The Lost Mother

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Thomas couldn’t understand why his father didn’t just smack the grin off his face. One quick left and a right. Pow-pow! Instead, he was handing Thomas the chair and picking up the cot. Meekly. Like the whipped man he was, worn down and grim, averting his gaze as he slunk past Farley and this idiot barn man who reeked of the stalls he’d just been mucking.

  “No! Because I saw them! They were there all right!” Thomas declared. “The tire was out back of the tent, and the boning saw, that was … that was there too! You’re lying, the both of you. You’re nothing but liars. Damn liars!”

  He couldn’t remember where anything had been. Adult possessions in a boy’s life were vague objects that existed, but in some other realm of consciousness.

  “Thomas!” His father’s hand clamped over the back of his neck. “Get in the truck!”

  “But they are! They’re—”

  With that whimpery outburst his father shoved him along, then one big shoe snagged the other and he staggered into a heap by the side of the truck.

  “Don’t you ever do that again, ever, you hear me?” his father called over the engine.

  “But they were, they were lying!” he cried as the truck pulled onto the road. “And you let them. You didn’t do anything!”

  Thomas’s head snapped back as his father wrenched the truck sharply onto the soft shoulder.

  “What? What can I do?” he bellowed, eyes wild for an answer. “Go ahead, tell me! Tell me! Don’t you see? There’s nothing I can do! Nothing! Nothing, goddamn it. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing,” he groaned into his arms over the steering wheel.

  Time resumed its vapory flow with one day lasting the length of a week and four gone in the wink of an eye. Their stay at Gladys’s was wonderful. Except for old Bibeau, of course, but even his foul moods were endurable with good food and clean clothes always available, not to mention real mattresses to sleep on. In the evenings after Gladys finally got her father settled for sleep in his parlor bedroom, she and Thomas would play bridge at the kitchen table. Margaret busied herself cutting pictures out of the old Montgomery Ward’s catalog Gladys had given her. Each night Margaret would arrange her dozens of beautiful ladies, handsome men, and pretty children into various families. Their names were forever changing, but she would never admit as much. She would insist that this blonde lady in the polka dot dress had always been Norma. He and Gladys would tease her and say they distinctly remembered that last night she had called her Annabelle. No I didn’t! she would insist and, if in one of her mopes, might come close to crying.

  Thomas was learning he had to be the one to change the subject. More than kindhearted, Gladys almost seemed to care for them in a way their mother never had. But there was a ferocity in her attention that could be as overwhelming as it was comforting. She was a strong woman who met life head-on. She said what she meant. And meant what she said. Sometimes her forthrightness left a child like Margaret flattened in her path. Sensitive as he was to Margaret’s pain, there were times, however, when he had to admit he enjoyed her misery. She’d always been spoiled. But no more.

  The scouring efficiency of Gladys’s ways was rough enough on Margaret, but old Bibeau was deliberately cruel. Gladys only meant well, but her father seemed to delight in upsetting the little girl. Little Miss Priss, he called her. Out of the way! he’d warn, then let go a gob of tobacco juice into the tin can by his bed. One day he missed and it hit the tatted antimacassar on the chair arm. Gladys had gone into town for his medicine, leaving the children and the old man to mind each other. Everything he needed was bedside, well within arm’s reach: water, his plug of chaw, the thunder jug. With his sight too weak for reading, his only entertainment was watching out the window for the occasional car or truck, or, even rarer, a neighbor to pass by. Gladys had put the radio by his bed, but its staticky transmission with his poor hearing made it a difficult companion. To hear anything, he’d have to turn it up so loud that no one in the house could think. Most of his contemporaries had died and the few left had never liked the sour old man anyway, certainly not enough to come fill his idle hours. According to Gladys, the chickens had come home to roost. He was getting back just what he’d given, not a kind word or deed for anyone. The one man he’d ever liked was young Henry Talcott, who had always treated him with respect. On the frequent occasions of old Bibeau’s bilious eruptions, Henry had taken it in stride, both as a boy coming to play with Gladys and now as a man, down on his luck and needing shelter.

