by Doug Burgess
The sound of the tires on gravel echoes against the house, but no light appears. Good, I think, she really is asleep. “You working tomorrow?”
“Six thirty in the morning. They’re sending us all up to some protest at Salve Regina.”
“Come for dinner? I’m making meatballs.”
“Sure. I’ll bring the wine.” He kisses me on the cheek, just like an ordinary couple. “Your tattoo looks great.”
“Just wait till the bandages come off,” I promise and kiss him again, longer.
Nevertheless, I can’t restrain a slight shudder of apprehension as his truck pulls away. The key sticks in the door, and it takes a few minutes of fumbling before it finally opens with a creak. The front hall is completely black. I trip over the hall rug and bark my shins against the table. Something overbalances and hits the floor. The lamp. Now I’m groping in the darkness, running my hands along the wall, trying to find the switch.
“Who’s there?” a quavering voice calls. Grandma is at the top of the stairs, the light through the stained-glass window turning her hair blue. “What do you want?”
“It’s okay, Grandma!” I shout up.
But clearly, it’s not. Somehow, she has managed to find Grandpa Mike’s service pistol, and she’s holding it with both hands. “Get out of my house,” she growls.
“Oh my God, put that away! You know me!”
The shot goes wide, taking out a beveled mirror. The sound of the explosion fills the room.
Now she’s on the second landing, peering down with rheumy eyes. I finally find the switch for the chandelier and turn it on. Recognition and relief flood her face. She lowers the gun.
“Teddy?” my grandmother sputters, her eyes widening.
“Huh?”
“Teddy Johnson!” She sees the resemblance, and in some cold and mossy part of my soul, I see it too. Blond hair, blue eyes. Like my father. But Grandpa’s hair was black, and his eyes were hazel. “Teddy, you can’t stay here!” she cries. “Emma’s on the warpath; she found your letter. Fucking postman sent it to the wrong house.” Now she is grabbing my sleeve, pulling me toward the door.
I could end it now, but I don’t. “What letter?” I ask. “Do you still have it?”
“Sure! Here.” She pulls out a drawer in the hall table and extracts a frail piece of parchment, the same one Emma handed her all those years ago. It looks old enough to have the Ten Commandments written on it.
September 1, 1966
Dearest Babs,
All day long I’ve been trying to pack, putting in this pair of socks or that shirt, looking out at the windows as if I expected the view to change, doing all the dumb things one does before they say goodbye to the place they love most in the world. So I guess it’s only right that I say goodbye to you since you’re what I love most about it. Do you regret how we met? Sometimes I do. But other times I think it had to be like this. In a way, the war’s a blessing. Gives us a chance to sort things out. Once I’m at base, I’ll write to Em and tell her it’s over. I won’t tell her about you, not yet. But that way we can start making plans for my return. And I will return, darling, I promise. I’m not such a fool to go throwing my life away now that it finally means something.
Em’s got a million things for me to do, so I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to see you before I go. She’s yammering on about underwear and suspender belts and I don’t know what, and all I can think about is how your hair smells of lavender, the soft weight of your breast in my hand like a fluttering bird…
I can’t read any more. Teddy Johnson knew something that no one, not even Aunt Emma, did. Something that would not come out until I had to dig up Grandma’s birth certificate for the application papers to the Methodist Home. Margaret is my grandmother’s middle name. Her full name is Barbara Margaret Hazard.
Poor Emma. Poor Teddy. Poor Grandma. “But you’re hurt,” she says, touching the bandages on my chest.
“It’s nothing, it’s okay, don’t worry…”
“What did that bitch do to you?” Grandma demands, eyes bugging out of her head. “She killed you, didn’t she? Oh, my poor Teddy, she’s killed you!”
“It’s okay,” I murmur to her. “Emma’s gone, she’s gone now.”
A strange look comes into my grandmother’s eyes. Sly. I don’t who I am talking to, whether this is Maggie or Babs or Grandma or some other creature I have never seen before. Different ages, different personalities bubble up to the surface. “You bet she is,” she says. “That’s all fixed. Stupid cunt. Smashed her like an eggshell with her own frying pan. Bam, bam, bam. Ha!”
