“Ah well,” said Elizabeth’s father, “I’m glad things worked out. Any time these little problems come up, Mrs. Stimson, that’s what I’m here for.”
“I know that,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Reverend. Why, I was about to have a collapse, worrying like I did all the time I was at work. I thought, if I could find someone—but I never dreamed your Elizabeth was back in town. I must’ve missed her in church.”
“I don’t go,” Elizabeth told her.
“Oh?”
There was a silence.
“Elizabeth’s one of these modern young people,” her father said. He laughed lightly. “She’ll get straightened out. We don’t see eye to eye on — what is it this week? Reincarnation.”
“You don’t say,” said Mr. Stimson. “Why, I never knew it was in any question. Don’t you believe in the reincarnation of Christ on the third day, young lady?”
“It’s a thought,” Elizabeth said.
“What?”
“She’ll get straightened out,” said her father.
“Why, of course she will. Of course she will,” Mrs. Stimson said. She beamed at Elizabeth and rocked steadily, holding her Kool-Aid glass level on her knees. Elizabeth’s father cleared his throat.
“Well now,” he said, “I expect we better be moving on. Got a busy day tomorrow.”
“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Stimson. “We surely do look forward to those sermons of yours, Reverend.”
“That one about pride!” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. And we appreciate this so much, you helping out about Daddy and all.”
“Glad to do it, glad to do it.”
“Be nice to have a young person about,” Mr. Stimson said. “Never had the fortune to have kids of our own.”
“That’s what I said earlier, Jerome.”
“And it takes the burden off Ida some. Old people tend to get difficult sometimes, not that they—” He grinned and rubbed his chin. “Dangedest thing,” he said. “The other day he took me for one of them quack medicine peddlers. Must have been forty years since they been through here last, wouldn’t you say? Believe it was back in ’21 or ’22, I was just a — well, he gave me hell, or heck. Seems I had sold him some little bottle I swore would cure anything. ‘Where’s your conscience?” he asks me. ‘Can you get up in the morning and look yourself in the eye, knowing how you let a man down?’ Well sir, there I stood, wondering who in Hades I was taking the rap for. Probably long dead, by now. Probably died a quarter century ago. Maybe more.”
Nobody said anything. Elizabeth’s father sat sharply forward, as if he were about to speak, but all he did was stare into the diamond formed by his knees and his laced hands. One wisp of hair had fallen over his eyes — a single flaw that made him look haggard and beaten. Elizabeth imagined that all his disappointments could be read in the grooves around his mouth: Why couldn’t his family see him the way his congregation did? Why had his daughter stayed glued to her seat in the revival tent? What gave him the feeling sometimes that his wife viewed God indulgently, like an imaginary playmate, and that she prepared her chicken casseroles as she would tea-party fare for children on a Sunday afternoon? He shook his head. Elizabeth leaned over to lay a hand on his arm. “We should go home, Pop,” she said gently.
He flinched, and she remembered too late that she should have called him Father.
When she went to bed, fragments of last night’s dreams puffed up from her pillow like dust. She lay on her back, clamping her forehead with one hand. She saw a tea-tin spilling out buttons — self-buttons with their fabric frayed, wooden buttons with the painted flowers chipping off, little smoked pearls knocked loose from their metal loops. The self-buttons she cut new circles of material for. The wooden ones she retouched with a pointed paintbrush. She dipped the metal loops in glue and set them into the pearls, holding them there until they dried, pressing them so tightly between thumb and forefinger that she could feel, even in her sleep, the dents they made in her skin.
7. JUNE 12, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
I don’t understand why you don’t answer. I keep thinking up possible reasons, new ones every time. Are you angry? But when you are you generally say so, you don’t just fade away like this. I’ll keep on writing, anyway. I’ll come down in August even if I don’t hear from you. I would like to see you before then, maybe for a weekend, but for that I’ll wait till you tell me how you feel about it.
Sometimes I imagine you just walking up my path, some sunny morning. It wouldn’t bind you to anything. If you wanted I wouldn’t even make a fuss about it — just say hello and peel you an orange to eat on the front steps for breakfast.
Mother is well. She totaled the car last week, which shook her up a little, but she escaped without a scratch. Now she has a Buick. Walked into the car lot and bought one, on sight — said a friend had told her they were all right. I was sorry to see the old Mercedes go. You wouldn’t like the Buick at all, you always had such fun maneuvering the gear shift. Whatever happened to your chauffeur’s cap? I looked for it in the old car before they took it away. I’d hate to think of it in some auto graveyard.
Andrew has been in a rest home in upstate New York. They expect to release him any day now. I wonder if he shouldn’t come back here, but there would be so many difficulties that I haven’t suggested it. He claims he’d rather be alone now, anyway; he was very insistent about it. I don’t think he has recovered from Timothy. He keeps writing Mother and asking questions and more questions, two letters a day sometimes — all about Timothy, irrelevant things like what he was wearing that day and what he ate and who he was talking to. Mother is very patient about answering him. She says that now that Timothy’s gone she doesn’t worry so much about Andrew. It’s like some quota has been filled.
You said we were all crazy. Maybe you said it just for the moment, not meaning it, but it’s all I have to go on so I keep trying to relate it to your not writing. I don’t see how it fits in. I do see how it could make you want to leave us. Do you think craziness is catching? It could be, of course. It is, if you still blame yourself for what happened. If that had anything to do with you at all, it was only on the surface.
I just remembered one time when I was downtown with Andrew, Christmas shopping, years ago. We were standing on a corner waiting for a light to change. This car passed us, going very fast, and just as it reached the corner all four doors popped open. One of those fluky things, I just laughed. But Andrew didn’t. He got scared. He said, “I can’t understand it. Why do these things happen to me? Why on my corner? I can’t grasp the significance of it,” he said. Well, I’m not saying you’re like Andrew. But things have been happening to us for years, long before you came along. Before you were born, even. Look at last summer, when we didn’t know you existed. My father died, my mother tangled with a hold-up man, Margaret got engaged to a middle-aged widower but broke it off and Melissa had a ten-day crying jag thinking she was pregnant. That’s just what I remember offhand; there’s more that got crowded out. We’re event-prone. (But sane. I’m sure of that. Even Andrew is, underneath.) Probably most families are event-prone, it’s just that we make more of it. Scenes and quarrels and excitement — but that part’s manufactured, just artificial stitches knitting us all together. What would we say to each other if we had to sit around in peace? I may not make scenes myself but I allow them, I go along with them. I see that. It’s my way of making connection with my family. Like Andrew’s peculiarities. He chose them. Every trouble he causes is just another way of talking. If you look at it like that, doesn’t it seem a waste to leave us? I know I’m talking a lot of bull.