Still Life with Bread Crumbs (6 page)

She picked up her camera, took a few more photographs, then hiked up the side of the butte to see if there was any point in shooting it from above. The vegetation hid the yearbook from view, and so she kept climbing, her pack heavy, a damp spot
spreading at the center of her spine. When she brushed her hair back with her hand it was as warm as tin. The slope was getting steeper, and she had to push hard to continue.

She found herself doing math in her mind, the math she did almost every day. Fifty-eight hundred for subletting the apartment, minus 1000 for renting the cottage; 1400 for the maintenance on the apartment, 1900 for her part of the nursing home charges, 1000 for her father’s rent at the apartment near the nursing home. It left 500 a month to live on no matter how, or how often, she added it up. She hoped the old tires on her car held out. She hoped none of her cameras needed repair. She hoped she could produce some new work, some good work, that her work would come back into fashion and start to sell. “Look at Jane Ann Bettison,” Dorothea had said when she told her she was subletting her apartment. “She was huge, then nothing, then suddenly the secondary market went crazy and she was huge again.”

“Jane Ann Bettison died last year.”

“Granted, but she was flush when she died.”

Rebecca leveled off on the crest of the mountain, or at least the first crest. All through July she had vowed to reach the top, but it was like a mirage, or solvency, always much farther away than it looked. She peered through a break in the trees but there was more and more mountain, ever upward. Overhead she saw movement, and a bald eagle bisected the patch of sky. The shock of recognition was powerful; he looked exactly like money. He banked slightly and from inside a huge maple ahead she saw a gun pointed at him and she broke into a run, her backpack bumping between her shoulder blades.

“What are you doing?” she shouted as the bird wheeled and disappeared. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Ah, hell,” said a voice from deep within the branches of the tree.

She looked up, saw the soles of hiking boots over the edge of
a platform above her and then a flushed truculent face. “Jim Bates,” she said aloud.

“Ms. Winter,” he said, making the
s
in the term of address sound like a bee buzzing, more Southern manners than political correctness.

“I’ve always understood it’s illegal to shoot a bald eagle,” she said. “If it’s not it certainly should be.”

He shimmied down the tree trunk, the big gun held on a bandolier strap that cut across his chest. Beneath it a T-shirt the green of midsummer leaves had the letters SWS on its front. Under his arms the green was the darker shade of the deeper forest. He shook her hand formally but the line of his mouth was hard.

“It’s illegal to shoot a bald eagle, and even if it wasn’t I’m the last guy you’d find doing it. This isn’t a gun. It’s a tracking device. It reads the chips in the bands the State Wildlife Service puts on the big birds. That bird you just saw is the male of a pair that have a nest about a half mile that way. The scientists like to keep track of his habits. I work for them on weekends.”

Rebecca breathed in, then finally said, “I’m sorry. I’ve interfered with your work.”

Jim Bates shrugged. The line of his mouth had relaxed. “He’ll be back. He always is.”

“The same bird in the same location?”

He nodded. “They mate for life,” he said. “Unlike people.”

“Can you show me where the nest is?”

“I’d rather not, to be honest. I try not to disturb them at home. I don’t really need to do that. I usually log each of them when they’re out looking for food for their babies. He’s out now, she’s home. He’ll bring something back, she’ll go out.” He looked down at her. She was on the tall side, but he was taller and bigger, a block of a man. She wondered if his pink skin faded with the winter light. She began to try to apologize when he held up a hand and put the other on her shoulder, turning her
slightly and pointing up. The eagle was flying above them, a limp squirrel hanging from his talons. His profile was an etching, the white head, the golden beak, the pale eye.

“Oh, look at you,” Rebecca said.

“Never gets old,” he said.

She fumbled for her camera but it was too late. He shook his head. “I’ve tried it,” he said, “but, you know, you take the picture and you look at it and it’s just not the same. It kind of loses something in the translation.”

“I suppose it depends on the picture,” Rebecca said.

“No offense,” he said. “Sarah says you take good pictures.” He stuck out his hand again. It was wrapped in a grubby bandage. “You could use some fiberglass insulation in that crawl space before winter comes,” he added. The calculator in Rebecca’s mind began its desperate clicking again: 5800, 1000, 1400, 1900, 1000. The owner of the cottage had not replied when she had asked him to pay for the raccoon removal and the roof repair. “It won’t be much,” he said as though he could hear the sound in the silent forest. “Mainly materials.”

