“It’s all right. It’s only me. My God, I’m sorry, child.” Ailene put her arms around her dazed daughter and kissed her, the most forsaken kiss Lily had ever received. A kiss that probed for comfort and came up dry. “Forgive me.” Lily’s neck muscles, still straining to bolt upright, relaxed, and she sank back against the pillow. Her mother, forgetting the year let alone the hour, returned to stroking her hair abstractedly. “You were so young, once. You were all so young.”
Lily reached out from under the linen and took her mother’s hand. Tensing slightly, she stilled Ailene’s rocking. She could comfort her parent in the middle of the night without panic. But comforting her rocking parent: she would have better luck trapped under the ice. “When were we young, Mother?”
Ailene heard the sedative gentleness in her daughter’s voice. She freed her hand and said, disgusted, “Oh, I’m all right.” They sat in silence, each hating the other. “I wish to heaven you had let me talk to him.”
Too furious to answer, Lily at length got control of her hands and voice. It was stupid to fight, she knew. Neither of them wanted to. Their anger was with awkward kindness in an unkind place. “So what would you have said?”
“I don’t know what I would have said,” Mother answered, testiness draining from her in mid-sentence. “I would have found words as soon as I heard his voice.” After a long silence, she said, “You let him shake your composure.”
Lily fired back, angered again. “You were as shook as we were.”
“I was not. You didn’t even give me a chance.” Her mouth crumpled, and Lily reached out to guide the woman’s hand back into her hair. Stroking awhile in darkness, Ailene at last said, “I’ve lived with the man for thirty years. I signed the papers. I could have said things to him that might have brought him around. Things that I never told any of you.”
“Secrets, Mom?” Lily said, softly skeptical. Ailene laughed silently at the absurdity.
“I would have told him that we needed a fourth to make a table.”
Lily smiled, unseen in the dark. “Mother, what’s wrong with him?”
Ailene shrugged. Lily felt her bony shoulders erupt. “Your father never made it a habit of telling me anything. I suppose if I had gone to college on a scholarship things might have been different. But the way they turned out . . .” She shrugged again, cutting Lily’s heart. “‘Just the facts, ma’am.’”
Ailene opened, spoke her thoughts out loud as if Lily had at last become that other part of herself that blood made her. “Not that he doesn’t talk to me when we’re alone. My God, you know nobody can shut the man up sometimes. He carries on about things I couldn’t follow even with a college degree. But Ed never says how he feels about anything. Just some instructive example from the fifties or the twenties. That and his stupid fear of doctors. He wasn’t so bad when we were young. He didn’t have half so many ideas. But a little farther away every year. Life with your father has not been . . . simple.” Suddenly hearing what she confessed, Ailene added hastily, “Of course, I could have done far worse.”
Lily sank deeper under the petting hand. Her mother knew no more than she did. The answer would disappear with Pop. But just as she had almost given in to the comforting hand, she sat bolt upright, with the force of her original fright. She kept her eyes lowered, focused on an idea. “Mother, what do you know about Hobstown?”
The mention of the word startled Ailene. Her face became a mix of reticence and eagerness to talk about an awful topic. “The first time I walked in on him, in the late 1950s, it scared the living daylights out of me. His mind was in another place. His eyes were smoked over. I don’t think he even recognized me. I thought he had had a fit. It came just weeks after he had first fallen sick.”
Lily, by reflex, shook a finger and said, “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” the old schoolteacher’s admonition. Both women smiled weakly, but lowered their heads in shame.
“No, Lil. Really. I have a sneaking suspicion . . .” But she would not say what her suspicion was. Instead, she returned to the facts. “When he first started recording the tapes, he used an ancient machine. We couldn’t play the first ones now, even if we wanted to. I can’t tell you how many times I passed closed doors and heard the monologue on the other side. I even listened in a few times. I never understood anything I heard. The things he dictated into the tape machine were like chunks of a dream, melting into each other, changing shape without any connection. It spooked me, like discovering, after thirty years, that your husband’s Thursday night jaunts to supposed Elks meetings were really trips to an anarchist’s bomb factory.”
