Matilda’s cable was phoned to me. I was in my garden, painting. Pink roses with a tinge of lavender climbed against the deeper rose of the brick wall which enclosed the garden on two sides, the L of the house making the third and fourth. Indoors the phone rang. Still holding my brushes, annoyed at the interruption, I nevertheless ran to answer it.
PLEASE MARTIN COME NOW
She did not say whether it was Mother or Father. Her Yankee blood restrained her from phoning except in case of death, but presumably something was wrong with one of our parents. And I had promised each summer, on my annual pilgrimage to the home place, that if ever she really needed me, if one of our parents became really ill (I could use the word “dying” in connection with Mother and Father but never quite mean it) all she needed to do was send for me and I would come. At any time. All the way across the Atlantic. Brother Martin’s big dramatic gesture, but sincerely meant.
I went back out to my garden, past the old, beautiful pieces of Georgian furniture I had slowly collected to go with my old, beautiful house, of which only the newest wing, the long side of the L, was Georgian. In the garden the pale April sun was gentle against the daffodils, which burned almost too brilliantly in the borders. I looked at the almost-finished portrait on the easel, a middle-aged woman, Lady Elinor Broughan, greying hair, hawkish aristocratic face: How did that happen? Some strange genetic throw-back? Lady Elinor’s father had been a pork butcher and Lord Evelyn Broughan had plucked her from behind the counter when she was sixteen and married her, to give their child a name, in a quixotic gesture against the establishment. So now I painted her, Lady Elinor Establishment, helpmeet to her mate, devoted and beloved daughter-in-law.
I yawned, which in me is always a sign of anxiety. There was something in my portrait of Lady Elinor which reminded me of my sister Matilda. Was it Mother or Father she had cabled about? They were both near ninety: Matilda, Helen, Billy, and I, born late in their marriage.
I took Elinor-Matilda indoors and dismantled the easel and all my painting things. I would never be as good a painter as Father, but I was far more successful, and my popularity eased any sense of bitterness I might otherwise have had. Father was long out of fashion, though he still painted. It was probably Father, possibly a stroke or a heart attack. We had always had a family joke that one day we would find Father draped over his easel, dead, a paintbrush still in his hand.
The joke had begun to wear a bit thin the past several summers. It took him months now to finish a canvas, though the results, it was my private opinion, were still extraordinary; one day Father would be rediscovered, and I think I hated him for that. I hated him far more for being silly. He lost things constantly: his fork at table, his glasses, his painting glasses, his current kitten. Sometimes he thought I was his brother instead of his son. He moved into a realm of chronology into which I could not and did not want to enter. Only Matilda, his first born, could push him out of it and into the passive present.
Or Mother. Mother had been bed-ridden now for three years, but she was—as she herself put it—catching up on her reading. During my visit the past summer—I always stayed at least two weeks—she had piled on the big table by her hospital bed Nietzsche; Heidegger; Remembrance of Things Past; five Margery Allingham mysteries; a history of the Wars of the Roses; a biography of Catherine the Great. It wasn’t display. She knew what she was reading, despite the idiotic variety; she kept the authors and characters straight, and by the time I left the pile had changed. She was rapidly becoming physically incontinent, though Matilda kept her immaculate with disposable diapers; but, unlike Father, Mother knew where she was in time and space.
Matilda did not cable me three years ago when Mother fell and broke a hip. She wrote. Mother had gotten up to go to the bathroom during the night. Matilda heard the great thud as she tripped over something—what? A kitten? A turned-up edge of the hooked rug?—and her obese body, over two hundred pounds, went down like a felled tree, though that’s too poetic an image; we used to say that Mother was four feet around in any direction.
Still, it was more likely Father.
I yawned again and phoned my travel agent. Then I cabled Matilda—I, too, saved the phone for death, though, unlike Matilda, I always wrote airmail. Matilda wrote sea mail, except for events like broken hips. I told Matilda that I would arrive the next night, catch another plane to the local airport, rent a car from there, no need to meet me, and would drive over early the following morning.
