Spirit (15 page)

He waggled his eyebrows at Aunt Beverley like Groucho Marx, and Aunt Beverley said, ‘Shut up, Moe, for God's sake.'

They went through to the drawing-room. Moe circled around and around as he walked, admiring the antique fireplace and the tall colonial-glazed windows that gave out onto the gardens. Aunt Beverley sat down in the largest, most dominant chair and asked for a whiskey. Moe said he had an ulcer, and he was driving, so gin would do. Straight up, no ice, no olive. Father allowed Elizabeth to have a small glass of cherry brandy. There were hickory-smoke peanuts on the table and Moe started to scoop them up as if he hadn't eaten in three days.

Laura sat well away from the grown-ups, on the faded brocade window seat. Behind her the sunlight sparkled on the raindrops, and her golden curls shone, and she looked like an angel of flawless innocence. That, of course, was why the late Dick Bracewaite had found her so alluring.

Elizabeth tried to join the grown-up conversation; but there
didn't seem to be very much more that she could say. She sensed, too, that her father needed to talk to Aunt Beverley alone.

‘Why don't you go find your mommy, you two?' her father asked them. ‘See if she needs any help.'

They went upstairs. Oddly, however, mommy wasn't in her bedroom. Her bed was still unmade, as if she had only recently got up, and her dressing-table was still scattered with combs and lipsticks and an open powder compact. The powder puff had dropped onto the carpet and she hadn't bothered to pick it up. Even odder, though, she had left a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

‘Maybe she had to rush to the bathroom,' Laura suggested.

But just as they were turning to investigate, Elizabeth glimpsed something down on the front lawn, something white that bobbed quickly out of sight. She ran to the window; and she was just in time to see her mother hurrying across the driveway, wearing her long white nightgown and carrying her white umbrella. ‘It's mommy!' Laura exclaimed. ‘And she isn't even
dressed
!'

The two girls pelted downstairs and into the living-room. They caught father and Aunt Beverley with their heads close together, earnestly talking, while Moe was pacing around the billiard-room next door, chalking a cue. ‘Daddy! Mommy's run out of the house in her nightgown!'

‘Oh, God,' said their father. He took off his glasses and came hurrying after them. Seamus had been coming into the living-room with a tray of iced tea, and he almost dropped it. ‘Where's the friend?' he asked, in panic. Moe, perplexed, said, ‘What?'

They ran outside. The rain was soft and fine. The sun was so bright that at first they couldn't make out where their mommy had gone. But then Elizabeth saw a flicker of shadow on the corner of Oak Street, and she screamed. ‘Look! There she is!' and they all set off in pursuit.

Elizabeth hastily smeared the rain out of her eyes with the back of her hand, and prayed that they would find mommy first, and that this latest escapade wouldn't be noticed. She already had enough patronizing gibes to put up with, and she always heard the whispers, although she pretended that she didn't: ‘You see
her?
Her mom's a certified loony.'

However, they didn't even have to run as far as Oak Street. On the right-hand side, just before the intersection, the ground dropped away. There was a creek here, no more than a muddy trickle in winter and dried-out in summer. It was here amongst the scrub and thistles that Margaret Buchanan was standing, her upside-down umbrella on the ground beside her, her hair hanging in rat's-tails, her wet nightgown clinging to her ribcage and her bony thighs. On her face was an expression of such desolation and anguish that Elizabeth had to look away.

Father slid down the path to reach her, and put his arm around her.

‘Come on sweetheart, let's get you home. What on earth made you come running out here?'

Mommy twisted his sleeve, and stared at him as if he were the one who was mentally unbalanced. ‘I saw her. It was just like Lizzie said. I saw her with my own eyes.'

‘Come on sweetheart. You'll catch your death.'

‘Don't you say “come on” to me. I saw her with my own eyes. She must be here, not too far away, if Lizzie saw her and I saw her, too. And it
was
her, no question about it.'

‘Who was it?' asked father.

‘You don't
know?
It was Peggy, my little Clothes-Peg! Peggy's back!'

Father looked at her, his face fractured with sadness, and said nothing; but mommy wrenched herself around and pointed along the creek and screamed at him, ‘She's here! I saw her! Why can't you believe me? You should be happy that she's back!'

