Ann
1967
Every time she turns her head to greet a guest, the hard spine of bobby pins digs into her scalp. The lowest one, especially, at the base of her skull, tugs at the roots, until finally she drops Eddie’s hand long enough to twist it out and slip it into the pocket of her maternity dress. She had such a time finding a dress that would fit her figure in a fabric light enough for the season in a color dark enough for a funeral. She hadn’t noticed until she needed something different how cheerful and scalloped and festooned all her smocks were. It was such a happy time in life, and to be pregnant in the summer should be the happiest of all, so no designer would want to spoil it with blacks and browns. She would have sewn something if she’d gotten the news earlier, but as it was, she barely had time to make it downtown to the department store before they had to leave. She chose a navy skirt and shirt with a sailor collar, and felt that to be somber enough. She didn’t really care what people she’d never see again thought of her, but she wanted to leave them with the right impression.
She knew she had made the correct choice when she and Eddie arrived at the small Baptist church his mother had sometimes attended. A few older women wore black wool dresses but, of course, they weren’t pregnant. Some of the younger women didn’t bother to dress at all, just wore whatever they would have worn to work, as if it were any other day. The men had washed their faces, though many looked as if they’d stepped right out of the field, sweaty in dungarees and work boots. They clomped in and removed their hats and paid their respects to Cora Alley laid out in her open casket. Some of them stayed if their women were there and the rest of them left. Cars and trucks pulled in and out of the graveled parking lot all throughout the service.
From time to time, Ann glances over at the woman who could have been her second mother, would have been her child’s grandmother. Laid out with her arms crossed over her sunken chest, she looks nothing like Ann had imagined. The corpse of Cora is heavyset with short grizzled hair, and the living Cora, judging by the memorial photo on the program, had worn a pair of translucent, gray, brow-line glasses like every other old lady Ann knew. There was nothing distinctive to mark her out that she can see. A moderate number of people have come to the service—not a huge showing, but certainly she was not without friends. Eddie shakes hands and introduces his wife, and Ann feels their appreciative eyes upon her. Eddie has done well for himself with a pretty bride and a child on the way. Her last-minute clothes are still far more stylish and expensive than anything else in the church, and it makes her feel proud to raise Eddie’s status among these people he had left, so that he might confirm, simply with his arm around her waist, the correctness of his choice.
All the Baptist churches she’s ever visited smelled of the same sweat and boredom. It is difficult to stand so still against the stench, but she will do it for Eddie. Squeezing her husband’s hand, she sends him all the strength she has to give. Eddie had recently purchased a new suit for a hospital benefit and he stands beside her now, not exactly handsome, for that would be stretching the truth, but dignified and benign, his hair combed back from his forehead and his pink cheeks freshly shaven. He still has a little baby fat, just enough to keep him approachable, and more than anything she wants to lean in and kiss a soft cheek. It would embarrass him, though, in front of all these farm men. It is hard to imagine her sensitive, wry, goofy Eddie growing up among them. Thank God he’d found her and could finally be himself. There is nothing she wouldn’t do for him, no burden of his she wouldn’t bear. She was the one who answered the phone when the hospital called looking for next of kin. I am his wife, she had replied, and they had given her the news that Eddie’s mother had been brought to the hospital with complications of diabetes from mellitus and had died earlier that morning of heart failure. She thought she should call him at the station but she didn’t want to trouble him before the nightly weather, so she baked a pot roast and an apple pie and lit candles and put a record on the stereo, which was exactly how she’d delivered the news she was pregnant, and when he got home and she helped him out of his jacket and shoes, she could tell he was confused, knowing this dinner had to be about something, but now, seven months into it, it could not possibly be about what it was before, and Ann had waited until he finished his meal and ate his pie and drank his coffee, and perhaps it was not the best way to announce his mother’s death, but she could think of no other. They borrowed her father’s car for the trip up to Panther Gap because it was more reliable; it was such a lovely drive and only his silence kept it from feeling like a vacation. With so much silence she was left to her own thoughts most of the way, and she fell to wondering what Eddie’s childhood home would look like and whether or not it would make an acceptable summer house once the baby was born. She hoped more than anything Eddie would not try to force the name Cora on her now if their child was a girl, when she had her heart set on Grace, her own mother’s name; both mothers were dead now, she no longer had the upper hand in that matter, but, of course, everyone was telling her she carried straight out and high, and so it would probably be a boy, anyway.