I tend to sleep late but the five-hour time difference was in Matilda’s favor, eleven o’clock my time as I stood shaving, six o’clock Matilda’s.
As always, when I approached the long macadam road that wound uphill to our house, I felt an ambivalent churning in my gut, a longing to be home and a feeling of terror at what new changes time had wrought. I longed for Father’s ability to move in time. If I could return, during my visits, to the way things used to be, then it would bearable.
It was the first time in years that I had come before mid-summer, and I had forgotten the difference between April in old England and New England. In shadowed curves of field and roadside lay tired patches of snow. The trees were still winter-bleak, the new budding barely visible against the grey sky. Stone walls scratched black lines across pastures. In my brick-walled garden, I had roses year round.
The house was at the top of the road after an interminable climb, a grey shingle house that looked as though it had been blown by sea-salt winds rather than the north wind from the hills. In the winter, more than summer, it went with the stark landscape: I had forgotten that half the year the land was not gentle. I had come expecting to see orchards in bloom, the lilac bursting, the new green trees embracing the house. From the upstairs bedrooms in the summer I always had a sense of being in the trees.
But the maples and oaks were still skeletons, and another of the elms was down, only the sawed-off trunk a reminder of where it had stood. The elms had somehow been part of the house itself, so that now there was a dying look to the unprotected front door. Nothing to keep out the cold, and the wind that was always alive on the crest of the hill, cool and comforting in summer, but bitter now, taxing the heater in the rented car.
I went past the front of the house, turned down a small dirt road, and drove to the old barn that served, among other things, as garage. The red paint was wintered off, grey wood showing through. Beyond the barn was another, also paint-peeling, which was my father’s studio. When we were little, we all had easels in the studio, and were allowed to paint with Father for an hour every day. For the other three, it was only a comfortable memory of childhood. I still drew upon the things I had learned painting beside Father. I wondered if he was already at work; he liked the early morning light, and even in his latest work, the absolute newness of the first light was what struck one most forcibly.
As I got out of the car and left the barn, planning to walk back to the studio and look in on Father, Matilda came running to me, followed by Scar, the old hound. She was pushing her arms into an old coat, a man’s coat, not my father’s. I did not recognize it. She flung herself into my arms and simultaneously managed to hold me. Scar jumped up and barked in greeting. Matilda said, “Down.” I have never been very fond of Scar.
I pushed Matilda away to look at her; she smelled of fatigue, an odd odor for Matilda the Immaculate, always recognizable by her personal scent, the Madame Rochas with which I provided her and which I took in through contact with her flesh. “What is it, Tilly? Why did you send for me? Is it Father?”
She shook her head in negation at the same time that she said, “Yes.” Then, “It’s everybody. Father. Mother. Me. Bless you for coming, Marty, though you’re earlier than I expected and the house—oh, Martin, it’s just all got”—she held out her arms in a strange gesture of helplessness—“too much.” Helplessness was not a characteristic of my elder sister, who always stood tall and austere over every situation.
I said, “The barn needs painting.”
“Yes. And the house. Oh, Marty, I’m sorry about the house. Lily couldn’t come yesterday and I haven’t had time to get things tidied…”
“We better have the house and barns painted this summer.”
“We can’t afford it, Marty.”
“Why? What’s happened to their money?”
We were walking towards the house, arms around each other. I could not now see the gauntness of her face where the skin stretched thinly over the bones so that she had reminded me of Father. It was Helen and Billy who had inherited Mother’s tubbiness—Helen was always on a new diet. Matilda and I were long and lean. She said, “Money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I sell one of Father’s paintings occasionally and that helps, but we have more expenses now.”
“What?”
“I can take care of Mother, except for lifting her, I need help with that. But Father—”
“Is he ill?”
“Not—physically.”
“What, then?”
“His mind. You saw yourself last summer that it was going.”
“It’s worse, then?”
She did not answer.
“Is he painting?” I gestured towards the barn.
Again she did not answer.
I said, “As long as he paints, he’ll—”
Leaving Scar to whine outside, we went into the house by the low east door, which led us through a stone pantry to the kitchen. The front door was used only in summer when all doors and windows were flung open so that the house could drink in the blue and gold and green.
