An hour into the storm, and at its peak, she heard a scratching at the kitchen door. Her heart thumped. A cat has nine lives, doesn’t it, William? Mugs has eight to go. It was Winston, the outdoor cat, tortoiseshell and sleek, who frisked past her legs and padded down to the den to make himself a bed on the couch. “It was wonderful to see, William,” Rosemary would’ve told him, had he been there, had he come back from his last trip to London alive. “It was like a royal succession. One king died and so another took over. Mars was in Sagittarius, William, when Winston ascended the throne.” But William was not there. William would never be there again.
Rosemary put Mugs’s dish back out and filled it. She filled the water bowl. But it would be weeks before she ventured back up the hill to dismantle, as though it were a time bomb, the dangerous tent.
THE TANGLED BRAIDS
Many a night I saw the Pleiads,
rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies
tangled in a silver braid.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”
Autumn hit the massive house on Old Airport Road in the form of strong winds laced with the painted leaves of October. Already withered and gone were the lilacs, the violets, and the tiny strawberries that had dotted the hillside like red buttons. Cherries had come out of the wild blossoms and gone to the robins, and the orioles, and into mason jars in the basement. The sown seeds of wild grasses had thrived on Mugs’s grave, and died, and now stood above their deadened roots, feeling the first tremor of cold shoot through the earth. Winter was coming to Bixley, Maine. The first snow would take away the final remnants of the things that had grown throughout the summer toward their own self-harvest, toward Nature’s thrashing time. It had been a long season, even for Maine, with unusually stifling dog days curling in and out of July and August as Sirius, the dog star, the old scorcher, rose and set with the sun. Now it was over. Snow would soon turn the fields and roads and driveways white again. October was slowly inching into winter and soon icicles would hang from eaves, glassy stalactites. And storm windows would come out of the basements of the older houses, cobwebbed and sleepy-eyed, to be Windexed back, shiny enough to stare out of for months. The migrating birds had gone, remembering their broken images of gulfs, and rain forests, and marshes, pictures slumbering in their heads from a previous year. Halloween came and went, like the pumpkin on its vine, like the witches of folklore, with only a handful of trick-or-treaters venturing out to goblinize Old Airport Road, to tap their chilled hands on Rosemary’s front door, kids who lived along the road only, the town children preferring sidewalks of cement. Rambos and Terminators now, these trick-or-treaters carrying toy machine guns, rarely witches or ghosts.
The first light snowflakes fell just as the last Halloween pumpkin withered on Rosemary’s porch steps. With Thanksgiving now just a week away, an expectancy engulfed the land, a hurriedness in the animals. Would it be a harsh winter? Rosemary wasn’t unnerved. She knew the migrating birds, like little clocks, would be back. And so would the cherries. And she knew that the Bixley River would run again, free of ice, clear. She knew that the winter birds would do their best at the bulging feeders to avoid the mortality rates, so she kept the feeders filled. And she shoveled a path to the mailbox, a source of communication for her again, as it had been in those months following William’s death. The first day that the weatherman had threatened snow, she had backed her blue car out of the garage and had driven it slowly down the road and into Bixley, where it could be serviced and dressed with snow tires. She had then covered the bicycle with a sheet of plastic and pushed it into a quiet corner of the garage. Winston settled easily into his role of indoor cat. Uncle Bishop came occasionally to visit, the Datsun’s hind feet burdened with chains for Old Airport Road, not one of the best-plowed avenues in Bixley. Sometimes Miriam tagged along with him and talked incessantly of a current boyfriend, who would be, she claimed, the very last man in her life. Lizzie’s cards still arrived once in a while. Things are better with Charles and me. I think Philip is getting married. His secretary. Life is strange, isn’t it, Rosie? Rosemary wished Lizzie and Charles the best, but she would worry about them. Marriages, like cobwebs, were fragile things. Robbie studied hard, sent letters sparsely, called occasionally. Mrs. Abernathy’s column ceased to appear in early September. Every day Rosemary planned to inch the car out of the garage and take a spin over to check on her. Every day. But something kept getting in the way. Only the young, and Mrs. Abernathy probably knew this, have the pleasure of such delays. There would be a January opening now at Bixley High School, if Rosemary wanted it. Mary Templeton was taking a year’s leave to have her first baby. Rosemary could teach Early American literature. She shuddered to think of Jonathan Edwards, the Mather boys, the Puritan writings. But she needed to give the school board a decision within the month. A month, now, seemed like an eternity to her.
