When Mountains Walked, page 37
Julia dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, smudging her mascara worse than before. She looked as though she’d suffered a basal skull fracture. “Your eulogy,” she said to Stoddard. “It was full of mistakes, too. Errors of fact as well as of tone.”
Maggie leaned against the holy water font, rubbing her forefinger along its nubby granite lip, feldspar and diorite crystals smoothed by human touch. There was no water in it, just a stain of damp that tempted her to lay her tongue down on it. If there’s a Heaven, let it help us now, she thought. For if you’d listened in a certain way, Stoddard had suggested that Althea had been an unfaithful wife and Johnny had been insane; and worst of all that Julia—he’d said this directly—was vain and spoiled. He hadn’t mentioned Calvin at all, not that Maggie could remember.
Stoddard asked what his mistakes had been. He’d tried to make the eulogy true to life.
“Nothing is true to life if it isn’t true to facts.” Julia sniffed, put her handkerchief inside her coat’s left sleeve. “Wing walking, for instance. My mother never did that.”
“Sorry,” Stoddard said again. “I thought Lester said she had.” He’d begun the eulogy with the image of Althea walking out onto the wing of a DC3 as it flew over Angel Falls in Venezuela.
Lester piped up, saying he remembered the night Althea had told him this story at the Harvest restaurant, comparing the wing to a silver sidewalk. The wing’s stability had impressed him deeply: it had become Lester’s private emblem for Althea’s bravery as well as the needlessness of certain fears, such as the fear of death. Stoddard had used it that way.
“I liked it,” Maggie said. When Stoddard had invited the congregation to imagine Althea alive, held in space by some invisible, unexpectedly solid thing, she’d seen her grandmother vividly as a much younger woman, placing her feet carefully along the flattest part of the wing, staring at the toes of her sneakers to avoid the suck of space. Wind in her hair. Dark green jungle unrolling not so far below.
And now, on this cold afternoon in Cambridge, she could see Althea just as clearly, leaning forward across the restaurant table, her long pale hair pulled untidily back. “The wind was so cold on my laigs. My Panama hat blew off and I didn’t dare look where it went.”
Lies?
Althea’s pale, gunmetal coffin shook with silence.
Maggie touched the priest’s ruby ring in her pocket to remind herself of what was true. Its gold was oddly hot. Warmer, it seemed, than flesh, it reminded her of Vicente.
Her mind flew off to find a place where the two of them could live together with their child. If not El Mirador, Bolivia, halfway to the sky.
Vicente would finish his studies at the university while Maggie got a job in the U.S. embassy’s public health programs. Their child, Vicente’s child, would be a boy. He’d walk precociously. He’d have opinions. Perhaps he would grow up to be an artist, because of the many worlds he’d had to inhabit. In all of them he’d feel at home, knowing himself to be both of his parents’ hearts’ desire and light. She saw black, snapping eyes, and the humor in his face.
Their home would be small, dignified, with tile floors and shabby colonial balconies. At first, Maggie might find an Aymara nanny, a strong-minded woman, one incisor rimmed with gold. Not that Maggie didn’t want to pamper her own baby—a child should have as many mothers as possible, one extra at the very least, as Maggie had had, to open all the chambers of its heart. Of course, the nanny would bring her own children to the house. They’d all go to the plaza together, speaking a mix of languages. Feeding pigeons, watching her son run around on fat, sturdy legs, Maggie would know she needed nothing more. Then, in the evenings, she saw how it would be when Vicente came back from his classes. Lamplight. The clean lines of his jaw, the joyous power of his arms as he swept their child off the ground. He’d meet Maggie’s eyes and kiss her lightly over their son’s dark head. “Let’s make another,” he’d say.
Or they might also go and live in France . . .
“You may love that story,” Julia was saying, “but Mary Lou Kaminsky did that. She was a friend of Althea and Johnny’s. She was married to a cargo pilot, Frank Kaminsky. Mary Lou was quite the daredevil. She used to parachute, too.”
“Didn’t we meet her in Colombia?” said Sonia. Sonia was famous for her memory. “She wore a Panama hat and pedal pushers. She had a big white poodle. She smoked a Cuban cigar with Daddy.”
