The Afterlife (34 page)

“I don’t say I love it. I was born there, is all.”

“It was too much house—my father’s vanity made itself a monument the day he bought it. He bought it when I was off at college, without even telling me. I never could feel at home there. Neither could Mother. We weren’t city people. It nearly killed her, trying to keep it clean, up to city standards. It had a peculiar dust in it, that clung everywhere.”

He had heard this before, too, but its implausibility still made him laugh. “Well, you showed it,” he told her. “You escaped its clutches.”

“I don’t know why you’ve always resented our moving. Honest to goodness, Lee, I added years to all of our lives by getting us out of Alton. The only city person among us was your father.”

“I was just a child, Mother. I was in no position to resent anything. I’m still not.”

But was she right? Had he loved the house in Alton, all these years, just to spite her? It was a long, narrow-faced brick house, on a wider lot than most along the street. In his childhood the bricks had been painted pale yellow and the trim dark green. There was a front porch, a side porch, and an upstairs porch, and the yard had held cherry trees, a walnut tree, a birdbath, a bed of lilies of the valley, and a vegetable garden that his grandfather turned with a shovel every spring.

“I can take it or leave it, seeing the house,” he said. “This trip wasn’t my idea, remember.” They were skimming along a highway lined with ranch houses; it had been a winding asphalt
road the first time he had travelled it, with an occasional dirt lane leading off to a barn, a silo, and a square stone farmhouse just like theirs.

“I had to, seeing as it was our last chance. They were always inviting us, those first years. On every Christmas card. Then they stopped asking. I thought I’d get through life without ever having to see those rooms again. I like your idea, of you going in alone. You could drop me off at Weisbach’s Drug Store for half an hour.”

His mother’s fanciful distortions and quick little visions had always struck him as a higher form of truth. This trip
was
his idea, somehow; she had read his mind and set it up to please him. He said, truthfully, “Without you, Mother, it’d be no fun.”

“I could sit at the counter and have one of those sundaes. You have to say this for Luther Weisbach—he didn’t stint on the butterscotch.”

“Mother, I don’t think it’s still called Weisbach’s. And drugstores don’t have counters any more.”

The road surface wore a moist shine. It was a soft late-September day, the sunshine golden and the towering trees misty. A barn whose red side had said
JESUS SAVES
in fading letters year after year was suddenly gone, replaced by a Japanese-style building with wide eaves and staggered shingles—a golf-course clubhouse.

“You weren’t such a child,” his mother said, picking up another thread of her mental web. “You were thirteen. If we’d stayed there you’d still think of yourself as a child. That house made everybody in it childish. As long as I was in that house, I was my parents’ daughter.”

The Depression had thrown them all together—his parents and his mother’s parents. The Crash took his grandfather’s
savings, and then his father had been laid off from his job in Pittsburgh. Lee had been born into this wealth of disappointments and had been a happy child. All four adults had conspired to make him happy, as if his happiness might yet reverse their fortunes. They had scraped by, with various jobs. The war had come along and helped. With their modest war profits, his mother had finagled the change of houses, moving them to what his father had called “the sticks.” Now, with his grandparents and father long dead, the sticks—raspberry canes and sumac and wild grape and poison ivy—were moving ever closer to the little farmhouse, as his mother’s strength waned. For decades she had wielded the clippers and scythe like a man, and had ridden the power mower hour after hour, bouncing in widening circles around the lawn. Now reluctant teenagers did the mowing, when they could be recruited from the countryside; Pennsylvania held fewer and fewer farm children, accustomed to physical work. His mother’s house, stuck in the past, smelled of dust balls and mouse droppings. The plumbing and heating, brand-new in 1946, had become antique. Yet she insisted, “That Alton house was never healthy. The coal furnace made a gas that sat on my chest whenever I’d lie down.”

Lee laughed again, for they had reached the far end of his old street, and he was heading home.

This neck of Alton had a small-town quality, many of the houses free-standing on lots adorned by hydrangeas and rhododendron bushes, and even the semi-detached houses solid and well kept up. The vacant lots of Lee’s childhood had been filled in, and the street had been widened at the expense of a row of sycamores whose blotched bark and buttony seedpods had seemed oddly toylike to him, as if God were an invisible
playmate. On the uphill side, a tall row of semi-detacheds held fascinating little guttered spaces between them, passageways sexual in their intimacy, with a thin slice of sky at the top. Even widened, Franklin Street from its far end had a contained, narrowing look. In the side of Lee’s vision his mother’s hand fumbled in her black pocketbook and darted one of her nitroglycerin pills into her mouth. “Don’t be nervous,” he told her.

