Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  “I let him in and led him to the kitchen. He was very hungry, so I fixed him a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea. He was also very tired—he said he’d had a long trip—so I showed him his room and went back to bed. The next morning he was gone, and I would have thought it a dream except that the cereal bowl and cup and saucer were still on the kitchen table. That night my wife called and said she’d heard he’d died two days earlier. Now Mary—may I call you Mary?—Mary, that is really true.”

  We were silent, I wondering if it had indeed been a dream, and hoping, because I longed for belief, that it had not been.

  On the flight to Eastern Siberia the big string bag an old man had labored to bring on board the plane burst and sent dozens of oranges rolling down the aisles. The stewardesses had no interest in whether or not seatbelts were fastened at takeoff and landing, and passenger luggage was stowed in what seemed like hammocks over our heads. But by now I was used to Aeroflot; I was used to Russia; I was used to talking to myself. In Irkutsk, however, an Intourist guide (I had had none in Samarkand) suddenly appeared and took me to the churchyard where the Decembrists were buried (“This is a working church,” I was assured) and on a hydrofoil across Lake Baikal and through street after street of elaborate wooden houses. “Why do you wish to photograph these?” she chided me. “They are old, no good.”

  She took me to a daycare center where all the children used their potties at the same time, and a woman gave me dolls for my own children. One evening I shared a restaurant table with a German engineer who, having asked me to write in my magazine about how much his countrymen wanted peace, made me feel like a Messenger to the World. Another day I was taken to tea with some middle-aged women who, laughing and excited, fussed with their hair and tugged at their girdles when I asked to take their picture. They gave me the best tea—oranges and sweet preserves to be eaten with little spoons—that Irkutsk could provide, and the hostess said, “I can hardly wait to tell my husband I had an American in my apartment.” Suddenly I envied her the tiny bedroom with its brass bed, the tiny living room on whose couch her son slept, the tiny balcony on which she had placed pots of gloxinia. A husband came home at night and kept her warm, whereas I, resident of the land of the free and the home of the brave, and looking, though I was not, a generation younger than she and her friends, could not come in from the cold.

  At night I lay in bed muttering my usual prayer—“Get me out of here and I will never leave my children again”—but when the time came, I was reluctant to leave Irkutsk. I had fallen in love with the old churchyard and the old Cossack houses and the little dachas out at Lake Baikal, and thought how fine it would be to stay here and write the town’s history. A year or two ago I wanted the peace of the grave, and now I wanted the peace of the carrel and a burial m books. But I was kidding myself, I knew, not only because I had no Russian and had lost the habit of scholarship but because I had too little of what an Austrian friend called sitzfleisch, “sitting flesh.” “You have no serenity,” B had said more than once, and I didn’t, not even when I slept. Out of waking life I would enter dreaming life, and emerge exhausted.

  So I left on schedule, depending on my usual trick—following the people whose boarding cards were the same color as mine—to get me on the right plane. This time, though, there were no colors and I had to ask the members of an American tour group, pair after pair of Darby and Joans, if I was at the right gate. Without exception they drew back, averted their eyes, answered with nods, fearful of getting stuck with a woman traveling alone.

  A few weeks before, on my first morning in Moscow, the three Russian men with whom I shared a breakast table offered me a drink from their carafe. I assumed it was mineral water. Instead, it was vodka, and they laughed, but not unkindly, at the look on my face when I took my first sip. Hearing I was from New York—they too had Russian-English dictionaries—they were dumbstruck. Had I seen the Empire State Building? Had I ever been to Radio City Music Hall?

  The morning after my flight from Irkutsk I shared a breakfast table again, this time with an American salesman. “Why don’t you stay for another day?” he suggested. “We could have some fun.” Then he winked. So, in the morning sun, did his wedding ring.