Today all doors were closed, and windows, and, as Matilda opened the door to the kitchen, I could feel the atmosphere of the house take me unaware and slap me across the face. Always when I crossed the threshold I thought of Mother’s bread baking in the oven; I smelled comfort and Queen Anne’s lace and the north-west breeze.
It was as though I had entered a strange place. The kitchen floor needed washing. There was a pile of soiled sheets sending up the stink of urine on the floor by the washing machine. This mixed with an equally strong stink from the cat’s box, which needed changing. There were dirty dishes in the sink, something unprecedented. Then I saw the chair by the hearth, but turned away from the fire so that the occupant could look out the window, across the cold fields and scars of stone walls, out across the bare valley to the hills. Our old cat crouched on the high back of the chair, staring unblinking, unwelcoming.
“Father.”
“When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen. Who’s that? Is that you, Billy?”
Billy was dead, dead in a war as stupid as every other war. Sharper, more self-protective than Billy, I’d managed to duck out of the war, sent cables after Matilda’s brief, dry phone call, cried hot tears with Mother and Father the following summer, and asked if I could have Billy’s magnificent captain’s desk shipped to England. It was perfect in my study, but I always felt a shock when I went into his room, as though seeing someone with their front teeth pulled out. It was right that I should have Billy’s desk—everybody said so. But I also want it to be in his room, too: simultaneously.
“Go away, man,” Father said, “we don’t know you.”
It was like looking into Billy’s room and expecting to see the desk: something was gone, something was not there that should have been there. It was not simply the appalling changes that less than a year had made in him physically: the silver hair was limp and lifeless; the contours of his face seemed to have fallen in; all his bones, indeed, seemed to have crumbled, so that the once erect old man was a huddle of bones held loosely by the wrinkled skin. The hands on the arms of his chair trembled.
“Father, it’s Martin. It’s Martin, Father. I’ve come home.”
“I’ll put green paint on your nose,” the old man said. “That may possibly improve it.” Tremulously, he started to rise.
From the shadows of the hearth behind his chair a girl emerged, a stocky creature, probably in her late teens, with lank brown hair straggling about her coarse features. Calmly and firmly she pushed the old man back into the chair. “It’s all right, Gramps,” she said in a loud, cheerful voice, as though she were speaking to a not very bright child. Then, to Matilda, “Lily called just now. She’ll be over this afternoon to clean things up. I’ll get the washing machine going in the meantime. Don’t you fret, Miss Tilly, I’ll get the dishes out of the way in a few minutes now that I’ve got Gramps settled.”
Matilda put her hand over Father’s to pet it. “Marty, you remember Daphne. She takes care of Father in the mornings.”
I murmured something that I hoped sounded affirmative.
“Daphne is Harriet Cooley’s youngest. The Cooleys have the big garage down in the valley. You remember.”
“Oh, yes, yes of course.”
“I don’t know how I’d manage without Daphne. Do you want to see Mother now, Marty?”
Want. Yes, but not now, not today. Then. Yore. Ten years ago, when Mother waddled happily between her rows of flowers and vegetables wearing one of those loose shifts of subtle blues or rusts or greens, exotic patterns she had created and dyed herself and which strangely suited her comfortable bulk. Her white hair was braided and coroneted, and her face, devoid of makeup, was alert, questioning, welcoming. She would sit down on the rich soft ground between a row of zinnias and a row of brussels sprouts and talk: about my latest portrait—she was inordinately proud of my success; about Billy’s brilliant PhD thesis—Macmillan was publishing it; about Helen and her husband and the children living in California, and how Helen never wrote but always came once a year with the children; about how spartanly Matilda was bearing the death of her husband and children in an automobile accident—we never said that Malcolm had probably been drunk, only how terrible for Matilda, the waste of four lives and the death of her world. Then we would turn from the subject, the wanton reasonlessness of life and death, and talk about Father’s painting, about mine, and finally Mother would say, when reason returned, “You’ll have to help pull me up, Marty. There are disadvantages to being shaped like a cannon ball and I don’t want to roll into the vegetables.”
