The year She Fell (5 page)

She shook her head, smiling. “Whatever you say, Ellen, but I don’t know that I need help. You are, after all, trained to look for the best in people, which is praiseworthy, but not a great aid in looking for household help.”

I was almost forty, deep into my second profession, and she persisted in thinking I was unworldly. It had never annoyed me as much as today, when I was sleep-deprived and preoccupied. After all, I’d lived all over the world, and she’d lived only in one town in
West Virginia
. I snapped, “I’ve looked for household help in six countries so far, including three where the national sport is ripping off your employers. I’m not in the least naïve about human nature.”

With a level look, she said, “But Merilee, you trust. That doesn’t indicate much discernment, unfortunately.”

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Mother wasn’t just being her usual patronizing self, that there was something wrong. So I said only, “I’ll tell you what I think of the candidates.”

After that confrontation, the actual meetings in the front parlor with the two housekeeper wannabes were something of an anticlimax. They were both clearly unsuitable—in fact, that’s what my mother called each afterwards. “Clearly unsuitable.” The first was too old and arthritic to manage dusting, much less vacuuming. Probably none of her previous employer had paid social security taxes for her, so here she was, older than my mother and twice as infirm, wanting to clean her house. I wanted to go after her and give her a list of social services—but I was a daughter here, not a minister.

The second was a middle-aged woman whose dark eyes were rimmed with red. She used to work in the mines, she whispered in a tubercularly hoarse voice. “But I’m good at cleaning,” she promised, before she was seized by a fit of coughing.

Mother rose, the grand and compassionate lady. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Price. I’ll call if I decide I need another interview with you.”

The woman glanced up at the name, but then only said her thanks in a subdued voice and departed.

As the door closed behind her, I said, “You called her Mrs. Price.”

Mother glanced down at the application she was holding. “I did not. I called her Mrs. Peterson.”

I was going to have to start taping our conversations. “It’s an understandable mistake. She obviously had a touch of black lung, like Mr. Price. And she’s a housekeeper like Mrs. Price.”

“I called her Mrs. Peterson. I would never call her Mrs. Price.”

And Mother crumpled the application into a ball, dropped it into the grate, and stalked out.

Gathering my courage, I followed her into the kitchen. “Perhaps just a quick checkup would be in order, Mother. Dr. Weaver could—”

“Dr. Weaver?” She shoved the faucet on with a harsh motion and watched as the sink started to fill. “He was probably the one who put Merilee up to her theft. I wouldn’t doubt it. She’s gone over to work for him now.”

I swallowed a sigh. I wasn’t uncertain any longer. Something was wrong when both our long-time housekeeper and our family doctor were suddenly objects of suspicion. And the Mrs. Price mistake—“There are other doctors in town. Just a checkup.”

“I had a checkup last November. I was fine. And I’m fine now.”

She jammed off the faucet and turned to face me. Just like that the anger flowed out of her face, and she said, “Now what did you think of President Urich? A well-spoken man, don’t you think? I don’t know if you remember him from his earlier teaching appointment here, but we were lucky that he came back to be president. And he’s so appreciative of the house. And the garden! He was head of the botany department at a college in
Maryland
, you know, and he gave me several organic solutions to the slug problem.”

She chatted, in her steely brook-no-interruption way, about slugs and aphids and other pests, and then announced she had weeding to do.

I gave up, but only for the moment. Retreating to the dark study—there was no phone line in my 70’s-era bedroom—I hooked up my laptop. How bad was it, I asked myself as I plugged in the modem cord. Just a slip of the tongue.

But it was this particular slip that worried me.

Mrs. Price had been our housekeeper before Merilee, indeed, for much of my childhood, until around the time my father died. And . . . well, she was Theresa’s mother. Birthmother, that is. When she and her husband moved out of town—he had black lung disease, we were told, and couldn’t breathe here in the mountains—they left Theresa with us, and Mother adopted her. It had always been the most awkward of subjects around the house, because Theresa had been, for the first six years of her life, the housekeeper’s daughter, and only after that our sister. We were all careful not to remind her of that earlier status or suggest that she hadn’t always been one of us. At least I was. I didn’t know about Laura, my younger sister, who always seemed to resent Theresa’s arrival.

No, in ordinary circumstances, Mother wouldn’t mention Mrs. Price. All the more reason to believe something was wrong. And it was my duty to try and help her, even if she didn’t want help.

I dreaded this. It was hard enough helping my mother when she asked for help.

I’d never quite gotten used to being the eldest. Second children, the psychologists say, mold their identities around what the older sibling isn’t, and I was certainly evidence of that. Cathy, almost four years older, was the leader. I was the one who followed, making meek little suggestions whenever I could. I was quiet where Cathy was outgoing, conscientious where she was adventurous. And while I was definitely “the responsible one,” all through our childhood I deferred to her when it was time to make a decision. She was positive and decisive and always knew what to do, and so even if it wasn’t the decision I would have made, I usually went along.

Now I was the eldest, and I had to be decisive. I had to think like Cathy.

But a few minutes of thinking like Cathy made me very nervous. I couldn’t stride into Mother’s room and insist that she listen to me and obey me. Cathy could do that, but I was, alas, still myself, certain that direct confrontation led to direct destruction.

