Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  When he looked through his father’s old photographs, few with any information written on their backs, he thought he could pick out this girl, whose name was Jean. A pretty, darkhaired girl with a strong chin, in a sailor blouse, she looked at the camera while his father looked down at her. His chin and jaw were lithe and young, and the way he looked at her, his face seemed almost skinned.

  His mother left his father to go to New York with a visiting politician, a candidate for city councilman who was also a professor of political science at a college on Staten Island.

  On Richard’s first arrival in New York, by train (a man from Travelers’ Aid helped him change trains in Chicago), he had with him from Minnesota a large painted turtle in an odoriferous cardboard box. Childhood seemed full of such errors, abetted by adults.

  On Sixth Avenue a man parked his car diagonally to the curb, got out, and took a leak in the gutter. “No one knows him, so why not?” his mother said. “New York’s a big town.”

  It was his mother’s idea to drop the turtle off the Staten Island ferry. That was water down there, wasn’t it? He knew the difference between salt and fresh water, even though this was the first salt water he’d ever seen, so at ten he was an accomplice in the turtle’s death. It fell turning, like a plate.

  The Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty looked more or less like their pictures; more vivid was the water’s dull green and all the pale condoms limply floating just beneath the surface.

  They lived in a ground-floor apartment in a small house, on a street of small houses. Beyond the end of the street was an area of depressed-looking hay and brush, and a burned-out brick building that had evidently been a paint factory; powdered pigments of all colors were in troughs, tubs, vats and in piles all through the long, broken building, where he and his new acquaintances climbed and crawled.

  N. P. Carter, “Dr. Carter,” because he had a Ph.D., spent most nights with his mother.

  “Who’s that?” a friend would ask.

  “Dr. Carter.”

  “Is your mother sick?”

  A child of convention, as all children are, he was embarrassed, and couldn’t get around it because at ten he had no way, no words, to make less of their relationship. Once, at night, seeing the shadow of N. P. Carter’s hat passing a window, Richard was half dreaming, and terrified.

  N. P. Carter could not speak directly to Richard at all, not a word, but made jokes associated with his embarrassment—sexual insinuations that Richard recognized and didn’t think funny. He wondered if N. P. Carter thought he ought to think them funny. A short, prematurely bald man, seven years younger than Richard’s mother, he was an unsuccessful professor who would, a few years later, be chosen by his family to rescue the family lumber business in New Hampshire from near-bankruptcy.

  She and N. P. Carter often argued and even threw things like plates and glasses, shouting unforgivable things at each other. He listened; nothing like that had happened between his mother and father, so each time seemed a final end to this relationship, and worth his fear. Later, in Leah, New Hampshire, he found a book of N. P. Carter’s he’d evidently taken to heart, concerning how a young man should deal with women. Underlined was the advice to marry a woman older than you, because she would always be grateful, faithful, and treat you like a prince. Other advice was on masturbation, in which it said that you only had a certain supply of sperm and prostatic fluid, so you shouldn’t waste it. The book was published in 1930.

  It was in the small brown living room of the apartment on Staten Island that she told him that she and his father were getting divorced. There was that hollow consideration, hollow as despair, and then the wonder that she could prefer N. P. Carter, a small, humorless, and often violent man, to his calm father, who could smile without irony, and talk to children. He asked her why she preferred N. P. Carter, and she said that he was satisfying. “He’s so satisfying,” she said.

  After the election, in which N. P. Carter lost, she taught at a private school in Manhattan. He saw a note written to her by a fellow teacher: You promised me you’d never mention the World Fellowship business, ever, and then you blabbed it to Davis. You are a lying, backstabbing bitch! Reading these words, he had a strong twinge of loyalty to his mother, and yet he also understood; in spite of the urge to share thoughts with her, because she was always friendly and receptive, he hadn’t told her very much for a long time. She didn’t understand about promises not to say things. Even as a child, and in spite of his anger when she betrayed his secrets, he’d begun to think of her as suffering from something beyond judgment, like a defect, or a sickness.

