The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  Why had he bought the nightgown? In the beginning of the marriage every time he wanted to do something frisky in the bedroom, he had the disturbing feeling that his mother was aware of these particular kinds of thoughts even in their most incipient form. It was like she was sitting in a mechanical room somewhere back in the Old Country, just waiting beside a machine that would spit out the ticker-tape evidence of his fornicating mind. What else had she ruined for him, with her brand of faith that drew its energy from a general suspicion of the pleasures of the body? When he couldn’t have been more than eleven years old, he and the little girl who lived next door had danced cheek-to-cheek to “Stardust” in the living room, and when his mother caught them they had to write a letter to the priest telling him everything. After that Gene was forbidden to play with the little girl, though sometimes at bedtime after his mother had recited a prayer over him and left him, he would climb out of his covers and flash the light in his room. Then he and the girl would send through each other’s windows paper airplanes on which they had written secret notes. He could still hear his mother reciting the prayer over his body: “I beg of Thee to give him love for the virtue of holy mortification, by which he may chastise his rebellious sense, and cross his self-love. At the same time I beg Thee to give him holy purity of the body, and the grace to resist all bad temptations…” So strong was this feeling of her as a witness to his innermost sexual self that it had persisted for years after she had died.

  Not that he and Maida had talked about this. There was an unspoken agreement between them that they would not go out of their way to make each other uncomfortable. He never told her about the image of his mother with the ticker-tape machine; to have told her would have made her suffer in an inner drama she was helpless to alter. It would have also given the image a greater power over him than it already had. Which wasn’t to say he and his wife didn’t converse about sex. They conversed plenty, they just did it mostly without talking.

  (But this was not the sort of thing you could write about in a eulogy.)

  A photo of the deceased will be your helper in this process. Take a special photo along with you on your personal journey.

  There were hardly any photos of her in the house. The upstairs hallway connecting the bedrooms was a veritable photo gallery of Dary, but the few of Maida had been taken long ago on formal occasions, like the one of them on their wedding day, standing on the brick steps of St. Mary’s next to the handicap rail. Maida had never been shy about proclaiming her dislike of having her photo taken; “I already know what I look like, thank you very much,” she would say, and send him off with his still-shuttered camera. When they first became a couple, he asked for a photo of her as a child. “That’s just kooky,” she said. But she allowed him to take from her room in her parents’ house an ink-and-watercolor portrait of her and her sisters. It had been made by a man who fancied himself an artist and was hopelessly in love with the second-eldest Halloran girl. In the portrait the three young women sat nestled on a grassy hillside like doves, their faces forever preserved in expressions of charming modesty, their hair pinned back in rose-colored bows that matched the rose-colored buttons on their white pinafores. It was all made up, Maida said—they had never sat together on a hill, and they certainly had never worn silly outfits like that. But for Gene the fictional elements didn’t detract from the powerful feeling they evoked.

  Take these precious items somewhere quiet, somewhere free of distraction, where you can hear the stories they have to tell you.

  The house had three bedrooms, one larger than the other two, and the two smaller rooms next to each other. One of these was Dary’s old room, the other a guest room, and both contained identical desks. It was a narrow wood-and-metal model, sparse and tidy and not particularly functional except as a resting place for keys or wallets. It had been added to Dary’s room after she moved to California, and he supposed it accomplished what Maida had wanted, which was to convert a teenager’s bedroom into a neutral space for additional guests. Afterward he went into the room with the cordless phone and shut the door behind him and pressed the “MEM” button followed by the number 1, which connected him to Dary, who was mildly startled to hear from him because he didn’t call very often. Without assigning blame, he informed her that there had been some changes to her room, that her mother had made further changes, and though he didn’t want to get involved, he also felt it was Dary’s right to know her room didn’t look much like her room anymore. To which she unsentimentally replied: “But it isn’t mine.”

  He set himself up at the desk in the room where Annie was staying, bringing along with him the items he’d collected for the sake of the eulogy. He studied the photo of him and Maida taken on their wedding day. His eyes had the hooded, puffy quality that they did after a bad night’s sleep. His pants were too big and his hair overworked by a comb, but there was something he liked about his appearance, a pose of confidence, a weary declaration of manhood. His arm was around Maida’s waist and her nose and chin were raised slightly in the air, as if just before the photo was snapped she had heard someone calling her name.

  He understood this was an image of him and his wife, but he didn’t entirely recognize the people. At least he didn’t quite recognize the couple they became, not the one that had stayed together for forty-nine years. He couldn’t help searching anyway for visual clues that would hint at the narrative that would become their lives, and he was conscious of his unhelpful effort to assign the slightest meaning to everything, not only their expressions and the relative position of their bodies but also the pigeon in the corner gorging itself on an unexpected cascade of rice, and the distended clouds above the church’s portico, and also the particular cast of the light tinged both gray and yellow, slightly more gray in the open space of the sky and slightly more yellow on their faces. The truth was that what had been photographed that day was lost to him. He couldn’t remember any of it in his body—not standing on the steps, not putting his arm around Maida, not the sensory experience that accompanied being able to say for the first time in his head, My wife, my wife, my wife. In the end his memory wasn’t spurred by the photograph, it was simply identical to the photograph, its details and limitations.

