Our Aunt Grace was buried on the last warm day in November. One day later, they told us, the gravedigger would have stopped work for the season; then she would have gone into a vault until spring. Grace had hated the winter and always worn a sweater except on the hottest days of summer. Maybe that was the reason she didn't like to visit our
mother in the house where they, and, a generation later, we
had grown up. The house was cold. Our mother preferred
the winter. She said she liked to see the outline of trees, to
feel the sting of cold on her face. In the summer she felt
dead. "That's when I come alive," Grace would reply, then
compress her lips and shake her head. "Can't stand the cold.
Don't know why you like it."
Grace always looked huddled up against herself, trying to
keep warm. In the upstairs hall of the house in New Rochell
is a picture of Grace and her twin sister, Mary, each lying
bundled in one of their mother's arms. She must have been
warm then. A year later Mary fell from a carriage and died
of head injuries. That left two children: our mother, four
the time, and Grace, just turned one. Their own mother, the
dark-haired woman in the picture looking down so peacefully
at the babies in her arms, had kept a journal following the
twins' birth. It breaks off, a month after Mary's death, with
single entry: "Every night I dream of her as a baby of two
weeks. She is sitting on my lap, her helpless back with its fine
hair buckled forward; one of my hands supports her jaw
while with the other one I caress her head, feel the plates of
skull that have not yet knit together in a sheet of bone. 0r
sometimes she is lying on her back on the bed, crying tearlessly, her arms making those strange amphibian motions of
newborns, swimming through space. I raise her to my shoulder. We walk back and forth, my hand moving up and down
her spine, soothing her quiet. The thought of her flesh makes me dizzy. It doesn't help that Mary's crib has been given away and her clothes distributed. Grace remains."
In fact, Grace remained seventy more years. "Poor Grace,"
our mother would say. "She's had all the bad luck." The day
after Pearl Harbor was bombed Grace married Patrick who,
in a few weeks, was sent to the Pacific. He returned some
months later with a disability pension, discharged on medical
grounds. The doctors said that in New Guinea he had incurred a weak heart that would last him about seven years.
During those years-exactly seven-he and Grace produced
five children who all had eyes like Grace's: full of light that
hid more than it revealed. The year before his death Patrick
put the house in order: in the kitchen he built cupboards
with special revolving shelves, a room in the basement where
the children could play, a platform for a television opposite
her bed so Grace would be able to finish the day in adult
company. The last time we saw him, Patrick stuck his head
into the car where we were sitting, ready to leave. "Don't wait
till I'm lying in McGinnis' to come back to see us." Our parents laughed and protested, warmed by an afternoon of conversation and drinks in the sun, and we all turned back to
wave at Grace who was standing with a baby in her arms on
the steps of the house. The next time we saw Patrick, however, he was at McGinnis', laid out in his green army uniform,
the tie rising stiffly f'rom its knot before sinking onto his
chest.
After Patrick's death, we saw less of Grace. It had been Patrick, always, with his slow dark eyes and lingering handshake
who had welcomed us and waved goodbye. Without him, no
one seemed to know where to look, least of all our mother
and Grace. When they met, each would look past the other to
her nieces and nephews, our mother bending quickly to kiss a
child, Grace leaning backward to focus her gaze and ask if
anyone were hungry. Our father would immediately set off
on a long walk by himself, and the older children begin a
game of cards that lasted till it was time to leave. We always
played sprawled on the floor of the same little room. Over us
towered the grandfather clock that had once stood in the hall
of the house in New Rochelle but which Grace had asked for
after Patrick's death. Looking up from our cards, we could see the silent moon sailing above, or hear, over the shuffle cards, the wheeze of the gong sounding the hours. Together
our mother and Grace sat on the couch talking. Our mother
would rest one arm along the back, her eyes drifting over
Grace's face, while Qrace, upright in a green sweater, chafing
her hands together for warmth, explained how much she had
paid for the baby's snowsuit, the bargain she had found in
girls' shoes.
