When Mountains Walked, page 36
Althea’s eyes opened, glaring under her frowzy, worn-out permanent. Her legs, her fingers struggled amongst the bedclothes. Maggie felt sorry for disturbing her.
“Julia hates it, but I don’t.” Maggie repeated Julia’s parting instructions from this morning: not to believe a word Althea said. Julia had told an elaborate story, saying Althea had been accused of adultery by the British community, an affair with a minister or a doctor. Now that she was senile, the story had popped out of a wrinkle in her brain, and Althea was repeating it as true, perhaps a wish fulfillment. If she mentioned any affairs, Julia wanted everyone to know they hadn’t happened. “She’d rather think you’re crazy, Grandma.”
“But you believe in me.” Althea’s face became so sly, so smirky-shifty, that Maggie couldn’t keep from grinning. “I slept with the priest and she’s a Hindu child. So if I told you that, you would believe me, even though you’re not supposed to?”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “It must be true! Please tell me!” She’d convinced herself that the factual truth didn’t ultimately matter, but now it ultimately did.
“I sure did pay,” Althea said. “I wish I could talk to him again.”
“I could go to India. Try to contact him for you.” Maggie put her hand on Althea’s wrist, hoping she’d never be old and yearning for a lost Vicente. “What town was it again?”
Althea made a wry face and said Brother Jesünandá could not be alive. Her voice was soft. Althea could tell when people weren’t alive. Don Héctor, too, had died. “You and I, chased all over the world by the same old devil.” Here she paused and looked up at Maggie soulfully. “What about you, young lady? Is there anything you would like me to know?”
“Grandma, I’m in a situation that I think you’d understand.”
“Uh-oh. I better leave you my house.”
“No, Grandma,” Maggie said, flustered.
“Dear, I mean that. Sell it if you want. You’ll need it more than anyone, I reckon. There, that’s my last will and testament. Bring my lawyer,” she called past Maggie’s shoulder. “I got to change mah will.”
Turning, Maggie saw the day nurse, who had come to the bedroom door with her bag of things to wave goodbye.
“You!” Althea cried. “Can’t you hear me? Too much hair over your ears? Get a haircut!”
The nurse was a tall, glamorous young woman with a flipped, straightened, Barbie-doll perm. She rolled her eyes theatrically at Maggie, and said, as if Althea did not exist, “Olena is going to be twenty minutes late. Mind if I leave?”
“Fine. Thanks. Bye,” said Maggie. Althea sat up, quietly elated.
The woman disappeared from sight. Maggie could not remember her name. These nurses cost hundreds of dollars a day, and no one could prevail against their slackness.
No matter where in the world you were sick, you needed family to take care of you and feed you properly. If Maggie was pregnant, she should keep this child, for purely selfish reasons. “I’ll get you something to drink.” She took the pitcher off the bedside table.
“After all, I don’t have to drive anywhere,” Althea said hopefully.
Maggie had forgotten about the martinis, the jackal urine. She’d been planning to bring water only. The conversation had put her in a strange mood. She wanted to forget everything, and simultaneously to celebrate. I’m a Hindu child, she thought, running wild.
Althea’s constitution was still powerful. It wouldn’t kill her to have a drink. Probably just soothe her a little, make her even more truthful and amusing. Maggie went down the basement steps, found a bottle of Clos de Vougeot. It was a 1966, and Calvin would miss it, but it was one of the few names she recognized. When she came back up with the open bottle and two tumblers on a tray, her grandmother was staring out the window. White, late light slanted in through the shredded damask curtains.
They held their glasses to the light. “Ruby, pink, brown,” said Maggie.
“Black, gold, and purple,” Althea said.
They drank together in silence, one glass. “To the truth,” said Maggie as she poured the second. “The Godawful truth,” said Althea. They sipped again, Maggie thinking it should be her own last drink for some time, if she actually was pregnant.
“I see Johnny’s face before me,” Althea said sadly. “I hope you will stay with me for the rest of your life. I mean my life. He did. That would be the happiest day. Already is. It won’t be long now. I haven’t told them, but it’s hurting me to breathe. The only good thing about old age is nobody cares about you anymore. So you can say and do as you please. That’s the ticket. You’ll all find out. You’ll all forgive me one day.”
