The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Well, just bring them, too.”

  “Really? I’d like to if it’s all right. There’s not much to do here, and I hate to just leave them—”

  “Bring ’em with you. I’ll give you directions, but it’s easy as pie. Earl, my husband, he’ll be up after a while, and you can meet Mother, too. Lord, Caddie, just think. She’s probably your grandmother.”

  25

  Even downtown, the streets of Clover, Delaware, were only a lane and a half wide, with rutted dirt shoulders for passing. Downtown—ha. Two churches, one gas station, the post office, and a place to buy lottery tickets, that was about it. The rest was Victorian and gingerbready houses, old and not restored, with flat, grassy-green yards only half a step down from the front porches. The big shabby-stately houses gave way within a block or so to smaller ones, also old and mostly frame, painted white, blue, and pale yellow. “Sleepy” was too dynamic a word for Clover, but Caddie liked it. My dad grew up here, she practiced. My father. He grew up in this town.

  “Thank you again, you guys, for coming with me. I really appreciate it.”

  “Don’t mention it. What else did we have to do?”

  “Don’t be nervous,” Magill said. “This’ll be a cinch.”

  “I don’t know why I am—she sounded perfectly nice. I know they’re not going to eat me.”

  “Just be yourself, they’ll be crazy about you.”

  She smiled gratefully. “I hope.” When she’d first told him and Cornel about the phone call, Magill had said, “Caddie Winger, you are full of surprises,” and he’d looked at her with the nicest mix of admiration and sympathy. Cornel had said, “I can’t take too many more of these goddamn revelations.”

  “Turn here,” he instructed. Even now he had to navigate, from the slip of paper she’d written Dinah’s directions on.

  “Here?” Away from town? She steered onto a frontage road paralleling the highway, surrounded by stalky, dry, sawed-off cornfields and far-off houses dwarfed in clusters of tall trees. Mrs. Ernest Holly’s car was an SUV. Caddie wasn’t used to her new, superior relationship to the ground, or to the stick shift, which she kept grinding between first and second. Her nerves were jumping. After talking to Dinah she’d gone back to her room to fix herself up, and the sight in the mirror of her plain old self—except for the highlights, which Magill liked, so thank God for them—had been disheartening. She’d never wanted to look attractive, smart, and full of character more than she did right now, and all she looked like was her usual old self.

  “Should be the next house. I can’t see numbers that far,” Cornel said.

  “Krauss,” Magill read on a black mailbox in the distance. “There it is.”

  Things were happening too fast. She couldn’t take in her surroundings; she couldn’t prepare. Here was a gravel driveway leading up to a one-story frame house, yellow with brown trim, and then beyond it to a green aluminum outbuilding and a parked school bus. The house had a weathervane on top and a Pennsylvania Dutch ornament over the door. Somebody had decorated a leafless dogwood tree in the front yard with plastic pumpkins. Where should she park? Down by the school bus? Here? What if she blocked somebody in?

  Magill started to say, “This is good, right here,” when the front door opened and a woman came down the two steps to the concrete walk. She waited, smiling, her arms down but her palms out, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Rather than grind the gears in front of her, Caddie left the car in third and turned off the ignition. “Well!” she said brightly, for courage. Magill winked at her. She took a deep breath and got out.

  She was only halfway up the walk when the woman, tall and solid-looking, big-boned, with frizzy hair the color of the rusty geraniums in a box by the front door, held out her arms and said, “Oh, Lord, I see Bobby all over you. Come here, darlin’, I’m your aunt Dinah.” She had tears in her hazel eyes. Caddie blinked her own eyes clear and went into her arms, unprepared for the ferocity of her embrace. Dinah pushed her away to look at her—“Aren’t you sweet?”—and then grabbed her back, mashing her against her bosom. She had on a long, scratchy sweater vest with a blouse underneath, green stretch pants, and white sandals.

  “I don’t know,” Caddie said in a tremulous voice. Her hands felt small and childlike in Dinah’s strong grip. “I think I might look like you.” Not the eyes or the fleshy features, but something in Dinah’s smile, happy and sad at the same time.

