The Uses of Enchantment (3 page)

“I work at a private girls school,” she repeated.

“Do you,” said Maxie dryly.

“That’s
odd
,” said Susan.

Silence. All three looked at Clyde, holding the baby upside down by the ankles yelling, “Adios, little moonman!”

Then:

“Terrible about the obituary,” said Susan.

Mary assumed they were referring to the headline—
DAUGHTER OF EARLY AMERICAN WITCH DIES
—she hadn’t read more than that.

“Soooooo tasteless,” said Maxie.

“Newspapers can’t pass up an opportunity for scandal,” said Susan. “Referring to her as ‘Miriam’s mother’—the
gall
of those people.”

Mary blanched.
Miriam’s mother.

“That book ruined her life,” Maxie said tonelessly.

“And such
exquisitely
bad timing for the funeral,” Susan said.

“Fourteen years to the day,” Maxie said. “Imagine the coincidence.”

Susan’s and Maxie’s skulls quivered atop their reedy necks like the tips of dowsing rods, veering toward hidden watery areas under the green-ribboned Persian. Mary noticed people checking their watches and the other guests as if searching for a silently agreed-upon cue that they’d mourned enough in their bucked-up way and were allowed to go home for dinner.

Mary faked a coughing fit and pointed at her throat with one hand while miming a drinking gesture with the other. She escaped to the punch bowl where there was no more punch, and where her fake coughing fit intensified into an actual coughing fit. Eyes watering, Mary hurried toward the kitchen for a glass of water but was stopped in the foyer by Aunt Helen. “Weegee’s tired,” Aunt Helen announced, her words punch-shirred. She’d retrieved her vase from the mantel, having transferred her sister’s ashes to the silverware drawer. After informing Mary of Paula’s new whereabouts, she grasped Mary’s wrist with a cadaverish hand.

“Mimsy,” she said. When she pronounced it like that,
Mimsy
, nasal and high-pitched, Mary was reminded of Regina’s favorite childhood goad—that her nickname was not a sweet diminutive inspired by her early-life littleness, in fact it came from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and was a hybrid concoction of
flimsy
and
miserable
.

“After all this time, darling, you really shouldn’t blame yourself,” Aunt Helen said. “Your mother got over it—I mean
yes
, for many years she thought you did it to her on purpose. But you were young and unaware that anyone existed in the world but
you
. We all knew you didn’t mean any
intentional
harm.”

Outside, Mary heard the rhythmic swell and ebb of Ye Olde Bastard’s leaf blower.

“I
mean
it,” Aunt Helen slurred. “I think we can all stop catering to Paula’s every little Paula whim now that she’s…I mean look at your father, just look at the man, he hasn’t had a whim of his own since he married her!”

If her father was a man impervious to whimsy, Mary thought, her mother could hardly be blamed. No two words less belonged in the same sentence than
whimsy
and
father
.

“Paula
did
have a talent for sucking up all the desire in the room. That’s why everybody loved her, isn’t it, because she was so commanding and grand and aristocratically needy while appearing to need nothing at all. It’s no wonder my life is floundering, it’s no wonder I never learned how to want with Paula as my older sister. But I forgive her. I mean I forgave her.”

“So you had a talk with her,” Mary said. “Before she died.”

“Talk!” Aunt Helen cast a persecuted glance toward the living room. “Can I tell you a secret?”

Mary nodded even as she wondered,
Who says no to that question? And is the result ever worth the build-up?

“Of course I loved her and forgave her all her controlling devious flaws, but Weegee knew better than anyone what a bitch she was, my darling. She pretended to love poodles but Weegee saw right through her. She was really a terrible liar, you know. Fooled absolutely no one, dear heart, except maybe you.”

Aunt Helen held a finger to her rouged lips that were red now only in the creases; she smiled and the remaining color bloomed wide and Mary, in her slightly disoriented state, was made to think of the unexpectedly bright undersides of the wings of certain birds. Aunt Helen smothered her in a ginny embrace before teetering off toward her station wagon, parked beneath one of her father’s
DO NOT PARK
fliers.