Ailene began to rock again. This time Lily let her. The hour was so late, the story so strange, that the annoying motion now seemed better than the alternative. “He invented such strange stuff, speaking it right off of the top of his head, in perfect sentences. I can’t piece it back together now. Full sentences. Spooky. I . . .” Ailene paused a long time. “I didn’t want to know what he was saying.
“I thought the passing out—you know how stroke victims become different people? I thought that whatever change in blood vessels made him pass out must also have changed him enough to make him want to . . . tape his journey. In the early years, Hobstown filled him with excitement and enthusiasm. He spent days at the library, returning with maps, charts, and plans. He used to come down from a half-hour session rubbing his hands and kiss me. I thought he was working on a book or a movie script. I’d ask when I was going to be able to hear it. He’d say, ‘You hear it already. Everybody does.’” She looked at her child across the pitch-dark inches. Her face asked for some sign of agreement. Lily nodded, wanting her to go on.
“For a long while, wherever we moved, he hung photos above his desk in the corner of his workroom. The pictures would change every few months. Sometimes they were well-known personalities—a famous scientist, a politician, an actress, an inventor, a revolutionary. Sometimes they were stills, landscapes, or famous events: the Statue of Liberty from out at sea, or a labor-strike riot early in the century. I imagined he was writing a great history text, that when it at last came out, he would get an offer from a college back East and we could go home.” She spoke bitterly at her own willingness to hope.
“What picture did he have up most recently?” Lily asked, less for information than to distract the woman.
“About six months ago, he hung a photo from a thirties magazine. Walt Disney sitting at a desk, dictating into a black horn microphone, recording an idea for a Silly Symphony. You kids wouldn’t know what those were. They were cartoons, but not like any cartoon anyone had seen up until then. All back and forth, three dimensions, with everything moving, even the background. As a child, I could feel myself falling into the frame. They were long shorts, shown before the feature. No words: all set to a classical piece, image fitting music. Three days before we took him to Hines, he took the picture down.”
The bedroom shrunk, became a little girl’s room, far too small for two full-grown people. For a brief instant, both women looked like cornered rabbits, gauging the danger the other represented before preparing to dart. When Ailene spoke again, her words would have passed for free association to anyone except her daughter.
“Your father was already pretty sick when we first moved to Ohio. I didn’t let on to you at the time, but it was touch and go. He was all jaundiced, as bad as last week, and sullen, too, which he never is. He was between jobs, like now, and all I could think about was, “There’s just the army life insurance between us and disaster.’ I never told you kids that he was so much worse than you saw.”
“For God’s sake, Mother. You think you have to tell me?”
“You were all so young. There was no need to put you through it, too. The unemployment was murder on him. You know how he always says, ‘Whatever work your hands can do, do now.’ One day he came down to breakfast with that newspaper article about—remember?” Lily nodded, motionless, knowing what was coming. “About how that famous entertainer cured himself
of self-destructive behavior and substance abuse, just by talking into a tape recorder. By holding a dialogue between his healthy personality and his ill one.
“The tapes came back out, for the hardest work he ever put in on them. He took a surprise turn for the better. His mind cleared up. He grew kinder again. We moved to Illinois, into this house. He got the job at the high school. He didn’t work on Hobstown then. He hardly went to it at all. The tapes stayed in the back of the closet. He was totally clean for I don’t know how long. It seemed like Hobstown had done its job, cured him, made itself useless. I thought he would retire the place, put the hobby out to pasture, for good.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t. He started up again, on the sly. I didn’t even notice at first. I’d be in the kitchen and think he was talking to me from upstairs. I’d call back to him, and when he didn’t say anything in return, I’d let it slide. Then it was back to full-length sessions, all over again. Adding tapes to that neat library in the closet: ink-labeled, always in order. He got ill again. My heart hit low-water mark. When he lost this latest job soon after, it was cause and effect. A replay of the old days.
