“He does not have good health,” the man wheeling Mr. Bedell past them said. “He thanks you, but he is unable to continue on to your house.” Standing behind the wheelchair, the man rolled his eyes upward. What was this? Dismay at not being able to stop for coffee, or a more general roll of the eyes about everything: old age, bad health, death?
“You and Evie were friends for many years,” Sonja said a little louder, crouching to look into the old man’s face. She nodded in agreement with herself, because the old man only stared. “I’m Marshall’s wife. Evie’s stepson’s wife,” Sonja said, gesturing toward Marshall.
“He does not hear well,” the man behind the wheelchair said loud enough to startle Sonja. “He told me when he still had his voice that he knew all about you,” the man said, in a more conversational tone of voice.
All about her. Wouldn’t that have been distressing. Yet of course he did not; he had probably only heard some innocuous story from Evie. “You know about me from talking to Evie,” Sonja said. It was half a statement of fact — of course that would be how he knew — and half an expression of her puzzlement: How was it she had never heard of Ethan Bedell? “You must have read about the funeral in the newspaper,” she said.
At this, the old man vigorously shook his head no.
“He was contacted at his friend’s request by a nurse at the rest home, I believe,” the man said. He turned to Marshall. “Your stepmother, sir, was quite a favorite of the nurses. She did have a lovely way, and I offer my heartfelt sympathy.”
Marshall nodded, only half following. He had begun speaking quietly to the priest, giving him detailed instructions about how to navigate a particular route. Then Mrs. FitzRoy spoke to the priest. She thanked him for his sensitivity and said she assumed he knew that the 121st Psalm was one of Evie’s favorites, that she recited it so beautifully her friends often asked to hear it during their own times of trouble. Would it be at all fitting to recite that psalm at Marshall and Sonja’s house, or was such a thing not done? The 121st Psalm came back to Marshall, fragmentized: mine eyes; my help; neither slumber nor sleep. He thought he knew the other words, the other verses, but at the moment it ran together as if it were something he had to race through to the end. Why had this suddenly set off such a strange reaction?
Because outside the hospital … when he went to see McCallum … Jesus Christ: How could he have forgotten? That night, just before the snowstorm hit with real force, it had begun to come back to him, the memory of being a child, seated near his mother on a dark night, his father outside, his mother speaking earnestly to him and to Gordon, who had taken a paperdoll away from him. At first he had been quite angry at Gordon, but then, small as he was, he had understood that Gordon had his best interests at heart as he tried to make him pay attention. Gordon was also trying to placate their mother, whose eyes had moved more than once to the box of spilled paperdolls Marshall stared at with such fascination … the paperdolls on the floor, flat on the floor, dead, his mother had said the word “dead,” she had spoken of herself as dead, as a paperdoll put in a box, they must not cry, they must listen … and outside had been the sound of his father crying, or perhaps talking; there had been that indistinguishable sound and also the cat scratch of branches scraping the windowpane. Like an actor rehearsing, she had walked back and forth in her white nightgown, reading, at once passionate and slightly perturbed, as if she could not quite get it right, starting over, trying for the right intonation, the only intonation acceptable to her ear, his mother telling them she was dying, reading the 121st Psalm. Yes … of course Evie would love the 121st Psalm, because what did she not love that his mother loved? Evie and his mother had often read the Bible to them at night — sometimes stories from the Bible in an illustrated children’s book, but in time directly from the Bible. That night his mother had read the 121st Psalm, and Evie had stood in the doorway, visibly upset, not going toward either Gordon or Marshall to comfort them as she usually did, because they were crying too — first Gordon, then Marshall, imitating him, frightened at the way their mother appeared, astonished that he had had his paperdoll snatched away. From that night on, it would be what seemed an eternity until Evie comforted them again, and their mother … surely she could not instantly have disappeared, yet he couldn’t remember what had come next, couldn’t remember further interactions with her, or even how or when he had been put to bed that night.
It was not considered proper that young children be at funerals, so they had not gone to their mother’s funeral. He could vaguely remember Evie crying when the day finally came, combing her hair and looking at herself in the tall hall mirror with the gilded putti trailing flowery sashes in each corner, crying as she yanked a comb through her hair, punishing her hair, it had seemed, Marshall’s father ignoring her, ignoring his sons, who were taken care of that day, Evie had told him years later, by a neighbor woman who had always frightened them because of her long black hair. Both boys had been convinced they’d been left in the care of a witch.
After two years — a decent interval of time — their father had married Evie, providing a known quantity as a mother for his sons, having with her a much different marriage than he had had with his first wife. Not a business arrangement, exactly, but two people who seemed never to speak harshly, though neither did they seem to laugh — generic grown-ups, if such creatures could be said to exist. He had always been sure that his father thought he was doing the right thing, the logical thing, in marrying Evie and in trying to attain again a sense of stability for his sons, and therefore for himself. If they hadn’t loved each other, though, that would have been a tragedy. If his mother, in her white nightgown, had become a ghost whose presence permeated the house.… Because it now seemed more than possible that this was the case, he tried to put such thoughts out of his mind. He could remember berry picking with his father and Evie the summer after his mother’s death; taking turns climbing the ladder to string lights on the Christmas tree; hiking to a waterfall, laughing … she had laughed then … or had that been his own laughter, his and Gordon’s, running ahead, Gordon sliding in the mud? Did he remember it, or had he only been told about it so many times it seemed real?