A minister friend of the family reads from Psalms. A black professor from Rutgers speaks about his mother’s contributions to New Jersey African American history and her role as chair of the New Jersey State Historical Commission—how hardworking she was, how she made everyone laugh, how her passion and conversation inspired them all. She was, the professor says bluntly, a white woman from an old WASP family who made enduring contributions to black history (the following year, the annual Black History Conference at Rutgers will be dedicated to her memory). Sitting there, Charlie is surprised, even impressed; his mother always seemed restless, scattered and
unfinished
, a dilettante, but apparently she got things done, and her work crossed worlds. Jane gets up, snowy-haired and standing tall in a sky blue skirt and jacket, and talks about Helen as prankster, intellect and friend, and as a mother who was proud of each of her four children and in love with her husband till the day she died. “I’ve never known anyone so full of vim and verve as my sister Helen,” she finishes. “I’m not sure where she is now, but wherever it is, she’ll never be gone from me. In fact, I fully expect her to call me every day!”
Then it is Charlie’s turn. He stands at the podium, considers abandoning his notes but turns to them. “What I’ll remember most about my mother is the sparkle in her eye and how she was fascinated by everything and everybody,” he reads. He talks about how she was always natural, without a trace of phoniness or pretension, and how she could be complicated, easily hurt, sometimes quick to strike back, full of contradictions, and how she believed that everyone was exceptional and thought that many of you here today were bona fide geniuses (laughter ripples through the crowd), and made everyone, with the possible exception of her children, feel like her best friend (more laughter, though perhaps uneasy now). “In the last few years”—he hears his voice grow stronger—“my mother came into her own, and although her death is tragic, I believe it happened the way she might have wanted it to: suddenly, while doing something she loved—swimming in the ocean—at the very end of a transcendently happy summer.”
He returns, sapped and shaky, to the pew. Rachel and Holly both pat him on the knee. Hymns are sung, liturgy recited. The church is full of flowers—yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth—and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. Poking fun. Peering out.
It is not until he has crossed the parking lot with Rachel that he is visited by grief, and then (he walks alone to the edge of the asphalt and stands looking into the woods) it is grief of the most arid variety, a desert creature, all hoarded water and sharp spine.
H
ULLO, PAUL, IT’S
Bea, says Bea when a male voice picks up, but the voice says it’s not Paul, it’s Charlie, who is this? And she says Bea—Beatrice Grubb. Oh Bea, hi—are you calling from Scotland, the voice says, and she says
Charlie
, though didn’t he die a long time ago, and her own voice is echoing back in a most distracting way—Charlie, Charlie—and he says are you looking for Jane, which of course she always is so she says yes, and then Charlie—it is Helen’s Charlie—tells her to hold on, just a minute, and there’s nothing but background chatter for a long while, and though she has the discount phone cards, she still can’t call America without a sense of time running fast, running out, and she watches the numbers on the digital clock on her hospital table flip and flip again. Her neck is sore and the bed is slanted too low, but she can’t reach the lever and the girl has left; the nurses run in and out like mice. On the other end of the line, more silence, and behind the silence, noise (are they having a party? Is it American Thanksgiving?), and enough time passes that she considers hanging up, but then a voice says Bea, are you there, and she says yes, and there, it is Janie, in the flesh or not quite, but close enough to make Bea lighten and settle, both at once.
“Bea! My goodness. How are you?”
“Fine, dearie, and yourself?”
“All right. I’m . . . I’ve been meaning to call you—I tried a few days ago, but no one picked up.”
“I’m not at home, that’s why. The line is funny. My voice is echoing, do you hear that, everything coming twice?”
“No,” Janie says. “But I can call you back.”
“No.” She will not risk it, to have Janie leave, to be obliged to find the phone number of her hospital room. “I’m not at home,” she says again.
“Where are you?”
“In the rehab.”
“Oh Bea. What happened? Are you all right?”
“I had a wee fall—I’m fine, just a broken hip. They said I’m too old for the surgery, which is a shame. I’d have gone for a brand-new hip.”
“You broke your hip? I’m so sorry! When? And how?”
“I tripped in my very own house, in my very own kitchen! Over nothing! Can you imagine? But I got myself to the phone,” she says proudly. “And they came and opened up my Message in a Bottle.”
“You had a message in a bottle?”
