“How do you keep all these people straight?” Auberon asked.
“Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill.”
“A swain,” Lily said.
“And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And
“Hello, Auberon,” Tacey said. “How was the City?”
“Gee, just great,” Auberon said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. “Great.”
“Did you walk?” Tacey asked.
“No, the bus, actually.” They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. “So listen. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?”
“Fine. She got your card.”
A horror swept him as he thought of the few cards and letters he had sent from the City, evasive and bragging, or uncommunicative, or horribly facetious. The last one, Mom’s birthday, he had found, oh God, unsigned in a trash can he was examining, a bouquet of smarmy sentiments; but his silence had been long and he was drunk and he sent it. He saw now that it must have been to her like being stabbed cruelly with a butter knife. He sat down on the steps of the porch, unable just for the moment to go further.
An Awful Mess
“Well, what do you think, Ma?” Daily Alice asked as she stood looking into the dank darkness of the old icebox.
Momdy was examining the stock inside the cupboards. “Tuna wiggle?” she said doubtfully.
“Oh dear,” Alice said. “Smoky will give me a look. You know that look?”
“Oh, I do.”
“Well.” Beneath her gaze the few damp items on the slatted metal shelves seemed to shrink away. There was a constant drip, as in a cave. Daily Alice thought of the old days, the great white refrigerator chock-full of crisp vegetables and colorful containers, perhaps a varnished turkey or a diamondback ham, and neatly wrapped meats and meals asleep in the icy-breathing freezer. And a cheerful light that winked on to show it all, as on a stage. Nostalgia. She put her hand on a luke-cold milk bottle and said, “Did Rudy come today?”
“No.”
“He’s really getting too old for that,” Alice said. “Lifting big blocks of ice. And he forgets.” She sighed, still looking within; Rudy’s decline, and the general falling-off in the amenities of life, and the not-so-hot dinner probably awaiting them all, all seemed contained within the zinc-lined icebox.
“Well, don’t hold the door open, dear,” Momdy said softly. Alice was closing it when the swinging doors of the pantry opened.
“Oh my God,” Alice said. “Oh, Auberon.”
She came quickly to embrace him, hurrying to him as though he were in deep trouble and she must instantly rescue him. His harrowed look, though, came less from the trouble he was in than from the trip he had just taken through the house, which had assaulted him unmercifully with memories, odors he’d forgotten he knew, scarred furniture and worn rugs and garden-exhibiting windows that filled his eyesight to the brim, as if it had been half a lifetime and not a year and a half he’d been away.
“Hi,” he said.
She released him. “Look at you,” she said. “What is it?”
“What’s what?” he said, attempting a smile, wondering what degradation she read in his features. Daily Alice raised a wondering finger and traced the line of his single eyebrow across his nose. “When did you grow that?”
“Huh?”
Daily Alice touched the place above her own nose where (though faintly, because of her lighter hair) she bore the mark of Violet’s descendants.
“Oh.” He shrugged. He hadn’t actually noticed; he hadn’t been studying mirrors much lately. “I dunno.” He laughed. “How do you like that?” He stroked it himself. Soft and fine as baby hair, with one or two coarser hairs springing from it. “I must be getting old,” he said.
She saw that that was so; that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the backs of his hands. A hard lump formed in her throat, and she embraced him again so that she wouldn’t have to speak. Over her shoulder, to his grandmother, Auberon said, “Hi Momdy, listen, listen, don’t get up, don’t.”
“Well, you’re a bad boy, not to have written your mother,” Momdy said. “To tell us you were coming. Not a thing for supper.”
“Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay,” he said, releasing himself from his mother and coming to kiss Momdy’s feathery soft cheek. “How have you been?”
“The same, the same.” She looked up at him from where she sat, studying him shrewdly. He’d always had the sense his grandmother knew some discreditable secret about him, and if she could just squeeze it between the thick layers of her usual discourse, it would be revealed. “I go on,” she said. “You’ve grown.”
“Gee, I don’t
“Either that or I’d forgotten how big you’d got.”
“Yeah, that’s it… Well.” The two women looked him over from the heights of two generations, seeing different views. He felt examined. He knew he ought to take off his overcoat, but he had forgotten exactly what was underneath it; he sat instead at the far end of the table and said again, “Well.”
“Tea,” Alice said. “How about some tea? And you can tell us all your adventures.”
“Tea would be great,” he said.
“And how’s George?” Momdy asked. “And his people?”
“Oh, fine.” He hadn’t been to Old Law Farm in months. “Fine, same as ever.” He shook his head in amusement at funny George. “That crazy farm.”
“I remember,” she said, “when that was really such a nice place. Years ago. The corner house, that was the one the Mouse family first lived in…”
“Still do, still do,” Auberon said. He glanced at his mother, who was busy with teapot and water at the big stove; surreptitiously she brushed her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and then saw that he’ caught her at it, and turned to face him, teapot in her hands.
“… and after Phyllis Townes died,” Momdy was going on, “well that was a protracted illness, her doctor thought he’d chased it down to her kidneys, but
“So how was it, really?” Alice said to her son. “Really.”
“Really it wasn’t so hot,” Auberon said. He looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, oh well,” she said.
“For not writing and all. There wasn’t much to say.”
“That’s okay. We were afraid for you, that’s all.”
He lifted his eyes. He really hadn’t thought of that. Here he’d been swallowed down by the teeming terrible City, swallowed as by a dragon’s mouth and hardly been heard of again; of course they’d been afraid for him. As it had once before in this kitchen, a window rose within him and he saw, through it, his own reality. People loved him, and worried about him; his personal worth didn’t even enter into it. He lowered his eyes again, ashamed. Alice turned back to the stove. His grandmother filled the silence with reminiscence, the details of dead relatives’ sickness, remission, relapse, decline and death. “Mm, mm-hm,” he said, nodding, studying the scarred surface of the table. He had sat, without choosing to, at his old place, at his father’s right hand, Tacey’s left.
“Tea,” Alice said. She put the teapot on a trivet, and patted its fat belly. She put a cup before him. And waited, then, hands folded, for him to pour it, or for something; he glanced up at her and was about to try to speak, to answer the question he saw posed in her, if he could, if he could think of words, when the double doors of the pantry flew open and Lily and the twins came in, and Tony Buck.
