Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  I was fascinated by these stories because he, the storyteller, was fascinated by them too. Sometimes Thomas would pause for what seemed like a long time trying to find just the right words. At least that was what I thought he was doing. I don’t know why he stopped telling these stories to me. Maybe he ran out of them. But by the end of our first summer together, my father no longer came to my room at bedtime to lull me, if not to sleep, then to a faraway place, where he was Prince Charming, by the sheer fact that he was there.

  Of course, I had an easier time falling asleep after the stories stopped. But I missed them. Missing the storyteller was worse. I made up another game to pass the time between darkness and sleep. I would imagine myself with the young man on the IRT, with him on the sidewalk, both of us staring up at the Empire State Building, with him in a taxi as it navigated us through the streets of a city built of glass. I saw us there clear as day.

  Maybe this was why I wasn’t surprised when I saw the photographs. I was surprised by their existence, certainly, but not of the scenes that they depicted. I experienced instead an odd and impossible feeling, as if I were reliving them. Young Thomas, handsome and fresh-faced (by that I mean that he was lit up from within), standing by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, beside him a young woman whom I didn’t know but whom I recognized. Young Thomas, smiling and his hair disheveled, as if he had been running against the wind, sitting on the cascade of steps in front of Columbia’s Low Library, next to him the same familiar woman’s face and body. Young Thomas—this time alone—in his law school graduation gown, a hand resting on the marble and granite base of Alma Mater, her outsize, sculpted feet barely visible at the top edge of the photograph. There were only twelve of them, these black-and-white images of another Thomas. They came to me tucked inside of a large envelope that was probably once white but had since ivoried.

  In a box, marked HANDLE WITH CARE, my great-uncle Harper had also sent me four H.E.B.’s, though these were not numbered on the spines to indicate their place within the chronology of his life. When Leo saw me taking them out of the box, he asked who had sent me their old wedding albums. I had never thought of the H.E.B.’s in that way. In other words, I had never really seen them for what they were. All the H.E.B.’s were white and embossed with doves, and occasionally there were roses. I laughed out loud, thinking of how that must have been Baby Harper’s idea of a joke all along.

  Postmarked Boiling Springs, the box arrived in New York City in November of ’97. Leo and I were still living in the brownstone in Chelsea. We were just beginning our discussion, which turned into a negotiation, about getting engaged. We had been dating for almost seven years and living together for two of those years. He was fully Dr. Leo by then, having just completed his residency in psychiatry. (Kelly had dubbed him that from the start of our relationship; her coupling of his professional title with his first name turned out to be a succinct and prescient characterization of his ego and his hubris.) Why therapy or analysis wasn’t eventually stipulated as part of our medical prenuptial was a mystery to me. Maybe Dr. Leo thought he was fully capable of making all the necessary mental health assessments for himself. Maybe he thought that the “depression” that silenced me for days could be managed by a prescription or two. That our nights of sleep interrupted by my mumbled cries of “Fire!” would go away with medication as well. And of equal importance to Leo, that the awkwardness that I exhibited in front of his mother and father and older brother would dissipate the next time we gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, just the five of us seated around a table so large that when we spoke to one another we had to raise our voices, as if in anger, in order to be heard.

  Leopold Thomas Benton—I may have fallen in love with him for his middle name as well—came from a small family, which was part of his appeal. When I realized that his only brother was unmarried and probably would remain so, given his personality, I knew that there would be no nieces and nephews to scream my name aloud at every family gathering. The fact that both his father and mother were the only children within their families was an heirloom that I couldn’t have foreseen but greatly cherished. This meant that Leo had no cousins with their attendant families milling around his parents’ Beacon Hill home, the place where he was headed when we met on the New York–to–Boston train. Leo grew up in this four-story brick row house that had been in his family since it was built, in 1795, and whose front steps and cornflower-blue painted door were now photographed by straying members of tour groups, who swarmed the streets of Beacon Hill coveting American history, the Boston Brahmin edition. What I hadn’t anticipated was that Leo’s distinguished but sparse family tree meant that he would want to add to it, to make it fuller with new leaves.