And I decided that I wasn’t going to make this decision or take this action without my remaining sisters sharing the heat.

So I wrote a long email about Mother’s condition and her refusal to go to the doctor, stressing the seriousness of it all, and, in an aside, mentioning the college president and his apparent interest in the estate we’d had every expectation of inheriting, and cc’ed the whole tome to Laura and Theresa.

Thank God for email. No matter where Theresa had been posted, or where Laura was on location, they could pick up their email. In fact, last year Laura had been doing a film in one of the remotest places on earth,
Tonga
, and she sent me a photo attachment of her with the chubby, rattan-skirted Tongan king.

And even in her cloister outside of
Pittsburgh
, Theresa had email. Or at least the mother superior did. I presumed she’d pass on the message.

We were a rootless globetrotting set of sisters—a natural reaction, I supposed, to parents who, like Laura’s Tongan king, were rulers of their small region and uncomfortable anywhere else.

While I was at it, I called into my office and told Jill that my mother wasn’t well, and that I’d had to come home to help her. I felt guilty about this, even though it was true enough. Jill made the appropriate sympathetic noises and reminded me about the wedding on Saturday and the two services on Sunday. “Terry?” she asked delicately.

Terry was our youth minister, an energetic young man just out of seminary. He was wonderful with kids, but froze when he was in front of an adult group. “I don’t think he’s ready for primetime yet. I’ll call the presbytery and see who’s on call this weekend to fill in.”

“Chuck would be glad to do it, I’m sure.”

Jill had a carefully calibrated voice, a real asset in a church secretary. This time her tone was telling me that calling the presbytery first would offend the
Second
Church
’s former minister, Chuck, and that in turn would offend all the Seconders. And Chuck, though long retired to the golf course, was an experienced and accomplished preacher, and did a good wedding too. My only objection, and it was a selfish one, was that every week he sat in the third row and took notes on my sermons, not the gratifying notes of someone struck by my wisdom and spirituality, you understand, but notes which he’d expand on in an email that I’d receive Monday morning: I paused too long at the conclusion of the reading, and I made the same point about the prodigal son’s older brother twice, and that prop I used, the dragon beanie baby, was really a bit undignified for the later, more traditional service.

But Chuck got away with that because he knew what he was talking about, and so, reluctantly, I got his number from Jill and called him. Don’t worry, he assured me, he happened to have six new sermons in reserve, just in case, so I shouldn’t hurry back.

Oh, well, I thought as I hung up. At least the Seconders would be happy for a couple weeks. Sometimes I thought they saw me as a usurper, though I hadn’t replaced Chuck. Between his retirement, just after the church merger, and my hiring, another minister tried to meld the two congregations. He failed utterly, poor man, becoming a victim of the crossfire between the conservative congregation with more money, and the liberal one with the better building. The Seconders made a formal motion to fire him after a sermon on the Eye of the Needle, which seemed to imply rich people were less likely to impress God than the rest of His children. Two interim ministers had also been reassigned when they refused to abide by the session’s demand for prior approval of all sermon topics.

I got the permanent job because the presbytery assumed that I, with my long experience teaching children in the primary grades, would be good at curbing temper tantrums. And I took the job only with the assurance that no one would be censoring my sermon topics.

My contract didn’t exclude Chuck and his helpful emails, however.

I also dashed off a quick e-note to Sarah at her camp, just saying I was straightening out some business out of town, and she could get me by email or on my cell phone. I was trying not to be a smother-mother, an overprotective busybody, so I had confined myself to one call and two emails a week. I also allowed myself ten-minute anxiety intervals every few days, when I gave into all the mommy-worries about the disasters that could occur because I wasn’t there—the drownings and the overdoses and the unprotected encounters with boys . . . I didn’t mention any of that, just told her that my cell phone would be charged and on every minute of the day and night.

Then I sent another to Tom, telling him not where I was, only that I was safe. I didn’t want him calling me here, using that sweet Irish voice of his the way he always did whenever he remembered how well it worked with me. He could reply to my email if he had anything to say, like who that boy was, and how he came to be.

But as if I’d opened a channel in my brain, I heard Tom’s voice, soothing and easy. Maybe I was overreacting. After all, if he was telling the truth about when this happened, we weren’t married—not even going together—when this child was conceived. Was he supposed to recount for me every date he’d had those few months we were apart? Maybe Brian’s existence was as much a surprise to him as to me. Maybe he hadn’t lied to me, hadn’t concealed a material fact, hadn’t concealed himself . . .

But he had. I knew him well enough to know that while Brian’s appearance was a surprise, Brian’s existence wasn’t. Tom knew some woman somewhere had borne his baby—some woman who knew he’d married me before the baby was born, and thought it clever to name me as the mother. Or maybe it was a decision they made together, a cynical way to keep their identities hidden while still keeping that connection alive.

He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew . . . so why not admit it? Why hide it? The big secret was out.

So why not just say her name? Maybe it was true, he didn’t know it. But then how did he learn about the boy? Maybe he was trying to protect her. Maybe he thought her spouse wouldn’t be as accepting as he thought I would be.