As the lingerers lingered, Mary stepped outside to smoke one of the two cigarettes she’d nicked from a guest’s overcoat and walk around the neighborhood. She received a few sympathetic waves from neighbors out with their Yorkies but was ignored by Ye Olde Bastard, reversing out of his driveway in a beige Cadillac that featured a single bumper sticker:
TAKE UMBRAGE
! The sticker referred to the 1983 town council election between Harold Clarke and Sally Umbrage, an election handily taken by Clarke after a newspaper revealed that Umbrage’s campaign was funded by a historical-amusement-park developer with his eye on West Salem’s sleepy waterfront.

TAKE UMBRAGE
!

Mary had seen this sticker hundreds of times and read nothing more than a clever campaign pun, but today, on this day, the day of her mother’s funeral, Ye Olde Bastard’s chrome bumper prickled with rebuke. She, Mary, was too accepting, too flimsy, and too miserable. A more committed sister would have appeared beseechingly weak in front of her sisters and begged for the comfort she so clearly wanted from them. A more committed daughter would have demanded to be seen by her dying mother. A more committed griever would be wracked by the injustice, she would have thrown herself atop the grave site (had there been a grave site) and howled into the dirt until the medics arrived.

TAKE UMBRAGE
!

She could not. She could not take umbrage. She was too long dull in the heart.

Because it seemed like a fitting place to go on the day of a funeral, Mary walked all the way to the West Salem Cemetery, a seven-acre square of ill-tended grass and gravel paths pocked with tombstones scorched a depressing carbon color, out of proper use since the eighteenth century but favored by teenagers as a grisly locale in which to smoke pot or drink vodka stolen from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet or read faux-Victorian pornographic novels procured in Boston by someone’s older brother. She and her friends, who used to escape to the cemetery for a between-class smoke, delighted in finding the shredded pages on the grass with sentence fragments such as “he resurrected his aching supplicant” and “languishing her rose-red nonpareil.” After entering the stone gate she found herself searching the uncut grass, the piles of crimpled leaves, the evergreen shrubs for a suggestive scrap of text from which she could extrapolate a beyond-the-grave message from her mother. She’d assumed that Mum had refused to see her in her final weeks because, in her dramatic and, yes, controlling way, she’d intended to have somebody deliver a letter to Mary after she was dead explaining why she’d refused to see her, claiming that she’d forgiven her and wishing her well and maybe—just maybe—claiming to love her despite it all. The assumption that such a letter existed had kept her from panicking when she’d called her father to inform him she was coming to see Mum, she didn’t care what Mum wanted or didn’t want, and her father had responded, tonelessly, “Not now, Mimsy.”

Thirty-eight hours later, her mother was dead.

During the cross-country flight home from West to East, as the ground beneath her turned from brown and bold to brown and flat to crimped and darkly wooded, the world felt unthreateningly alien; from this height she could let the scenery roll under her as a tourist might, without any defensiveness or fear because she did not belong to it, nor it to her. She found the most comfort in thinking that she and her mother were fellow travelers on this day; a chance existed that they could pass each other on the way to their respective new destinations. She examined the cumulus clouds, those speech bubbles of the traveling dead, for any message at all, even an insincere one benignly divorced from the events that colored her mother’s feelings toward her while alive.
Goodbye
, she imagined the clouds were saying as she fell asleep, her cheek pressed against the window.
Goodbye
.

I
t was dark by the time she returned to Rumney Marsh, all the downstairs lights, save for the kitchen light, extinguished. She sat on Ye Olde Bastard’s curb and smoked her second cigarette, trying to observe the house as a perspective buyer might, as a box of happy potential and not as the saggy-floored, rotting-silled container she saw, listing slightly toward the scrubby rear yard, bogged down to a structural breaking point by her family’s many material and emotional residues. In three days, her father would move to his golf condo. The historical society was coming with a truck to collect the auction items. Then the house would belong to her, at least until it sold. She would be its interim caretaker. She articulated her choice to live in the empty house to her quasi-boyfriend, a Beaverton cabinetmaker she’d been dating for seven months:
I feel badly for the house.
This was true. While she couldn’t cry for her mother, she became idiotically tearful when she thought of the house abandoned by the people and the things that had afflicted it, lovingly, for the past thirty-two years, as a cool parade of buyers weighed its flaws against its promise.

