She loved her home so much, had loved it so deeply for so many years, that when she thought of her death it was the house she felt sorry for.
No one would ever hold this place as dear as she did. The house wasn’t grand—from the outside it was frankly plain. But she’d furnished it so deliberately, so delicately over time that every shade of color or light, every nook and corner was cared for, warm and welcoming. Curated, they said now, about everything. Her home was curated.
The furnishings were only her belongings and not permanent by nature, though she wished them to be. On the news recently a venerable archaeologist in Syria had been murdered by militants. He’d been defending a cache of ancient artifacts from Palmyra, refusing to tell the radicals where they were. They cut his head off. When she heard it on the news she cried.
Courage, she thought. That was courage.
But this was only a home, only her house, and even before she died the whole place would be taken apart methodically, no sentiment wasted. Her chairs, rugs, lamps would be separated from each other with violent haste, never again to be a part of this perfect harmony. If she was lucky they would be sold to people who valued them. That was the best case, and even the best case was unbearable.
She gazed out the window from her favorite armchair—a graceful prospect. In the breeze her front-yard trees dipped and swayed. The greatest of them was a Norfolk Island pine, its rounded needles like velvet. Beyond the moving bough she could see a haze of blue lupines among the river rocks, and then the neighbors’ hedge. Beyond the hedge was only sky, where, on this sunlit late afternoon, a bank of cumulus had gathered. Billowing flowers of atmosphere.
Now was the time to give up what she loved. She knew that. But it was so hard. She should have specialized in Buddhists instead of fascists, then maybe she’d be ready for the world to fall away. Ready to rise, her arms outstretched, with nothing to the left of her and nothing to the right. Enter the air.
There was his car, its top a hard shine of silver, pulling up to the curb. It wouldn’t be assisted living, at least—for this she was gladder than she could ever say. Her son’s guesthouse was butter-colored stucco and surrounded by a lush garden. He paid a gardener to do the heavy lifting, but she would putter around, prune and put in some plantings here and there. She would dwell in the backyard quiet and humble, the troll lady in the hut, the gnome in the hollyhocks. The grandmother in the calla lilies. Twice over, for her new daughter-in-law, the twenty-four-year-old he’d left his first wife and his son for, was expecting.
There were three boxes, all marked Study. Before her hip went bad she would have had the boxes neatly stacked in the front hall, waiting, but now it was virtually impossible for her to carry them. They sat through the open door to the study, in her line of sight: Study. Study. Study. Betrayed by joints! In the end, it came down to parts. This load was a small one, only art. The earliest moment of moving, the nonessentials—nothing she needed to sit or sleep or eat on. But things that mattered, all the same.
“Mom?”
She’d never liked that word. Preferred Mama, Mother, even Mommy. When he was little he’d called her those, but it changed to Mom over time—greater neutrality. More masculine.
His head came around the doorjamb.
“Where’s the stuff?”
She inclined her head toward the study door.
“These three? That’s it?”
“For now. I’m just going to look at the wall space today, see where the pieces should go.”
He lifted the first box, walked out the door.
“Thank you,” she called after. She wished she could do it herself. Wishes had to be surrendered. Surrender, she thought, give up, these were verbs of defeat.
But at the end of things, surrender was the only victory.
Maudlin. She wasn’t dying yet, for Chrissake, just moving out, which people did every day. Commonplace. No hospital smells in store for her, no cafeteria smells, no humiliation in the loss of privacy. She’d visited her cousin at an old folks’ home. Upscale, they claimed, but the smells had been so disgusting. Also the tube lights overhead, that sick fluorescence that bleached out the world.
He was helping her out of the armchair next, and she was performing her invalid’s walk toward the front door. Once she was up or down it was fine—the pain was in the transitions. Sometimes she was able to convince herself that in the act of slow, deliberate walking she was maintaining her dignity; other times she felt like a wreck. A stately wreck, she insisted to herself hopefully, like a ghost ship moving across the wide ocean: its sails were tattered, but proudly it faced the wind.
Or she might look like a trash barge. Hard to know.
It was just fifteen minutes’ drive and on the way he talked on his cell phone. She got to hear both sides of the conversation—sports-team opinions she didn’t care to follow—since he was driving and had it hooked up to the audio. Why he needed such a large SUV was a mystery to her. She’d always assumed these hulking cars were mostly for obese people.
“Lora will help you, OK?” he asked as he parked, finally done reeling off his commentary on sports scores. “I have to go pick up Jeremy after I drop your boxes in back. He’s actually coming over tonight. His first time since, you know.”
