The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Yes,” Carol said. “You are that, Mom.”

  “I mean about the Lamaze, sweetie.”

  “I know,” Carol said.

  “I wasn’t talking about anything else.”

  “Mother.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “How’s Ellen doing?”

  “Ellen.”

  “Mom.”

  “Oh, Ellen. Ellen’s doing fine. The baby’s fine. We’re all very happy.”

  “Mom,” Carol said, “you are quite amazing to us all.”

  “Are you making fun?” Edith wanted to know.

  Carol had been serious. And after they’d hung up, she sat crying, thinking about Edith with the ridiculous hospital robe on, standing in the lobby of the emergency room, yelling into the phone.

  When the more obvious signs of her mother’s illness began, Carol spoke to a doctor friend, who told her there could have been subtle indications of the trouble for several years: signs that might’ve gone under the name of eccentricity or seemed like quirks of personality, of the fact that she was aging and might be expected to throw away some of her old inhibitions. Carol thought immediately of Edith’s habit of pilfering things from one daughter’s house and spiriting them into the next: if she thought Ellen would appreciate a scarf that Carol wore, she would steal the scarf during her stay with Carol and hide it in Ellen’s closet when she visited Ellen. Allison might notice that a box of chocolates had disappeared at about the same time that Edith was on her way to Carol’s—and a week later Carol, looking for something else, would discover the box hidden in the seldom-used kitchen cabinet over the refrigerator.

  The three sisters, ranging in age from thirty-four (Carol) to fifty (Allison), had grown accustomed to finding each other’s things in strange places, and were often inclined to wonder what might be lurking under a bed, or in the back of a closet, the bottom of a cedar chest. The joke between them had been that in order to set everything right, they would have to take a kind of inventory. And they had joked about it, as they’d joked about other habits of Edith’s: her girlish love of Paul Newman at all the stages of his career; her fear of mice (she had nightmares about them); her love of chocolate; and the fact that, for all her apparent presumption in wishing to achieve some sort of equal distribution of her daughters’ possessions, she still claimed to consider herself only a visitor in their houses, with no rights at all; she wouldn’t allow anyone to treat her like a guest, and was always saying so.

  “That’s right, Mother,” Ellen had said to her one Christmas, having opened a present from her which turned out to be a skirt Carol had given Allison on her birthday the previous March. “As long as you don’t want us to treat you like a thief.”

  Edith hadn’t understood the joke.

  Perhaps this was the first time any of them realized that she couldn’t help what she did any more than she could remember having done it.

  Last June, after almost exactly a year, she’d come to stay with Carol again, and had brought along a tin of hard candy that Carol learned had been in Ellen’s pantry. Carol put it in a package and mailed it to her sister with a note in which she talked about their “communist” mother. But perhaps a week later she woke in the middle of the night to the smell of burning, and found Edith standing in the glare of the overhead light in the kitchen with a soup ladle in her hand, and an empty saucepan on the stove. The burner was on, and gas flames licked up the sides of the pan. It was as though she’d been sleepwalking.

  “Mom?” Carol said.

  Her mother seemed startled. But she said, “You go on, dear. I’ll make us something scrumptious.”

  “Let’s have it later,” Carol said, and guided her gently back to bed.

  The following morning, Edith had no memory of the event, and as she learned what happened all the color went out of her face. “I’m not a sleep-walker,” she said. “What in the world.” She sat staring, and Carol moved to her side, put her arm around the thin shoulders.

  “Maybe you just got too tired,” Carol said.

  There had followed several sleepless nights, and perhaps the younger woman had noticed a certain increasing garrulousness in her mother, an unsettling forgetfulness. But there were no more sleepwalking episodes. When the visit was over and Edith headed south to Charlottesville, her daughter decided that it had all been the result of one of those small seizures she’d read about that the elderly were subject to—a ministroke, the effects of which were transitory. But she was unable to dismiss the one instance from her thoughts.

  Allison and Ellen still lived in Charlottesville, in separate houses. Edith went to stay with Allison next, and it was while she was there, during the autumn, that things grew quickly much worse. Allison called Ellen or Carol almost daily with bad news. The doctors were describing with clinical efficiency what lay ahead, what would be required, and clearly matters concerning their mother were growing beyond them. Edith was getting worse all the time. She’d wander out of the house and be gone for hours; you had to go get her and bring her back. Twice recently she’d gone out alone in the predawn, walking the dark streets in a bathrobe, humming tunes to herself. She talked incessantly, and of course she’d always had stories to tell, but these were the same childhood tales over and over. The last time she’d gone roaming, the police had picked her up for shoplifting. “It’s driving me crazy,” Allison said to Carol over the hum of long distance. “My work is suffering, I have no private life anymore, I never know what to expect. I’d ask Ellen to take her, but you know what things are like for her now, with those kids and starting a new job at the university, and the older kids just aren’t up to baby-sitting an old woman and a toddler, too. But something’s got to be done, and quick, I’m telling you. Something decisive and rational.”

  “Should we get a nurse?” Carol said.