  He set it aside.

  Someone had placed a bud vase with a single hydrangea on the corner of the desk. He recognized it as a bloom from his own garden. Someone had done this, but of course, someone meant Gayle. She had made up the beds in the two guest rooms the day before Dary and Annie arrived, and he saw now that she had also placed a little dish of chocolate mints in silver foil on the dresser, alongside a drinking glass turned upside down in a cupcake liner. He tilted the vase toward the light. The water was leafless, colorless, and clean. So Gayle had been by the house to refresh the rooms since his daughter and granddaughter had arrived, and she had done this without telling him or asking anything from him. He wondered why she had done it, why she had done all the small, private, benevolent acts for him that he would never find out about in his lifetime, his knowledge of them only accidental and sporadic, when he happened to catch her before she was able to disappear. What had made these unrequited gestures throughout their lives acceptable to both of them, acceptable to give and receive without explicit acknowledgment? Just thinking of it circulated a warmth through his chest, and he didn’t know why contemplating this unanswerable question should kindle his mind, when by comparison the task of writing about Maida seemed impossibly onerous.

  He supposed it had something to do with regret. The way that with a living person the imagination still had liberty, but with the dead, everything was finite. Whatever happened between you and the deceased could no longer occupy the present or the future, so you were confined to the rigid facts of the past, which were recorded somewhere and not subject to reformation. Not that he especially felt any regret about his marriage. He didn’t regret any of it, not even the lapse someone more superficial might think he was supposed to.

  Actually it bolstered
him to think of it, though it was so ancient he was almost embarrassed that it still meant something to him. This was at White Pine Camp more than forty years ago, when Maida’s heat rash had returned and she refused to nurse Dary, who was crying and flailing in the portable crib, her little body turning the disturbing color of water after beets have been boiled in it. “What’s going on here?” he said, and Maida said she couldn’t feed the baby because her skin was on fire. “What do you mean, can’t feed the baby?” he said. “A mechanical problem?” And she said, “Oh Christ, Gene, just go to the store and get me a box of lime popsicles, all right?”

  Maybe if she had just asked for popsicles without specifying a flavor he wouldn’t have reacted with the same intensity, but the fact that she could demand lime popsicles but was somehow unable or unwilling to feed her child provoked him to rage. What kind of mother was so derelict with a helpless creature she had birthed from her own body? Possibly he said this out loud and possibly he said it only in his head—he could no longer remember—but either way, it was very loud, so that even if he hadn’t spoken it, she had seen it in his face, and she had called him a shithead and told him to go fuck himself. In his rage he was too upset to handle the baby, so Ed put her in the car and left to drive around.

  It was one of the few times he heard Gayle say anything unkind about anyone. Maida was upstairs in the bedroom, cloistered in her misery, and Gene was sitting on the deck trying to collect himself. He was getting drunk on gin and watching a diaper-clad Brian in the playpen pull himself up to standing and fall down and pull himself up again and fall down again, when Gayle put her arms around him from behind and said, “She’s a real bitch sometimes, isn’t she.”

  He turned and grabbed her then, grabbed her and kissed her, a full sloppy kiss with her warm mass pressed against him, and her tongue tasted of his tongue, of salt and juniper, and she kissed him back. When they parted he felt a light-headed desperate urge to protect himself and his family, which in the craziness of the moment transposed itself in his mind in such a way that his instinct was to pack up Gayle and Brian in the car and drive as quickly as possible as far away as they could. But when he went to lift Brian from the playpen and Brian began to wail, the sound of that wail, sharp and alien, pierced the unreality that had seized him.

  Before long Ed returned and transferred the sleeping baby, still in her bassinet, just inside the door, where they would be able to hear her if she woke up. Then he and Gayle and Gene arranged their chairs together on the deck and, without any acrimony, continued to drink and to dunk the lime popsicles Ed had brought back into their gin, as they discussed whether or not they ought to organize a fishing excursion before the end of the week.

  Gene and Gayle had never talked about the kiss. He had never told anybody about it and he saw no reason to. They had never kissed like that again. And when he thought of the consequence of it, of what had been born out of it, it wasn’t sexual or romantic love. It was a deeper loyalty—not just to each other, oddly, but to their spouses. It was almost as if the whole experience, the airing of all those young hot feelings—his wife’s childishness and his own whipped-up anger and Gayle’s complicity—had happened with the express purpose, hidden to them at the time, of helping each of them bend more pliantly toward the lives they already had. It all presented itself so clearly to him now.

  He studied the photograph of their wedding day once more, but the elements were still the same and still retained their sealed quality. The original way he had encountered them was impossible to recover. Something definite had been lost. This was his feeling: something definite was lost. He wrote it down and counted the words. It was the closest he’d come to articulating something he knew to be true. Was there such a thing as a four-word eulogy? Perhaps he could launch the trend, relieving mourners from having to falsify an order in their mind that couldn’t possibly exist under the circumstances.

