The Distinguished Guest (35 page)
Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
Ettie will switch to the guest suite the second night of Thomas’s stay, “because he talks in his sleep. God. All night.” And reaching deep into the drawer of the nightstand
there one evening—he never says for what—he will find at the back of it an ancient, flowered-silk pouch of Lily’s. Inside will be a pair of reading glasses, two buttons, around
twenty dollars in fives and ones, an old family ring she wore occasionally, and a locket with pictures of her parents within, one on each side of it.
He will look embarrassed, almost ashamed when he brings this out to Alan, who is sitting in the living room. Wordlessly he will hand it to his father.
“A reticule for Christmas, Ettie?” Alan will ask, smiling.
“Open it, Dad.”
Alan will pull wide the strings at the mouth of the bag. “Oh!” he will say. He will lift out the items one by one, setting them on the arm of his chair. He will shake his head slowly
at what is odd, what is touching in this collection.
Ettie will understand this as grief, and quickly reach out to grip his father’s shoulder. But what Alan will be feeling is that Lily has somehow just forgotten this, that he needs to find
a way to get it to her—as though she were a traveler who had left something necessary behind. He will have a strange sense of puzzlement and obligation, of incompleteness.
On a bitter-cold winter day, Alan will decide, for reasons he isn’t clear on, that it is time to read Lily’s book—her fiction, her collection of stories. He will
take it with him to his office, where, he feels, he can somehow be more alone with it. He plans to read it story by story, when he has the odd moment free.
But of course this isn’t what will happen. The steeple clock will say almost three when he begins the first day, and he will still be reading when he looks up and sees that it is time to
go and wake Gaby. The next day, Alan will simply sit down and begin to read as soon as he arrives, acknowledging to himself his eagerness to take in Lily’s words.
He has read most of these stories before, as they have appeared separately in magazines, and he was affected by them then mostly as they reflected some aspect he could recognize of Lily’s
life, or Paul’s, or the whole family’s.
In the aggregate, though, they will affect him differently. He will feel, after these few days, immersed in a sensibility that he might not have recognized as Lily’s. He will feel that he
is drawing closer to a sense of her, of how she understood the world. He will feel incapable of describing this, even to himself, except by contrasting it to the way he understood her before: that
she seems, as the writer of these stories, somehow softer, more forgiving, than he knew her in life, or in her memoir. There is a kind of mysterious generosity in the despair of these pieces.
In the last story—the one published the previous spring in
The Atlantic
, she wrote of her character, an old woman:
Imagine her as she imagines them. [Her children, whom she left long since.] She sits in her studio apartment—what they call a studio, it’s really a rented
room with a refrigerator and hotplate installed. From next door through the thin walls she hears the sordid, night-long battle between her neighbors begin, as it must each evening,
whatever the trigger this time. Money, food, drink, sex, cleanliness, the use of language. She feels a kind of gratitude, for this is her trigger too, the beginning of her true night. She
has the telephone book open to the map of the United States divided into area codes. 202—Washington, D.C.: the white buildings, the wide groomed paths and flower beds.
802—Vermont: the rolling hilly green of old farms. 312—Chicago: the famous buildings, the gray lake. And in each place, she sees the face of one of her children, costumed now
one way—as a doctor or a lawyer—now another—artist, teacher. But always youthful, the way they were when she left them.
It’s no wonder that when she calls the numbers listed by their names, the voices are always wrong. Too old, too defeated, too brusque. She has given them perfection, in memory.
She has imagined them unembittered, unsaddened, undiminished, unchanged. What else, poor woman, could she do? Because of course, the first change she would have to imagine would be the
one wreaked by her departure, and at that time and whenever she thought of it later, she had argued to herself that it wouldn’t change anything. They were launched, they were
accomplished and safe and happy. They would have the memory of her, but none of them needed her person anymore. They were done with her, she felt, and her departure might even be
construed as a kind of gift to them. If she could have spoken to them, she might have said, “All I did, truly, was to move earlier than I should have into memory.”
