The Memory of All That

by Gibson, Nancy Smith

  “I was going to ask him to spend the morning with me anyway, to show me around the house, and perhaps help me remember things. And I thought we could read or watch a movie on TV.”

  David looked from one woman to the other. “Mrs. Tucker, of course you can take as much time as is necessary. Marnie, are you sure you’re up to caring for Jonathan for several hours?”

  “I’m sure,” she answered as she looked at him expectantly.

  “OK then. Mrs. Tucker, do you need me to drive you to the dentist’s office?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Barrett. I can make it. I’ll leave right now.” She placed her napkin neatly by her plate and left the room.

  “Poor woman,” Mrs. Grady said as she gathered the uneaten breakfast and carried the dishes to the sink. “A sore tooth can give a body a right lot of trouble, all right.”

  “I noticed her touching her cheek when I stopped in the nursery this morning, but I thought it was nerves.”

  “And you’re sure you’re OK caring for Jonathan for the morning?”

  “Of course! Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “It’s just that you’ve never done it before. You’ve said he—that it made you uneasy to be in charge of a child.”

  “Nonsense! We’ll do just fine. Won’t we, Jonathan?”

  Jonathan nodded, his mouth too full to speak, but his eyes were bright as he looked at her.

  “Well, if you have any problems, Alice will be to work before long, and Mrs. Grady is here. You can leave him with either of them if you need to.” He had finished his meal and pushed back his stool. “Good breakfast, Mrs. Grady,” he said, and after giving Jonathan a kiss on the top of his head, he left the room.

  “If you’re through eating, Jonathan, let’s go get washed up before we start our morning activities.”

  I must really have been pathetic if David thinks I can’t even care for my son for a few hours. I’ll show him. I may have been a bad mother before, but I’m going to learn to be a good mother to my son from this day forward.

  Chapter 20

  Jonathan’s schedule included brushing his teeth after meals, so each of them went to their own room to complete their preparations for the day, meeting in the hall a few minutes later.

  “Jonathan, maybe you can help me remember things around here.”

  “OK,” he said. “How?”

  “Let’s start by you telling me about all these rooms up here. There are a lot of them, and I don’t know who they belong to. That is, I don’t know who sleeps in them. Are they all bedrooms?” She hadn’t wanted to open any of the doors for fear of prying or invading someone’s privacy. “Will you be a tour guide and tell me about this house?”

  “Sure.” He took her by the hand and pulled her back to stand in front of her own room. Pointing across the hall, he started his explanation.

  “That’s Mrs. Tucker’s room,” he said, “right across from yours.”

  “Yes, and the next one is yours.”

  He opened the door to his room and led her inside. “See, there’s a door from my room to hers, so if I get scared during the night I can just go get her, or I can yell and she will come.”

  “Do you get scared often?”

  “No. I used to when I was little, but now that I’m four I never do.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That door”—he pointed to a door in his bedroom opposite the one to Mrs. Tucker’s room—“goes to the play room.”

  “Yes. We came through it the other day when you were showing me around.”

  They went into the room where she usually spent time with Jonathan.

  “Do you spend a lot of time here? Or do you go other places?”

  “I spend lots of time here,” he said dramatically. “We almost never go anyplace else.”

  “Really? Do you ever go to the park, or to a friend’s house, or any place like that?”

  “When it’s warm, we sometimes go to the park. Daddy says it will be spring soon and maybe Mrs. Tucker will take me to the park with the swings and slides and things. We used to go there before it was winter.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “It is. I like the slide and the teeter-totter. But I can’t play on the teeter-totter unless there’s someone about my size to do it with. Mrs. Tucker doesn’t like to push it up and down for me. She says it hurts her back. But Daddy does it when he takes me.”

  “Don’t you have any friends about your age you can go with?”

  He looked sad. “No. I don’t have any friends.”

  “Do you ever go to a school, like pre-school?”

  “No. Mrs. Tucker teaches me my numbers and ABCs. Grandmother says we pay her to do that and Daddy shouldn’t pay someone else to do the same thing.”

  Well, Marnie thought, there’s more to pre-school than just learning the alphabet and numbers. There’s making friends and playing games and learning to work in a group. I’ll have to see about that.

  “So what about the rest of the rooms on this floor?” she asked, leading the boy back out into the hall.

  “Daddy sleeps in that one,” he said, pointing to the last room at the opposite end of the hall from hers.

  As far away from me as he can get, she thought.

  “How about the rest of them?”

  “Nobody sleeps in them. They used to, a long time ago, but they don’t live here anymore. Now they’re for company, but we don’t ever have any company.”

  “Let’s go downstairs, and you can tell me about the rooms down there.”

  “OK,” he said and led the way down.

  They went into the living room first. It was as dreary and gloomy as it had appeared the first time she had seen it.

