Absolute Fiction

In her grandmother’s apartment, she was a submerged fish gulping for air in thick dark water. At the height of an August hot spell, a table fan and an air conditioner whirred away, making two tones of monotonous white noise. Blue curtains were drawn shut against a setting sun that beat directly upon the room’s only window. It was only late afternoon, but a brass pole lamp was already alight, pouring bright halogen light onto the mint seafoam carpet. Paula was limp on the soft cushions of her grandmother’s sofa, struggling against sinking backward, trying to concentrate on the game show blaring from the television. She squelched the urge to ask her grandmother to turn down the volume.

“Well, that’s over,” the old woman said. She reached for the remote control and lowered the volume. “Now, when did you say you’re going back?”

Paula jerked to attention, yawning. “I don’t know yet. I have to visit my father and stepmother again. And I still haven’t seen Jim or Lucy and her kids. And I’ll be stopping by here every day, of course.”

Her grandmother still had her eyes on the television tube, but she smiled at Paula’s last words. “I want to have you and your brother and sister all over here together,” she said. “Maybe on Tuesday when your cousin Teddy brings over my groceries.”

“Oh, I’d love to see Teddy,” Paula answered. “It’s been so long. Is he still trying to get out of the high school and find a coaching job at a college?”

After a pause: “You on vacation or what?”

Paula hesitated, her mouth open, as her grandmother pressed a button on the arm of her chair that made the seat cushion slowly lift up and tilt forward. Paula watched her rise like an airborne water balloon, her thick, veined legs reaching heavily for the floor. Whorls of air from the fan made her thin, sleeveless duster flutter girlishly around her knees. The dress was decorated with large, aqueous purple flowers.

“Sort of,” Paula answered. “I don’t have any major deadlines coming up, so it’s a good time to let things slide a little. Figure out a few things. Maybe I’ll get an idea here for an article of some kind.”

“Oh, I liked that one you sent me about hiking in that desert. Where was it again?”

“New Mexico,” Paula answered. She tried to concentrate on her grandmother’s voice through the churning cooled air.

Her grandmother walked over to the dining table at one end of the living room, teetering slightly from side to side, and began rearranging things that Paula had already straightened after their early dinner.

“Don’t tell your father you’re goofing off, though. You know how he is about not missing work. He used to push your mother right out the door, right up until she couldn’t get out of bed. Not that that kept him from retiring before he was sixty. Just like his father, Mr. Allen, that way. May he rest in peace.”

“Granny,” Paula started, watching the woman fiddle with a bowl of silk flowers. But her voice trailed away into silence. Every time she visited her grandmother, she learned something new about her family, about her mother’s death when Paula was seven and her mother thirty-one. The tangle of connections between her relations on her father’s and mother’s sides. Her father’s treatment of her mother. But the information came like random bursts of gunfire, scattered across visits separated by month, years. Whenever she saw her grandmother now, she searched for the right question that would make her grandmother disclose something vital about the family, that would bring everything together. But never found the right question. Nettled, she asked about something unimportant that she knew would renew a long, tedious conflict.

“Where’d you get the groovy chair, Gran?”

“Teddy,” her grandmother answered, clearing things off the drainboard. “But I told him to take it back. I don’t really need the lifter, and the edge of that cushion sticks out too far for me to sit in. Hurts the backs of my knees.”

“I wish you’d tell me when you need things,” Paula said, following her grandmother into the tiny kitchen. “Just because I don’t live close by like Teddy doesn’t mean I can’t get you things. All you have to do is tell me what you want. I could at least share the cost with Teddy and Jim or whomever.”

“Oh, stop, not that again.” Her grandmother waved a wooden spoon at her. “Next you’ll be saying I always liked Teddy better than you and Lucy and Jim. I told you he’s taking it back now, didn’t I?”

“But that’s not the point, Gran. I want to—”

“Stop, I said. I don’t want to argue. Look at the paper and see what’s on TV tonight. Did you put your shoes outside the door like I told you, so Helen knows someone’s here so she don’t come over to watch with me?”

Two hours later, Paula and her grandmother chatted intermittently as they watched the climax of a TV docudrama. A pregnant woman was in a coma and her husband tried to get permission in court to have the baby aborted. Another man, a stranger from a pro-life group who had never met the injured woman or her family before the accident, had petitioned the Supreme Court to gain conservatorship of the woman and keep her pregnant.

“Can you believe it?” Paula asked her grandmother. “Some fanatic can come that close to getting custody of a woman in a coma who he doesn’t even know? Could that really happen, do you think?”

“Based on a true story,” her grandmother nodded. “Says so in the TV Guide.”

After much suffering, the husband won custody. The abortion was performed and the woman regained consciousness. It was full dark now, but the terrible heat continued, held at bay by the air conditioner Teddy had bought for his grandmother two summers ago. Paula suddenly realized she had been trapped in the small apartment for over six hours. Sitting, watching TV, reading magazines, washing dishes, eating M & M’s and other junk her grandmother kept around for the young kids. She wondered if her grandmother felt as sluggish and swollen as she did. If maybe she felt this way every day, uncomplainingly.

“I’d better get going, Granny,” she said, standing up and stretching. “It’s late, and I want to call Trent in California when I get back to the motel.”

“What’s your hurry?” Her grandmother always made the same remark, no matter what time it was when Paula moved to leave or how long she had stayed. Paula never knew how to answer her. She quickly gathered up the dressy clothes she had worn to the apartment, before she changed into shorts and a T-shirt.

“You know,” her grandmother said slowly, “that movie reminds me of something.” She picked up the remote control and pressed the mute button. Abruptly, voices stopped blasting from the set. The apartment suddenly seemed quiet and cool, a white-lit island safe from the sweltering heat and the darkness outside.

