Mama (airily): “There’s plenty of time for that. As long as I have someone to drive me around...”
“What did I tell you?” said Jeff triumphantly. “Your mother knows how to get what she wants, so she signed up for driving lessons and got herself a daily chauffeur.”
Actually, I was somewhat relieved that Mama was putting off the day she would drive alone, and my conversational questions regressed to: “Is Mrs. Herter doing her job?” and “Is Joe Gomez mowing the lawn?” both of which received the submissive if laconic replies of “Yes” for another month or so when Mama unaccountably answered, “I let them go, dear, the two of them.”
“Mama,” I screamed, “why?”
“Because I wanted to, Margaret,” she said.
When Mama changed her impersonal “dear” to the highly personal use of my given name, it meant she wanted me to shut my mouth because what I was using it for was none of my business. “Don’t you have anybody to clean the house and mow the lawn?” I screamed, and she said, with great dignity, “Yes, Margaret, I have.” Period.
“Maybe I’d better go on down there,” I told Jeff.
“What for?” he asked.
“Oh, to look over the cleaning woman and see who she’s got for a yard man.”
“For Pete’s sake,” he said, “let her live her own life.”
I mentioned casually to Mama, the next time I called, “I thought I might come down to see you,” and she said, “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “just for a little visit.”
“I might be gone,” she said.
“Gone? Where?” I screamed.
Then she came back with a couple of non sequiturs and three or four feminine obliquities that indicated, mostly, an antipathy for guests and questions — me in particular, and mine.
“If you go anywhere,” I said, “on a trip or something, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”
“Of course, dear,” she answered.
I didn’t believe her. “She doesn’t want me,” I told Jeff.
“Has she ever?”
“She said something about traveling.”
“She’s got a right,” and the following week when I phoned and Mama did not answer, Jeff said, “Well, okay, maybe she’s off on one of those trips she was talking about.”
“She promised to tell me about it first.”
“You didn’t believe her, did you?”
“No,” I said. I also didn’t believe she’d take off on a trip without Papa to hold her hand and make all the arrangements and call her “Little Bit.” Not Mama without Papa.
“Why not?” said Jeff. “She fired the housekeeper and gardener without your father. She took driving lessons and grabbed herself a chauffeur without him...”
I felt a chill step down my spine.
I called again late that night and in the morning, and then I packed and was on my way.
“Aren’t you kind of jumping the gun?” asked Jeff. “Look, if you’re worried, phone one of the neighbors...” (One of the neighbors, hah!)
Mama’s house, pseudo-Spanish, built during that fancy time when they put a fat little towerlike appendage on one corner that always reminded me of an obscene tumor, perches on a hillside between tall, vine-covered walls. The lot extends from one street to the other, with neighbors on each side and above, but Mama never knew a single one of them, and that was one thing that worried me. She could fall flat on her stilt heels and die among her souvenirs without a soul to know.
It was windy dusk when I arrived at the house. The town below looked like a bowl of diamonds; the houses on the hill were cheerfully lighted. I parked in the driveway on the street above, nosed close to the garage door, which I tried to open and found locked.
I could see no light from the back of the house as I walked down the cement steps to the yard. I thought of Longfellow’s lines: “The twilight is sad and cloudy,/The wind blows wild and free...”
I tried the back door, then banged on it, calling, “Mama. It’s me, Margaret.” I went around the house, peering in windows between the draperies, through outside dusk into inside gloom. Dark as a tomb in there, I thought, shuddering, wishing I had not thought in cliche. I ran then, stumbling on the uneven flagstone path, thinking of Mama in her ridiculous tall heels, and tore up the front steps. No light.
I banged the knocker, lifted the doormat, felt along the top of the ornate door — but Mama, of course, was not the type to hide extra keys under mats or above doors as she was not the type to offer an extra key to her very own daughter in case of emergency. I became suddenly furiously angry with Mama, with her immaturity, her secrecies and silly little vanities, as I stood helpless before her closed door while she might be dying inside — or dead.
Then I remembered a trick I had read about and rummaged in my bag for a plastic credit card, ran it down the crack of the door, heard a click, turned the knob, opened the door, and called out, “Mama.”
I felt along the wall, found the switch, and turned on the lights. The hall looked different. “Mama,” I called. I left the front door open behind me and walked hesitantly to the dark living room, flicked the switch, bringing several lamps alight. “Mama,” I called again loudly. “Are you in here?”
Nothing.
The living room looked different, too.
Of course, the whole house seemed to be different without Mama fluttering among her treasures, and tapping those silly heels on hardwood between Persian rugs. I stood there yelling, “Mama” like an idiot, my hand still on the wall switch, when I thought, well now, this is not finding Mama, and I walked determinedly to the sitting room, switching on lights; to the dining room, flashing on the chandelier; then to the kitchen, turning on the overhead lights — two bedrooms, two baths, the desk lamp in the study.
The house was ablaze and empty except for me, quiet except for the sound of the wind outside, and that damn line came back to haunt me: “The wind blows wild—” when the front door slammed, sending me at a dead run through all the alien rooms to wrench it open again.
It must have been the wind. It really must have been the wind. I looked for the bust, a bronze that had always stood in the hallway, to prop the door open — but the bust was not there, nor the pedestal on which it had always stood. That was what was different about the hall as I remembered it.
I tore out then, slammed the door behind me, raced down the stairs and along the flagstone path around the house, up the steps and into my car. Dark now; I could see the shafts of light I had left shining from Mama’s windows down below. The houses across the street above looked warmly bright. The trees whipped in the wind, and diamonds flickered in the town bowl.
I drove down the hill, found a motel, registered and phoned home. Of course there was no answer. I glanced at my watch: seven thirty. Jeff and the kids would be out somewhere to dinner — catch any of them turning a hand to the frying pan or kettle. So I sat down and cried. Then I went out, got into my car, and drove to the police station.
They looked at me, the officer behind the desk and the one leaning on it, as if I were a hysterical female (which I never am, although I was sobbing rather wildly and speaking in an uneven voice), and orated from the heights of their Male and Official Authority, explaining, as if to a child, that I had broken and entered (no matter that I was a daughter), that my mother was an adult (which I questioned), and if she chose to be absent it was strictly her business, certainly not theirs.
I sneered through my tears and raced out, burning rubber as I left to return to the motel. Those officers must have shaken their heads as they debated whether or not to tag me on a speeding charge.