She and Matthew had driven to both funerals in Alabama, but only for the day each time. Pamela did all the real work before and after—the arranging and paying and cleaning and selling and all the rest of it. Julia fell back on her teaching as an excuse, though she knew she could have asked for, and been granted, time off. But Pamela didn’t play the martyr, just took it on willingly and, of course, efficiently. Julia knew it was something a lot of sisters would still be bringing up. But Pamela didn’t. She understood the real reason Julia couldn’t come, the thing they never talked about.
• • •
OVER the years Julia had tried to blame her misjudgment in the matter of Jeremiah’s papers on the fact that it had been such a confusing time, losing her brother and both parents so close together. But she knew emotions didn’t suddenly erase a person’s understanding of right and wrong, that good people in stressful times rose above temptation every day.
It all started with the letter she received months after Jeremiah’s death, mailed from somewhere in Wyoming, signed, simply, “Lulu.” She was surprised at the quality of the writing itself, though the stationery had been a sheet of notebook paper. The letter stated that Lulu had “stacks of Jerry’s papers,” which she wanted to send to Julia since “Jerry always said you were the one who could appreciate them and would know what to do with them.”
Suggesting that the packaging and postage would be a hardship since “Jerry didn’t have insurance and things are tight,” Lulu asked if Julia wanted her to “go to the trouble of mailing them, or just dispose of them.” She would wait a few weeks, she said, and if she didn’t hear anything, she would “assume the latter.”
Julia wrote her back, of course—addressing the envelope the same way the letter was signed, to “Lulu,” and though Pamela advised her not to, she enclosed a check. Sometime later a box appeared at the front door of the stone house. It was a box that at one time had held a television, a fact from which Julia deduced that though money was supposedly tight, it appeared that Lulu was able to scrape together enough for one of life’s real essentials.
So those were the facts. One, two, three deaths, all within a few months. Then a box of handwritten manuscripts—short stories, essays, a novella, and a lengthy memoir titled Lost Boy. It was the memoir that filled in the gap between the hot summer night Julia had last heard her seventeen-year-old brother slam the door of his bedroom in Alabama and the day over twenty years later when he finally called his mother on the telephone to tell her he was living in Wyoming with a woman named Lulu and their little girl, who was six.
The memoir made fascinating reading, like a novel, with a hero she would have loved even if he hadn’t been her own brother. When she took it out of the box that first day, Julia read it straight through without stopping. Though she realized the potential for distorting the truth when penning one’s own life story, she also recognized in Jeremiah’s writing something remarkable. Even if certain details were overstated—though she had no way of knowing whether they were—her brother was a poet with words.
She had seen glimpses of it when he was growing up, of course, in his book reports and English papers, whenever he took the trouble to do them, but this was different. It was mature writing by someone who had somehow mastered the narrative art without apparently having been taught.
The knowledge affected her in two ways. First, she was proud, as anyone is proud of a family member who performs well, though she knew it was a selfish kind of pride, the kind whereby one sees a relative’s achievement as a reminder that he shares the same superior gene pool. Second, she was angry that Jeremiah, who had slouched his way only through eleventh grade, could put words together as well as she could. Further evidence of the fundamental unfairness of life. She had always tried so desperately to meet their father’s high standards, while Jeremiah, the apple of his eye, never appeared to care whether he measured up, in fact seemed to make a game of falling short.
The memoir ended abruptly after fast-forwarding over a great deal of time, as if tired of itself. No more lush, detail-rich passages, only a small breath of white space followed by a flat summary: And one September day I arrived in Wyoming, where a woman’s heart opened to me and I found home at last. We had a child, a beautiful little girl, and it came to pass in the fullness of time that I returned to the faith of my mother.
That was all. Stymied, Julia read the closing sentence many times. She never would have guessed that “the faith of my mother” was a place to which Jeremiah would return, for she couldn’t remember that he had ever been there in the first place. In his youth, he, like Julia, had had no use for their mother’s faith. He saw it as a defect that enabled their father’s tyranny, for submission was a key ingredient of her particular faith. But so was love. And prayer—their mother took to heart the admonition to “pray without ceasing.”
The faith of their mother was not embraced by their father, though the two of them had met at a tent revival in the early fifties, where her father was song leader and soloist for a traveling evangelist. Her mother, sitting on the front row between her parents, had caught his eye, as he had caught hers. Julia wondered if there were signs, had her mother’s eye not been so dazzled by his handsome exterior, that his heart was not in his work, that the words he sang meant nothing to him, that he had simply secured a job where he might meet pretty, easy-to-manipulate young women.
After they married, he told her he wanted sons. That she bore him only one was a disappointment he never let her forget. As children, Julia and Pamela never had to wonder where they stood in their father’s affection, for he never tried to pretend that he esteemed his daughters as much as his son.
Though, to be sure, he had a strange way of showing his esteem for Jeremiah. The two of them, father and son, were so much alike they could have been twins if time could erase an age difference of thirty years. Yet as far back as Julia could remember, there had been conflict.
