Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I dream of dead people a lot these days, and sometimes I can’t remember who is and who isn’t,” she said. “And I can’t always be sure when I’m awake. I was afraid I was seeing a ghost.”

  “Me too,” I said, smiling tentatively.

  I put Zoot down and he floated back onto her lap in the chaise and began to clean his behind. I remembered what Grammaude had always called that leg-over-head posture: playing the cello.

  “I’m so glad he’s alive,” I said.

  “I’m so glad you are,” she said, and tears began to roll silently down her fissured cheeks. I made a small sound of distress, and she shook her white head impatiently and dabbed at them.

  “Don’t pay any attention,” she said. “Old people cry like other people belch. Or fart. It’s entirely unconscious and serves to relieve a little pressure. That’s all. But it has to be the most unattractive thing to watch…. Oh, my dear child. Here you are at last. And still you, except much too thin. And you’ve cut your hair; I like it. You look like a redheaded elf.”

  Her voice was like my own blood beating in my veins. It warmed and eased me; it always had. I did not want to be warmed and eased; I wanted only white, seamless peace. I wanted control and distance.

  “They made me cut it in the hospital,” I said. “They won’t let you have curlers or scissors or dryers or anything you need to take care of long hair. After a woman committed suicide by taking her hot curlers into the shower with her, they made everybody have short hair, even the guys. Some of them were gay and minded a lot more than I did.”

  She looked at me steadily, smiling just a bit, and I felt as I had as a child, when I had tried to shock her and failed.

  “So you have a car,” she said. “Wonderful. I can stop depending on Sarah or Petie or one of the Willises to do errands for me, and we can do some serious running around. I sold the big car several years ago when my hands got just too bad to drive—arthritis; it’s a monumental bore.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to like this car,” I said. “It belongs to a black drug and alcohol addict, and it’s rusted all over, and it has a bumper sticker that says SHIT HAPPENS. Or it will again when I get some stuff to clean it.”

  She looked at me in silence for a little longer, and then her mouth twitched and she began to laugh. There it was, bleached and diminished, but there: Grammaude’s old laugh. I smiled too, unwillingly.

  “Perfect,” she said. “Let’s take every old lady in Retreat to lunch. We’ve had SAVE THE WHALES and BABY ON BOARD, and I believe one of the Conant children had a RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD last summer, but to my knowledge we’ve never had a SHIT HAPPENS. Come on, dear, give me a hand up and I’ll point you toward your room, and then I think I’ll call Petie and Sarah and tell them no thanks for tonight and make us a martini. Maybe two. There’s enough crab to do for dinner.”

  I helped her off the chaise, wincing to myself at the stiffness of her gnarled hands and stooped body and the way she had to lean on me. She was as weightless as a child, but I remembered the straight spine and quick steps. Now she clung and hobbled and her breath came in laboring, wheezing gasps.

  “Grammaude, are you okay?”

  “Perfectly,” she said with effort. “It just sounds grisly. Low blood pressure or something about the circulation, I think. Mainly age. I’ve got you upstairs in my old room; I’m sorry to switch you, but I just can’t manage the stairs any more. Will it do?”

  “Of course. I never could figure out why you gave me the big downstairs room all those years. A child in the best bedroom…I know it had been yours and Granddaddy’s.”

  “That’s why,” she said softly. “I never could sleep there again, somehow. But I find it’s perfectly all right this summer. I guess I should have moved down there long ago.”

  That night my grandmother and I got drunk. I took a bath in the old claw-footed bathtub upstairs and changed into clean jeans and a sweater, and when I came downstairs she was in the kitchen in a bright Indian cotton caftan, a bit of lipstick on her mouth and a cloud of Caleche enveloping her, mixing martinis in a pitcher. A bowl of crab and mayonnaise salad sat on the old oak table that had always occupied the precise center of the kitchen. We took the pitcher out onto the porch and sat drinking, looking at the sun sliding down behind the Camden Hills. Everything that had happened for twelve years and before lay between us: too much. Somehow I knew we would not speak of it, not this night. And we didn’t. We had one drink, and then two, and then I poured us another. Calm dropped down around me like a glass dome. We talked a little of my trip up from Atlanta and who was in the colony this summer, but mainly we looked at the eternal blue of the bay and the orange sun. And we drank. I could not ever remember my grandmother having more than two drinks. The calm deepened and thickened.