“Don’t be saying last words, Grandma.”
“Oh, but you asked me and now I want to do it. Let’s see. You were asking for advice? Aren’t I the wrong person?”
“Tell me once and for all if it’s true.”
“I promised Johnny I would never say, as long as I lived.”
“I won’t tell Julia or anyone else, I swear, Grandma. Please!”
“Well, I’m half dead.” Althea slurped at her glass. Then she nodded, eyes beaming at Maggie. Her lips were pressed tight. “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” she said.
So here it was. Maggie no longer needed to prove her mother wrong. Now what? “You loved Johnny, too, or did you?”
“Of course, dear. He was good. My Johnny. He adored me. I didn’t deserve him. I couldn’t ever leave him.”
“I find that relevant,” Maggie told her. “Anything else I ought to know?” She was still afraid to ask if Althea wished she’d done things differently. All in all, it didn’t seem so.
The front door opened, letting in the wet, ripping sound of tires on the street. Boots stamped at the entry. Althea’s knees began to tremble, her heels fluttered against the mattress. “What’s that?” It was a stage whisper.
“It’s just Olena,” Maggie said. She pulled the blanket over her grandmother’s legs. “Don’t worry.” But the legs still shook.
“Olena?”
“That night nurse. The one who gives massage.”
“Oh yes, the fatty. Olena. Brand of margarine. What kind of a name is that?”
Maggie put one hand on Althea’s jacking knee. “It’s Russian. She gave it to herself. Are you all right?” She squeezed the kneecap, hoping to warm it into submission.
“I can’t remember if I like her. Some of these gals, I think they’re coming to drag me straight to hell.”
“She’s okay. I guess.”
“Olena. Petroleum product,” Althea said. Her leg relaxed, then quivered again as soon as Maggie lifted her hand.
“It’s her grandmother’s name, Grandma.” Sometime last week, Olena had had to be reimbursed for a bag of groceries, and had asked Calvin to write the check to “Susan Petkoff.” She should change her last name next, the Goodwins all had said. “She wanted to honor her female ancestors. She told Calvin she’d had five names in this life, if her marriages all counted.”
“Ha. Well, that’s better. I’ve had dozens of men myself,” Althea cackled.
“Priest and who else?” Maggie didn’t think so.
“Never mention him to Julia. Swear!”
“Grandma, I swore already! Quick, take a glug of this mouthwash.” She grabbed the wine bottle and ran on tiptoe toward the upstairs bathroom. Passing the stairs, she could see the back hem of Olena’s denim skirt bobbing as Olena replaced her snow boots with apostolic sandals. She looked familiar, as if she might have worked at Harvard. Maggie bit off a dab of toothpaste and stashed the Clos de Vougeot under the sink behind some dried-up sponges, where it took on the appearance of a poison. Four inches left, ten dollars’ worth, and she hadn’t focused on its nuances, which she might need to describe to Calvin, should he notice the theft.
Olena was lumbering up the stairs. She was over fifty, but with her fine transparent skin, round red cheeks, and unworried forehead, she looked miraculously preserved, until her smile revealed small brownish teeth.
“Hello!” Olena said. “It’s snowing out! The sidewalks are terrible! How’s everything in here? So nice and cozy!”
“No it’s not,” Maggie told her. “It’s freezing in here.”
Althea called from her bedroom in a parrot’s querulous, lost voice. “Hello?”
“Olena’s here!” said Maggie. And to Olena, “Everything’s fine, though she was feeling anxious a minute ago. Thanks for coming.”
Together they walked into the bedroom and saw Althea, a murky shape, struggling to raise herself. The room seemed much darker than when Maggie had left it.
“What do you two want?” Althea said.
“Hello, it’s me, Mrs. Baines!” Olena said, brushing past Maggie. “Sorry I’m so late. Were you sleeping? Why are you lying here in the dark?”
She clicked on the bedside lamp, fixed pillows, ran her hand under the blanket. “Your feet are blocks of ice. Would you like some water? How is Mrs. Baines today?”