“What are you talking about?” But I know, of course I do. I can see it playing out before my eyes like a Kodachrome. It’s early October, and Grandma wants some strawberries. She knows Emma has a deep freeze, so she puts on her carpet slippers and crosses the lawn. Emma sees her old friend bustling over and lets her in through the back door, the one that leads to the kitchen. There on the draining board is the lobster, waiting for the inevitable. Something snaps. It’s September 1966. Emma has just confessed to murdering Teddy Johnson. The lobsters lie next to the body. Grandma stands there, numb with rage, staring down at the man she loved. And she hears Emma’s voice droning on about a misdelivered letter, a letter that was meant for her. Emma comes toward her and asks her what’s wrong, why does she look like that, does she still need the strawberries? Strawberries or lobsters? Without even thinking Grandma grabs the frying pan from the stove and brings it down. Teddy Johnson is avenged.
She leaves Emma’s house, stumbling back over the yard. She needed something. Yes. The strawberries. Emma has a deep freeze. So Grandma turns around again and heads back to Emma’s place. She taps on the door, on the glass. She peers through the window. She sees the body of her best friend spread-eagled on the floor, and in a panic she rushes back and starts telephoning.
Telephone. I tentatively reach into my back pocket and pull out my phone. “It’s going to be okay, Maggie,” I say as gently as I can. “Just let me make a call.”
“Call? Call who? She’s dead, I tell you. There’s nothing for it now. What is that thing? Put it away.” She slaps the phone out of my hands, and it lands on the floor between us.
“Grandma,” I say, willing my voice to remain calm, “listen to me. It’s past midnight, and everyone is asleep. You need to go to bed now.”
Her eyes slip out of focus. She is still holding the pistol. “But my bedtime’s not until later,” she insists. “Dad said I could stay up to watch the parade. I want to see the parade.”
“You can see it from your bedroom window. Go on now.”
She stands for a moment, irresolute. I can feel the house shifting and morphing around us, jolting back and forth through time. Captain Barrow is seated in his chair by the fireplace, studying us with an ironic smile. Sunlight streams through the windows, then disappears, then comes back. We are in the eye of the storm. The paper on the walls is faded green, bright red, soft blue with silver swans flying past. I can even feel my own face melting, realigning, taking the shape of Teddy Johnson and Grandpa Mike and Great-Grandpa Ezekiel and God-knows-who else. “Just give me the gun,” I say, lowering my voice to an authoritative growl.
“The gun?”
“It’s dangerous, Maggie. It’s not a toy. You hand that over now, like a good girl.”
Her hand outstretches. The gun dangles limply from her fingers. But then a shaft of light comes through the windows and throws my face into sharp relief.
“You’re not Teddy…”
The pistol is pointed at my head now. “Who are you? What do you want? What have you done with Teddy?” She takes aim, and her arthritic fingers fumble with the trigger.
At that moment the front door bursts open, and there, like sentinel guards, are the last surviving Laughing Sarahs.
“It’s going to be all right, Maggie.”
>
This is Aunt Constance, who steps forward bravely and takes the gun from her hand. “But…Teddy,” Grandma protests, “she killed Teddy!”
“Yeah, honey, I know. Come on now.” Constance takes her by the shoulders and propels her firmly, but not unkindly, toward the stairs. She never turns around.
Aunt Irene puts a soft hand on my arm. “Don’t worry, love,” she says. “We’ll look after her. You go on to Billy’s place and get some sleep. It’ll be all right in the morning.” She kisses me on the cheek.
“How did you know to come?”
“Your phone. You dialed Connie, didn’t you know that? We heard the whole conversation. Course we were both racing over before you’d even finished. I’m just glad we got here in time.”
“But Aunt Irene,” I say, confused, “it’s past midnight. What were you doing with Aunt Constance at this…? Oh.”
Her face is completely closed. “You go on to Billy now. We’ll be fine.”
I should have known. How arrogant I was to assume mine was the only transformation in Little Compton! It was theatrical, that’s all. Theirs was quiet, unassuming, quintessentially New England. Two old ladies tending garden together. This is a fascinating revelation, but there’s no time to consider it.