  Of my family, I had told Leo mostly about Baby Harper, because I loved saying his name aloud. Leo’s eyes flashed brightly when he first learned of my great-uncle’s nickname. Leo said that it was a clear example of how my family had sanctioned and prolonged the infantilization of my great-uncle. I looked at Leo and thought, You had to go to medical school to learn this? Of course it was, Dr. Leo. My grandmother Iris had to keep her younger brother a child because if he became a grown man she would have to see whom that man desired and that would have shamed her. Everyone in my family knew this, and none of us were doctors except for the juris doctorate kind. Leo never had a sense of humor when I joked with him about how there were in fact two doctors in our brownstone. Leo said that a doctor in law was like a mother-in-law. What he meant was that both didn’t count for much.

  Leo had heard about Baby Harper but had never met him in person because my great-uncle, after his first flight to New Haven, became a traveling man. Sometimes with Cecil but more often on his own, my great-uncle was seeing the world. The world he chose to see surprised me. I thought he would be like my grandfather Spartan and head to Europe for the Western-civilization highlights. Baby Harper went instead to South America. During my first year of law school, I received a postcard sent from Cartagena that said, “You got into Columbia and so did I! But they spell it a bit differently here.” Baby Harper added that he had longed to see this part of the world ever since reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  My great-uncle traveled the way that people used to travel. He would dress in a suit and tie for his airplane flights. I offered to send his fedora back to him so that he could complete his ensemble, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would stay for a month or longer in one city, taking his time to see what was in the guidebooks and what wasn’t. Baby Harper never sent me an e-mail, which gave me the great privilege of opening up a physical mailbox and finding his handwriting floating on the other side of a sandy beach or behind the façade of a church. He claimed that he was too old to learn new languages, so instead he familiarized himself with the literature that had been translated into his own language. The librarian in him came out of retirement and steered him to the English translations of José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night before he flew off to Santiago, Chile; to Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces prior to his two months in Montevideo, Uruguay; and to Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star before leaving for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  Baby Harper was sixty-six years old when he began his life as a traveler in late August of 1990. His subsequent journeys were scheduled from mid-January to the end of August. He preferred to be in Boiling Springs for the beautiful autumn days that North Carolina offered up to its inhabitants as a reward for surviving the summer. He also wanted to be home for the trifecta of American holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. Also, Cecil was unwilling to travel during that time of the year because the Home of Eternal Rest tended to be busiest during the holiday season. Apparently, the following was a classic quip among morticians—people in the funereal business would never circulate a “joke”—that Cecil shared with Baby Harper: “If Thanksgiving doesn’t seal the deal, Christmas will.”

  Baby Harper also stayed in Boiling Springs during the holidays to make sure that DeAnne wasn’t alone. When
she realized that their roles had reversed—he was in a committed relationship and she was the one on her own—she retreated into the blue and gray ranch house and refused the first of his many invitations to Thanksgiving dinner at the Greek Revival. “Cecil will be cooking” was how my great-uncle Harper came out to his niece in the autumn of 1987. It was a sentence so simple and complicated all at once. Words are like that, I thought, as his voice on the telephone informed me of DeAnne’s reaction. My great-uncle was trying to make light of the situation, but I could tell that he was hurt by DeAnne’s refusal. His voice had the same quality that it had had right after Iris had passed away. It sounded like he had pebbles in his mouth.

  DeAnne didn’t join Baby Harper and Cecil at their holiday table until Thanksgiving of 1990. I think her change of heart had to do with Baby Harper flying away earlier that same year, to my college graduation in May, then to Cartagena in August. DeAnne must have been as shocked as I was at Baby Harper’s full embrace of air travel. Perhaps she was more shocked at being truly alone in Boiling Springs.

