“I’m glad you didn’t go to New York. I would have no one to fix it,” Sunny said.
Weeks before our graduation, Twolly had been invited to study at a prestigious art school, an honor almost as rare as a woman getting into Harvard. She had apparently turned down the offer.
“There are jewelers in this town, Sunny,” Twolly said.
“None as good as you. What’s under those clothes?”
Twolly looked. “Something I haven’t opened yet.”
“Who’s it from, and can I open it?”
“None of your business, and no.”
Under a layer of laundry, there was a package addressed to Twolly, the handwriting my own. The package I had intended to mail her the day I died. For whatever reason, she could not look inside.
“What happened to your necklace?” Twolly poked inside her box.
“I caught it on a branch.”
“How on earth did you do that?”
“I went to hang upside down, and it swung away from me.”
“When was this?”
“A few minutes ago.”
“It’s pitch-dark out, and time for bed.”
“I know.” Sunny flopped stomach first on Twolly’s bed. “I was wondering what it felt like to be a bat.”
“You are such a peculiar little thing.” She stopped her search for a moment. “That’s why Razi liked you.”
I had not been in a room—in a house—near a block—in almost three months where I could hear someone who loved me speak my name. Not since the séance that Grams had demanded and I had attended. Not since Andrew left for Yale. My edges began to shake.
“I liked her, too,” Sunny said into a pillow. “Do you miss her?”
The box shut with a thup. “Yes. Very much.”
“Does her old beau?”
Doors, drawers, and lids slammed closed at once. The night was not particularly cold, but they watched the first exhales after the shock condense before their eyes. The sisters looked at each other.
“That’s a doozy of a draft,” Twolly said as lightheartedly as she could.
“I’ll say.” Sunny studied the room for another explanation.
“I’ll need to use my little soldering tool to fix your chain. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow.” Twolly went to put the box back in its place. A slip of paper pushed out of the chest as she shifted possessions around inside.
“All right, then. Good night.” The little girl kissed Twolly on the cheek before she left. She opened the door, pausing at the threshold. “Bury deep in the blankets tonight. There might be spooks about, Twolly.” She ran down the hall, laughing loud enough to silence fright.
My dear friend turned off the light and tucked herself inside a cave of layered cotton. I sensed that she was awake and concentrating, in prayer. Twolly believed in such things. When her breathing slowed and shallowed, I picked up what had fallen to the floor.
I read as well in starlight as in sunshine. The postcard was stamped September 15, 1929. There was a picture of Boston Harbor on the front. On the back:
Twolly,
Sightseeing now. Visiting cousins. I am well. I will let you know my new address soon. Not settled yet.
Regards, APO
Andrew. My Andrew. I wondered what he was doing that night, months after his visit to Boston. Was it snowing outside his dormitory? Was he reading in a cold room or smoking a cigarette with a crack in the window? Or was he in the company of friends? In the company of a nice young woman? Possibly, was he thinking of me?
Twolly’s room became frigid again, and she buried herself deep in her blankets in response. I tried to ice away the memory of the burn of his touch, the warmth of my affection for him, the heat of my heart that no longer beat.
I had no such success that evening.
I DECIDED to spend the night with Twolly. Amy went to her parents’ house. She was clearly exhausted and fragile when she hugged her great-aunt good-bye and promised to cook her a lovely breakfast in the morning.
Twolly’s night sitter helped her upstairs and into the bathroom. When I heard the shower running, I went into the dining room to glance through the boxes again. Perhaps there was a postcard or letter from Andrew somewhere among Twolly’s collection. I poured out everything from her boxes and flicked the photographs back inside. She had a sentimental streak, and she was a pack rat. If there was a hint about Andrew, I would find it. And then, wedged under the inside flap of one old brown box, a telegram.
