by Karen Raney
“Maybe I like the art too much,” she cut in. “I don’t want to have to dream up nonsense about it.”
“Is that how you see what we do here? Nonsense?”
Maddy had once said, about a wall panel I wrote: “I don’t understand a word of this. Sorry, Mom. Not one single word.” I had taken her to too many Fun Days at museums. It had been a great relief to me when she started drawing again.
“Can’t you let people think for themselves?” asked Alison.
“Like the man with the backpack?”
“What was he doing here, anyway?”
“Everyone has a right to look at art.”
She snorted. “Someone like that isn’t capable of looking at art.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“All they do is read the labels. Maybe if the words weren’t there, they might have to actually look at the art for more than two seconds.” She crossed her arms again. “You should have to pass a test before you’re allowed in here.”
“Oh yeah?” I smiled. “And what would you put on the test?”
“What about: ‘If you could own any work in the collection, which one would you choose and why? Anyone who mentions how it would look over their sofa is banned for life.’ ” Alison gave a hoarse laugh. “We’d have the place to ourselves.” Slyly she added, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
• • •
I let two weeks go by before raising the London idea again. To my surprise, Claire had already looked into dates and finances and found someone to cover for my absence. She’d contacted a British colleague I might be able to stay with to keep our costs down.
“It’s a good moment, as you say. No telling what might come from something like this. And it will do you good to get away.”
“You can say that again.” I gave her a hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Claire!” Stepping back, I said casually, “I was wondering if Alison Ward could come with me.”
“Alison?”
“She’s had a rocky time recently.”
“Have you followed up that complaint?”
“This guy threatened her with a gun, believe it or not. She apologized. What I realized is that she knows a great deal about art. Not the obvious choice, I know.”
“Don’t you think an opportunity like this should go to someone more . . .”
“Presentable?”
“Experienced. Alison’s an attendant. She’s very young.”
“She’s planning to do an MA in museum studies. At Johns Hopkins.” When had I become so adept at improvisation?
“Oh, I see.”
“It could be a good way,” I said, “of showing that we value our staff at every level.”
At this Claire laughed out loud and fixed me with a square look that said: Let there be no nonsense between us. I did not normally try to put anything over on her. I could see she was mentally scanning everything she had read about bereavement.
Eventually I said: “I don’t know why, but I feel drawn to young women these days. I want to be in their company. I want to help them out.”
Claire tipped her head to one side and gave me one of her deep, regretful smiles. I knew then that the London trip was in the bag, and that Alison would be allowed to go with me.
23
From work, I took a meandering route to Corcoran Street, feeling the need to be in my mother’s company. My afternoon teaching session had gone well. The group had been more attentive than usual, and Ben Shahn’s Still Music seemed again to be eloquent and full of possibilities.
Now that the London trip was taking shape, Antonio was everywhere. He’d been an invisible presence in the gallery, observing the way I drew knowledge out of people they didn’t even know they had. He accompanied me down the streets we had once walked together, past the mansions built by turn-of-the-century shipping magnates, now luxury apartments and military museums, past the block-long embassies on Massachusetts, some of which, Robin said, must be worth more than the countries they represented, past the hotel famous for the sting operation that brought down the mayor. Incarceration did him no harm in the long run; when Antonio and I first met, the mayor had just been elected for another term.
When I turned onto R Street, though, Antonio dropped away. I had the sensation of Maddy’s small hand in mine. My steps had brought me past the little brick house with the purple door. A former garage nestled between two brownstones, it had acquired the local nickname Hobbit House. When Maddy was small, she always insisted we detour past it, so that she could study the faux-medieval ironwork and the gas carriage lamps, and solemnly inform me that’s where she was going to live forever and ever.
I quickened my pace to my parents’ house, and rang the bell before letting myself in. The heavy door gave way all at once, delivering me onto the fur-choked mat. Would they never fix their locks or replace their doormats?
“It’s me!”
Coffee, wet dog, old wood: essence of home. Maddy had loved that smell. She’d loved everything about their house: the pictures crowding the stairway walls, the piles of books, the handmade pottery squatting on shelves, and the bulging cartons on the back porch that had been there long before recycling became fashionable. My own childhood and my memories of Maddy had a way of merging together. The place still half belonged to her.
“Mom? It’s me-ee!” I called again, though, being an expert in empty houses, I no longer expected a reply.
I was in the kitchen starting a note when I looked up to see my mother making her wordless way down the stairs. She had on jeans and a yellow sweater embroidered at the neck. Her hair was flattened as if she had just woken up. It struck me that this place, the stage of my childhood, had become the house of an elderly couple. In her slow progress toward me, I saw stair lifts, walkers, and home help, a high bed installed in the bay window. I saw my mother and my father leaving the house they loved and the neighborhood that no longer particularly loved them.
