by Robin Black
I hadn’t planned the stop in advance, but on my way back from the home that day it felt right.
A few days earlier, after the farmers’ market, I had turned once again to the obituaries I’d been focusing on, but this time, my thoughts on Kathleen Mayhew, I read the lines I had been skipping as somehow irrelevant to my needs. Services will be held at … Burial will take place in … I looked some of the churches up online and all were within twenty minutes of my home. Doubtless, I had driven by them dozens, hundreds of times, pushing them to the periphery of my thoughts.
I had long hated cemeteries. Maybe that would have been different had our father taken us to visit our mother’s grave—or maybe I would have hated them more. Either way, it wasn’t in his character to march his three girls, ducklings in a row, in woolen coats, as I have always pictured us, the image fused with all those stills of Caroline Kennedy, the mourning girl-child for a generation of us. Even if we had been allowed to acknowledge our mother, I don’t believe he would have seen the point to having us stare at a stone, a strip of lawn, as though we could communicate with it all somehow. As though the grave were a she who would see how we had grown.
I did go there once with Charlotte on a summer evening when I was sixteen. We were both a little drunk and there was the energy of a dare in the air, like children goading each other onto the crabby neighbor’s lawn despite warnings, with no real motive in mind beyond because we can—or so it felt until, standing there in the tidiness of the rows, staring at my mother’s name, those dates, it occurred to me in that sloppily acute way of tipsiness to ask, “Wait, how did you even know where she is?”
“Oh, I just like to come here sometimes,” Charlotte said, not looking at me. “I like to say hi.”
Jan is the brain of us; Charlotte was the heart; and I, I sometimes think I am the skin, not constructed for logic or even truly for love, but designed instead for trying, always trying to keep the world apart from my being, to prevent myself from coming undone.
We sat on the ground for an hour or so that night, and we talked about the future, Charlotte’s return to Oberlin in only days, my dreams of art school, of a life littered and studded with all the chaotic beauty our father seemed to fear.
“He does his best,” Charlotte said. “He tries really hard.”
“He can be such an asshole,” I said. Something like that.
As we spoke, I thought about the woman below us—of course. I wondered if I would feel her waft up to embrace us. Would something in my heart flutter, expand? I so wanted it to. But she belonged more to my sister than to me. Whatever presence Charlotte felt, I could not feel. Maybe Charlotte had taken me on this visit to try and pass on some strand of their connection; but I was unable to grasp the thread. I certainly never went back. Not until Charlotte herself died and our father bought a plot for her near theirs. And then, silently, foolishly, I was glad for their proximity. My conviction that the dead are dead are dead are dead had hardened, as had I, yet this tiny indefensible comfort at having my mother and my sister buried so close shimmered in me like a single, dewy blade of new green grass.
At Jackie’s cemetery, the graves nearest the church were the earliest, barely legible dates all beginning with 17; and then, farther out, the 1800s. War dead. War dead in almost every generation. But also dead of every imaginable sort. Dead as varied as the living. Babies. Ancients. Beloveds and those who evoked no eternal adjective; nothing but the facts. And then of course the central fact, the only fact. To walk outward in this field was to progress through a calendar of only one date. If I kept on long enough, I knew, I would find the place, still just grass, marking the time of my own end, a time when the bodies of my peers-in-expiration would begin to arrive; and then if I went farther I would reach in some too-close grassy patch a time beyond the range of my own life.
The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stones were ornate compared to those before, but then notably less so during the years of the war, the period of the Spanish flu. It seemed not only as though the stonecutters had been overwhelmed with work, but that the peculiar exultant joy of it had all gone flat. No more celebration of lives well lived or the opening of Heaven’s gates. Here was a humbled bow to reality—the plain granite, the right angles. The spirit deflated by relentless young demise. I knew I would find Jackie soon and I almost turned back, beginning to fear that this inescapably physical world would squelch the Jackie of my imagination, the boy brought back to life. But something felt important enough to me that I kept on until I found the small gray stone.
