Inside, their mother had begun again to speak in the stifled and frustrated tone she used only here. The youngest child and her endless reflections got up from the chair, walked to the door beside the night table, and pressed her ear against it, then walked to the double bed (her sister watching her carefully) and, without removing her shoes, stretched out on the chenille spread.
Aunt May spoke and their mother said, “I'm not expecting wine and roses.”
In a photograph on the tall dresser at the foot of the bed her mother stood on the stone steps they had climbed just an hour ago, with Momma and Aunt May (a nun then) on one side of her, Aunt Agnes and Aunt Veronica on the other. She was in her wedding dress, a tall veil and a white scoop of neckline, and an armload of long, white flowers crushed around her. Through the bedroom wall behind her the child imagined she could hear Aunt Veronica stirring in her small room, a room the girl had seen only once or twice despite the many hours she had spent in this apartment, a room, she recalled, with fabric walls and pillowed floors and dim light reflected off a glass dressing table covered with jewels, a draped bed, a draped chair, a smell of perfume and the starry-night
pinch of alcohol. She listened but suspected the sounds she heard were imaginary, a product of her own wishfulness, for if the day was ever to move forward at any pace at all, Aunt Veronica would have to appear.
At their windows her brother and her sister peered down into the street, to the shadowed door of the candy store they might get Aunt May to take them to, to the deserted playground of another elementary school that was closed for the summer where they might run, shoot imaginary baskets, hop through the painted squares for potsy which were now burning white in the city sun. There was another row of stores beyond the school's back fence, signless, mostly nondescript storefronts where, they had been told at various times, mattresses were made, ladies' lace collars, bow ties, church bulletins.
Once, sitting here, they had passed an hour watching bales of something, paper or cotton, being pulled hand over hand, one bale after the other, up from the street and into a third-story window. And once, their chins buried into their chests and their foreheads flat against the glass, they had watched a man in broad daylight walk on wobbly rubber legs from one edge of the sidewalk below them to another until he fell, all in a heap, between the fenders of two cars, and then, after some minutes, pulled himself up, peered over his forearm and the trunk of the first car like a man at the edge of a pool, and then righted himself and began his snaking progress all over again.
But today there was no such luck and when they had watched long enough for it they returned once again to the comics on their knees.
In the dining room their mother said, “But who thinks of me?” Aunt May's reply was too soft for them to understand. “A little happiness,” their mother said, and then said again, “I don't know. Some peace before I die. I don't know.”
She didn't know. The children understood this much about her discontent, if nothing more. She didn't know its source or its rationale, and although she brought it here to Brooklyn twice a week in every week of summer and laid it like the puzzling pieces of a broken clock there on the dining-room table before them, she didn't know what it was she wanted them to do for her. She was feeling unhappy, she was feeling her life passing by. She hated seeing her children grow up. She hated being exiled from the place she had grown up in. She feared the future and its inevitable share of sorrow.
“The good things,” they heard Aunt May tell her, and their mother replied that she'd counted the good things until she was blue in the face. Against the silence they heard the teacups being gathered and children shouting in the playground across the street.
Knowing the routine, they knew that when Aunt May next came into the room, holding her wrists in her hands although she no longer hid them under a nun's sleeves, it would be to tell them that Momma was coming in for her nap now, if they would please. And sure enough, just as the game outside was getting interesting, there she was with the old woman behind her, as white and broad as a god.
She was not their natural mother but the sister of the woman who had borne them and who had died with Veronica, the last. Momma had married the girls' father when Agnes, the oldest, was seven. He had died within that same year and so there had been no chance, the three children understood in their own adulthood, for any of the halfhearted and reluctant emotion that stepmothers are said to inspire to form between them: within the same year as her arrival she quickly became not merely a stranger to resent and accommodate but the only living adult to whom they were of any value.
The children stood as Momma moved into the room. She was a short woman but serious and erect and wide-bosomed and it wasn't until the very last month of her life that any sense of fragility entered her old age, and even then it entered so swiftly and with such force, her flesh falling away from her bones in three quick weeks, that it hardly seemed appropriate to call the result of such a ravaging fragile. (Seeing her sunk into her coffin, the cartilage of her nose and the bones of her cheeks and wrists pressing into her skin, the three children, teenagers by then, would each be struck with a shocking, a terrifying notion: she had not wanted to die; she had, even at ninety, fought furiously against it.)
They passed her one by one as she stood between the dresser and the foot of the bedstead, the same small smile she had worn when she greeted them still on her lips. When they were gone Aunt May quietly closed the door.
The living room was a narrow and windowless pass-through, a large green horsehair couch on one side and a sealed white fireplace on the other, before which stood the coffee table with its lace doily and ceramic basket of waxed flowers. There was another ancient, overstuffed chair in the corner beside it and a large brass bucket filled with magazines, which the children, in their routine, next went to. They were Aunt Agnes's magazines, just as every book and newspaper and record album in the place belonged to Agnes. They were the singularly most uninteresting magazines the children had ever seen:
New Yorker
s with more print than pictures and cartoons that were not funny.
Atlantic Monthly
s without even the nonsensical cartoons,
Fortune, Harper's.
There were a handful of
Playbill
s and these the older girl took to read once again (she had read them last week) the biographies of the actors and actresses, and two
National Geographic
s for the boy, and, finally, a single limp copy of
Life
magazine that featured on its cover
a formal portrait of President Kennedy edged in black and inside (the younger girl found the place immediately) a full-page photograph of Mrs. Kennedy in her black veil, a dark madonna that the younger girl studied carefully on the worn Oriental rug.
