The Vagabonds (6 page)

“Good night.”

“Sleep tight,” says Joanna. “Sweet dreams.”

“I will”—he turns to her—“I’ll go with you. But now I need to try to sleep . . .”

“Good night,” says Claire.

“Good night.”

III

2003

S
ardines, he tells himself, or cat food: the smell in his room is of old canned fish, and he wonders if their mother kept a cat. He does not know. David sits. At nine or ten he had wanted a dog; he read
Lad, a Dog,
and all the Lassie books, and he begged his mother for a collie. He would feed and groom it, he promised, and it would be a watchdog and in case of fire would save everybody’s lives.

But Claire was allergic to dog hair, or so Alice said, and by the time she left for college he wanted a pony instead. He had kept hamsters and a canary and goldfish and buried them under the lilac bush when, turn by turn, they died. Now in his bedroom, in the wintry dark, David remembers what it felt like on a school night to be doing homework with his mother at the kitchen sink, her back to him, arranging, rearranging things. There would have been music, the six o’clock news, that parental routine she mustered the years of his childhood. His mother would be occupied chopping or slicing or rinsing or drying until, of a sudden, her hands would go slack, her eyes would go vacant, unfocused, and she would stand immobile for what seemed to him like minutes, facing the wall.

“Are you all right, Mom?
Mom?
” he would ask, and—if he asked it soon or loud enough—break into her reverie. Then she would give a little shake and lift her shoulders visibly and turn to him: “Of course.”

At other times the dream or memory or fear or whatever it was that had caused her to pause would seem impenetrable, and she did not hear. Then what were seconds and had felt to him like minutes would be minutes that felt hour-long, and she would neither turn nor smile nor sigh but wait it out, unmoving. “I get preoccupied,” she told him. “I get—what would you call it?—lost.”

In school they studied outer space and the likelihood of flying saucers, and Mr. D’Amelio, their fifth-grade teacher, said it wasn’t likely but couldn’t be ruled out. He said the Pentagon and NASA investigate these things. Mr. D’Amelio wore a suit and matching vest and bow tie and had an artificial leg; he walked with a queer rolling gait and had been shot in Korea. So when his mother stood that way David wondered if a flying saucer or a group of extraterrestrials was visiting, their space stations visible to her but not to him, and he asked if she saw Martians out the window, on the lawn.

“Of course not,” Alice told him. “It isn’t like that, darling.”

“It’s what Mr. D’Amelio tells us,” he said. “It’s what everybody talks about—a bright light out the window and feeling peaceful, not scared.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV. There’s no space capsule in Saratoga. Or not on our lawn, anyway. I’m just being quiet, David.”

Then, later, when he attended Williams and took a course in abnormal psychology and learned about manic-depression he thought perhaps that
this
was what his mother suffered from. And when he read of epilepsy and narcolepsy and seizure disorders—petit and grand mal—he thought perhaps she had a case of narcolepsy or something neurological, some condition a doctor could fix. He wrote a paper about it—not being personal, of course, not naming names but remembering the way his mother would go blank, then shrug herself free like a dog from a dream—and got an A from the teacher and the handwritten comment: “Fine insights. Extremely GOOD work!”

This afternoon in the funeral home he’d looked at her glazed stare again—the mortician had discovered it somehow, pasting it back on Alice’s face—and it reminded him of absence, how absent her presence had been. Staring unseeing at the sink or floor she went, as she put it, away.

When his sisters came home for Thanksgiving, however, things changed; the house would grow noisy and busy, and the phone would ring. Then Alice made squash and creamed onions and corn and chestnut purée and baked three kinds of pie: apple, pumpkin, mince. There would be cider and wine. She would make yams and mashed potatoes, since Joanna preferred mashed potatoes, and there would be peas and cranberry relish and complicated stuffing and a turkey she had ordered from Pederson’s farm at the intersection of Route 372 and 29. The day before Thanksgiving, always, they drove together to the turkey farm, and David can remember standing in the barn mud while his mother chatted gaily with the farmer’s wife, not bothering to brush away flies but admiring the fresh-killed bird. Then Mrs. Pederson would weigh the turkey, bag it, and his mother—usually so fastidious, so prim in her pantsuit and heels—would pay and say, “Thanks a million. See you soon,” and get into the driver’s seat and not buckle up. “She’s a beaut,” Mrs. Pederson said.