V893 12=LAFAYETTE LOU 763 R 1940 JAN 19 AM 8 43
MRS LEONARD LAMBERT=
10001 MYRTLE PLACE BLVD LAFAYETTE LOU=
TWOLLY EMMALINE DIED. I AM GOING TO PAY MY RESPECTS. MAY I VISIT YOU NEXT WEEK. I PLAN TO TAKE THE TRAIN INTO LAFAYETTE. PLEASE SEND REPLY TO WESTERN UNION OFFICE ABOVE. SORRY I HAVE BEEN OUT OF TOUCH=
REGARDS=
APO.
The return address was in Philadelphia. What a coincidence, I thought. In the year that telegram was sent, 1940, the Andrew O’Connell I had mistaken for my own was living in that city. That man had been named a partner in his firm that year, too—Fitzhugh, Kohl, and O’Connell—and he had married a young woman from a prominent Pennsylvania family on Christmas Eve.
That winter, why was my Andrew in the city? Perhaps he went to visit Warren and Anna Tripp, his oldest friends. Or perhaps he went to see distant relatives who had emigrated from Boston and settled there decades before. Could he have been only passing through, a stop on his trip to Emmaline’s funeral? Maybe he decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit Twolly, who would be only a two-hour train ride away from New Orleans.
Or did he live in or near Philadelphia at the time? Perhaps he was an attorney in a nearby town, or a banker, or a photographer. Moving through their separate lives, did the two Andrews—mine and the stranger—ever cross paths, bump into one another while buying a newspaper, ask the other for the time? Had my Andrew become an anonymous man among many?
Anonymous. Only a few letters I had sent under my pen name, Barrett Burrat, had yielded replies. I heard from Jenna O’Connell, a remote cousin, and Tulane University, which had no record of his whereabouts after he received his bachelor’s degree in June 1929. To cover other possibilities, I had written every other Ivy League law school besides Yale. I was surprised to receive rather prompt responses from each, but was disappointed to learn he had attended none of them.
Although I had little to go on, I knew he had not vanished. The telegram was proof he was still alive a decade after he left New Orleans.
When I returned the full box to the place Amy had left it, Twolly passed through the dining room and went into the kitchen. The family had cleaned up everything from their meals and snacks. There was a warm patch of air by the dishwasher. Twolly filled a teakettle and found a bag of ginger snaps in her cabinet.
She stood there oblivious to me, nibbling a cookie in that mousy way she considered savoring. The letter I had sent her weeks before, on faked Tulane stationery, was near the phone, opened but unanswered. I was curious to know why she wouldn’t reply to the phantom alumni representative who wanted stories of her college days. When Twolly glanced at the clock, I pushed the letter to the middle of the counter. Perhaps the letter had become a familiar object, something she now ignored.
I wanted to talk to her so badly. I wanted to know if her life had been as happy as it seemed to be. Did she enjoy being a mother? What kind of man had her husband been, and did he deserve her? What did she do to fill blank hours? Did she ever think about what she gave up by not going to study in New York?
I heard the kettle’s whistle long before it became audible to her. I flinched as it screeched into her range. Twolly moved slowly under a lavender silk nightgown and well-loved yellow plissé robe. Her ankles were chicken thin above the white ballet-style slippers as the treads squeaked against the tile floor. Spicy orange tea warmed the room as she filled her cup. Twolly stacked four ginger snaps on a bone china saucer and put it gently on a tray along with her
tea.
Nearly every light was still on downstairs when she settled in her den and turned on the television. She thumbed through a Reader’s Digest until the ten o’clock news started. By the time the sports segment came on, she had finished her snack and was beginning to drowse in her overstuffed chair.
I hovered on the ottoman next to her small, straight shins, which gleamed in the lamplight. “Twolly, I can’t believe your old bag of bones is still around.” Although only another like myself could have heard my voice, I wanted to speak aloud, in case, in some way, Twolly could understand. “You remember how much fun we had? I hope so. We were such a pair.”
Her eyelids slipped closed with the grace of butterfly wings. I lifted her cheaters with the help of the air and placed them on the end table. She pursed her lips, then relaxed them, as if she’d given someone an affectionate kiss. I told myself it was meant for me.