“That I did, with all the info.”
“Oh Bea. I’m glad you’re all right.” Janie’s voice is louder now, and made even more so by the fact that the echoing of Bea’s own voice has stopped. “Listen. I’m—it’s not a great time to talk. I’ll—can I call you back tomorrow? We have quite a lot of people here and now more have arrived, we—”
“I just need to know if I can afford to stay,” Bea interrupts. “Just tell me that, dearie, quickly—or put Paul on. I won’t bother you long. I need to know so I can make arrangements.”
“What? Stay where?”
“Home, dearie. In my house. The lady from the Council is telling me to go to Benholm, where Callum is, but I’m quite set on the idea of going home. I’d have to hire a nurse—they say I can’t manage alone until I’m back on my feet, and there’s the question of the cats and the garden, but I said to the lady, I may be ninety-four but that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of—”
Janie gasps. “I forgot your birthday!”
“No matter. I’d like to know if I can stay at home. Financially.”
“You can stay,” Janie says, almost impatiently. “You have plenty of money and the stock market is booming and if you ever ran out, which you won’t, we’d help. You can live anywhere you want, Bea. Anywhere. All right?”
“I don’t know.” Though Bea expected to feel relieved—and in some measure, she does—the question of where she will live seems suddenly unimportant. She is asking for something else, though she can’t quite say what. If she matters, maybe. If it matters to Janie where she is. Something feels off: in the conversation, in the rehab room, where her roommate, recovering from spinal surgery, is lightly moaning in her sleep. In Janie having forgotten her birthday, after having come and thrown a party for her ninetieth. In Bea having forgotten (is it the painkillers?) that Janie forgot. In the echo, especially, of her own voice, which has started up again: I don’t know, I don’t know.
“I’ll call you back,” says Janie, and then she lets out a series of extremely not-right sounds.
“You’re crying!” Bea says. “What happened, love? What is it?”
“It’s—oh Bea, it’s Helen.”
“Helen? What?”
“I . . . I can’t quite bring myself to say it. I—” Her breath goes in and out. “Helen—she, well, she drowned.”
Bea sits up, the motion sending a slicing pain through her hip.
“I didn’t want to tell you this way,” says Janie. “Bea, are you there?”
Just as suddenly as the pain arrived, it’s gone. “Drowned? Helen? That’s impossible! She could swim for miles! She had a cancer. You told me. Breast come back as bone.”
“Yes. She was getting treatment for it,” Jane says, “and she was weak, though she put on a brave face, and she . . . well, she went swimming. She didn’t drown right away, we hoped . . . I tried to call you. I tried, but no one answered, and I—I should have tried harder. We just had the memorial service—the house is packed with people, that’s why I was talking so loudly. I’m in the bathroom now, with the door shut. I should go back out.”
A rage courses through Bea that Janie didn’t invite her to the memorial service, didn’t even tell her, and now Janie is saying I’ll call you later and that she’ll come visit to help Bea get settled back at home, within the month she’ll come, will that be soon enough? And Bea says I suppose (her anger mostly gone; she can’t afford it), and please put Caroline on. And then there is more noise and Caroline is on the phone saying Bea, are you all right, Jane told me you broke your hip, and then Caroline asks her to sing so she croaks out a line or two—
speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing, onward the sailors cry
—before a nasal female voice says, “
You are running out of minutes, please complete your call
.”
And so she must hang up and does hang up and lies back down and prays for Helen’s swift, winged passage, and weeps because she cannot help it, despite knowing that Helen never much liked her (and truth be told, vice versa) and only visited once for Agnes’s funeral, but still was family, and Janie down to one sister and Caroline without the mother she was born from now.
And it all seems terribly unlikely that she, Bea, should be lying here in hospital, hip on the mend (she will live for four more years, at home with a caregiver), while Helen in America is dead.
J
ANE AND PAUL’S
house is full of sunlight and beautiful things, unlike Charlie’s parents’ house, which feels gloomier than he’d remembered it when he returns there after his mother’s memorial service, struck by how dark it is, how full of heavy furniture, worn Oriental rugs, tarnished silver, nearly all of it from Grace Park. Also, at his parents’, books and books and books. His father, in an almost manic way, has already begun urging him and his siblings to take things, as if enough winnowing down might eventually convince him that his wife is really gone. The night after the memorial service, while Rachel sleeps, Charlie stays up for half the night wandering—in the attic, in his mother’s study, outside, an insomniac as she was an insomniac, a searcher as she was a searcher.