“What’s that?” Paula asked. Her voice sounded loud, demanding, in the new quiet.

“It was someone on your father’s side, way back in….” She paused, turning her face into the blast of cold air from the machine, thinking. “Seems like it must have been a sister or cousin of your great-grandfather on your father’s side, the one who lived long enough for you and Lucy to know. What was the old gentleman’s name, again?”

“Larrimer,” Paula prompted. “Alden Morris Larrimer. Grandmother Allen’s father.”

“That’s right. Almost married someone in my family.” She nodded, musing. “I can’t remember the woman’s name, but her husband owned a grain store in Clyde. My Uncle Frederick took it over when he died, ran it until it went bankrupt, like everything did Fred got his hands on.” She shook her head in disgust, but then her face lit up again. “Loretta! That was her name. Named one of her daughters after herself. Well, she had a whole bunch of kids already when she got pregnant again. Then somebody threw a bag of grain from the loft down to the floor and hit her right square on the head.”

“And she went into a coma?” interrupted Paula.

“Lord, no! Woulda took more than a sack of grain to knock out Loretta.” She laughed in a loud, nasal hoot. “Tiny, mean-natured woman. Had a head like a bullet, ears plastered right against the sides. Got sacks of grain dumped on her all the time, I wouldn’t be surprised, ‘cause she was always running around that feed store, trying to get her husband to make more money. She’d squeeze a nickel until it squawked, same as your father and all the other Allens. Wasn’t the only way they were pure Scotch.” After a low belch, she added “No disrespect to your father’s family, of course.

“No, it was a railroad accident got Loretta. She was picking milkweed right by the train tracks. Real vain about her house, you know. Always making these tacky arrangements and setting ‘em all over the place. Anyway, she was picking milkweed and a train went by and threw up a big piece of metal that went flying straight into her brain right over her left eye.”

“Good heavens,” Paula said. “And then she went into a coma?”

Her grandmother nodded, lips pulled into a grim line. “Dropped like a stone. Never moved again. And they never got that piece of metal out of her head, either, though they did finally get a welder to cut off the end, ‘cause it looked just awful once it started to get rusty. Her husband took to oiling it every day so she wouldn’t get infected from it. Doctors came from Syracuse and Albany to look her over, and somebody wrote about her in a book. She was still alive when my sister Fanny was killed, and that was 1911. Didn’t weigh seventy pounds.”

Paula hesitated between asking how Fanny had died—she knew her grandmother had told her once, years ago, but now she couldn’t remember the story—and pursuing the coma tragedy.

“What about the baby?” she finally asked, making a mental note to ask about Fanny later.

Her grandmother shook her head this time. “That was the sad part. Loretta went into labor a few days after the spike got her and it looked like the birth would be okay if they took it with a C-section. But not every doctor knew how to do a C-section. Besides, she probably had the baby at home. Anyway, it was dead. I remember because my grandmother went over to the hospital in Weedsport to help with the kids.”

“Well,” Paula sighed, picking up her purse and looking for the keys to her rented car. “At least there weren’t any lawsuits over giving her an abortion. That’s what would happen today, probably.”

“But that’s exactly why the movie made me think of her.” Her grandmother stood up smoothly from her chair, suddenly excited. “I was too little to be told what the grown-ups were saying, but me and Fanny spied on my Grandma Walkling one day and heard her telling some of her gossips that Loretta wanted to get rid of that baby. If she had another, she would have had to turn her parlor into another bedroom, and she hated that idea. So she was looking for ways to get rid of it. Grandma Walkling said the spike in the head was God’s justice.”

“She tried to give herself an abortion by ramming a spike into her head?” Paula nearly shouted, somehow swept up in the old woman’s excitement. “Come on, Gran. No one could be that ignorant, not even way back then.”

“I know that,” the woman sniffed. “Think I’m stupid? What she was doing was trying to kill the baby from the vibrations of the trains when they passed by. There was milkweed all over the place that summer. You couldn’t swing a stick without knocking open a dozen pods and filling the air with the snow. So why did Loretta need to go so close to the tracks right when she knew a train was coming through? And she walked there for hours and hours. The spike part was a surprise. So there.”

“Did women really think that would work back then?” Paula asked, her voice suddenly serious.

“Some women’ll try anything, I suppose, if they want it bad enough.” Her adamant tone made Paula listen closely. A feature writer’s instincts. “Probably some of ‘em tried spikes in the head. My sister Sadie knew a woman who drank a whole bottle of gin and jumped into a tub of boiling water. I mean boiling. Here, you wait a minute before you rush off in such a hurry even though you’re on vacation. Want to get something from my dresser.”

She came back holding something in her hands. A stack of plain white typewriter paper, tied together at one corner with a length of fuzzy blue yarn tied in a bow.

“My niece Lou put this together,” she said. “Meant to get it out earlier today but forgot all about it.” She handed it to Paula.

“Oh, a genealogy,” Paula said. “Did Lou do this all by herself?”

“Just about. She got some help from Tommy Lynch, who lives right in town here. He’s the great-great-grandson of one of my father’s cousins. You met him, remember? At the calling hours for my brother Mahlon?”

Paula nodded abstractly, looking at the cover page. In neat handwritten script: “The Duwiger (Däuer) Family. 1823-1931.”

“‘Duwiger?’” Paula asked. “Who were they?”

“That’s my mother’s ancestors. You ought to know that. Lou started with the first one who came to America from Germany and went up through my generation. Now she’s working on the rest of the tree, up to today. Here, sit back down and look at it a second before you leave. What’s the damn hurry?”

Paula did as she was told, distracted by what her grandmother had said. And genealogies had always bored her. Years ago, at a family reunion on her father’s side, two of her aunts had given an informal lecture on all the family information they had dug up during a trip to Scotland. Paula had fallen asleep during the slide show, imagining her aunts rummaging through church records and local libraries, taking rubbings at old cemeteries, ignoring everything in Scotland not connected with the Allens.

