“Don’t be ridiculous.” My mother pointed at me with a long finger. “That makes no sense, Ana, what you just said.”
“Of course it does!” I punched at the paper. “First of all, you told us you never read the letter. Well, we knew that was bullshit.”
In spite of herself, Justine giggled when I swore. I ignored her.
“All this time, you knew what was in that note. How could you do that? How could you not tell us?”
My mother began picking strands from the afghan, pulling at the design. “Okay, I did read the note,” she mumbled, jutting out her chin.
“Then why didn’t you just tell us what it said?”
“Because it’s so—crazy. I thought it was better for you not to know.” She coughed, then rubbed her fingers against her throat. “I guess I was protecting Daddy, in a way.” She reached over and picked up the letter. “Look—’There’s nothing left for me.’ I didn’t want the two of you to read that and be hurt.”
“Goddammit,” Justine said. Her fingers twitched above the remote and she looked at the blank screen of the TV. “It was a perfectly good night until Ana came home.”
Abruptly my mother got up and went to her bedroom, emerging a few moments later with a pack of Salems. She’d smoked all of our childhood lives, but quit when Meggy turned twelve and threatened to take up the habit if my mother didn’t stop. Seeing the cigarettes, Justine and I looked at each other.
“I didn’t know you started again,” she said, and my mother said, “I didn’t,” as she lit one up. “I just need something, sometimes, for the stress.” When we didn’t say anything, she asked us, “Would you rather I drank myself into oblivion, like Ed Lonergan?” When neither of us answered, she made a pph noise and dragged deeply.
“Listen.” She let the smoke out in a final-sounding sigh. “I heard the same threat from your father for twenty-five years. It was always I’m going to kill myself or I just want to die. At first it scared me, I can’t tell you how much. I watched him the way I watched you guys when you were little. When he wasn’t at work, I hardly let him out of my sight. I was always asking, You okay, hon? I had to be the strong one, he got to fall apart.” She paused again for another tobacco hit. Her eyes glazed over in the same senseless pleasure you always see in movies about drug addicts getting their fix.
“I talked to him that morning. He called me at the office and said he felt out of control. But you’ve got to understand, both of you. He’d said that before.”
My mother lifted her body from our small circle of seats and went over to the island separating the living room from the kitchen. On the other side of it, she let herself down slowly on a stool, then set her head inside the arch made by her hands. She turned her body slightly so that while Justine and I could still hear her, she was no longer facing us.
“He was seeing a new psychiatrist,” she murmured, almost as if we weren’t even there; as if she were reciting her reasons to herself. We could hardly hear her. “That guy whose name started with a Z. Your father thought he was good. That morning, I told Tom he should call him—the shrink. He said he would.”
“Well, he didn’t.” My mother and Justine looked at me in surprise. “I talked to him, too,” I told them. “Today. I went to see him.”
“Hm.” My mother had many sounds to convey doubt, and she made one of them now. “That’s what he says.”
“I believed him.” I reached over to pick up one of my mother’s cigarettes. It was just something for my hand to do; I didn’t light it. “He’s a jerk, but I believe what he said.”
“Liars,” my mother said, but it wasn’t clear whether she was referring to the psychiatrist or other, anonymous people she suspected of God knew what.
“What I don’t get,” Justine said, looking at the floor, “and Mom, don’t be mad, okay?” I could tell she was nervous. “But is it true that Meggy called you that night?”
After a long moment, our mother whispered, “Yes.” She held smoke in her lungs until we could see that it burned, and exhaling she added, “I told her to go to bed, things would look different in the morning.” She spoke quietly and reached for a tissue, both hands pressed against her mouth.
“But how could you take that chance?” Justine’s skin had begun to mottle around her throat. “If she called and said she was scared of him, why didn’t you do something? Come and get her? Or at least call Ana and me?” She could not look at my mother as she asked the questions. Each of the three of us faced a different wall.