Poor kid. And yet: one day the acne would be gone.
He disappeared around the side of the house carrying the first box and she made her labored way to the front door, which was unlocked. Then she was moving—trundling, as she thought of it—into the main house, expecting an interception but also indifferent to it. The place’s benign and subtly sculpted appointments looked like a page from a West Elm catalog. Too much off-white, the default palette of many a modern homeowner . . . an error of domestic engineering. There was no surer way to make a house feel cold and generic than by painting its insides white.
She always puzzled over the place’s décor elements, probably bought from the selfsame West Elm or another such bourgeois home-furnishings vendor, possibly meant to conjure a faint idea of art. For instance, here in the large foyer—more like a luxury hotel lobby—there were life-size, stylized brown branches along one wall, made not of wood but of plastic. Or metal. Or plastic painted to look like metal. On another wall there were large autumn leaves in shadow boxes. But neither her son nor her daughter-in-law had an interest in trees or leaves. Paul had told her more than once that a garden, to him, was nothing but added property value.
Farther along she passed a floating shelf made out of cut-up books. The books had been disassembled and covered in shellac or something, maybe epoxy, all glued together with their spines pointing outward. Scouting for Boys. Birds and Beasts of Africa. Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting. Sport in War. Paddle Your Own Canoe. Baden-Powell, if she wasn’t mistaken. The famed Boy Scout founder. Also, fascist.
On the shelf sat glass globes with ferns sticking out of them.
At times she thought she should have been an interior decorator instead of a scholar. She would have failed, needless to say: too many harsh judgments. She would have tried to rule her clients instead of satisfy them, ride roughshod over their taste. Correct, uplift and educate. She would have been as popular as head lice.
No wonder she’d thrown in her lot, instead, with the Nazis.
On the cream-colored sectional sat Lora, reading a pregnancy book that had the heft of an annotated King James. They put them through their paces these days, the wealthy mothers. You had to read a Bible-sized parenting manual—and make no mistake, its commandments were stern. Thou shalt not eat unpasteurized cheese. Lora looked up, smiled sweetly—a good-natured girl, despite being a trophy—and stood, offering a wide array of beverages, up to and including a fine Hendrick’s G&T.
But she couldn’t stop walking now on her way to the guesthouse. No. Her progress would not be impeded.
“You know what it’s like,” she told Lora, who had stood up and padded nervously beside her, belly leading. One hand hovered midair, as though to prop her up in the event of a sudden timber. “Once I go down, I can’t get up again. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Remember that? The famous commercial?”
The girl shook her head, confused. Of course. That commercial was before her time. Born in 1991. Literally half the age of the man she was married to. Paul was already forty-eight, but still didn’t believe in old age. As far as he was concerned, decrepitude was something that happened to others. His mother, for instance.
It would come as quite a shock when it happened to him. At that point he’d have to marry a twelve-year-old to feel young.
“Let me get it,” said Lora, and opened the door for her. She stepped onto the deck, slowly down the redwood stairs, slowly onto the flagstone path. The garden was beautiful, though it lacked her Norfolk Island pine. It lacked her lupines and swells of California poppies . . . but those could easily be ushered in. Her pine, though—she’d never see its like again. Once she moved here, after her own dear house was sold away, no tree she planted would grow tall before she disappeared.
She’d take that G&T, she told Lora as soon as she was situated in the guesthouse on a chair—thank you. Lora kept up a stream of quiet talk as they made their way down the path to the cottage, whose door stood open now; Paul had deposited her boxes square in the middle of the doorway, she could see, so that she’d have to steer around them. Lora said something about a stroller, then a swing, then a vibrating chair.
Containers. Babies were mostly about buying polymers now. Feminism had taken the form of plastic. Arms are the best place for babies, she wanted to say, you don’t need all that crap.
In the small house it was cool and a fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Lora was surprisingly patient about holding up the pieces of framed art against the walls. She marked the walls carefully with a pencil once she was told where a piece should go.
“What’s this one of?” she asked. Remarkable image, shades of red, a golden amber, steel-gray in the background. “Oh wow. Is that black thing a . . . ?”
“Swastika, yes,” she said. “This is an original poster for the most famous of all the Nazi propaganda films. By Leni Riefenstahl. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure. Triumph of the Will?”
“You’re not afraid the swastika will, like, offend someone?”
