The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  “Wal-mart or Milady’s Boutique?”

  “Neither. Mother took her into Buckhannon to buy some clothes.”

  “But why? I thought in her order, they always wore the habit.”

  Ellen glanced back at me. “She left that order. And for this one she hasn’t taken her vows yet.”

  I thought she’d already taken vows. I had assumed that no one would enter a cloister unless they were planning on life imprisonment. “She isn’t under vows?”

  “Not that I know of. And I guess it’s easy to quit before that.”

  “Wow.” I sat down on the bed, next to my suitcase. I don’t understand Theresa, I wanted to tell Ellen. Do you? But instead I did the how’s the family segment, and she countered with what’s going on with you, and it wasn’t till we were settled on the sun porch with diet cokes that she told me about Mother.

  “It’s not very much, understand. She seems the same. But then there’ll be a moment, and she’ll say something she would never say, or something that isn’t true—And,” she added reluctantly, “there’s President Urich.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know. The president of the college. He’s practically moved in here. He thinks she’s going to leave the college a lot of money.”

  Loudon was the local private college, an odd little place with a thousand students whose parents didn’t trust them to stay safe or straight up at WVU. The most amazing thing about Loudon is that its recruiters actually managed, year after year, to find 250 West Virginia freshmen with parents wealthy enough to pay private college tuition.

  Loudon was the family college. Generation after generation of Wakefield graduates. There was a plaque on one stone pillar, memorializing our grandfather, and another over the east arch for Daddy.

  The school was an anachronism even when I was in high school and my mother kept mentioning how much Cathy had enjoyed “matriculating” there, and how much I too would enjoy it. I used to wander through the campus, looking up at those walls that really were covered with ivy, and imagined myself holding hands with Andy Hardy and joining Judy Garland’s sorority.

  Even then it was hard to imagine Cathy there amongst the timid sons and daughters of real estate agents. But she always seemed to like Loudon, ever since that summer after 8th grade when she went there to science camp. Ellen went to science camp there too, but when it came time to choose a college, she found all sorts of excuses to go to the bigger and better school across the state line. She didn’t live for rock-climbing and skiing as Cathy did.

  Even I, the academic no-show, went to science camp one summer, curing myself forever of any desire for higher education. Instead I matriculated at the school of hard knocks, or at least the school of horny producers.

  But Loudon was a fixture in my parents’ lives, where they met, where they courted back in the days when fraternity boys serenaded sorority girls on moonlit nights. And since then, Mother had worked to keep the college as the center of culture for this old town.

  “What’s so strange about meeting with the president?” Automatically I used my finger to wipe up a condensation drop from the teak table under my glass, then rubbed my wet finger on my other wrist. It was warm out there with the sunlight streaming in and barely a breeze stirring the air. “She was president of the alumni association. And didn’t Daddy’s will endow two professorships?”

  “This sounds like more than two professorships. This sounds like a new dormitory.”

  A new dorm would cost millions. Not for the first time, I wondered how much money my mother actually had. (It was idle speculation, nothing personal. I didn’t need her money and didn’t expect that she’d leave me more than a token amount, if that.) There were the shares in the bank that Daddy once ran, and I presumed some safe old-money investments and insurance policies, and this house, of course.

  Anywhere else, this old monster house with its three acres of gardens would be worth more than a million. But this was West Virginia. No one around here had a million to spend on a house. I felt a moment’s pity for whichever of my sisters got stuck with the place and had to pay to heat it during the long winters. “So ask to see a copy of her will.”

  She laughed, a short, unamused laugh. “You first.”

  “You’re older.”

  “I’m not old enough for that.” For a moment, she was quiet enough that I could hear the bees buzzing in the rose bush under the window. Then she said, “I’m glad you both could come.”

  “How did you explain about us all coming home? I mean, she’s got to figure that’s an unusual event.” Like the first time this century, and only once in the last century too.

  “I let her think it was her doing. She kept talking about the college president, and about bequests, and I suggested that maybe we could all help her make the decision.”

