Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  For emphasis, I touched his desk. “Circumstances have changed, my fine young friend. And it’s deeply good news. Let me first say how easy you have made all this. Really, Ian. Myself, being someone who’s published in the Atlantic and so forth, I know there are differences between amateur and professional standards. These, you’ve eased us over so lightly. Nothing is lost on me.” I pause, open my purse for the handkerchief I’d ironed especially.

  “Ian? my daughter is alive. The drowning was a false report meant to only shake me down for money. A cruel plot. And did I ever fall for it! Why, her air freight alone—or the lie about their needing to ship her—set me back three thousand. On top of that, there’ve been other carrying costs. Which brings us to certain-other-extras. I mean my check meant to hold the orchestra for some eventual Thursday up ahead . . .”

  “You aren’t by chance speaking of the ‘nonrefundable moneys already distributed,’ Mrs. Mulray? Fifteen thousand dollars might not sound like a lot to you. —No, wait, of course it is. But we have fully sixty-nine persons on VSO payroll, not counting our cleaning crew and freelance bus drivers. Not to mention your own superbly-educated if student-loaned young Ian here.

  “Let me finish, please. At times, our orchestra gets hired out to play certain big-ticket weddings. The Boston Symphony need never do this sort of work (it is considered demeaning especially by our first-chair string players). You’d be amazed how many weddings—particularly the more expensive society kind—get canceled at the eleventh hour, Mrs. Mulray. It usually happens when some playboy-groom just fails to turn up. The bishop is already waiting at the altar, our full orchestra has been placed in grouping all over the church and choir loft. After thirty-five minutes’ playing our stalling music—usually one to four Vivaldi Seasons stretching across what can feel a whole year—the bride’s father will tiptoe toward our busy conductor. This father, holding a cell phone, will whisper thanks while explaining that, as of this second, and the present phone-call from Miami, our services are no longer required.

  “I’m asking, madam, that you put yourself in our place. —Weddings fall through far oftener than funerals, I believe. Fact is, yours is the first such reprieve I’ve ever heard of. Look on the bright side. Your daughter is home and alive and, by your own account, amazing at flute-playing and all else. That’s the good news of your story. One might say she’s your refund! You created in her honor a musical work of a certain complexity and length. But, as for rebates . . .”

  REPATRIATED, KEEPING HER tan current, Cait reserved our home’s great room from two to six. She would be giving most of her interviews there. She’d begun acting like a prom queen entitled to center stage. Pointed, cool, she seemed more and more a chip off the old “Ice.” I told no one of this newfound similarity to my mom. Instead I did exactly as the girl instructed, silently gagging while complying. That’d been my way of dealing with the earlier Ice’s insane demands.

  Cait was probably kinder than your average homecoming queen tensed up the night before her ball, but not by much. I did recall: she was a child barely eighteen. She was our “home-coming queen” okay!

  The emotion of return made me feel gypped by my firstborn’s hype. “‘Hope,’ ‘hype.’ Just one letter apart,” so I decided at a red light. “Saying what?” a twin asked from my backseat. It shocked me, somehow still being heard.

  During some breakfasts Cait quizzed me about my own operatic emotions regarding her death. On hearing of the drowning, when had I phoned whom? Dad first? Good. Had he screamed? Really? Say he had to call back? Good. Too stunned at first, probably.

  Cait wondered aloud how I had found the energy to go on, to plan it all. She actually interviewed me. Should that not have pleased a mom? But it did not. Somehow I remained convinced this was just more of her vanity. She was simply gauging her present power by measuring the crater that a Caitlin-absence truly made. Looking back, I think she might have been trying to help me; but I was still too stunned to accept counseling from the likes of her. I found I almost liked her better when she was being snippy, childish. I wanted her sympathy as little as I craved another head-cloth installation. Once, when I stood washing dishes, she came up behind me, massaged my upper shoulders and asked in her huskiest voice, “And how are we doing, you?”

  “Look,” I stiffened with a tone her dad had hated. “I know I gained some weight while you were gone. But I don’t yet feel qualified for my own full-out ‘we.’”