But she flipped through the pages dutifully, under her grandmother’s encouraging stare. In a few seconds, she read dozens of names, the dates of births and marriages and deaths. And brief annotations that described momentous events in the family’s history. ‘Killed when a tractor exploded for no reason.’ ‘Disappeared after his mother killed herself. Left children with sister, Augusta Duwiger. Died in Cleveland, 1911.’ ‘Died on her 100th birthday, 1878.’ ‘Never returned from Civil War. Body never found.’

Paula was about to hand it back when she noticed an especially long entry. Under a line reading ‘Gustava Duwiger Classen, m. Randolph Classen,’ seven children’s names were listed. Two names, Ralph and Estelle, were bracketed together, with “twins” written next to them. She scanned through the dates, finding that all but one of the children died at an early age. Another name, Olivia, was followed by ‘Died age fourteen in accident in barn jumping onto horse from hayloft.’

“Did you know these people, Granny?” She held up the page, pointing at the list of dead children. “Gustava Duwiger Classen. You must have been in your teens when she died. See?”

Her grandmother squinted at the page, then screwed up her face.

“Oh, Gussie. Yeah, I knew her. Married to my great-uncle Randolph, my mother’s father’s brother. She lived over in Emerson, right next to the big house the first Duwigers lived in.” She sighed, pushing the book away. “Poor Gussie. All those dead children. Only one grew up was Jonah, and they had to put him away right around the time I was married. Thought everybody was trying to kill him. Started when he was still just little, but got worse and worse after Olivia died. They finally locked him up when it got so bad he wouldn’t sleep unless his mother sat up all night in his room holding a shotgun in her lap. He didn’t die until just a few days before your brother Jim was born, you know. 1954. Still in the mental hospital. Musta been thirty years since I’d seen him, but I attended the funeral. Me and two other people.” She paused, her lips compressed, a statue. “I’d just gotten home from that funeral and your father called to tell me your mother was in the hospital.”

Paula had never heard of Jonah before. She looked up at her grandmother, who was staring back at her, silent and oddly intent. “These twins,” she continued, tapping her finger on the page. “One died just a couple months after being born, and the other, the girl, about four months later. And look, look.” She knelt down on the floor so her grandmother could see the page. “This one who was killed in this weird accident, Olivia. She died nearly on the same day as the second twin.”

Her grandmother looked at the page, silent for a moment, then turned away and removed her thick eyeglasses. Suddenly she looked very tired. “I remember. I was only a kid, but there was a great to-do about it.”

“But why did this girl jump onto a horse out of a hayloft?” Paula demanded. “What for?”

“It was just a trick she did, can’t you see?” her grandmother answered sharply. “She wanted to be a stunt rider, like her Uncle Jack. He’d gone out to Hollywood. She did that trick all the time, but that day something went wrong and she cracked open her head and broke her back. Took her hours to die. Just terrible. I don’t know the whole story. Fanny and Mahlon and Sadie and I never knew Gussie’s children very well. There was something bad between my father and Gussie’s husband. Never found out what. Maybe it was just that he drank and Pa hated drinkers.”

“But this poor woman,” Paula said. “She lost both twins within a couple months of each other, and then Olivia just a few days after the girl twin. You’d think it would drive her nuts.”

“If it drove anybody nuts, it was Jonah,” her grandmother said flatly. “Gussie was too stupid to go crazy. She just buried one after another and went on cleaning that big house and hunting around for her husband at the beer gardens and flop-houses in Port Byron when he went off on his binges. Then, after Jonah went off his rocker, she pretty much gave up on Randolph. They had to drag Jonah out of the house, Gussie screaming and all. My Ma and Pa was there.

“Look here, now, honey, it’s almost midnight.” She began to rise on the chair cushion, putting one hand on Paula’s shoulder as they came closer to each other. “I want to take out my hearing aid, and you should get back to your motel. It’s late.”

Paula set the genealogy on a table, then walked to the door with one arm around her grandmother’s rounded shoulders. It was twenty years or more since she had first noticed that her grandmother had become shorter than she was, but the strange, unfamiliar feeling struck her anew when she walked this close to the old woman. After Paula’s mother died, the grandmother moved into her son-in-law’s home and took charge of his children. Paula had seen her like a stately mountain, something that would endure forever. That exaggeration had dwindled slowly, eventually replaced by an equally exaggerated concern for her grandmother’s frailty. Whenever she left Granny now, even if it were only for a few hours to run to the grocery store or pharmacy, she couldn’t stop thinking that when she returned she might find her dead. The last time she had left New York State to return to California, she sat in her car and cried for an hour after leaving her grandmother, thinking of the small woman alone in her apartment, probably also crying.

“Bye, honey.” She bent over and kissed her grandmother on the lips. “See you tomorrow. I’ll be over in the afternoon.”

“Maybe then you’ll tell me what’s wrong,” her grandmother said, taking one of Paula’s hands in hers. Her eyes were tinged with red, the blue of her pupils almost translucent.

“There’s nothing wrong, Granny.” She put her free hand on her grandmother’s head, patted it.

“Hey!” As she opened the door, a note fluttered down to the floor.

Paula picked it up and read aloud to her grandmother: ‘Doris. You don’t have to tell your guests to put their shoes outside so I won’t bother you. I know where I’m not wanted. Helen. Call me tomorrow.”

The two women stood in the open doorway. They clutched each other’s hands and shook with stifled laughter, the old hands making shush gestures and jabbing at a door down the hallway.