Our mother was silent for a moment. Then she whispered, “I didn’t think he would have the guts.”
“Guts!” My voice rang shrill through the room around us. “Guts!” We heard movement on the other side of the duplex, and a moment later Deirdre’s mother appeared at our door, clutching a robe around her middle, stepping a slipper inside.
“Please,” she said. Her voice was apologetic but forceful. “The baby’s trying to sleep.”
The next day, as soon as my mother had left for work, I moved out. I reserved a room at the Fountain Motel, in the next town over, and packed my suitcase while Justine begged me not to leave.
“Come with me, then,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Well, I can’t stay here with her.”
The night before, my mother had tried to hug Justine and me before we went to bed. Justine let her, but I moved away. “Don’t do this to me, Ana,” my mother said. “Honey, please.”
“Don’t do this to you?”
She had refused to carry our discussion any further after Deirdre’s mother interrupted to ask us to stop the noise. “There’s really no point,” my mother said to us, “in talking it to death.” Her own word choice seemed to startle her, but she didn’t miss a beat. “It’s over. They’re gone. There isn’t a thing we can do.”
“Mom,” I said, “we’re talking about Meggy. And Daddy.” I hadn’t used the word Daddy since I was nine or ten, but now it filled my mouth and heart with an old, deep comfort that had been waiting to be called.
“I know that,” my mother said. For a moment her face flickered, and I thought with relief that she was going to break down. But then she pressed her lips together and told us she was going to bed.
“Don’t worry.” Justine murmured so our mother wouldn’t hear. “She’s just upset.”
“Fuck her,” I said, loudly, and Justine turned up the volume with the remote.
I stayed at the motel for a week, going out only to my job at the law office. When I went back to my mother’s house to tell her I was moving to Boston and to say good-bye, she asked if I would consider putting it off until after Thanksgiving.
“There’s something I have to tell you both,” she said. Beside me I felt my sister’s shoulders rise. “Paul and I are getting married,” our mother went on, not looking at either of us.
“Married!” Justine blasted out a laugh. She had just finished eating three miniature Mounds bars, and chocolate sprayed from her teeth. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You can’t get married, Mom,” I told her, feeling my chest grow cold. “For Christ’s sake. It hasn’t even been six months.”
“I know how long it’s been, Ana.” She shook out a cigarette. “Don’t you think I know?”
“Then what are you saying?” Justine asked again.
Our mother closed her eyes before she answered. She seemed to be searching for something to say. “The two of you have each other,” she told us. “I need him.”
She asked our grandparents if she and Paul could have the wedding at their house. My grandmother was ready to say yes, but my grandfather hesitated, and when it came right down to it, he said he’d feel more comfortable helping to host it at the Hyperion Club. Why, my mother asked. My grandfather answered, How long have you known this man? It doesn’t look very good, coming so soon after it all.
My mother said, I feel like it’s been forever.
Well, my grandfather told her, I guess it’s also because of
—Tom. I feel a certain loyalty.
You never had that when he was alive.
I know. And I regret that now.
But Dad, my mother said, he killed Meggy.
I know, my grandfather answered. Believe me, I know. I’m not saying it’s what I should feel. But I can’t help it. I do.
So they reserved one of the smaller rooms at the Hyperion Club and sent out invitations—handwritten by my mother on floral stationery cards—for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Our grandfather enlisted the Reverend William Corson, from Albany Presbyterian, to officiate. He was the same minister who performed my parents’ marriage; who baptized both of my sisters and me; and who conducted the joint funeral service. He was nearing eighty by the time of the deaths, and he wore hearing aids behind both ears. Occasionally, if he spoke before a microphone, the aids started whining with electricity. I had seen Mr. Corson actually cry from the pain.