Over her teal-blue dress she had donned, though the day was unseasonably warm, an old-fashioned wool overcoat in a broad plaid, with a fox-fur collar. Her thick head of chestnut hair had been one of her youthful glories; Lee remembered from childhood the witchy, dripping tent her hair made after she had washed it, a towel worn over her shoulders as it dried. Now this hair, gone in the last decade from iron-gray to a gauzy white, let pink scalp show through, and she wore indoors and out a round knit cap on her head, bigger than a beanie but not quite a beret. Her ankles and feet were so swollen she could no longer squeeze her feet into anything but running shoes; she had chosen a vivid, several-striped pattern. From the days when she had been a young beauty and her father had still had money, she retained a taste for attention-getting clothes. Lee tried to repress his embarrassment, as he had when he was an adolescent and she was a vivacious, overweight, countrified woman, her sun-reddened hands and forearms scored by the scratches of raspberry and greenbrier thorns. “Why would I be nervous?” she asked sharply.

It was he who was nervous. Parking the car, he rubbed the tires against the curb, which the street improvement had left higher and whiter than it had been. Getting out of the car, he felt eerily tall in this setting of his earliest days. The houses
across the street, with their trees and telephone poles, presented the same silhouettes, though on this side the sunshine struck down strangely through the absence of sycamores, and the Jessups had taken away the waist-high box hedge that had shielded the front yard from sidewalk traffic. Sidewalk traffic, of course, was a thing of the past; it belonged to the Depression, to door-to-door salesmen walking on foot and people running to catch clanging trolley cars. The pale new curb of the widened street was so high that his mother couldn’t get the door of the BMW to swing open, and he had to repark it, his stomach nervously pinching. Entering this house again, this paradise at the far end of his life, seemed a trespass.

The brick front walk, which had had little ant cities of mounds like coffee grains between the bricks, had become glaring concrete. The distance across the porch to the front door, which he remembered as large and full of peril—for the porch had thick brick walls that might conceal a crouching beast—had dwindled to two strides. The door, with its letterslot lid saying
MAIL
and its bevelled-glass window, had been replaced by an opaque panelled door, though the leaded sidelights and tinted fanlight holding the house number,
303
, remained above. Jessup, who greeted them inside the door, had grown shorter than Lee, but his hair was still close-cropped and blond, and his figure had a military trimness. Mrs. Jessup, whom Lee had never met, was like a bride on a wedding cake, perfect of her kind, though grown plump and blue-haired. She had dimples, and bifocals, and cheeks as round and bright as if rouged. The Jessups greeted Lee cordially, but saved their real ardor of welcome for his mother, whose shrunken figure seemed in the corner of his vision to be engulfed by their courteous bodies. His eyes were darting about, desperate to light on something familiar and cherished.

“What a
nice
idea this is,” said the former Marine. “I must say, you folks have waited to the very last minute. As soon as we get a buyer, we’re out of here, as the young people say.”

“Well, my father used to tell me, ‘Don’t be so impatient, Elsie. Good things keep.’ ”

Her charm—Lee tended to forget that about his mother. When pulled out of the sticks and put to the test of social encounter, she rose to the challenge. “I love your lemon-yellow wallpaper,” she told the elderly couple. “This was always such a dark hall, with the two big gloomy radiators. I never knew why there had to be
two;
on winter days it was the warmest spot in the house. Lee used to lie on the floor, drawing, where we all had to step over him.”

The flattened texture and faded plum color of the carpet that had lain at the edge of his drawing pad returned to his mind’s eye out of the past, along with the diagonal beams of dust-laden light that came in the sun-parlor windows and broke on the wide oak arms of his grandfather’s favorite chair. The sun parlor was gone, swallowed up by Jessup’s office; he had used the GI Bill to become an attorney. Lee was tempted to open the shut office door on the chance that his grandfather was still sitting there, in the slices of sunlight, his head tilted back in that ostentatiously resigned way he had, and his hands, frail and brown as onionskin, folded across the buttons of his gray sweater as he waited for the mailman or the afternoon paperboy to bring him word of the world. His grandfather had exuded an air of graceful defeat that the boy had found endearing.

