by Anne Tyler
“We’ve come to visit a Mr. Dower,” Ben Joe said.
“Algernon Hector James Dower the Third,” said his grandmother, still looking intently at the chandelier.
“You members of his family?”
“Raised together.”
“Well, he’s not feeling too good. He’s a bed patient. If you’ll only stay a few minutes …”
“We’ll be quiet,” said Ben Joe.
“Follow me, then.”
She led them through the social room, toward an elevator around the corner. As they passed the other patients there was a whispering and a stirring, and everyone stared at them. “Mr. Dower,” the nurse told them. They nodded and kept staring. The nurse turned back to Ben Joe and his grandmother and gave them a sudden, reassuring smile; when she smiled, her nose wrinkled like a child’s and the spattering of freckles stood out in a little brown band across her face.
“If you’ll just step in here,” she said.
The elevator smelled dark and soapy. It was so small that it made Ben Joe nervous, and he could see that his grandmother was beginning to get that lost look on her face and was twisting her engagement ring. He smiled at her, and she cleared her throat and smiled back.
“Here we are,” the nurse said cheerfully.
The door slid open. Gram bounded out like a young goat, with a surprising little kick of her heels, and looked back at the nurse.
“My, I wish our people were as spry as you are!” the nurse said.
Gram smiled.
“Are those—those are very, um, sensible shoes you’re wearing,” the nurse went on pleasantly. “They must be—”
“I get them at Pearson’s Sport Shop,” Gram said.
“Ah, I see. Down this corridor, please.”
The corridor was very long and silent. It was hard to imagine that such an average-looking house could hold it all. The walls were covered with a heavy brown paper that had columns of palm leaves up and down it, and the doors were of some dark wood. At the next to the last door, which was slightly open, the nurse stopped and tapped lightly with her fingernails.
“Mr. Dower?” she called.
She peeked in, all smiles, and said, “We have company, Mr. Dower.”
Then she looked backed at Ben Joe and Gram and said, “You can come in. Don’t stay long, now. I’ll be out here when you want to go down again.”
They tiptoed in, Gram ahead of Ben Joe. Jamie Dower was lying in a spotless white iron bed, with his white hair fluffed out around his polished little face. His eyes were as alert as when Ben Joe had first seen him, but his breathing was worse; even when he was lying flat now, there was that squeaky kittenish sound that had been there when he’d climbed the hill.
“Oh, young man,” he said, recognizing Ben Joe.
“Hello, Mr. Dower.”
“Who is—”
Gram stepped forward. She had her hands folded primly in front of her and she looked very small and uncertain. For a long time she looked at Jamie Dower, taking in every change she must have seen in him. Then she dropped her hands and became brisk and lively, the way she always did at a sickbed. “I look familiar?” she asked him. She flounced over to sit on the edge of the chair beside his bed and smiled brightly at him. “I look like anyone you know, Jamie Dower?”
“A doctor—”
“Oh, no, no.” She twisted out of the white lab coat impatiently and flung it behind her. “Now?” she asked.
“Well, ma’am …”
“I’m Bethany Jane Chrisawn!” she caroled out loudly. The nurse came swiftly to the doorway and put one finger to her lips, but Gram was watching only Jamie Dower. “Now you remember?”
“Bethany …”He raised himself up on one elbow and stared at Gram puzzledly. For a minute Ben Joe held his breath; then the old man’s face slowly cleared and he said, “Bethany! Bethy Jay Chrisawn, that’s who!”
Ben Joe breathed again, and Gram nodded smugly.
“Bethy Jay!” the old man roared.
“Mr. Dower, please,” the nurse said.
“Well, I’ll be,” said Jamie Dower. He lay back down and shook his head as he stared at her. “Bethy,” he said, “you surely have changed some.”
Gram turned around and beamed at Ben Joe. “I told you,” she said. “Didn’t I? Before we even left the house I said to Ben Joe, I said, ‘I bet he won’t recognize me.’ This is Ben Joe Hawkes, Jamie. My grandson. He’s the one told me you were here.”
“I’m going,” the nurse called across to Ben Joe, barely mouthing the words. She trilled the fingers of one hand at him, gave him a warning look, and vanished.
“Never thought you’d still be alive,” Jamie said.
“Why, I’ll be! I’m younger’n you are.”
“Well, I know that. I know.”
He tried to sit up higher, and Gram reached behind him to pull the pillows up.
“You’re looking good, Jamie,” she said.
“That’s funny. View of the fact that I’m dying.”
“Oh, now, you’re not dying.”
“Don’t argue, Bethy Jay. Your word against the doctor’s and I’ll take the doctor’s any day. Yes sir, I’m dying and I come to die where I was born at, like any good man should. Not that I’d recognize the damn place.”
“Language, Jamie. You’re right, town has changed some.”
“Sure has. This your grandson, hey? You got married?”
“Well, of course I got married. What’d you think?” She sat up straighter and glared at him. “I married Lemuel Hawkes, that’s who.”
“Lemuel Hawkes?”
“Why, sure.”
“That kind of chubby guy whose voice wasn’t changed?”
