A Face in Every Window (2 page)

At night Pap would climb up on the roof and sing Christmas carols at the top of his lungs, and again, if I tried to get him to come down, he'd shout, "Yer not me mam down there, so go away." "Yer not me mam" had become his response to every request I made. Worst of all for me was that he'd take off on his bicycle early in the morning before I woke, instead of going to mass the way he used to do with Grandma Mary, and he'd stay away for hours. I'd have to go looking for him, sometimes missing my classes at school, which made me furious. I had final exams coming up and I needed to ace them.

I had to ace everything, always. It was the only way I could prove to myself and everyone else in town that I wasn't Pap. People thought because we looked a lot alike that we were alike. True, we were both thin and had long bodies. We both had blue eyes and wild hair that could only be tamed by shaving it all off, but neither one of us, with our long faces, looked good in hair cut too close to the head, so we kept it long. There were differences, though. My hair was red and his was brown, I had freckles and Pap didn't. Beyond that, if all a person did was look in our eyes they'd see right off the difference between us. My gaze was keen, focused, and Pap's glance was slow, his focus just off center, as though he could draw in the object to be seen only so far, and no farther. You could never feel satisfied that he had taken in the whole picture, the total view.

However, during those three weeks that Mam stayed in the hospital, we were alike. If Pap ran, I ran after him. If he shouted in a public place, I shouted for him to keep quiet. We were acting just alike, and I couldn't wait for Mam to get well,
but it didn't take long after her return to realize things would not get back to normal.

I had had Pap bake a loaf of soda bread for Mam's homecoming. Grandma Mary had taught him how to bake the bread, and he could do it on his own as long as someone reminded him to take it out of the oven when it was done. The bread baking calmed him down so much I wished I had come up with the idea sooner. I would have had him baking bread all day. I cooked Mam SpaghettiOs, just about the only thing I knew how to make; but Mam barely touched her food that first night home and she left the table early, saying she still had unpacking to do. I followed her and watched her from the doorway of her bedroom. She moved from suitcase to closet, bent forward as if her back hurt too much to straighten. She'd lost so much weight that the pants she wore had bagged out at the hips and thighs, and her shoulder blades poked out beneath her spring sweater like elbows. Worse than her thinness, though, was the way her whole personality had changed. She had become quiet and withdrawn, even secretive, and she seemed to want nothing to do with either Pap or me.

The old Mam was open and lighthearted, always happy to see me, to spend time with me. My favorite times were when Mam would invite Pap and me to go with her to the creek. It curved around the back of our small neighborhood like an arm gathering and caressing our tired homes, and to us it was paradise. We would tuck the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches Grandma Mary had prepared for us into our jacket pockets and spend the day there. In the summer we'd go to the deeper section and swim or fish. Pap was a good
swimmer and loved it more than anything. Mam didn't swim but sat on the bank drawing wildflowers in her sketchpad, happy just to be outside in the fresh air.

We'd examine every blade of grass, every dump of dirt, every wildflower. And I, loving order and Tightness in all things, classified all our findings on index cards.

When I was six, I got hold of Grandma Mary's recipe file, dumped the cards with words on them in the garbage, and created our first file with the blank yellowed cards that had been crammed at the back of the box. I made a list of all the insects we had seen, working long and hard at keeping my words within the narrow lines of the cards.

Grandma Mary dug her cards out of the garbage and gave me a swat on my bottom for dumping her treasure, but the next day she bought me my own file box with two sets of index cards. I continued with my insects and then moved on through the animal kingdom, writing down names, habitats, diets, et cetera, and filing the cards alphabetically according to species. At eleven I worked on the plants, going beyond our little universe at the creek, and growing anxious at the thought of the existence of so many plants. If I lived forever, I thought, I could never list them all. Still, I continued to try—labeling and ordering the world, somehow believing if I could name it all, put it in its proper category, I could control my own fate. I believed I could understand the order of the world, God's order, God's reason, the way the nuns taught it in school, and then I wouldn't have to fear the chaos and randomness of life.

