by Rhian Ellis
“But she says the mother was in touch with him for at least a year after he left here. There were postcards, and apparently some phone calls.”
I’d sent the postcard, of course, but the phone calls were impossible. I nodded, though, fixing the look of concern on my face. They said they came up with my name through a friend, a Nelson Karp.
“So, anyway,” said Peterson. “We don’t have any real good reason to think Mr. Morton’s our John Doe, but we’re checking it out. The sister isn’t real eager to dig him up, so to speak. They didn’t get along too well.”
“Right,” I said.
My mother brought in the coffee. Her face was gray.
The police took just a few sips of their coffee, then shook our hands again and thanked us. They’d be in touch.
“And Mrs. Ash, you let us know if you have any of your ‘hunches,’ right?”
My mother nodded mutely.
They left, and I was alone in the living room with my mother. I drank my coffee very quickly, letting it burn my mouth.
“Peter,” said my mother.
I was shaking, so I set the mug on the floor.
“Naomi,” she said. “What was his middle name?”
“I don’t…”
“What was his middle name?”
“Samuel,” I whispered.
She nodded. She knew this. “Peter S. Morton,” she said, folding her hands and looking past me, out the window.
The room seemed cold. I pulled the hem of my dress down as far as I could, tried shifting it around to cover more of my body, but I still felt naked. My stockings were torn. The wig slid onto the floor.
9
she was more than a glimmer
I kept some of Peter’s things. There was his wallet, which I took from the back pocket of his khaki pants before I buried him. In it was five hundred eleven dollars—five hundreds, a ten, and a one—and fifty-three cents in change. I never spent any of it. There were several cards: his Princeton student ID card (he was growing a mustache when it was taken, an awful, smudgy-looking thing); his New Jersey driver’s license (grimacing at the camera, his hair tall and bushy); a Visa card that had expired in 1989; a business card for a used-book store in Hollington. My business card was in there, too, for some reason, perhaps because of the phone number he’d scrawled on the back. It wasn’t my phone number. A few months after he died, I called it. It was a pet shop in Wallamee. Was he thinking of buying a pet? Or did he meet someone who worked there? I had no way of knowing. The wallet was well organized, no receipts or paper clips or handfuls of pennies. There were no photographs of anyone, either.
I had his wristwatch, too, which he wasn’t wearing before he died. He might have been getting ready for bed before I came over to my mother’s house, where he was staying. I found it in the bathroom, on top of the toilet tank. It was an expensive watch, I could tell; I vaguely remembered Peter telling me it had belonged to his grandfather. It was gold, with fine hands and Roman numbers and a dark leather band. It stopped running after a day and a half, because no one wound it. I also kept his glasses, the lenses so thick they made me dizzy to look through, and a pair of his wool socks, a pencil, a third of a pack of chewing gum, his comb, his razor, a tube of athlete’s foot cream, his nail clippers, some keys to I didn’t know what, a few books, and a pair of binoculars.
All this, except for the binoculars and the books, I kept in a box under my bed. It was one of those Christmas gift boxes, covered with teddy bears in Santa hats, about a foot square. I tied a red ribbon around it and hid it behind some shoe boxes and rolled-up blankets. The door of my bedroom was always locked, but the box never stopped making me anxious. The rest of his stuff—clothes, mostly, and some of the books—I put in taped-up paper bags with some rocks, then I rowed out to the middle of the lake and dumped them. I’d have preferred to burn them with some leaves and yard waste I’d collected from my mother’s yard, but leaf fires had been prohibited here since the thirties, when one set a whole neighborhood of Train Line on fire. For months afterward I worried about the bundles, and found myself scanning the shore for signs of rotting clothes and swollen books every time I went out. But I never found anything.