How could she have so misunderstood things? It is the right of the children to leave the parents, it is what they need to do, in order to be adult.
And the transformation into memory’ of a parent is a gift we give gladly only to the dead, receive gratefully only from them.
Alan will be sitting by the window in his office as he reads this. The day will be bright and windy outside. The grass on the town green across from his windows will be stiff-looking, rimed in
frost, the limbs of the winter trees as black as India ink drawn with a broad nib against the blue of the clear, cold sky.
Linnett’s article will come out in mid-February. One of Gaby’s employees will bring the magazine into the shop to show her, and Gaby herself will stop on the way home at
the drugstore to buy a copy for Alan.
It will be shorter than Alan would have thought, given the time Linnett spent with Lily, and on the whole, more adulatory than anything else. It will begin with the death.
Lily Maynard, the noted memoirist and short-story writer, died last August in a Massachusetts coastal town while a hurricane raged around her. This somehow seems entirely
appropriate, that the elements themselves should protest her death. For even though she was old, and on some days nearly incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease—a fact which she had
by and large kept a secret from her admiring reading audience—Lily Maynard was an intriguing and vital and complex presence—beautiful, astonishingly alert, deliberately
mysterious, quick, funny, and occasionally even downright mean.
After that, in part because of his relief, Alan will find the rest unremarkable, a fairly predictable summary of Lily’s career and achievements. These will often be set cleverly, Linnett
describing Lily very well—a gesture for instance, or a turn of phrase with which Lily dismissed whole decades of her life. She says of Lily’s Parkinson’s voice:
The effect of this rushed, smooth, nearly inexpressive quality is that she seems to be trying to slip her often outrageous opinions past you. You hear a remark as the
modestly presented, idle thought of an elderly woman, and only somewhat later do you realize she’s said something profoundly insulting, or wildly politically incorrect, or shockingly
intimate.
On the whole though, the fresh slant that Linnett wanted will seem absent to Alan. Maybe the death
will
make it hot enough to be well-received, he thinks. He doesn’t wish her
ill.
In the late spring, he will finally get around to rearranging the guest suite back to the way it was before Lily came, something Gaby will have asked him several times to do. First he will move
out the table Lily worked at, and then he will start to shift the bureau next to it back to its original position. And he will see under it a letter that escaped Lily’s destruction.
This is special, this is a gift, Alan will think, and sitting alone on the bed in the guest room, he will let himself read it. It is from Lily’s mother, mailed, clearly, early in
Lily’s marriage.
My dearest girl [Violet wrote],
This is written in haste, as I will try to get it to the mailman when he comes by—too soon! I hear the ticking of the hall clock as I write.
By now you will be completely settled in. I am grateful for all the detailed floor plans, the swatches of fabric, and the account of furniture arrangements, so that I can imagine you in
your life there. How exciting it must all be, especially after the quiet life here at home with just me and your father! The amount of entertaining you have done in just the first few weeks
is almost literally staggering to me.
I do think it’s a good idea to keep a record of menus, not just so that you don’t serve the same group the same thing twice—how clever you are to have thought of
that!—but also so that you can remember what dishes were especially successful. I am wondering if you have quite enough china? I have that set of twelve dinner plates I never use
anymore, from Cousin Laurie. Would they be of more use to you? This is an offer, dearest, so think about it.
We have had Auntie for another week. She just wasn’t well enough in my opinion to make the trip back home. So I sent a telegram to Uncle Patch and we kept her. She just left today,
your father took her to the train. And I will pack her things and send them on after her in a day or two. It was hard on Henry to have her here so long—he likes his privacy, as you
know, but I felt we couldn’t in good conscience let her go any earlier.
And now I must close, my darling, for the clock is striking the quarter hour and Mr. Bement is nothing if not punctual. I would need the window measurements by next Friday to get Mrs.
Stickley to do the curtains you would like, and I would very much like to do that for you.
