REMAINS by Barbara Klein Moss
The secret of life is to drop at the peak of ripeness.
Priscilla has confronted this wisdom more than once over the last three months as she walks the rooms of the house she grew up in, reacquainting herself with her late mother’s collections. Lynette had been partial to fragilities that outlast the flesh. Birds’ eggs bedded in cotton and displayed in their nests. Tortoiseshell combs laid out in a drawer: a living substance, her mother said, too delicate to be touched; she had broken the teeth of one playing dress‑up, and gentle Lynette had slapped her hand. Quantities of mourning jewelry, the tresses of the deceased plaited into intricate braids and set in brooches and lockets. Priscilla has known since she was tall enough to study the lock of hair in the oval frame on the foyer wall that she would never be as blond as little Amelia, who died at the age of ten, before the Civil War. The child’s curl, “snip’t from her marble brow,” as the accompanying verse put it, cinched with a blue satin ribbon and preserved under glass, is a yellow so pure that it defeats similes. Like freshly churned butter, she has said at one time or another; like a slice of sun – wan clichés that wilt as soon as they hit air while the golden girl skips off into the distance, forever spared beauty’s slow fade, the disappointments of love, the thousand unkind cuts of aging. These days, when Priscilla looks at the curl, she assesses her losses.
She, for instance, should have dropped while she still resembled Joni Mitchell. Her last summer at home, a boyfriend took a photo of her that mimicked the famous picture inside the album: bare-assed on the crest of a hill, hair streaming down her back, arms flung out like wings. At the time she had thought she would soar so far above Brewstertown, Maryland that the house, with its four symmetrical chimneys and greenish copper gutters, would soon be lost to view, if not to memory. And she had flown, farther and wider than she could have dreamed. When the irony of her return overcomes her, she takes the photo out of her wallet, smooths the frayed edges, and contemplates herself at nineteen, poised for take-off.
One thing is clear. If she’d had the sense to flame out early, she would not be standing before the mirror in her pink-and-white girlhood bedroom, agonizing over the linen shift she paid too much for – a classic, the saleswoman assured her, adaptable for all seasons. It’s obvious in this guileless summer light that the black is too stark, drains her of what little color she has. Her arms look padded, like dolls’ arms. What fitting-room smoke-and-mirrors had fooled her into thinking they were taut enough for sleeveless?
She is going to all this trouble for a date with her father. Arthur’s stiletto eye has not dulled with age. Too youthful? “Someone’s looking very girlish today.” Too much skin showing? “Lots of lovely lady!” Too drab? “Not in mourning, are you? Mother wouldn’t like to see you in those muley colors, Prissy.”
She ties a turquoise scarf around the crown of her straw hat – a diversionary gesture or a defiant one, she isn’t sure.
She is taking him to see the memorial bench recently installed at Proserpina, the public garden where her mother had volunteered. The bench was Priscilla’s idea. For all Lynette’s elegance, she had been happiest in her battered hat and loose smock, circling dreamily among the whimsical statues, trowel in hand. Arthur wrote the check willingly enough, but Priscilla has had to use all her powers of persuasion to convince him to visit the garden. He claims that whimsy gives him gas.
Priscilla had come home to help her mother die, and this Lynette accomplished in a mere five weeks, making her transit gracefully and unobtrusively, as she had gone about the business of life. She had even chosen the outfit she wanted to be buried in, sending Priscilla to the closet again and again – “Oh, not that stiff thing. I might as well be comfortable!” – the two of them hilarious, as if they were selecting a gown for a charity gala. When Priscilla was putting the dress in a garment bag for the undertaker, she found a piece of stationery pinned to the sleeve: directions for flower arrangements in her mother’s flowing cursive, pinks and purples to complement the dove-gray silk they’d decided on.
