Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 17

7

THANKSGIVING 1998. My sister kept me company in my mother’s upstairs bedroom in the house on State Street, where we’d grown up. She was laughing and telling stories as we waited for the cue that the wedding could begin. I looked in the mirror and pretended to check my hair, but really I watched the room behind me and the memories it held. The big white bed I slept in most nights for most of my childhood, afraid that if I wasn’t with her, my mother would die in the dark. The old pine bureau that made me smell mothballs just looking at it, where I knew the neatly folded wool sweaters were waiting their turn to be pulled over her head. The windows were cracked open a bit, letting in the sounds from the street below, busier now than it was when I was little. And then Nan’s pretty face smiling at me, holding up the dress she helped me choose and telling me it was time to put it on. As I stepped in and she zipped it up, I heard the click of a camera and saw that my sister-in-law had come in, all smiles and warm embraces and loud laughter.

“What’s the holdup?” Michele called from behind the camera, loud even though I was right there, in front of the mirror attached to the inside of the closet door. When I was little, what I loved best was that my mother’s closet was a tunnel that led to the other side of the house. A much shorter walk from my bedroom to hers, the push of hanging clothes rough then smooth against my face, the smells of the silks and wools and velvets she hadn’t worn, even then, for years and years.

“James isn’t here yet,” I told Michele, naming the one guest on Ngoni’s side besides his best man, the only other African in attendance, one of twenty people at that small wedding at my mom’s house. We had no money to bring his family over from Zimbabwe for this day. We told ourselves we’d celebrate there as soon as we could. “The bus from Boston is late,” I said. “We’ll wait.”

I looked out the window and saw it was getting dark, saw we should be married by now. I could hear the sounds of the gathering party downstairs and wondered what Ngoni was doing, who he was talking to, if he was nervous like me. The women around me laughed and told stories, and I loved them but they were far away. Something was missing, and it wasn’t until I said it that I knew what it was.

“Can someone get Mom?” I hadn’t seen her all day.

She came up trailing the smell of the white lasagna she was cooking, her lavender dress creased where the apron strings were tied. She was filled with family, happy to have all of her people there, excited for an excuse to celebrate.

Mom said, “Yes?” as she walked toward me, in the way she used to say, “Yes?” when I’d called to her from my sixth-grade bedroom wondering if the laundry was clean.

“I just thought you might want to say something to me before . . .” It was hard to say the words. She looked at me and smiled. Her sea-blue eyes were clear, open, guarded. I wondered how my hazel-greens matched up.

She paused before saying, “I do.” And then it was too late to stop her. “I want to tell you that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

This wasn’t what I meant, this wasn’t the story I wanted to hear, but of course it was the only story she could tell me in that moment, and I should have known better before asking. I’d heard this story so many times I could have told it to myself.

“No one ever said that to me before I got married, and I want to make sure someone says it to you. Do you want to do this?”

WHEN MY PARENTS met at the Riviera, a bar in the Village, early in 1967, they were both still married to other people. Mom was a “copy girl” at the publication she still calls Sporty Illustrations, and Dad was an editor at Tower Books, a “factory of paperback originals.” He saw contracts go out to writers he was sure he could best, and he soon hatched a plan to get one himself, to fund a trip to Africa and Europe where he could become “a real writer.” It had worked for Hemingway. He got my mom a contract, too, and they typed their way across the Atlantic on a freighter with cheap fare. I have a picture of them leaning against the railing, the wind blowing my mom’s long straight hair across her face, my dad’s white shirt flapping against his tan skin, his sunglasses dark on his face.

They spent some weeks living in Tangier before settling in Rome, where they wrote novels to fulfill the first contracts and got new contracts to write more. It seemed this could be a great way to make a living. Letters from Mom to her parents from that time reveal plans to live there indefinitely. Those letters don’t mention the annulment my mother’s father helped her organize before she left, but they do make it sound as if Mom and Dad kept separate apartments, as if it were a funny and sometimes irritating coincidence that George was also living in Rome. Really they shared a rooftop apartment above a restaurant. Had their mail delivered to the American Express office.

Six months into the trip, something happened and my mother returned to the U.S. alone. Sometimes she says she was expected home for Christmas. Sometimes she says she was fleeing a failing relationship. She says, “Anyway, your dad wanted to stay in Europe to confront his art,” using air quotes so I know it’s not her phrase. She says, “Anyway, I was just sure it wasn’t going to work out with us.”

But my father had another idea. Within a few months, he’d returned to New York with plans to win her back. She says when he emerged from the airplane “he was covered from head to toe with eczema,” and the implication is that this manifestation of his heartbreak on his skin softened her, broke her heart, brought her back to him.

By the time she took him to Albany to meet her parents, it was summer. Dad’s skin had cleared up and his position in her life was safe. My grandmother—black sleeveless dress, black stockings and pumps—stood tall in the doorway of her suburban home as my folks climbed out of the car. My dad had a good six inches on her, but that didn’t make her short. He approached slowly and stayed on the lower step. He bowed low before exclaiming, “My God, it’s Mrs. Robinson.” She loved him from the first.

I wonder what my trim, silver-haired grandfather thought of this charming stranger, his mop of untamed black hair, his thick rusty mustache. Was he as quick to hand over his firstborn again so soon? I can almost see him there, just inside the house mixing a gin and tonic and muttering to himself about this stranger’s saccharine words seeping through the screen.