  To the Russians, male and female both, I had been a visitor from an almost unimaginable outside, treated with the kind of innocent curiosity that reminded me of the questions—“Perhaps you have met my niece who is a waitress in a restaurant called Schrafft’s in New York?”—that country people had asked me on my first trip to Ireland a long time ago. But to the Americans in the tour group, I was that dangerous thing, a woman nearing middle age and on the loose. To the American salesman, I was that easy thing, a woman nearing middle age and on the loose.

  A few hours later, taking a last walk through this city I had never really seen, I strolled down a street lined with linden trees just like those which had lined the sidewalk in front of my high school. Their scent was, as always, heartbreaking, and, just as the minister’s mention of Canon Parshley had, brought me back “home.” Then I realized at last that all journeys—the final one, too, for all we know—are circular.

  Six

  It was a warm autumn night in New York, a few months after Moscow, too warm to sit in the hotel lobby waiting for the balding man. So I crossed the street and sat in Central Park, breathing in the green from the trees that were still hanging on to their leaves and the blue from gasoline fumes, glorying in being dressed up and about to meet a man who, however ineligible, was someone I could boast of knowing. I never did boast of knowing him, though. I was afraid of B’s hiring a private eye to find me an unfit mother. “You ever see any guys in felt fedoras hanging around?” my sister asked before my divorce. She, who had liked him, and I, who had loved him, knew how I enraged B simply by being myself. But, then, isn’t that always the case with husbands and wives, even when their marriages endure?

  I looked east and there he was, my secret suitor, my secret Santa maybe, coming up the street, carrying two big Doubleday shopping bags. Wearing a leather jacket, his face shadowed by a broad-brimmed hat, his shoulders bent forward by the weight of the bags, he looked like an aging cowboy. Had he seen me first, he’d have raised his head and started to strut, trying to belie the years that were written on his face and in the way his stomach had started to slide over his belt. But he didn’t, so for once I saw him before he had a chance to put on his armor: slowed down by bags that had a weight he wouldn’t have felt twenty years ago, and walking with an old man’s flat-footed caution.

  Usually we ate in his hotel dining room, but this night we went to a nearby restaurant. It was crowded, so we had to wait at the bar, and although people made room for us, no one looked at him.

  “It’s hard bein’ a middle-aged man, mah Mary. If I sat on one side of a good-lookin’ girl and some young truck-driver sat on the other, it wouldn’t be me she’d turn to and smile at.”

  “Would that matter a lot?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’d matter.”

  “You mean you want the applause of strangers?”

  “Thass right.” He laughed. “I like the way you put that. I want the applause of strangers. They’re not out to get me, like my enemies are. But now Lowell is in the madhouse, and I am King of the Cats!”

  “Mah Mary,” he said later as he put down the telephone on which he had been talking to his wife, lying about his day and the way he was spending the evening, “I want you to understand exactly who you are. You are the other woman.”

  Bull. I am one of many other women and I know it. I say nothing, and he continues the performance.

  “Now mah wife’s a good woman, a good country gal, but . . .” I turn and look out the window, not because what he is saying hurts, but because he is pouring another bourbon, and the liquor, as they say, will start talking.

  “Fat! She’s got the sex appeal of a walrus. And squeamish! So nice with that douche bag. She’s always got a hose hangin’ out of her.”

  I feel sick. I cann
ot bear the way he talks about his wife, but I sit silent because I am taking my punishment.

  He is raging now and I am about to pick up my shoulder bag and leave, because God is telling me that my listening constitutes participation, that I am sinning again, when he shifts—he is always shifting—and says, “You want to hear a little guitar, mah Mary?”

  He showed me her picture one day: she is dark and pretty with a nice straight nose. I think he loved her once, but even more incapable of surviving deep feeling than I, he had severed the nerve so that love was like a dead tooth in his head.

  She telephoned me one New Year’s Eve, his wife, when I was at a next-door neighbor’s drinking eggnog. When I came home, Snow White, suspicion written all over her face, told me that while I was out a Mrs. ——— had called. Surprised that his wife even knew of my existence, I waited all night for her to call again, fearing she would, fearing she would not. Because if she had asked me not to see her husband again, I would have said yes and meant it. I could not stop myself from seeing him. I wanted her to stop me.

