The Stories of Richard Bausch (59 page)

Her sisters were talking about how at one time or another each of them had felt as though Edith were shutting the others out to concentrate on her alone. It had been almost like a competition. “Well,” Allison said “maybe it’s because I’m the oldest, but even when she was being impossible and I was mad at her I liked being with her.”

“I used to like talking to her about you guys,” Ellen said.

“Me, too.”

“God, don’t use the past tense about her,” Carol said, too loudly. The panic had worked its way inside her bones, it seemed. Her own hands looked too white to her.

“I know we seem hard,” Allison said. “But I’m thinking of our mother, too. I know what she’d want. And she doesn’t want to be seen wandering the streets like a bag lady.”

“You know what happened this summer?” Carol said, feeling vaguely petulant. “She called me Dee, and she told me she thought she’d failed with us.”

“Are you all right?” Ellen said.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I guess she did fail with us,” said Allison.

The others waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t, Ellen said, “I’ve got four of them I’m failing with.”

“At least you
have
children,” said Allison. “Would you like two of mine?”

Allison shrugged this off. “All right,” she said. “We can go on record and say that it was all my idea. But I’m for choosing a place today.”

“Not a hospice, though,” Carol said.

“Carol,” said Allison, suddenly. “Do you really think you could do it—you know, take over?”

They both looked at her. “Oh,” she said, the dampness moving under her skin. “I—no. It’s—you’re right about it. It’s impossible.”

“All right, listen,” Ellen said. “We have to do this together. We have to agree on it, and we have to find a place, and look at it and everything together. That’s the only way.” She bit into her sandwich and sat there chewing, looking almost satisfied, as though everything were accomplished. But then her expression changed. “It sounds like we’re planning a murder, doesn’t it?”

They were both looking at Carol. “Listen,” she said. “I know I suggested it. But I can’t take her. It’s impossible, okay?”

“Calm down. No one expects you to do anything of the kind.”

She found that she couldn’t look at them. She stirred the coffee she hadn’t drunk and tried not to think of Edith among strangers.

“When Mom arrived here this time,” said Allison, “she gave me a blouse. I think it was the one I bought for you, Carol. Two Christmases ago.
It was all wrapped up, and she’d sprayed something on it, some fragrance or other that I didn’t recognize. But it was the same blouse.” Her voice broke.

“I have a cake mold that belongs to somebody,” Ellen said.

Carol excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. She had to ask the hostess where it was—down a flight of stairs, past a row of closed utility doors and a wall telephone. The rest room itself was small, windowless, with a single mirror over the sink. The light was bad, and the flower design in the wallpaper had faded to the same brown shade. She stood in that closetlike space and was quiet, and then she cried into her hands. It all came over her like a fit, and she’d been wrong about everything. How badly she feared that her life might change. In her own eyes now she was what she was: someone clinging to small comfort, wary of the slightest tremor. She washed her face, fixed her mascara. It was a matter of facing up to realities. Certainly it was a matter of practical truth. Yet she felt trapped. As she left the rest room, she saw her own image in the wall mirror across the corridor, and it was like Edith’s. Something in the smudges on the glass had given her face a darker, older look. Climbing the stairs, she thought of her mother spiriting objects from one house to another, and something occurred to her that seemed suddenly so right it stopped her: what if, all those years the sisters had looked with tolerance and with humor upon Edith’s pilferage—talking of it as an attempt to force some sort of equal share of everything—what if it had been instead a kind of web her mother had meant to spin around and between them as a way to bind them together, even as she slipped away.

How awful to be so alone!

She reached the top of the stairs, shivering. Her sisters were waiting for her in the dim little corner beyond, and as she approached them she had a bad moment, like heartbreak, of seeing herself elsewhere, going through things her mother had wanted her to have from their houses; in her mind it was decades from now, a place far away, past the fear of madness and the dread of empty rooms—and she was an old woman, a thin, reedy presence with nervous hands rummaging in a box of belongings, unable quite to tell what was actually hers and what wasn’t, what had been given and what received, with what words and by whom, and when.

It’s exactly twenty
minutes to midnight, on this the eve of my seventieth birthday, and I’ve decided to address you, for a change, in writing—odd as that might seem. I’m perfectly aware of how many years we’ve been together, even if I haven’t been very good about remembering to commemorate certain dates, certain days of the year. I’m also perfectly aware of how you’re going to take the fact that I’m doing this at all, so late at night, with everybody due to arrive tomorrow, and the house still unready. I haven’t spent almost five decades with you without learning a few things about you that I can predict and describe with some accuracy, though I admit that, as you put it, lately we’ve been more like strangers than husband and wife. Well, so if we are like strangers, perhaps there are some things I can tell you that you won’t have already figured out about the way I feel.

Tonight, we had another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument (remember?) over pepper. We had been bickering all day, really, but at dinner I put pepper on my potatoes and you said that about how I shouldn’t have pepper because it always upsets my stomach. I bothered to remark that
I used to eat chili peppers for breakfast and if I wanted to put plain old ordinary black pepper on my potatoes, as I had been doing for more than sixty years, that was my privilege. Writing this now, it sounds far more testy than I meant it, but that isn’t really the point.

In any case, you chose to overlook my tone. You simply said, “John, you were up all night the last time you had pepper with your dinner.”

I said, “I was up all night because I ate green peppers. Not black pepper, but green peppers.”

