Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “We’re going to have someone else with us,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”

  I thought it must be Fannin, since if it were a girlfriend, she’d be with us already. Perhaps they’d cooked up the story that she was going to Bess’s, and she was going to show up, to let me make amends for my grudging reception of number five. If that was something they’d worked out, I thought, then that would be fine. That would be good.

  “The Depot is definitely the place to go,” he’d told me on the phone. “The place to be seen to prove that you produced young.”

  I’d been amused. “What is all this?” I’d asked him. “We didn’t do Mother’s Day back when I was your mother.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “I mean, when we lived in the same house.” I’d laughed.

  “An interesting concept of kinship you have, Mom.”

  “Rankin, table for three,” he said to the female host when we’d parked and joined a crowd at the Depot. He was looking spiffy in a light gray summer suit, cream shirt, wild tie with black walleyed fish on it.

  Spiffy was a word of Mother’s—its coming into my mind should have been a clue. Still, I was amazed to see Edith Huntt Cooper appear in the wide doorway, hobbling slightly, her mouth tight with obvious discomfort. She was headed straight for our table.

  “Mother!” I rose and helped her to a chair. “I cannot believe this. And what happened to you?”

  George looked quite pleased with himself. “I sent her a plane ticket, and arranged a rent-a-car. Happy Mother’s Day to you both.”

  “… was getting the Hertz car,” Mother said, sinking down into the chair, “and I didn’t see the step. Somehow I’ve jammed my hip. Apparently I’ve plain and simple injured the muscle. I can’t lift my leg worth a damn. It didn’t matter driving—the left leg these days is like the appendix, left over from another era, in this case when automobiles had clutches. But I’m to leave for Tierra del Fuego Wednesday. I can’t hobble down there—”

  “Eat, Grandma, then we’ll see,” George said. He didn’t want his party dampened.

  “We’ll check with Will Perry,” I said.

  “No need to do that. I’ll have to work it through. It’s a matter of moving it back into position.” She beamed at her grandson. “What have we to eat, then?”

  We were in the side dining room, which, like the rest of the restored building, had train timetables framed on the walls—mementos of Mineral Springs in its heyday as a world famous spa. The menu contained familiar staples: chicken with chive dumplings, meat loaf and mashed potatoes, pork loin and sweet potato pie. What they always served here: down-home food for people who never had and were never going to eat like this at home.

  The other tables were filling. Looking around, I saw a son alone with his elderly mother, an aging daughter with hers. At the bigger tables—for six or eight—you could spot a mother surrounded by the son and his wife, the daughter and her husband, plus a couple of other grown children, unattached, between alliances. Usually, I saw, the oldest male at the table looked tired, restless, stole a glance at his watch. Usually the youngest female looked withdrawn, angry, off somewhere else. I could feel the rip and tear of kinship in the restored rooms, the air beneath the old timetables rippling with attempts at armistice.

  I had to admit what a different meal it would have been at our table if Nolan were here. In fairness, not all of that was his fault, some of it was the nature of the beast, the strain of being father to a son. Nolan would have been fighting the army of feelings he had about George: pride that the boy had followed him into finance, hurt that he never asked his advice, above all envy not just that George was investing in a future his dad wouldn’t be around to see (too true, as it turned out) but that he had such a grand time doing it.

  I was glad I’d worn my brown linen: Mother had given it to me a few years back, saying, “I saw this and it looked like you.” That was unusual, as we seldom bought for one another; more often, we both bought for Bess. It had a square neckline, bell sleeves, and was longish, nice with sandals.

  Mother wore a light yellow dress with self buttons and stitched, inverted pleats. Very much a Washington-in-the-spring sort of dress, good from the desk to the Rose Garden. With her hair a cap of white curls, she’d made the transition from looking like a naturalist in loose bloomers, hiking boots, khaki jacket and bobbed hair, to looking like someone of possible importance. I knew this was not a calculated decision; rather, it was my mother’s instinct for protective coloration.

