Another You (48 page)

That was what we were doing, sitting and sipping tea, Marshall with his paperdolls, Gordon with his book of fairy tales, with the stories printed on the left side of the book and the right-hand page to draw on. He would draw pictures that were improvisations on what he’d read, drawing mountains when there were no mountains in the story, or drawing the world underwater, though he didn’t even have a snorkel mask. To my knowledge there were no such things for children in those days. He would read the fairy tales and leave the pages empty most of the time, but sometimes, to amuse his brother, he’d demonstrate his skill with drawing, and then we’d see some of the fairy-tale figures in imaginary landscapes, along with a fox, say, that simply hadn’t appeared in the story, or an enormous tarpon he’d decided to put on land, underneath the castle under which Rapunzel had let down her hair. He was always adding to the fairy tales, not just illustrating what he’d read, and Alice and I would be so fascinated: What was that crow, sitting on the bonnet of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” or the snake peeking out of the shoe in “Cinderella”? They were very original drawings, quite well done, but Miles didn’t like them; he always wanted Gordon to stick to the facts, and he took it personally, as if all those stories he’d read aloud so many times had been misunderstood by his son, or as if the boy must have been bored, if he felt the need to add to what was there. This reaction,
if you can imagine, from the same person who so admired Magritte. Fine if a train was rushing out of a fireplace, or if an apple floated in front of a man’s face, but let his son draw a bird sitting on a wolf’s bonnet and he was absolutely at a loss to understand what such a thing could mean. I think it’s possible he saw Alice as unbalanced, and he greatly feared it might also be true of his children. At any rate, that day in the kitchen, where he’d come to sit with us as she was knitting and I was making a list of things we needed to buy to make raisin pudding, he saw the book open on the table and he picked it up and started flipping through, asking us questions about what Gordon had intended, as if we had any idea. Alice said that perhaps Gordon actually
was
illustrating the characters he read about, but they were in a different form; she thought it possible that he might be including creatures that existed in their reincarnated forms. Alice had come to believe in reincarnation. If only she could have lived to hear authorities on dying: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for example. Well: Miles didn’t want to hear about religion, so he certainly didn’t put any stock in reincarnation. She was needling him by mentioning it. He’d come into the kitchen and we both could tell the call he’d just hung up from had upset him—business was his deity—and poor thing, she had nothing but vague reports from the doctors, she was no fool, she knew the news was bad, knew more than I did, certainly, because I never believed she was so terribly ill, I thought it was just taking time for her to mend, and what use was he, coming into the kitchen, where we sat peacefully, suddenly starting an argument about his son’s very nice illustrations in a book? Now I think I should not have been so unrealistic as to believe that any surgery simply cured the problem, but he was so insistent that this was so: he claimed to be stating the doctors’ certainty, too. She had been through so much—who could believe there was anything worse in store for her? We were having tea when he pulled up a chair, sat backward in it—which was always a sign he was going to start in on some serious topic—and he said to her, “Tell me that you do not have delusions of an afterlife.” Imagine: she was terminally ill, and he was intent upon disabusing her of the notion there would be an afterlife. I wonder what would have happened if the whole subject could have been turned aside. If we hadn’t taken everything he said so seriously. Sonja tells me the expression “Get a life” is popular now. I wonder: what if one of us had had the
nerve to tell him to get a life, if we’d gone on with what we were doing. But she was having none of it that night. She looked so frail in her white nightgown. So haggard. And yet, she had already forgiven so much. She said: “I won’t come back as a person, Miles. I’ll come back as an animal.” She fingered Gordon’s drawing of the fox. “You can marry Evie,” she said, “and I can be your cat. Or your dog. I could be a bird, in a birdcage you could put over there, in the corner. It could be like the secrets we keep now, but then everyone would be thinking how sad that I’m dead, not just sorry you had such a crazy wife. Wouldn’t that be fun, with only you two knowing the cat was really me? I could bring a dead mouse to your doorstep. Or come back as a dog that’s rolled in carrion. I could enact what you really think of me. If I come back as a bird, be sure he clips my wings, Evie. Have it be the same way it’s been in this life.” We were astonished, of course. I understood, though I’m sure he did not, that she was imitating the manner of Madame Sosos. Ethan had insisted I meet her and I’d agreed, intending to put my foot down if she was too obviously crazy and would be sure to upset Alice. He’d driven to Maine with Madame Sosos. The boys were out of the house, which I thought was better. I expected someone in a turban, with a crystal ball. Instead, she had on the prettiest sterling-silver earrings from Georg Jensen. I’d seen them in a magazine, and I recognized them immediately. She had on those earrings, and a little rouge and lipstick, and all she wanted to talk about was how far away Maine was from New York. The car trip had really tired her, and of course she must have been slightly hostile: she was going to see Alice, at the hospital in Connecticut, so why did she first have to see the woman who took care of Alice’s children? We had tea together, while Ethan very kindly fixed a shelf that had fallen in the basement. She’d examined the palm of my hand, lit incense, and found meaning revealed in the rising twines of smoke. There Alice sat, some time later, doing a perfect imitation of the dreamy voice of Madame Sosos, whom Ethan had sent to see her, after all, not Miles, though I don’t blame her for being angry she was condescended to. I think I let out a little laugh—a sound, anyway—but Miles was too astonished to react for quite a while, so we were both shocked when he swept his hand across the tabletop, knocking everything to the floor, our tea, the saltcellar, the book, the ashtray. It made me sure, in that moment, I didn’t want to ever be married to
anyone. I was thinking that I was so glad I wasn’t married, I was so glad I was not a person who might say such things, or another person who might react as he just had. I’d witnessed too many such scenes between married people. That was what I thought, sitting there with the smell of ashes in my nose, my ankles wet from toppled teacups. It had started to rain. Gordon stood in the kitchen doorway, having rushed from the living room to see what had happened. He looked confused, then stricken. The book was upside down in a puddle. He rushed to pick it up, but Miles got there first, opened the book, and shook it at Gordon, demanding that Gordon explain the made-up animals. Gordon was speechless. Miles was not a violent man. Even Miles recovered himself the instant he saw the expression on his son’s face. Miles blotted the book with his sweater. Apologized for his outburst. Held out the book to Gordon with one hand and held out the other hand hoping Gordon would put his hand in his, forgive him. But nothing was explicit, and Gordon simply turned and walked out of the room. Marshall had run upstairs. Gordon was very protective of his brother, and he was probably setting out to talk to Marshall, but Alice got up and called him, asked him to come back. She went up and got Marshall. He was too heavy for her to carry, but she did anyway. I put my hand on Gordon’s shoulder and guided him into the living room, hating Miles. Hating him, but at the same time sorry that Gordon had not taken his hand. I knew what that emptiness felt like: it was as if emptiness had weight, and texture. There had been so many times I’d looked down, thinking I felt Martin’s little hand in mine again, only to see nothing. The air. Yet my fingers tingled. My palm was warm. It was as if he’d clasped my hand and vaporized, leaving his bodily warmth. Of course, I never, ever, would have mentioned this to either of them. Her most recent hospitalization had been a terrible time for everyone. We were not up to such a scene as had just exploded. He had tears in his eyes. Things from the tabletop were strewn everywhere. Miles bowed his head and said he was going out. Out in the rain? It was a storm: thunder; lightning. I wanted to take his hand myself, not so much for his sake, but out of sympathy for all of us. Instead, I got the umbrella from the stand and handed it to him, and that was what he used to sweep away everything else in his path on his way to the door, pushing Marshall’s paperdolls off the table, breaking a vase, scattering paper. It was the baby she
thought of constantly, he said. She lived in the past, cared only for the baby, who was she kidding by talking about the future, when she was fixated on the past?