It was his job to carve. David would whet the knife edge carefully, then remove the legs and second joints, and then slice white meat and dark. This was his business, said Alice, because it’s a job for the man of the house; always put white meat on
this
platter, darling, and the dark meat and wings and the giblets on this. His sisters were part of the cooking team too, and everyone helped in the kitchen, but he had been responsible for knives and proud of how he sharpened them; he tested the edge of the knife blade along his wrist and thumb. That was the way to do it, and he had learned by watching: you whet the knife on the sharpening stone and turn your wrist just so . . .

By the time he had turned nine years old, he was the man of the house; both his father and his grandfather were dead. Dimly he remembers his grandfather Aaron, sitting in the easy chair and saying, yes, that’s right, and talking about Roosevelt and the Washington Baths and the war in Vietnam. Aaron died at ninety-two, almost entirely deaf and blind in his right eye; he was proud of his eyesight, however, and liked to supervise.

“I’m only halfway blind,” he declared. “My doctor tells me I could get a driver’s license. If I wanted to.”

He wore horn-rimmed glasses and squinted and talked but did not listen; he liked to say the proof of God—not the white-haired white-bearded old man they talk about in Sunday school, but a principle of divinity, the idea that makes me pious—is how the willow and the chestnut tree can live together, side by side, and never once in nature will you find a chestnut on a willow tree. That’s the kind of pattern only God Himself could have created, the divine presence everywhere, boy.

His mother’s father, Aaron Freedman, lived two streets away. He had been much older than her mother, and when Alice married he was in his seventies, a widower, and it was time for a change. The cottage had belonged to him, but he gave it to his daughter as a wedding present and moved into an apartment complex and then a retirement home. You and George take the cottage, he said, and I myself will live around the corner and go to Florida in wintertime and not have to worry anymore about the gutters or the furnace or the lawn . . .

In the beginning, David understood, his grandfather did go to Sarasota, spending winters down in Florida and coming back to Saratoga Springs in April. From Sarasota to Saratoga, he would say, the best of both possible worlds. But then his grandfather had had a stroke and lost the use of his right arm and after he turned eighty could no longer travel south. Then Aaron moved into a managed facility—a half-timbered summerhouse that had been renovated for the purpose and divided into single rooms, with a glassed-in wraparound porch. Every morning Alice telephoned and went to take him shopping, or Aaron came to visit, wheeling up the driveway, or in fine weather in the spring and summer walking with his cane.

Betty Livingston, who worked at the home, would call him always, only, Mr. Freedman; if he was tired she would wheel him to the cottage in the wheelchair, and stop and take a cup of tea, and tell Alice how her father had been doing fine, he was such a good-humored person and not one to complain. Not like some of the others, I tell you, she said; he’s got a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Freedman does, and enjoys his chocolate bars. I only hope I’ll be in anything like that good shape when
I’m
ninety-two, I only hope I can be
halfway
as hopeful by then. His grandfather’s shape did not look good to David, however, all bent over and hunched and slow and with teeth he kept adjusting. When Aaron said I’d like another piece of chocolate and perhaps a glass of wine to keep you company, Betty Livingston complied. Then he would sit and rock and hum and speculate upon the nature of the universe, that cloud formation there, he’d say, that color red in the westering sky. This pattern is not accidental; it makes me feel pious, he said.

Many years later, when Aaron was dead, he had asked his mother what her father had been like to live with when she herself was a child. There was a time, said Alice, when piety was not his thing and he would rage and rage and had a terrible temper. The stroke fixed that, she said, it gentled him, it made him seem, well, not a different person entirely, but calmer, it drained all the bitterness off. What bitterness, David had asked her, what did he have to feel bitter about, but his mother did not answer and went, as she put it, away.

In bed Claire tries to sleep. Sleep will not come to her, however, or at least not easily; she lies on her back and stares at the ceiling, then turns to her left side. She hears her brother in the room beside her, breathing. Her sister stays downstairs. She has been watching their old interplay with—what? she asks herself—disapproval? envy? the sense that all Joanna needs in order to be happy is some male someone in the room . . .