On one of her last conscious days, Lynette took her hand. “It’s been so wonderful to have you home,” she said. “You’ll stay awhile . . . won’t you? Look after Dad?” Priscilla promised, hesitant at first, then with an eagerness that surprised her. Her father had always been a cipher to her, but did anyone know him? He was not a man who revealed himself, apart from the roles he inhabited. To his clients at Moulton and Moulton he was a reassuring presence who guided them over life’s legal hurdles and drew up their last testaments, chatting folksily about living wills and interment options. To her mother he was a partner in the courtly ritual of marriage, a god of good sense whose crotchety nature must be placated with a daily menu of small tributes.
Priscilla had often thought, growing up, that she and her brother were incidental in Arthur’s eyes, addenda to his primary bond; he was fond of them in his way, solicitous from a wry distance as long as they behaved. Scott disappointed him by showing no interest in the family practice, but redeemed himself by passing uneventfully through university, marrying his college girlfriend, and establishing himself as a financial advisor in Chicago.
Priscilla had been, from adolescence on, outrageous. She’d fallen in with a theater crowd, drinking and drugging, sleeping with whomever she fancied, getting expelled from two schools in a row. When she had disturbed her father’s peace one too many times, she fled before he could throw her out, first to New York with the photographer boyfriend, then to the West Coast and a flamboyant break‑up in Berkeley. On her twenty-first birthday she was doing summer stock with a small company in Portland, the young cast sinking Noel Coward beneath the weight of their sincerity. The only one with the necessary flair was the second lead, a British actor named Clive.
He was older: raffish, slightly worn, light of step like an old-time vaudevillian. A vicar’s son who called her Holy Prisca, sliding the s on his tongue as if he were already tasting her. She told herself she wasn’t attracted, but was drawn to his ease, onstage and off, and to his freedom: if she worked hard at being a rebel, he seemed to have been born one. He never pressed her, only looked at her in his knowing way and waited for her to come to him. He didn’t have to wait long; kindred spirits, they agreed, were bound to find each other. He was appalled that she had never crossed the ocean. “My parents were stay-at-homes,” she explained. “Travel would’ve interrupted their precious routines.” “Well, then,” he said briskly, “time to get going!”
They went first to Amsterdam, where Clive had actor friends, and lingered for months, doing mime and one-act plays in cafes and public squares. Then on to Prague and Berlin. He knew people everywhere. Another species, they seemed to her: fearless and resourceful, exuberantly inventive. Priscilla felt like a wisp of an ingénue among them, but soon enough began to think of herself as a member of a company, a buoyant repertory of ever-changing faces. “I’ve found my tribe!” she wrote Lynette, who wrote back, “Ah, to be young,” and sent news of what was coming up in the garden. A check was enclosed, though Priscilla had not asked for it.
Paris in February was gray and damp. They found an attic room in a pension near the Gare du Nord and spent long hours in bed, making love beneath the musty comforter as rain tapped on the roof. Priscilla developed an intimacy with the brown stain on the ceiling, which seemed to be spreading. When at last a tepid sun broke through, Clive went out to chase up old friends. She plunged into a thick sleep, the accumulated fatigue of their journeys pulling her under all at once. Beyond the yellowed window shade was the city she had always longed to see, but she couldn’t stir a limb to explore it.
The next morning a tray of coffee and croissants was waiting, as usual, outside their door. Priscilla had been charmed by this touch of civilization in a place otherwise so humble. Now the smell of the coffee turned her stomach. Clive felt her forehead. “Italy,” he pronounced, as if the cure for her malaise were written on her brow. “Paris is dead at this time of year, no one’s here. All the interesting people are in Venice. It’s a regular hive in winter.”
“More water?” she said, gazing at the ceiling. “Is that what we need?” Her idea of the place, culled from her reading, was death and decay: old men lusting after children, ancient countesses fingering begrimed jewels, malarial vapors hanging above the canals.
“Fabulous town! It’ll perk you right up. And from there, we’ll take the Orient Express to Istanbul. Most intriguing city in the world, Prisca. Endless surprises.”
But the surprise, when it revealed itself, came in Venice, perhaps not the most wholesome habitat to grow a new life.