“Well, by the time I married him it was changed,” Gram said. “Good heavens, Jamie.”
“When I knew, when I knew—” He laughed, and the laugh ended in a wheezy little cough. “When I knew him he was sending away for all kinds of creams and secret remedies, that’s what. He had this kind of black syrup made by the Indians, you’re supposed to put it on your throat and lie out in the moonlight with it, and it was guaranteed to give a manly vibrance to your voice. A ‘manly vibrance,’ that’s the exact words. Only his mother found him lying under the clothesline and all she could see was something dark and wet all over his neck, oh, God—” He choked and choked again and still laughed, with his little wheezing breaths pulling him almost to a sitting position.
“When I knew him,” Gram said firmly, “he sang bass in the Baptist choir. Had his own business, and—”
“Did he have a little sort of pot above his belt? With his navel sitting on it like a button on a mountain? Oh, God—” and he was off again, laughing delicately this time so as not to choke.
“And,” Gram said, “I married him and had four girls and a boy and all of them healthy. Lemuel he died after the children were grown on account of having influenza, but the children are all alive to this day excepting Phillip, who passed on due to a combination of circumstances. And he left behind him seven children, Joanne Ben Joe Susannah Lisa Jane Jenny and Tessie and a wife and a granddaughter Carol who is just as—”
“Let me say mine,” the old man said. He struggled up higher against the pillows and folded his hands across the sheet. “While making bed linens in New Jersey I married my secretary though of good family and not just an everyday secretary, mind you, and to my grief she died having Samuel our son—”
“You’re not married any more?”
“Don’t interrupt me. You always were one to interrupt me. I raised him honest and respectful and first he kept books—”
“A bookie?”
“A bookkeeper, for our company and gradually rose to an even higher position than I ever had. He has now got a wife and six healthy children Donald Sandra Mara Alex Abigail and uh, uh, Suzanne and one of them—”
“I got a grandchild named Sus
annah,” Gram said.
“One of them, I say—”
“How’s she spell it?”
“One of them went to Europe!” the old man shouted joyfully.
“Is that so!”
“Summer before last, she went.”
“My Susannah is spelled kind of like ‘Savannah,’ Georgia,” said Gram. “Only it’s Susannah.”
“Well, mine’s not. It was Sandra that went to Europe. She got to see the Pope.”
“The Pope!” Gram’s mouth fell open. “Why, Jamie Dower, you haven’t gone and become a—”
“Oh, no. Oh, no. But she went with this touring group, her and her aunt, and the itinerary said they could have an audience with the Pope. The family came to me and asked what I thought of it; they ask me about everything important. And I said, ‘Sandra, honey,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what do. You go visit the Pope and then right after that, the very same day, you go see a Protestant minister too. And encourage him in his work and all.’ Only it turned out the touring group had to move on before she could track down a Protestant. She was heartbroken about not keeping her promise.”
“Did she sell the clothes the Pope blessed her in?” Gram asked.
“Oh, yes. Excepting her shoes. I think it’s good to keep something he blessed her in, just in case, you know.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said, “remember what I said about keeping it short, now. If you could be thinking about drawing your visit to a close …”
She was standing in the doorway with her hands pressed neatly together in front of her, and when they looked up she smiled. Ben Joe, leaning silently upon the window sill, nodded at her. When she was gone he turned back to look out at the view, but Gram and Jamie kept on staring blankly at the place where she had been. Their faces seemed crushed and pale. Finally Gram forced her bright smile again and began anxiously working her dry little hands together.
“Urn, Jamie,” she said. “Do you remember the time your cousin Otis bought a wild horse?”
“Horse?”
“I was thinking about it while watching a Western the other night. He bought this wild horse that couldn’t nobody tame and rode off on it practically upside-down, the horse was bucking so bad, but he was waving his scarf and shouting all the same, with your mother and your aunt on the porch watching after him and crying and wringing their hands. And after dark he came back safe and sound and singing, with the horse so polite, and dismounted into the sunken garden and broke his leg in two places. Oh, law, I reckon I never will forget—”
“You know,” said Jamie, “I just can’t recall it.”
“Well, it came to me out of the blue, sort of.”
He nodded, and for a minute there were only the kitten squeaks of his breathing.
“Then I reckon you remember Grandfather Dower getting religion,” he said finally.
“Not offhand I don’t.”
“Sure you do. Along came this revivalist by the name of Hezekiah Jacob Lee, preaching how nothing material is real and things of the spirit is all that counts. He only stayed for some three days of preaching, but Grandfather Dower, he latched right on. Gave up his swaggering ways and his collecting of old American saloon songs and went around acting unfit to live with. And one day, after Hezekiah Jacob Lee had been gone about a month, Great-Aunt Kazi got stung by a bee on the wrist knob and naturally she went to Grandfather, him being a doctor, and he stamped his foot and shouted, ‘Don’t bother me with your material matters; put mud on it, woman!’ when suddenly he frowned and his eyes kind of opened and he said to her, ‘Why,’ he says, ‘why do you reckon Hezekiah Jacob Lee went off and left me holding the bag this way?’ And what a party there was that night, with alcohol floating on the garden path—”
“I declare,” Gram said, “it rings a bell, sort of. I just vaguely do remember.”