“A pepper is a pepper, isn’t it?” you said. And then I started in on you. I got, as you call it, legal with you—pointing out that green peppers are not black pepper—and from there we moved on to an evening of mutual disregard for each other that ended with your decision to go to bed early. The grandchildren will make you tired, and there’s still the house to do; you had every reason to want to get some rest, and yet I felt that you were also making a point of getting yourself out of proximity with me, leaving me to my displeasure, with another ridiculous argument settling between us like a fog.

So, after you went to bed, I got out the whiskey and started pouring drinks, and I had every intention of putting myself into a stupor. It was almost my birthday, after all, and—forgive this, it’s the way I felt at the time—you had nagged me into an argument and then gone off to bed; the day had ended as so many of our days end now, and I felt, well, entitled. I had a few drinks, without any appreciable effect (though you might well see this letter as firm evidence to the contrary), and then I decided to do something to shake you up. I would leave. I’d make a lot of noise going out the door; I’d take a walk around the neighborhood and make you wonder where I could be. Perhaps I’d go check into a motel for the night. The thought even crossed my mind that I might leave you altogether. I admit that I entertained the thought, Marie. I saw our life together now as the day-to-day round of petty quarreling and tension that it’s mostly been over the past couple of years or so, and I wanted out as sincerely as I ever wanted anything.

My God, I wanted an end to it, and I got up from my seat in front of the television and walked back down the hall to the entrance of our room to look at you. I suppose I hoped you’d still be awake so I could tell you of this momentous decision I felt I’d reached. And maybe you were awake: one of our oldest areas of contention being the noise I make—the feather-thin membrane of your sleep that I am always disturbing with my restlessness in
the nights. All right. Assuming you were asleep and don’t know that I stood in the doorway of our room, I will say that I stood there for perhaps five minutes, looking at you in the half-dark, the shape of your body under the blanket—you really did look like one of the girls when they were little and I used to stand in the doorway of their rooms; your illness last year made you so small again—and, as I said, I thought I had decided to leave you, for your peace as well as mine. I know you have gone to sleep crying, Marie. I know you’ve felt sorry about things and wished we could find some way to stop irritating each other so much.

Well, of course I didn’t go anywhere. I came back to this room and drank more of the whiskey and watched television. It was like all the other nights. The shows came on and ended, and the whiskey began to wear off. There was a little rain shower. I had a moment of the shock of knowing I was seventy. After the rain ended, I did go outside for a few minutes. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house. The kids, with their kids, were on the road somewhere between their homes and here. I walked up to the end of the block and back, and a pleasant breeze blew and shook the drops out of the trees. My stomach was bothering me some, and maybe it was the pepper I’d put on my potatoes. It could just as well have been the whiskey. Anyway, as I came back to the house, I began to have the eerie feeling that I had reached the last night of my life. There was this small discomfort in my stomach, and no other physical pang or pain, and I am used to the small ills and side effects of my way of eating and drinking; yet I felt the sense of the end of things more strongly than I can describe. When I stood in the entrance of our room and looked at you again, wondering if I would make it through to the morning, I suddenly found myself trying to think what I would say to you if indeed this
were
the last time I would ever be able to speak to you. And I began to know I would write you this letter.

At least words in a letter aren’t blurred by tone of voice, by the old aggravating sound of me talking to you. I began with this and with the idea that, after months of thinking about it, I would at last try to say something to you that wasn’t colored by our disaffections. What I have to tell you must be explained in a rather roundabout way.

I’ve been thinking about my cousin Louise and her husband. When he died and she stayed with us last summer, something brought back to me what is really only the memory of a moment; yet it reached me, that moment,
across more than fifty years. As you know, Louise is nine years older than I, and more like an older sister than a cousin. I must have told you at one time or another that I spent some weeks with her, back in 1933, when she was first married. The memory I’m talking about comes from that time, and what I have decided I have to tell you comes from that memory.

Father had been dead four years. We were all used to the fact that times were hard and that there was no man in the house, though I suppose I filled that role in some titular way. In any case, when Mother became ill there was the problem of us, her children. Though I was the oldest, I wasn’t old enough to stay in the house alone, or to nurse her, either. My grandfather came up with the solution—and everybody went along with it—that I would go to Louise’s for a time, and the two girls would go to stay with Grandfather. You’ll remember that people did pretty much what that old man wanted them to do.

So we closed up the house, and I got on a train to Virginia. I was a few weeks shy of fourteen years old. I remember that I was not able to believe that anything truly bad would come of Mother’s pleurisy, and was consequently glad of the opportunity it afforded me to travel the hundred miles south to Charlottesville, where cousin Louise had moved with her new husband only a month earlier, after her wedding. Because
we
traveled so much at the beginning, you never got to really know Charles when he was young—in 1933 he was a very tall, imposing fellow, with bright red hair and a graceful way of moving that always made me think of athletics, contests of skill. He had worked at the Navy Yard in Washington, and had been laid off in the first months of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Louise was teaching in a day school in Charlottesville so they could make ends meet, and Charles was spending most of his time looking for work and fixing up the house. I had only met Charles once or twice before the wedding, but already I admired him and wanted to emulate him. The prospect of spending time in his house, of perhaps going fishing with him in the small streams of central Virginia, was all I thought about on the way down. And I remember that we did go fishing one weekend, that I would end up spending a lot of time with Charles, helping to paint the house and to run water lines under it for indoor plumbing. Oh, I had time with Louise, too—listening to her read from the books she wanted me to be interested in, walking with her around Charlottesville in the evenings and looking at the city as it was then. Or sitting on her small porch
and talking about the family, Mother’s stubborn illness, the children Louise saw every day at school. But what I want to tell you has to do with the very first day I was there.