  Caddie introduced Magill and Cornel, who were hanging back self-consciously, missing nothing but trying not to stare. “Well, hey,” Dinah said, and she hugged them, too. “Come on in, everybody come in, gracious, you all look so hungry.”

  Small, formal living room cluttered with pictures and knickknacks and a suite of matching furniture. “The room nobody ever sits in,” Dinah explained, leading them through it to a smaller room, a den, with a wide-screen TV on one paneled wall and a cluster of lounge chairs and ottomans around it. The TV’s sound was off, captions running along at the bottom. Caddie didn’t see the woman stretched out on one of the recliners until Dinah said loudly, “Mother? Mother, look who’s here. Oh, Lord,” she said in a softer voice, “I don’t think I’ll try to explain it all to her now. Mother—this is Caddie and these are her friends, Mr. Montgomery and Mr.—Magill. They’re visiting. Visiting.”

  She looked like a wizened doll, tiny in the enormous padded chair with her hands folded, feet together in furry white slippers under a knitted afghan. Caddie bent close and put a soft kiss on her cheek. Her hair was white as cotton. She smelled like baby powder. She blinked rheumy blue eyes and smiled a sweet, trusting smile. “Hello,” Caddie said. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

  “Mother doesn’t talk much anymore,” Dinah said softly, “not for a while now.” She smoothed the old lady’s forehead with her hand. “She’s fine—you all come in the kitchen, won’t you, I just baked four pies, I hope you like pumpkin. Sit, sit. Who wants a cup of coffee? It’s just made. Caddie, I wish you could’ve met Mother a year and a half ago, she was sharp as a tack. She lived here by herself, drove her car, went to church, you name it.”

  “How old is she?” Caddie sat down on a stool at a long Formica island opposite the sink in the cheerful yellow kitchen. Magill and Cornel took seats on either side of her. For the rest of her life, she would associate the smells of cinnamon and warm, baking pastry with her aunt Dinah.

  Dinah turned a knob, dimming the lights in a chandelier shaped like a wagon wheel over their heads, and leaned back easily against the sink as if that were her spot, her station. “Eighty-four in January, she’ll be eighty-five next year. The doctor said it was little strokes one after another, taking bits of her mind each time. Earl and I moved in a year and three months ago.”

  “Oh, this isn’t where you live, usually?”

  “Well, it’s the house I grew up in. We’re down in Salisbury, but we came up here when Mother couldn’t do for herself anymore. Long story, but this was easier. She looks little and harmless, but she would not move—but you don’t want to hear about all that. Anybody want ice cream on top?”

  She was cutting huge wedges of pumpkin pie and pushing plates across the counter. “Anyway, here we are for who knows how long, and I got to thinking after you and I hung up, Caddie, it’s a good thing Earl never got around to changing the phone. He’s got his business phone out back, but so far we’ve just left Mother’s name in the book even though she never talks on it anymore—her answering today was most unusual—and if we hadn’t, if we’d had them put Earl and Dinah Krauss, you’d never’ve found us!”

  Mighty good pie, Cornel told Dinah, smacking his lips in appreciation. Even Magill, who usually had to force himself to eat, was making pretty good headway on his piece. Dinah asked how they all knew each other, and Caddie let the men explain it while she and Dinah stole looks at each other, flashing quick, thrilled smiles.

  “I wish I’d brought the letter your brother wrote,” Caddie said when there was a pause. “I could send it to you if yo
u like. It was very sweet. And sad. It sounded like he loved her a lot.”

  “Oh, he did, I know that for sure. Bobby was four years younger than me, so he told me things. We were real close, although I didn’t see him as much after he got so taken up with his bands. Music meant the world to him, he was off from the time he was about twenty, off traveling and playing, trying to hit it big. You know, that big break that was coming any second, just around the corner. And once Chelsea joined up as the singer in Red Sky, why, that was it, nothing was going to stop them.”

  “Did you ever hear them play?”

  “Not in person, not after your mother joined. After that they were moving around so much, it seemed like they were always too far to go, and then of course I had just had my first baby, Sherry, she’s a little older than you, Caddie, but not much. She’d be your cousin. She lives in Dover, has two kids of her own already, she will love to know you.”

  Caddie shivered with excitement.

