The Afterlife (35 page)

Lee tried to intervene. “Mother, it’s only been since the nineteen-fifties that people expect to make money off of real estate. And now they’re losing it again.”

But Mrs. Jessup could defend herself. Putting herself on a first-name basis, she said, “Elsie, we really couldn’t have paid a penny more. Even so, we went into debt, and Hank was working nights as a watchman as well as going to law school. Those were hard times.” Her blush of indignation was pretty.

“It’s been a kind house to us,” Jessup said, in a conciliatory lawyer’s voice, putting the done deal behind them. “We raised three beautiful children in it.”

Back in the dining room, Lee at last found a survival of the house of his own childhood: the windows. They were still tall, gaunt four-pane windows, and the panes were still the imperfect glass whose waveriness and oval bubbles had fascinated him as a child. He would stand and move his head and watch the lines of their neighbors’ house warp and undulate, as in the underwater scenes of
Pinocchio
. The oval bubbles, like immortal microbes, were still there, in the glass, though combination storm windows dulled the outlook, and the neighbors’ house was a different, closer house, filling the vacant lot where Lee had played fungo and kick-the-can with Doug
Rhoda and Shorty Heister and the neighborhood girls, who lived in the sexy row houses across the street and whose parents would call them home from their rickety high porches in the summer twilights, as the fireflies came out.

The tour of the downstairs completed, Mrs. Jessup politely asked, in the narrow hallway, “Would you like to see the upstairs? We moved some walls about, to accommodate the children. I doubt you would recognize much.”

“I’d love to see it,” Lee said, when his mother was silent. Upstairs had been the enchanted realm of sleep, of days home sick in bed, of his parents in their underwear, of his grandparents muttering behind their closed door. Ultimate realities had resided upstairs.

The party was dividing along gender lines. Mrs. Jessup conducted her own conversation with Lee’s mother. “Elsie, there was something I’ve always wanted to ask you about,” she said, drawing close enough to touch the older woman on the shoulder, next to the prickly fox-fur. “When we moved in, there were two little rooms out back, above the kitchen, looking into the back yard.”

“Yes. The one on the right was Lee’s room, looking toward the vacant lot.”

“And the other, the one with only the one window, was painted black.”

“Oh no! Was it really?”

“Yes, and we couldn’t figure out what it had been used for. Had it been a darkroom, maybe, for your husband’s photography?”

“Norman never took a picture in his life. I was the family photographer, with this old Kodak that had lost its viewfinder. You paced off the yards and hoped for the best.”

Mrs. Jessup persisted. “It must have been for storage, then.”

“Yes, we kept a few things in it. Mother’s ironing board, her Singer sewing machine, an old sleigh-bed headboard and footboard that had been
her
mother’s … But I don’t remember that room as
black
.”

“Well, it was. We were quite struck and puzzled, I remember, at the time.”

Lee sensed an impasse. His stomach was starting to chafe. He asked, “Mother, do you want to come upstairs?”

“No,” she said. “No I don’t.”

“Really? Why would that be?” He darted a look at her; her face, fallen into creases with her loss of weight, seemed pale, stricken by some internal development. He felt in his own insides the effort with which she kept up the charm. She gasped before she spoke.

“You all go,” she said, “and I’ll spare myself the stairs and just sit and admire how bright and cheerful the Jessups have made our dreary old living room.”

“Then I’ll stay right with you,” Mrs. Jessup said, with the firmness of a warder. “We’ll have a good chat. Shall I make us a cup of tea?”

For much of his life, Lee had seen other people, attracted by his mother, draw close; but in the end, only he could follow her twists and turns. Sometimes he wondered if his personality hadn’t been so exactly conformed to his mother’s that it made a poor fit with anyone else’s.

“Tea? To tell the truth, I never developed the taste for tea. I was a coffee drinker, up to a dozen cups a day, and now the doctors say I shouldn’t drink even decaf. Coffee and ice cream and apple pie were my sins, and now I’m paying for them. Norman always used to say to me, ‘You’re the last person in the world, Elsie, who thinks there’s such a thing as a free lunch.’ ”

While Mrs. Jessup coped with this pronouncement, her
husband took Lee upstairs. In passing, Jessup touched the newel post, with its round knob. “Bet you recognize this.”

