The Vagabonds (13 page)

“We need advice,” Claire ventures. “It might be smart to wait a little.” She spoons herself a portion of loganberry jam.

“How long?”

“Not very long,” says David. “She means, until the price goes up . . .”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Claire does not say,
Don’t smoke, at least not here inside the house, I’m sick of your smoking, I hate how it smells.
Instead she says, “You’ve got a point. What happens if GE continues to drop?”

“We ought to sell. It’s what he told us,” says Joanna. “Beakes, I mean. What did he call it, the law against perpetuities? The ‘rule’ against it, anyhow?”

“Agreed. I think we ought to cut and run,” says David.

The jam is tart—both sweet and sour, syrupy, and with a bitter aftertaste. “That’s
always
what you think,” Claire says.

“It’s the procedure our lawyer advised. And I don’t know about the two of you but
I
could use the cash.” Exhaling, Joanna curls her lip; smoke billows by the hanging lamp above the sink.

“We all could,” David says.

“Right. But some are more equal than others . . .”

They smile at each other. They eat their baguettes. Half a million is not nothing, Claire reminds herself; half a million is much more than she’d expected, flying East, and she decides upon a college fund. Five hundred thousand ought to cover it—Jim will say, “Whoee, what a relief!”—and when they sell the cottage there’ll be more. It will yield twenty thousand per annum at least, even with the market down and these catastrophic interest rates, and will go a good long way to covering tuition. She has not been worried, really, about the cost of college, but this will make a difference, this will make it simple in the years to come . . .

“I think he had a crush on her,” says David.

“Who?”

“The lawyer. Beakes. I think he was one of her, her admirers way back when . . .”

“You’re not serious,” Joanna says.

“Not really, no.”

“Gentlemen callers,” says Claire. “It’s what she called them, remember?”

“Is he married? Did he ever marry?”

“You know, what I’ve been thinking about”—Joanna shakes her head—“is it’s hard to believe how
young
Mom was, no older than
I
am when Daddy died. I don’t mean I feel young, of course, and lord knows I don’t look that way but she seemed such a
grown-up
in, when was it, ’76? You were, what . . . ?”

“Eight,” says David.

“Think about it. All those years, those
decades
of living here all by herself, and with all those gentlemen callers. The doctors, the lawyers, the Indian chiefs . . .”

“The college professors,” says Claire.

“Joke,” says Joanna. “I was joking. I
do
know she didn’t date Indian chiefs.”

“I don’t think Beakes did marry,” David concludes. “There weren’t any photographs, were there, of the wife and kids?”

They shrug. They drink their tea. Claire says, “Imagine, just imagine showing up for work and answering the telephones and not having any voice. But being Mrs. Robison and writing
laryngitis
all day long.”

While his sisters discuss laryngitis, David assesses the kitchen: its cabinets, the snow on the pine trees outside. He asks himself if he should stay in Saratoga Springs and buy two-thirds of the house from his sisters and what it would feel like to live here again. Lawyer Beakes as much as said to him,
She wants you back, she wanted you here. Unto the third and the fourth generation she hoped you would stay in the cottage.
He is the youngest of the family, the one without a mortgage or roof, and he wonders how his mother’s will will change his life.

“But our grandmother?” Joanna asks. “Elizabeth. Doesn’t it just . . .”

“Just what?” Claire finishes her pastry.

“Oh, I don’t know—just blow your mind? To think of her entertaining them. To think that Thomas Edison . . .”

“And Harvey Firestone. And Henry Ford,” says David. “I wonder if he ever knew she married somebody Jewish, a Jew? That world-class anti-Semite, that major league son of a bitch . . .”

“We don’t really know what
did
happen back then. All we know is that they gave her stock. In General Electric, which was Edison Electric . . .”

“Let’s sell it tomorrow,” Joanna declares. “Let’s just get rid of it, OK?”

“GE,” says Claire. “‘It brings good things to life.’” And then she pauses, quizzical. “Or is it ‘light’? ‘Good things to light’?”

“Whatever,” David says.