  And then, shortly after he’d begun high school, circumstances allowed his abduction to Leah, New Hampshire, a prisoner half willing, half hopeful, aware of the irrational powers of adulthood. N. P. Carter and his mother were married, and they left for New Hampshire in a 1949 Ford, which N. P. Carter drove at eighty-five and ninety miles an hour. Richard sat in the backseat among suitcases, tremendously alert, ready to dive to the floor before the accident. This was before he learned to drive, but he recognized pathology. When near-accidents occurred, his mother would suck in her breath with a hiss, and N. P. Carter thought this amusing, so he would deliberately steer toward other cars, just enough to evoke the hiss.

  The town of Leah with its square and elm trees and white churches, if viewed from certain angles, was as pretty as a scene from Currier and Ives.

  The next year, at fifteen, he had an after-school job in Trotevale’s clothing store and had saved enough money to at least buy a bus ticket to Minnesota, but he never quite made that decision. His father wrote to him that he was going to school to become a high school teacher, and was pretty hard up, but that if he wanted to come, maybe he could get a job after school and they would do all right. He could read duty in his father’s words, and much pain.

  When he was sixteen and his mother was working in New Hampshire for the New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, she told him that she’d met a man a lot like his father. “He’s so much like Dick it’s amazing,” she said. She had to tell someone of her adventures, her symptoms, her periods, her aches and ecstasies. “He’s tall and sort of shy, like Dick, and he’s got Dick’s dumb sense of humor.”

  He thought of N. P. Carter’s book, which advised one to marry an older woman.

  Leah High School seemed to him an anarchy ruled by the strong and the stupid. Teachers and principals left, were replaced, left again. Certain types of students, in this vacuum, ruled the hallways and the yards. For the three adolescent years he was there, he paid great attention to the terrain ahead and behind him. His mother would sign any excuse he made for not attending, so he skipped school as much as he attended. There were certain advantages in having the sort of mother he had. At seventeen, with her written permission and his great relief, he joined the Navy.

  He came back to Leah at the same time N. P. Carter killed himself in the automobile accident that had been inevitable, Richard thought, for all the years. He and a local lawyer took N. P. Carter’s portfolio of stocks and bonds to the lawyer’s office and a copy of The New York Times, added up the quotations, and found that Charlotte Clifford Carter was a comparatively wealthy woman. Until that moment no one had known how well N. P. Carter had done in the lumber business.

  Richard went to college, and his mother, at fifty, began a life of affluence, travel, and the buying and selling of houses and apartments in places like Manhattan, Washington, D.C., northern California, New Hampshire, Maryland, Arizona—she lost money on most of them because she sold cheaply when she got the urge to move on, but she seemed to have enough money to lead this sort of life.

  When Richard and Nora Barnes, a girl he’d met in college, were married and had children, his mother brought presents, sent presents such as expensive furniture they hadn’t room for, arrived always without notice, and soon aggravated Nora beyond her usual pragmatic equanimity. “She won’t give me time to invite her,” Nora said. “Does she own us?” His
mother brought to Leah, where they now lived, a young man she’d met at an Arthur Murray Dance Studio, a dance instructor named Stavros whose arms were raw from the abrading operations necessary to remove the tattoos he had decorated himself with in an earlier, less classy life. She had given Stavros a Cadillac convertible, in which they arrived, unannounced, as usual.

  When her brother, Joe, visiting, picked up the baby and it gurgled at him, his mother cried a long and soft “Noooooo,” which meant that it was wrong, all wrong, because the baby should gurgle and smile only at her. Richard recognized it as the primal long call of jealousy, or more than jealousy. What if she had all the power in the world? With her, every emotion was close to the skin, and always uttered and acted upon.

