It took up most of a whole room, the mail, in uniform boxes taped and labeled by NASA, and everyone who knew him, few though they were, his mother and some childhood friends, was surprised that Vincent kept it. The letter regarding the forwarding had arrived in the summer of 1984 and he read it standing in the kitchen, barefoot, having just come in from tending to the tomato plant in the backyard. His feet were almost translucent in their age, the metatarsals beneath the skin more pronounced, like the original pencil showing through some painting . . . no longer holding mail addressed to astronauts of your class, the letter said . . . budgetary limitations. He lifted his left foot at forty-five degrees and stood on his right, then switched, an exercise he performed three times a day, morning, afternoon, evening . . . happy to provide forwarding to your home address, or to another address you provide, in perpetuity. Letters and packages from NASA had the same feeling as those from Elise, an ask from your old life that promised to be the last. Two years before she had sent a class ring he’d given her, the university’s lyceum engraved in miniature, no note, and a year before that there was a package from NASA, his old Speedmaster, relinquished by the Smithsonian, which had kept them on display. The museum was returning them to the original astronauts for reasons unclear. By a month after the landing Omega had repurposed the special design and sold it en masse, the go-to gift for fathers and husbands who might measure the inertia of their armchairs. He had imagined some scene in public, a stranger’s hairy wrist held up to point out a made-up bond, and put the watch away.
His life had become the small acts of discipline that had once punctuated it, the main events blotted out. He washed his car once a week, made his next appointment with the barber as he was paying for the last. His accounting was perfect, his laundry folded as if by ruler.
Why keep them if you won’t read them, his mother’s face said when she saw the stacks, but she had become, it seemed in the matter of one Sunday, too old to voice this or any other characteristic admonition. Her wheedling little questions were gone from their exchange. He visited and checked after her meals, now, rearranged the TV dinners in the freezer. Her hand and bath towels had begun appearing crumpled on her bathroom floor, and each time he came he folded and rehung them. Once she found him on the tile as he did this and tried to pass him the phone, the cord stretched to its limit.
“Somebody keeps calling and saying he’s your son,” she said, her voice as flat as the teal of her polyester pants. He waved this away, changed her number and made sure it was unlisted, and surprised her on her birthday with a cordless. She brought it to the grocery store and showed it to the checkout clerk.
In terms of the letters, it was a matter of practicality, he thought. What was the other option? Some PO box that he’d need to regularly empty of the letters? No. When the forwarding began NASA stopped boxing them, so he put them instead in the plastic bags from the supermarket that had accrued under his sink, and when those had run out and a new supply had yet to build up, he put the letters in loose and closed the door to the room. It was the one area of his life that defied organization, the place he would rather not look. The year before the landing, when the letters had begun swimming in, he had been told that they mostly contained suggestions, directives on what he should say when he set foot in that new place. He had never had any interest, not because he believed he knew explicitly better what should be said, but because he thought no one was more or less suited to know.
It had come to him on a run one day, as he pushed past the hoariness of sleep deprivation, a phrase that he heard as he came to a field of grazing cattle. It was almost as though they had supplied it, the bigness of their eyes. Anderson had asked about it often, wanting to run it by some committee. Vincent knew for months, what he would say, but told no one.
His mother lost her mind in the space of a summer that was arid and unyielding, even bemoaned by the little boys on bicycles, who could be seen on the side of the country roads taking breaks en route to the same destinations he’d sought out once, the creek bottom, the quarry, their radios sputtering from where they were tied with twine to the Ts of red and blue frames. There was no wind. She began calling him and posing questions that were like koans, rhetorically impervious but hiding some candor.
He was in the garage, the first time, sorting winter clothing, bagging some sweaters for donation, when the phone rang, and though he had decided to let it go it went on a long time, twenty rings, thirty. Finally he put down the turtleneck in his hand, navy, Scandinavian wool, a gift from Elise, and ascended the two steps inside.
It seemed there was no one on the other end, at first, but then she was there, his mother who had never asked him a question about the divorce, just opened the furniture catalogs she subscribed to and begun to leaf through them with a pen in hand. She had read out prices like possible names for babies. Blinds and sectionals, lawn chairs and ottomans.
“The clock is talking too much,” she said.
“Do you mean,” he said, “the bedroom alarm or the kitchen wall? That the minute hand is loud? Should we replace it?” She hung up. The next came two days later, five A.M. sharp, early even for him.
“No space for a tree in a house,” she said.
