Mail Page 20

  I dump sugar from the bowl directly into my coffee with no civilized temporizing of spoon. Although I usually drink my coffee black, today I yearn for sweetener. I take a sip, add more.

  “That’s interesting,” my mother says.

  “I don’t always drink it black.”

  “Not that. The mail.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Katinka, never have I known you not to run out into the hall at the first sound of the post.” My mother’s got her gotcha voice coming out of her who-knows-the-troubles-I’ve-seen face.

  I am speechless. “I am speechless,” I manage to emit.

  A problem not shared by my mother, who rushes forward like a tide that can’t be stopped. “And I know about your mailman!”This last statement crashes with the hurricane intensity of a wave against a rock.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, all innocence. “How do you know?” I ask, all guilt.

  My mother shakes her head sadly. She sighs profoundly. Once again I have disappointed her. “The man, let me amend, the mailman you kissed at that Christmas party. The mailman whom Arthur saw leaving your apartment at an inappropriate hour!”

  I am tempted to ask my mother what Arthur was doing at that inappropriate hour, but I am not an eye-for-an-eye kind of person. Unlike my mother. “Louie said Arthur didn’t recognize him without his uniform.”

  “It’s Louie, is it?” My mother rolls the word on her tongue as if it’s one of the moldy unidentifiable items of food I have earlier thrown out. “I guess I did know this,” she adds with a lack of conviction. His name might as well be one of the Frenchys, she implies, interchangeable people in overalls who provide services. “Of course Arthur recognized him. There’s not a sharper eye in all of Cambridge.”

  “But Arthur didn’t say a word.”

  “Arthur,” this name she tastes like caviar, “is nothing if not discreet.”

  I slump against my chair, limp as Raggedy Ann.

  My mother is merciless. She should have gone to The Law School from the University of Maine. She could have stood up to Frenchy’s professor. Socrates would have discarded his method on meeting her.

  My mother stands up and paces my kitchen linoleum as if she’s Clarence Darrow summing up. “Not that I would convict you on just those two pieces of evidence,” she continues.

  “Phew. That’s a relief.”

  “There have been other clues, other sightings.”

  Like sightings of Elvis? Of UFO’s? “Spare me the details,” I plead.

  “I guess I will,” my mother says not unkindly. She examines last week’s to-do list taped to the refrigerator, four of the five items not done. “It’s not as if he’s unattractive,” she ruminates, surprising me. “What happened? Did you break up?” Her voice is hopeful. Give the right answer, it warns, and the quality of mercy will not be strained.

  “Not break up. Broke a leg. He did. A mailman’s lot.” I pause. I brighten. “Aha! You didn’t know! Evidence overlooked by your spies!”

  “Katinka! What an accusation. I am your mother. I have your best interests at heart.” She stops and sponges a counter I have sponged five times. “Believe me, I understand. I understand those Latin looks.”

  “Latin looks but no Latin. In a nutshell, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs. “Talk of misconception! Still, I of all people understand. I sympathize. But a mailman?”

  “What if I told you he was a Harvard student?” I ask, hating myself.

  She brightens. “Like that old beau of yours who grilled Big Macs to put himself through Yale?”

  I shake my head.

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t think so,” is what she says.

  The phone rings. I consider letting the machine answer, then change my mind. God knows what message will roll toward her pricked-up ears. I have made the right decision, I realize, when I grab the receiver just as my mother is reaching for it. “I called you earlier, Katinka,” Louie begins.

  “Can’t talk now.”

  “Your mother?”

  “You got it.”

  “The mailman?” my mother asks as I replace the phone.

  “A student. From my Harvard class.”

  “I don’t want to get in the way of your work.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll call her back.”

  We sit silently sipping our inferior instant coffee in companionable but sad mother-daughter silence. My mother sighs. I sigh. The kitchen clock ticks. From the hall I can hear the substitute mailman put the last letter in the last box and then thump out the door with a heavy foot, not Louie’s foot. My mother removes her glasses. Her eyes are watering. From disappointment. Empathy. Or merely the harsh chemicals I used to scour the kitchen. I start to worry about Max. Max in relation to dirt, then in relation to my arsenal of weapons—Lysol, Top Job, Ajax, Clorox, Mr. Clean—against that dirt. What if Max has one of those environmental allergies? Stop, Katinka, I tell myself, you have enough problems without making them up.