In the house now, in April, a log crumbled. The smell of burning applewood covered the smells of the unclean house. I was grateful that it was only because Lily, whoever she was, hadn’t come. In his chair, my father leaned forward, and I saw spittle dribble down the corner of his mouth and hang off the point of his chin. He had been shaved, and I wondered whether Matilda or Daphne had shaved him. “Why don’t you change the cat’s papers?” I said sharply.
“Marty.” Matilda’s voice was quiet, hurt. “Do you want to see Mother?”
No.
I followed her to the ground floor room that had been made into a bedroom for Mother when she broke her hip. It had once been a formal Victorian parlor. Now there was only a hospital bed, a chair for visitors, and shelves for Mother’s books. The back of the bed was slightly raised, and Mother lay there inertly, her soft bulk covered by a throw, another of those exotic, subtle pieces of material she had designed and executed. There was one book on her table, and an enormous magnifying glass.
“Marty’s here, Mother.”
She opened her eyes. “Marty, where are you?”
“I’m here, Mother, right here.”
Her rheumatic hands groped towards me. “Marty—where—”
Matilda gave a shove. “Go to her, Marty. She can’t see you unless you’re close.”
“But…”
“Her eyes are going, rapidly.”
“Can’t anybody—”
“No. Marty—”
I went to the bed, and I took Mother’s hands in mine. They were as always, dry and warm. Her grip was firm. She spoke, and suddenly it was her own voice, familiar, reassuring. “Matilda, I’d like some coffee, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martin would join me in a cup.” Then she gave her inimitable giggle. “Though we’d both look rather foolish, both trying to sit in the same cup.”
I laughed, too. “I’d love a cup of coffee, Tilly.”
As Matilda’s steps retreated, Mother said, “How does she look?”
“Tilly?”
“Who did you think I meant? The kitten?” And I noticed the inevitable kitten curled between Mother and the wall. There’s a new kitten every summer. When they grew up they stayed in the barn—behind the garage section we kept a milk cow—and in Father’s studio.
Mother spoke with an unwonted edge of impatience. “How does she look? Damn it, Martin, I can’t see for myself. I can only feel how she looks, and l don’t like the feeling.”
“She looks tired,” I said.
“And well she might be. What else?”
“There’s a good deal more grey in her hair.”
“And—?”
“She’s not standing as straight.”
“Go on.”
“Mother, I’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“You’re a portrait painter.”
“She doesn’t look like one of my portraits anymore. She used to. Now—maybe Grant Wood. She’s thinner. Everything about her is tight. That—oh, sort of grace and fluidity—is gone.”
“What about her eyes?”
“They’re veiled.”
“Tilly was never one for letting anyone in. Generous to a fault about everyone else, but too proud ever to let us be generous in return.” Then Mother’s nostrils twitched, very slightly. I was glad she could not see my face. She said, “Malcolm, please ask Tilly to come change me. I am soiled.”
Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, and perhaps I only imagined the humiliation behind this horrendous reversal of roles.
Tilly, the eldest, could probably remember me, and even Billy and Helen, being bathed and powdered and diapered by Mother. Although it seemed to me that I remembered lying on Mother’s and Father’s big bed, on a towel soft from age, while Mother’s firm hand rubbed cornstarch over my bottom, pinned on the clean nappie, and set me, fresh and powdery, in my crib.
I said, “Where’s Mrs. Matson?”
Mother said, “She died a month ago. We haven’t had anybody to take her place. Tilly’s looking. We have three girls to help take care of Father: Daphne, Lily, and Grace.” Again her irrepressible giggle. Then, “We’re very lucky, because they’re all kind and patient with him. Please, Martin, I am quite uncomfortable. Call Tilly, and then leave the room.”
Mrs. Matson wasn’t—had not been—much older than Tilly. It did not make sense for her to be dead and Mother alive. I went out to the kitchen and Tilly was at the stove, cooking something—for lunch, I suppose. It smelled like a kind of stew—Tilly was always a good cook—and this homey odor was a relief.