  Later we sat at the dinner table in the light of two candles in the old faience holders, looking across at each other. Spots of color stood on her cheeks and her eyes glittered. My own face was warm.

  “I haven’t had this much to drink in I can’t remember when,” she said. “It’s wonderful. I don’t know why I don’t do it oftener. I’ll know in the morning, though.”

  “You look twenty years younger than you did when I saw you this afternoon,” I said. The calm was profound and wonderful. I felt I could say anything to her.

  “So do you,” she said.

  “I haven’t had anything to drink since I left here,” I said. “Twelve years, as dry as a bone. Tranquilizers have been my addiction of choice lately. I’ve been missing out. I feel better than I have in years. Booze is the answer. You know, this is what I remember most about this place. This…certainty of safety. This peace. I hope it’s not all liquor.”

  “Not all of it,” Grammaude said. “It’s what Retreat does best. I’m glad you feel it. I hoped you would.”

  “My shrink said it wasn’t good to lean too much on places or people,” I said. “I’m supposed to be learning to trust only myself, lean only on my own strength. Isn’t that a laugh? But I know what he means. Places change, or you lose them. People go away, or they die.”

  I looked away from her. She would die soon, I thought. She was silent for a long moment, playing with her fork in the crab salad, and then she said, “Was it so bad, this fear? I’ve never quite understood what panic disorder is. But sometimes I think there are many, many worse things than fear.”

  Anger flared, far below the martini calm. She knew nothing.

  “It was horrible,” I said. “It is horrible. It’s nothing at all like ordinary fear, not even like honest terror. It’s like…imagine that you know you’re about to die awfully, horribly, and magnify that a thousand times, and let it go on and on for months and years. Sometimes you want to scream with it. Sometimes you do: scream and scream and scream….”

  “When did it start?”

  Her voice was calm, but there were tears in her eyes again. I was perversely glad to see them.

  “I’m not really sure. Gradually. Sometimes I think it was when I first graduated from college and went home and Dad wasn’t there. I mean, I knew he had gone to Nevada; we’d talked about it and decided I’d keep the apartment, since I’d need one anyway. But we thought maybe Mother might be home from the hospital by the time I graduated, only of course she wasn’t. There wasn’t anybody at all. I don’t know why it was so bad, or so different, being there alone. He’d been gone often while I was growing up. I never had anybody staying with me after I was sixteen or so. I was used to taking care of him and myself. Her too, at first.

  “But it was different. I began to be afraid; my heart would pound and I’d feel like something awful was going to happen. I couldn’t keep still. So I went out and practically knocked on doors and took the first job I was offered, at a public relations agency, as a receptionist. And I got myself a smaller apartment and a roommate, and I worked nonstop, day and night, for the next six years and got to be a senior writer at a regional magazine, and was really very good at it too, and for a l
ong time I didn’t really think about the fear. It was just when I was alone and not busy, like a long weekend, that it came back.

  “And then I met Hank, and he was so perfect—old Atlanta family, money, charm, wit, prospects: the whole nine yards, old Henry Chiles Taliaferro had—and we got engaged and thought we might be married in June. This was in January, when I was twenty-seven…. Well, I had the first full-scale panic attack the night his parents were announcing our engagement to all their buddies. Instead of the Piedmont Driving Club, I went to the Piedmont Hospital emergency room. They diagnosed it as fatigue and hyperventilation, and we told everybody it was food poisoning, but it kept happening, oftener and oftener and worse and worse, and finally even I saw that I had to have some help or I’d just…die. By that time I was afraid to leave the apartment, afraid to be alone for even five minutes. My roommate moved out and I lost my job, of course. Hank said he couldn’t spend any more time babysitting me, so I signed myself into Peachwood Hospital. I paid my own bill for the first month and then had them call Dad in Las Vegas. I didn’t hear from him for nearly three months; I know you must have paid for all of it. It’s supposed to be a very good hospital, by the way; you got your money’s worth. Hank’s mother picked it out herself and came along when Hank drove me there. I never saw either of them again after that night.”