“Yes.” But in fact the knob, with its equator of beaded grooves, had seemed an unpleasant presence to little Lee—an eyeless head, a possible Martian like those in that radio play that had frightened everybody in New Jersey.

“I asked that it be left,” Jessup said, with what seemed shy pride, “though Dorothy thought it didn’t go with the new décor.”

At the head of the main stairs there had been a windowless landing where they would gather, sitting on the steps, during air-raid drills, while Lee’s father strode around the darkened neighborhood in his air-raid warden’s armband and helmet. One set of three steps had led to a hall that went past Grampy and Grammy’s bedroom to the guest bedroom, which overlooked the street. Another short set had led the other way, to his parents’ bedroom and his own, and a third had gone up to the communal bathroom. All this awkward architecture had been smoothed into a parade of bright bedrooms to shelter, in the Jessups’ prime, the couple and three growing children. Lee’s grandparents’ room, which even through a closed door had smelled powerfully to his childish nostrils of old shoes and old bodies and mothballed blankets and bottles of liniment, had become the Jessups’ daughter’s room. A kind of shrine, it still held her school pennants, a poster of a bare-armed Mick Jagger, her frilly bed coverlet, and framed photographs of herself as a child, as an adolescent with braces, as a graduating senior, as a bride in white, and as a mother in slacks posing with two small children in what Jessup told Lee was a back yard in Colorado, where she lived with her husband, an Air Force pilot. “She inherited your military gene,” Lee observed.

“Born ten years later, she’d have been a pilot herself,” her father boasted.

The guest bedroom, where his mother would go for her naps when she needed to get away from them all, and where Lee, when sick, would recline in a litter of picture books and cough-drop boxes, had been expanded outward, into a massive master bedroom, swallowing the hall window, whose sill had always held a potted geranium. At the back of the house, other walls had vanished as his little room with its stained and varnished wainscoting had been merged with the mysterious one next to it, and from his parents’ bedroom had been carved a spacious bathroom that the Jessup sons could share. The boys’ bedrooms still held traces of extensive electronic equipment. In this unfamiliar space Lee found himself remembering how the whole sleepy house would resound with the noise when his grandfather, first thing in the morning, shook down the ashes in the furnace, and shovelled in fresh coal.

“Well,” he said to his host, by way of leavetaking, and in response to a certain air of self-congratulation, “I’d say you spent your forty-seven years here very well.”

“It was a happy house for us.”

“Good. For me, too.” No longer child and young veteran, they had become two aged men who had loved the same object. One had won and one had lost, but now the winner was surrendering the prize also. Time takes all. Lee looked around once more and couldn’t find himself, even in the shape of the windows. A silent hurricane had swept through this house, leaving nothing undamaged. His parents’ bedroom had opened onto a side porch just like the one below, with jigsawed balusters holding up the wooden, green-painted rail. The present railing was ornamental ironwork, as if they were in New Orleans.

•  •  •

Downstairs, a glance told Lee that his mother was in trouble. She had slumped to one side on the sofa, and was resting a bony, veiny hand upon her chest, as if to quiet something within. Yet her face still bore a listening smile, as Mrs. Jessup finished saying, presumably of a son, “Now he’s in corporate finance in Wilmington, with this wonderful Bank of Delaware.”

“Mother,” Lee announced, by way of rescue, “you missed a grand tour up there. They knocked out the wall between the guest bedroom and the hall and made a master suite! Grammy and Grampy’s old room is full of pennants and teddy bears. Their daughter married a pilot in Colorado.”

“Dorothy was saying,” she responded, “that she agreed with me—this house … is hard on its women.” She spoke in little hurried skips, struggling for breath. When she stood, she staggered one sideways step, and leaned heavily on Lee in heading to the front door. She had never taken off her plaid overcoat.

“Can’t we get you anything?” Mrs. Jessup asked, her eyes and cheeks yet brighter with alarm. “Even a glass of water?”

“You’ve done … everything,” was the answer. “I get … these spells, where my chest … doesn’t seem to have any
depth
.” She laughed in self-deprecation. “It was lovely of you to let us … see what all you’ve done. You’ve done … wonders.”