“Grandma’s dangerous,” I stammer. “I can hardly believe it, but I think she brained Emma. Now she’s convinced it’s 1966 and I’m Teddy and…” I can’t go on.
Irene sighs. There is no surprise in her expression, only pity. “Damn. You shouldn’t have heard all that. And you really, really shouldn’t have to see her like this. It’s not fair. But honey, you can’t mind anything she says or does. It’s not her fault. We know, we’ve been through this before, the night poor Emma died. Why do you think we had that scumbag Marcus Rhinegold hanging on us? But it’ll be okay.”
I am standing dumb, shocked into silence at the compact precision of Yankee speech. But I can translate without difficulty. Grandma told me as much herself. She’d seen Marcus Rhinegold hanging around Emma’s house that day. But why?
Here’s how it must have happened. Grandma finds the body of her best friend and calls the Sarahs. They come at once. It doesn’t take long for Irene and Constance to discover the truth: Emma’s body on the kitchen floor, a bloodied skillet nearby, Grandma confused and agitated. Perhaps she slipped back into 1966 and told them the truth herself. So, once again, New England Wrecking and Salvage swings into action. Irene wipes off the skillet, pulls down a pile of pans onto the body, hiding the tree in the forest. Constance sits with Grandma Maggie, asking her pointed questions. But it’s clear she doesn’t remember a thing. So far, so good. But then, disaster. Maggie looks out the window and sees Marcus Rhinegold standing in Emma’s yard. Constance confronts him. He came to see his grandmother. Instead, he found her best friends covering her with cookware. Constance tells him…something. But clearly, it’s not enough. Turns out Marcus has a plan of his own, and now he has two accomplices ready at hand. He offers them money and his silence. Reluctantly, they accept. And so begins the dark chapter that ends with a sunken yacht in Narragansett Bay.
I can see them now, the Laughing Sarahs, leading my grandmother up to bed, tucking her in, coming down and straightening the pillows on the sofa. Three old ladies with four murders between them, and yet I can’t find it in my heart to condemn them for any of it. Not so long ago, Billy said it was odd to find so many corpses and so little responsibility. Truth is, he literally didn’t know the half of it.
Or is this all the product of my grandmother’s dying brain, spinning out its last fantasies, groping about the all-enveloping mist for something real, something absolute, something she can cling to as the rest vanishes?
Finally, the Yankee conundrum. Does resilience come from calling a spade a spade or transforming it into a diamond through sheer will?
There are no more answers. Irene smiles rather sadly, disappears into the shadows. The door closes in my face.
Chapter Nineteen
Two weeks later, Grandma is dead. It was not anything sinister: she had a stroke. Doctors say it could have come at any time. Sometimes I wonder if the excitement of that night tore something inside her brain, a tiny fissure that widened into a gulf, but they say no. The brain doesn’t work like that. And it must be true, because the next morning after Grandma confessed, I came over to the house from Billy’s and found her in the kitchen, eerily normal, flipping pancakes. Aunt Irene was sitting at the breakfast table reading the paper aloud. It was clear that Grandma’s mind had, in its last reaches of mercy, kicked over the traces once again. She knew who I was, asked me about my job, if I had anybody special in my life. I told her the truth, selectively edited. Maybe I’m becoming more of a local.
In the meantime, Aunt Constance and Aunt Irene went on exactly as before. Of course, neither ever said a word to me about that night, then or later. By no gesture or sigh did they reveal any of their thoughts. Irene treated Grandma like a nurse with her favorite patient; Constance, in her gruff way, let it be known she was ready to take on any extra duties. As if their best friend didn’t kill her fiancé; as if Grandma, the fiancé’s lover, didn’t kill Emma; as if Irene didn’t brain Marcus Rhinegold after Marcus shot Wally the Postman. But this is Little Compton, where nothing ever happens.
