The Lost Mother

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “No. You can’t. You can’t stay here.”

  Margaret began to cry. Irene touched her daughter’s shoulder, less a gesture of comfort than of resignation.

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why can’t we?”

  She looked at him, finally. Her lovely mouth parted then trembled shut for a moment. “You must be hungry,” she said in a shaky voice. “I’ll get you something to eat.”

  They had been with her for two days. She seemed happier, even laughing the way she used to whenever Margaret said or did something funny. “Oh! You remind me so much of Aunt Lena when we were little.” They were playing old maid at the parlor table, and Margaret had just dropped her cards.

  “I do?” Margaret seemed disappointed.

  “Oh yes, she was always so impatient. So clumsy about certain things.”

  “I’m not clumsy.” Margaret set the cards down.

  Under the table Thomas gave her a mindful nudge.

  “In a cute way,” Irene tried to explain. “That’s all I meant, Margaret. Really. You’re not clumsy in the way you do things. But … well, in the way you act sometimes, that’s all I meant.”

  Margaret pushed back from the table. “I don’t want to play anymore,” she announced.

  “In the way people think of you,” Irene called after the footsteps hurrying up the narrow back stairs. “It’s endearing,” she said, looking now at Thomas. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” She quickly drank the rest of her tea. Margaret’s footsteps clomped overhead. He was glad. Now it could be just him and his mother.

  She had left them alone for an hour this morning while she ran errands. They were to sit quietly and not answer the door if anyone came. She had returned with beef from the butcher for the stew they had just eaten and molasses for the gingerbread cooling on the windowsill. She stood up with her cup and saucer. “I sent Aunt Lena a letter today,” she said on her way into the tiny kitchen.

  “You did?” He followed her to the doorway. The kitchen was little more than a pantry with a sink and stove. The ice-box was in the back shed. The one bedroom, hers, was just off the tiny parlor. For the last two nights he and Margaret had slept in an iron bed in the windowless, steeply pitched attic room above.

  “You have to go back. You can’t stay here.” As she spoke she kept busy, drying knives, forks, spoons with careful scrutiny of every blade, tine, and hollow, scrubbing with her towel. “It’s not a good situation. I’m all by myself. It wouldn’t work. I just couldn’t do it.”

  “But we’d be good. I swear, I promise. We wouldn’t get in trouble and I … I could help. I could bring up the coal and run all the errands.” He looked frantically about. “And sweep and clean, and I can mind Margaret until you get home from work. I did that all summer, and anyway we’d be in school so we wouldn’t be that much of a bother.”

  She shook her head and continued wiping, their three glasses, three plates. Even these were too much bother for her, he thought.

  “I can do that. I can wash the dishes and dry them and put them away. Here, I’ll do that.” He reached for her towel.

  She turned away and buried her face in the towel, crying softly.

  “Don’t send us back. Please?”

  “You don’t understand,” she finally gasped. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  She was right. He didn’t understand.

  In the morning he and Margaret ran downstairs to warm themselves at the parlor stove. Refreshed by sleep Margaret had either forgotten or forgiven her mother’s criticism. She was very happy. She wanted to play outside. Three girls lived in a brown house on the other end of Kressey Court. The middle one was about Margaret’s age. Yesterday afternoon, from the window, she had watched them playing ball and jumping rope. This morning she intended to go out and introduce herself, she told Thomas. He reminded her that the girls would be going to school. Well, when they came home, she said.

  Irene emerged from her bedroom wearing a green dress with a wide lace collar and matching cuffs. It wasn’t at all like dresses she used to wear, Thomas noted.

  “Oh, Mommy, you look so pretty!” Margaret touched the lacy cuff. “Where are you going?” Margaret followed her into the kitchen, where Irene ladled oatmeal into bowls for them. “Are you going to work?” Margaret persisted.

  She wasn’t going anywhere, she said. As a matter of fact someone was coming today. A friend of hers. Coming here.