“Fine. And yes, and no, and please, and thank you,” Althea said. “Mrs. Baines is very well, just living the life of Riley.” She cleared her throat and glared around the room.
Olena laughed. “We’re feisty today.”
Althea settled back against the pillows and assumed an expression verging on meekness. “You’ll give me my rub?”
“Certainly.”
“I’ve got pins and needles in both feet. And I’m feeling very nervous. I get the heebie-jeebs lying on my back all day. But you’ll fix that. Won’t you? You’ll make me relax?” Althea was breathing through her mouth, panting almost. She had bright red, allergic-looking blotches on her cheeks. Maggie regretted giving her the wine. It seemed to have increased Althea’s frailty, so her tough talk no longer seemed the sign of a strong mind but rather of a cornered desperation. Maybe this was an effect, on Maggie, of Olena’s presence. “Certainly,” Olena said. “Have you taken your anticoagulant?”
“I’ve had nothing but pills since dawn.”
Maggie leaned on the door jamb, not volunteering to refill the empty water pitcher Olena set at her elbow, on top of the chest of drawers. Instead, she watched her grandmother blinking with heron-like dignity while the nurse refolded the newspaper, closed the curtains, stacked the lunch tray with an assortment of dirty dishes and debris.
“How about rolling onto your stomach.” Olena pumped a dab of cream into her palm.
“Scram,” Althea said. “Vamoose.”
“Excuse me?”
“Get out! I thought of one last word to tell my granddaughter.”
“Oh, yes ma’am, very well.” Olena huffily left the room.
“Look in that top drawer,” Althea said. “No, the other one. Maybe it’s in the closet.” Rummaging under Althea’s direction, Maggie at last found a pair of paisley ankle socks, knotted together. Inside was a ring of coarse yellow gold, with a magenta cabochon stone set into it. “Your Burmese ruby,” Maggie said. “You took it out of the sugar bowl.”
“I was afraid someone might eat it. That’s for you, dear. I’m glad I could remember where it was.”
“Thank you, Grandma.”
“Don’t say thank you till you know what you are getting,” Althea said. “That’s the only thing he ever gave me. Does it fit?”
“On my middle finger,” Maggie said, holding up her hand.
“Very nice. See, that was his, from when he was the Hindu kind of priest. This way, you won’t ever have to wonder whether I was senile at the end and just told you any old thing.” Althea smiled with satisfaction. Her pale eyes softened. “Everybody always thought Johnny gave it to me. It was my souvenir of him, as Julia didn’t turn out to be.”
“We know why Julia decided to be that way, though, Grandma.”
“Oh yes, we do indeed. I should have been nicer to her. I wish I could have, but I couldn’t help myself, you see.”
Maggie made a silent resolve to convey Althea’s regrets to Julia, somehow.
“It wasn’t my fault, was it, if I loved him so? Some things you never get over. You understand that. I know you do. You said so.”
Maggie agreed, though it seemed to her she’d told Althea something slightly different. “Grandma, I am really, really, really glad I came to see you.” She squeezed Althea’s hand, and then bent down and kissed her.
“Thank you, dear. You’ve saved my life. I feel perfect.”
Snow was falling slowly past the tall windows. This year’s first snow had come unusually early. Big flat flakes like shreds of ash. Some were traveling upward. Inside and out, all distinctions were vanishing into a pewter-colored flatness.
“Isn’t the snow so nice and peaceful?” Althea said. “Maybe I’ll have my massage.”
23
“YOU SHOULD HAVE called her ‘Your handmaiden,’” Julia said. “Don’t you remember, I asked you just to read the service straight from the Book of Common Prayer.”
The air around her head was cubist, shattered.
The minister had just introduced Althea to God as “Your beloved servant.” He said, “I’m sorry. Of course I remember.”
Julia, Maggie, and Maggie’s sister, Sonia, stood just inside the church exit, hair all blue under a blue emergency light. Why did they keep this church so dim?
With them were Lester Weeks, Althea’s boyfriend, and the minister, Stoddard MacLean, who had just performed Althea’s funeral. He was twenty-eight, the nephew of one of Lester’s old friends, fresh out of Harvard Divinity School. Maggie had joked with him about how, at Harvard, Jesus was equivalent to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. She’d refrained from asking after Larry or any other possible mutual acquaintances. So far she’d called only one friend in Cambridge. No one else knew she was here.
