A Bigamist's Daughter (16 page)

As Ward began to speak, I had watched the silhouette in the high rise across the street moving around a kitchen, opening cabinets, carrying things to a table, standing, hands on hips, before what I imagined to be a stove, just, I thought, as I would be doing now if the phone hadn’t rung. I noticed the traffic in the street had grown quiet. I longed for some loud noise to set my heart beating.

She had died at five o’clock. I remember thinking that if
she had worked all her life, the hour might have had some significance.

After we’d eaten, and Lillian had poured us all a second cup of tea, Carol, who was sitting next to me, pushed the blue bandanna back on her head (her equivalent, I learned, of rolling up her sleeves) and took a small notepad from her pocketbook. Although she ran the local library, where she had met my mother, everything about her suggested a woman who shouted orders in the open air.

“Your mother,” she began, “had certain requests for the funeral and I’ve already spoken to Father Lappen about them. It’s all arranged, but he’d like to see you this afternoon. I’ll take you down.”

“Thank you.” I sipped my tea, reminding myself that the ordeal was just beginning, and so was beginning to be over.

“The service will be at ten tomorrow. She asked that there be no viewing.”

Lillian smiled at me from the other chair. “She said she didn’t want any of us Yankees standing over her and saying, ‘Ay-yup, thar she is.’ ”

Carol and Lillian laughed and Ward looked up at me, hopefully, I thought.

I smiled back at them. Last night, as I packed, I had realized I knew nothing of funeral arrangements and it frightened me. That dreamlike fright of walking into an exam unprepared. I suppose my mother had realized it too.

“She’s asked to be cremated,” Carol said softly. “I’ve cleared it with the Church for her.” She raised her thick eyebrows slightly, as if this was my cue to approve. Her face was pitted, pale as concrete.

“All right,” I said. My mother had chosen her well. It was clear that she was the type of woman who grew solid in difficulty, who became that retaining wall you trust you will eventually run
into, no matter what the catastrophe. I felt myself flat against her now. “That’s okay.”

Ward leaned forward. “She thought”—he said, and then paused to clear his throat—“she thought it would save the complications of securing a plot here.” He smiled; it was not a real smile, but that odd upward-turning of lips that people sometimes do when they’re making a difficult point. “Or of bringing her back to Long Island.”

I sipped my tea again and it was thick in my throat. “Sure.”

“The cremation will take place after the service,” Carol went on. “She said she wanted to be at the service.” And then she placed her red hand solidly on my knee. “Would you like to see her, Elizabeth?”

I suppose I said, “No, I’d rather not,” because the three of them bowed their heads and whispered that they understood.

Because I didn’t see her.

There was the young, meaty priest that afternoon who took my hand to shake it and then held it, held it until my palm began to sweat and then held it still, as if to prove that nothing human repelled him, to offer this small sacrifice—the unflinching grasp on soaked flesh—to his Lord and Saviour. The priest who said that my mother, in death, had wished to be reconciled to the Church.

There was the mortician, who reminded me of the school photographer who came each year to take our pictures, placing each individual child on the same stool, in front of the same screen, saying the same words to get the same smile from this child unlike any other. The mortician took shook my hand, saying, “Yes, the daughter.”

There was the plain coffin before the altar in the small church. The coffin covered with just a spray of lilacs from Ward’s yard—another of her requests: No flowers, she’d told Lillian, nothing from a florist anyway, because she’d been walking into
flower shops all her life and, no matter what she’d gone in for, had always come out thinking of funerals—the church filled with people from town: the shopkeepers, the mailmen, the waitress from the coffee shop, the crossing guard, all the people a stranger would first befriend.

I was the daughter, Dolores’ daughter from New York, and although I’d dressed carefully that morning, navy-blue suit, white lace blouse, good shoes, I felt somehow mistaken, inadequate, as if I were a new understudy taking on a role that had been played before, and much more effectively, by someone I alone had never seen.

