Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

by Ramona Ausubel

  Ben—his life, his death—had shadowed Evelyn and Paul always. Evelyn had known that she had not cared for him well. She had thought of the call from the hospital, reporting his death as if it had been just the next in a series of developments they had been monitoring: Patient exhibits schizophrenic behavior; patient does not respond to electric-shock treatments; patient undergoes prefrontal lobotomy; patient experiences death.

  The body had been sent by car so that Ben could be buried in the family plot. Fern and Edgar and Cricket had flown in and taken a taxi straight to the cemetery. Evelyn had asked Edgar to carry the bronze cast of a sculpture she had made of Ben when he was four, old enough for his parents to know that he was unusual but too young to realize how much it would matter. In this bronze Ben was hugging a small dog and the dog was licking his cheek. The statue made Fern endlessly sad. The companion Ben would have wanted forever was Fern. They had been born together and he wanted to live together and die together. Here he was, dead, with only a metal dog to love him.

  After that, Evelyn had spent money to have the entire garden in the country torn out and replanted with something less soft than English roses. The roof had had to be replaced. The basement had flooded. Fern’s father had made large donations to libraries and zoos that he did not tell his wife about. Paul had given and given, each sum larger than the last. It had not occurred to him that he would one day reach the bottom of a reserve that had always seemed utterly endless. Giving money had been the only way anyone thanked him anymore.

  Evelyn had gone to the doctor and said, “I’m so old all of a sudden.” As she had said it she realized that she had not known very many truly old women.

  “Are you ready for your prescription? I don’t want to rush you, but I recommend having it around earlier rather than later. One never knows how these things will progress.”

  “My prescription?”

  “For when your body is no longer able to house you properly. For when you are ready to move on.”

  She had remembered learning in school that women lived longer than men and thinking, Not here. Even as a girl, Evelyn had been aware that women died politely. Almost always in bed, having bathed and tidied up, called the children and grandchildren to say goodnight. Lucky men died of heart attacks, usually while playing a beloved sport. It was considered a good way to go. Racket in hand, having just sent into the sky a gorgeous, sailing volley. Unlucky men wound up in a home where someone mashed their green beans and helped them with their diapers. But well-bred women never died in public and they were almost never so decrepit that they had to be sent away. Now she understood why.

  “What is it?” Evelyn had asked.

  “Just sleeping pills. Strong sleeping pills. I’ll give you more than enough. I think you’ll feel better having them around.”

  Paul had given money to the National Association of American Thoroughbreds, the Lakeshore Beautification Campaign, The Poor.

  By Christmas, Evelyn had made a plan. She had thought of her daughter in her nice house with her nice husband and children. Fern had turned out as expected. She could take care of herself. Evelyn thought of her son and hoped that whatever kingdom had taken him in could care for him better than she had. Evelyn thought of Paul, his headaches, and decided easily that they would need to go together. She had not told her husband the plan. She hoped the pills would be sufficient for them both. She bathed, encouraged her husband to bathe. Though the maid would not be there until morning, she hung up a tag on the bedroom door that they had received on an African safari decades ago: Resting, it said.

  “The doctor gave me something that he said would make us sleep better than we have in our whole lives,” she said to her husband. “Shall we?”

  He reached out his same old hand and she had poured eight pills in. “This is a lot of pills,” he said.

  “It’s the regular dosage, apparently.”

  “Cheers.”

  Evelyn leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. It had been a long time. Their lips had felt different together than they used to, but hardly.

  Fern had gone home alone to bury her parents, flown in and out the same day and seen only the cemetery. She had been sure the men and women of the North Shore were disgusted with her decision not to hold a proper funeral with all the fixings, but she had not cared. She had cared about seeing the boxes that held the bodies. She had cared about watching them as they descended into the earth beside her brother. After that, she had eaten something in the airport and gone home.