One visit only is distinct in memory from the others. As
usual we were on the floor playing cards and as usual Grace
and our mother were sitting side by side on the couch. But
the incident begins in silence. They are bent over a photograph of themselves as children that our mother had come
across the week before and shown us. In the picture the two
of them stand together in a blaze of light with their mother
whose face is hidden by the sharp tilt of her hat; behind them
is a young version of the tulip tree that grows against the side
of our house. Grace, in the middle, is clutching her elbows
and looking with a wide, impassive gaze straight into the eye
of the camera; our mother, taller than Grace, scowls at the
ground from under dark brows. The silence in the room, as
they stare at the picture, absorbs the slap of cards on the
floor, the repeated click of the pendulum describing its arc.
Then our mother speaks, wondering aloud why they have so
few memories of this unknown woman, their mother, who after all hadn't died till they were in their teens. Did Grace, to
always connect her with darkened rooms and enforced quiet
What was wrong?
Grace's lips twitch together, then apart. "I'll tell you what
was," she says. "She couldn't stand to touch me. I cried at her
funeral. But I promised myself then I'd never cry again. And
I haven't. Not even when Patrick died." Our mother makes
some awkward movement, leaning forward to look into her
face, but Grace is already on her feet, pulling her skirt
straight.
On the November morning of our Aunt Grace's funeral,
my sister, Maddie, walks up the hall of the apartment where
live into the sunny room in front. Together we are going to the funeral with our older brother, who will arrive in a few
minutes. Each of us is married, each of us has children, but
the three of us are going to the funeral alone. While we wait
Maddie and I sit at the round oak table, listening to Brahms
and sipping tea from mugs. The sun falls through the green
depths of the plants hanging in the open windows onto the
floor in long slanting rectangles. We can see the bare
branches of the ailanthus tree across the street; on such a
warm day branches should be heavy with leaves. We agree on
that. Maddie is wearing very high heels and a longish skirt
that swings forward in front when she walks. As always, I am
wearing pants and boots. We want to be sure nobody will mistake us for each other. In fact, we look entirely different.
Maddie has long straight honey-colored hair she wears twisted in a knot on the back of her head. My hair is dark and
curly. Yet throughout our childhoods, inexplicably to us,
teachers and friends of our parents confused us. "Oh yes, of
course," they would say when one of us sullenly refused to
answer to the other's name. "You don't really look at all
alike." But that didn't prevent their mixing us up again and
again. In dead earnest we tried to make the confusion impossible. I became more outspoken; Maddie grew silent. She
spent more time alone; I surrounded myself with people. As
we got older, we held long conversations in which we defined
ourselves in contrast to the other. These talks always began in
moments of understanding and rest. At first we would listen
with almost exaggerated attention, generously agreeing where
at another time we would have objected. But then things
would get confused.
"It's good to be quiet, Maddie. You're much more aware of
other people if you're a bit silent."
"And it's nice for people that you talk so much. You liven
things up."
"The only thing to be careful of is not to become withdrawn. You don't want to shut people out."
"I think there's more danger of that in your noise."
Instantly we would be filled with rage, furiously denying
what we feared were fatal incapacities in ourselves. If they
were fatal, each of us thought, it was only because of the existence of the other.
But the most important fact between Maddie and me was the year that divided us. I was older; she was younger. With
Maddie I couldn't resist playing the part of the first, the enviable one, and she, rebelling the whole time, couldn't acknowledge me in any other role. Chafing against my protection,
she felt abandoned by demonstrations of my need. I, on the
other hand, was impatient of her reliance on me, yet felt
tender toward her because of it. Her self-sufficiency affected
me as a desertion.
"I brought you a piece of the cake I made last night," Maddie says, opening her big black bag and putting it on the table. "Better you should eat it than I." Maddie has a tendency
to gain weight easily; I, on the other hand, worry about being
too thin.
I eat the cake in gulps, showing her what a good cake I
think she's made. This is one of my tricks, the older sister
reinforcing her authority by bestowing approval, affirming
the younger sister's faltering efforts. Maddie, undoubtedly
wishing I'd take a more matter-of-fact tone, looks away from
my nodding, churning face. "Incredible, isn't it," she says.
"All these years and now Grace dies while she's away."
Our mother is farther away than she has ever been in her
life, visiting a friend who has gone to live in Egypt, and we're
not even sure she's received the telegram announcing her sister's death. She hadn't wanted to leave with Grace so sick; for
the last month Grace has been lying in a coma, hearing, seeing nothing. "Go," Grace's children had told our mother.