“Offend,” she murmured. The girl made her shake her head inwardly, but she couldn’t help liking her. “Well, it’s what I studied. Study. Still working on a paper or two. It’s not an endorsement, dear. I had these pieces in my office, you see. They’re part of my work—the art and the propaganda of fascism. The aesthetics.”
Maybe Paul had omitted to tell Lora that detail, how most of their relatives had perished in the Gulag.
She wouldn’t put it past him. He was a guy with little time for history, even his own family’s.
Offend. She’d have her desk here—she’d re-create her study in miniature. She couldn’t walk well, but she could still write.
“That soldier looks like he’s holding the flag so awkwardly,” said Lora. “It’s weird how high his elbow is.”
The elbow was notably high.
“Well, bearing the standard of the thousand-year Reich wasn’t a task for pansies,” she told Lora. Though technically, of course, it often had been.
“I like this one a lot,” said the girl, taking the next framed poster from the box. “He’s handsome. And the baby’s so cute!”
Indeed: a distinguished gray-mustached gentleman was holding up a baby against a blue sky.
“That’s Joseph Stalin,” she said.
She said it kindly, she thought. Not condescending, she hoped. Just letting her know.
But the name didn’t ring a bell. Lora smiled and nodded, as though a distant but welcome relation had been introduced. “I adore how they dressed old-fashioned babies in these lacy outfits, don’t you? I saw one picture from like eighteen-something where even though it was a boy, it wore a long white dress.” She held up Stalin near the door to the kitchenette. “You could put it right here! The baby’s flowers and that little flag go with the colors of the backsplash tiles, don’t they?”
She heard herself sigh softly. Lately she’d been sighing a lot. It was a medical syndrome, among other things. She’d looked it up.
“It has to go over the desk, like the other. For now, maybe—I don’t want to press my luck, but do you think possibly—that gin and tonic you mentioned . . . ?”
“Oh wow, of course,” said Lora. “Pregnancy brain. Sorry. I’ll be right back.”
Once she was installed, she’d have her own wet bar. She depended on the cocktail hour, felt actual tenderness on its approach—every day, a grateful expectation. When it came to alcohol, you couldn’t afford to be at someone else’s mercy.
With Lora gone she could soak in the mood of the place. It was three rooms plus a bathroom, not too small, and many windows—the rear ones, off the kitchen and bedroom, had a view of the tennis club over the fence. The beige of its buildings in the background; in the foreground a red expanse of clay court.
“They’re playing foosball,” said Lora. She came in holding the tumbler. “Paul and Jeremy.”
Last time she checked, the boy still hadn’t been speaking to Lora. His policy had been straightforward when it came to his stepmother: silence. She was only eight years his senior. He spoke to her mostly in monosyllables. Barely spoke to his father either. His mother was deeply depressed, so it was scarcely a surprising resentment, but all in all, Lora—who’d been ignorant of Paul’s first marriage when he first picked her up at a nightclub, due to outright lies on his part, and then had gotten knocked up—accepted it with good grace.
“So when are you thinking you’ll move in?” asked Lora.
“I’m not in a hurry,” she told her. She took a sip of her drink and let it sit on her tongue.
“Paul’s going to feel so much better once you’re here with the au pair. I repainted the east suite for her. Like, robin’s-egg blue? I’ll show you later.”
“It’s good of you.”
“I love that she’ll help you out but also double as a nanny! So great! Right?”
“So great.”
The Swedish au pair would be changing diapers at the bookends of life, from Huggies to Depends. No, stop, too harsh, she wasn’t there yet—so far, at least, incontinence wasn’t her lot. Still. The au pair was a nursing student and six feet tall, Lora said, with big hands; she’d be nice enough but likely condescending as she managed the helpless, both newborn and ancient.
Paul wanted her to move soon. He claimed he was afraid of a hip breaking when she was alone in her house, no one nearby to notice or help . . . though something had rung false when he said that, come to think of it. Since when was he afraid of her poor health? He noticed even her hospital stays in passing, at best. Maybe he was just embarrassed by the prospect of her keeling over, being found like an upside-down beetle, limbs helplessly pedaling. He set great store by appearances, her son. He’d been embarrassed by the sight of human weakness since he was a teenager. And she was a poster child for weakness now, any idiot could see it. But maybe she underestimated him: maybe she was the one who should feel ashamed of casting aspersions on the nobility of her child’s feelings—a bad habit of hers, taking cheap shots. Privately, even. There was nothing funny about that eighties medical device commercial, for instance, just common stupidity. The sterile humor of mockery.