Elizabeth, shivering, peered through the glittering rain. For a split second she thought she glimpsed a blurred white figure, running behind the rainbows, but it could have been nothing more than a flash of refracted light, or something she wanted to see, rather than something that really was. She looked at her mommy's face, however, and she could tell that her mommy had really seen the same little girl all dressed in white. She could tell it for sure. Her mommy was staring at her, quite steadily, quite calmly, and there was nothing in her face that beseeched her to believe that she wasn't insane, because she didn't have to prove her sanity to anybody.

Elizabeth reached out and took hold of her mommy's hand. She was very cold.

‘Come on, mommy,' she whispered. ‘Let's go home.'

They all climbed back up the slope to the sidewalk. The rain began to ease off, almost as if somebody was slowly closing off their lawn-sprinkler. They walked back with squelching shoes along a street that was already beginning to steam.

‘Your hat's gone strange,' Laura said to Aunt Beverley.

‘Is
that
all?' Aunt Beverley retorted, fiercely.

As they walked back along the street, Elizabeth noticed that some of the bushes were sparkling. At first she thought it was only caused by raindrops, but when she brushed one of them with her hand, she realized that they were sparkling with ice. She looked down at her fingers, and she could see the crystals melting on her fingertips, like snowflakes. She brushed another bush, and then another, and she was showered with tiny particles of ice. They glittered on her sleeve, and blew through the summer sunshine like chaff.

Ice, in June, it's magic.

Her mommy looked at her, and Elizabeth touched one of the bushes and whispered, ‘
Ice
, mommy. It's
ice.
'

Her mommy gave her a tired, affectionate smile. Elizabeth was sure that she understood what it meant. She took hold of
her mommy's hand, and the two of them walked back to the house with a shared secret and a shared feeling that the world was made of more than rain and sunshine: it was made of mirrors, too.

She hugged Laura goodbye. Aunt Beverley was already waiting in the car, and Moe kept checking his wristwatch and looking fretful.

‘I'll write you every day,' Elizabeth promised. ‘I won't mind at all if you don't write back every day, but do send me some picture postcards.'

Laura nodded. She was crying so much that she couldn't speak. At last their father laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Come along, sweetheart. Time to go.' He was going too, so that he could visit granpa in New York.

But as Laura climbed into the car, Elizabeth called out, ‘Wait! Please! I won't be a second!' She ran back into the house and up the stairs. She hurried along the landing to her bedroom, snatched what she wanted from her pillow, and ran helter-skelter back downstairs again.

Laura was sitting in the back of the car, her face pale and her eyes pink. Elizabeth said, ‘Here . . . he always wanted to go to Hollywood. You can take him.'

She passed Mr Bunzum through the window. Laura took him and hugged him close.

‘You
will
look after him?' asked Elizabeth.

‘He's a rabbit,' said Aunt Beverley, turning round in her seat, smoke issuing out of her nostrils. ‘He'll have the time of his life in Hollywood. They're
all
rabbits there.'

Moe gave a vulgar chuckle, and for the first time in her life Elizabeth realized that she understood a grown-up joke. It was extraordinary. It was just like the day she had suddenly realized what ‘
mairzy doats and dozey doats and little lamsy divey
' actually meant. She stepped away from the car feeling extremely adult.

She stood beside her mommy and waved as the car turned out of the driveway and then turned behind the trees. The sun sparked once from its chromework, and then it was gone.

‘Well, Elizabeth,' said her mommy. ‘It's just you and me now.'

Elizabeth looked up at her. Mommy gave her a wink.

That Sunday was humid and still and very, very hot. The church bells sounded like buckets of treacle being banged slowly together. Mommy and Elizabeth walked to St Michael's and knelt at their usual pew. The doors were left open in a futile attempt to keep the church cool, but all the ladies flapped their gloves and all the men were quietly boiling in their Sunday suits. The service ws taken by the Reverend Skinner, a white-haired retired priest from Danbury with a shrivelled, monkeylike face. He led the congregation in a special prayer for Dick Bracewaite, and hoped that God in His infinite mercy would find it in His heart to forgive him for what he had done. Not many people said amen to that and Janie McReady's parents got up and walked out.