"She could continue like this for months, years. Certainly she
doesn't know if you're here or five thousand miles away." So
our mother had gone, worried about the heat in Cairo, about
Grace slipping into death.
"Yet somehow fitting," I mumble to Maddie, without too
much thinking what I am saying. Maddie gives me a quick
look of comprehension and pulls up her mouth at one side to
show she doesn't care. Immediately I am sorry, knowing I
have touched the sore place between us. Fitting, I have said,
that sisters should die so far from each other when they have
spent their lives nearby. Fitting that the distance between
them should at last, in the hour of death, be made concrete,
measurable in miles.
Maddie and I are always signaling back and forth how easily we can do without each other; and we do so in almost exact
proportion as we are beguiled by a dream of sisters tenderly,
eternally united, closer in sympathy to each other than to
anyone else. Like potential lovers we are attracted and repelled by the promise of an intimacy that would shut out the
world. We are fearful of finding ourselves enclosed in the
spaces of childliood where all the old rivalries and exclusions
and betrayals wait to rise up with their power to accuse and
to hurt. But now, because I have made my claim, because it
seems like a holiday to be sitting here in the sun with Maddie
on a Friday morning, I want to open a door I would open to
no one else. "Maddie," I will say. "Listen with me to the high
note on the clarinet that is coming. Every day I wait for it.
Does it make you think of anything? To me it's the last
strained note of autumn, the final protest before the collapse
into winter."
Maddle's eyes are deep green; when she looks at me over
her tea the edges blur, light slanting straight through. No, I
cannot say these things. As sisters, we are too intimate for
confidences of this kind. Our knowledge of each other is too
complete. Not only will she understand immediately what I
hear in the note, she will also remember what my enthusiasms cost her childhood.
Now Maddie gets up to answer a knock at the door, I hear
a shout and then Charlie's footsteps coming up the hall.
Charlie's feet are too big for him. He flings them slightly out
to the side when he walks, as if to get them out of the way.
But at forty-three they are steadier than in his teens when
they were always wobbling out of control. I get up to greet
Charlie; he grabs me by the hair and pulls me forward to kiss
my forehead. Then he jabs his finger at Maddie and shakes
his head. "Trouble," he says. That's his name for Maddie. I
am Disaster. I don't know what greeting he sends to Maddie
on her birthday; to me he always sends a variation of the last.
"Forty years ago this month, the German nation sent forth
men of great vision to civilize France. In the process, these
men traversed Belgium where on May twenty-eighth Leo-
pold, King of the Belgians, stopped impeding their progress,
thus making possible the enlightenment of his neighbor to
the south, You must reflect that you were but one of the
bright things that occurred on that memorable day."
Charlie doesn't want to sit down or drink tea; he is impatient to leave. Maddie and I gather our coats and the sandwiches we are taking with us. Then we walk down the hall in single file, Maddie, Charlie, and myself.
"Get in," Charlie says, unlocking the doors of the car that is
parked just outside the building. "Get in and roll down the
windows. We're late."
"Relax, Charlie," Maddie replies. "You're getting all
worked up."
When we were children Charlie had fits of temper that
shook the house. He'd stick out his lower lip, narrow his eyes,
then throw himself, shoulders first against a wall. Or he'd
throw one of us if Maddie or I were near. Sometimes we'd
liked to tease him. "Temper, temper," we'd chant, hopping
around, keeping just out of reach. But often we'd provoke
him, knowing he'd catch us.
Charlie looks at Maddie over the roof of the car and shakes
his head. "Same old Maddie," he says, and she throws back at
him an intensely sweet smile. But once we're rolling down
Columbus Avenue on our way to the Lincoln Tunnel, we
look around, at peace. In the cafés people are sitting coatless
in the sun, talking, reading the paper. They are sprawled on
the steps of dusty buildings, and rocking back and forth in
chairs that have been placed, along with panels of stained
glass and headboards of brass beds, in front of second hand
furniture stores. We are all sitting in the front of the car,
Maddie in the middle, and she and I gaze out the window.
We pass Lincoln Center and just below it the plot of land
with the placard announcing Fordhani University. "Lombardy poplars," Maddie murmurs and we look together at the
columns of green leaves shifting in the light. "I always forget," she continues, "how long they hold onto their leaves.