Easy mockery: it clung to the mind like a spider.
He wanted her to move, but to move she would have to destroy her home.
“You just relax,” said Lora. “I’ll send one of the guys to get you when dinner’s ready. We’ll eat on the deck. OK?”
After Lora had gone back to the kitchen she sat on the patio in front of the guesthouse sipping her drink. Could have used another jigger, but it was nice enough. The sunset’s pink bands were partly hidden by the trees that rose around the edges of the property, tall trees like oak and eucalyptus. She liked the trees, but she would miss having a wider view of the sky.
When Jeremy came to get her, walking his slouching walk, his lowrider jeans a mere hair’s breadth from exposure of his genitals, he wore his default sullen expression. But he grinned when she held out her glass to him. Only the watery dregs. He was well below drinking age so he appreciated even the smallest gestures toward inebriation. She made it her business, when not in view of either of his parents, to parcel out booze to him. Gin was better than marijuana, after all, when it came to conversation.
“Thanks, Gram,” he said, and slugged it back. “You rule.”
He set the empty glass on the rim of a planter and bent down to help her up. He was a perceptive kid, despite the crude acting out. She saw the bad behavior as a tithe, not to a church but to his pubescent demographic. He’d grow out of it. Meanwhile he knew just the right angle, just the right speed at which to help raise her to her feet, and the pressure of his hands was solid and comfortable, unlike his father’s. Paul always had a more important place to be and didn’t pay much attention; usually he jerked her out of her chair so abruptly it made her bones rattle.
Sure, her grandson liked her mostly because she slipped him liquor, but she could hardly blame him for that.
Ahead she saw the deck table with places set for dinner—those massively oversized goblets. They were so trendy now you could barely buy anything else to drink your red from. Some pompous ass had told the foodies their wine was only acceptable when served in fishbowls with narrow sticks on the bottom; well, they got their comeuppance when they had to tip the things almost vertical to eke out the last sip. She’d once seen a hedge-fund manager, some obnoxious colleague of Paul’s, break the upper rim of a giant goblet on his nose in the middle of a buffoonish anecdote about a “slutty girl.” Served him right. She’d chortled loudly and perhaps a shade too long for good manners; Paul had covered his embarrassment by implying she was senile.
She could have made a retort, but a mother spared her son, when it was in her power to do so. It had been her choice.
In the low wind of twilight paper napkins were fluttering, pinned down by cutlery. Cloth napkins would never occur to Lora. She might have seen some white ones in a restaurant once.
The sun was throwing shadows against the wall of the house. She leaned on Jemmy, whose arm was thin but strong. Yesterday he’d been bouncing in a swing, chubby and angelic. Now tall and pimpled and rangy, with the ass-crack-revealing jeans and an addiction to pot and masturbation.
But he was a good boy.
She hoped the new baby was a girl, though, had to admit she hoped she’d have a granddaughter this time around. In the long run, less heartbreak. Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being.
Into that gap civilization fell.
Not that Lora was much different, in terms of her net effect. The footprint of Lora on the earth. A hostess at the nightclub now. Made less there than the au pair would cost. They didn’t work just for room and board these days. Frankly, she suspected Paul didn’t trust Lora by herself with a baby. She was warm, so nice you felt guilty, and full of just about nothing. For her it wasn’t that history had faded but that it had never existed to begin with.
To a child the world began anew every day. All life was the life of the self, the life of now, and stories flitted around the margins like butterflies.
But at least, unlike Paul, Lora did no harm.
Could that be said for her? In old age and weakness, was all forgiven? Did it need to be?
What had she done with her whole life? She’d studied them. The ones who took her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Her baby sister. The ones who took so many. And after all it was the United States they’d wanted to imitate: these easy-living, these complacent and iniquitous United States. Hitler admired, with deepest faith, the way the New World conquerors had so effectively wreaked genocide upon the Indians. Established the supremacy of whites. That recent study—what had it said? She kept up, even if she wasn’t a contender anymore. There might have been about 80 million of them. Not 8 million, as early twentieth-century scholars used to guess. As many as 80 million, it was now estimated by the archaeologists, the demographers who worked on historic population densities. Cabeza de Vaca, Lewis and Clark, their stories of the Indians they met so frequently, the size of the country. That meant the genocide in the Americas had taken maybe 10 million, at the low end—60 million at the high.