  “Barbara, our other girl, she’s over in Germany with her husband, you’ll have to wait to meet her. But so, no, I never did hear Bobby and Chelsea play in person, but I’ve got a tape you can listen to, a demonstration he had made for them to try and get a record contract. That never panned out, but your mother sings on it, and Bobby, too.”

  “Oh, my. A recording of them together?”

  Magill squeezed her knee, and when she looked at him, she thought her eyes must be shining the same way his were.

  “What finally broke it up as far as I know is that Chelsea—Jane—wanted to go solo and more into rock and roll, with Red Sky just a backup band. Bobby loved their country sound and thought it should stay Red Sky with a girl lead singer. I think your mother wanted to go off and be Janis Joplin or something, and Bobby wanted a band like, oh, the Flying Burrito Brothers. You won’t remember them, but sort of weird country rock, it sounded like to me.

  “So they split up, and Bobby came back home to regroup. He took a job in construction to make some money while he tried to get another group going. He wrote a lot of songs during that winter, real sad love songs—but he’d always put some humor in, they weren’t corny, you know, they’d make fun of the person who was crying in their beer or whatever. Too bad he didn’t write any of ’em down, I’d give them to you, but he couldn’t read music, he played everything by ear. He could play more instruments than anybody I ever knew, all the different kinds of guitar, and banjo, the mandolin, fiddle, you name it. Harmonica. He was a one-man band. Oh, honey, what did I say?”

  “Nothing.” She’d let a tear fall out of her eye. “I’m a music teacher, that’s all. That’s what I do.”

  “You are?” They shook their heads at each other in sad-happy wonder. “Come on, I’ll show you some of Bobby’s things. You-all want more coffee, would you please just help yourselves. To anything, you know where the refrigerator is. Or watch TV if you want, Mother won’t care what channel.”

  In a narrow hallway, she opened a closet door, stood on tiptoes, and pulled down a white cardboard box. “Let’s go in my room.” Caddie followed her into a bedroom. “Pardon the mess, Earl’s got a project going.” No mess, really, but birdhouses everywhere, on every surface, made of wood or twigs, and some were the kind that was edible—the whole thing was seeds and nuts, and the birds ate the entire house.

  “He’ll be up soon,” Dinah said, moving four birdhouses from the bed to the floor. “Sit.” They sat on the bed. “Mother’s got more stuff in the attic, but this’ll start you off. And of course there’s pictures of Bobby all over the place.” She opened the cardboard box.

  It looked like a jumble at first, papers and letters, loose photos, a baseball, newspaper clippings, ribbons and medals, a birth certificate. Caddie’s hand fell on one of the snapshots, and she gave an involuntary cry. “Is that him?”

  “High school graduation.”

  Long blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, straight-across eyebrows, broad shoulders under a royal blue academic gown. Her father had his mortarboard pushed to the side of his head and the tassel in his teeth, grinning hugely, probably laughing.

  “He was always cutting up, you won’t find a serious picture in here. Look—he’s about two in this.”

  “Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  They were in a sandbox together, Bobby sitting in the V of his sister’s legs, holding a plastic shovel in one hand and a rubber snake in the other. “He’s so blond.”

  “White. And it never turned brown, it was still light-colored when he died. Much lighter than yours, but it waved the same way. You look like him, I swear you do.”

  She still couldn’t see it. She looked at pictures of Bobby on a baseball team, his yearbook pictures, snapshots of him with his friends, his family—“Oh, look at your mother,” Caddie exclaimed, “she was so pretty.”

  “She was.”

  “Are there any of your father?”

  “Not here, but I can find you some. He died before Bobby was born. I barely remember him myself.” She was rummaging through the box. “Here it is, here’s the one you want to see.”

  “Oh, Dinah.”

  “Red Sky. The whole band.”

  “Oh, God. They’re all hippies.”

  “I know.”

  “My mother. Oh, my God.”

  “You can have it.”

  She’d been hanging on to her composure, but that snapped it. Dinah put her arms around her, and she wept on the scratchy wool flowers of her sweater vest until the tide passed. When she pulled away, it was a relief to see Dinah wasn’t exactly dry-eyed, either.

