Some Wildflower In My Heart (19 page)

Our piano lessons continued on Tuesdays and Fridays, and as I have said, on Mondays and Thursdays Birdie assisted Miss Grissom with the choir. This left her with but one weekday afternoon, Wednesday, to fill as she waited for Mickey's arrival at about three-thirty from his job in Spartanburg. Because I generally made my departure an hour before she left, my desk was unoccupied during her wait.

The Tuesday after Mr. Solomon granted his permission for the school paper, Birdie walked with me to my car following my piano lesson at her home. I was progressing “like a house on fire,” according to Birdie, and she had just told me before we exited the house that I “ought to think about giving a little recital in a month or two for a few friends,” to which I replied that I had absolutely no intention of ever doing such a thing.

“Margaret,” she said hesitantly as we neared the car, and I steeled myself to resist what I expected to be a listing of gentle arguments in favor of a piano recital. But her mind was on a different subject now. “Margaret, I've been wondering,” she said, “if you'd let me use your desk at work on Wednesday afternoons for about an hour after you leave.” This was characteristic of Birdie, at times, to drop a matter without remonstrance yet immediately take up another.

I disapproved of the idea at once. I suppose I am in many ways a territorial person, and the thought of someone else sitting at my desk was disagreeable to me. “I leave my desk in order at the end of the day, and I want to find it undisturbed when I return each morning,” I said. By this I meant to communicate a negative response to her request. I opened the car door and seated myself behind the steering wheel.

Smiling, she closed the door and gestured with a swiveling of her wrist for me to lower my window. “Well, I can sure promise you I won't touch a
thing
,” she said with grateful mien. “Why, you won't find so much as a paper clip out of place!” I understood then that she had interpreted my words to be the stipulation for her using my desk rather than a clear statement of opposition.

I tried again. “I do not want others to work at my desk.”

Again she misunderstood. “Oh, don't worry, I'll be the only one. I won't open your office up for general use! Nobody else even has to know about it. And I'll keep your desk so neat you'll never even know I was there.”

She placed both hands over the top of the car window, bent down—though she was so small she did not have far to bend—and smiled joyously at me. I knew that in order to make her understand I would have to be brutally direct. “
No, Birdie
,” I would have to say, “
you may not seat yourself at my desk, not on Wednesday afternoon or any other afternoon. The answer again is no
.”

However, glancing at her guileless face, I knew that the time for refusal was past. I could not correct her misconception. I believe that I could have done so two weeks, or perhaps even one week, earlier, but I could not do it now. Because she herself was so genuinely magnanimous and selfless, she found it easy, I suppose, to assume the same of others. More than once she took my words and translated them into saintly utterances.

“Thank you, Margaret,” she said now. “I won't be a bit of trouble, I promise. I thought I could read some of the children's stories or maybe write letters and notes while I wait for Mickey. I sure appreciate it, and you can count on me to keep it nice the way you like it.”

I inserted the key into the ignition and began rolling up the window. “Margaret,” she said, raising her voice over the sound of the engine, “I wish you wouldn't keep leaving that money on the piano after every lesson. It sure makes me feel bad that you won't let me do it without pay. That was my offer, remember?”

Through the half-closed window I replied, “I will not accept the lessons free of charge. I have told you this before. It can be no other way.”

“You're just really something else, Margaret,” she said. I suppose she had picked up the expression from Francine. “It's so hard for you to take—” but she stopped and appeared to give a small sigh. She tipped her head to one side and smiled at me again.

“I know you've got to know this already,” she said, “but I'm going to say it anyway. You're an awfully pretty woman, Margaret. You carry yourself so tall and dignified, and you're just…well,
pretty
.” I felt myself stiffen as she continued. “You've got such a pretty complexion and such pretty eyes. And your beautiful curly hair and your hands—but I guess people must tell you this all the time. It's one thing to be smart like you are, but when you're smart
and
pretty—well, that's just a real special combination.”

