House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

The officer gave Lilly a lift to the hospital. Lilly held the bottom of her womb with both hands, climbed into the back of the police car, and from behind the metal grate, gave us a small, defeated wave.

  Max was in the hospital for nearly three weeks. Lilly dutifully went to see him, with near-heroic devotion. She held her hands over her growing stomach, still believing the baby was her trump card, and while he was convalescing in the hospital, she carried in her arms magazines, cookies, and cakes. She brought pillows from home for his hospital bed, but there was a private sadness perched inside her.

  The day Max came home, I didn’t recognize him. He was black-and-blue around the eyes; his jaw was wired closed, and a bandage crowned his head. He turned his head slowly, like a robot would; his face was swollen, his posture rigid, and stitches were sewn across his forehead and along his chin. It was as if he had turned into the reincarnation of his darker self, the mysterious, reckless creature that I had begun to sense underneath his happy-go-lucky nature.

  “How are my princesses?” He forced the words out his wired jaw. They sounded flat and hollow.

  “Give your father a kiss,” Lilly said, motioning us forward.

  “Are you okay, Dad?” I asked timidly.

  Max nodded his head, but without his big smile and confident disposition he looked sadly diminished.

  After the accident everything changed between my mother and Max. Lilly was reserved around him, less anxious to please him. She now began to demand things she had in the past been afraid to do. Instead of wearing fancy negligees and silk robes, she wore old T-shirts around the house. In the morning she plugged in the coffee pot and wandered back up to bed before Max had finished reading the paper.

  “Get dressed,” I said one afternoon when I came home from school to find Lilly still in her robe. I threw her magazines off her bed. “Can’t you at least change your clothes?” I was angry that my mother did not know or even care how to win Max back.

  After Max went back to the hospital to have his jaw unwired, he slowly returned to his former activities. When he came home late one night, Lilly cornered him before he had a chance to pour himself a scotch.

  “I called your office five times today,” she said. “Where were you? I’m your wife, I have a right to know.”

  “Is that right?” Max tore down the basement. We could hear jars breaking and smashing. All Lilly’s pickle jars, one by one, came down from the shelves in the pantry and crashed to the linoleum floor.

  My mother screamed down the stairs at him.

  “Max, what are you doing! You’re crazy.”

  But he came up newly restored. Calm. “I didn’t get married to be cross-examined,” he told her.

  As the weeks of her pregnancy crept on, Lilly had trouble holding down food, and complained of feeling light-headed, and of cramps. Even though the doctor assured her that everything was fine, Lilly believed something was wrong, and she quarantined herself in bed.

  During the week, Max snapped at Lilly if she didn’t have supper waiting for him on the table when he came home from work. At dinner, Lilly and Max rarely spoke. If she complained that she was tired, he said, “Quit your goddamn bawling,” his rage like a cork about to blow. Then he went outside with his putter and practiced his swing. When he came back inside, he grabbed me and tickled me until I screamed. It was the kind of tickling that hurt.

  Lilly looked so agitated and worried, I prayed things would soon return back to normal. I was beginning to feel sorry for my mother again, and angry that Max had humiliated her. Maybe I was protecting him for no reason. What good were men anyway? I wondered. Brontë’s Mr. Rochester was a saint, but Max, as far as I could tell, had none of his characteristics.

  Max was basting a roast for dinner. Sometimes on Saturdays he liked to spend the day roasting a turkey or simmering an expensive cut of beef. Lilly was upstairs napping, and Ruthie came into the kitchen.

  “Dad, can I help you?” she said.

  It was the first time Ruthie had ever called Max Dad. My stomach tingled.

  “Of course you can, sweetheart,” Max said, and kissed Ruthie on the forehead. “You can peel the potatoes.”

  Even Ruthie couldn’t bear to see Lilly in so much pain.

  After Max had regained all his strength, he sometimes didn’t come home until midnight or later. Lilly grew increasingly angry.

  “Where the hell were you?” she’d shout when he came in. She was in full throttle.