  “Oh. I meant the two of us, is all,” she pulled away. I turned, regret, but she had barefooted off into the dining room. Via mirror ricochet, I could see her standing one room away, still being hurt by me. And then the worst thing happened. My husband had always told Caitlin she looked like Ingrid Bergman as a girl. And, at that moment, given her weight loss, while she suffered my rebuff, I saw it. She did. Her hennaed hair chopped short, she stood there: Ingrid Bergman at eighteen, a righteous beauty playing pure Saint Joan.

  —Well, that certainly felt distancing.

  HER STORY WAS now national news. And if the reporters she had known before were just print journalists, I now fielded phone queries from two nightly New York news shows. “A Town in Mourning Becomes a Town Overjoyed” was the general idea. One of her friends confessed he’d just sold Cait’s junior yearbook for five hundred bucks to CBS. Was that bad? he asked us all. We just stood there. We had no rules. “More power to you,” I had to laugh.

  I was left feeling lopsided, coldcocked, even slightly fatter. I had made a thousand “If only . . .” bargains with a God I now considered mainly nonexistent. And yet all those feverish IOUs, they now came due.

  XI

  LET’S SPEED HER TALE ALONG A BIT, SHALL WE? I HAVE not been able to catch the rotation since. I was thrown off, is all. See, at 4:40 p.m., your daughter is dead; her orchestral mass is ready; and yet by 5:19 p.m. she has stuffed your washer with filthy skivvies, and come 8:40 p.m. she has you smothered in some gold lamé Klan head-hood.

  You try on these freeze-drying extremes. It’s as if something in my nervous circuitry, already split-ended, got truly finally fried. I’d first resented that she went to Africa after my urging her not to. “Over my dead body,” I had said. That may well prove true.

  Her being announced drowned then shipped home, her causing me to question everything, her forcing me to make my peace with missing my own favorite child forever, that was a toughie, okay? But how might I survive her simply strolling through our front door, stepping free of flip-flops, munching one of my famous oatmeal-raisin cookies? All without even a phone-call’s warning? Hard. And after cadging some free ride courtesy of a married pilot thanks to her midriff made even tighter by a season’s swimming with every nude tribesman this side of Botswana? I’m sorry. My daughter thinks she owns the world and now—come back to life—she truly does. Seems almost unfair how her college-entry essay concerning this very topic will nail her Princeton, Yale, maybe even Radcliffe, plus Brown, her backup school, all early admission. Early resurrection.

  And where does that leave me?

  Where?

  Pissed is where.

  At whom? Myself, as usual, I guess.

  As before, my every sentiment, my each attempt, looks spastic, inappropriate. My life has been an intense training session for some event as yet unstaged, its date still unannounced. I’ve known there would be some test, intended just for me myself. And it was not this one.

  —For a while, with her presumed dead, the press had written about “the surviving mother, a published poet and single parent who’d scrimped to provide her children with Encyclopædia Britannica and each Creative Plaything that helped stimulate them into being the stand-up citizen role models they today remain.”

  Cait sported the black eye a week after our wrestling match. I suspected she doctored it with eyeliner. So be it. She had chopped off her hennaed ends when that first Atlanta photographer told her it would not “read.” She simply grabbed my kitchen’s chicken-snipping shears and stepped toward the half-bath’s m
irror and, as grown men watched with a prurience I sort of shared, Cait took six swipes, dropped dark frizz into the trash basket, fluffed her crest, and stepped the Leica’s way fashion-ready. No fair. A somebody.

  Between interviews, I kept asking Cait if she’d yet phoned her devoted Mr. Shelburne.

  “Mom? any idea the length of my Check-in Cheer-up Not-dead-yet list? Anyway, I didn’t announce my drowning. So you phone whatever ones you want. But keep a list so I can then do little follow-ups. There’s plenty in this for everyone, okay?”

  • • •

  THE SAME REPORTERS who’d sung eulogies to Caitlin’s high school public spirit returned to chronicle a family in overjoyed shock at her return. The Alive at Five news team hinted I should say on-camera how Caitlin’s comeback had been the single greatest moment of my whole life, right? Obviously. They wanted all my emotions laid out paint-by-number.

  “The world must again look truly perfect to you, right, Jean Mulray, mother of Caitlin?”

  “Yes and no, Kelli.”