  “Oh, I get it. She’s supposed to think we’re so greedy that we’ll come back to insure our inheritance, if not to actually visit her.”

  “Well, I didn’t know how else to justify it,” Ellen shot back. “Was I supposed to say that I was calling a family meeting because she’s losing her marbles?”

  “I don’t know. But I would like to make it clear to her somehow that I have no expectations. I don’t want the house and I don’t need the money.” This was Ellen, I told myself. I could trust her, at least a little bit. “All I want is a few mementos of Daddy, maybe—” Yes, I trusted her. But I didn’t want to remind anyone of the watercolors. “Maybe his desk.”

  She shook her head, smiling again. She never could stay mad very long. “Yeah, that big old heavy desk will fit right in with all that pretty white Euro furniture of yours. You’re welcome to it. It’ll cost a thousand just to ship it.”

  I glanced behind me, worried that somehow Mother might hear. I didn’t think she’d wiretap her own house, but you never knew. “It’s so weird, talking like this. Like she’s going to die soon, and we have to divide up the possessions.”

  “She’s not going to die soon. But we don’t want her giving away all her money before she does. I don’t know about you, but I really would prefer that she didn’t move in with me.”

  I had to laugh at this. “I can just see the look on Tom’s face when you announce that he’s got to make room for his mother-in-law.”

  As soon as I mentioned her husband, she glanced away, and her hand went nervously to the gold cross at her throat. I wondered if already he’d made it very clear that Mother would be moving in over his dead body. Not that I blamed him, but I didn’t like to see my sister anxious like this. I tried to reassure her. “She’s really very strong, remember.”

  Ellen nodded. “I know. But something feels different. When she gets back, you see what you think. Maybe I’m overreacting. She seems fine physically. She walks down the hill every day to the store, and back up again. It’s just—”

  She didn’t have to say it aloud. We were both thinking the same word. Alzheimers. But I didn’t have time to explain how utterly foreign this concept was—our formidable mother with a weakened mind—when the matriarch herself returned with a wary but appropriately dressed Theresa, all spare body and straight cropped light hair and taupe crepe, still a nun, even without the wimple.

  In the hall, I kissed my mother without a hint of awkwardness, one of those patented moves I’d learned from Joan Crawford—taking the hand (so that we didn’t have to embrace), leaning forward, pressing lips to cheek, and murmuring, “Mother.” But when I did, I faltered just for a moment, breathing in the fragrance that lingered on her powdered cheek. Chanel #19. I’d sent her a bottle last Christmas.

  “Welcome home, Laura,” she said, drawing back. Her tone was so perfect, so admonitory, so courteous and reproving in reminding me how long I’d been gone, that I shot a glance at Ellen. At this moment, Mother seemed entirely Mother to me.

  I turned to Theresa, and took a step towards her. She took a step back. It wasn’t an insult, I knew, but an involuntary response. She wasn’t used to being approached like
that. I reminded myself that she had been in a cloister for a year, and moved to the side, as if all along I’d been planning to go pick up her shopping bag. “Hi, Theresa,” I said casually, as if we’d seen each other last week. “Did you bring home anything for me?”

  Deliberately, she reached for the shopping bag and removed it from my hand. “Just some new clothes. For me.”

  I smiled. She hadn’t changed either.

  Ellen, of course, took over and made everything nice. She sensed that Theresa didn’t want to be asked about the clothes, and drew Mother towards the sun porch. “I made some iced tea. You sit down and I’ll get you both a glass.”

  But Theresa chose to disappear up the stairs, so I was left with my mother. I inquired politely about the drive to Buckhannon, explained that my car was in the shop, and was tempted to mention Jackson. Instead, as casually as I could, I asked for local news.

  Mother had a catalog of harmless and trivial news, about the garden club benefit and a new addition to the library. At first, she was making eye contact, and then her gaze drifted over my shoulder and over the garden, and a little after that, her recitation just sort of faded out. She was no longer paying attention to me.