  We sat in the candle-flickering silence. There was only the peace and a kind of sighing hum, like white noise. I listened contentedly to it.

  “Was he special, this Hank?” Grammaude said presently.

  “I can’t even remember what he looked like,” I said.

  We both began to giggle.

  “I can remember what his mother looked like, though. W. C. Fields. She was not enchanted by the prospect of a mentally ill daughter-in-law. Try telling that lady about childhood trauma and delayed reaction and repressed anger and all that jazz. She, by God, knew it ran in the family. I think old Hank told her about Great-Granddaddy and Granddaddy’s little spells, and about Mother’s big ones, before he stopped the car that night they put me in. He married Luanne Ormsby the next year, I read in the society section. Nothing running in that family but Republicanism and money and maybe a little hookworm, way back.”

  “You think this…whatever it is, fear…comes from your Chambliss blood?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Even my shrink doesn’t. It sure as hell couldn’t have helped.”

  “Well,” Grammaude said, “you’ve got just as much Gascoigne blood in you as Chambliss, and I’ll tell you, there’s not sturdier or more constant blood on the East Coast than that. Eccentric, maybe, but the lot of us are hopelessly sane and doomed to stay that way. So put your mind to rest on that score.”

  I finished my martini and poured another. It felt like perfume on my tongue: lovely stuff. Grammaude seemed to have a limitless supply. I decided to stay just a bit drunk for the entire three months I would be in Retreat.

  “Tell me about Mike,” I said, ready now to hear anything.

  “Well, Mike. Let’s see. He’s a very good architect in…I think it’s Portland, or maybe Portsmouth, I can’t ever remember. He wins awards and has his designs in magazines. He was married briefly, a long time ago, right out of MIT. They split up after a year or so, and there weren’t any children. I think she was awfully rich, and he wasn’t, and one or the other of them cared too much about that, and one thing led to another…. He doesn’t get home much, but when he does, he comes to see me and spends hours and hours talking, just like he used to do. He’s a much more attractive man than he was a boy, but he really hasn’t changed a great deal. I’m terribly fond of him. He never got over you. I don’t think he ever will. You needn’t worry, though; I don’t think he plans to be here this summer.”

  I was silent. For just a moment Mike Willis stood in the shimmering air beside me, dark, solid, the odd light-blue eyes gleaming, the thick lock of straight black hair down over his left eyebrow. I could see the peppering of dark freckles across the bridge of his nose and the gap between his two front teeth.

  “When did his grandmother die?” I asked. “I realized today that I never actually knew.”

  “Tina died the summer after your grandfather,” Grammaude said softly. “She had cancer of the colon; she must have had it the summer before, and they didn’t know, or I didn’t…. I didn’t come to Retreat the first summer without Peter; it was the only summer since we were married that I didn’t, but…I didn’t, and so I wasn’t here when she died. Micah called me in Charleston. It was very quick, I think. It’s always been one of the few real regrets I’ve had in my life, that I wasn’t here when Tina died.”

  “I saw your boyfriend today,” I said, grinning at her, the wine humming in my ears.

  She smiled at me inquiringly.

  “Your old boyfriend. Micah Willis. I stopped in the cemetery for a minute on the way in, and he was there. I’m sorry about his stroke; it must be very hard for him. He’s failed badly, hasn’t he? But the old Micah is still in there.”

  She was quiet, and I looked at her across the table and saw something that had not been there before.

