"No, Cathy," Momma flared, "you must accept the truth. You are not to find solace in pretending. Do you hear that! Your father is dead, and his soul has gone on to heaven, and you should understand at your age that no one ever has come back from heaven. As for us, we'll make do the best we can without him-- and that doesn't mean escaping reality by not facing up to it."
I watched her rise from her chair and begin to take things from the refrigerator to start breakfast.
"Momma .. ." I began again, feeling my way along cautiously lest she turn hard and angry again. "Will we be able to go on, without him9"
"I will do the best I can to see that we survive," she said dully, flatly.
"Will you have to go to work now, like Mrs. Johnston?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Life holds all sorts of surprises, Cathy, and some of them are unpleasant, as you are finding out. But remember always you were blessed to have for almost twelve years a father who thought you were something very special."
"Because I look like you," I said, still feeling some of that envy I always had, because I came in second after her.
She threw me a glance as she rambled through the contents of the jam-packed fridge. "I'm going to tell you something now, Cathy, that I've never told you before. You look very much as I did at your age, but you are not like me in your personality. You are much more aggressive, and much more determined. Your fath
er used to say that you were like his mother, and he loved his mother."
"Doesn't everybody love their mother?"
"No," she said with a queer expression, "there are some mothers you just can't love, for they don't want you to love them."
She took bacon and eggs from the refrigerator, then turned to take me in her arms. "Dear Cathy, you and your father had a very special close relationship, and I guess you must miss him more because of that, more than Christopher does, or the twins."
I sobbed against her shoulder. "I hate God for taking him, He should have lived to be an old man! He won't be there when I dance and when Christopher is a doctor. Nothing seems to matter now that he's gone."
"Sometimes," she began in a tight voice, "death is not as ten-i- ble as you think. Your father will never grow old, or infirm. He'll always stay young; you'll remember him that way-- young, handsome, strong. Don't cry anymore, Cathy, for as your father used to say, there is a reason for everything and a solution for every problem, and I'm trying, trying hard to do what I think best."
We were four children stumbling around in the broken pieces of our grief and loss. We would play in the back garden, trying to find solace in the sunshine, quite unaware that our lives were soon to change so drastically, so dramatically, that the words "backyard" and "garden" were to become for us synonyms for heaven--and just as remote.
It was an afternoon shortly after Daddy's funeral, and Christopher and I were with the twins in the backyard. They sat in the sandbox with small shovels and sand pails. Over and over again they transferred sand from one pail to another, gibbering back and forth in the strange language only they could understand. Cory and Carrie were fraternal rather than identical twins, yet they were like one unit, very much satisfied with each other. They built a wall about themselves so they were the castle- keeps, and full guardians of their larder of secrets. They had each other and that was enough.
The time for dinner came and went. We were afraid that now even meals might be cancelled, so even without our mother's voice to call us in, we caught hold of the dimpled, fat hands of the twins and dragged them along toward the house. We found our mother seated behind Daddy's big desk; she was writing what appeared to be a very difficult letter, if the evidence of many discarded beginnings meant anything. She frowned as she wrote in longhand, pausing every so often to lift her head and stare off into space.
"Momma," I said, "it's almost six o'clock. The twins are growing hungry."
"In a minute, in a minute," she said in an off-hand way. "I'm writing to your grandparents who live in Virginia. The neighbors have brought us food enough for a week--you could put one of the casseroles in the oven, Cathy."
It was the first meal I almost prepared myself. I had the table set, and the casserole heating, and the milk poured, when Momma came in to help.
It seemed to me that every day after our father had gone, our mother had letters to write, and places to go, leaving us in the care of the neighbor next door. At night Momma would sit at Daddy's desk, a green ledger book opened in front of her, checking over stacks of bills. Nothing felt good anymore, nothing. Often now my brother and I bathed the twins, put on their pajamas, and tucked them into bed. Then Christopher would hurry off to his room to study, while I would hurry back to my mother to seek a way to bring happiness to her eyes again.
A few weeks later a letter came in response to the many our mother had written home to her parents Immediately Momma began to cry--even before she had opened the thick, creamy envelope, she cried. Clumsily, she used a letter opener, and with trembling hands she held three sheets, reading over the letter three times. All the while she read, tears trickled slowly down her cheeks, smearing her makeup with long, pale, shiny streaks.
She had called us in from the backyard as soon as she had collected the mail from the box near the front door, and now we four were seated on the living room sofa. As I watched I saw her soft fair Dresden face turn into something cold, hard, resolute. A cold chill shivered down my spine. Maybe it was because she stared at us for so long--too long. Then she looked down at the sheets held in her trembling hands, then to the windows, as if there she could find some answer to the question of the letter.
Momma was acting so strangely. It made us all uneasy and unusually quiet, for we were already intimidated enough in a fatherless home without a creamy letter of three sheets to glue our mother's tongue and harden her eyes. Why did she look at us so oddly?
Finally, she cleared her throat and began to speak, but in a cold voice, totally unlike her customary soft, warm cadence. "Your grandmother has at last replied to my letters," she said in that icy voice. "All those letters I wrote to her . . . well . . . she has agreed. She is willing to let us come and live with her."
Good news! Just what we had been waiting to hear--and we should have been happy. But Momma fell into that moody silence again, and she just sat there staring at us. What was the matter with her? Didn't she know we were hers, and not some stranger's four perched in a row like birds on a clothesline?
"Christopher, Cathy, at fourteen and twelve, you two should be old enough to understand, and old enough to cooperate, and help your mother out of a desperate situation." She paused, fluttered one hand up to nervously finger the beads at her throat and sighed heavily. She seemed on the verge of tears. And I felt sorry, so sorry for poor Momma, without a husband.
"Momma," I said, "is everything all right?"
"Of course, darling, of course." She tried to smile. "Your father, God rest his soul, expected to live to a ripe old age and acquire in the meantime a sizable fortune. He came from people who know how to make money, so I don't have any doubts he would have done just what he planned, if given the time. But thirty-six is so young to die. People have a way of believing nothing terrible will ever happen to them, only to others. We don't anticipate accidents, nor do we expect to die young. Why, your father and I thought we would grow old together, and we hoped to see our grandchildren before we both died on the same day. Then neither of us would be left alone to grieve for the one who went first."
Again she sighed. "I have to confess we lived way beyond our present means, and we charged against the future. We spent money before we had it. Don't blame him; it was my fault. He knew all about poverty. I knew nothing about it. You know how he used to scold me. Why, when we bought this house, he said we needed only three bedrooms, but I wanted four. Even four didn't seem enough. Look around, there's a thirty year mortgage on this house. Nothing here is really ours: not this furniture, not the cars, not the appliances in the kitchen or laundry room--not one single thing is fully paid for."