I used the binoculars. When I was a little girl I had a pair of plastic binoculars I got in a box of cereal, and though things appeared rough and blurry through them, they did work: they brought the distant close. For two or three years before she died, my grandmother played double bass in an orchestra. I used to bring the binoculars to the theater when she played, and by squinting a little I could even make out her expressions. It was, in general, a stiff and gloomy orchestra. The violinists sawed away liked carpenters, the horns squealed, the triangle had bad timing. My grandmother, heaving over her double bass, was the only musician who ever moved or swayed. I don’t know if she was any good or not, but to me she looked good. I imagined the others were angry at her, resented the way she emoted, thought her a big phony. I worried a bit that she was a phony. Still, hearing the music and watching the way it translated across my grandmother’s face was one of the first things that actually moved me as a child. It was almost too difficult to watch, but fascinating, too. At home, my grandmother was as stiff and gloomy as anyone. It was as if my cheap plastic binoculars let me see inside her, and what I found there betrayed her.
Peter’s binoculars were, of course, top of the line. They were sleek and black and oiled, and had a delicious, pharmaceutical odor. They came in a case with a little maintenance kit: a set of fine cloths and a small spray bottle full of glass cleaner. The smooth leather strap felt good around my neck, and I liked the way they bumped heavily against my chest when I wore them. No one asked where I got them, but if they had, I’d have said that Peter left them for me. That was, essentially, true.
If I sat on the dock at the end of Fox Street and looked out over the lake with my bare eyes, I could see the shapes of houses and buildings in Wallamee. The downtown was a few blocks inland, but I could make out the long blue roof of the Italian Fisherman, where my mother and Darva Lawrence used to go for lunch, and the broad orange back of the Catholic church, and some boathouses and cottages. There was often a bluish haze obscuring the far shore. If the weather was clear I might just be able to see the shapes of people or cars. I had good vision.
But with Peter’s binoculars, I could see everything. Birds, flying across the water, looked like cutouts from a field guide: one-dimensional and detailed and precise. I could see the way every leaf on a tree on the other side of Train Line moved independently of the others, and even had its own shadow. Grass and weeds and peeling paint looked beautiful and delicate through the binoculars. The lake, I realized, never stopped moving.
I could even see in windows. Usually it was hard to distinguish much: maybe a vase full of flowers on a sill, books propping open a casement, an arm or face moving past. There was a row of apartments in a converted warehouse near the restaurant in Wallamee, and they fascinated me. I often thought that if I’d had a different life I might live in an apartment like one of these. Some had window boxes, and all had unusual seven-paned windows. Inside they had white walls and dark wood molding and, from what I could tell, Murphy beds. The idea of hiding my bed during the day delighted me. I didn’t like the look or smell of beds, and I thought I’d like to live the kind of life in which they were invisible. In the very end apartment there was a woman who looked a little like me. She had similar long dark hair, and was stocky, too, though her hair was curlier than mine and she was shorter. Sometimes I saw her sitting by the window, reading or eating. She had a white cat who spent a lot of time sleeping on the windowsill, and a strange piece of art on the wall: a black-and-white mermaid holding a big red heart. A man was in the apartment sometimes. He was better looking than Peter and appeared to talk a lot—his hands were always moving and gesturing. I was deeply jealous of the woman and watched her often. But one day in the spring I spotted her and her boyfriend looking out at the lake with a pair of binoculars, too. By the w
ay they moved them I could tell they were bird-watching: some geese were on the lake that day. They passed the binoculars back and forth, pointing and exclaiming at the dull brown birds. They didn’t see me, but they could have. Soon after that I stopped watching her. It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting caught spying, but knowing the woman had the power to watch me, and didn’t, made me feel as if what I was doing was boring and sad.
I continued to watch other things, clouds and leaves and water and birds, but I was tired of people.
The summer I met Peter it thundered every afternoon. It reminded me of New Orleans, it was that hot. All day long the clouds above us would gather and threaten, and by three or four it might break into storm. There might be lightning and ripping thunder and tremendous, sudden winds. But more often the clouds would just continue rumbling on into evening, and by the time the sun went down the sky would have broken up enough to let the last of the sunlight stream through. It was portentous weather.