Of course, I don’t remember my own baptism, or Justine’s either. But Meggy’s is still clear to me, both in image and resonance. Mr. Corson called our whole family forward in front of the congregation and took the baby in his arms. It was the first Sunday in December, and a single Advent candle flickered behind us at the altar. High in the ceiling, above the pulpit, was the round stained-glass window that always mesmerized me whenever I walked into the church. From the time I was old enough to discern it from the pew, I had fantasies of being married in this church someday, walking down the aisle toward its starburst of color and light.
I never imagined a funeral.
For her baptism, Meggy wore the antique christening robe that went back to Great-Grandmother Ott. Justine and I had on matching dresses, which our grandmother made for us: I remember that they were red and green, in the spirit of Christmas, and we wore red velvet ribbons in our hair. Justine’s ribbon looked properly beautiful in her long curls, but my hair wasn’t long enough for the ribbon to stay in place, and it kept sliding around on my head until my mother finally reached over and pulled it down so I could wear it like a necklace.
My parents linked arms next to each other, with my mother’s parents behind them, and Justine and I stood in front as Meggy squirmed in her lace blanket against the minister’s black robe. Mr. Corson asked us, “Do you, in receiving this child, promise with God’s help to be her sponsor, to the end that she may confess Christ as her Lord and Savior, and come at last to His eternal Kingdom?” Behind me I heard my parents murmur, “We do,” and I added, with extra fervor to make up for my tardiness—“we do,” so that my six-year-old voice rang through the sanctuary and made everybody laugh. (It seems to me that I remember this moment—the big room, my family in front of an audience—but of course it’s possible that the details have just been filled in so many times, through the family telling of it, that I only think I remember.)
With the hand not holding my baby sister, Mr. Corson patted the top of my head, smiled out at the congregation, and said, “Now that’s the kind of faith God’s looking for.” A little confused, I reached up to rub Meggy’s bootied foot with my fingers, and when I heard sniffled tears I was astonished to see that they came from my father. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. My mother handed him a tissue from her dress pocket and said, “Ssh, ssh,” the way she often did to the baby.
Mr. Corson raised Meggy above his head and asked members of the congregation if they would also receive this child. “We will” came the murmur back, echoing against the shiny glass, and—this I know I remember—I felt the power and strength embracing my family as we faced our friends and other people who wished us well. Even as I watched my father flinch to see his baby being sprinkled with water from a communal font, I believed I understood what God was, and it was a moment of perfect peace.
I remember when I learned the phrase “perfect peace,” and who it came from. One day when I was in the ninth grade, we had a substitute for English. Everybody was relieved because we were supposed to have started Great Expectations, and nobody had done the homework except me and Delia Leonard. I’d read the first two chapters, as Mrs. Berg had assigned us, but I didn’t have the sense or patience to care for Dickens yet and if Mrs. Berg had been there, Delia and I would have had to do most of the talking; that was the punishment for being prepared.
So we were all intrigued and shy and on the cusp of obnoxious when we came to the classroom that day and found a new substitute waiting for us behind Mrs. Berg’s desk. Usually, we got Mrs. Crummey, whose name and high hair cracked everybody up. But this was somebody new, a man who’d written his name in big capital letters on the blackboard: Mr. Martino. He was dark and thin, with a bald head and mustache. He wore a pale pink oxford shirt, which had sweat stains under the armpits, and a red tie. I heard John Shea whisper “Fag-a-lina,” as we sat down, and a couple of kids snickered.
Mr. Martino let us settle in before he said anything. Then he told us to take out a pen and a piece of paper. His voice made him sound even more effeminate than he looked, and behind me the same people did not even try to contain how funny they found him. Mr. Martino ignored the laughter; he seemed to have expected it. “I want you to write an in-class essay,” he said, “on the following.” He picked up a piece of chalk and blew across the top of it.
“Blow me,” John Shea whispered, and this reached everybody, including Mr. Martino; I could tell by the way his ears wriggled as if they were wincing and turned red at the tips. But again he ignored what he’d heard, and as he turned to the blackboard, we could see sweat wrinkled in the back of his shirt. The best thing that ever happened to me, he wrote, and he looked at it for a few moments before turning around to face us again.
