom bum. I blame it for the increase in rainfall. Ida can tell you. Used to be we could plan a Sunday drive with some hope of carrying it out. Not any more. Bum’s changed the cloud formations.”
“What does Reverend Abbott care about cloud formations?” Mrs. Stimson asked. She settled herself in her rocker with a tinkling glass. “Jerome, Elizabeth says she’ll come look after Daddy for us.”
“Is that a fact,” said Mr. Stimson. “Well, you surely will be taking a load off my wife’s mind there, young lady.”
“And they hit it off just beautifully, Jerome.”
“Is that a fact.”
“Some people,” Mrs. Stimson told Elizabeth, “seem to irritate him, like. I’ve noticed that. We had a colored girl cleaning up for me on Fridays, he didn’t take to her at all. Then people with a lot of make-up on, he don’t like that. Well, he’s just old-fashioned is all. I notice you don’t wear make-up. I expect that’s from being a preacher’s daughter.”
“Ah well,” said Elizabeth’s father, “I’m glad things worked out. Any time these little problems come up, Mrs. Stimson, that’s what I’m here for.”
“I know that,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Reverend. Why, I was about to have a collapse, worrying like I did all the time I was at work. I thought, if I could find someone—but I never dreamed your Elizabeth was back in town. I must’ve missed her in church.”
“I don’t go,” Elizabeth told her.
“Oh?”
There was a silence.
“Elizabeth’s one of these modern young people,” her father said. He laughed lightly. “She’ll get straightened out. We don’t see eye to eye on—what is it this week? Reincarnation.”
“You don’t say,” said Mr. Stimson. “Why, I never knew it was in any question. Don’t you believe in the reincarnation of Christ on the third day, young lady?”
“It’s a thought,” Elizabeth said.
“What?”
“She’ll get straightened out,” said her father.
“Why, of course she will. Of course she will,” Mrs. Stimson said. She beamed at Elizabeth and rocked steadily, holding her Kool-Aid glass level on her knees. Elizabeth’s father cleared his throat.
“Well now,” he said, “I expect we better be moving on. Got a busy day tomorrow.”
“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Stimson. “We surely do look forward to those sermons of yours, Reverend.”
“That one about pride!” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. And we appreciate this so much, you helping out about Daddy and all.”
“Glad to do it, glad to do it.”
“Be nice to have a young person about,” Mr. Stimson said. “Never had the fortune to have kids of our own.”
“That’s what I said earlier, Jerome.”
“And it takes the burden off Ida some. Old people tend to get difficult sometimes, not that they—” He grinned and rubbed his chin. “Dangedest thing,” he said. “The other day he took me for one of them quack medicine peddlers. Must have been forty years since they been through here last, wouldn’t you say? Believe it was back in ’21 or ’22, I was just a—well, he gave me hell, or heck. Seems I had sold him some little bottle I swore would cure anything. ‘Where’s your conscience?” he asks me. ‘Can you get up in the morning and look yourself in the eye, knowing how you let a man down?’ Well sir, there I stood, wondering who in Hades I was taking the rap for. Probably long dead, by now. Probably died a quarter century ago. Maybe more.”
Nobody said anything. Elizabeth’s father sat sharply forward, as if he were about to speak, but all he did was stare into the diamond formed by his knees and his laced hands. One wisp of hair had fallen over his eyes—a single flaw that made him look haggard and beaten. Elizabeth imagined that all his disappointments could be read in the grooves around his mouth: Why couldn’t his family see him the way his congregation did? Why had his daughter stayed glued to her seat in the revival tent? What gave him the feeling sometimes that his wife viewed God indulgently, like an imaginary playmate, and that she prepared her chicken casseroles as she would tea-party fare for children on a Sunday afternoon? He shook his head. Elizabeth leaned over to lay a hand on his arm. “We should go home, Pop,” she said gently.
He flinched, and she remembered too late that she should have called him Father.