Claire rubs at her back with her fist. Then she rolls to her right side instead. She considers the next morning’s schedule, the things she has accomplished and what she has not yet accomplished; she walks, in her mind’s eye, through each of the rooms of the cottage—from storm cellar to the attic eaves—and divides up the linens, the wedding china and pictures and the cutlery and rugs. There’s little she chooses to choose. She does want the picture of Heidi on a hillside, sitting with her dog and sheep—but only for its sentimental value, only because it has been here since her childhood and she’d stared at it for years.

It hangs above her bed. There are snow-covered mountains, and clouds. A waterfall spews from a rock. The picture is not black but brown, and Claire wonders if it always was intended to be brown or if the canvas yellowed over time. She counts the sheep: five, six. The gilt of the frame has worn thin. This home that once contained them all seems, tenantless, much smaller now, and she cannot fail to notice how shabby the curtains and furniture look, how her mother’s collection of porcelain cats has lost its childhood sheen. There are wooden cats also, and glass and ceramic and metal cats no bigger than Claire’s thumbnail, and two brightly colored papier-mâché cats perched life-size by the fireplace. Idly now she wonders if she should carry a pair of statuettes back on the plane for Becky and Hannah, and what to wrap them in . . .

She can remember how, when young, she’d spent long afternoons absorbed in setting out these animals, arranging, rearranging them so that the Siamese and tortoiseshell and black and long-haired cats belonged together in cat-families and perched or sat or lay down together on separate shelves, how she made parties and dances of cats and gave them each separate names. A memory assails her of Joanna knocking down a shelf: careless Joanna with her ribbon-wrapped baton. She’d been practicing cheerleader routines and twirling and doing the split and dropping and catching the aluminum stick until she knocked over the shelf. Claire still can see her sister, jumping and prancing and shouting, “Go,
Go!
” and still can hear the breakage, the clattering wreck of the porcelain cats and how the glass shattered. “Oh shit,” said Joanna, “shit, shit.”

It has been this way, always: the china shop that she herself built carefully, so conscientiously, and then her sister-bull. They have been in opposition from the start. If one of them would nod the other one would shake her head; if one of them said
yes
the other would say
no.
When one of them chose white the other wanted black; when one of them could eat no fat the other ate no lean. You two, their mother used to say, you lick the platter clean . . .

Claire yawns. She has spent the day arranging things, making telephone calls and to-do lists, confirming the appointment for tomorrow at the lawyer’s office and calling the 800 number for the
New York Times
to complain about last Sunday’s paper in its blue wrapper in the bushes and to make certain delivery has been canceled and calling home to say she’s fine and calling the insurance agency and bank and post office and the
Washington County Post
and the
Daily Saratogian
to place obituary notices and writing a check to the hospice and one for Gretchen Adams and starting a log of expenses incurred and what the others owe. By lunchtime she had been hungry and took a piece of moldy cheddar from the fruit bin and toasted a piece of frozen bread and boiled a can of chicken noodle soup. She began an inventory of the household objects, room by room, but after an hour gave it up as hopeless or at least as something she could wait for her brother and sister to help with when finally they came. At least they arrived for the funeral home, at least she didn’t have to deal with
that
alone and identify the body by herself and smile at that awful Bill Becker. She will ask for the picture of Heidi and sheep, then let the others take a turn, and they will go from room to room and draw straws and divide . . .

Now, counting sheep above her on the hillside in the painting, she recollects a joke about a king who calls a mathematician to court and asks, how many sheep are grazing in that pasture there, and the man takes a quick look and says, Your Highness, two hundred forty-three. That’s remarkable, the king avers (having ordered a head count previously); how ever did you know? It’s easy, the wizard answers; I count the legs and divide them by four.

Once she had a boyfriend called Tommy—this was at Colgate, before she met Jim—who dreamed of doing what he called “stand-up.” That had been one of his jokes. He practiced in front of the mirror and then in front of Claire, making her watch. “Be my audience,” he liked to say. “Pretend you’re two hundred people, OK?”