Mrs. Poughkeepsie’s prophecy about his mother’s early death did fulfill but not until Timken was twelve and the old old woman’s curtailment of giving him the information gave him the freedom from the expectation of it until it occurred. He would have the same number of years until her death as he had already lived.
They returned to the Big House after a year away.
Nothing had changed but everything had and later Timken was to realize the entire difference was in his perception. His horizon had expanded and his vision narrowed to fit the world that horizon cupped.
The house was enormous. He was aware of this as once again he got out of a car – Daly had come to collect them – and once again stood and stared.
There was no emotion of judgment. This was not just a house become mansion across the space of a year, this was home that had grown. And he could not wait to explore the added dimension of each and every beloved room.
“Home,” he told himself, aloud. “Home.”
There was no need for his mother to nudge him forward with her knee. Arie’s eyes were roaming the landscape, seeking something she was forever watching for. Timken was off and running toward home.
His grandmother was on the veranda, arms wide to receive him.
Arie was distracted from her eyes roaming the grounds by this display, this embracing. Astonished, actually. (Her mother had never hugged her like that as a child.)
Lily was almost mournful in her joy and her long ago mid-European relations would have understood the keening sounds she was making as she felt the warmth of this changed child. Her tongue flicked out in a quick touch of one of his black curls.
Everything had suddenly made sense to her a year ago when she had ‘conversed’ with a young man with black curls who had walked past the house too frequently not to be noted.
Lily had become more aware of life outside the house once the life within was gone. So she noticed the youth. Finally, on the third or fourth day, she went out and stood on the veranda to stare at him as he was passing once again. He stopped.
She had retreated into her husband’s clothing that day.
They looked at each other. Thirty-five years later he would say to Timken, “I saw your grandfather” and Timken would be puzzled for a moment and then understand but he would not try to explain about Lily.
‘Grandfather’ and the young man did no more than exchange eye contact. Then Lily raised her hand and he got the message. The people he was seeking had gone away. He went away. It was not what he wanted, this release, this permission to leave. But he also did not want to be beckoned forward, to question this departure, to pursue answers.
“Did anyone ever come asking for us?” Arie once startled herself by asking aloud a few months after their return. She had asked it often enough in portrayals, but, unlike Timken who ‘told’ with his voice, she never did.
“Yes, he came”, Lily answered. They both knew who was being asked about. Avoidance was a necessary ritual and expected but it was also superficial.
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t speak with him. I just waved, like this. And he went away.”
Her mother tried to stare an explanation from her but it did not work. Not then. 584 words Ch 5 Dec 1 03
Lily would wonder, wonder mightily. Arie’s sudden move to the Carriage House more than twenty years ago made sense now. She tried to think about how it must have been hiding a pregnancy, and why, and then giving up the baby. But this disturbed her so greatly that she replaced those mind forays with the knowledge that when Arie became pregnant again, years later, and obviously by the same man, the two boys were so much alike, she had shared this with her mother, had kept the baby. And, if truth be known, she was forever looking for the reappearance of her first grandson.
Timken released himself from his grandmother’s greeting on his return to the Big House.
Arie felt guilt at the naked hunger she saw on her mother’s face as Lily watched Timken scamper along the wide veranda greeting each of the chairs and realized how much her mother must have missed him. And did she miss me too, the thought trod on her mind but she flicked it away. Jealously of one’s own child was totally unacceptable.
“I’m six. I’m home. I’m saying hello,” Timken was joyously ‘telling’, touching each chair, chairs with plenty of space around them. Chairs facing properly out toward a street, albeit distant across a deep yard, where things worth watching might happen. More chairs than they ever had company so it gave a great choice for the three occupants of the house.
“Timken, come and carry your things,” called Arie as Daly unloaded suitcases and boxes from the back of his truck. They had acquired things in their year at the Boarding House.
“Oh, I don’t know, let him welcome himself home,” Lily called back to her daughter and trotted herself down to help. Daly wouldn’t hear of it. Arie, although she had seen her mother a few times across the year, realized how she had aged. She was then eighty-three.
“Mom, we can do it.”
Lily surprised them all – even Timken stopped to look as her voice carried to him. She straightened her back and tilted her head in the way she had and stated, “I am hardly useless.”
Arie dumbly handed her the bags with comfort blanket and pillows. Lily walked sedately, if unevenly with the light but awkward bags, back to the house and passed Timken who was now in the entrance hall about to do a stand and stare at the wide staircase.
“You can stay here. There’s plenty of room. It’s your house, too,” she told him but this third time saying it was not in the hollow needy tones of those said before. She knew what was needed. Arie and Timken had come back and she intended that they not go away again. She set out to prove her usefulness.