“Hello, dear,” she said.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
Her eyes slid out from under mine. “Oh, just one of those days.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Hardware store. Something to fix the back door. Rain got in and swelled the wood.”
“Kind of late in the day to go shopping.”
“I think he wanted to get out of the house. This is a nice surprise. On your way from work? Cup of something?”
“Yes, please.” Once we were seated with our herbal tea, I asked again what was wrong, confident of a buoyant response; then I could tell her my news. Instead my mother’s eyes brimmed with tears she made no effort to hide.
“What is it, Mom?” I went over and hugged her from behind. “What is it?” I repeated, with foreboding.
There was in my mother a well of darkness she was determined not to see. She stepped around it and gazed resolutely past it. This gave her a sunny temperament, twice-yearly migraines, and a low tolerance for bad news. When my brother and I were small, my father had cut disturbing articles from the newspaper before handing it over. She read around the holes scissored out of the pages. Through the years this story had been relayed as fact; recently I’d begun to suspect it was a family myth, or a onetime stunt recalled as a regular occurrence. In any case, it was a cruel irony no one had the heart to point out that the person who’d lost her own mother at the age of ten, the person who most feared calamity, would have to face the death of her only granddaughter.
“Lightning strikes twice.”
“What did you say?”
She angled a weak smile up at me. “Lightning strikes twice.”
“I was just thinking that.” I passed her a tissue. We both kept one on our person at all times. I returned to my chair to give her some privacy.
“I’ve been thinking about my mother,” she said slowly. “I don’t know why.”
“Has something happened?”
“Everyone loved her. My father never recovered, you know.”
“Of course n
ot. Of course he didn’t.”
“My mother never met you. She never had the pleasure of being a grandmother.”
“No.”
“Never is an awful word, Eve. I hate that word.”
“Me too,” I said.
“It’s a great pleasure, you know, being a grandmother.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was looking forward to it.” My grandmother had been bedridden for a year and died of a lung ailment she would no doubt have survived today. “It must have been terrible for you. Beyond terrible.”
“Oh, I had Aunt Jean.” That’s what she always said when the subject came up. “Aunt Jean was wonderful to me.”
“Yes. You said.” A vision of Maddy came to me, ten years old, in her sky-blue leotard, ponytail swinging to her unself-conscious twirls and jumps. At least she’d had me right to the end.
“I didn’t lose a child,” said my mother. “I never lost you. Or Chris. That would have been unendurable.”
The air was thin as mountaintop air. “I’ve endured it.”
“You astonish me,” said my mother. “How you’ve faced this. How you’ve survived.” She paused. “It just makes me sad you don’t have that comfort.”
“What comfort?”
“The comfort of faith.”
She had said this before in different ways. I was accustomed to indulging her. I had not minded taking Maddy to their church when she was small. I let her make what she would of the language and the imagery. Belief belonged to my childhood, after all, and I was grateful for the sense, so deeply part of me, that what we can see is not all there is. Through the nightmare of Maddy’s death, I had leaned on my mother and let myself be soothed by her devotional murmurings. What counted was the tone and the intention. If my mother was held up by God, she could hold me up. I did not care. I could not judge.
“It doesn’t matter,” said my mother hastily.
My heart was beating in my ears. “Maybe it does, Mom.”
“What I meant was, I wish that was something you and I could share.”
“I know you do,” I said. “Sorry.”
My mother only smiled a little, running her thumb and forefinger around the handle of her mug. “You were such a curious child, Eve. Always turning your head to see another side to things. ‘Open the curtains,’ you’d say. ‘The nighttime wants to come in.’ You found your father’s cap out in the rain. ‘Look! It’s Daddy’s old, dead hat!’ ”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, thinking of that sepia person in her shapeless dress, hair crimped into earmuffs, smiling the enigmatic smile of early death, “what gets pushed down comes up somewhere else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t imagine losing your mother and having to pretend it’s in your best interest.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“Believe it’s in your best interest.”
But even as I spoke, I could feel the tangle of my own erroneous logic. By the lake with Norma it was: Maddy’s death was preordained! The snake got the baby birds! There’s nothing wrong with as if! In the presence of my mother, it was: Drop the wishful thinking! No higher meanings! No mysterious patterns! And back again: Had we brought this on ourselves? Was she taken away because we didn’t deserve her? Once a thing happens to you, you become the kind of person that things happen to.
“I can’t explain it, Eve. I don’t know what it’s about or how it affects anything else in my life. All I know is, my faith is something essential to me. It’s in a box over here”—with both hands she set down her invisible box—“and I need it. Selfishly, for myself.”
“Well!” I said. “I can’t argue with that.”
She smiled at me. “Maddy found some solace in it.”
The beating started up again, gong-like in my ears. “How do you know?”
“She came to church with us. It meant something to her.”
“Of course it meant something to her. She liked going out with you and Dad.”
“I’m so glad.”
