Charms for the Easy Life (5 page)

Before I started the water, I put on my robe and went and stood by my parents’ bedroom door, watching him. To be blunt while at the same time running the risk of being thought a cold, heartless girl: I had even less feeling for him dead than alive. For years he had made himself unavailable to me, and so the fact that he was now truly unavailable didn’t create a void or fill me with a sense of loss. Nothing of that nature. I didn’t think I’d have less of a life with him gone. I knew my mother and I would have more.

She appeared beside me, and after a few minutes of watching the body with me, she said she was going outside to wait for her mother, who was on her way to our house for the first time. The curse of absence was lifted. Later I was told that while my mother was standing out in the yard she spoke with the paper man, who subsequently reported his astonishment that she had made her regular highly critical comments about his lax service while giving not the slightest indication that there was a body in the house. Not realizing that he was considered a strange little man himself, he told everybody on his route: “I always knew the woman was odd.”

My grandmother arrived and went right to work. She covered the windows and mirrors in the bedroom with towels and stopped all the clocks in the house. This sounds as though she may have been bordering on voodoo, but she wasn’t. These death rituals had lost any magical associations a hundred years before. By the 1930s one would’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone, except for some of my grandmother’s superstitious patients, who believed that a restless spirit could get trapped in an uncovered mirror and howl in the house forever. That morning, when I asked her why she did these things, she said, “My mother performed this routine, and hers and hers and on back. The same reason I crush eggshells. I know witches don’t ride to sea in them and sink ships, but my mother did it, and hers and on and on.” She judged the cause of death to be a cerebral hemorrhage, but because my father was a man of standing in our community, the county coroner had to come out and give her diagnosis his blessing. He confirmed that my father had died from exactly that, in the wee hours of the morning. My grandmother said to the coroner, “People like to go then, don’t they, George?”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, recording something into his notebook, and he looked up at my grandmother and said, “Tender bonds snap before dawn. Isn’t that what they say, Charlie Kate?”

My grandmother nodded and left the room to go wash my father’s body.

My mother sat down at the table and asked that a cerebral hemorrhage be described to her in full detail. As was to be understood, the coroner at first balked. He asked my mother if she was sure she wanted to know. She looked him in the eyes and said, “I would not have asked.”

With that, he began. My mother cocked her head and toyed with an earring, and any man who didn’t know her well would’ve taken this as a sort of flirtation, a first sign of a new widow’s losing her mind. She wasn’t flirting. She was listening intently, and that was merely the way she fixed herself to listen. At seeing my mother’s beautiful head so slightly bent, her mouth open as it was, the coroner, it seemed to me, suffered a burst of desire to impress her, and I would swear on my father’s grave that what the man did not know he made up. He was about to say what generally causes the condition, when my mother cleared her throat, moved forward in her chair, and laid both her hands on the table as if to keep it from rising. She spoke as if she were reading from a medical textbook: “It is a condition caused by ingrown selfishness.”

After the funeral my mother locked herself in her room and read. My grandmother and I sat in the living room and made excuses for her. Lucky for us (a horrible way to put it), another person in the community died suddenly that same day, and so we were relieved of a long afternoon filled with small talk and strangers. The undertaker took the telephone call in our kitchen and then made the announcement in a maddening fashion that made women remember for years afterward how they had longed to strangle him. He asked for silence while he delivered the news. He said, “There has been another sudden and unfortunate death, one that will touch each of you in a profound way.” He did not name the person, and for some time it did not appear that he would. When he was asked to please identify the deceased, he patted his hand in the air and continued with how grieved and so forth we all would be. One woman, who had already started to cry, asked if it was Mr. Roosevelt. He assured her it was not. We all expressed our relief, and then he carried on. My mother had been listening to all this from her bedroom. When she’d heard all she was going to, she shouted, “Jesus! How about just telling who it is! The suspense may kill everybody who’s left!”

He was as startled as he should’ve been, and barely got out the name of Ida’s mother, Maureen O‘Shea, before he found his hat and left. It took several calls for me to find out the details, and when I told the group what I had learned, the reaction was unanimous: The guilty will not go unpunished. Mrs. O’Shea suffered a miserable choking death in the café in the basement of the courthouse. Reporters covering a murder trial covered her death during their lunch break. When the story appeared in the newspaper, mention was made of the similar fate of her child. The reporter didn’t discuss justice and retribution, and he didn’t say this death was more proof, as if any of us needed more proof, that the mills of the gods grind slowly but exceeding small. I wondered how many people read the article and then went to bed that evening thinking about horses they had whipped, stray cats they had kicked, and wives they had wounded. I wondered how people slept at all, dreading what was to become of them in the end.

My mother and grandmother and I worked the next week boxing my father’s belongings. Although we got everything, down to his key chain, packed and taped up, we couldn’t rid the house of the echo of my parents’ voices sounding off the walls for too many years, always asking the same question: Is there anybody here who loves me? The three of us put the boxes in the attic. My mother stood on the top step and took boxes that I handed up to her, and she pushed them across the attic floor, grunting each time she shoved a particularly heavy one. When we were through, she backed down the ladder and folded it up into the ceiling. “That’s it,” she said. “He’s all up there.” Then she wiped her face and neck with her handkerchief and said, “I have to get out of this house.”