Stoddard apologized again.
They all had on their overcoats, waiting for Calvin to come out of the office where he was giving his address for billing. It was typical of her family, Maggie thought, to end up in arrangements that felt trumped up, and lonely. She could explain it now: it was because they were secretly foreigners. Even Calvin had been happiest in Colombia. Sonia and her husband had gotten married in a white church they’d seen in a travel article about Vermont—Alexandre was an architect and had admired it. Johnny Baines had rested in Cambridge Cemetery for ten years, but this afternoon would be the first time his family had ever visited him as a group. And now this morning, within yards of her grandmother’s coffin, Maggie Goodwin had tested herself for pregnancy in the church bathroom, so she could anonymously dispose of the box and dipstick.
A pink haze had formed instantly on the white blotting paper.
There were no false positives, she’d learned. Still, she’d tested herself again, and again had seen the double bars. “Whee!” she’d squealed, pressing her forehead against the toilet stall’s cold marble wall, the color of canned dog food. She’d begun to feel her body pullulating inside, rich as soil or soup. Her knees went weak. “Oh, God.”
Arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium. Klaus and Liliana had brought down the lab report with them last Wednesday, results that were equally positive. She’d drunk the river for eight months. Was it her moral duty now to stay in Cambridge? Would new, clean water wash out all the old?
A library book lay hidden under her bed at Althea’s. Unfortunately it was for laypeople, lacking detail, and, in this country of safety, mercury was the only metal mentioned. Mercury was bad enough. In gray, square photos she’d seen the child without a brain who was buried now in Piedras. Stump arms, fused fingers, eyes without pupils, bodies like cloud formations. Fortunata would have warned her not to look at such pictures, lest they affect her baby. Maggie understood why. She was Julia’s daughter, after all, letting herself be carried away by the worst imaginings. She must fix her mind upon the dozens of perfect babies born in Piedras, despite the water, despite everything.
Tomorrow she’d make a doctor’s appointment and mail off a lock of her hair. She’d already talked to a lab in California. The hair test took three weeks and cost two hundred eighty dollars, causing her to wonder why she’d snipped off so many black mechas and sealed them into envelopes. Relics, she decided, to be analyzed a thousand years from now.
Two nights ago, Althea’s doctor had insisted, repeated, that Maggie had not murdered her own grandmother by plying her with wine. Althea’s cause of death had been a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot had traveled from the leg into her lungs—even her nervousness had been a symptom. Carson would have seen it coming, but Carson was not here. Just now, Carson was only one of numerous impossibilities.
Why did distance limit physical sight? Why couldn’t people hear each other’s thoughts?
The baby inside her was ten million times the size it had been.
…
The plan was to follow Althea’s hearse to the cemetery in two cars. The rest of the mourners, a dozen or so people including Olena and another nurse, had already gone home. Too cold for graveside speeches in this unseasonable year. People were proclaiming a new ice age. Last night, they’d heard, the frozen topsoil had had to be opened with a jackhammer.
Althea’s coffin stood by on its wheeled cart. Hermetic, made of streamlined steel with a shimmering pale gray finish, it reminded Maggie of a small, new Mercedes-Benz. Impossible to imagine Althea’s body inside it, nor anyone else’s.
This chapel by the river was the saddest room Maggie had ever occupied. It smelled of myrrh and burnt matchheads, and there were no flowers anywhere, only an arrangement of dried bittersweet, raw material for a crown of thorns. Darkness wept from the unadorned stone walls, pressing in on everyone. The tiny Jesus on the altar looked emaciated after his long winter without food, water, and sufficient light. Maggie missed the Andes, where saints were so dangerous they had to be boxed in bulletproof glass, and where even the poorest village chapel was as full as possible of gold, dusty velvet, sky-blue paint, and plastic flowers. Down there, it was easier to believe in a higher world, or at least to feel sure that someone else believed. Just think what a nice plaster Virgin could do for this place, she thought, a nice pregnant Virgin in an Empire-waisted nightgown.
