by Jack Ketchum
His gift was his curse.
There was no way he could stand the City. Not just New York City but any city—which played hell with his career as a musician and limited him mostly to the small clubs nearby around the Jersey shore. In tourist season even lazy old Cape May would make him surly. His cure for surliness was a scotch bottle. My father was functionally drunk from June to September and throughout every major holiday season. We took it for granted that he would be.
What we didn’t expect was for him to leave us.
One cold clear night in February while all of us were sleeping he got up and drove away.
My mother covered the mirrors.
I was only eleven at the time but my sister Louise was sixteen. What for me was just a dumb, weird adult inconvenience to her was a disaster.
“Are you crazy?” she said to my mother.
She was—beginning to go there at least. I know that now. But our household had never been Leave it to Beaver anyway. The mirrors were just more of the same as far as I could see.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
She wasn’t. She was doing it for herself. My mother was as vain about her looks as my father had been proud of them and in covering the mirrors she was saving those eyes, that skin, that wild shock of hair toward the day he returned. So she wouldn’t see the time passing, reflected in her face.
She knew he’d return. Against all hope we heard it from her again and again. While it was probably her bickering and constant chattering that finally drove him away.
“How am I supposed to have any friends over?”
She couldn’t. It was too embarassing.
“Everybody has friends over. You know what this is doing to my life?”
She meant her social life. What it was doing was ruining it. But that was partly her own fault.
My sister felt ashamed.
It also nearly destroyed the family business. We’d been running a modest little bed and breakfast out of the six-bedroom Victorian gingerbread my mother had inherited from her sister and it was pretty near impossible to explain mirrors shrouded in Laura Ashley prints to paying guests. My mother didn’t even try. Instead she adapted—replaced the large oval dining-room mirror with a Neal McPheeters seascape and opened the room up for a limited-menu breakfast and dinner. My mother was a good cook if slightly prone to thick floury sauces and people seemed to like the intimacy of a restaurant which could seat no more than sixteen at a time.
We survived. I survived handily. My sister Louise a lot less so.
She was ashamed. She was guilty because she was ashamed.
It lasted the rest of her life.
For my mother it took a few years before the bitter truth set in. Despite the hopeful litany—when your father gets this out of his system—she eventually must have realized he wasn’t coming back. Their wedding photo stayed on the mantle above the fireplace in our living room but gradually lost its power to draw her glance. I got to wondering why she didn’t cover that too. We got Christmas cards and birthday cards from Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and Maine signed in my father’s small neat hand. There was never a return address. My mother got the occasional crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. There was never a note.
Then he missed my sister’s twenty-first birthday and a few months later, my sixteenth. The hundred-dollar bills stopped coming.
Louise and I assumed he was dead.
My mother never talked about it.
Louise and I did, plenty of times. There was a place we used to like to go down by the Point off St. Mary’s By the Sea, a nun’s retreat. We hardly ever saw any nuns, just fishermen. We’d take the old boardwalk path over the dunes down to a long breakwater jetty built of huge flat slabs of granite set with pilings and cemented together by pebbled concrete. Over years of tidal pull and pounding surf the concrete had disintegrated into white glinting chunks which deposited themselves into the fissures between the rocks after about thirty yards out or so. The jetty continued on for another sixty, black and jagged and slippery green with lichen.
On the one side of the jetty was the wild Atlantic, on the other the calm beginnings of the Delaware Bay.
It was a place of contrasts, a good place to sit and think.
I remember lying on the sand on the Atlantic side one warm September afternoon and asking my sister why she didn’t just leave. Why she wasn’t going off to college like the other kids. Hell, she had the grades.
“She needs me here,” she said. “How’s she going to run the restaurant?”
“She yells at you.”
“Everybody yells sometimes.”
“Dad didn’t.”
“No. Dad just ran away. I’d rather get yelled at, wouldn’t you?”
“You figure he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
I remember I had on the bright orange bathing trunks I used to favor and that Louise, in her flowered modest two-piece, had a little bit more belly than she might have liked.
“I figure he’s dead,” I said. “It used to be sometimes, every once in a while, it’d be like I could feel him, y’know? Just sort of like know he was around somewhere. Not nearby or anything but around. I haven’t felt that for a long time now. You think that’s wierd?”
“No.”
“You think we’ll ever know what happened?”
“No. Not if we don’t by now.”
“I think you should leave. I think you should go away to school. She can get somebody else to work the restaurant.”
And another time much later, in full summer. Louise and I standing on the rocks watching the sand-fleas swarm through the bright wet lichen at low tide.
“I should have gone,” she said. “She hardly speaks to me. Either that or she’s going on and on about something and half the time I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. I should have gone, dammit. Now I never will.”
“Sure you will. You can do it anytime.”
I was leaving in the fall—flying off to college. I wasn’t planning on returning anytime soon thereafter, either.
“It’d be like running away,” she said. “It would be just like Dad.”
“No it wouldn’t.”