  “This is the living room,” Jonathan said. “I’m not allowed to play here. I can’t be in here unless an adult is with me.”

  “Well, I’m an adult and I’m with you, so you can be here.”

  He grinned at her. “Yep.” He quickly looked solemn. “I mean yes.”

  “Are you not allowed to say ‘yep’?”

  “The kids at the playground say it all the time, but Mrs. Tucker and Grandmother say I should talk properly at all times.”

  “Hmm.” Marnie would not allow herself to say anything else about the subject. “I didn’t notice those portraits over the fireplace when I was in here before.”

  “That’s Grandfather and his brother, Uncle John.”

  “I see.”

  “They died before I was borned.”

  “Born. They died before you were born.”

  “Yes, before I was born.” He struggled to not put the final -ed on the word, and Marnie smiled at his efforts.

  “This doesn’t seem like a room I want to spend much time in. Let’s go on, shall we?”

  The next room on their tour was the library.

  “I came in here the other day,” Marnie told him. “There are a lot of books, but I don’t think I saw any for children.”

  “Daddy uses this for an office sometimes when he works at home. That’s the only time I can come in here. He gives me paper to draw on while he works. I don’t think there are any kid books in here.”

  “That portrait, is it your grandfather?”

  “Yes. It’s Daddy’s father. Daddy says that makes him my grandfather,” he said, looking at Marnie to see if she followed.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  The next two doors down the hall were ones she had not opened the first time she ventured into this part of the house. Jonathan put his hand on the first door they came to as he spoke. “This is a great big closet with a lot of old stuff in it.” He advanced to the next door and opened it. “Alice said they call this the ladies’ card room ‘cause folks used to play cards in
it a long time ago, when my grandfather lived here.”

  “Let’s see the next room,” Marnie suggested.

  They entered the sunny room at the end of the hall.

  “Sometimes Mrs. Tucker likes to sit here. I bring my cars and play on the floor while she reads.”

  “It’s a very nice room. I like it a lot.”

  “Me, too.”

  Marnie thought the side yard that was visible from the sunroom would be an ideal place for a swing set and other outside toys for Jonathan to enjoy. She wondered if he had a set somewhere.

  “Jonathan, do you have a swing set or climbing set or anything like that in the yard?”

  He looked sad when he answered. “No. I have to get Daddy or Mrs. Tucker to take me to the park to play on stuff like that.”

  She wondered if she could convince David to have some play equipment installed in the yard come spring—if she was still there by then. She couldn’t imagine David tolerating a wife who had done all he told her she had done.

  The next room on the tour was on the right as they left the sunroom. Jonathan told her matter-of-factly, “This is the men’s card room.”

  In it was not only a poker table, but a pool table as well, with all the trappings that accompanied it. Balls were scattered around the massive table, and a rack on the wall held pool cues.

  “Does your daddy teach you how to play pool?”

  “No. He said he will when I get older.”

  The next room on that side of the hall was the room she had previously discovered. Bright and sunny, it was welcoming to the pair.

  “I think I like this room best,” she told Jonathan.

  “I like it, too,” he agreed. “I like my room and the playroom and this room bestest of all.”

  “What do they call it?”

  “The TV room.”

  “Do you come here and watch TV?”

  “Sometimes Daddy and I do, when it’s raining and we can’t go outside to play. We come in here and watch a movie.”

  Marnie sat in one of the overstuffed chairs that were scattered around the room and patted the one beside her. “Come sit here so we can talk.”

  Jonathan did as he was told, sliding back to snuggle into the pillows lining the chair.

  “Remember when I said you could help me remember?”

  He nodded his head enthusiastically.

  “I want you to try to remember any time you saw me in any of these rooms we’ve talked about this morning. Remember who was there with me and what was going on, what I said, and what the other people said to me. OK?”

  Chapter 21

  Jonathan’s forehead wrinkled, and he studied his hands, which were clasped together in his lap. He seemed to be in deep thought.

  “When we were in the living room, I told you who those men in the pictures were.”

  “Yes, sweetie, I know. That was this morning, just a while ago. Can you think of another time I was in any of these rooms? Before I went away, I mean.”

  Jonathan twisted his hands together tightly. It seemed to Marnie as though her question had upset him. She thought there must have been some incident that had happened earlier, something he didn’t want to tell her about. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to distress him. She wouldn’t force him to remember something he’d rather forget.

  “That’s OK if you don’t.”

  “I don’t,” he said, a relieved expression spreading over his face. “I don’t remember ever being in any of the rooms with you before. Just yesterday and today.”

  “OK. Let’s forget it. We’ll start all over again from when I came back, and you can forget anything that happened before then. OK?”

  He nodded.

  “Are there any games or puzzles in this room that are yours?”