“Look at you. You’re still healthy. You’re looked after and content. You’re not lonesome, thank goodness. It’s lonely being dead, Twolly. Jeepers creepers, you wouldn’t believe it. Everyone is always going beyond, once this all becomes too much—or not enough.
“I’ve had fun, or couldn’t you guess? You wouldn’t believe how many books I’ve read and how much I’ve seen. I could diagnose any disease or teach the history of almost any period. I know Italian and German and French now, so I could be a translator. For a long time, I helped the ones like me. I taught them what they needed to survive. I mean, you don’t have to eat or drink or remember to breathe or anything like that. But you have to learn how to get around without tearing things apart. How to deal with having so much time. How to stay entertained. Once you learn that you shouldn’t cause others pain.”
I remembered Andrew’s eyes, their depth and brightness drained, in the weeks before he left New Orleans for destinations unknown. The night I saw the light disappear.
“Did he send you a letter now and then? Did you ever see him again, and speak of me when you did? Tell me it didn’t hurt so bad. Tell me you laughed. Please tell me he knew how much I loved him. Truly, I loved no one more than my Andrew.”
I’d spoken his name aloud, not in a thought. My form rippled into vaporized gooseflesh as I heard my memory answer in his voice, Razi, that whisper of content, as if he were breathing me in and out in equal measure.
My hand was suspended above her knee. I couldn’t touch her. “Where is he, Twolly?”
Twolly snuffled and woke herself up. She blinked rapidly and raised her right hand to her face. “My glasses.” Her left hand passed slowly over the end table and found her cheaters where I’d placed them. During a wide, feline yawn, she clicked off the television and the lamp.
She walked into the kitchen and began to turn off lights on her way to bed. Kitchen, dining room, foyer, overhead den light. She walked into her sitting room and stood in front of her table of photographs. “God bless my family and friends and may they always know I love them. May you all rest in peace. Amen.” She blew a kiss to the room before she turned off the light. Then she inched toward her bedroom, humming a tune from our college days, and gently closed her door.
NEL HAD BEEN between for eight months when he decided to learn the languages in which his favorite operas were written. He figured if Ralph Waldo Emerson could learn a handful of languages without the benefit of recordings, he could do it with them.
In the silence of night in the public library, Lionel sat with headphones floating around what would have been his head, repeating phrases. We slipped into high schools and used their listening labs. Lionel studied textbooks to learn to read and write the language as well. He practiced constantly. His accent was flawless, unmistakably Italian.
He made me go with him to see Federico Fellini movies so he could test his new tongue. Only the surreal ones amused me. So he wouldn’t cheat and read the subtitles, Nel suspended popcorn boxes in front of his face to block the bottom of the screen. For months, he didn’t listen to a single Italian opera—although it tortured him—in preparation for his virgin experience.
“It’ll be like figuring out the words to ‘Louie, Louie.’ You can mimic every sound, but you don’t have a clue what he’s singing,” Nel said. “Now imagine that a switch flips in your brain. The words become clear. You’re not just mouthing sound anymore. Wouldn’t that be spectacular?”
“Copacetic,” I said.
It was February when he decided he was ready for his first listen. We filtered through the front door of the library with the best CD collection. He found his favorite opera and nervously fiddled with buttons and knobs to get a disc player to start. In the meantime, I settled with a book in front of a window that no one had covered with a curtain. As I read, the sounds of the piece were thin, filtered by his headphones. Within minutes, I heard him crying.
The sound, the timbre, was not of the ones between. It was within the range of human hearing.
“Nel, what’s wrong?”
“I understand every word. It’s beautiful.”
Bathed by the glow of the streetlights outside, Nel lay flat on the floor, spread-eagled, sobbing like a jilted lover. The CD jacket was next to his hip. His chest heaved as he bellowed his own rendition of an aria in La Traviata. His singing was awful, but so heartfelt that I dared not make a joke.
