By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  I shook my head, looking past him, through the window to where darkness approached from the east, spreading itself over the pine trees that edged the marshy field behind the house. I knew exactly what he meant about my mother.

  “Your father, too, he was a nice man, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He was.”

  “And he knew what a treasure he had,” Jake Heolms told me. “I’ve always wished she hadn’t disliked me. She had lovely manners.”

  “Mumma?” I protested. “Mumma was a bull in a china shop.”

  “Not really. She noticed people, really noticed them, and cared about them, and she listened. She had her own way of doing things,” this odd man told me. “At the time, she didn’t seem to dislike me, although Jonquil knew her better and explained it to me, after.”

  I tried to remember what Mumma had said about this man, after Jonquil had brought him to dinner. Pops had said he was “a decent enough sort who had a bad time in the war,” but Mumma? Then, as if I could hear her speaking in my ear, I did remember. “The man was wishing he’d met me, not her, at that fancy resort club. He was wishing I wasn’t already married. He was half in love with me—Don’t laugh, a woman knows. Wasn’t he, Spencer?” She turned to Pops for corroboration and, “Anybody would be,” Pops told her. “He’s a sad specimen,” Mumma said. “But I’ll bring him around. You’ll see. He might not get to have me love him, but he’ll be glad he met me, you can bet your buttons.”

  I would have bet my buttons, and I felt even more sorry for Jake Heolms and, unexpectedly, for Jonquil Cartenbury Heolms, too. “She did like you,” I told him. “She thought you had promise.”

  “I could have,” he agreed. “She must have been a wonderful mother.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life working that out,” I told him, and he giggled, then saw his wife enter the room.

  “There you are, you elusive man. Have you spoken with Meg? She’s dear, poor Rida’s firstborn, you’ll want to express your sympathy to her, I know. You’ll excuse us, Beth? It’s really Meg, by the way, Jake, not Margaret, don’t make that mistake. I did once, but never again.” She emitted a pretty little laugh. “You should have seen the dust fly. Your mother certainly knew how to get the dust flying, didn’t she, Beth?”

  I couldn’t disagree. Neither did I point out that flying dust wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could be said to clear the air, or at least to be an effort in that direction, the direction of a better world, that is. It wasn’t that I wasn’t just about to point out those things, but the phone rang and I answered it instead.

  “Hello?” I said, and Jonquil waved at me, miming that she didn’t want to take any more of my time, miming sympathy and farewell, leading her husband away by the arm.

  “Beth,” a woman’s voice said. Not familiar, not immediately identifiable. “Janice Lauter.”

  “Oh. Hello,” I said, surprised. “What can I—?”

  She cut me off. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. Or, rather, what I wasn’t thinking of. Or how I could have not thought of it. Of course Rida can be buried out of Saint Stephen’s. I’m sorry not to have realized sooner how wrong I was. She would have caught it right away, if it had been her making the mistake.”

  “She can? Really? I can’t tell you, Janice, that’s—”

  “Your mother was always bringing herself up short,” Janice told me. “She wasn’t one to let herself get away with things.”

  Mumma? Self-aware? But Janice had gone on, before I had begun to digest that improbability.

  “And whatever her faith—or, more accurately, lack of it, because she never lied to me about that,” Janice said.

  Not a liar. That I could entirely agree with.

  “She was always generous with the church, which is the same as being generous with God, in my view of things. Generous to us in your father’s name, the family name—”

  For the Howlands? My mind reeled.

  “—and it seems to me that the church, Saint Stephen’s, can be equally generous with her. To her. For her.”

  Janice hesitated before concluding, “It seems to me that God will be, too.”

  And well He should be—I could hear Mumma saying it.

  “If, that is, you still want to have the memorial here?” Janice asked. “Beth?”

  “Yes. Yes, we do. We would. That’s exactly what she would have wanted. Thank you, Janice, I’ll…It’s pretty hectic around here right now. Can I call you Monday morning about details? After I’ve had a chance to talk with my sisters.”