When he left, she became quite composed. Quite calm, with Marshall in her arms, his chin on her shoulder, his legs dangling. She read to them from the Bible, told them she was going to die, walking back and forth in her nightgown. I thought it was a private moment between them, that I shouldn’t be there, but as I backed away I saw the look in Gordon’s eyes and lingered. I blotted the book dry. Because he’d used crayons, the drawings themselves were not ruined—except that later, the pages puckered. Not that he ever looked at the book again. Or that she ever read aloud from the Bible again. Though I looked at the 121st Psalm the other day, when Father Molloy brought me a Bible as a gift, and I could hear her saying the words, hear her voice as if she stood in the room. What would she make of such a room as mine? She, who had lived in such spacious houses. Lately an old movie has come to mind when I think about houses.
Holiday Inn
, with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, with all those wonderful songs by Irving Berlin. It was a movie about two friends who turned their home into a roadhouse, so they could perform for visitors every year. Fred Astaire did his Fourth of July number accompanied by torpedoes and firecrackers. I was told they had to call in technicians to build an organ that would set the firecrackers off electrically, so the organist could play the explosions at exactly the right moments, and the fireworks would be coordinated with Fred Astaire’s feet. If I think of the Fourth of July, I like to remember that movie, not what once really happened on the Fourth of July.