  —

  Mac followed Fern’s directions to her old house. There had been much new development since she had last been back. Big houses, uglier by a thousand degrees than their predecessors. Fern said, just as her mother would have, “It’s wretched what they’ve done.” White columns had replaced brick, old trees were cut, lawns were unearthly green, vibrating with color much too late in the season. She figured the interiors would have been filled with flash and bright colors, mirrors, shiny white plastic. Fern felt old. She had not expected to miss what had come before so much. She had not expected to be a skeptic about the way things were going, the future outlook.

  And then came the old wooden fence, the familiar driveway, and they turned down it and the old house was the same cream color with blue trim, the same stone geese sculpted by Fern’s mother out front, the same pink geraniums in the window boxes.

  They parked and stood outside looking at the house. Fern had planned to take a moment, maybe walk the perimeter, but now she went to the door and knocked. Of course it went unanswered. Of course it was locked. But there were so many entrances and Fern knew all of them. They tried the screened porch, the kitchen, the garage. At the maid’s entrance the doorknob turned easily and they stood in the laundry room where there was still a load of whites hanging on a drying rack.

  The house, awaiting the legal process, was exactly as her parents had left it, exactly as they had died in it.

  Fern stood in the living room and smelled the wood of it, the fibrous old-age rugs. Mac pulled out a huge leather-bound edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The pages were half dust. The room was breathing, was what it felt like, and Fern had to sit down on the floor because the chairs were all too familiar. All those same books, all those same pictures, the fireplace and the nooks beside it for reading. Her grandfather had built the house for a happy family, the children tucked away with books and the mothers and fathers on the porches with their sketchpads and tall glasses of iced tea. Outside: bees, butterflies, a constant parade of roses in the garden, dripping fountains. It had been a true dream, sometimes. Fern running through the wildflowers and grasses; supper on the porch by candlelight; lying on the dew-grass at night while the stars poured down.

  Fern thought of her brother. Ben, inside alone with a gardening catalogue, a pair of scissors and a roll of tape, rearranging the plants so they were grouped by family, rather than alphabet. “Lily, lily, lily,” he said, pressing garlic beside onion beside a picture of a massive white bloom, like an outstretched hand. The floor around him was covered in bits of paper like so many snowflakes. Ben, making better sense of things. He had been safe in this house and should never have been made to leave it.

  Mac stayed downstairs but Fern went up the creaking stairs. Her parents’ door was closed. There was a hang-tag on the knob and Fern remembered the trip it had come from. They had all gone on safari when she was ten, had watched the beating heart of a water buffalo slow down while a lion untangled the ropes of its muscles with her teeth. Fern had been able to smell the blood. It was sweet in her nose and the lion looked right at her while she ate the buffalo’s living leg.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Evelyn had said. “The cycle of life.”

  Ben had had to turn around. He was watching the clouds change. “Tell me when it’s over,” he had said. Fern watched, trying to prove strength to her mother.

  Fern, standing at the doo
rway to the room where she knew her parents had died, had to choose to enter or walk away. She knew the bodies had been buried but she was still afraid that she would find some leftovers of them lying in bed. Bones or blood. She had to tell herself to stop being crazy but crazy was what she felt as she let herself in, knelt at the edge of the bed, which was empty, of course it was empty, and tried to hear them or smell them or sense the residue of their death in the room.

  The rug was warm; the sun must already have passed through.

  Surrounding Fern were the trappings of a good life. The house was stately and big, the lawn rolling, miles of prairie with trails through the wildflowers. Hardwood furnishings, a silk rug, crystal chandelier, a closetful of dresses and suits. Here were the belongings with no one to belong to, so many objects sitting dumbly where they had been placed. It seemed almost obscene to Fern, this huge remainder, when the lives themselves had ended.

  Fern opened the bedside table drawer and found a handful of pens, a tube of lip balm and four index cards with her father’s shaky script. On each was a name: Evelyn Westwood, Paul Westwood, Ben Westwood, Fern Keating. There was nothing else written. Fern imagined her father lying on this bed, his brain liquid with pain, trying to remember the names of his family members. She imagined him holding her card as if the mere fact of her could calm him. She wished she had offered more, anything more.

