The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

Mary knew without ever needing to be told: her father was a self-made lonely man.

  She would tell her sisters, when they asked how he was: Dad is Dad. This diagnosis, transferably applicable to all of them, they would understand.

  Mary returned to the living room, dodging the two hors d’oeuvres platters wielded at her neck height by the waspy widowed caterers. Did even they refuse to see her? How many years had it been? A stupid question. She knew how many years. Everyone in the room knew how many years. Fourteen years to the day. The waspy widowed caterers offered toothpicks and colored finger napkins to the guests, who seemed relieved to be interrupted from their non-conversations. People emptied their cups of gin punch so they could get a refill and have something to do. Not that funeral receptions were judged by the same standards as other social gatherings, but even given Mary’s exceptionally low expectations for this event, it was proving to be a dud.

  Though not a regular smoker, Mary needed a cigarette.

  “Excuse me,” Mary said to Fran Bigelow, Mum’s tennis partner and a relentless chimney, currently hurrying past her en route to the bathroom. Mrs. Bigelow—Such hand-eye! she remembered Mum marveling—sprung sideways as though Mary had attempted to stab her with an hors d’oeuvre fork; as Mrs. Bigelow continued to move in a diagonal vector at a near-tripping pace, her heel caught in the loop of green ribbon extending from the handle of the decorative coal hod. Her heel acted like a catapult; her next forward step hurled the coal hod into the fireplace, where the hod cleanly picked off both andirons and landed on its side with a deafening crash.

  Conversations halted.

  “Whoopsy!” Mrs. Bigelow said, staring damningly at Mary.

  Mary froze. She, who had been previously so invisible, was suddenly aggressively seen. Mum’s Wellesley College Alumnae Association friends, Mum’s Semmering Academy PTA colleagues, Mum’s historical society co-workers, the spouses, the distant cousins, all of them eyed her with a familiar blank probity. Exuberantly, she returned their gazes. She’d forgotten how enjoyable it was to dislike these people and was invigorated by the reminder. Cocktail parties notwithstanding, their preferred pastime was making others feel eternally shitty about themselves. These emotionally mummified, blank-eyed, sorry people. How easy it was to blame them for her troubles with her mother. How much easier it was to blame them than to blame a more deserving party: herself, for example.

  She rewarded the lot of them with a grotesquely buoyant smile.

  “Strike!” she said.

  In the hallway, her father stifled a hiccup.

  Aunt Helen—three, maybe four drinks deep into the afternoon—rushed from the kitchen, silk skirt thudding on her apparent wind as she pincered Mary by the elbow and steered her to a vacant space near the punch bowl.

  A gossipy buzz engulfed them.

  “Not recommended today?” Aunt Helen said. “Irreverence.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Mary lied. “It’s what Mum would have said.”

  Aunt Helen refilled her punch glass. Her wardrobe clashed as loudly as her interests in curative teas and gin drinks: a silk Ikat skirt blandified by a gum-colored twinset and a gold frog pin from the local purveyor of preppy, The House of Walsh.

  “Also not recommended today?” she said. “Presuming to speak for your mother.”

  You’re one to talk, Mary wanted to say, but didn’t. Aunt Helen was a shadowy pro at expressing her own feelings by attributing them to others. Usually she employed her standard poodle, Weegee, for this purpose, to wit: Weegee’s feeling neglected today, isn’t he? But today Weegee was with her neighbors, and Aunt Helen needed a Weegee surrogate. Mary apparently fit the bill.

  “Not that your extreme inappropriateness isn’t understandable. You must be devastated,” said Aunt Helen. “Refusing to see you before she died. But that’s just so Paula, isn’t it? She didn’t give two hoots about anyone’s feelings except her own.”

  “What can you expect from terminally ill conflict avoiders?” Mary said lightly. The truth was, she’d been blindsided by her mother’s refusal to see her, expecting, as inane as it sounded, to share some sort of pablum closure moment with her in the Lillian P. Rudy Memorial Cancer Wing, as the candy stripers wept and the oncologists did a mournful soft-shoe and her mother, the most pablum-free individual on the planet, clasped her hand and said…this is where the absurdity of her fantasy overrode the actual fantasy. Which didn’t mean the failure of the fantasy to be met, to ever be met, hadn’t left her feeling bludgeoned.