And so green. Do they turn yellow before they fall?" But I
can't remember and Charlie looks as if he hasn't heard.
We do not say what we are thinking: how strange for the
three of us to find ourselves alone, no parents, spouses, children or friends to mute the edges of our old childhood isola-
tion. Long ago we had despaired of trying to describe to other people the things that together we knew too well to
mention: the smell of the sheets on our beds, the desolating
music of the operas that our father listened to on the radio Saturday afternoons, the taste of rust on the back screen door. What these things had meant to each of us we didn't know, couldn't ask. They served merely as the backdrop of
events we could more easily describe. But we didn't often try
to talk about those either.
When Maddie and I tried to recall something from our
childhood, we were usually left staring at each other in disbelief.
"What an awful Fourth of July that was, when I wouldn't
speak to you because you'd left the sparklers out in the grass
and it rained on them," one of us would say.
"That wasn't me, it was you who left them out. We'd
bought them the day before and you wanted to light one and
left the whole package under a tree. Don't you remember?"
With Charlie, efforts to recapture the past were more
straightforward. "You must be talking about the ice storm of
January, 1947," he'd say when I asked him if he remembered
our mother making us stop midway through a snowbank so
we could look undistracted at ice-coated branches glittering
against a blue sky. "The telephone wires snapped and hung
in the streets. None of the trains were running. Your father
didn't go to work for a week."
That's how Charlie talked: "your father, your mother."
When we were in our late teens and early twenties and went
to the same parties, people overhearing us talk to each other
would ask if we had different mothers and fathers. "Isn't
your mother his, too?" Then it had seemed to me that Charlie was disowning me as his sister; but I had come to think
differently. Charlie's passion was history. For him the past
was intensely romantic, the present endurable only as it could
be perceived from some distant perspective. When he said
"your mother, your father" he was assuming the voice of either an anonymous ancestor or a hypothetical grandchild,
speaking of our generation as if he hadn't belonged to it. He
himself was of another time and place, a disembodied observer of our common experience.
Or perhaps it was only that Charlie, who loved facts, was
acknowledging a simple one: parents are not the same parents to their different children.
"If the French and German military leave policies hadn't
been so different during the First World War, Grace might have had a very different life," Charlie says, when we are in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Charlie, we know, expects us to look startled, but we are
united in refusing to give him the satisfaction of a question.
He waits until we have emerged into the flat noonday of New
Jersey before he speaks again.
"Her life would have been very different."
Now that we know he will go on without requiring us to
show interest, we can give it to him.
"Why is that, Charlie?" I ask.
"A question of numbers. The manpower needed by the Nazis was spawned while the German army of the First World
War was on leave. The French army wasn't so successful in
replacing its lost numbers in the next generation."
"You're telling us the French were outdone by the Germans?" Maddie asks.
"Well, to begin with, the French army didn't give leave as
regularly as the German army. And when they did, the men
were taken out of the lines, packed in muddy boxcars and
sent back to Paris. They'd pick up some cheap wine in a canteen and by the time they got home they were drunk, dirty, a
mess. I doubt their women were overjoyed at the sight of
them. The German army, on the other hand, gave leave fairly often. And then the men were sent home shaved, in dress
uniform. They travelled by boxcar, too. But if the cars had
been used to carry horses, they cleaned them out before they
packed the men in. Look at the comparative birth rates during the war years. You can see where the armies of twenty-five years later came from."
We are moving steadily down the New Jersey Turnpike.
On one side the Newark airport rises uncertainly from beyond the marsh grasses; on the other, a plane is making a
swift descent, its nose pointed straight at us.
"But what of Grace?" I ask Charlie, leaning forward to look
at him.
"Can't hear you."
"Grace," Maddie yells. "Different life."
"Oh yes," Charlie says, as the plane sinks down on the other side of us. "If there hadn't been a war to disable Patrick,
she wouldn't have been left alone all those years."
Charlie's logic is irrefutable, but it makes me twitch. "Sure she would have had a different life if there hadn't been a
war. But so would we all. And why isolate just one cause? For
the war, or for what happened to Grace?"
"That's the way I see it," Charlie replies. "Watch out for the
exit to Metuchen."
