by Mona Simpson
“You are right, I think. And I always thought Marion was middle-aged. You know, you didn’t expect her to change much.”
Then of course I knew they were talking about Marion Werth. I’d wondered a second when they said Hat and Glove Heaven. Marion Werth had run the Saturday afternoon charm school. The Joker stopped for a moment, reached down for a miniature carrot. Her nails were long and bright red. I was noticing nails now, since the manicure. Mine were still good but I’d bitten on the plane. On the ends, I’d bitten the polish off.
“Well everybody got to figuring,” the Joker went on, “and we realized that she was probably just out of college when she started here. It’s true she was ensconced but she was only here what, fifteen, twenty years tops, she just got involved. She really rose in the library. She had couple of promotions first year so by the time we really knew about her she was prettinear running the whole thing, but she could have still been not too far past forty.”
“Callie Hanson his name was,” the Greek man said. “I offered to have him checked out, see if he was just a ragtag person.”
“Who?”
“Him.”
Merl Briggs lifted one of the cherry tomatoes to her mouth and snuck it in with a kind of hurry. She felt shy eating her own food, like it wasn’t for her too. Marriage to the richest man in Racine had never really rinsed away that.
So Marion Werth had run off with a guy. Good for her, I thought, good for her. Callie Hanson.
“How did they meet, anyway?” I said.
They all looked at me. I shrugged. Two people started to tell me at once, and then Letitia Skees stopped talking, out of deference to the superior wealth and status of the Joker. “Well, you know they had a program with the monastery. Bookmobile. And she went in once, twice a month to bring them the books. And I guess they all said he sought her out to find out about his family tree. He was adopted, see, and he wanted to find out who his real mother was. And I guess he was a reader too like she was always and pretty soon they started reading the same book every week and talking about it I suppose and before anyone knew it, he quits the seminary and they run off to California. I guess he inherited some money from a grandmother or somebody, and they went out there to buy a farm. Turns out he had always wanted to be a farmer. She called in from Santa Rosa to the library on a Monday to say she wouldn’t be in. Ever. They were going to raise dates!”
“Had to terminate her insurance and benefits and all without her signature even,” the Greek man said. He had leaned forward, toga taut between his knees.
“And I don’t know if they ever did really find his mother,” Letitia Skees said now, glancing from face to face. “I never heard a thing about that.”
“A date farm, I think it is,” the Joker said. “Different kinds of dates. Everything I’ve heard leads me to believe it’s a pretty small enterprise.”
“Can you just see her on a farm? Ugh,” Letitia said.
“And with her nice suits and shoes.”
“We worry about her,” Merl said, “I really do. You know, a lot of times, we thought of getting together a collection pool and just sending her on a cruise somewhere to meet somebody nice. And now I wish we had done it. But you know it wasn’t the money, we just didn’t know how we’d bring it up.”
“And she seemed to have a full schedule.” That was Letitia Skees, sitting on the edge of her chair, her plump knees trembling with life. A shock of gray hair made a point on her forehead.
“Why sure.”
“Are they,” Emily said, pausing and then with difficulty, “they’re really in love you think?”
“Certainly they think they are,” the Joker said, crossing her diamond-tighted legs, pulling up closer to the edge of the couch. “But I wouldn’t call that love.” That was clearly one of her favorite subjects.
“No,” the Greek man said. “Hormones.”
“Merl?” I whispered. “Can I ask you something?”
“She just threw it all away,” I heard someone say as we stood up and walked away.
In the kitchen Dorothy was preparing the last two phases of the party. Coffee percolated in huge silver serving urns and electric mixers went on their own, one beating whipped cream, the other egg whites. She was lifting tarts, made of wild strawberries and the tiniest raspberries I’d ever seen, onto doily-lined maroon tin platters.
I told Merl about the detective and the box. When I finished, she sighed. “Now where could that be now.”
“Anywhere,” Dorothy said from the other side of the counter. She’d been listening too. “Anywhere on this earth.” To emphasize, she bumped the swinging door with her ass, backing out with the tray of tarts.