She had asked that a rosary be said, and when the time came, I fumbled to find the pale-blue beads Ward had given me that morning. My mother’s beads. I had a blind moment when I thought I had somehow lost them.

The priest came down from the altar, knelt in the pew across from mind, and began the prayers. When he announced the first Joyful Mystery, The Annunciation, he turned his flushed face to me, my cue.

I prayed: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” My voice trembled a little but with stage fright, not tears. “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of Grace,” the others mumbled, the priest’s voice clearest among them. “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” Ten times I repeated the words, moving the beads between my fingers. The beads she had kept beneath her pillow, in the bed she had shared with my father, the bed I had shared with Bill.

Ward, a Methodist, began the next decade, his slow voice repeating the same words.

I remembered the nights my father was gone, when, frightened
or sleepless or just bored, I would crawl into bed with her and, reaching under her pillow, feel the beads and her fingers upon them. I would ask, “Are you praying?” and she would finish whatever prayer she was thinking and answer, “Yes, I am.” She would tell me where in the rosary she was so I could pray the rest with her; but silently, she would always insist, to myself.

I moved my fingers over those same beads now, repeating the same words. If I could have rubbed some of that old belief from them, I would have. If I could have brought them to my lips and sucked from them anything other than the salt from my own fingers, any faith, any comfort, any of the old trust that the words truly meant something and that their meaning endures beyond all loss, I would have.

Carol was leading the prayers now. Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Because I wanted it all back. The eternal mother, the immortal confidence. The same prayers repeated. The feel of new clothes, the smell of my father’s aftershave, the clean taste of a communion wafer on an empty stomach, repeated each Sunday for the rest of my life.

I looked at the familiar statue of the Blessed Mother on the side of the altar. Her white dress, her blue robes, her arms extended. Someone had placed a crown of flowers on her head. The wreath was a little too big and it dipped rakishly over one eye. The pinkie on her right hand was chipped, showing white plaster.

Father Lappen was leading the final prayer: “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.” His voice was high and nasal, as affected as a butler’s. His hands were folded before his lips, the two fat index fingers raised to his nose, nearly plugging his nostrils. “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

I knew about conversions on battlefields and at gravesides. I knew that God had sprung from death and fear and loneliness and nostalgia in the first place. I knew why Jesus was big at Vista. I knew what I was asking.

The priest began the litany of Our Lady and I felt Ward’s hand upon my back, felt him lean toward me and then lean away.

Our Lady of the Sorrows, pray for us.

Our Lady of Peace, pray for us.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, pray for us.

I should have been crying for my mother, but I knew what I was asking.

I had planned to go back to New York that afternoon, but the luncheon at Ward’s lingered until four, and as she was leaving Carol said she’d be by in the morning to take me to the airport. Lillian told me there was a dinner casserole in the refrigerator for Ward and me, and because accepting their help had already become habit, I merely smiled at them both and said thank you.

I stood at the door until their car pulled away.

The house, after all those visitors, had not quite settled itself. Although it showed no traces of the party (the women had seen to that) it seemed to resound with it in some way. Ward was in the kitchen, running water, clicking dishes, a loud bird was calling, cars passed by outside. The smell of perfume and food was still in the air. It was over but not yet past.

I went upstairs to change. The house had three bedrooms. One had been made into a den, the other, where I’d slept, was the room Ward’s mother had lived in, and the third, Ward’s room, was where my mother had slept during those long winter months. Although it occurred to me that she could have slept in this room too; that a mother or a lover might have suited Ward equally well. Ward, my mother’s lover.

I took off my suit, put on jeans and a light sweater. Church clothes to playclothes. Someone had put the flowers on the night table beside my bed. They’d been delivered just as we got back from church—the florist, despite my mother’s rejection, knowing just what time the service would end. Carol had brought them to me, grinning, and when I read the card out loud, “Sincerest Sympathy. We love you. Everyone at Vista,” the people around me had smiled, as if reassured. Reassured that I wasn’t completely alone and that, perhaps, indeed I
had
had better things to do these past few months. Introducing me, they had all told one another that I was an editor.