  Perhaps—but then he doubted it.

  When he looked at his watch he saw that more than an hour had passed since he’d sat down. The number of words on the page was still four. He decided he would have to go to his office if he was going to get anything done.

  4.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING he walked into town, a short walk that took him by the abandoned mill. It was a massive fortress of brick four stories high and several blocks long, barred with an iron gate that remained locked, at the top of which was an empty armature where an iron bell used to hang before it was stolen. The window glass, what was left of it, was the color of old milk. The fate of the building was regularly debated in cycles that coincided with city elections, but the only repairs the voters could agree on were the ones that kept the smokestacks from shearing off into the river or collapsing the street.

  Colton’s downtown was faring only slightly better. There were vacant lots and empty storefronts, but the bars always had customers and the Save Mart carried two brands of instant coffee. Each spring large pots of white, purple, and pink geraniums appeared on the sidewalk and they were lush and exultant for a few weeks, after which they were used informally as ashtrays and receptacles for trash. A few of the nicest old buildings with intricate brickwork and extra-tall windows had been touched up by new tenants.

  A new business had moved into his old store the previous spring. It was a mystery to him how it survived, selling its oddball collection of bits and strings: tiny, spidery succulents, scissors with cast-iron handles made to look like twigs, leather bracelets, diminutive wooden spoons, and household matches in little bell-shaped jars. He’d run into the proprietress half a dozen times in the street, she with her large, broad forehead and widely set eyes that somehow made her look both innocent and dangerous, and each time she’d tried to wrangle him into the store for a cup of tea, cheerfully assuring him that he would always be welcome there. During one of these uncomfortable meetings she had thrust a delicate jarred succulent into his hand. He tried to give it back, claiming a black thumb, but she insisted that the little plant, which was already lacking soil, needed no more than a drop of water now and again. “I believe in you,” she said. The last time he’d come into town, he and Annie had gone inside to look at a necklace she wanted, a scanty thing of string and chicken feathers and a small metallic charm that she claimed was the same one worn by someone named Sugar Dakota, whom she referred to as “only like the best singer to have ever lived.”

  He climbed a dark stairway in the building next door where the buff-colored carpet smelled of cat pee and stale tobacco and was rucked with trapped pockets of air. Three flights up, on a small triangular stair that passed for a landing, he unlocked a door. The top of the door was cut on a slant at a severe angle to accommodate some hidden structural aspect of the roof. He gave it a good shove, forcing it over the carpet.

  It had been a sore point between him and Maida, his keeping an office after his store closed. When she brought it up, it was always in the context of money: why were they continuing to pay for him to have an office when the business had closed and there were rooms sitting empty at home? Whenever they had the argument, he thought, it was both about the money and not about the money. On the one hand, she’d always kept an eye on their money. Possibly because he’d accepted that loan from her father, or possibly out of habit, since in the early days of the business she had helped him by keeping the books. He still had a wonderful image of her sitting on the floor beside his desk with her stockinged legs tucked beneath her and the crown of her head catching the late-afternoon light as she bent over the accounts. It had never failed to surprise him when out of the depths of this serene repose she looked up with a slightly cross expression, explaining that they would have to restructure their debt or finally give up cash-basis accounting.

  Working together, they’d shared a sense of purpose that in some way they’d never been able to fully recapture. Before long they had Dary, who kept Maida occupied at all hours of the day and sometimes at night too. And then just when it seemed the baby was getting more self-sufficient, Maid
a began to talk about getting a job. Initially he was against it; he didn’t like the idea of her working when Dary was so young. But she didn’t want to stay home all day with the baby, and he didn’t know how to make her want what she didn’t want herself. When she got the job at Walden he told himself it was just an experiment. Of course the experiment had lasted over thirty years, and during that time his attitude had changed. He came to respect the advantages of her employment: the health care, the paid vacations, the retirement fund.

  So money was part of it, but it didn’t account for why his keeping the office galled her so much. If only he had been able to explain to her why he needed it. But then he couldn’t, because the truth skimmed too close to his ego. There was a period of time when Maida hadn’t retired yet but his store was gone and then where was he supposed to go during the day? He couldn’t stay home for all those hours, rearranging the cupboards. It wasn’t good for a person, it wasn’t right for the brain to be cooped up all day pretending to invent engrossing problems and solutions in domesticity. He was accustomed to having a place of his own, a place apart and in communication with some timeless unaging version of himself, where the mundane concerns of his life fell away and he could rediscover himself as a fundamentally reflective creature. Even during the best and busiest years of the store there had been afternoons slow enough that the high school boy he’d hired could manage by himself, giving Gene time to think. This was the most useful thing he’d learned from the poetry class in college, and he’d found it in a footnote about one of the poets, a life-insurance man. He found this man’s poetry almost willfully unintelligible, but he was nevertheless affected by something he had recommended, namely, an hour or two of thinking, pure thinking, each day, even if you found yourself “staggered” at first by the confusion and aimlessness of your thoughts.