  He slid from the chair and ran over to a cabinet. He threw open the doors and started to search through the boxes.

  I must have really been some kind of a pathetic mother if my son doesn’t even want to talk about what went on before, Marnie thought. I’ve forgotten it, and he obviously wants to. So we’ll just put the past in the past and start over.

  “Here’s a puzzle Daddy and I like to work together,” Jonathan said, pulling a colorful box from the stack.

  “Would you like to work it with me?” Marnie asked.

  “Yes. We work puzzles on this table,” he said, as he opened the box and dumped the pieces on the table in front of the window and spread them out. “First you turn all the pieces right side up,” he said, demonstrating. “And then you find the edges. See?” he said, holding up a piece to show Marnie. “See how it’s straight on one side?”

  “Yes, I see that. I can see you really know how to do this. You must be a very good puzzle worker.”

  “I am. Daddy says so,” he answered proudly.

  While they were working the puzzle, Mrs. Tucker came to the door. “I’m back from the dentist, Mrs. Barrett. I can take Jonathan upstairs now, if you wish.”

  Marnie noticed the crestfallen look that spread across Jonathan’s face.

  “I’d just as soon keep him with me, Mrs. Tucker. He’s great company. You go on and rest. Take a nap if you want. Jonathan and I are doing just fine.”

  Jonathan’s face beamed with that, and when Mrs. Tucker left, they went back to their project.

  When the picture of marine animals and ocean waves was assembled, admired, and taken apart again, Marnie asked, “So, what should we do next?”

  “I like games.”

  “Then let’s play a game. What do you have?”

  Jonathan proceeded to find a game and instruct her in the rules. After half an hour of winning and losing game pieces, she asked, “Do you have any more games?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he answered.

  How sad, she thought. How many games there must be for children his age, and he only has one. Doesn’t anyone ever buy him anything? Then the truth hit her; she was the one who should have been buying them. I’m going to have to do something about this. If I’m going to be a good mother, I need to get him things he needs. There is obviously no shortage of money in this house. I’ll have to talk to David about buying some things for my son.

  “Are there any playing cards here?”

  “Sure,” he said as he pulled open a drawer in the table and produced a deck.

  “Do you ever play Go Fish?”

  Jonathan looked puzzled. “Gold Fish?”

  “No, Go Fish.”

  Marnie explained the game as he sat in rapt attention.

  After playing for some time, Jonathan once again pronounced the dreaded “Go Fish,” and Marnie moaned in exaggerated despair. As he cackled delightedly, a voice sounded from the doorway.

  “It sounds like someone’s having fun in here!”

  “Daddy!” Jonathan rushed to hug his father around the knees. “We’re playing Go Fish!”

  “So I heard.”

  “I learned how. And I got threes. And she needed sevens. And I didn’t have any, and I told her to Go Fish!” he related animatedly.

  “This game is a lot more fun with three people instead of two,” Marnie said.

  “Please, Daddy, please play with us.”

  “Well, just for a little bit. I just came home to see how you were doing,” David said, looking directly at Marnie.

  “We’re doing fine. We’ve worked a puzzle and played a game with cherries and buckets, which he says is the only game he has, and now we’re playing Go Fish,” she said, smiling broadly at David.

  After two rousing rounds of Jonathan’s now-favorite game, David called a halt.

  “I think it’s time for lunch. I’ll join you and then I have to get back to work.”

  Jonathan gathered the cards
and put them back into the drawer.

  As they walked down the hall, David told Jonathan, “You better wash up before going to the kitchen. We’ll meet you there.”

  “OK,” Jonathan replied and opened the last door on the right which was obviously a powder room.

  “I think I’d better wash my hands, too,” Marnie said.

  “There’s another powder room off the east hall, too,” David replied as they walked through the living room.

  “Will Ruth be joining us for lunch?”

  “No. Mother eats breakfast and lunch in her suite of rooms. It’s like a separate apartment for her. She does like to have dinner here,” he said as they passed through the dining room. “I think you are recovered enough to join us tonight.”

  “All right. What time?”

  “Six o’clock. Be on time.” He glanced at her attire. “Mother is old school. You’d better dress more formally than jeans. Wear a dress.”

  Chapter 22

  “What do you wear to dinner with someone who hates you?” Marnie mused aloud as she looked through her closet. With as many choices as she had, she was having trouble coming up with something appropriate. She had tried on several dresses, but when she looked in the cheval mirror, she realized each was too short, too tight, or showed too much cleavage for a family dinner.

  Where in the world did I wear all these things? she wondered again.

  Finally, she came upon a pink knit dress with long sleeves and a high, rounded neckline. The hemline reached mid-calf, and when she tried it on, it fit perfectly. She added high-heeled black boots and admired the look.