By the time he missed the train and decided to stay in Train Line, it had cooled off, and hurricanes wandering away from the southern coast swept the tips of their long arms over the county. It rained and rained. I moved out of my mother’s house and rented two rooms from Welchie Pratt, and Peter got his room at the Silverwood back. During the fall he worked off part of his rent doing painting and repair work around the hotel, and when it closed up for the winter in late October, he moved in with me.
We were happy for a while. At least, I was. Welchie Pratt went to stay with her invalid sister for several months, so we had the house to ourselves, and I spent a lot of time painting and fixing up my séance room. I never had more than three or four readings a week in the fall and winter, though, and I didn’t work at the library yet, so Peter and I could sleep late and make each other elaborate breakfasts. He had been a vegetarian before, but now he ate bacon and pork chops and steaks. “This,” Peter said often, “is real life.” He liked going for long walks along the lake, breathing in wood smoke, watching wild turkeys and grouse through his binoculars. He sometimes brought books with him, and more often than not ended up in Maxwell’s, reading and drinking Irish whiskey. He’d come home with cold cheeks and hot, sweet breath, and we’d have sex against the living room wall. This ended when we ran out of money.
I hadn’t realized how much I had depended on my mother to support me. In the summers my mediumship brought in scads of money, and so did hers, and we were not excessive people so money was not much of a problem—ever. Of course, she owned her house, and that made a big difference. Our rent wasn’t much, but my earnings barely covered it. I told Peter he needed to find a job.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ve been planning on it.”
But he couldn’t find one. He wouldn’t mind doing something with his hands, he said, but since he had no experience, the few construction jobs left by that time of year went to other people. He said he couldn’t work in a store; it would depress him too much, and I had to admit it was hard to picture him selling things, ringing up change, smiling when people were rude to him.
He decided to start a tutoring business. He drove to the Super Copy in Wallamee with a five-dollar bill I gave him and made posters, hung them around town, and waited for the phone to ring. It did, eventually, but only three times. He saw each of these students once a week in our kitchen. Two were high-schoolers needing help with calculus, so Peter read a Calculus Is a Snap! textbook from front to back one weekend. The other was a woman going back to college after fifteen years who needed help with her papers. This project energized him for a while. It didn’t bring much money in, however. One evening we were sitting in the living room with the heat off, trying to eat spaghetti sauce on bread, when Peter broke down crying.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” he moaned, putting the food on the floor and covering his face with his mittened hands. We were bundled up, blankets to our chins. I didn’t mind so much. My mother and I lived this way, on and off, during our first few years in Train Line. It appalled Peter, though. He couldn’t believe it when the telephone was disconnected. “How can they do that?” he kept asking me. “What if there’s an emergency?”
He cried for several minutes, and though I thought I should comfort him, something held me back. His sobs were broken and cracked; they staggered, faltered, collapsed.
I listened to him awhile, and when he quieted down I asked him something I’d been meaning to ask for some time: didn’t his family have money? And if that was the case, shouldn’t he have a little, too?
They did, he said, catching his breath, hiccuping, but his share wasn’t coming to him until he was twenty-five, almost three years off. And there was no way he’d actually ask any of them for money, he added roughly.
We ended up borrowing money from my mother to get through that crisis. Over Christmas I made a bundle at a psychic fair and got a store in town to sell gift certificates for readings, and that helped, too. But it was an endless winter. It was cold for long periods, so cold that the snow squeaked underfoot, and if Peter cried outside, his lashes froze together. The sun might come out just long enough to start the snow on the roofs melting. The icicles were the biggest I’d seen: some like stalactites reaching all the way to the ground, some like frozen waterfalls. Icicles built up so thickly along our porch roof they became a wall of ice. “Like living in an ice castle,” I told Peter, whereupon he took the crowbar lying by the door and smashed the ice to pieces.
