The Afterlife (17 page)

Working his way, after her death, through all the accumulated souvenirs of her life, Joey was fascinated by the college yearbooks that preserved her girlish image. Group photographs showed his mother as part of the hockey team, the hiking club. With a magnifying glass he studied her unsmiling, competitive face, with her hair in two balls at her ears and a headband over her bangs. Her face seemed slightly larger
than the other girls’, a childlike oval broadest at the brow, its defenses relatively unevolved. As he sat there beside the cherry casket crying, his former wives and adult children stealing nervous peeks at him, the young woman ran for the trolley car, her breath catching, her panting mixed with a sighing laughter at herself, and the image was as potent, as fertile, as a classic advertisement, which endlessly taps something deep and needy within us. The image of her running down the street, away from him, trailed like a comet’s tail the maternal enactments of those misty years when he was a child—crayoning with him on the living-room floor, sewing him Halloween costumes in the shape of Disney creatures, having him lift what she called the “skirts” of the bushes in the lawn while she pushed the old reel mower under them—but from her point of view; he seemed to feel from within his mother’s head the situation, herself and this small son, this defenseless gurgling hatched creature, and the tentative motions of her mind and instincts as she, as new to mothering as he was to being alive, explored the terrain between them. In the attic he had found a padded baby-blue scrapbook, conscientiously maintained, containing his first words, the date of his first crawl, and his hospital birth certificate imprinted with his inky day-old feet. The baths. The cod-liver oil. The calls to the doctor, the subscriptions to children’s magazines, the sweaters she knit. Trying to do the right thing, the normal thing, running toward her farm, her death. In his vision of her running she was bright and quick and small, like an animal caught in a gunsight. This was the mother Joey had loved, the mother before they moved, before she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house.

Ruthlessly, vengefully, weekend by weekend, he cleaned the place out—disconnecting the phone, giving the auctioneer
the run of the attic, seeing the refrigerator and stove hauled off for a few dollars each, by a truck that got stuck in the muddy winter lawn. With his new vacuum cleaner Joey attacked the emptying rooms, sucking up the allergen-rich dust from the cracks between the floorboards, sweeping the walls and ceilings clean of their veils of cobwebs upon cobwebs. How satisfying this was, one room after another that he would not have to do again. Joey discovered that his mother had been far from alone in the house; while the cats mewed and milled outside on the porch, a tribe of mice, year after year, ancestors and descendants, had been fed sunflower seeds, whose accumulated stored husks burst forth by the bucketful from behind where the stained-pine corner cupboard had stood, and from the back of the dish-towel drawer of the kitchen sink. He set traps for the mice. He set out d-Con, and the next weekend tossed the small stiff bodies, held gingerly by the tail, down into the swamp, where the chimney rocks, and the ashes of his grandmother’s mattress, had joined earth’s stately recycling.

The old house had curious small cabinets built into the stone thickness, and they disgorged packets of his father’s index cards, riddled with anxious reminder notes to himself, and pads of old high-school permission slips, and small boxes of dull pencils and hardened erasers, and playing cards from the remote days when he and his parents played three-handed pinochle at the dining table. At first, he could scarcely hold the cards, sixteen fanned in one little hand, and would stifle tears when his meld was poor and he lost. Once at the farm, they were too busy to play cards ever again. There were animals of petrified Play-Doh made by Joey’s children, and useless pretty vases and bowls sent distractedly as seasonal gifts from Bloomingdale’s, and plush-bound old-fashioned albums, with little mildewed mirrors on the covers, of stiffly posed
ancestors he could not identify. His mother had offered, over the years, to teach him their names and exact relation to him, but he had not been interested, and now she was not there to ask, and his ancestors floated free and nameless, like angels.

There were things she had offered to tell him he had not wanted to hear. “What didn’t you like about him?” he had once asked her—a bit impatiently, tiring of her voice—about his father.