  Still, he sustained me for several years. I used to say good night to him, to the air, when I went to sleep, and I would always note the temperature in the city in which he lived when they gave it on the Today show. I laughed through all our phone calls, while he played a harmonica and told shaggy-dog stories or we got excited about a book we were both reading. When he was in New York I sang to his guitar and capped his limericks, and we told each other stories about ourselves and our childhoods.

  He was like an old shoe I couldn’t slip off, and I was . . . I don’t know. One day he said, “Mah Mary, I think we’re kinder to each other than either of us has ever been to anyone else.”

  He was lying supine and I was on top of him, as comfortable as if floating on a raft. My arms were folded across my chest and over his and I kept nuzzling his lips open with my mouth and kissing his tall, narrow teeth.

  We always lay like that early in the morning, following a familiar litany.

  “You’ve got long teeth.”

  “My brother always said I should have got a dollar from the tooth fairy when I lost one.”

  “You’ve got small ears. My grandmother says small ears indicate stinginess or madness.”

  “Madness, mah Mary.”

  “Now that I see them in this light, I think your eyes are more gray than blue.”

  “I always thought they were green.”

  “Never! Do you supppose you’re a genius?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “But can I call you by your first name?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’d you say your first name was, honey?”

  He’d whoop and roll me off his chest, sit up, catch me across his lap, and pretend to spank me. I’d wriggle, never quite sure he wouldn’t, and once, when I was twisting around, I saw his face. It was puzzled. I think he was in love.

  Who knows? Certainly not he. Was I in love? I’ve never figured it out. All I am sure about is that I was grateful to him for liking me. My husband did not. “I don’t think he could stand my silences” was the only answer I had when he asked why B had left.

  “Mah Mary!” he crowed. “Ah love your silences.”

  Oh, I was grateful, all right, maybe even more grateful for the haven that was the hotel room. Because once I left it, I had to go home, and I couldn’t bear what was going on at Number 83.

  Lillian was dead. Early one morning I was sitting in my office, drinking coffee and reading the paper, when the phone rang. It was a friend. “Lillian died yesterday during an asthma attack, and someone found her late last night.”

  She had been alone, in her crazy-closet of an apartment, probably dressed in one of her trailing garments, the kind with the Mickey Mouse transfers, and maybe—I am imagining this part—grabbing desperately for her inhaler when she dropped. Snow White mustn’t hear this, I thought, except from me, so I ran from the office and out into the street for a cab. When I am faced with death, my self-control deserts me, and Snow White, seeing my red eyes when I got home, knew something terrible had happened. I had no words but the simplest—“Lillian died yesterday”—and, looking hunted, Snow White turned and started to run up the stairs to her room.

  I tried to hold her, but touch couldn’t bring her back from the place where she was going. I begged her to come to church with me, but church meant little to her or her sister. I had been sloppy about Sunday school and religious instructions and lazy about Mass and resentful of every priest who had ever told me what to do even while I was silently begging to be told what to do. That Snow White couldn’t have the consolation even of lighting a candle and saying a prayer for Lillian’s soul—“Free her from purgatory,” she could have said, “and bring her into heaven”—was my fault.

  But I had that consolation. Nearby, on Fourteenth Street, was a church built to hold a thousand or more parishioners and, now that the old Eighth Ward’s old Irish had died out, empty most of the time. Tall and drafty and silent, smelling of floor wax and last Sunday’s incense, it was just like the church I had known in childhood. I was that child again, shoving a dime in the slot, reaching for a spill, dipping it into a votive cup, and hoping against hope that my prayers were not just words lost in space. Then I came home, poured myself a stiff vodka, and sat crying in a corner of the living room.

  The telephone kept ringing, friends of Lillian whom I had never met, and I spoke over and over again of getting her out of the morgue so that she could be buried from my house. The kind of funeral I was familiar with was preceded by a wake, and that was what I wanted for Lillian. I think she would have wanted it, too. But nothing could be done, so I cried some more and drank some more until Rose Red came home from school, determined as always to have a family like the one in Little Women, and frightened by my grief.