“That’s right,” Julia said. “That’s Mary Lou to a T.”
“They were friends,” Maggie said. “Why couldn’t they all have gone out together in Frank’s plane, even just once?”
“My mother was a compulsive liar, that’s why,” Julia declared. “There, I’ve said it. I shouldn’t blame you, Stoddard. ‘Handmaiden,’ though, I really did want that word. She was a biblical wife. I won’t say it was her only virtue, but it was one of her main ones.”
The Bible contained many kinds of wives, Maggie thought, and you’re as big a liar, Julia, as your mother ever was.
“Well, well, well, now, many things get lost in the translation,” Lester interjected, rubbing his hands together.
Lester had turned out to be just as Maggie had imagined, with cheerful, tight red cheeks. Today he wore a black karakul hat and rubber overshoes, and stood blinking hard, as if he were making an earnest effort to understand the conversation. Perhaps he was a little deaf.
“I truly didn’t mean to insult anyone,” Stoddard said. “Least of all your grandma.” His hands were clasped in front of his crotch, a sure sign of fear in a man, according to Carson.
“Who told you Sonia and Alexandre met in a singles column?” Julia said. She snapped and unsnapped the clasp of her purse.
Sonia said, “Mom, that’s no big secret.”
Do you love the world or don’t you, Maggie thought. That was the only question. Yes was the only answer. It hummed and resonated inside her body, echoing Vicente’s favorite saying: With faith and affection a person could walk into a lion’s mouth.
What if the baby was Carson’s?
She saw herself, five years from now, making graphs for Carson in his new clinic in South India. Nurses, doctors running around asking him for direction. Or asking Maggie, for she was second in command. She wore a white sari; her hair was longer, beautiful. Their child was tall and slender and intelligent—Carson was proud of it. Local people had learned to love Maggie and respect her, for they knew whose granddaughter she was. In the evenings, out under a banyan tree, she gave literacy classes, in English, to local ladies. She was fluent in Hindi and Telugu.
It would build her character, to live in the lion’s mouth. She’d become as strong as Carson. Carson would continue exactly as he was. Over time, his trust in her might soften him a bit. He’d make an admirable father, once his duty was clear. He’d fall in love with his child, and remark that it had his eyes, his chin. They’d have a noble life, all three.
Would Carson be as noble as Johnny Baines? If she told him the child was half Peruvian, half poor, already alive for him to care for? “I loved Althea,” Lester announced. “She made you all sound like such a wonderful, lively group of people. I had no idea you’d be upset.”
“Stoddard never actually talked to Grandma, did you?” Maggie said, belatedly realizing she was shifting all guilt onto Lester.
“Never met her,” Stoddard said, testily now. “I’ll try to do better at the cemetery, unless you prefer me not to go?” Nobody moved. “Stay, we want you,” Maggie said, feeling sorry for him.
Stoddard waited a few more wounded instants. “Okay then. See you there.”
“We should have used the regular minister,” Julia said when he had gone. “Not him.”
Lester lifted his hands defensively, then lowered them again. His tie was Armani, Maggie recognized, a chunk of disused cultural information floating back into her consciousness. Gray blobs on a red ground, edged with electric-blue fluorescence, like dyed cells under a microscope. Notochord, egg yolk, Maggie saw, furiously budding cells.
I’ll have twins, she thought, one for each father, like a dog bitch. Spend the rest of my life lying sideways, giving suck, letting them crawl all over me. I don’t care where I live.
Two men in orangey tweed jackets and rubber-soled loafers came to roll the coffin out the door. “Stay in where it’s warm,” one of them said. “We’re just putting her in the car.”
The wooden door sighed shut, hesitating on a final puff of air. When it had closed, Julia said, “I only wish we hadn’t argued in front of my mother’s coffin.”
“Oh, Mom! It’s natural to be upset,” Sonia told her.
“Thank you,” Julia said. She licked a corner of her handkerchief and wiped carefully under her lower lashes, managing to clean off the last smears of mascara. She put her handkerchief over her mouth, then bit her knuckles through it. Julia was vain: she’d had her teeth recapped five times. Carson cited this so often, even Maggie leapt to her defense: “The new polymers were better!” It might be nice to get away from Carson’s rigid judgments.