The phone was ringing. Paula woke up disoriented, sweaty. She had dreamed of a great expanse of dusty planking, of sunlight slanting through a wooden roof in thick diagonal bars. She shook her head, trying to let go of the image. But for a moment the morning light breaking through the room’s venetian blinds was the same as the light in her dream. The ringing slowly faded, the rattle of the air conditioner dulled. A queer, painful buzzing grew slowly in her ears, filling the entire room until it felt like an electric current waving through her body. She saw a dark figure at the far end of a broad, empty floor. Then a harsh, piercing scream rang through the room. The scream of a horse.

“What?” she cried aloud, jumping upright in the bed. The buzz stopped dead and the phone began ringing again. She groped for it with one hand, knocked the receiver off the cradle. “Huh?” she said, feeling stupid, vaguely frightened. She stared down at the receiver rocking in the bedspread.

“Are you there, Paula? It’s me.”

She picked up the receiver. “I called you last night, Trent. You said you’d be in. Where were you?” She heaved herself up in bed, feeling a first sharp pang of nausea.

“Sorry about that. I had to go to the studio after all. Just got home a few minutes ago and heard your messages.”

She picked up her travel clock, calculating the difference in time zones. “What were you doing at the studio until three in the morning?” she demanded, not caring if she sounded like a shrew.

“Just the usual problems. This new band is nothing but trouble. You want to talk now, or are you still asleep?”

“I’m awake, I’m awake. Almost ready to barf, but awake. Talk fast.”

“You still getting sick every morning?” His voice was solicitous, which always irritated her.

“Uh huh,” she answered. “Sicker than ever. And apparently now also having hallucinations.”

“I’m sorry you’re sick, Paula. I wish you were here so I could take care of you. But have you thought more about what we brought up?”

“I thought you were in charge of thinking about that.” She stumbled out of bed, managed to reach the bathroom faucet and pour a glass of water while still holding the phone.

“Look, Paula. We both know this is ultimately your decision, right? I just thought you wanted to know all my feelings about it. And I haven’t changed my mind at all. I still just don’t know if our relationship is ready for a baby now.”

“You have two children, Trent.” She gulped down water, an image appearing before her of the two beautiful daughters Trent had created with his former wife. They would be actresses or models or news anchors. They would stay out of the sun and they would not do drugs. They would look California-young until they died in their late nineties.

“I have no kids, Trent. I’m thirty-two. Maybe I want this baby whether you stay with me or not. And maybe I don’t want it whether you stay or not.”

There was a long pause. She could picture Trent pressing two fingers to his temples, trying to control his frustration.

“Have you thought more about having the tests?” he finally asked, wary but assertive.

“Would you stop haranguing me about those bloody tests?” she yelled. “My doctor hasn’t recommended any tests. I’m healthy as a horse, Trent. I just vomit like Niagara Falls every few hours. Maybe you recall your wife doing that.”

“Listen, Paula, don’t get emotional. I just think it would help us make an informed decision if we know the baby is totally healthy. That it’s all formed properly and things like that. You know. People don’t have to take chances these days.”

“I’m not far enough long for those tests, Trent. And if you want a guarantee that I’m carrying Albert Einstein or a football star around in my womb, then—”

“We could at least find out the gender,” Trent cut in smoothly. “It’s not too early for that, I know.”

“The which?” she asked, holding the receiver away from her face and looking at it. “The what?”

But Trent’s words were lost, muffled by the sound of footsteps on a dust-covered floor of soft wood. Maybe she was dreaming again, shocked back into sleep. The motel walls of French Quarter green were dissolving, opening up to bars of bright sunlight cast on a dusty boarded floor. The droning buzz returned, blocking out the room’s other noises. She smelled hay, the damp odor of large living animals. And far away, behind some large dark objects piled in a corner, a figure moved slightly in the still air. Suddenly she knew what would happen next, and she braced herself against the headboard, digging her heels into the rumpled bed sheets. The horse’s peal scattered the dust on the boards, broke all the light outward in a white explosion. She dropped the phone and put her hands over her ears, gasping for breath, cold sweat flowing down her sides.

“Paula, are you listening to me? What are you doing?”

She wiped sweat from her face with a sheet corner, inhaled deeply, then snatched up the phone again, her stomach heaving. “What’s this about gender, Trent? Where the hell did that come from?”

“Forget it, forget it,” his voice soothed. “It was just an idea, a factor. I don’t want you—”

“I’m going to throw up now, Trent.”

She slammed the receiver onto the phone and ran into the bathroom, hand clamped over her mouth, pale orange fluid seeping between her fingers.

Breakfast at a diner. Shopping for new Reeboks. Picking up one prescription for herself and another for Granny. Phoning a magazine editor in Oregon. Waiting in a steamy Chinese restaurant for two take-out dinners, the odors making her swallow hard against rising bile. Paula floated through all the tasks heavy and groggy, half-awake. When she reached her grandmother’s apartment at three, she still wanted to fall back into bed. The waking dreams that had broken up her phone call to Trent preoccupied her. She blamed them for making her short-tempered and cross with him.

“Oh, those are spiffy,” her grandmother exclaimed. “Red and silver. Helen will be jealous. Remind me to get you the money before you go.” She held up one sneaker, rotating it slowly for Paula to see. “Picture me in this.”

“I don’t want any money,” Paula said. “Wait, here’s your Motrin.” She dug in her bag to find the orange bottle. “But, Granny, I wish you’d have Teddy take you back to that doctor and get you a prescription for something stronger. This stuff is like aspirin, for heaven’s sake. If this decreases your back pain a little, something like Darvon would help a lot.”

“I don’t want to be doped up,” her grandmother said. Her face closed up.

