“Outside it was rimy,” Mother said, “but I liked saying at parties ‘I’m just back from Florida,’ and their not knowing the tan was local.”
Whatever became of Arthur’s homemade Florida?
“There is so much about your own life you never know,” Mother said, and she sighed, and she cleared her throat and shuffed the pillows, squirming into sleep-position. Then when she was comfortable and quiet in this way, I knew how to lie against her, close enough to be touched.
“Scratch?” I asked, holding out my arm, and I felt her fingers graze me, and then she fell asleep.
A car exploding woke her. “What is going on?” She spoke fearfully, “It’s so noisy. What are you watching? Why are you watching that noise?” She said, “I’m hungry, Alice, aren’t you?” but the food I found made her sick. Mother said, “Don’t blame me, please.” She said, “I can’t help it. I have ulcers. I shouldn’t drink.”
The next day we read our books in separate rooms. This was nice. The sad part was walking out of the dark and into the coarse kitchen light. Mother was at the table in her nightgown, petting herself — her hands, her arms. She said, “There’s nothing to eat. What do you want to do?”
I wanted to wake up very early in the morning and get a head start. I wanted it to be next week and me in the city at home where I lived: West Seventy-Sixth Street! New York, New York.
IV
ARTHUR
PLOT ABANDONED IN FAVOR of insight … I was reading old notes on the Lyrical Ballads when Aunt Frances called to say Arthur had died while driving a burned woman to the hospital. The greenhouse man, name of Niles, on Lawn: It was his wife. Aunt Frances said, “The fire happened this morning, a kitchen fire.” The wife’s hands were burned. All Aunt Frances knew was already hours ago: Arthur had died on the side of the road in the truck, had died doing what he had done for most of his life: driving a woman, hurt, to help. The burned wife said Arthur had pulled onto the shoulder when he felt it coming. He looked alarmed, yet it seemed he drove onto the shoulder carefully and put the car in park before he settled back and died.
Aunt Frances said, “Can’t you imagine him? It happened on Highway 83 toward Nashotah.”
I knew the highway. I could see the high, graveled shoulder of the road that ran along with the railroad tracks. I saw a strip of grass, some fringe of dusted green, railroad tracks again, and in the distance, cornfields, turned ground dried but planted. I saw myself explaining to the students what Wordsworth meant by “spots of time.”
The new man, Duane, was waiting at the airport. He told me about the accident, and how the burned woman had watched Arthur die. Duane said, “It happened quick.”
Arthur — thinking of others.
Duane drove me on in silence past closer cornfields and lumbering barns and modest houses; we bypassed the town where I had lived with my mother, passed the road to Nonna’s house on the way to Uncle Billy’s with its garden of jutted stone menacing the path to the lake.
“Arthur would have wanted you here,” Aunt Frances said at the door. “I’m glad you could come.”
“Mother wasn’t up to the trip.”
“But your being here he would have wanted,” Aunt Frances said. “He would be glad.”
“I don’t want to see him.” This was later. We were having early supper by then, Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, and I, and the cold-spring, brusque light made me squint; I spoke to my plate. I didn’t like open-casket, and I didn’t want to see Arthur’s face rouged and his hair painted black.
“There will be a receiving line,” Aunt Frances said, “but we’ll be the only ones in it. You can stand at the head, you won’t see.”
“There was no family,” Uncle Billy said. “We were the only ones. He left instructions.”
Thinking of others, thinking of others — Arthur always.
That night I wanted to dream but I didn’t; no promises or portents, no visions of the years to come, just pure, dark, dreamless sleep, then in the morning, Uncle Billy, at the breakfast table, talking family plots. His was on the north slope of the cemetery, where his father had gone, and he would go, too, and Aunt Frances was debating. But what about Arthur? Arthur was only one and obliged to sleep in a crowded row where nobody knew him.
“Why not with the family?” I asked, and then to Uncle Billy, “You’re such an ass.”
“Alice!” Aunt Frances said. “You’re not the only one upset. Arthur was a part of our family. Your Uncle Billy and I have made all of the arrangements. And none of this ugly business is inexpensive.”
Aunt Frances and her S&H stamps. Yes, I remembered her slimy economies, her slapping after dust.
“We’ve more or less taken care of Arthur these last few years, and we were glad to and lucky we were in a position to do it.” North facing at the table, in less light, Aunt Frances sat to her breakfast, saying, “But what would you know, Alice; you don’t live here.”
For the funeral Aunt Frances wore a nubbly suit and on the jacket some jewel the size of a rodent. A rabid, clawed thing was crawling up her shoulder and the heavy folds of her neck to the harsh hair, dyed rust and shapelessly arranged — some nest!
When did my aunt grow homely?
When did she start to drive?
I followed her driving the second car, so that I wouldn’t have to stay long at the funeral home but could go back to Uncle Billy’s and read. That is if I could find my way back to Uncle Billy’s. Aunt Frances was going too fast, was speeding through four-way stops and leaving me behind with more cars insinuating themselves, and I didn’t know where we were going exactly, making a left and then a right in a neighboring town I had never known well and to a business I had never noticed. LEONARD CRADLE’S FUNERAL HOME was a sign I could not recall although it stood out like a marquee as we drove to it. She forced me to drive over the railroad tracks when the crossing gate was clanging down. She forced me to gun through yellow lights and to pass other cars when the double line said not to. Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home, Leonard Cradles Funeral Home, Leonard Cradle’s Funeral Home was blinking closer.
I shouted at her for real in the parking lot until Aunt Frances slapped me, and I slapped at her rodent.
“Is this how you show your respect?”
“Fuck off.”
“Is it, Alice?”
“Is it?” from Uncle Billy, leaning on a cane, I noticed, from Nonna’s collection — since when had he taken those? “This may be how people act where you live. …”
I followed them inside and saw faintly familiar town faces. Two women, one from the Piggly Wiggly where Arthur liked to shop and the other from Bold Motors, named Barbara.
Barbara said to me, “I know where you live,” and she smiled a crooked, idiotic smile. “I can’t imagine it,” she said. “Will you ever come home again?”
“Home?” I asked back, and I hoped Aunt Frances heard me.
Who came through the line then? Duane and the unkempt men from Pat’s Hardware, Mr. Philco, the bakery ladies, Rita from the dentist’s, Victor’s Drugstore, and others: They all said, how sorry, how sudden, how sad.
It must be sad for you to come home this way. When was the last time you saw him?
The last time?
I tried to remember while driving back to Uncle Billy’s, but the back roads rolled up and down — a field, a copse, a field, a muddy trough with guernseys ankle-deep in muck, filthy — and nothing came back to me.