“Ready?” Calvin reappeared at last, walking briskly. “Hey, hey, what’s all this?”
“Mom’s sad, and she was upset with the eulogy,” Maggie said. And ha, guess what, I’m pregnant! Would she ever tell her family? She laughed inwardly, recognizing her own lack of foresight. Obviously, the entire world would find out eventually, not simply that she was pregnant, but that some man or other had gotten inside her. Procreation was sickeningly public. She’d be huge.
“I have a few points I might like to mention, too,” Calvin said.
“No, oh dear, enough, poor Mother,” said Julia, starting to laugh and cry at once.
Maggie and Sonia surrounded Julia with hugs. Maggie felt her belly against her mother’s hip. Amazing to think that Julia had given birth. So many ordinary women had endured that raw, bloody, screaming event and they were still walking around looking ordinary. Not just women endured it, she thought. All human beings hung upside down and weightless in the dark until crushed and ejected. This was a revolutionary view of things. How did anyone forget? Forgetting was as amazing as remembering. “I love you, Mom,” she heard herself say.
Calvin, who’d stood aside, now cleared his throat. “They wanted to charge me for their priest, even though he didn’t speak. I refused. Shall we go?”
“That’s ridiculous.” Julia straightened, put her fingers through the crook of Calvin’s elbow. They filed out the door and down the wide stone steps. The steps and walkway had been shoveled, but the wheelchair ramp had not. It bore black, parallel tire tracks, the marks of Althea’s progress.
At the grave there was a pile of dirt under canvas, a ring of rhododendrons and hemlocks. Johnny and Althea were to share a red granite headstone, but Althea’s name had not yet been incised on it. Snow had blown against the roots of the trees. The cold ground ached up through Maggie’s shoes. Maggie remembered the day, ten years ago, when Johnny Baines had died. She had still been married to Larry, unable to imagine what would be happening today.
Two cemetery employees in thick coveralls were standing beside the trees. They took over from the men in tweeds, setting the coffin inside a square arrangement of pipes. After fiddling with straps and ratchets, the gravediggers looked questioningly at Calvin, who nodded. They flicked a switch and a humming motor lowered Althea into the ground. Stoddard said, “Moment of silence?”
While they stood with heads bowed, Maggie peeked at Calvin and Julia. They were holding hands. Once she’d met a Spanish man who’d told her humans mate for life, like swans. It didn’t matter how long the relationship lasted, whether it was with a man or a woman, or whether it worked out. You could see at the corners of a person’s eyes whether it had happened yet. Carson, she thought, had been most truly mated with Maxine. Nonetheless, she saw him dying of her cruelty, a bewitched swan prince at her castle’s locked gate. If only she weren’t pregnant, she could go, kiss him, and push everything back to the way it should have been. But no. Irreversibility was the first of a mother’s lessons. So much for my experiment in happiness, she thought—it wasn’t over, but it had taken its own uncontrollable course.
She’d have to stay in Cambridge until the baby was born and she could see whose it was. Nine—eight—months was a long time, but Carson and Vicente had plenty to keep them busy down in Piedras. They didn’t even know Althea was dead. There was a difference between telling lies and living them: one was permissible in order to prevent the other, she decided.
When the coffin was down, Julia walked over to the pile of dirt and pulled off a corner of its canvas sheet. The sandy soil had already frozen. She clawed up a small handful in her glove and threw it onto her mother’s coffin, where it fell with a sound like sleet on a window.
One of the men in tweeds held out the shovel timidly. “Any of you like to use this?”
“Althea didn’t approve of burial,” Lester remarked. “She told me she’d like to be fed to vultures, or burnt up in the crater of a volcano.”
Calvin said, “None of that was in her will.”
Lester said, “Her kind of person would forget to stipulate.”
Julia shrugged and began walking back toward the cars. Calvin followed her, trotting to catch up, putting his hand under her elbow. The gravediggers picked up their shovels and looked questioningly at Stoddard, who said, “Okay.” Lester, Maggie, Sonia, and Stoddard stayed for a few minutes to keep the men from feeling lonely in their work.