“Anything stronger than baby aspirin is dope to you. When Lucy told you she was on Xanex, you acted like she was a junkie. Why do you have to be so stubborn about—”

Her grandmother held up one hand. “I don’t want to argue, Paula. The pain don’t bother me much. Lots of days I don’t feel it at all. Now help me get out the dishes and let’s eat. You didn’t get egg rolls for me did you? I can’t eat anything deep-fried anymore, you know.”

After dinner, Paula took out the genealogy and spread it on the table, beneath the overhead lamp. For several minutes, she stood before it, studying, while Granny changed into night clothes. When the grandmother finally sat down, heavily, Paula brought a few pages to her chair.

“Look here, Granny,” she began.

“Oh, not Gussie again,” her grandmother sighed, leaning back her head and closing her eyes. “Why does she interest you so much?”

“Did you ever really read this?” Paula asked. “It’s like a whole tragedy shrunk down into a few lines. Look, the first entry says that the oldest offspring, Regina, dies when she is two, May 1899. After that come Olivia, Jonah, Frances, the twins Ralph and Estelle, and Mary.

“Look,” Paula repeated. “Frances, the second dead one was about the same age as Regina when she went. It says she fell down a well five years before the twins were born. Then Ralph died in infancy, with his twin, Estelle, dying just a few months later, and Olivia exactly one week after that. Then Mary, the last one. What did Lou mean here, Granny? Look at it: ‘Disappeared 1915.’”

“I don’t need to read it, Paula. I know what it says. I told Lou what to write. It’s a lie and Lou didn’t want to write it, but I made her do it. Reminded her how I nursed her mother for over five years after she had her stroke, then she did it quick enough.”

Paula turned her head to see her grandmother staring directly at her. The deep blue was hard, glinting, making Paula remember when she was a girl and she would argue with her grandmother about boys, make-up, homework, until they reached a fierce, smoldering standoff.

“Why?” Paula asked. But she was suddenly aware of a new sound in the room, a small but distinct buzz cutting through the air conditioner’s roar. The yellow electric light from the halogen lamp suddenly seemed brighter, whiter, like sunlight. She thought she heard a dull thump from toward the door, and she jumped in her chair.

“‘Cause Ma and Pa wouldn’t want anybody to know what really happened, that’s why. Gussie and Randolph were family, after everything.”

Her grandmother’s voice seemed too loud, but also distant. The light around Paula pulsed whiter and whiter. She strained to follow her grandmother’s voice as the light and air and sound in the small room changed into something new.

“It was Randolph made her get rid of Mary. She was Gussie’s last one still alive, except for Jonah, and everybody already knew he wasn’t all there. Gussie cried and cried and cried and one day she come walking into the store in Emerson wearing just her nightgown. Me and Sadie was there. Those eyes of hers, black like coal, flashing like some crazy animal’s. But Randolph didn’t care how she carried on. He took what was left of the money Gussie got when her father died and sent Mary off. Sent her baggage and all to some relation of Gussie’s in Germany. Going by what he said, he sent her with some man he met at a poker game. Just a baby, she was, still in a cradle.” Her grandmother sighed a long raspy exhalation.

“But she never got to where the cousin lived. Randolph wrote to them over and over and over again and even found someone who talked German to call over there, long distance. But she was gone, lost. Nobody ever saw the man again.

“My sister Sadie would’ve took her!” Granny cried out, digging in the pocket of her white robe for a tissue. “Sadie was married by then and big with her own first baby, but when she heard what Randolph was up to, she wanted to take Mary in. So did her husband. He was a good man. But Randolph wouldn’t hear it, he wanted the baby gone. One night he got drunk and told my Pa he was afraid what Gussie might do to it, but Ma and Pa knew he was lying. He just didn’t want another baby, ‘specially a girl baby, after all the others had died and Jonah was losing his mind, writing letters to the courthouse saying someone had killed Olivia and Frances and the baby Estelle and now wanted to kill him. So off Mary went, and nobody ever heard a word about her after she got on that boat with that man.”

All around Paula, the buzz droned on, the glaring light of an unearthly noon enveloped her. She felt harshly alert, her body stretched with fine wires, immobile, stunned.

“Maybe Randolph wasn’t lying,” she heard her own words merging gently into the buzz.

“Huh?” Her grandmother pressed a sodden lump of tissue against her nose and blew loudly. The folds of loose skin on her bare upper arms shook from the force.

“Nothing, nothing,” Paula said. Suddenly she was aware of the hunched-over shape of her grandmother, the soft round shoulders rising and falling.

“Oh, Gran, don’t cry. I’m sorry.” She got up and stood over the woman, wrapping her arms around the stooped shoulders. “I didn’t mean to make you upset. Please please don’t cry.”

As she moved, the buzzing stopped. The light transformed itself back into the bright pool of white on the green carpet. The sense of airy space disappeared, replaced by the enclosure of the rectangular living room. Paula exhaled slowly, rubbing her grandmother’s back.

“Oh, I’m all right, now. There.” She blew her nose again with one hand, reached up to pat Paula’s side with the other. Then she drew herself up in the chair, gently pushing Paula away. “Stupid of me to carry on so. It’s just that I haven’t thought about all that in so long. Funny, but for a minute it felt like it was just yesterday, like Gussie and Randolph and Ma and Pa were still alive. Maybe I’m the one that’s going nuts now, like poor Jonah.”

Or maybe I am, Paula thought.

“Come on, honey, let’s go over and say hello to Helen. I felt sort of bad about the shoe thing this morning, so I told her we’d stop in for a minute. She’s a snoop, but she always brings me back a nice present from Hawaii when she visits her grandson. Except last year it was that awful lamp with all the blue shells. Look at it there in my bedroom! How’m I gonna look at that thing every day till they carry me out of here? You want it?”

