Against the Ruins Read online

  “I always wondered who bought that picture. Nice symmetry.”

  “Do you have new work somewhere in town?”

  “Not at the moment. I’ve been doing other things, teaching, not painting so much.” Like not at all.

  He says to give his best to my mother. “I always liked how she told stories when we were kids, she was always so kind. I remember her helping me memorize things for school.”

  “Thank you, Johnny—John. For coming by. And for the apology.”

  I don’t want him to leave, this connection to Lincoln Street. “By the way, whatever happened to Uta Moazen?”

  “You don’t know? She killed herself in the late 1960s.”

  It takes me a moment to respond. “Did anyone know why?”

  “Not as I recall. Your mother sang at the funeral, amazing song, someone translated an African American spiritual into Irish—didn’t she tell you?”

  “She never liked talking about sad things.”

  John says good-bye, gives me a hesitant hug, and heads down the hall. I stare at the closing elevator doors. Why didn’t my mother tell me about helping Rosa? About Uta?

  I know why. After my parents moved across town, she never mentioned Lincoln Street again.

  My father almost never leaves the hospital. The nurses, who roll a portable bed into the waiting room for him at midnight, say how lucky his wife is to have a husband who cares so much. I want to say something cynical, bastardize my mother’s favorite mantra about the airplane sightings of her childhood—Some things are there even if you can’t see them, but other things aren’t there even when it looks like they are. Instead, I suggest that every other night I stay over. He tells me it’s his “duty” to be there and sends me home. A half hour later I pull into my parents’ driveway and sit for a moment; I still steel myself upon first seeing the house.

  Usually when I’d arrive, I’d barely get out of the car before my father would rush out and start inspecting it. “Your car is in bad shape” were his first words to me. Then came dire stories of people dying in traffic accidents.

  My mother would appear, embrace me but turn to him. “Stop being so negative, William. If you can’t say something nice, just keep quiet.”

  “I’ll talk about anything I want to,” he’d shout, brandishing a parking ticket he’d found on my car seat. “See this?” Gleefully he’d wave the ticket in my face. “If you don’t pay this right away, you’ll go to jail. If you don’t pay it, I’ll go to jail too.”

  “William, I’m talking to Lyra now. Leave her alone. She doesn’t want to talk to you. Nobody goes to jail over a parking ticket. You’re ridiculous.”

  “You do not understand these things, Louise.”

  Usually I’d go inside at this point; they didn’t need me in order to decide what I did and did not want to hear. Their bickering was always civil, though; it never drew blood. No profanity, threats, physical blows. Blood and bad words would have been cleaner. Instead, after they tired of jabbing at each other, they separated to different rooms and combat was replaced by global silence and barely disguised fury.

  Inside the rancher I graze on odds and ends in the refrigerator, make wine my main course. If it weren’t stupider than spit, I’d buy Benson and Hedges menthol lights. Maybe they don’t exist anymore. I sit in the den and try to read Ms. Borgia’s uplifting history, but I can’t stay with the story. I phone my oldest friend, the only friend I ever brought home when I was a teenager; she offers to come to Columbia. I say I’m fine. I go back to the cedar chest for more company towels—I’m becoming downright wanton with them. Beneath the last ones are old linens: dainty embroidered dresser scarves, lace tablecloths made by hand, the regrettably mute history of my family’s women. I also find a shoebox covered with bright contact paper; my mother never discarded old boxes and she always decorated them. This small act by the child of a painter nearly brings me to tears. Inside, carefully wrapped in yellowed linen, is a very old doll. Tiny, delicate unclothed rag body, creamy porcelain face, startling blue glass eyes. A note pinned to it reads: “From around 1900.” The swaddling cloth is so thin it could disintegrate, and the china face is cracked, but the fissure between the eyes down to the chin has been carefully glued. I trace the crack with my finger.

