by Jeffrey Lent
Ruth suddenly wanted to flee the room, to be away from all this, to not have any of it happening, but she only swallowed and said, “No, Mother. I don’t.”
Jo writhed upright in her bed, higher against her pillows and then she said, “It was a Heath bar. I had to break it into pieces and hold each piece in my mouth while first the chocolate dissolved and then slowly the toffee, those lovely tastes all the way down. Oh, my. That was delicious.”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “You always liked them.”
Jo looked at her and then said, “That was three years ago. An August afternoon. I’d go back there in a heartbeat if I could but it’s gone. It’s all gone.”
After a moment Ruth said, “Mother?”
“Promise me.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, yes. You can. You have to.”
Ruth held her hands clenched tight before her, twisting her fingers until they ached and she could not feel that pain as she said, “Oh, God. Mother. Don’t you see? It’s not only about you.”
“Yes,” Jo said. “That’s the problem. It’s not all about me but what I fear most of all is when it will be about nothing except me. But without my being able to take part. Or be a part of myself. And that is what I’m not willing to be. And not only for myself.”
As it happened Jo recovered from the pneumonia with a vigor that surprised them all, not least herself. The broken hip and fracture of her pelvis were more difficult, the old bones not so willing to mend, the techniques for replacement of her hip were complicated and finally abandoned because of severe arthritis and calcification of the surrounding joint. Her plan to simply stop eating failed from the simple and surprisingly strong urge of appetite. She was home in time to see the snowdrops and crocus blooming and then the daffodils and the astounding bed of multihued tulips beyond the library window. Where a rented hospital-style bed had been set up, along with a set of tables drawn close, a reading lamp, a bell to summon whoever would be in the house and, finally and against her strong argument, a second telephone had been installed. Incongruously, once she’d agreed to that phone for the rare times when she was alone, she’d insisted on a pink pastel princess phone otherwise popular with certain teenage girls. “Why not,” Jo said. “Everything is frivolous at this point. And perhaps when I do die, it can be a gift to Katey.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it, it won’t,” Ruth had said.
“I’ll put it in my will, then.”
“For God’s sake, Mother. You last wrote a will after Father died.” She was clearing away a mostly full bowl of now-cold beef consommé, dry toast and a bowl of applesauce.
“I can write a codicil,” Jo said. “All I need is a witness. I’m sure for a five-dollar bill passed her way, Mrs. Greene would happily serve that purpose of an evening.”
“I’m sure she would. Mother, won’t you eat the applesauce? It’s your own, you know.”
“Don’t trust it—how old are those jars? Bring me a bowl of ice cream if you would. Coffee, please.”
“You can’t live on ice cream, Mother.”
“Well,” Jo said. “I seem to be. Aren’t I?”
Katey went up afternoons after school and warmed the hopeful supper left by the day nurse, visited with her grandmother when she was awake, did her homework. Ruth came at eight and stayed until midnight when the overnight nurse came. Jo was awake it seemed most of the time but then would slip to a deep staggered sleep, daytime or night. Friday and Saturday nights Katey stayed over with her grandmother—after a determined, almost stubborn discussion with her mother, the girl insisting that when the two of them were alone her grandmother seemed to rouse and would tell old stories or query Katey about her own world, her plans for her life. Ruth had no doubt this was true but nevertheless felt a bit of a pang—it had been so many years since Jo had spoken to her in those sorts of ways. Ruth found herself studying the girl, not only wondering what she shared with Jo but also wondering if in the distant day when Ruth was in need of such care, would Katey offer such kinship and love so freely given? And if Katey would lead a life that would be as close to her mother, as Ruth had with Jo. There was no way to know but somehow Ruth doubted it. There were only hints at the coming changes for the children of this generation so it was the spirit of the girl herself that Ruth studied. Her own daughter, but how unlike her she was, bold and restless, a tucked-in chin of determination yes but eyes that flared also with a fire hidden by placid tones. Or, more recently, not. Ruth had never talked back to her mother this way, never this taut nerve of defiance, as if there was something mildly distasteful that Katey couldn’t name or even voice, perhaps only a dreadful but accurate appraisal of Ruth’s own character. How a child so well known can suddenly seem to become a stranger.
In the end, which came just as the lilacs were rusting, it wasn’t her lack of eating or the secretly planned overdose of hoarded medications she’d secreted in the mudroom drawer but a clot that built within her bedridden body and traveled one afternoon to her brain. The day nurse was with her when the stroke seized her and Jo was dead by the time the ambulance arrived, as much as dead by the time Ruth was there; a slack gray face and body failing response to any touch or voice, any reach from the living. Oliver stood behind Ruth with his hands on her shoulders as the body was wheeled out on the gurney. Katey had stood before the window that looked out on the apple tree, hunched, silent, her face when she finally turned toward her parents a mask of bright anger and sorrow, as if this were all somehow someone’s fault.