I sat next to him on the taupe-carpeted floor, inches away from a twisted staple and nail clipping. He wiped away tears that weren’t there. He sniffled although nothing clogged his nose. Now and then, he flicked his rakish hands into the air to accentuate a series of rousing notes. Each line of lyrics was sung off-key, but no one could have suspected he wasn’t a native speaker.
Nel writhed along the fine line between agony and ecstasy. I could hear it in his voice. I could see it in the way he smiled as his big hazel eyes squinted against phantom tears. He was in pain. What he was feeling required—needed—a body to complete it, to make it whole.
I hated opera, but as I sat there with him, I realized that I, too, could understand every word. Within earshot of Nel’s lessons for so long, I never noticed I was learning. The language had seeped into me.
“Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core non puoi comprendere tutto l’amore,” Violetta sang to the lover she’d left. Alfred, Alfred, little canst thou fathom the love within my heart for thee.
I noticed the decorations near the children’s section. Hearts arched over a display of books featuring holiday projects and young teen romances. Even in that light, I could see the pink bulletin board paper, rosy doilies behind smooching cartoon people, and blushing cupids. I didn’t turn away fast enough—a background of blooms—the taste of icing on my lips—the sound of his voice telling me for the first time—
A rush turned me cold under my gossamer edge. A loneliness that I dodged with distraction during the day hummed in time with the music’s vibration.
“I miss it, Razi.” Nel settled down. His eyelids appeared puffy. The opera continued.
“What?” The particles at my throat were tight.
“Before. The way the music would make my skin prickle and my heart race. How some part of me had to move when I heard it—my foot, or my fingers, or my head. I felt it, you know? Not just in here,” he said, tapping a loose fist against his chest. “And then there are the memories connected to music. The songs that played during an evening with a good bottle of wine and a good lover. Walking home through the humid streets of this city after I’ve left him warm in his bed, hearing whatever came out of the cars driving by. The crickets.” He stared up at the ceiling covered in ugly acoustical tiles. The space between us filled with red wine, musky cologne, a blast of exhaust, and mint—the smells of a wonderful night he could recount in excruciating detail if he wanted to. “That’s what I wanted. I wanted to feel this music all the time. I shouldn’t have been a human resources director. I did the wrong thing. I did what I thought I should do, not what I wanted. And I can’t take it back.”
I burst into arid tears. My edges shook, but without
breath, without a body, the release was hollow, incomplete. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel that way since Andrew left for New Haven. Or when I thought, at the time, he had left for New Haven. Seventy-one years, five months, nevertheless. Nel sat up and reached his arms out to me. His gesture was so automatic that he didn’t think to stop himself.
I missed Andrew so badly in that moment that I forgot to raise my hand to keep Nel away. The instant our vaporous forms met, there was a second of solace—an embrace meant to soothe. The sensation was only a memory of what comfort felt like. We pulled away simultaneously, our forms agitated, disturbed. We had mingled what should have never had contact.
We glanced at each other. He was crying again.
“I miss him,” I said.
“I know you do, honey. Wouldn’t you feel better if you talked? After all this time? You can trust me.” Nel knew Andrew as a footnote to my life, but I knew Nel understood that he filled chapters.
“There is something I want to tell you. Last week, I received an obituary from someone who has sent me correspondence about Andrew over the years. The man in the obituary—he was born in Illinois. He isn’t my Andrew.”
Lionel gave me a puzzled stare.
“My Andrew was born in New Orleans. I’m certain. This man I’ve followed, he has Andrew’s name, he lived Andrew’s life, but he isn’t mine. He isn’t the man I loved. I’ve been mistaken.”
“Not once in all these years did you bother to see him? In person?” Nel said. “What harm could one visit have done?”
“You have no idea, Lionel.” My voice was weak but ominous. On any other night, he might have pushed me to explain myself, but he was clearly exhausted with his own pain. No matter how curious he was, he didn’t have strength to interrogate me. I met my friend’s full hazel eyes. “I do wonder what happened to my Andrew.”
“Without you.” He reached his hand along the floor between us. I reached toward him. We didn’t touch. We couldn’t. It was pointless.
The Mercy of Thin Air Page 13
