“Mail call!” Patty the nurse always says, when she pokes her head in the door and has a catalog for me, or a postcard from Sonja of some pretty scene she knows I’ll enjoy seeing. Or in the days when Ethan was still able to write. I said to her that it was as if one snow-flake made her herald a snowstorm! I shouldn’t have, because she, herself, seems cheered when she has mail to deliver. So different from years ago, when I didn’t know what to hope for: more lies, about Alice’s progress, letters announcing his or their imminent arrival, or an empty mailbox, no boot tracks leading to it, no false promises inside, flap closed, like a trap empty of animals. They can be quite beautiful, if you come upon them in the snow: a trap transformed into some harmless igloo, pleasantly insulated by whiteness. You forget what it might contain — what terrible pain. What bad luck. The other day a young woman, a new person, a social worker, came to see what she could do to “facilitate my adjustment,” as she put it. Is one supposed to adjust to loneliness, to old age? I found the question quite stupefying. Welclass="underline" if it had been years ago, she could have helped by being Amelia, and she could have stood her ground, and stayed in spite of my protests; if the social worker had been Ethan she might have construed my puzzled silence as wavering — a sign she might insinuate herself with me. If she had been Madame Sosos, a woman who was as oddly charismatic as she was lunatic, she might have flattered me and then played poker for my soul with the doctors. I think about that, sometimes. Ethan not knowing what to do, sending his fortune-teller into Alice’s hospital with instructions to look at her palm and predict a long and happy life. She must have been so happy to see any outsider that she wanted to believe what she heard: a full recovery; good health; a quick return to her loved ones. Apparently, the doctor in charge was willing to buy Ethan’s lie that Alice had consulted Madame Sosos for years. Alice was responding so poorly, and indeed she did manage to cheer her: she knew her devoted husband’s name; where she lived; where she’d grown up. Madame Sosos’s mistake was to name only two children, Gordon and Marshall, which devastated Alice because then she was certain that Martin did not even live in the spirit world. Before leaving, Madame Sosos was lured into a game of poker by some of the doctors — who could imagine how or why? — and won every game she played. They never let her in again. The second time she went there she had a special message from Martin, but she couldn’t get into the hospital. Miles had made an enormous fuss. The doctors who’d been beaten at poker pronounced her a charlatan. Alice would never have heard from her again if Madame Sosos hadn’t been clever enough to have flowers delivered, with the gift card saying she’d been contacted by Martin, who was fine, and who sent invisible kisses on each pink petal of the roses. She said she touched them to her lips — not so crazy she believed it true, but liking the idea of holding soft, fragrant rose petals to her lips. After her shock treatments her lips were always parched. Long after she got out of the hospital, she kept jars of Vaseline around the house which she’d dip into to moisten her lips. All day, we would sip tea.
That was what we were doing, sitting and sipping tea, Marshall with his paperdolls, Gordon with his book of fairy tales, with the stories printed on the left side of the book and the right-hand page to draw on. He would draw pictures that were improvisations on what he’d read, drawing mountains when there were no mountains in the story, or drawing the world underwater, though he didn’t even have a snorkel mask. To my knowledge there were no such things for children in those days. He would read the fairy tales and leave the pages empty most of the time, but sometimes, to amuse his brother, he’d demonstrate his skill with drawing, and then we’d see some of the fairy-tale figures in imaginary landscapes, along with a fox, say, that simply hadn’t appeared in the story, or an enormous tarpon he’d decided to put on land, underneath the castle under which Rapunzel had let down her hair. He was always adding to the fairy tales, not just illustrating what he’d read, and Alice and I would be so fascinated: What was that crow, sitting on the bonnet of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” or the snake peeking out of the shoe in “Cinderella”? They were very original drawings, quite well done, but Miles didn’t like them; he always wanted Gordon to stick to the facts, and he took it personally, as if all those stories he’d read aloud so many times had been misunderstood by his son, or as if the boy must have been bored, if he felt the need to add to what was there. This reaction, if you can imagine, from the same person who so admired Magritte. Fine if a train was rushing out of a fireplace, or if an apple floated in front of a man’s face, but let his son draw a bird sitting on a wolf’s bonnet and he was absolutely at a loss to understand what such a thing could mean. I think it’s possible he saw Alice as unbalanced, and he greatly feared it might also be true of his children. At any rate, that day in the kitchen, where he’d come to sit with us as she was knitting and I was making a list of things we needed to buy to make raisin pudding, he saw the book open on the table and he picked it up and started flipping through, asking us questions about what Gordon had intended, as if we had any idea. Alice said that perhaps Gordon actually was illustrating the characters he read about, but they were in a different form; she thought it possible that he might be including creatures that existed in their reincarnated forms. Alice had come to believe in reincarnation. If only she could have lived to hear authorities on dying: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for example. Welclass="underline" Miles didn’t want to hear about religion, so he certainly didn’t put any stock in reincarnation. She was needling him by mentioning it. He’d come into the kitchen and we both could tell the call he’d just hung up from had upset him — business was his deity — and poor thing, she had nothing but vague reports from the doctors, she was no fool, she knew the news was bad, knew more than I did, certainly, because I never believed she