The service in the Congregational Church was overflowing which was almost a surprise to Ruth; her mother had been a quiet and retiring soul the last decade of her life and so this abundance of mourners at first felt unseemly, as if people were making an appearance. This impression was strengthened by the new minister, a man on the job for half a dozen years. Ruth sat rigid through the first part and then it came to her that while her mother might’ve grown hidden to the town, the town always had known exactly where she was, who she was, something surely of what she and her family meant within not only the history of the place but its ongoing fabric and Ruth understood this fabric was something she was very much a part of. Now, after all, the bearer of whatever standard, whatever torch, the Hales had ever held and ever would. Jo was buried in the cemetery on West Hill next to Nathaniel and as Ruth stood before the graves on that early summer late morning she understood for the first time that the span of years, just shy of twenty, between the deaths of her parents had not been so great after all. It was her own life that made it seem so.
Ed and Jennie, Jennie probably, had rented the Grange for the reception after the committal and there was an abundance of food, far beyond the usual carried-in hot dishes and cold platters and Ruth felt now as if she were sleepwalking as person after person approached her and leaned to press her hand and speak close to her face, as if these somber and dulcet tones were some strange and lovely tonic. At one point she saw Katey clumped with some other young teenage girls and then the next time she looked for her she was gone. Later, on the short drive up Beacon Hill to home she asked Oliver if he knew where she’d gone and he’d only said, “Likely where she needed to be.” Ruth let that go, not even wanting to probe but then an earlier thought returned and she said, “All of that, back there at the Grange. That was lovely of your parents. But it seemed so much.”
He drove, his jacket sleeves a bit short so his white cuffs protruded. He said, “It’s what people do, Ruthie.”
At home she made a pot of tea and then was suddenly deeply exhausted and went upstairs to their bedroom and, still formally dressed, removed her shoes and stretched atop the covers in the bright afternoon. When she woke it was late evening and the sun was streaking low bars of gold down the wall across from the bed and for long moments she had no idea where she was or what she was doing. And then it all came back to her.
The great shock was that there was no money. Not that Ruth had been expecting it, in the sense of having plans for an
inheritance. Simply she’d assumed there would be something beyond the house. But as it turned out, in important ways there was even less than nothing. Not only were there the hospital bills and the home-health nurses to be paid but the house itself was a bit of a shell, a facade of something resembling what it once had been. After meeting with the lawyer and learning these bare bald harsh facts, Ruth had sat with Oliver of a late evening in the garden. Katey was in her first summer working at the Double Dot and would be walking up the hill soon. Oliver had a can of Narragansett, Ruth a gin and tonic that she nursed, her brain firing hot and not yet wanting to let the drink soften her. Oliver said, “It’s sad but makes sense—your father died almost twenty years ago which is a long time to live, modestly as she did, on whatever money he’d put aside. And the house, well, you have to consider there were another four or five years, during the war, when he probably didn’t have much work done, if any at all, on the house. That’s near on to a quarter-century of, I don’t know. What? Benign neglect? Perhaps that’s the best way to look at it. Nothing intentional. For that matter, I imagine Jo might not’ve even truly seen the issues. A place gets into ill-repair slowly unless there’s some major event—an ice storm or somesuch. The important thing was she was able to live out her life there, the life, as she saw it, that she’d always had.”
Ruth felt a ripple of unease and lifted her drink and swallowed. She said, “We’ll need to get a man in to go over everything and determine what must be done and what it will cost. Who would you think would be best?”
Oliver was quiet a long moment and then said, “Why, Ruthie. That’s a pile of money you’re talking about. And the property taxes, well, you know, with so many folks from Boston and New York buying up those old hill places for summer houses or to retire. We don’t have that sort of money, Ruth.”
She was not looking at him. “That’s my home,” she said.
He nodded and looked off into the greening evening slowly fading to black. In the sky dome to the east a planet hung bright. He then looked up at her and said, “I know it was.” Then he paused and she knew he was almost about to remind her that this was now her home, the home he’d made for her. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Even if we were able. What would you do with it?”
“Hold on to it for Katey. It should be hers. It’s a grand place to raise a family, you know that’s true.”
He nodded and said, “Ruthie, Katey’s a dozen years, maybe more from such a time. And we’d be assuming she’d want to return here.” He paused again and squinted off and then said, “She’ll leave you know, even if just for college but whatever happens with her in those years, even when she’s ready to make a home and family, how can we be sure this is where she’ll want to do it?”
Ruth stood. She was suddenly atremble and angry that she was. She said, “I’d want her to have that choice, that chance to make her home here.”
He said, “I understand. But say we found a way to hold on to it for her? What burden would we be placing upon her? Would that be fair?”
“Why can’t you see what this means to me?”
“I do. But that doesn’t mean I can make it happen. Even if I agreed with you.”
“So there’s not only no money, or you’re not willing for us to find it, but you think it would be wrong anyway. That’s what you’re saying.”
He was silent and again looked off at the darkening sky.
After a time of holding herself against the twirling wrong world she managed to break out her question. “So what do you propose?”
He waited and then said, “There’s a man from Westchester, New York, who last year was poking around and found the lawyer. He made an offer then, a good one that he said would stand as long as needed.”
“So you already sold it.”
“Of course not. But Ruthie, think about what you were saying. A place for Katey in the future when she’s ready to have a family. The money gives her a choice, is what I’m thinking.”
