He turned to Mammy, but she shook her head and I realized Daddy had never told her. I wondered why. I think Mr. Krutzar realized it, too, because he suddenly looked embarrassed and made his excuses to leave.
Some of my school friends came to visit and a few of the women Mammy had gotten to know and be friendly with brought baskets of fruit and flowers, some coming with their husbands, but most coming alone. Everyone wanted to know what we were going to do now, but few came right out and actually asked. I think they were afraid she might ask them for help.
Mommy was still considering going to work at the insurance company. We were in very bad financial condition, even with the two months' salary from Mr. Kruegar, because Daddy's income really came from commissions. We had little in a savings account and all our regular expenses loomed above and around us like big old trees threatening to crush us. In the evenings Mommy would sift through her possessions, considering what she could sell to raise some money. I felt so terrible about it. I offered to quit school and get a job myself, Of course, she wouldn't hear of it.
"You're so close to graduation, Rose. Don't be stupid."
"Well, how are we going to manage, Mammy?" I asked. "Bills are raining down around us like hail."
"We'll get by, somehow," she said. "Other people who suffer similar tragedies do, don't they?" she asked. It sounded too much like another of Daddy's promises floating in a bubble. I didn't reply, so her warning continued.
At first she didn't tell me about her desperate pleas to her father, how she had belittled herself, and had accepted his nasty descriptions of her and of Daddy just to see if she could get him to advance her some money. In the end he relented and sent a check for a thousand dollars, calling it charity and saying since he would give this much to the Salvation Army, he would give this much to us. But he left it pretty clear that Mammy shouldn't ask him for another nickel. He told her he thought struggling, suffering, would be the best way for her to understand fully what a mess she had made with her life by not listening to him. It was very important for him to be right than generous and loving. When she finally broke down and told me all of it, she was shattered.
"I used to love him." she moaned as if that had been something of an accomplishment.
"Doesn't everyone love their fathers?" I asked.
"No," she said with her lips twisting and writhing with her pain. "There are some fathers you just can't love, for they don't want your love. They see showing emotion as weakness. I can't even remember him kissing me, whether it was good night, good-bye or on my birthday."
I decided Daddy had been correct about people like that: just cut them away as you would cut away so much swamp grass and keep your boat surging forward.
After the funeral and the period of
bereavement. I returned to school. The night before I told Mommy that I had decided I was going to pretend Daddy wasn't gone. He was just on some sales trip. I was doing what he always did when he was faced with unpleasant events and problems. I decided, I was ignoring death. She became angry as soon as I finished telling her.
"I won't let you," she said. "You're not going to fall into the same traps I fell into, traps he set with his promises and his happy-go-lucky style. I let him mesmerize me, bedazzle and beguile me until I became too much like him. Look what it's gotten me!" she cried, her arms out. She turned to the mirror. "I'm old beyond my years because of all this worry and trouble.
"No, Rose. No. Your father is dead and gone. You must accept the truth, accept reality, and not live in some make-believe world as he did, and as I permitted myself to live in as well. Now we have to find ways to make the best of our lives without him.
"I'm sure wherever he is, he's belittling what happened to him and telling other souls to forget it. He's telling them they can't do anything about it, so just say. "Whatever' and play your harp. He's probably looking for ways to move on to another heaven or hell for that matter, trying to get himself thrown out," she said. She smiled, but she was crying real tears, too.
I hugged her and promised not to ignore reality anymore. She forced me to confront it dramatically that night by helping her box all of his things, most of which she had decided to donate to charity.
"If we only made enough money to use it as a write-off," she muttered.
I hated folding his clothes and stuffing them in cartons. The scent of his cologne was still on most of them, and when the aroma entered my nostrils, it stirred pictures of him in my mind and the sound of his voice in my ears. I worked with Mammy, but I cried and sobbed, especially when I felt him twirling my hair and heard him reciting. "Your eyes are two diamonds. Your hair is spun gold. Your lips are rubies and your skin comes from pearls. My sweet Rose."
Closing the cartons was another way to say, "Good-bye. Daddy. Good-bye."
When we were nearly finished with the clothes in the closet. Mammy found a manila envelope under two boxes of old shoes in the far corner. She opened it and pulled out an eight by ten black and white photograph of a young woman. There was nothing written on the photograph or on the back of it and nothing else in the envelope.
"Who's this?" she wondered aloud, and I looked at the picture with her.
"You don't know?"
She shook her head.
The picture was of a woman who looked to be in her twenties. I couldn't tell the color of her hair, but it was either light brown or blond. She had a very pretty face with a button nose and sweet, full lips. There was a slight cleft in her chin. She had her hair cut and styled with strands sweeping up about her jawbone and she had high cheek bones with a smooth forehead. She looked very happy, as happy as someone who had found some great contentment in her life. There was that peacefulness in her eyes.
"She's no relative of mine, and I don't believe she's a relative of his." Mommy mused aloud. "Of course, she might be a cousin I never met, but why wouldn't he have ever shown me her picture?"
In the background we could just make out what looked like a large plantation house. a Greek revival with the grand pillars and style that were
characteristic of some of the wealthier estates around Atlanta.
"Well," Mammy concluded with a deep sigh. "it doesn't surprise me that he never showed me the picture. Just another thing he didn't think mattered. I suppose."
She put it aside and we finished the work. I thought about the picture before I went to sleep and then I shrugged it off just the way Mammy had, thinking of Daddy's favorite word. "Whatever."