“It all sounded so believable, though, every embarrassing detail. Sex with a total stranger. My mother. I thought it was just going to be some story about the war. I shouldn’t have asked. She talked like the guy was rescuing her somehow. Can you imagine hearing your mother talk about having sex? And Ibsen?”
“But it can’t have been true, Matt. At least it can’t have happened to her. Not in the first war. You said she was talking about the first war. She can’t have had sex before she was born. Could your grandmother have told her the story?”
“My grandmother didn’t tell stories of her youth. At least, I don’t think so. And why would my mother tell it as if it happened to her?”
“They do that. It’s called confabulation.” Amanda took a long sip of wine. “My mother tells me how she’s just been to the Superstore, or out walking the dog this morning. She hasn’t been able to walk for over a year, and she hasn’t left the Lodge for months. We never had a dog. It’s not lying. Not really. Just tangled wires.”
“Do you think she might have been trying to tell me something, though? About herself or about Gran? Folding one war over another like that? Or was it just that she saw that cap badge?”
“Only two people can help you with this, Matt. One’s dead and the other won’t remember telling you the story in the first place. Sorry if that sounds cruel.” She reached across the table and rested her hand on his forearm. “Delicious lunch, by the way. Again.”
He was afraid Amanda was beginning to tire of their lunches. It had gotten so that he spent the whole of every morning planning and tweaking and puttering away in the kitchen. Each day, he tried something more ambitious than the last. By noon, the prospect of seeing her was so exciting he had to wash dishes to calm himself down. When she came through the door at exactly one o’clock, he always pretended to be surprised. The two carefully laid place settings in the dining room gave him away, of course.
He started to clear away the dishes. “This is probably starting to be a pain in the ass, helping me every day.”
“Would you rather I didn’t?”
“No. Of course not. I’m just thinking of you.”
“I’ll worry about me. It’s my ass where the pain would be. And I’m going to keep hauling it into that workroom, starting with right now.” She never offered to help with the dishes or cleaning up the kitchen.
Amanda had persuaded him to buy dozens of banker’s boxes. If she couldn’t convince him to part with things right away, she said, at least having them organized into batches would help when the time finally felt right. He doubted that, but it was a way of putting things off while seeming productive. He was no longer sure whether his desire to drag the process out had more to do with his reluctance to throw things out or his need to have her stay around.
Deciding how to group things had taken one whole afternoon. She had suggested approaching it chronologically but he had thought that was too cold. And some of the things were hard to pin down or to limit to one epoch. He thought about how his mother seemed so often now to occupy several periods at once, rewriting time. So then Amanda proposed colours, though he thought that was only a joke. They both thought that genre might do, handbags with handbags and scarves with scarves and papers with papers and so forth, but there would clearly need to be subgenres. There was no way even a fifth of the handbags would fit into one banker’s box. Amanda suggested attractive and grotesque as subcategories, but that did little to solve the problem; there were still too many of each. In the end — over Amanda’s protests that they hardly needed the banker’s boxes if this was what they were going to do — Matt had settled on what he called an archaeological approach. “If we think of the room as a series of cubes and we record exactly where we found each thing and label the boxes to correspond with the cube where we found its contents, that could work. Like a dig.”
“How is that different from just leaving everything in its place?”
“It’ll be in actual boxes. We can move them around without losing touch with the original order. We could even empty the whole room and give it a good cleaning.”
“I’m not helping you clean this place.”
“No. Of course not. I just think there’s maybe something significant about where everything is.” He didn’t mention Simonides and the collapsed banquet-hall roof in ancient Greece.
She had agreed to indulge him in the end. He hoped it was partly that she too wanted the task to go on longer.
The system divided the room into sixteen cubes with edges a metre long. Four portions at the tops of the end rows and the top ones of both of the side rows weren’t perfect because of the slope to the ceiling, but there was less stuff piled that high anyway. The rows were assigned letters going one way and numbers going the other, with a Greek letter denoting height, so that A1Gamma, for instance, was at head height on the left just inside the workroom door.
They had begun to tackle B4Alpha — on the floor at the far end of the room — when Amanda let out a little squeal. She held up a coil-bound sketchbook. “I don’t know whether you are ready for this.”
“Mamma’s or Gran’s?”
“Neither. At least I don’t think so.” She handed it over with a grin he could not read.
