It Will End with Us (9 page)

She also used the word
immortal
without irony. I have never met anyone else who could do that.

A provincial woman who never learned to be cynical.

“Your mother’s a funny bird,” my father said.

The time she said to my father, “I won’t have illiterate children.”

The time she took Thornton and me to Columbia to view an exhibit of Blake’s drawings, and Thornton was bored. He sat in back on the way home and kicked the front seat even after Mama told him he had better stop. She said, “Just keep that up and I’ll tell your father.”

I was aware that superior people must not be bored by art.

I remember always knowing that Edward was not artistic.

The time, much later, that I tried to visit an art museum in order to see real paintings, the time I was in Connecticut with Thornton.

I remember walking there with him, crossing the campus when the carillon in the tower started ringing and students in coats and ties were suddenly all around us on the sidewalk. I was the only
girl and Thornton wouldn’t let me take his arm. He said to everyone we met, “This is my kid sister.”

I remember that I cried when we found out the museum was closed to the public, sensing, I suppose, even then, that I was never going to see an actual painting by anyone famous.

Standing out front to watch the people who had invitations climb out of taxis and go in through the door, some in evening wear, though it was the middle of the afternoon, and thinking that these flat, bland, ordinary-looking men and women were the very ones Mama meant when she talked about cultured people and people of sophisticated taste, and Thornton remarking that they were
swank
.

Realizing later that she had invented a whole society of people that didn’t exist anywhere, one composed exclusively of people like the Brownings and
Keats and Whistler and so forth, who in addition to being geniuses were kind and generous and helpful to each other, though she would never have admitted that even to herself.

An image of my mother kneeling in the upstairs hall, putting a notebook away in a tall mahogany secretary that stood just outside the door to her bedroom, pressing down on the stack of notebooks with the palm of one hand while pushing the drawer shut with the other, frozen in that posture, in that image.

I remember always knowing that the notebooks were important.

Other drawers of the secretary held linen from my grandmother that we never used and that fell apart in our hands when we took it out later, like the past, it occurs to me now, locked away in all the little drawers, opening them now and finding it has crumbled away.

She wrote in ordinary composition books, the kind with marbled black-and-white covers that one sees everywhere still, with a white rectangle in the center of the front cover and lines for name and subject. On the line for name she put a number. I don’t remember any of the numbers. I don’t know how many notebooks there were.

I remember “Please don’t lean on me like that,” the times I stood next to her while she was writing in a notebook.

If I shut my eyes, I can turn my head in the image, so to speak, and look at a page covered with her script. Despite being able to do that, or imagine that I am doing that, I can’t make out any of the words that are on it. The image of the page within the larger image of my mother seated at her desk is blurred like a photograph that is too small or too out of focus. If I stare at it, so to speak, it wavers as if glimpsed through water.

I want to say that the page has drowned in the river of time.

I sometimes imagine, absurdly, that if I could recollect some moment in the past with sufficient intensity, I would be able to live it again exactly as before.

Peter Pan wasn’t able to remember anything for very long because he was never going to die.

Not that he wasn’t
able
to remember exactly, it was just that he needn’t bother, I think, needn’t grasp at such meager immortality when an eternity of new experiences lay before him.

Ahead of me, I want to say now, I have only the past.

A truly crazy attempt to make time flow backwards.

I remember Mama reading her poems to Thornton and me, and later just to me, reading from a notebook that she held at eye level in front of her, like a schoolgirl, I thought even then.

Reciting above the hiss of rain that, it seems now, always accompanied her readings, as I mentioned earlier.

Not caring that we grasped almost nothing, apparently.

Is the reason, I suppose, that I can’t remember any words.

The fact that with my eyes closed I can see her reading, on the sofa in the library, usually, or at her desk or on the bed in her room, but all I hear is rain.

The fact that she mailed her poems and stories to magazines and reviews that always mailed them
back, until she finally found a few small enough and obscure enough to print them. A newspaper in Charleston sometimes printed one of her poems.

I was fifteen when I finally understood that my mother’s poems were not literature.

I felt like a murderer.

If I had learned that my father was a molester of children, that would have been easier to accept than that my mother’s poems were not literature.

I understood that regardless of what had happened and might still happen to her externally, her life within had come to nothing.

The many times I looked out the window at my mother on the rope swing in the yard, scarcely moving the swing, staring at the ground in front of her.

“Is she going to spend the rest of her life on that swing?” my father said.

The time she saw Rimbaud standing in the cotton.

The time she fell to her knees in the church aisle and my father and my aunt Alice took her out, and after that she wouldn’t go to church anymore.

The hours and days she lay on the library sofa with her eyes closed.

I remember “I don’t want God to see me.”

Behind the locked door of the library, writing and balling up pages, starting a new sheet in an attempt to record her failure on the previous sheet, and giving up and stopping, forever she would say, and then starting again, hopeful once more, Thornton driving to town to buy her more paper when my father wouldn’t.