There were other cities over the years. Other men. A brief marriage to a young actor – a mistake that soured her on both the breed and the institution. Theater work when she could get it, and in the lengthening intervals between, a series of jobs of the sort actors took, performed with casual competence, left without regret. Having studied at the School of Clive, she had learned how to keep afloat and when to move on, slipping the noose before need or boredom set in. Often she was lonely, occasionally desperate; at her lowest moments, checks from Lynette seemed always to find her, propelled by some elastic understanding. Still, on her rare visits home, she marveled at how vibrant she had stayed compared to the girls she’d gone to school with, who had dulled into matrons while she was navigating the world. Her life had its stresses, but its fluidity kept her keen and bright, renewed her.
She was back in the Bay Area, working at a friend’s gift shop in Santa Rosa, when she got the call. It took her a moment to grasp the reality of her father at the other end of the line – his counselor voice, measured and precise, laying out the facts of Lynette’s condition. For twenty-seven years it had been her mother she spoke to.
If Arthur was pleased that the prodigal daughter had come home to care for her mother, he didn’t say so. He kissed her dryly on the cheek, saw that she was settled in her room, and went off to work, as he had most mornings Priscilla could remember. Weak as she was, Lynette insisted on coming downstairs to supervise the making of dinner and warn Priscilla against indulging any continental penchant for spice. “Plain food is best for his stomach,” she said apologetically. “Nothing exotic like you’re used to. Just sprinkle a little parsley to show him you made an effort.”
Each evening, once her mother was asleep, Priscilla sat with Arthur in the den and conferred about small comforts they could provide. It gave her an odd thrill: the two of them chatting easily as though they had always been close. She had expected him to chide her for all the grief she’d caused, but he didn’t ask about her past or question her about her travels; it was as if those turbulent years were filed under CLOSED in the orderly cabinet of his mind. She began to sense a frail bond forming between them, a tentative trust after years of chill. Contained as her father seemed, he was about to experience the ultimate disruption. He had married straight out of law school and never lived alone. The loss of his beloved partner was bound to leave him dazed and floundering, vulnerable as he had never been. She resolved to see him through the worst of it – for her mother’s sake, she told herself, but also because he would never expect such attention from her.
Lynette slipped away in the middle of a mild April night, her last breaths so calm that Priscilla, dozing at her bedside, never woke until the book she had been reading clattered to the floor. “As lovely as ever,” people murmured, as they filed past the coffin. Priscilla thought of how her mother had composed this last still life as dispassionately as a monk gazing at a skull, balancing the silver of her hair with the sheen of the gray silk, the subtle harmony of the flowers. When the lid was lowered, she felt a fleeting relief that now Lynette could rest, her artful arrangement preserved for eternity.
On a Monday morning, a month after the funeral, her father looked up from his newspaper, set down his cup, and said, “The house is yours, you know.”
Priscilla had been admiring the breakfast she’d set out for him, the glistening pink grapefruit to the left of the scrambled eggs, the carafe of black coffee to the right. She hadn’t forgotten the vase of tulips – fresh flowers, Lynette always said, got the day off to a cheerful start. Her days of street theater had come in handy: it was a kind of mime, the way she’d mastered her mother’s niceties.
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.
“Scotty isn’t interested,” he went on, “and I don’t suppose those actor fellows left you anything.”
“Just a few unpaid bills.” She refilled his cup, steadying her hand to disguise her emotion. He would never say he forgave her in so many words, but he would offer his house as if it were a section of the paper. “It’s incredibly generous of you, Daddy. Who ever thought I’d be a property owner – me, the original rolling stone! But we don’t need to worry about that now. This will always be your home.”
“All these remains lying around,” he said. “I never understood your mother’s affection for relics. Now that she’s gone, the place gives me the willies.”
A week later, he moved to his office on Lawyer’s Row.
Priscilla enjoyed having the house to herself at first. She indulged an urge to clean, wiping surfaces in a pleasurable trance like the house-proud women she’d scorned, possessed by their possessions; it was a novelty, having nice things to care for. She was more amused than intimidated by her rational father’s attack of superstition. The willies? Where on the fear spectrum did they fall? If any spirit were to show itself, it would likely be Lynette’s, hovering over the rooms she had recently departed, mournful that her feckless daughter had let Arthur get away. But her mother, never one to wander, confined her presence to the furniture. When Priscilla aimed a can of Pledge at the rosewood writing desk, an invisible force stayed her hand and a still, small voice commanded, “Lemon Oil!” It was difficult, under the circumstances, to feel the pride of ownership.