  “Of course. I’m so pleased you haven’t made other arrangements. Your mother was…Well, you girls were lucky to have her. I’m lucky to have known her.”

  Lucky? Well, maybe. “Thank you, Janice. Really.”

  “Thank her.” Janice laughed. “I don’t know that I’d do it for anyone else, subverting my own principles.”

  “I’ll call you Monday,” I promised, and went to share the good news with my sisters.

  • • •

  We got through Mumma’s non-funeral non-memorial non-service and its brief social aftermath by the cluster of oaks outside the church. After, George and my brothers-in-law, a category that includes one brother-in-law equivalent, took the grandchildren out to McDonald’s and then dropped them at the movies, going on themselves to the Club for drinks and a stag dinner. This left the four of us at home. Mumma’s motherless daughters.

  We took glasses of wine outside, to sit on the back porch steps and watch the sky. The gold-rimmed gray faded to purple. Darkness approached, arrived. Only the brightest of the stars could make themselves seen through a thin layer of clouds, although the night was moonless.

  “Well,” said Meg, and Amy echoed her, “Well.”

  “Yes. Well,” I said.

  Beside me, in shadows, Jo exhaled smoke. “Well, that’s it.”

  “Yes,” Meg said. “That’s really the end.”

  Jo asked, “Who has the tissues?”

  We aren’t big weepers, Mumma’s daughters, but every now and then one of us needed a tissue. Not when we were on show, on parade, not when we had something to do, people to welcome, a non-service to manage, but at odd times, as then, when we were alone together, quiet.

  “Gone but not forgotten, that’s what I say,” I announced.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Amy asked, while Meg protested, “Is that supposed to console me?”

  Jo reminded us, “We lost her years ago. She didn’t know who any of us even were for a long time. Isn’t that right, Meg? It’d been months since she’d known even who you are.”

  Unexpectedly, Amy came around to my point of view. “But this does feel different.”

  “She was really—I mean, Mumma,” Meg said. “Mumma really was—When she was herself, I mean…”

  “Remarkable,” Jo suggested.

  “A handful,” I said.

  “She was really something, wasn’t she?” Amy asked.

  “Trouble,” I said.

  “…one of a kind,” Meg finished.

  “Alive,” I said.

  “Frankly,” Meg said, “I was always glad you were the one she lived next door to.”

  “Not exactly next door.”

  “You know what I mean. The one she chose. I couldn’t have done it. None of the rest of us could have. She’d have eaten up my life.”

  “She’d have eaten up all of our lives, except Beth’s,” Amy agreed.

  “Not mine,” Jo maintained.

  “You wish,” Amy answered.

  “I wish I was more like her,” I admitted.

  “So do we,” they chorused. “But there’s Sarah.”

  We laughed, little reluctant laughs and mine, at least in part, ironic.

  “Who has the tissues?” Amy asked. “I can’t see. Jo?”

  We sat silent then, for a long time. The filmy cloud cover faded and a few stars broke through its veil. From behind the garage, the insect light tolled steadily.

  Meg broke the silen
ce. “Nothing got in her way when she thought she was in the right.”

  “She always thought she was in the right,” I pointed out.

  Meg ignored me. “That time at Cotillion? I just remembered that, the way she looked, charging across the dance floor to snatch me up? Like Lancelot, riding to rescue Guinevere.”

  “Not exactly like that,” I said. “Because he actually came to do battle for her.”

  “You know what I mean. I mean, heroic. I felt rescued.”

  “You said you were embarrassed,” I protested. “That’s what you always said. You said she’d ruined your life.”

  “I know, but really? She saved my life. If I’d had to sit there, doing nothing, which is the only choice I thought I had. I was doing exactly that, sitting there, doing nothing, like a good girl. But Mumma didn’t do nothing. She didn’t tolerate things. She walked right into the middle of it and got me out. Think of what an example that was for an adolescent girl,” claimed my revisionist sister.

  “What a role model for you as a mother, you mean?” Jo asked.