  At the bottom of the cedar chest, under stacks of empty picture frames, is a photograph of my father. A blond boy of seven or eight, freckles, unruly flaxen forelock slicked back, wearing a coat and a tie that’s hopelessly askew. The only photograph of him as a child I’ve ever seen. Why did no one straighten his tie? I notice a static vacancy in his eyes—he’s never spoken of his childhood or told me anything else that’s personal. Or ever said anything personal about me that wasn’t critical. There’s also an envelope of black and white photographs: unfamiliar houses, churches, other buildings; for years he took these for no apparent reason. I also find, in a torn envelope with an APO address, a letter in my father’s tiny script addressed to his parents. I read its single fragile page out loud, much of it about the weather, packages his mother has sent him. Mailed from a hospital in England, the last line reads: “They’re sending me back to the front tomorrow. Maybe someday I’ll get used to it.”

  After I reread the letter, I put it in the box with the doll.

  Some days as I sit by my mother’s bed, I sense that she’s still present mentally. But who knows if that’s true or not? I tell her about John Truesdale’s visit, and then I remember how I found out what Rosa did for a living, though I didn’t know it was her profession until later. One day in our first year on Lincoln Street, I went looking for Johnny and no one answered his door, but I could hear music inside so I walked along the creaking, sloped porch and peered in the front windows. Rosa was sitting on her flowered couch with a man in a dark suit. He looked like a judge or a bank robber—he was all rolls where my father was angles, and he had a large sparkly ring on his pinkie finger. They were laughing and talking; his legs were slightly parted and Rosa’s right thigh dangled across his, which had hiked her dress up. The man’s left hand seemed underneath Rosa’s dress. Her dress moved around a little and she let out a giggle just as Johnny came down the street on his bike—I knew there were times he was made to play outdoors. I hightailed it down his steps before he could catch me spying on his mother. I ran back to my house and jumped on my bed to ponder the strange habits of adults.

  Because there were so few cars on Lincoln Street—our neighbors mostly rode the bus—Johnny and I spent hours roller-skating in the street. I could skate rings around him and lost no opportunity to do so. But eventually my father ordered me to skate only on the sidewalk. “Stay out of the street,” he yelled. “You’ll get hit by a car and we’ll have to take you to the doctor. Doctors cost money. Try to behave better.”

  While I was sitting on the porch steps unscrewing my skates with the metal key, my mother appeared. She was wearing a shapeless flowered housedress and had blue-black ink stains on her fingers from grading papers. “You do skate well, honey. Like the flying wind. You can do anything.”

  Soon I became quite proficient at the yo-yo. The up and down of it came natural.

  One afternoon I defied my father and was whizzing down the street on my skates when he ran down the front steps, grabbed me and carried me inside, took off his leather belt, and turned me over his knee and began hitting me. Hard.

  My screams summoned my mother. “William, hasn’t she had enough?”

  He hit me once more, then left the room. I dove into the pillows sobbing. My mother leaned over me, rubbing my back. I reared up. “Why doesn’t he like me? What did I do?”

  “Lyra, he’s just trying to help you grow up right.”

  “He’s never nice to me, he hates me, I know he does.”

  She burst into tears and jumped up and ran out the door. And not for the last time.

  Johnny was my escape from my h
ouse. That first summer, ignoring my parents’ rules, he herded me over to Elmwood Cemetery where he pointed out tombstones for dead little kids and Confederate soldiers, and then over to the railroad trestle to “look for bums” (we didn’t find any fortunately), and finally down the ten blocks of Elmwood Avenue to the state mental hospital. As we peered through the wrought-iron gate, Johnny pointed at the massive Babcock Building, dark and scary with bars on all the windows, and whispered, “That’s where the old lady with the red wagon used t’live.” He nodded toward the ten-foot walls to our right and left. “Them walls’s on account of not lettin’ nobody get away. They put Yankees in here way back. Now just loonies. Yes sir, onc’t you get put in, ain’t no way out.”

  I didn’t want to admit the place spooked me. “Onc’t is not a word,” replied the English teacher’s daughter. Since Johnny was two years older, I lorded anything I could come by over him. “Say once.”

  “See that dome yonder?” He pointed at the Babcock cupola. “People up there’s chained to the wall. Droolin’ and stuff.” He turned toward me. “They gonna put you in there when they catch you riding that fool cat around in your baby-doll carriage.”

