The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  I bent over the colander and picked out the tiny stems, the hard green berries. “When you’re done,” my grandmother said, “your grandfather’s waiting in the other room.” I looked up at her, but she was hunched over the table, working.

  After a few minutes I crossed to her. I set the bowl of dark berries next to the floured breadboard. I wiped my hands and stepped into the living room. My grandfather was on the front porch in a rocker. I could see him through the old crazed windows, moving jerkily in their prismatic panes. I crossed to the opened doorway, stepped outside into the soft light, the sound of water. He turned from the lake to me, motioned acknowledgment with his head. His real rocking seemed dreamlike in its smoothness. I sat down in a straight chair by one of the tables.

  “Well, Anna,” he said. His hands were folded across his slight paunch. He looked tired. It occurred to me that he probably hadn’t had his nap.

  “I need money,” I said.

  He smiled at me. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude. I just do. Need it.” I tried not to look at his face, fallen into hard lines, the curling brows frowning now.

  He rocked a moment, his feet lifting slightly off the floor on the backswing. “You’ll forgive my curiosity,” he said. “I’m wondering why the urgency.”

  I picked up the glass salt shaker, dusted the grains off its bulbous nickel head.

  “You haven’t rushed up here because you’ve suddenly decided to hire someone to care for your daughter, surely?” I looked quickly at him. He’d resurrected his smile, deepened it when our eyes met.

  “No,” I acknowledged.

  He rocked, the gentle creaking joining all the familiar noises, an ominous minor theme. In the kitchen I could hear my grandmother’s slow step, crossing the room, the clatter of pans.

  I shrugged. “Brian’s started a custody suit, he wants Molly. I need money for a lawyer.”

  The steady rocking continued. Then: “What makes him think he can win such a suit? The whole weight of the law is in your favor, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “He believes he has some grounds.”

  “I see,” he said. A boat swung noisily around the point into our inlet. He looked out over the water, watched it jealously until it buzzed back out towards the islands. Then he turned to me again. “I was under the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that the mother would have to demonstrate some kind of incompetence to lose such a case.”

  “I think that is correct,” I answered.

  “What?” He frowned, leaning forward.

  “I said, I think that’s right.” My voice was loud, slightly defiant.

  He rocked back again. “Well, then?”

  How like a hundred scenes from childhood this was! The gentle mocking voice, the weighty sense of guilt, a foot-dragging silence the only resistance possible, mere temporizing with fate.

  Finally I answered. “Brian has grounds.”

  “He has grounds, based on your incompetence.” My grandfather was asking, but it was flat as a declaration.

  I looked at him. My words came fast in sudden anger. “I’ve had a lover, Grandfather. Not an unusual event for a woman in my situation. Someone living with me, essentially. Molly’s been aware of that. She’s seen some of it, not to put too fine a point on it. She must have talked to Brian about it, and he’s angry. He’s taking legal steps to get her back. That’s the scenario.”

  He rocked. “Not pleasant,” he said mildly.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “And you’ve talked to a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  He raised his eyebrows to ask me. “And?”

  “And he’d like twenty-five hundred dollars to start with.”

  There wasn’t a pause in the rocking, but after a moment he said, “I meant, And what does he think your chances are for keeping custody?”

  I met his eyes, steady and intelligent on me. “Ah,” I said, genuinely surprised. It seemed to me there was a kind of acknowledgment of the justice of my misunderstanding in the smile that lifted his mouth. “Well,” I said. “He doesn’t talk about it in that way exactly. But it seems to me he’s suggesting that Brian has a reasonable chance.”

  “Brian has a good chance of getting her?”

  “I believe he was suggesting that to me, yes.”

  After a moment’s silence, from the kitchen came the slow dry squeal of the pump two or three times, then splashing water.

  “You’re satisfied that this lawyer is competent?”

  “Yes. I had him for the divorce, actually. He comes highly recommended. He’s in one of the big law firms.”

  My grandfather nodded.

  “And who is this . . . lover of yours, this man Molly has seen too much of?”

  “Does it matter, Grandfather?”

  “To me it does, yes.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled, “Why not?”

  I had, without thinking about it, at some point in this conversation, taken the cap off the salt shaker and poured a small amount of it onto the pale green table. Now I drew a line with my finger through the white crystals. “Because,” I said flatly. “It seems prurient to me.”

  His face seemed to enliven. “But you would like my money.”

  “Yes.”

  He spread his hands in the air. “It seems to me I have the right to ask a few questions then.”

  I said nothing for a minute. Then, “I simply don’t see the relevance of my personal life beyond what I’ve told you. And I don’t think you do have the right, the entrée to it.” His rocking continued. “If you’re not going to give me the money, just say so, so I can figure out what to do next.” Having said this, I was reminded that there was some sense in which he was my last resort. I thought fleetingly of my parents again, but then imagined my mother asking these same questions, but tearfully, anxiously.

  After a moment he said, “Are you still seeing this man?”

  I said nothing. My finger traced circular patterns in the salt.

  “You drive a hard bargain, Anna.” I looked up sharply at him. He smiled.