The minister arrives and they sit through the sermon, which is mercifully brief because Eddie chose to forgo a eulogy. She keeps her hand in his until he rises to join the other pallbearers. She is not sure if she is to rise also—at her own mother’s funeral she had been so distraught, an aunt had led her through the entirety of it and she remembers nothing. This is men’s work and she can’t trail behind them like a flower girl, so she waits until the coffin is safely out of the church and others have begun to rise before joining her husband outside. Cora Alley had wanted to be buried on her own land among her people, but the funeral home had been very clear that was not allowed anymore. She was laid in a new, midsized, nondenominational cemetery bounded by a chain-link fence. It was arid and treeless like something a sharecropper might get stuck farming, and because it was so new, Cora was only the third resident, the other two being veterans. Ann expected they might have spread things out a little and filled in over time, but instead of spacing out the graves, they were clumped up together in the far left corner, Once Upon a Time or In the Beginning, the first three words of a very predictable story. Many fewer people joined them at the cemetery. Just the pallbearers, really, and the minister. Poor Eddie was an orphan now. His father dead in Normandy (her father survived the same invasion, yet another bond between them), and she takes his hand again. He looks around the cemetery, just as he was looking around the church, and as he soon will be looking around the path leading up to Cora’s house.
“Is there something wrong?” she asks. “You look like you’re expecting someone.”
“No,” he says. “I’ve always been afraid to bring you here, but I’d like to show you where I grew up.”
Ann’s eyes well with tears. It would mean so much to her, after all the stories and all the years of wondering. It was hard to say exactly how it came between them, but she always felt it there. Not really a secret but a silence.
“Oh, Eddie,” she says. “Nothing would make me happier.”
“It’s a little bit of a climb,” he warns her, “but I’ll help you, and we can always turn back if you get tired.”
“I can make it,” she says.
He helps her into her father’s car and drives her up the mountain. She would like to look out of the window and take in everything about this place, but the sharp turns make her feel like she’s flying over the edge and she is about to throw up from the heat and motion and the crowding baby. He parks the car in the shade of a clearing.
“It’s just up this path,” he says, taking her hand. “Be careful, though, there’s poison ivy.”
She draws closer to him, so close she nearly pushes him off the path. He helps her over fallen stones and up a dry creek bed. She is breathing hard against the weight of the baby and, in the pumps she wore for the funeral, has trouble finding purchase, even as he holds out his hand to support her. She is disappointing him, she can
tell. She is not light on her feet and moving at his pace, she feels his impatience. The path is clouded with midsummer gnats, they brush her cheeks and stick in the moist corners of her eyes, but she will not complain.
“We’re almost there,” he says. “Hang in just a little longer.”
She nods, winded, and keeps going. She climbs the last rise, stepping into the yard. He had told her stories of this place, painting a portrait of romance and mystery, a beautiful, uncanny mother who healed with roots and a childhood spent wandering the woods. But what he leads her to is a dark and parsimonious hovel, stuffed with rags around the window frames and roofed with rusted tin cans. It is nothing like the cottage in the laurels she pictured, set atop a sunny hill with a view of the valleys all around. It hunkers against the rock face defensively, like a cornered animal. The yard drops off steeply behind the barn and tumbles into sharp stone and briar. If a child toddled too close, it would fall to its death.
“What do you think?” Eddie asks, shyly. “This is home.”
Ann turns to him with tears in her eyes. Her darling raised here? He had told her ghost stories but she never believed them. How could she? But seeing this place, for the first time Ann understands who she has married. This is what he brings her and without her, this is what he would slide back to. The weight feels so great.
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” she says, embracing him. “I had no idea. You were so right to leave. We’ll sell this place as soon as we get back and you’ll never have to think of it again. We’ll work hard and save for someplace bright and happy to raise our child. Never this, oh, God, darling, never this.”
He has made a mistake bringing her here, she can tell that is what he’s thinking. Better he had protected her from it. That is what he should have done. But she will not let his beginnings come between them. She is his future. Ann and his child. He puts his arm around her and kisses her cheek, but he is scanning the woods again. What could he possibly be missing when he has so much? A new career, a child on the way, and a woman who loves him well enough to forgive him every awful thing he is?
Eddie
NEW YORK CITY
4:50 a.m.
When I first got my diagnosis, Wallis, I thought a lot about death. I didn’t talk much about it because every time I did, Charles would go shopping and come home with some new rare orchid we’d have to baby or matching sushi mats and Japanese cooking classes we’d need to attend. I didn’t want to stay busy, I wanted to sit quietly, but I understood his need for activity, so I determined to study my own imminent demise in the Happenings section of The New Yorker—all those improbable, impossible lectures we moved here to attend. And, truly, every time I showed up at the red door of an Upper West Side stone church—for they were always held in the common rooms of churches or the crisp blue auditoriums of the JCC—it was to find a room full of old people exactly like myself, all smudged spectacles and broadcloth coats and fedoras and clutch handbags. We elderly, who needed magnifying glasses to read the tiny print of announcements, were lured to these lectures and documentaries and museum talks by some mysterious pheromone of the Afterlife. The aroma was as distinctive as mothballs and Vagisil, the dissonant perfume of resignation and a sharp New York need to understand.