She snuffed her cigarette into Ye Olde Bastard’s tight-napped grass. Across the street, heels clicked along the sidewalk and up her family’s driveway. The automatic garage light snapped on, illuminating a familiarly fuzzy-haired woman knocking with familiar impatience on the kitchen door. The woman huffed and checked her watch. Mary heard the kitchen screen yo-yo shut, she saw the woman struggle to fish a set of car keys from her canvas bag.

Mary ducked behind the rear fender of the nearest parked car.

What the hell is she doing here
, she thought. But her bewilderment was insincere. Though a psychologist, Roz Biedelman had never been one to register the fact that a person hated her guts, even a person of her mother’s calculated lack of subtlety. Mary crouched lower. It had snowed two days ago, and then it had rained, and then the temperature had dropped below freezing, but the curb was still lined with a sooty, filigreed crust that crunched noisily under her weight. Worse than Roz Biedelman spotting her was Roz Biedelman spotting her crouched idiotically behind a car. But Roz remained on the opposite side of the street and unlocked the door to a green sedan parked in front of the Trevelyans’ house. She started the engine. She drove away.

Once Roz turned the corner, Mary sprinted for the house (noting, curiously, that the automatic garage light failed to respond when she crossed beneath it). She locked the door and flicked off the kitchen overhead, just in case Roz circled back (all paranoia was justified where Roz was concerned). She removed her shoes and padded up the back staircase. From down the hall she could hear Gaby and Regina in Regina’s old bedroom, now a guest room, as Regina regaled Gaby with details about her impending breakup from her third financé, Bill, the two of them chortling in a ragged, sloppy way that indicated they were drunk.

Mary paused in the hallway. She needed to say good night to her sisters. She needed to engage in a polite post-funeral debrief. She wanted to confer with them about the unexplained appearance of Roz Biedelman. She decided to put it off.

Mary assumed that her father had gone to bed and so was surprised to spot him, as she passed the half-open door to the study-cum-second-guest-room, standing in the skinny triangle of light thrown downward by the desk lamp, reading a letter. The corners of his mouth spasmed as though his lips were being electrocuted toward a smile. From the doorway, she could see the letter’s handwriting—her mother’s—and she permitted herself a dopey surge of hope.
Of course.
Her mother had given a letter to her father, with instructions that he give it to Mary on the day of the funeral. The fact of this letter—the way her father held it, as if it were his but not his—relieved her for two reasons. The obvious reason involved her mother. The less obvious reason involved him, because the letter meant she could forgive her father his irritating and, yes,
hurtful
passivity. This trait of his she’d accepted without much resentment until his most recent failure to intercede on her behalf, acting as her mother’s neutral spokesperson on the hospital phone and refusing, as he’d always refused, to go against his wife. Since Mum’s death, her acceptance of his long suffering assumed a more spikey, wrathful tinge, at least until she arrived at the house full of pent-up angry words and he, numb-faced and too small for his own skin, showed her the photos of the charmless golf condo he’d bought, and tried, with a palpable neediness, to rally her enthusiasm for a life that sounded to her like just this side of death.

She stood quietly in the doorway to the study-cum-second-guest-room. Her father looked up from the letter long enough to register her own desperation, and to allow it to make him uncomfortable.

He turned back to the desk.

“Just catching up on some bills,” her father said, folding up the letter and sliding it into his pants pocket. “Your mother left us quite a mess here.”

He gestured toward a crisscrossed pile of envelopes.

“Quite a mess,” he repeated.

He put his hands on his hips. He stared at the pile, as though willing it to ignite.

“I read an article about estate planning on the airplane,” Mary said, after an awkward silence.

“We don’t really own what you’d call an estate,” her father said.

“It listed the top ten things people would do with their time if they knew they only had a week to live,” she said.

“Ah,” her father said, not listening.

“My point is that bill paying was pretty low on the list,” she said.