Part 7 (1/2)
”Oh, honey, I'm so sorry And after all you've doneall these years I wish I knehat to tell you”
”I wish you did, too”
We were silent for a time ”How's Barbara?”
”At the end of her tether,” I adrateful to havedecades, finally acknowledged ”Still here Though, honestly, I can't iine why”
”I feel so bad for her”
Suddenly I was anxious for the conversation to be over You couldn't ask for a better confidante thanof my mother's condition, ”her nerves,” aainst a sick woman, and I suspected Phyllis felt all too keenly that saivable was that telephoning etting in thethe well in advance of my mother's thirsty arrival
That must've happened near the crack of dawn, because it was still very early when our telephone rang, waking us up ”Well, it's over,” uess I' anywhere”
”I' up
I lay there in bed for a long tiine that terrible conversation with ently as possible, that what she was proposing si in Gloversville that er herself, that by the end of the year she'd be putting the house on thethings out she'd probablyood word onmy mother that I loved her, that I'd always been there when she needed ed close by so I could look after her, that she was lucky to have a son willing to do all that
At some point another possibility occurred to me: that my mother hadn't called her sister at all, that all this was just between us, as it had always been Locked in a two-person drama, we had no need for additional players
BUILDING FLOOR-TO-CEILING SHELVES in the downstairs bedroo roouests, was the first order of business in the new Cain work the day after the closing ”This whole wall?” he said dubiously, convinced ere nuts once we explained e had in ht bookcases, and the wall in question was very long indeed nobody had that , he reluctantly agreed, as if it were a bathroo and we'd instructed hi as you won't get ht We had badly otten that in addition to Barbara's and mine from the Waterville house there were all the books froe We'd unpacked the books onto the new shelves hurriedly, ale them at our leisure and make sure dickens and Trollope and Austen were co spines and that Hammett and Chandler and Jah proxihts-out Returning fro my mother's books, I collapsed, Hotel du Lac in hand, into a chair in the living roo but stare at the wall of my own books, as well as the iht up to the ceiling in the corner I counted these, trying to gauge how many additional bookcases would be required, where on the coast of Maine we'd find them, when there'd be ti day and I was far too tired to solve a proble parts I even was too worn out to roust myself from the chair and locate the shelf that contained the other Anita Brookners Possibly they were still in one of those side boxes Sitting there utterly drained, I wondered ifinto a funk of my own Over the years I'd noticed that I was susceptible toa fair a I had to be careful of, because her periods of irrationality and dark depression had a tendency to infect bothand faot ho at all those books, shelved or not, I suddenly felt so akin to the anxiety-dread, really-that I knew my mother was prey to when her routines were in disarray
One of her most cherished (and to my mind absurd) convictions had always been that she and I were essentially the same If we didn't always see eye to eye, that was because I enty-five years younger; given time, I'd surely coreenetic poles in effect repelling each other I'd long iined that she developed this ridiculous theory in order to explain to herself how she could have brought into the world a kid who couldn't have beenBut what if she was right? Was I really so different? In this respect her relationshi+p to her own mother-a woman she considered conventional and moralistic and repressed-was illustrative On the one hand there was no denying the to, but there were some truly eerie temperamental sirand battles with milk She preferred milk in bottles, but when home delivery ceased she had no choice but to switch to supermarket cartons, which she invariably tried to squeeze open at the wrong side, then attacked with a dull paring knife Like my mother, once she euided, she was incapable of reversing it, and the consequences could be explosive, even bloody Many tih, throaty moan, with a pool of milk dyed pink at her feet When I asked what happened, she'd show me her punctured thuirl, ”I hurt me,” as if the wound itself was the explanation I'd asked for
In no time her ferocious, irrational attacks on these cartons beca coh I couldn't have articulated why, they troubled otten strategy s to make sense, for the world to be a rational place ”Gra up the mutilated carton from the floor, ”look” And then I'd squeeze at the correct end, which opened obligingly I i her that the hurt and blood and mess were all unnecessary, but of course I had it exactly wrong It was thethat were necessary These satisfied soin to fathom but that was, in any case, real
Moreover, while I couldn't have explained this either, irl cadence she used only when she'd injured herself, creeped me out She never said I hurt myself but rather I hurt me, as ifthe paring knife had stabbed an innocent bystander Showing ashes and puncture wounds, she always seeh I loved her, I was never able to summon It seee, that warring with the milk cartons was simple lunacy Perhaps in some remote sector of rand bouts of madness to whatever it was that possessed an to see the good talkings-to rand a divided or fractured self-but I ht have sensed the correlation even then Nor would the necessary inference have corandmother with her cartons, then she'd never truly learn Like her ownherself in the process Which, forty years later, sees stood
Still, did the fact that my mother was more like her mother than she cared to admit mean that I was more like mine than I cared to? Did the fact that I occasionally had ht into my mother's behavior than, say, est that I was like my mother, as she always so confidently claier? The latter, surely For co evidence I needed to look no farther than the book in e:
Frorey It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which see but the stiffish leaves of so like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in iination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d'Oche, on which snowFor it was late Septeone, the rates were reduced, and there were few inducee, whose inhabitants, uncoin with, were frequently rendered taciturn by the dense cloud that descended for days at a time
What in the world had possessed an like this? ”Grey” was used three times in the first two sentences to describe the physical landscape, and ray already Her purpose in reading was to flee that grayness into a brighter, more colorful world She loved for books to take her to exciting new places, and she ht well have enjoyed a novel set in a swank Swiss hotel on a lake, but she never would've wanted to go there out of season at reduced rates after all the interesting people had left I'd taught the novel at Colby the year before, so its narrative details were still fresh in ed writer named Edith Hope, who, unlike Anita Brookner, wrote the kind of roht actually have liked to read At the hotel Edithproposal of e, not a love match but a union of convenience that will allow each of them societal ”cover” as well as ro offer out of hand, Neville rather cruelly adds that given Edith's age and rather plain appearance (in her cardigan sweaters she reseet a better one
My Colby students, an otherwise pretty savvy bunch, had i thecruelty Edith had suffered at the hands of her mother and female friends, the very ones who'd packed her off to Switzerland after she fell in love and made a fool of herself back in London My female students-all in their early twenties-were particularly unwilling to acknowledge the griht in fact be the best Edith would ever get, and they were of one voice in proclai that she should reject his cynical proposal and wait for love If their ues, suggesting just how thorough the cultural training of the late Eighties had been for both genders
That, I now recalled, hy I'd given the book to otten her cultural training in an upstate New York mill town four decades earlier, and I was curious to see if she'd twig to what nored The results of this experi My mother hadn't really enjoyed the book and certainly didn't want to read any more Brookner, but just as I suspected the novel's theme of women's cruelty to women had resonated deeply, and her identification with poor Edith Hope, while not wholehearted, had been sufficient to initiate one of her diatribes against her own mother and sister, who had done their level best, she reht ulti her self-confidence if she hadn't escaped Gloversville when she did The choice Edith had to make didn't particularly interest her The solution-as my mother saas to return next year, in season, with a better wardrobe, so she'd likely meet a better class of man She saw Neville as less of a villain than a nonentity