  He tried to reassure Nora by explaining that he understood his mother, or thought he did, and that she was no threat to either of them. His mother didn’t own them, couldn’t buy them; it was that she believed she controlled the world, and could operate it by charm or by the lies that were her natural language. But Nora would not transmute this smiling dangerous woman into a psychological syndrome, didn’t trust her for a minute with a child, and suffered much guilt because of her own chilly behavior.

  What his mother did upon arrival was to pick a chair in the living room and surround it with her needs and possessions—Kleenex, pocketbook, pillboxes, discarded pieces of clothing, wrappers—and in this chair she would receive, and give, and watch. She wanted laughter and good feeling, to be the star but also to flatter everyone present and to be flattered back. Any promise, any contract, any moral principle, would be sacrificed for this moment.

  He could never, by saying anything about his mother, ease Nora’s mind. “She lent us money,” Nora said, “so she really does think she owns us.”

  “No,” he said, trying to explain. “She really does think she owns everyone, not just us. She thinks she owns Stavros, too. Well, maybe she does own Stavros.”

  She’d bought Stavros a business he’d been interested in, a series of ancient popcorn vending machines, the kind with a bare light bulb to keep the popcorn warm, in run-down Washington, D.C., movie houses. The problem was crickets, which liked popcorn and invaded the machines. It was disconcerting to patrons when they felt the frantic soft bodies of crickets in their hands, or mouths.

  Stavros soon departed, or was dismissed, and she sold the last house she’d bought and redecorated, and she was off to India, and South America, and Europe, and Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She liked to take passage on Chinese freighters because the crews were so respectful and solicitous.

  And she came back, bearing strange gifts; did she think Nora would wear a necklace of polished green stones that weighed, or seemed to weigh, five pounds? The children simply put in their orders for what they wanted, without benefit of Nora’s advice or consent. He tried to talk to his mother; it seemed to him normal to try to straighten things out as much as possible. But though he could, by his criticism, make his mother cry and fight back, he could never define for her what Nora couldn’t stand. It was impossible, truly. The things she did that were the most aggravating seemed not choices on her part at all, but the inevitable motions of the center of her being. Both children understood this quickly and by themselves; their affection for her was tolerant and slightly wary.

  Now while his mother slept, or was dulled by pain and drugs, he went through her papers and bills, trying to put them in order. That evening he left her asleep, with Maria in charge, and found himself in a cheap motel just outside the limits of Sun City, across a broad avenue lined with amazingly tall palm trees. His hanger-on motel didn’t have telephones in its rooms, which might or might not have been the reason he didn’t call Nora that night.

  What if no one ever heard from him again?

  The next day his mother was “up,” receiving visitors to whom she could show off her son, her faithful son who’d flown all the way from the East to see her. Even the banished Frank Weeks was welcome, provided he didn’t try to start a conversation on the side. Four old men and one thin old woman stood around her bed. Their voices seemed young, Midwestern, and hopeful. His mother, whose new bird-face, beaked-face, Richard was becoming used to, gleamed her pleasure at them all. They really did like her. She had the talent, as she’d always had, to make her guests feel the benevolent and exciting importance of her recognitions.

  “Well, now, we’re going to have a game of bridge,” one man said meaningfully to Richard. “But you’ve got to be sixty or over!” The man, whose name Richard had immediately forgotten, was heavy, and waxy-pale gray in skin and hair and eyes. But his voice had spoken to the world with authority and humor for a lifetime.

  His mother begged off from the bridge game, and finally they left, chattering about their leisure, their game, like children going to play.

  He thought they seemed nice people, and said so to his mother. But he shouldn’t have. “They’re idiots,” she said. “They’re a bunch of children.”

  Christmases had been particularly horrible, all of them over the years when his mother came and a frigid tension belied the soft colors of the lighted tree, the quiet New Hampshire snow falling past the windows. He hated both women for their irrational female hatred of each other. Their sour looks, their silences painful to him as bellyaches, their taut voices—both, of course, put-upon—were obscene to him, alien to any life of his. It was not his disposition or his fate or his vision of his home and family; it was all wrong, foreign, a story not his own.