  “I’ve got a nurse. I’ve been paying a nurse for two weeks now.” “Well what, then?”

  “We want you to come to Charlottesville. Ellen wants to talk about it. We all have to agree on something.”

  “Allison, what are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know. Really, Carol. Ellen just feels that whatever we do should be done together. That way the responsibility can be equally distributed.”

  “Responsibility.”

  “Please come,” Allison said. “Please don’t be difficult.”

  “Things aren’t so good right now,” Carol said.

  “Explain.”

  “It’s just going to be hard to do. How long are we talking about?”

  “Are you having trouble again?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Carol told her, and she couldn’t keep the annoyance out of her voice.

  “Well. What do I know,” Allison said. “People do have relapses.”

  “How long are we talking about?” Carol said.

  “We have to do some things, don’t we? A couple days, anyway.”

  “When?” Carol said.

  “Now. Tomorrow. The next day. You say. But soon.”

  “Thursday,” Carol told her.

  Two years ago, out of a kind of restlessness, she’d ended a long relationship with a man, someone who didn’t matter at all now but whose absence, quite oddly, worked on her in ways she couldn’t have supposed it would. She was bored with him; things were going nowhere, and so she broke off with him. She spent two days feeling free of the burden of having to work at everything, but then with the gradualness and the secret speed of clock hands a malaise had set in—a completely unexpected, pervasive sense of spiritual sickness which undermined her normally confident nature and left her in a state of almost suicidal despair. She stopped going out, stopped returning her mother’s and her sisters’ calls, saw no one, and time died out. Mornings blended into afternoons, into evenings. She quit her job by simply ceasing to go to it, and as the money she’d been saving all that summer began to go, she marked the diminishing balance of her checkbook as though it were the number of days she had to live.<
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  Into this darkness Edith had come one Sunday, peering into the first-floor window of the apartment and saying her name. It was like all those days when she had been a little girl and Edith had called from another part of the house. Even so, she had no memory of letting her into the apartment. But Edith came in and sat down across from where she lay on the couch, and took Carol’s hands into her own and looked at her. “Okay, now, Missy,” she’d said. “Suppose you tell me what this is all about.”

  There was something in the commanding, matter-of-fact tone of her voice that made Carol calmer inside. The air seemed somehow charged and fragrant again, though there were soiled clothes everywhere. She looked into the sharp brown eyes and felt that her mother could do anything. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Of course you do,” said Edith.

  And Carol began to cry. It was the first thing she’d felt in perhaps six weeks. She cried and Edith gathered her into her arms.

  “You just wait,” Edith told her. “I’m going to fix you up. I’m going to concentrate on you, young lady.”

  “I’m okay,” Carol said, because it was what people said in such circumstances. But she held tight to Edith’s side.

  “You know what, honey? You held on to me just like this when your father died.”

  Carol didn’t remember much about it. She saw a room, a pair of shoes. There were people standing with their backs to her. She had dreamed these things; they were like something someone had told her.

  “You went for days without saying a word to anybody and without showing the first sign of what you felt. You just pulled down into yourself and wouldn’t come out for the world. Do you remember? We were all very worried about you, and then one morning you perked right up and asked me for pancakes.”

  Carol nestled and said nothing.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Edith said. “I’m going to get you right again, sweetie.”

  And for the weeks that led into winter, Edith worked on her, made her go out, squired her from place to place around the city, claiming that she wanted to be shown the nation’s capital by someone who had lived there. She cooked and cleaned and talked and cajoled and teased, and one late evening she initiated the conversation—at a restaurant in Alexandria—with the young man who became friendly with both women and who, that spring, moved in with Carol, though Edith had gone to stay with Ellen by then and had no knowledge that things had progressed that far.

  Which was somewhat of a complication now, since, last summer, during her mother’s most recent visit, Carol had asked the man to sleep elsewhere rather than trouble Edith with the facts. His name was Ted, he was a college student, nine years younger than Carol. Because there had lately been a kind of uncertainty between them, she’d been purposefully vague about the trouble concerning her mother, and she wondered how she could speak of it at this late date.

  Finally she couldn’t do it.

  There were more important things, and somehow it was a matter of pride that he not know how far her mother’s decline had progressed. She kept the whole thing to herself through the week, and on Thursday morning she lay in bed pretending to sleep, watching him move around the room, readying himself for work. He was a dark, boy-thin man, full of suppressed angers about everything—the culture he found himself in; the failures of his family; his job; his schoolwork; his own inability to organize himself. Yet he could be charmingly self-deprecating and lighthearted when he wanted to be.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She feigned drowsiness, yawned, extending her arms. “Hey.”

  “Aren’t you going to get up?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be late coming home today,” he said. “I have to go to the library and do some work.” “Okay.”

  “I might go have some drinks afterward.”

  “Fine,” she said. She lay there looking at him. The fact that she was going to be gone when he returned felt like some sort of advantage. And then she thought about this feeling and pulled the blankets up over her shoulder. She was suddenly cold.

  “You can come, too, if you want,” he said. “You want me to call when I’m through?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Do you want me to.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?”