“I felt like a woman I once read about who’d lost one hundred and thirty pounds. When she started to gain it back, four pounds, then ten, she went into the bathroom one day and killed herself. She left a note saying she knew the weight would all come back and that she just couldn’t stand having to surrender all that hard-won ground.”
Lily saw her mother’s cheeks wetting in the dark. She said nothing, and Mother carried on alone. “Maybe he tapes what he hears and sees when he goes down. Maybe it’s the record of those cells going bad.” Ailene’s voice spilled. “The worst part is hope. I think every change will be a change for the better. His small kindnesses, his annual resolutions. I cannot help it. What’s the alternative? When he agreed to go to the hospital for the first time in twenty years, I thought, ‘Now, at last.’ A few days later, this.”
“Mother,” Lily said, heading off the worst. “You are too good.”
“You think I’m a saint? I’m not even close. I’ve tried any number of things they don’t recommend in heaven.”
Lily could not help smiling at the vintage-Ailene phrase. “Like what?”
“That time I ran away? Lil, you’re old enough to remember. He passed out in his room, while working on the project. He’d locked his door, and I couldn’t get in to help him. Twenty minutes is a long time to sit in front of a locked door, smashing it with your fist, calling out, not knowing what is on the other side. The next day I packed, explaining to you and Art and little Rachel that I was only leaving your father for his own good, to try to bring him around.
“Artie must have been ten. But he was so old already. He helped me carry my bags out to the car, saying he understood and approved of my actions. I looked at that little boy—he was wearing a pair of chinos and a paisley shirt; he hated paisley, and only wore it because I gave it to him for Christmas. All of a sudden, I couldn’t do it. If that child hadn’t been so accommodating, things might have worked out differently. For one, your father might still be around today. And in good health.”
Ailene got up suddenly and walked out of the room. Lily sat up, threw on a robe, and wearily followed her out into the kitchen. “The problem,” her mother said to herself, “is that the alternative to foolish hope is even worse.”
Lily toyed with the playing cards and score pad, still on the table, as her mother paced the kitchen straightening things and boiling water.
“If you’re tired, you should sleep. You don’t have to keep me company.”
“I’m not tired, Mom.”
“I don’t want to keep you up.”
“It’s no bother.”
“I know it’s no bother. I just don’t want to, well, trouble you.”
“Mom, just quit.” When Lily felt it safe to talk again, she asked, “What’s your guess?” Getting a blank look from her mother, she glossed, “Your guess where.”
“Where he’s going? He has a definite destination all worked out. We’ll know soon enough.”
The answer didn’t satisfy. “‘Man is the animal that surprises.’ Remember that old favorite? Like ‘single-file Indians,’ or ‘Sometimes we need coaxing.’ He wants to keep each of us guessing. Mother, I know where he’s going.”
Ailene froze her pointless shuffling and held still.
“Do you remember the Whistle Man?” Ailene’s baffled eyes showed she did not. “The lifeguard, the protector of all swimmers? I think it’s Aptos he’s after. He’s headed back to Back When. He’s a little south now, but he could turn.”
“What on earth for?”
Lily swelled with the anger of rejection. “You have to remember it: that summer, our rented beach cottage. You on the porch, with your handiwork, humming. Dad pulling medicine from out of the surf. Mother, weren’t we happy then? Wasn’t he? I always thought so. I always thought he might try for a return visit.”
Ailene stared at her, defiantly, a look that could only have come to her this far into night. “We were never happier than we were last week.”
Silence fell across the room. The two women dutifully kissed each other good-night, knowing they could no longer help one another. Lily went to her own room and prepared for bed. In this, she was guilty of the same foolish optimism her mother had just described. After lying under the covers for twenty minutes, she got up and turned the light back on. She went to the bookshelf that housed those volumes she had preserved from childhood. She removed and read one of her favorite bits of juvenilia, a book titled This Is What Would Happen If Everybody Did. “Do you like to squeeze the cat?” she read out loud. She turned the page to reveal a feline squashed into an hourglass. “This is what would happen if everybody did.”