The greatest genocide of all had happened here. War and foreign disease, spread purposefully, often. Enslavement had failed, with the Indians. They’d rather die than work the fields. Mostly they’d been nomads, of course. They didn’t care for the white man’s land-work. So Africans had to be imported, for the purpose of enslavement, because the Indians didn’t make good slaves. Hell, they didn’t make even mediocre ones. The red man was no slave at all. They had refused to farm and been summarily erased, and other unfortunates had been brought in. Under the whip, the black man agreed to work the fields. For a time.
But who spoke of the Indians? Where was it mentioned?
In academic journals, that was where. Indian news. A handful of native activists. No one listened to them. There was a founding myth, and their petty quibbles existed only at the margins.
And what had she done? She’d studied the art and design of the imitators. The second or even third generation. The weak-minded copiers of race domination, with their brilliant banners and their engineers of empire. She’d scrutinized their accoutrements. Following in their path with a microscope and a sad flutter of little-read articles. This was the song she offered up to the fallen?
She’d held it as an article of faith that distance gave you insight. But distance gave you distance.
She would have laughed at herself, if she had it in her.
Something faltered, a pang shot up her leg from the knee. Flicker of agony. She clutched Jemmy’s arm harder.
“Gram! You OK?”
“I think—”
There it was again, a long stab up to the joint of the hip. To the bursa, that sack in the joint, full of fluid. She’d had shots in that sack, steroid shots when she was younger, a giddy girl in her late sixties. They never helped. Her whole leg was folding. She had the feeling she was hollow: what bones she had were made of glass. But terribly, the glass was sharp on each end, split into shards like a paintbrush whose bristles were pins. And those pins were embedded in the nerve-wracked flesh.
Jemmy spun and was standing in front of her, clasping her around the waist. Bearing her full weight, must be. She sagged but didn’t hit the flagstones. A high, panicky voice came to her ears.
“Aleska? Aleska!”
Vaguely she remembered asking Lora to call her “Professor Korczak,” though. But could she have? Possibly? Or was that a dream? She hoped so. She couldn’t have been so rude. She was rigorous, but rude only when provoked. Not to the innocent; it hadn’t been her upbringing. The true people of the book were seldom impolite.
The young woman was running toward her. Worried! Poor dear. Not so fast, she wanted to say. You’ll hurt the embryo. Wasn’t that what they called it?
“Gram, can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
She was unsure. Her bones were rubber or they were spiky. They couldn’t hold.
The weakness receded as suddenly as it had come on.
“I’m OK. Thanks, Jemmy. Thanks, dear. Please—just give me a moment.”
“Steady there, Gram.”
“It was just my—was my body.”
“You’re OK, Gram.”
Still a bit confused. A form of aphasia, possibly. Where you say the wrong thing. But she felt firmer and steadier every second. She was solid. She was herself. For a little while yet.
“I am OK. Yes. I’m quite all right now. My apologies.”
“Aleska, are you—what was that? You want to sit down? Rest?”
The girl’s pretty, concerned face was suspended beside them. Jemmy still held her up. He was the solid one; he was the mainstay. She thought of his mother, an intelligent woman, if depressive. Worlds apart, the first wife and the second: a woman and then a girl. Paul knew the difference—even he knew. But for his purposes he didn’t give a shit.
It made her sad. She’d wanted to raise a finer man.
“I’ll make it to the table,” she told them. Paul was coming out the back door finally.
“She stumbled,” Lora called to him. “But it was almost like she was having an attack or something.”
“I’m all right now,” she repeated faintly.
She felt like an ancient bride, advancing along the garden path on Jeremy’s arm toward the wedding feast. He’d give her away. But to whom? She was already given. She had given. She’d given all she had. And it was surely not enough.
Not by a long shot.
In so many traditions, heaven was in the sky. It made sense—up there where personhood dissolved, dominion of light and ether.
Go on, just leave the earth. Your work here is done. Insufficient. But over with.
But how much she loved this place.
If only she could find someone to live in her home exactly as it was, not with its insides stripped away but with everything still in position, soft and careful, its every corner well-disposed to company. If someone could exist there, on through time, and quietly appreciate the place the way she had—if they could know the small, unsayable beauties of that cherishment. In all their singular detail. If she could hand that down inside her house.
I may have failed, but I knew one precious thing: I knew what was beautiful.
So take my home, here, take the way I lived, nestled within these rolling hills. Take my view of the sky, and on a clear day the ocean.
You too will thank this life. Flooded with gratefulness. Bow your head.