Her mother had often wrung her hands over it, called it a Frederickson family trait. “Your father and his father never did see eye to eye either,” she told Julia once, “and the same with his father and grandfather—it’s something in the Frederickson men that can’t just let each other be. The fathers always have to be striving and picking at the sons.” Julia wondered if her mother really did believe the striving and picking were aimed only at Jeremiah. Didn’t she hear the way their father talked to them all? Or maybe she just meant that Jeremiah was the only one who ever fought back.
Though their battles were many and fierce, there was a softness in Jeremiah that her father didn’t have. Not softness in the sense of weakness, but gentleness, toward women, babies, animals, and anything beautiful, even everyday beauty—a wildflower, a leaf, a robin. Running deep beneath all the things they shared, which were many—good looks, intelligence, verbal wit, musical giftedness, physical strength—there was this one enormous difference. And it seemed to be the thing her father couldn’t abide, the thing he kept trying to root out.
If judging only by her last memory of the two of them together, Julia might be tempted to say that her father had succeeded, for there was nothing gentle about her brother that sultry July night. Not when their argument first erupted, not when Jeremiah hurled a chair against the wall, not when he answered his father’s tirade curse for curse, not when he slammed the door of his room so hard the wood splintered, not when he turned his music up as loud as it would go and threw things around inside his room.
By early morning he was gone and never came back. On the kitchen table he left his mother a pink rosebud from the bush by the back door and a note that said simply, I love you, Mom, I always will, but I have to leave before I turn into him. I’ll see you again one day. Promise. Pamela had found both flower and note in a small jewelry case in her mother’s dresser after her death, the brown papery bud detached from the stem, the note worn from handling.
Within her brother’s papers, Julia saw sure evidence of the gentleness her father had so hated but had fail
ed to eradicate. All these lovely words—she wondered if they had cost him effort, or had just wafted into his mind as a breeze through an open window.
And though Julia hated to admit it, the anger evoked by her brother’s writing gave rise to another emotion: envy. She found herself wishing she had written these words. So what if her dissertation had been praised as a “masterpiece of writing, both scholarly and artistic”? Academic writing had only been a hoop in the dog and pony show of higher learning, and she had jumped through it, with one goal in mind: to qualify for a college teaching position. It certainly wasn’t the kind of writing she really wanted to do.
In her first years as a new teacher, she submitted papers and essays to various literary periodicals to fulfill the standards expected of faculty members in the arts and sciences at Millard-Temple. Several were accepted for publication. But it was her love of fiction that continued to grow, especially the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. She fed her obsession by reading these stories over and over. This was the kind of fiction she wanted to write someday—startling and mysterious and comical all at once.
The day she received the box from Lulu and first read Jeremiah’s stories, something else hit her hard: What was she waiting for? She had already been teaching for fifteen years. If her younger brother had written things like these, why hadn’t she? She had gone through hard times, but what of it? So had he. Anyway, hard times were no excuse for not writing. If anything, they should be fodder.
She nearly lost heart that day. She imagined a drag race, with her car stalled at the starting line while Jeremiah’s and everyone else’s sped around and around the track.
Time passed, not much, and then one day she was sitting in the living room of the stone house, reading through one of Jeremiah’s stories again, this time penciling in a few changes, as if she were a magazine editor and someone she didn’t know had submitted this piece.
• • •
A VAN swung into the library parking lot now and pulled into the spot next to Julia’s Buick. The back door slid open and four children clambered out, all of them holding armfuls of books. A woman got out from the driver’s side and ambled toward the library, the children trailing after her, all talking at once. One of them, a skinny boy with shaggy white-blond hair, was hopping on one foot.
What’s wrong with you? Settle down! Can’t you just walk like all the normal children in the world do?—it was amazing how words you hadn’t heard for almost half a century could come back so clearly. Starting with his first step, Jeremiah’s constant motion had been only one of their father’s many complaints against him.
Julia took a piece of paper out of her purse and looked at it. On it were written the titles of the movie and the books she was going to pick up here at the library. It was getting stuffy in the car, so she opened the door. But still she didn’t get out.
The woman and three of the children were almost to the door of the library now, but the towheaded boy was down on all fours beside the broken sidewalk, peering into a crack, his books strewn about him on the ground.
Keep up! Watch what you’re doing! Why can’t you stick to one thing?
Julia suddenly wondered if over the years the roots of the oak tree had gradually applied more and more pressure until one day the sidewalk had all at once broken apart with a sound like a discharging cannon, or whether it had happened silently. She wondered if even now the cracks were still growing, if someone could monitor them around the clock and, with measuring tools, could actually chart them widening, lengthening.
• • •
AFTER she had been through Jeremiah’s story several times that day, revising a word here, adding a transitional phrase there, changing the title, she had looked up from the sofa where she sat in the living room. On the coffee table in front of her was a trial issue of a new regional literary magazine titled Green River that had come in the mail the day before. She decided on the spot to submit the story there.