  Okay. That was weird.

  I was about to say something when Ellen returned with a tray and a glass with ice and tea and lemon and spoon arranged just as we’d been taught. The bustle brought Mother back, and she focused her gaze on me. “So do you find the town much changed?”

  I mentioned the commercial strip, and all the landscaping, and then, unable to help myself, I said, “And I see the police have some snazzy squad cars. Chargers, it looks like. That’s pretty racy for Wakefield.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Mother stirred her iced tea. She was a tough one—no lemon, no sugar, no Sweet and Low. Just tea and ice. “We had to bring in a new police chief, and he made some demands before agreeing. New squad cars, a new building.”

  My heart started beating faster, but I kept my tone casual. “That must be one expensive police chief.”

  She nodded, still stirring. “A young man out of Bristol. He’s used to a bigger city, with better facilities. But he came highly recommended, and we did need to upgrade our facilities. We don’t have a lot of crime here, but he was right that we couldn’t keep the city lockup in the basement of a house.”

  I felt Ellen’s gaze on me. She knew who the new police chief was, and she knew who he was to me. Oh, not that we’d eloped, as Mother had gone to some pains to cover that. But she knew that we’d dated and that Mother had disapproved. And she knew what I was thinking. Mother knew the provenance of everyone in town: who was an aunt of whom by marriage, who had a cousin-in-law on the planning board, which derelict was connected to which founding family. Even without the personal connection, she should have known exactly who Jackson was, one of those worthless McCains who arrived from Charleston in 1984 and scattered out of town, one step ahead of the gambling commission, in 1992.

  “Okay,” I whispered to Ellen as we went upstairs to change for dinner. “Maybe you’re right. But—” I stopped outside of the door to her room, looking around for eavesdroppers. I still didn’t trust Theresa. “But what can we do about it?”

  Ellen sighed as we stopped outside my door. “She told me that nice young president from the college is taking us all out to dinner. So we can’t say anything then. And—here’s my thought—sometimes medications elderly people take can interact in weird ways. Maybe Theresa can go through Mother’s prescriptions.”

  Before she entered the cloister, Theresa had been with a nursing order doing mission work in Romania. I wasn’t sure if experience with cholera and polio would help her interpret Mother’s pharmacology, but I supposed it couldn’t hurt.

  Besides, it would make Theresa a party to our conspiracy, and thus equally culpable.

  Was I paranoid? Maybe. But I had reason to know that Theresa’s first loyalty was to the woman who adopted her and gave her a life of relative luxury, not to the sort-of sisters who shared her home for a few years.

  At the Farmhouse restaurant, the nice young president from the college fawned nicely over Mother, but in off-moments turned his charm on me. He wasn’t actually young—fifty-five at least—but he was as handsome and as blow-dried as any LA entertainment attorney. Merely a botany professor, he told us modestly, elevated to this leadership position because no one else would take it.

  “I was very surprised they chose me,” he confessed, “because I’m definitely one of those outside-the-box thinkers. I’m all for tradition, but this is a new century, and the ivy on those walls is getting dusty!” He leaned forward confidentially. “Do you know, I’m hoping to make Technology Week’s list of top-ten wired colleges this year. Small college division, but still . . . every student is given a laptop, and all the dorms have wi-fi access. And I particularly like to do online recruiting chats with interested high school students. That way we make sure that we’re getting a good crop of techno-savvy freshmen. Do you have a website?”

  I had to admit my publicist had set one of those up, which so far had mostly led to a lot of creepy emails from techno-savvy prison inmates.

  “I’ll be sure and visit it. Perhaps you could link to the Loudon College site? Since you are an alum?”

  This was news to me. “I am?”

  “Didn’t you attend our summer science camps when you were in high school?”