Paula slept fitfully that night, tossed by overlapping dreams with barns, sunlight, floors swept clean, horses, and a slight, vague figure that stayed in the shadows. She woke to fierce buzzings that hurt her ears, then the telephone rang loudly until Trent finally gave up. She woke up early and got out of bed at once, not wanting a repeat of yesterday’s borderland between dreams and waking. From a pay phone outside the motel office, wrapped up in a trench coat over her underwear, she dialed Lou at her farm outside Port Byron. Lou cried efficiently when she recognized Paula’s voice, Paul struggle to keep her voice even, Yes, everything was fine, the writing was going well. Yes, California was beautiful, a different world from upstate New York.

“Good, good, how lovely,” Lou would reply, her accent so sharp it made Paula think of Empire State apples. But when Paula casually asked if the house Gustava and Randolph Classen had lived in was still standing in Emerson, and how she could get there, there was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“It’s been empty since the last tenants moved out,” Lou finally answered. “That must be five years ago now. But it was still standing when I was down there working on the family history. Someone in the family still owns it, but they been trying to sell it for ages.”

“Could you give me directions over the phone?” Paula asked. “Is it hard to find?”

Another long pause. When Lou spoke again, she sounded troubled. “Why do you want to go there, Paula? It’s way, way off the highway and there’s nothing around those two old farmsteads these days, ‘cept one new farm that was just barely working when I was there. Emerson ain’t even on the map anymore. Does Aunt Irma know you want to go out there?”

Over an hour later, Paula was driving slowly down a rural county road, hunting and pecking for landmarks Lou had described to her. Hills rolled away from the road, divided into checkerboards by plots of green woods and yellow wheat. Ramshackle barns next to gaunt, unpainted houses. The rank ammonia smell of cow farms filtering through the car’s air conditioning. All of it reminded her of driving to the homes of distant relatives on her father’s side, before her father had remarried. Every weekend there was somewhere else to go, some obscure country place outside Weedsport or King Ferry or Cato where unknown aunts and uncles lived, people she saw once and never saw again. When her paternal grandparents had died, the visiting had stopped abruptly. Then her father had remarried, and Granny had moved away to live with her son and his family, until she took an apartment of her own. Paula left behind the country roads of upstate New York, tied to them still only through her grandmother.

She saw an abandoned octagon house with a wrap-around porch and pressed the brake, consulting her notes. ‘Two/three miles past octagon house, left fork onto dirt road. Old Duwiger Road. No sign.’

The dirt road was as rough as Lou had warned her. As she bumped down it, steering wheel gripped hard, she laid her hand across her stomach, feeling a low, slight swell for the first time. She wondered what Trent would say. The first farm was a low, modern building almost hidden behind a maze of derelict tractors and cars. From a sagging porch with a broken railing, a group of small children wearing only cut-off shorts solemnly watched her drive by.

‘G.’s house a mile past the new place. Original Duwiger home beyond that.’

The house was smaller than she expected, but in better shape. Two stories of red brick with a steep roof that had stepped walls and narrow chimney stacks at both ends. It sat far back from the road, surrounded by a mass of overgrown lawn with weeds flowering nearly to Paula’s head. She parked the car in the middle of the road, assuming that no one else would want to pass.

“Hello?” she called, wading a few feet into the junglish grass. She could find no path through the overgrowth and the house seemed miles away, as protected from her perverse curiosity as a medieval fortress behind a moat. Frustrated, she gazed at the darkened windows, feeling weak and breathless in the intense heat after hours in the car’s cold air. Far out on the lawn, in a spot where the shaggy vegetation seemed to thin out, a lawn ornament stood upright and intact. The pedestal was a white concrete cone, decorated like a wedding cake with braiding and medallions. At the top sat a reflecting sphere of bottle green. Paula stared at it, narrowing her eyes against the green and silver beams that shot away from it. She remembered a similar one in her paternal grandmother’s front lawn, but with a silver ball. A ‘sun ball,’ her Grandmother Allen had called it.

You’d never see anything like that in California, she thought.

She shaded her eyes, scanning past the explosive green. At the lawn’s distant edge, some type of shed had buckled in on itself, the four walls slanting inward until they touched at the top. Fallen roof boards lay loose and scattered on the ground. But the big barn—the barn where Olivia had missed her horse and broken her back—had outlasted the years. Paula peered hard, imagining what was behind the broad side wall that faced her. In the center was a double sliding door as high as two men. Each door was criss-crossed by two rough planks, one of them loose at the top and swinging gently forward. Green geometry still flashing before her eyes, she began walking down the road toward the barn. With each step, the heat grew stronger and the sunlight brighter, filling her ears with a buzzing wail. But she wanted to get closer, to see if she could take a look inside.

You’ve come all this way. Might as well try.

When she reached the barn, she discovered a gap between the doors just wide enough to slip through. But first she peered inside, twisting her head carefully around a jagged piece of wood. Inside the barn, she saw only empty space in near-dark. One end seemed slightly brighter. Perhaps there was a window down there. She pulled her head back into the daylight, suddenly cold underneath a layer of perspiration. Down the road, her car looked miniature. She wished it were only a few feet away, so that she could get in it right this second and drive away, defeat the impulse to enter the barn. She shook her head against the stinging buzz, which had grown so loud it felt like needles stabbing at her ears. Leaning her back against the barn door and exhaling heavily, her line of vision was drawn to the green sun ball. She tried to turn away, but the brilliance froze her gaze, fusing with the ceaseless buzz inside her head. Overhead, the sun was a white burning disc. But wasn’t there something else, something also white, or was it just a trick of the light? Through the green rays, outside the house, above the lawn, a blur of white, like a curl of fog caught in the headlights of a car. It seemed to move away from the house, mingling for an instant with the shimmering green. Then it was closer. Drifting toward the barn.