They say she was happy the night she died. I wasn’t there; I had a conference at the college. But the Laughing Sarahs kept her company, made her a frozen pizza, and put on old tapes of The Honeymooners. Grandma laughed so hard she choked. Then she choked a bit more, her eyes widened in surprise, and she slumped sideways in her chair. The seizure hit both sides of her brain like a lightning bolt. Constance says she was gone before she hit the ground.
Several times I’ve had to ask myself if I feel any real grief. I’m still not sure of the answer. There’s regret, of course, and a stately kind of sadness that comes with reflecting on the impermanence of all things. But real, raw, actual grief…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been saying goodbye a while now. Hers was a ship that left port long ago and only just passed over the horizon.
The day of the funeral is April 25, a Tuesday. The fog is back, a damp chill that settles over everything. It could just as well be that day in late October when we put Emma in the ground. Strange, I think, that one fall and one spring day should be so like one another, as if there were no real passage of time. Just fog and shapes that move through the fog.
Aunt Irene and Aunt Constance lay wreaths on the grave. Irene shivers in her black skirt. Her legs are bare. “I hope I die in summer,” she murmurs. “It’s too darn cold to make everyone stand outside.”
“I hope I die in January,” Aunt Constance answers with a grim smile. “Let the fuckers freeze.”
“Maybe they won’t come at all!”
“You will, Irene. And David too. You’ll bury both of us, David.”
In that moment I realize it’s true. The Laughing Sarahs are down to two, with three replaced knees, arthritis, cataracts, and a pacemaker between them. How long before I’m here again? But they are with me now, standing on either side, their warmth giving me strength.
Constance asks, seemingly apropos of nothing, “So you’ll be home as usual on Saturday?”
Still thinking about mortality, I answer, “Sure, why?”
“Why do you think?” she replies with a hint of her usual tartness. “With you and Billy that makes four for bridge. Haven’t had a decent game since we lost Emma. You do play, don’t you?”
My mouth opens and closes. “Grandma tried to teach me the basics, but it never really stuck. And I have no idea if Billy…”
“Oh, we can teach you both!” Irene says brightly. “Your grandma had to learn, and she ended up the best player of us all.”
“Except for overbidding her hand,” avers Constance. “Maggie always thought she was on a winner. Sign of an optimistic nature, I guess. So we’ll see you then?”
<
br /> They’re both looking at me closely. I know what they’re asking. The Laughing Sarahs, the most exclusive society in the world, are about to induct two new members. There’ll be no black hoods, no swearing of oaths. They will simply go on doing what they have always done, our mutual acquiescence binding as any blood oath. In truth, the induction already happened—on the deck of the Eula May as we watched the Calliope go down. The bonds that keep this club together have nothing to do with bridge. “Sure,” I tell them. “I’ll see you then.”
“Lovely!” Irene cries. “Can I give you a lift back to the house?” Her new pickup, cherry red with a crew cab and fog lights mounted above the grill, glitters nearby. I have a shrewd suspicion it came from the Save Marcus Rhinegold $500,000 Fund, just like her slate roof and the landscapers that chopped down poor old Melvin the Oak. But there is no tactful way to ask.
The crowd of mourners is thinning out. Billy stands dutifully by, but he is scraping his toe in the dirt. “No,” I tell them. “Take Billy home. I’d like to be here myself a little while.”
“Of course.” Irene and Constance go have a word with Billy, and I see them depart, arm in arm.
Now it’s just me and Grandma. No, that’s not entirely true. At her left is Grandpa Mike, a small flag marking him as a veteran. Just as well since that’s the best that could be said of him. I’m standing amongst the long rows of Dyers, Thurbers, Butlers, Tinkhams, Browns, and Hazards, all jumbled together by marriage and issue, with names like Frances Tinkham Butler and William Butler Brown. Here is Harold Hazard Dyer, 1929–1961, who had an enormous collection of Dresden figurines and a wife named Luley that nobody could stand. Grandma called her “Physic Face” for the look of intestinal discomfort she habitually wore. The marriage was childless, and Harold took to spending more and more of his summers with his artistic friends on Fire Island. Luley’s discontent deepened. But it was Harold who put a bullet through his mouth, April 15, 1961, the same day the CIA invaded Cuba.