  “Yeah? Well, they’re gonna lock you up when they see you reading a comic book while jumping on your pogo stick. Your head’s loose already.”

  “Your daddy’s loco enough to get in here now.”

  “Everybody says your mama’s a bad lady.”

  Silenced by larger truths, we both turned and stared into the distance.

  Johnny was also obsessed with Uta Moazen. Convinced that her arm had been torn off by another witch in a fight, he wanted to catch her at “witch stuff” and get her locked up in the madhouse. One day at dusk Uta’s front door was open, and Johnny and I stood on the sidewalk surveying her stone fortress. We intended a secret spying mission, but Rosa stepped out on her balcony and called Johnny home. I stared at his retreating back; thinking to outdo him, I crept onto Uta’s porch alone and peered through the screen door. The old lady was standing in the middle of her fussy living room holding a green jar in her right hand. She slid the jar under the opposite armpit, clamping it with her half-arm, and unscrewed the metal ring and took the lid off. A moment passed. Then she put the lid back on and removed the jar from under her arm.

  She was still holding the jar when she appeared at her door. I backed up like crazy as she said, “You see, child, my husband was a mean and stingy man, and when he lay on his deathbed I sat beside him and waited for his last breath. He tossed and turned, kept staring at me like it was my fault he was sick. He thought everything was my fault. If he had let me go to the doctor before the gangrene set in, I’d still have my arm. But he kept saying doctors cost too much, the trouble was just in my crazy head.”

  I was considering whether to make a run for it. And whether Uta would tell my parents I’d been spying on her.

  “When my husband was in the bed dying, I decided what I would do.” She paced back and forth by the screen door, white ringlets bobbing, half-arm tight to her side. “On his last day his eyes shot back in his head and he gasped. I put this jar up to his lips and trapped his dying breath, knowing full well this would keep his soul from going to heaven. Provided—and I doubt it—it was headed there. You see, my husband took things from me that no one should ever take. Even before they cut off my arm, he stole my soul.”

  She stopped at the door, stared at me through the screen. “But sometimes I feel guilty, so I let a little bit of him go on. The rest stays in limbo; he’s kept me in a limbo most of my life. I’ve hated him, but I once loved him too. That’s the way life works out sometimes.”

  I wondered if my mother knew you could put a husband in a jar.

  Uta pushed open the screen door. “Come in and visit, dear.” She held out her only hand to me. I took it. Uta’s strangeness didn’t hurt.

  My mother improves, she falls back, on it goes for a week. One morning while my father is home showering, a graying African American nurse with matching dimples and the gait of a slow dancer comes into the waiting room and says to me, “I’m Darlene. I work down in pediatrics and when I heard there was a schoolteacher named Copeland in ICU, I had to come on up—your mama taught my daughter Annette. Miz Copeland got that gal to love reading, she kept on telling Annette she could do anything.”

  I burst into tears.

  The nurse slips an arm around me and guides me down the hall. “Did I tell you my girl’s a big ole lawyer now, partner and ever’thing? Your mama was a fine teacher, she loved children with a big heart.”

  I cry harder.

  “You poor thing,” she says. “How ’bout I come see your mama now and again?”

  I nod gratefully as she pats me on the shoulder. “One day Miz Copeland told Annette—‘You find yourself something in life you can be for. Don’t base your life on what you’re mad about.’”

  Darlene pauses beside the nurses’ station. “I had the feeling your mama knew ’bout tough times. And these things come on down—it was Annette who pushed me to go to nursing school when I was forty-seven and my no-count husband took off with all our money.”

  She heads down the hall. As I stare after her, I realize—she is what I love about the South I’ve spent a lifetime putting in a rearview mirror. Women like my mother. Women of the hard life remarkably missing the gene of self-pity.

  Later, back at the house, I wonder—what am I for? Did my mother and I ever want any of the same things?

