7. The Final Dispatch, contd.

I had never seen a person looking the way she looked when she came home. She was dead, of course. I understood that. I was acquainted with death through my rabbits. But my rabbits still looked like themselves, when dead, whereas my mother had become something like a landscape or a pile of trash. I thought of tree trunks that when the light is right resemble crouching figures, I thought of clouds in which laughing faces can be seen, and fungi that seem to have noses, cheeks, and ears. As with tree, cloud, fungus, the resemblance to a familiar form convinced my eyes but not what I will quaintly call my heart.

That was not because this so-called face was bluish gray and very cut up around the lips. My mother’s real face could have been bluish gray, I thought, and still I would have known it. I would not have been able to look at it the way I looked at this—this bag of frozen squirrels, this cow pie, this pan of bubble-and-squeak. I had never been able to look at my mother’s face before, not at, because it had no surface on which my eyes could rest. Her face swam upstream in my gaze, overtaking my impulse to look, and arrived at the source before I knew that she was coming, then turned to greet me as if she had been there all along and I were the one belated. She opened me like the door to her own room.

No one can say that I have not accepted my mother’s death. This is an open-casket chronicle. Nor am I an undertaker, to doll her up, shoo away the flies, and whisper Shh, she’s sleeping. My mother was not sleeping. My mother was not here. They had replaced her with this thing.

This thing was not my mother. But though it was not my mother I thought that it might know where my mother had gone. So I pulled up a chair to the coffin—which was laid out on a low table in our drawing room—and asked it.

Where was my father? I cannot locate him in this scene. Probably upstairs, moaning, “Bea, Bea,” repining too late, as usual. Possibly savaging a pillow. Feathers drift down over his disconsolate figure, their soft touch like a healing angel’s kisses, I don’t think. It should but does not surprise me that I was left alone to experiment with my mother’s corpse.

I did not cry or plead like an ordinary child but interrogated the imposter in a monotone, speaking rapidly and without any of my usual tricks, on the contrary seeking out the sounds that were hardest for me, my s’s above all, my d’s, b’s, and m’s, so that I might stammer as violently as I had stammered when I talked to Hopsalot that last time. I was hoping to fetch my mother back, as I had brought him back, long enough for her to tell me something. I don’t know what. Goodbye, perhaps. It is trite but one comes to expect it.

No, I will not perjure myself for the sake of a cynical quip. I do not know what I wanted. But at her death a question had opened in me like a door, perhaps the one my mother had just gone through. “Where are you?” it might have been. “What are you, now? How should I comport myself toward you? Do you need anything? Can I help?”

What do we owe the dead? I have never received a satisfactory answer. But the empty place in me where my mother was still issues its imperatives, though there is no one to receive my offerings, or tell me I have done enough at last.

All night I stammered, and time stammered with me. I dragged it back, it jerked ahead again, I dragged it back, farther back. By the first blue hint of dawn her mouth had tunneled back, I thought, to the day before. I saw a warmer light on it, glinting off a sliver of tooth. Sunlight, or maybe electric light, factory light. And still it was mute.

Abruptly I was weary with this playacting and sat up, feeling adulthood closing over me like bark. I rubbed my dry eyes. Then I let fall my hands, from which all strength had fled, for I had heard a sound. The most ordinary sound in the world, one might think: a cough. But from that still form, terrible.

Again I bent over the dry, unmoving mouth.

“Harwood,” my mother said.

Later I would try to convince myself that she had said it imploringly, or accusingly, or in any other way that would help me construe it as a message and a directive. But in fact her voice was perfectly neutral. It sounded if anything a little bored. But it was my mother’s voice.

Now I cried, without dignity, gasping and snorting, eyes and nose streaming, drops falling even into the coffin, onto the impervious face.

My father’s name was the last thing I would ever hear my mother say, though I talked and talked, trying to get more out of her, I even talked for her, saying, “I will never leave you, my darling; I will watch over you, my little girl, my only, forever,” and things to that effect. I remember very clearly how these sentiments creaked out of me in the airless wee voice I used back then when I wished to pretend, for the power it gave me with the other children, that I was possessed by a ghost. Oh yes, just as little boys play at murder with toy guns, so I did in fancy what I would later do in fact. Our lies tell the truth about our leanings.

Could I have been channeling her after all, thinking I was pretending?

No, my mother never told me fairy tales.

[Pause.]

She was gone, I’m sure of it. My mother took to death as to her native element. Whereas of my father’s death, I have often had the uneasy sense that, like so many of his projects, it would not “take.”

[Pause, static.]

Because I am in the land of the dead, where every word is true, I felt, while I was telling you how I leaned my forehead against her coffin, some cold edge press against my brow, as if the sky had bent against my head, and when I mentioned satin I nearly choked on its white billows. As for lilies, I scarcely have to mention them to smell their reek. And once again I am talking, talking, talking, bent over a dry unmoving mouth, listening for an answer that never comes.

Are you receiving?

My mother’s face has become a travesty, so I look at her hands, which are more honest in their repose, confiding their familiar freckles to me, though her familiar ring is wasp-waisting her finger which therefore must be, must have been swollen.

My eyes are wet. It must be rheum.

[Pause, static, sound of breathing.]