Earthly Possessions (8 page)

“I don’t know, Mama.”

“Do you think he felt
he
had settled?”

“Of course not, Mama.”

“He said it, all the time. ‘Oh, why am I stuck in this
life,’
he said, and then I said, ‘Go, go, who asked you to stay? Go someplace else if you don’t like it here. Marry some floozy,’ I told him; but he would just look at me from under his eyebrows and not say another word. ‘I’ll find you a bride
myself!’
I said. Yet it would have killed me, Charlotte. Isn’t that comical? Laugh. He had the softest, saddest expression. He had this way of tipping his head when he listened to people. Oh, Charlotte, was he happy at all, do you think?”

“Of course he was, Mama,” I said, and then I would have to leave, I just had to. I would go to the studio where my father’s photographs still averted their eyes and his dented metal sign still swung outside the window:
AMES STUDIOS. FINE PORTRAITS
. Sometimes people came and rang at the outer entrance and I would let them in, for lack of anything better to do. I would take whatever pictures they asked. “Could you do my poodle? He’s old and we want a memento in case he passes on.” I could feel my father wince. But I won’t say it really bothered me and, besides, we needed the money.

We made barely enough to keep us fed, that winter. Uncle Gerard slipped us ten-dollar bills from time to time but that just paid for Mama’s blood pressure medicine. Finally in desperation I put up a
ROOMS TO LET
sign, and a factory watchman named Mr. Robb took the east front bedroom. He didn’t like it much, though. He said we kept the house too cold, and he moved out three weeks later. The sign just gathered dust. I
tried a little harder in the studio and asked all customers if they would tell their friends about us, but that didn’t help. I think the sight of Mama put them off. She had this way of wandering in sometimes, halfway through a sitting—pulling herself along by clutching at pieces of furniture. I could tell when she was coming by the sudden startled look on a customer’s face. “It’s amazing,” she would say in the doorway, “how every corner of the world agrees simultaneously that someone’s dead. Don’t you think so? I mean if a man dies in one room then his meal in another room goes untouched; he doesn’t show up for his doctor appointment; the photos he was sorting just stay in a heap. There’s never a slip-up; the world has everything so well arranged.”

“My mother,” I would tell the customer. “Look a little toward the light, please.”

“But then I never did place much faith in physical things,” said my mother. “Oftentimes I’ve set a cup down and left it somewhere, and been surprised to see it there two weeks later. You would think just once there’d be a lapse of some kind; the cup would forget and be back on the shelf when I looked at it again. Or gravity: you’d think you could take gravity by surprise, just once, and set a tray very suddenly on air and have it stay. Wouldn’t you?”

The customer would clear his throat.

“I see now I didn’t give the world enough credit,” my mother said, and then she wandered out again.

On certain evil days I had thoughts of running away, but of course I never did.

One afternoon in late March, the front bell rang and I opened the door to a very tall soldier with his cap in his hand. He had straight black hair and that sealed kind of face that keeps its own counsel. An Emory face. Only I wasn’t sure which one. I said, “Amos?”

“Saul,” he told me.

“Saul!”

“Hello, Charlotte.”

He didn’t smile. (Emorys seldom do; they just look peaceful.) “I saw your sign,” he said. “I came to town to settle the property and I wondered if I could room and board with you till I get it taken care of.”

“Of course,” I said. “We’d be glad to have you.”

“I hear you’ve had some trouble this winter.”

“Well, some,” I said.

Saul only nodded. The Emorys were used to trouble; they didn’t have to make a big to-do about it.

The way we knew the Emorys was this: the mother, Alberta, was a woman who kept no secrets. She would tell her business to anyone, even us. She would bring us a pie or a bowl of fresh berries and stand half the morning in our kitchen doorway, talking on and on in her lush soft voice. Discussing her husband, Edwin Emory the radio repairman, who drank far more than he worked. And her four strapping sons: Amos, Saul, Linus, and Julian. Julian was my age; the others were older. The men in that family were wicked and mysterious, but thanks to Alberta we always knew what they were up to. Amos kept running away; Saul got in trouble with girls a lot. Linus was subject to unexplainable rages and Julian had a tendency to gamble. I don’t believe there was a day in their lives that something complicated wasn’t happening to them.