  The lawyer had mailed Fern the note her mother had left in an embossed envelope with her name on it.

  Dear Fern,

  This is the kindest thing we could possibly do for you. Being old is terrible. Think of this as a gift to all of us.

  Love always, Mother

  On the table was a glass with a white mineral ring at the bottom, the evidence of dried liquid. Was the fact that the glass remained untouched a question of politeness? The rule was not to clear a person’s place until she told you she was finished. None of the people who had passed through this room wanted to be the one to clean up a deadwoman’s cup. Before she left, Fern took the glass to her lips. Lipsalt on the rim, hers and her mother’s.

  * * *

  THE DOCK WHERE EDGAR AND GLORY were still tied off was busy with pleasure boaters hauling huge coolers of drinks and snacks out for a day on the water. The women wore kerchiefs and sunhats and minidresses and the men had long fringy hair and no shirts. They would fish, drunken and uncareful, and grill whatever they caught on deck. Edgar wanted to be rid of them so he and Glory skipped breakfast and untied the lines that held them to land. They left the harbor on a port tack then swung past a ferry sounding her long, sad horn. Edgar’s pulse was quick and strong. The shore was green and tangled from a summer of growing. Beach plums were dying on the branch, and Glory, looking through the binoculars, could see their dusty purple shapes. The wind was steady and they both put on their jackets, but it was sunny and clear. The boat threw water off her prow in long ribbons of white foam. Rainbows were cast in the water-light. “See?” Edgar said out loud. “See how good it is?” Glory smiled at him, a boy in the middle of a favorite game. She did see. They were out, away, and the wind pushed them farther. Edgar could feel Boston getting smaller and if he traveled far enough away, the whole idea of Chicago, he hoped, would turn to a speck. Glory went belowdecks to make toast, learned to spread her feet wide for balance, hold on to something with one hand while the other worked. She liked that everything was just so—the jars fit the shelf perfectly. There were three plates, two cups. They had plenty of food and water stored deeper, but what was in front of Glory was the precise amount needed. There should be a word for this happiness, she thought. The happiness of nothing extra.

  —

  To Glory, the route was just out to sea. Edgar hitched the lanyards as they passed a small island. The Island of Tragedies, it was called. Edgar knew that they would pass above the Nantucket Shoals, Powell Canyon, Picket Seamount and the Hudson Fan. He knew that two hundred million years before, the Atlantic Ocean had just begun to form. Hot plumes of magma had pushed upwards and volcanoes were made. Mountains rose from the seafloor, and the steam-heat seeped through and warmed the water and forests began to grow, corals and fans. All that made food for the animals—lobsters and fish and brittlestars. Thousands and thousands of feet of water separated the sand and sediment and rock bottom from the mirror-surface. But the water was thick with life—microbes and krill and amoebas and shrimp and sharks and tuna and whales and lobsters and dolphins and halibut and turtles.

  Two hundred years before, in this spot, a trading vessel bound for America had been making good time. It was a Sunday and the crew had been preparing to bring up the nets to see what they would have for dinner. The cook had his hands in a basin of grey washwater. And then a wave had appeared, a huge wave, alone on the surface of an otherwise still sea. Like an obedient dog, the ship had rolled over. Her crew had been underwater before they knew they were in danger. She had sunk slowly, air caught in the hold. The sea was featureless except for the mast, which stuck up like a knife-stab. The captain’s body came to rest on the foredeck. A hundred years later divers had found his bronze watch in a tangle of seaweeds. The steel hands were still set to the time of the wave: nineteen minutes before twelve.

  The sloop floated above the distant bottom like a star.

  By late afternoon they were crossing into waters Edgar had never sailed before. This was the part he had wanted. Out beyond. They were headed southeast at eight knots and the water peeled out from below them and the wind was strong and steady.

  “How do you feel?” Edgar asked.

  “I feel wobbly.”