They clean up the kitchen. They wrap the coffee cake and close the jar of loganberry jam and wash their plates and cups. The water from the kitchen tap is a thin trickle, but hot. Claire checks the to-do list she taped by the telephone yesterday and calls Bill Becker Jr., informing him of their decision as to coffin type and funerary urns. He is polite, attentive, and she gives him the several addresses to which their mother’s ashes should be sent. For purposes of dotting the
i
and crossing the
t,
Bill Becker says, he’ll read the three addresses back. He does.

Then David takes the receiver and says, Don’t send my urn to Berkeley, please, I don’t really know when I’ll be there again; can you store it in your office for me—keep it, I mean, on hold?

We have, the funeral director says, a closet of memories, yes.

Claire has been trying not to mind that David was given the portrait of Aaron; she has never liked it anyway: too stern, too brown, his hands inexact. She might lodge a claim for the portraits of great-grandfather William Dancey and Elise his wife; they make a matched pair—primitives, but well enough framed—and should not be split up. Where will we hang them, she wonders, and shuts her eyes an instant and
sees
them in the living room: above the Biedermeier desk and by the standing lamp. She has been trying not to think about the way their mother faded in and faded out, so you never knew for certain if she was remembering or misremembering or flat-out inventing things. At least their mother understood that
she
was the one who liked porcelain cats; the collection has been willed to her, and she will pack it up. “We’ll have to have a grab,” she says.

“A grab?”

“Where we go through the house with stickers—a color code for each of us—and take turns in a room, saying
this
is the object or painting I want. In the kitchen, say, I’d be the one who makes the first choice, then David goes second, Joanna third, and in the living room it’s Joanna who goes first, and in the dining room David, and we do this room by room until we’ve tagged it all. Let’s say I get red and David blue; Joanna, you’d be white. And then we can trade if we want to, and if nobody lays claim to a chair, say, or a mixing bowl then we sell it or give it away.”

“Have you done this before?” he asks. “You’ve got it all worked out.”

“Of course not, no. It’s standard procedure,” Claire says.

“But first,” asserts Joanna, “we need to get rid of the obvious junk. Stuff no one could possibly want . . .”

They walk through the cottage together. The rooms have nothing new in them, nothing from the recent past, but the prospect of dismantling their shared childhood home is nonetheless a daunting one. The sisters check the mudroom off the pantry; there are gloves and scarves and umbrellas and a Dustbuster and brooms and a lightweight snow shovel and, improbably, a volleyball. There are dried-flower arrangements and dead plants still in pots. David carries down the wheelchair from the upstairs hallway; he calls the telephone number on the tag and the woman from Miller’s Medical Supply says they’ll pick it up tomorrow afternoon; just leave it by the kitchen entryway if you won’t be around.

The three of them examine the dining room and living room and library. There is accumulated clutter everywhere, cabinets and shelves and closets stuffed with their mother’s leavings. There are skirts and hats and shoes and cardigans and many winter coats; there are throw rugs for the Goodwill store and quantities of blankets and boxes of old photographs and canceled checks and letters from the three of them and keys and key rings in triplicate and carefully saved clippings from the
Daily Saratogian
and the
New York Times.
The clippings do not signify: old wedding announcements, obituary notices, old letters to the editor about an election long since decided or a local referendum voted up or down. There are articles about the Adirondacks and fishing expeditions and their high school and college yearbooks and ancient AAA TripTiks and worn, much-folded maps. There is a bookcase full of wallpaper paste and cans of paint and an unopened gallon can of turpentine and brushes and rollers and Spackle and wood stain and oil.

Thick glass carafes—quarter-liter, half-liter, full-liter carafes—occupy a basement shelf; so do an assortment of teapots and drip coffeemakers and espresso pots. There are chipped plates and cups and plastic glasses they might have used on picnics, once; there are chafing dishes and electric can openers and a fondue set and shish kebab skewers, their long thin blades spotted with rust. They sort through cookie tins and Pyrex dishes and lamp shades and frying pans and salad tongs and kerosene and propane lanterns and a set of candleholders with wickless burned-out candles—the detritus of decades of hoarding and possessions set aside.