  “You must be angry with her,” Aunt Helen said. “I imagine you’re very, very angry.”

  Aunt Helen widened her smudgy eyes tellingly, then shudder-gulped twice in rapid succession before appearing to cease breathing altogether. She released Mary’s elbow and waved at her—Mary stared, bewildered, until she realized Aunt Helen wanted her cocktail napkin. Aunt Helen exhaled loudly, using the napkin to dab at her tearless face.

  Across the room, Mary saw Regina and Gaby exchange a look that told her they were bonding over the hating of other people. Aunt Helen. Mary. Even their own father, who had excused himself from his nonexistent coat-check duties. Now he was playing with a second cousin’s baby beneath the portrait of Mum’s eighth great-grandmother, Abigail Lake, a suspected witch executed at Gallows Hill in 1692 and yet to be officially pardoned by the state of Massachusetts—and, notably, the only item in the living room without a green ribbon. Baby as grief shield, Mary thought, no funeral should be without a baby. Her father bounced the baby on his knee, he fake walked it across the carpet, he absentmindedly played with its left ear, squashing it in half and unsquashing it at seemingly intentional intervals as though he were sending Morse code to a guest across the room.

  She watched as Regina approached their father and asked him if he’d like another punch. He smiled toward a longitude of unoccupied airspace; he’d been smiling at no one in particular since he woke up that morning, surrounded by an aggressively chipper force field that repelled all attempts at human connection.

  Maxie and Susan, Mum’s former Wellesley roommates, ladies-who-lunch vipers and the only two people Mary had been pointedly avoiding herself that afternoon, stood proprietorially to the left of the portrait of Abigail Lake. The portrait, frequent target of family scorn and the only item, according to her will, that Paula Abigail Bowden Veal had left to her three daughters, was painted to look like an antique but was in fact less than ten years old, inspired by a passage Mum found in a diary describing her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s walk to the gallows. “Flatte and grey of eye,” the diarist wrote. “Expressionless mouth, in which the words of a pretty devile lurk.” The painting was a money-making scam, in Mary’s opinion, cooked up by Susan’s feminist artist daughter, a former classmate of Mary’s at Semmering Academy, who offered, for an absurd fee, to paint portraits of the gallows victims “to honor those who have been so long dishonored.” Susan’s daughter had interpreted the diary description of Abigail Lake to produce a woman who, according to Regina and Gaby, resembled nobody so much as she resembled Mary in a bonnet.

  Maxie held a paper plate of grapes; Susan nursed a sweating glass of seltzer. Both women were rickety and unseasonably brown, their chests and arms so sun-spotted they appeared upholstered in a miniature leopard print. They flashed Mary grins so intense that it only confirmed her formerly paranoid suspicion that they’d been discussing her.

  “How’s life in Montana?” asked Maxie.

  “Oregon,” corrected Susan.

  “You moved to Oregon?” said Maxie.

  “She’s always lived in Oregon,” said Susan.

  “You’re still a waitress?” asked Maxie.

  “She’s a secretary,” said Susan.

  “I work in the admissions office of a private girls school outside Portland,” Mary said. Work was either an understatement or an overstatement. She was more of a professional calmer of buttoned-up hysterics, the bulk of her actual job consisting of talking down the mothers who
se daughters were rejected from Beaverton’s Grove School, mothers who charged into her office holding the “Due to the high quality of applicants” letter like a pair of damning panties pulled from a husband’s blazer pocket. Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably faraway expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades. The past and the present ghosted together in the hallways of the Grove School, and maybe that was why she worked there—when the halls were abandoned for the day and the sound of rain thrumming on the slate roof blurred with the far-off screech of coaches’ whistles, she could imagine she had herself been ghosted, that she’d been sucked back to a crucial crossroads in her own life and offered a second chance.

  “I work at a private girls school,” she repeated.

  “Do you,” said Maxie dryly.

  “That’s odd,” said Susan.