  The old man had never forgiven Henry for betraying his “plug-ugly, but decent daughter” for a woman like Irene Jalley. “Nothing but a painted face and a wiggle when she walks,” he had come right out with it at the time, telling Henry if he married Gladys instead of Irene, the farm—every acre, down to the last inch of dirt—would be his. “You don’t even have to have those kinds of feelings for Gladys and I’d be surprised to hell if you did,” he confided. For that there was always a quick trip to Albany. Henry said he was sorry, but he couldn’t do that. No, no! the old man had grabbed him and thundered. Let her do what women do when that happened. The most important thing here was loyalty; rejecting Gladys was the same as rejecting him. Not only had he trusted Henry like a son, taking him in after his father left, but through all those years of Gladys’s spinsterhood had assumed Henry would marry her. Why else did Henry think he’d been allowed “full access” to her. As if she were one of his cows in heat, Henry must have thought, for he was as angry as he was insulted for Gladys. Henry told the old man he should be ashamed of saying such things about his own daughter. The old man hauled off and backhanded him across the mouth. “You’ll pay for that, you jackass, you stupid jackass!” he bellowed as Henry stormed off.

  Most of the acrimony between old Bibeau and his father Thomas wouldn’t understand until he was grown. One thing seemed clear to the boy now. All of the old man’s bitter hope for revenge had appeared in the form of these two children. Margaret heard it first from the kitchen where she was mixing flour and water for paste. Thomas sat on the porch steps whittling with his knife. It was okay to let the shavings fall where they might when they were living in the tent, but Gladys had ordered all whittling to be done outside. The bell clang-clang-clanged, but Thomas ignored it. Whatever it was, the old man could wait a minute. Suddenly the door banged open and Margaret burst outside screaming. A shiny brown splatter ran down her dress.

  “Look what he did!” she cried in disbelief, plucking the wet bodice out from her chest. “He spit on me! He did!”

  He had rung the cowbell and ordered Margaret to clean the chair arm doily before Gladys saw it. If Thomas wasn’t so mad, he might have been amused at the old man’s imperious assumption that finicky Margaret would ever go near his mess, much less touch it. “That’s disgusting!” she had told him, cringing from the soiled doily. And with that the next stream hit her right across the chest. He had done it on purpose, though he would deny it later to Gladys, claiming instead that the girl had barged in on him right when he was spitting. With Margaret gagging in the kitchen while she pulled off the stained dress, Thomas marched into the parlor. Old Bibeau’s open pajama top revealed the waxy yellow skin on his sunken, bony chest. His head trembled as he tried to fix Thomas in his filmy gaze. He demanded that the boy earn his keep and clean up the chair. Thomas knew better than talk back, especially when the insult to his sister had been far greater. Behind him Margaret was insisting they leave. Thomas said he’d clean the antimacassar, but first the old man should tell Margaret he was sorry. Sorry, the old man repeated, almost eagerly. Thomas practically had to pull his sister into the room. Wheezing, the old man strained up one elbow. Instead of being pitiable, his feebleness was repulsive, creepy the way it emphasized the great effort it took to wage such cruelty. Instead of apologizing he asked why the hell they weren’t with their mother.

  They would be soon, Thomas said, secure in the lie as long as his father did not acknowledge his brief possession of the water-stained letter. Soon as she could, he added. Of all
the ways a child keeps safe, easiest is the lie no one dares refute. You mean she’s coming back? the old man said quickly. Thomas nodded. So then the old man told the story of taking Henry Talcott in and raising him along with his daughter, certain that one day Henry would reward him and do the right thing by marrying her. To that end old Bibeau had taught him a trade and sold Henry the land he’d built his house on. “And you know how he paid me back? By knocking Irene Jalley up, that’s how. So the way I look at it is I’ve given all I’m gonna give. So don’t be telling me to say sorry. I’m the one should be said sorry to. And now I want you out of here! Now!” he yelled, pointing as they backed out of the room. “And keep on going! Get outta here! Get outta my goddamn house, go on, you little bastards, the both of you—”

  They were moved out by morning. The argument between Gladys and her father was bitter and quick. She stormed from the room and slammed the door. The cowbell clanged and clanged. The old man hollered her name on through the night until hoarseness paled his outrage to a rasp.