“Mother wants you, Matilda.”
From his chair, Father said, “Matilda is brutal to your mother, Billy, brutal. How any child of mine can be so cruel—”
Daphne, pushing a strand of oily brown hair out of her eyes, stopped him cheerfully. “Oh, come now, Gramps, you know that’s not so.”
“She’s cruel, Marty, she won’t let me paint, she hides my brushes—”
Matilda, walking to Mother’s room, was suddenly more erect, so I knew his words had hit her.
Daphne’s warm smile belied the forced heartiness with which she called Father “Gramps.” “It’s a sickness in his arteries, you know. He doesn’t really mean it.”
Father raised his voice. “Don’t talk about me as though I’m not here. She bullies me. I’m not a child. Take her away.”
“Take who away, Father?”
Daphne said, “Gramps, do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“No. I can mess if I want to, like you-know-who.”
I said, “I’m going to my room.” I went upstairs. Past Billy’s open-doored room with the hole where his desk had been, the color of the wallpaper less faded. Past Mother’s and Father’s room, the great bed unused now, or did Father still sleep in it? Past my own room to the nursery, where Matilda’s children in summer had wakened the entire household at a proper seven or seven thirty in the morning (Mother would already be in the garden, Father in his studio), and where now Helen’s brats disturbed me during their visits by screaming for water at least three times a night and no one was allowed to sleep after five a.m. On to Matilda’s room, the smallest and always the coziest, reminding me of Emily Brontë’s room. Mother had made the curtains and the bedspread for the small bed that Matilda had moved into after Malcolm’s death. Mother had done the stencils on the walls, too, all in soft shades of brick rose, so that the room reminded me of my garden. I was relieved that the room was unchanged until I saw the picture—if one can call it a picture—over the bed. Matilda seldom bothered to show up at any church, casually calling herself a Unitarian. What in God’s name was my Unitarian sister doing with a cheap, gaudy, bleeding heart framed and hung over her bed? It destroyed the room. I backed out, did not go to Helen’s predictable room, but returned to my own, which was always a paradoxical blow to me, clean, impersonal, pleasant, but hardly mine anymore since I had virtually stripped it for my house.
I sat on my bed. How long does she want me to stay? Why did she send for me? Does she need more money? If I accept just a few more commissions, it won’t be a hardship for me to send more money.
I heard steps on the stairs. Heavy steps. Like Mother’s. Mother would come clumping up the stairs at bedtime and squeeze into the big wooden rocker. She might be four feet in all directions, but she managed to have a mammoth lap, big enough for several babies simultaneously, and an unending repertory of seventeenth-century songs, some of them extremely bawdy.
Mother: singing to me: to my nephews and nieces: simultaneously.
Matilda came into my room. “Marty. There’s a tray of coffee in Mother’s room, and some hot muffins.”
“Tilly, what the hell is that bleeding heart doing over your bed? Have you gone to Rome?”
Tilly’s laugh was often reminiscent of Mother’s joyous chiming. Now she sounded like Father. “Hardly. It’s simply a reminder that life is a bloody farce.”
“You need to be reminded?”
“Sentences need periods at the end of them. It’s also a slim hope that somebody who once shared in the comedy may also be laughing at it.”
“You still believe in God?”
“On occasion. That’s why I use a bleeding heart for punctuation. Mother’s waiting for you.”
“Her eyes—”
“Part of the farce.”
“The magnifying glass—”
“She can still read for a few minutes at a time.”
“Why did you send for me? Is she dying?”
“Nature is not that kind.”
“Then—”
“Martin—I tried to tell you. Sometimes one needs—support.”
We went downstairs. Tilly buttered a muffin. “Mother, Grace made these muffins for you.”
Mother said, “Grace comes at night. You remember Grace. Grace Butler.”
I didn’t, but I let it go. “To help Tilly with you?”
“Father,” Tilly said. “The girls often bring their friends, too. I really have lots of help.”
“What about Mother, now that Mrs. Matson’s—gone?”