John “Jackie” Mayhew
Beloved Son
April 1901–May 1918
I read it, silently first, and then aloud. I looked away, up to the sky, then out to a distant hill. A few turning trees, the early ones, stood out among the dark green mass. As I noticed that, I felt—something. A truck drove by, close enough to see, but not to hear. I looked again at the name and at the dates. And I forced myself to read them aloud again, then forced myself to know that Jackie’s body lay beneath my feet, his actual body—an exercise in imagining the real.
I sat on the ground and studied the Mayhews all around. His parents. His brother and brother’s wife—Kathleen’s parents. I imagined her visiting here, but saw no evidence, no old or new bouquets.
When Charlotte was buried, I knew I would never visit her.
Yet years later, I could feel my sister’s presence as I sat among the Mayhews.
Here was the mother. Harriet Mayhew, her flat stone seeming to mimic the crush of grief. And a brother, Thomas Mayhew, whose daughter Kathleen could tell me how he had mourned for Jackie his whole long life.
And here was Charlotte too. As if buried in among them. Charlotte. The missing set of hands reaching for my father’s few belongings. Charlotte, whose name could barely be spoken by her sisters, so tender were the injuries still. Charlotte. The one who would have made us stop by to see our father before leaving. She of the big, reliable heart.
Why had I come to this cemetery on this day? Not to weep over my sister, gone more than six years. Yet I did exactly that, head in hands.
Owen had already made dinner when I got home. He told me to have a drink and just relax. If he noticed that I’d taken longer than I might have, he didn’t mention it. I sent him out to the van to get the box from my father’s place.
A fire burned in the fireplace as we took the odd things out. I told him sweet stories about their history and he helped me find the right places in which to set them. I gave him the jade bookend to bring out to the barn. “Dad would want you to have something literary.” There wasn’t much at all. It didn’t take us very long. At some point, all of it dispersed, Owen asked me if I’d heard from Alison during the day.
“Or I thought maybe when you got home …”
I told him I hadn’t. “Why?”
We were sitting on the couch, my back leaning into his chest, his arm around me. “She had two hang-up calls during the night,” he said. “They seemed to have shaken her.”
“For real? Was it Paul?”
“She doesn’t know. They were on her cell but no number came through. Blocked.” Owen stood and walked to the fire. He poked at a log. “I think she assumes it’s him. But she said she isn’t afraid. Still, she seemed upset.”
“That’s all she needs. Do you think I should go over?”
“I told her she should come for dinner if it would help, but she said she was fine. She said she thought you might need some quiet time here tonight. She was concerned about how you spent the day.”
“Did you tell her to call if it happens again?”
“I did indeed. I told her exactly that.”
“It probably won’t,” I said. “Probably a wrong number.”
“I said that too. Anyway.” He put the poker down. “Anyway, I slaved over a microwave and thawed us some lasagna, so let’s go eat.”
I looked at the emptied box on the table in front of me. “I feel bad about Alison. You’re sure I shouldn’t �
��?”
“I’m sure,” he said. “She knows where to find us.” He reached for my hand. “Come on, Gus. It’s dinnertime. Let’s eat.”
I let him pull me to my feet. I would check on her after dinner, I resolved.
In deep dusk I trekked over the hill, coaching myself all the while on how to comfort a frightened friend. My father had so stressed to us the importance of being brave—by which he meant fearless. He wouldn’t brook worries about airplane flights or bears on camping trips or bullies at school or even illnesses, high fevers, racking coughs. The great mystery for me was always the degree to which he was like that—or in any way like the man I knew—before his young wife complained of a sharp pain in her head one morning and was dead by afternoon. Maybe his refusal to tolerate fear was part and parcel of his reluctance to talk about her, a general stance of denial. Or maybe it was closer to hopelessness. What was the point of worrying, when you could never know what bullet was aimed at your heart?
