Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
It was Gustave. He started to ask what was wrong and I screamed, “They shot my mother!” And again I left the phone, dangling this time, to run down to the basement, where I hit Father's boots together over a sink and got most of the dirt off, and tossed them back in the box. By the time I was upstairs again and ready to look out the front door I was really crying the way an eleven-year-old would cry. There was no stopping what happened to me after that point.
I suppose there is no need for me to say that when I pulled the trigger that time the world cracked in pieces around me? I did not come alive as I had in the past. No great heaving clots of blood rushed to my
heart, to stir it into activity. I felt no surge of strength. What had been in the innermost hollow of my being dimmed to a spark, a pinpoint, and very slowly went out. Through the mist that rose above me I was able to make out certain faces, certain voices. Father, for one, and kindly official men who were policemen, though not dressed in uniform, nurses, a doctor. I must have been in a hospital. At times I drifted, free and helpless, at the bottom of the ocean, far from their ability to touch me, and at times I lay on a windswept desert far to the west of Cedar Grove.
Well, this memoir is about Nada, and with her death it comes to an end, more or less. Since I cannot do anything gracefully, you won't be surprised that the memoir keeps on for a few pages, and it isn't just that I am afraid to die. Why should I be afraid to die? I have nothing to live for, after all.
There is no point in a fake chronological report, because in the hospital I lost all sense of chronological time. Time was compressed and exploded in my brain. But outside me, in the real world, time did progress ordinarily, and someone must have called the police, after I pulled the trigger, someone did run up to her and to me, and out of the silent houses of Labyrinth Drive came maids and children, to watch the usual vehicles drive up and the usual uniformed people jump down. In my own delirium I caught sight of a boy of about four, crying hysterically; the Negro woman with him had to pick him up in her arms and run down the street to their house.
You'll notice how I refrain from mentioning my mother. I am not going to look at the center of that circle, any more than I really looked at it through the telescope. And, later that day, the final edition of the evening paper was quick enough to have as a headline, CEDAR
GROVE WOMAN SLAIN BY SNIPER,
and a photograph not of Nada but of our home, described as a $95,000 home in the heart of Cedar Grove, but the photograph was a poor one and did not do our house justice. A baroque X marked the spot where she had fallen. Subsequent editions followed with photographs of Nada, described variously as a “beautiful woman,” a “writer of national reputation,” a “figure in local society.” But I don't want to go on with this. You can dig up those papers yourself.
Yes, she did die, and no, she won't be back again. It is as simple as that. I have used up years of my life trying to realize how simple it is. But let me call your attention to these photographs—quite simply stolen from Father, who forgot about them in a few months. They are photographs taken from Nada's room, pictures I had never seen, a little creased with my handling because I look at them constantly. The first one is of Nada as a young bride, and note the happy smile but the rather serious, suspicious eyes. Or am I imagining this? Her hair is fixed in a style that looks old-fashioned now. I like this snapshot very much though. Nada is wearing a spring suit and she is squinting into the sun. Perhaps it is Father she's looking at, Father with a loaded camera like a loaded gun, and if I could only reach out and warn her—tell her to get out, escape! But she squints and smiles forever at me, the son she is going to have and cannot escape having, as far from me in that snapshot as she ever was in life.
And look at this one—this is a surprise. When I first saw it I must confess I was very upset. It is a snapshot of a girl of sixteen or so, standing on a porch, a front porch of a frame house. But if you look more closely you see that the girl is Nada, and her hair is cut short, she is smiling too widely, and the shadow of the porch cuts very unprofessionally across her face. On the back of the snapshot Nada's mother had written in her cramped hand, “Nancy June 1945.” But who is Nancy? And who is Nada's mother?