17
Okay, campers. Let’s play What’s Your Favorite? You start. What’s your favoriiite . . . make of automobile?” Rachel, in the driver’s seat, cheered stoically while stroking the metal seam joining the windshield to the door. She kept her chin up, pretending to bring off today’s game as nonchalantly as all the others. Artie, passenger side, pushed up the corners of his mouth at these heroics. He dropped his head and scratched a nonexistent itch on his scalp. He heard in Sis’s routine her homage to the man who taught them all that a running irreverence was always more appropriate than distress.
Winter fastened down the North, stronger than seasonal. Route 5 lay well-drifted in. Snow controlled the stray fields to either side of the road, with more on the way. Stubble of last fall’s corn poked through the white crust, indigent prairie dogs killed and frozen vertical by the cold. Farmhouses lost their resolute look and hid scattered, white on white, waiting for the Arctic visitation to pass over. They glided through a landscape of grays and halftones, a world out of the old newsreels. Above them, a sky steepening with clouds unbaled its white freight on an already repentant ground. The land rolled underneath its cover of cold and fell lifeless.
Except for the salt trucks, Artie thought, with their mundane amber lights and pragmatic plows, the scene might be that Brueghel painting, “Hunters Returning in Snow,” that he so loved. Everything waited for the old, tired, miraculous, often-repeated, but never quite sufficient midwinter birth, a birth made more desperate during the long delay. Everything waited except the two of them, forced to work out their own salvation.
Artie thought: This road again. They stuck to thirty, feeling their way along the shoulder. Rach denied him the wheel, saying she didn’t trust intellectuals on slippery roads. Visibility fell off steeply with each mile west. They had not yet passed the Aurora exit, with nothing in front of them except white. An hour before noon, Rachel had to revert to lights. Flakes spread an opaque curtain over the dash, tucked them in for the duration and six. Every ten minutes Rach laughed maniacally at the danger, fish-tailed, crept back into the lane, and tried to keep the car pointed in the approximate direction of home on intuition alone.
She se
emed completely unafraid of a crack-up. The prospect of a stall or a spinout, the odds of becoming stuck, stranded on the obscured road with only a feather tick in the backseat to keep them alive until spring, did not frighten her. Exposure to cold seemed glorious about now. It would freeze those uninvited hypotheticals into holding still. “Answer me, buddy,” she said, doing her favorite gag of clenching her jaw until her head began to quiver on her neck. “Favorite car. Or we’re going sledding.”
Artie smiled wider. From somewhere, a surprise infusion of calm came over him. He grabbed his sister’s neck between his fingers and thumb and rubbed, comforting her, settling the runaway strain of imagination. “My favorite car,” he said in the demi-recitation voice of a sixth-grader rehearsing an oral report the evening before, “is the Lincoln Cadillac.”
Her cheeks blew apart with the violent laughter reserved for sheer idiocy. The burst of air released viral spit spores against the steering wheel and window. “Lincoln Caddy,” she exclaimed. “Lin-coln Caddy-yak. Dig this guy, will ya?”
Artie, pretending incomprehension, fish-gaped. “What? What?” He curled his nose, defensively.
“What kind of . . . ? You are a disgrace, my friend. You’re lucky the voting public lets you stay in this country. No wonder your dad disowned you. He just couldn’t face having a firstborn who . . . Lincoln Caddyack. I can’t believe you’re related to me.”
“What’s yours?”
“Porsche.” Just then the car moved laterally across the ice sheet and required a few full oscillations of the steering wheel to correct it. Rach at once patted the dashboard, cooing at the car, assuring Mr. Nader, “I mean Pinto. What’s your favoriiite . . . meal? Quick. No fair thinking.”
At a loss to remember anything edible aside from his daily regimen of open-face peanut butter on balloon bread, Artie fumbled for and retrieved the traditional holiday menu that Ailene even now spread for them this Christmas Eve Day. “Uh, roast turkey with Mom’s stuffing, with the cranberries and mashies and gravy and everything. And you?”
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 31