A few days later Arie was horrified to find both her mother and the car gone. She went back in the house in a panic, planning to call Daly, but first she speeded herself upstairs. It would take her a year or more to lose the weight she had gained at the Boarding House so she paused in the upper hall to catch her breath.
Timken now had his own room. It had not been hard to convince him into his own bed, his own space. As Arie had been explaining to him that it was time for him to be on his own, he was going to go to school now, even if it was in his own house, he had the clearest image of Mrs. Poughkeepsie come to mind and her voice saying, “Thomas!”.
“Okay,” he’s said to his mother, and helped set it all up.
Arie could hear him now, in his room, ‘telling’ something. Satisfied that he was not with her mother she went back downstairs and saw that the car was back, not in the half of the Carriage House that served as a garage, but in the driveway. Lily was seated in it.
Arie tried to get in the passenger seat but the door was locked. Lily reached over but the smooth button that would release the door defeated her attempts so she rolled down the window, got the keys from the ignition and handed them to Arie.
Arie slid in beside her.
“Where did you go?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, just for a drive. Wanted to see if I remembered how.”
It had been nearly forty years.
“And how was it?” Arie asked, gently, somehow knowing she need not fear a repeat.
“Well, I don’t know. It sure is different not having to change gears. I stepped on the brake a few times by accident, thinking it was the clutch. Couldn’t find the gear shift. Made for a jerky ride. Scared a couple of squirrels.”
They were both looking ahead, into the Carriage House garage.
Now a laugh escaped Arie and she was afraid she might have offended her mother. But Lily was laughing too and she put her head down on the steering wheel and the horn blared and that got them laughing even harder.
When they finally mopped their eyes and got out of the car Lily looked at the keys in Arie’s hand. “Better hide them in case I get a mad urge again,” Lily said and that started them off yet again.
Timken, in his very own room, looked down on his mother and grandmother leaning against each other as they walked, laughing. He regarded them for a moment with interest and then he too was laughing, not sure at what, and licking the window frame.
Arie suspected that her mother also ventured into ‘being useful’ over the finances. She found the contents of the desk not quite as she had left them. But nothing was ever said. In truth, Lily was amazed at and confounded by what she saw as the complexities of how Arie ‘kept house’. It had all seemed much simpler in her day. She didn’t understand ……. She left well enough alone.
Once she looked up from an advertisement in a magazine and inquired, “Are you setting aside funds for Timken’s education?”
Arie was in the midst of a portrayal and dragged her gaze back to the immediate. “All taken care of,” she answered.
“I had prepared for yours.”
“I know. I used it.”
Lily sighed, satisfied, and went back to her magazine. Arie returned to her real life.
Lily made herself ‘useful’ in Timken’s home schooling. She would sit endlessly with him, a patient soundingboard.
There was not the large classroom of students Arie had portrayed at the Boarding House but over the years one or two or three children would be included and use the sessions as tutoring, extra help for regular schooling. They provided society. Timken watched them with great interest.
Daly had started their coming by asking Arie to let one of his grandkids sit in on the lessons occasionally.
“He needs to learn what he knows,” Daly told her. And that is what he got. Arie had a way of drawing this out with a well worded question, the tone of her voice inviting confidence. But Lily seemed to be able to create a gentle vacuum of silence that broadened the response, the awareness.
“Did you ever consider being a teacher?” one of the mothers complimented her one day.
“Oh, I don’t know. Not really. I felt more qualified to be an actress.”
Arie had been surprised. She’d never heard her mother say this before.
“Well, maybe a good teacher is an actress, too,” the woman offered.
“No, I did my acting elsewhere,” Lily concluded.
“She said she did her acting elsewhere,” Arie would explain to Lily’s brother Kenneth when he came at her death. They had seen him on occasion across the years since his unexpected appearance when Arie’s father had died.
“I mean, she said it when someone told her she could have been a teacher and she said she wanted to be an actress, or thought more of herself as an actress and this woman said well maybe a teacher needed to be a good actress but Mom said, ‘I did my acting elsewhere.’” Arie felt it was important to get it just right, to be exact. She had been puzzled and wondered what her mother had meant.
Now she and Kenneth were in the summer house attempting to put together a tapestry of Lily’s life with bits and pieces of information.
“Seems most likely she meant her relationship with your Dad. Doesn’t it?” His doubt came at the end of a thought, Lily’s had proceeded it.
Arie considered this. “Maybe. But how accurate can I be in this, I mean, neither seemed unhappy, or particularly happy, I suppose. And what was I, eleven, when he died.” For some reason she shuddered.
