After Life (3 page)

We lived in New Orleans until I was ten. My memories of that time are scattered and odd but mostly good: taking baths in the kitchen sink while my family sat around the table, playing backgammon; a sugar skull given to me by a customer of my mother, which I left under my bed until one day when I found it half-dissolved and swarmed over with ants; the green velvet walls of the séance room; and helping my mother, when I was three or four, to attach the fabric to the walls with a staple gun. Our house didn’t have air-conditioning, so every room had a collection of fans—ceiling, box, oscillating, paper—each with its own prevailing winds. Summers, we’d stagger from room to room and fan to fan, windblown and exhausted. To escape the heat, my grandfather and I went to the movies. I remember buying pickles in brown paper and eating them in the chilly dark. When the movie was over and we stepped back outside, the heat would feel intensely good for a while, damp and intimate but slightly threatening, like the breath of someone leaning in too close. Later, when my mother and I left for good, I would miss this heat more than I missed the house, or the city, or even what was left of my family by then.

This was my family: my mother and her parents. My grandparents were kind, shy people; my grandmother was a librarian at my school, Saint Ann’s, while my grandfather—a gentle old man with a fringe of white hair on his forehead—kept house. He’d sold his stationery store around the time I was born and now puttered around in his tennis shoes, always sweeping and pulling weeds. The house belonged to my grandfather. It even looked a little like him: tall, hunched, dapper.

The man who was my father did not live with us. He was my mother’s dentist and a good friend of hers, but no one, she said, she could marry. Anyway, he was already married. He visited us now and then, and would sometimes hang around during his lunch hour, wearing a white dentist coat covered with little blood spatters. My mother fixed him sandwiches and he made polite conversation with me. He called me “Squirt.” I was not supposed to let on to him that I knew he was my father.

It was an awkward situation. My mother loved him. I could tell by the way she pretended not to: she avoided his eyes if anyone else was looking, and made a big deal about “forgetting” her dental appointments, as if they meant nothing to her, but she always called to reschedule. He might have loved her, too, though my mother didn’t think so. “Two people never love each other at the same time,” she told me once. She had just returned from a dental appointment and was sitting in the kitchen holding a teabag to a tooth, and frowning. “One loves, and the other is in love with
being
loved. The fun is in guessing which one’s you.”

Bottles of perfume and silk scarves had a way of appearing around the house, and we were never short of toothbrushes. But if they ever planned to get together, if he ever thought about leaving his wife, I knew nothing about it. I would be surprised if he did. Run off with my mother? She did not seem to be the running-off-with kind. She was tall and bossy and had a big nose; I couldn’t picture her collapsing in someone’s arms, or galloping away on horseback. In any case, by the time I was seven or eight he was gone, to an army base in the western part of the state. And that was that. I never saw him again, though before he left he gave me a checkup and a set of windup choppers. To tell the truth, though, I was relieved. I didn’t like what he did to my mother. He made her moony and wistful, made her want something she could not have.

It would have been easier for her, I think, if he had died. She had special access to the dead. Living, but disappeared, he was completely out of the picture. If he’d died she’d at least have bits of him, now and then: his voice, flattened and tinny and small, floating from her trumpet, or a whiff of his aftershave in a darkened room, or—best of all—his ghostly fingers, probing her mouth for signs of decay.

Those years, the years we lived in my grandfather’s house, my mother practiced a particularly outdated and quaint brand of spiritualism. She didn’t know. This was the seventies, and by then most mediums had turned into “psychics” or “tarot card readers,” and spent more time developing their ESP than communing with the departed. The few remaining spirit trumpets—the big tin cones that amplify the voices of the dead during séances—were preserved in museums or stashed in attics, but my mother had one, and sometimes it even levitated for her. I think she suspended it from a horsehair; it was lighter than you’d think. Modern psychics have no use for the dead at all. The living is what they care about, and lottery numbers, and horoscopes. My mother wasn’t aware of this trend. She learned what she knew from books. She ordered her equipment out of an obscure catalog from somewhere up north. I remember it—the pages were rough newsprint; the printing type, minuscule.

But her work had a large following, especially among the old and morbid. One of these people was a woman named Beryl Kemper, who was obsessed with the thought of her own death. When she and my mother got together for one-on-one sessions, which they did every other week or so for several years, she’d often whip out her left hand and display the break in her lifeline.

“What do you think?” she’d ask my mother, breathless. “Do you think I have three more years? It looks to me like I have at least two. Look at that crossline there.”

My mother, neither fortune-teller nor palmist, would politely push Miss Beryl’s doomed hand back into her lap. “You know that stuff’s bunk. Besides, your left hand’s what you were born with, and the right is what you do with it. You can guess my advice, Beryl.”