The top half of Birdie's face was framed by the narrow open rectangle above the car window. Her eyes, the color of strong tea, shone with simple goodness. She was wrong, of course. People did not tell me such things all the time, although in high school someone had once said that I looked like the girl in
National Velvet
. Before we were married, Thomas had told me that I was a “looker,” and, of course, I will not pretend to be blind to what my own eyes tell me when I stand before a mirror. As a girl, however, I viewed pulchritude as a handicap, my mind continuously playing back the dreaded sound of my grandfather's sonorous nighttime murmurings:
Be still, Marg, shhh…you're such a beautiful girl…a beautiful girl,
always spoken menacingly as if it were a curse. Perhaps if I were ugly, I had often thought, I would be free from his horrible acts.

I shifted my gaze past Birdie's face to the fence some distance behind her, the fence that apparently marked the boundary between her yard and the Shepherd's Valley Cemetery. “Fences taut as the lines on sheet music.” Annie Proulx had described such a fence in her novel
Postcards
, which I had recently finished reading, a book full of startling descriptions in a hardy, spare, energetic style. Miss Proulx's
Shipping News
is also a marvel of brilliant, laconic prose. Beyond the cemetery fence I saw the rows of headstones and bright clusters of artificial flowers. A green Mortland Funeral Home tent stood at the site of a new grave.

“Well, good day,” I said, glancing briefly at Birdie and then shifting my car into reverse gear. Though I felt in that moment a peculiar void that I knew could most likely be filled only by verbalizing some measure of gratitude to Birdie, I could not form the words. What could I say? “
Your praise of my physical attributes is most kind
”? “
Your piano instruction is most helpful
”? “
Your employment at Emma Weldy is proving beneficial in ways which I had not anticipated”?
All of these were true, of course, but I could not say such things. It did not occur to me simply to say, “Thank you.”

Birdie stepped back from the car and waved. “I'll see you at work tomorrow!” she called. “Thank you again for saying I can use your desk!”

Perpendicular to the driveway was a gravel extension suitable for the turning around of a vehicle. This I did. As I drove slowly down Birdie's narrow driveway, I saw her through the rearview mirror. She stood in the same place and continued waving, not a great flapping of the hand but rather a small circular gesture like the wiping of a smudged pane.

As I drove home that day and as I went about my housekeeping duties, I recall musing over what manner of woman I might have been had my mother not died and left me in the hands of my ignoble grandfather. Not that it was my mother's wish that I be consigned, upon her death, to the home of my grandparents. Indeed, she would have moved heaven and earth to prohibit such an arrangement had she foreseen her untimely death.

I do not know by what means my grandparents were identified and contacted following the death of my mother. I only remember that a neighbor in Dayton, Ohio—a large, friendly woman, soft and loose of flesh, named Mrs. Gault—knocked on our apartment door one afternoon in mid-June and called to me, “Margaret! Margaret, are you there? Come to the door! It's about your mother!” Mrs. Gault was the only neighbor whom Mother had ever invited into our home. The two of them frequently played Scrabble and drank hot tea together on Saturdays, and I had been allowed to join them upon a few occasions.

It had been so deeply ingrained within me never to open the door while Mother was at work that I would not give entrance even to Mrs. Gault, a trusted neighbor. I would not even talk to her through the keyhole. “I know you're there, Margaret!” she continued to shout. “Your mother sent word to me to come get you. She's been hurt and wants you at the hospital!” Something told me that Mrs. Gault was telling the truth, but still I would not respond. Since we had no telephone, Mother's contacting me through Mrs. Gault was perfectly plausible.

I suppose a thirteen-year-old might be excused for hiding herself away in the face of a tragedy, for believing that the truth could be avoided or perhaps altered if she denied it, particularly when the tragedy involved the only person in the world whom she loved. I screamed when a key turned in the lock and Mrs. Gault entered with the landlord, a pale, thin-lipped man with purplish folds of skin sagging beneath his eyes. Though Mrs. Gault's face was full of compassion, I fled from her and locked myself in the bathroom.

Eventually, of course, I could not escape the news that she bore, and as I rode to the hospital beside Mrs. Gault in the backseat of the landlord's car on June 13, 1957, I am certain that I knew my life was forever changed. Had we reached the hospital sooner, had I been cooperative with Mrs. Gault from the beginning, perhaps I could have seen my mother alive one last time. As it was, I saw her lying white and still beneath a sheet, having been stricken by a heavy blow, a gauze headband over her brow and a crimson abrasion upon her chin.