  Good advice. My mother, my immediate problem, sniffles and daubs her eyes, which are less the eyes of someone attacked by Liquid Pledge and more of someone touched by nostalgia. Her eyes have a faraway look, a term I would have once dismissed as belonging to a writer of genre fiction if not for this evidence before me. “It takes me back,” she sighs.

  “What does?” I ask in the gentle voice the experts recommend for eliciting information from a troubled child.

  “Your unsuitable romance. Before your father, I had someone rather like your mailman.”

  “You did?” My voice is harsh, astonished, almost shouting.

  My mother doesn’t seem to notice. Her voice is dreamy. “He brought me flowers, too—huge bouquets of wildflowers. Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, buttercups—he picked himself from a field he found on Indian Island.” She pauses. “Not like your roses, of course.”

  The way she says this implies that roses are just hothouse consumer goods you put on your MasterCard while wildflowers are nature’s blessings you have to wrestle acts of nature for. But maybe I’m misinterpreting her. I know my mother. I know her taste. Maybe this is just an aberration. The misweave in the kilim which placates Allah.

  “Any more of that champagne left?” my mother asks now, narrowing her point of view to a focus I completely understand.

  “Not a drop. But I do have beer. And wine in a half-gallon jug.”

  “Better not,” my mother says.

  I’m not sure whether her declining my offer is a dismissal of a wildflower in a bouquet of cultivated vintages because of rising social status or her realization that the sun is still very far from passing over the yardarm. It’s one thing to celebrate my story. Another to hoist one over … Over what? An unsuitable romance?

  Obviously probing cross-examination is called for. I am just about to ask when my mother interrupts me. “Your kitchen is so clean, Katinka. Whatever did you use to get these cabinet knobs to shine?”

  “Half-Clorox, half …” I stop. I sound like my mother’s house-wifely co-conspirator in a commercial break. How can I sidestep this news she’s dropped into my Cloroxed kitchen, into my messy life? “Who was this man?” I ask.

  “What man?” my mother tries, but it’s a halfhearted attempt.

  “Tell!” I command. The milkman, no doubt. In Old Town, when I was a child, the milk was still delivered to our door. I remember the cool white bottles with their frilled paper caps, the smaller ones of cream, left in the crate set at the corner of the porch. I can picture the milk truck, milky white with one painted cow and “Footman’s Dairy” printed underneath. The milkman wore a uniform and a billed cap. But between the cap and the stiff collar I can’t fill in a face. The milkman? I laugh. Impossible. Too trite.

  “Don’t laugh, Katinka,” my mother says in an offended tone. “I know it sounds trite. But at the time …”The faraway glance comes again, passing through me, through the cabinet, through the wall. “He was a lovely man, boy, really. He worked at the S
ears in Bangor. In Auto Parts. He wore this uniform.”

  “I know about uniforms.”

  “I’m sure you do. Afraid you do. But the point is it didn’t work out. And then I met your father.”

  “You loved him?”

  “Of course I loved your father.”

  “I don’t mean Daddy.”

  My mother’s voice is soft. “There are different kinds of love,” she says nearly whispering.

  “What happened?”

  My mother straightens. Her voice gets brusque. It’s her moral-lesson voice, the one that warned me to stand straight, brush my teeth, be kind to those less fortunate, act like a lady so boys will respect me as one. “It was totally inappropriate.”

  “Why was it totally inappropriate? Tell me!”

  “That’s a question you already know the answer to. You tell me.”

  “Mother!” I yell.

  That I am shouting doesn’t faze her, so secure is she in her sense of rightness. “The answer is obvious, Katinka, as you well know. Because it was like you and your mailman.” She pauses. Her eyes fix on my half-Cloroxed half-Ajaxed cabinet knob. “I …” Her throat catches. “I broke it off.”