I miss you terribly and look forward with great eagerness to my first visit to you in your new life. Please give my love to dearest Paul, and know that it is always flowing toward you, my
darling daughter.
Your loving, Mother
There is no news here, nothing even interesting, really, but Alan will be moved to tears by the presence and the absence of this new Lily, waiting so patiently to make herself known.
But what is so new?
He isn’t sure. That her mother thought of her as a child, when she was twenty-six or twenty-seven? That she was so deeply loved, adored even, in a way she was somehow so incapable of
passing on? That her life with Paul had begun with such ordinary and familiar steps—arranging furniture, making curtains, having over the first guests?
The letter is on frail onionskin paper, tissue almost, which rustles and whispers as he handles it. The ink is black, faded to yellow-brown. The writing is strong, vertical and shapely, the hand
of a person who wrote, no doubt, four or five letters a day. His own hands will tremble as he tears it in half, then into quarters, before throwing it too away.
This must be the last, he thinks. The last surprise, the last gift.
Early the next fall he will get a telephone call from Marcea McKendrick. He will recognize her voice before she says her name, as though it were only a day or two since he saw
her.
She will say, almost shyly, that she was sorry to hear of Mrs. Maynard’s death.
He will thank her for that.
“I guess it was just shortly after I talked to her.”
“Yes,” he will say. (He will not say, “It was the next day.”)
Well, she will say, she is coming the next weekend to the state beach nearby, and she wonders if he might like the copy of her thesis she had intended to give his mother. “I promised
everyone who talked to me I’d send them each a copy. It was kind of, like, part of the deal? It’s just a Xerox that I did myself, I couldn’t afford bound copies, but it does
belong to her, if . . . ” Her voice will trail off.
And Alan, who will be glad simply to hear from Marcea McKendrick, who will be touched that she so honors her bargain with Lily, and who will think that she may, somehow, bring him something from
Lily too, will say, “Oh, please do stop by. I’d be delighted to have the thesis. I’d be interested to read it.”
“Okay, great,” she will say. “I’ll be with some friends, though, they’ve got the car, so it really will be just to drop it off.”
They will arrange a time, late on Saturday afternoon.
Alan will be home a good hour before she is due. He will check to be sure there is wine, seltzer, beer, iced tea, in case they should all want to stop.
But as Marcea promised, she will get out of the car alone and cross the yard (it will be green again, in full leafy shade). She will wear a loose pink cotton smock, a beach dress, and her
unpinned hair will fall free over her shoulders in amazing tight coils, dark brown touched with gold at every twist.
He will open the door before she rings, and they will stand for some moments, talking. She will refuse his invitation to come in, gesturing back at her waiting friends (black and white together,
Alan will note). Just before she leaves she will say again how sorry she is and she will give him the thesis, in a black binder.
Then she will say, “Oh, and I had a kind of funny message, I might as well give to you. I found a couple of the women, you know, from the church group? And one of them, Iva Lewis, did you
know her?”
Alan will nod, remembering Iva, who had a fat son his age, Charley, and who ran the youth choir with an iron hand and a limitless supply of chocolate chip cookies.
“Before I realized she didn’t know your mom was dead, she was remembering her and all? And she said to tell her, ‘Girl, how you been.’ ”
She will say this woodenly and for a moment Alan will be confused, trying to make meaning from it.
Marcea will laugh, then, a little uncomfortable, a little shy. “Well, what she actually said was”—and here she will change her voice deliberately, make it Southern, black,
pitch it, perhaps even a little higher—“
Gi
-rl! How you
bin?!
”
And Alan will laugh too, hearing in these words, said this way, tenderness, endearment, the warmth that Lily had drawn from her life at Blackstone Church, the affection Iva felt for his mother,
the woman she thought of as “girl.”
And Lily will be born for him again, as though she had been waiting for this moment too. And he will understand that all these loving moments, these births, are things he holds within himself
and always has, though he couldn’t have felt them until they were released by death. By the gift of memory. Hers to him.