Watching, she had sunk to her knees in the smooth dirt. In another second, not thinking, not looking back, she eased her heavy body through the gap between the doors. As she slipped across the boundary separating daylight from dark, a shudder rolled through her body, emanating from her stomach and ending in her droning, buzzing head. She dragged herself a few inches away from the vertical line of light and put her back against the solid door, closing her eyes, not wanting to see any more of Gussie’s house or barn. For several long seconds she remained still, trying to calm her breathing, sucking the barn’s cooler air in deep gulps. But the texture of the air around her seemed to change. Coolness dissipated until she felt again as though sunlight were beating down on her. There was a soothing smell of dusty, bare wood, but also an odor rank and damp.

When she opened her eyes, the barn’s darkness had fled. Wide, sweeping reaches of empty space now were washed with grey light striped by bright rays at intersecting angles She was dwarfed by the high walls, alone on the clean, swept floors that stretched away from her in all directions. There was a dry, tasteless odor of hay and grain, but underneath it, something sweet and spicy. Molasses, she thought, fighting through the daze of sensations. Sweet feed. For horses who won’t eat dry oats. She remembered it from a summer when she and Lucy lived on an uncle’s farm. All summer long, thick droves of flies hovered around the covered barrels. And she smelled something alive, something wet with sweat. Slowly, she slid herself upright, her back pressed against the door. Directly opposite, a set of crude wooden steps ascended to the loft that encircled the barn on three sides. She looked up, straining her eyes. Was there something white up there, back in the loft’s far recesses? Behind a shaft of milky light dancing with flecks of chaff and dust? Again she wanted to leave, to run headlong back to the car, and she began to edge along the wall back to the narrow aperture. But a single, hard stomp on the planked floor made her freeze. It echoed through the vault, blending with the deafening buzz. The white stain on the air was drifting closer to the edge, dissolving through the column of light. Paula wiped one grimy hand against the sweaty film covering her eyes, not wanting to see, but compelled. The vague shimmer seemed to gather substance as it swept forward. Near the top of it, where it dissipated into the light, she saw two floating circles of hard, gleaming black.

She wrenched herself away with such force a new wave of pain shot through her stomach. She banged her fists against the door, suddenly knowing what would happen. The stomping had increased to a rapid, clumsy patter, like a horse frantically trying to find its footing on a shaking platform. Paula stared wide-eyed into the blank barn door, but the two circles of black still seemed to hang before her eyes, moving to the very edge of the hayloft. Slowly, two strands of white separated from the blur, like ragdoll arms reaching forward, poising for one instant. Then they pushed at something standing on the edge.

Paula forced herself between the doors, feeling as though she were falling, flying, through the gulf to the barn floor far below. Her blouse caught on a long splinter of wood, but she pulled at it violently, afraid of what she would hear next, a dull, massive thump and a horse’s cry. Her blouse ripped from the shoulder to the elbow and she was free, stumbling away from the barn, falling to one knee but plunging forward. Then she broke into a run, heedless of the beating sun, focused on the car down the road. When she reached the door, she threw herself in, started the car with a roar and pulled away from the house in a spray of red dust without looking back at the barn.

“Why’d you go up to Emerson yesterday?” Her grandmother pulled back from Paula’s kiss. She sounded angry, defiant.

“What?” Paula was startled. “How did you know? I was going to tell you today.”

“Lou said you wanted to know which house was Gussie’s. How come?”

Paula turned away and walked into the living room, throwing her gym bag on the sofa. Her grandmother followed behind, bent at the knees and more hunched over than Paula remembered her.

“I just wanted to look around, Gran. I thought I might get some ideas for a magazine feature. You know, writer’s stuff.”

Her grandmother crossed the floor to stand directly before Paula. “I don’t want you going up to Gussie’s house again. You understand me, now?” Paula tried to turn away, but her grandmother gripped her left arm and jerked down on it. “Now, you listen to me, Paula!”

Paula looked down into her grandmother’s face. Long violet blotches stood out on her forehead and cheeks. Her eyes were rimmed with moist red.

“Okay, okay,” Paula answered, pulling her arm free, feeling like a bad girl again. “Why are you so mad? All I did was walk around the place, look into some windows.”

“You didn’t go inside the house, then?” She sounded only anxious now, not angry. “Or in the barn?”

“Hell, no,” Paula lied. “I couldn’t even get close to the house, the weeds were so high. Why?”

Her grandmother collapsed heavily into the electric chair. She looked exhausted. And old. “I didn’t tell you this before, Paula, because there wasn’t no reason to.” She spoke slowly, licking her lips. “Your grandfather Frank and me lived in that house for a while after he got back from the war. We were poor then, and one of my aunts who owned part of Gussie’s old house let us stay there for free. We thought we were lucky.”

“And what happened?” Paula asked, trying not to think of the light and noises inside Gussie’s barn.

“After a few weeks, we had to move out. Frank said I was crazy, that it was all in my head ‘cause I was pregnant with your mother then. But he was wrong. All night long I heard noises all through that house, sometimes even in the day, and banging and such from that empty barn so you’d think there was still horses and cows there. Got to the point where I couldn’t sleep one wink the whole blessed night. But there was something more, too, something I never even told Frank. I got pains in my stomach the first night we slept in that house. Not real bad ones, but they got worse, sometimes. Then they’d go away for a while. Maybe Frank was right and I wasn’t thinking straight ‘cause of the baby, but I got the idea that something about the house was givin’ me the pains, and then I knew we had to get out. I’d already had two born dead, you know. Makes me shiver now just to think of it, after all these years.”

“Did you ever see anything strange?” Paula asked. She knew she sounded too eager.

“What’s that?” Distracted, absorbed in memories, looking out the window from her chair. “See things? No, never saw nothing peculiar. But I finally told Frank I was leaving whether he came with me or not. And we moved out that day. Never went back.”