Either way, we grew up in an atmosphere of forced bravery, a condition that left me flummoxed by other people’s fears, even as an adult. A part of me longed to give the kind of comfort I had never received; but undeniably a steely sliver of my father’s sternness had slipped into my character. And so this strange self-reeducation as I pushed through the graying night, over the lawn between our homes.
There were people, I knew, who didn’t need to be so conscious of instructing themselves on how to behave. Alison herself was a natural at interacting with other people, in a way I never would be. Charlotte had been another such. You couldn’t ever detect a hitch between her responses and her true nature. A loving gesture flowed from her loving heart. But at forty-seven I still gave out kindness and warmth in starts and stutters, having to remind myself to do so all the while.
Alison and I sat in her kitchen. She looked upset, as Owen had reported, and also as though she hadn’t slept at all the night before. “It was probably just a one-time thing,” she said, but with no more conviction than I’d heard from the gravel-voiced nurse suggesting the same about my father.
“You look worried, though.”
“I suppose so. Yes. And no. I’m a little bit shaken, that’s all. Ever since Paul was here. And then the calls. I’m not afraid of him.” I must have looked skeptical. “Well, I’m a little bit afraid of him.”
I remembered the locked door from my very early visit to her home. “Would it help to stay with us for a while?”
She shook her head. “No. But that’s awfully nice of you. I’ll get past this. It occurred to me just this morning to turn off the damn phone. Funny, I think Nora would have done that after the first call, but I still think of phones as attached to the wall, not something where you just push a button and it’s gone. And I don’t want Nora unable to reach me.”
“If you need us, if you ever want to stay over …”
She reached across the table, touching my arm. “I can’t believe how lucky I was to land here,” she said. “Truly. But now, enough about the stupid calls. Tell me how it went at your father’s today.”
“Oh, it was fine. It was sad. Just what you’d expect.” I didn’t say anything to her about the cemetery, as I hadn’t to Owen either. I told her instead that I should probably go to bed, and I stood. “But don’t hesitate to come over if you need anything. Even just company,” I said. “You know where I am.”
Later, after I’d showered off the day’s institutional perfume and its cemetery air, a glare outside the window caught my eye. Every single light in Alison’s house was on.
Just months earlier this view had been of darkness, speckled at times with tiny, distant lights but more often, by this late hour, not. Now there was this bizarre, inexplicably upsetting house of light right next door, as though a spaceship had landed across the lawn.
Light. It was something I had been nurtured by my whole life. In fifth-grade science class when we’d learned the four elements, I was certain there had been a mistake. How could light not be one? When it seemed like it was everything to me?
I was still afraid of the dark then—eleven years old—and for a long time after, but my father, of course, didn’t believe in such things. I would turn the closet light on each night and it was always turned off by the time I woke up, sometimes even before I was asleep.
I stared over at Alison’s, remembering all those long black nights of childhood as one infinite time of unspeakable terror and loneliness. I had felt most motherless then, most lost, each darkening day an echo of the death that haunted me. Until Owen. Owen taught me to love the darkness, to view it as a necessary respite from a world of visibility, a world in which as a painter I was eternally vigilant. And that was how I first knew I loved him. That I no longer felt bereft at the nightly departure of the sun.
12
The calls didn’t stop. Two or three a night. Sometimes she answered but no one was ever there. No one who spoke, anyway. Sometimes she just let it ring. After nearly a week, she agreed to stay in our house, if only once, so she could get a single decent night’s sleep, but she left all the lights on at her own place anyway. “If he’s watching,” she said, “I don’t want him to think anything has changed. I don’t want him knowing I’m afraid.” I didn’t point out that if he—whoever—was watching, he would know from the lights themselves that she was afraid. There was no point trying to reason with her. By then, having barely slept for days, she wasn’t thinking logically.