Merl Briggs’s head flicked up sharply as a horse’s. “Dottie, no, not yet. People are still eating real food. Wait a half hour to start dessert. Wait till after Tad’s here. His plane should be landing any minute now.” Then she turned back to me, with the air of finishing off something unpleasant but necessary. “Well, this’ll be just the push I need to start organizing.” She laughed, an upreaching helpless sound.
Dorothy mixed the egg whites and whipped cream in a bowl. She left the kitchen first, carrying a new cut-glass tureen of eggnog, then Mrs. Briggs followed, with more grapes and miniature pears, sliced in half with almonds and crème fraîche. I just stayed, by the open back door. It was nice to be alone a minute.
The Briggses always held one odd advantage; just their presence made me listen for the wind and feel the rich seduction of my mother. They made me almost love her. No matter what, no matter what. Proximity to the Briggses seemed so random.
I heard Renaissance music start up in the other room. I still didn’t want to go back in.
“That’s what I heard anyway,” the urgent voice of the Joker carried clearly. “That’s what they told me.”
I fixed on the tray of perfect, broochlike tarts. I wanted one but didn’t want to be seen. Nobody would have minded, but still. I just didn’t want them to see me eat here in the kitchen, by myself. Then Emily came in through the swinging doors.
She grabbed a tart, popped it her mouth. She took two more then and looked at them on her palm while she chewed.
Dorothy returned with trays of ravaged food. Emily, with three more tarts in her hand, opened the refrigerator. Two tarts dropped on the floor, face down.
“She paid a lot for those little strawberries,” Dorothy said, used to it all, “this time of year.”
Emily didn’t answer, she just backed away from the refrigerator, took two more tarts from the tray and put them over each of her eyes. She reached her arms behind her head and began contorting towards the floor in a backbend.
“Spoilt child.” Dorothy bent down the usual way, picking up the ruined tarts. She did what I’d do. She ate one.
Emily was still twisting and coiling, her hands reached the floor, the tarts quivering, unsteady on her eyes.
Dorothy just sighed a sigh that was years long and bumped out of the room carrying a tray of small silver sherbet stems with balls of lime green sherbet. Sherbet to clear the palate was always one of Merl’s touches. You got the feeling she stayed in bed some bad days watching old movies and then styled their household life after them.
“Emily,” I said. She was walking on her hands and legs, hump-bellied, the dress dragging on the floor. “Can you help me find that box with stuff about my father?”
She sprang up, lifting the tarts off her eyes. “Ask my parents,” she said.
She gave that shrug I used to make. She was at home here. She could do anything.
I slipped outside, holding the tuxedo jacket closed in front of me. What a place, I was thinking, and what people to have to need something from. Pat Briggs was a good fifteen years older than his wife. Merl had been the pretty Swedish girl who’d grown up not even in Racine, but in the mud-poor outskirt you could barely call a town, which had a name and little else, Suamico. My mother bought gas there when she’d taught at the out-of-town school she’d had to go to aft
er the Racine School District wouldn’t take her anymore for missing so many class days. Pat had been thirty-two. My mother could have had him. Twice she could have. Most of the prettier girls in Racine could have married Pat. Even rich, he had trouble getting a wife. He had the twitch. Every few minutes his face winced up to the left. And he was bald young, just out of college. Once he came to my grandmother’s house when we were living there and he ate cinnamon toast with us all. After he left, my aunt went around the whole day twitching her face and laughing. My grandmother tried not to smile when she saw Carol’s face. She said, “Shush now, I don’t like to see that.” They said Merl was seventeen when she married Pat, but there was a lot of talk that she was younger even than that. It was all too apparent even for gossip.
“I wonder what she sees in him,” Jen and the girls had said at the time.
“Oh yeah I wonder all right,” Gish said. But even that wasn’t much of a joke.
