The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  Gene purchased the shoe business and moved his bride into their first apartment, a third-floor walk-up in Colton with a stove but no oven and a bathtub squeezed into a space so narrow that you had to sit sideways on the toilet. The years that followed were busy and exhausting as they tried to grow the business and establish the rhythms of their marriage.

  But there were always summers at the lake. Every year Gene closed the shop for two weeks, and Maida often stayed on longer after he returned to Colton. The summer Ed graduated medical school Gayle was six months pregnant, and the next year she and Ed brought baby Brian to White Pine Camp. Then Maida was pregnant, and the next summer the Ashes brought an infant. It continued like that, with each year introducing some new development in the families that inducted them into a life in common centered around their children.

  Because really—summers at Fisher Lake belonged to children. Each day the valley filled with their delighted cries ricocheting off the mountains, as all around the lake little bodies hurled themselves off piers, docks, and canoes. The boats with their snarling engines cut from one side of the lake to the other, making the large, rocking wakes that the older children loved to dive beneath holding their noses. In the evenings sandy towels were rattled from open windows and there were halfhearted attempts at bathing and grooming the littlest ones. Then the children with their drying hair and sweet-smelling necks would be pulled onto the laps of adults, who had gathered on the deck at the back of the cabin with their wine and gin and beer to watch the mirror of the lake relinquish its light. “Look,” someone might say to a babbling baby, as if she too might see and later remember the spectacular progression of the light, the retraction of gold from the water that was like a purple shade being pulled across it just beneath the surface.

  There were, of course, the occasional notes of disharmony. Gene recalled the summer that Ed was reading Anna Karenina, and how he fell under what Gene and Gayle called the “Tolstoy spell.” That summer Ed couldn’t stop telling everyone what a genius Tolstoy was and how this was a book everybody had to read because it contained all of life: the unsolvable arguments of husbands and wives, the regretful necessity of politics, long gorgeous passages on the natural world, a man clinging to life in a sickroom, the confused motives of people in love. He lugged it around everywhere and while the others were playing board games or untangling fishing lines or erecting a teepee for the children, he was sitting off to the side reading. Or there was the summer he carved broken knowledge into a piece of white pine, plying away at it with a spoon gouge and chisel. From the rustic look of the board you somehow expected it to say God bless this house or home sweet home, but it said only broken knowledge. When they needed a fourth for the kayaks or a sixth for croquet, they couldn’t count on Ed because Ed had Broken Knowledge. When the carving was finished Gayle hung it in the bathroom, and after that anyone who spent any time on the toilet was forced to contemplate the enigmatic outpouring of Ed’s philosophical soul.

  But mostly it was the vision of peace at White Pine Camp that prevailed. Their little beach, scrappy and enduring, the sand prickly and alive on their feet from the hulls of broken pine needles. The women and the lovely figures they cut coming out of the water, the beads of water clinging to their clean skin like magnets of light. The hum of young and old voices carried across the valley, and the glimmer of iron-colored water glimpsed through the trees. It was all right there before them, a prayer to human ordinariness that was nevertheless transfiguring.

  With Ed’s residency complete, the Donnellys moved back to Colton. Ed established a family medical practice in town, Gene had his store, and now in addition to summers together, the families began the everyday enmeshing of their everyday lives.

  It was a good life, this life they had, and whenever Gene found himself wanting something to improve it (more time away from the store, more money, more recognition), these desires seemed petty. He was afraid to ask for too much—afraid that, according to the hidden demands of a universe striving for some degree of equilibrium, wanting too much would compromise what he already had. But sometimes you were lucky and got what you wanted anyway.

  Even now, in his grief, he knew that. He knew he had been lucky in the things that mattered most.

  3.

  DARY WAS ENAMORED with the idea of holding the memorial at St. Mary’s, the church where Gene and Maida had been married. They had never compelled her to attend religious school or holiday masses, and probably because of this their daughter found churches charming and quaint, as if their association with religion was merely a curious and incidental part of the historical record. She had gotten the idea that Maida’s family’s ancestral church would make a picturesque setting for her mother’s memorial, and Gene had to remind her that according to an agreement between him and Maida, the Ashes’ wedding was to be their last day in church.

  Dary’s second choice for the memorial was Walden, the private college where Maida had worked in the day-care center for over thirty years and where she had arguably spent most of her adult life. Once Dary was in high school it wasn’t unusual for Maida to stay on campus after the end of her workday to partake in the life of the college, where every week it seemed a different luminary in his field was delivering a talk, or a newly restored film was playing at the campus theater. Sometimes Maida invited Gene and sometimes she didn’t, and sometimes he came along and sometimes he stayed home. He was never especially comfortable on the campus—he felt like a hanger-on, illicitly cleaving to a time of life that was no longer his to enjoy—and his discomfort increased the older he became. So while it would have been easy to hold the memorial at Walden—all that remained was to sign the papers and put down a deposit—it was a bad fit. The few memorials he’d attended there over the years had been for professors who, having played a substantial role in the life of the college, had developed a nearly cultlike following among the students. Maida’s contribution was no less than theirs, but her instruments had been alphabet blocks and coloring books. She would have been embarrassed by the idea of the large quadrangle filling up with guests to pay homage to her.

