Irises (5 page)

Kate sighed. Sometimes it was impossible to talk to Mary. “Mother is someone we need to take care of. I mean, we need to take care of ourselves now.”

“There's Aunt Julia.”

“I don't think we can count on her for any help.”

“She's Mama's only sister.”

“She didn't even come to the funeral,” Kate said.

“She couldn't leave her beauty shop at such short notice. We did rush things.”

“No, we did the right thing. It was too painful to be sitting around
.
.
. waiting.”

“Anyway, you need to be nice to her when she gets here tomorrow. I know you don't like her.”

“I'll try,” Kate said grudgingly. But it was going to be hard. Kate thought Aunt Julia was very bossy.

“We'll be all right, won't we?” There was apprehension in Mary's voice, as if the possibility that they might not be all right had just dawned on her.

Kate suddenly remembered that her father had life insurance. She knew about it because one day, a few weeks before, he'd asked her to come to his study. He opened a desk drawer, showed her a folder marked
Personal Documents
, and told her that was where he kept the insurance and tax records and other important papers. She had a fleeting notion to get up and look for the insurance policy, but she decided to wait until morning. She wondered whether the life insurance would be enough. “Yes. We'll be all right.”

“At least we have each other,” Mary said.

“Yes,” Kate answered. She closed her eyes and sighed.

 

W
hat color was a sigh? How would she paint it? It would be impossible to find the right color for it. Purple? Indigo? Indigo with tinges of light blue, maybe. Kate's sigh reminded Mary of Van Gogh's irises, the ones she had been trying to paint.

When Mary was a child, Mama would save her drawings and paintings and show them to Papa when he came home. Mama framed one especially beautiful drawing, a picture of a bald eagle flying on a blue-sky background, with ra
ys of
golden light illuminating its flight. Papa kept the picture on his desk until the day Mama came home from the hospital. Then he put it away somewhere. Mary never knew where.

Removing the picture from his desk marked the beginning of Papa's change in attitude toward Mary's paintings. It was as if Mama's accident meant they could no longer waste time on impractical things. He thought that people who painted were weak, unable to survive in the harsh world, and he was afraid for her.

Something else happened to her painting then. Making art had always come naturally to Mary. It was simply something she did without thinking. Through painting she could see the light that dwelled in all things, in all people. Those who saw her paintings were amazed. They could not believe that someone her age could paint like that. Even then, people offered to buy her work.

But after Mama's accident, the very act of painting was n
ot the s
ame as before. Painting became a duty rather than
a joy. T
he light was no longer seen. She continued painting because the sense of loss was less when she painted, but she knew in her heart that something was missing. Her painting now took place in darkness. The feeling behind the paintin
g wa
s gone.

Nevertheless, people admired her work. When Mary was a freshman, her art teacher, Mr. Gomez, came to the house to convince Papa to let her stay after school for extra studio time. Mary had never heard anyone speak to Papa the way Mr. Gomez spoke to him that day. “You don't understand,” he said. “She has an extraordinary gift. She needs to learn a little technique, but not much. She's already more original than people who have their stuff hanging in galleries.”

“She needs to look after her mother after school,” Papa answered.

She knew that when Papa spoke that way, there was no moving him. But somehow Mr. Gomez convinced him. He reminded Papa how he had entered one of Mary's paintings — one she had done before her mother's accident — in a citywide competition, and it had won first prize and a five-hundred-dollar award. Perhaps it was the money that convinced Papa. They were always in need of extra cash.

Mary waited to make sure that Kate was asleep. As hard as Papa's death was for Mary, she knew it had been harder for Kate. In the midst of all her sorrow, Kate was worried about how they were going to live without him. Mary worried too. After a long, long time, Kate finally stopped tossing and turning. Mary got up softly, put her slippers on, and slipped out of the room. When Papa was alive, the girls kept the door to their room closed, but this past week they had kept it open so they could hear Mama. Mary glanced in and saw that Mama had her eyes closed and was breathing softly.

Then she walked to Papa's office, closed the door, and turned on the lamp on his desk. Papa had a brass lamp with
a crea
m-colored shade that cast a soft glow over the room. One of Mary's earliest paintings, the one that won the five-hu
ndred-d
ollar award, was a watercolor still life of Papa's study. It showed the huge oak desk with its three drawers on each side. The wall in front of the desk was blank, because Papa didn't want to have any distractions while he was writing his sermons. On top of the desk she had painted an open Bible, a few white sheets of paper, an old-fashioned fountain pen, and a bottle of ink. She invented the fountain pen and the bottle of ink because she thought it would give the scene a quiet, peaceful mood. She depicted a room where thinking and writing were done slowly. In reality, Papa used a penc
il and
an old Olivetti typewriter.