  Still, there had been comfort in the lighting of the candle and the prayers, the merciful vodka and the tears I shared with those gulping strangers on the phone. Snow White, however, stayed in her room alone, without solace, and a long time later I found written on her wall, in green ink, “Lillian, why did you leave me?”

  I took her to Dr. Franklin, and when I mentioned Lillian, I cried again. But Snow White was stony-faced and wouldn’t talk about her. There was a second doctor to whom she went alone, but I heard from her father, whose suggestion he had been, that she wouldn’t talk to him either. I think, though, that he was the doctor who suggested an institute that specialized in family therapy. When I told the man who was its head that the institute-supervised family weekend he recommended was a bad idea, he said, coldly, “Don’t you want to help your child?”

  Shamed into an alternative, I assembled, in the institute’s formal living room, Snow White, her father and stepmother, Rose Red, who wept bitterly at her cruel distance from the life lived by Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and myself. This time I was the one who wouldn’t talk. Instead, I reverted to the fearful child I had so often been with B and shrank in my chair. By now our marriage was something dimly remembered, or misremembered, but B had remained the only adult in the world whose approval I wanted.

  Because the psychiatrist who presided over this torturous hour realized that family therapy was out of the question, she decided to see Snow White alone. During their hours together she fed her tea and cookies, and as long as Snow White was with her I could breathe again. But when, having made an appointment for myself, I asked what I could do, praying for guidelines and lists and modes of behavior, anything that would help me help my Snow White, the doctor said, “Just try being her mother.”

  As if I weren’t trying! Snow White was living in a place I could not enter, no matter what my efforts, and I doubt that the doctor, smugly encased in credentials and self-confidence as she was, ever entered it either. But Lillian could. Somehow she could walk into Snow White’s world and in it find ways to keep her moored to the middle class and its mores. Without Lillian and the giggles and jokes and whispers they shared, my daughter was be
yond my reach or anyone else’s.

  One night, very late, when I was dozing I heard a knock at the door downstairs. The landlord had found one of the cats meowing in the front hall. I took the cat, went back to bed, and was slipping into sleep again when I remembered, with the kind of terror that keeps one mute in nightmares, that, hours earlier, when I had put the night lock on the front door, all the cats were inside. There was no way for one of them to have got out unless someone else had gone out.

  I ran to Snow White’s room. It was empty. Her bag was on the library table. She never went anywhere without her bag and its jumble of letters, diaries, and an address book of names only she would recognize, although many of their owners might not recognize her. They were people met in passing and perhaps never seen again. That she knew their names, however, made them, if only in her imagination, her friends.

  I dialed B, so frightened that I could hardly talk. “You’d better search the cellar,” he said.

  Fred, the semi-Schnauzer, trailed me to the basement, and we searched together, the flashlight poking around the worn wing chair and tattered posters, and into the dark and dusty side rooms with their cargoes of paperbacks and 45s. But it was not them I was seeing. Instead, I saw all of Snow White’s life, from the time she was a baby so beautiful I was afraid to hold and crush her, to the slouching mutiny she was now, eyes sliding, always sliding, walking with her pelvis thrust forward, more in threat than in invitation. I also saw all the times in between. Snow White slipping into sleep after the nightly reading of Eloise. The day when, her finger broken, she asked my permission before yelling “Shit!” as the doctor set it. The afternoon in Bristol when we sat on the rocks under the Mount Hope Bridge, trying to catch crabs with mussels tied on a string.

  With the flashlight darting over the basement walls, I saw a hanging figure, sneakered feet projecting from a corner, a flaccid hand crowded with the silver rings she’d learned to make in a course at the YMCA. She and her father had the same small, short-fingered hands, hands that made me tender because my own are so long and fierce. I saw the figure clearly, and then not at all. Fear had distorted my eyesight, made me see what wasn’t there.