The Color of Family (19 page)

“I think she is psychotic!” She paused, then softened her tone. “Okay, so maybe she's not psychotic, but at the very least she seems close to some sort of dementia. Not in any way where I think she's a danger to others or herself, but certainly in a way where this obsession, which by the way has absolutely no foothold in reality, could make her act out some pretty bizarre fantasies that could have unfortunate circumstances. Don't you think so, Poppa?”

Junior had taken a bite out of his catfish, and without fully swallowing said, “About the only thing I'd be willing to agree with is that she has held on to this Clayton Cannon thing like a hound with a jackrabbit, but the one thing your mother is not is crazy.” He looked first at Maggie, then across the table to the other end at Rick. And then as if there was a need to set things right with them, said, “Now, Antonia has always been a little bit different. A little bit eccentric. Why, she did things as a young girl that nobody could understand, especially when it came to that old yellow cat of hers, the first Tippy,” and then he laughed, mostly to himself, with what seemed to be memories too numerous to tell. And then he grew serious again, saying, “But now, you two just have to understand all the circumstances that led her to believe what she believes.”

“We know it all, Poppa,” Aaron said with weariness, wanting to hear anything other than the Emeril and Agnes story once more. He knew it hadn't been told to him every day of his life, but surely, he thought, if the number of times he'd played it in his head counted at all, then without a doubt he had indeed heard it every day of his life. “We've heard all about how Agnes and Emeril had this wild forbidden love affair and then Agnes turned up with a baby after Emeril died.”

“Yes, those are the bare facts, son, but it's the timing of the whole thing. I'm not saying your mother's right, but I have to tell you, there's something mighty fishy in the way that gal married Douglas Cannon before Emeril was even cold in the ground, and then nine months to the day after Emeril died Agnes has this baby.” He took a bite of his fish, then a forkful of greens, chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. “I guess the clincher for your mother is that on the morning of the day Emeril died, she'd caught the two of them, Agnes and Emeril, having relations. Anyway, my point is that the math never lies, son. It's the only absolute in life. Now, maybe that baby was early and he really is Douglas's son and the date is nothing but a big old coincidence, which personally I think is closer to the truth because hardly any babies are born to that kind of exactness. Then again, maybe that baby came right on time. Either way you look at it, though, that boy came into this world right on time for Agnes, literally and figuratively. So all I'm saying is that your mother has held tight to
her belief that that boy's her nephew because the math gave her every reason to.”

Many seconds passed without word and very little sound. Aaron lowered, then raised his head as if there were something to add. But there was nothing, because he had never, ever given any thought to the math of it all. Math sure didn't lie, and if what his father says is true, he thought, he and Ellie would be forced to reshape all that mattered. So all he could say quietly was, “I never knew all that about catching Agnes and Emeril on the day he died. Did you, Ellie?”

Ellie never responded, but her silence told Aaron that she had not known.

But then, as if he had given the words to her through an odd telepathic communication transmitted through moving forks, Maggie said, “So Emeril died on—”

“July the twenty-third, nineteen fifty-six,” Jackson said like a man who would take the memory of that day into eternity.

“And Clayton Cannon was born April twenty-third nineteen fifty-seven,” Aaron said, answering Maggie's next expected question before she would ask. It was a date that had been stamped in his mind as cleanly as his own birthday, and Ellie's, and his mother's and father's—with no fuzzy edges whatsoever around it. And so now that he had the memory, he was left to sit and ponder just what his mother had done with all those birthday cards she'd bought every April 23, the ones emblazoned with some such message as
Happy Birthday To My Nephew
or
From Your Loving Aunt
. And she'd signed every single one, he knew. But he also clearly knew that she hadn't mailed them, so all he could imagine was a strongbox with a combination lock tucked away somewhere—maybe under her bed, or in the bottom of her closet—holding forty some-odd years of birthday cards she had most likely tied with a ribbon of some pale color, and God only knew what else.