  “None of your goddamn business,” he’d tell her. Sometimes he’d turn around and leave the house again.

  Once, in the middle of the night, when Max still hadn’t shown his face, Lilly called to me. “Bring me an aspirin, darling, I can’t lift my head.” Lilly was furious that Max had betrayed her, but she still ached for him to love her. Louise rubbed Lilly’s feet while I held out a glass of water for her to take her pills, and Ruthie navigated the windows to see if Max’s car was approaching. We all wanted him to come home.

  Then one day my sisters and I found Lilly hunched over the bathroom toilet, holding the small mound of her womb. She was into the fourth month of her pregnancy. Tears were smeared across her face. We got the next-door neighbor to drive her to the hospital. Hours later Max stormed into the waiting room. He had finally been located at the Hunt Club.

  “Your mother’s going to be all right,” he told us, but he looked concerned. I smelled liquor on his breath.

  When the doctor came out to report that Lilly had miscarried, Max had already, in his impatience, exited the waiting room for the gift shop. He returned to Lilly’s hospital room with his arms filled with a dozen red roses and a box of Lilly’s favorite chocolates to find us surrounding her. Her face looked tense, and engraved at the corner of her eyes were a few new lines. She had lost a lot of blood and developed an infection. When Lilly saw Max her lips opened into a small, sad smile. She held out her arms for him and began to cry. Then, quick as the snap of a rubber band, she pulled back and stared at him. The room was empty and white, filled with trapped, stale air.

  “Where were you?” Lilly shouted. “How come you’re never here when I need you?”

  “I’m here now,” Max said gently. He took Lilly in his arms.

  “Don’t touch me,” Lilly said.

  “We’ll have another baby,” Max said.

  “I don’t want another baby. I wanted this one.” Tears filled her eyes again. “I lost my baby,” she sobbed, pounding her fists against Max’s chest. “How could you do it to us? How could you? I was carrying our child.” She paused. “The doctor said it was a blessing.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “It was God’s way of telling us that it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Max tried to hold her. “Get away from me,” she screamed. “Everything you touch turns to evil.”

  “Go get the nurse, Anna,” Max said in a tempered, desperate voice. “Your mother’s hysterical.”

  “My poor baby,” Lilly cried. “My sweet, sweet baby.”

  That evening Max took us home without our mother. The doctor wanted to keep Lilly in the hospital for observation. We all piled into the backseat of Max’s Lincoln.

  “Isn’t anyone going to sit in the front with me?” Max said. I peeked over at Louise and Ruthie, then got out of the backseat and slipped into the front passenger seat. Max wore the sheepish look of someone who felt ashamed at what he’d done. I felt sorry for him, but I stared straight ahead into the pigeon crap splattered on his windshield.

  That night I looked up miscarriage in the dictionary: “failure to achieve a proper desire or result.” Like my mother’s marriage, I thought. I closed the dictionary and planted myself against the window. Polaris, the North Star, the brightest, was the star navigators depended on to find their way in the dark, but the sky was filled with so many stars I couldn’t make it out.

  At seventeen I wasn’t ready to have a child. My mother had had her first child when she was not more than a few years older. One day that fall I stared out the window of my bedroom int
o the yard thinking about what I was going to do. I thought about what it would be like to keep the child. But any life I imagined, the image of the pregnant girl at the track, the home I grew up in, didn’t seem right. I never considered giving the baby up for adoption. It wasn’t something anyone I knew had done. I tried to tell myself that none of this was happening.

  I worried that my mother would be able to tell I was pregnant just by looking at me, but she was too preoccupied. By the time I discovered I was pregnant, my mother’s attention was elsewhere. It happened, as such things do, long after we had given up on it, that toward the end of that summer, the perfect man for my mother had moved into the neighborhood. Joe Klein had left an opulent home with three acres his wife had groomed and manicured and moved to a spare, modest Tudor two houses north of us. He came by one Saturday in August, when we were pulling in the driveway, to ask my mother if she knew of a neighborhood boy who could bring in his newspaper and check his mail when he traveled.