  “The sickness goes away after a while. We could swim. That helps.”

  Edgar let the mainsail down and made it fast. The sloop slowed and slopped, rocking now instead of skimming.

  With tethers to their waists, they dove overboard. The water was warm at the surface and cold just below, and they kicked hard against waves that had appeared small when they were aboard but now seemed big. Glory lost sight of Edgar and spun, looking for him in the vast blue. She thought: shark. She thought: dead. Her only hope without him was to send a distress signal and wait to be rescued. She realized that she should ask more questions about what to do in a series of what-ifs. She thought of being dragged from a rotting ship, half dead, even though it only would have taken a few hours for a rescue boat to find her. Edgar appeared beneath her and lifted her up; she kissed him on the salty mouth. They kicked together, ran to keep above the surface. They laughed hard, knowing this was the best it would get. It was never a mistake to swim.

  Back aboard, they lay naked on deck and let the sun warm them. Glory rolled a joint and they passed it back and forth and then she lit a cigarette and Edgar took a drag. He didn’t like the taste but it felt good in his lungs, the heat. He coughed when he exhaled. The salt dried on their skin and shone. Cold to warm, wet to dry. “Bermuda,” Glory kept saying, trying to get used to it. Edgar drank beer, Glory said that word—everyone aboard had a way of making the time pass. The Ever Land slapped at the water, and the halyards clanged the mast. Such specific sounds and so few. Edgar thought that people would be different in a world with fewer sounds. When Glory touched him on the back of the neck he jerked away, wanting less rather than more. Finally, there was so little.

  “Remember the night of the party when we met? Was that really your mother?” he asked.

  “Oh, God. I think I’m so different from her and then there we were on the same vacation, trying to get drunk at the same party. I spend so much energy trying to be unlike my mother but then she responds by turning into me. It’s like she’s trying to prove to me that no matter what we do, we become the people we were always going to become.”

  “Does that mean you were always meant to wear a fringe vest?” Edgar teased.

  Glory laughed. “I’m sure she looked in the mirror twenty times before she left the house and felt great every time.”

  “My parents a
re even more embarrassing than yours,” he said. “Mine are gluttons. They own everything a person could ever purchase.”

  “Did they grow up with money?”

  “No. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they’re trying to use it all before someone realizes the money doesn’t belong to them.”

  The immigrants in Edgar’s family had crossed these same waters on a boat from Ireland, an old thing, the boards fat with seawater. The immigrant relatives had thought about waves as landward things, rolling onto the beach and rocks. That the whole ocean rolled was a surprise. Most of the earth was covered by water, and the water was in turmoil.

  After three weeks at sea, four miles from the Cape Cod shore, from their promised home, and in the middle of the night, the ship had quietly and unceremoniously sunk. The passengers’ deaths were dreams they dreamed or dreams they woke into—by the time they understood that they were beneath there was no such thing as above.

  The currents gathered the bodies and distributed them on a single beach along with driftwood. One woman and one man still had air in their lungs and their hearts had not stopped and the blood moved. They woke up slowly and coughed. They had never met but they already knew the story: God only needed one of each, but from them, a whole race could be carried forward.

  The immigrants worked in carpentry. They moved from Hope Street to Prospect Street to Promise Street.

  When Edgar’s father told the family story, the turning point was always exactly the same. Great-grandfather Joseph, Chicago, 1871. He was poor and his people had always been poor. He lived alone in a building that stood only because it seemed used to standing.

  Joseph sold metal parts and pieces from a shop next to the dirty river. One morning he sat out back with a donut and coffee and watched the affected water pass when he spotted something upstream in the slow current. A hand? he thought. Wait, a hand? It was grey and dead, fingers curled softly, the glint of a ring. The river slinked. Joseph squinted and the hand got closer. He wanted it to transform into anything else. No, no, just an old shoe, just a piece of packaging. The closer it got, the more handlike it became. Joseph ran inside and pulled a long rod out. He held one end and reached.