I leaned to smell the flowers. My mother was right, you couldn’t help but think of funerals and wakes. I breathed deeply.

I had read stories, even manuscripts, seen movies on TV and in the theater, it’s almost a cliché, but if cancer can be said to have any compensations, surely that is it: the final meetings, the wait together. The moment when the mother, while peeling potatoes or sorting clothes or setting her hair for the trip to the hospital, says some simple word or tells some new story and the daughter sees, for all of her life, what the love between them has been.

The days when the daughter, waiting at the hospital, reviews her own life, and taking her mother’s frail hand, says, “Thank you” or “I’m sorry,” or simply: “Mother, I’m here. Don’t worry, I’m here.”

If cancer can be said to have any compensations, surely it is in the cliché of time allowed. Time to say what can no longer wait to be discovered. Time when death is not merely a thought to put your teeth on edge, to be dismissed with a swallow, when life is marked clearly by beginnings and endings, by spoken words that mean something and change everything.

If she had called me, we might have said something, everything might have changed. If she had called me, I would have been delivered from all these past months of ordinary days.

I straightened up. I was descending a stair I couldn’t see, couldn’t trust, whose next step might disappear beneath my foot.

She hadn’t called me, and whatever her dying had to give was given to Ward. I would think of her as I’d thought of my father: not here, someplace else—in Wisconsin, in Maine—apart from me voluntarily because we both had better things to do.

Ward was calling me. He was at the bottom of the stairs, softly calling my name and he seemed a little surprised when I appeared, as if, like a child, he’d been calling for so long he’d forgotten the intent.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But there’s a casserole in the refrigerator.”

“Yes. Margaret left it. The woman with the red hair. From the beauty parlor.”

I nodded, staring down at him. The hours until I could leave seemed steep and ragged, impossible to overcome. I considered trying to get a taxi to Boston.

“I thought maybe you’d like to …” He smiled that strange smile again. “There are some things in your mother’s house for you. Would you like to go out there with me?”

I shrugged, walked down the stairs, knowing it was ridiculous to think of farewell letters and revealing diaries. To think that when the two of us walked down the drive, through the chilled odor of daffodils and ocean salt, my mother would appear, the screen door slamming behind her.

The cottage seemed ready for new tenants, as if this month’s occupant had only to make one more trip from house to packed car before the Labor Day group could move in. There were two brown cartons on the sofa bed, a gift box in a plastic
bag from Barnes and Noble on the table by the window. The bed, except for a faded blue comforter, was stripped; the armoire, except for a few hangers, was empty. The kitchen was spotlessly clean.

“Your mother took care of everything before she went to the hospital the last time,” Ward said, almost apologetically, as I searched the place. “She said everything you’d want, her good tea set, some photos, I don’t know what else, would be right here. Her silver set is in my safe-deposit box in town, but of course that’s yours too. And the rest of her savings.”

I looked at the cartons. She had used them to move here from Long Island. Our old address and this one were written on them. The masking tape that had sealed them then had been sliced open but not removed. The tops were now neatly folded over.

I turned to Ward. I remembered from my last trip here that he’d had to stoop a little in this room to keep his hair from brushing the ceiling. He was stooping now, but seemed, still in his dark-gray suit, much smaller.

“How long had she been sick?” I might have asked the same question the night he called, but I couldn’t remember the answer.

“I’m not sure,” he said hoarsely. “She barely talked about it until the very end. She went off for her treatments by herself, at first.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I looked at the room, the floor swept, the corduroy cushions smoothed and tucked, a neat pile of magazines on top of the TV. My mother had straightened the room, set out the cartons and the bag and gone to the hospital. It occurred to me that she’d been there when we last spoke, two weeks ago now, although I’d presumed she was here, or at Ward’s. It was Sunday, her usual day to call, and when I said she sounded tired, she told me she’d been sitting in front of the television
all night, nodding off. We talked mostly about Joanne’s upcoming wedding and what I should serve at the shower.