She was to sleep in the spare room down the hall, a space never occupied enough to be called a guest room. I spent a good amount of time trying to make it a welcoming space for her. Flowers. A pretty set of sheets. I dusted the old wardrobe. Took the braided rug outside to shake it clean—or if not clean, then fresher, anyway. I knocked some cobwebs off the ceiling with a broom, out of the corners, off the upper ledge of the door.
And of course she’d be using the spare bath—the one that had been renovated early that summer. I stepped into it for the first time in many weeks, a clean towel, a bar of fresh soap, in hand. We had kept the original fixtures, the claw-foot tub, the sink with its separate hot and cold taps. The milky blue subway tile I had chosen and the pristinely painted pale gray walls gave those porcelain pieces from nearly a century before an aura of something like dignity.
I stood there for some time, not unlike the way I had sat in the cemetery, though this time it wasn’t the reality of the dead in which I was trying to believe, it was the spirit of all the life that had been lived in this home. There must have been generations of children bathed in that tub, and couples who stood side by side at the sink. I had spent so much time attuned to the dead of the house. I was grateful to let the living into my consciousness as well.
Alison came by after dinner. “I’m already imposing enough,” she said. “You don’t have to feed me too.” I took her upstairs and she said all the right things about the room. It would be like staying at an inn for the night. She was certain she would sleep well. Just as I was going to leave her alone, Owen peered around the door and said, “Why don’t you give me your phone, Alison? I’ll answer it. Let him hear a male voice.”
I saw her hesitate, but then she handed it to him, like a child turning in a confiscated toy.
“Something tells me it isn’t going to ring,” Owen said quietly, as we settled into bed.
“Why do you say that?”
“A hunch. That’s all.”
“Well, that’s a complete cop-out. Calling it a hunch. You really think she’s lying? She’d have to be a pretty great actress. She looks like hell. And I’m not sure what the motive would be.”
“You’re assuming there’s something rational going on.”
I gave his arm a slap. “Yes, Owen. I am. I am assuming she’s not a lunatic. Because she’s not.”
“Well, maybe I’ll scare him away with my manliness.”
“I’m certain you will. With your he-man voice.” I switched off my bedside lamp. “Seriously though, I do give you points. You may not li
ke her as much as I do or even believe her, but you’re certainly helping her.”
He began to rub my back. “It isn’t in my nature to let the people around me feel scared.”
“No. It’s not,” I said, savoring the darkness he had taught me not to fear. Soft, thick darkness. Velvet, loving darkness. “You know, I think you would have been an incredible father, Owen. Probably a much better parent than I.”
From the long silence that followed, I knew he was adjusting to my having raised this topic, so long unmentioned—as if I had now turned on a too-bright light and his pupils needed to contract. “You have a more nurturing nature,” I said. “I can be pretty self-involved, I know. But I’m just self-aware enough to understand how much is missing in me. How very much. Who knows. Maybe it’s all just as well.”
“I don’t think it’s just as well, Gus. It’s not just as well.”
“I don’t mean … I’m just paying you a compliment. I shouldn’t … I put it badly. You’re just very good at taking care of people. That’s all I mean. Better than I am. Even people you don’t much like. I just wanted to say it. You would have been the better parent. And I’m sorry you never got that chance.”
“I’m sorry neither of us did. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you that.”
“No apologies allowed. You know that.”
We lay in silence for a time.
“It’s not always easy, is it?” he said. “Having her here? All that devoted motherhood of hers. She’s like … like some kind of monument to parenting. Like an advertisement for it.”
“I’ve had my moments, I admit.”
“Me too. I’ve had my moments.”
There was another silence.
“But you would have left her in the dust, Gussie,” he said, after some time passed. “As a mother, I mean. You would have been the best mother the world has ever known. Thorns and all. You think you’re all prickles and brambles, but you would have aced it.”
I felt him curve up against me. “Thanks.” I shut my eyes and I raised my knees as he pressed his legs to form with mine. “I’m glad you think so,” I said, forcing myself not to explain all the reasons his assessment couldn’t possibly be true. He kissed the back of my head.