Sitting in her television-watching chair, her weight and strength so wasted that only her mouth and mind could move, she had been telling him about her youthful romantic life. She had gone to a one-room country school—when she was dead, he came upon a photograph of the student body and its corpulent mustachioed instructor, his mother’s broad little face squinting toward the camera under a ponderous crown of wound braids. Among the other children there had been a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy whom she had fancied, and who had fancied her. But her parents had disapproved of the boy’s “people,” and of several other dark-eyed substitutes that over the years she had offered them. Not until Joey’s blondish, pale-eyed father did she bring home a suitor they could endorse. “They liked him, and he liked them. I’ll say this for your father, not every man could have lived with his in-laws that cheerfully all those years. He really admired my mother, that style of little woman. Energetic little women—he loved them. He thought they could make money for him. It’s true, Mother was a money-maker. She was the one who got up in the dark to drive the cart into Alton to market. The tobacco they retired on had been her project. But admiring Mother was no reason to marry me. I was
big
. It was a mistake, and we both knew it. We knew it the first day of our honeymoon.” Joey had often heard his mother’s views on little women, how they have the best of it, and take the men from the big women
like herself, big women who have tortured their little mothers in the birthing. Behind these formulations there was something—about sex, he believed—that he didn’t want, as a boy or a man, to hear.
A real femme
. Even as a very small child he had been aware of a weight of anger his mother carried; he had quickly evolved—first word, first crawl—an adroitness at staying out of her way when she was heavy with it, and a wish to amuse her, to keep her light. But now, as they were nearing the end of their time together, and her flesh was dissolving and her inner self rising to the surface, his responses had become more daring, less catering, even challenging. Her own pale eyes, a blue faintly milky though she had never needed a cataract operation, widened at his question as if she were seeing ghosts over his shoulder. “Oh, Joey,” she said, “don’t ask. It was un
speak
able.”

He had to smile at the old-fashioned concept. “Unspeakable? Daddy?”

A bit of flush had crept into her colorless creased cheeks. She was getting angry, once again. She kept staring, not so much at him as at the space in his vicinity. She knew from watching television what the talk shows permitted people to say these days. “Well, maybe you’re old enough. Maybe I
should
speak it.”

“Oh no, no thanks, that’s all right,” he said, jumping up from his chair and heading into the kitchen, much as his father used to in the middle of a marital exchange.
Poor Daddy
, was his thought.
Let the dead alone
. Now she, too, was dead, and there were many things, once speakable, that Joey would never know. Though he grew used to the sandstone house without her in it, he still found it strange, back in his Manhattan apartment, that she never called on Saturday mornings the way she used to, with her playful, self-mocking account of her week. The dead are so feeble they can’t even telephone.
The phone’s silence more than any other conveyed the peace of the dead, their final and, as it were, hostile withdrawal.

The real-estate appraiser, an old high-school classmate, stood in his gray suit in the cobwebbed cellar, next to the rickety oil furnace, among the paint cans and rusty hot-air ducts, and said to Joey, “Seventeen years here alone. It took a lot of guts.”

Yes, she had been brave, he could now afford to see, all those years alone, alone but for the animals she fed, and the presences on television. Over the telephone, even when reporting an insomniac night of breathlessness and terror, she had tried to keep it light for his sake, and mocked herself, mocking her very will, at the age of eighty-five, to live. “It’s strange,” she confessed to her son, “but I really don’t intend to die. Though a lot of people would like me to.”

“Really? Who?”

“The real-estate developers. The neighbors. They think it’s time for this old lady to move over and make some room.”

“Do they really?” He was grateful she had not included him among the many who wished her dead.

“Really,” she mocked. “But I have a responsibility here. The place still needs me.”

“We all need you,” Joey said, sighing, giving up. The fate of the place was another unspeakable matter. She wanted the place to go on and on, unchanged, as it was in her idea of it.

He had scanned her in vain for some sign of sunset resignation. She had choked down her pills and vitamins to the end, and her fear of life’s sensations’ ceasing had seemed pure. The last time he had visited, on a cool fall day, she came outdoors to supervise his planting, in two arcs by a curve of the cement walk, two dozen tulip bulbs she had ordered from a catalogue. At first he had arranged the bulbs point down, and then realized
that the point was what would grow upward, toward the sun. His mother had stood there on her unsteady feet, in her gaudy bathrobe, looking down; the sight of the fat cream-white bulbs nested in the turned red earth startled a kind of grunt out of her. “Oh, how dear they look,” she said. To Joey she added, as his encouraging mother, “How nicely you do things.”

