Gladys and my father had two boys two years apart, Honus and Henry Jr. Gladys named Honus after her father. It was the first I knew old Bibeau ever had a real name. He died a year after we got back from seeing our mother. Died in his sleep and did one good thing in his mean life, left his house and the acre it stood on to Gladys. We moved back there and, no matter how hard things got (which was hard for a long time after), my father would never take out another loan from anyone for anything for the rest of his life. If we didn’t have the money we went without. And if it was really needed we saved up first.
No one ever knew Honus and Henry Jr. were born illegitimate because when Dr. Creel delivered them he checked the box for Married. Didn’t matter to him. (Or maybe he just never knew. Nobody else did.) My father and mother never did get divorced. Strange in a way, and yet what was there to be divorced from? I suppose in his mind it ended the day she left, but just as he couldn’t tell us that or why until that snowy morning in the orphanage office, so perhaps he could not bring himself to make official an act, a state of being he never wanted. Not in his whole life, I think. Not ever. Sometimes, especially when Margaret was a grown woman, I’d see it in his face, how much he loved her. And for the stunning image she had become of her mother.
Such beauty. In my mother’s case was it a curse? A waste? I think so, but I can’t be sure because I never saw my mother again. Or wanted to. I only know what Margaret has told me about her.
Margaret stopped off in Collerton once with her new husband on her way home from her honeymoon in Boston. She told my mother it was a spur-of-the moment decision, though knowing my sister, I doubt it. She called first, from a pay phone around the corner from the cottage. (Lena had probably given Margaret the number. Lena would pester Margaret for years, for rides, money, attention, and Margaret was always kind.) She described the silence at the end of the line when she said her name. A silence that felt, when she closed her eyes, like being back in the tent. Alone. And covered with bee stings.
Margaret. Her mother repeated the name as if trying to place her in the murky context of someone she used to be. Margaret Talcott. Your daughter, she made my sister say. And hearing that, I hated her for the first time. For that unjustifiable cruelty. Because that Margaret was not just her daughter, her lost child to forget, but still my dear little sister. That Margaret would always be more mine than hers. Recovering quickly, she invited Margaret and Brad to come by in the morning. Ten thirty would be good. Margaret explained that they were on their way home and could only come now. Brad had to be back at his base in the morning.
“Well, it’ll have to be now then, won’t it?” she said, trying to sound pleasant though not eager.
It was still that same little cottage. Only to Margaret’s adult eyes it seemed even smaller, tiny. More like a doll-house with everything in place, a bouquet of fading yellow roses the only jarring note. Brown petals lay on the tabletop. One stem was bare, the water brackish and cloudy. Irene poured Brad a brandy and said she was delighted her daughter had married an Army man, adding that her father had been in the Army. Margaret wasn’t sure who she meant, Henry or Grandfather Jalley. The brandy and my mother’s charm warmed shy Brad into talking more than Margaret had ever seen before. When my mother went into the kitchen to get more iced tea for herself and Margaret, Margaret read the card that was stuck in the withered roses.
“Thinking of you” was all it said. The rest of the visit was pleasant, however awkward for all that went unsaid, all the questions my mother never asked, the names she never spoke. Mine. I asked, and Margaret hesitated, but as always, she was truthful and said, “No, but she only did when I brought someone up. She’d ask how they were doing and—”
“But you never brought me up, right?” I said, feeling the old edge, the cold, hard barrier rising.
“Of course I did. But she just listened.”
“She never asked anything, not one thing about me?”
“She’s a very unhappy woman, Tom. I could tell. She has a job at a department store. And she’s got beautiful clothes and nice furniture, but she’s all alone and she regrets what she did. What she gave up.”
“She told you that?”
“No, but I could tell. I could see it in her eyes. Even Brad, he said the same thing. She’s got the saddest eyes.”
“Yeah, probably because you stayed more than five minutes.”
“No, Tom, really! If you saw her you’d know what I mean.”
“Well that ain’t gonna happen,” I laughed, but Margaret continued. She was positive my mother was all alone in life. When Margaret had asked (as only Margaret would dare) how Mr. Dexter was doing, my mother said he’d died a few years before. In an automobile accident. We both recalled the stormy night he’d come banging on the cottage door.
“That’s why I think it must have been Dad who sent the roses. And that’s why she couldn’t throw them out.”
“In a million years he wouldn’t do that,” I assured her. “And besides he doesn’t know the first thing about sending flowers to someone.” The poor man barely knew how to make a long distance telephone call. But Margaret was convinced. She said there was something strange about those dead flowers in that perfect little cottage. It was almost as if she couldn’t enjoy them or throw them out.
“So I think he did. Just like I’ve always thought he still loves her,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous! He loves Gladys,” I said, surprised at how angry I felt.
“I know, but sometimes when Dad looks at me I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking of Mom.”
Yes. For how could any of us not? How do you forget your mother? Even if you make that conscious effort, there is still the longing, the almost primitive need. In the marrow, the blood, the genes. What is so very amazing then is how she could walk out on her children and then betray them.
So, no, I never saw her again. When each of my own children were born I was angry and hurt all over again because she had deprived them of their grandmother, even though they loved Gladys, who was surely more fun, hiking and camping and fishing with them, than my mother ever would have been.