  The cameraman’s eyes rolled. I felt my cantankerousness latch back down, its metal flanges fastening extra-fierce. I’d become the teenage sulker who refuses a family fiction faked so easily by everybody else.

  Sure, her cell got stolen, but could she not bother to borrow a friend’s? And once she got a replacement, could she not have unblocked all incoming from me? —Still, we must consider her heroic, for forging clear back to us. I wanted to tell reporters: If she’d simply called me or anybody local, we would’ve known she was alive.

  Too busy to bother.

  • • •

  WHAT GOT TO me the day after her return, my home phone rang back to life with a midnight jungle’s full-moon vengeance. A virtual Virginia Symphony Orchestra of messaging. “Would you put in a good word for my moving up my Caitlin Mulray interview so we can wedge her comeback story on page one of our Sunday supplement? Else the boss will have my head on a platter. You’ve got to help me, lady. I have kids, too. This is the mother, right? Look, would eighty-five bucks help you offset certain scheduling expenses? No, make that a cool hundred ten, plus copies of every good picture we get of her, sent as JPEGs, Web-ready.”

  Hearing yet another shy knocking at my front door, I simply hung up on this paparazzo leech.

  • • •

  SHELBURNE LOOKED HUGE there, jammed all angled into my doorframe. Bristly, he’d seemed to have experienced some boy’s final growth surge. His hair stuck out in back but the dark jaw had been shaved so thoroughly he’d nicked himself. A bit of folded toilet paper, resting in the cleft below his nose, looked to me like a tiny origami dove of peace.

  Seeing him, I straightened. Today I felt overripe for his usual hug, the kindly baritone asking after me.

  “Just me, Jean. —How is she?”

  I stepped, silent, aside. He passed into her home.

  “Stan, you mean that girl hasn’t phoned you once during her days home, and with all my reminding and after you wrote an entire choral work for . . . ?”

  “Probably busy. I expect very little . . . At that age . . . they’re so . . . Is she . . . here, Jean?”

  No, I answered: my celebrated one was out being honored by her former Brownie Scout troop. But, stunned as I felt, I did not say more. I simply settled on our foyer’s single wicker bench. I gestured a palm-up help yourself toward the waiting rooms. I even pointed Stan toward the staircase. Like that bum, older males all wanted to be led to where she sleeps. I told Stan that he would know Cait’s room when he found it. As for Jean? She would just go on sitting on a low straw perch where nothing ever rests except overdue library books, soccer balls, zinc-oxide tubes, dry-cleaning outgoing. Now, overdue, out-rolling: here Jean waited, listening as Stan patrolled her suburban home’s second floor.

  He sought his beloved at every door, within each closet. The ironing board, built into its own cupboard? fell on him. A grunt. I allowed myself one laugh. Jean attended to his big (size 16) feet slapping around up there. Bongo clown-shoes crossed floors, muted by each throw rug, a grown man’s pointless quest for someone literally half his age and fully indifferent to him.

  I told myself I felt that same way toward Stan now. And after all we had been through together.

  Footsteps finally halted beside the actual girl’s actual futon. One married man was likely picking up stray outer- or underclothes, no doubt breathing through them. (Oh, I read a lot, I’ve seen films, I know how these things work in other, real lives.)

  Dry-eyed, dry, with only menopause’s heat to signal all her true warmth’s ending, Jean simply waited near this home’s front portal. He’d need to come back out this way. Back past his former “Jeannie with the Light.”

  Finally the man descended, quaking. “Jean? don’t even tell her I came by. And no confronting her with any criticism on my behalf from you, either, hear? I’ll just pretend, whenever she and I do meet, it’s by chance. That way we’ll keep it . . . clean. Don’t complicate things for me, umkay? People say she’s more amazing than ever . . . And you, you’ve been so . . . I really think your faith made all this possible, Jean. Your will has brought her back to me, us. Plus, you opened me up . . . to myself again. And now I can direct that on toward her. Bless you for knowing.” Stan left. In his right back pocket, the giant walkie-talkie cell phone; in the left I saw a cusp of white, one of her socks? No, surely panties. I remembered Bongo, the abducting carny clown, seen from behind, running. I listened as Stan’s old car started, on its third try.

  With the last of what my mother willed me, I’d commissioned a symphony from him.

  And now? Dental receptionists, behind glass, receive greater attention from most exiting patients.