  “I’d be happy to keep an eye on the house,” Lilly said. “It would be silly for you to pay someone.” My mother asked Mr. Klein in for a cup of coffee.

  Shortly after Lilly met Joe Klein, I came home one day to find him at the table with Lilly. “I’m not used to being in this situation. My wife took care of the house,” I heard him say.

  “Your wife?” Lilly said.

  “Cancer,” Joe Klein reported, like it was an evil word that needed no other explanation. He snapped his fingers. “It took her just like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lilly said. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

  “Esther was organized and energetic,” Joe Klein continued. “She was president of Hadassah. I really don’t know how she did it all.” He diverted his eyes. He was the first Jewish man my mother had been interested in since my father had died. “I can’t get over it,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. One day the sun is shining, and the next your entire world has changed.”

  Lilly patted his hand. “Oh, Joe,” she said. They were already on a first-name basis.

  I quietly retreated upstairs so as not to disturb them.

  When Louise and I came downstairs later that afternoon, Lilly and Joe were still talking. On the coffee table in the living room were two plates filled with remnants from their lunch.

  “I was in the army during the Korean War. Watched my best friend get his brains blown out . . .” It was clear the way Joe Klein blathered on to my mother’s willing ear that he hadn’t talked to a soul in ages. “Our family lost everything in the Depression. But this . . .,” he said. “I don’t know how you get through it.”

  “You girls don’t have to hang around here,” Lilly said. She gave us the eyes that meant she wanted some time alone with Mr. Klein. I hadn’t seen those eyes in a long time. Not in the years since Max had left us.

  Things moved guickly, and Lilly was in heaven. They had become friends. Joe Klein often sat with Lilly on our front steps that August drinking iced tea with mint that Lilly had picked from the garden. He talked my mother’s ear off about complicated business deals, or reminisced about his dead wife. Lilly patiently endured his endless conversations, but after he scuttled off to tinker in his yard she talked about him as if his wife had never existed.

  One day Joe Klein was out of town, and Lilly was sorting through his mail.

  “How’s it going with Mr. Klein?” I asked her. He wasn’t Lilly’s usual type. He wasn’t flashy or slick; he was what Nonie would call a mensch.

  “Anna, he reminds me of your father,” Lilly said. “He’s the first man I’ve felt that way about in a long time.”

  On Saturdays Mr. Klein mowed his lawn. “This will only take a second,” he said, as he rolled the mower across the driveway and sheared down the square of our front lawn after he’d finished with his own. “No use in letting leftover gasoline go to waste.”

  He was easy to get used to.

  “You must be in the middle of thinking about colleges,” Joe Klein had said to me one weekend. I was sitting on the front steps at the house. “I’ll help you with those applications. My two sons both went to Ivy League schools, and they’re not half as smart as you.” I wasn’t going to break the news to him that there was no money for college. There was barely enough to pay the bills.

  The next time Lilly came back from collecting Joe Klein’s mail, she was excited. “This one is from Merrill Lynch,” she said. She held up an envelope to the light. “He must be worth millions.”

  “If he’s worth millions, do you think he’d be living almost next door to us?”

  “He wanted a clean break,” my mother stated confidently. “He couldn’t bear all the reminders of his past life. Look at all these,” she added. She held a stack of condolence cards. “He’s well liked,” Lilly summed up. “He’s been getting four or five a week.”

  On the night of my seventeenth birthday, a week after I discovered I was pregnant, I came home from an afternoon shift at the diner to find my mother had invited Austin for dinner. It was Saturday night. I really didn’t expect much of a birthday celebration. Birthdays were never big in our house. And all my thoughts were on the baby growing inside me, and what I was going to do about it. I’d been hoping the day would pass by unnoticed.

  When I came into the kitchen, Austin was helping my mother set the dining room table.