“I have a photograph of the raccoon you might be interested in.”

“A dead animal in a picture, now that’s a different thing. I’ll trade you. Deal?”

“Deal,” she said.

“Back to work,” he said, hoisting himself onto the lowest branch of the maple tree, and she stood and watched him climb, disappearing by inches.

During the month of August:

Sarah put up the poster of
Still Life with Bread Crumbs
in Tea for Two. (Like everyone else in town, that’s what Rebecca called it. She ignored Kevin’s parentheses. If there was a Kevin. Rebecca had yet to meet him.) Rebecca had signed two copies of the poster and Sarah had had them framed. One was going to Sarah’s mother for her birthday, and the other had been hung on the long wall of the shop, opposite the door. “I need more art in here,” Sarah said.

“This is really good,” Jim Bates said when he saw the photograph of the raccoon’s paws, shot so close that it was difficult to tell what they were. He put two layers of insulation in the attic. A spark of sunlight from below struck the side of the ladder laid across the top of his truck. It was something that happened often, the odd ray of light from below.

“Where’s your flag?” Jim Bates said. Rebecca went to the back door where the white flag was leaning. “It fell off during that thunderstorm,” she said. He put it back up so that it fluttered wildly in a gust off the mountain. Rebecca wondered if it was an advertising vehicle, like those signs along the road that said
THIS SUNROOM COURTESY OF BRIGHT DAY ADDITIONS.

The shards of lights from below disappeared.

Rebecca found two more crosses. One had a blue ribbon at its base. “First prize” was written on the ribbon, but the cheaply embossed gilt letters were beginning to fade, and parts of the fabric were bleaching to a military gray. The ribbon was limp and sad from rain and sun. Over the course of a week it became limper and sadder, and she kept taking photographs. No one moved it. She thought of asking Sarah whether she knew why someone would be leaving the crosses in the woods, but she thought Sarah would discuss the matter with everyone who lived within a ten-mile radius, and that perhaps the person who had removed the first cross would take the others. She didn’t want that.

The next cross had a birthday card open beneath it and was surrounded by chicory, its starry blue flowers a frame. “A daughter is a blessing / from heaven above / a gift that’s everlasting / of wonderful love,” the card said in pink script. “Mommy,” said the signature in copperplate penmanship. (“Mother,” her own cards from her mother had always said.) Rebecca wondered what the front of the card looked like. It was still fresh and untouched, although a thin line of red ants was marching across the glittery border of pink roses. Rebecca took photos with the ants and, when they had moved on, without.

The following day that cross and the card had both disappeared, and she reluctantly decided it was time to go visit her parents.

Anthropology 101/Mount Holyoke College

Fall semester

Family of Origin Field Study Exercise

Rebecca Grace Winter

Mother: Beatrice Sophia Freeman, born 1925, New York City. Only child, Morris (born Krakow, Poland) and Bertha (born Warsaw, Poland) Freeman. Educated Fieldston School and Manhattan School of Music.

Father: Oscar Winter, born 1920, Brooklyn, New York. Son, Jacob and Leah Winter (born New York, NY). Educated Evander Childs High School.

Mother’s occupation: housewife

Father’s occupation: business owner

Brothers: none

Sisters: none

Like most nursing homes, the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm was situated in an unattractive area of a pretty neighborhood, a busy street where no one would want to raise children. The residents of the home never noticed, and their families, when they visited, pretended not to. Behind it were twisty streets with old trees stretching overhead and large Tudor houses neck-laced with climbing roses. From the nursing home roof the river was visible, moving sluggishly toward New York Harbor and a chance to kiss the feet of the Statue of Liberty. It was a nice view, but no one ever saw it except two guys working in the kitchen who went up there to smoke during their breaks. State regulations made it unlawful to bring patients onto the roof, even if any of them could have climbed the metal stairs. They made it unlawful for staff to use it as well, but the two kitchen workers were making close to minimum wage, so they said to hell with it.

The home itself, on a commercial boulevard, had no scenery except a back court that was more or less a biggish air shaft with some pots of dusty ivy at the corners and a few outdoor chairs. The chairs were for the visitors, usually; the residents used wheelchairs or, if they were especially lucky or relatively new, walkers.