After dinner that night—I picture smoked salmon on simple white china—Mom and Dad headed north. They landed at a motel on the shores of Lake George and eloped in the morning.

“I WANT TO do this,” I said to my mom in her bedroom. My voice was smaller and less confident than I intended. Maybe she hugged me before she headed back to the party. Watching her go, I felt a familiar yearning, a wish to call her back to me, to ask her to take me up into her arms and tell me that everything was going to be all right. But just as I’d learned to do when I was little, I shut that feeling out, turned to my face in the mirror, pasted on a smile.

Then it wasn’t long before someone told me that James had arrived, that it was time. I walked to the top of the stairs and stood where we used to sit and listen to their dinner parties when we were tiny, and I could hear Dad’s deep voice and loud laughter wafting up at me through the years, and for a moment I lost my balance and thought the heels on these stupid shoes were too damn high. I grabbed the banister with my shaking left hand, looked down and saw my brother smiling up at me. His face blurred and he was Dad, hair longer and smile broader and shoulders wider.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, it was Josh’s voice that whispered, “You look beautiful,” but maybe it sounded like Dad. I smiled and blushed and Michele snapped the camera, but the flash didn’t go off and I knew the picture was lost, the one picture I ever would have seen of me and my dad. Tears sprang to my eyes as I rounded the corner and there was my aunt Libby in her striped dress.

“Does anyone have a Kleenex?” she asked. “Jules and I have this thing.” Her voice wavered as she, right there in the middle of me walking down this makeshift aisle, reminded us of all the Thanksgivings during which we’ve cried when we caught each other’s eye as someone spoke aloud the Robert Burns poem before the meal. I realized no one said it this year—we were so preoccupied with the wedding a few days away—and as if to make up for the neglect, or to bring myself back into this moment, I said it in my head as I crossed my childhood living room:

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

But we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

But do I have meat or do I want it? Which one am I in the poem? Because how it feels is that something is missing, and even when there’s a feast on the table I’m hungry and alone.

When I arrived at the front of the room, the windowsills heavy with purple day lilies, Ngoni, Kathleen the priest, my beautiful sister Nan, and Dave the blond best man were each looking my way, and I had to shake out those thoughts and return. I focused on Ngoni’s herringbone suit, his black hair cut short to his head, his tidy wire-rim glasses, the deep browns of his skin and eyes coming together in a shy smile. His cheek twitched just a little.

Kathleen looked at me long before she told what she said might be an apocryphal story. “In antiquity,” she said, “when a marriage procession and a funeral procession came together at an intersection,” she said, “the marriage procession had the right of way.”

I was conjugating verbs in my head, left turns and triangles and ceremonies not my own. She saw my confusion, Kathleen the priest, and so explained it to let me catch up.

“The story tells us that love is more powerful than death.” She joined our hands there in front of the family who knew what she meant.

Then it was Ngoni’s turn, and he took out the papers on which he’d typed up some words from the book of Ruth: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

I was too hot and couldn’t focus my eyes and my head was thumping and pumping. I turned to Nan and asked for the John Donne book she was holding, opened it to the page I’d marked, but the book shook in my hands and I couldn’t see the words, so I took a deep breath and tried to get steady.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee. . . .

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,

And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,

Where can we finde two better hemispheares

Without sharpe North, without declining West?

What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

Dad wasn’t mixt equally, I wanted to scream. Our loves be so alike, you and I, I wanted to whisper. But when I looked across the space that separated me from Ngoni, I couldn’t tell if he saw me anymore. If he wanted to take my hand.

Kathleen burned brimstone, filling the house with smoke and the smell of sulfur. Rings were exchanged, vows spoken, our hands were wrapped together in a colorful stole as Kathleen declared that those whom God has brought together no man can put asunder. But when I kissed him, for the smallest moment, it felt like make-believe.

Until my aunt Annie said, “Doesn’t it make you want to clap?” and there was loud applause and we stood in the living room closed in by walls my father Sheetrocked, surrounded by the people who raised me or came up with me there in that house on State Street, and I came back into myself and then I clapped, too.

When it came time for the toasts, Ngoni gathered me up by his side and wrapped his arm around me, and the people in the room formed a circle around us. He said, using his teacher voice, “In Zimbabwe, where I’m from,” as though anyone there didn’t know where he was from, “it is believed that when a person dies, his soul goes to the wind.”

I heard Annie moan just a little. I felt Ngoni’s arm tighten around my shoulder. “I would like to toast the winds that brought us together.” And then I knew that he felt it too, our dads blowing by in the November night. They were there for me and they were there for Ngoni, and we couldn’t see through them to us but we knew that everyone was there to help us try to see through them to us. We knew that we would try to see through them.

THAT NIGHT IN the hotel room I had the dream again. The one I had the night I met Ngoni. The one where my dad is really alive. This time he was a homeless man in my hometown. I came upon him in the dark cold entranceway to the old record store on Main Street. I’d walked by him my whole childhood and not seen him.

We talked for hours, and by the end I understood why he had to do it, why he had to make us believe he was dead. I promised to keep the secret and I walked around the next morning proud that he chose me, proud of this secret only I could hold.