Is this when he takes the cache of diaries, letters, photographs, the war scrapbook his mother kept? He will not remember, later, when each item first came into his possession; it will seem, after a time, that they were always there. Over the years, he will occasionally show Rachel or his children things that were his mother’s, grandparents’, or great-grandparents’—an ivory and silk fan, a clutch of hatpins, letters his mother wrote from Switzerland that will seem to his twenty-first-century daughters like ancient relics—the onionskin paper, the slanted, girlish cursive, the images on the postage stamps: a cheese-making atelier, steam engines, edelweiss. A Japanese silk kimono. A Swiss navy blue ski pullover, embroidered with white thread. The following winter, and for winters to come, Rachel will wear it skiing in Vermont.
Whether these items were given to him or taken by him will not matter much by then. His mother’s money will have been divided up, most of it skipping his father (who has enough with his pension and the house) to go straight to the children and already-existing grandchildren. Charlie’s inheritance, after taxes, will be enough for him and Rachel to sell the Concord bungalow and buy a rambling eighteenth-century farmhouse a mile down the road. Ownership of the Ashaunt houses will be transferred as designated in Helen’s will—the Portable to Percy and Caroline (who will sell her share to Percy); the Red House and cabin to Charlie and Will, who will collect some $50,000 in damages a good eight years after the oil spill (they do not, Charlie thinks, exactly deserve the money, but he is glad to have it for house repairs and taxes and convinces his brother to give a quarter of it to the Coalition for Buzzards Bay). One corner of the cabin, straddling the property line, will technically belong to Dossy’s family from inheriting the Big House, and Holly will remark on occasion that they own the porch and half a bed. Charlie will urge his siblings to place a conservation easement on the six acres of land they own together, the site of his network of paths. After some tense discussions, they will settle on an Open Space designation. It isn’t a permanent restriction but will have to do.
In mid-June, Charlie will give Rachel the kimono to put in her birthing bag, both of them unprepared, despite her research on midwifery and the birthing class they took, for the actual extent of liquids—blood, mucus, iodine, orange juice, colostrum, pee, shit, vomit, spit-up, water, milk—that circulates around a baby’s birth. The kimono—silk, pale peach, with a pattern of cranes and umbrellas—will remain in the bag during her hospital stay. Later, at home, she will wear it as she and their newborn daughter learn to nurse—painfully at first, eventually with ease, then with sleepy, nearly drunken pleasure that leaves Charlie envious of them both.
BUT NOW. BUT IN THE
long, hard days to follow. Charlie does not talk much about his mother. Rachel teaches her classes. He goes to work, where there is little time either to grieve or to mourn grief’s absence, his mind gratefully harnessed, his days packed—with a brief to write for his pay-for-stay case, heated meetings with Department of Correction officials, young lawyers at his door with pressing questions, prisons to monitor. One prisoner sends him frequent letters:
I noticed that a paper with three Words Defined went missing, Words like Milk, Creation, Opportunity
; and
The officer whom lives up to low standards Myself is feeling the stress of his meanness
; and
Myself doesn’t have smooth Understanding and finds it hard to do certain Things.
Charlie copies this last one onto a scrap of paper and tapes it to his office door. He answers the letters when he can. Sometimes he wonders: Is it true that he, as accused by his mother, courts suffering? Certainly he walks among it, chips away at it, not to do good, not exactly; he likes the prisoners, just as he likes to navigate the thorny puzzle of the legal system and figure out ways to push back against the state’s heavy hand. One day he goes to the shiny high-rise offices of a big downtown law firm to give sworn testimony at a deposition for the oil-spill lawsuit. On weekends he and Rachel read or putter at the house in Concord, go for walks in the woods, have dinner by the fire. He buries his mother’s bathing suit in the backyard with a few acorns he’s brought back from Ashaunt, hoping for a tree, though one never sprouts. He goes for runs when his Achilles isn’t acting up. Rachel drives into Cambridge to see friends and see movies. Sometimes he goes too, though not often; he relishes the time alone, and movies still unsettle him, the wall after the wall after the wall, and no way in.