This Alberta was a gypsyish type, beautiful in certain lights and carelessly dressed, slouchy, surprisingly young. In the summer she often went barefoot. Needless to say, I loved her. I hung on everything she told me: “Then what? Then what?” I wished she would adopt me. I longed for her teeming house and remarkable troubles. For on Alberta, troubles sat like riches. “Look,” she seemed to be saying, “at how important my life is. See how I’ve been blessed with eventfulness?” And she would lift her warm brown hands, spilling wealth.

“She’s got no common sense, that woman,” my mother said.

I think what Mama meant was, sense to realize when she was badly off. Mama might have liked her better if Alberta would only come crying sometime. But Alberta never cried. She told her news between breaths of laughter: scandals, disasters, miracles, mysteries. Someone broke into the radio shop and wiped it out, left a note behind: “Sorry for the inconvenience.” In Julian’s handwriting. Her father-in-law arrived on the doorstep with all his worldly goods, sixty years’ worth of clippings and old theatrical costumes, and since there were no extra bedrooms he slept in the dining room surrounded by fake ermine mantles, military uniforms, swords and crowns and boxes of hats. At any hour of the day or night he would call to her for health food snacks.

“That house ought to be boarded up and condemned,” my mother said.

The winter of my junior year in high school, Alberta eloped with her father-in-law.

Well, it wasn’t exactly your everyday occurrence. Edwin Emory staggered around looking stunned, but no more stunned than I was. I couldn’t understand why she’d left them that way. (Left
me.)
I had thought she was so happy. But then, I also used to think that barbershop quartets on the radio were one man with a hoarse voice. What I mean to say is, I was easily fooled by appearances. Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them. Maybe Alberta was secretly as sad as my mother. Or maybe, as Mama said, “That woman just wanted to be envied for everything, even her scruffy old father-in-law.” I never had looked at it that way before.

For a while I brought the Emorys cookies and casseroles, but I never got much response. Their house sank in on itself and went silent. Edwin sat around drinking muscatel wine in
his thermal underwear while Linus tried to run the shop. (Saul and Amos had left home years ago.) But mechanical things were depressing to Linus, and he had some kind of nervous breakdown and was sent to live with an aunt. Then Julian dropped out of school. He had a fight about a gambling debt and wasn’t heard from again. And last of all, Edwin left. We didn’t know exactly when, or for where. He just wasn’t around any more. One day I chanced to look out the window and see a stranger boarding up the Emory house, just as Mama had always said they should. And that was the end of that.

Or seemed to be, till Saul came home. Saul wore a uniform so crisp it looked metallic; he stood in a room as if planted there. It was clear the Emorys hadn’t dwindled away to nothing just because I had lost sight of them. Though he couldn’t say exactly where a couple of his brothers were, he knew they were all alive—even Julian. And Alberta and her father-in-law were someplace in California, or had been as of last Christmas; not that Saul cared. Only Edwin was gone forever. He’d died of liver trouble while visiting his sister in New Jersey. Now Amoco was going to buy the house and tear it down for a filling station, beat out Texaco, and Saul was here to settle the sale and put the money into back taxes. He wanted to sell the radio shop as well. He would take the first offer, sign the papers, and go, he said. He’d just got out of the Army, had a life to start. He couldn’t afford to spend much time on this.

But he did. The settling of the house took longer than he’d expected—you
know
how complicated just the title search could get, with Emorys—and then a broken-down radio shop is not all that much in demand. He stayed on through March, April. I was glad. With Saul around, life seemed more definite. We had to get on a schedule, give him his meals at predictable hours. Also, he was good at fixing things and he made repairs we’d been needing for years. In the evenings, he watched TV with me and Mama (who wouldn’t say boo to him, in spite of his careful manners) or he took me out. We went to movies, or
restaurants, or the B & B Soda Shop. He acted like a brother, never so much as held my hand, but there was a measuring look in his eyes. I didn’t know what he was waiting for. At the end of an evening I would climb to my bedroom, and there in the mirror was this college-age girl in a sweater and skirt—not a sullen old spinster after all.

