Tuesday morning Sharlie waited for Brian to leave for work, and called Queens information for the telephone number of Mrs. M. Udstrom in Elmhurst. She sat for a long time trying to summon the courage to dial. She remembered lying in her hospital bed at Saint Joe’s working herself up to call Brian to thank him for saving her life. There was no use speculating what would have happened if she had never made the call. Would the numbers under her fingers at this moment precipitate a comparable upheaval in her life? Unthinkable, change of any kind. And yet not to make the contact left her poised on the edge of something forever unresolved.
The voice at the other end sounded tremulous. Suddenly Sharlie’s carefully prepared words fled. She gripped the phone hard and managed to stammer, “Mrs. Udstrom, I’m Charlotte Converse. I mean, Morgan.” She laughed a little with embarrassment and nervousness.
“Yes. I know who you are,” the voice said tonelessly.
“I would like to see you. Meet you,” Sharlie went on.
“Why?” asked Mrs. Udstrom.
“Oh,” Sharlie faltered. “Well, I think it would be nice…” Oh, my God, she thought. The woman’s son is dead, and I think it would be “nice.” “What I mean is, I would like to thank you.”
“Not necessary,” said Mrs. Udstrom.
“Oh, but it is,” Sharlie gushed, thankful that videotelephones were not yet the norm. Her face was so crimson and hot that she put her hand against her cheek to cool it down. She took a breath and tried again. “Mrs. Udstrom, I would really like to talk to you. In person. If you think it would be difficult for you, of course I won’t impose. But it is important to me.”
“All right,” the flat voice replied. They arranged a time, or rather Sharlie arranged and Mrs. Udstrom agreed.
The shabby frame houses on Twenty-sixth Avenue seemed deserted to Sharlie as she walked along the cracked sidewalk. She was grateful that she’d worn a pair of slacks. She shuddered, imagining herself waltzing into one of these sad homes sporting a designer dress whose every thread shrieked “privilege.”
She passed a clump of dusty gray trees surrounded at its base by a bouquet of litter. In front of Number 159, she stopped, staring anxiously at the peeling paint and the cellophane stretched over missing window panes.
Do I really want to do this? she asked herself. But Udstrom’s heart thumped steadily in her ears. She walked resolutely up the cinder block steps and knocked.
Mrs. Udstrom opened the door so quickly that Sharlie wondered if the woman had been watching out the window as she hesitated on the sidewalk. Sharlie tried to smile, but Mrs. Udstrom’s face was expressionless as she stood aside and said, “Come in.”
She led Sharlie to a tiny living room. A tea set had been laid out on the coffee table. The older woman took her seat on a stiff-backed chair and motioned to Sharlie to sit on the couch. Sharlie noticed that Mrs. Udstrom’s cup was chipped along the rim.
“Thank you,” Sharlie said, lifting her teacup. She helped herself to sugar, but her fingers had begun to shake, so she set the saucer down and folded her hands in her lap.
“Mrs. Udstrom …” she began tentatively, “I appreciate your letting me come.”
Mrs. Udstrom nodded. She wore a faded-blue dress—to match her faded eyes and faded, peeling house, Sharlie thought. Her face was fined and nearly as gray as her hair. She was a lean, bony woman, and Sharlie thought she must have been quite handsome before poverty and misfortune had worn her down.
“I want to thank you … for your son’s … for your son …” Sharlie began to blush. This was much more difficult than she had thought, probably a mistake altogether. How much of her impulse to come here had been the need to express gratitude and how much was a macabre curiosity about the mother of the stranger who had become so significant to her?
Finally Mrs. Udstrom spoke. It was the monotonous, flat voice Sharlie recognized from the telephone.
“I done my Christian duty, that’s all.”
“It was a wonderful thing. You saved my life.”
“I done what I had to.”
The statement seemed so final that Sharlie thought she should probably get up and leave, but Mrs. Udstrom sat stirring her tea and regarding her with pale eyes that were filmed with something indefinable. Grief? Exhaustion?
“Could I trouble you for a glass of water, please?” Sharlie asked reluctantly.
Mrs. Udstrom got up without a word and returned a moment later with the drink. Sharlie opened her bag and took out the ten-A.M. medication she had prepared before leaving the apartment. With Mrs. Udstrom watching silently, she swallowed nine pills and capsules, crowding as many into her mouth as possible in order to avoid being forced to ask for more water. She set the glass down, and still Mrs. Udstrom stared at her with complete disinterest, as if Sharlie had merely inserted herself temporarily into the woman’s sole line of vision.