  When he was gone, she called the savings bank where she now worked and took two days of sick leave. Once she’d begun to act she didn’t think about him, or what he might say or do. The chill had left her. She packed a small overnight bag and one suitcase, and before she left, she wrote him a note.

  Ted,

  Sorry, had to go to C’ville. Will call you and explain.

  Love, Me.

  Allison’s house was near the University of Virginia campus, in a cul-de-sac of small three-bedroom ramblers which had been built just after the war and were now a little rundown and depressed-looking, with uniformly awninged windows and brittle hedges shedding leaves and brown, dirt-patch yards. Carol drove up to the house and Allison came out, carrying herself with the placid erectness of someone for whom such apparent calm has exacted a price. She kissed Carol on the side of the face, then spoke quietly, with all the quiet reverence of funerals: “Ellen’s already left for the restaurant to make sure we get a table. You’re late.”

  “Can I see Edith first?”

  Allison seemed faintly exasperated.

  “Is it all right?” Carol said.

  Allison turned and led her inside. Edith sat in a straight-backed chair in the low-ceilinged living room, looking very much older. The bones of her face seemed swollen, as though they might break through the waxy smoothness of the skin. Some discoloration had set in around her mouth. A nurse Allison had hired was combing her hair. Allison herself was all business. Indeed, she was like Edith in better days: brilliant-eyed with will, her mind made up. “Ellen’s at the restaurant,” she said. “Let’s not keep her waiting. There are kid requirements, remember.”

  Carol leaned down and looked into her mother’s eyes. “Mom?” she said.

  Edith stared at her and seemed perplexed.

  “It’s me,” Carol said.

  During those awkward weeks of last summer while her mother stayed with her, Ted had stopped by in the afternoons or called in the evenings, as he had in the first days of his acquaintance with them. The whole thing had taken on aspects of television comedy, with poor Ted trying to seem brotherly, uninterested in Carol as a sexual partner. He was a perfect gentleman. He took them out to eat and to the movies; he bought roses for Edith, and was positively gallant; and when Edith got on the train south, he punished Carol by disappearing for two days. He’d gone to get drunk, he said, and spent two nights in a miserable motel room alone. He was hurt. He’d started to think about what it meant that Carol was afraid for her mother to know what their true situation was. “Do you want to get married?” he’d said. “Is that it? You think I’m afraid? You think I won’t marry a woman older than me? We’ll get married.”

  Carol told him she did not want to get married.

  “Mom?” she said now.

  “Oh,” said Edith, smiling at her. “Hello.”

  “Mom, it’s me,” said Carol. “Ted says to say hello.”

  “Of course it’s you.”

  Carol kissed the cool forehead.

  “I’m with Dorothy now,” Edith said, and she turned to the nurse. “Dorothy, say hello.”

  “Hello,” the nurse said.

  “Let’s go,” Allison said. Then she touched the nurse’s wrist. “We’ll be back in a little while.”

  There had been fog and some misty rain in Washington, but over the miles of the journey the mist had dissipated and the day had taken on that vividness which makes October so beautiful in the mountains: cool, leaf-fragrant breezes, bright fall colors everywhere on show, and puffy canyons of cumulus, brilliantly white in the sun. Allison drove. The trees on either side of the street were almost bare, and the yellow leaves that littered t
he road surface swirled in the wind the car made. Carol looked at the black branches and thought of sickness.

  At times last summer, Edith had called her by the name of a long-dead sister. They had joked about it. Carol had humored her by answering to the name. Twice Edith corrected herself. “Good Lord, you’re not Dee. Why am I calling you Dee?”

  “Do I look like Dee?” Carol wanted to know.

  “Not even a little bit, honey.”

  “Maybe I remind you of Dee.”

  “No.”

  Carol had then turned it into a joke. “If you want to call me Dee, you call me Dee. How many names is a person supposed to remember in a lifetime?”

  Now she recalled that she had felt so good then, a year removed from the darkness, better, healed, Edith’s patient in full recovery, and Edith’s small lapses had been a shadow on it all. Something she didn’t want to think about. She turned to Allison and said, “I hate this.”

  “Don’t judge,” said her sister.

  “Judge.”

  “I don’t want to talk about how awful things are,” Allison said. “There’s no sense pointing out the obvious.”

  “I’m not pointing out the obvious.”

  “Yes, you are. You always do. When you turned thirty-two you called me and bothered to point out that you’d reached the age Mom was when she had you. As if this were important and as if we didn’t all know it.”

  “Okay,” Carol said. “Maybe I’ll try not to talk at all. You might remember that I’m the one who got to go through the death of her father at seven years old.”

  A moment later, Allison said, “I’m sorry, honey. Jesus, let’s not argue.”

  The sidewalk that ran along the row of shops across from the Colonnade Club was crowded with couples in suede jackets and patched faded denims and cords; a group of runners crossed at the intersection, wearing suety-looking burgundy tights and metal-colored sneakers. Little knots of people stood on the corner decked out in outlandish jewels and beads, riotous decorations, wild colors and hairdos, as if a whole segment of the population had achieved rock stardom.