“But there is still so much to be done, Emily,” I told her.
“We must go over the same ground a thousand times before it is ours,” my mother said to her.
“And the ERA,” Fletcher added.
But Emily just wept. “There is so much left to do,” I told her again. But it must have been hard for Emily to believe. In a few years Ella Grasso would be governor of our state.
I looked at Emily’s sad gray shape. It was dangerous to dedicate one’s whole life to a single thing, I thought, whether it was writing poetry or raising children or working for the rights of women. It did not matter. Things had a way of ending or turning on you and leaving you empty.
I cannot say anymore how much of these lives were facts my brother lugged back from the library and how much we ourselves invented. The documents Fletcher copied, the notes he took, have all been lost. It is possible my father, fed up with so many houseguests, threw them all out in a symbolic gesture, hoping that if the words disappeared so would Jacob Potter and Emily and all those dogs and cats. Even Fletcher, after listening to my mother, seemed unclear as to what he himself had learned and w hat we had all added. None of us knew where it was that the facts had ended and we had taken over.
“What does it matter?” I asked finally. And Fletcher shrugged. For what did it matter? Noises in the night no longer frightened us. We could easily imagine Murphy, that eighteenth-century explorer, storming through the house looking for the lost deed to the land or hear Bernard reciting parts of Hamlet and Richard III, a brightly colored scarf around his neck, his hair plastered back as he stares into the long mirrors and weeps, so moved is he by his own performance. Fact or fiction, we could not help but feel bad for John Cook, who wandered in every now and then looking for his head, which was sold after his death to pay doctor bills and used for a time in local productions of Hamlet. Occasionally he’d come to check that it was not his head Bernard was using.
We were not frightened by any of them. We knew the tickling on our necks was really Patrick Derrick whispering, “Whales, whales,” under his breath, his blue eyes fixed in the distance, an enormous harpoon in his hand. “I’ve got to go now, children,” he whispers. “Whales, whales.”
The only one we dreaded hearing was Allison. When Allison cried I put the pillow over my head. When Allison cried the room turned red. Lovely Allison, the daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate, was forbidden to see the dock-worker she loved. She was the saddest sort of suicide. All night sometimes she sobbed. Nothing could make her stop. She cried into infinity. She came back again and again looking for her father. She wanted to let him know, I guess, that the life of grief is long — it lives even beyond the grave.
Twists of fate, lost love, broken trust, sudden death — all these things haunted our house. I think my mother, whose wisdom was wide, knew from the start the sorrow that was there, but she wanted to be sure that we knew, too, and that we were willing to accept it, accept it all, accept it in advance.’ She knew all along. She did it for us.
Last night we were all back in the house again: Fletcher and Dad and you and me. Dad built a fire, Hetcher read aloud from the Canterbury Tales, you wandered in and out, looking for the right word, warming your feet. Does it never end, Mother? Must it all go on forever?
I can barely see her now in this little apartment, but I know she’s here. She does not need to speak and she knows it. She does not need to lift one finger or even assume her human form. She has taught me well what ghosts are about. The wind sighs for her. The trees rustle her poetry.
The rain beats hard on the windows. No snow this year — only the grayness of rain. It is Friday again. He lights a cigarette.
She is soaking wet. She has been out for a long walk without a hat or boots again. I reach for a towel but I cannot get her dry
“The rain makes me want to make love,” I say to him. When I close my eves she is still there; she is soaking wet and begins to shiver.
“Such sadness,” he says.
“I need you,” I say, unbuttoning his shirt. “I need you now.”
He knows that with his hands alone he can stop all this for a moment — at least, for a moment.
The rain beats harder and harder. The rain seems to beat from within. I know about the rain forests of Brazil, the cold rain of London, the rainy seasons of Central and South America where, after a while, people begin to mimic the rain with their voices, unconsciously, its strange, compelling monotony I know about the men and women of rain who grow to incredible proportions, their heads like umbrellas, their moist skin like the flesh of fish, their movements the movements of fish.
I know about the monsoon belt of Southeast Asia, the dry winds that blow off the Gobi Desert for six months and the torrents of rain that follow from the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. I know about the great glaciers of Alaska, the century upon century of winter that has accumulated there. I know about the Alpine fohn and the vent du Midi. I know the paths of the tropical hurricane.
In the Amazon rain falls on a fixed daily schedule. Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington, is nearly always draped in fog. In the winter cold winds blow down from Siberia, pick up moisture over the Sea of Japan, and drop it as snow w hen they strike the mountains of Japan. In North Africa the dusty sirocco blows off the Sahara.
I have learned to watch the way trees bend, the direction smoke drifts. I listen to the pitch of wind chimes. I clock the velocitv of clouds. My brother has taught me what a halo around the moon means, a rash of stars. I know the place where the boreal forest meets the tundra. I ha\e drawn the horse latitudes around the globe. I have seen those ghost horses, dropped overboard in the windless night to lighten the load, rise up and trot on a watery field.
I hope she lives in some temperate zone, a place w here the weather is easily predictable. I have let my eye wander across the rolling hills like a gentle wind, looking for her. I have looked to the sky many times, wondering what kind of weather she faces now. I know the altocumulus, the cirrostratus — the nimbus.
“You’ll miss your train,” she whispers.
I look up now and it is twenty-five years ago and m\ mother and Sabine are laughing as they get off the train from Poughkeepsie. Her head is tilted back and I can see her beautiful throat. Sabine takes her arm.
Once, Marta and I got off that same train. Our bags seemed weightless and our books, too, as we stepped onto the platform and into the city that promised everything.
Part Two
I live supported by the royalties from lo Vanessa, which has just gone into its sixth printing. In the last few years there has been a great increase of interest in my mother’s work. Even I have been asked for interviews, mostly by young journalists who hope through some obscure means to make names for themselves. But this is not a cause I believe in and I always tell them that I am not that Vanessa Turin.
I have a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. I have a cat named China, a lover I’ll call Jack. To most it will seem that I do very little. I go to Grand Central Station looking for my mother who has quite simply disappeared off the face of the earth. It is December now, though a poor, warm excuse for one, and in January it will be one year since I last saw her. About once a week I see Jack.
I have very little contact with anyone else. Throughout the past year Fletcher has sent me postcards from various parts of the country he found bearable enough to stay in for more than a day. I write him letters but they have all been returned. “When do you think Mom is coming home?” I ask, following him across the country with the same question, but he cannot say yet. I have spoken several times by phone with Sabine, my mother’s best friend, but she has become increasingly hard to reach, having become with her fifth record album something of an “overnight” sensation in France. I have little actual contact with Aunt Lucy, my mother’s sister, who lives with her husband in Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world. “Where did Mom go?” I ask them, whenever I get a chance, but I have grow n accustomed to the silence that collects around the receiver in response to this question.