“Maybe it would have happened anyway,” I said. “Maybe it was just the time.”
Aunt Annie paid no attention to me. “I went up to see her,” she said. “She was so glad to see me because I could tell what she was saying. She said Aunt Annie, they won’t keep me in here for good, will they? And I said to her, No. I said, No.
“And she said, Aunt Annie ask Maddy to take me home again or I’m going to die. She didn’t want to die. Don’t you ever think a person wants to die, just because it seems to everybody else they have got no reason to go on living. So I told Maddy. But she didn’t say anything. She went to the hospital every day and saw your mother and she wouldn’t take her home. Your mother told me Maddy said to her, I won’t take you home.”
“Mother didn’t always tell the truth,” I said. “Aunt Annie, you know that.”
“Did you know your mother got out of the hospital?”
“No,” I said. But strangely I felt no surprise, only a vague physical sense of terror, a longing not to be told—and beyond this a feeling that what I would be told I already knew, I had always known.
“Maddy, didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
“Well she got out. She got out the side door where the ambulance comes in, it’s the only door that isn’t locked. It was at night when they haven’t so many nurses to watch them. She got her dressing gown and her slippers on, the first time she ever got anything on herself in years, and she went out and there it was January, snowing, but she didn’t go back in. She was away down the street when they caught her. After that they put the board across her bed.”
The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed. It was a picture I was much inclined to resist. Yet I had no doubt that this was true, all this was true and exactly as it happened. It was what she would do; all her life as long as I had known her led up to that flight.
“Where was she going?” I said, but I knew there was no answer.
“I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Oh, Helen, when they came after her she tried to run. She tried to run.”
The flight that concerns everybody. Even behind my aunt’s soft familiar face there is another, more primitive old woman, capable of panic in some place her faith has never touched.
She began folding the clothes up and putting them back in the box. “They nailed a board across her bed. I saw it. You can’t blame the nurses. They can’t watch everybody. They haven’t the time.
“I said to Maddy after the funeral, Maddy, may it never happen like that to you. I couldn’t help it, that’s what I said.” She sat down on the bed herself now, folding things and putting them back in the box, making an effort to bring her voice back to normal—and pretty soon succeeding, for having lived this long who would not be an old hand at grief and self-control?
“We thought it was hard,” she said finally. “Lou and I thought it was hard.”
Is this the last function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills—making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?
She was afraid of Maddy—through fear, had cast her out for good. I thought of what Maddy had said: nobody speaks the same language.
When I got home Maddy was out in the back kitchen making a salad. Rectangles of sunlight lay on the rough linoleum. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was standing there in her bare feet. The back kitchen is a large untidy pleasant room with a view, behind the stove and the drying dishtowels, of the sloping back yard, the CPR station and the golden, marshy river that almost encircles the town of Jubilee. My children who had felt a little repressed in the other house immediately began to play under the table.
“Where have you been?” Maddy said.
“Nowhere. Just to see the Aunts.”
“Oh, how are they?”
“They’re fine. They’re indestructible.”
“Are they? Yes I guess they are. I haven’t been to see them for a while. I don’t actually see that much of them any more.”
“Don’t you?” I said, and she knew then what they had told me.
“They were beginning to get on my nerves a bit, after the funeral. And Fred got me this job and everything and I’ve been so busy—” She looked at me, waiting for what I would say, smiling a little derisively, patiently.
“Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” I said softly. All this time the children were running in and out and shrieking at each other between our legs.
“I’m not guilty,” she said. “Where did you get that? I’m not guilty.” She went to turn on the radio, talking to me over her shoulder. “Fred’s going to eat with us again since he’s alone. I got some raspberries for dessert. Raspberries are almost over for this year. Do they look all right to you?”
“They look all right,” I said. “Do you want me to finish this?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go and get a bowl.”
She went into the dining room and came back carrying a pink cut-glass bowl, for the raspberries.
“I couldn’t go on,” she said. “I wanted my life.”
She was standing on the little step between the kitchen and the dining room and suddenly she lost her grip on the bowl, either because her hands had begun to shake or because she had not picked it up properly in the first place; it was quite a heavy and elaborate old bowl. It slipped out of her hands and she tried to catch it and it smashed on the floor.
Maddy began to laugh. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Oh, hell, oh Hel-en,” she said, using one of our old foolish ritual phrases of despair. “Look what I’ve done now. In my bare feet yet. Get me a broom.”
“Take your life, Maddy. Take it.”
“Yes I will,” Maddy said. “Yes I will.”
“Go away, don’t stay here.”
“Yes I will.”
Then she bent down and began picking up the pieces of broken pink glass. My children stood back looking at her with awe and she was laughing and saying, “It’s no loss to me. I’ve got a whole shelf full of glass bowls. I’ve got enough glass bowls to do me the rest of my life. Oh, don’t stand there looking at me, go and get me a broom!” I went around the kitchen looking for a broom because I seemed to have forgotten where it was kept and she said, “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I?”
DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES
Miss Marsalles is having another party. (Out of musical integrity, or her heart’s bold yearning for festivity, she never calls it a recital.) My mother is not an inventive or convincing liar, and the excuses which occur to her are obviously second-rate. The painters are coming. Friends from Ottawa. Poor Carrie is having her tonsils out. In the end all she can say is: Oh, but won’t all that be too much trouble, now? Now being weighted with several troublesome meanings; you may take your choice. Now that Miss Marsalles has moved from the brick and frame bungalow on Bank Street, where the last three parties have been rather squashed, to an even smaller place—if she has described it correctly—on Bala Street. (Bala Street, where is that?) Or: now that Miss Marsalles’ older sister is in bed, following a stroke; now that Miss Marsalles herself—as my mother says, we must face these things—is simply getting too old.
Now? asks Miss Marsalles, stung, pretending mystification, or perhaps for that matter really feeling it. And she asks how her June party could ever be too much trouble, at any time, in any place? It is the only entertainment she ever gives any more (so far as my mother knows it is the only entertainment she ever has given, but Miss Marsalles’ light old voice, undismayed, indefatigably social, supplies the ghosts of tea parties, private dances, At Homes, mammoth Family Dinners). She would suffer, she says, as much disappointment as the children, if she were to give it up. Considerably more, says my mother to herself, but of course she cannot say it aloud; she turns her face from the telephone with that look of irritation—as if she had seen something messy which she was unable to clean up—which is her private expression of pity. And she promises to come; weak schemes for getting out of it will occur to her during the next two weeks, but she knows she will be there.