She was more nearly the same than any of us. Old to me when I left, now she was age’s very conception, sparrow where she had been eagle, all of her contracted to a minimum, occupying a space almost too small for an enumeration of its parts, and there was no need to, the years having done this for us; she was ninety-five. Only the forehead had gained and was now of a breadth that would have made her sexless, had it not been for the atmospheric dainties with which she was still surrounded. Beneath it, sharpened by many skin-folds, unblinking, the eyes held us, drew us on and stopped us a few feet from her, while Maureen came round the side and knelt to set the tray down between. Sir Joseph let himself down into one of the chairs arranged on either side of her for audience.
“Mother. Mother, here’s someone who knew us a long time ago. He’s going back to America tomorrow, but he came all the way down here on a day like this—just to see us.” His eyes watered with sentiment; it was true—next to her he was an old party. He was an old man; she was age.
“Dora Cross, you remember her. You remember her, him. This is her son.” He had not raised his voice; she was not deaf, then. But she said nothing. He tried again. “Dora Cross’s son, Mother. The boy who used to come here with her, must be thirty years ago. This is he.” She was regarding me now, unmoving. For what seemed endless minutes, she looked at me. Finally he spoke again, in an even lower tone. “You can’t have forgotten.
Rachel’s
Dora.”
A beardlike puff of lace between breast and chin played in her breath. She was breathing heavily. There was a slight, all-over wince of the body as her lips opened. “Amayrika,” she said.
He stared at her, petulant. “No, no. He used to come upstairs in the afternoons—you used to have conversations, he says.” Already he had adopted me. He pointed a shaky forefinger. “He used to bring up your tray.”
“
Hald dein Mund.
” It should have brought me down to earth, that swift, guttural phrase, the raised, perfectly steady hand, but I was still acting from sentiment. I reached for the tray. It was my last impersonation, as it had been my first, but I could not know this; we do not lightly assist at the death of the child we were. Even if I had been listening with all my talent I would not have heard his exit preparing, or at what point during that afternoon the sound came, no more than the squeak of a windpipe garroted with its own undersized collar, his final sound. One expects so much more of murder. I even smiled condescendingly down on the two of them, as I lifted the tray in that sudden flamboyance with which the middle-aged act young to the old. “
Guten Tag
,
gnädige Frau
,” I said.
She did not smile back at me, but when she took up the cue it came in a whisper as light as a girl’s. “
Da bist du.
” Still, she scrutinized me, the corners of her seamed lips turned down. “
Ach
, such
ton
he had,
nicht
?” she nodded. “
Das kleine Herrgöttle von Bieberach.
” Lips working, until the cry came she appeared to be smiling, until the cry came. “Pierre!” Eyes closed, she rocked with it, in the dying fall for the departed. “Ai, ai, Pierre!” Her eyes open, she whispered it, “Pierre,
selig.
Pierre.”
Only my grasp on the tray upheld me. The exorcised must stand that way, rigid before the worn syllable that is the curse, that is the blessing, while the inner bulwarks slide. Then his muttered aside—“Why should she take you for
him
, of all people?”—released me, and bending carefully, knees, back, arms, as if I were of an age with them, I handed the tray to Maureen and sat down. For they had forgotten me. Gabbling, they were exchanging the ritual insults with which members of a real family relieve one another in their imprisonment. “
She
!” I heard her say. “I am not ‘she’; I am your mother, and I still know what I am doing. Who anyway makes here the mistakes nowadays, does not know himself from one day to the next one?”—his low, answering “I did not mean—” and her overriding “
Gott sei dank
, the women in our family hold on to their minds!”—his rising “Can’t you ever forgive me for her, you devil, leave that poor thing out there alone after all these years! Or me!”—and in the sudden, shocked silence, his “Forgive me, it’s true—I don’t always know, these days,” and her quick, agonized “My son, my son, I did not mean—” They had forgotten themselves. With less than twenty years between them, both cornered now in the far end of the enclosure, they might have been not son and mother but in turn a variation of couples—spouse to spouse, sister to unfavorite brother, father to intemperate child—hand over hand, over hand. Age, the far corner, was the relationship that now made them most near to one another, most dear. As I watched, waiting for them to remember themselves and me again, they receded to it, not as far as their obscure legend, but to the more intimate distance of two old ones of indeterminate years, even sex, of certain human smells and lapses, a little ahead of me in the human stockade. The sound of a door closing, Maureen going out, reminded them of me.