Meals were simple affairs again, as they were in those days after losing William. She made fires in her Schrader fireplace and sat sometimes late at night with a glass of wine, listening to the trees talking in snaps and pops, gossip of the old days when they were still standing in the mother forest. Her dreams were still around. They perched themselves in the black corners of the night, curled beneath the handmade cherry bed, on those particularly long nights, those particularly cruel nights, when she could almost smell the sweet smell of William and of Mugs. That’s when the finger of nightmare slid itself out from under the bed, crept up over the blankets, and poked her awake. Those nights.
A few days before Thanksgiving, she went with a handful of flowers from the local florist shop to the white mound of Aunt Rachel’s grave. The snow was fluffy, being almost as new as the grave, and it spread evenly over the hillock like a beaten quilt. Like Grandmother’s quilt, brought over from the old country. A few headstones away was Father’s grave, one-half of his tombstone already sharing Mother’s name, and the inscription 1924 to blank. All snowy, these people, and dreamy now, some long gone, some newly gone. Rosemary imagined them, like the cast in Our Town, perching atop their tombstones, wishing she’d round up her foolishness and go away, go back to the living. She placed the deep red carnations on Father’s grave, the irises on Aunt Rachel’s. The flowers sank into the snow, red as cardinals, blue as blue jays. Like William, they were all color on such a gray day. Aunt Rachel and Father. They should have a casket like Catherine and Heathcliff, Rosemary thought. But it was only a romantic notion. She knew that when one ceases to exist above the ground, one ceases to exist anywhere.
Nights were too cold to finally christen the telescope, so it sat in the den and collected dust. Instead, Rosemary watched the timeworn constellations from behind a paned glass. Sometimes, she didn’t bother to make the long climb, the fifteen steps, up to her bedroom. Instead, she fell asleep on the sofa, listening to the dying snaps of the fire, cradling Winston against the curve of her stomach.
Two days before Thanksgiving a package arrived from Boston, from William’s old friend and travel mate, Michael. With it came a letter. It had taken its time in coming, considering Rosemary had written to Michael in early July, in the middle of Lizzie’s visit to Bixley. Over the months that followed since she mailed the letter, over the months that brought her past the warm summer, past the tent days, past Aunt Rachel’s fast decline, she had come to realize Michael would have no answers either. There were none. Rosemary knew this weeks before the letter arrived.
I’m seeing a psychiatrist now, Michael wrote. I had given him up years ago, but after William’s death I came back to him, the prodigal patient, and he scolded me but took me in. He needs the money. I’m looking for answers myself, Rosemary. Dr. Wimmer tells me that sometimes there are no answers as to why people suddenly kill themselves. Not even he knows, sometimes. This is a good sign. Something positive has come out of William’s death. I’ve never heard Dr. Wimmer admit such a thing before. Perhaps, with William
’s death, we will all turn a tad humble, not knowing.
The letter did not surprise her. It was true. William had his reasons, emotional, chemical, or both. And being his reasons, he took them greedily with him. Rosemary had long stopped reading books on suicide for an answer. In one book, she remembered, was a statement she read over and over again, and then underlined in black ink. It was something a Dr. Wilson had said about a certain type of suicidal person characterized by a lack of constructive plans for the future, high chaotic energy levels, and general isolation. Rosemary had underlined it and then written William in the margin next to it, as though this were something she must remember for a future exam. At least it was a portion of the answer to a multiple-part question. Aunt Rachel had been right when she said that William lived without goals. William had always been running. Much of the blame had to lie in the nooks and corners of all those unhappy foster homes he’d been raised in. And some of it with Rosemary, too, for recognizing the distress signals of birds, instead of the people she loved.