  After a moment, I shook my head. “Not in the sense you mean, no.” Suddenly, like a chasm opening below my feet, I understood the utter impossibility of going on with Leo, with our life together. It was over. I had to turn my head away from my grandfather. As I did so, I saw my grandmother through the window, standing in the center of the living room, her head held tilted up like a blind woman’s at a busy intersection, listening for danger.

  “In what sense, then?” my grandfather asked in his mocking voice.

  I wasn’t sure I could speak, so I didn’t answer.

  “In what sense?” he persisted after a moment, the smoothness stripped from his voice. I swallowed, struggled to get my voice in control.

  My grandmother moved in my peripheral vision, disappeared from the window, appeared suddenly in the doorway. I looked up at her.

  She looked from one of us to the other, then spoke quickly to my grandfather. “Here now,” she said, as though he were a naughty boy. And then her mouth worked a moment. Then, “Stop this,” she said.

  “You do not need to concern yourself with this, my dear.” His voice had changed. It still had the same self-important sternness, but the edge, the mockery were gone.

  “I’m talking to you, Frank,” she said as though he’d said nothing. “Do you hear me?” Her bony hands were at my eye level. They gripped the door frame, and I watched the thickened nails whiten around their edges as they squeezed. I had never heard my grandparents so much as disagree. I felt a child’s terror, a wish to disappear.

  “This is between Anna and me, my dear,” he said.

  She waited a moment, pushed her lips together, then had nothing to say. After a long silence she whispered, “No.”

  “Yes,” he said, gently. “Anna has asked me for help.” He too spoke as if to a child; and it struck me that neither of them had a tone,
a vocabulary, for conflict with the other, and so each borrowed from his relations with children, those with whom you could be assertive, or condescending, to disagree.

  “Then hadn’t you better help her?” she said, shrilly.

  “That’s for us to arrange.” His tone was final, dismissive.

  He rocked again, and waited. She had no choice but to withdraw, and we all knew it. Her moment of defiance in memory of . . . what? her ten years of misery? Babe’s misspent life? her other children’s constricted, obedient ones? was over. I almost couldn’t bear to look at her, but I wanted to find a way to release her, to let her go with some dignity.

  My hands, gritty with salt, gripped each other tightly in my lap. I turned to her. She stood framed by the open doorway, her look faraway over the lake.

  “Thank you, Gram,” I said.

  It was as though I’d waked her. Her head swung towards me. She brought me into focus with her sharp eyes. Then she said, “You could ask me.”

  I looked at her blankly for a minute.

  “I have money, too. My own money,” she said. “You could ask me for money.”

  “Eleanor,” my grandfather began.

  “It’s my money,” she said to him, over my head. Then, again, to me: “You could ask me.”

  “That’s not what your money is for, Eleanor,” he said.

  “It’s my money,” she said.

  “You’re not to spend your money on the family, Eleanor. That’s not the way we do it.” His voice had a nervous quality I’d never heard in it.

  “It’s my money,” she said. She kept her eyes on me. “You could ask me,” she said.

  My grandfather’s voice was suddenly stern. “Now, Anna’s not going to do that,” he said. “Anna’s asked me and that’s that.”

  “She could ask me, too,” my grandmother said. She looked at me again, her eyes pleading. “You could ask me, Anna.”

  My grandfather stood up, stepped towards her. As he spoke to her, his hand reached up to touch her shoulder in some final assertion or claim. She was, after all, his wife. “Anna has asked me, Eleanor,” he said, and his strong male hand, the back of it furred lightly with white hair, gripped the frail bones under her blouse.

  She yanked herself back from him. “But you’re not giving it to her!” she shrieked. Her voice echoed, to her, to her, to her, and we all listened to it until it had faded. Then there was just Garrett whistling somewhere, the boats, the hissing trees. I looked from one of my grandparents to the other. She was braced in the doorway as though he were going to attack her.

  He stood openmouthed, frightened, at a loss. I remembered, suddenly, that he was in his eighties.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Yes, I am,” he said.

  “You are?” she asked.

  “Yes, I will give Anna the money,” he said, as though he were making a kind of vow to her.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  He waited a moment, then stepped towards her. As though to avoid his touch, she swung back. He stepped into the living room, and I watched him cross the crazed panes of the two windows to the left of the door. I heard one desk drawer after another slide open and shut, the smooth whisper of wood. He bent over the desk for a few minutes. She stood near the door, watching his back. Under her gaze, he returned, stepped down, handed me a check. I looked at it. He’d made it out for five thousand dollars.

  “That’s that, then?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She waited, looking at me.

  “Yes,” I said, looking only at the check. “Thank you.”

  There was a pause. I imagined I could feel each of them straining towards the other, though I don’t think either of them was looking at the other.

  “Well,” she said softly. “Good for you, Frank.”

  “I think I’ll nap now,” he said, turning to her. “I skipped that today, getting the berries and so forth; I’m tired.”