Pat and Merl provided better jokes in the years to come. The architects. She chased them away back where they came from with her drawn-from-crayon-on-grocery-bag plans of fountains and pillars, the atrium bird room in the foyer, the gilt and gold and torched entry. The architects left on a stormy Tuesday, sitting in the airport in one line with galoshes up to their knees. The rumor was that she told them all to just get out and never would they see a cent more of her husband’s money, but her husband, hearing the story by telephone from Dorothy, had driven out himself to the airport and paid them each double, and in cash, and put them on the plane. Merl got her fountains. Oh, they were still there, I saw them as I turned the corner, dry in the moonlight, and the atrium, birdless now, it turned out Emily was allergic to all feathers. The skeletons of grandeur still lurked, isolate, crumbling, commissioned and made by Scully the stonemason, whose only work before and since Merl Briggs’s statuary was gravestones, enough to keep him in business, but not for the flush of prosperity he’d felt the year her construction first surged and allowed him to double the stone yard and build a new storehouse.
Merl had the big house and she began, sometime in the middle of Emily’s childhood, to fill it. She couldn’t throw away. So the two-car garage now housed no cars. It was a filled rectangular vessel, packed densely from floor to ceiling, side to side. In the back den two decades of empty egg cartons nested inside one another neatly in columns connecting floor to roof. In everything, Merl favored columns. Merl was, in her own way, neat. In the Midwest, I’d known messes. Matzgees on our old road lived in nested filth. But Merl was a collector. She didn’t just let things accrue and grow and mold and clutter. She tended them. She managed. She worked as custodian of a huge museum of worthless everyday things. I liked Merl, really. The empty tin cans she saved she soaked labels off, washed and scrubbed. A long string of maids had left the Briggses. Dorothy still came up the hill Monday through Thursdays, and for parties, but most of the real work, Mrs. Briggs did herself, because no one else, she found, acted with the same care. I’m sure that was true.
As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw a crowd out there in the moonlight, on the stone patio, by the statuary. They were watching something—I couldn’t see what. They looked odd from here, the empty terraced gardens, the cracked stone, the little circle of costumed people. There was the Clown, the Dunce, the Joker, the Queen of Hearts, the Wraith. Someone was juggling white balls, so they gleamed in the dark.
I went back a little so they couldn’t see me and just leaned against the house. Down the hill you could see Racine and its few lights, the dark outlines of buildings along the river, the sinister night lights and smoke of the paper mills. I took a breath and made myself join the crowd. Why, I was wondering, why was that always so hard? I grew up private. We didn’t mix in close with big groups.
It was a man running on a wagon wheel, lit to fire on each end, and himself eating flames. Inside, the old music lifted on. The circle around the fire eater murmured loudly. The moon was full and close-seeming, veined with a crooked line of blue-gray like a map. People’s feet were stamping, they started to clap.
A cute guy in medieval clothes I didn’t know was saying to someone else in a low voice, “The Briggses’ll accept any eccentricity except pretension. As long as you’re yourself.”
That was enough. I climbed the steps back inside. People felt obliged to compliment the Briggses. And it was money. That’s what it was, just money.
I found a phone in the empty den and closed the door to call Stevie Howard. His mother, June, answered and told me the plane was grounded in Chicago, in a blizzard. She was calling the airport every half hour and they still hoped Stevie and Helen and Jane would get in tonight. She apologized again for not having room for me. I told her once more it was no problem, not to worry, and then I hung up and sat in the scratchy plaid chair a moment. I liked being alone during a party. I was thinking how strange it was to be closer to the Howards but stay here, because they didn’t have room. And it didn’t take being that close to the Briggses to stay here. This place was sort of like a compound.
When I went back, I found three old women bent cooing over the puzzle table. “When I was young I was a fancy worker,” Viola Pride was saying. “There’s only so much bridge you can play.” Viola now taught bridge Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
The puzzle they had spread out before them was of the Grand Canyon in lurid colored detail.
Near them Letitia Skees was talking to an old nun, whose chin was kept bound by her white habit, and to the Joker. “I think a man alone is very sad,” she was saying. “A woman is different.”
The nun didn’t seem to be able to hear. Her head nodded along amiably to everything.