She knew what Clive would say if he could see her dusting. Some variation of the last words he had ever spoken to her, flung over his shoulder like a prophecy as he turned his back on their dank sublet in Hackney. He hadn’t wanted to return to London – never had much luck there – but he needed a regular job. They’d had a shock in Venice, mortality had brushed them, and in Istanbul they’d shaken off its touch, living like tourists, spending too freely. A few months of being sensible and they’d have enough for the next leg of their journey. “We’ll shut our eyes and think of Marrakesh,” he told her.
But the reality of staying put oppressed them both. The flat he’d rented was tiny, a section of an unconverted basement, the fold-out couch and hot plate shoved in among pipes. There was no room for the effortless choreography of their traveling days, which seemed a lost artifact of the road, along with their gift for improvising. When he was home, they were always stumbling over one another.
He came in early one afternoon, surly because the friend he’d arranged to meet had not bothered to show up, and caught her sweeping, tears running down her face. “What’s the matter now?” he asked.
“I can’t live this way,” she said. “It’s sordid.”
“Sordid? My lady finds our accommodations saw-did.” He began to recite a passage from Streetcar in a quavery Blanche DuBois treble, swanning about the room and flinging things into his pack.
“Under that wild-chick costume, you’re just a proper Southern girl, aren’t you?” he said at the door. “Go home to the plantation, darling.”
And she had shouted after him, “I’ll go home in a box!”
After a week of solitary days and silent evenings, the ghosts she had courted in her restless childhood began to stir in her memory. The remains didn’t haunt, exactly; she had known from the start that they were too flimsy to fan a full-blown scare. To raise a goose bump, or even a modest shiver, they had to be marinated in the mind, their origins teased out and reanimated. When Lynette explained to her about egg-blowing, Priscilla had pictured a thin pipe, the baby birds sucked up from their snug homes and expelled into the air like bubbles. She’d felt a twinge of pity for those mothy creatures, and something like horror on behalf of the naked tortoise, whose gray meat made a grisly contrast to the lacy combs in her mother’s drawer. The braided necklaces and brooches ought to have summoned images of pale ladies expiring on chaises, but were as lifeless as fabric.
Only Amelia’s ringlet seemed to have belonged to a real person. Priscilla had conjured the whole girl from that vivid yellow curl: her high forehead, her eyes the pure blue of robin’s eggs, the satin ribbon repurposed to hold back her shining fall of hair. For a welcome gift, she’d endowed Amelia with a hoop like the one a Victorian child played with in an old picture book, and watched, transfixed, as her new guest wielded a stick and set it spinning.
As a playmate, or even an imaginary friend, Amelia wasn’t very satisfactory. She was a tease, always rushing by, flaunting her perfection in intoxicating glimpses. Often she was gone before Priscilla registered her presence, a phantom of a laugh lingering on the air. Catch me if you can, she seemed to dare. Priscilla, confined to poky human time, could never keep up with her. The older she got, the less Amelia visited, and when puberty invaded with its unsightly eruptions and distracting urges, the ghost-girl lost patience and vanished altogether.
Maneuvering for a parking place in the courthouse lot, Priscilla marvels again at how small the buildings are: one story, most of them, with a single window in front and doors of different colors. The whole row could be set down in one of those Dickensian villages people display at Christmas, dollhouse furniture for grown‑ups. Moulton and Moulton, Est. 1875, is one of the oldest structures and, by virtue of continuity, the largest: an early legal Moulton had added an attic before there was a historical society to protest, and Priscilla’s grandfather had extended the back room. She remembers the decades of stacked files in that room, the detritus that had accumulated: plaster busts and a 48‑state flag, an old globe, boxes of holiday decorations. How can her meticulous father live in such clutter? He who was always brushing imaginary dust off his cuffs, who wore a tie at dinner.
