by Sue Miller
“Where will you put them? Or will you … ?”
“Scatter them. Yes. I think so. Probably on the lake. We haven’t talked about it much. Here. I should take it up and pack it.” He took the box from Mary and turned the lights out after them. Following her up the stairs, he was thinking of Mack. He’d lifted the box too, earlier in the day, before the service, and asked the same question. When David had told him what it was, he’d been silent a moment. Then he’d smiled that strange distant smile he had, and said, “Boy, he ain’t heavy.” And sung, “He’s my bro-the-er.”
David had felt his head shake, involuntarily.
Mack’s hands lifted. “Okay. Okay. Bad joke.”
“Just if your mother had heard you, Mack …”
Mack had grinned, almost wickedly. “For Mother I would have said, ‘His burthen is light, by God.’”
In spite of himself, David had laughed.
And now David, carrying the box slowly upstairs, was suddenly struck by it too—all that power that Randall had held, reduced to this, a few pounds, most of that probably the plastic jar the ashes sat in. Surely some of what he felt himself was the weight falling away, the yoke lifting.
In the middle of the night, he heard Lainey get up. They hadn’t bothered to pull the curtains because they needed to rise so early to catch the plane, and he watched her silhouette cross in front of the glowing white windows. The floorboards of the old house protested every step. Once she’d gotten downstairs, he sat up partway. He expected to hear her in the kitchen, but the house was deeply silent, no noises rose above the heavy push and pull of the ocean that washed in from the open window.
He dozed very briefly, and when he woke, he immediately got out of bed himself. He’d been dreaming her sitting in the dark living room, or at the dining room table, weeping silently in order not to wake him or Mary. He felt around on the chair for his bathrobe. He was standing in front of the window, about to put it on, when a movement in the moonlight on the wide lawn that stretched down from the house to the sea caught his eye. He turned and stared. It was Lainey in her nightgown moving up the lawn, her white feet winking on the black grass as she ran. He saw her stop and turn back to face the ocean. He could feel himself stiffen, and only after she turned again and continued on her way back to the house did he realize he’d been holding his breath.
He went quickly down the dark stairs, stumbled across the living room, and opened the front door. She was perhaps ten feet from the foot of the porch stairs, standing on the lawn. Her arms were wrapped around herself, and she spun to him when she heard the door, her nightgown swirled, and she lifted her face. It was open, alive; her. dense hair was blown back from her forehead.
He stepped forward to where the moonlight fell on him too. “I was worried about you,” he said. His voice sounded thin and puny in the expansive air.
“You needn’t be.”
“I didn’t want you feeling sad by yourself.”
“Sad! Oh … ! David.” She stepped toward him, and her face was anguished and jubilant at once. “That’s not it, not at all. It’s terrible. It’s terrible, I know. But what I feel …” She stopped and looked at the ocean again. Then after a moment she turned slowly once more to face him. “Don’t you see?” she whispered. “I’m free.” Silver tears glittered in her eyes. “I’m free as a bird!”
Chapter 17
It was my mother, it was Lainey, who wrote chapter two for them—Lainey who ended it, finally, though it was my father who moved out again. And it’s clear she was set in motion by Randall’s death. Certainly not so quickly as I was: I married Will about a month later; or Mack—by Christmas of that year he’d sold his Vermont farm and used the proceeds to buy into the bar in Chicago. No, for Lainey and my father it took longer, it was all more tentative and gradual. But the first impulse toward change was immediate. It came when they returned from the funeral. Lainey called a realtor to ask what they could get for the house. She wanted out, she said. She knew it as soon as she walked through the front door and set her bag down by the newel post.
It was my father who resisted, who said he wasn’t ready to give it up. She was surprised, she told me, at what seemed sentimental to her in this, sentimental and out of character. Still, she canceled the appointment, even though she felt almost physically uncomfortable at home now: all those useless rooms, all that wasted space. But then she started in the set-painting program at the Goodman, and for a while they were both very busy. They seemed to settle in again. Her letters and phone calls were accounts of all they were accomplishing in their separate worlds.
But the dramas had run out, and slowly the engine of their marriage stopped. She was the one who felt it, keenly. For two years in a row she spent most of each summer away from my father, at her family’s house on the shore. I went up from New York a couple of times each of those years to visit her, to get out of the city. And it was late that third fall after Randall’s death—the fall of 1981—that my father moved out. Harold Baker had had a heart attack and died quite suddenly, and Lainey said it made her feel a need to be decisive, to make the changes she’d been thinking of. That was the explanation she offered all of us at the time anyway. And it was the way she spoke of it to me too, on those dreamy nights on her front porch while I was visiting her. But it’s occurred to me more recently that it might have been more complicated than that. That perhaps she realized in some way when Harold died that there would always be women for my father—women like Tony. That she wouldn’t in any sense be abandoning him if they separated.
At any rate, they separated. He moved out, and after a while he did begin to see Tony. At first it was because she was an old friend and they were comfortable together, they understood each other. And then, increasingly, it was out of a sense of potential, of joy.