  Now that was thinking outside the box as far as alumni categories went. Summer campers. “Yes, maybe one summer.” Don’t get the wrong idea. I only did it to be near Jackson—he had to go to make up the credits he’d missed while in reform school. “But I didn’t even graduate from high school. My sister Cathy was the Loudon alum.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember your sister. One of our athletic stars. On the ski team, wasn’t she? Forgive me for bumbling around like that.” He bowed his head as if to acknowledge our family tragedy, then looked up with a smile. “We’d love to award you an honorary degree,” he assured me. “You could give the commencement address.”

  I was tickled in spite of myself. Yet was another example of his outside-the-box thinking. There I would be, an utterly uneducated actress, known primarily as “Uma’s best friend in Casework, the one who steals Uma’s boyfriend and then tries to commit suicide” (I was brilliant, sawing away at my wrists like that with a penknife), telling these little college graduates how fortunate they were to have coasted through Lit 102. But then, when I thought more about it, his offer stung a bit too. I resolved there and then that if I wanted to get a college degree, or high school diploma even, it wouldn’t be honorary.

  “Speak to my publicist,” I told him. “He’s in charge of all my honorary degrees.”

  Mother wasn’t pleased with me. After the nice young president dashed out to retrieve something from his car, she gave me a look—Bette Davis couldn’t have been scarier—and announced that she was thinking of endowing a building at the college.

  “That’s nice, Mother,” I said, smothering a yawn. Ellen shot me a look of her own, more Burstyn then Bette, reminding me that very likely that nice young man was taking shameless advantage of our confused mother. I entertained the notion that perhaps it was Mother taking advantage of the nice young man, getting him to take us all out to the best restaurant in town (well, the selection was limited) by alluding to a potential windfall. But there was no use telling that to Ellen. I was a product of the corruption factory that was Hollywood, so I was quick to leap to suspicion. She had worked in schools and in churches, and those weren’t the sort of world to make her paranoid.

  “Perhaps even a museum,” Mother observed. “A museum of West Virginia culture.”

  I had only a moment to consider that when President Uriah—okay, his name was actually Urich—returned from his car with the college catalog, and slid it onto the table next to my plate of spinach pasta. Then he tapped my hand in a jolly old uncle sort of way. It took everything I had not to pick up my plate and dump it in his lap. But al
l I did was withdraw my hand from his vicinity and pick up the glossy little magazine.

  Urich was all eagerness as I looked at photos of Phi Delts under the arch and the women’s lacrosse team, fierce with their face masks and raised sticks. I paused at a head-and-shoulder shot of Urich against the paneling of his office.

  “Nice picture of you,” I said, giving it a cursory study. In the photo, he looked contemporary and cutting edge, traditional but definitely outside the box—his coat off, his rep tie knot loosened. Just over his shoulder, on the paneled wall, was a diploma and a framed watercolor of the famous arch.

  My fingers stilled on the page. I felt Mother’s gaze on me. She knew. She was wondering if I knew.

  I mustered twenty years worth of acting experience and casually turned to the next page. It was a grid of majors and requirements, and I managed a near-perfect grimace as I closed the catalog and handed it to Ellen. With a shrug I knew my mother would consider typically insolent, I said, “Great publication. Too bad you have to take classes to qualify for all the parties and sports you depict there.”

  Mother gave me another look, one annoyed enough that it quieted my fear of discovery. As far as she knew, I had never seen what she must have known was in that photo of the president’s office—the watercolor by my father, one of a series he’d done of the college, with his bold strokes and odd way with borders, recognizable even in miniature.

  She was already giving Daddy’s work away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was nine p.m. when we got home. Theresa excused herself and went right to bed. I guessed she was still on convent hours. I waited until Mother and Ellen also drifted upstairs, and then I waited some more. When Letterman was over, I flipped off the TV and the living room light and went to the kitchen pantry for a sturdy shopping bag. From there I went up the back service stairs, slipping my shoes off as I approached the second floor where the bedrooms were. It was another flight up to the servants’ quarters—not that we’d ever had live-ins—and the hall that ended at the attic door.