  There must have been some grave mistake.

  It was generally accepted, in his father’s family, that the first Richard Abner Adgate had been a deserter, not a victim. If so, something had caused him to run away. He would have been forty-four or forty-five, a relatively young man. No one had ever hinted at another woman. She’d have had to be someone from what was then a fairly small town, and everyone would have known. No, if he ran away, as Richard now wanted to run away from this room, this whole history, he probably ran away unencumbered by the cause of another imprisonment. He just ran.

  His mother groaned, and in spite of what he saw, and knew, he couldn’t help wonder if she was lying, groaning for witnesses. She said she wanted to die, but had she ever told the truth? It had become his nature to be wary.

  Look, he thought in self-disgust, this is an old, old woman near death (probably). No, get away from skepticism unseemly beside this bed of pain. Stop such thoughts. She was a creature worn out by the years, cursed by the real knowledge, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she had little power left. Always the judgments came. He didn’t respect her; did he even like her? He should feel the pity and sympathy his deepest beliefs told him any dying animal deserved.

  He had an appointment to see a lawyer, one recommended to him by the man at the bank. In order to sign checks for her he would have to have power of attorney, and of course there was her will, and probate, and all that to be taken care of eventually.

  When she slept, having been given more of the BB-sized pills, he got out of there, though he was an hour early for his appointment with the lawyer. A form of desertion. He’d have to guide her hand when she came to sign the power of attorney—a strange sort of forgery, the weak hand holding the pen, the hand itself held and powered. Right now, however, he had to get out. Sensitive him.

  He stopped first at his motel, and called Nora from the pay phone outside.

  “Well, when you didn’t call last night,” Nora said judgmentally, “I wondered.”

  “Wondered what?” he said. He didn’t want to identify his sudden emotion as self-pity, not at his age.

  “This phone’s been peeping and chirping like the other one, and I think it’s affecting the other phones. I can hear voices sometimes. How’s your mother?”

  “Not very good.”

  She was silent, nearly thirty years’ worth of dialogue on this subject expressed.

  “I’m going to tell her I can only stay until Friday,” he said, which would be a lie. Nora, of course,
would never have told such a lie no matter the circumstances. This was known. “She’s running out of money,” he said.

  “You know we promised to help Sarah in graduate school.”

  He had calculated, taking into consideration rent at the Garden, nurse’s aides, doctors, drugs, vs. social security and a mortgage she still held on one of her former houses, that in three weeks he would have to start paying out two thousand dollars a month. He would have to sell that mortgage of hers. Actually, he expected her to live another ten years. One of these days she would start eating again, the leg would heal, and so on. Such recoveries had happened to her in the past, and he had no precedent of death. It would mean that his plans to retire early, at sixty, were out the window, as well as his daughter Sarah’s projected late entrance to graduate school, which he had actually forgotten about until now.

  “I’ll just pack her off, pissing and moaning, to the Country Farm,” he said. This conversation was becoming irredeemable. This often happened on the telephone, which seemed to bring out the worst in both of them. They both sighed, Nora in a sort of resigned disgust. There were other voices, too, talking away below their sighs. “Yes, of course,” he heard clearly, and a music of clear small notes, a distant, atonal xylophone. Then, “Just a second, I’ll put him on.” Such friendliness. “Hello?”

  When he returned from the lawyer’s office, with the lawyer’s secretary as a witness, and signed with his mother’s forceless hand the power of attorney forms, she was “up” again, and fairly cheerful about her hand’s weakness.

  Richard had to get her and N. P. Carter’s social security numbers, and the correct names of her mother and father, for Les at the Tradition. “Your father’s name was John Walter Clifford?” he said.

  “Yes. John Walter,” his mother said proudly, as if John Walter were a character to reckon with. “He was six-foot-three and all legs.”