“People ask me,” Letitia continued, “if I go out on dates. And the answer is yes and no. I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be married. But I still need touching and hugging like every person does. So I have friendships which give me the hugging and touching I need. I have a friend, we go for breakfast once a week at the bay shore at seven-thirty in the morning and we take a thermos of coffee and we just have breakfast and we sit on a blanket and watch the sun come up.”
“How about you?” I asked the nun. I meant about friendship.
“Oh, me?” she said. “I don’t know.”
“What about you, Sister Maren?” Letitia said. “The girl is asking do you need loving and hugging too?”
“I like to know who’s going up with who,” she said.
The Joker had joined the older women at the puzzle table. They were talking about the chef of the fanciest restaurant in town, La Nuit. “Of course she wants everybody to think she’s French,” the Joker was saying, “but we all know she’s from Belgium.”
Belgian restaurants were a new trend in New York City. I hadn’t been to any but you just could tell from people talking and articles in the newspaper.
Emily stood eating one of my small red bananas. Dorothy was now passing out the raspberry and strawberry gemlike tarts.
Pat Briggs and the woman novelist stood by the mantel over Tom Harris talking to the man in the reindeer outfit, with two pine cones attached to his forehead as antlers.
“You’ve got to let her drive, Mack,” Pat was saying.
Behind me I heard Otto Kapp say clearly, “I am not. I am not afraid of it. Pff. Not at all.”
A group of young boys in white choir robes pushed out from the kitchen then, red turtlenecks poking up to their chins. They formed a triangle on the left of the fireplace, opposite the Christmas tree. The room stilled. They each held one gold bell lifted, shoulder high. The only light in the room was from candles and the fire and the chandelier. Otto Kapp, sandaled and robed as Gandhi, stood before them, arms lifted, and for a long moment drew out the room’s silence like a perfectly rosined violin bow on string.
Tad arrived. Merl and Emily rushed over to him and helped him off with his coat. He rubbed a hand on his stomach and whispered something to Merl and then they all went to the kitchen, where he stayed a long time, eating. When Emily
came back out, she was holding a child’s satin kimono from Tokyo for Tom Harris.
AFTER THE CONCERT, the room moved more loosely. Pat stood talking to his father’s longtime rival, Frank Umberhum, who ran Shauer and Schumaker. Up until recently in the Midwest, the same people owned furniture stores and funeral parlors. The merchandise lines were shown together at the big buying shows, made by the same manufacturers. Pat’s father had had the largest furniture collection in town, at Briggs’s. Now in Racine, there were two large funeral families who also owned furniture stores. Shauer and Schumaker and Van Zieden Grieden. Whether you went to one or the other depended entirely on your family. It was like which brand of toothpaste you used.
“Remember ‘Fish or Factories,’ ” Pat was saying and nodding.
“I sure do. We gave ’em a fight.”
Pat stopped to explain to Tad how he and Frank had lobbied forty years ago to ban PCBs from the Fox River. The paper mills had mounted an advertising campaign in the Press Gazette with full-page ads that said FISH OR JOBS.
“Hey, want to do the Ouija board over by the fire?” Eli Timber asked. “Emily and Danny and a couple of us are going to set the thing up by the dog.”
They were already opening the board in front of Tom Harris’s creche.
Pat Briggs was lifting a cloth coat onto the woman novelist’s shoulder.
“I’m driving,” the Reindeer was saying, wobbly, one of his pine cone antlers awry.
“No you are not,” she said in her tiny voice. Keys threatened in her hand.
“Ann,” Pat said, “Toddy Sullivan wanted to say good-bye to you.”
The Queen of Hearts stood over me with the Dunce. “Excuse me but I just realized who your mother is. And I have a message to you from Ted Stevenson. He says hello and that he’s so proud of you being in medical school and all. He said he was going to write you a letter one of these days.”
“Where is he now?” I asked. “Minnesota still?”
“Oh no, he moved from there some time ago. He’s a professor now in Nebraska. What is it, Edward, is it Wayne State?”