  “I guess, but I was thinking more of a role model as a human being. That you don’t have to stick it out, doing what people say you should. If it hadn’t been for Mumma, I’d never have had the courage to give up on Jack Cartenbury. And then what would my life be?”

  We couldn’t argue with that.

  “And Pops was so proud of her. Remember?” Jo said. “He’d tell the Cotillion story. She loved when he told that story.”

  “You always tried to get him to stop, you were so embarrassed,” I reminded Meg.

  “I know.” She laughed, a low, self-effacing laugh. “But I got over it. Who lives may learn, like Mumma said.”

  Jo turned to look at us, her eyes dark hollows in the shadows. “That’s one of the things I learned from Olympia. Didn’t the rest of you? How to let Mumma give me advice. Not that Olympia ever said precisely that, not, ‘Listen to your mother.’ No therapist is going to say that. As we all know.”

  I reminded them, “Not me.”

  “Not that old song and dance,” Amy said.

  Jo continued, “Not that I’m anything like perfect, but I often think how if Mumma hadn’t kept after me about the dangers of the way I treated people, letting them get away with anything? I don’t know what I wouldn’t have done.”

  “Wait a minute!” I protested. “Hold on!”

  “It was sentimentality, really, which is just what she told me.”

  “You called her cold-hearted. You called her the Snow Queen,” I reminded Jo. “And those were the polite names. Remember when she said that you were looking for pets, not boyfriends? And then offered you a goldfish?” and that made us all laugh, remembering Mumma.

  Jo said, “I don’t want to be like her and I never did, the way she bossed Pops around, and told us what we should be doing, and made such a big deal out of monogamy. But I’ve had some good relationships, and she showed me how. I’m having a good one now.”

  I gave up.

  “I’ve never settled for less, and that’s because of Mumma,” Jo announced. “And I’d have made a truly lousy mother, we all know that. Of all of us, I’m the most like her. Don’t look at me like that,” she said, as if despite the darkness she could see our expressions. “You know it’s true.” I don’t know about the others, but I had never thought about it. She lit another cigarette, and laughed, “I’m too old now, even to adopt. I’d be the mother of a teenager in my seventies.”

  “But you’re a therapist,” I pointed out, as if she might not have seen the connection.

  “What else was there for me to do with all this empathy and insight?” Jo asked.

  “How did Mumma show you how to listen to other people when it’s something she never did herself?” I asked, then I was distracted. “You mean that because of the way she was, I’m the way I am. Like, the way I never brought a boyfriend home until George. Psychological cause and effect?”

  “Too damned independent for your own good,” they quoted Mumma.

  “Because I knew he was for keeps or I wouldn’t have brought him at all.”

  “Yes, but how did you know?” Jo asked.

  “I’ve always relied on my own judgment,” I answered. “You all know that. You’ve complained about it enough. If I hadn’t, then Mumma would have filled my head with her opinions. Taken over my life, the way she did—” I cut myself short, to finish my thought privately.

  They waited, not speaking.

  “And that’s why I never got to see Olympia,” I concluded, surprised that I had never thought of it before. “It’s not as if she thought I was so right or smart about things,” I apologized to my sisters.

  “No,” they agreed. “But you did.”

  “Well of course,” I said. “And I was.” I thought. “Mostly I was, anyway, and for anything really important—Now what’s so funny?” I demanded, but I could feel the sheepish smile spreading on my face.

  “You’re always complaining about Mumma,” Amy observed. “Even still now.”

  “We’ve all had our complaints,” I said.

  Meg soothed us. “And they were all justified. She wasn’t your normal everyday mother.”

  “No mother is your normal everyday mother,” Jo announced with irritating authority. “So don’t go thinking you’ve been deprived of something everybody else gets without even asking.”

  “Remember Mr. Smithers?” Amy said, almost dreamily. “I was thinking, when you were talking about Cotillion, it reminded me of Mr. Smithers, and I was thinking that Mumma really did a good job with him. Mumma was a fixer.”