Helen Dunleavy waves to her from the window. She has worked for Arthur for decades, an implacable bulk behind the reception desk, her beige cardigan permanently draped over the back of the chair. She reminds Priscilla of her fifth-grade teacher, another large woman whose maternal façade masked a Fascist soul.
“Make yourself comfortable. He’ll be with you in a minute.” Helen raises her penciled brows. “Primping,” she stage-whispers. “They’re worse than women, aren’t they?”
Priscilla declines to answer. Helen’s peak would surely have been in the fifties, that bastion of smug complacency when predictability was a virtue. But the irritation of the woman is that she probably never had a peak; she’s persisted in the same state from her youth up. Priscilla can see her as a child in a Catholic school uniform: a plump little nun’s pet in a white blouse, plaid skirt, and one of her ubiquitous vests. Today she is wearing a version modeled on the Unicorn Tapestries in The Cloisters. Horned beasts gambol across her bosom, spear-carrying hunters in hot pursuit.
Helen offers spring water. “You couldn’t ask for a prettier day, could you? It’s almost as if your dear mother arranged it, with that knack of hers for making everything perfect. I’m going to pay my respects this weekend. I thought you two should have this time to yourselves.”
Priscilla is momentarily stunned. Apparently, Helen believes that her long tenure at the desk makes her a member of the family. “How considerate of you,” she says. Helen smiles blandly and nods. If the sarcasm has reached her at all, she will, of course, attribute it to Priscilla’s fraught state.
Her father comes in, his sparse hair carefully combed, wearing a suit she doesn’t recognize and one of his dapper summer bowties. He bends to kiss her. He is a tall man, but age has curved his spine, giving him the tottering dignity of an old tower.
“You’re looking well, Prissy. A little pale. You could use some sun.” He pats his pate. “I’m the one that needs a hat. I burn in the darndest places.”
Helen rises and with a complicit glance at Priscilla – men! – takes a white fisherman’s hat from the coat tree and hands it to him.
“Oh, not that,” Arthur groans. “With the suit? Spare me, Mommy.” The secretary crosses her arms over her chest and contrives a glare. “Well, I guess it covers the subject,” he says, and, to Priscilla’s amazement, plops the shapeless thing on his head.
At the door he pauses. “Helen, did I tell you how much I like that vest? Unusual! Very attractive.”
Helen looks up from her computer with a small smile. “You told me this morning, Arthur,” she says.
Priscilla adjusts the passenger seat so her father can fold himself in. “You can take the hat off now,” she tells him. “Teacher’s left the room.”
“That’s all right,” he says vaguely, and gazes out the window.
She sees how it is. He is disoriented after his loss, perhaps even in the first stages of senility. She has read that grief sometimes hastens the condition. And Helen – immobilized behind the desk all these years, trundling home each night to her canary or her cat, possibly diddling herself to sleep with thoughts of her esteemed but inaccessible boss – will, of course, leap at the chance to take him over. Spare me, Mommy. The woman is by nature a dominatrix without the whip, a benevolent dictator who may already be besieging him with casseroles and stitching frilled curtains to brighten up the back room.
In the old days, she and Scott had a standing joke. “At least Mom doesn’t have to worry about the wife at the office.”
But who else would her father turn to when he has lost the wife of his home and heart? In crisis, familiarity is more consoling than love. Priscilla knows this from experience. After Clive left her, she’d developed a bizarre nostalgia for things American; she would go to newsstands and buy magazines from the States – trivial stuff, home decorating and recipes – and pore over them again and again, savoring even the ads. She thinks of Helen’s wide arms, her talcum smell and tight perm, her rules. Put them all together, they spell Mother.
In the rush of her thoughts she nearly misses the turn-off to the garden, and swerves so sharply that her father grips the seat and says, “Don’t kill us!”
“We’re fine, Daddy. Trust me.” Priscilla pats his hand. She has been absent for a long time, but it is not too late to show him what it means to have a daughter.