No, Rosemary, Michael’s letter ended. William and I were not lovers. You needn’t apologize for asking. Dr. Wimmer will arrive at this thought himself one day, and when he finally asks me, I’ll answer quickly. Time is, after all, money.
The letter did not surprise her, but the painting did. It was of her, sitting on the sofa, with Mugs asleep near her leg. Rosemary’s face was turned away from the cat, and she appeared about to speak to some person outside the perimeter of the picture. Some ghost, perhaps. She remembered the photograph William had used as his model, one that was in the album of pictures he had taken with him. It was of no particular event, no birthday, no holiday, no important gesture. It was just Rosemary on the sofa, her profile, and Mugs sleeping in an embryonic ball, his throat thrust upward in submission. “The best action,” William liked to say, “is the action you must imagine. There is glory, sometimes, in the things people do not do. Sometimes, Rosemary, there are even heroics.” What surprised her most about the painting was that William was not in it. He had never done an oil of her or Mugs. Sketches with an intent to paint, yes, but they had never come to fruition. The only oil of Rosemary had William beside her in what he called a Half Self-Portrait. It hung in Uncle Bishop’s den, a birthday gift.
William had had few personals for Michael to ship home. What he did have had arrived earlier in the summer. Rosemary had unpacked the heavy art books and replaced them on the library shelves, in the parking spaces reserved for them. His clothes she eventually gave to Goodwill, after Robbie had selected a few shirts, sweaters, and two jackets to take away to graduate school. William would like the idea of Robbie taking his clothes back to college. The Civil War sword she sent to William’s sister, in Portland, since it was a family heirloom. But she did not know of the existence of the painting until it arrived two days before Thanksgiving, snow piling up quietly on the brown wrapper as it leaned against the front door where the UPS driver had left it. Oh, by the way, William began this in Amsterdam, Michael added, in a postscript. I wanted to keep it because it was his last work but really, Rosemary, it belongs to you. She had stared at the painting a long time. No work of art this, taken from a photograph of a ponytailed woman, looking away from a sleeping cat. Rosie and Mugs: Life as Usual was the title he had written in pencil on the back.
Rosemary went up to William’s room, with all the light and the enviable consciousness, and found the photo album. There was the picture back in its plastic slot but paint-smeared. “He wants to paint Goyas and El Grecos and Rembrandts,” she had told others, as well as herself. “He wants to set his easel up before some masterpiece and share, stroke by stroke, the artist’s genius.” What was there to painting a woman in worn jeans and a flannel shirt—the woman you lived with—and a sleeping cat, if you were on an exodus to the land of the masters? “I told you Michelangelo would be all color,” one postcard had said, “if they only wiped away the smoke.” What was the sense of being in Amsterdam, surrounded by Van Gogh’s lifetime of works, if William spent his time before an easel re-creating a thirty-five-millimeter photo processed by Kodak? What could he be thinking of to squander such valuable time in Europe?
She did, however, love the painting. It was large enough that Mugs was lifelike, the soft throat in need of a stroking, the eyes rolled back into sleep, content with the humans, only dreaming now of the terror of being stray. It was Mugs all right, captured in brush strokes. And it was Rosemary too, lackadaisical with the goings-on, staring off, about to say something, then preferring to think it instead.
Rosemary was uncertain as to how she should feel about the painting. It saddened her as well as pleased her. So he was thinking of them, was he, in those final days? The last postcard had come from Brussels. Today Brussels, it read. Tomorrow? No cards had arrived from London, the last stop, the elephant’s graveyard. His last work, Michael had said, and Michael would know. He was with him. So William had spent his time in Europe evaluating, stroke by stroke, his relationship with Rosemary. Rosie and Mugs: Life as Usual.