Kenneth said, “I don’t think she ever really trusted that he married her because he loved her and not because she had this house. And the means to keep it.”
Arie swallowed some of her own thoughts over the years on this, not to do with her parents. “Cursed heiress,” she said quietly and then laughed at Kenneth’s look. She couldn’t tell hi she had named one of her comedic portrayals just that. And then she realized he might think she was speaking from her own experience and the absence of a father for Timken but she didn’t know how to retract the phrase. Instead she distracted with, “She took care of your parents, didn’t she?” Maybe she would get some clue as to why Lily had retreated totally from responsibility.
“Sure. They were both delicate. A right pair. Weren’t they? Lucky they both had money, both sides. They never would have survived otherwise. Would they?”
“I never knew that. Mom never said much about them.”
“Likely afraid once she got started she’d never stop. Oh, not to be harsh, they were my parents too. Weren’t they? Lily stayed home and looked after them. Maybe she wanted to go on the stage, or something. If so I never knew about it. Did I?”
Kenneth escaped, Arie heard in her head.
A dried leaf in the summerhouse was dangling magically in mid air, the means of support invisible. Arie settled her eyes on it.
“You saw her when she dressed in my father’s clothes.” Her tone was light, expecting nothing but hoping for much.
“Didn’t recognize her at first. Did I? But funny how it was never mentioned. I wondered afterward – “, he turned toward Arie and grinned widely, “ – if she had been dressed in a Zulu suit with bones in her ears and nose if I could have also accepted it without comment. I mean, how far can one go and get away with it?”
Arie gave a broad smile back and shrugged. She wasn’t sure what it was she needed to understand but it wasn’t this.
“When did she go back to dressing normal again?” he asked.
Arie felt suddenly frozen and then let out a part of her breath she might have been holding for decades. “Oh, Kenneth,” she said and reached out to put her hand on his knee. “It wasn’t normal, was it?”
He patted her arm. “No, of course not. It wasn’t.”
“But she did ‘get away with it’. For years and years. She became – normal – again when TK was born. I never understood any of it.” She had taken her hand back and was dragging her fingernails back and forth across each palm.
“Did you never talk about it?”
Her look told him that that had not been an option.
“Well, our parents were strange. Weren’t they? And Lily lived with them until they died. Didn’t she? She was in her thirties, then. Wasn’t she? “
Arie gritted her teeth in annoyance at his speech habits. She would have strangled her mother if she talked like that.
“Why do you say they were strange?”
“Oh, they were! Larger than life. Everything much more than it was. Much much more. They wore costumes more than clothing. Say – maybe that’s why…….”
They stared at each other.
“No,” Arie said, slowly. “I think it was more that she was, oh, I don’t know, using his clothes as a sort of disguise.”
“Exactly!” Kenneth was triumphant. “All costumes are disguise. All roles a mask. Aren’t they? You couldn’t have a true identity around them. You were just shadows. Weren’t we?”
The silence between them grew and the wind traced out the lattice with small whooshy sounds.
“How did they die?” Arie finally asked.
“Oh, God, you don’t know?” He paused, caught between a short telling or a detailed description. Caught between wanting to pat her arm again and protect her from gruesome family history and the need to share information that he had never shared with anyone else. He’d been there. It was clawed in memory. His telling was a compromise.
“My father died when he broke his neck sliding on some ice in the driveway, showing off, singing at the top of his voice, when he fell into the creek. Killed instantly. Wasn’t he?”
Arie stared at him wondering if he was joking but she knew he wasn’t. She was flummoxed. “What creek?” was all she could think to say. She had an insane desire to laugh.
“Oh, it used to flow along side the driveway, never much water but the incline was steep. Lily fell into it once or twice as a child. She hated it. It got all filled in after the accident. That’s why the willows grow so well. Don’t they?”
Arie continued to stare at him. She no longer felt like laughing.
“And my mother made a spectacle of herself by throwing herself on the coffin, gripping his hands, having to be – taken away. Wasn’t she?”
Even now, so many many years later he still had the occasional nightmare of his mother’s cries as she was dragged away and his father’s body partially lifted from the coffin, his head lolling lopsidedly. Lily had fainted. He had thrown up. This he could not describe. He was amazed she had not heard any details. But the family had become very reclusive after that, he supposed.
“Then she locked herself outside and died.”
“What?” She stared at the old man who was revealing things she had had no idea about. He sounded as if he needed to speak.