Years later, when our mother died, my sister begged me to go to the funeral with her. Margaret’s own children refused to attend the services for a woman who had abandoned their mother. There was no wake, just the funeral mass in a cavernous, nearly empty stone church. We walked the casket down the aisle. We had discussed it in the car on our way to Collerton. Irony or not, we would take, as once before, the little we could of her presence, her body if not her soul. In the second pew sat a few wizened women who had worked with my mother at the department store. They leaned forward, surprised, probably thinking we were some bequest-driven niece or nephew who’d never bothered visiting the poor old woman when she was alive. At the back of the church was a dapper, nervous-looking old man. After the service, he left quickly before the casket came up the aisle. Was he another married suitor? I wondered if there had been many more after Mr. Dexter, each as devoted and as furtive in departure. She must have been a breathtaking companion—for men who couldn’t stay too long or give too much.
When we went to the cottage afterward to go through her few possessions, another vase of yellow roses stood on the kitchen table.
“Thinking of you,” Margaret read the card aloud. “So it couldn’t have been Daddy.” Henry Talcott had died ten years before. “I wonder when they came. Oh look.” She picked up the envelope. “Here’s the date. Five days ago. August twenty-first. Now what’s August? Your birthday. Oh Tom,” she cried, throwing her arms around me. “Oh my poor Tommy. You sent them. And the others too. You did that, didn’t you? It was your birthday and you … you wanted her to know you were thinking of her.”
Margaret had herself a good cry. And I let it go at that. But the selfish truth was, for at least one day a year, I had found a way of making my mother remember me, think about me, and maybe even miss me as much as I have always missed her.
Even as an old man
now there are still moments when I feel that twelve-year-old boy’s emptiness deep in my heart. Part of me will always be that distrustful child, alone, afraid, and sometimes angry for no reason that I can explain. I long ago gave up judging her. I will never know what inexorable needs must have driven her from us. Perhaps it is self-delusion but I have always chosen to believe that her decision was a painful one. I can only pity her for all the love and living she left behind. Children, grandchildren she never knew, now, great-grandchildren.
Margaret got my father to talk about it only once. She said it was late in the day and they were sitting on old Bibeau’s porch watching the streaks of color fade behind the trees with the setting sun. My father enjoyed seeing the new houses built across the road on Farley’s pastures. Mr. Farley had died some years before. He’d been bringing a lost calf out of the woods when he collapsed and died of a stroke not far from our old tent site. A year or two later Mrs. Farley and Jesse-boy moved to Arizona where, according to letters he sent Margaret through the years, unanswered letters, he has become a watercolorist of some local renown.
Whenever the contractor wasn’t on the site my father would walk over and talk to the carpenters while they worked. One hot day he brought ice-cold bottles of Gladys’s root beer and her ham salad and a jar of homemade piccalilli. Gladys said it reminded her of old times, how much he loved sitting around and shooting the breeze at the end of a long day. He was always a better talker with men, she said. With women he’d freeze up. Margaret being the exception, she added. My father had cancer then, but only he and Gladys knew. Six more months, the doctor said. He lasted a year, long enough to see Henry Jr. marry one of the Tillotson girls. It was a big fancy church wedding and the older sister played the organ.
But that day on the porch Margaret didn’t know he was dying, only that he looked old, and frail, and more tired than she could remember. In the warmth of the porch and his nearness she told him all the things I never did, what a wonderful man, a wonderful father he’d been. And how hard it must have been, working night and day while he tried to hold on to his children. And probably his sanity, she added. “Not many men would’ve done what you did, Daddy,” she told him, then took his hand in hers. He didn’t grip back, she said, but let her hold it while they sat in the quiet dusk. He was trembling. Finally, an awful sob wrenched up from his chest.
“It’s a terrible thing letting your kids down. Failing them. And that’s what always hurt most of all. That I couldn’t keep her for you. I couldn’t hold on to her.”
“She didn’t want to stay. It wasn’t your fault. Just like it wasn’t my fault or Tom’s.”
“I begged her to come back. I want you to know that. I did. I said I’d quit butchering. I’d get a job in town, anything she wanted I’d do. And if she liked it better there in a big city like Collerton, well, that was fine too, I’d move in there with her. That very day. The next week, whatever she wanted. I promised her I’d never let anything bad as Jamie’s dying happen to her again, ever. And all she said was, ‘I can’t. I just can’t,’ shivering, like it almost sickened her, the thought of it. Of me. Even Gladys tried. She went in with me that morning. Your mother just sat there, shivering and staring down at her hands the whole time Gladys told her how much I loved her. How I loved her more than any other woman I’d ever known. And by that she meant herself, of course. And I was so broken up then, I never even thought how she felt. Gladys, I mean. I just hope she knows. I’ve tried to make it up to her. She’s been a good wife.”
“And a good mother,” Margaret said.
A wonderful mother.
About the Author
Mary McGarry Morris grew up in Vermont and now lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Vanished, was published in 1988 and was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman (1991) was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year” and was made into a motion picture starring Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, and Gabriel Byrne. Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, and it was adapted for a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges. Morris’s other highly acclaimed works include the novels Fiona Range (2000), A Hole in the Universe (2004), The Lost Mother (2005), The Last Secret (2009), and Light from a Distant Star (2011), as well as the play MTL: The Insanity File.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Mary McGarry Morris
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4807-1
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
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