  Did it feel like gravity was no longer the law of the land, DeAnne? How the forested hills and the cultivated fields no longer held you to them. Their history and memories were no longer yours, which made your body so light that you floated and drifted, which wasn’t the same as flying and soaring. Did you want to hold on to someone’s hand so that Boiling Springs would come back into view?

  Baby Harper’s description of their first Thanksgiving together made me wish that I had been there for him. Cecil had attempted a new recipe that called for deep-frying the turkey, which when done improperly made the twenty-pound bird shrivel up to the size of a roasted chicken. DeAnne didn’t talk to Baby Harper or Cecil for most of the meal, except when Cecil brought out his usual spread of three kinds of pie: the traditional pumpkin, a pecan (a nod to his late mother’s Texas roots), and his personal favorite, a lemon meringue. It was the lemon meringue that finally brought words out of DeAnne’s mouth, and they weren’t kind. According to Baby Harper, DeAnne was channeling Iris that day. As Cecil presented her with the third of her dessert options, DeAnne said, “Oh, my, I had no idea we were celebrating Easter today.”

  That did it.

  Cecil placed the antique silver pie server, which Baby Harper had bought for him as a third-anniversary present, down on the table and calmly walked himself and his lemon meringue right out of the dining room of the Greek Revival. Cecil sat in the kitchen and ate the entire pie by himself while Baby Harper drove DeAnne home. She was only fifty-eight years old then, but her eyesight was that of a much older person. Her degenerative night blindness had made her dependent on Baby Harper that evening and, she knew, for many more evenings to come, which didn’t help to lighten her mood.

  In the car, there was silence.

  Baby Harper walked DeAnne to the front door of the blue and gray ranch house. Before going inside she gave him a note, which he said looked as if it had been held tightly in her hand the whole day.

  “I forgive you,” DeAnne had written.

  For what, Baby Harper wondered as he read those three words by the light above his rearview mirror. He could think of more than one thing that he had done in his life that would merit forgiveness in her eyes. He decided that it didn’t matter. He told me on the telephone that the note was DeAnne’s way of calling a truce. Baby Harper tore up the piece of paper and threw it confetti-like out of his car window as he drove home to the Greek Revival, where he would apologize long into the night and all through the weekend to Cecil.

  In 1990, I, unlike DeAnne, had again declined my great-uncle’s invitation to join him and Cecil for Thanksgiving. I told my great-uncle that I needed to stay in New York City to study, that if I didn’t, my first year of law school might be my last, and that I would call him again soon to see how it all went. I had changed our routine from a call once a week to a call twice a week because seeing him in person in New Haven had told me something that his voice on the telephone hadn’t—that Baby Harper was getting old.

  I then caught a train to Boston because I didn’t want to be in the dorms with the foreign students and the handful of American ones, the strangers and the estranged. I had made a reservation at the Lenox, a hotel in downtown Boston that had a grand lobby with promising historical details and tall arrangements of fresh flowers and autumnal leaves, but whose rooms, at least the ones that I could afford, looked as if the life had been beaten out of them. I cried when I opened the door of my hotel room. I was thinking about Kelly’s most recent letter to me and about her addiction to making life-changing mistakes. “It’s now a habit I can’t kick,” she wrote. I hadn’t thought about my refusal to return to Boiling Springs as a habit, but it was. Like biting my fingernails or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, the act of not returning home had an ameliorative effect on my psyche. It had begun with the idea, new and fizzy in my eighteen-year-old brain, that family was a choice and not fate. If that were true, then I chose not to have a family. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, I would prefer not to.

  Four years of choosing “not to” had brought me to that hotel room with its faded floral bedspread and carpeting the color of cigarette ash. I pulled down the covers and climbed into bed. There, in the dark, I said this in lieu of a prayer:

  I miss my great-uncle Harper and his chosen family, Cecil.

  I miss Kelly, closer to me than a sister.

  I miss my father. For every reason and every thing.

