'Can you drink beer?' he said. 'I don't give a rat's ass if you drink double bourbons. Do you good. But that's also your mother's department. Maybe if you sipped it from a sherry glass she'd give you the okay.'
I laughed and took off the other shoe.
'Is she still making preparations for the big party?'
'She's moving into second gear. A full month in advance. She's a honey all right, your mother is. Nobody like her.'
'Will you let Arondella come to the party?'
'Don't mention his name in this house,' my father said.
At the table my mother usually talked about food. When she was riding in a car, her conversation centered around cars and driving. Knitting, she talked about clothes; sweeping, about the virtues of cleanliness; watching television, about watching television.
When she was feeling well, we became absorbed in her, grateful for every simple moment. But she was rarely well. There was no pattern to her illness, none that we could discern anyway. Each break in the bad weather gave us hope and my father would put off until another time the necessary task of seeking professional help. He understood nothing and therefore did nothing. She was not a photograph that could be retouched. The maimed child could not be cropped out of the picture. She was not an advertising campaign and so he did not know what to do about her. When she was well, he lived within latitudes defined by her intelligence and grace, as we all did, lovingly. The rest of the time we did our best to pretend she was not there.
She was blond, blessed with smooth lovely skin, with almost musical hands. She was quite small. In her simplest actions was a delicacy so theatrical and self-aware that one often felt witness to some lonely child's performance. Virginia born, the only daughter of a minister and a minister's daughter, she met my father when he was visiting relatives in Alexandria. Two months later they were married. It embarrassed me to hear stories of their courtship, such as it was, and the early years of their marriage. She was seventeen when they were married and I was born five years later. She told me the story of those years dozens of times. She seemed to consider my birth the culmination of a series of preparatory events almost ceremonial in meaning and scope.
The Episcopal church in Old Holly was called Calvary. My mother spent a lot of time there. The church had organized a permanent fund-raising drive for the orphans of Asia. My mother was in charge of Burma and South Korea. Although she was genuinely devout, I think she was uneasy about the whole idea of the passion of Christ. Perhaps he sweated too much for her taste. I say that without facetiousness. She used to tell me charming little fables about Jesus. It wasn't until much later that I realized she made them up. In her fables Jesus was a blond energetic lad who helped his mother around the house and occasionally performed a nifty miracle. 'And after Jesus cured the blind man,' she would say, 'he went home to the farm and helped his daddy milk the cows.'
As a child I was devoted to her. But we had our differences. Most of our arguments were pedantic flurries and whoever lost would usually try to even things up with a senseless display of spitefulness. I was playing baseball one day, or hardball as we called it, standing out in center field, when I saw her coming across the grass toward me.
'Good little boys do not pick their nose,' she said.
'Do not pick their noses. Boys is plural so noses has to be plural.'
'Boys
She turned and left before I could say anything. The game resumed and when the inning was over I trotted in and sat on the grass behind the first-base line. Tommy came over and sat next to me. He asked me what she had wanted. I told him.
'If that was my mother,' he said, 'I'd have told her to go take a flying fuck at the moon.'
Her bedroom was full of childhood things. Several cloth dolls sat on the dresser, slumped over in their dull colors, limbs woefully bent. There was a set of toy dinnerware in the closet as well as a small dollhouse, a teddy bear and bunny, six or seven coloring books. Jane and Mary were not allowed to play with any of these things. Music boxes were everywhere.
At times her presence in the house seemed accidental. She was one of those people who turn up now and then only to fade into some parenthesis of the middle distance; one catches glimpses of such people in parks and museums. Walking down the hallway I would see her move from room to room, a quick white daze of cloth, hair, bare arms; turning the bend in the staircase I would see first her feet, then knees, hands, face, a tired light in the eyes. She liked to sit on the top step. There was an apparitional quality about my mother. She seemed almost translucent and no expectation of eye or mind could ever fully prepare me for the sudden glimmers of her comings and goings.
When we were alone in the house I sometimes sat on the steps with her. That's where she first told me about Dr. Weber. It was a summer afternoon. The house was full of sunlight. A bear's great warm slumber was spread over everything. The girls were playing tennis.
'The minister and the doctor are the heart of every community,' she said. 'Your great-grandfather on my mother's side, Philip Thatcher, was a fine country doctor. We've had doctors and ministers in our family practically all the way back to Jamestown. I've always had the greatest respect for doctors. In my family the doctor was second only to the minister. It was the tradition. And that's why Dr. Weber surprised me so. Dr. Weber is part of no tradition I know of, and if he's second to anyone it's probably a field hand. If I'm going to tell this story-and I am because one day you'll realize that true education is made up of shocks and rude surprises, so I am going to tell it- but first I have to tell you what an internal examination is. It's an examination of a woman's most intimate parts. Don't ask me why, but these things are necessary from time to time. Dr. Weber told me to take off my clothing and put on a white gown. It was like the gown you wore when you had your tonsils taken out. Then he asked me to recline on a big funny table and he put my legs in a pair of stirrups. Then he put a pillow on my stomach so I couldn't see what he was doing down there. I can tell you there wasn't much dignity to any of this. Then he began to do things. He asked me if I liked it. Naturally I said no. He said of course you do, everybody does, it's only natural, and what a pretty young thing you are to have three children; what a pretty young woman and already three times a mother; so young and pretty, he kept saying, and do you like it and of course you do and you're the prettiest woman I've ever seen, Ann, and no one will ever know. He called me by my first name.'
Whenever I saw my mother go through the house with the can of air-freshener I knew the Reverend Potter was expected. They had informal discussions every few weeks. She had known him since she was a girl in Alexandria. She talked of him often. She would run through the litany of his credits as if he were a make of automobile that had competed successfully in the various economy runs and endurance trials. The Boston Latin School. Harvard. The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria. Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. St. Bartholomew's in New York. Rector of Calvary Church in Old Holly. Added to the resonance of the man was his full name, William Stockbridge Potter; that Stockbridge was perfect, implying great girth and distinction, and it did not disappoint, for he was big, hearty and companionable. So I would see her spraying all the rooms with lavender sachet and I would find an inconspicuous chair in the living room and duck my head behind a copy of
'Ann, this tea is delightful. You know how carefully I choose my words and I say this tea is delightful.'
'What about the Judeo-Christian ethic?' she said.
'What about it, Ann?'
'I came across it in a magazine. I said to Clinton I must ask William Potter about this.'
'Correct.'
'Well, what about it?'
'I suppose it refers to certain common elements in our heritage and theirs. I suppose it distinguishes these elements from those of the Moslem ethic, if there is such a thing.'
Reverend Potter sat in titanic splendor, slouched elegantly in the armchair, legs high and crossed at the knees, hands joined just beneath his lower lip, fingers barely touching. I was fascinated by the length of his fingers and by the small gray hair-fields above and below the joints of each finger. I had never seen such long fingers, nor fingers with so much hair growing on them. His black shoes gleamed. His hair was long and gray. He had harsh blue eyes and his voice seemed like steel struck on rock in a deep cave. The sight and sound of him filled me with fright and pleasure. To me, he could not have been more striking if he were an Abyssinian chieftain. But despite the beauty of his voice, there was something odd about the way he spoke. He often inserted long pauses between sentences and
