On the porch one evening. The two of us watching the Night Gardener gardening. Tess saying, “I want to see her alone.” We had been out to The Pine together, the two of us, and sometimes the three of us, a number of times and in various combinations. Me alone, my father alone, but never Tess alone. My mother was always better, and she was always the same. Physically, she was stronger. She seemed to glow. Her spine had straightened. Still, her eyes remained flat. The coldness deepened, the distance more profound.
It was her old toughness without the warmth.
What happens exactly? Physiologically, what happens? To the eyes, I mean. How do they brighten? How do they dull? Whatever it is, hers were awful. And combined with the way she held herself away from me, her questioning, as if I were some stranger, one of her many acolytes seeking advice, come for an audience with Empress Anne-Marie.
I often had the impression she was preparing to leave. Even if that’s the one thing she wasn’t doing. And yet every visit the same feeling. Talking to her I saw the light of interest go out. Click, and off it goes. Like one of those old TV sets. The picture drawing in from all sides to a pinpoint of light.
When we were kids, Claire used to blow at the last instant like it was a candle.
My mother drawing away just like that. But in the slowest motion. Visit after visit, an incremental contraction.
No one else saw it. The others, my father, Tess, they talked about her health. It drew them closer. An intimacy built around a shared love for my mother. Love is the wrong word. I loved her too. So what’s right? An enthusiasm? A belief? A faith? Yes. And me? No, not quite. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy the routine. The silent sage. The found-truth-and-God-in-prison routine. Not if the God she found had stolen all her warmth. Had stolen her from me.
What I saw when we came to visit was the slow disappearance of my mother. She was being replaced by something else, something foreign.
Anyway, we weren’t the only visitors. Right away she had fans. She showed us the letters. The small gifts. Dream catchers, and coasters and poems mounted on cardboard. Mostly women. Men too though, which, while he’d have never said it, troubled my father.
Dear Mrs. March, you are a hero. Dear Mrs. March, It’s about time. Dear Mrs. March, There is a limit to what we will accept, is there not? Ma’am, I have no pity for that man, whose name I will not write. My pity is for his widow, and for his children. And now they are free, while you are not. Dear Mrs. March, Without you, I would not have found the courage to leave. Dear Mrs. March, Every night I dream of leaving, and each morning I find myself here in the same bed, with the same man, and I cannot find the courage to do anything but make him breakfast. Dear Anne-Marie, I’m fifteen. I read about you in the paper. My father is a rich man. Last year he broke my collarbone. He is in the living room. You are in jail. Mrs. March, when I was a boy my father killed my mother. I saw your photo in the paper and I am glad for what you did. Dear Mrs. March, Should I kill my boyfriend? Dear Ms. March, We are a group of women. Dear Ms. March, We have run out of patience.
The letters came and came and came.
My mother turned from nurse to killer to heroine.
Tess and I on Mott Street, the two of us working together at The Owl.
My father our neighbor.
Claire gone.
We say it all the time, but it’s true, isn’t it? How quickly things change, how quickly the foreign becomes familiar.
Often I forgot where my mother was and what she’d done.
One can’t always imagine the hammer. One can’t always imagine the cell. Times she was just my neighbor over the hill.
On the porch that evening. The two of us watching. Night Gardener gardening. Tess saying, “I want to see her alone.”
“Sure,” I say.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it doesn’t. Why would it bother me?”
She shrugs.
Of course it does. Someone else has taken her attention. My love is looking out the window.
But I say, “Sure, Tess. Go see her. She’d like that. With Claire gone.”
“With Claire gone?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not trying to replace anyone, Joe.”
The rest may be approximate, but I’m sure of that line. I hear it so clearly.
She hangs her arm around my neck the way she did, the way I loved. She presses her mouth to my ear. “Maybe I’m going to ask permission to marry you. Maybe I’m going to make my intentions clear.”
And I thought, she has not come here for me.