  Carrying the sugar bowl, Margaret followed her to the square table in the corner of the parlor. She wished she could get dressed up too, Margaret said. Would it be a tea party like Mommy had gone to once at Mrs. Farley’s with the Grange ladies? No, Irene said. She poured warm milk over their cereal, then set the pitcher on the blue sideboard. The furniture, like the little cottage itself, was painted in vivid colors. The whimsy of green doors with yellow moldings, rose window casings, and violet sills was actually an economy of leftover paint, dregs of the many cans in the caretaker’s shed, Irene had been quick to explain when Margaret declared this the prettiest place she had ever lived in. It seemed to Thomas that his mother was always pulling them back to earth.

  It wasn’t a tea party, Irene was saying. Just a visit, that was all. Mr. Dexter would be coming by in the afternoon. And when he did, the minute the doorbell rang, they were to run straight upstairs and stay there, quietly, without a sound until he was gone. Why, Margaret asked, disappointed. Thomas was relieved, but puzzled.

  “Because. Because I said so,” Irene told her.

  “But why?” Margaret badgered. “Doesn’t he like kids?”

  “Because,” Irene answered. “Mr. Dexter owns Kressey Court. All these houses are his and he’s agreed to let me stay here. Not my children.”

  “Why doesn’t he want us here?” Margaret asked, getting on her mother’s nerves once again, Thomas could tell, her snappish little voice persistent as ever. “He doesn’t even know us!”

  “Please, Margaret,” Irene said distractedly. “Just eat.”

  “We don’t break things. The whole time we were at the Farleys’ we never broke anything. Did we?”

  “Well, nothing important anyway.” He wiggled his nose to remind her of Jesse-boy’s battered nose.

  “Nothing much he means.” Margaret giggled.

  “You make the best oatmeal,” he told his mother before Margaret could say more.

  While they ate, their mother moved about fretfully, straightening doilies, plucking infinitesimal motes of lint from the upholstery, raking her long fingers through the fringe to smooth the dog-eared carpet flat. She was very quiet. She had a lot on her mind. They too grew quiet and watchful. As the day went on the weight of Mr. Dexter’s impending visit pressed as heavily upon them as her.

  Before the doorbell was even rung, the clang of the iron gate announced the visitor.

  “Upstairs! Go now! Hurry!” She shoved them up the steep, narrow stairs. “Sit quietly,” she called then closed the door below.

  Knees drawn to their chins, they sat on the bed. Margaret exhaled, expecting her breath to vaporize in the air the way it did in early morning, but the afternoon sun lay full on the eaves. Below them a man was talking at length. His voice droned like a faint rumble beneath the rough floorboards. If Irene did say anything it was too soft to hear. Every now and again they could make out a few words. Fingertips splayed against the floor, Thomas hung partway off the bed, listening. Mr. Dexter was telling about a party he had attended in Boston over the weekend. Apparently at his brother-in-law’s.

  “… much too lavish though, considering the … rather amazing how desperate Archie is to keep up … even had his … kept thinking about you … got this for you …”

  “Oh, Louie! Thank you!” Irene said, the details of her gratitude murmurous and indistinct.

  “What’s she saying?” Margaret pestered from above. Not tall enough to hang down to the floor, she had wearied of being waved off for quiet.

  “… don’t have much time …” Mr. Dexter
said.

  Irene’s voice answered, trailed off. A door closed.

  “Did he leave?” Margaret whispered.

  “Shh!”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Shh!”

  “Let’s go down. C’mon!”

  “No, listen.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something, I don’t know.” He dangled over the musty mattress, listening, straining to hear the not unfamiliar rhythmic struggle that was more vibration now than sound to his blood-pulsing ears.

  “Is that him? Is he laughing?” Margaret whispered.

  “No.”

  Voices gone, all sound ceased. Something cold and dagger-sharp hung in the air. If he moved it would destroy everything. There was only uneasiness, that moment of revelation when all is understood though nothing is known. Yes. Of course. But what? The violation was too vast. It changed everything.