A week or so before their wedding, my father and Tony asked me out to dinner with them on the spur of the moment. They would pick me up, they said. There was a restaurant they wanted to try on the North Side. Maybe we’d stop by Mack’s for a drink afterward.
I wasn’t ready when they arrived. I pressed the buzzer and then stepped barefoot out into the chilly hallway. I could see it was just my father down there—he stood alone in the little lighted space at the bottom of the stairwell, his dark coat widening out under his shoulders and head. I called down to him to come up, and he lifted his face blindly to my voice.
“Let me signal Tony,” he said. He disappeared for a moment, and then I could hear him begin his ascent.
“Good Lord, Nina,” my mother said softly when I went back into the living room. “You might have warned me.” She was still in work clothes, stretched out on the couch with the newspaper spread around her. She was barefoot too, and I could see that the soles of her feet were a dusty gray.
The room was a mess. What’s more, she had recently taken the canvas off a flat from her latest set and tacked it up on the wall. It showed part of the front of a stone house, a mansion. The big granite blocks it was made of were deeply chiseled at the edges; the front door was wooden, the grain done with careful exaggeration. There was a grotesque brass face for a knocker.
It was astonishing really—you stepped into her quite ordinary apartment and there seemed to be this other fantastic building there, making everything in the real world around you small and colorless by comparison. When my father came in, he was silent for a moment, looking around. His head swung back and forth, taking in all the different elements.
“Hello, David,” my mother said. She was still on the couch, though she’d sat up. She’d hastily folded the messy newspaper, too, and taken her glasses off.
“Well, Lainey.” He stepped into the room. His face looked suddenly oddly animated and eager. “Still making scenes, I see.” He gestured at the wall.
She looked up, and then she laughed, her old loud, whooping laugh. “I’d never thought of that,” she said. “No wonder I like to do it.” She was still beaming across at him as he sat down on the chair closest to the hal
lway.
“The place looks nice, though,” he said with some generosity. “All the old stuff looks good in here.”
“This is hardly all of it,” she said. “There’s tons more in my storeroom downstairs. And just boxes and boxes of junk shoved in the guest room and the study. I had no idea what to do with anything.”
I’d started down the hall to find a pair of panty hose with no runs, which was what had held me up in the first place. “There’s even all our old stuff,” I called back.
“Really,” he said.
In the guest room, I pushed my hand into one pair after another of ragged hose. I finally found one on which the run was for the moment confined to the foot area. I touched nail polish to the point where the ladder ended and waved the hose through the air, blew on it to speed its drying. When I pulled it over my foot, I twisted it so the run would be almost entirely hidden by my shoe. The whole time I was doing this I could hear my father’s quiet voice and then Lainey’s—more animated, more alive, than it ever was when she talked to me or to one of her friends. She still loves him, I thought. But of course, she’d never said she didn’t.
I stood still for a moment even after I was ready, listening intently—as I had listened so often to them when I was a child, trying to understand the mystery that had brought them together, that kept them locked in their endless struggle with each other. Somehow I felt a kind of anger at what seemed their ease with each other now, their comfort. Then I noticed, under a pile of other books on my nightstand, the worn journal my father had given me those weeks ago. I extracted it and carried it back down the hall to where they sat smiling across the room at each other.
“This is yours,” I said, holding the book out to my father. He squinted at it as he reached up.
“Oh, good Lord!” Lainey cried. “It’s that horrible diary about how crazy I was.”
“No, no, no, no, this is about Randall,” my father said, turning it over in his hands.
And then he looked up, his face suddenly pained. There was a moment of stunned silence in the room as we all took it in: the long, hard history laid bare in their quick exchange, the claims implicit in their different versions of the meaning of my father’s written record. And I was aware of a sudden guilty sense of myself as provocateur. I realized that I had wanted all this somehow when I picked up the book. That I had deliberately created this moment—this moment in which Tony sat alone outside in the car and the three of us in here stumbled once again over the events in our past that bound us together, in some sense forever. With an almost clinical distance I noted that I was a little breathless, that my heartbeat was bumpy and fast.
But my father had recovered himself. He was saying, in his gentlest voice, “Actually I think it’s neither. Or both. It’s really just a young man’s very philosophical discussion about which came first, the chicken or the egg.” He smiled tentatively at Lainey, as though asking her for something he wasn’t sure she’d want to give him. After a moment, my mother smiled back. Then both of them stood, nearly simultaneously, as though this had broken a spell that held us all in place.
As my father and I were going down the stairs, my mother called out, “Give my love to Tony.” Her voice sounded strained, and I looked up quickly, but all I saw was her back disappearing into her fun house of a living room and then the blank door shutting.
My father was quiet in the car on the way north. But he’d taken the back seat, and Tony was chatting about the restaurant—a friend of hers had invested in it, it turned out—so I don’t think she noticed anything. Every now and then I looked over at him, at the passage of streetlight after streetlight across his smooth, almost skull-like face. It revealed nothing.
When we got to the restaurant, Tony excused herself, and my father and I were seated together. The room we were in was dark and plush and old-fashioned, with leather banquettes against the walls and portraits everywhere, in heavy gilt frames, of horses and dogs. It felt simultaneously genuinely rich and deeply phony.