  Since Joe Klein had entered the picture, my mother had become energetic and talkative. Lilly had her makeup on, wore one of her slinky dresses, and had musk perfume pressed against her pulse points.

  I was still wearing my stained waitress uniform. I smelled like greasy French fries, ketchup, and spilled Coke. My hair was pulled back in a ponytail. On my feet were dirty tennis shoes.

  “Anna, aren’t you going to offer Austin a drink?” Lilly mused. “Since it’s a special occasion, I thought we could all have a glass of wine.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle.

  “Let me help you, Mrs. Crane.” Austin took the corkscrew and bottle from Lilly. I should have been flattered that Austin was working hard to win my mother’s approval, but I was pissed off that he could carry on with his life as though nothing had happened, while my world had hit a dead end.

  Austin wore clean blue jeans and a crisp white oxford shirt. He smelled like Irish Spring soap. Usually he wore the same Grateful Dead T-shirt and pair of ripped jeans I watched him pull on day after day.

  The kitchen table was covered with Lilly’s color swatches and magazine clippings.

  “Your mother’s a closet artist,” Austin said, looking at the table.

  “What do you think of rose for the bedrooms?” My mother held up one of the swatches.

  “Where’s Louise, Mom?” I was hoping Louise was going to join us.

  “There would have to be a war going on to drag her out of that pool. Sit down, Anna,” Lilly said. “Why are you so jumpy? I don’t want you to lift a finger. This is your day.”

  “I’m going upstairs to change.”

  When I came back down, Lilly and Austin were talking by the stove. I quietly walked into the hallway by the kitchen and listened.

  “Anna thinks I should work. All my girls do. But what would I do?” Lilly said. “I’ve never been good at anything.”

  “I’m sure Anna understands,” Austin said.

  “Why should she?” Lilly was stirring a skillet of sauce on the stove. “My family was wrong. They all were. They thought it was enough to expect a man to take care of you.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Mrs. Crane.”

  As soon as Lilly’s divorce was finalized, she changed her name back to Crane. “I don’t want to think about Max every time I sign a check,” she offered as an explanation.

  “My daughter is seventeen today. I wish her father could see her.”

  It was impossible to make sense of what my mother was doing. Why she felt she needed to explain herself to Austin. It made me sad to think she didn’t fit in with all those couples s
he used to socialize with before my father died, or later the friends she had made with Max, as if she’d been expelled from the world of country clubs, cocktail parties, and aqua pools just because she was a widow. When I stopped to think about it, I didn’t know who would be her friends or confidantes. She was like a castaway on a desolate, uninhabitable island that belonged to birds and vegetation.

  At dinner Lilly drank too much. She picked uneaten mushrooms off Austin’s plate.

  “Anna, you didn’t tell me Austin is training to be a driver,” Lilly said. “Your father used to love to take me to the racetrack. I think it’s so romantic. I’m glad Austin is going after his passion. Anyone can be a lawyer or a doctor.”

  My mother was making me furious. How could she encourage the sleazy track life for Austin? I was getting tired of going to the track every weekend night, worrying about how much money Austin was losing gambling, and then having to walk through the barns with him, watching the track hands gape and stare. I was hoping that his attraction for the track was wearing thin. By the time fall had come, I longed for the geography of my life to expand, wanted to be consumed by something outside myself and my family.

  “Your father used to get us seats in the clubhouse, and we’d drink chilled champagne with the Moskowitzes and Shapiros,” Lilly went on. “In our day there was dancing at the clubhouse. We’d wear our cocktail dresses, hats, and white gloves. Before I married your father, I went out with a different boy almost every week. The world has changed so much since the time I was a young woman. I told Anna that at her age she should date. But nowadays everyone just wants to hunker down with one fellow. I don’t understand the modern world.”

  “You’re still young, Mrs. Crane.”

  Lilly laughed. “I’ve got three grown daughters.”

  Austin was falling under Lilly’s spell. It was so clear, I felt as if I had stepped back and was watching a movie. My mother was animated and suddenly vital now, with Austin’s attention focused on her.