The ice cubes had melted in her drink and there was a scant inch or two of liquid in the glass and she threw it in a hard arc of splash in his face. “You bastard,” she said and turned and stalked toward the house. Where she’d put fresh ice in the glass and a pour of gin, find cigarettes and go on out the seldom-used front door to sit in the tangle under the old apple tree and drink and smoke and be alone with her molten core. And as she approached the shed she saw the dark form of her daughter coming into the drive and walking toward where Oliver still sat, outlined against the night. Then as Ruth reached open the screen door she heard Katey say, “Dad? Was that Mom? Is everything okay?”
It was now a week to the day that Katey had slipped out of the house and Ruth was trying to hold herself steady. Surely, if she’d had success finding Brian Potter, it wouldn’t have entailed an entire week. It was all of the other possibilities that had Ruth so worried. The many ways Brian Potter, in whatever his life now was, could’ve reacted upon learning of this girl. Of what their chance encounter had brought forth—not just upon himself but for Oliver, for Ruth herself. She calmed herself; however short her time had been with him there had been nothing but pained kindness and genuine concern for Oliver, as well as his own deep mortification over how it ended. It wasn’t Brian she feared but what else was out there in the world that might snag her girl.
Katey was moving into the life she saw for herself, not the life they’d envisioned for her. However much Ruth knew this was true, she also knew how much pain the world could give. And also, on top of walking so quiet through her June days, knowing how Katey had come to see her, these past years. As a fearful person of crushed dreams, of one who had settled for less. When nothing truly could be further from the truth.
On this, the seventh day, she’d spent the morning at the school, completing the last of the paperwork for the year, routine work she could barely make her way through for thinking of her daughter. Finally a bit before noon she gave up and drove home. She made egg salad and ate a sandwich and set out another on a plate for Oliver, who, it seemed was in his workshop. Perhaps finally working on the fiddle he’d been unable to undertake. She understood in some ways he was more devastated by Katey’s departure than she was. Or, perhaps, simply differently. That she could understand. She cast about in her mind and knew, whatever she did, she wanted to be in the house, felt that within her. She determined to dust her books. This was not a simple job but one she undertook each year—working her way along the shelves, taking them down and using a cloth to clean them, replacing them and moving to the next shelf. It was a slow process, laborious even, but in the end as worthwhile as owning the books themselves.
And, importantly, she’d hear the phone when it rang. Some part of her knew it would, this day. Some other part also understood that this was a fevered mother’s urge, close to a dream. A quiet pleading to the universe for relief from her worry.
As she worked she considered again how her daughter had come to think of her, of how she was viewed. And the wry humor was not only that Katey was wrong, but how close she’d come to being right. Only late by about three years.
By the time winter came again after Jo died Ruth felt she’d come to terms with it all—peace certainly wasn’t the right word. By autumn the house was sold and she, along with Oliver’s tender and quiet presence, had worked her way through the furniture and art, books and household goods, long lifetimes of items and oddities, all, it seemed known to Ruth—even those surprises and things she didn’t have a clue of their purpose; the goods and items gathered over time and held for possible use. Even if those uses were uncertain. In the end about half of the major items made their way from the house on West Hill to the house on Beacon Hill, replacing similar things of lesser quality or simply lacking the luster of the long-held and precious. The little Shaker-made cherry bedside tables with their dovetail joints and single drawers. The two-century old dry sink with its fading ancient red milk paint. The dining room table and chairs, the old china and older silver. The Seth Thomas e
ight-day clock. Her father’s shaving cup and brush simply because it had been his. Books. And finally, in late October on a Sunday morning Ruth had driven up alone and avoiding the empty house had carefully dug parts and sections of certain plants, even a few she had much older transplants from already. Iris and lily, bleedingheart, another slip from the smokebush. Masses of spring bulbs already dormant. And finally, from along the fence that separated the gardens from the adjoining fields, fields that long ago had also been part of this property, she dug a clump of wilted goldenrod and another of purple asters. Common, abounding everywhere. But these, these were from here and therefore would bloom now on Beacon Hill forever. From here.
That day she never once stepped inside the house although she still had a key. The fact that she had a key and the house was locked was enough itself to stop her but beyond that everything left inside was grouped into lots for the estate sale to take place the following weekend. She had no intention of attending that event. She’d heard workmen would be in the house through the winter. Men hired by the lawyer from Westchester who had bought the property. She’d met him, had to meet him, at the formal closing of the sale. He’d been pleasant and solicitous and she’d disliked him immediately, with his deep suntan and argyle sweater vest. But she’d stood outside the house that afternoon with the backseat of the car loaded with plants, technically stolen, and took a shiver of pleasure in knowing this and yet she still held a spark, hidden well, she thought, that Oliver had been so unable or unwilling, she truly didn’t know which, to have let her hold this property. To understand what it so deeply meant to her. She drove down the hill with the car filled with the rich smell of dirt and tubers, seeping tears. She didn’t know it at the time but it would be years before she’d drive again up West Hill, to drive past the house she no longer recognized that nevertheless held within it the shapes of memory, the walks and rooms of childhood, the footfalls and voices of the dead.
