“I’ve never heard of Peter Marsh, Mother.”
“Why when you were a child, you even knew the name of Hitler’s dog. I remember how astonished all our friends used to be at your acumen.”
Liberty lowered herself to the floor and put her chin on her knees.
“Peter Marsh used to be one of Daddy’s patients in the long ago,” Liberty’s mother began. “One day he came into the office and he was very quiet. Later, of course, everyone realized how uncharacteristic it was for him to be so quiet. He was a very handsome man and very successful with the ladies. Men liked him too. He was a city commissioner then. He always seemed to be having the best time, but that day he just didn’t smile or say a word and when anyone spoke to him he just shrugged or nodded. Well, finally he sat down in Daddy’s chair and opened his mouth and his teeth were just braided with pubic hairs. The little dental hygienist Daddy had at the time practically screamed her head off.”
“Oh,” Liberty said.
“It was a joke, Liberty. A joke! You’re so stuffy sometimes.”
“Well,” Liberty said.
“The point is,” her mother said, “that Peter Marsh is running for governor. Isn’t it a small world? I hope you and Willie are still involved in the democratic process, Liberty. I think it would be fun for you to go out and vote for someone you know for governor.”
“Umm,” Liberty said.
“Is everything all right?” her mother said coolly. “There isn’t a burglar or anyone there, is there? A burglar just waiting until you complete this call, threatening you? Is Willie helpless somewhere?”
When time permitted, her mother practiced attitudes toward disaster. She studied carefully the written or televised accounts of victims’ responses — in particular the survivors of floods, hurricanes and plane crashes. She attended with grave interest the replies of mothers whose small children had been missing in some National Park for forty-eight hours. Liberty suspected that her mother still cherished the possibility of little Liberty in some alternate world toddling away from the cheerfulness of a family campfire into the wolf-filled gorges and bottomless lakes of a vast forest so that she could react with composure and grace.
“No, Mother, no, no. A burglar.” Liberty made a laughing sound. “How’s Daddy?”
There was an affronted, momentary silence. “How do you envision my life, Liberty? Really, I’m curious. You used to be such a sensitive girl. You act as though my life was the sound of laughter carried by a breeze over a green lawn. You act as though my life took place on a sunlit balcony someplace. Daddy’s the same as ever. When I met Daddy I had twenty-two cavities and filling them was the last thing that man has ever done for me. Do you remember Tina Terrance?”
“Yes,” Liberty said. “Tina was the artist who was living with you last Christmas.”
The Christmas turkey had crouched before them on the table. There was wine and brandy. There was a sweet potato and banana casserole. There was pecan pie. There was a white mop leaning against a wall, and just outside the window, there was a collapsing septic tank. Willie had been silent and extraordinarily silent that day like someone laid out in a casket. Before they sat down to the meal, they had watched a “Star Trek” rerun on television. The episode concerned a woman named Stella Mudd who was so shrewish that her husband fled into space, creating a colony of androids, including a duplicate of Stella, which could be silenced upon command. Lucile had felt that Lamon had been inordinately amused by the plot and it had put her in a bad humor.
“Your mother’s tense, very tense,” Tina had whispered to Liberty later, above the soapy dishes. “Very into signs like tent caterpillar shapes or dead wrens at the feeder. There have been these headless wrens lying around by the feeder and it drives her wild. Your mother’s not wrapped very tight, I think.” Tina grinned. “Like her marbles are a little flat on one side.”
“You’re saying her elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top, like,” Liberty said.
“Boy, you’re a cold one,” Tina said. “Innocence is not your game, I can see that.”
Liberty said, “I can even remember the name of Hitler’s dog now, Mother. It was Blondi.”
“I don’t mean to suggest that you should remember everything,” her mother said. “Only schizophrenics remember everything. Tina isn’t living with us any more. She moved out a month or so ago. She married the largest Negro I have ever seen in my life.”
“My,” Liberty said.
“Well, you know Tina. Everything is art to her, her life is her art, but honestly, the size of that man. Sometimes he puts his hands around her head, just playfully, you know, and her head just vanishes. Well, Tina’s gone and Daddy has already got two other students living here. These are boys. They bring home the most peculiar assortment of groceries. I think they must steal them out of people’s cars.” She sighed. “You know when you know you’re really old, Liberty?”
Liberty looked at a vein tapping in her wrist. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I never dreamed I’d just grow old like this,” her mother said.
“You’re not old.”
“Forty. I’m forty years of age, Liberty.”
Liberty knew for a fact that her mother was forty-five.
“But we have to make the best of things!” her mother said. “You know the woman who got 1.2 million from the jury, the one whose husband died in the plane crash? Pots of people died in that crash, but she got the biggest award. She was in the hospital giving birth to their second child or something right after it happened. Isn’t that always the way? These women always end up in the hospital giving birth right after their husbands die, the same old revolving door story, and the nurse comes in with the fellow’s effects in this little box and there was his watch on one of those elasticized bands. There was this stuff webbed around in the band, it was like his skin, and the nurse said, ‘Why that’s nothing, dearie, it’s just a little fuzz like caught there’ and she rubbed it off with her fingers and dropped it on the floor. The wife got 1.2 million for mental anguish. Now that’s making the best of things …”
Liberty could hear her mother breathing.
“Talking to you at times is like addressing a paper plate,” her mother said. “Well, I’ve got to go now. I have to turn the water off under the carrots.”
After her mother hung up, Liberty kept the receiver to her ear. There was a faint sound, as of waves breaking. She could hear a distant conversation murmuring across the wires. Frequently the conversations of strangers were made quite plain to her. She had heard very clearly, for instance, a woman once describing a monkey-hair jacket she had had in her youth.
It was beautiful, the woman said. I knew what I was doing. I was ten years ahead of my time.
The voices that seemed clearest were the ones most lonely and aggrieved, the bitterest, the most amazed. There seemed to be a great dark mournful web of voices that Liberty could swing into as easily, as lightly, as one of its essential threads.
She returned the phone to its cradle. It instantly rang. When she answered, the communicant on the other end dropped the receiver.
“Doll,” Charlie said. “Scusi. Phone fell. I had to call you. I have new thinking relevant to our future together. I think we should change Teddy’s name to Reverdy. What do you think? Reverdy, a good Southern name. Do you know what Janiella, that awful woman, calls him sometimes? Odd. She calls him Odd sometimes.”