I am jolted by the sound of a name I haven't heard for
years.
"Oh, Charlie," I say, leaning across Maddie. "Did we visit
Grace in Metuchen once and come back in a train full of soldiers?"
"Yes, your mother took us. Maddie, you stayed at home; I
guess you were too little. We took a train back. It must have
been late afternoon, December, January."
"The train was all lit up," I remember, "and it was dark outside. Everyone was laughing and talking. You went up
and down the aisle telling the men how much they made a
month because you had a little book, what was it called, that
gave ranks and salaries and you could tell their ranks by looking at their uniforms."
"It was called a pay table. You were four and I was seven."
Maddie is staring straight ahead, excluded. "Never mind," I
say to her silently. "I'll tell you what Charlie will never know.
On that train I fell blindly in love for the first time. Nothing
remains except the feel of his knee, the fresh smell of khaki.
I had my arms around his leg, at first maybe to keep from
falling. But the longer I held on, the harder I clung. It was
the only place in the world I wanted to be. It was home.
When the train started to slow down and I knew we'd have to
get off, I thought no, I'll stay here, they can go without me.
But when the train stopped I got off without a word because
I was too proud to let anyone know. I can remember walking
down the platform, soldiers everywhere, hugging my desolation to myself'. Do you remember the first time for you?"
Maddie continues to stare blankly out the window. We
haven't exchanged a word.
McGinnis' Funeral Home has a parking lot in the back and
we get out of the car, leaving our coats inside. Scattered over
the pebbles are leaves from the maple and tulip trees surrounding the old house. We hesitate a moment before going
in. The sun is warm, the sky is blue. "In the city, the sky never looks like that," Maddie says, tilting her face to the sun.
Charlie is putting on his tie. "Patrick died on October
twelfth, Columbus Day. The difference of a month. Most of
the leaves must have been on the trees then."
We look up through the mesh of branches. The maples are
almost entirely bare. On the tulip trees spikey pods glint
among the last flat leaves, ragged yellow. Beyond, expanses
of blue open before our upturned faces. Like the eye of a
camera, I think, and remember the old photograph of Grace
and our mother when they were children.
Two of Grace's daughters are at the door to take us by the
hand as we enter. Their eyes are drenched in light, just as
when we played cards together on the floor. One of them
asks us how long it took to drive down while the other looks
eagerly into our faces. "Oh, yes, Charlie," she says. "You're
just the same." She seems less sure of Maddie and me. I feel
shy, suddenly; when I look obliquely in Maddie's direction I
catch her doing the same in mine. "But come in," she says,
and we follow her down a hall into a large room in front.
Nobody looks to the end of the room where the open coffin stands banked with flowers. Instead we join Grace's other
children in a corner, exclaiming in low voices. "Why have we
let so much time go by," we say; "hardly any distance at all, it
would be so easy." It has probably never occurred to any of
us to try to see the others and I have listened without interest
to passing news of these cousins: marriages, babies, divorce.
Yet we are in earnest now. How have we lived our entire
adult lives without each other? With a quick gesture one of
Grace's daughters crosses her hands in front of her, and
Maddie stares. I know she has been startled by the memory
of Grace's broad, sensitive fingers.
Charlie nods to Maddie and me that it is time. Slowly we
move toward the coffin, Maddie and I holding back a little in
protest to Charlie's taking charge. I am about to put my arm
through Maddie's but stop when I see her face. When Maddie is moved, her eyes widen with amazement and her mouth
slides up at one corner. She does not like to be touched then.
I know to keep my distance. But now, whether it is the heavy
scent of chrysanthemums, or Charlie standing there with his
bottom lip stuck out a little, or the glimpse of Grace's face
which in death has finally lost its chill, Maddie raises one arm
and rests it across my shoulders. "Poor Grace," she whispers so quietly I don't know if she means for me to hear. "That's what she was always called. But why?"
After the funeral Maddie and I take the train back to New
York because Charlie is going on to visit friends in Washington. He drives us to the station and we talk briefly while waiting for the train.
"Grace would have hated that, the open coffin," Maddie
says. "She didn't like people to come see her even when she
was sick. But she would have liked your being one of the pall-bearers, Charlie. She was fond of you."
Charlie bows. "What you mean is we were both fond of'our
own ways.