  “He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he? Lord, Grammaude, I was teasing you, but he was…something to you, wasn’t he?”

  Dear God, part of me thought, what are you saying? You can’t say things like that to Grammaude. But she only smiled at me.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was something to me. He is something to me. But not a boyfriend. Not…a lover. Only your grandfather was that, always.”

  “But you loved him…Micah.”

  “I needed him.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No. But in a way, a very real way, I loved him too, just not in the way you meant.”

  “You mean you never…had an affair with him? Oh, why, Grammaude? You always were together, the two of you; I can hardly remember a day that didn’t have Micah in it. It could have been such a good thing for both of you, I mean, after all those years when you were alone, and then he was…. Was it because he was a native?”

  She smiled. “Never that. It was…I suppose it was because of Peter—your grandfather—and Tina.”

  “But they were gone.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You mean, you and Micah felt you had to be faithful to their memories?”

  “If you like. Gracious, what a conversation to be having with your granddaughter. It can’t be proper,” she said, and I knew she would talk no more today about Micah Willis. Well, there would be time for that. The white peace swirled and hummed.

  “I don’t see a thing of my mother in this house,” I said, looking around the dim old room. The warm smoke gold of the walls had not changed since I was small. There were amulets of family all about, all familiar to me. But I realized for the first time that I could not see my mother here.

  “I see a lot of her,” Grammaude said, “but not the woman who became your mother. Only the little girl who was my daughter. She’s everywhere. Your mother never came here after you were born.”

  “Because of the way Grandfather felt about my father?” I said.

  “I suppose so, yes,” she said. “That and other things.”

  “I’m supposed to get therapeutically angry at them,” I said serenely, “but I just can’t seem to feel it. I never have.”

  “How can you?” Grammaude said. “It would be like getting angry at a couple of abstract ideas. You can’t get angry at your mother because she was never a mother to you. She was never anything to you, really; the running away and the drinking and the craziness started in earnest before you were old enough to remember her. She’s been in hospitals most of your life, and when she wasn’t, you were more like a mother to her than vice versa. And she’s been away in this last one for…what, seven years now? Eight? I don’t think she’ll come out this time. She’s just gone too far past healing. And your father…dear God, what was he to you? All over the country, from one job to another, broke most of the time, hardly ever home, you in
those awful boarding schools he picked out, never even letting you come to me except here in the summers…and the few months at a time you were both home you were taking care of him like a little wife. You can get angry at the idea of what they both were to you, or were not, but not at them as parents, because neither ever was. No wonder you can’t feel anything.”

  She stopped, breathing hard, coughing a little, and drank off her wine. I stared at her. I had never heard her speak so of her daughter or the man she had married. I knew only that she paid my bills wherever I was, both before I left her that last summer and after, and that for most of the seventeen summers of my life she was its sole and very present polestar. I had never considered how she might feel about Happy Chambliss O’Ryan, though I suspected what she thought of my father.

  “I think maybe we’re both drunk,” I said. “And you may be right about all that. But somehow it seems to me very important that I feel the anger. My shrink says I really must, or I’ll never be well.”

  She made a small noise of disgust. “What can he possibly know about you, this shrink? Let them go. That’s something the old always want to tell the young and seldom can; one of the few true things we’ve come to know in our lives. Just…let them go. You can’t get them back as parents; they’re gone from you. Let go. Save your splendid anger for something worth it.”

  “What is, Grammaude? What’s worth it?”

  “You’ll know,” she said, “when the time comes. Don’t worry. You’ll know. And it will be a fine anger, one that can blow up the world. It means nothing that you don’t feel it, except that there’s been nothing yet really worth it.”

  “My shrink says I’m supposed to get angry with you too.”

  “I rather thought you had been, all those years.”

  “No,” I said in a low voice. “Not angry. Afraid to think of you, I guess; certainly afraid to be in touch with you. Afraid I’d run straight back to you and end up here. And now I have. Dear God, Grammaude, how can I just let twenty-nine years go?”