Ellie laid her fork on the side of her plate, then looked squarely at Aaron and said, sternly, “So what are you saying, Aaron? You really think that what Ma's been saying all this time is true? Because I just can't talk to you if that's where this is headed. Besides, do you know how few babies are born exactly nine months later to the day of conception? As an obstetrician, I can
tell you that very, very few are.” And she had the determination of someone ready to walk out.

“No, Ellie, I'm not saying I believe her. What I am saying, though, is that before you slap a
CRAZY WOMAN, KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
sign on her back, we should have a little more patience with her point of view, especially in light of what Poppa just said. I've already set her straight about not coming to my job anymore with this stuff, and she understands that she crossed a line when she did that.”

Ellie, with her fork in midair, gave Aaron a stunned stare, as if she had misheard, or he had misspoken. Then, with a tone too calm to be real, she said, “What? Are you telling me that she came to the station ready to go on the air with this nonsense? You didn't tell me about this.”

“Well, no Ellie, I didn't tell you about it. I guess her coming to the station was trumped by Agnes calling to invite her to lunch, and when I called you, that was the only thing I had on my mind. Besides, she didn't come there ready to put anything on the air. It wasn't like that at all. She just came there to let me hear a tape recording she had made of Agnes Cannon's visit. For some reason Ma thought that in the conversation Agnes had all but outright admitted that Clayton Cannon was Emeril's son. In actuality, though, she never admitted anything of the sort. Never even came close. But she just wanted me to hear the tape, that's all.” Then Aaron looked to his father for help of any kind, a look of empathy, or even as little as a half-smile of encouragement. All he got in return, though, was his father's even eyes that were filled with the resolve of a man, Aaron knew, who had long ago made his peace with having spent the better part of his years loving Antonia while the ghosts of Clayton and Agnes, but most of all Emeril, hovered always right alongside them.

“Well, this is just unbelievable!” Ellie said, her ire clearly visible. “Do you see what I mean now? Do you see what I mean about her actions creating situations that could have ugly consequences?” Then she turned to her father, nearly sticking her head full in Maggie's face, and said, “Poppa, did you know about this?”

“Yes, Ellen, honey, I did know. It wasn't a big deal. No harm was done and I don't think it requires you to overreact about it” was all Junior would say.

“Well, I just don't know what to say. I don't know when any of you will start listening to me,” and up she jumped from the table in an explosion of tears, squeezing her belly past her father and running into the kitchen.

Rick got up to follow her, but Aaron stopped him when he stood. “Just let me handle this, Rick. Just give me a few minutes with her.”

“But she's so upset,” Rick said sharply.

“It's mostly the hormones,” Maggie said flatly, as she continued to eat. “She'll be okay as soon as she cries out whatever it is she's crying about, and believe me, she may not even know.”

Aaron went into the kitchen unsure of which form Ellie's temper had taken. He'd heard Maggie's account of hormones, which gave his mind a reason for the tears that rarely flowed from his sister's stubbornly dry eyes. Still, her ire could have been in his kitchen blasting every felt emotion like so much spewing hot-spring water, or simply sitting there trapped inside her anger like torpid pond water that's given up on any hope of trying to move from nature's unmovable binds; there was no telling, even if she had been in her ordinary condition because when it came down to their mother—and only when it came to their mother—Ellie's emotions were red-raw and volatile. So it was only when he walked nearer to her that he saw she was shaking as if the room had become a deep freeze. He put his arm around her for warmth and comfort, then asked with a calm that went beyond calm, “Why are you in such a state about this, Ellie?”

She sucked in a generous breath, then deflated herself and said, “Because I'm tired, Aaron. I'm just so tired of trying to make that man not matter.”

And Aaron thought about his own futile attempts to do the same before saying, “Yeah, I know. But the fact is, Ellie, he does matter. So now what? What are you afraid of? Because being tired of trying to make him matter would not make you shake with this kind of terror.”

She looked up at him with surprised eyes, then looked off, as if in shame. “I'm scared, Aaron, because in four weeks I'm supposed to give birth to this little boy—”

“A boy, Ellie?” Aaron said louder than he immediately knew he should have. Then he brought himself down a level or two before continuing, “You didn't tell me it was a boy.”