Steps into the Mad Hatter’s Garden, Priscilla succumbs to an old enchantment. She has been coming here since she was a little girl and the first moments are always the same: that inner swooning as tropical lushness envelops her, walling her off from the parking lot only yards away. Even knowing how hard her mother worked to preserve the illusion, she turns again into Tiny Alice gaping at the top-hatted teapot surrounded by plate-size purple flowers, the warty succulents that Lynette called Red Queens.
Her father stares bleakly into the depths of a giant teacup. “This is where they put the bench? Way too close to the road, I’d say. You can hear the traffic.”
“We’re only in the courtyard. I asked them to set it” – she almost stumbles and says ‘her’ – “in Il Giardino. The Italian Garden. Mom loved spending time there.”
“There’s more than one? They ought to call it Gardens. Let people know what they’re in for.”
A woman pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair shoots her a look of sympathy.
“Such a curmudgeon,” Priscilla says, shaking her head with what she hopes passes for fond tolerance.
She escorts her father through the spill of roses and lavender in the Cottage Garden; the calculated wildness of The Wood; the bridge over the Water Garden, where they pause to watch a snake swish between the lilypads. She keeps up a steady patter: “Mom used to take her lunch break here.” “I hid here once, Mom was frantic.” He nods, and trudges on. He consents to use the rest room at the estate house but refuses an offer to sit on the terrace and enjoy the view. “Where isn’t there a view?” he snorts.
He shows no further sign of life until they come to the Abbey Ruins, which are not ruins at all, but new constructions artfully designed to look like the remnants of ancient walls. “Now that’s clever,” he says, reading the names of donors inscribed on the stones. “They must have a smart marketing team here.”
“I’m glad something meets with your approval.” She tries for lightness, but her frustration seeps through. His dogged resistance is wearing her down, making her doubt the whole excursion.
He glances at her, squinting in the sun. “I’m not one to ooh and ah, you know that. It’s all very pretty. Flowers are pretty. What else can I say?”
‘‘You could show a little enthusiasm for Mom’s sake. We’re here for her.”
“Your mother had her enthusiasms and I had mine. We knew when to leave each other be. Maybe that’s why we lasted for fifty-two years.” But his face softens. “Don’t mind me, Pris. I’m getting cranky in my old age. Curmudgeon – you had that right.”
In Il Giardino a single statue reigns: Proserpina herself, a serious deity, proffering her sheaf of wheat – like a wand, Priscilla thinks, supplying the whimsy. Who but a fairy goddess-mother could have decreed that the two of them arrive at just the hour when the afternoon sun sinks low enough to glaze the garden’s formal charms in honeyed Tuscan light?
They find the bench under a fig tree, overlooking a small fountain. The woodworker sent her photos, but this is the first time she’s seen the finished piece in place. It is a thing of beauty: teak, with graceful lines, at home in its classical setting. Her idea has been perfectly realized: if an object can be said to embody a person, this bench is the essence of her mother. Priscilla had not cried at the funeral, but now her eyes fill, the tears spilling over. She swallows a shuddering breath and wills herself to glance at her father. He has taken off his hat and crushed it to his chest.
They stand in silence for a few seconds, heads bowed, their sides not quite touching. Though Priscilla doesn’t strictly believe in Heaven-in‑the-sky, she has a strong sense of her mother looking down upon them, a serene smile on her face. She reaches for her father’s hand and bends with him to read the gleaming plaque.
In Memory of Lynette S. Moulton
Beloved Wife, Mother, Gardener
“The earth laughs in flowers.”
“ ‘The earth – ?’ ” He straightens up suddenly. “What the heck does that mean? I never heard your mother talk that way.”
“It’s Emerson. Mom adored Emerson.” Pure hyperbole. She had searched for flower quotes on the Internet and chosen this one because it was short.
“Oh. I guess I should have known that.” He sighs and gestures at the bench. “Shall we?”