“How can I leave her here all by herself, Steven? You know she forgot to turn off one of the back burners last night? If I hadn’t caught it, the whole damn house could have gone up.”
“Jesus.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “You’re leaving.”
I flew to Boston. My sister drove me to Newark Airport and waited for me to board. Waving to me from the gate I saw a plain but not unattractive young woman dressed in jeans and workshirt who, in all her twenty-three years, had had only three boyfriends, each of them very briefly. I couldn’t even be sure she wasn’t still a virgin.
On the plane I thought about my mother.
By then the lines around her mouth were already deeply set beneath the hollows of her cheeks. She’d begun to stoop slightly. Her hair had begun to dull and thin. Her eyes appeared to have somehow settled more deeply into their sockets like sinking stones. It was as though her entire body were slowly turning in on itself—as though my father were still alive inside her however he might or might not be in the physical world and consuming her from within.
She was growing old before my sister’s eyes and mine if not her own.
The mirrors were still covered.
The men in our family leave, I thought. The women stay.
My mother’s osteoporosis set in my senior year.
I was twenty-two. Louise was twenty-seven and called me a few weeks before Thanksgiving to say that my mother had bumped her hip against the kitchen table. She’d fractured the hip and fallen. In falling she’d managed to fracture her wrist in two places. The hip was the main problem. It would keep her in the hospital for a week or so at the very least. I asked Louise if she wanted me to come home and help her out for a while.
�
�I can handle it,” she said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I took her at her word. There was a girl in Cambridge with soft red hair and a washboard belly who was screwing the daylights out of me. I called my mother twice in the hospital. She sounded depressed but otherwise surprisingly okay. Her talk was all doctors and bowel movements and bad food. Typical hospital-patient-talk, not mindless chatter. Then Louise phoned me to tell me she was home. She said she was sleeping and I said not to wake her.
I went to Cambridge for my own type of thanksgiving and home only for Christmas. Louise met me at the airport. I was shocked at how thin she’d gotten since just that summer. Her hipbones showed through her jeans. Her breasts had practically disappeared. When I told her she could stand to gain a few pounds she laughed.
“I know, I know,” she said. “Mom’s taking me with her, right?”
When we got home I saw what she meant. The house was as neat and clean as always but it was none of my mother’s doing. My mother was confined to her bed. Only a week before she’d stepped out of bed and her left foot hit the floor the wrong way and now she’d broken a toe. They hadn’t told me.
There was a throw-rug by the bed now. Too little too late.
My mother’s flesh sagged off her brittle bones. When I hugged her it was like hugging a human-sized sparrow.
She was turning sixty-five in January. She looked to me more like eighty.
I figured with her in bed that except for in her own room we could at least unshroud the mirrors.
Louise shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m not all that big on looking at myself these days either. Leave them.”
My mother was in and out of sleep a lot. That was the medication for the pain. Awake she was usually lucid and kept wanting to set her affairs in order, to tell us for the umpteenth time where her will was or her insurance papers or the deed for the house. As though she was planning on dying the next day. She seemed to think she was still back at the hospital now and then. Bitching about the doctors or the nurses or the food. Or else she’d be half-asleep, and that was when she’d really start talking ragtime.
“You got your dollar? Good boy. Go on down to Murphy’s and get us a bucket of beer, okay? And make sure get change. Can’t trust that Murphy. You got your dollar bill? Okay . . . good boy . . .”
On that one Louise and I finally determined that what she was doing was talking to her dead brother Lloyd—but in the voice of her own mother. It had to be. She was back in Newark, somewhere in the late 1930s.
Her brother Lloyd was killed in Bataan during World War II.
Christmas for my sister and me was cleaning bedpans and checking her for bedsores and doing loads of dirty laundry and turning her and and wiping her chin. That and the restaurant. We closed it down Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and then realized we had nothing much to do. We hadn’t bothered with a tree or decorations and the exchange of presents Christmas morning took maybe all of ten minutes. For her, a silver bracelet I’d picked out in an antique store in Cambridge. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, not a good selection. The bracelet made her wrist look even thinner than it was. For me—the lit major—a handsome boxed collection of the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. We sat around the television. I glanced through the books.
“We could go to the Point,” she said.
“Pretty damn cold for the Point. And then what about her?”
“She’d be okay for a while.”
I thought about it.
“Nah. Forget it. Never mind. It was only a thought.”
Osteoporosis is pain, and pain strains the heart.
Against all expectations my mother lasted till April of the following year. I’d visited as often as my teaching schedule would permit and had watched my sister deteriorate by degrees almost as my mother had before her, but without the added problem—or excuse—of physical disease. I could only hope that now that this was finally over Louise could bounce back to something approaching a normal life. She’d never had one.
At the funeral service she was all skin and bones draped loosely in black. I’d only just flown in. My flight out of Logan was delayed and I’d barely made it.
“She wanted to be cremated,” she told me.
“She did? Since when?”