He ran the three blocks there and found her in the living room with one piece of white bread in her hand, curled like a tube. No butter, no plate, no knife. She performed a girlish annoyance at the breach of privacy and he left on her insistence, but on the next visit there were eggs in forgotten bathwater, coupons stapled to a jacket. His mother had always treated him the same, had insisted, two days after the quarantine was lifted and she saw him for the first time back from the moon, that he comb his hair again before dinner. He wanted to afford her the same privilege, despite how far she had traveled—much farther, he thought, than he’d ever been. When she told him, the last afternoon in August, during the middle of the game show that was her favorite, that she was very late, that her ride would be in front of the movie theater any minute, he reassured her that her dress was perfect, there was no need to change, and then they got in the car. On a bench under the marquee, his hand on her neck when she let him, they waited two hours.
“Your son,” she said, and he patted her hand.
She died without much awareness of it, bothered by any ceremony around her, swatting the pastor Vincent had invited when he tried to take her hand. The pastor, sitting with his scrubbed hands spread on his knees, called her by her name, Andrea, something that had thrilled her once, and made reference to her many years as a Sunday school volunteer. At the close of ten minutes, in the middle of one of his careful sentences, she tottered up and turned off the lights. They laughed, Vincent and his sister and the pastor, the way they might at a child who has said a taboo word without knowing it, but not for very long. The last thing his mother said aloud in this life was: “The ladies’.” As in, I need to use the ladies’.
The matter of the letters was raised in her dying, because she left so much to be kept, much of it the story of who he was, the newspaper clippings and the locks of his baby hair. It had to go somewhere. His sister laughed meanly at the suggestion she take it all, her hands on her hips in their childhood kitchen where she had once, in private curiosity, chewed some dog food and then tried to put it back in the bowl. Sophie had been the first to idolize him, spelling her own name wrong months after she’d perfected his, and also the first to give up trying to know him. She had exploded during the Thanksgiving following his divorce, nearly a full year after, when she asked where Elise was and had to glean the answer from the ashamed look on their mother’s face. Please pass the rolls, he had said, and she had, not before unscrewing the salt shaker and emptying it on the one golden lump remaining. Even this provocation he had not taken. He got up and announced he thought he’d take a walk, and she had said, as he pulled on a jacket, You know, I used to call you a mystery, but even a mystery rewards you some for trying to understand it. My son got more out of his pet snake.
Now, in the light of the open refrigerator, squatting in loosely laced running shoes and jeans that were too young for her fifty-six years, pulling out the crisper bin and passing a hot bleached cloth over it, she was less nasty, tied only loosely to the situation and its questions. She hadn’t even looked up at the suggestion, which he had voiced without really thinking, that she take the boxes of clippings and grade school photos, the proof of his life their mother had saved. He had forgotten or never really known she was unlike the other women who had appeared in his life, pliant, just to grow around it.
“Why would I hold on to your childhood? What do you think I care about those scrapbooks? You’re not famous to me.”
He found her weeping, later, crouched over a box in the bedroom, a photo of herself in a hand-sewn costume of a plane, six years old, a bid for his attention that their mother had architected. As he turned to go she caught him leaving, and she threw him a look as though he were a chore too long postponed, some filth that had spread and changed.
It seemed preposterous to him that we should all be so beleaguered by our lives’ arcana, have to decide about the college yearbook and the wedding reception album. How could we possibly determine their worth, he thought, and weren’t we damned either way, cold and unsentimental if we let them go, hamstrung by nostalgia if we didn’t. At the end of her month packing up the house he accepted her invitation to breakfast, a diner where they had gone as children, a place with high-backed booths and a wall of celebrity photographs that included nine of him. He could not understand why she became so furious when, after ten minutes of their sitting there in silence, he opened the newspaper. “Your things are boxed by the back door,” she said as she got up. “Once you’ve got them, you can slip the keys in the mail slot for the Realtor. Thank you for breakfast.” The bill had not been received or discussed. She was passing through the glass door and agitating the string of bells, she was making her way to her scratched-up car in the lot, she was adjusting her bangs in the mirror, she was pulling out, she was gone.
When he brought them home, the thirty-two boxes that she had carefully taped and angrily annotated, Marriage-Edwards, the only place for them was the spare room where the envelopes with strange handwriting already lived, and so he decided one evening, after days of stepping around them in the hall, with a hand on the back of his neck and a forkful of overcooked pasta in his mouth, that he had no choice but to take care of the letters.
He was of the age now that his admission to the movies was discounted, but he paid full price. On his bedside table were books in stacks, in his wallet no photos or ticket stubs, and he had begun knocking wood when he passed it, cabinets or tables, for luck in what he didn’t know.