It was a fear that had grown out of my need to understand my dear Pap, and yet I couldn't understand. What had happened to him? Why was he born slow? Why couldn't he be like everyone else's father, like my friend Tim Seeley's father? How could it happen? How could I stop it, change it, fix it?

I thought I could order the world, write it down on a piece of paper and file it away. Then Grandma Mary died. I dumped all my index cards, sixteen packed file boxes' worth, into the garbage. I realized life was all about randomness and chaos.

Mam continued to ignore us those first few days after she came home from the hospital. She acted restless. I'd see her pacing in front of her bedroom window, standing beneath the crucifix over her doorway, staring at it for long periods of time, and then wandering outside to stare at Pap's holes, scooping up the birdseed he'd dumped in them from Grandma Mary's forty-pound bag, and running it through her fingers. She took long walks and wouldn't say where she was going or when she'd be back. Worst of all, though, she'd race to the phone every time it rang, and I knew who she was waiting for. I'd seen it when I'd visited Mam at the hospital her last week there. I'd seen the way she'd get when it was time for Dr. Morris to visit.

"Hand me my makeup bag, would you, JP," she'd say, setting aside a well-read copy of
Philadelphia
magazine. Then she'd pull out her mirror and look at herself, powdering the freckles on her face, smoothing down her red hair, shaping it on her shoulders just so, and adding another coat of lipstick to her lips.

"What are you getting yourself all dolled up for him for?" I asked her once. "Why should he care what you look like? He's just your doctor."

Mam was still dabbing at herself, holding the mirror higher and closer to get a better look. "He's lifted my spirits the past couple of weeks, the very least I can do now that I'm feeling better is make myself presentable."

I didn't like it. I didn't like the way her eyes shone when he entered the room, or the new familiar way they talked to each other. He called her Erin and she called him Mike. Mike Morris, built like a soccer player, had dark curly hair, bushy brows, and broad hands with fingers that seemed to touch Mam too often and linger on her arm, her shoulder, way too long. He had a way of looking at her that I'm sure wasn't professional. His brown-black eyes studied her, stayed on her face so long it made me squirm and sweat. There were three other patients in the room with Mam, but when Dr. Morris was there, you'd never know it. She had me draw the curtain, for privacy, she said, for when he listened to her heart—another thing he did way too often, all of a sudden.

I felt like a helpless kid, dancing around the bed, talking too much, interrupting their conversations, sitting on the bed next to Mam so that Dr. Morris wouldn't. I talked about Pap as if he and I were just having the greatest time at home together. I brought up stories, Mam and Pap stories. "Hey, Mike"—if Mam were going to be familiar, so was I—"did you ever hear about how my mother and father got together? It's a sweet story, it really is."

Mike told Mam about the opera
Tosca,
which was playing in town that next month, and right in front of me he said, "We'll have to go, Erin. It's always nice to have an opera buddy. I hate to go alone, don't you?"

"Oh, she hears operas all the time, don't you, Mam?" I
said, jumping into the conversation before Mam could give her answer. "Yeah, she and Pap play tapes and dance all over the house to the operas, don't you, Mam? Tell him. Tell him how Pap will grab you and say, 'I love you, I love you, I love you,' a million times."

I had hoped Mam's infatuation would end when she left the hospital, but it didn't. It was as if she were walking around holding her breath all the time, only letting it out when the phone rang, then holding it again when the caller wasn't who she'd hoped it would be.

His call came three days after she got home. I stood close by, at the kitchen window, pretending to watch Pap staring up at the Nativity set while Mam talked, chattered, laughed, played with her hair, and said a couple of times, her voice lowered, "I can't talk about that now, I'll let you know later."

Finally, after several days of this kind of call, I figured it was time to have it out with Mam, to make it clear that she was a married woman and if she didn't like who she'd married, it was her own fault.

Mam sat at the kitchen table and listened to me rant, her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed, her feet tucked halfway under her chair. She acted patient with me, the way she often did with Pap, and this infuriated me even more.