Priscilla sits first. It is an awkward business, sacrilegious somehow, like sitting in her dead mother’s lap. Her father drops down heavily, his long legs splaying, and mops his forehead with his pocket hanky. She realizes with a pang how tired he must be, traipsing around in his suit in the midday heat. She is weary herself, and her feet are stinging; the straps of her new sandals have rubbed raw patches on her heels.
“Need a Band-Aid?” He fumbles inside his jacket and brings out a plastic packet. “Helen made me an emergency kit. It’s a little bulky, but she won’t let me leave the office without it, even if I’m only crossing to the courthouse. Tums, Tylenol, antiseptic wipes, cough drops. Just in case, she says. She believes in being prepared.”
Are there condoms, Priscilla wonders? A couple of brittle rubbers preserved for thirty years, should the earth happen to move?
“Daddy, you don’t have to submit to that woman’s tyranny,” she says. “Can’t you see she’s taking advantage of your grief? It’s time you came home and let me take care of you.” When he doesn’t respond, she adds, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Tyranny? Are we talking about Helen?” He turns the packet over in his hands. “She’s the kindest, most unselfish person in the world.”
“You’re not thinking clearly. You’re still in shock. I suppose it never occurred to you that she has . . . feelings for you. Beyond that of an employee, I mean.”
“You get to know someone pretty well,” he says slowly, “working beside them day after day.”
“As well as you know a wife,” Priscilla says.
She’d intended a question, not this steely statement flashing from her closing throat. Finding its mark too soon.
He raises his head. “I never humiliated your mother. I always respected her. She liked things to look a certain way, and I made sure they did.”
An acting instructor once told Priscilla that in the vast vocabulary of mime an expression can be summoned to convey every subtlety of emotion. Wordless, she gropes for one now, and sees the result reflected in her father’s face. Popped eyes and pained mouth, a silent-movie caricature.
He offers a tissue from the packet and she takes it.
“How long?” she manages.
“A couple of years . . . maybe more like three. It kind of crept up on us.”
“I can’t believe this! What can you possibly see in the woman? After what you had. After Mom.”
“No one planned it, Pris. We were just two people who were comfortable with each other, and things . . . evolved. Helen never asked for anything, it’s not her nature. She thought the world of your mother. Still does. I couldn’t have made it through these last months without her help. The life in her, the humor. . . ” He pauses, his gaze inward. “One day a man wakes up and realizes where home is.”
Priscilla thinks of Lynette sunk in pillows in the big four-poster, her head turned to the side. “Mom must have known. She was too intelligent not to. If you poisoned her last years on earth, I will never forgive you.”
His shoulders sag. “I can’t say for sure. We got used to not talking about things.” After a moment, he says, “She was peaceful at the end. If she knew, I don’t think she minded.”
The goddess has withdrawn her favor. She has ordained that Priscilla see the box hedges and bleached camellias through her father’s eyes – or perhaps it’s only that the light has changed. Either way, the well-mannered loveliness of Il Giardino has become intolerable.
“You must be eager to get back,” she says.
They drive to Lawyer’s Row without speaking. She pulls up in front of the office. Her father unbuckles his seat belt but sits with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead as if they are still en route. They are spared the wave from the window; Helen is not at her desk. Priscilla has an unobstructed view of the beige sweater, the knit stretched thin over the shape of the chair where it was tossed long ago just in case and will likely remain for the duration, the days ahead a queue of drab neutrals, one lined up behind an identical other, until. . . . Until.
“Daddy, don’t stay here! Come home, please.” She clutches his arm. “Bring her if you have to. What am I going to do, all alone in that big house?”
Gently he frees himself and smooths her hair back from her forehead, a gesture she remembers from childhood.
“Sell the place! Go wherever you have a yen to! That’s what I’d do if I were you. You don’t want to take care of me, Prissy, you only think you do. The house is your portion, free and clear, no ornery old man attached. Sell it and have a big, glorious adventure!” His eyes are bright, his voice genial. “You’re not as young as you were, but you’ve got a few adventures left in you.”
