“I asked if she could come, but she said no. She’s not interested.”
“Oh. Well, then,” Matthew said.
“Then I thought of Emmeline. Remember her? Do you happen to know what her last name might have been?”
“Why are you asking me all these things?” Matthew said. “Ask Mother, she’s the one who keeps using people up and throwing them out. Wouldn’t you think she could just once keep someone?”
“There, now,” Mary said. “Keep your voice down, Matthew.” And she went on serenely knitting that endless sweater.
Mrs. Emerson came home in an ambulance, pale and mysterious on a wheeled stretcher. Mary rode with her; the others stayed at the house to meet her. As soon as the ambulance drew up to the curb Mary leaped out, all energy and efficiency. “Coming through! Coming through!” she called, and chased Matthew from the front door so that she could open it wider. “Is the room ready? Are the sheets turned down?” The men bore the stretcher up the steps. Mrs. Emerson stared straight into the sunlight with the corners of her mouth slightly curled. “Where is the doorstop?” Mary asked. Beside her, the others seemed drab and subdued. Margaret stood next to Matthew, with little Susan over her shoulder. Andrew waited just inside. His face loomed out of the dimness like a sliver of moon on a cloudy night. “Out of the way, Andrew,” Mary told him, but he paid no attention. “Should you be so loud?” he asked. “Mother? Are they going too fast?” The men navigated the stretcher through the house, calling out warnings and cursing newel posts and doorframes. Mrs. Emerson’s smile seemed to be apologizing for her sudden awkwardness. She had been so small, all her life. Now she had grown to the size of a bed, with four square corners to catch on furniture.
She was taken to the sunporch, which Mary had converted to a sickroom. Her twin bed filled one wall, with a table beside it already bearing a tumbler and a water pitcher, flowers in a vase, a pile of slick new magazines. At the other end were all the chairs that had once been scattered through the room. They were placed in a double row, as if Mary had planned on the family’s sitting there as rigid and watchful as an audience. Beneath one window was the television, its face newly Windexed, waiting to be depended upon.
“Easy, easy now,” one of the men said, and they lifted Mrs. Emerson from the stretcher. She held her neck stiff and clutched at her bathrobe. Matthew, watching her face, could tell when she tried to move her paralyzed hand and failed. There was a shift in her expression, a momentary distance in her eyes, as if she were surprised all over again at the failure and was just recollecting how it had come about. Then she was settled. Her lips moved, and firmed themselves, but instead of speaking she merely nodded to the men. They backed out of the room with the stretcher between them.
For the first hour, there was a concentrated flurry centered in the sunporch. A servant’s bell was brought in, and a reading lamp. Andrew put ice in the water. Susan was set on the bed but she cried and had to be taken away again. And everyone, without intending to, kept speaking for Mrs. Emerson. “How nice to be home!” Mary said. Then she caught herself, and laughed. Mrs. Emerson raised her head. “It fools—” she said. “Feels? Feels too hot?” said Matthew.
“Too cold,” said Mary.
“Strange,” said Andrew.
Mrs. Emerson brushed them all away. “Summery,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, as if she were disappointed at such a pointless remark after all that effort. Everyone rushed to make a fuss over it. “It does,” Mary said, and Andrew said, “It’s June now, you know. Good time to be on the sunporch.” They fell silent and looked at the slant of yellow light. “Tomorrow,” said Mary, “I’ll get the window washers in.”
Mrs. Emerson didn’t open her eyes.
Pianists, Matthew thought, are the ones that get arthritis, and artists go blind and composers go deaf. And his mother, who pulled all the family strings by words alone, was reduced to stammering and to letting others finish her sentences. All morning they supplied her words for her — never exactly the right ones, never in the proper tone. Tears of frustration kept slipping out of the corners of her eyes and forming gray discs on the pillow. Her chin trembled and her mouth turned downward. She gave her children the feeling that it was they who had failed.
They found her a memo pad, and closed her fingers around a ballpoint pen. But what good was that? Even writing letters to her children, she had preferred using a dictaphone first to try out the words on her tongue. She threw the pen away, with such a jerky movement that it landed in the bedclothes. Then she shook her head, over and over again. “Sorry,” she told them.
“It’s all right,” said Mary. “Nobody blames you at all. Do we? We know how hard it must be.”
Lunch was eaten in the sunporch, with Mary beside the bed helping her mother and the others in the lined-up chairs. Susan was put on the windowseat, where she popped all her peas with one finger and babbled to herself. Everyone was grateful to have her there. During breaks in the conversation they watched her intently, implying that there was much more they could be saying if only she hadn’t distracted them.
Supper was easier; their mother was asleep. But by then they were all exhausted. They ate sandwiches by a dim light in the dining room, on a table cluttered with bills and playing cards which no one had the energy to move. “How do nurses do it?” Margaret asked. “There are four of us. Wouldn’t you think we could manage better than this?”
Mary raised her chin from her hand and said, “Margaret, do you know Emmeline’s last name?”
“Emmeline. Emmeline — it will come to me. Why?”
“We figured she might take care of Mother after we leave.”
“Well, that’s a thought,” Margaret said.
“Mother knows her name, I’m sure of it, but she pretends she doesn’t. She’s latched onto the idea of Elizabeth.”
Andrew lowered his sandwich carefully to his plate, and Margaret shot a glance at him. “Then why not Elizabeth?” she asked.
“Margaret?” Andrew said.
“She won’t come,” said Mary, ignoring him.
“Did you try her?” Margaret asked.
“We called her this morning.”
“Really? Where’s she at?”
“Virginia,” said Mary. “I thought you kept in touch with her.”
“Oh, no. Not since, not for years. I wrote but she never answered. What’d you say to her?”
“This conversation is pointless,” Andrew said. “I would never allow her to come back here.”
“Well, she isn’t, so don’t go into a stew over it,” Mary said.
“Stew? Who’s stewing? I merely feel—”
“She isn’t coming, Andrew.”
“Can you guarantee that?” Andrew said. “She’s packing her bags right now, I can feel it. Wild horses couldn’t keep her away. Well, if necessary I’ll bar all the doors and lock the windows. I won’t allow it. Mother wouldn’t allow it.”
“Mother’s the one who asked for her,” Matthew said.
“There are other people she likes in this world.”
“But not that she asked for.”
“I’m surprised at her. I don’t understand her, she used to not even want to hear her name. Are you sure she said Elizabeth? Does she remember?”
“Mary,” said Margaret, “what did you say to her?”
“Just asked if she could help out with Mother a while. She said no.”
“Did you say it would only be for a short time? Did you tell her we’d just need her till Mother’s herself again?” “She didn’t give me a—”