When she went to bed, fragments of last night’s dreams puffed up from her pillow like dust. She lay on her back, clam
ping her forehead with one hand. She saw a tea-tin spilling out buttons—self-buttons with their fabric frayed, wooden buttons with the painted flowers chipping off, little smoked pearls knocked loose from their metal loops. The self-buttons she cut new circles of material for. The wooden ones she retouched with a pointed paintbrush. She dipped the metal loops in glue and set them into the pearls, holding them there until they dried, pressing them so tightly between thumb and forefinger that she could feel, even in her sleep, the dents they made in her skin.
7
JUNE 12, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
I don’t understand why you don’t answer. I keep thinking up possible reasons, new ones every time. Are you angry? But when you are you generally say so, you don’t just fade away like this. I’ll keep on writing, anyway. I’ll come down in August even if I don’t hear from you. I would like to see you before then, maybe for a weekend, but for that I’ll wait till you tell me how you feel about it.
Sometimes I imagine you just walking up my path, some sunny morning. It wouldn’t bind you to anything. If you wanted I wouldn’t even make a fuss about it—just say hello and peel you an orange to eat on the front steps for breakfast.
Mother is well. She totaled the car last week, which shook her up a little, but she escaped without a scratch. Now she has a Buick. Walked into the car lot and bought one, on sight—said a friend had told her they were all right. I was sorry to see the old Mercedes go. You wouldn’t like the Buick at all, you always had such fun maneuvering the gear shift. Whatever happened to your chauffeur’s cap? I looked for it in the old car before they took it away. I’d hate to think of it in some auto graveyard.
Andrew has been in a rest home in upstate New York. They expect to release him any day now. I wonder if he shouldn’t come back here, but there would be so many difficulties that I haven’t suggested it. He claims he’d rather be alone now, anyway; he was very insistent about it. I don’t think he has recovered from Timothy. He keeps writing Mother and asking questions and more questions, two letters a day sometimes—all about Timothy, irrelevant things like what he was wearing that day and what he ate and who he was talking to. Mother is very patient about answering him. She says that now that Timothy’s gone she doesn’t worry so much about Andrew. It’s like some quota has been filled.
You said we were all crazy. Maybe you said it just for the moment, not meaning it, but it’s all I have to go on so I keep trying to relate it to your not writing. I don’t see how it fits in. I do see how it could make you want to leave us. Do you think craziness is catching? It could be, of course. It is, if you still blame yourself for what happened. If that had anything to do with you at all, it was only on the surface.
I just remembered one time when I was downtown with Andrew, Christmas shopping, years ago. We were standing on a corner waiting for a light to change. This car passed us, going very fast, and just as it reached the corner all four doors popped open. One of those fluky things, I just laughed. But Andrew didn’t. He got scared. He said, “I can’t understand it. Why do these things happen to me? Why on my corner? I can’t grasp the significance of it,” he said. Well, I’m not saying you’re like Andrew. But things have been happening to us for years, long before you came along. Before you were born, even. Look at last summer, when we didn’t know you existed. My father died, my mother tangled with a hold-up man, Margaret got engaged to a middle-aged widower but broke it off and Melissa had a ten-day crying jag thinking she was pregnant. That’s just what I remember offhand; there’s more that got crowded out. We’re event-prone. (But sane. I’m sure of that. Even Andrew is, underneath.) Probably most families are event-prone, it’s just that we make more of it. Scenes and quarrels and excitement—but that part’s manufactured, just artificial stitches knitting us all together. What would we say to each other if we had to sit around in peace? I may not make scenes myself but I allow them, I go along with them. I see that. It’s my way of making connection with my family. Like Andrew’s peculiarities. He chose them. Every trouble he causes is just another way of talking. If you look at it like that, doesn’t it seem a waste to leave us? I know I’m talking a lot of bull.
I love you. Why won’t you marry me? I think you love me too.
Matthew
JUNE 27, 1961
Dear Elizabeth Abbott:
Having thought it over I am going to kill you.
Yours very truly,
Andrew Carter Emerson
Dear Mrs. Emerson,
How are you? I’m doing just fine.