  “Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” Irene counted as she brushed her daughter’s hair. The silver brush had been his gift, the etched mirror bearing Margaret’s reflection part of the set. Irene’s cheeks were flushed. She was happy, laughing easily at Margaret’s imitation of old Bibeau bellowing at Gladys for being so homely she’d never find a man. “Poor Gladys,” Irene sighed.

  “She never even wears lipstick,” Margaret said, gazing back at her mother.

  Thomas knelt on the floor moving jigsaw puzzle pieces around. He was sure some were missing, but there was nothing else to play with. Now that Margaret had her mother, she had no need of toys or games. He felt excluded from their easy companionship.

  “She’s got hairs on her chin.” Margaret shuddered. “And she even wears men’s boots.”

  “Gladys was never very feminine. She just didn’t care about those things,” Irene sighed again.

  “She’s a good cook.” Thomas sat back on his heels. “And she knows how to fish.”

  “Yes.” Irene glanced at her son. “I’m sure she does.”

  “Old Bibeau told Daddy he should’ve married Gladys. She never would’ve run off, he said.” Margaret’s prattle was belied by the steadiness of her gaze.

  Thomas leaned closer, peering at the pieces. The blues and whites were all the sky, but there was no way of telling where the sky began and where it ended.

  Early the next morning they went to the grocer’s with their mother. Their appetites amazed her. She had forgotten how much food two growing children required, she said, uneasily counting the coins in her cloth purse. Thomas asked if she had enough. Enough to be concerned, she answered in her perplexing way where nothing was clear or tenable. There was still their five dollars, but to admit that might only buy them two tickets back home. Even Margaret was unaware of the bulge in his instep.

  After enough days cooped up in the cottage together, Irene had finally relented. She let them go out to play. If anyone asked, they were to say only that they were visiting. Under no circumstances could they say they were her children. It wasn’t allowed. Please, she said closing the door; they mustn’t betray her.

  It was very cold, but they were glad to be outside again. Neither one had mittens; Margaret had left hers in the crazy man’s car. They walked through the patchy circle of dead weeds that made up the courtyard. In a U-shape around it, the houses stood close together, closer than any back home, all owned by the Dexter Mill Company. Three were rented by supervisors and foremen at the mill. A worker whose hand had been mangled in one of the mill’s machines occupied a house. One stood empty. Set back and smaller than the others was their mother’s cottage.

  They had ventured as far as the busy street beyond. Here, people spoke a different language and lived in three-story tenements even closer together than the houses on Kressey Court. Italians. Thomas nudged Margaret as two ancient women in long black dresses passed by. A basket of red and yellow peppers dangled from one woman’s arm. Margaret asked Thomas if they were apples. Italian ones, he told her confidently.

  Children began to pass them. School had let out. Thomas and Margaret turned, enjoying the steady stream around them. When they got to Kressey Court some of the children were already there. Two younger boys ran around the courtyard whacking shriveled pods off the milkweed stems with sticks. A cluster of girls watched Thomas and Margaret approach. The tallest girl was very skinny. The first to speak, she asked if they were from the cottage. Grinning, Margaret said they were. But they were just visiting, Thomas was quick to add. That’s all, just visiting. Who? the girls asked in unison. That lady in there? the taller girl asked. Yes, they said with Margaret grinning, exhilarated as much by their rapt attention as by the secret they kept.

  “Is she nice?” one asked with a wary glance at the cottage.

  “Oh yes, very nice,” Margaret said with Thomas nodding.

  “We can’t go over there,” the smallest one said.

  “Her name’s Miss Talcott,” another said.

  “No, it’s—” Thomas caught himself. “It’s Irene.”

  The gray sky was lowering. All was drab and dingy, all but the pale blue cottage.

  “The shady lady, that’s what my father calls her,” the youngest one said. The others were uneasy. They’d better go. They had to get home.

