ANY HOUSE
“WHAT DID YOU EXPECT would happen if you didn’t come home at all?”
“You don’t know?”
“You don’t, really?”
“Am I to believe such a story?”
“You know who you remind me of, don’t you?”
ARLETTE’S STORIES
“YOUR NONNA SAID ONE time she accidentally clobbered your momma with a oar when they was on the lake. She knocked Miss Alice out. She said she thought your momma was dead. And I’m not saying this is true now — okay? but your nonna said the accident might explain the way your momma is.”
THE BIG HOUSE
AN OLD STORY WAS that my mother and my uncle Billy were fighting on the second-floor landing when he pushed her down the stairs in an argument. Nonna was watching from the foot of the stairs as her children, who were then no longer children, fought for possession of The Clockmaker, an oil the size of a double bed, a clockmaker at his work in windowlight, all fumy, red-based colors. Think of brandy or whiskey, think of whatever was being drunk by Uncle Billy and my mother and that was the painting’s preponderate color — the color of what made them drunkenly fight this way in front of Nonna. But Nonna liked to watch them fight was what my mother said, and I believed her.
I believed Mother when she said the argument with Uncle Billy was about a lot more than money. Of course it was! Nonna’s heart was ridged, rough, dry. The answer was simple: She only had room for Uncle Billy.
I believed Mother when she told me about her father’s mistress, met on a train, although how would Mother know where he had met her? Still I believed Mother when she said the mistress had walked by Daddy on the train. The mistress was an old-fashioned milk-drinker wearing spiked heels, and Daddy followed her.
Daddy’s mistress had a heart that wasn’t bitter.
“Do you believe everything you are told, Alice?” Uncle Billy had asked me in the desert. “Do you?”
Yes, yes, yes, I did. I believed that before Nonna’s tongue thickened, she took her husband out of any story she thought to tell. She talked about her father, instead, and favorite dogs and Uncle Billy’s travels.
I believed that when she had talked about my mother, and she had not often talked about my mother, Nonna frenzied helpless gestures. Talk, talk that was what Nonna did before her stroke, and after her stroke, too. I believe we talked, Nonna and I, and that she told me about my father. There was a flood — remember—and Nonna made waves with her hands.
My father gone away, yes, yes, yes, I was nodding; yes and the storms across the lake in air: stalk, leaf, stillness.
“What else, Nonna, what else do you remember? What? Are you awake enough to talk? Do you think I am like my mother?”
“Quiet,” Miss O’Boyle was saying, “your grandmother is asleep.”
When how could anyone sleep through snows that piled to the third-floor windows, rains that fizzed through screens and puddled sills?
The house was called the Big House, the Big House on the hill. It came with a horse chestnut tree and elms and oaks and a spruce tree I didn’t like, and in the middle of the circular drive something exotic, seeming shortened and level-headed when in blossom.
Norma went on living to be ninety-something; my father was dead at thirty-seven.
THE BIG HOUSE
LATER, WHEN I WAS struggling with calculus, Arthur ignored how we crossed county lines. He was talking along the long stretches we drove after school while I, driving, could only listen. I was driving Nonna’s unused car, and Arthur was sitting next to me, instructing. He kept his window open and put out his arm when the sun was on his side. He told me that the medicines he now took sometimes made him sleepy. Arthur talked and talked and talked a lot about himself in the way he had when his heart broke and he outfaced surgery and came home well.
“This thing with my heart,” he said, “made me ask lots of questions I never asked before.”
I thought he was changed, too. He was careful in the way he moved. For lunch he ate dryly cooked fish he only flicked at with his fork — eschewing even relish, saying, No. No and a sigh were his gestures, but I was glad — glad! — we were driving together again, and I was at the wheel.
“Want me to park?”
“No,” he said, “drive on.”
And I did. I drove on through the spattered light of fall, the warm, monied promise of it, the lights saying, Yes, it is possible: Purpose might find me and success might follow. My father could have been a poet; it is not absurd.
“It is possible your mother might come home,” Uncle Billy had told me a long time ago, and I had felt afraid of what might happen if she did, and then she didn’t come home, yet I was still afraid, often lonely — surely thirsty.
No one was ever as happy or as sad as she was, my mother, who might have come home to claim me, but she didn’t.
MR. EARLY
MOTHER HAD USED OVERCOOKED bacon for a bookmark or a hair pin, stick of gum, sucker-stick, twig — whatever was at hand. Her books were paperbacks, she said, and it didn’t matter how the water-swelled pages fanned, dried, stuck together. “Paperbacks,” she always said, “a great invention.” I read the way my mother did. I was impatient. I cut the uncut pages in Uncle Billy’s fancy books (sets of Tarkington and Conrad) with my finger for a knife until, found out, Uncle Billy took away my ragged Bleak House.
At Uncle Billy’s I learned to read behind the curtains and the guest room’s dresser skirt, but I could wander anywhere at Nonna’s and read.
Books, the orphan’s consolation.
“‘That head I see now … has it other furniture … within?’” I wanted my own Mr. Rochester and found him in the shape of Mr. Early. High school English, last two years:
By seventeen I had guessed
That the “really great loneliness”
Of James’s governess
Might account for the ghost
On the other side of the lake.
If the head was a room, I wanted mine cluttered, stuffed, Victorian style. I wanted Mr. Early’s praise, but the rebuking length of Mr. Early’s sentences, and the speed with which he delivered them, often left me dumb and angry, and the only assuagement was he spit. Pinball body, angry nose and bald spot, Mr. Early was a class joke except for what he said when he spoke; then the dwarfing capaciousness of his complex speech and the seriousness of his sentiments made us quiet.
Once, bending to where I sat shaking my hand out of cramp, he rolled my pen into the pencil groove, stroked my arm, and spoke: “Dear Alice, you don’t have to tell the whole story.”
Yet I wanted him to know how well I knew the story, better than anyone else because I was not like anyone else but special, inward, informed. I wanted to say: I have seen such things.
Days when, from nowhere, unappeasable, punishing sadness kept me at the Big House, and my name in the roll went unanswered, Mr. Early sometimes called to see how I was. We could have used you, today, we needed you, are you feeling better?
Yes! from Mr. Early. Good point. Well put. Exactly. I got this subject right. Mr. Early was excited, and I was responsible for his delight, and I kept him at his desk asking, What do you think about and What do you think about … and Mr. Early said, You tell me.