  • • •

  I LATER INFORMED Cait: Mr. Shelburne had just extensively toured her blue room, possibly giving prayerful thanks; he had stayed up there a half an hour easy. (Not strictly true.) “So if your pillow is wet, it’s from some grown man weeping for a girl too busy to return Stan’s calls . . .”

  “Uh, Mom? How is this you’re putting me through not waterboarding abuse? —God, Mother, you will dramatize.”

  I told her, with a Caitlin around, I didn’t have to.

  • • •

  I FELT ASHAMED everywhere I went in Falls. Had I not filed a false report? Had I not been plucked clean by phone hucksters? Had I not spent a life specializing in bungled news that made me look first alarmist then ill-informed?

  But, I had just been on TV. Once-rude store managers now came out front to greet me. Even the martinet grocery manager who’d made me pay for all that grapefruit juice after the glass-breaking Bongo sadness thirteen years back. He actually took my hand, saying, “Cannot imagine. First to be tricked by some foreign terrorist, which we have to call those types. My heart would’ve actually stopped if my son stepped back in that way.”

  “Well, Sam,” I replied, speed-reading his name tag. I was about to sound like the sad sack B-actress I’d lately become. “We feel we cannot go on, dear Sam,” I paused a cheap three-beat Susan Hayward often used, two-three. “And yet . . . somehow, guy . . . we go on. We do, Sam, don’t we?”

  Then I smiled with my own brand of cheerful, uninvited-by-any-book-club woe.

  FIRST I HAD been just one major somebody’s shoe source or AA sponsor or faux-wife. I was Mom. Then at last I got elevated to a newer status: Saint second-rank. And for a while I found myself escalatoring toward the fully saintly. Next, that moving stairway’s power failed, and with such force it knocked me down a story, a flight or two. Of course, to see her eating breakfast, to note the twins piling into her lap, of course, I rejoiced clear to the point of sunny madness. Again I ranked her beauty very high. Once more I revered how she “dealt with the press,” making mental notes for my own next shot at it.

  Saint Somebody, life-sized, waltzes in again, even further alive—surer, trimmer, more a martyr, one topic fully-tanned. I know it’s not her fault.

  But, really, is it mine?

  XII


  WAS AT OUR ANNUAL NEIGHBORHOOD PICNIC SOMEthing wonderful finally happened. (To me, I mean.) Might seem a small moment for anybody else. The mothers of two girls Caitlin’s age stood serving food alongside me. Plump ceramicist-Millicent’s mom, plus the mother of a class “Caitlin” everybody always instead called “Winooski.” We were arranging deviled eggs on platters across oilclothed card-tables.

  Cait arrived late in BlondMatt’s red convertible. She appeared barefoot though it was autumn already, an African folk custom she’d adopted. She acted surprised if anyone mentioned it, looking down at her own wriggle of toes. “My what? Oh, yes, but in many, no, most countries, shoes are still such a luxury, I guess we sometimes forget how . . .”

  Many locals had not seen my girl since her resurrection. When Caitlin Mulray climbed into view, applause broke out. Eyes lowered, she nonetheless waved one wrist. Like royalty, sparing herself carpal-tunnel—all while militantly barefoot.

  Other kids had heard she’d saved the ambassador’s young son from drowning by pulling him back from the very edge of a nasty waterfall, etc. . . . Was that true? I got asked. Me? I corrected no story. “Amazing little girl,” is all I’ve ever said. And who could argue that?

  Even certain adults, the fathers of her classmates, now asked her to address civic clubs about both the state of modern Africa and any of her recent watery adventures there. Younger girls wondered if they might carry her back-from-Africa pink-gray backpack. And 96 lb. Cait—humbled to find herself considered larger than life—simply nodded, accepting child aid.

  The high school glee club had chipped in and bought my daughter her own commemorative puppy. The blond cocker looked like our old Cookie. I wouldn’t let Cait keep it. I’d housebroken three children and, now with my hardwood floors finally half-decent, I would just not go through that again. She used the words “monster of selfishness.” Furious, she hauled off and boarded the dog at Tori’s one block away. That trampy Tori, interested at last, became Cait’s new close friend. Tori teetering on heels beside my barefoot child, they walked their pup together.