It was around two in the afternoon. Our routine is drawing or playing a game and then we have tea and cookies while I talk and she listens. I have been telling her about my life—my childhood, that is. School, pets, early books, our parents, you and Edmund, Polly and Teddy, the many rules we lived by in Philadelphia, and the freedom of life on the Point. I could be reading her Tolstoy and the result would be the same. She doesn’t understand. Yet I was careful about what I said as if she might, until today. Perhaps it was because she was in a pensive mood, or perhaps I was. In any case, I spilled the beans.
“Come in,” I called out.
I kept working. Finally she came into the dining room. I didn’t look around. She placed her hand on my arm, a heavy, damp touch, rain falling.
I turned around, feigning great surprise. “There is a frog! Dressed as a girl!” I covered my eyes.
She giggled. Pulled my hands apart. Stared at me, but when I didn’t respond, pressed her nose to mine. See me.
“Nan? Is that you?”
She cocked her head and widened her eyes. I love her scent. It’s not nice, or pretty. It’s the odor of growth, like undergrowth, like dirt.
“What are you doing today? Do you want to do some drawing with me?” I pushed a piece of paper her way, and then went back to my work.
She put her hands on the edge of the seat and climbed up, first one knee and then the other, turned around and sat. I extended a pencil to her. I was trying to draw a campanula flower. Purple cups holding shadows. To my right, a pencil sought a place in a child’s hand. I slowed down and grasped my pencil again in the triangular method I was taught. The other pencil got throttled near its tip. I pushed mine across the paper. This was imitated in a line that was slight on the outward foray, but more assured on the return. I went back to my work but was wholly aware of her, her industry, her unquestioning trust in what I was doing, and the simplicity of how she joined me. I doubt it even occurs to her whether or not to like me. I am a given, a fixture. Her companions are the trees, stones, small animals, birds, and Robert. The same companions I have chosen now—but I have chosen them after a lifetime of spending my days with people, and my adult life mainly in sickrooms, working with fervor and purpose during the days of hope, and then dull duty during the hopeless waiting. I’m not certain which is the more enervating, coming sorrow or sorrow itself. When it was going on, I put one foot in front of the next, lived one day at a time, as the dying live. Now I can look into the distance, across the water, past the horizon, with a growing interest in what’s there.
Nan worked very hard. We didn’t speak, but her breaths are a vocabulary. When she’s concentrating, her tongue moves across her bottom lip as if polishing it. The air in the back of her throat laps, tide-like. The quality of her application to the task is impressive, and I believe she has a high intelligence—but I don’t know much about children.
We spent another hour drawing, which seemed a long time to me for a child to focus. When Nan lay her pencil down and slid out of her chair, Mrs. Circumstance made grilled cheeses and tomato soup. After we ate, we headed into the glass room for a postprandial stretch on the wicker sofa. Star was with us, as always now. We walked around the room in a parade. Nan stopped to look at various objects, and lingered over the family pictures on the center table. I named everyone for her, and she touched their—your—faces. Then to the sofa, where Star thrust his head forward onto Nan’s lap, and she tapped his back. I began to speak without a plan, and found myself back in the realm of the family pictures. As good a subject as any, and all the same to her.
First, Edmund. A car accident. No real surprise to anyone, such was his exuberance, his wildness, too often buoyed by Scotch. He didn’t seem like a person who’d grow old, did he? He burned at too high a temperature to last a whole lifetime. He was the light soul in the house, the person who found humor behind every sofa cushion. Only Edmund was undeterred by our mother’s austerity. He threw himself at her in every way possible, not so much determined to crack the fa?ade—a mind welded to the society it came from—but to find the place he believed she must have saved for him when she decided to have children, that secret meadow or coveside where his real mother roamed, ready to lie on the ground with him and tickle. We girls kept our silliness confined to our bedrooms, or took it way outside, but he brought it into the living room in the form of jokes, limericks, mimicry, puns, impersonations, dances, and songs. He could imitate the voice and posture of anyone. After a visit from one of Grace’s friends, he liked to sit where that person had, and speak exactly as she did. “You must come see my daffodils! I actually fear for their taking over the property! It must be so hard to live in the city in springtime! Please come cut my roses!” He was especially good at imitating Ailish Hancock, Polly’s stepmother, the Irish factory girl. “Edmund Lee, it’s the Fourth of July, and why aren’t you wearing your red, white, and blue? Even the colored don the flag for Independence Day, though it was no independence for them!”
He was ingenious, wasn’t he? We laughed until our mirth stopped making sounds and our faces were twisted like dried apples and we were sure we’d die from lack of air. Edmund studied our mother’s face for signs of amusement—any sign would do. If her lip twitched or her cheek bunched, he clapped his hands and threw his arms around her neck. “Mummy, you are a peach pie!” and she’d throw back her head and laugh!
I don’t know what would have become of Edmund had he grown older. He was getting tight too many evenings, acquiring an exhausted look in spite of his continued swirling energy. I tried to talk to him, but he made light of it, hugging me around the shoulders and assuring me he was finer than fine. I have always wondered about his accident. A single car accident, they called it. Instantly dead, or so they told us. Who knows what that means? What fraction of a second of consciousness might be included in the word instant? If he had that fraction of time, what did he think of? I’d guess it was his days as a boy, when mischief wasn’t deadly, but brought him love.
Then you. You became sweeter and sweeter as you turned to Jesus more fervently, believing you understood him better with every bite taken out of you by your disease. I’d walk in the room and you’d tell me you were at Station Seven, when Jesus falls for the second time. “Imagine his pain,” you’d whisper. This dramatic experience of Scripture wasn’t part of our upbringing. Lachlan took us to Meeting, but our mother believed in both the notion of a Supreme Being and in the social importance of church and made us go with her. “You are Episcopalians,” she’d admonish us, to correct our manners or wayward thoughts. We weren’t, though. Lachlan put his foot down before we were confirmed in the Episcopal Church. “Too many worthy people among those ranks,” he said, worthy being just a shade away from unctuous or holier than thou. You were sorry, yearning for ritual and ceremony. Once again I, for the hundredth and thousandth time, was grateful that he’d protected and saved me.
Elspeth, we were so close, but I never understood your spiritual life. You secretly wanted to become a priest and were crushed when you learned that women weren’t allowed to. “Doesn’t that prove to you that there’s something wrong with the religion?” I goaded. “It certainly does to me. You’d be a much better minister than the Right Reverend William Blanchard.” He was a snob who read the prayers and psalms with the wrong words emphasized and in a singsongy rhythm, robbing them of meaning he might have communicated if he spoke normally. Instead, he magnified himself.