“He was here,” she told him, pointing at me. “On Pierre’s last visit. That’s why I said it,
du alte Dümmling
, you old fool. What else do you think!” She turned to me. “He will remember. Der Onkel Pierre, my little brother. Every child he ever met fell in love with him.”
Sir Joseph lowered his eyes, in truce for the time being. Not every mistake need be corrected.
“The pig said
Oui
,” I said to him. “You were the one to interpret that for me.” Whether or not he got the reference, my absurd post-mortem gratitude, but was being careful because of his alternations, I could not tell.
“He died four years later, in Brazil,” he answered. “Got married there, leaving us a parcel of cousins we’ve lost track of. Never got back.” Then his lip twitched, and together, in our separate ways, we stifled the smile one reserves for those who have after all not escaped.
“And of course I know who you are, then,” she said to me, “what do you think! So-o. So.” She marveled at me. “So, Dora’s boy.
You
got back.” She leaned back, shrugging off marvels as easily as she had once dispensed them; in her firm grasp they were natural, even when she added, “Well, handsome waiter, pour the wine.” As we drank, she turned to him again. “
Deine Grosmutter
,
my
mother, used to play that game with him—my brother. You never met her. But last time he was here, I recalled it to him. ‘What a memory you have, Franziska!’ he said, that last time.”
“My mother,” she was still saying at ninety-five. “Your grandmother,” she was saying to this rheumy-eyed man. We were all being equally absurd, equally sentimental. Eternity makes us so, leaving us to make what we can of it. What Lasch had once said of me, in his old age and too soon for me, was now becoming true. I saw the cycle, or began to, even imagining that outside the door Maureen, whom Molly would never think of letting listen at doors, had her ear pressed against this one, yearning toward the epic company of this house.
“Look there,” said Frau Goodman, pointing to some shelves I knew well. “Everything he ever gave me is there. Maureen has just been dusting them.” What mind-readers, she and I, I might have thought formerly, but saw it now for merely the heavy repetition of the way things are. “And you know what?” she continued. “I would give them all up for just one little thing.” She stopped, to wipe a drop from the corner of her eye, nose, mouth—not tears, but that general ichor toward which we all slowly refine. I thought she was going to name the “one” thing for me, give me the nonagenarian’s secret, impart to me, just before leaving, a hint of what it is our end to know. “What I would not give for it!” she said. “That little stickpin he wore always in his tie. His horse.”
Because she was pleading with me to remember, I nodded back to her. And since hearing another person describe it would bring it nearer for her, I did so, but with no other reverence—recoiling now from any such storehouse of the dead for myself. At the point where she was, had already been when I first knew her, at the point where this brave man opposite would refuse until death to admit that he was, there might be an almost permanent place from which one might look backward only—to the vast, frozen rearguard of the happened—with honor. But I was still in the middle of life, where one needed only enough remembrance to walk toward.
“I’m looking at your pictures,” I said, hoping to coax her a little nearer me, closer in limbo. “The ones you painted.” Lined up on a wall devoted solely to them, they were a queer lot such as would never be shown in any gallery but might be seen any day, though seldom in such number, in a house. Copies all of them, of modest Dutch interiors, mild Holy Families, they were in themselves too mild to be bad, but taken together possessed an elusive congruity, of domestic subject perhaps, or of that vague diffusion of comfort to be derived from the second-rate—for there did not seem to be a known original among them. Surely, however, the originals could not all have been—that was it. She had made them all exactly the same size. What unity she had tried to bring them all down to, I could only surmise. Around us were those other objects she had massed against change all through her life, just as my mother—each of them in her way the domestic repository—had tried to do so much later, at the very end of hers. Looking at their dim serial, I might even begin to understand the nature of the enclosure which my mother had tried to push me toward too soon.