Well, of course I fell in love with him. How could I avoid it? With that serene, pure face of his, those heavy-lidded eyes. It hit me for maybe the first time in my life that someone could have a whole world inside his head that I would never guess at. I was desperate to know what he thought about things. What was it like to have a family like his, a mother like Alberta? How did he feel passing his house now, with the shutters sagging off their hinges? He never said. I couldn’t ask. Every time I saw him I
wanted
to ask, but I had such a sense of his separateness that it didn’t seem possible. We stayed locked in this friendly small talk about mortgage assumptions and leaky faucets. The real conversation was carried on in silence: he helped me into my sweater as if wrapping a breakable gift. He somehow knew to lift my hair and settle it over my collar in just the right way. And I threw out three bowls of batter, trying to make Alberta’s buckwheat pancakes. Even my mother took part in this conversation, for when we were all together now she grew stiff and still. She sent us little rodenty glances. The three of us were strung on elastic, and not a person could move without joggling the others.

Then one night in April we were coming home from a movie, Lana Turner in something or other. We happened to walk past his father’s radio shop. A narrow, dismal wooden place set between a sandwich joint and a shoe repair, vacant all this time, black as a toothless mouth. I could have cried just looking at it, so how must Saul have felt? I reached out and touched his arm, and instantly he stopped and took hold of my hand and looked down at me. “Listen,” he said.

He scared me. I thought he was mad that I had touched
him; I’d upset the balance, some way. But what he said was, “You know I don’t have a job yet, Charlotte.”

I said, “Job?”

“And I don’t seem to have any interests. I don’t know what I’m going to do in life. So I’m waiting to see what just
lands
, but so far nothing has.”

I couldn’t tell what he was getting at. I said, “Um—”

“It’s you and me I’m talking about, Charlotte.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I feel I have to have some kind of a future before I can say anything to you.”

I still didn’t understand. It seemed like an excuse, to tell the truth. I was used to high school dates, where the future had no bearing whatsoever. “Well,” I said, “is that all you’re waiting for? I like you better without a future.”

But I might as well not have spoken, because his face stayed troubled the rest of the walk home. Though he did keep hold of my hand, and on our front porch he kissed me—but only once, and very gravely, like somebody much, much older than me. Which he was, in a way. I was so young! I didn’t think ahead at all. I only thought how strange it felt to touch surfaces like this, from behind our two private selves. I could have stood there all night with my head against his woolen shoulder. It was Saul who finally said we should go in.

My mother started condensing somehow, shrinking and drying. She was scared. I saw how she watched Saul with her bright, webbed eyes. The kinder he was to her, the more carefully she watched him. When he asked her a question it took her a long time to answer; she had to rise up through so many layers of fear. At night, when I helped her into bed, she clutched my wrist hard and peered into my face and moved her lips but said nothing. Then I would go downstairs and Saul would grip that very same wrist and draw me toward him. For a second I always felt confused and panicky. “What is it?” he would ask me, but I never told.

I kept trying to understand him. It wasn’t easy. He lacked the recklessness that I had expected of him—had hoped of him, even. If anything, he was too serious. (When I was in high school, they always told you to look for a sense of humor.) He treated me in a stern, unsmiling way that made me shy. Also, I couldn’t figure out this job business. It seemed he was waiting for his life’s work to be issued like a fate. Really, he was so trustful. “Maybe you ought to just set out and seek your fortune,” I said, only half joking. “That’s what I would do. Oh, I’d love to go with you! Take off tomorrow, travel anywhere.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “Leave your mother? At this point in her life?”

I don’t know how a man like that could have been a son of Alberta’s.

In May, he bought me an engagement ring. He took it out of his pocket one night when the three of us were eating supper—a little diamond. I hadn’t known anything about it. I just stared at him when he slipped it on my finger.

“I thought it was time,” he told me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ames,” he said. “I can’t wait any longer, I want to marry her.”

Mama said, “But I—”

“It won’t be right away,” he said. “I’m not taking her off tomorrow. I don’t even know what my work will be yet. We’ll stay here as long as you need us, believe me. I promise you.”