“We found her in the morning, a day or so after the funeral, nearly frozen to death in the solarium – “ he gestured toward the house. “She could barely speak to tell us she thought she’d heard him calling to her in the night and had gone to find him. Then she lie down in there, on the potting bench. Never really stopped shivering, it seemed. Died next day. Didn’t she.” His voice sounded as raspy as the hands he was slowly rubbing together. Memory could flick raw nerves long thought dead or at least numbed.
“What solarium?” The question burst from Arie’s shock and need to touch some sort of reality.
“It’s covered in the section of the house where the vines have taken over. By the lilacs.”
“I had no idea.” Arie was almost speechless.
“Lily would never speak of it. Maybe it would have been better if we had talked about it. But it’s all in the past now.” He suddenly thought of his sister’s death and how and why it had come about and he shuddered.
Arie slowly drew her eyes and caught Kenneth’s which suddenly seemed so watery and old. “I hope I die peacefully in bed,” she said, a half cry, a half laugh. “I hope there’s not some damned legacy…….,,”
And then she was crying and Kenneth was patting her back with one hand and digging in his pocket for a hanky for his own eyes.
Lily had been found midmorning in the garden with her tongue frozen to the clothesline pole.
“Stupid, I know,” she told Arie when she had been freed and tried to explain. “Stupid. Stupid.” The words were distorted by her damaged tongue. “Tell Timken to never, ever, ever – “
“I will, I will,” Arie had promised. She did not tell Timken. He thought his grandmother had developed an instant cold. Arie had never had a desire to lick anything out of the ordinary. Like her mother did. Like her son did.
Lily died. Something in her heart had given out, likely caused by “that unfortunate incident,” the doctor said.
As she was seeing the doctor out and she caught sight of Timken worriedly licking the newel post in the upstairs hall she spoke as harshly to him as she ever had in his entire life, “Don’t do that!” He was shocked. The doctor had not seen what the child was doing in the dim hallway. He patted Arie’s hand.
It had been midmorning, Arie bringing order to the laundry that her mother had turned chaotic with her “experiment” the day before and she was putting towels in the upstairs linen closet.
“I’ll be in to see how you’re doing in a moment,” she had called cheerfully out to her mother as she passed her door. There was not a response, not even an attempt at a painful, garbled one. The silence was somehow final.
Arie had not dropped the towels and gone immediately into the room. She carried them along the hall and put them carefully away, pausing to adjust a pile so they were more even, pausing to run finger and thumb of left hand several times from corner of mouth down full bottom lip.
Lily was on her side facing the window that looked over the garden. She looked asleep. Arie knew she was not. But she also somehowfelt she was not dead. Beyond help of returning to life but not yet past it. Hovering. And into that hovering, Arie spoke.
She sat on the chair beside the bed. She gave a great sigh. She had a small thought at Timken and remembered, gratefully, that he was with Daly choosing a Christmas tree on Daly’s son’s woodlot.
“I know you’ve been wondering,” Arie began. I know you will rest easier knowing. Or maybe it’s me who will rest easier knowing you know. So you won’t hesitate to help us wherever you’re going. If we need help. Well, I’ll tell you – “
And she sat there with her hands crossed on her lap and her feet crossed at her ankles and told her mother. About the Sunday morning when she was forty-four years old and settled in life. How she had finished her errands in the mall and walked the few blocks to the hydro building intending to drop the payment in the evening and weekend mail slot. It was one of those infrequent occasions where she had forgotten to mail it before its due date.
(weather) She was in a pre-portrayal state, casting around in her mind for a role or a scene that would fit the day and the situation. The views of herself in store windows in her casual clothes gave her a casual feel and she exaggerated the bop-along gait. Maybe she’d become -. And then she noticed that the door to the building that housed the hydro was propped open and the smell of new carpet adhesive was much in evidence. Without much thought she slipped through and went up the two flights of stairs to the hydro floor. The portrayal was put on hold. (describe somewhere how she cannot portray in the present!)
There was no mail slot in the door of the payment office for some reason. She tried the door but of course it was locked. She considered pushing the envelope under the door but then realized this would lead to speculation as to how and when it had gotten there, supposedly when the building was all locked up. With this in mind Arie wiped the doorknob with the skirt of her dress and smiled to herself as she did so, thinking that this would give her something to enlarge upon in the future portrayal. She’d put the envelope in the intended mail drop outside the front door.
As she turned toward the stairs the elevator door beside her opened. She couldn’t see anyone. Curiosity made her take two steps forward and peer inside to the left. A boy was in the corner by the controls and he stared back at her, fear and resignation and a bit of bravado in his expression. The door began to close and for some reason Arie let herself be pushed inside the elevator rather than out.
