“And they didn’t drink whiskey, I don’t think. It was something clear, gin or vodka. They would pretend it was water if you ran into them in the supermarket.”
The sisters were trying to come up with a version of the past they could both agree upon. There was a long pause. In it some exchange was going on between the two, impossible for us to know. After so many years they were adept at communicating without saying a word.
“Perhaps you would like some tea?” the older one said, getting up and stepping toward the kitchen.
“They tried to burn it down,” the younger one whispered.
Her sister sat back down, impressed with the perfect timing. “It’s true,” she nodded.
“Had we not been waiting up for our cousin to arrive from Duluth—”
“We heard them arguing back and forth about who would have the honor of doing it—”
“Then, quite suddenly, we smelled smoke and the next thing you knew there were flames. I got up and called the fire department.”
“Thank goodness only the garage was lost.”
They closed their eyes for a moment. The sisters were exhausted. They had given up their last story. Not to embellish it had taken a discretion they had abandoned in their old age. They felt young again.
“How can we thank you?” we asked. But we already had. We had listened carefully to them, and we had believed what they told us.
“I was sitting there on that red velveteen sofa we had and the phone was there and I got up and I called the fire department.”
The sisters were heroines again, and we had come a bit closer to understanding the long, troubled life of our house. Only the Osbournes suffered. Shortly after the fire, they were killed, as if not by accident, in a private plane crash, fleeing from the law.
“Let us know,” the sisters said weakly, waving from the porch, “if you ever write a book.”
I can see those sisters now reenacting their one great evening: putting on their bed jackets, looking out the window, closing their eyes, and saying to one another, “I could swear I smell smoke,” and then getting up and reaching for the telephone, the fire department number taped to the black receiver. I wonder whether they could still be alive today. I suppose that’s impossible, but if they are, it’s the Osbournes that have kept them breathing. Even then it was the Osbournes who kept them vigilant, who warded off senility.
My brother and I, too, could communicate with each other without saying a word. How else to account for the similar transformations the Osbournes’ story took as we drove home? In the silent zones of the brain, we had discussed and then agreed on yet another version of the truth. We thought we might make the Osbournes constructive in their afterlife. Ted could build furniture by hand and Evonne could be a glassblower. What pleasure we thought this would bring Mother. Maybe it was solely my mother’s reaction that determined the version of the Osbournes’ story we finally came up with, and not some real intimacy between my brother and me. Maybe it was always our mutual need for her happiness that determined our response to the events of the world. It is impossible to say what Fletcher and I would have been like without our mother at the center of our concerns; our lives as they were then and as they are now would not even be recognizable.
“I think Mom’s sick again,” Fletcher said as we pulled up to the house in Father’s boatlike Oldsmobile. She was gardening in her fanciest clothes.
“Oh, no,” I said, “you know how she likes to dress up!”
“Children,” she cried, “what have you learned today?”
We always knew that the truth was useless if it did not make Mother happy. We did not want to see flames in her eyes. “How lovely,” she said when she heard about the Osbournes, “how wonderful.” And over and over in my mother’s head for months after, the Osbournes made things — beautiful pitchers of glass, glass bowls, and tiny glass animals; smooth dark night tables and handsome chests of drawers; elegant cabinets and wing chairs — until they finally replaced all they had destroyed. It reassured my mother to know that not everyone who had lived in our house had met tragedy. She loved the Osbournes. They decorated her house. And who is to say that stepping out of the fiery plane wreckage they did not decide on this path for their next life? “We must try to forgive the dead,” my mother used to say. And we did. We forgave the Osbournes, riding home that day in Father’s enormous car.
Our search was like a treasure hunt; one clue led to the next. A young boy who had lost a finger in a boating accident revealed the doctor who moved in after the boy’s family decided to leave for safety reasons. A dedicated birdwatcher was followed by cat lovers who had nearly twenty cats roaming the halls. A family who bred show dogs followed them. We watched everyone materialize in front of us. Even the highest-bred, best-trained dogs chased the cats. The bird-watcher, horrified that the cats might take away his identity, kept shoving them in the closets.
In another corner young Betsy Wiggins played a spinet. Her sister Martha carded wool and wove cloth in the living room. The Osbournes nipped at the sherry and carefully cradled glass baskets. Every corner of our huge house was full. I suppose we should have known that once we discovered the names of these people and invited them back again that they would be reluctant to leave. When we asked them about their lives, we should not have been surprised that after so long they could not stop talking. Still I was surprised to learn that the dead, w ith only slight coaxing, could fall so easily back into their old emotions. I am deeplv disturbed by the longings of ghosts. I want better lives for them, less pettv, more whole.
Usually I left the hard fact-finding to Fletcher, who found it rewarding. “Historical research,” I think he told his friends, soberly. But whatever name he gave it, he found after a short while that it was impossible to leave it at the day’s end. “Jacob Potter,” he would say in his sleep, recalling that afternoon’s work in the dusty Connecticut libraries, the county registers, the microfilm room. “Allison Anne Worthington,” he murmured. I think Fletcher fell in love with Allison a little. “Allison,” he’d say most nights, very late, “don’t cry.”
“I saw Allison’s sweetheart last night,” he said one morning, looking exhausted. “He was dressed in women’s clothing, the fine women’s clothing of the period, so as to trick her father. Isn’t that great?” he smiled. “How sad,” I said. “How sad,” my mother said.
“What is that chill breath we feel brushing against our necks even in summer?” I asked. “Out in the back, behind the lake?”
“That is where Cecily Pickens and Samuel Hall secretly courted in the woods in winter and froze to death,” Fletcher said.
My father finished his orange juice and stood up. “Someone keeps trying to convince me,” he said, slightly irritated, “to vote for Lincoln.”
My mother laughed gaily. She seemed to love them all. She savored each person, every detail, turning the stories around and around until she could see each face clearly, hear each voice.
“I’ve got a feeling you’ll like this one,” Fletcher said excitedly to my mother. But that was just the problem, she liked them too well, and the project which we intended to participate in so as to get more attention from our mother turned on us, giving us less and less. For, long after the rest of us had let these people go, free to roam the lost landscapes of their human lives, my mother held onto them and kept them with her. Weeks after we’d forgotten Jacob Potter, leaving him somewhere outside to pick wild strawberries, my mother would say, “I think Jay Potter should take a trip abroad next fall.
“And Emily Tilset,” my mother continued. “Poor Emily Tilset,” she sighed. “What to do for Emily?” Fiery Emily Tilset, suffragette, was even more lost than most in this century. “Why did you bring me back?” she demanded. “Women vote. Women work. Women run banks. Women smoke.”