She leaned across the table, her bosom on her folded arms, and hoped there was motherly concern in her eyes. But concern had gone out of those eyes a long time ago, and her daughter knew it, and so they sat, strangers who had once an eternity ago been attached with a cord through which the same rich blood has surged.
“What happened this summer?” Mrs. Wagner said, and Margaret watched her and thought, I would no more tell you what happened this summer than I would tell the milkman.
“Lots of things,” she said. “There were parties and barbecues. You know how it is in a small development.”
“You know what I mean, Margaret. You know exactly what I mean. Don’t start telling me about parties and barbecues. I’m not interested in them.”
“What are you interested in, Mother?”
She had stopped calling her “Mom” or “Ma” or “Mama” on the day her grandfather died. On that day her mother stopped being a blood relation and became only another woman named Elizabeth Wagner, a woman who had done something unspeakably horrible. She would have called her Elizabeth now except that it was not in her make-up to call this other woman by her first name. And so she had chosen the coldest word she knew within the limitations of the mother-daughter relationship she denied, and that word was “Mother.”
“I’m interested in you,” Mrs. Wagner said.
“You’re interested in me?” Margaret asked, and a small sardonic smile touched her mouth.
“You’re like me,” Mrs. Wagner said. “You’re my daughter. You look the way I looked when I was your age, and I can see in your eyes what was in mine. So I don’t have to hear what happened this summer. I know what happened.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t ask me.”
“But not the way it happened with me, Margaret, not that way at all. That’s in your eyes, too. Whatever happened wasn’t good.” Mrs. Wagner paused. “Margaret, I don’t care what you think of me, or what—”
“Mother—”
“Or what—”
“Mother, lower your voice.”
“They’re watching the football game in the parlor, the two hemen. Don’t worry about them. Listen to me, Margaret. When it happened to me, it was everything — and that’s the difference. And that’s what you’ll never be able to understand, that’s what you don’t want to understand.”
“I don’t—”
“Nothing else mattered, Margaret. Not your father, and not you, and not... not your grandfather, either. There was only—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“When will you want to hear it?”
“Never.”
“Don’t judge me, Margaret. I’m not to be judged by you. I’m still your mother, you know.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, damnit, I am. And I know a little more about life and living than you might imagine.”
“I imagine you know a great deal about life and living, Mother,” Margaret said.
Mrs. Wagner sighed heavily. “You’re a very cold person, Margaret,” she said. “You’re very cold.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
“Very cold. I would like to talk to you. I would really like to be able to talk to you. I used to wonder, when it happened, how I could explain it to you, how I would tell you when you were old enough to listen. That was what bothered me most, do you know? What will my daughter think, what will my daughter think? Oh, I know how you feel about what I did later, but that was a part of it too, all a part of it, and only because of what happened, only because I was so desperately—”
“Mother—”
“Margaret, I’m not a whore.”
“Mother—”
“Please understand that, Margaret. I’m not a whore. It’s important to me that you under—”
“Please, please,” Margaret said.
She looked across at her mother, and there were tears forming in Mrs. Wagner’s eyes, and for a moment she wanted to reach across the table and take her mother’s delicate hands, the wedding ring and engagement ring large on the third finger, take her mother’s hand in her own and say, “It’s all right. Please don’t cry, please.”
The moment hung suspended.
And then Margaret said, “I don’t want to hear it, Mother.”
“I hope your life is never threatened, Margaret. I hope your blood supply is never cut off.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Margaret said, more firmly this time.
“Whatever happened to you is your business, but I can tell it meant nothing.” Mrs. Wagner studied her daughter, and her eyes were clear now. “Do you know what I wish?”
“What?”
“I wish you fall in love some day. I wish to God you really fall in love.”
“The way you did, Mother?” Margaret asked, vast sarcasm in her voice.
“Yes,” Mrs. Wagner said slowly, her eyes bright and hard, “the way I did.”
On Tuesday morning, in the town of Vega Alta, Larry saw the funeral.
The town was hot and dry and dusty. The shops lined the main street, and Larry stood on the sidewalk waiting for Hebbery, who had stepped into one of the shops to buy some “cigarillos” after showing Larry the site. There was a hush to the town, the silence of bare feet on dust-covered roads. There were few shoppers, and there was a feeling of almost complete inactivity, a laziness sponsored by the sun, washing the road and the sidewalk and the colorless, faded pastels of the shop fronts in a monotonous warm bath of sun yellow. The silence seemed suddenly to mushroom in upon itself. There had been silence before, but it deepened now as if before a sudden summer cloudburst so that Larry looked unconsciously skyward, expecting rain.
At the far end of the street, he saw the procession. It took him a moment to realize what it was, and then another moment to realize it had caused the deepening of silence.
The procession started with the little girls in white. He counted an even dozen of them, walking in pairs, each holding a bunch of flowers, walking in slow cadence, the dust rising around them on the painfully silent street. Six pairs of girls in white dresses, young girls with tan faces and brown faces, each clutching a bunch of blood-red flowers at her waist. And behind the little girls, the pallbearers marched with stiff solemnity, carrying the huge black coffin on their shoulders, the weight evenly distributed so that it appeared the coffin was not heavy at all, seemed as if they walked effortlessly beneath this huge black box which hovered magically on the air over their shoulders.
Behind the pallbearers, behind the coffin, the townspeople marched in mourning. They spread across the width of the small street, marching shoulder to shoulder with the slow, uneven beat of stragglers, their faces serious with the serious business of death.
The shoppers were lining the curbs now. Men removed their hats as the coffin passed. Storekeepers came out onto the sidewalk and closed the doors of their shops behind them. Up and down the street as the coffin passed, the wood louvered doors eased quietly shut, and the hats were lifted silently from heads, and the straggling mourners raised giant clouds of dust that sifted up silently on the bright, golden, sunlit air.
He felt like an outsider. He felt like a scientist watching bugs perform under a microscope, and he didn’t want to feel that way, didn’t want these people to think he was scientifically and coldly watching death go by, didn’t want them to think he was the proud, aloof Americano who watched dispassionately while they put a friend and neighbor to rest. He was suddenly involved in the funeral, very involved in it, suddenly feeling the pure white innocence of the flower girls, the burden the pallbearers carried, the sadness that showed on the faces of the mourners who walked in sloppy disorganization, the awkwardness of their hands hanging at their sides, knowing they did not know what to do with their hands.