  Silence. All three looked at Clyde, holding the baby upside down by the ankles yelling, “Adios, little moonman!”

  Then:

  “Terrible about the obituary,” said Susan.

  Mary assumed they were referring to the headline—DAUGHTER OF EARLY AMERICAN WITCH DIES—she hadn’t read more than that.

  “Soooooo tasteless,” said Maxie.

  “Newspapers can’t pass up an opportunity for scandal,” said Susan. “Referring to her as ‘Miriam’s mother’—the gall of those people.”

  Mary blanched. Miriam’s mother.

  “That book ruined her life,” Maxie said tonelessly.

  “And such exquisitely bad timing for the funeral,” Susan said.

  “Fourteen years to the day,” Maxie said. “Imagine the coincidence.”

  Susan’s and Maxie’s skulls quivered atop their reedy necks like the tips of dowsing rods, veering toward hidden watery areas under the green-ribboned Persian. Mary noticed people checking their watches and the other guests as if searching for a silently agreed-upon cue that they’d mourned enough in their bucked-up way and were allowed to go home for dinner.

  Mary faked a coughing fit and pointed at her throat with one hand while miming a drinking gesture with the other. She escaped to the punch bowl where there was no more punch, and where her fake coughing fit intensified into an actual coughing fit. Eyes watering, Mary hurried toward the kitchen for a glass of water but was stopped in the foyer by Aunt Helen. “Weegee’s tired,” Aunt Helen announced, her words punch-shirred. She’d retrieved her vase from the mantel, having transferred her sister’s ashes to the silverware drawer. After informing Mary of Paula’s new whereabouts, she grasped Mary’s wrist with a cadaverish hand.

  “Mimsy,” she said. When she pronounced it like that, Mimsy, nasal and high-pitched, Mary was reminded of Regina’s favorite childhood goad—that her nickname was not a sweet diminutive inspired by her early-life littleness, in fact it came from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and was a hybrid concoction of flimsy and miserable.

  “After all this time, darling, you really shouldn’t blame yourself,” Aunt Helen said. “Your mother got over it—I mean yes, for many years she thought you did it to her on purpose. But you were young and unaware that anyone existed in the world but you. We all knew you didn’t mean any intentional harm.”

  Outside, Mary heard the rhythmic swell and ebb of Ye Olde Bastard’s leaf blower.

  “I mean it,” Aunt Helen slurred. “I think we can all stop catering to Paula’s every little Paula whim now that she’s…I mean look at your father, just look at the man, he hasn’t had a whim of his own since he married her!”

  If her father was a man impervious to whimsy, Mary thought, her mother could hardly be blamed. No two words less belonged in the same sentence than whimsy and father.

  “Paula did have a talent for sucking up all the desire in the room. That’s why everybody loved her, isn’t it, because she was so commanding and grand and aristocratically needy while appearing to need nothing at all. It’s no wonder my life is floundering, it’s no wonder I never learned how to want with Paula as my older sister. But I forgive her. I mean I forgave her.”

  “So you had a talk with her,” Mary said. “Before she died.”

  “Talk!” Aunt Helen cast a persecuted glance toward the living room. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Mary nodded even as she wondered, Who says no to that question? And is the result ever worth the build-up?

  “Of course I loved her and forgave her all her controlling devious flaws, but Weegee knew better than anyone what a bitch she was, my darling. She pretended to love poodles but Weegee saw right through her. She was really a terrible liar, you know. Fooled absolutely no one, dear heart, except maybe you.”

  Aunt Helen held a finger to her rouged lips that were red now only in the creases; she smiled and the remaining color bloomed wide and Mary, in her slightly disoriented state, was made to think of the unexpectedly bright undersides of the wings of certain birds. Aunt Helen smothered her in a ginny embrace before teetering off toward her station wagon, parked beneath one of her father’s DO NOT PARK fliers.