“Jamie Hooper comes to help me after he’s finished with chores. It really takes a man. And Ted comes in at least twice a week.”
“Ted?”
“Ted Orthos. The doctor.”
“Miss Tilly!” Daphne called from the kitchen.
When Matilda was out of earshot, Mother fumbled for her coffee cup, almost overturning it with groping fingers. “Ted Orthos’s coat is the only comfort Tilly has.”
I had noticed the man’s coat over Tilly’s shoulders—when? Only an hour ago, maybe less than an hour.
Mother sipped her coffee, slowly, as though she was thinking: then, “Tilly needs someone to love.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Those who can’t love without devouring are better off without. Ted needs loving.”
“Why don’t they marry?”
“Ted has a wife. I wouldn’t mind her looking like a codfish if she didn’t feel like a codfish as well. Ted’s coat is cold comfort, but it’s something. It’s a promise.”
“Of what?”
“That there is love in the universe. Please eat my muffin, Martin.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Then dispose of it. Tilly will fuss.”
Matilda had come in silently, deliberately silently, I thought, so that Mother, who couldn’t see her, would neither hear. She said, “Yes, indeed, Tilly will fuss. You don’t have any right to starve yourself, Mother.”
“Why not? It’s all I have left. The right to choose not to eat.”
“That’s suicide.”
“There’s a great deal of blubber left for my body to feed on. I wish I could think of a quicker way.”
“It’s taking life,” Matilda said, “into your own hands.”
“I wish I knew what life is. Then I might understand the yes and no of taking it.”
Matilda picked up a coffee cup and held it for a moment to steady her trembling lips. “We don’t know what life is, Mother. We don’t. So we have no right to take it.”
“Why don’t you sell the dining room set?” Mother suggested. “It’s back in style and we won’t use it again. You could get some more help in with the money, Tilly. You need to get away. I made Tilly cable you, Martin. Helen’s no help. You were always fond of Tilly. Can’t you see what this is doing to her?”
“It’s all right, Mother,” Tilly said. “I don’t mind.”
She didn’t mind. I really believe she didn’t. I did. I went back to the kitchen. The smell. Where the hell was Lily to clean things up? A cat was squatting in the ancient box. Daphne had my father’s trousers down and was cleaning him with a wet cloth. Her warm smile came again. “We’d do anything for Miss Tilly, Grace and Lily and me. Sometimes when Gramps and Granny are asleep, we have such good talks. In spite of everything she has on her mind, she always listens to us. The other kids, too. They like to drop in of an evening. There aren’t many older people who remember what it was like to be our age. Miss Tilly says it’s what she has left that nobody can take away from her—remembering. She’s told us lots about Gramps and Granny, the way they used to be. Not so much lately, since they’ve been so much worse. She needs a vacation, Miss Tilly does.” Daphne had tidied Father up and he was back in his chair, snoring lightly. So the good memories were being taken away from Tilly. That as well as everything else.
And from me. I had always thought that when people kept on working they didn’t become senile. Stokowski. Stravinski. Scarlatti. Maybe only people who begin with an S and end with an i.
Mother, no longer able to read her way through everything. Father, within a year no longer Father…
Daphne continued, “But it’s more than that with Miss Tilly anyhow. She makes us feel she really cares.”
“She does care,” I said automatically.
The bleeding heart. Because some mythical god came and cared?
“Tell Tilly—” I started, yawned, then finished, “I’ll be back”—I went into the pantry—“this summer”—and out of doors—“maybe.” Scar greeted me eagerly, great tongue lolling, jumping up at me for petting. I pushed him down, let him into the pantry, and shut the door on him. Then I went to the barn and drove to the airport.
If I stayed unwillingly, ungraciously, even a few days, even a few more hours, I would kill the only thing of the old things left, the still warm fragment of Tilly’s love.
I waited for the moment when the stewardess would ask if I wanted a cocktail after take-off. When I closed my eyes I could see the vulgar bleeding heart over Tilly’s bed, red and distasteful.
After the first martini I was able to see the roses on my rose brick wall.