I’m writing to see if you could send me my combination drill. It’s down on the workbench in the basement. It has a metal box that you can pack it in. I’ll be glad to pay the postage.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
JULY 2, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
Well here is half of that ten dollars you loaned me that I bet you thought you seen the last of, ha ha. I would send it all but my nephew’s wife is in the hospital getting her nerves fixed and I just didn’t have the heart to say “no.” It seems like this summer we been ailing so. My husband has the arthritis so bad he can’t leave the bed and my sister’s getting the Change and myself I have the headache alot. Well I shouldn’t complain, I can still get around thank the Lord and have a job for what its worth. Mrs. Emerson is changing ageing before my eyes and the symptom is parsimonousness. Turning into one of those old ladies that checks on every dime when there’s a fortune in the bank. She saves moldy old leftovers and gripes do I take some of the ham for my lunch then goes out and buy herself a Buick. I have talk to her about getting some new handyman as washing outside of windows is not my job but she says “no” they all steal you blind. Well Elizabeth didn’t I was quick to say and she says no, that’s true, “I never had to lock up the valubles or the liquor around Elizabeth but she was such a magpie junky things was never safe around her, old doorknobs and screws and caster cups disappearing and coming back in the shape of paperweights and chest men and rubber stamps.” I thought you would want to know how she is talking about you. She is ever criticizing how I do my work. On the phone she was telling about “my maid is going to drive me up the wall one of these days.” Lady take care who you call yours I wanted to say but held my peace. She is all the time talking like she owns people, my florrist and my pharmacist and my meat man. Well Lord knows that woman has had her share of trouble though. I must close for now as it is hospital visiting hours. I will get that other five to you when my troubles eases up.
Sincerely,
Alvareen
JULY 3, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
I tried to call you this morning but your mother said you were at work. I didn’t even know you had a job. Then by evening I’d changed my mind. You are one of those people who deflect what is said to you and then hang up, bang. But I have seen you reading everything, instructions and Occupant ads and cereal boxes, and I can’t imagine you throwing an envelope away without looking to see what’s in it. Writing’s better.
You must not know what it’s like to wait for a letter. I leave for work late, just to catch the postman. I listen for his car on the highway. Cars that aren’t his I hate, I despise the way they creep past my eyes taking up road space on trivial errands. Then I go to the back of the house and pretend I’m not interested. It’s a superstition. When he comes he’s always so cheerful. I reach the end of the driveway before he’s finished loading my mailbox and he tells me it’s just bills and grins from ear to ear. I pretend that’s all I expected. It worries me the sloppy way he handles mail; anything could get lost, fall on the ground or under his car seat and he would never notice. In grade school they showed us a film about how letters travel—canceling machines and sorting machines and finally just the feet of a mailman down a sidewalk. Now that I think about it, there were so many ways those machines could lose a thing.
Mary’s baby was born premature, a girl, and she telephoned all in tears at having to
leave the baby in an incubator so mother’s flown there to keep her company. Margaret has married again, nobody knows who to. I think Mother’s going to check him out on the way back. It will do her good to travel a while. I go by the house often, just to make sure Alvareen’s taking care of things okay. The place is going to hell—grass turning brown, leaky faucets. You know Mother never got another handyman. She was distrustful of all the people the employment agency sent out to her.
Andrew is back at his old job and doing fine. I called him on his first night home to invite him here, but he says he’d like to be alone awhile.
Mr. Smodgett at the paper is drunker than ever and now the linotype operator has taken up drinking too, but come August I’m leaving no matter what. I have two weeks off and I’m spending them with you. Don’t tell me not to. I would like to take you back with me. We could live at my house or someplace better, I don’t care. If you still don’t like children, that’s all right. I won’t expect you to change in any way. I love you.
Matthew
JULY 3, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
I don’t know if you remember me very well or would even be interested in hearing from me, after all the trouble you’ve been through with my family, but this morning when I was trying to think of someone I’d like to announce my marriage to yours was one of the few names that came to mind—
Not that you would be all that interested in my wedding, I guess, but it seemed like a good excuse to get in touch with you and tell you a lot of other things I’ve wanted to say—
When you left so suddenly I realized that those last few days must have been hell for you, only none of us thought of it at the time, and I wanted to apologize on behalf of my family and also to thank you for taking such good care of Mother—she used to write about you and she was always so pleased to have something offbeat, like a girl handyman, that could make her feel unconventional right in the safety of her own home—