In all of her leavings that came to light he was most touched by her accounts—her tax forms and used checkbooks, meticulously kept, even though her tiny backward-slanting hand had become spasmodic and shaky. (Could that big pencilled handwriting on the back of the enlarged photograph have been hers after all, at the age of thirteen?) She had kept, on a large pad of green paper, spreadsheets of her monthly expenses, ruled off by hand at the beginning of each month. The last entries had been made the day before the morning of her death. This financial and mathematical niceness of hers was something quite unpredictable, like a musical passion in a banker. Among the stored sheets of figures were several drawn up before they moved, with lists of expenses side by side—taxes, heating, utilities, upkeep. Absurdly small amounts they now seemed, having loomed so large in that price-frozen wartime world. By her calculations, their reduced costs in the little sandstone house, and the projected rentals of their eighty acres to the neighboring farmers, would save them five hundred dollars—a third of her husband’s salary. It had never really occurred to Joey that their move here had had a practical side. When he came to sheets showing how the money for his college education could be squeezed out among their other expenses, he couldn’t bear to keep reading.

Gradually, through the stark months of a winter that was, according to the forecasters, unseasonably cold, and then unseasonably
warm, he reduced the house to its essence, removing every trace, even a rusty pencil sharpener screwed to a windowsill, of his life and the four lives that had ended. Here on this patch of now uncarpeted wood his grandfather had fallen, having convulsively leaped from the bed where, a year later, his widow would breathe her last. Here, in the bedroom adjacent, his father one midnight had sat up with such pains in his chest that he finally asked his wife to call the ambulance. He had died in the ambulance. Here in this same space Joey had lain sleepless, wondering how to tell his mother of his next divorce. Here on the other side of the wall he would lie after a date, his head still whirling with cigarette smoke and the girl’s perfume. Here on the worn linoleum his mother had died, at the base of a wall she had the Amish carpenters make of old chestnut boards, boards left in the barn from the era before the blight, to cover the rough stones exposed when the big kitchen chimney had been removed. The rooms had a soft beauty, empty. The uncovered pine floorboards drank the sunlight. Joey looked through the curtainless windows, seeing what his mother had seen—the sloping old orchard to the north, the barn and road and fields to the east, the lilac bushes and bird feeder and meadow to the south, the woods and the tall blue spruce to the west. Each day the sun would set behind the woods, in a blood-red blazon of concentric fire.

On his final cleanup visit, Joey found floating in the bathroom toilet something devil-like—a small dark stiff shape, in size between a mouse and a rat, its legs connected by webs of skin. A flying squirrel. It had come down from the attic and drowned, sick and thirsty from the d-Con. Joey remembered watching at twilight, that summer he moved the stones, a pair of flying squirrels sail, as if sliding swiftly on a wire, from the attic window over to the blue spruce. The house had stood
empty the previous summer, before his family had moved in, and this pair had moved in ahead of them.

He had bought a padlock for the cellar bulkhead, and closed the house with a key, having installed new locks. The house was ready for sale in the spring. But in the meantime, as he lay awake in his apartment three hours away, its emptiness called to him. It needed him. Only he understood it. Suppose a fire, or local vandals, jealous of the price the place would fetch … Housing developments were all around, and even Philadelphians were moving into the area. His mother had made a shrewd investment, buying back paradise.

Those weekends alone in the house, sorting, cleaning, staying away from the motel until moonlight had replaced sunlight on the floors, Joey had discovered himself talking aloud, as if in response to a friendly presence just behind the dry old wallpaper, within the thick stone walls. Weeknights, his own rooms, suspended above Manhattan’s steady roar, with an ornamental piece of porch bannister hidden at the back of a closet, seemed to be flying somewhere. He felt guilty, anxious, displaced. He had always wanted to be where the action was, and what action there was, it turned out, had been back there.