…
Back at the house, there were holes in the air. Althea’s portraits were all changing, the highlights receding from her pupils. Carson had begun to recede from Maggie, too. She glanced at the Russian novel she’d insisted on bringing, a book that was connected to him. Sure enough, it had shriveled slightly on the nightstand.
“Liliana? It’s me, Maggie,” she whispered into Althea’s bedroom telephone.
“Quién es? Más fuerte! No se escucha!” Who is it? Louder! I can’t hear!
“Maggie!”
“Maggie! Are you coming back? Things are crazy here. We need you!”
Maggie sat down on the edge of Althea’s bed, where her grandmother had died two days ago. She closed her free ear with a finger while Liliana told everything into the other. Three hundred people had marched upon the mine last Saturday, bearing white flags. Doña Ema’s abusive husband had been found beaten to death by the river. People said his sons had done it.
…
She walked down the stairs gingerly, a ghost already absent. Her family had all changed clothes and reassembled in the living room, where Lester had lit a fire. She missed them in advance, their safe, familiar clamor and the silly poses she’d so diligently uprooted from herself. Julia and Sonia sat side by side on the couch, crossing their ankles in the same ladylike way. Calvin was jocosely opening another Bordeaux from Althea’s cellar. Most of the best bottles were missing, Lester confessed, because he and Althea had drunk them.
“A toast,” Lester proposed. “To her.” The way he spoke of Althea made Maggie glad, even for herself. For everyone. She toasted, then established herself in the wing chair.
Sonia addressed Lester. “When he invited her presence to remain with us?”
Lester nodded yes, yes, yes.
“I felt her,” Sonia went on. “I really felt her, hovering. Am I crazy? What do you think that means?”
“Death is not the end,” said Julia.
Swaths of darkness were beginning to fall across Althea’s living room. The streetlights were being turned on, sector by sector, from some central switch. The bulb in front of the house went on, off, then quickly on again. “What’s that!” Sonia said. “Did anybody see that?” No one responded. By the fire, Calvin and Lester braced their legs and swirled their wine. Maggie stared at the Persian rug they stood on, trying to decide whether the shapes in it were animals or plants.
Calvin cleared his throat and announced that Althea’s will was to be read soon. He hadn’t spoken to her lawyer since Johnny’s death, nor had Althea, probably, but his recollection was that the estate went entirely to Julia. The house was the greatest asset; she’d probably sell.
“I love this house. Rent it to us, Mom?” Sonia fantasized.
Maggie had to get back to Piedras. Last Saturday’s demonstration had succeeded, according to Liliana. Three mine company vice presidents were flying down from Canada the day after tomorrow, responding to concerns about the water. Though the mine had expressed some predictable objections, it appeared that the Rosario’s clean water campaign was going to be shockingly painless.
Maggie would still send off her hair sample tomorrow, but she’d get her checkups in Cajamarca, where Liliana would know the competent physicians. Her pregnancy wouldn’t show for a while, and by then she’d know what to do. She hadn’t mentioned it to Liliana, but somehow, talking on the phone with her, Maggie had realized that she’d been considering her options backwards. Vicente, not Carson, was the man who might be willing to raise a child that was his in spirit, if not in flesh. At that lunch with Uncle Zenobio, he’d praised Johnny for adopting Julia. Meanwhile, Carson would have trouble taking on even his own kid.
She had to talk to Vicente as soon as possible. Vicente, before anyone else.
Calvin said to Julia, “The graveside prayer was all right, wasn’t it, honey?”
“Yes, but again he made my mother sound like a different kind of woman from what she was.”
When Althea’s grave was being closed, Stoddard had dared to make one more remark. “Althea Baines was a woman remarkable not only for her unique life history, but for the depth of her loving self-sacrifice on behalf of her husband and her daughter.” It was true, all sad and true. Maggie remembered how Althea had said, “I paid.” She thought she’d finished telling herself Althea’s story, but it kept continuing, and continuing to change. She’d pay, herself, as well. In the end you gave back everything, even the body you’d been issued. So you had to make the meantime count. Althea had been saying that, too, on her last day.