  I wanted to probe what I didn’t understand, examine it; she did not. But when I was in my thirties, married, I guess we had more in common. I’d just begun teaching and we sat in this den and laughed and talked about art and books and old family stories. But almost imperceptibly something changed and a terrible distance set up shop between us. She didn’t criticize me—my father was always at the ready for that—but I knew she disapproved of my divorce and the wild years afterward. All the moves and job changes, the affairs. I’ve had enough variations of “relationship” that I ought to be put in a museum. Exhausting work, so for the last few years I’ve avoided having a romantic life. I like singleness; I’ve always known what solitary means. My mother definitely didn’t like the blatant sexuality of my post-divorce paintings: so she told a relative who gracelessly passed that information on to me. Is that why she didn’t show up for my final show in Columbia? She didn’t like it that I refused to stay married, to accept unhappiness? That I’ve never behaved like a proper Southern lady? That I rejected her interest in cooking and gardening, swore off traditional women’s interests? That I didn’t stay in South Carolina and churn out grandchildren?

  She adored children. Why didn’t she have more of her own? I don’t know when the separate bedrooms began. I hated it. One more thing that marked us. Another sign of the failure to thrive.

  Why weren’t they happy?

  Wandering into the living room, I hesitate beside one of my surreal paintings. Uncharacteristic hot color leaps off the canvas. I never understood why my mother wanted this picture. A stooped old couple is happily burying 1950s halter-tops; beneath the ground, skeletons from a potter’s field catch the tops and try them on. An ironically hopeful elegy to lost causes. Our Lincoln Street neighbors the Sweetes, an unmarried brother and sister who looked like Russian nesting dolls—gentle farm people out of place in the city—did indeed buy old clothes they didn’t wear but inexplicably buried. No wonder my father didn’t initially stand out. I notice the Seth Thomas mantel clock atop the bookcase across from me and smile. My father gave it to my mother twenty years ago, a replica of the chiming clock from Brantley. Six years ago he stopped winding it so, in his words, “I won’t get any older.” Somehow it didn’t surprise me to come home to find that correct time no longer existed there. He also told me he’d invented fitted sheets, adding, “If I’d only taken out a patent, we’d be rich.” It was always a coin toss, though not until he
mellowed at seventy, whether I’d come home to find the funny man or the man from the funny farm. How did my mother live with this for half a century? With so little affection?

  Once when visiting in Columbia in my thirties, I hesitated at the back door and said to her, “I can’t bear the thought that someday you’ll be gone. I feel like you should have had more.” A little happiness, for example.

  She smiled—she was heavy by then and her hair, which stayed dark until her late sixties, was finally turning gray. But her eyes were gentle, seemed wise and forgiving.

  “I’ve had a good life,” she said. “I got to have a child and watch her grow up and make her own way in the world. I’ve had wonderful friends. I’ve had a full and happy life. You have made it all worthwhile.”

  It was the kindest gift she ever gave me. A lie. And a responsibility I knew I’d blown to hell.

  I’d grown up around too much of her loneliness to believe her—the vampire of loneliness that hides in dusty corners in daylight and comes out to feed at night. All those nights—I’m ten, maybe eleven—when moonlight shines through the windows by my bed as I listen to the creaking of our unsteady house, which always feels like a houseboat that might go under. Often my mother cries out in her dreams, moans as though trapped in a nightmare. Day or night, whenever my father says something unkind to her, words which sting like poison arrows, she retreats to the bathroom, hiding her tears. I don’t know how to help. So in my teenage years I fled her despair by breaking rules; she tightened the rules and said I was rebellious and contentious, that I deliberately rattled the windows and shook the rafters. I did: I was angry as hell. I couldn’t bring friends home for fear of what strange thing my father might do or say. I didn’t want anyone witnessing the palpable lovelessness in the air. As soon as I could, I left South Carolina for good.

  But later I took the leap and brought home the perfectly normal twenty-five-year-old man I wanted to marry. When he told my parents of our plans, my father stared at him as if he didn’t understand the words. Then he laughed, a high-pitched hyena squawk, and said, “You know she hasn’t paid off her car, don’t you? She’s no good with money, I can tell you that.”