  As the lingerers lingered, Mary stepped outside to smoke one of the two cigarettes she’d nicked from a guest’s overcoat and walk around the neighborhood. She received a few sympathetic waves from neighbors out with their Yorkies but was ignored by Ye Olde Bastard, reversing out of his driveway in a beige Cadillac that featured a single bumper sticker: TAKE UMBRAGE! The sticker referred to the 1983 town council election between Harold Clarke and Sally Umbrage, an election handily taken by Clarke after a newspaper revealed that Umbrage’s campaign was funded by a historical-amusement-park developer with his eye on West Salem’s sleepy waterfront.

  TAKE UMBRAGE!

  Mary had seen this sticker hundreds of times and read nothing more than a clever campaign pun, but today, on this day, the day of her mother’s funeral, Ye Olde Bastard’s chrome bumper prickled with rebuke. She, Mary, was too accepting, too flimsy, and too miserable. A more committed sister would have appeared beseechingly weak in front of her sisters and begged for the comfort she so clearly wanted from them. A more committed daughter would have demanded to be seen by her dying mother. A more committed griever would be wracked by the injustice, she would have thrown herself atop the grave site (had there been a grave site) and howled into the dirt until the medics arrived.

  TAKE UMBRAGE!

  She could not. She could not take umbrage. She was too long dull in the heart.

  Because it seemed like a fitting place to go on the day of a funeral, Mary walked all the way to the West Salem Cemetery, a seven-acre square of ill-tended grass and gravel paths pocked with tombstones scorched a depressing carbon color, out of proper use since the eighteenth century but favored by teenagers as a grisly locale in which to smoke pot or drink vodka stolen from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet or read faux-Victorian pornographic novels procured in Boston by someone’s older brother. She and her friends, who used to escape to the cemetery for a between-class smoke, delighted in finding the shredded pages on the grass with sentence fragments such as “he resurrected his aching supplicant” and “languishing her rose-red nonpareil.” After entering the stone gate she found herself searching the uncut grass, the piles of crimpled leaves, the evergreen shrubs for a suggestive scrap of text from which she could extrapolate a beyond-the-grave message from her mother. She’d assumed that Mum had refused to see her in her final weeks because, in her dramatic and, yes, controlling way, she’d intended to have somebody deliver a letter to Mary after she was dead explaining why she’d refused to see her, claiming that she’d forgiven her and wishing her well and maybe—just maybe—claiming to
love her despite it all. The assumption that such a letter existed had kept her from panicking when she’d called her father to inform him she was coming to see Mum, she didn’t care what Mum wanted or didn’t want, and her father had responded, tonelessly, “Not now, Mimsy.”

  Thirty-eight hours later, her mother was dead.

  During the cross-country flight home from West to East, as the ground beneath her turned from brown and bold to brown and flat to crimped and darkly wooded, the world felt unthreateningly alien; from this height she could let the scenery roll under her as a tourist might, without any defensiveness or fear because she did not belong to it, nor it to her. She found the most comfort in thinking that she and her mother were fellow travelers on this day; a chance existed that they could pass each other on the way to their respective new destinations. She examined the cumulus clouds, those speech bubbles of the traveling dead, for any message at all, even an insincere one benignly divorced from the events that colored her mother’s feelings toward her while alive. Goodbye, she imagined the clouds were saying as she fell asleep, her cheek pressed against the window. Goodbye.

  It was dark by the time she returned to Rumney Marsh, all the downstairs lights, save for the kitchen light, extinguished. She sat on Ye Olde Bastard’s curb and smoked her second cigarette, trying to observe the house as a perspective buyer might, as a box of happy potential and not as the saggy-floored, rotting-silled container she saw, listing slightly toward the scrubby rear yard, bogged down to a structural breaking point by her family’s many material and emotional residues. In three days, her father would move to his golf condo. The historical society was coming with a truck to collect the auction items. Then the house would belong to her, at least until it sold. She would be its interim caretaker. She articulated her choice to live in the empty house to her quasi-boyfriend, a Beaverton cabinetmaker she’d been dating for seven months: I feel badly for the house. This was true. While she couldn’t cry for her mother, she became idiotically tearful when she thought of the house abandoned by the people and the things that had afflicted it, lovingly, for the past thirty-two years, as a cool parade of buyers weighed its flaws against its promise.