  I even miss my grandmother Iris.

  I added Iris because I, at the age of twenty-two, had just begun to understand how rare it was to have someone in my life who would never lie to me. DeAnne I didn’t miss because I knew so little about her. There it was, the full listing of the members of my family, and they were all in Boiling Springs, two of them already beneath its soil by then.

  In the moment before sleep, I thought about the young man who had kept on finding another thing to say to me until the train pulled into South Station, when he asked for my phone number before saying goodbye. “Leoparsnip,” I said aloud to my hotel room. Then, as easy as taking another breath, I said it again.

  The following November, I returned to Boston for the first of the seven Thanksgivings that I would spend with Leo and his family. We ate bland, hearty New England food together, and never did I see a deep-fried turkey or a lemon meringue pie on their table. I once made Leo livid by calling his mother “Goody Benton.” Not to her face, of course, but still I had crossed some sort of invisible WASP line with him. I tried to make it up to him by saying complimentary things to his mother, about her homemade cranberry sauce and her silver gravy boat. I picked out that vessel for commendation because “Benton” tasted of gravy, not the under-salted, defatted turkey gravy that Goody Benton served every year, but the milk gravy thick with crumbled pork sausage that southerners poured over our biscuits. I kept this factoid to myself and focused my comments instead on the curve of the handle and the gleam of the silver. Leo told me afterward that the gravy boat was a “sauceboat” and that it had been made by Paul Revere. Goody Benton probably thought that I was coveting her family heirlooms.

  I decided that none of it mattered to me. Leo’s family was his and not mine. Mr. and Mrs. Benton—I wasn’t sure that even Leo knew their first names—were unfailingly polite but never enthusiastic toward me. Their older son, Collin, was enthusiastic enough for all of them. Collin was an investment banker who had spent a couple of years working and living in Hong Kong. He thought that meant that he and I would have an instant rapport. We had nothing in common. He, nonetheless, liked to touch the small of my back when guiding me through the rooms of his parents’ house. He always made sure to help me with my coat so that he could stand too close behind me. When we first met, Collin said that I reminded him of someone he used to date. After a couple of minutes in his company, I began to feel sorry for that unfortunate young woman.

  In order to take Thanksgiving off as a long weekend every year, Leo the intern and then Leo the res
ident had to work on Christmas Eve and Day. Perhaps that was another reason I loved him. Leo’s restrictive schedule provided me with a convenient and deflected excuse for not going back to Boiling Springs for the holidays. My own school and then work schedule, that of an associate trying to make partner in eight years, kept me in New York City for the rest of the calendar year.

  Baby Harper never gave up, though. At the beginning of every November, he would send me a Hallmark card—overflowing cornucopias, dimpled pumpkins, nonchalant turkeys—inviting me to “fly South” for Thanksgiving. So in 1997, when the box with the H.E.B.’s and the photographs of young Thomas arrived, I thought that my great-uncle was just trying a new tactic. He, of course, also included a greeting card, which I read first. When I took it from its bright orange envelope, I could hear my great-uncle hiccupping. The card featured a pudgy, round-faced little Native American girl holding hands with a pudgy, round-faced little Pilgrim boy.

  Inside the card was a sheet of lined notebook paper on which Baby Harper had written on both sides. His letter began with the fact that he had finalized his travel plans (and reading list) for the upcoming year. From mid-January to mid-February of 1998, he and Cecil would be going to Buenos Aires, Argentina (Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman), and then to Bogotá (Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera), which would be a second trip to Colombia for my great-uncle and a first with Cecil. I knew that Baby Harper’s main frustration with Cecil was his unwillingness to leave the Home of Eternal Rest in the hands of his assistant director and travel more often. The length of their planned trip and the two destinations must have been quite the coup for Baby Harper. In the next line of his letter, my great-uncle explained how the tug of wills had been won. He wrote, “I said to Cecil, ‘Darling, your customers are already dead. What’s the worst that could happen to them?’”