Mary looked for the crayon drawing of the bald eagle. She wanted to know that Papa had not thrown it away. She wanted to believe that deep down Papa valued her painting, even if she no longer did. The drawing was not in her parents' bedroom, because she had searched for it before when she was taking care of Mama. Now she opened all the drawers in the desk, starting from the bottom. She lifted out the folders and papers in the drawers and looked carefully. There was a gray file cabinet where he kept all his old sermons and she looked inside i
t, but
she couldn't find any of the paintings or drawings she ha
d gi
ven Papa over the years — not just the drawing of the eagle, but the pictures she had given him for his birthday or Father's Day.

Mary sat on the floor and put her hands over her eyes. Papa had thrown away the drawing of the eagle. He had thrown away all the paintings and drawings she had ever given him, and she felt a terrible and dark loneliness.

 

A
unt Julia arrived the following morning. She came into the house, gave Mary and Kate each a hug, dropped her turquoise suitcase, and plumped herself down on the sofa, breathing heavily, her hair disheveled. She was thinner and paler than the last time Kate had seen her. Kate expected her to make some excuse as to why she hadn't attended the funeral services, but Aunt Julia was silent on the subject. Instead, after telling them how the taxi from the airport had not been air-conditioned, she looked directly at Kate and asked: “So what are you girls going to do?”

“We're going to be okay,” Kate said. Aunt Julia had not been in the house more than five minutes and Kate could already feel her blood rising.

“Who's going to take care of Catalina while you girls go to school? I can't stay here forever. I have to go home soon.”

She has to take care of her cats
,
Kate thought.

“Aunt Julia, would you like to go in and see Mama?” M
ary said
.

Aunt Julia ignored her. “Did your father leave you any money?”

“I have to find out,” Kate said coolly. “There's an insurance policy.”

“How much?”

“I don't know. I haven't had a chance to look.”

“That's something you need to check quickly. You'll need to file a claim and send a death certificate. When my Phil died, it took a couple of months to get a check from the insurance company. They'll do whatever they can to keep from paying.” Aunt Julia seemed to think they were little children who did not know the ways of the world. “Do you still have a nurse come every day?”

“Yes,” Mary answered. “Talita. She loves Mama.”

“How much does she charge?”

“I don't know,” Kate responded. She made a mental note to find out how much Talita would charge to stay with Mother for the hours she and Mary were in school. For the time being, Aunt Julia would have to do.

“I don't know either,” Mary said.

Aunt Julia looked at them for a moment before taking o
ut a tissue
and coughing into it. “Well, those are things y
ou girls need
to know.” Kate thought that Aunt Julia loo
ked like a
dried-up prune. All her freshness and juice w
ere gone.
“What about the house? How long can you st
ay here
?”

Kate didn't answer, so Mary said tentatively, “I'm sure we can stay here for a while.”

“They told you that?”

“No, but Papa was the minister for nineteen years. They're not going to just kick us out.” Mary's bold response made Kate smile.

“Pssh!” Aunt Julia said.

“We haven't had a chance to look into a lot of things.” Kate stared briefly at Aunt Julia in case she had any notions of running their lives.

“I'm just trying to help,” Aunt Julia said.

Kate grinned. She could not believe how Aunt Julia had started asking questions the minute she walked in. She thought of Reverend Soto. Maybe she could talk to him about the house, confirm with him that they could stay as long as they wanted.

“Aunt Julia, do you want me to take your suitcase to Mama's room?” Mary asked.

Aunt Julia shook her head quickly as if the very notion frightened her. “Poor Catalina,” she said. “I wanted to come to visit her more often, but I couldn't. I
.
.
. haven't been all that well. And then, to be honest with you, there was Manuel. I just couldn't face the fact that he was driving the car when they had the accident. If he hadn't been so careless, she wouldn't be like this.”

“It was an accident,” Mary said meekly.

“It wasn't an accident, really. Manuel went through that red light. It was in the police report. I could never get past that. Every time I saw him, that's all I could think about.”

There was a long, awkward silence. Finally, Mary spoke. “Papa thought about that accident a lot too. He blamed
himself a thousand times
more than anyone else could blam
e him
.”

“How long will you be staying?” Kate inquired before Aunt Julia could say anything else. She had heard Aunt Julia's explanations before about why she couldn't come see her own sister, and she didn't buy any of them. The truth, as far as Kate was concerned, was that Aunt Julia was a selfish woman comfortable in her little world. She had married in her fifties to a man twenty years older, who had died a few years after they were married. She lived with her two cats in a house that was all paid for.