I remember “I have become dust.”

Wandering the house, agitated, her hair every which way, wringing her hands, wild-eyed, like a crazy person, binoculars dangling from her neck.

My mother was the only person I have ever known who actually wrung her hands, grasping the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other and twisting and squeezing, exactly as one would twist and squeeze a washcloth.

The time my father told us she was just pretending.

Thinking even then that she was just half-pretending.

Wanting to get my attention, Maria opens the door softly, stands in the doorway behind me, and shuffles her feet.

The time I was standing in my room playing
Tristan and Isolde
as loud as I could make the little record player go, when my father came up behind me and touched me on the shoulder and I was so startled I fell down.

The fact that Mama hated people coming up behind her while she was at her desk, locked the door to the library so people couldn’t startle her by coming up and touching her while she was writing.

The year I let my hair tangle and wouldn’t bathe or change my clothes, when I was always listening to
Tristan and Isolde
, when I was fourteen or fifteen, was the time my mother was locked in the library.

My most vivid memory from that time is of the voice of Kirsten Flagstad.

It was a portable record player in a hard case that would close up and lock. It had a handle on top
and when shut looked like a piece of Samsonite luggage.

I used Mama’s Samsonite suitcase to travel to Connecticut later, the time I rode the train with Thornton and my father.

Ordinary things—luggage, radios, toasters, and so forth—looked just the way things were then. Similar items today look just the way things are now. I can’t explain this.

Memories also. It is impossible, I think, for anyone to have memories like mine now.

She dwelled in the wreckage of her poems, sat in the house in one or another of her lavender dresses and fantasized about a life that fate, my father, and the South had denied her but that she could not let go of, that she mourned the loss of, while the only real life she possessed slipped past her almost
unobserved, her husband and children grew away from her, became actually frightened of her.

As if a foreign body had invaded the family. It could not be expelled, so we isolated it within the system, gave her wide berth when we passed her in the kitchen or hall and avoided looking directly at her, into her eyes, as if the system had formed a protective cyst around her.

I want to say that the foreign body was my mother’s soul, dwelling among us like a spirit of the dead, not resting, not able to find any peace, wandering the house, distraught.

If only I knew what I meant by
soul
.

The world seems to me such a poor and barren place, I can’t imagine what a soul would find to live on here.

The times she came into a room and the conversation faded and then resumed as a pretend conversation, stiff or animated in a false way, sounding rehearsed and wooden.

We were puppets, my mother said. We were little wooden dolls. She said she could see the strings.

I remember “Why don’t you shoot me, Stanley, the way you shoot dogs?” one night at supper, looking across the table at my father.

We acted as if she hadn’t spoken.

Birds flew to the feeders, and, finding no food there, flew away, and in time they forgot why they had ever come. We still saw them in the bushes and trees, and heard them all around us, but none came to the feeders.

The time Thornton tossed a handful of seed on one of the feeders just as we were getting in the
car, so he could tell Mama that he was taking care of the birds.

I didn’t see my father take the notebooks, though I saw the splintered drawer where she had kept them.

I don’t remember when I learned that he had burned them. I have an image of him flinging the notebooks into the incinerator but it doesn’t feel like a real memory. It is perhaps only an imaginary picture that I invented to illustrate the remembered fact that he burned the notebooks, so it is not evidence that he burned them, standing there flinging them in one by one.

Though I know he did in fact burn them.

It was not as if she had forgotten the notebooks on a park bench somewhere, or left them in a taxi, as someone did just recently with a Stradivarius violin,
I saw on television, in which case she would have had only herself to blame.

If she had left them on a bench or in a taxi it would be possible that one day in the future somebody would find them and be devastated.

The afternoon she came home I was on the front porch. Gracie heard them first. She lifted her head from her paws, pricked her ears, and padded down the steps to the yard, where she stood listening, and then I heard the car turning in from the highway. It had rained hard in the night, and when they came to a puddle Papa gunned the engine so as not to get bogged down in the middle. The car went into a huge puddle and tipped and wallowed, and the engine roared and it climbed out, I could tell just by the sound of it. The dogs ran barking down the road to greet them and escorted them back, racing in circles around the car, nipping at the tires. Papa stopped the car in front of the house
and got out. “Goddamn dogs,” he said, kicking them away.

I came down the steps. I didn’t say anything or look directly at her.

She was thinner. Never buxom, she had melted away. Her hair, which was beginning to grow out again, was standing up in spikes. She looked like a little old man.

She knelt and let the dogs come around her, wriggling and wet.

She stood up. She said, “What dog is this?”

It was jumping up against her, it was nearly as tall as Gracie. Papa pushed it away with his foot. “Why that’s Gracie’s puppy,” he said.

Edward came down and held the puppy. He didn’t look at Mama. He talked to the puppy so as not to
look at her. “That’s Mama,” he said, kneeling by the dog and fluffing its ears, “That’s Mama.”