  With out-of-town guests confirmed, Gene saw that he had already lost an argument with Dary about the scope of the memorial. Now it was a matter of exercising what little power of his remained. At the beginning of his daughter’s visit, he had put forth several venues as countersuggestions to the church: the local Elks Lodge where he had an in with an old classmate; a respectable pub where the sandwiches were named after the founders of Colton’s cotton mills; the veterans’ hall, which had the advantage of being right at the center of town, not far from the office he’d maintained after his store had closed. But when, after their beach day, they visited many of these venues together, Dary found a reason to dismiss each one of them. “This has a Grim Factor of eighty-nine,” she would say. Or later, when they had returned to the house, “You can smell the staleness of that place all the way from here.”

  So they were back to the beginning. Only the beginning had become a kind of midpoint, because the failure of one option nudged forward the likelihood of the church.

  “What about St. Mary’s?” Dary said, as if this was the first time the idea had occurred to her.

  They were standing on the steps of the veterans’ hall, where they had just met with the staff, a contingent of shrunken old women smoking cigarettes they ashed into coffee cups.

  “Your mother made me promise we wouldn’t go back there,” Gene said.

  “I never heard her say that.”

  “It happened before you were born.”

  “You always make it sound like every important decision happened before I was born.” She let out a small, impatient sigh. “It was Mémère, wasn’t it? She was the reason you didn’t go back there.”

  It was true that his mother had made the wedding difficult. She had been a devoted parishioner of St. Charles back when there were separate Catholic churches to keep the Irish and the French from mixing. In that sense his mother’s ideas
of propriety had hardened a million years ago, in an era when the birth of a baby to a French mother and an Irish father or vice versa was recorded in the register as “mixed race.” By 1955, when he and Maida wanted to get married, it seemed like those days had been over for half a century, but they still weren’t for some people. For Gene’s mother the spiritual distance between St. Charles and St. Mary’s was as great as the distance between a Protestant and a Jew. All her life she maintained it was a sign of divine favor that the bells of St. Charles rang a half second before the bells of St. Mary’s. She didn’t express outright objection to Gene and Maida’s nuptials, but she publicized her dismay by suggesting that they had chosen St. Mary’s in order to cause her shame.

  And yet his mother wasn’t the reason they hadn’t gone back to the church. It was something sillier, really. On their honeymoon, cloistered in the Pelican’s Nest, they had discovered that neither of them had actually wanted to marry in the church and that in trying to please each other, they had discarded their own true feelings. At first when they recognized this, they anguished over having marred what otherwise might have been a perfect day. But soon enough they found themselves laughing about the whole incident, and in unity they turned against the force that had betrayed them, vowing to keep the church out of their lives.

  “It wasn’t your grandma’s fault,” Gene said.

  “Why didn’t you ever take me to church?” Dary said.

  “We thought you could become a decent person without it. Which you did. You’re mostly perfect, except—”

  “—I forgot to get married.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say, You’re mostly perfect, you just have terrible ideas for a memorial.”

  “You don’t really think that.”

  “That you’re mostly perfect? I do. But let’s think about what your mother liked.”

  “She liked her job,” Dary said. “She liked Walden.”

  “She liked peonies,” Gene said. “For her there was nothing prettier than white peonies in a vase.”

  “She also liked shucking corn, but that doesn’t mean we should have the service in a barn.”

  “Well, it’s not the worst idea,” Gene said. “She loved visiting that farm in Hampton Falls, the one where you pick your own apples and get a horse-drawn hayride.”

  “It wasn’t because of the apples.”

  “It’s the only place with Fujis. She was very hard on American apples. Unfairly so, I thought.”

  “Bobby Jaeger owns that orchard.”

  “Who’s Bobby Jaeger?”

  “Mom’s first boyfriend.”

  “Not true. I was her first boyfriend. Aside from some bozo in college who made the mistake of telling her that he had to end things because he loved her too much.”

  “Yeah, Bobby Jaeger.”

  “No, somebody else. An art-history doofus.”

  “Well, why did he end it if he loved her so much?”

  “She never told me.”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Peonies,” he said. “That’s what we should get.”

  That evening he sat down at the computer, which he still thought of as Dary’s because she had set it up for him and Maida in a corner of the living room. In the beginning he forgot his password regularly and would call her in the middle of the day asking her to remind him what it was. Having tired of this, on her next trip she taped to the side of the monitor a sticky note with his username and password written in her hand. He knew the password now but still consulted the sticky note automatically, a step that in some way confirmed for him once again that with this supposedly private act of logging into his AOL account, he was entering an indefinite world that belonged more to her than to him.