  George ordered for us, sweet potato biscuits and corn soup all around, the pork, meat loaf and chicken to pass around. For Mother’s Day the Depot was serving champagne, since it was after church hours, and he got us each a glass of that.

  “What’re you working on now, Grandma?” he asked Mother. My son being the only person in the family who really understood what Edith did, why her work took her all over the world, and—his real interest—why the government was willing to finance her trips.

  Mother’s eyes lit up at his question. “I’m studying a tropical moth which the spider cuts out of her silk net rather than eats.” She reached over and patted George’s sleeved arm. She had lost weight and now had a certain stringy look, pared down for just such obstacles as her jammed hip.

  “What does the moth eat to guarantee he won’t be her supper?” He was already a jump ahead, his hazel eyes fastened on his grandmother.

  “An alkaloid, which is passed on in his semen to protect his female’s eggs from predators.” She beamed. “Aren’t you the smart one?”

  “Would you send me a copy of your report?”

  “If I get there. You may notice I’m having parboiled chicken in Mineral Springs, South Carolina, and could hardly walk up the Depot steps. We’ll see.”

  “I want to be in on the ground floor when you perfect an alkaloid-based, disease-resistant vaccine.”

  “Mercy, George,” Mother waved a hand. “Not everything has to have an economic value.”

  “The United States government is not paying your way to Tierra del Fuego because of its general interest in arachnids. Or to verify that there are over three hundred thousand spiders on the rain forest floor.”

  “Right you are about that.” Edith looked at her heaping plate of food. She buttered a biscuit, then raised her champagne glass to her grandson. “And how about you, George, what are you touting today? I know you’ve got a pitch. Some new snake oil.”

  “I invested in my own snake oil, actually,” he said, brushing back his flyaway brown hair, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. “Quite a bit of money, it happens, which my mother signed over to me in such a cavalier way I had to hear about it from a lawyer.” George looked at me, letting his affection show.

  I felt myself flush. Was that what this was all about? His arranging this lunch, his flying Mother down? A thank-you for Nolan’s money? Amazing. When I didn’t hear back from Theo Kenton, the messy fussy hulk of a lawyer in his red suspenders, I’d figured it would take from now until Christmas to snuff out Nolan’s offending secretive will. His last word from the afterlife. That meant that both my children had received their inheritance already. Perhaps, I considered, that, and not her father’s death, was what had prompted Fannin to become pregnant with number five. The knowledge that there would be funds to rear it.

  How different, truly, males were from females. If you gave a son money, he became convinced you loved him. He thought: She parted with money, what more can a mother do? If you gave a daughter money, on the other hand, she thought you were trying to buy her affection, attach strings. She gave me a check: what’s going on?

  I told George, “I’m glad your father’s attorney finally moved his ass,” glad to find myself the Good Guy, and on Mother’s Day at that.

  “To answer,” he said to his grandmother, “I’m hot about this substance called elastomer. It’s the plastic of the future. Let me give you one example, Grandma. A piece the size of a gumball in a can of ca
r paint makes a permanent impenetrable coating. It’s coming out of Belgium; I’m pushing it and I’m buying it.”

  “Mercy,” Edith said, enchanted. She liked nothing better on earth than a good look at vistas well into the twenty-first century. “Elastomers.” She made a note on the back of an envelope in her bag.

  “Buy in,” George said, smiling at her.

  She smiled back, but shook her head. “I’d prefer to have invented it.”

  We stopped to choose dessert. Mother got the bread raisin pudding, George the apple skillet pie, and I the banana pudding with vanilla wafers. Homestyle sweets that were never served at home. We all agreed to share, to taste all around. The coffee came with sugar cubes and real heavy cream.