In different ways, and for different reasons, Peter and I both became obsessed with death that winter. It started with a riddle he told me. We were standing on the heater, a two-foot-by-three-foot grate that got hot enough to melt the rubber bottoms of my slippers, but not Peter’s, which were leather. Outside, a blizzard raged.
“So,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself. “A man is found dead in a locked room. Windows and doors have been locked from the inside—the cops had to break the door down. There are stab wounds in his chest but no sign of a weapon anywhere. The only other thing about the room that’s slightly out of the ordinary is a glass on the bedside table filled with pinkish water. How did he die?”
“I give up.”
“Come on!” he said. “Try!” Peter had acquired a somewhat manic look in the last couple of months: his hair was out of control, and his eyes darted. Sometimes he forgot to shower.
I thought for a while. The heat billowed up my nightgown. “Really, I have no idea. I’m going to go make some corn bread, if you don’t mind.”
“Suicide, there’s a clue.”
“I still have no idea.”
“He committed suicide by stabbing himself with an icicle. Before he died he put the icicle in the empty water glass, where it melted.”
“I should have got that. It’s horrible.”
“It’s my favorite riddle,” said Peter. He skipped supper that night and spent the evening in bed, where I found him several hours later, asleep with his face in a book.
Then, maybe two weeks later, a child died in Train Line. I didn’t know him well. He was a six-year-old named Brian Robinson and was related in some way to Winnie Sandox. He’d spent Christmas here, and on the day the accident happened—it was a few days after New Year’s—he was playing in Winnie’s yard, building a snow fort. It was one of those cold but sunny days we’d had on and off all winter. The sun warmed the roofs of Train Line just enough to allow a giant pillar of ice to loosen itself from the upper story of Winnie’s house. The ice slid down the porch roof and landed where the child was playing. He didn’t die right away. He lay unconscious in the snow for perhaps half an hour, his skull fractured, and when they brought him to the hospital and warmed him up, his brain swelled. He was in a coma for a week before he died.
It was an awful thing. There was a memorial service in the lecture hall, attended by the eight or ten households who were there that winter—more than usual had left town, it seemed. I went with my mother. Ice covere
d the small high windows, and even with the huge oil furnace roaring away while we prayed, we could see the breath gusting from our open mouths. Peter stayed home.
When I got back to the house he was drinking whiskey. He never got violent when he drank, but he would, occasionally, become argumentative. I was angry that he’d spent our money on whiskey but decided not to bring it up.
“Why is it,” he asked, while I hung up my coat and hat and mittens, “that, if mediums really believe what they preach, they still freak out when someone dies?”
“They don’t ‘freak out.’ ”
“You’d think, if death were so great, that mediums would go around offing themselves whenever they got in trouble, or in debt, even. I mean, if the only difference between this plane and the other is that you can’t bring your stuff with you, it’s kind of like declaring bankruptcy. See what I’m saying?”
“No, I don’t.”
“No one has a memorial service for you if you declare Chapter Eleven.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” I said.
It did upset me, though. It was clear that spiritualism had lost whatever temporary charm it had held for Peter. He’d begun hiking across the frozen lake to go to Wallamee’s miserable public library every couple of days or so; it took him an hour and a half each way. He said he was reading magazines. “My mind’s gone to hell,” he said. “I can’t concentrate. I can’t even handle the freaking New York Times.”
But that winter, my faith in mediumship was stronger than ever. Every morning I woke up, usually cold, usually hungry, but terribly excited about the work waiting for me that day. The more I thought about death—death in the concrete, I mean, death as in being crushed by ice, as in being stabbed by an icicle—the more important spiritualism seemed to me. It was so important! Believing, as I was sure I did, in the spirit world, I was kept from thinking that life and death were without meaning. Peter didn’t have that. Living in the half of the house we rented was like living in a cave, or a coffin, to him.