The porch, as Lee escorted his mother across it, seemed as wide as he remembered it from childhood. The concrete walk glared under their shoes as they shuffled to the curb. She allowed herself to be folded into the passenger’s seat, and lifted a withered hand and waved it in response to the Jessups’ cheery, worried farewells. As Lee drove the car down the street, in the direction in which he would walk to elementary
school eating his Tastykake, past Weisbach’s Drug Store, she struggled to breathe, in intense, sharp sips; her body shook as if some invisible predator had it by the nape of the neck.

Lee asked, “Shall we go home or straight to the Alton Hospital?”

“Home.” The syllable seemed all she could manage.

As he made the turn to circle the block, her hand in the side of his vision fed a pill into her mouth.

“That house,” she explained. “I needed … to get out.”

“Just like always.” Her retreating into ill health irritated him. His old grudge remained. “Well,” he announced, putting on the blinker to signal the next right turn, which would head them out of the city, “you won’t have to see that house ever again.”

“That room … was never black.”

“What?”

“That’s what upset me. That room was never black. Why would anybody in their right mind … paint a room black?”

“That’s what they said they were wondering.”

“They imagined it. The walls had old cream-colored paper … with blue florets … and the wainscoting was pine, stained walnut. Mother used to do her sewing in that room, before her eyesight went.”

“They couldn’t have just imagined it, they must have had some basis, Mother. She was very definite.”

“Yes, about everything. Maybe it was a joke. That’s how those Alton people are, Lee. That’s the way they were when I was a girl. Sly. Always poking fun. It made me feel bad. It made me feel crazy. That they would think … we would have had a black room.”

“How’s your chest?”

“A little better. Don’t you remember how the room was?”

“I don’t remember ever looking in, Mother. That room frightened me. When I would go to sleep in my bed, I remember, I would turn to face that wall so that if something came through the wall I could grab it before it grabbed me.”

“Oh my. And here we all thought you were such a happy child.”

As Alton fell away behind them and the country roads began to sing beneath their tires, her spirits lifted. She helped him make their dinner, directing the cooking from her chair at the kitchen table, where she sat with all her pill bottles—a miniature city—at her elbow. He fried a big slice of ham, boiled up some frozen succotash, and baked two potatoes in the crusty old oven: the kind of meal she used to devour, with a heaping of ice cream to top it off. She ate half, trying to please him, and he finished up her plate, which made him feel unpleasantly full. During the night, he heard her moving about in her room, clearing her throat and gasping, on the other side of the wall. It was still dark, before dawn. He thought of going in to her, but fell back asleep instead.

In the morning, the smell of coffee rose up the stairs. It was like his grandfather stirring the furnace: life. His mother was downstairs ahead of him, in her quilted purple bathrobe, with a tent of white hair worn loose over her shoulders. Light from the back door shone through her thinning, floating hair. “Isn’t coffee verboten?” he asked.

“Not to you, yet. I had a cup myself. I don’t know why that woman offering me tea made me so mad.”

“You were determined something would,” he told her, “no matter how nice they tried to be.”

“They were nice,” she said tonelessly.

He had to leave right after breakfast, since it was three
hours back to New York City and he had promised to take his younger daughter to her riding lesson in Central Park, while his wife went to a matinee of
Jelly’s Last Jam
. His mother came outside with him and shuffled along as far as the sandstone walk allowed. She was dressed in wool-lined suede slippers, and the uncut lawn was lank and whitened by dew. Beyond the house, the sumac was turning red here and there, and the poplars showed a yellow tinge. Fall was on the way, with winter behind. What would she do, alone? They should have discussed it last night, after dinner, instead of watching television:
Golden Girls
, followed by
Empty Nest
. She had become an unreality addict.

“Wouldn’t you like it,” Lee asked, “if we could get somebody to stay in the house with you this winter?”

“The Jessups, maybe,” she said. “They could call this their retirement home. They could clean out all my cobwebs and put in wall-to-wall polyester.”

In the low morning sunshine, the eastward wall of the stone farmhouse glowed as if from within. Lee was conscious of the neglected lawn, the wild raspberry canes, the towering trees beyond as a tightening net of interwoven nature. The house seemed perilously small. So did his mother. From the concerned look on her face, he knew she was viewing him as her child, having one of his nervous stomach cramps. “It’s a real problem, Mother,” he weakly insisted. “It worries me. You shouldn’t be alone.”