was so terribly ill, I thought it was just taking time for her to mend, and what use was he, coming into the kitchen, where we sat peacefully, suddenly starting an argument about his son’s very nice illustrations in a book? Now I think I should not have been so unrealistic as to believe that any surgery simply cured the problem, but he was so insistent that this was so: he claimed to be stating the doctors’ certainty, too. She had been through so much — who could believe there was anything worse in store for her? We were having tea when he pulled up a chair, sat backward in it — which was always a sign he was going to start in on some serious topic — and he said to her, “Tell me that you do not have delusions of an afterlife.” Imagine: she was terminally ill, and he was intent upon disabusing her of the notion there would be an afterlife. I wonder what would have happened if the whole subject could have been turned aside. If we hadn’t taken everything he said so seriously. Sonja tells me the expression “Get a life” is popular now. I wonder: what if one of us had had the nerve to tell him to get a life, if we’d gone on with what we were doing. But she was having none of it that night. She looked so frail in her white nightgown. So haggard. And yet, she had already forgiven so much. She said: “I won’t come back as a person, Miles. I’ll come back as an animal.” She fingered Gordon’s drawing of the fox. “You can marry Evie,” she said, “and I can be your cat. Or your dog. I could be a bird, in a birdcage you could put over there, in the corner. It could be like the secrets we keep now, but then everyone would be thinking how sad that I’m dead, not just sorry you had such a crazy wife. Wouldn’t that be fun, with only you two knowing the cat was really me? I could bring a dead mouse to your doorstep. Or come back as a dog that’s rolled in carrion. I could enact what you really think of me. If I come back as a bird, be sure he clips my wings, Evie. Have it be the same way it’s been in this life.” We were astonished, of course. I understood, though I’m sure he did not, that she was imitating the manner of Madame Sosos. Ethan had insisted I meet her and I’d agreed, intending to put my foot down if she was too obviously crazy and would be sure to upset Alice. He’d driven to Maine with Madame Sosos. The boys were out of the house, which I thought was better. I expected someone in a turban, with a crystal ball. Instead, she had on the prettiest sterling-silver earrings from Georg Jensen. I’d seen them in a magazine, and I recognized them immediately. She had on those earrings, and a little rouge and lipstick, and all she wanted to talk about was how far away Maine was from New York. The car trip had really tired her, and of course she must have been slightly hostile: she was going to see Alice, at the hospital in Connecticut, so why did she first have to see the woman who took care of Alice’s children? We had tea together, while Ethan very kindly fixed a shelf that had fallen in the basement. She’d examined the palm of my hand, lit incense, and found meaning revealed in the rising twines of smoke. There Alice sat, some time later, doing a perfect imitation of the dreamy voice of Madame Sosos, whom Ethan had sent to see her, after all, not Miles, though I don’t blame her for being angry she was condescended to. I think I let out a little laugh — a sound, anyway — but Miles was too astonished to react for quite a while, so we were both shocked when he swept his hand across the tabletop, knocking everything to the floor, our tea, the saltcellar, the book, the ashtray. It made me sure, in that moment, I didn’t want to ever be married to anyone. I was thinking that I was so glad I wasn’t married, I was so glad I was not a person who might say such things, or another person who might react as he just had. I’d witnessed too many such scenes between married people. That was what I thought, sitting there with the smell of ashes in my nose, my ankles wet from toppled teacups. It had started to rain. Gordon stood in the kitchen doorway, having rushed from the living room to see what had happened. He looked confused, then stricken. The book was upside down in a puddle. He rushed to pick it up, but Miles got there first, opened the book, and shook it at Gordon, demanding that Gordon explain the made-up animals. Gordon was speechless. Miles was not a violent man. Even Miles recovered himself the instant he saw the expression on his son’s face. Miles blotted the book with his sweater. Apologized for his outburst. Held out the book to Gordon with one hand and held out the other hand hoping Gordon would put his hand in his, forgive him. But nothing was explicit, and Gordon simply turned and walked out of the room. Marshall had run upstairs. Gordon was very protective of his brother, and he was probably setting out to talk to Marshall, but Alice got up and called him, asked him to come back. She went up and got Marshall. He was too heavy for her to carry, but she did anyway. I put my hand on Gordon’s shoulder and guided him into the living room, hating Miles. Hating him, but at the same time sorry that Gordon had not taken his hand. I knew what that emptiness felt like: it was as if emptiness had weight, and texture. There had been so many times I’d looked down, thinking I felt Martin’s little hand in mine again, only to see nothing. The air. Yet my fingers tingled. My palm was warm. It was as if he’d clasped my hand and vaporized, leaving his bodily warmth. Of course, I never, ever, would have mentioned this to either of them. Her most recent hospitalization had been a terrible time for everyone. We were not up to such a scene as had just exploded. He had tears in his eyes. Things from the tabletop were strewn everywhere. Miles bowed his head and said he was going out. Out in the rain? It was a storm: thunder; lightning. I wanted to take his hand myself, not so much for his sake, but out of sympathy for all of us. Instead, I got the umbrella from the stand and handed it to him, and that was what he used to sweep away everything else in his path on his way to the door, pushing Marshall’s paperdolls off the table, breaking a vase, scattering paper. It was the baby she thought of constantly, he said. She lived in the past, cared only for the baby, who was she kidding by talking about the future, when she was fixated on the past?