"Okay," I said. "I can see you're not listening to me. You're treating me like Pap, but you're the one acting like him. You're the one who looks foolish, not me."

Mam coughed and closed her eyes a long minute. Then she opened them and said, "Come on, let's go on back to your grandmother's room a second."

She took my hand, but I pulled it away. "No, you go on and get what you need, I'll wait here," I said.

"I don't need anything. I just wanted to talk to you."

"I thought we were talking. Why are you trying to change the subject? Why do we need to go to her room?"

"Because her room will become your room. You're finally going to get your own room, a real room."

"No. Why? I like the room I have now. I like sleeping on the porch. I've never complained, have I? I don't want Grandma Mary's room."

Mam took a few seconds to look around the kitchen. She blinked her eyes several times and I saw the tears welling up. "JP, every room is Grandma Mary's room. This is Grandma Mary's house. Look at these stenciled cabinets, those lacy curtains—they're all hers, they're all her. You can't live in her old room, JP, and I can't live in her house. Do you understand?"

"No." I backed away from her. "What do you mean? You don't want to move, do you? That's not what you're saying, right? You want to change things some, change the wallpaper or—or the curtains." I looked around the kitchen at all of Grandma Mary's things, and I couldn't imagine the room any other way, with any other wallpaper, any other cabinets. I thought to myself how this was her house. I could still feel her presence in every room. I could smell her fresh-brewed coffee, her peach turnovers, her molasses cookies. The smells had wafted into every room, into every corner and crevice in the house, and settled on the carpets and curtains like a mist. They were there in the house forever, Grandma Mary was there—and that was all the more reason not to leave, not to move. We couldn't move. Where would we go?

"We've got to move, JP," Mam said, breaking into my thoughts. "I've thought about it, and it's the only right thing I know how to do."

"But it isn't right. You've lived in this neighborhood all your life, and Pap—Pap's lived right here, right in this house. How will he survive without—This is all he knows. This is my house, too. 1 was born here."

"JP, let me tell you something. When I married your pap—well, I married your pap because I loved him. I love dear Pap very much, you know that. But you see, I had been sick, I had been afraid, and I knew a safe place. Here. This was the safe place, with Pap and Mary. It was home because she was home. She created such a haven for us, for all of us, and Pap and I—we've lived like children, we've never had to grow up, have we?" She looked at me, her head tilted, a sad, please-understand-me expression on her face.

She continued, "Then you, JP, you came along and I thought,
Now, now I'll have to grow up, learn to cook, learn to be a mother.
But Mary took care of that, too. She was your mother and I was your friend, your best friend. 'Just you and me, JP,' remember? Remember how I used to say that to you?"

I didn't answer her.

Mam sighed. "I think Mary was just happy to let me take over playing with Pap, the everyday playing with Pap, and I've been happy to do it. I wanted to play, to spend my days outdoors with Pap and do all the things I missed out on when I was growing up. So that's what I've done. But then—well, then your grandmother dies, doesn't she? And here we are. Here we are without her."

Mam took my hand again and pulled me toward the hallway. "Come here, I want to show you something."

"I don't want to go in her room," I said, leaning away from her.

"No, not her room, the living room." I followed Mam and she took me to the closet where Grandma Mary kept the vacuum cleaner. Mam opened the door and next to the vacuum were a pair of Grandma Mary's shoes. A pair of navy pumps, the shoes she died in, though Mam had had her buried in her white ones to match her favorite dress. I stepped back from the closet.

"I put them in here," Mam said. "I couldn't look at them. More than anything else in the house, her shoes make me the saddest They're waiting for her, for her feet, and I'm waiting, too, for her to fill them again—because you see, James Patrick, I can't I can't fill them and I know—I know you want me to, expect me to. Everyone expects me to, and I can't"

I shook my head and Mam nodded back at me. "Oh yes, JP, I've noticed you watching me, hating me almost. We were friends, you and I, but now what? What are we now to each other? I don't know how to be your mother. You want me to bake and say motherly things and knit sweaters and cook dinners just like Mary's, but I can't. I don't know how to cook. I never learned. I never had to learn."