“Twenty minutes,” he said. “I suggest you write like hell, and in the last half hour of class, you’ll read them aloud.”
Around me, I could feel everyone else freezing in their seats, the same way I was. We had all been impressed by the fact that he had said hell. Then, across the aisle, Ginger Cox scribbled something, put her pen down, took out a bottle of nail polish, and began touching up her manicure. I lifted myself from my seat far enough to make out what she’d written for her essay: “I was born.” Mr. Martino came down the row and read over Ginger’s shoulder. “Let me clarify,” he said. “What I’m looking for is a memory, something you were a part of that makes you happy to look back on, that made you glad to be alive.” This time only John Shea made a snickering sound; the rest of us were trying to figure out what to think.
“I’ll give you an example.” Mr. Martino pushed aside Mrs. Berg’s stack of folders and sat on the teacher’s desk, facing us. “I’ll tell you what mine would be. When I was twelve, my family took a trip to the Grand Canyon. We camped out one night because everybody said it was so beautiful. But the whole time we were there it rained. The tent leaked, and my parents were fighting, and my little brother got sick and started coughing and couldn’t stop.” He had all out attention now, even John Shea’s. A grown-up who would talk about his own parents fighting had something to say to us.
“It was late, after midnight, maybe two in the morning. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Mr. Martino’s tasseled fag-a-lina loafers swung against the desk as he spoke. “The noise was driving me crazy—my brother coughing, my parents sniping at each other.” (In the margin of my notebook, I wrote down snipe, to look up later.) “So I went outside, and they didn’t even notice. It was pouring, I mean like buckets of water on your head, but it drowned out all the sounds from the tent. I couldn’t hear any of them anymore. I found a rock not very far away from where we had camped, and I sat on it and let the rain come down on me. I pretended I was a frog, or something in nature that liked to be wet. It was a hot night, and even though I was soaking, I didn’t feel any chill. I turned my face up to the rain, and after a while I started laughing. The weird thing was, though, that I couldn’t hear myself laughing—I could only feel it. I don’t know whether it was because of the rain, or the wind, or what. It was the oddest thing.” Mr. Martino paused, and looked as if he
were seeing that night again, right there in front of him, instead of all of us in Mrs. Berg’s ninth-grade classroom in Ashmont, New York.
“You’re the oddest thing,” John Shea muttered, but by now the class had been converted to Mr. Martino’s side because we sensed that he was describing something important, inviting us into a private room to which other adults never opened the door.
“At that moment, I was completely happy,” Mr. Martino told us, and we could tell by his face it was true: remembering the moment was almost as good as having it happen the first time. “It was like nothing could touch me, or make me unhappy, or—this was probably the biggest part—make me afraid. I think human beings spend their lives being afraid, most of the time.” Nobody in the classroom was moving. We were all looking straight ahead at him, waiting to understand, but also understanding at the same time.
“Then it was over,” Mr. Martino went on, “and I was just sitting there on a rock in the rain, shivering. I wanted to get that feeling of perfect peace back again, but it was gone. It started going as soon as I realized how good it was.” He turned again to the blackboard and picked up the chalk. I think he wanted to be alone with that part of the memory. “T.S. Eliot wrote about those moments—that kind of fleeting illumination—in a poem called ‘Burnt Norton,’” he said. “I mean, I don’t know if that’s what he meant to be writing about, but that’s what it always means to me, every time I read it.” His voice cracked on the word poem, and a couple of kids laughed, because the air had gotten too heavy. Mr. Martino wrote:
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
He put the chalk down and turned to us. “Write about that moment,” he said. “You’ve all had them. Try to get it back again and put it on the page.” Then he pulled the chair out behind Mrs. Berg’s desk and rearranged the papers he had messed up by sitting on top of it.
And Give You Peace Page 21