“We didn't tell anybody. But I especially didn't tell Ma, because I'm so afraid, Aaron, that when this baby is born, she'll have a grandson she can't fully love because that damned man is taking up too much of her mind space and heart space. And I won't know how to explain that to him as he grows.”

Aaron hugged his sister a little closer then said with a softness filled with shared and unspoken memories, “I don't think it works like that. I think a mother always finds room in her heart for her children and her grandchildren. At least that's what I want to believe.” And the possibility of the truth being vastly different, the same thought he'd always danced on and off with, sent a momentary fear through him that he desperately needed to beat back, so he repeated, “No, it just doesn't work like that.”

“Doesn't it, Aaron? I mean think about it. Did you really feel, when we were growing up, that you had Ma's full and undistracted attention?”

Aaron's face grew smooth as he thought about the question of his mother's distractedness, and he knew his answer would take far longer than either he or Ellie would have ever anticipated. It would veer him off down paths that would wind and twist and gnarl into more questions too hefty for his slight sister, particularly in her state and condition, to take on. So he took his arm back because he needed it for his own succor, then rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I don't know, Ellie. It just seems to me that none of that matters now. It's in the past. I mean, do we really want to drag all of that up as if it could possibly change anything now? Growing up was growing. Now is now.”

“And now, we need to settle this once and for all,” Ellie said as she clutched Aaron's forearm desperately. “If we take her and have her evaluated and the doctor says that she's perfectly fine, which I doubt he will, then I'll drop this whole thing, Aaron. I swear I will. I just need to know if she's got some kind of imbalance going on that would explain all these years of my life.”

“What do you mean, Ellie? Something like an obsessive-compulsive disorder?”

“Yes, exactly. Something just like that.”

“I don't know, Ellie,” Aaron said, wrestling with every part of his mind that gripped the dilemma.

“And you know what? It may even be chemical!” she said with
an enthusiasm that seemed to have the purpose of giving her plan validity and acceptability.

And finally, a good enough reason, Aaron thought. It may be chemical. “Well, I guess you're right about that. Let me go talk to Poppa.” Aaron left his sister's side and walked with slowness to the door. He turned to see her once more just before he went through, still with doubt, because there was that part of his memory that will never let go of the time when he was four and Ellie was nine and she told him that his socks walked around by themselves at night when he went to sleep. She told him then with the same passion she was now using to convince him of something far more sobering. Back then, the only fallout from her exaggeration was a solid month of him not being able to sleep at the baby-sitter's, since he stayed up practically all night to catch his socks in their frolicking act. That went on until one night, tired and barely able to keep his face out of his dinner plate, Aaron was remembering, he finally asked his mother about the walking socks and learned that Ellie had lied. She got a sharp and immediate punishment for the lie. This time, though, if Ellie was exaggerating and leading him down a path behind a band of walking socks, she would leave behind a messy trail of ill will, the likes of which he knew she has never known from their mother. But right now, her look—that was less of a nudge than a two-armed shove with all her might—sent him the rest of the way into the dining room. And all he needed to do was enter the room to command everyone's eyes on him. So he went back to his chair and sat, saying, “Poppa, I need to talk to you about what Ellie and I were discussing in there.”

“All right, son. I'm listening.”

“Well, Ellie brought up what I think is an excellent point, and that is that maybe Ma could have some sort of chemical imbalance that makes her do so many odd things.”

Junior ate the last morsel of food from his plate, leaving it looking nearly clean enough to put back on the cupboard without a washing, then said, “Aaron, I don't know how you and your sister are seeing things, but I don't think what your mother does would really qualify as ‘so many odd things.' I mean, yeah, she goes on and on about it, but you don't have as many years with it as I do, so you don't know how to become numb to it. Now, I hear your
mother talking and going on and on, because God knows she talks all the time, but I don't start listening until she gets to a point. That goes for this and for everything, because everything with her is something. I just thought you kids had done the same thing. But if it bothers you that much, then I'll go along with whatever you two want to do.”