My eyes settled on the ridges and gullies of my mother’s hands curved around her cup. Eventually age brings all the bones to the surface. “It was the music, Mom. Maddy loved the music. Did you notice she only went to church when there was a concert?”
She shook her head, keeping her body unnaturally still.
“Maddy had her own mind. But she liked to please. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Just don’t tell me you know what she was thinking. Do you remember that time we stayed overnight and you were talking to Maddy about God?”
Rose nodded vaguely. Maddy had been six. From the landing I’d listened to my child’s reedy voice and my mother’s resonant one singing “All Through the Night,” a lullaby I too had been raised on. I heard Rose explain that she loved Maddy and so did God, and He would watch over her while she slept.
“Mom . . .” Maddy said to me afterward, “what happens if you don’t like God?”
The words hung in the air between us. In slow motion, without a sound, my mother’s face deformed into a rictus of despair. She held out as long as she could, fighting for mastery, until with jerky in-breaths and a toss of her hands, she began to cry as she had never cried before, not through the year of Maddy’s illness, not during the service, not in the long cold months since, when she was being strong for me. The wordless keening went on and on, as though she had drilled through to a secret source of fuel, while across from her, patting her soft-boned hand where it lay on the table, I watched with alarm and envy this act of nature that I had set in motion and was powerless to stop.
My mother grew quiet. She withdrew her hand and blew her nose.
“Goodness.” Her blank eyes looked through me. “Goodness! Where did that come from?”
“Where do you think it came from?”
Now she fixed a hungry gaze on my face. “How,” she said, in little above a whisper, “can a person just disappear? It makes no sense.”
“Blame God,” I said briefly, “not yourself.”
“Don’t be angry, Eve.”
“I’m not.” I squeezed her hand. “I’m not.” But I was. Underneath my compassion for what my mother had lost and her wrangles with her faith, deep inside my answering grief, I was unreasonably, ungenerously, incurably angry. Mine had just happened. Mine was maternal, the worst kind. I would go under if I had to take on hers too.
“Thank goodness you have Robin!” declared my mother. “Dear, dear Robin.”
“Mom,” I said, “I’m going to London.”
“London?”
“For work.”
She looked confused.
“I ran the idea past Claire today. I think she’ll go for it.”
“Well, good for you, sweetie,” she said dully. “That’s exciting.”
“There’s another reason.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to look up Antonio.”
Surprise barely registered on my mother’s face. “Walter told me about the letters.”
“He did?”
“Don’t be mad at him, Eve.”
So they had discussed it and arrived at the party line: I was not to be mad at my father. My family spent all their time making sure no one got angry with anyone else. Anger had certainly been in the air when I told them I was going to raise my child without a father. Walter’s jaw made of stone, Rose’s blurry eyes avoiding mine. They rallied soon enough, and stood behind me, and loved Maddy more than anything, but even so, at the time I had delivered a blow to their life plan.
“You didn’t know Maddy and Antonio were in touch?”
“I had no idea. Your father sure can keep a secret.”
“So could Maddy.”
“Walter said he was kind to her. It was a good thing she wrote to him. Is that the way you see it? He’s not just saying that to justify himself?”
“They wrote back and forth for months. It seemed pretty friendly.”
“I just hope Maddy got something from it,” said my mother hoar
sely.
“Oh, she did!” I leapt on that. “I think it was very important to her.”
“Antonio.” My mother frowned. “After all this time! Have you thought this through, Eve?”
“I can get his side of the story, at least.”
She gazed at me for a moment, her anguish subdued in the lifelong habit of counsel. “Is that really why you want to go, sweetie? To get his side of the story?”
The back door scraped open and the hallway was filled with panting dog.
“Well, why else would I be going!”
“You know best, Evie,” said my mother, and I let her pat my arm. My father stood in the doorway, his glasses steamed over from the cold, stamping his shoes, peeling off his gloves, oblivious to what had just taken place.
Maddy
24
So, the place turned out to be awesome. Robin came up with the plan to go, the three of us, on a Friday to avoid the weekend crowds and to fit it in before I went for scans and blood work Monday morning. My mother loved Fallingwater. Robin had never been, and I had gone once when I was eleven. My main memory was of a white-haired lady in the gift shop who let me go behind the counter and punch numbers into the cash register.
The visitor center was in the middle of the forest and made of raw wood. Ramps went up to it on three sides, like it was a waiting spaceship, and there were three pods: a museum in one, a café in one, and the gift shop in the other, where my mother almost bought something for holding letters, with carving on the sides like stained glass windows. She said she didn’t get many letters these days. I said that’s not the point, Robin said go for it, but then we had to rush to get to the tour and she put it back. My mother can be too reasonable. She denies herself things.
“You’ll love this place,” I told Robin on the ramp where our group was assembling.
“I do already. Why?”
“All the wood.”
“The house isn’t made of wood,” said my mother. “Remember? It’s concrete. The only thing I’m not sure about is the color.”