  I acknowledged that it wasn’t just his son that Nolan would have been jealous of, it was my mother as well. He’d have suggested she talked too much about herself, thought too much of herself, was, by implication, putting down women like his own mother, who had been—his term—“a simple homemaker.” It meant that Mother, answering questions asked by her grandson—out of his nose for news, his knowledge that insects’ survival strategies today were tomorrow’s chemistry—would have been seen by Nolan as Edith Huntt Cooper’s having hogged what would otherwise have been “a pleasant luncheon.” In fact, Nolan resented Bess as well. His sister, he said, had been crazy for horses, too, “at that age,” but had given them up when she was grown. In truth, what he objected to in the women in my family was their—our—priorities. Our putting something, anything at all, ahead of a home and a man like him. If my mother’s and sister’s interests were all-consuming, then what did this suggest about me and my wallpaper shop? Jealousy, I thought, not for the first time, was pervasive, systemic. Why did we construe it only sexually?

  Unsettled, I looked at the train timetables on the wall, willing myself back into another era. I was dismayed at the anger that still rushed over me when I least expected it; at how married I still clearly was.

  “They start so young, now,” Edith was saying. “Did you see the girl, Hungarian not Russian, who is a chess grand master at fifteen? Youngest ever, first female. What a way to begin your life. And I saw a TV spot on this tennis-playing ten-year-old—she was Russian—who was already in training, planning to turn pro at twelve. It amazes me, I must admit. At a time when I was playing jacks, riding bikes, trading mysteries, these young women—one can hardly call them girls, with those achievements—are already competing and winning in world class events.”

  “You haven’t done so badly,” I said, finding it painful that she should compare herself and find herself wanting.

  “But see what it cost me, dear. I’m seventy-eight and may lose my last chance to go into the field because my damn body is misbehaving. Had I started even ten years sooner—”

  I didn’t answer. What was there to say? I would have preferred to be in my mother’s shoes, even with her hip, at her age, than to have had the high point of my life some sixty years in the past when I was a tennis prodigy or a chess luminary. But I could hear my mother’s frustration in her voice, could sense that her passion would outdistance her flesh. Having the chance to go for it when you were ready: that was the point.

  I could and often did feel guilty that Bess and I had held Mother back. Guilty even that we had not done with our lives what she might have expected. Yet I knew that my mother’s loss was personal, her own. That it was her own race, her own best time, her own distance she was measuring and finding wanting. There was no reproach regarding what Bess or I had done with our lives, only regret with what she had not yet done with hers.

  Mother said, “Sarah, my grandson enticed me down here with a nonrefundable ticket, knowing I couldn’t refuse, even though I’m due to leave in a matter of days. I didn’t set out to make this a secret trip, but I didn’t call your sister. I know Bess has her hands full with guests this time of year—”

  “Fannin and the boys are there for the weekend,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “Isn’t it odd the way we all rally round and think of your sister on Mother’s Day? Even your dear daughter does. I had a Vermont cob-smoked ham sent to her—sending coals to Newcastle to send pork to Carolina, I know that. Still, she can have something to carve and set out.”

  I nodded. “I sent her cow plates and bowls, as if there were still milking sheds at her place.”

  Edith pushed away her plate of dessert, and looked at both of us, smiling. “I have a war story to tell on myself before we go. I was on a plane, going somewhere, long flight, Africa it was, and I got to talking with the man seated next to me, the way you do when you have time to exchange your entire life stories and you can’t see any way out of it. He began by telling me about his combat service and how the war had changed his life. Before I could stop myself, I asked him, ‘What war?’ ” Mother threw back her head and laughed, her white curls bobbing. “Honestly. But, in my defense, my dad had been in WWI, MacDonald in WWII, your Nolan in Korea.…” She waved a hand. “Naturally, he was offended and soon turned his attention to the in-flight movie.”

  “ ‘What war?’ is a fair question, Mother,” I said. “I ask it of myself all the time.”

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “And thank you, George, for the luncheon. I do feel it’s quite my day.”