  Even in the driveway she begged Henry to stay. He knew how unpredictable the old man was; he’d probably already forgotten what he’d said and why. Henry said he was sorry, but he couldn’t do that to the children. Or to her, he added. “You’ve got a tough enough job as it is, Glad. No need of me making it worse.” He patted her hand.

  In a way Thomas was sad they were leaving. He really hated old Bibeau now, and though he didn’t know for sure what it all meant, saw through the fire in his father’s eyes that it was vile. But now they had nowhere to go. It was too cold with a snowy skim of frozen ground to go back to living in the tent. His father still didn’t have enough for rent.

  “Here.” Gladys tried to give him three dollars, but he wouldn’t take it. “For God’s sake, Henry, it’s just a loan.”

  “Well, hold on to it then. If I need it I’ll ask you for it.”

  “Just so you’ll know, Henry, I ran into Phyllis Farley yesterday. She was asking all kind of questions about the kids and didn’t I think they’d be better off with a family that could take proper care of them.”

  “I hope you damn well told her I do take proper care of my children!”

  “Of course I did! But then she said what a hot-tempered, coarse man you are.” Upset as Gladys was she couldn’t hide her amusement. Thomas squirmed, envious of their easy banter. His father talked to Gladys in a way he never had to Thomas’s mother. His father and Gladys always found humor in the same things, while his father had usually been closemouthed at home, and his mother usually resentful. Was this why she had gone away? Had it been Gladys?

  “And what’d you say to that?”

  Gladys burst out laughing. “I said, ‘So? He still gives them proper care.’”

  “Thanks for the hinds-end compliment,” Henry called with a wave as he drove off.

  When they came into Atkinson they passed a For Rent sign on a porch, and Thomas groaned.

  “What’s that for?” his father snapped.

  “Nothing.” He didn’t want to go back to the big town school where everyone thought they were better than the country kids.

  Margaret was happy. “Look!” she called, pointing out the window. “The church, that’s where Mommy took us, remember? And the park, remember we had a picnic and we listened to the band play up there in the bandstand!”

  It was all he could do to keep from pinching her. How could she be so happy to be back in the very town where their mother had abandoned them? Because she was stupid, that was why. That, and the fact she didn’t know the half of what was really going on here.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right out,” his father said grimly as he pulled in front of Aunt Lena’s battered gray bungalow with the purple shutters, half of them missing slats.

  “Oh no!” Margaret watched their father trudge up the weedy path, then pause on the top step to rub the back of his neck. “Don’t!” she gasped, willing him back to the truck. “Please, don’t.”

  “Yeah, and it’s all your fault!” Thomas poked her leg hard and she yelped, then cried, wanting her mother back. Why did Mommy do this? Why did she go away and leave them like this, she wept into her hands.

  “Because of you!” he spat. “Because you’re a mean, bad girl and she couldn’t stand being near you anymore. Nobody can,” he continued as the door opened and Aunt Lena appeared, clutching the front of her bathrobe closed, squinting blearily out at the truck. “You always ruin everything for everybody.”

  6

  “Aw, they’re okay. They’re nice kids, Max. And that little Margaret, now you gotta admit, she’s hot as a pistol, hon. A lot like her Aunt Leenie, don’t you think? Cute as a button. I was just like her. Here, look … look …,” tumbled Aunt Lena’s blowsy voice up the stairs through the dark. She’d been drinking since they got home from school. Maybe all day. So unsteady was she that Thomas had had to help her cook supper. Something fell with a thud.

  “Jesus Christ. Can I just read the paper?” Uncle Max grumbled.

  “Just look. Look a minute. Look at this picture. See? That’s me in front. Wasn’t I pretty? Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I, Max?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Irene and me, you know what they called us?”

  Paper rustled with a turning page.

  There was a pause, brief as a slap. “The It girls!” she cried, hard on the course of her dogged nostalgia. “We had so many boyfriends, we couldn’t keep ’em all straight, who belonged to who, we—”

  “Shut up, Lena, will ya?”