“Those?” she said. “
Ach—
embroideries. I had never the patience to sew. Any more, I don’t do them. I have on my hands too much else.”
Sir Joseph moved impatiently. In his opinion, I was reminded, she had no present. In hers, I suspected, she had him, and more. But his manners prevailed. “She ought to write down the family history, I tell her. But she won’t.”
“A box to talk into, once he brought me from the Museum. When I tried it—such a
schmier
!” A flush had come over her, from several glasses of the wine. “No. Not for me,
boxes
!” I agreed with her. A box doesn’t listen, from deep, receiving eyes. “‘Then let Harley do it, be your secretary. He knows anyway all your stories,’ he says. ‘Harley knows the end of them?’ I said.” She held out her glass and I refilled it. Sir Joseph, not drinking, was occupying himself by moving and removing the brass weights, no bigger than dice, from the platforms of a miniature letter scale on an end table near his chair. She drained the glass halfway. “What isn’t yet finished, I tell him, how can you write down?” She muttered into her glass. “It ends not so quick, such a family.”
“Joseph’s children come to see us very faithfully,” he said. “When they’re in town. The others have none; odd, isn’t it.” Under his long fingers, the letter scale wavered to perfect balance and was still.
“Claire! You forget Claire is expecting!”
“Oh yes, my youngest daughter. Who lives in France. And is always expecting. We’re all pretty much scattered, now.”
They were talking to themselves through me, as she had done from the beginning, as all that early list, Miss Pridden, Demuth, had done. I listened with less rancor now.
She drained her glass and set it down. “We were
always
scattered,” she said fiercely.
He was silent. “My mother takes the Diaspora quite personally,” he said then. “As she does everything else.” His forefinger poised over the scale. “Oh, I grant you, nothing ever concludes,” he said, sweeping the brass weights from side to side so that we heard their miniature plunk, plunk, out of Haydn. “Except the power to go on.” He took things no less personally, I thought. As did I.
At his last remark, there was a moment’s deference. For all the room’s protection, we heard the current.
But when I rose to go, he was charming. “If the history is ever done, he’ll be in it, won’t he, Mother? After all, he was born in this house.”
She appeared to be quite drunk now. “
Wer kommt
?” she muttered. “
Wie heisst er
?” Who comes. And what is his name.
He mistook her meaning, not unreasonably, for she must never have played that trick with him. He had never been king of Beeberock. “Why, don’t you remember? I do, very distinctly. He was a posthumous child, named for his father. I was thinking of it only a moment ago.” He was triumphant. “Hold on. Hold on.” Then, before our eyes, he faded. “No—don’t tell me,” he said, turning to me. “I’ll get it directly. Hold on.”
I held on. Let it come, the name of that dead innocent who meant so little to me now. Mine, which I had begun earning ever since my uncle had been the first to say it aloud, was Pierre Goodman. Not a name to be used here, but I had never really expected to, half hoping to get by here as anonymously as up to now I had. Let the other one come from him, then, fitting end to an expedition I was beginning to find as oversweet to me now as the Madeira, which, like my years of innocence, no longer tasted of justice but of sentiment.
“
I
never knew it. His name.” Drunken or sibylline, she spoke in triumph over him, his hands clasped in painful search, lips moving in that soundless “Ah.” “To me he was always just Dora’s boy. Isn’t that so, Dora’s boy?”
He came timidly close to me, even searching out my lapel. All his yellowed, grandee dignity gone again, his face was splotched with flushes that worked and faded like the visible dilation of the dying brain inside it. “Wait—was it not—” He bit his lips, and I waited, even prayed for that strong, growled “Ahr-r” which would mean that he had once more recovered himself. Instead, I saw him forced one notch farther back in his struggle. He took off his glasses, but the serenity of that sealed-off eye could not uplift the dreadful softening around it. “For your father—” he said “—surely?”—but the meaning of his own words was already lost on him. His face, nearing me in trust, found itself only inches from mine. Some kernel in it still presided over its own horror. “I—b-beg your pardon, sir.” The expletives forced through; he was using speech like a cane, to lead him back. And he was succeeding. “No. I don’t know your name.” Seeking the arm of the chair behind him, he wavered, almost fell.