“I know you children are going to put all these magazines back,” Aunt May said as she passed through to rejoin their mother in the kitchen.
“Yes,” they said and watched her pick her way through the slick magazines, her pale thin legs in the same thick stockings Momma wore, her feet in the same brown oxfords. In their secret hearts they wished to see her slip on one of the magazines, see her rise for one second into the air like a levitated woman (garters and bloomers showing) and then fall crashing back, their mother running in from the kitchen, Momma pulling open the bedroom doorâthe noise, the excitement, the drama swallowing up at least one long half hour of the long and endless afternoon.
She safely reached the end of the room and then turned to say, in a whisper, “How about in a minute or two we go across the street for a treat?”
And so they got their easy half hour, anyway. They thundered ahead of her down the stairs (“Careful, careful,” she whispered, but smiling, admiring how many steps they could leap at each landing) and crossed with her, her hand on the two girls' shoulders, between two parked cars. They chose bags of pistachio nuts from the candy store that seemed to them to be the authentic version of the one in their own neighborhood where they had bought their comics that morning. Here the man who took their money had only two fingers on his left hand and a four-digit number burned into his arm and the accent with which he spoke was to the children a Brooklyn
accent, a city accent, as were the accents of all the people on the street and most of the grandparents of their friends, as was Momma's brogue.
In the street again, Aunt May let them sit on the low wall of the schoolyard that was once again deserted as they ate their pistachios and tossed the bright red shells into the street. She was, the children understood, cracking and tossing and leaning back against the fence to stay in the school's shade, the one of their mother's sisters most determined to be happy and, although she treated joy as a kind of contraband, sneaking them glasses of Coke, bags of pistachios, folded dollar bills, showing the great pleasure she took in their company at brief moments when no one else was looking (as she was doing now, holding her pale face and flashing glasses to the sun, swinging her legs against the wall like a girl), she was for the most part successful.
Her fifteen years in the convent had included some part of each of the children's lives and each, even the youngest, had some memory of her in her wimple and veil and long robes, robes that she seemed to use like a magician's cape, pulling from them as if from thin air the prettiest gifts: gilt-edged holy cards, miniature glass rosaries, a ceramic baby Jesus that the younger girl could cup in her palm. Each had some memory of her small face smiling at them from the circle of her habit as she slipped them these gifts; each at some point had had the impression that the habit was a kind of disguise, something she used only to gain access to the places where these lovely things were keptâonly so she could swipe them and hide them in her robes and then, smiling, present them to her sister's children when no one else was looking.
And then, some years ago, Momma had spent the night in their parents' room (their parents moving into the girls' room,
the girls into their brother's, their brother to the couch, in what was an illogical but equitable arrangement sure to guarantee each member of the family equal discomfort). In the morning their father drove them all to a convent, a lovely old white house surrounded by gardens and woods. It was a beautiful day in late spring and the air there smelled of the sea. There were white garden swings, freshly painted, here and there throughout the woods and most of the paths led to small grottoes where the ceramic face of the Sacred Heart or the Blessed Mother, Saint Francis and Saint Anthony, hung from the trunk of a tree. The children rocked the swings and ran down the paths and once or twice with elaborate ceremony knelt down to pray while their father read the newspaper in the car and Momma and their mother visited inside the convent.
Just as they were growing tired, even of that holy, enchanted place, and had begun to look around for something else, they saw Momma and their mother and Aunt May coming down the white steps of the house. They didn't recognize her at first, her hair was curly and short, pale red, and she wore a loose black suit that they knew had belonged to their mother, but then the sun caught her glasses as she glanced up at the sky.
The three women were halfway to the car before their father saw them and then he hurried to put the paper down and get out to open the back door. When the three women had slid in, he shut the door with great gentleness and then, with some sudden impatience, called to the three children. They rode all the way to Brooklyn squeezed beside him in the front seat and only got out to rearrange themselves when they got to Momma's street. Aunt May touched their hair before she and Momma climbed the steps to the door, to what would become the rest of her life. She touched their hair and
brushed their cheeks and pressed into the hands of each a damp dollar bill folded to the size of a Chiclet.
Â
When they'd finished the nuts they crumbled the stiff plastic bags and then walked with her to the corner to throw them into the wastebasket there. The mailman was just passing by and he tipped his hat and called her Miss Towne. She called him Fred and touched the children on the shoulders as she introduced them. “My sister Lucy's children,” she said, standing behind them. She spread her arms out as if to take them into her embrace, as if he had offered to take a snapshot.
“Aren't they handsome?” he said. He was a thin man with a long face. He wore his blue-gray hat at a jaunty angle. “And don't they resemble their auntâthe little one especially.”
“Oh my,” Aunt May said. “Don't wish it on her.”
They crossed again to the other side of the street and walked in the cooler shade of the buildings back to Momma's. Upstairs again, she gave them tall glasses of ice water and, from the top drawer of the server, three brand-new ball-point pens marked IBM in gold letters. She sat with their mother at the window beside Momma's empty chair.
“He's not the man I married,” their mother soon said, and Aunt May replied, “This is the worst part of the day's heat.”
At the dining-room table, drawing battleships and submarines or houses and flowers on white paper napkins, the children recognized the tenor of this code and so made no attempt to crack it for its meaning.
“A different person entirely,” their mother said.