  “I think you should,” she said. She turned and went back through the living room to the kitchen. Without a word to me, he followed her. I didn’t hear them speak to each other, and after a moment I heard the gentle smack shut of the kitchen screen door. As I looked off to the right through the woods, I saw my grandfather’s figure move slowly down the path to his cottage, every few seconds his white hair blazing with the brilliant strobe of the sun through an opening above. In the kitchen the pump squealed again, and the pans clattered under the rushing water in the old sink. I looked at the check, at my grandfather’s enormous black signature coiled assertively above both their printed names.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE FAT WOMAN LEANED FORWARD and showed the judge where her husband had knocked her tooth out. He frowned at her, then looked away. “Fine, fine,” he said. “You can shut your mouth now.”

  “Your honor, my client no more knocked that tooth out than—well, I don’t know. But that tooth has been missing since I don’t know when.”

  The judge shook his head at the elderly lawyer—a gent, with pomaded white locks carefully trained over his bald spot. “Well, but your client didn’t come to court to tell us that, did he now?” The judge wore half-glasses, and when he looked over them at the lawyer and the woman, he was stern, fussy, a spinster school-teacher.

  I couldn’t hear the lawyer’s answer. Next to me, Muth had take, his pen out, was making a note on his legal pad. The room was stifling and dark in spite of the two big open windows on the wall behind the judge. The shades on the other windows were pulled down, but these two opened nakedly out on Cambridge Street. I suppose someone was trying to cool the room, but more noise than breeze wafted in. Trucks, buses roared by, portable music swelled and faded occasionally. Across the street I could see a sign for The Barrister Dining Room in plastic gothic letters.

  The wooden bench was uncomfortable. I recrossed my legs and looked around again. Brian was sitting with his lawyer, Fine, behind us in the corner to the right. Scattered here and there in these few back pews were real people, clients, but for the most part the room was full of lawyers. You could tell the difference easily. The clients were nearly all frumpy, attentive, silent. The lawyers were natty, even those who wore cheap suits; and they sat differently. They crossed their legs expansively. They were relaxed.

  Though the room was hushed and even the lawyers presenting their cases spoke in muted voices, there was a steady level of noise: the traffic going by outside, phones ringing distantly in the vast old courthouse, the double doors into the hall whumping and squeaking with the flow of people in and out. There was a large fan set on the floor under the windows which swung its face back and forth, exhaling loudly across the room, ruffling everyone’s papers.

  The judge had granted the order for the woman’s husband to be evicted from the house; now he was trying to arrange a time for the man to get his clothes, his belongings. It was hard for the woman to imagine how this would work. Someone needed to be there to be sure he didn’t hit her again.

  “But you’ve lived alone with him up till now, haven’t you?” the judge asked.

  “Yes, but I didn’t have no order kicking him out of the house up till now.” Out from under the shoulders of her cotton housedress, the straps of her slip looped over her shapeless upper arms.

  The judge was patient. “Well, who could you get to come and stay with you? Could your daughter come over?”

  The woman thought for a moment, offered some objection. Back and forth they went, the judge resourceful, energetic. Finally, as though he’d worn her down, she consented to one of his arrangements. The judge talked to the lawyers for a moment, handed them some papers, and then the fat woman waddled slowly after her lawyer and her husband’s lawyer out of the room. “Whump whump, whump-whump-whump,” went the doors behind them.

  The clerk picked up another folder from the pile on the edge of the judge’s desk—some were in colors as bright as children’s lunch-boxes: green, orange, blue—and called out, “The Carney matter.” Muth leaned to me.
“I think we’re next, after this guy,” he whispered.

  Carney approached the bench. He was young, bearded, wearing workclothes. He had stood directly in front of Fine when the lawyers lined up to hand their papers to the clerk. Carney bent forward, towards the judge, spoke inaudibly for a minute or two.

  The judge looked down at the papers on his desk, then up over his glasses at the nervous-looking young man. “O.K., so you’re Edward Carney?” he asked in his ringing voice. Carney assented.

  “You’re the father of this . . . John Edward Carney?” Again a murmur.

  “And this woman, Dolores Carney Diglio, she’s the mother?” Carney’s head moved. “And she’s remarried?” A nod.

  “You understand what you’re doing here?” Carney’s voice, hesitant, too soft to carry, buzzed for a moment under the other noises in the room.

  The judge listened. “O.K., now,” he said when Carney had finished. “But I’ve got to officially explain this to you. That’s my job.” He scanned the papers, looked up again. “You understand that once you sign this, you give the child up to the mother and her new husband?” Carney turned so that no one in the courtroom could see his face. His head bobbed.

  “You no longer have any rights or obligations to the child?” Carney seemed to make no response. “You understand that you can’t see the child?”

  The clerk stood off to one side, talking to a lawyer. The lawyers seated by themselves in the front rows looked at their own papers, checked notes, crossed and recrossed their legs, paid no attention to Carney’s shame as he gave up his child. Now Carney signed something on the judge’s desk and started to walk away. I couldn’t help it. I stared at him, at his blankened, neutral face.

  “Ah, ah, ah, ah, Mr. Carney,” the judge called out, scolding.

  Carney spun around and approached the desk again.

  “No, now,” the judge said. “We gotta do it all over again for the mother’s lawyer and the State of Michigan.” And he began his litany, the awful booming questions, the silent answers, again. Carney gripped the edge of the judge’s desk, and always kept his head bent away from us.