I never thought of her, Joanna says, as so surrounded by objects; she wasn’t a pack rat or anything like it; she just never threw stuff away. And some of it probably comes from Mom’s
own
childhood, David says; this was Aaron’s house beforehand, and her grandparents’ house before that. Yes, says Claire, it’s been in the family since way back when, and David says there were
Cultivator
magazines stuffed in the attic floorboards from 1830, remember; remember when she had insulation blown in and they discovered those old newspapers from when the house was built?

I remember, says Joanna, but these shish kebab skewers are recent enough, and she never threw anything out. What’s that disease about newspaper-piling, old people who can’t bear to get rid of newspapers, it has a medical name, and Claire says, Don’t be silly, this isn’t
anything
like that, it’s not a disease, she was just plain forgetful and didn’t throw objects away.

“Well, somebody has to.” David shrugs. “We need a Dumpster, looks like . . .”

“There has to be some sort of service. A company that cleans stuff out.”

“Or an estate sale,” says Joanna. “We could advertise a tag sale. If we set up an auction here, they’d come from miles around.”

Claire looks in the telephone book under “Auctioneer” and then under “Estate Sales”; indeed, there are listings to call. She selects three possibilities and writes their numbers down. Meanwhile her brother is talking; he has always been a talker and is giving them a speech about retrieval, how there’s a system for old objects where nothing is ever lost. We think of ourselves as a consumer society, an economy built around planned obsolescence, but that’s wrong, says David, that really isn’t the case:
everything’s
in secondhand shops, everything’s an antique now and what our parents or grandparents threw away is a
collectible;
there are whole barns and shopping malls devoted to this—forgive me, but it
is
the word for it—junk. You can find everything anybody ever threw away, whole shops are devoted to what’s been recycled; there’s a collector out there somewhere for every single thing on every basement shelf.

Are you serious, asks Claire, do you really want an auction, and he says, remember, I said what we need is a Dumpster. There’s a lot I
do
want to preserve, David says, but it isn’t Pyrex dishes and teapots with a canary motif and carafes with all those cute little pieces of lead to show that the Italian government officially approves of them; it didn’t matter much to Mom and doesn’t matter to me . . .

“I need some air,” Joanna says. “I need to get out of the house.”

The wooden shingles of the roof are glistening with snowmelt; the cedar stand droops, burdened with old snow. How strange, she thinks, to think of this as “home”; she hasn’t lived in Saratoga Springs for years and visits only rarely. Joanna walks along the driveway, and there’s a tune in her head:
I’m going away, for to stay, a little while—but I’m coming back, if I go ten thousand miles.

Last night’s snow is dry light powder on the hood of Trusty-Rusty, and pine needles have collected where the windshield wipers lie. She brushes them off with her hand. The idea of her mother alone in the house makes her too sad to think about, and she shakes her head to clear it but the song stays in her head.
I’m going away, for to stay, a little while.
She walks the yard’s perimeter, breathing, inhaling, remembering Alice at forty and how she’d seemed so old already, staid, set in her adult ways, and how her own daughter must think this way also; returning, she will talk to Li-li and say we don’t mean to be difficult, darling, it’s just what mothers do. It’s what we’re
supposed
to do, and someday you’ll find yourself also explaining to a teenager why there’s a midnight curfew and why not to smoke dope . . .

She lights a cigarette. Ten thousand miles used to mean something; it used to mean a world away, but now ten thousand miles is less than you drive in the course of a year; it means you come back home. Therefore, approaching the door again (seeing a deer at the edge of the woods, seeing a birch tree uprooted) Joanna is half-unsurprised to find the light on in the kitchen and her brother at the sink, his back toward her, gesturing, and a figure at the table who because of the red flowered curtain fails to see her on the path but has her chin on her hand and her elbow on the white Formica tabletop in an attitude of waiting, of patience, abnegation, fury, as familiar to her now as then only it’s not their mother but Claire.

“Say hey,” says David. “Welcome back.”

“Did you have fun?” Claire asks. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

Joanna shrugs out of her coat.

“Did you have your Garbo moment? Your
vant to be alone
?”

“What’s wrong? Has something happened here?”