“Everything is so
right
,” his mother was saying. “When we were here, everything was slightly
wrong
.”

Lee knew, as the Jessups did not, that his mother distrusted rightness, in this bourgeois sense—felt herself rather above it,
in fact. As her breathy voice flirted behind him, in and out of the Jessups’ catering voices, he felt freed to walk ahead, looking for traces of the house he remembered. There were almost none. Renovations had come in and washed everything away, even the old touches of elegance like the elaborate spindle-work headers above the wide archways into the living room, and the fluted wooden pillars that framed the archways. The ceilings, plastered in tidily overlapping semicircles, seemed lower. Instead of their old Oriental rug with its mazy border and the cane-back settee and its companion chairs—their horsehair cushions holding that musty, oystery scent country parlors have—there was fat modern furniture in pastel shades surrounding a glass table supported on wrought-iron scrolls. A semi-tropical Floridian luxuriance had crept into Pennsylvania interiors since the Forties. Where their Christmas tree had annually stood, between the two front windows from which Lee would watch, beyond the porch wall, the coal sliding thunderously down the chute that telescoped out from the truck, now stood a blond-stained wood cabinet holding souvenirs of the Jessups’ foreign travels—beaten copper, carved ivory, Mexican pottery, New Mexican turquoise.

The “piano room” held not the old upright Chickering but a large-screen television set and a cabinet of hi-fi components. Down the dark hall that had once seemed perilously shadowy and long, beside the flight of stairs his grandfather had quaintly called “the wooden hill,” the dining room quickly appeared, minus the Tiffany lampshade that had hung from the center of the ceiling, and the mahogany-veneered sideboard with the cloudy mirror, and the stained-pine corner cabinet that had held their good china, including the Philadelphia blueware whose broken plates had been one of the
costs of the move from Alton. In this room, on a strip of wooden floor between the figured rug and the doors that led out to the side porch, Lee to entertain himself would bowl, using rubber Disney dolls—Mickey Mouse and Pluto, Donald Duck and Ferdinand—for tenpins. Now wall-to-wall carpet covered the space. Staring down, trying to picture the concealed floorboards, he was overtaken for a moment by the taste of that distant time, a musty sensation, bland as a stale malt ball, of being sheltered in a low cave while great things were going on above him, in the clangorous heights where the Second World War merged with Walt Disney’s busy kingdom. Beneath the notice of all the grown-up furor he would set up his battered rubber creatures and bowl them down again with a lopsided softball, whose stitches, he seemed to remember, were not real but a bas-relief imitation.

The house was quickly traversed; next came the kitchen, which he had not expected to find unchanged. Even the plumbing had been moved about, so that in place of the slate sink with its long-nosed copper faucets now bulked an electric stove with a black-faced microwave, and where the old gas stove had poured forth X-patterns of blue flame a modern stainless-steel sink had appeared, the dishwasher and trash compactor installed to one side. Rose-colored cabinets matched a giant double-doored refrigerator; the little walnut icebox, the blackened tin toaster that had sat on a gas burner like a tiny house full of chinks, the food-grinder that had clamped to the edge of the kitchen table were so thoroughly, irrevocably carted away by the years that Lee could scarcely imagine the little boy who used to reach up on tiptoe to the red-and-white recipe box on top of the icebox. The family kept its meagre cash in the tin recipe box, and he was entitled, at schoolday lunchtimes, to buy a Tastykake to eat on the walk back to elementary school.

His mother’s voice was carrying on behind him. “So Mr. Oberholz came to us and said, ‘It was an eight-thousand-dollar house when you bought it in 1922, and it’s still an eight-thousand-dollar house in 1945.’ My dad, he was such a trusting man, he believed him, just like he believed all those shysters who unloaded their stock off on him before the Crash, but me, I had a bit of the devil in me, I guess, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t gone up in value
at all
in twenty years. Now I read in the paper that you’re asking over two hundred thousand. I still have friends in town who send me such clippings in the mail. If you can call them friends.”