The graphite had faded, rubbed with the years, but you could still tell the technique was exquisite. All of the sketches by Thora and Penelope they had found up until then were designs, meant to be transferred or executed elsewhere. Lovely, some of them, but definitely a means to another end. These were perfect little works of art all in themselves, although they too were also clearly studies for other work. The hand that produced them was classically trained. Matt flipped through heart-stopping renditions of apple-round breasts, dimpled buttocks, and S-curved hips before coming to a sketch that united them all and added a face. Penelope’s face. Younger. Before he had known it. But definitely hers.
“That portrait that used to hang above the mantel in the living room. Do you think …?”
Matt did. He struggled to remember the painter’s name. Something Sparrow. Jonathan? No. The bird was the first name. So obviously not Sparrow. Robin. Robin Humphreys. How did Humphreys come so easily once he had Robin? “What’s on the outside of the bag?”
Amanda held it up. “Hard to say. It’s not really a scene, is it? I guess a series of symbols. No, look: it’s like a coat of arms or a knight’s shield or something.”
Matt took the bag from her. She was right. A green lozenge-shaped escutcheon with a yellow pale running down the centre was topped — where the helm or coronet should be — with the twin masks of tragedy and comedy. On either side, the lozenge was supported by a dancing maenad. Crossed paintbrushes and facing-off treble clefs lay across the green field. The imagery was cliché, he thought, and then reminded himself that that was precisely how heraldry actually worked.
“Did your mamma belong to an arts club?” Amanda had taken the bag back and was beginning to unpack more of its contents.
“Mamma was not very clubbable.”
“That’s what I would have thought.” She unfolded a newspaper clipping. “Oh. I remember hearing about this. The summer that Myrna Loy and Kostelanetz and Lily Pons were all here together. The old people used to go on and on about it. It was before we were born. Myrna Loy. I loved the Thin Man movies. They used to play them on TV late at night when I … They used to play them late at night.”
“Mamma had recordings of Lily Pons. She never let me touch them. I used to ask her what’s a recording for if you don’t ever listen to it. It didn’t change her mind. I wonder where those are now.”
The article was little more than a social notice, a registry of artists who were summering in St. Andrews. Matt recognized Miller Brittain and Robin Humphreys along with the ones who were more nearly household names. The date was 1954. The article might, then, have been clipped by either his mother or his grandmother, although, given the contents of the sketchbook, he was betting on his mother. A second carefully folded article was devoted to a notice of an opening of a show of paintings by Robin Humphreys. It was from the Montréal Gazette two years later.
Amanda produced an envelope from the bag. It was unmarked, had never been sealed. The adhesive had turned to powder, some of which stayed on her hands. When she shook the envelope, a small photograph slipped out. A baby in a knitted suit. Matt recognized it immediately. He held it carefully between thumb and forefinger, looking at his chubby face.
“There’s a story about Shelley, isn’t there?”
“Shelley Trenholme? From school?”
“The poet.”
“I know. Percy Bysshe.” She pronounced it with a posh British accent.
“Something about how he grabbed a baby once and held it up and demanded that it tell him what it knew, what it remembered of the life before.”
“You mean all that Wordsworth stuff about ‘trailing clouds of glory. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.’ All of that.”
Matt liked it when Amanda stopped pretending she hadn’t read anything.
“What do you think this little fellow is trying to tell us? Probably that he needs to be changed.” She kissed Matt’s cheek lightly as she took the photograph and put it back in the envelope, which she then returned to the bag. “I bought a photo album for Carolyn. I’ve told her I want it filled up with pictures of the baby when it comes. She says that’s stupid, that I’m going to be right there, that she’ll have lots of photos on her phone. Were we that cavalier? Our mothers certainly weren’t. Thank God.”
Matt didn’t want to remind Amanda that he and Jennifer had no children. “Carolyn must have been a cute baby.”
“Fairly ugly, actually, at first. But you still want pictures. You should take this bag to your mamma. Maybe not the sketches of her bits, but the rest of it. She’d love to see the baby picture.” She tossed the bag toward the workroom door.
“I should tag it somehow,” said Matt. “So I remember where it came from, which box it needs to go into.”
“I can remind you.”
“But what if you’re not …” He trailed off, not willing to finish the thought.
“I’ll be around. And I have a very good memory. Extraordinary, in fact. You might be surprised.”
He wished she hadn’t said it. He was doing such a good job of forgetting Ingrid.