  What’s the lesson here? I wonder. Mother-daughter apartments. Mother-daughter romances. Mother-daughter breakups. As an adolescent, the minute I was told to do one thing I would do the other. I ate everything bad for my skin. Let boys’ hands roam over strictly no-trespassing areas. That my mother broke off her mailman-equivalent romance makes me instinctively want to go for broke with my own. But I am, despite my rarefied education, too confused to make an educated choice. “Did you sleep with him?” I ask, astonished to hear these words fly out of my mouth.

  “Katinka!” my mother exclaims.

  “Well?”

  “Well, some things between mother and daughter should be left unsaid.”

  From which remarks I immediately assume the worst (or best, depending on your point of view). Knowing my mother, if she hadn’t slept with the dashing auto parts man from Sears, she would have smugly announced this, trumpeting her virginity and moral rectitude. And now I have to reevaluate her. A process akin to throwing out a novel I have been working at all my life and starting from scratch. I go back to Old Town to my parents’ bedroom which even as we speak Frenchy’s son is renovating for somebody else. I picture the twin beds with their sprigged spreads made by my grandmother just like my own. But instead of the night table and the slip of rug, what divides them rises up like a Sears knockoff of Banquo’s ghost.

  Meanwhile, as my thoughts spin off, my mother is maintaining such eye contact that to look away would warrant twenty years to life.

  “It’s okay, Mum,” I say. “I refuse to pry. Unlike other people I could name.”

  My mother stands up and smoothes the Parthenons over her knees. “I’ve got to be going,” she says. “I’m meeting Arthur in the Square for lunch.”

  I see her to the door. “I’m so happy about your story,” she says.

  And so unhappy about Louie is the silent but clear subtext. “I know,” I say.

  She kisses me. Her cheek is damp. I smell Arpłge. “Remember what I told you,” she says.

  “How could I forget.”

  “Not that,” she exclaims. “About appropriate choices.”

  Like Jake. Picking between Jake and Louie is not exactly like picking between Harvard and Yale is what she’s telling me. I say nothing. I know nothing, only that at this moment I am incapable of choice—at least of the male kind.

  * * *

  The toy kind is a different story. I drive to Fresh Pond Mall and walk the aisles among Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, superheroes and cowboy hats. I pick up a small metal blue and white truck on which is written “U.S. Mail.” It’s in the shape of a jeep, one of those suburban mail trucks you’re always getting stuck behind on country roads. Its doors open onto a sexually indeterminate figure behind the steering wheel. Though you can remove the figure, it’s bent into sitting position. No bad back or worn-out shoes for this mailman. This is drive-through delivery, fast-food mail. I myself prefer the personal touch.

  I return it to the shelf. I buy crayons, coloring books, games, joke books, a set of cowboys and Indians with a plastic fort. For Daniella I buy a silver cardboard crown just slightly creased in a bin marked “75% Reduced.” Next, I go to Bread and Circus where my cart runneth over with organic fruits and vegetables and two loaves of seven-grain no-additives Russian pumpernickel.

  * * *

  There’s another message from Louie on the machine when I get home. His mother’s inviting me for Sunday dinner he says. From the way his voice rises on the word mother, I can pretty much tell the invitation’s not his idea. Then, again, maybe it’s just the quality of my machine which distorts a string of perfectly uninflected sentences.

  I call him back. Get his machine. Where can he be? I wonder, a man on crutches, in a cast. After the beep, I explain I’m taking care of Max, will have to take a raincheck on Rosalie’s feast. “But I’m dying to see you,” I whisper. I put the toys in the closet, the produce in the crisper, the fruit in a basket. I lie down on the sofa and wait for Max.

  13

  Zenobia arrives with Max, who is so wrapped up in a down jacket, earmuffs, and hat and scarf that I wouldn’t be able to recognize him if he weren’t carrying Daniella. On the other hand, Daniella must be shivering in her skimpy floursack though Max holds her close to his heart. Zenobia is wearing a coat with a Persian lamb collar over a classic suit. On her feet are leather boots with heels. A Hermés scarf floats over a string of pearls. The way my mother used to dress for a trip. The way she still does. Today, successful Zenobia’s dressed for success. She’s probably going first-class. A privilege which my Yankee soul dismisses and my hedonist self desires.