They came to the funeral and they stayed around afterward, Nada's parents. No, they weren't dead as I had always thought, and they weren't peculiar either; they were just ordinary people. Nada's father had worked in a rubber plant for many years and was now retired; he was a janitor in a parochial grade school. Nada's mother was a thin, sickish, whining, rather deaf woman who had Nada's hawk-like nose but nothing else, nothing else! Their name was not Romanov but Ukrainian
Rotnanow,
and it had not been out of political necessity that they had come to America but for ordinary reasons: not emigres but immigrants. The father was neither madman nor genius but just an ordinary, very ordinary, apologetic, slow man with the slightest suggestion of a hump between his shoulders. Nothing more. I don't want to
go into the details of those visits with them. Father handled it well enough, but it's better to forget about it. And Natashya was never Natashya but Nancy Nancy Romanow, born and baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, and therefore, according to their notion, saved in spite of everything. The Catholics believe that one can make a swift last-second prayer of repentance or something, and Mrs. Romanow argued with us about this as if we were selfishly holding Nada's soul back from its rightful place in heaven.
This Nancy, this sudden intrusion of another person, was born in a small town in upstate New York with a ludicrous name: North Tona-wanda. Yes, it must be an Indian name. I have lulled myself to sleep many a night with that name, which hints of mysteries and beauties that are no doubt betrayed by a sky full of smoke from rubber plants, but anyway, North Tonawanda was the town she was born in, and there she went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school, and Mrs. Romanow said, “She was always a good girl, not wild, a
good girl?
though her tone would change in a minute when she moved on to the subject of her good girl Nancy's running off to New York City. When Nancy at last bothered to write she explained nothing; she did not even ask for money, which of course meant the worst. Some time later she wrote her parents to announce her marriage and to promise them they'd be invited out soon, as soon as she and Elwood (“What a name, Elwood!” Mrs. Romanow said sourly) were settled, but of course no invitation ever came. So Nancy was a bad girl after all, and when she turned up as Natashya, slain by a sniper who was never to be apprehended, it would seem that North Tonawanda should have been the limits of her world after all.
Other snapshots I have here—let's see—this dog-eared one of an even prettier Nancy, who holds up her chin aggressively and is surely contemplating New York City and its wonders, the darkness of which will allow a rebirth and a rebaptizing—this Nancy is standing with an obscure and anonymous girl friend, both in white summer dresses and looking rather coy. This time the background is the side of a garage with a few scrawny rose bushes. No background at all. My mind swirls to think of the leap Nancy-Natashya made, from the bland wooden-frame world of North Tonawanda to the bland headiness of Cedar Grove. Wonderful! Wonderful! But look closely at the snapshot, look at
the face that girl had. This is in 1946, so she's seventeen and ready to graduate from high school and take off, and look at the face she has already—fine, serious, intelligent, the lips coy and closed. How beautiful she is! Her girl friend is smiling and showing her teeth, but not Nancy. Nancy's lips are closed. I have such an urge, such a desperate urge, to go to North Tonawanda and look up this girl friend, talk with her, force from her all of Nancy's secrets …
You are wondering what happened after Nada's death? Well, nothing happened. This is a memoir and not a novel. I can't fabricate anything. The search for the sniper continued without success, dropping out of the newspapers with a stunning swiftness, and when I was well enough to talk I told Father that I had done it. I remember him bending to me, his ear moving toward my mouth—the pink swirls and coils of that ear—but he only laughed loudly, then he stopped laughing. He thought I was crazy. I told my doctor that I was the person who had killed my mother, and he too thought I was crazy, and I began shouting and screaming that I had done it, no one else, and everyone thought I was crazy, the bastards!
A detective came and listened kindly to me and made a pretense of taking me seriously. I was such a thin, wretched child, you see—in that hospital bed that was too big for me, fed intravenously, with my weak near-blind eyes and my bruised arms. I believe he wrote things down to be polite, information about the buried rifle and the boots. (The boot prints in the ground had been one of the police's strong clues.) But for some reason I never heard from the detective again, and when I questioned Father desperately about him, Father cleared his throat and said it was “Coming along, coming along.”
What about the Baptist who confessed? Nothing happened to him either. He disappeared from the newspapers, and that was that. They didn't believe his confession either. They are very jealous and suspicious, the police. But to hell with him.