They told me that it had been a mishap at work, a horrible freak accident. She was working at the time as a secretary for a pipeline company in Dayton, and she had ventured into the warehouse that afternoon in search of her supervisor, who was needed on the telephone. The intercom system by which she usually conveyed such messages had just that morning developed a malfunction, rendering it inoperative. I was too dazed to listen well, but my mother's death, they explained to me, was the result of a faulty forklift, an enormous load of heavy-gauge pipes, and unlucky timing.

In the days that followed, I stayed with Mrs. Gault while people I did not know questioned me and examined my mother's personal effects. It was through her papers, I suppose, that they were able to trace the name and address of her parents, who were soon notified of her death and of my existence.

As my mother had never spoken to me of her parents, I did not know that I had a grandmother and grandfather. I had asked her once as a much younger child whether I had aunts and cousins and grandparents such as I read about, and she had replied, “You have only me, Margaret.” At first, the knowledge that I had grandparents and that I would go to live with them afforded me some small degree of comfort, but it soon came to me that my mother's reticence on the subject was perhaps, or most likely, inauspicious.

I cried when I left Mrs. Gault. She was wearing a navy-and-white polka-dot dress the day she took me to the train station—a comforting, motherly dress—and I left dark, splotchy teardrops upon it. At the other end of the train ride, my grandmother was wearing a black dress of sinister sheen, and my grandfather was clothed in dark gray trousers with a flamboyant green and gold necktie. When I stepped from the train, I shuddered to see his white shirt stretched over his great, broad belly.

As I say, I pondered on the way home from my piano lesson that day whether under different circumstances I might have become a woman who, like Birdie, could easily praise others, from whose lips words of simple thanks could fall naturally, whose spirit toward others could be open and artless, the type of woman who could present bonsai plants—mine was and is still thriving—to people she hardly knew, who could accept blame with effortless grace and sincerity, who could stand in the driveway waving until her company was out of view.

I believe I could have, for my mother had the capacity for warmth and liberality in her speech and manner. Though never offering unreserved friendship to other adults (I know now that she feared the discovery of her family ties), she was nevertheless a cordial and ready conversationalist, operating freely within safe limits of acquaintance. She was witty, vibrant, and highly intelligent, though she once told me she had been mortally shy as a child.

I do not know to what extent my grandfather victimized my mother, but the fact that she never spoke of him and that she spent her life making certain he could never track her down is, in my opinion, full of meaning. I cannot, however, reconcile the memory of my mother as I knew her—charming, cerebral, and in my youthful judgment, perfectly stable—with the possibility of a traumatized childhood. Perhaps her mind had done her the favor of obliterating from her memory the nightmare. This I see as the only possibility, for surely no mere human could rise above such a perversion of the father-daughter relationship.

The fact that my mother had a quiet, steady respect for the Bible further mystifies me. In my childhood we read the Bible morning and evening and discussed it at length. How could she believe in something that my grandfather claimed to revere by day yet by his behavior he so flagrantly desecrated by night? It defies comprehension. The question plagues me yet, and still it has no answer. Such a duality cannot exist. Perhaps he did not abuse her. Yet why did she deny his existence? I am certain that I will never fit together the pieces of this puzzle, for many are missing, the greatest of which is my mother herself.

For thirteen years at the beginning of my life, there was my mother. After fifty years there was Birdie. But sandwiched between were the vile and abhorrent years of my grandfather with their residue of ghastly memories. Though I had lived in his house only four years, it was because of him that I had rejected the Bible. I had been abandoned. For me the love of God was fiction. Birdie Freeman could retain her illogical faith in a loving God. She could go on worldwide tours of mercy, drawing from her bottomless well of charity to ease the suffering of untold millions. She could even, perhaps someday, gain a toehold in my own fortress of affections—this, if I were honest with myself, I knew her to be already in the process of doing—but she could never begin to lift me from the chasm of faithlessness into which my grandfather had thrown me.