They’d drink coffee and gossip for several minutes, then my mother would take both Beryl’s hands into her own, as if to warm them. “Your mother’s here, dear,” she might say, looking right into Miss Beryl’s eyes. “She wants you to take better care of yourself. There’s an empty pot on the stove, she says. Does that makes sense to you?” Beryl ate it up. She didn’t need evidence—a floating guitar or a tipping table—as some people did. The session would always end with a long chat with Miss Beryl’s dead daughter, via the intercom. I would put on a gaspy, choked voice, because Irene had died of the croup when she was a little girl. For a baby, Irene could impart a great deal of wisdom. I would sometimes read from
The “I AM”
Discourses
:

Out of the heart of that Great Silence comes the Ceaseless, Pouring Stream of Life, of which each one is an individuized part. That Life is you, Eternally, Perfectly, Self-sustained…

Beryl knew it was me. How could she not? But she’d always cry to hear “Irene’s” voice, and she seemed comforted by my mother’s prayer, which ended, “And there is no Death, and there are no Dead. Amen.” If I met her in the kitchen as she was leaving, she’d squeeze my shoulder and tell me to come by her house on my way home from school, so she could give me a Mallow Cup. Whether what had happened was “real” or not didn’t matter a bit to Miss Beryl. She—and really, all of my mother’s customers—swallowed it whole, and why not? My mother made their lives more interesting and more meaningful. From these old women I learned that belief didn’t have to be something you got after weighing the evidence; you could just have it. Belief was a decision you could make.

Miss Beryl lived on Carondelet Street, which wasn’t on my way home from anywhere. But sometimes I wandered around after school, chasing cats and looking for money on the sidewalk, and one day I decided I would stop by and say Hello to Miss Beryl, and maybe get my candy. Mostly, I wanted to see the house where a dead girl had lived. I had never known any real dead people, let alone dead children.

I knocked on the door, and after a long wait Miss Beryl answered, surprised to see me and without any makeup on. She let me in, though, and I stood in her front room while she burrowed through mounds of things, looking for her Mallow Cups. On the wall, over the piano, there was a blown-up picture of a child’s face, a girl’s. There was something odd about the eyes.

“That’s Irene in her casket,” said Miss Beryl. “I had a man paint her eyes in.”

It was chilling. I stared and stared at the photograph, unable to get enough of it. Her pale hair was clasped with two silver clips, and the fingers of one hand curled along the bottom of the picture, the nails dark. Her painted eyes could have shot bullets.

When I said good-bye and was back on the sidewalk again, I noticed the Mallow Cup Miss Beryl had given me was so old—its yellow wrapper faded to white—it might have once belonged to Irene. The chocolate gave way under my fingers into a sticky, powdery mass, and the marshmallow in the middle was tough as cartilage. It smelled like an old book. I ate the thing anyway.

For a long time after that I could not think about death without remembering the photograph of Irene Kemper in her casket. That picture became death to me: to be dead meant being suspended over someone’s cluttered piano, twice life-size, eyes forced open in an unnatural, unblinking gaze, forever.

If I were to die, I often wondered, what would my mother do? How would she feel? These questions haunted me. Until I was eleven or twelve, I was sick a lot—so sick that I sometimes thought I
would
die, though I never mentioned this to anyone. My illness was mysterious: every couple of months I’d begin throwing up everything I ate or drank, and couldn’t even brush my teeth without vomiting. This would go on for a week or more. I’d lie in bed almost unable to move, falling in and out of sleep, under the
flick flick flick
of the ceiling fan. If I touched my fingers to my lips they felt like something else, not like lips at all, but like a bit of carved ivory or bone. I’d listen to the voices of people in the street outside and not remember what it was like to be well.

The doctor didn’t know what it was. Except for the throwing up, I was fine. He gave me a bottle of pink stuff I couldn’t keep down and some advice:
Don’t be so nervous! Take some deep breaths if you feel like you’re going to heave-ho. Lots of fresh air can’t
hurt.

Before he left, the doctor would pat my hand and tell me it would pass, and it would. After a week or so I’d wake up and see a glass of water by my bed, and it would look good. I’d sit up on my elbow and drink a little, then a little more. Later, when I woke up again, I’d notice the sunlight in the leaves by the window, and the shadows on the wall, and the bright blues and reds of the books on my shelves. Once, I smelled my grandfather cooking chicken downstairs, so I crept down to the kitchen, joined my family at the table, and began to eat without saying a word. My mother and grandmother glanced at each other, then at me.

“I had a little chat with the doctor,” said my mother. “He said it’s all in your head.” She gave me an accusatory look.

“My
head
?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked my grandfather. He frowned, brandishing his silverware.

What she meant was, I was doing it for attention, though not necessarily on purpose. The very thought made my heart pound with shame.

“Utter baloney,” said my grandfather.

“She knows,” said my mother, still giving me a look.

I swallowed my chicken. Could it be true?

The next time I was sick, my mother’s manner was brusque and distracted. She set a glass of water on my night table and squinted out the window. It was raining.

“I’m
not
doing it on purpose,” I whispered. My mouth was parched, dry as paper.

“Oh, I know,” she said, still watching the rain. “But you don’t see me or your grandmother getting sick, do you? We have work to do. We couldn’t possibly lie around in bed.”

I closed my eyes, trying to cry, but no tears came.

“You’re not much of a trooper, are you?” said my mother.