  Seamus never made such distinctions. Soon after we were married, the Joyce Society brought Seamus to London to give a speech. He was sent a first-class ticket, me a coach. Blinded by love and the prospect of clutching hands as we flew up through the clouds, I assumed Seamus would take the empty seat next to me in the center lane of five across. “You do jest, my dear,” Seamus had exclaimed. Halfway into the flight he ventured to steerage to praise the beef Wellington and French vintages while I struggled to cut a rubbery, gray-gravied chicken breast with a plastic fork and knife. He then beat a hasty retreat back to the lap of luxury.

  “Harriman is double-parked,” Zenobia explains now, “and in a terrible rush. He insists on arriving hours early. Traffic and crowds are so unpredictable.”

  She hands me Max’s suitcase, as large for a four-day stay as one I would take on a three-week trip. She puts his backpack on the floor. She pulls a notebook from her own pocketbook—burnished leather trimmed in brass. Hermés, too, I suppose, made from the same leather that crafts those saddles that sheiks and princes order for riding their Arabian steeds. The notebook is more my type, curled vinyl ends and a ring binder, but thicker than the notebook I carry around to note my novel ideas for novels in.

  “This contains all the information about Max,” Zenobia instructs. I leaf through the notebook; both sides of its pages are covered with dense scrawl. Gee, if Richard Ellmann or Leon Edel had as much information about the early years of Joyce or James respectively their biographies would have filled twice as many volumes. The pages are headed like chapters: doctors, neighbors, emergency numbers, bedtimes, schools and teachers (which chapter I can skip since it’s vacation time), dental hygiene, vitamin supplements, likes and dislikes, TV rules, table rules.

  I put the notebook on the hall table. “This will be really helpful,” I say. “I’ll be sure to study it.”

  “You’re being incredibly helpful, Katinka. Harriman and I are so grateful.” She unwinds Max’s scarf, takes off his cap. His cowlicks spring up. His cheeks are round and red, apple cheeks, like the illustrations of Dutch children skating on a canal in a book I once had of boys and girls from around the world. “I worried about a little h-o-m
-e-s-i-c-k-n-e-s-s,” she spells out, “but Max is actually looking forward to this.” She takes off the rest of his winterwear, which is not easy since sleeves and mittens have to be twisted out from under Daniella’s sizable girth. She points to the hall closet. “Shall I hang them up?” she asks.

  I grab them out of her hands and put them on a chair. “I’ll do it later,” I say. The hall closet is of course the only thing I haven’t cleaned. It is in fact the place where I’ve stuffed everything I’ve cleaned out of everywhere else. Zenobia has the unerring eye of a social worker, an investigator from the DSS. I imagine police lines around my closet, stickers affixed which read this place is condemned, search warrants issued by the cleanliness patrol.

  But I must have a more extreme imagination than Zenobia, mine fueled by the knowledge of the inside of my closet. None of which seems to interest her. Her unerring eye is now filling with a tear. “I have to go, Max,” she says now. “We’ll call from Amsterdam. Katinka will take good care of you. And Grandpa is right upstairs.”

  “I know,” says Max.

  “So good-bye, my big boy.” She bends over and kisses him. “My little man.”

  “What about Daniella?” he asks.

  She kisses Daniella with only a slight diminution of enthusiasm.

  “Mummy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Daddy forgot to say good-bye to Daniella.” His smile is mischievous.

  “I’ll make sure Daddy blows Daniella a kiss from the car.” After Zenobia leaves, I expect Max to run to the window and hold Daniella up for Harriman’s kiss. Instead, he stands looking at me expectantly. I have a moment of panic. What am I doing? What do I do?

  These questions don’t seem to bother Max. He dumps Daniella in a corner and is wandering around my apartment, which he seems to be inspecting with what I fear is his mother’s unerring eye.

  Though not a judgmental one. “I like this,” he says. “It’s like Grandpa’s but better for kids.”

  “In what way?” I ask, thrilled that he has noticed this practically germ-free environment I have toiled toward. I, who crave credit for good works, am not an anonymous giver to charity.