She said this with such emphasis that I understood she didn’t want to get out of the house for only a few minutes or even a few hours. She wanted to linger somewhere and then come back home restored. I suggested that we go to the beach. My mother considered this for a moment and then thanked me for having such a grand idea. I was very pleased with myself.

My grandmother had never been to the ocean although it was only four hours away by automobile. In her mind, there was nothing to do there but walk and sit, and anyway, she believed she knew exactly what she’d see. When my mother invited her to come with us, she said, “There is nothing but water and sand there, and people aimlessly walking. I have things to do at home.”

My mother urged her to set work aside for a few days, saying she could sit in a camp chair and read a favorite collection of shipwreck stories. She told her, “I know you would have a fine time. Please come.”

My grandmother thought about this. She must’ve been seeing herself on the water’s edge reading
The Graveyard of the Atlantic.
Then she said, “I guess it would be a shame to die without seeing it.” She did not mean this in self-pity, but her regret at having lived so long without seeing so much of the world seemed clear to me. I was soon to learn that it was my vision that had been bordered, not hers.

We left the following morning. We stopped to eat sandwiches wrapped in wax paper at a roadside picnic table, and stuck our heads out of the windows to smell the salt air. When we got to Morehead City, we didn’t go to our hotel first but directly to the ocean. My mother and I walked beside my grandmother over the wide strip of sand down to the water. She proceeded across like a camel in her brown high-top shoes from the last century while my mother and I held each other up in our dime-store sandals. She stopped just short of the water, and when we caught up to her, I asked, “So tell me, what do you think of the ocean?”

She stared out over the water and replied without looking at me, “It’s fine, but it’s actually not as big as I thought it would be.”

I asked her if she was disappointed, and she smiled over her shoulder at my mother and me and said, “Only slightly, just the palest disappointment. I thank you both for bringing me.”

My mother followed her mother’s line of vision, and then mine merged with theirs, and for a second I wondered what we three were supposed to be looking at or looking for.

My grandmother said, “Europe is coming to a rolling boil. Once it starts, it’ll take years to finish. Watch and see.”

This was August 1936. Two years later, when she and I sat in the movie theater and heard Neville Chamberlain speak of “peace in our time,” and then again when we listened to the reports about Poland the following year, and yet again when I was seventeen, listening to reports of Pearl Harbor and Mr. Roosevelt’s speech the following day, I heard my grandmother’s voice and saw her in her wind-whipped dress and resolute shoes, standing on the edge of her unsatisfactory ocean.

We spent the night at the Atlantis, the only hotel my grandmother would consider. She said she’d be less likely to have a transient drag her out of bed and cut her throat at a place that advertised in
The New Yorker.
It made no difference to her that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a favorite oceanfront room, or that the first palm heart salad seen in North Carolina was served there, or that General Pershing maintained a summer suite there and held court in the manner of General MacArthur years later at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. All that mattered was the postage-stamp-size advertisement in The
New Yorker.
We checked into the hotel after our walk on the beach and a flounder dinner at a place called the Sanitary Fish Market, a worrisome name for a restaurant. The hotel lobby was packed with people who had spilled out of the ballroom. A debutante party was in full tilt. Everyone there was dancing and, as far as we could tell, also very drunk. While my mother was checking us in, my grandmother edged her over with her shoulder and told the clerk to tell the debutantes to stop it. They were too loud, and it was time to go to bed. The clerk said he’d see what he could do, which meant he’d do absolutely nothing and take the chance that she’d complain to the management and receive a nice note and a fruit basket as compensation. That my grandmother could think for a second that her command would be heeded and she would stop debutantes from jitterbugging was evidence that she was not fully aware that we lived in a new age in which ladies were not always obeyed and in which turning a profit was worth much more than the patronage of a few people who liked things quiet.

Not only did the music not stop, but we had other accompaniment in the room next door to ours. We complained, got the note and the fruit basket, complained again after midnight and got our room for free. There seemed to be no hope of sleeping, so we sat on one of the beds and played spades. As for next door, this is what happened: A couple entered their room, very full of commotion. I gathered that they had drunk themselves into a near stupor downstairs and had ridden the elevator up mauling each other. They spent several minutes unlocking the door. I heard the girl giggle and bounce down on the bed, and then I heard the boy’s shoes drop on the floor. I was afraid of what I’d hear next. My mother pronounced what was going on next door to be more interesting than our game of spades, so she laid down her cards and listened closely. My grandmother and I did the same thing. The boy said at one point, “I’m going to make it so hot in here you’ll think two cats have their tails tied together.” Then came the mushing around, with most of the noise on his part, and next I listened to all the thousand things he said to try to get the girl to say she loved him. He said over and over, “I hope nobody ever steals you from me. I hope nobody ever steals you.”