  Meg doubted that. “She hounded the poor man out of his job. Out of his career.”

  “But you know, there really was something going on,” Amy admitted, after years of refusing to speak about it. “We knew. Never me, but some of us, he’d stand too close, crowd up close to you, or call you to stand close when he was seated at his desk. Some girls said he’d touched them, nothing drastic, and Ellen Jablonski—Remember her, Beth?—Ellen claimed he’d kissed her. In the cloakroom. French-kissed her, she said, but nobody knew if it was true. You have to remember Ellen Jablonski, how she tried to be sexually ahead of us all so we never knew if she was making things up, but she didn’t always lie, some of it was true. We were twelve years old, or eleven, it was the ’50s, nobody knew anything. We had no way of dealing with him. We couldn’t even talk frankly among ourselves. Girls didn’t then. Anyway,” she said, “he would have gotten worse, that’s human nature. In my opinion, the man ruined his own career. But Mumma—”

  “She even found him another job,” Meg remembered.

  “Those priests it’s coming out about,” Jo reminded us. “Think of what Mumma would have said about that.”

  “Where were those boys’ mothers?” I suggested, then, “What do you expect from an untaxed corporation?”

  “But with Mr. Smithers, I watched it happening. I saw how Mumma did it, and I’ve always tried to work that same way. Why do you think I’ve always had such good employees?” she asked us. “Besides being smart and hard-working.”

  “And ambitious,” Jo added.

  “That’s not a crime,” Amy pointed out. “Not in my book. And mine’s the book I’m going by,” she told us, as if we hadn’t noticed. “Who has the tissues?”

  “We’re all going by our own books,” Jo told us. “I mean, what do you expect? From people raised by our mother.” Her lighter flamed in the darkness, again, so that I could see her face, and Meg’s, and Amy’s. Then there was just that round red glow and a pale wisping upward of smoke as Jo inhaled deeply, exhaled.

  Somebody had to say it. We were all thinking it, even Jo, I was sure, so I asked the unwelcome question, risking the quarrel. “Isn’t it time you stopped smoking? I mean, now that Mumma’s dead,” I said, as blunt as Mumma herself.

  Sometimes, life is too short to worry about sounding just like your mother.

  10.

  After Mumma

&nbs
p; A question I often ask myself is: How did Sarah come to be so like my mother? I do not ask my sisters this. Their answers would range from “It serves you right” to “You bring it out in her, just like you did with Mumma.” Nor do I ask George, who would only avoid responding. “I’m not a geneticist, I’m a legalist. How would I know?”

  I did, once, put the question to Sarah. She was in late elementary school at the time; I think that the occasion was her refusal to wear sneakers, or any shoe with laces, not ever, not for any occasion, not even—the immediate point of crisis—gym. “You didn’t even know her and you’re just like her,” I complained, and Sarah explained it to me. “She’s your hero, isn’t she? So what’s so bad about me being like her?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. Did I say it was?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Wrong with me? I’m not the one refusing to wear sneakers, the world’s most common footwear.”

  I don’t remember losing that argument, but I don’t remember winning it, either. Winning or losing isn’t the point here. Sarah is the point, Sarah being herself. Two of the world’s least low-key characters, my mother and my daughter.

  I have put forward, and been mocked for, the theory that as Mumma’s intelligence abandoned her, it systematically relocated its base of operations into the brain of my youngest daughter, who was transformed while still a toddler into my mother. When she says too often and with too judgmental a glance in my direction, “That’s so lame,” I tell Sarah, “You’re your grandmother all over again,” and I add, so that she won’t misunderstand me, “Twenty-twenty tunnel vision.”

  “Hunh,” Sarah says, or, “You wish,” or some similar mid-teen parent-dismissing phrase.

  I point my youngest daughter in the direction of the nearest mirror. “Take a look. Gran reincarnated.”

  “Reincarnation is arithmetically illogical,” says Sarah.

  “Captain and high scorer of Team Denial,” I say.