  His early forays on the internet had been limited to responding to the emails his daughter sent him and occasionally reading the sensationalistic but nevertheless impossible-to-ignore news stories that appeared on his home page. (He wondered if this was something Dary could tell from the settings—that he clicked on articles such as “Nude Man Accidentally Tasers Self” or “Beano Bandit Apprehended.”) When Dary realized how little he was using the computer she tried to help him, but the only thing that really stuck with him from her tutorials was this idea that you could ask the internet a question, any question, and it would give you not just one answer but dozens. He found this oddly reassuring because it suggested that somewhere on the other side of the internet connection, back in the human realm, somebody—and possibly a lot of somebodies—had the same semiprivate question that was more comfortable to send through a filtering layer of inhuman data.

  Now he typed into the oracle field: “How to write a eulogy.” It was nice, or at least nonjudgmental, he supposed, that the internet assumed nothing about your existing abilities. Maybe you were a human willing to exert some effort, or maybe you were a half-automaton who needed to pass himself off as acceptably human. If he hadn’t wanted to write the eulogy there were plentiful options: premade templates, preselected themes, inspirational quotations, mournful yet triumphant poems. He was looking for something else, something that wouldn’t give him the shape of the thought, but that would tell him how to begin a process of thinking about the unthinkable.

  The most reasonable site he found had been created by an entity who called herself “the Lady in Black.” She said that writing a eulogy was “a personal journey of gathering memories.” She suggested collecting personal items that belonged to the deceased, and “spending time with them until they speak to you—not literally, of course!” Following the Lady in Black’s suggestion, he got up from the computer and went upstairs to the bedroom to find these items.

  He opened the top drawer of Maida’s dresser. She had never bothered to match up her socks, mixing them loose among her underwear and bras, and her pantyhose often ended up stretched beyond use or tangled in a knot. How many times had she and Gene been late for some event because on the way she had made him stop at the drugstore to buy a new pair? She would wriggle into it standing beside the car right there in the parking lot, while Gene would lower himself in the front seat, hoping nobody they knew saw them. When she was alive her tendency to make them late had never ceased to frustrate him, but now he looked upon her disorganization with peculiar fondness. Suddenly everything that was hers—the coins that had once been in her pocket, the hour and minute she had last set her alarm—was overburdened with significance. In some mad inversion of time, grieving his wife’s death resembled falling in love.

  He examined her lipsticks, black and silver tubes of brilliant color worn down to various states of concavity, each one offering a negative image of the curvature of her mouth. How he loved her mouth! He’d loved all of her physicality—her hair blonded by the sun, her eyes guarded by dark eyebrows taunting you to try to ignore her—but he loved her mouth especially, its full lower lip with the slight droop on its underside even when she smiled. He touched the tube of the most worn-down lipstick lightly to his own lip: it tasted of the soapiness of his wife’s made-up mouth. It was the taste of her saying he wasn’t allowed to kiss her because she had just finished her face and it was the taste of him ignoring this and kissing her anyway.

  It occurred to him that maybe the Lady in Black hadn’t foreseen that for certain people, this matter of choosing one or two special items would be next to impossible. Say, if you had lived in a house with someone for more than forty years, and in that house everywhere you turned you confronted evidence of another person’s sensibility. Had he ever picked out a toaster? Given his opinion on the style of an armoire? It seemed that everything they owned was an expression of her taste, right down to the living room furniture that had been an anniversary present from her parents, the couch with the curved wooden back and matching armchairs all the color of a drowned olive, the low, sledlike wooden coffee table, the wheeled cart for the television. How could he choose among these things?
<
br />   Don’t worry about choosing “the most important thing.” Whatever you choose will have meaning. It is said that meaning is the mother of memory.

  Her shoes were beautiful expensive items, most of them ordered by him from specialty catalogs that were customarily sent to women living in Hyannis and Boston and New York. On the day a new season’s catalog arrived at his store he would make a mental note of what he intended to get her, because her appearance was a reflection of his professional integrity and the wife of a shoe man deserved footwear as fine as the women in cities. He had kept her closet filled with pieces made as carefully as art: horse-hide booties with elegant stitching along the cap; sandals whose buckles disappeared beneath the genius of their design; pointy-toed slip-ons cut from a single piece of calfskin.

  He found a nightgown he’d bought for her years earlier, a frilly, pretty length of buttercream silky fabric with lace finishing across the bosom and around the armholes. It had been expensive at a time when there had been no money for indulgences, which was exactly why he had bought it (this was what the credit card was for). It was only a little slip of fabric—the cost per square inch enormous—but you couldn’t put a price on reinvigorating love. Maida was embarrassed when he brought it home in its tissue paper and glossy white box. She asked him to take it back, but he told her it had already been paid for and it couldn’t be returned.