Before they had a chance to say one word to each other the elevator moved a foot or so and stopped. (check out mechanics of this)
They looked at each other. The boy made a show of pushing the DOWN button. Then the UP button. Then the OPEN DOOR button. Nothing.
“I think we’re stalled,” he said.
“I hope it wasn’t because I haven’t paid my hydro bill,” she said with a bit of a laugh, swinging her purse slightly in which the bill was, but he didn’t understand. She traced her lips with her thumb and forefinger.
“We’re not actually supposed to be in here, I mean this building, “ he said, watching her, staring at what she was doing so she stopped. “I mean I’m not supposed to be.”
“Me neither,” she admitted and he seemed relieved and disappointed at the same time.
“Oh, I thought I could pretend I was with you – when we’re caught.”
She laughed and he laughed and they relaxed.
“Wonder what happened?” they said at the same time.
“Owe me a Coke,” he said.
He moved away from the corner where he had ducked when the doors opened, flexed his arms and cracked his knuckles. Cracked them again. The sound made Arie feel nauseous. She leaned against the back wall and stared at the door.
“Maybe it’s a power blackout and we’re stuck for the rest of the weekend,” he said. Neither laughed.
After awhile they both stopped standing and staring at the door. He slid down the side wall and sat with his back against it. Tied a shoelace on his sneaker that was half undone.
Arie had on a loose flowered dress that was totally unlike the severe suits she wore all week to work. She stared at her feet in sandals, the toenails painted a brilliant red. No one at work would expect such scarlet nails. The boy was staring at them too. Then he looked at her fingernails which were square filed and not polished. She felt exposed by his scrutiny.
“We could yell, I suppose,” he suggested. “I think there was someone putting in carpet downstairs.”
Arie lowered herself to a seated position, tucking her legs modestly beside her, covering the crimson nails with the skirt of her dress, putting her purse and the bag with the ????? neatly on the floor.
“I’d rather not,” she said. “I’d rather be rescued without fuss.”
“Me too,” he agreed and grinned and she saw the braces on his teeth.”
He noticed her notice and quickly closed his lips, looked away in embarrassment toward the door, stretched out his hands and cracked his knuckles again. Arie grimaced.
Sometime later he was telling her how he had just gotten the braces the day before, in this very same building, his orthodontist was on the top floor and he hated them, they felt awful but they were supposed to fix his teeth and that was why he had come back today, he’d left his backpack somewhere and his dad would be furious when he found out and he thought he might have left it at the tooth doctor’s and he’d seen the door open so he came in and then he decided to check out the elevator………
Arie knew he was lying but she couldn’t guess why and she was amused at the extent of the details of his fabrication.
“I don’t know really why he was there,” she told her mother, not knowing if her mother could hear or understand but driven in the telling. “But he was there and so was I.”
They talked idly. She couldn’t really remember a great deal of what was said afterward. It wasn’t really interesting or of great depth on her part, or his, she suspected. They were passing time.
The change occurred when he began to fidget. It suddenly occurred to her why.
She was as embarrassed as he was but she was, after all, an adult.
“You, um, could – uh, go – in the corner. I won’t look.”
He turned red. “I couldn’t. Not on the floor.”
“Suit yourself. Better than in your, um, trousers.”
He had on baggy jeans.
Finally he scrambled to his feet and moved toward the corner. She turned her head away. She waited. And waited some more. She ventured a peek. He was standing with his back to her, one hand up on the wall, his head hanging. The desolation of his posture made her blurt, “What’s wrong?”
She could hear him swallow. “I – can’t –“ His voice was strained.
She was genuinely puzzled. “Well, I’d offer to step outside,” she started to say and then giggled. He turned slightly toward her at the sound and she saw the reason for his distress.
“Oh,” she said. And looked immediately away but her face burned and her body responded in a way it never had in forty-four years.
He watched the flush creep up her neck and his eyes crept down the neckline of the flowered dress to the scoop of flesh showing. He turned fully toward her, his breath louder and faster and hers was beginning to match his.
She raised her eyes slowly and when she got past what he was cupping in one hand to look into his eyes she shook her head. But then her hand raised and finger and thumb traced her full bottom lip and he whispered, “Oh, please.” And she welcomed him.
Of course she did not detail this to her mother. “Nature took its course,” she told Lily. “It seemed right for us both.”
When she had finished speaking she sat still for a moment, hands still folded primly, although her body, at the memories, was anything but locked.
“Just so you know,” she finally said against the shame and the longing. “Just so you know.”
Chapter five 5012 Jan 2 04