In a sunroom with a view of a white brick high-rise a tiny woman with thin white hair sat bent over a card table. It took everything Rebecca had to approach her, although it was unlikely the woman would look up. If she did, it was unthinkable that she would recognize her only child. Not that the flat, slightly suspicious look in her blue-gray eyes would be much different from the way she had looked at Rebecca when she was a girl, or a young woman. “Some women, they shouldn’t have children,” her grandmother had once muttered, and for a long time Rebecca had agreed. But over the years she realized it was more complicated than that. In her mother’s generation it had been assumed that a girl would get married, and a married woman would become a mother, and all of the girls with whom Bebe had grown up and later played cards had. In some cases they had warmed to the task, and in other cases they had not. It was difficult to predict: Bebe’s old friend Ruth Wetzel, for instance, had been a mean-spirited wife whose great love affair had been with her eldest child, her son, for whom enough was never enough. (As for her second child, her daughter, that was another story.)

For Rebecca’s contemporaries, it had been different: some of them had purposefully avoided having children, even some of the ones who seemed likely to be good parents, and some of them had reluctantly and fearfully conceived, and then been surprised to discover that they were filled to the brim by motherhood. Sometimes Rebecca thought she fell somewhere in the middle. She was not sure that she could say she loved being a mother, that three or four children would have enriched her life. But she had loved Benjamin Freeman Symington, funny little Ben, from almost
the first time she had placed his bald misshapen head at her breast, had perhaps come to love him even more when she realized that he would grow up with one and a half parents, given the vagaries of his father’s peripatetic personal life, and that she was the one. Or maybe she had just relaxed into him over time.

Bebe Winter had never relaxed into anything, especially motherhood. She was as definite, as unyielding, as dark as the ungainly statue of Artemis that she had placed on the table in their old apartment’s foyer. There had been no Jekyll and Hyde, no Dorian Gray, no sweet and sour mother depending on the day or the mood, just what Rebecca’s former husband, Peter, called the Tao of Bebe, dismissive, grand, aggrieved. How she had loved the fact that Rebecca had married an Englishman. Sometimes it seemed she even picked up Peter’s accent when he was around, although on Bebe it sounded a bit as though her back teeth were stuck together with toffee. She loved toffee, and brandy Alexanders, and chocolate mousse, and the honey ice cream at Gigi’s, the “perfectly fine” French restaurant two blocks from the apartment at which Bebe was a regular. “That chicken I had the last time, Franco,” she would say airily as she let her jacket drop from her narrow shoulders onto the back of the chair, and somehow the poor man would remember what chicken she had had last time, or at least both of them would pretend he had as he presented and she picked.

Her mother would be appalled at the pale blue acrylic sweater the aides at the home had dressed her in today, never mind the fact that she was living in a place with the word
Jewish
in its name.

Bebe was playing the piano, of course. Bebe always played the piano. Rebecca watched her shoulders, arms, and back. There was something deliberate, even aggressive about the way her mother’s bony winglike shoulders shifted beneath the ugly sweater, how her fingers moved along the fake wood surface of the table. Bach. With Bach or Beethoven she usually moved forward
and back, as though Bebe Freeman was davening as her conveniently forgotten male ancestors had done. Rebecca had agonized over that anthro assignment in college. Should she write that her mother’s parents had once been Friedmans? If her mother discovered Rebecca had come out as what, when she had had several brandy Alexanders, she would call a Jewess, even if only to an adjunct professor at Mount Holyoke, she would be very angry. Bebe Freeman—Freeman!—was a practiced expert at the casual anti-Semitism of the wealthy assimilated New York Jew.

Bach, Rebecca thought again, as certain as though there were actually notes and chords and movements instead of the muted sound of her mother’s reddened fingertips hitting the table surface. When it was Chopin or Mozart her mother’s body rocked from side to side, softer, gentler. And she had always preferred Bach to Beethoven. When Beethoven’s name would come up, her mother would say flatly, “deaf,” as though it was a character defect and the mark of a lesser talent. Bach’s hearing had remained intact. It was hard to tell if this was true of Bebe, since her capacity to ignore the comments of others had been fully formed even when she was quite young.