"Yes, I mean that too. And she would have enjoyed the sun
in the cemetery, the feel of it on her back. It was almost hot."
"Almost a day in September," I say, "except that the
ground was hard."
We catch sight of the train coming down the tracks.
"By the way," Charlie says. "You heard the soprano sing
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' as we carried the coffin
out of the church?"
We nod at him.
" 'The trumpet that shall never call retreat.' That was for
Grace."
Maddie and I look at him expectantly but the train is pulling in and Charlie rapidly kisses each of us on the forehead
without seeming to notice. "Hurry up," he says. "Get on."
As we are going up the steps he calls after us. "An abolitionist tune before the Civil War. Became a marching song
for the Union Army."
We turn to wave and the train jolts forward. "Your mother's grandfather marched to it. A drummer boy, fourteen
years old in 1861."
Charlie straightens his shoulders and turns one foot at a
right angle in our direction, then clicks the other one closed.
He faces us, his eyes expressionless. Then, as the train gathers speed, he gravely raises his hand to his forehead in a salute.
On the train going back to New York, Maddie and I talk
very little. The car is almost empty. It is too early for people going into the city for the evening or returning home after
work. We choose a broad leather seat for three. Maddie puts
her bag on the seat between us and takes out the sandwiches
we have been carrying around all day, waiting to eat. The
winter solstice is only a month away, we remark. Now that the
sun is in the west the fields of marsh grass look cold. Between
bites I tell Maddie how walking home the other night I had
suddenly caught sight of the full moon suspended between
two buildings. It made me stop where I was. Then while I
hesitated, waiting, a long formation of Canada geese passed
over its face. The street was so quiet, the city so still, that
f'rom far away I could hear their faint honking as they flew
south to warmth.
Soon Maddie falls asleep to the slow jostling of the train
and I pick up the morning paper that someone has left on
the seat in front of' us. No news there, I think, briefly turning
its pages. Then I put it down and idly stare, past Maddie, out
the window. The sun is turning red. In the distance the
flames from the oil refineries stand out against the darkening
sky. Maddie's head, framed by the window, looks smaller,
more compact. As it rocks back and forth against the seat her
hair is coming unpinned, slipping in a coil down her neck.
Her hands are lying palms up on either side of her, empty. I
wonder when it was, the last time I saw Maddie asleep, and
think how that made the great difference in living with someone: you saw them sleep. Then I remember a Sunday afternoon twenty years ago when I had watched Maddie sleeping.
We had gone to the same college for one year. On that afternoon she had come to the room in the library where she
knew I studied to ask if I would look over an essay on King
Lear she had to hand in the next day. The room was empty,
except for us, and we sat on a leather sofa, a little embarrassed to be close together in an unaccustomed place.
Through the long windows that looked on a, cluster of birch
trees we could see that it had begun to snow. Perhaps it
would continue all night. We said how glad we were there
was no Cordelia in our family, how it would be a strain, having a sister like that. Then, when we had finished with the
essay, I picked up the book I had been reading. I thought
Maddie was reading, too, and looked up suddenly to see her asleep, month wide open, essay in hand, her head failing
backward at rest against the slippery leather. Till death, Maddie, I vowed, my heart tightening with pity and love. But in
the next breath I asked her forgiveness, knowing how intolerable it was, the condescension in my love.
Maddie wakes up as the train is pulling into Penn Station.
Quickly she loops her hair into a knot and fastens it to the
back of her head. We gather our coats and walk toward the
door at the end of the car so we can get off as soon as the
train stops. Maddie is going to take a crosstown bus, and I am
going uptown on the Broadway Express. Each of us will soon
be home. We stand sideways together in the aisle, facing the
window. Outside, in the tunnel, lights sweep slowly past in
the darkness. Maddie is a little dazed from sleep; looking at
her reflection in the window I think she must be dreaming
still. For a minute I lose myself in the rhythmic sway of light,
in the slow clatter of wheels. Then, gradually, I become
aware that Maddie, staring straight ahead, is looking at me.
In the instant before the train jolts to a stop we exchange a
reflected look: intimate, defiant, sustained. Then we pull our
coats around our shoulders and walk out onto the platform
where we smile and part.
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Fiction from Web Del Sol