Charles came with me to the first few and we sat close together in our folding metal chairs, sipping our coffee with its artificial creamer, silently praying to be stymied into revelation, believing if we sat among experts long enough and listened carefully and questioned and took our arguments home and slept on them and packed them along to the next lecture, something would shake loose and meaning would come before it was too late. He lasted about a month, but I continued to go to probably three lectures a week for close to a year, eating more Hungarian pastry than is good for a dying man, and every night when I came home Charles would refrain from quizzing me, knowing that there were no words for the things I was learning in those basements without him. Or rather there was only one word. Eschatology. The study of last things.
It was at one of these seminars, led by a rabbi—and, yes, I am a sucker for a long, white beard—that I heard the most cogent argument for a Creator. This delightful old rabbi told us God commanded His angels, “Make me a creature with the ability to say thank you.” He didn’t care how we got there, or how long it might take to arrive. But the ability to give thanks was the sole purpose of evolution, what separated reasoning Man from the animals, and it was predicated on one thing alone—the free will to accept or reject. This was the single truth I took away from all those talks on the funeral rites of the Arawak Indians and the marathon bare-bulb readings of Joyce’s The Dead. We don’t need a discussion or a balance sheet or an itemized list of all the transgressions big and small we’ve perpetrated against each other and ourselves. We need only for life to teach us the humility with which to give thanks. It takes many attempts and many more failures before we mortals can offer up those two simple words. Thank you. Some of us die never being able to do so. Some give lip service to our thanks, but most of us don’t even know what we’re grateful for. We throw our happiness away with both hands.
I didn’t talk to Charles about that lecture, surprisingly enough. He’s a very grateful sort, naturally, which is why everyone he meets instantly loves him. Instead I sat down and composed a letter to your mother. I wrote like a broken-down alcoholic from a twelve-step program, out to make amends. I am so sorry, I wrote. I wish I’d known enough to spare you all that hard work on all the wrong things. Men don’t care about the artistry of everyday life, you see. We don’t really like surprises because they make us feel inadequate and under obligation. We want someone who can hold steady, so that we can see ourselves, as if shaving in a mirror. If there is too much darting around, too much back and forth, the mirror shakes and our self-image is blurred and we are apt to cut ourselves. God must feel the same at the end of a long day. Stop trying to make Me happy with all that ritual up and down, all the good works and psychic genuflecting. All the good works in the world will not bring you any closer to Me. Stand still. Let Me look at you and find Myself reflected. Maybe for a brief moment, you thought it was about you, but surprise, Creation. It is all about Me. I wanted to write her: It’s the same for you.
Wallis, we are the YHWHs of our own relationships, though we can’t admit it, our names, like that of any jealous creator, must remain hidden, even to ourselves. It is too terrible to dispense with kismet and destiny; to accept that we are the sole inventors of our Edens, and with them, our perfectly personalized snakes. Only at the end of my life do I understand that I am the unpronounceable tetragrammaton containing past, present, and future of being, derived (I learned, this time from a mullah) from the Arabic y-hawa, which means not only “He who is,” but “He who falls.” Why did it take me this long to accept responsibility and with it find the humility to utter that singular incantation that makes everything else possible? Thank you. It’s all He wants. It’s all we want. And maybe a few memorable kisses over the decades. And maybe a grandchild. But those are our Elohim and our Adonai, a vowel or two added, different names for the same thing.
That night you showed me the projector hidden in my mother’s bottom drawer, I took it to my room intending to hold a private screening for you and Jasper the next evening. I thought we’d pop corn and watch it a few times—if it wasn’t ruined—before I donated it to a film museum or the Library of Congress or wherever it might belong. That’s as far as I thought. When Jasper came in to offer me a sandwich and a beer and talk about the clothes we recovered, Tucker Hayes spread across the woods, it didn’t occur to me not to tell him what you’d found. How we decided that tomorrow was too long to wait, I don’t remember. I felt bad I wouldn’t let him finish wiring the house. I felt bad about the poison ivy, about Captain Casket getting cancelled, about his father’s suicide and his mother’s death. What’s the harm, I thought, in making him happy about this one small thing? How we came to watch it in the barn is also hard to recall, except I knew I
didn’t want to watch it with him in my bedroom. Maybe that should have told me something. We said it might be noisy and we didn’t want to wake you, and after we ate and talked and drank some beer, we left the fire to burn down and walked across the yard together. Jasper pointed out the stars were falling through Perseus and I think I promised we’d come back in November to catch the Leonids.