As soon as we sat down, the waiter came over for our drink order, but my father said, “We’ll wait for my wife.” I was caught by surprise; for a moment I didn’t know what he meant. Perhaps I made a noise of confusion, because he dipped his head toward me as though in apology and explained, “Tony.”
When the waiter had gone, we sat for a moment in awkward silence. Then my father leaned forward and rested his folded hands on the white tablecloth. “You know, Nina,” he said, “I wouldn’t have ended it. It wasn’t what I wanted at all.”
“I think I know pretty much how all that happened, Dads.”
He smiled coolly. “I doubt you do. I doubt Lainey explained to you how hard I fought for it.” I was looking at his hands, at how slim, how pretty, they were. Like a woman’s really. He said, “I thought we could be happy, perhaps.” His voice sounded suddenly bitter, and I looked quickly up at him, but his face, as usual, was unreadable. “Lainey said an odd thing to me, you know,” he went on. “After Randall died. She said she felt free. And I was foolish enough to think I could join her in that, that we could be free together somehow.” He shook his head. “That was not what she meant.” Then his quick smile passed over his face, and I felt my own face lift too, in automatic response. He said softly, “You should know, though, that I’m very happy now. Tony and I are, I think, better suited to each other in some ways than Lainey and I were.”
I murmured something.
At the table next to us, a couple sat in awed silence while the waiter ceremoniously lifted rolls from a basket with a pair of silver tongs. My father sighed abruptly and said, “Lainey had—still has, I think—such a need for drama, for everything to be high-pitched.” He shook his head. “I was no good at living on that scale. Everything, even sex, had to have a nearly sacramental quality.”
Far across the room I could see Tony being directed to us, nodding, her chin lifting.
“And after Randall died, my incapacity for that was all too evident. There just wasn’t enough there for Lainey. In me. In our life. I didn’t have the power to draw her back to it.” Then he looked intently at me and smiled again. “Perhaps what it is is just that Lainey has no gift for what Freud calls ‘normal misery.’”
I laughed, too loudly, to signal him to stop talking. Tony was nearing the table, her pretty dress swirling behind her, her face open in greeting.
But he went on: “Life, in other words, as we mere mortals have to live it.”
And then she was there, smiling down at us, smelling freshly of perfume—a lilacy, light odor—and he rose to pull her chair out for her and signaled the waiter that we were ready to start.
After the meal, my father said he was tired, too tired to go to Mack’s. I was relieved, actually. I had drunk too much, and I was exhausted too. Both of us had been preoccupied through the dinner, and as though she could sense that something was wrong, Tony had been talkative and charming, directing our conversation easily to the world outside of us—politics, the theater, the food we were slowly eating. Even in the car on the way home, she kept things light and sociable.
When I opened the door to my mother’s apartment, Lainey stirred on the couch and slowly sat up. She was wrapped in a blanket. An opened bottle of wine and a sticky-looking glass sat on the coffee table. “Nina,” she said.
I felt I’d known all evening that she would be waiting up for me. Without taking my coat off, I sat down in the chair my father had occupied earlier.
“I fell asleep,” she said. She licked her lips. “I was so upset when you left. I …” She looked confused, and then her eye fell on the bottle. “Would you like some wine?” she asked.
“I’ve had plenty.”
“Me too,” she said, but she leaned forward and filled her glass again. “I don’t know when I’ve had so much to drink.” She took a swallow and then looked up, smiling. “A bald-faced lie. I do know very well when I’ve had so much to drink. But it has been a long, long while.”
She sat back, with the glass i
n her hand. Her short hair was oddly ruffled and then flattened around her head. In another situation it would have been comical, I would have joked about it with her. Now I felt a powerful surge of remorse for her suffering. I said, “I’m sorry about the notebook thing, Mom.”
“How could you know, darling?” she answered quickly.
I watched her for a moment. I felt dismissed rather than forgiven—and I suddenly wanted her to understand that I’d intended to stir things up. “I knew,” I said, too loudly.
“Oh.” Something crumpled in her face. She set her glass down. “Then what on earth did you think you were doing?” Her voice was flat and cold.
I shrugged. “Maybe I was being like the proverbial child of divorce you read about in the literature. Trying to bring her parents back together.”
“Well, you ought to know it’s much too late for that.”
“Or else I’m just the wrong child.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She was scowling. Her face looked old and sexless.
I got up, went across to the black windows.
“Nina, no one could bring your father and me back together.”
I turned around, quickly. “I’d like to know why not, when you finally had a chance for a peaceful life together.” I had the sense, oddly, of speaking in my father’s behalf, of pleading his case.
She shook her head. “No, we didn’t. Not really.”
“Why not? Just why not?” My voice sounded childish and shrill, even to my own ears. She stared at me a moment before she answered.
“Because after Randall died … it was like there was an empty place, a hole, in the center of my life where he used to be.” Her hand had lifted to her chest and rested there. “I measured everything against what it had felt like before, and everything seemed … diminished. Unimportant. I couldn’t help that. That feeling.”