He runs his knuckles over her cheek. “You won’t believe this, but you were my favorite. You reminded me of the way I started out, before life turned me into a premature old fart. Maybe that’s why I was so hard on you. Scotty, he’s a tame soul, a homebody like your mother. You were hell on wheels to raise, but you had the guts to go your own way. I admire that.”
Her father insisted she join them for a drink, and somehow Priscilla had carried it off like her mother’s daughter: had sat in a recliner in the back room, sipping one of Arthur’s gin-and-tonics and sampling Helen’s enchilada bites; complimented the curtains and other domestic felicities; made enthusiastic noises as they described the trip to Hawaii they were planning for the fall. “Nothing exotic like you’re used to,” Arthur said, inadvertently echoing Lynette’s words, “but we’re starting slow. Neither of us has ever been anywhere.”
It is dusk, the house shrouded in shadow by the time she gets back. She leaves her sandals in the foyer and pads barefoot into the living room. The couch here is opulent, its cushions seldom dented except by guests. With only a passing thought of Lynette, she swings her legs up and stretches out, slipping a silk-covered pillow behind her head and another under her feet. The strain of the day has caught up with her, not to mention the drink. She is buzzed from the gin, too foggy to call her brother and deliver the sound bites she’d been composing all afternoon. The love nest on Lawyer’s Row. Helen, the face that launched a thousand memos. Actually, she has no heart for it. The woman is not so bad, really. She saw a chance for love and took it. Who can blame her for that?
The living room was reserved for company, which has given it a certain mystique. Priscilla would sneak in here after dinner, when the rest of the family had retired to the den, and sit in the waning light and wait for Amelia to come to her. The little girl would arrive in her own time, running or skipping or expertly rolling her hoop, her long hair bouncing behind her. She wore a white frock and boots that buttoned, and when she passed Priscilla, she turned and gave a mocking, mean-girl laugh.
This evening Priscilla wouldn’t mind being haunted. She could use the company. And what fodder for mockery she provides. A middle-aged woman sprawled on a sofa massaging her sore feet. A woman who has just been gifted with the ancestral home and all its contents, decades of possessions she must sift through, remains that must be – what, buried in the backyard? – before fulfilling her father’s mandate. An adventure! A big, glorious adventure! Really, Daddy, who has the energy? And even if she manages to get the place cleared and sold, where would she go? There is nothing calling her, no one waiting for her, no reason to be anywhere but here.
“But these are the problems of the living,” she tells the elusive Amelia. “The fact is, you came to a full stop a long time ago. Probably of some ordinary childhood sickness that could have been cured with a shot of penicillin. You’re gone.” She cannot explain why this obvious truth should strike her with a hushed astonishment, as if she had only absorbed it now. “Your parents must have wept, and prayed, and begged you to stay, but all they could keep of you was a little lock of hair.”
She and Clive believed in traveling light. When the pregnancy was confirmed, they were at first disbelieving – how could they have been so stupid? – then quick to get a name from one of Clive’s friends. But when they stood in front of the low stucco building, wedged between a tailor shop and a salumeria, she could not bring herself to go in. “I can’t,” she whispered, and he nodded, his face as pale as hers. She offered to go home, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Why not travel with a baby? Other people did. Another backpack, would it add so much weight? They would raise their child to be a companion, resilient and free like the kids of the nouveau Gypsies they’d met on the road. “Three makes a troupe!” Clive said, doing a little soft-shoe.
At the end of her second month, just as they were beginning to think of themselves as a family, she started to bleed. They were sad at first – shaken that their vision could be snatched from them so suddenly – then weak with relief that her body had made the decision for them. She was too young, it wasn’t meant to be, they’d averted a disaster! As soon as she was well enough they bought third-class tickets on the Orient Express, and by the time they arrived in Istanbul, the pregnancy had been all but forgotten.
Priscilla has rarely thought of it since. Certainly, she has never mourned. It was a bit of tissue the size of a blueberry, not enough substance to make a ghost, and yet tonight, in this darkening room, it rises.
Barbara Klein Moss is the author of a collection of stories, Little Edens (2004), and a novel, The Language of Paradise (2015), both from W.W. Norton & Company. Her stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Southwest Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2001.