  “Well it’s true. We—”

  “Go to bed, will you just go to bed?”

  “No! I feel like talkin’, and you’re—”

  “All right then, I’m leaving. Is that what you want?”

  “No! No, don’t leave! Come on, Maxie! Please! Please don’t go!”

  Just like the night before, the door closed and Uncle Max was gone. Everything had seemed all right their first few days here. Uncle Max made little effort to make them feel welcome. He wasn’t mean like old Bibeau, just uninterested. If they had to be there, fine. Just keep out of his way.

  Uncle Max was a preoccupied man. His marriage to Aunt Lena was held together by her ownership of the house they lived in and his reliance on her increasingly sporadic income. Once considered the best beauty parlor in town, LENA’S operated out of her winterized sunporch with two chairs and the latest perm and coloring techniques. But life had gone sour for Lena. Max hadn’t turned out to be the adoring husband such a sultry woman deserved. Worse than not finding her in the least bit amusing, he had little interest in her physically. But then again when they finally did get married Lena had been deep into her thirties and thickening around the ankles and waist.

  Everyone knew the marriage was an empty one, a sham really. All it ever took was a few sips for Lena’s tumbler of troubles to spill over. Max’s latest stake in the future was a wealthy older lady whose long ailing husband just couldn’t seem to die. Even Max had expressed concern, “as a friend of the family,” to Dr. Creel about the mounting cost of the old gent’s round-the-clock nursing care. The scandal, like so much else, existed on the periphery of Thomas’s awareness. Gladys had been one of the old man’s nurses before her own father took sick. Certain people deserved her professional discretion, but as Gladys had told Thomas’s father, Max Lessing was a snake.

  The more Max stayed away, the more Lena let herself go. Then, she would struggle up from her boozy depths to a four-, maybe six-week run of perfect sobriety. Her “ladies” would return. The money would cover enough of Max’s gambling debts to make life good. But little by little she’d start getting the blues again, hearing all the talk of other women’s children and the cute, nutty things their husbands were always saying. “Excuse me,” she’d say slipping into the bathroom, where the brown glass flask lay in the bottom of the hamper. In the past year the last of her ladies had stopped coming. Lena blamed the times; things were bad all over.

  “Beauty is a terrible curse,” she wa
s telling Margaret now as she brushed snarls from her hair. “It’s like a magic spell, but then it starts to wear off and you look in the mirror one day …” Her voice trailed off, as it often did.

  Thomas was beginning to recognize when it was time for her trip into the bathroom. Sure enough. The hamper lid banged against the wall, then closed with an even more heedless bang. Even Margaret could tell now. At first she had enjoyed her aunt’s silliness, but last night long after midnight she had crawled into Thomas’s bed. The terrible sobbing from Aunt Lena’s bedroom frightened her. She’s just drunk, that’s all, he said, pushing his sister nearer the edge, away from him.

  This morning Aunt Lena had been sleeping when they left for school. Actually Thomas had been grateful. She was usually so jittery first thing in the morning that everything she cooked she ruined. Yesterday it had been burned oatmeal. Ever since they’d been home from school today she’d been struggling to make it up to them. First, she tried to sew a button on Thomas’s cuff, but got so many needle pricks in her fingers that she’d gotten blood all over his best shirt, the one Gladys had given him. He put aside his homework and finished the job himself. Now she wanted to set ringlets in Margaret’s hair. Margaret waited in the chair while the curling iron heated. Aunt Lena came out of the bathroom smiling. She stood over Margaret a moment looking confused, as if not sure what to do next.

  “Was my mother beautiful when she was little?” Margaret asked. She looked tiny under the soiled yellow cape over her shoulders.

  “Oh yes! She was such a pretty little girl. I used to dress her up. I’d tie ribbons in her hair and bring her everywhere. She was my little, little dolly girl, my pretty little …”

  Margaret’s eyes raised, waiting. Aunt Lena had paused midsentence, the brush still in Margaret’s hair.

  “Does she write you letters?” Margaret asked.

  Aunt Lena blinked. “Who?”

  “My mother.”