My favorite nurse always gets involved in whatever old movie I’m watching on the VCR. Never to have seen
Casablanca
! Nineteen forty-two was such a vivid year, in part because that was when we first saw that unforgettable movie. The young are made weary by being told they’re young; it’s as rude, I suppose, as pointing out to someone old that they’re old. It seems so many young people are cursed now with weighing too much. Patty is a pretty girl, but she’s always worried about her weight—as well she should be. Sonja has stayed the same pretty, slender girl she’s always been. It wouldn’t have been insecurity about her looks that led her into an affair, I hope. I hope both boys were raised to give a lady a compliment when she deserves
one. Who knows what Marshall really sees? Marshall is such a solitary person; it makes him self-absorbed. And Gordon is unobservable, like life on a star. There it is, shining, but you don’t know the first thing about what goes on there. Frustrating, not to be able to find out how time will change them. Yet beyond a certain point, I think the world changes so much that no one can predict. An old person’s intuition doesn’t operate as it once did, because the rules change, familiar faces disappear, the things you came to count on to provide a context aren’t there anymore—not even the music. No one ever hums “Moonlight Becomes You,” and it was one of the greatest songs of 1942. Even before that, Frank Sinatra singing “This Love of Mine,” the year Martin was born. That was also when we first heard “Blues in the Night” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Of course, there was also Ethan’s favorite: “There Will Never Be Another You.”

It’s difficult to imagine that Gordon or Marshall have particular songs that evoke romantic feelings. Sonja loves classical music; Beth tells me she likes “New Age.” I thought to leave Miles’s letters to one of the boys—Marshall, I thought, at first, because he is a college professor, words are his love, his business, but hesitated because he already thinks too much about everything. Neither of them would know that landscape. That haunting music. The resonance of the world in which we lived. Giving the letters to either one of them would be like giving them a silent film, based in a foreign land. Which made me think that Sonja should have them. Yet she is dismayed, now, at how men act. They would only reinforce her skepticism. So: Gordon. Better to give them to Gordon, along with something pretty for his wife, and hope that the person who so patiently explained things in his youth—who explained to his brother, at the same moment he was improvising stories himself—would discover things in them worthy of his attention. Gordon has spent his life on the run. He might be interested to know that there was a period of his father’s life when he, too, kept himself apart from everyone. When he wished to reinvent his life.

I’ve been wondering, lately, what it might have been like if I’d never left Montreal. That first day we spent together alone, when I was still a teenager: Miles jumped off the lift and spread his arms, stood at the top of the mountain and whispered
Paradis
, then drew
his arms in tightly as if to embrace the air. If I had drifted away like hot breath hitting cold then. Or skied down the slope, away. What if I had never started with him, let alone been won back through the years by fragments of romantic melodies. Or by an avalanche of letters to which I added a P.S. that was not there: that he loved me. If I had not responded, on the ski slope, or later, sealing my fate as easily as I licked an envelope, I could have had a different life. I could have been the white space between words.