It used to be Elizabeth who managed this family. Matthew had never realized that till now. She was the one they had leaned on — he and his mother and Timothy, and the house itself, whose rooms had taken on her clear sunny calmness and her smell of fresh wood chips. Only now, when she was needed most, Elizabeth had changed. With the others present she looked bewildered and out of place, like any ordinary stranger who had stumbled into the midst of a family in mourning. Mrs. Emerson called on her continually, but she answered with her mind on something else. Her care-taking had descended to the most literal kind: errand-running, lawn-sprinkling, lugging down more toys for Mary’s Billy. At twelve o’clock one night Matthew found her on a stepladder in the pantry, changing lightbulbs. She wandered through crowded rooms winding clocks or carrying table-leaves, her face set and distant, and while Father Lewis was in the parlor offering his condolences she stayed on the sunporch, yanking weather-stripping from all the windows.
“Why are you working so hard?” Matthew asked her.
“This is my job,” she said, and dumped tangles of cracked stripping into a garbage can that she had brought in from outside.
“So that’s Mother’s famous handyman,” said Mary. “Is she always so grim?”
“No, not ever,” Matthew said.
Then he removed his glasses and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Mary looked at him a moment but said nothing more.
Late Friday afternoon, Elizabeth came into the kitchen while Matthew was making a sandwich. She was in her oldest jeans, carrying a curved pruning saw that she set on a counter. “I thought you would be the one to tell,” she said. “After the funeral I’m going home for good.”
Matthew spread jam over peanut butter and patted another slice of bread down on top of it. Then he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you left.”
“I think I’d better.”
“Is it because of the trouble with the police?” “No.”
“Mother’s going to rely on you to keep her going, these next few months.”
“I don’t want to be relied on,” Elizabeth said.
Matthew laid the sandwich carefully on a plate and offered it to her. She shook her head. He set the plate on the drainboard. “If you would just give it a little more thought,” he said.
“I have.”
“Or if you held off till things here were settled. Then I could come with you. I’m still planning on it.” “No,” she said.
“Well, all right. Not now. But as soon as you want me to.”
She said nothing. He laid a hand over hers, over cool rough knuckles, and she kept still until he removed it. Then she picked up her saw and left.
“Where is Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Why don’t I see her around any more?”
“She’s out cutting that hanging branch, Mother.”
“That’s not what I need her for.”
“Shall I call her?”
“No, no, never mind.”
He set a tray on her nightstand, tea and a perfectly sectioned orange, and then straightened to watch his mother pace between the bed and the window. There was nothing broken about her, even now. She continued to wear her matched skirts and sweaters and her string of pearls, her high-heeled shoes, her bracelet with the names of all her children dangling on gold discs. She spoke when spoken to, in her thin, bright voice, and she kept in touch with the arrivals and the sympathy cards and the funeral arrangements. It was true that she spent more time alone in her room, and there were sometimes traces of tears when she came downstairs, but she was one of those women who look younger after crying. The tears puffed her eyes slightly, erasing lines and shadows. Her skin was flushed and shining. She moved with the proud, deliberate dignity she had had when her husband died. Once, months ago, Matthew had asked Elizabeth if she found his mother hard to put up with. “No, I like her,” she said. “Think what a small life she has, but she still dresses up every day and holds her stomach in. Isn’t that something?” Now that Elizabeth seemed so removed, Matthew tried to take over for her. He shielded his mother from visitors, and answered her telephone, and brought her food that she never ate. When she paced the room he watched with his hands slightly flexed, as if he were preparing to leap forward any minute and catch her if she stumbled, or prevent her from ricocheting from wall to wall.
He was the one who broke the news to her. Elizabeth had called him from the police station and asked who should do it: he or she. “I should,” he told her. “I couldn’t decide,” she said. “I thought, you’re her son after all, she might prefer it. Then I thought no, it’s something I should do”—as if she saw herself as a culprit, duty-bound to face in person someone whose dish she had broken or whose message she had forgotten to deliver. He couldn’t understand that. Everyone knew she was not to blame. He had called for her at the police station, searching her out through long flaky corridors and finding her, finally, pale and stony-faced in a roomful of officials. “Wait in the hall,” they told him, but instead he crossed to stand behind her chair, one hand on the back of it. He had waited through the endless questions, the short, stark answers, the final re-reading of her statement. The policeman who read it stumbled woodenly over her words, so that it sounded as if she herself had stumbled although she hadn’t. His voice was bored and dismal; he was like someone reciting lists. Even her useless repetitions had been conscientiously recorded—“I don’t know. I don’t know,” which she must have said before Matthew came in, and surely not in such a despairing drone. She would have been quick with it, flicking it off her tongue like a dismissal, the way she always did when she felt cornered. The thought made Matthew want to move his hand from the chair to her shoulder, but he kept still.
On the telephone he had not even asked her the cause of death, but when it came out at the police station he wasn’t surprised. He had assumed it was suicide from the start. Now he wondered why. He had never known that he expected such a thing of Timothy. Why not a car accident? He was a short-tempered driver. Why not a hold-up man, a hit-and-run, one of those senseless pieces of violence that happened in this city every day? He couldn’t answer. When he fixed an image of his brother in his mind, trying to understand, he found that Timothy had already grown flat and unreal. “He had a round face,” he told himself. “He had short blond hair, sticking out in tufts.” The round face and blond hair materialized, but without the spark that made them Timothy.
He had driven Elizabeth home and left her outside, sitting on the porch steps facing the street, while he went into the house. He found his mother writing letters in the bedroom. The little beige dictaphone was playing her voice back, as tinny and sharp as a talking doll’s: “Mary. Is Billy old enough for tricycles? Not the pedal kind, I know, but—”
“I have bad news,” Matthew said.
She spun around in her chair with her face already shocked. “It’s Andrew,” she said instantly.
“No, Timothy.”
“Timothy? It’s Timothy?” She had dropped the pen and was kneading her hands, which looked cold and white and shaky. “He’s dead,” she said.
“I’m afraid he is.”
“I thought it would be Andrew.”
Behind her the mechanical voice played on. “Does he have a wagon? A scooter? Ask Peter about his plans for the summer.”