As soon as I was released from the hospital I made Father take me at once to the site of the shooting. I marched triumphantly to our neighbors' shrubs and went to what I thought was the correct spot and poked around and finally got to my knees and dug wildly, but I found nothing. Father watched me in silence. I said, “Please may I have a shovel, Father,” and he brought me one but did not offer to help. I dug in the
dirt but found nothing. Father said that the police had been in this, everywhere, digging up everything, but I ignored him, turning my sweating face to the ground that had betrayed me. How was it possible the gun was gone? Can you explain that? What happened to my rifle? And I hadn't even had sense enough to keep the box it had come in, but I had thrown that away immediately. Father all but picked me up under his arm and carried me into the house.
Did our neighbors find the gun and, not wanting to be involved, dispose of it themselves? Did one of the sullen, muscular men who worked for the Cedar Grove Green Carpet Lawn Service discover the gun and steal it?
I never found out.
We moved from 4500 Labyrinth Drive to another house, about the same size but more expensive, with a living-room ceiling that was three stories high and quite a conversation piece, across Broad Road in the heart of Pools Moran. Of course we had to move. It wasn't just the memory of Nada, but Father was shoulder-tapped for a presidency, which he modestly accepted (the product was—still is—some sort of wiring, perhaps for detonators), and after his remarriage he spoke less and less of Nada, which was not surprising, until one day I thought I might as well steal those snapshots Mrs. Romanow had given him in a tearful moment of sentiment. So I took them out of his bureau drawer, and he never mentioned them, thinking, perhaps, that his new wife had destroyed them, out of jealousy for Nada. She had already relegated Nada's expensive French Provincial living-room furniture to the back part of the house and decorated everything with her own Spanish rugs, swords, and spears, her Oriental tapestries and Mexican church doors.
Are you wondering if you know the second Mrs. Everett? A week after my discharge from the hospital I was sitting in my usual daze out in the sun porch, fingering the part where the screen had rusted and broken (in an interesting pattern, a hexagon), digesting breakfast and waiting for lunch (and after lunch I would wait patiently for dinner), when Father came home at a surprising hour, eleven in the morning, and with him was Mavis Grisell, in a splendid new fall outfit and dusky-gold jewelry that clattered as she approached me. “Richard, Mavis and I have something to tell you,” Father announced. I saw on Mavis' finger a diamond large enough to pierce your hearts, my readers,
and I was silent in awe of that diamond and the fact of its being bigger, far bigger, than Nada's had been. My silence displeased Father, I think. He took Mavis out to the car and came striding back, a large, rather paunchy, but still attractive man, at whom I glanced in surprise as if I hadn't seen him before. He came right to me and said, “Look, you little brat, you neurotic little nut, I'm through with all this horse-shit! Mavis is going to be your new mother, and if you don't like it you can go to hell! I've had enough of this lousy American father bit! I've had enough of smiling and gritting my teeth and taking it in the guts, from you or your mother, both of you, and from now on things are going to be different. It's no happy, forgiving Elwood
Daddy
—it's going to be your
Father vihom.
you are going to respect, Buster, or get the hell out, I don't care how young you are or how nuts.”
And I recognized then my real father, who was shouting at me out of that familiar man's face.
Yes, there was a series of psychiatrists. Father did that much for me, or against me. My favorite was Dr. Saskatoon, who explained gently to me that I had loved my mother so much, indeed overmuch, that I could not accept the fact of her death being caused by anyone except myself; a familiar delusion, he assured me. I had wanted, poor deluded brat, to be my mother's destroyer simply because I had wanted to establish forever a relationship between the two of us which no one could transcend, not even my father. “You have a very ambivalent, may I say rather negative, attitude toward your father,” Dr. Saskatoon told me.
“Dr. Saskatoon,” I would say, my teeth about to grind together in a spasm of shuddering, “Dr. Saskatoon, you don't understand what it is like to be free and alive when everything is finished—no, please let me talk,” I would cry, shivering convulsively. “Nobody ever lets me talk and I have to say this—there's nothing more terrible than to commit a crime and still be free, there's nothing more terrible than to be a murderer without a murderer's punishment. Dr. Saskatoon—”