  “How did he die?” Caddie asked, blowing her nose on a tissue Dinah yanked out of a box on the night table.

  “An aneurysm. We thought it was a stroke at first, but they said he probably had it for years and it could’ve happened anytime. It was very fast, that was the blessing.”

  “Do you think he knew about me?”

  “No, I do not. If he did, he’d have told me, for one thing. He never kept a secret, Bobby was open as the sun.”

  “I want to think he didn’t know.” She picked up a small, browning piece of newsprint. His death notice. He had died on January 8, 1973. So they’d been alive together for four months.

  “He’d’ve wanted his own child, ambition or no. Your mother didn’t tell him, I’m sure of it, although I cannot imagine why. Especially if she meant to keep you, because Bobby was steady—maybe too steady for her. He’d tell me some things. Not that she was bad in any way, not at all, but just so young. And not careful. Thoughtless and full of big dreams about herself.”

  “Yes.”

  “So your grandmother raised you, and you still live in Michaelstown? What do you do besides teach music? Come in the kitchen, I want to hear about you.”

  “Did you say you have a tape?”

  “I forgot, it’s in the other room. I used to listen to it every once in a while, but it’s been a long time. Just a sec.”

  She came back with a cassette and a dusty boom box, which she plugged, grunting, into a crowded outlet behind the night table. Caddie watched her, bent over and graceless, her rear end stretching the fabric of her green pants, and she thought, I love you already. I really do.

  “Okay, you listen, and then take as long as you want in here. Come on in when you’re ready, we’ll probably still be eating pie. That one, the young one, my Lord, he looks like a starving crow.” She swooped down for another fierce hug, and then she was gone.

  There were two songs on the demo. Caddie put the tape in the player, then sat still with her finger on the play button, not thinking about anything, just listening to the quiet of her own breathing. Drawing out the moment. She admired the shape of her hand, how long and thin the fingers were, just the right sort of hand for playing a violin. She couldn’t remember her mother’s hands very well. Maybe she had her father’s. As soon as she pressed play, she would hear their voices. His for the first time in her life. What a day.

  She pressed the button.

/>   Electric guitars ripped out a fast, twangy, upbeat intro to the verse—her mother singing about wishing she was home, she’d had enough of the bright city lights. Ha, thought Caddie with real amusement, no cynicism, waiting for the chorus. Here it came—but it was the whole band, and she’d been wanting her father’s voice by itself. Verse again. Oh, Mommy, she thought. She hadn’t heard Jane’s voice in a long time; it was softer and higher than she remembered. And pretty, but not hard or bluesy, not really a rock-and-roll voice at all. Had she wanted to be Linda Ronstadt or someone like that? Her soprano was too breathy and feminine even for this driving song about being on the road too long, missing her sweet someone.

  Serves you right, Caddie caught herself thinking, and in the next instant, Poor Mommy. She felt both sentiments about equally. She must still be angry—odd, she hadn’t known that about herself.

  The second song was a love song. Jane’s voice was just right for this—yes, because, oh God, here came Bobby’s voice, winding the harmony around it. Caddie went blind, lost every sense but one. If she could have, she’d have climbed inside the tape machine. But in spite of her intense concentration, when the song ended she couldn’t remember it. She ran the tape back and played it again. This time her head was clearer, the path between her ears and her brain not as cluttered. She could hear. Well, it wasn’t really a love song. Against the sweetness of the melody, the subversive lyrics made her laugh.

  Honey I haven’t felt this blue

  Since the day before I walked out on you.

  So if you could find it in your heart,

  Let’s do it again,

  Let’s part.

  She wanted more of his voice; she wished she could turn everything else off, like reverse karaoke. She played the song again with her eyes closed.

  He was a tenor. Warm but not trained, a little gruff around the edges. He sounded like a grown man, but he looked like a boy to her in his photos. Well, no wonder: she was older now than he’d been when he died. Sweet hippie boy. In the picture of Red Sky, shot in front of a rusty old barn, he wore faded, low-slung jeans and a collarless Mexican shirt, a belt with a turquoise buckle, saggy suede boots, and a black hat studded with silver stars. It made her laugh, but she pressed it to her heart.