“I’m sorry … about your son,” Sharlie said finally.
“He got what was coming,” the woman responded curtly. She saw the shock in Sharlie’s face and went on. “Giving you his heart’s the one decent thing he ever done, and that wasn’t none of his doin’, was it?”
“He was so troubled?”
Mrs. Udstrom’s mouth twitched in what Sharlie presumed to be the bitter remnants of a smile.
“That’s what they call it, do they, ‘troubled’? Well, he troubled me all his life. And it wasn’t that he didn’t get nothin’ at home. I sacrificed and worked, two, three jobs, day and night, housework, laundry, and anything so’s he got a clean shirt for school and somethin’ for lunch in his bag. And to keep this place.”
“His father?” Sharlie asked.
“Run off. Before Martin was born.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She hesitated, then asked. “If you were working, what did you do with … your boy?” She couldn’t bring herself to say “Martin.”
“When he wasn’t in school, he come with me. Or stayed here.”
“By himself?”
“Now, who would I keep him with?” Her voice was tired, resigned. “Anyway, he liked bein’ alone. The other kids use to torment him so’s he’d shut himself up in his room, and I’d have to whip him to get him to school.”
Sharlie looked stricken, and Mrs. Udstrom continued, still without a trace of emotion in her voice. “He couldn’t talk right. Had this stammer. Oh, he didn’t say much anyhow, but when he did, it come out all stuttery. The other kids, they’d make fun.”
“How cruel,” Sharlie said.
Mrs. Udstrom shrugged. “That’s kids.”
She sat musing for a moment. “Martin, he went for a whole summer once without sayin’ more’n a word or two, and them you couldn’t hardly figure out.”
Sharlie was beginning to feel ill. Her head ached, and her stomach was queasy. She longed to get out of this shabby room, away from this woman who said such terrible things in a worn voice as if she were reciting her grocery list. Sharlie set her teacup down.
Mrs. Udstrom was gazing off into a dark corner. “But I kept this place. I did that.”
“Yes,” Sharlie said, hoping her urgent compulsion to leave wouldn’t come bursting out in a scream. She stood up, forcing her voice to remain level. “Well, thank you for seeing me. And for the tea.”
Mrs. Udstrom rose also. There was nothing in her face to indicate that she cared whether her visitor stayed or left. Sharlie walked deliberately toward the front door, resisting the impulse to run. She stopped at the threshold and tried to smile.
“Well … thank you again,” she said. Mrs. Udstrom nodded wordlessly, and after hesitating for another moment, Sharlie started down the steps. She heard the door click shut behind her and kept her stride under control just in case the woman was watching her. Then, safely around the corner, she began to run. She ran and ran, further and faster than she had ever been able to run in her life. A ten-year-old boy-shadow raced beside her, laughing and jeering and stammering her name.
Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t go straight home. She took a cab to the Metropolitan Museum and spent almost two hours looking at Renaissance paintings, comforting herself with their classic order and their declaration of the civilized nature of humanity. She began to feel less distraught, and was able to think calmly about her interview with Mrs. Udstrom.
One of the astonishing things, she thought, was that the woman had never once inquired how Sharlie was doing. One wouldn’t necessarily expect solicitude, but certainly there would be a natural curiosity. After all, it was her own son’s heart beating across the teapot. If Sharlie were his mother, she knew she’d be straining all her senses searching for some hint of her child’s immortality in the recipient’s body. Mrs. Udstrom was a hollow shell, all the color bleached from her life, all vitality abraded away by misery. For such a woman there seemed to be no such instinct as curiosity. Only acceptance, a dull, grinding tolerance of everything that fell into her path.
Sharlie walked slowly through the Medieval Court and sat down to rest in the chapel alcove, imagining the face of Mrs. Udstrom’s tortured son against the shadows. She understood his childhood torment, felt their fates converge—her years of pain and his seemed to twist together into a pattern of shared anguish. Her heart, his heart, pounded, echoing in the dark chamber of the chapel room. She knew him now. This afternoon in that defeated house, she had stared into the past of a man whose heart she carried beyond death. She realized also that finding him had finally set her free. Udstrom’s life was over. Hers was not.
Sadness mingled with her relief, and she felt her eyes sting. She gazed up at the stained-glass windows, the deep-blue light like glistening seawater through her tears.