We’d greeted our fellow mourners. There were a surprising number though I actually knew hardly any of them. Some went back all the way to my father’s day as a musician. Louise and I were seated in the front row with the low hum of organ-music in our ears and the closed pine casket to our right. We were waiting for the minister to begin.
“It surprised me too. She said a funny thing, Steven. Funny for her, anyway. She said she wanted to get the hell out of here, finally.”
“Let us pray,” said the minister.
We bowed our heads.
“I didn’t blame her,” she whispered. “So do I.”
And that was my wish for my sister. That was what I was praying for at the funeral home that morning. Not for my mother’s dear departed soul.
But that my sister was finally out from under her for good.
The day she was cremated we took the ashes directly to the Point.
Louise’s idea.
“She wanted to get away from here,” she said. “Wind and water. I can’t think of a better way, can you?”
The sky was the kind of flat slate grey you get with an oncoming storm. I’d have been happy to put this off for another time—it looked like we were going to get rained on any moment. But Louise was having none of that. She got out of the car with the small white heavy cardboard box in her hands and headed up the boardwalk to the dunes. By the time I passed the Sisters of St. Joseph sign at their base she was halfway to the top.
I caught up to her about twenty yards down the jetty, just where the concrete starts to crack and fissure. To our right the Bay rippled gently under a steady southwesterly wind. On the ocean side the whitecaps slapped and then hissed across the flat black rocks. I caught her arm. I had to yell for her to hear me.
“That’s far enough!” I said.
“What?”
“I said let’s do it! This is fine.”
“Just a little more. Let’s do it right. We owe it to her, Steven!”
“We don’t owe her anything for God’s sake. She’s gone.”
I wanted to say you don’t owe her anything but I didn’t.
“Just a little more.”
She stepped out ahead of me. I was right behind but made no further attempt to stop her. The rocks were wet with spray and beginning to get slippery where there wasn’t much of the concrete so you had to watch your footing. And then there was no concrete at all. Walking became treacherous.
We were about halfway down the jetty, out forty-five yards or so. The air was thick and cold with spray.
“Louise!” I thought, Jesus, sis, enough’s enough.
She stopped which was a big relief to me and turned and smiled and then squatted and started pulling open the cardboard box to get at the thick plastic bag inside which contained the powder-and-bone remains of my mother and I stepped forward and suddenly saw it building off to her left and started to yell, to scream at her but there wasn’t even enough time for that, she had the bag out of the box and that was when the rogue wave hit her like a huge grey-and-white cat’s-paw and lifted her off the rocks and down to the sea. I slipped and ran my way to where she’d been but as the foam receded bubbling off the rocks all I could see below me were two pale slim hands reaching up empty, clawing through the unsustaining water and then pulled down and under into darkness.
I saw a black form that I knew was my sister race away from me down the breakwater and strike the rocks and then a second time toward the very end of the jetty and once, just once, the sealed plastic envelope riding high atop the waves, a chalky message in a plastic bottle. Then another wave broke hard right in front of me and the rain began and I backed away.
; I backed away from all of it.
I turned and walked toward the dunes and toward the telephones at a retreat for an order of nuns.
When the police were through and the report was duly filed I drove myself home declining their kind offer and drank the way my father had, scotch neat in a tumbler, and wept for us all and then in the small hours of the morning I got up and uncovered all the mirrors.
When the Penny Drops
for Mort Levin
Bear with me.
I have a story to tell but first, bear with me. It’ll take just a moment.
Here’s the thesis.
It’s from the mysterious that we make the leap to godly grace or evil.
And only from there.
A little knowlege, which is all we’ll ever have, is a dangerous thing.
My wife and I were having dinner with friends one evening some years ago at an outdoor cafe on Columbus Avenue and as sometimes happens even when you don’t particularly want it to happen the conversation got around to religion, organized and otherwise—and I recalled the story about the Eskimo and the Missionary. The Eskimo asks the Missionary, if I knew nothing at all about this God of yours and nothing about sin, would I go to hell? and the Missionary says no, of course not.
Then why on earth, asks the Eskimo, did you tell me?
My wife laughed. My friends, both of whom would go on to be critics for the New York Times Book Review, smiled thinly.
But the point of the story I think is not that innocence is grace or even good. The Eskimo is not the Noble Savage. It is that knowlege is never complete, it brings with it a core of mystery, of the seemingly impenetrable—and with that a dangerous complexity of light and dark, brightness and shadow which must be penetrated at least to some degree even to make out everyday objects against the looming sky or teeming earth and, lest we stumble, begin to see.
But there I go, talking like a cameraman again. Sorry.
At the time of our conversation on Columbus Avenue I’d been working for ABC News for roughly five years. I’d photographed the Super Bowl and the Rangers, crime scenes and celebrity galas, floods in Iowa and fires in California, mayoral and presidential campaigns and other natural disasters. I liked the work almost as much as I’d loved my Brownie box camera as a boy, roaming the deep Maine woods. I liked the business of watching, the keen eye, the quick fine moment of reaction when the picture either works or doesn’t, I liked the frame of things and the roiling images.