They were quiet again, thinking. Jamie Dower drew the edge of his sheet between his small, brittle fingers.
“About all that’s left now is Arabella,” said Gram.
“Arabella.”
“Your cousin, the fat one. Auntie Adams’s little girl.”
“Oh, her.”
“I don’t see her much,” Gram said. “She was always kind of a prissy girl.”
“She was. She was at that. She went to study in Virginia, I remember, before I’d even left home. We heard from her regular but stopped reading her letters.”
“It was on account of her mother, I believe,” Gram said. “She was the same way. Told Arabella to watch out for germs in public places. Every letter Arabella sent us after that sounded like something from a health inspector. All these long detail-ly descriptions of every—You remember that? Auntie Adams finally wrote back and said she would take Arabella’s word for it, but I don’t recall that Arabella paid her any mind.”
“How about her brother Willie?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, he was prissy too. That whole section of the family was prissy.”
“No, I mean, what is he doing now?”
“Oh. Well, he’s dead. He died about a year ago.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And of course Auntie Adams is dead. She died.”
“I remember someone telling me.”
“All that’s left now,” said Gram, “is Arabella.”
They both started at a place in Jamie’s blanket. Behind them the door cracked open softly and the nurse poked her head in and said, “About time to be saying our good-bys now.”
“Do you remember,” Jamie said suddenly, “do you remember that funny old L-shaped bench that sat on your front porch?”
“What color was it?”
“Green. Dark green. Forest green, I think they call it. Us kids used to sit all together on it in the summer afternoons and eat fresh peaches out of a baskety box. Remember?”
“Well, no.”
“I do. I do. You-all were having Hulda Ballew as your maid then, and it was she that set the peaches out for us to dice up small with sharp kitchen knives and eat in little bitty bites, the boys to poke a bite on the tip of a knife to some girl they liked and she to bite it off, dainty like, on summer afternoons. You got to remember that.”
“Well, I don’t,” Gram said. “I remember Hulda Ballew, but no green bench comes to mind.”
“You got to remember.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said.
Something in her voice made Gram know it was time to give up. Her shoulders sagged and she fell silent, but she kept staring at the blanket.
“Say bye to our guests, Mr. Dower.”
“I’m coming,” said Gram. “We’ll come back, Jamie Dower. If you want us.”
“That’ll be right nice, Beth. Funny thing,” he said, looking at her suddenly. “You were such a fat little girl.”
Gram patted his hand on the sheet and then stood up and left the room, so suddenly that she took all of them by surprise.
“Well, good-by,” said Ben Joe.
“Good-by, young man.”
“You take a nice little nap now,” the nurse said. She pulled the venetian blinds shut and then tiptoed out of the room behind Ben Joe, closing the door behind her. “He’s not well at all,” she whispered as they walked down the hall. “I don’t know how he lasted this long, or managed to get here all by himself.”
“Hush,” Ben Joe said. They were approaching Gram, who stood waiting by the elevator. The nurse nodded without surprise and clamped her mouth shut.
When they were out in the car again Ben Joe said, “Put on your coat, Gram, you’ll catch a cold.”
“All right, Ben Joe.”
“You want me to turn the heat on?”
“Oh, no.”
He started the motor but let it idle while he watched her, trying to think whether there was something to say or whether there was even any need for anything to be said. Her face, with its clown’s coating of rouge, told hi
m nothing. When he kept on watching her, she folded her arms across her chest and turned away, so that she was looking out of the window toward the home. Ben Joe let the car roll out into the street again.
“That house,” Gram said, looking back at the home, “wasn’t even here when Jamie Dower was born.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t even here when we were growing up, did you know that? They hadn’t laid the first brick yet. They hadn’t even dug the foundation yet. There were only trees here, trees and brambly bushes with those little seedy blackberries on them that aren’t fit for pies, even—”
“I know. I know.”
She grew silent. He didn’t know what her face looked like now. And he didn’t try to find out, either. He just looked straight ahead at the road they drove on, and kept quiet.
12
On the wall behind the silverware drawer in the kitchen was a combination blackboard and bulletin board, frayed at the edges now from so many years of use. Ben Joe stood leaning against the refrigerator with a tomato in his hand and studied the board very carefully, narrowing his eyes. First the blackboard part. Jenny’s great swooping handwriting took up half the board:
Eggs
Lavoris
Contact lense fluid
Who in this family wore contact lenses? He frowned and shook his head; he felt like a stranger. Under Jenny’s list his grandmother had written, in straight little angry letters:
Chewing gum
And then came Tessie’s writing, round and grade-schoolish, filling up the rest of the board right down to the bottom:
What shall we do about it? I will think of somthing. What I want to know is, how do you think?
He switched the tomato to his left hand and picked up the piece of chalk that hung by a string from the board. With his mouth clamped tight from concentrating, he bent forward, inserted an “e” in “somthing,” and then stepped back to look at it. After a minute he underlined the “e” twice and then dropped the chalk and reread the whole message. Something about it still confused him.