Rosemary took the painting upstairs and leaned it against the wall in William’s room, his studio, his haven of light. Then she stood back to view it. Was there an answer in it somewhere? A goddamn symbol? It had been such an ordinary day in her life that she couldn’t even remember when the picture was taken. Only that it was at least two years old. The blue sweater with the V neck had been gone that long. Had she said something, on that day, that made William realize their time together was fated?
“Oh, William,” Rosemary said, after a time. “Do you want to hear about life as usual?” She could tell him lots, couldn’t she, this man who had given life up, given it away? She had lived in a tent in the backyard. She had written imaginary letters to Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Rosenbergs, as though they were pen pals. William had not so much as written one lousy suicide note. Oh, she could tell William loads about life as usual. She had watched Uncle Bishop move a small plastic family into his dollhouse. She had bought a dress—twenty fucking dollars—for Mother’s Cabbage Patch Kid. She had scanned the skies for an ultralight man. She had held Mugs down so that he could be killed, and the killing, William, was only to spare him the pain of death. She had seen the best memories of Father sink back into the earth, where the pump was steadily pumping at the Christmas tree farm. She had talked to Father’s other woman, and then she had buried Aunt Rachel, the same woman. Life had been pretty damn unusual.
Rosemary could not bring herself just yet to hang the painting, so she left it leaning against one of the stark white walls until she knew what to do with it. In the meantime, she had business to attend to with the still living.
***
After Aunt Rachel’s death in September, Mother had drifted into a sharp decline. With Aunt Rachel gone, she lost any last conceptions she had of her family, of the members in it. Now it was Uncle Bishop, her little brother, who gave her the greatest comfort, and Mrs. Fortney, a private nurse whom Uncle Bishop refused to let Rosemary help finance. “Where does he get his money?” Miriam was asking now more than ever. “He’s never lifted a homosexual finger to do a day’s work in his life. He lifts them to read Dolls World and to build those little houses.” Where did Uncle Bishop get his money? An early lover of his, Rosemary knew, had died and left him all his personal belongings. She supposed that with the personal things there might have been a sizable life insurance. Maybe some stock. “I invest, Miriam,” Uncle Bishop would say. “Haven’t you heard of Charles Schwab? Weren’t you married to him once?”
Regardless of where he got his money, Uncle Bishop’s insistence on taking Mother into his home was a touching tribute to the sister he still loved. For the two months that Mother had been in his house, Rosemary tried to help as much as she could. But it was plain that Mother felt more comfortable with the nurse than she did with any of her children. So the nurse became like one of the family. The nurse became Aunt Rachel, and the cycle began again, this time in Uncle B
ishop’s beige house with the chocolate-brown shutters. Mother was not long for the world of the living. The family doctor had wasted his time in telling them this because they knew by looking at her. She’d lost much weight and was now also frail. Mother was shrinking. Like so many other magic acts Rosemary had lived to see, Mother was disappearing.
The day before Thanksgiving, Rosemary stopped by Uncle Bishop’s house to say hello and to drop off a small roaster he wished to borrow. Everyone was cooking their share for the holiday dinner, and Uncle Bishop, who was in charge of the turkey and ham, needed the extra pan.
“Thanks for the roaster,” he said. “Jason burned mine up this past summer. So I put it in the trash and the goddamn garbage men wouldn’t take it. They said it didn’t qualify as garbage.”
“They’re fussy,” said Rosemary.
“Fussy?” Uncle Bishop asked. “They’re sanitation engineers now.” How many times had Rosemary heard him shouting at the wheels of a departing truck about some item they refused to take: a blown tire, a Christmas tree, an old lamp. “If I don’t want this goddamn shit, then it’s garbage!”
Uncle Bishop arranged the holiday turkey in the pan she’d brought. Rosemary frowned as he pried apart the unfortunate bird’s legs and shoved it full of stuffing. Then he began decorating a large ham with pineapple rings.
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