They sang ‘Lead Kindly Light' and ‘Nearer My God To Thee'. The Reverend Skinner gave a long and scarcely-audible sermon on the text of idolatry. ‘Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field are they, and they cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk! They have devoured Jacob; they have devoured him and consumed him, and have laid waste his habitation.'

Elizabeth, in her yellow-and-white-striped cotton dress, so stiffly starched by Mrs Patrick that it crackled whenever she sat down, discreetly sucked a humbug and thought about the scarecrow in the cucumber field. She imagined him drowsing in the summer sun, and the cucumber field all wobbly with heat. He probably didn't care that he couldn't walk, because he was too darn comfortable drowsing in his field.

But she imagined a crow, too – a huge black crow, lazily flapping its wings on the warm up-currents, always circling the cucumber field, waiting for the scarecrow to close his eyes, and so the scarecrow never could.

Elizabeth was almost dozing off herself when she saw a small white figure walking past the church doors, so bright that her outline seemed blurred. A thrill of excitement ran down the back of her legs, and she was tempted for a split second to touch her mommy's arm and whisper, ‘Look! She's here!' But she couldn't be sure that it was the same girl, and she didn't want her mommy to get excited, not if it wasn't the same girl. Yet who else would be walking around the streets during communion, except for Catholics or Jews. She didn't know any Catholics in Sherman; and the only Jews she knew were middle-aged.

She watched the doors for a long time but the girl didn't pass again. After a while she squeezed her eyes tight shut and said a prayer for Peggy's soul, and for mommy's sanity, and for herself, too, because it didn't matter about muffs and peckers, not to her. All she wanted was her sister back home.

After the service they left the church and talked for a while to some of their friends. Mrs Brogan was holding the stage, as usual, a big loud woman in a big loud dress and big feathery hat. Elizabeth and her mommy had to elbow their way past them. They had almost reached the gate when Mrs Brogan called out, in a grating, mock-sympathetic cluck, ‘How's your trouble, Margaret, dear?'

Mommy hesitated. Elizabeth could see that she was tempted to just keep on going, to pretend that she hadn't heard, but for all of her illnesses, mommy was made of pricklier stuff than that. She turned around and faced Mrs Brogan and said, in a very high voice, ‘Oh yes, Mrs Brogan? And which particular trouble was that?'

Mrs Brogan's face subsided into her double chins. ‘I was
referring to Laura, of course. And that repulsive Mr Bracewaite. Such a terrible business. Terrible. I was just saying how tragic your life has been, dear, what with Peggy and now Laura. I don't know how you manage, I really don't. Well – I know there are times when you
can't
manage, but surely we all have those.'

Mommy took two or three steps back towards Mrs Brogan and Mrs Brogan flinched. When mommy spoke, her voice was hushed and deadly serious, like a snake sliding swiftly across a shingle slope.

‘I'll have you know that all of my daughters are alive.
All
of them; and all are well.'

Mrs Brogan stared back at mommy for a long time, her lower jaw visibly quivering behind the net of her Sunday hat. Then at last she said, ‘No offence was intended, Margaret.'

‘No offence was taken, Mrs Brogan,' mommy replied.

They walked home through the heat, hand in hand, one white glove in another. There were times when Elizabeth thought that her mommy was one of the prettiest, most characterful women in the whole world, and this was one of them.

‘Do you
really
believe it?' she asked. ‘Do you really believe that Peggy is still alive, somehow?'

‘Yes. I do now. I'm sure of it.'

‘She doesn't look the same. She's older.'

Mommy shook her head. ‘I don't think that matters. It's her, whatever age she is, whatever she looks like.'

‘But how can we be sure?'

‘I'm sure. I'm her mother.'

‘But – '

‘But what? I may be her mother but I'm insane? I'm not insane. I was never insane. I was grieving for your sister, that's all. Grief is a
kind
of insanity, I suppose. But I'm not so grief-stricken that I can't recognize my own baby when she comes
calling for me. God, I gave up everything for my children, my stage career, my movie career, my singing career. I could have had the whole world spraddled at my feet. So don't tell me I don't know my own baby when she comes calling for me. I gave up too much.'