She typed it from the handwritten pages, very carefully, and proofread it multiple times. Up to the end, she planned to submit the story with the same byline he had neatly printed at the top of every page—J. Frederickson. Or at least that was what she told herself now. She had prepared the mailing envelope, thinking about other magazines she could try if this one didn’t want it. As it turned out, Green River did want it, and they published it without making a single change.
What she couldn’t remember was what had gone through her mind in the seconds right before printing off the final copy, the exact moment when she lifted her hands above the computer keyboard and added another name to the end of J. Frederickson to make it J. Frederickson Rich.
Maybe she had been plotting to do this all along, or maybe the thought came to her at the very end in a rush of pragmatic justifications piling up one on top of the other: Contemporary magazines prefer to publish stories by living writers. And After all, this would be in a trash heap in Wyoming by now if I hadn’t ransomed it from Lulu. And My editing made it what it is. And Jeremiah wouldn’t care who got the credit. And Tenure requires publishing. And, of course, No one will ever know the difference. All of which missed the point completely.
• • •
AN old woman was slowly exiting the library using a cane. In her other hand she carried a quilted tote, bulging with books. She crept to a car in a nearby handicapped space and proceeded to get her books, her cane, and herself inside. It struck Julia that here was a woman of courage whose limitations didn’t stop her from venturing forth to get what she wanted. Yet she defrauded no one in the process.
Julia sighed and glanced down again at the paper in her hand. One of the titles she had written down was another how-to book that a colleague in the English department had recommended—On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King, of all people. So now she would go inside, check it out, take it home, and read it. She put one foot out of the car. She couldn’t begin to count the number of how-to books she had read, always delaying the action of writing for a little more preparation.
She got out and headed for the entrance, thoroughly peeved that she had allowed herself to be trapped once again in all these depressing memories. Perhaps they had served one purpose, however, by increasing her resolve to avoid Carmen. For how could you bear to look at a child, knowing you had stolen from her father?
• chapter 5 •
LIKE PRECIOUS CARGO
Three more days passed without incident. No dreaded phone calls or knocks on the door of the stone house, at least not while Julia was home. She began to hope that Carmen had already come and gone or had given up her plan to visit, had decided instead to get back on the boat with her friend and perhaps sail to South America.
Julia gave her last exam, finished reporting her grades, and then on Friday afternoon put on her black academic cap and gown to march in the graduation procession. The faculty members flanked the students as they filed into the auditorium, then parted from them and sat on the platform in rows facing the graduates and their families.
Julia found herself listening and watching more attentively this time, knowing she would be absent from the ceremony next year. It came to her that her sabbatical was a rare opportunity in more ways than one, a warm-up exercise for retirement. She found her senses on high alert—the trumpet fanfare sounded louder than usual, the colors of the flags borne in at the head of the procession seemed brighter, the excitement more palpable.
Usually during the conferring of degrees that followed the commencement address, Julia listened carefully to each graduate’s name as it was announced. Sometimes, just to have something to do, she even checked them off one at a time in the printed program, adding asterisks beside the names of students she had taught. Today, however, she had no interest in that. Already she felt a detachment from campus proceedings, as if observing from a great height.
She knew it was due to more than her imminent sabbatical. Part of it was a recurring sense of dismay that time could have swept her up and so quic
kly deposited her at the end of another school year, seated here with other gray, stodgy professors. But even more than that, she felt somehow shaken by the sight of so many happy faces in the audience. The graduates, yes, but more than these, the parents and grandparents. It was a line of thought she didn’t want to allow, a box she wanted to keep the lid on.
• • •
IN Julia’s youth, parenthood was always the cornerstone of whatever future she imagined for herself, in spite of the fact that her own parents did little to cast it in a positive light. Though she might become other things, too, she knew she would surely be the mother of children. Maybe it was only an extension of her lifelong impulse to revise the unsatisfactory, but regardless of its source, it was a persistent dream—to be half of a happy team of parents such as those she saw on television or occasionally in the homes of neighbors and friends, sometimes even in public places among strangers.
And it was at the beginning of graduate school that she at last began to feel that the dream might be within reach. She met a boy—college students were still referred to as boys and girls in those days—in a class called Research and Writing. They started dating, then going steady—another obsolete term. Victor Hart was his name, and he was working toward a doctoral degree in history. At some point they began to talk of marriage.
Victor was smart, not only in the global sense of understanding how the universe was put together but also in subtle, intuitive ways often thought to be a woman’s purview. He knew in an instant when she was troubled, for example, had an instinct for whether silence or coaxing was called for, was a dispenser of the understated but perfect compliment: I see the world reflected in your eyes, Your voice is like a fresh clear morning, You create solace when you enter a room, I admire your truthfulness. But it was her truthfulness that fell short in the end. She let him go, or rather sent him away, without ever telling him why.
To See the Moon Again Page 5