  Mr. Dexter was a very nice man, she told them. She enjoyed talking about him. Thomas stiffened into silence whenever she did. Her cheeks pinkened and her eyes glowed just saying his name. Louie, she had called him that day, but to them he was Mr. Dexter. Mr. Dexter was letting her live here until something better came along. What was that? A better situation, she said. A job? Well, something that suited her more. What did she mean? She had first heard about the mill from that Mr. Hemmings. He’d passed himself off as one of the bosses, when he was only a salesman. That had been disappointing enough when she got there with just the few things she’d been able to fit into her little suitcase, but then she found out how difficult working in a mill could be. Too many rough people. It hadn’t been a good situation. Mr. Dexter had come into the office one day when the head bookkeeper had been screaming at her. Swearing and saying the most vulgar things. She had made the mistakes, but only because she had misunderstood his accent. Ordering him to stop, Mr. Dexter took her aside and tried to calm her. She couldn’t stop crying. She was sorry, but she wasn’t used to their system, all the double entries and confusing postings. Or to such coarse people, she would later confide. Maybe she should go back home. Where she came from, people were plain and hardworking, but they showed respect for a woman. They knew how to treat a lady. The way she told it, it sounded like a fairy tale.

  The gingerbread had never risen, but they ate it anyway. She made applesauce pudding so sour they curled up with stomachaches all through the night. Every day she hurried to the mailbox, but there was no letter from Lena. Mr. Dexter came again, midafternoon as before, his visit, this time, longer, harder for Margaret to endure in stillness on the attic bed. She whispered how bored she was, how she couldn’t stand it a minute more. The silent ruckus over, the door opened, closed again. His voice droned below.

  “I hate that smell,” she whispered as the rich cigar smoke seeped through every crack and seam. “I’m going to sneeze,” she warned and Thomas pushed a pillow into her face. She pinched his arm. Enraged, he pinched her back as hard as he could, angry with her and his mother, but she couldn’t cry out because he pressed down on the pillow. Grunting, she kicked her legs and flailed her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he hissed, lifting the edge of the pillow.

  “I can’t breathe,” she gasped and tried to free herself. “You’re smothering me!”

  “Shh. Shh!” He lay next to her and begged her not to cry, to be quiet so Mr. Dexter wouldn’t hear them. So they could stay. She wanted to stay, didn’t she?

  She covered her mouth and cried, sobbing into her hands. He stared up at the cold glints of sunlight through the gaps in the frosted roof boards.

  12

  Mr. Dexter visited two or three afterno
ons a week and never came weekends. On the sofa table next to his cut-glass brandy decanter was a green marble ashtray. Yesterday’s half-smoked cigar was still in it. The colder the cottage grew, the worse the cigar smelled. Thomas offered to dump it out in the ash bin, but Irene said she’d take care of it in a while. Actually, she liked the smell, she admitted.

  “It stinks.” Margaret held her nose.

  “That’s because you’re young.” Irene moved her red checker forward. She had come home with the board yesterday. “You won’t think so when you’re older,” she said with a little smile.

  “Yes, I will.” Margaret leaned over the table, watching.

  Irene reached up and patted her cheek. “You’ll see.”

  “See what?” Thomas made his move.

  “Well, that things change. From when you’re young, that is.”

  “Did you like the way cigars smelled when you were like me?” Margaret asked.

  “But I wasn’t like you, Margaret,” Irene said absently.

  “Yes, you were!” Margaret stood so quickly the board shifted. She was crestfallen. “Everyone says so, that I look just like you.”

  “What I meant was in some ways we’re very different. You’ve always been such a happy little girl, and … and I never was.”

  “I’m not happy!” Margaret protested.

  “Yes, you are. You’re so sweet and outgoing. People have always loved that about you, Margaret.” Irene leaned back and held Margaret’s hand.

  “I just do that,” Margaret said. “So people will like us.”

  Irene’s mouth opened, but nothing came out for a moment. “People like you,” she said weakly. “They like the both of you.”

  “No, they don’t. They never want us around much. Like old Bibeau. He didn’t like me too much, but he liked Thomas. And then some people like me, but they don’t like him, so then I try and make them like me even more so we can stay.”