"Mama, we can't do that"
"Certainly we can. I want my lawyer."
"You don't have a lawyer," I told her.
"Oh," she said. 'Well. In that case." She slumped a little. I thought the conversation had tired her. I stood up and said, "Why don't you try and sleep now, I'll go see about supper. Amos is here if you need something."
"I need to know the name of my problem," she said.
For a minute I didn't understand. Her problem? How would I know? I was still trying to figure out the name of my problem. But then she said, "My illness, Charlotte."
"It's cancer," I said.
She folded her hands on the quilt and grew still. I became aware of Amos; he had lowered his music sheets and was staring at me. His shucked-off moccasins lay gaping beneath his chair. I saw he had a hole in his sock that I would have to fix. Every thought seemed to come to me so clearly. "Don't wear that sock again until I've darned it," I said. I left.
Then there was a period when Mama didn't care to see me, barely answered when I spoke to her, sent the others out of the room for making too much noise and littering the floor with their torn envelopes and tangerine peels. She asked only for Saul. Wanted him to read to her from her big old family Bible: Psalms.
She didn't like the rest of the Bible any more, people undertaking definite activities or journeying to specific towns. Saul would read until his voice cracked, and come downstairs pale and exhausted. "I did the best I could," he would say. You would think this was his mother. First he'd had Alberta and now he had Mama, and here I was with nobody.
"What more could I have done?" he asked.
"If you don't know, who does?" I said. Her bedroom hung over our heads like some huge gray dirigible. She hulked In our minds; her absence filled tine house.
I took to keeping the studio open at night. You'd be surprised at the people who decade to get photographed at tenor eleven p. m. if they pass by and see a place lit They would stop at the bay window-solitary teenagers, men who couldn't sleep, housewives going out for tomorrow morning's milk. They would stare at my pictures, all my portraits of people bedecked with Alberta's clutter and dimmed by the crackling, imperfect light that seeped through my father's worn camera.
Then they'd come inside and ask, "Are those your regular portraits?"
"What else?" Fd say.
"You mean I could have one like that too?"
"Of course." And while I was loading the plates they'd drift around the studio, picking up an ermine muff, a celluloid fan, a three-cornered hat with gold braid…
Some people I photographed over and over, week after week-whenever they fell into a certain mood, it seemed. And this boy Bando, at the Texaco station: he would come by the first of every month, as soon as he got his paycheck. A hoodlum type, really, but in his pictures, with that light on his cheekbones and Grandpa Emory's fake brass sword at his hip, he took on a fineedged, princely appearance that surprised me every time. He wasn't surprised, though. He would study his proofs the next day with a smile of recognition, as if he'd always known he could look this way. He would purchase every pose and leave, whistling.
Our sleep requirements changed. Our windows were lit till early morning, often. You would think the whole household had developed a fear of beds. Julian might be out with some girl, our only night-wanderer, but the rest of us found reasons to sit in the living room-reading, sewing, playing the piano, Linus carving bedposts from Tinker Toy sticks. Sometimes even the children got up, inventing urgent messages now that they had my attention. Selinda needed a costume; she'd forgotten to tell me. Jiggs had to ask, "Quick: what's five Q and five Q?"
"Is this important?"
"Oh, come on, Mom. Five Q and five Q."
"Ten Q."
"You're welcome."
"Ha ha," I said.
"Get itr get it, I get it," I said, and kissed the small nook that was the bridge of his nose.
Upstairs, my mother sat propped like some ancient, stately queen and listened to her own private psalmist But then she banished him. She shouted at Saul one suppertime so that all of us could hear, and a minute later he came down the stairs with his heavy, pausing tread and sank into his chair at the head of the table. "She wants you, Charlotte," he said.
"What's happened?"
"She says she's tired."
"Tired of what?"
"Tired, just tired. I don't know," he said. "Pass the biscuits, Amos." I went upstairs. Mama was sitting against the pfl-lows with her mouth clamped, like a child in a huff.
"Mama?" I said.
"I want my hair brushed, please." I picked up her brush from the bureau.
"Those psalms, you wouldn't believe it," she said. "First so up and then so down, and then so up again." 'Well find you something else," I said. "I want Belinda to have my tortoise-shell necklace," said my mother. "It matches her eyes. I'm dying."
"All right," I said.
We greeted like an enemy. None of us had much hope for it. Saul lost several of his older members to the flu and had to be gone more than ever. The children were growing up without me. I spent all my time taking care of Mama. There was no position that felt right to her, nothing that sat easy on her stomach. She would get a craving for some food that was out of season or too expensive, and by the time I'd tracked it down she'd have lost her appetite and would only turn her face to the wall. "Take it away, take it away, don't bother me with that."
Her pills didn't seem to work any more and she had to have hypodermics, which Dr. Sisk administered. She developed an oddly detailed style of worrying. "I hear a noise in the kitchen, Charlotte; I'm certain it's a burglar. He's helped himself to that leftover chicken you promised you would save for me." Or, "Why has Dr. Sisk not come? Go and check his room, please. He may have committed suicide. He's hung himself from an attic rafter by that gold chain belt in the cedar chest."
"Mama, I promise, everything's under control," I would tell her.
That's easy for you to say." It occurred to me that if I were the sullen spinster I had started out to be, this death would have meant the springing of my trap. Only it would have been useless even then; I'd have had a houseful of cats, no doubt, that I couldn't bear to leave. Newspapers piled to the ceiling.
Money stuffed in the mattress.
"You're just waiting for me to die so that one of Saul's strays can have my room," she told me.
"Hush, Mama, drink your soup." Then she asked me to sort her bureau drawers.
There may be some things I want burned," she said. I pulled out the drawers one by one and emptied them on her bed: withered elastic stockings, lemon verbena sachets, * recipes torn from magazines and hairnets that clung to her fingers.
She fumbled through them. "No, no, take them back." What was she looking for, love letters? Diaries?
She felt in the bottom of her smallest desk drawer, came up with something brown and stared at it a moment. Then, "Here," she said. "Put this in the fire."
"What is it?"
"Burn it. If there isn't a fire, build one."
"All right," I said.
I took it-some kind of photo in a studio folder-and laid it beside me. "Do you want me to bring the next drawer?"
"Go, Charlotte. Go burn it." When she was angry, her face bunched in now as if gathered at the center by a drawstring. She was finally looking her age: seventy-four, scooped out, caved in like a sunken pillow. She raised one white, shaking forefinger. "Fasti" she said. Her voice broke.
So I went. But as soon as I was out of the room I looked at what she'd given me. Stamped across the front was "Hammond Bros., Experienced Photographers'-surely no outfit in Clarion. The folder was cheap, and hastily cut. The corners didn't quite match.
Inside was a picture of my mother's true daughter.
I don't know how I knew that so immediately. Something about the eyes, maybe-light-colored, triangular, expectant. Or the dimples in her cheeks, or the merry, brimming smile. The picture had been taken when she wasn't more than ten, maybe younger. It was a soft-focus photo on unusually thin paper: head only, and a ruffle at the neck, and a draggled bit of ribbon holding back her pale, rather frowsy hair.