Paula nodded, thinking of Gussie’s dead children. Except for Ralph, the first twin to die, all of them were girls. Now she knew, with certainty, even if the truth were buried forever by almost a century of life and birth and death, that Gussie had not killed Ralph, just as she never killed Jonah, even after he started telling people someone had killed all his sisters. Had Jonah thought his father was the guilty one, the same way her grandmother’s mother and father thought Randolph had shipped Mary off to Germany because of his own greed? She looked at her grandmother, who had fallen silent, staring out the window. Was it possible she had never suspected the truth, or did she have some reason for protecting Gussie? Her grandmother had given birth to five children, all of them stillborn or dead in infancy except Paula’s mother and Teddy’s father. Years ago, she had told Lucy that if she hadn’t been able to give Frank a healthy son, she would have wanted to die.

“Granny.” Paula spoke softly. She extended one arm across the narrow space separating the sofa from her grandmother’s chair. She laid one hand on her grandmother’s white, bare arm. “Granny,” she said more loudly. “Did you ever think … ever wonder if maybe Randolph had a reason to think Gussie might hurt the last daughter?”

“No.” She was cold, exact. She didn’t turn to look at Paula. “Why would I?”

“Because maybe Gussie…”

Paula’s voice trailed off. She looked at her grandmother’s face. The harsh sunlight from the window fell cruelly on her wrinkles, the sagging flesh, the dark oval mole under her ear. But in the line of her jaw, the rims of bone around her blue eyes, she was still the rock that she and Lucy and Jim had clung to when their mother died. The rod of just punishment, the fountain of sudden, rushing affection.

“Because maybe Gussie had something to do … that she played a part in the deaths of her daughters?” She rushed the words out, breathless.

Still gazing through the window, her eyes fixed on something very distant, her grandmother answered. “Why, no, Paula,” she said. “I never thought that at all.” She turned slowly from the window to look at her grand-daughter. For a moment, the two women searched each other’s eyes. The grandmother’s face was calm, her thin lips pressed together and slightly lifted at the corners.

“Oh, no,” her grandmother said, half-rising from her chair. “There’s Jim and Lucy, down in the parking lot. Early, for once. And Teddy right behind them. How’m I gonna fit everybody in this place?” She pulled herself up by the window sill, began waving at the group below her, the overlay of old age lifted.

“Yeek!” she yelped. “Lucy’s twins, too. I thought they were with her in-laws.” She turned away from the window, dragging Paula up from the sofa by one arm. “Quick, take the big carnival china bowl off the sideboard and put it in the bucket on the floor of my bathroom closet. Careful with it! Quick, like a bunny! Close the closet door tight.”

She gave Paula a shove, then hustled herself into the kitchen. Paula heard her rapidly opening cupboards and drawers.

“Granny,” Paula called to her from the bathroom as she hid the bowl. “Lucy’s twins can’t reach the top of that sideboard. They can’t even walk yet.”

“It’s not the twins, not the twins,” her grandmother shot back, making several fast zigzags through the living-room, kitchen, and bedroom as she prepared the place. “It’s Lucy. She sees that bowl and she goes all google-eyed, just like your great-aunt Oll used to do when she saw something she wanted. She collects glass and china, you know, and it would look soooo good in the center of her big china closet with the glass doors.”

Paula straightened up from the floor with some difficulty, putting one hand on her lower back. “You told her years ago that the bowl goes to her in your will, anyway, so what’s the problem? Please stop rushing.”

Her grandmother’s head popped around the corner, her face beaded with perspiration, tendrils of snow-white hair escaping her smooth helmet of a perm like wisps of cloud breaking away from a huge billow.

“She wants it now, of course, silly!” The head popped away again.

“Hey, Gran!” she shouted. “Give her the Hawaii lamp to hold her over!”

They were ringing from downstairs, and Paula heard her grandmother shouting at top volume through the intercom to the three people waiting below, as though they were the deaf ones.

For the next hour, her grandmother’s apartment whirred with greetings, bursts of conversation with quick questions and answers, swells of laughter. Teddy brought in beer, Lucy and Jim a bag of fish sandwiches and potato salad. Everyone took turns pushing their grandmother back into her chair, telling her to stop fetching silverware, dishes, glasses.

“Where’s the bowl?” Lucy whispered to Paula at one point, holding up one baby so her grandmother couldn’t see her face.

“What’s that, Lucy?” her grandmother asked sharply, trying to peer around the baby.

“Bathroom closet,” Paula whispered back. “Let me hold one of the twins.”

“Nothing, honey!” Lucy called. Then, to Paula: “Here, take Doris. She’s sick of me.”

“Hey, Gran!” Paula yelled, competing with the din. “Teddy and Amy’s baby will make you a great-great-grandmother. How do you feel about that?”

“Oh, stop,” said her grandmother, waving one hand helplessly in the air. “Don’t seven great-grandchildren make me old enough? You tryin’ to push me into my grave?” She shot a quick, suspicious look at Lucy. Her grandchildren all shouted in protest, but Paula waved them into silence.

“Then how would you feel about one more plain old great-grandchild, Gran, after Amy’s baby has made you into a phenomenon? Good or bad?”

Abruptly, there was silence. Lucy, Jim, and Teddy looked first at Paula, who was wiping white foam from the baby’s face and her blouse, then at their grandmother, who seemed confused.

“Eight?” she said. “But who? Lucy—?” Then her face lit up, and she almost leaped from her chair. “You mean you, honey? You’re gonna have your first? At last?” She spread her arms wide. “Land, you sure waited ‘til you’re plenty old enough!” She embraced Paula and the baby together, squeezing hard, then went back to her chair and immediately began wiping at her nose with a tissue.