  MOTHER AND I were sitting on the porch when Will brought the dogs back from their evening walk. She had taken a nap, held on to a chair and tried ever so slowly to raise her left leg front and back, then got on her hands and knees and tried to swing it to the side. We were having an iced tea and watching the strawberry sunset seep across the sky until even the distant trees and hills reddened in the dusk.

  He climbed the steps, and reached out a hand. “Edith Cooper, Will Perry. A pleasure to see you. You may not remember me, but I’m the ‘young doctor’ who took over your old doctor’s practice.” He indicated his middle with a gesture that suggested he hardly fit the description now.

  Mother stood, wincing at the motion. “I remember you well, young doctor.” She took his hand and held it in both of hers. “I thought you quite attractive, and hardly enough younger to make a problem. I’d have pursued the matter—but doctors weren’t free to travel in those days.”

  “I’m freer now,” he said kindly. “Where did you have in mind?”

  “How does Patagonia sound?”

  “Like hell, I have to say.”

  “Sit down, Will.” I liked seeing them together. They would have made a good pair, actually. Mother could have done worse than take up with him thirty-odd years ago.

  He settled himself, and the dogs did, too, on either side of his chair. “No tea. I’ve got to get back to the hospital.”

  “Bad?” I asked him. The hospital on Sunday night, on Mother’s Day? It must be.

  “Not good. The man on my table the day you called.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Will turned to Edith. “Let’s talk about that hip.”

  “Butt muscle, the one that lifts. Gluteus maximus, to be precise.”

  “I brought you a little homeopathic remedy. If my memory serves, you have an aversion to pharmaceuticals.” He fished in his jacket pocket, handed her a small tin.

  “Your memory serves.” Mother looked pleased, touched at his recalling her accurately.

  “Arnica. It’s from a mountain plant, an Indian remedy. Rub it in. It’ll heal the tissue from inside. Your hip should feel better. I’m leaving you a large enough sample that you can take it with you.”

  “That’s very kind.…” She demonstrated that she could lift her foot only inches from the porch floor. “I’m going down there if I have to crawl.”

  Will stood. “Is there anything else the young doctor can do for you?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is. Could you? I’m accustomed to travelling with three things: aspirin, eugenol, and paregoric. Now the last two are prescription and they’re fussy even about giving them.”

  “Eugenol—that’s oil of cloves.”
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  “Yes, for your gums, teeth, when you’re out in the heat, eating strange food, nowhere near water clean enough to brush with. Cloves. I’ve been chewing them, but it is not the same. Paregoric, well, I know that’s opium. But for dysentery or pain—the two terrors of the tropics—a tea-spoonful is a salvation.”

  Will nodded, not making notes but getting it all in his head. I had wished for him at lunch, although it was, and rightly, George’s occasion—he seemed already to know my family better than my husband of thirty-three years had. At least to have more understanding of them.

  “I’ll see you have both to take back with you,” he said to Mother. “I’ll call them in tomorrow, refills guaranteed. Let me know when aspirin requires a prescription, too, and you’ll have that.”

  “I’m much obliged,” Mother said.

  He gave each of us a cheek kiss, holding Edith’s face in his hands for a moment. “I missed a fine chance,” he said.

  “You’ll be good for my daughter,” Mother told him.

  “She’ll do for a consolation prize.” He touched my face. “Missoula wants to stay,” he said.

  “Ben is counting on it.”

  “Will Perry wants to stay, too.”

  “I hope your man makes it,” I said.

  At the bottom of the steps, he stopped. “I lost a boy last night. Just pushing thirty. Kid didn’t even make it to the end of the first chapter.”

  Mother shook her head. “Was that your first?”

  “No, but the worst.”

  I hadn’t been with Will long enough to grow accustomed to this, his dealing with death on a daily basis. Mother seemed more comfortable with it.

  “Hanging around, waiting for the experts to give me the bad news on my man, I started forming a plan to shake up the medical world here. They think AIDS is a Yankee disease, imported down here to whup us again.”

  Mother tapped her fingers together. “Tell them it’s killed more men already than the Civil War.”